Sales Automation Process for SMBs - Everything You Need to Know

Sales automation is a powerful way to close more sales, boost productivity, and integrate your marketing and sales processes. 

Yet, many small and medium-sized businesses struggle with creating seamless processes that remove tedious manual processes, ultimately allowing sales teams to better qualify leads and make more sales.

Sales process automation software allows SMBs to reap the same benefits as major enterprises that have leveraged these platforms for years. Now, it’s easy for small and medium-sized organizations to embrace sales workflow automation to benefit the entire organization.

A McKinsey report discovered that more than 30% of the sales process could be automated, removing the need for manual labor and human involvement. Then, sales teams can focus on the higher-level processes to better qualify leads and generate revenue rather than being absorbed in mundane tasks.

How exactly does sales automation work, and what benefits does it bring to your business? Read on to find out.

Understanding sales automation

Sales automation is a specific process in which specialized software eliminates or minimizes tedious and repetitive tasks throughout the sales workflow. The ultimate goal of an automated sales system is to allow sales teams to focus on closing sales rather than managing manual, routine tasks that need to be done repeatedly. 

Once implemented, sales teams will benefit from efficient processes, fewer mundane tasks, and more time to focus on qualifying leads and closing sales. 

It’s crucial to note that the goal of sales automation isn’t to remove the human element from the sales process but remove tedious tasks that allow staff to put more time into building meaningful connections with potential customers.

Key benefits of sales automation for SMBs

Adopting the right CRM for your business can do wonders for your business. Then, you can put it to work automating sales processes to reap several vital benefits, including: 

• ‍Close more sales: Free up your teams to focus on contacting customers, qualifying leads, and forming connections necessary to close sales. ‍

• Enhanced accuracy: Relying on manual processes will inevitably lead to errors, even with the most experienced teams. Automate these processes to improve accuracy, which helps the entire process.‍

• Increased productivity: Are manual processes making your sales representatives more productive? Even if they get a lot of tedious tasks done, their productivity is ultimately focused on sales, not admin tasks.‍

• More efficient processes: Inefficient tasks cost your company money, both in employee wages and missed opportunities to close sales. Boost efficiency and cut costs at the same time.‍

• Better customer satisfaction: Customers appreciate fast responses, self-learning, and more time with sales representatives. Create lasting relationships with customers with sales automation.

The above benefits can help SMBs, medium-sized businesses, and enterprises. But is it time to start automating your processes?

Implementing an effective sales automation process

Sales automation involves understanding your customers, your current conversion funnels, and any inefficiencies throughout your sales process. The process of upgrading to sales automation will look different for every organization, but the following high-level steps can help you get started.

1. Start with your overall goals

What do you wish to achieve by automating your sales processes? Begin by identifying the goal to keep you on track as you dive into the specifics. 

Are you losing opportunities because teams take too long to follow up with leads? Are your sales representatives overwhelmed with tedious tasks? Or are processes going well, but you want to streamline workflows to boost sales?

Your specific goals inform how exactly you build a new automate sales process to benefit your teams and customers. Take the time to evaluate the most detrimental issues to existing processes so you can make tactful decisions to enhance them.

2. Choose the right CRM with the features you need

Most CRMs will have some type of sales automation, but not all of them will have what you need. Keeping your goal in mind, evaluate the capabilities of any potential CRMs and their ability to help your teams. 

Additionally, consider available integrations and APIs to ensure it works with the rest of your tech stack. Overlooking a necessary integration can result in starting from square one if you realize it after signing up.

There are plenty of CRMs to choose from - it’s crucial to understand your needs and the prospective platform's capabilities before signing up.

3. Consider creating email templates

Your email marketing campaigns are likely using templates or pre-written emails, but how are your sales reps contacting leads?

It’s essential to have a personalized, human touch when your sales reps email leads. However, you can leverage email templates to streamline this process. 

Don’t make your teams write new emails with every new contact. Instead, establish templates ready for crucial milestones in the sales process for reps to customize as necessary.

4. Integrate all data and mundane workflows

The real power of sales automation is unleashed when you integrate all necessary systems and use specific capabilities to eliminate mundane workflows.

For example, lead generation and qualification can be entirely automated, depending on your sales process. Go beyond opt-in forms and create specific workflows to qualify new leads before a sales rep contacts a lead. Additionally, this practice involves centralizing all available data about a new lead into your CRM, saving reps from navigating too many systems when making contact.

Your chosen CRM must have all the necessary integrations before you start. Every other system involved in your existing sales processes should integrate with your CRM, and from there, you can explore specific ways to automate workflows.

5. Train your teams

If you don’t train your teams in these new processes, everything so far will be for nothing. Both marketing and sales teams should strongly understand new tools and workflows to better interact with customers.

Sales representatives should know precisely how to find customer information, pre-qualification information, and contact details effortlessly. In addition, they should be equipped with the tools to update customer-specific statuses with each contact, such as scheduling follow-ups and order tracking.

Team up with Fireberry for a customizable CRM ready for sales automation

Businesses of all sizes have already benefited from integrating leveraging sales automation to take manual processes off the plate of sales teams. Sales staff can then benefit from automated sales workflows and put more time and attention into working with leads and converting them into customers.

It’s vital to have an effective CRM to power sales automation while keeping your teams on the same page. Without the right platform, sales automation efforts may fall short of expectations and even create more issues than they solve.

Fireberry is an industry-leading CRM focusing on customizability, robust integrations, and the flexibility to accommodate your specific needs. Our platform is ideal for any business, from SMBs to enterprise-level organizations.

Ready to discover how we can enhance your processes and enable true sales automation? Contact us today to talk to a sales automation expert and learn how our platform can help.

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