The activities of the sales department are complex and multi-stage. In order to accomplish the main task, i.e. sales, it is necessary to perform many auxiliary routine operations: from saving contacts to drawing up a commercial offer.
Although these operations do not define the main goal of the business, they are extremely important for the fulfillment of the company’s main business process. When such tasks are performed entirely manually, chaos ensues. Information is lost and haphazardly recorded, too much time is spent on data entry and search, and analytics and statistics suffer significantly. Business process automation comes to the rescue.
What is sales automation and why is it needed?
Sales department automation is a way to simplify repetitive operations: data entry, task setting, communication with customers, mailings, and other functions of sales managers. Business automation programs minimize the amount of manual work, structure data, and eliminate the possibility of errors.
What does the automation of sales business processes bring?
Time spent on performing monotonous actions is reduced; stress is reduced, employee self-management is improved, and motivation is increased.
The necessary information is organized and visualized. The entire history of communication with customers is stored centrally.
Thanks to accurate data recording, you can create detailed sales and marketing analytics.
Communication between departments and employees becomes easier. Colleagues can view the information they need in real time, without sharing files. Data is not lost when one of the managers gets sick or quits. It is easy to transfer cases to new employees.
Sales performance monitoring also gets additional capabilities, becomes faster and more accurate.
What can be automated in the sales process?
To understand what business process automation in a company is, let’s look at what can be automated in business and sales, which is the key process of any company.
Customer relations. Sales automation is possible at all stages – from lead collection to purchase. You can automate receiving requests, filling out the customer base, setting tasks, sending offers, saving the history of interaction, sending newsletters, and more.
Sales funnels. With the help of an automated sales funnel, you can track the process of moving leads to purchase much easier, as well as perform predefined actions when changing the stage of the sales funnel. This gives several advantages at once: the business gets the opportunity to more accurately control the work of each manager, analyze the reasons for the loss of leads from the funnel, and improve business processes.
Marketing. A structured and maximally complete database allows you to segment customers, easily send out mailings, track and analyze customer behavior.
Management. Automation reduces the amount of time and effort to control the work of staff, gives access to information about the current state of affairs in the company through automatic reports, and allows you to conveniently manage the tasks of subordinates.
How to automate sales using a CRM system
Automating the sales process with CRM is a convenient modern tool that eliminates time-consuming data entry and repetitive tasks, gives businesses additional benefits, reduces the likelihood of annoying mistakes, and increases employee productivity.
A CRM system is a central control panel for business processes, so sales department automation starts with this program.