What is sales automation?

Sales automation, or sales process automation, is the strategy of using technologies to eliminate repetitive tasks, improve efficiencies and increase sales team productivity.

Sales automation tools help sales professionals better meet the changing dynamics of the sales process and provide value to their sales prospects.

By incorporating automation into sales activities, sales teams improve the customer experience. Organizations can become more efficient and can better move prospects throughout the sales funnel. Sales automation improves several processes throughout the sales cycle from lead generation to prospecting to onboarding to retention.

Historically, sales automation aligned around data capture and analysis and workflow automation, which involves automatically performing actions with that data. The rise of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) has expanded what sales automation can do. The best sales automation strategy combines traditional practices with new technologies like generative AI, machine learning and robot process automation (RPA).

Sales automation can boost sales performance and improve the bottom line, especially for small businesses that might not have many sales professionals to handle all of their sales process needs.

Marketing automation is the use of software and technology to manage routine marketing processes and tasks across multiple channels. Marketing and sales processes should work together by automatically sharing information about individuals and companies the marketing team reached. In addition, sales team platforms should automatically share back their successes to the marketing teams so they can learn about which types of companies are persuadable.

According to a Salesforce study, sales team members only spend 28% of their time selling and the rest of it performing manual tasks. Sales automation boosts sales productivity in several ways. Employees currently handle several manual or repetitive tasks that are time-consuming and error-prone. Automating these sales task use cases produces many benefits.

• Automating lead scoring
• Capturing customer data
• Compiling sales reports
• Drafting messaging
• Improving lead generation
• Streamlining workflows
• Supercharging sales forecasting

Every sales organization that has a well-running pipeline management process wants to score every potential customer on how likely they are to convert into an actual customer. Sales automation can take the new lead information that is needed for lead management such as demographic, psychographic and financial information. It can then analyze that information and produce the correct lead score for each prospect, better identifying qualified leads with whom sales reps should follow up.

Automation tools can help organizations better accumulate and analyze the vast amounts of sales data their organization creates. It can also help them aggregate and analyze external data that they can add to their first-party data to better forecast sales. Automation streamlines data entry so sales professionals can focus on more important tasks.

Compiling sales reports can take sales reps hours, when it can easily be automated by the right technology. Automation can extract pertinent information and use templates to compile new reports. This frees up the individual sales representative to analyze the results or spend more time interacting with prospects. That solves their biggest issues and sees to it that they know how to use the organization’s products or services.

Sales teams should use hyper personalization and customized messages when reaching out to prospects. They can use gen AI tools like chat GPT, Google Gemini and others to draft many different types of messages, which sales professionals can edit to personalize as scale.

Sales automation technologies help organizations better handle inbound leads and outbound prospecting. Sales professionals who previously used spreadsheets or other desktop tools to do time-consuming tasks like tracking prospects can now use a shared platform with other sales representatives.

Sales automation can solve roadblocks in many workflows that salespeople depend on. It can automatically add new contacts to an organization’s CRM platform and tag them appropriately.

Automated workflows, often powered by AI, can transcribe sales call transcripts and extract key takeaways and tasks in real time. It can eliminate the need to manually do administrative tasks like customer onboarding, project management and expense reporting.

Avid Solutions used IBM® watsonx™ Orchestrate technology to automate those tasks, which reduced customer onboarding time by 25%.

There are several types of sales software that especially benefit from sales automation, all of which have improved functionality due to the introduction of AI. These sales automation platforms help sales professionals manage their workflows.

Organizations need CRM software to track their contact management, which is relationships with customers and prospects. CRM software provides context around the organization’s relationship with individuals and companies. It can take contact information and add it to the right fields, helping companies better track their customer interactions. AI-powered CRM platforms can also now scan other data sources to append missing information. Automation can add more customer data to the CRM more efficiently giving sales professionals confidence they have up-to-date information on hand. That confidence helps them know who they should contact so they can convert more sales.

