Boost your business with sales automation in six ways

When someone evolves within a company, whether owner or employee, there is always a desire for effectiveness and efficiency at work. Sales automation was a turning point in this area, making it possible to reduce the time it took to complete tasks and increase their profitability. If you're still hesitant, here's why you might need to automate your sales:

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• For lack of time to follow up.
• To avoid spending an endless number of hours entering the data of your prospects into your CRM.
• To always remember the latest conversations with your customers.
• To facilitate the planning and organization of your customer meetings. Do you feel challenged by one or more of the points mentioned above?

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Automating your sales could then improve your efficiency and profitability, in particular through strategies such as Account-Based Marketing and Inbound Marketing or even through tools available on an automation platform like HubSpot.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is the equivalent of a household helper for your team. It's a process that takes care of time-consuming and repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on higher value-added activities. In this way, your business becomes more effective and efficient since resources can be distributed appropriately.

However, it would be wrong to believe that humans are becoming a superfluous element in the automation process. For example, there are poorly automated robots that solicit us at all hours of the day, without us being the company's target audience or needing their services or products. These “spam” traps should be avoided. But on the other hand, it is possible to automate tasks and sequences related to the customer approach while maintaining a personal and appropriate touch, making your target audience feel engaged.

Here are six ways automating your sales can help simplify the daily lives of your representatives and managers.

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1. Attracting more prospects

If you have a LinkedIn Premium account, you can set up a personalized selection using a combination of criteria, such as “CMO and MONTREAL”. This means that you no longer have to do the same searches regularly since the platform lists interesting profiles for you and submits them to you.

In addition, you can set up email alerts at the desired frequency, either every day, every week or even every month, depending on the number of prospects you are looking for. Thus, automatically, a list of prospects is created for you, without any manual work. Don't worry about always receiving the same profiles, because LinkedIn only sends you new profiles, this ensures you are always up to date with new prospects and not to receive the same references all the time.

Adding an analytical tool to your email inbox will also allow you to save time in managing your customer relationships. This tool made available by HubSpot Sales is called “Inbox Profiles” and extracts details from the CRM files of your prospects, i.e. their personal and business profiles on various social platforms. Thanks to this centralized HUB, it is no longer necessary to carry out numerous searches and open dozens of tabs to enter the function of your prospect or to know their field of interest and their latest tweet. The tool does that work for you. You therefore have access to all the information you need to refine your email approach, so that it is 100% personalized for your customer.

2. Attracting better prospects

With the help of tools that allow you to better reach prospects and convert them into customers, you can combine a lot of information from a variety of sources in order to compile it into a table that is constantly updated. This table will draw up a detailed portrait of your prospects.

It goes without saying that a daily challenge for businesses is the accessibility of information due to the digital age that has increased competition. Therefore, you must use a strategy to attract the eye of your potential customers, you must be doubly effective and efficient in your approach. Platforms like HubSpot marketing will help you reduce the noise around your business and create a more direct approach that will increase awareness among your prospects.

For example, HubSpot offers tools like:

• Forms
• Pop-up forms
• Chatbots (automated conversation using a list of pre-established questions/answers)
• Live chats — with a human behind the screen
• Email follow-ups based on forms submitted

All of these tools allow you to find, record, and maintain relationships with prospects. This gives you the opportunity to enrich your database. In addition, they can be easily integrated into any CRM that your company can use. Just install them to appreciate the information they provide you. The last step is to set up automated follow-up to continue to grow your database and reach as many — relevant — prospects as possible.

3. HubSpot sales sequences

Are you starting to get results with your Inbound Marketing strategy and think you are growing because you have record participations in your webinars or a list of contact data ready to be used? It is excellent, but you should not leave it at that since the biggest is yet to come.

At this stage, your prospects are far from being converted to your products or services. It is precisely at this stage that you must ensure regular follow-up in connection with the first approaches you made during an event — coffee morning, presentation, webinar or other. This is therefore when a well-used CRM becomes an important ally in order to successfully create a series of relevant follow-ups with prospects. On the other hand, it requires time and effort. To help you navigate this aspect, HubSpot sales sequences are becoming very interesting.

What is a HubSpot sequence?

