Money Makers: Everything You Need to Know About Sales Automation

 

Do you wish for a sales process without any manual input? Do you want to save time, increase efficiency and generate more sales from your marketing efforts? Are you looking for ways to improve the performance of your team and make it easier to manage them? If so, you are looking at the right article as in this post, we will be discussing the benefits of sales automation and how to integrate it into your sales process.

So what is this sales automation thing?

In today's digital marketing landscape, businesses need to adapt or die. Sales automation is a necessity for modern-day businesses that want to increase profitability and efficiency in their sales team. This is basically setting up your sales process or some its parts — with repetitive ones particularly coming to mind — such that it works with little to no human input involved. Understandably, this will help you save time and effort, as well as reduce your need to hire more manpower to get more of the job done.

Does your business need sales automation?

First off, it must be understood that not all businesses can benefit from sales automation. Small businesses, for instance, will only find it an unnecessary expense, but large and growing businesses will certainly find it a useful upgrade to their sales process.

Ask yourself the following to know whether or not you need to automate your business:

• Are you willing to spend money on automation? Automating the sales aspect of your business costs quite a lot of money. Installation, for one, will likely require you to buy new hardware, and the necessary software will not come cheap either. You will either need to buy the needed software licenses such as an email checker or work with a developer to create a software application tailored for your business' needs. That is not to mention the fact that you will need to spend money on a regular basis to maintain your system and keep it up-to-date.

• Do you deal with too many repetitive administrative tasks? Automation is best left to handle repetitive and mundane tasks, and the likes of managing schedules and sending emails fit that category. If are working on a large number of these tasks and you find them overwhelming, or if they are taking time and attention that is best spent on actually managing your business, then you will need to have them automated.

• Do you want to give more attention to growing your business? Handing over time-consuming and repetitive sales tasks to automation software will save you time and money. It will also let you focus on other aspects of your business, especially on making decisions that will direct the growth of your entrepreneurial venture.

• Are you willing to train yourself and your employees to use your sales automation system? A sales automation system is not plug-and-play — you don't just set it up and let it do all the work on its own. You will have to learn how it works and how you will have to operate it if you are to completely integrate it into your business. Your employees will have to do the same, and training them will temporarily take them out of their roles and disrupt your business' operations.

• Is automation worth the money and the effort? As we have discussed earlier, automation costs time, money, and a lot of work. You have to weigh the pros and cons of automating your business, and whether or not the possible benefits are worth the risk that you will be undertaking. This brings us to the next point, that being the advantages and disadvantages of automation.

The pros of sales automation

Automation has so many benefits, and here are the first few things that will come to mind:

• It will save you a lot of time. Repetitive tasks in the sales automation pipeline take some time to accomplish. Putting them on automation, then, will help you save precious time. Again, you can better spend this time on actually running your business and shaping up strategies that will bring in growth.

• You and your employees can focus on other aspects of the business. While you will be able to put more attention to running your business, your employees end up having more time in their hands. You can relegate them to other tasks, particularly those that require complex thinking and creativity.

• It will make your sales processes more efficient. Reducing the time spent on the sales process essentially increases its efficiency as well. As you end up paying more attention to other aspects of the process, you will also end up becoming more productive. Your company ends up accomplishing more in a day with automation than when you do things the old-fashioned manual way.

The cons of sales automation

That does not go without saying that automating sales do not have any disadvantage. It has some consequences as well, namely:

• The learning curve for sales automation is longer than it would be when you're doing things manually. That means that your employees will need time to get used to the new process and adapt accordingly. Retraining is essential, as mentioned earlier, and this will make them less productive as they learn how to use the new system.

• You might also end up investing in a more expensive system from the start if you want to go fast with implementing sales automation into your business. You will need to spend money on automation, and your expenses will depend on how much you are going to automate and how complex your automation is.

• Automation adds to the sales overhead. You will have to spend money on maintenance to keep your system running on a regular basis. You will also have to upgrade it from time to time in order to keep it up-to-date. After all, technology rapidly evolves and you need to keep up if you do not want to lose your competitive edge.

Should you automate, then?

The question of automating your business really depends on whether or not your business needs it at the moment. Are sales slow and you need to find a way to increase the number of leads? Are your marketing campaigns not generating enough ROI or conversions? If any of these are true, then automation is worth considering.

If you have no issues with lead generation or conversion rates, it may be better for now to just set the idea aside. You may still consider automating your sales process at a later time when you have grown your business and its needs have scaled up.