The ultimate guide to sales force automation

What is sales force automation?

Sales force automation is when salespeople use software tools to automate parts of the sales process. Automating sales process elements can save salespeople time, freeing them up to focus on tasks that require a more human touch. This can result in a more successful salesforce that qualifies more leads and makes more sales. 

Various sales tasks can be automated, such as:

• Order processing

• Inventory monitoring

• Contact management

• Order tracking

• Forecast analysis

Sales force automation software has been around for a long time now. That said, the technology behind this software has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years.

Take the activity of qualifying and scoring leads, for example. In the past, sales automation relied on hard-coded rules and considered limited factors when qualifying and scoring leads.

On the other hand, today’s sales force automation solutions are using more sophisticated technology (and even artificial intelligence) to fine-tune the lead-qualifying process. This allows companies to improve the accuracy of their lead qualifying, increasing the effectiveness of their lead nurturing efforts.

How does sales force automation work?

Sales force automation software works by automating certain tasks that would otherwise have to be completed by a salesperson. Here are a few examples of sales process tasks that can be automated.

Gathering information on leads

From details about the customer to their budget, situation, and requirements, automating information gathering before your sales team gets involved can save a lot of time.

Lead qualifying

Gathering information through automation can also help with lead qualifying, ensuring that your salespeople only deal with leads that have the potential to convert. And when they start the process, they’re already a step ahead, thanks to the information that’s been gathered for them.

Lead categorization

Organizing and filtering leads into specific sectors or requirements means that the right person or department can deal with them from the off. This saves potential leads from being transferred from person to person and increases the likelihood of conversion.

Why your business needs sales force automation

Sales automation allows you to do more with less. According to statistics, companies who use sales force automation

• Close 30% more deals,

• Reduce their sales cycle by 18%,

• Cut down their sales administrative time by 14%. 

Sales force automation eliminates all the repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks from your sales team’s day-to-day. This allows them to concentrate on nurturing and selling to their leads, which means your business gets better value for money, and your sales team enjoys more fulfilling roles. 

With sales force automation software, your reps will never have to personally schedule another appointment or update another lead’s information again. Instead, they can spend their time on revenue-generating activities contributing to the company’s bottom.

Benefits of sales force automation

Now that we’ve discussed the overarching advantage of sales force automation (read: time savings), let’s move on to talk about the other benefits that sales force automation brings to the table as well.

• Managing leads

• Upselling

• Support

• Sales forecasting

• Forecasting

• Reports and analytics

Managing and qualifying leads

Sales force automation can pull lead information from different sources, and collate and organize them, ready for sales reps to start the outreach process. 

Sales force automation software can extract leads from various campaigns and touchpoints. It can also score and qualify them so that sales reps can prioritize those most likely to convert. This gives your team more time to focus on selling instead of tedious admin

Upselling and cross-selling

After successfully closing a customer, some sales reps may move on to their next lead without considering potential cross-sell or upsell opportunities. 

Sales force automation software can automatically track and record your customer’s entire order history so that you can identify possible upselling and cross-selling opportunities with a single glance. 

You can also program your software to flag when your customers are likely to make a repurchase and trigger a reminder for you to follow up with them when it’s time.

This means you could get even more value out of your existing customers. Increasing the customer lifetime value (CLV) is a great way to generate revenue with little time or resource investment.

More streamlined support

On top of accessing all your leads via a single dashboard, sales force automation gives you a centralized database to keep track of your customer’s accounts. This enables you to provide your customers with better and more effective support.

For example, if your customer calls in and asks for help on a certain issue, what happens if the issue is resolved temporarily, but the customer encounters the same problem further down the road?

Without a centralized tracking system, your customer will be forced to recount the details of their problem again, wasting both your and the company’s time. 

With sales force automation software, your support staff can immediately access information about every interaction and issue attached to this customer’s account. They’ll be able to pinpoint the customer’s problem and help them resolve it quickly and effectively, meaning happier customers and more efficient support staff.

Forecasting sales

Strategy-wise, sales force automation software comes equipped with features that enable you to analyze customer behaviors and market sentiment. This software helps you understand past and current sales trends more intimately, allowing you to create an accurate sales forecast.

With an accurate, precise sales forecast that you can rely on, you can map out your marketing campaigns and strategies more effectively. If your company holds physical inventory, you can use your sales forecast to fine-tune your reordering time and quantity.

Generating reports and analytics

Last but not least, sales force automation software is a godsend for team leaders or business owners who look at analytics or reports regularly. With sales force automation software, these analytics can be generated with a click of a button. You’ll spend less time putting the numbers together and more time identifying your team's challenges and opportunities.

How CRM helps with sales force automation

Sales force automation tools aside, plenty of businesses also rely on CRM software to help them streamline and improve their sales processes.

What’s the difference between CRM and sales force automation (SFA)? In a nutshell, SFA is a specific subset of CRM. While CRM refers to software that helps a company serve and interact with its customers more effectively, SFA specifically deals with software that supports B2B sales teams. 

While CRM and SFA software may come with similar features, SFA software prioritizes sales-related activities such as:

• Lead generation,

• Lead scoring,

• Opportunity tracking.

