The Complete Guide to Sales Automation

Automating sales can help make your sales reps more efficient by offloading manual tasks and enabling them to focus on higher value activities. Meanwhile, automating your sales processes can help make your entire go-to-market organization more efficient, by reducing manual work across sales, marketing, operations, finance, and HR teams and making collaboration  more efficient. With so many sales automation technologies in the market, it can be difficult to figure out which tools and processes to focus on; let alone understanding the differences between all of the buzzwords. 

This is the only guide you need to understanding sales automation, sales force automation (SFA), sales process automation, sales operations automation, and every other sales automation buzzword you can think of. We’ll break down the essential concepts, processes, and softwares that you should think about as a sales leader, or someone who interfaces with sales managers on a regular basis. We’ll also cover the top sales automation software and sales force automation platforms that you might want to consider. 

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Sales Force Automation (SFA) vs. Sales Automation

Let’s break down this buzzword soup. Sales force automation is all about using software to streamline and automate the work your sales reps are doing to close deals and land more business. SFA can make reps more productive, and allow them to focus on selling, by making manual tasks less onerous or even fully automated. Sales force automation processes typically include functionalities such as lead and contact management, opportunity tracking, sales forecasting, sales analytics, and workflow automation. The primary goal of a sales force automation system is to optimize the sales force's productivity, improve customer interactions, and drive revenue growth. 

Sales Automation, on the other hand, is a broader term that encompasses the automation of a wider range of sales and marketing activities beyond the sales force. Sales automation includes both front-end and back-end sales processes, as well as marketing automation components. It aims to automate various aspects of the sales and marketing funnel, including lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, email marketing, social media automation, content management, proposal generation, contract management, commission calculations, and more. Sales automation focuses on automating the entire customer acquisition and conversion process, from initial lead generation to final deal closure. It can encompass work done by various teams, including finance, HR, marketing, and operations, rather than just the work that sales teams would conduct themselves. 

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Sales Automation vs. Marketing Automation

What is the difference between sales automation and marketing automation? While there is some overlap, sales automation is focused on automating activities surrounding the sales process. Marketing automation, meanwhile, refers to software platforms and technologies designed to help make marketing departments more efficient by automating repetitive marketing tasks. The goals of marketing automation tend to be more focused on generating demand and passing it on to the sales team, while sales automation is more focused on moving prospects through the sales funnel. 

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Essential Sales Automation Systems

Sales automation software is a broad umbrella category; we can break this down into a few different automation technologies, each of which has multiple competing sales automation softwares. This list includes examples of sales force automation tools. There are a number of benefits depending on which approaches you take. Here are some sales automation examples to consider implementing. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRMs allowing businesses to centralize and manage customer data effectively. CRM features facilitate lead and contact management, opportunity tracking, and customer communication tracking.

Sales Engagement Platforms: These sales automation tools focus on automating and optimizing sales communication and outreach efforts. They typically provide features such as email automation, personalized messaging, cadence scheduling, and analytics. 

Contact, Lead Management, and Prospecting tools: These tools help businesses organize and maintain a comprehensive database of contacts and leads. They enable efficient lead capture, lead enrichment, data scraping, and lead scoring. This helps sales teams be more efficient by focusing on higher value leads first, and helping sales teams capture the maximum value from each lead.

Sales Intelligence Tools: These tools provide valuable insights and data about prospects and customers, empowering sales teams to personalize their approach and make informed decisions. They offer features like company information, contact details, social media integration, and competitor analysis.

Sales Forecasting and Analytics: Analytics are essential to intelligent automation; sales analytics tools can help to forecast sales revenue, analyze sales trends, and uncover insights about where sales teams are succeeding and failing, and how they can double down on areas of strong performance. These features assist in strategic decision-making, resource allocation, and performance evaluation.

Sales Pipeline and Opportunity Management: It’s important for sales teams to visualize and manage the entire sales pipeline. This includes tracking opportunities, setting milestones, assigning tasks, and monitoring progress, ensuring effective sales pipeline management.

Proposal and Contract Management Tools: These tools streamline the creation, delivery, and management of sales proposals and contracts. They typically offer features like template libraries, document collaboration, e-signature integration, and version control.

Sales Performance Management and Gamification: These tools focus on optimizing sales team performance and incentivizing desired behaviors. They often offer features like goal setting, performance tracking, commission calculation, and gamification. Gamification features can motivate and engage sales teams. Gamification features can include competitions, leaderboards, and rewards to drive sales performance and boost team morale. We believe gamification can be used to direct your reps’ energy into activities that are beneficial to your business. 

Sales Compensation and Incentive Programs: Administering sales compensation and incentive plans is often a large undertaking involving sales, sales ops, finance, and HR teams. Managing all of the complexities of an incentive plan, ensuring that calculations are done correctly with input from multiple data sources, and making adjustments or correcting past mistakes can require significant time and effort. Sales compensation software automates this manual work so that teams can calculate error-free commissions and provide performance dashboards and insights to their entire team, from the rep level to the company level. 