A tool developed by HubSpot to facilitate the automation of communications with prospects. The tool offers up to five customizable email approaches. Each of them can be automatically sent according to a selected sequence and spread over a desired number of days. In addition, task tracking is also automated, so the sequence is carried out alone and goes to the next step or ends alone if the established objective is reached.

This tool allows you to automate your sales work by maintaining your interactions and customizing them at all stages of the sales process. It becomes easier for you to establish a follow-up strategy since it is sequenced and automated.

Create and edit HubSpot sales sequences

Thanks to the sequence tool, you can now send personalized emails that are, above all, scheduled to develop, enrich or maintain a conversation with your contacts and customers, throughout the sales process. When your contacts respond to the email or schedule an appointment, the sequence ends automatically so as not to unnecessarily multiply emails.

If you want to further expand your knowledge in terms of automating several sales actions and processes within a specific contact list, you can consult the following site: HubSpot workflows.

The HubSpot sales sequences you choose will help you be more effective by saving time and reducing the manual effort required by your team in order to follow up with your prospects and/or customers in a timely manner. This way, you maintain a personalized approach and create interest in your products and/or services more quickly.

If you want to make it even easier for yourself, HubSpot also offers pre-established templates based on what has already been proven in the B2B market. On the other hand, it is essential to understand that everything that HubSpot offers is manageable and can be modified in order to be aligned with your company's image. In short, you can — and preferably should — add your two cents to the sequences.

For example, if during a virtual show you meet an operations manager from a very good manufacturing company who agrees with yours but the latter does not follow up on your phone call, thanks to HubSpot sales sequences, you can easily contact him using a personalized and pre-established template to ensure follow-up.

4. Schedule your meetings

Planning to meet a new prospect can be a real headache. Often this causes a slowdown in the sales process in addition to reducing the buyer's interest. In order to overcome this problem of loss of time and interest, you can use HubSpot Meeting, to speed up the steps by directing the target person to an appointment scheduling tool directly connected to your personal calendar. At the same time, the prospect will be able to see your availability schedule and depending on this, he will be able to select the day and time that suits him. In addition, in the event that it is a new contact, it will automatically be found in your CRM.

5. Create proposals

No more copying and pasting to try to write personalized and complete proposals or quotes for all your prospects or customers. Now, you can use a tool like PandaDoc that integrates directly into your CRM, so that when you create a quote, quote, or other document, all relevant details related to products, prices, and customers are automatically entered into the file. This way, you can be sure that the essential information is there.

In addition, you can program follow-up reminders to refresh the memory of your prospects so that they accept the quote or other document; You no longer have to waste your time to carry out this type of follow-up, the tool takes care of it for you.

Another interesting and practical function of creating proposals is to set up a signature process. For example, if you want your legal team to first review the contract before it goes elsewhere, you can create an automated internal process so that managers have to sign the document before it is sent to the buyer. The proposal ensures consistency in processes in addition to ensuring that steps are completed one by one before moving on.

6. Prospect value

Do you want your sales team to focus some of their energy on golden opportunities? An automated Lead Scoring system can help to properly distribute your team's efforts according to your goals. This type of software uses demographic and behavioral data in order to classify a prospect; the seller is, therefore, in a position to know precisely which ones are to be preferred or not.

This tool is really useful for focusing energies in the right place, but first you need to make sure you have a sufficient number of paths to explore for it to be interesting. In the event that you are missing prospects, it will be important to focus on lead generation. In the opposite case, if you have a large number of prospects and your sales team is busy, with this tool you will increase your efficiency by segmenting your prospects according to their interest and their conversion rate.

One thing is certain, to do this with a Lead Scoring system, you need to have relevant information at your fingertips. There are a variety of ways to gather data, whether using a well-established sales process, forms, emails seeking social engagement, or otherwise; and it is no news to tell you that in the entrepreneurial world, Knowledge is a strong and essential element. There is a direct correlation between your level of knowledge and your attraction to your prospects.

That's a quick summary of the added value that sales automation can bring to your business. Sales automation software and tools will increase the efficiency of your business in addition to allowing you to better invest your resources in order to create truly personalized tasks and sequences.

If this has piqued your curiosity or interest, we are always available to answer your questions and needs. Do not hesitate to contact us.