Does that mean sales teams should always prefer SFA software over CRM software? Not necessarily – there are also CRM tools that are highly comprehensive. 

If your company already uses CRM software that comes with all the sales-related features you need, then there’s no point in splashing out on additional SFA software.

Best CRM-sales force automation integrations

Regardless of whether you’re in the market for CRM or SFA software, it’s important to make sure that the platform you’re using provides the necessary integrations. This helps to streamline your workflow and provides your team with greater convenience and accessibility.

Freshsales, for example, comes with plenty of integrations, including:

• Mailchimp

• Quickbooks

• Freshchat. 

This section will discuss how you can utilize each integration to increase your sales and marketing efforts.

Freshsales x MailChimp

Maintaining consistent databases or lists across your CRM software and your marketing platform is important. This way, you can ensure that everyone who’s supposed to be in your drip campaign is in your drip campaign and that no one falls through the cracks.

With our integration with MailChimp, syncing leads and contacts from one platform to another is a breeze.

You can also set up the system so that new MailChimp contacts are automatically pushed to Freshsales CRM and vice-versa. This means you’ll spend less time on tedious import-export chores, and you can focus on developing highly relevant email campaigns that will compel your leads to action.

Freshsales x QuickBooks

In an ideal world, all your leads and customers would pay up on time without you having to chase them. In reality, though, small businesses in America have $825 billion in unpaid invoices at any given time... and a mind-boggling 81% of these invoices are more than 30 days past due.

It typically falls on the shoulders of sales reps to ensure that a lead or a customer has paid up, but if your reps have to keep chasing unpaid invoices, this will hamper their productivity. Luckily, our QuickBooks integration helps you keep track of your payments and invoices without breaking a sweat. With this integration, you can have a bird’s eye view of all customer invoices under a respective lead, get a summary of the total paid and unpaid amounts for each lead, and get notified when your lead makes a payment without ever leaving the Freshsales dashboard.

Freshsales x Freshchat

If you don’t already have a live chat function on your website, you’re missing out, big-time. Studies show that up to 77% of customers will not purchase on a website if there’s no live chat option available. On average, companies that provide live chat enjoy a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour and a 40% increase in overall conversion rate.

To capitalize on the power of live chat, simply use our built-in chat tool to connect your leads to your sales reps. This modern messaging software allows your sales reps to chat with leads directly from the Freshsales, and the handy Assignment Rules feature automatically assigns chats to individual sales agents or groups based on predetermined conditions.

Using Freshsales for sales force automation

Freshsales CRM is the software of choice for companies looking to get started with sales force automation. Read on to find out why

Understand your leads

As any sales rep will tell you, it’s important to know your lead inside out. To learn more about your lead, you can use Freshsales CRM’s website and in-app tracking features to identify which landing pages they spend more time on and how they interact with these pages.  It displays your lead's interaction with the business chronologically, instantly giving you a complete context. Freshsales also has an advanced lead-scoring feature that automatically qualifies leads based on characteristics and behavior.

Master the follow-up process

Make following up an enjoyable experience with automation. Freshsales CRM comes with an easy-to-use sales pipeline that allows reps to locate where each lead is in the pipeline with a single glance.

You can also sort and filter deals easily. Received an email from a lead, but forgot to reply. Simply use the “Awaiting Response” feature to find a complete list of emails pending your response.

Freshsales CRM provides your team with a common inbox so that your sales reps can step in if anyone on the team is unavailable unexpectedly. They can:

• Answer each other’s unanswered emails

• Get instant context into conversations

• Follow up right away.

This reduces unnecessary delays and shortens your sales cycle, especially when using comprehensive sales software that streamlines your processes.

Simplify workflows

Anything that can be outsourced should be outsourced – that’s how you keep your team lean and highly productive.

Freshsales CRM allows you to create workflow automations that operate like clockwork. These free up your reps to work on activities that move the needle.

At the basic level, you can set up your system to use events to automate field updates. If a new lead is created in your CRM, you can also trigger a welcome email to them.

You can set up pre-designed action flows using workflow templates and automate the most common business activity.

Using nested conditions, you can create workflows with advanced logic combining AND/OR between blocks and within a single block.

Implementation strategies for sales force automation

Implementing your sales force automation may be time-consuming, but the investment reaps big rewards. 

First, analyze how your team spends their time. Break it down into tasks, then review which tasks are:

• repetitive

• menial

• easy to automate.

Then, we will go about implementing the sales force automation using Freshsales. Our software is intuitive and easy to use, so setting up automation processes is straightforward. 

It’s also important to ensure your sales team has been fully onboarded on using automation software to make the most of it.

Overcoming challenges in sales force automation

It’s common to face some hiccups when adopting sales force automation. Issues that often arise include:

• lack of understanding of how to use the software

• unrealistic expectations

• automating the wrong tasks 

• expecting instant results.

As with any new process, adapting to sales force automation takes time. Patience and willingness to embrace new technologies will ensure that you and your sales team to get the maximum benefit from sales force automation. Our support team can always help with queries and keep your pipeline moving.