- Client Prospecting
With an SFA system you can easily seek out the best new customers for your business, find the best leads and gain relevant information about them.
Another thing that you can do is filter out the most promising leads based on actual data that you gain from them and their interactions with your company. This data includes, for example, the actions they perform on your website.
Be sure to initiate a meaningful first contact with potential customers through automated marketing needs assessments. Your SFA system will be able to assess your prospect’s needs, and your sales team can then reach out to them accordingly based on their specific needs.
- Lead tracking and scoring
An SFA system can automatically track your prospects’ actions and engagement with your business to tell you when the appropriate time is to actually reach out and talk to them.
Some platforms also offer AI-powered lead scoring and lead management opportunities that in turn help you evaluate and prioritize leads based on different specs like their company, role, location, and so forth. Some leads are simply more likely to close than others, and lead management tools help you keep track of your most promising ones.
- Scheduling meetings and calls
Sales automation makes the process of scheduling meetings with potential leads a lot easier. Prospects can, for example, see your sales rep’s calendar right away and pick a meeting time that’s most convenient for them.
- Data collection from meetings and calls
Let’s be honest – data collection is one of the most time-consuming, tedious tasks in the sales process. Lucky for all of us, some platforms help you save data and information throughout your sales process.
Some SFA tools use technologies (like AI) to capture data about the customer and their business, and put that data directly into the integrated CRM system.
- Deal management
With an SFA system, you can easily handle contact management and order management, as well as recording calls, emails and meetings automatically. AI will keep track of previous deals in order to recommend potential offers. This way you can create the optimal deal for a specific customer.
By tracking opportunities within one automated dashboard, you can skip manual data entry while strengthening communication within your organization.
Reduce the amount of work hours put into sending emails by automating email campaigns that send out certain messages to a certain individual once they perform a desired action.
Let’s look at an example: the action could be starting a free trial with your SaaS company. Your first automated email could be a simple welcome message. Then later you could follow up with another email and, say, give them a discount on their subscription for a month after the free trial has ended.
You set up the email campaign just once, and every time someone meets the predefined trigger, the emails will be sent automatically. It sounds easy because it is easy.
An SFA system will also keep track of your email templates and safely store them in one place, in case you ever need to make any edits to existing templates or create new ones.
Signature automation a.k.a creating a good automated email signature will make it as easy as possible for possible new customers to contact you. A good signature includes at least clear contact information, your company name and a link to your website.
You can certainly make it cooler with pictures and colors, but it’s a good idea to start with the essentials.
- Proposals and requests for proposals (RFPs)
In an SFA system, you can automate the RFP process, communicate more easily within organizations, track the results you get and easily reuse RFP templates. An SFA system also lets you collect useful data from your RFP results.
- Creating contracts and deals
Set up workflows with your automated sales and marketing software to automatically create and edit records for leads who meet a certain criteria or perform a desired task on your website.
For example, if a lead with a certain job title visits your website, you already have a suitable template ready to go.
Sales Automation Tools
Sales, Marketing And Service Combined
There are multiple platforms that offer a combination of sales, marketing and service systems, all integrated. These include services like HubSpot Sales, Leadsquared and Outreach.
Lead Generation
If you’re looking for a combination of lead generation software and tools, as well as a CRM system, you might want to check out Salesforce Hub.
Another nice option is Pega Sales Automation – it has has a built-in AI that guides your sales professionals to the best leads, opportunities and content, and then suggests best next steps.
Email Marketing
There are multiple email automation tools out there, but you have to get started somewhere, right? Check out services like MailChimp and Prospect.io to get started on your email marketing shenanigans.
Invoicing & Contracts
LeadExec is a platform for capturing and routing inbound web leads and phone calls. PandaDoc offers a completely automated custom approval workflows that are designed to save time and make it easier to create, review, approve, and send documents. And lastly, companies like Keap offer an invoicing system for seamless payments.
Chatbots
Chatbots help keep potential guests interested and push them further ahead in the sales funnel while simultaneously ensuring a great customer experience. Using intelligent chatbots in your sales strategy means being there for your potential buyers and customers on their terms, whenever they need you.
Awesome Examples Of Sales Automation
Targeting New People At Interesting Companies
Each time someone is hired at a company you’re targeting, you can have the system automatically email them to say congrats, then later send them, for example, a survey about the future of marketing.
After this, an automated notification will let a salesperson in your team know to call the customer and schedule a meeting.
Notifications About New Developments
The SFA system can notify your sales team about any developments at a company you’re following. These developments can be things like a new product launch or anything your company is interested in.
When you are aware of these things happening, you can contact relevant people whenever suitable, or have the system contact them for you.
Keeping Track Of Customer Behavior On Your Site
Even without enabling cookies or leaving any digital footprint on your site, some platforms will give you the probability of a customer converting based on their behavior.
It can even tell you from what companies your website visitors are from, so that you can find out (for example through social media platforms like LinkedIn) who to contact from that particular company.
Making Subscription Renewal Easier in SaaS
In addition to helping with the sales process in general, you can automate and simplify subscription renewal within the system, and notify your sales professionals about upselling opportunities.
Like we mentioned before, contacting your customers via email after their free trial is about to end is a good example of using sales force automation in SaaS.
Sales Automation Process Checklist
- To sum everything up here’s a checklist to help you get started with sales force automation:
- Know your sales process
- Identify your best leads with a lead scoring program
- Automatically create deals and save the data you get from them
- Automate responses to your prospects (don’t forget follow-up messages!)
- Create reminders about moving forward in deals
- Move deals through stages in your pipeline automatically: through, for example, scheduling meetings, signing documents and payment
- Be ready for the next steps after closing with automatic reminders to your team
