Sales Automation: How Small Businesses Win Against Bigger Competitors

You’re David, and they’re Goliath. 

If you’re a small-scaling business with big growth goals, you know you’ve got a rival—a much bigger competitor casting a shadow over your business, standing in the way of your growth. Every day, you think about how to take them down, even though they seem to have all the resources in the world at their disposal. 

So how do you compete against The Big Guys™️?

If you’ve got a small, scrappy sales team of at least one human being—plus a computer with internet access—you can become a serious contender.  

Let me introduce you to the world of sales automation—or, as I like to call it, the great equalizer. 

Look, I’m not naive. I know you’re not going to displace Coca-Cola or Ford any time soon. But sales automation can be a small business’ secret weapon to hold your own against The Big Guys™️ in your niche. 

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation means leveraging technology to increase productivity in your sales process. 

In other words: you use software to eliminate repetitive, manual sales tasks and automate them, allowing you to focus more on closing sales and earning revenue. 

Some examples of sales automation tasks include: 

• Scheduling follow-up emails to nurture leads 
• Re-engaging leads that have gone cold
• Outreach through phone calls, SMS, and email to contact more customers faster
• AI-powered call transcribing and note-taking
• Analyzing customer data for better targeting

Automating sales operations and admin tasks helps businesses, specifically sales reps, become more efficient and higher-performing. 

So what does this mean for you, the small-scaling business trying to take a bigger bite out of your industry’s market share? 

Sales Automation = A Force Multiplier for Small Teams

Consider The Big Guys™️ in your space. They probably have huge sales teams with a headcount you could only dream of. But don’t let that intimidate you. Frankly, they spend most of their time gossiping in front of the donut box in the breakroom anyway. 

No matter the size of your business, sales automation tools speed up any sales process, giving you the power to handle high-volume sales just as well as a larger company. 

Sales automation is a force multiplier for businesses with lean teams. It can help level the playing field and allow you to do more with less. 

So yeah, maybe The Big Guys™️ have a 50-person sales team—but do they have the same sense of urgency you do? Are they as hungry as you are? (For donuts, maybe.)

I’ll go as far as to say that if you’ve got enough grit (and, let’s be honest, at least a little bit of a taste for revenge), you can easily leverage the right sales automation tools to punch way above your weight class. 

Keep Your Sales Team Laser-Focused on Selling, Not Bullshit

According to Forbes, nearly two-thirds (64.8 percent) of sales reps’ time is spent on non-revenue-generating activities. Fifteen percent of that time is spent on admin tasks. You want your sales reps to be burning six hours a week on admin bullshit? In this economy?? 

That leaves only 35.2 percent of a sales rep's time dedicated to functions related to selling. That ain’t gonna cut it if you’ve got big growth goals.‎

‎As a small business leader, your job is to remove all obstacles between your sales reps and revenue. This means they shouldn’t waste their time sifting through email inboxes (spoiler alert: they can’t find the email they’re looking for 😔) or spreadsheets, notebooks, post-its, cocktail napkins, etc. 

And how long has it been since each lead was contacted? How are you keeping track of your pipeline?

When you use a CRM with powerful sales automation built-in—like Close, hint, hint— you can keep your sales reps laser-focused on selling, not admin work, by automating the actions in your sales cycle. 

‎Real estate business owner Ian Hilario says:

“Close has helped easily automate our sales pipelines, creating more time for us to spend creating deals instead of working on systems and processes.” 

Now, I don’t exactly have the data to back this up (yet!) but it’s hard to imagine that a sales rep taking full advantage of automation would spend two-damn-thirds of their time NOT selling. Just sayin’. 

How to Automate Your Outreach to Win at High-Volume Sales 

When you automate your sales efforts, you speed up your ability to close. When you speed up your ability to close, you can tackle a higher sales volume than you normally would. Soon enough, you can become a real problem for your competitors, really fast. 😈 

So, how do you do it?

Listen, I’m going to level with you. You’re reading the Close blog, so you probably already know that the thing we do is automate sales using the Close CRM. So, I’m going to tell you how to do it using the software we’ve built for this exact purpose. 