Sales leaders depend on a wide variety of metrics to understand the overall health of their sales strategy. Modern data and analytics platforms can automate the collection of data, perform an analysis and produce notifications when pertinent data is ready to be reviewed. Data automation helps the organization make that information available across the organization, enabling quicker decision making.

Email automation technology can help sales teams create stronger sales email campaigns, such as lead nurture and renewal campaigns. Content automation platforms help sales teams create email templates, email sequences outreach and follow-up emails. It helps them create the initial foundational email templates and create various versions of them that might appeal to different audiences. Organizations that use email automation can set up triggers to reach prospective customers when they show signs of their interested in buying, which can increase conversions and revenues.

Sales professionals increasingly depend on social media platforms like LinkedIn and other platforms to reach their customers. Customers can schedule content to go out to different segments at different times. These platforms increasingly offer AI-driven tools that can help draft hyper-personalized content and help identify new segments to target. Social media automation cuts down the manual work in posting to multiple channels. It can also be used to automatically respond to customer service requests with messages that a representative will reach out shortly.

Sales teams in several industries often travel to meet customers where they live or work. They depend on having access to updated information when operating on the road. They need access to data from whenever their sales calls take them. Sales professionals can use sales apps while meeting with clients to receive and update information, which can spread throughout every organization. It creates a single source of truth for all information, enabling representatives on the road and those at the office to decide based on the same data.

Organizations can help customers get basic information about their company and the products or services through public-facing chatbots. Prospective customers can ask questions and access information at any time along their customer journey. IBM client Comparus used the natural language process (NLP) of the IBM watsonx Assistant™ and the generative AI capabilities of IBM watsonx.ai™ to power its own chatbot, TiONA. The chatbot reduced queries to the bank by 30%. Chatbots help reduce the personnel needed to get general information from prospective customers so they can focus on more important discussions.

There are several key benefits for organizations that use sales automation technologies.

• Close deals quicker
• Boost employee satisfaction
• Identify new market segments
• Minimize customer churn

Organizations that have adopted more sales automation solutions can meet customers’ needs and offer the correct price point quicker than those that rely on manual means. They can identify strong prospects in the sales pipeline and prioritize engagement with them.

Employee satisfaction is likely to increase when organizations eliminate their sales teams’ need to perform time-consuming tasks. The Salesforce study found 89% of workers were more satisfied with their jobs when they included automation.

Sales managers can have more real-time access to important sales data without needing to ask employees to send documents to them. Sales representatives can focus on what they need to do to convert leads, potentially leading to increased bonuses and promotions, rather than data entry.

Sales automation platforms can analyze data and identify patterns that employees may not see. For instance, predicted growth in an international market might lead the organization to invest more resources in that area or produce a product or build a service that is targeted to that audience.

Automation tools can use AI to analyze data to see whether specific customers or groups of customers are at risk of churning for any particular reason. They can alert sales teams when customers are in danger of churning. Examples might include customers that haven’t logged on in a while or those who were using the service less.

There are also some potential challenges organizations must overcome if they use sales automation technologies.

• Educating customers
• Identifying the right technology
• Safeguarding data privacy
• Upskilling sales teams

Organizations in industries that historically involved face-to-face meetings and contracts that are written on paper might need to educate their customers about the value of automated tools. They might need to convince customers that automation tools can help them get more information quicker and make better decisions.

There are many types of automation platforms that organizations can choose between. That’s why it’s beneficial to have a trusted partner that can help provide technology solutions while also providing guidance on their entire technology stack.

Automation platforms often feature sensitive data and connect to multiple technologies and software. Organizations should invest in the right cybersecurity measure to protect that sensitive information from hackers or other parties.

Sales professionals, especially those that have processes they’ve used for decades, might initially struggle with implementing new tools and technologies into their personal workflows. They might need training with the new platforms and also need to embrace a mindset shift. Organizations should educate their sales professionals about the benefits of automation technology.