What is Sales Automation? A must have strategic guide

Sales has evolved through the years. The rolodex and file cabinets had to make way over the years for tools enabling sales automation.

Sales Automation is our ability to do sales efficiently. Think syncing data across tools in the cloud, reducing manual account transitions, creating pitch decks automatically and handling client communications personalized at scale.

With the newest developments of AI, we are making a giant leap forward. In this expert article Founders, CEOs, COOs and sales leaders will get a high level introduction to sales automation.

Understand key strategies explaining:

• What sales automation is
• What processes you can automate
• What are the benefits of sales automation
• How to choose the right sales automation software

Megan Foster is a sales leader and revenue operations manager with 5+ years of experience in high tech SaaS. She has experience in both regional and global sales and marketing teams. She is the co-founder of SlideFill.

Sales automation is the process of making small steps in the sales process automated. It will allow you to decrease repetitive labour-intensive actions, save time and reallocate headcount to what’s most important: talking to clients.

The steps you want to automate are often:

One or multiple individuals in your organization have to perform this task more than once per day.

The tasks are necessary to run your business but they are not directly generating value. Think for example data entry in sales pitch decks.

When the task is performed wrongly, it will not create irreversible damage to your business.

In the ‘Guide to automate revenue generating activities in sales’, you will find an outline of criteria to check and resources you need before automating a sales activity.

Typical examples of sales automation activities are:

• Weekly business reviews: creation of accurate and consistent reporting to measure target attainment and input metrics.
• Reminder emails: sending an email to clients to remind them about an upcoming meeting or an action they have to take.
• Lead outreach: reacting on a lead form submission with basic information and the ability to schedule a first call with a sales development representative.
• Presentation creation: providing personalized data points coming from your CRM in client facing presentations.

To achieve these automation you high level need:

• Condition: a condition that is met which will signal to your software when to trigger automation
• Action: an action that needs to be performed by the sales automation software to start creating the output
• Data input: a form of input (client data, email, presentation) that is part of your automation process.

A lead submitting a lead form can be a condition (boolean). This will trigger an action such as sending an email. The input is a drafted email which will be delivered as output to the lead.

1. Sales automation requirements © SlideFill 2024

Depending on your business and the ideal customer flow, there are many processes you can automate. I live by the rule that you can automate whenever you have to perform the same, identical, action more than three times.

Below you will find an outline of processes that are a no-brainer to automate:

Automation can help you to prevent long threads to find a suitable slot for yourself and your clients to set up a meeting. Tools such as ChiliPiper and Calendly automate the process of finding an available slot. Reminders for emails can be automated in order to give more guidance to your clients and improve attendance rates.

Automatic analysis on the behaviour of a lead can improve your lead scoring model. Ensuring all of your leads get a priority assigned to them. Through lead routing you can assign leads to the best performing reps based upon bandwidth to make sure your sales team is busy.

Sales Automation provides solutions to increase your availability and improve the timing of your follow ups. Think emails, chatbots and sequencing. Interacting at scale with clients will become easier when you predefine sequences (a flow of emails) ensuring adequate client engagement to prevent getting ghosted.

Collecting data in your CRM can be a tedious process. Integrating your customer facing software (such as your website, lead form, demo request form etc.) with your CRM will make it easier for your sales team to understand when someone has high intent and the possibility to convert or upsell. It will help to keep data up to date.

71% of your clients expect personalized presentations and marketing content. Building an integration between your CRM and presentation software will allow you to create data-driven presentations that are always resonating with your clients. They drive 40% more revenue when done well. This is possible through SlideFill.

There is nothing that sellers hate more than logging client engagements in their CRM. These are important input metrics for leadership, but a real burden for sellers. Integration of your mail provider and calendar with your CRM can limit call logging to purely updating the outcome of a call.

Companies often have a weekly business review meeting and an operation meeting to understand how teams are performing. The creation of these decks takes a long time. Management or analytics will have to pull the freshest data from your CRM and make a presentable deck. You can automate this process with parameters that automatically update on a weekly basis. This is possible through SlideFill.

Automated sales tools can help you find leads by scanning the internet for prospects meeting your criteria. They also allow you to instantly score the prospects, send a communication and prevent duplication in your CRM.

