How Automation Eradicates Daily Challenges Faced by the Sales Team

Astonishingly, today’s sales professionals spend just 34%¹ of their time actually selling. Sales teams admit that they devote too much time to administrative tasks that take them away from customers. These include:

E-mail communication management
Entering sales data
Consumer-related notes
Quote generation
CRM

We take a look at how some of these daily challenges could be drastically simplified with automation.

1. Sales Activity Reports

Let’s be honest: high-performance salespeople hate filing sales activity reports. They want to spend their time selling, not reporting about it. In a bad week, some may embellish the truth to save face. The weekly sales report used by managers is thus rendered useless - there’s not much to help a low sales day after a week has already passed, so often they don’t even bother to read the reports. What a colossal waste of time for all involved! Automation streamlines the system to:

make it quicker and easier for the sales team to report
create daily, even hourly real-time data
actually enables the data to be used to improve the sales cycle.

2. Sales Emails

How many deals have been lost because a salesperson forgot to send a follow-up email? And let’s face it, not everyone is good at writing an email. Any poorly written document degrades a company’s reputation and given emails are an important part of the communication process in lead creation and follow up, they should be timely, crisp and WORK. A series of well-crafted emails to prospects and new customers that actually get a response should be left to a professional writer and continually reviewed for response success. With an automation system, these are then automatically generated and sent at the correct time, freeing up time for the sales team to concentrate on developing a more personal relationship with customers and prospects who are ready to buy.

3. Sales Completion

Salespeople hate paperwork but heaps of forms are inherent when closing a deal. The following documents can all be automated:

sales agreements
contracts
invoices
client information gathering and onboarding

This transforms the sales process into a highly time efficient, far more accurate and far less laborious one for the team responsible. This frees up their time and energy to do what they do best – sell more and grow the business.

4. CRM

The deal might be signed, but that doesn’t mean a sales rep’s job is over. Once the prospect becomes a customer, salespeople still have to work on maintaining and building their trust so as not to lose hard won business. But adding opportunities and updating CRM can add precious minutes into a busy day. Automating CRM keeps track of customers’ engagement levels by default and sends them personalised emails. Nurturing clients keeps them invested in the brand and it’s a lot easier to upsell a happy client!

5. Keeping Motivation Up

Sales teams want to do just what their title implies: Sell! Take away the tasks that keep them from working to their full potential by automating the time rich, imagination-poor tasks. This frees up time for example more training on productive selling techniques and helps them to feel valued.

CRM platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot and Microsoft Dynamics help with some of these tasks but are often not as user friendly as one would hope. Platforms like Autto can help integrate some of these tasks together into a single efficient workflow - create the contract, update the CRM and notify finance with one action instead of many. Saving precious time that can be put into more sales.