Sales Activity Tracking: Tracking and logging sales activities, such as calls, emails, meetings, and follow-ups, enables sales representatives and managers to monitor and analyze their engagement with prospects and customers. You can’t improve what you can’t measure - constant analysis helps find drop-off points, rank the different approaches that work and fail, and roll out best practices across your sales organization. 

Workflow Automation: Workflows and process automation capabilities help streamline repetitive tasks, such as lead routing, email notifications, and task assignments, increasing efficiency and reducing manual effort. The more manual work your team automates, the more productivity increases!

Sales Training and Coaching Tools: These tools provide resources and platforms for sales training, onboarding, and coaching. They often offer features like e-learning modules, role-playing exercises, performance tracking, and skill assessment.

Sales Enablement Systems: Sales enablement makes it easy for sales teams to find and access all of the materials and information that help them sell. This can include knowledge, statistics, content, calculators, and tools. Sales enablement software helps capture data around sales enablement materials and connect it with other systems such as CRMs, so that this data can be used to sell more effectively. 

Sales Operations and Productivity Tools: These tools aim to enhance overall sales team efficiency and productivity. They offer features like task management, calendar integration, sales workflow automation, and collaboration tools. 

Note that in many cases, there are sales automation platforms which can cover several of the areas above. Buyers looking to integrate these platforms should consider the trade-off between the core functionality of the platform versus standalone automation software which may have more advanced features within a narrower scope of functionality. In many cases, these sales softwares will integrate with each other, making it easier for companies to pull in the best automation technologies as they see fit. The best sales automation tools ultimately depend on each company’s use case; what works for a large enterprise, for example, may not be the ideal solution for an SMB, and vice versa. Buyers of sales automation softwares should create their own list of needs to determine the best fit for their business. 

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How to start with sales automation

Invest in Data Infrastructure and Analytics: This first step is crucial to understanding your company’s sales performance and seeing the impact of process, software, and other changes to the bottom line. As they say, garbage in, garbage out - ensuring data is as accurate as possible and directionally consistent across systems is the foundation of a sales automation initiative. If you don’t currently track this data, keep on reading - the systems and tools we outline here will help you get started! 

Understand Your Sales Process: Once the data is in a good place, begin by gaining a deep understanding of your company's sales process. Map out each step, from lead generation to closing deals, and identify pain points, bottlenecks, and areas where automation can make the most impact. Look out for areas which require significant manual work, or where there are bottlenecks and delays. 

Set Clear Objectives: Define your goals and objectives for implementing sales automation. Identify specific areas you want to improve, such as lead management, sales forecasting, or sales performance tracking. Sales automation initiatives can quickly increase in scope, so laying out defined steps is helpful in making progress and maintaining momentum. 

Get the most out of your CRM: Choose a CRM system that aligns with your business needs and growth plans. Look for features like contact management, pipeline management, reporting, and integrations with other tools you plan to use. Choosing a CRM system can be a big time and resource commitment, and switching CRMs can be similarly intensive; look for a CRM that can scale with your business as you grow over the next few years. Tailor the CRM system to match your sales process and requirements. Set up custom fields, stages, and workflows that align with your specific sales stages and activities. Configure the CRM to capture the data points that are essential for your reporting and analytics needs.

Train Your Sales Team: Provide comprehensive training on how to use the CRM effectively. Ensure that your sales team understands the benefits of automation and how it can enhance their productivity. Address any concerns or resistance by highlighting the positive impact on their workflow and results.

Integrate Sales Tools: Identify other tools that can integrate with your CRM to streamline workflows and automate tasks. Consider tools for lead generation, email automation, document automation, and analytics. Evaluate their compatibility with your CRM and implement the necessary integrations. 

Define Automation Workflows: Map out your automation workflows to automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes. Automate lead capture, lead nurturing, email sequences, proposal generation, and other sales-related activities. Define triggers, actions, and follow-up sequences to ensure consistency and efficiency.

Monitor and Refine: Continuously monitor the effectiveness of your sales automation efforts. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) and analyze the data generated by your CRM and other integrated tools. Identify areas for improvement and refine your automation workflows based on data-driven insights.

Seek Feedback and Collaboration: Engage with your sales team to gather feedback on the automation processes. Encourage collaboration and communication to ensure the automation aligns with their needs and enhances their productivity. Involve your team in identifying opportunities for further automation.

Stay Updated: Keep up with the latest trends and technologies in sales automation. Attend industry events, join relevant communities, and explore new tools and techniques. Continuously seek opportunities to enhance your sales automation strategy and stay ahead of the curve.

Automating sales, and automating peripheral sales processes, can result in great productivity and performance gains for organizations which undertake the necessary work to evaluate, implement, and properly administer sales automation systems. Automation makes sales reps and the overall sales process more efficient, leading to greater productivity across the organization. 

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