Let’s face it, automation has come in and transformed how we live – from the way we travel to how we communicate and pretty much how we handle all other facets of life. In business, automation has made it a lot easier and more efficient to set up and run businesses with low overhead costs and consequently bigger profit margins.
Are you looking for effective ways to boost the sales performance of your new business startup or to help you take off at a quicker pace? A good place to begin is to automate as many areas of the business as possible including client communication, sales management, and even those repetitive day-to-day tasks like data entry and report generation.
Here, we share three simple ways you can implement automation in your CRM sales process.
Lead management
One common feature that characterizes most successful business is a sales pipeline that works optimally at various levels. This means that at any one time, there are people considering using the company’s products (prospects), others are showing a real intent to buy (leads), while the rest are already making purchases (customers). Learning how to manage all these groups is crucial in the overall success of your startup.
When it comes to prospects and leads, it’s important that you to understand how to gauge their interest and determine if they are worth your time and effort or not. With a good CRM tech, you can define a clear lead scoring strategy which shows you those who qualify and worth pursuing for your business. For example, you can choose to send a follow-up email or call anyone in your mailing list who opens a certain email several times over a given period of receiving it. A CRM tool gives you this kind of information and can assist you in creating a sounder sales action plan for your business for increased success.
Client communication
How you communicate with potential and buying customers can make or break your startup. In addition to investing in your communication skills to improve your negotiations and closing skills, it also pays to use automated systems to make the whole process more efficient.
For starters, if you use email as your primary mode of client communication, there are a lot of areas you can automate to boost your email results. Tools like email autoresponders help you to easily create generic email templates that you can send to new prospects (welcome email) or even existing customers (for example, on special days like their birthdays). Some of the most popular email autoresponder apps today include Aweber, MailChimp, and ConvertKit to name just a few.
If you prefer calling your clients to email, a good practice would be to record these calls and review them later or use as references for future uses. The good thing about it is that there are tens of useful automatic call recorders on the market today including Twilio and RingCentral.
Finally, social media has come of age and now more and more businesses understand the potential they have in attracting customers and bringing in business. If you’re considering using these platforms to promote your startup, you’ll be glad to know that you can automate most of the work using tools autoposter tools like Hootsuite and Social Pilot. You can also consider using Facebook’s Messenger bot to grow your mailing list and sell offers privately.
Sales management
One of the primary goals of any business owner is to make as many sales as possible while ensuring they remain profitable and sustainable. This is why sales management is considered to be extremely critical in the success of any startup and the reason you need to keep improving this area including using automated tools that make your work easier.
To begin with, it’s important that you streamline and automate the different aspects of your sales pipeline. In this day and age, for example, you cannot afford to be using manual data entry methods like spreadsheets to record and track important data like sales. For this, consider acquiring a CRM tool to help you organize, track, and analyze all your sales information. Ultimately, you are able to enjoy improved workflow and productivity which is important in your quest to scale your startup.
Another key area you need to focus on when looking to improve your startup’s sales management results is order management. This is particularly important if you already have a team that takes care of the sales process. The idea is to ensure the procurement, finance, and dispatch units in your business work in complete harmony so that there exists no gaps or communication breakdown in the process. For best results, consider incorporating a CRM tool that allows everyone involved in the order management process to track what the rest in the team are doing.
Which areas of your CRM sales process do you think need to be automated for you to achieve optimal results for your business? We’d love to hear your feedback.
