Sales automation is functionality within the software that automates a range of processes and repetitive tasks within a customer journey. Sales automation is often included as part of CRM, lead tracking and email marketing software.
There are many benefits to sales automation, but we have listed the most impactful benefits that every business will see if they automate their sales process.
One of the biggest benefits of automating your sales process is time, as they say, time is money. While your sales team could be spending their time actually generating sales, do you find they are bogged down with repetitive tasks and multiple entries of the same data? This is where sales automation can help your business.
Rather than solely relying on manual actions taking place, your processes can move forward to the next step in your customer's journey faster.
For example, if a customer approves a quote, you can automatically create a sales order, send your customer an order confirmation and even create purchase orders, allocate stock and generate a delivery note instantly, rather than having to manually perform these actions.
When you are entering data multiple times, there is always a chance that data will be inputted incorrectly (We are all human and it happens). But when you automate the process, you only need to input the data once, depending on the process you may not even have to do that. Reducing the chance of input errors will ultimately save your business time, money and effort.
By making your sales process as efficient as possible, your cost per sale will be significantly reduced. The points that have been made above save countless hours for your sales team, as they are not wasting time unnecessarily creating documents, inputting information, and liaising with other departments to make sure the sale is managed and processed correctly.
Up to this point we have covered, reducing costs, speeding up your processes, reducing errors and reducing the cost per sale. All of these things combined will increase the opportunity for your business to grow and thrive.
Keeping customers informed on the progress of their order, is one of the keys to providing great customer service at the start of the relationship. You can do this by sending updates by email (or SMS) automatically to keep them fully informed.
Even before this point, automating emails as part of your follow-up process before or after you have sent your quote or proposal can have a massive impact on your sales and conversion rates. Sadly, sales follow-ups are usually the first area to be neglected in a busy sales department.
This works internally as well, if a purchase order is created, the accounts team can be informed, or if stock is allocated then the warehouse team can be informed. These are just the tip of the iceberg.
By creating tasks and jobs automatically and sending a notification to the relevant department or individual, you can keep your process running smoothly. As an example, you might have a service contract with a customer that requires routine servicing of equipment, a planned maintenance job can be created for the service to be scheduled and carried out.
Having up-to-date and accurate data on the amount of stock that you have can be imperative for certain businesses. By automatically providing your sales team with accurate stock levels it can save huge amounts of time and can also give them a tool which they can use to speed up sales cycles, for example, if certain items are at lower levels.
Cash is king! This means being paid on time is important for any business - large or small, automating credit control is the way to make this work. Customers can be chased by email when an invoice is overdue, or better still reminded in advance of upcoming payments. While on the face of it this may not seem relevant when talking about sales automation, if customers are behind or late on payments, this can often cause friction between sales departments and the rest of the business.
Automating credit control, ensures a shorter “quote to cash” cycle, and allows sales teams to get on with selling repeat orders to key customers.
You could even give Sales teams visibility of customers' credit limits, outstanding balances and more automatically, so they can save wasting time on customers who may not purchase or who present a high risk to your business.
What has been mentioned above is just the tip of the iceberg, and automating your sales process can help any business no matter what industry or sector they are in.
Zigaflow provides a CRM with automation at its core, the purpose of Zigaflow is to make businesses more efficient in the way they way and in turn help them to grow and prosper. For more information on Zigaflow visit our website and start your FREE 30-day trial.