Automation allows you to use the most up to date data. This will improve your sales forecasting. You can forecast trends, revenue movement and eliminate the need to manually analyse data to get insights about where you will land.

Auto-diallers are a piece of software reducing the time between sales calls. They enable your team to connect with more prospects and take away the pain of manually dialling each number. You will increase efficiency and increase the time your sellers talk to clients.

The key benefits of sales automation are:

• Increase in productivity
• Decrease in cost
• Uplift in revenue

Productivity is the straightforward one. When reps do not have to do a manual task, it is saving them time.

This inevitably leads to a reduction in cost. You will have the same amount of people available but they have more time available to do revenue generating activities.

Which finally results in an uplift in revenue. When sellers can focus on activities that are generating revenue such as talking to clients, they will be able to close more pipeline and drive more revenue.

Below are some examples outlined.

Lead scoring and prioritization will help your sellers to focus. They will need to spend less effort in manually analysing their book of business. By providing them automatically with the most qualitative leads, you will be able to save time and invest your headcount in the most promising leads.

Sellers will spend less time on creating presentations and updating slide decks with data relevant for their clients. This will help them to always have pitch decks that are resonating with clients. It will save time to create presentations but also increase conversion rate as clients will better understand the opportunity.

Clients can have queries or might become unresponsive. Through automated client nurturing sellers can schedule series of emails to reengage with clients that are becoming unresponsive. Chatbots can help to answer questions faster. A happy client that’s engaging with us, will spend more money.

Customers and leads are used to having an instant experience. They can order on Amazon in three clicks and they expect the same from every business. Automation can help to give instant support to clients and acknowledge the fact that they want to do business with you. It will allow you to put the next action item back on the client, saving time and focusing on having meetings.

Leadership needs consistent reporting to make the right decisions. Decisions require insights. With qualitative consistent reporting they can focus more time on detecting trends and making strategic decisions that are leading to more revenue.

Sellers should be on top of their business. Especially when sellers have a large book of business, things can become tricky. Through frequent reminders of outstanding tasks, you help your sellers move their pipeline to the next stage. They will know when to connect with a client, which clients are at risk to churn and where they can upsell.

When you are bought in, the moment will come where you have to look for the right sales automation solution. This requires careful consideration. Choosing the wrong tool can lead to problems down the patch.

When making decisions around your tech stack, keep in mind the following guidance:

Not all sales automation software integrates with your current technology stack. When selecting software, evaluate how well the software is working with your current stack and what needs to be done to start using the new software.

Put additional focus on the management of data. You want to choose tools that are using the same type of data as your CRM.

Ease of use is wildly undervalued. There are multiple elements you need to evaluate to evaluate the ease of use of your new software. Look at the following factors:

• Time and help necessary to set up the software
• Training and hours needed to enable your sellers to use it
• User-friendliness and intuitiveness of the software
• Documentation and tutorials you can find on the internet
• Setting up teams, access and permissions
• Support available for the maintenance of the software

Lastly, you want to be able to track the success of the tool you are buying. That means you want to be able to see usage, time saved, increase in revenue, decrease in cost, …

It should be easy and straightforward for you to report on the impact of the tool on your organization.

Before you head to the conclusion of this article, you can find answers on frequently asked questions related to how you can improve sales automation in your business:

There is no question that companies leveraging sales automation will do better and grow faster than those ignoring it. If you are not yet, you should start embracing automation today.

To get you become a better sales leader, we have outlined three next steps you can take today:

Map out your current sales processes. Find steps that are repetitive and consuming a lot of time. Research how easy it is to automate the process and work with relevant stakeholders such as Revenue Operations to create a plan to remove the manual step.

Make a conscious decision about the sales automation software you want to use. Decide based on easy of use, integrations and reporting capabilities. Calculate the savings the software will bring and how much these savings are worth for your business.

Once you have automated steps in your sales process, ensure you have adequate reporting on the improvements. You want to measure the impact of your new software and showcase that you have made the right investment decisions. Consider further expansion when results are good.

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Views are personal and not affiliated to employers.
No generative AI was used to write the article.
All examples are illustrative and fictional.