Have you ever gotten a sales call and thought about how many people that salesperson spoke to before getting to your number? Or how many people they’ll speak to after?

Have you ever been in a sales position and lamented over the volume of cold calls you had to make, follow-up emails you had to send, leads you had to manage, or appointments you had to negotiate?

According to McKinsey research, a third of all sales processes can actually be automated. So let’s look a bit more into sales automation, including what it is and how it can benefit your company, and how you can build such a workflow for yourself.

What's A Sales Automation Workflow?

A sales automation workflow is a process of automating your sales tasks and processes in order to improve efficiency and close more deals. “It's technology that is able to replicate human cognitive capability, such as logical reasoning, pattern recognition, and so on, thus reducing manual labor in a given sales process,” explains McKinsey & Company researchers.

The main goal of sales automation is to take care of the busy work, so that your sales reps can focus on activities that directly contribute to revenue generation, such as prospecting and building relationships.

Sales automation can cover a wide range of activities, from the very basics (such as contact management) to more complex tasks (like lead nurturing). In short, anything that can be automated in your sales process should be.

What Are The Benefits Of Sales Automation Workflow For Your Company?

Let's take a deeper look at the potential benefits to creating a sales automation workflow.

It’s Time-saving

Automating your sales process can save a lot of time. Especially if you have a complex or lengthy sales process, automating certain tasks can free up a significant amount of time for your sales team. For example, if your sales process requires a lot of follow-ups or if you have to send out a lot of proposals, automating these tasks can be a huge time saver.

It Increases Productivity

In addition to saving time, automating your sales process can also make your team more productive. This is because automating repetitive tasks frees up your team’s time to focus on more important tasks, such as selling.

It Improves Accuracy

Integrating automation also improves the accuracy of your data. Human error is the biggest contributor to mistakes in the sales funnel, so removing people from the equation and introducing AI leads to fewer mistakes to deal with.

It Elevates Efficiency

Creating this kind of workflow frees up your sales process to become more efficient. Once these tasks are out of the hands of your sales team, they have more time to do other things. If you delegate tasks based on experience or expertise, this allows your lead acquisition to become so much more efficient, as people are doing what they do best.

It Makes Customer Satisfaction Better

Automation can improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that the customer always has the most up-to-date information on their account.

It Creates Faster Sales Cycles

A well-designed workflow will help speed up your sales cycles by making it easier for your team to access the information they need and make decisions quickly.

It Maximizes Data Quality

When sales data is entered into the system automatically, it can be more accurate and complete than data that is manually entered. This can lead to better decision-making and improved forecasts.

It Reduces Costs

You can reduce administrative costs associated with manual tasks, such as data entry by adding, but incorporating automation into your sales department.

It Boosts Revenue

As sales automation accelerates your sales cycle and frees up your sales team to focus on selling rather than administrative tasks, it also in turn leads to increases in revenue.

HubSpot’s 2021 Sales Enablement Report actually found that 61% of businesses that made the effort to leverage automation in their sales workflow exceeded their revenue targets in 2020. That’s pretty impressive, right?

How To Build It

Now that we’ve looked at the various benefits of incorporating automation into your sales workflow, it’s time to learn how to build it in just seven simple steps.

No hard hats required.

Step 1: Choose Your Automation Tool

The first step is, of course, to select the software you want to use to automate your sales workflow.

Forbes Communication Council’s Expert Panel considers HubSpot to be one of the top six tools for marketing automation and HubSpot Sales is a great choice for small businesses and startups because it’s free and relatively simple to use.

If you have a more complex sales process or a larger team, you may want to consider a tool like Salesforce instead.

LaGrowthMachine is another fantastic choice for sales automation. In addition to being a powerful and versatile automation tool, it also doubles as a good sales prospecting tool, with hundreds of customizable templates to help you save time.

Step 2: Plug It In With Your CRM

Next, you'll need to integrate your chosen automation software into your Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM for short. Doing so will ensure that your automation tool can "talk" to your CRM and vice versa.

This communication is critical for sales teams because it allows them to have a complete view of the customer's buying journey – from the initial lead all the way through to purchase.

Step 3: Import Your Leads From Any Source

Now it’s time to get all of your leads into one place. You can do this by manually inputting them into your CRM, or you can use a lead capture tool like Leadpages or Unbounce that will automatically add new leads to your CRM.

Once you have all of them together, it’s time to start building out your workflow.

Step 4 : Set Up User Qualification Rules With Arengu

Setting up user qualification rules will help you ensure that only leads that are actually sales-ready are pushed further down into your workflow.

You can use Arengu’s powerful form builder to create a lead capture form and then add conditional logic to it, so that only leads that fit your ideal customer profile get through to the next stage.

Step 5: Enrich Your Leads With Data

When building an effective sales automation workflow, it's important to make sure that your leads are properly enriched with data. This data can come from a variety of sources, including your own CRM, social media, and even public records. The important thing is that it’s accurate and up-to-date.

One of the best ways to ensure this is to use a lead enrichment tool like LeadGnome. LeadGnome can automatically pull in data from a variety of sources and append it to your existing leads, making sure that they have everything they need to be successful.

Step 6: Create Multi Channel Campaigns

Sales automation platforms make it easy to create and track the performance of multi-channel campaigns.

With Pardot, for example, you can create an email campaign that’s triggered when a prospect visits your website, clicks on a specific link, or downloads a certain piece of content.

Step 7: Adjust Your Campaign With Feedbacks & Insights

The final step in the process to create your own sales automation workflow is to keep track of your campaign’s progress and make changes along the way.

You’ll want to monitor things like:

• How many contacts are you able to reach?
• Are you seeing an increase in conversions?
• How many sales are you closing?

If you’re not seeing the results you want, it might be time to go back to the drawing board and make some changes.

But if you are seeing success, then congratulations! You’ve just created your own sales automation workflow that is sure to help your business close more deals and boost your bottom line.

Conclusion

In this article we’ve gone over what sales automation is, we’ve looked into the multitude of benefits it provides, and we’ve gone through the steps on how you can integrate sales automation into your own workflow.

So there you have it; the case for why sales automation can enable you to create your best sales workflow, ever.

Now it’s time for you to decide. Will you keep your workflow the same? Or will you elevate with automation?