Tools to Automate Your Sales Workflow & Get Better Conversions

Almost 30% of all your sales tasks can be automated. So, imagine how much time and energy you could save that can be diverted to more result-oriented work. Automating your sales workflow can leave you with more time to focus on other things that need human intervention, like your lead generation strategy or channel strategy.

According to the 2021 Sales Enablement Report by HubSpot, 61% of businesses that leveraged sales automation exceeded their revenue targets last year.

What does sales workflow automation do?

Sales workflow automation helps you get rid of most of your manual repetitive tasks.

Human intervention is needed much more in some areas of your sales process, like personalized one-to-one interaction with high-value leads.

Most administrative tasks can be taken care of with automation. Sales automation streamlines the workflow and minimizes manual work in certain areas like data collection, prospecting, and follow-up.

There are many ways to automate your sales workflow. You need to identify which areas or tasks in your sales process can benefit most from automation and help improve your sales strategy.

Here are a few ideas for you to consider.

1 — Streamline your sales processes

Your sales team is constantly under pressure to increase sales. They spend their days chasing prospects and looking for new opportunities.

All the while, customers are asking you questions about what you can do for them.

The most common scenario leaves sales teams switching from one tool to the next. They’re answering questions from Microsoft Teams guests, prospects on Slack, and partners on Cisco Webex.

You need your environment to let you respond to questions about your product or service in real-time.

Switching from one environment to another means queries often slip through the cracks. What’s more, your employees can’t deliver the kind of consistent speed your leads expect.

You could go back to relying on time-consuming emails and chaser calls, but time is money, right?

How many times have you left a message for your prospect then sent a follow-up email? Only for them to go cold for three weeks until they need something at a moment’s notice.

When you install a universal channel, you remove the need to jump from one place to the next when responding to customers.

With universal channels, you can respond to prospects on Webex, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

All that, and you never need to leave your own Microsoft Teams tenant.

Increase sales by staying in Microsoft Teams (or whatever platform you prefer).

Improving your prospecting strategy increases your chances of converting prospects into sales. After all, no one’s going to buy from you if you can’t provide quick answers to their questions.

Mio accelerates sales cycles by connecting sales teams with their prospects. That means that your people can answer questions faster and close deals quicker.

2 — Automate sales enablement content creation and maintenance

Creating sales enablement content is as important for your sales process as website design and development is for inbound leads.

Like how the website is the interface between a business and its clients, sales enablement content is the interface between you and your prospects.

Content creation is, in fact, one of the very first tasks at hand. But the content creation process involves quite a few variables.

To create and maintain good sales enablement content, you need to be in charge of your content creation workflow.

The sales team needs to collaborate with the marketing team as well as with external stakeholders.

This is where a content collaboration and workflow management tool can be extremely helpful. Narrato Workspace was built for this purpose.

Narrato Workspace is a content creation, collaboration, and workflow management platform that helps sales content teams build, maintain and collaborate on sales enablement content.

Narrato lets you:

• Create quality content for every stage of your sales funnel
• Collaborate on content with sales and marketing team members
• Plan your content creation using a content calendar
• Maintain a sales content repository
• Manage team member access through custom roles

3 — Automate prospect monitoring and lead enrichment

Prospecting is all about finding people who could be interested in your business.

If you usually look for prospects on LinkedIn and have a Premium account, LinkedIn lets you set up a filter for your criteria. You receive a list of prospects who fit your criteria from time to time. The same works with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool.

Not all leads are equal though. Some leads may have a better chance of converting than others.

Lead enrichment by collecting more data about your prospects can tell you which leads are more valuable. This data can include their personal and professional details, their social media activity, their level of engagement with your content on various platforms, and so on.

Lead enrichment tools like DiscoverOrg, Clearbit, and Leadspace can be useful here.

They gather data from several sources to enrich your list of prospects. Based on the data, you can prioritize your leads and take the next step.

4 — Automate your sales and follow-up emails

47% of marketers consider email as the most effective tactic for lead nurturing and follow-up. Manually tracking each conversation and deciding when to send another follow-up email can be a tedious task and also leaves scope for errors.

If you miss a follow-up or send a targeted email to the wrong person at the wrong time, it could lead to lost sales.

Email automation tools are the solution here. There are email automation platforms that let you create personalized email campaigns for every stage of a prospect’s journey.

With an email automation tool, you can send personalized cold emails to prospects and also sequence automated follow-ups. Tools like Reply, Automizy, and Outreach can help your sales team engage with prospects and leads much better with email automation and personalization.

5. Automate appointment scheduling for calls and meetings

Your sales reps and your prospects are busy people. Deciding on a good time to talk often involves a lot of back and forth. It is valuable time wasted and results in frustration which might urge the prospect to give up on the idea entirely.

To avoid this, it is best if you can give prospects access to your calendar. The calendar tells them when your sales personnel is free to talk, and they can book a slot according to their convenience.

A calendar or meeting scheduling tool like Calendly can make things a lot easier.

Your sales team can add their availability and preferences to the calendar. They can share the Calendly link with the prospects and when they pick a time, the meeting gets added as an event to the calendar.

A tool like this can save you a lot of time and simplify the entire process of meeting scheduling.

6 — Automate sales proposals and contracts

Drafting a proposal, including all relevant details, and getting it reviewed can be a long process.

Sales proposal automation software can help you simplify this process.

Instead of copying and pasting every detail on the proposal, automatically extract all the relevant information from your emails, CRM, and notes.

Proposal automation tools like PandaDoc and Proposify integrate with your CRM to auto-populate new proposals with accurate information.

It has proposal templates that you can use to make your sales proposals look professional and crisp. You can also get your proposals approved by internal stakeholders by adding an automated internal workflow once the document is ready.

Proposal automation tools can reduce the time taken to respond to a Request For Proposal (RFP) significantly.

Conclusion

The sales process is a time-sensitive area.

The more time you take to respond to a prospect’s action or to follow-up on a sales pitch, the further you get from closing a deal.

Automating parts of your sales workflow can save you valuable hours.

With sales workflow automation, you can streamline the process, make collaboration easier, and get more done in less time.