Sales Automation in Action: 10 Ways to Work Less and Sell More

Sales managers want to give their sellers more time to sell. Sellers want to take that time to transform into productive revenue engines. Whatever the goal is, time is obviously a common denominator. 

Automation gives you back time to help you achieve your sales goals.

By automating certain tasks, you can free up more selling time and make your sellers’ long to-do lists a lot less daunting. Continue reading to learn how top sales teams are incorporating automations into the sales process to give sellers more time to do what they do best.

Make the Most Out of Your CRM 

Maximize the benefits of your CRM by bridging a relationship to the rest of your tech stack.

To do this, sales automation needs to be at the heart of your tech integration, specifically that of your CRM and sales engagement platform. Feed off of the data-driven insights collected in your CRM by automatically pairing them with your sales engagement platform to connect with customers and build relationships. 

1. Import Leads or Contacts From Your CRM

Automating the process of importing leads or contacts from your CRM to your sales engagement platform increases your speed-to-lead and saves sellers the pain of manual (and time consuming) work. 

Simplify the process further by automatically placing new leads directly into a sales cadence of your choice based on specific criteria. That way there’s no delay in contacting hot leads.

2. Align Account Ownership

CRM and sales engagement account ownership aren’t necessarily the same. For both visibility and engagement purposes, however, your organization might need them to be. 

Use sales automation to align ownership on both platforms without having to manually update each account. If you’re using Salesloft, each time CRM account ownership is updated, the change is automatically reflected.

This saves you a ton of time when territories change or accounts move between sellers. Finally, you have the time and space to prioritize getting to know your new contacts.

3. Sync Information Across Both Platforms

Managing many different accounts may require you to think about many different fields of information. This becomes even trickier when those fields are dependent on other fields. 

To create cohesion between the two, mimic your CRM automation in Salesloft. An automatic syncing process between your CRM and sales engagement platform ensures that the dependent field in your CRM corresponds to a custom field in Salesloft, without having to manually update it yourself. 

Not only can you catch sync errors before they’re introduced, you can avoid them all together – ultimately providing your sellers with access to the most up-to-date, relevant information. 

Perfect Your Prospecting Protocol

Prospecting is often a balancing act between strategy and tool. While strategy is important, having a tool that can put that strategy into action is just as valuable.

To find your center of balance between the two, use automation.

4. Reroute Prospects Based on Call Outcome 

It’s already frustrating when you disqualify a prospect after a call. Handling all the administrative tasks afterward is like pouring salt in the wound.

You don’t have to. Rebound quickly by setting up your sales engagement platform so that call sentiment or stage change triggers additional actions. When you indicate negative sentiment due to bad fit, you can automatically remove prospects from all cadences. Or maybe you’re disqualifying because the prospect isn’t ready to buy yet. In that case, trigger a move to a cadence designed to keep the prospect warm until they’re ready.

5. Personalize Your Process, Strategically 

Incorporating some form of personalization while selling can truly change the outcome of a sale, yet sellers can’t possibly make time to personalize everything. 

Save personalization efforts for the most engaged prospects by automatically routing lower-level prospects to cadences already personalized by industry or persona. Click count, view count, and reply count are some email tracking metrics you can use to either keep prospects in initial automated cadences or move them to more personalized ones. 

Sellers are then able to invest more time personalizing interactions with prospects who have moved to higher priority cadences, saving them time and setting them up for success.  

6. Reach Out When It Matters Most 

While we’ve explored sales automation to move prospects across cadences based on engagement, it is equally as important to move prospects based on lack of engagement. 

Given a scenario where there is no engagement in an active outbound cadence, you can automatically move the prospect to a specialized nurture cadence that matches their individual criteria. 

Rather than sending them back to marketing, or scrapping the lead all together, nurture cadences provide opportunities for sellers to continue to build rapport overtime – so they can eventually strike when the prospect is ready to become a buyer. 

Engage Effectively, at Every Single Stage

Engagement is at the heart of a successful sales process. It shapes the buyer/seller relationship, and often serves as a determining factor in the outcome of a sale. 

Automations can help sellers engage with buyers at every stage of the journey so they can always put their best foot forward.

7. Streamline the Marketing-to-Sales Lead Handoff 

One faulty step in your handoff process can cost you your entire deal. 

To avoid complication, automate your marketing-to-sales lead handoff by automatically importing prospects into an MQL cadence when their respective lead scores reach a predetermined threshold. 

Isolating these prospects based on their initial engagement ensures that you continue to engage and provide sustainable value. 

8. Focus on Hot Leads 

Like Nelly says, we all get ‘hot in here’ when our sellers engage with Hot Leads. 

Once you set the threshold for when a prospect becomes a Hot Lead, you can automatically move them into a cadence designed just for these highly-engaged leads. This reduces the time and effort of having to determine which leads you should prioritize, meaning you can follow up fast and keep the brightest flames burning longer. 

9. Tend to All of Your Buyers 

Sometimes we’re dealing with multiple buyers on one account. Stressful, right? 

It doesn’t have to be. 

Using sales automations, you can update the status of all of your buyers at one time as your deal evolves. This way, you can continue providing value to all of your buyers without the trouble, or time, of having to manually manage and/or differentiate between them. 

10. Keep Customers Engaged, Even at the End 

Sadly, some good things must come to an end. 

To keep prospects engaged even after a deal is lost, automatically move them to a closed/lost cadence. This removes them from any existing cadences and into one that specifies opportunities for follow-up. 

BONUS Automation: Share Outcomes With Your Team  

Teamwork makes the dreamwork, baby. 

To celebrate wins across your team, automate your Salesloft instance to send a standardized message to a pre-selected Slack channel of your choice. You can trigger this based on specific actions, ranging from an initial meeting set-up to a success metric prompt. 

Creating transparency through this process not only helps keep sellers aligned, but also provides opportunities for them to learn and replicate success – all while cheering their teammates on!

To learn more, see Sales Automation in Action.