In order to remain competitive in a rapidly changing business environment, it is important to use as many new options as available to you when striving to streamline your working processes. Using sales automation in an adequate and efficient manner can be crucial to the success of your sales goals. Here are some of the common sales automation mistakes and ways to avoid them.
Choosing the Right Sales Automation Software
A sales automation software should improve the effectiveness of your sales team by streamlining sales processes using task automation. To get the most out of sales automation, it is essential to choose a solution that works best for your particular situation. You should take several factors into account in order not to end up with a solution that is either inadequate for your sales processes or one that is too complicated and requires additional investment of time or money into training and maintenance. In order to avoid making a wrong choice, you should:
- Identify your pain points in order to address them with the new software you choose.
- Understand the specific needs of your sales organization as different types of sales teams have different needs and existing sales processes.
- Take these needs and processes into account when researching and comparing different software packages.
- Take your sales team’s feedback into account when deciding on new software and determining which features it should have.
- Avoid going for complicated and expensive software, as the expenses will only increase with training, maintenance and support costs.
- Pick an option that allows customization in order to get optimum results.
Automating Follow-up
It is unrealistic to expect that your leads will engage with your business or buy your product upon the first contact with your company. Having a consistent, personalized, and relevant follow-up from the get go is crucial in engaging prospects and closing deals. When sales team representatives are under increased pressure, one of the first things they are likely to neglect is follow-up and one of the most common mistakes businesses make is relying solely on their sales team. Finding the best solution for automating your follow-up processes will help your sales team be more efficient as manual and automated tasks will be streamlined into one coherent and consistent system.
Taking Advantage of Social selling
Social selling is a way for sales teams to use social media for finding the right prospects and building trusted relationships with them, which will ultimately lead to fulfilling specific sales goals. Social media could as be useful for lead nurturing as email and other channels, as it is a platform where you can establish long-term engagement that will ultimately pay off. The accessibility of social media allows you to actively communicate with prospects, while different tools such as analytics can help you detect when is the right time to reach out and to whom. You should look into options that provide analytics such as Facebook advertising in order to maximize the insight available to you. This insight will enable you to determine when is the right time to send a follow-up that is likely to be well-received.
You are not Scoring Your Leads
Going through prospect lists manually in order to determine which are your “hottest” leads is tedious and time consuming for your sales team. Automating your lead scoring is essential for a smoother operation. Lead scoring helps you to detect the most and the least engaged prospects in your database so your sales team can respond accordingly, either by follow-up or attempts at re-engagement. There is a number of parameters to base your lead assessment on, such as demographics, behaviour (engagement, website visits, etc.), length of time present in the database, and others. Before implementing a lead scoring solution, you should determine the traits of an ideal lead for your business in order to carefully choose the criteria on which you base the scores.
Automate Your Sales
Good use of sales automation solutions can significantly improve your business practices by boosting your sales team’s efficiency while helping you find the right prospects that you can later nurture into customers.