Automated Sales Workflows

It’s 2024, folks. You should be able to use AI to automate next steps in your sales workflow depending on customer behavior, from outreach to scheduling to follow-up and more.

‎Customizing sales Workflows in Close allows you to create multi-channel sales outreach. Trigger email, call, and SMS steps on your Workflows to increase your reach rate. 

You can experiment with different Workflows to see what works (and what doesn’t) for your customers. Hone and repeat your best formulas. As your reps build experience and optimize their Workflows, they can clone and edit proven templates to grow their sales skills—generating more revenue with less effort. 

One G2 reviewer said of our CRM:

“Close gives you the ability to take all the ‘thinking’ out of sales. Who should I be calling? What are the next steps with this lead?” 

We won’t go as far as to say automated workflows take all the thinking out of sales (or would we?), but it makes it easier to handle the kind of high-volume selling you need to create scalable growth. 

Automated Phone Outreach

Call automation simplifies and accelerates your day-to-day phone outreach. Close’s Power Dialer allows you to call through lead lists automatically, dialing a new phone number right after a call is completed.

For higher call volume needs, there’s a Predictive Dialer, which allows sales teams to dial multiple numbers at once—and when a real human answers, it routes an available rep to the call. 

Automated Call Assistant

Who’s taking notes on those customer calls? YOU?? 

Reader, you do not have to live like this anymore. The robots should take notes for you. 🤖

In other words, we built an AI call assistant that automatically transcribes and summarizes each phone call. Your reps can focus on the conversation and rely on AI to produce an accurate, searchable summary with action items.

What a time to be alive.

‎Automated Email and SMS Outreach

It’s becoming harder and harder to compete in cold outreach without some kind of email and SMS automation—and soon, it’ll be damn near impossible. Use automation to create and optimize templates, set triggers for outreach (instead of relying on your human brain), and track performance. 

Launch an email and SMS strategy that works for your ideal customer. Use Smart Views to specify which leads you want to receive your emails. Customize send times and track engagement—especially useful for bulk blasts. 

And it wouldn’t be true email automation without (more) AI, would it? So, we integrated an AI Rewrite Assistant powered by ChatGPT directly into Close so you can save time writing (and perfecting) your emails. 

Oscar Salomon Avila of Blú Capital shared how email automation has increased his close rate:

“I can be very fast at closing leads; I have all the information needed at a glance, and I can automate responses, emails, and trigger actions very easily, improving my chances of closing a lot more sales.”

Automated Follow-Up 

When your customer data is spread across multiple team members’ inboxes and contacts lists, prospects can fall through the cracks—especially if they’re not disciplined about following up. 

And as we all know, leads that slip through the cracks go cold. 

Luckily, you can automatically trigger messages to re-engage prospects after a set amount of time has passed without action. 

Brendan Swart, Director of Operations at MyBusinessApp says:

“In our small team, we focus on producing and delivering sales emails through the template-driven system that Close has. Along with the easy reminder setup, we never leave a potential customer behind.” 

Automation via Integrations

In a perfect world, all the tools in your tech stack would play nicely together and, if you wanted, you could build a fully AI robot automation superstack and never have to lift a finger to make a sale.

That’s not the world we live in. (Yet.)

But we’re one step closer with the integrations Close has with the following tools:

• Zapier – Allows you to build unique automations inside Close and lets you connect even more tools.
• Calendly – Syncs with your Calendly links so you can manage your meeting invites within Close. 
• HubSpot –  Syncs lead data between your marketing and sales tools seamlessly so customers don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Choose Your Sales Automation Tools Wisely

Okay. I’ve made a case for why Close is the best CRM for automating sales, but we know we’re not right for every business. 

Whatever you decide, when you’re evaluating your options, be sure to do a deep dive into a CRM’s sales automation capabilities. Otherwise, you may find yourself paying for a very expensive Rolodex that doesn’t actually help you accelerate your growth. You’ll find this kind of bare-bones functionality in budget CRMs like Pipedrive, GoHighLevel, etc. 

In any case, we here at Close love an underdog. Heck, we’re underdogs too. Try a free 14-day trial of Close to see how we can help you take down The Big Guys™️ in your industry.