By automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time data and insights, sales and marketing automation tools can help teams work more efficiently to nurture and close more deals.
The key is to deliver the right content and data at the right time to nurture more leads through the funnel. And the more you can eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks, this frees up your sales team to focus on the highest-impact things they can do to build relationships and close more deals.
This post takes a closer look at the benefits of sales and marketing automation and actionable examples of automations you can implement today.
Sales and marketing automation helps streamline and automate tedious or repetitive parts of the sales process, so you can free up your sales and marketing team to focus on the most strategic activities. This means a more efficient and productive process when executed well.
Sales automation tools can help across all marketing and sales aspects, from lead generation and nurture campaigns to CRM processes and reporting.
With sales and marketing automation, you can identify, manage, and close more deals faster by doing the following:
There is no shortage of ways to leverage sales and marketing automation to generate more leads, improve the customer relationships and close more deals. Here are some examples you can use.
Most buyers don’t convert on the first message. In fact, the optimal number of follow-up messages is two to three.
And many sales professionals recommend following up six times.
You can use automation to remind you when to follow up, surface relevant information to include, and even help write the follow-up sequences using tools like ChatGPT.
While sending a “just checking in” email is better than no follow-up, it is a lazy, suboptimal approach. A better way to follow up is to deliver value, which depends on where the prospect is in the sales cycle.
So, if it is a stuck deal, you will want to identify and address bottlenecks and objections head-on in your follow-ups.
Or, if it is someone who is early in their research, you might want to send relevant, helpful content (i.e. blog posts, guides, etc) or follow up at key milestones for them (like if they got a new job, raised a round, etc)
Still not sure how to craft follow-up messages that get replies? Read our post on how to follow up like a pro.
Whether you are following up with ghost leads or churned customers, it is far easier to engage someone who already has some familiarity with your brand than a cold lead.
Your messaging strategy and frequency will vary depending on context. For example, if you’re looking to re-engage customers, you could create an automated marketing campaign that shows LinkedIn ads to users who visited your site three days ago, but neer returned.
Most marketing platform, including social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter, and Google Ads allow marketing to automate re-engagment tasks.
Not every sales message needs to be sent by a sales rep. You can leverage AI chatbots to communicate with both prospects and customers on your website, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, etc.
It is best to use sales chatbots to answer frequently asked basic questions or automate repetitive tasks (like payment processes/reminders.) It can also be used to reduce customer service requests.
An added benefit of chatbots is that it works 24/7, so you could be qualifying leads and making sales while you sleep!
When all of the sales are being handled by the founder and maybe one salesperson, assigning and keeping track of leads can easily be handled manually.
However, as the sales team grows, you are going to need to create automated processes to keep track of all of your leads, so nothing falls through the cracks. You also want to prioritize the warmest leads and route the right leads to the right people.
This is particularly important if you sell to two or more different types of customers, like SMBs and enterprise companies. You’ll want to route any enterprise deals to enterprise reps.
Sales and marketing automation tools can help with this in various ways, including lead scoring, lead routing, and opportunity management.
If you have a longer sales cycle, it is critical to have automated nurture email campaigns. These campaigns should deliver content based on prospect behavior and where they are in the customer journey.
Where can you do this? Most CRMs, email marketing platforms, and engagement platforms offer this nifty features. For example, in Close you can create email workflow that automatically nurture new leads and push them towards conversion.
Most salespeople spend 25 percent or more of their day working on administrative tasks. like CRM data entry or call notes. That’s tons time they aren’t spending talking with prospects and selling.
Automation tools can streamline a lot of these manual, repetitive tasks, like:
If you’re looking for a telephony platform or CRM, look for sales task automation tools to eliminate those rote manual tasks.
You can’t manage and improve what you don’t measure. That’s why sales reporting is so important.
However, you shouldn’t be spending hours manually compiling sales reports each week (or even per month!)
Most CRMS, like Close, have detailed, built-in sales reports, so you can see your sales pipeline and how deals are tracking at any time. This makes it much easier to do everything from sales forecasting to quota setting for your team.
Many sales automation platforms also allow you to download information or port it into BI tools like Power BI or Google Data Studio so you can get more out of your data.
Scheduling meetings is the bane of most salespeople’s day. It requires tones of back and forth–plus juggling different time zones.
Eliminating friction and making it easy to get on a call with a prospect or book a demo is key to closing more deals. If you have to play email tag to find a time to meet, you are leaving a lot of potential deals on the table.
That’s where using a CRM, like Close, that directly integrates with scheduling software, like SavvyCal, comes in handy. With one link (and one email,) you can easily share when you’re available so prospects can pick a time that works.
No more email tags, no more lost leads.
Not only does it mean that a prospect can find a time to meet right on your calendar, but SavvyCal’s UX eliminates a lot of the awkwardness that comes with other scheduling software.
With the Close and SavvyCal integration, you can not only book more calls/meetings, but also automatically add all of your lead information to your Close account anytime someone books a meeting.
Here are some additional things you can do with this integration:
Editor’s Note: Looking for more details on how this integration works? Check out this how-to article.
Ready to book more sales calls and demos? Get a free month of SavvyCal for your whole team using our partner discount code. All you need to do is sign up for a free SavvyCal account here and email support@savvycal.com.