Essential Automation Features for your Sales Process in 2022

Sales automation is one of the most cliched terms in the sales ecosystem, sales leaders, sales CRM solutions, vendors, and thought leaders. While nobody can deny the importance of sales automation in this digital age, it's important to understand the concept in detail to filter out the noise.

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation is the mechanized execution of actions in the sales lifecycle driven by a software system. These actions are traditionally manual, repetitive, and many times involve human judgment.

Sales performance suffers in the absence of sales automation

• Poor response time
• Human errors & misses
• Leakages in the sales funnel
• High processing time
• Inconsistent sales process
• Resource overheads and many more

The adoption of technology for automating your sales processes is a no-brainer. It is important to evaluate the needs of the sales process and explore a compatible solution that meets the desired requirements.

Common sales automation use cases for modern teams

1. Lead Generation: Integrate all the demand generation channels with the Lead Management system in real time. This would encompass all Digital assets like websites, mobile apps & digital campaigns through embedded forms or API integration. Sourcing affiliates, and channel partner leads in real-time by integrating with their internal systems. For any offline lead generation, embedding lead generation forms in the mobile app can be of great help. Advantages: Faster time to respond, No lead leakage
   
2. Lead Distribution: Automating lead distribution to sales team members will save the crucial time of the manager's bandwidth and allow them to focus on strategic tasks. Features like round-robin, skill-based automated allocations, agent Load distribution management, and lead queue management will ensure allocations run on auto-pilot on pre-defined business rules.
   Advantages: Save manager's bandwidth, Targeted lead allocation
   
3. Lead Scoring & Prioritization: Leaving it up to the last sales agent to decide which leads to take up first creates inconsistent customer experiences and lowers sales conversion. An automated system to assign scores to leads basis parameters like channel, product, propensity level, or any other attribute to prioritize leads in an order.
   Advantages: Consistency in the sales process, higher sales conversion
4. Document Collection: Automating the document collection process with customers will build a seamless experience for both sales agents and customers. i) ability to trigger instant communications ex: Hotkeys) enable the customer to share documents ex: unique web link iii) multi-party workflows to teams to review & validate documents
   Advantages: Secure, Data Privacy & Security, minimize processing time
5. Communications: Automating communication with customers is super critical for maintaining constant engagement and timely notifications. Integrating Telephony with sales solutions, event-based notifications, and lifecycle communications are some important must-haves. It is also important to have all channels of communication integrated to engage customers in their preferred mode.
   Advantages: Faster communications, Minimal Human intervention
6. Tasks: Automating and organizing tasks are often overlooked by key stakeholders. Daily tasks like follow-up reminders, and call-back scheduling if not automated, risk increasing misses and leakages. Additionally, advanced automation features enabling auto-closure of leads, and auto-task creations bring greater efficiency to the process.
   Advantages: Minimal human error/missed, Save time for sales agents
7. Integrated Interface for Sales Agents: This simple approach can significantly increase the efficiency of the sale process is having your sale team work on a single interface for all their tasks. Integrated all internal/external tools (Telephony, e-mail, scheduler, Pricing, Inventory, etc) with your sales solution in a single interface. At any stage of the sales cycle, the sales agents will be able to carry out all tasks from this interface.
   Advantages: Minimal toggling across tools, Highly productive

Sales automation sounds simple to understand, though its implementation for your team can be a nightmare. There are standalone Sales Engagement solutions that act as a supplement to existing CRM solutions and together become automated sale solution. This is adding another tool to your sales tech stack and deep integration is essential for the smooth running of operations.

Chakra Sales is a modern sales execution solution to productize your sales process from Lead to Order, eliminating manual activities and multiple data entries. By integrating all associated tools, Chakra Sales creates a unified interface for sales activities with automated data capture and activity logging.

If you are looking for a customized sales solution for your fast-growing organization, do consider a free demo with Chakra Sales.