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How Can Automation Improve My Sales Process?

Do you feel that your company is spending too much time and energy on repetitive tasks? Although companies have more technology at their disposal than ever before, most still struggle to keep up with their growing workloads. 

Many companies try to solve this problem by throwing more manpower at it. However, not only is this approach costly, but it's also very inefficient. Companies who take this approach fail to solve the real problem. 

If you feel that your team is being crushed by its workload, you'll be thrilled to know that there are real solutions to this problem. Actually solving this problem means using technology to automate more of your team's workflow. 

Although automation may initially sound like a challenging solution to pursue, it can be used in ways that aren't intimidating on a technical level. It's possible to help your team by automating: 

Email 

Unless you're Amazon, the majority of your customers don't make a purchase within a few minutes of reaching your site. Instead, converting leads to actual customers requires multiple steps. 

Currently, members of your sales team are likely involved in every step of this process. While it's crucial to treat your customers well and fully understand your company's sales funnel, you've probably noticed that your sales team spends a lot of their time repeating the same tasks over and over. 

Since you and your team understand exactly what needs to be done to successfully complete these tasks, the actions can be automated. And the best way to automate these actions is with the help of email. 

With the help of a quality CRM solution, you can use email to automate tasks like responses to initial inquires and followups throughout your sales process. 

Social Media 

Part of the reason that many companies are hesitant to use social media is because they're afraid it's going to require too much time and not deliver enough results. 

Fortunately, automation can be used to harness the power of social media without having it eat up more and more time. While you don't want to use tools that spam social networks by creating hundreds of accounts, there are useful ways to automate social media. 

For example, instead of manually logging into an account each time you want to broadcast a message, multiple messages can be written at one time. You can then use automation to schedule these messages to be published over the course of a week or month. 

Data Collection 

Too many companies have broken data collection and entry processes. Instead of directly feeding the information into a central database, many companies have to go through multiple steps to reach a point where they can access and use their data. 

You can save your team countless headaches by using automation to eliminate all the extra steps from collecting and storing data. Once you overhaul the process with a solution like Sales Nexus, leads will submit their information, which will automatically be stored in a central database that your team can access from anywhere. 

If you've successfully used automation to improve your company's workflow, please share your experience with us by leaving a comment. 

 

Craig Klein is CEO of SalesNexus, a leader in online CRM systems for small business sales teams. Feel free to follow SalesNexus on Twitter.