How Sales Automation Can Help You Close More Deals

As a salesperson, you add the most value when you are engaging prospects one to one.

That’s when you can take a very personal approach, building rapport and reading the body language to increase your close rate.

But most salespeople are time poor.

That’s because tasks around prospecting and managing a sales pipeline are time consuming. Often they are repetitive and dull.

So here’s the good news. Sales automation technology has arrived; cutting down time spent on repetitive tasks.

Scheduling meetings

Trying to find a time in everyone's diary for the all-important sales meeting can be like watching a game of table tennis. Tools like Calendly or HubSpot Sales allow your prospect to pick a time that suits them. It automatically connects to your calendar, but don’t worry you can block out times or days when you don’t want meetings scheduled. Try Calendly: https://calendly.com/

Knowing when to follow up on emails

In sales, timing is everything. Email notifications can be very useful, so the moment your prospect opens your email you get an alert on your browser or your mobile phone. That means you can focus your time on prospects when they are ‘hot to trot’.

Using templates to save time

If you have a clearly defined sales process you will find yourself writing very similar emails to prospects a lot. Sales automation allows you to create templates for specific situations that can be personalised based on data straight from your CRM. I use templates for talking to prospects at different stages, i.e Lead/MQL/SQL/Proposal etc.

Document tracking

As a salesperson, it would be great to know when your prospects actually read the proposal or pricing document you sent them. Email tracking tells us when they open the email, but it doesn’t tell us when they actually read the document. Document tracking converts any document into a link that is trackable, you can even see how long they have spent reading the document. All this information could be a valuable trigger for you to get back in contact with them and help close that deal.

Creating a workflow to close those deals

A great salesperson knows that they need tenacity to follow up on opportunities. But it can be difficult to know where you are with every single opportunity or lead. HubSpot Sales allows you to create sequences to organise the flow of your work and automate some aspects, so you can win back time. For example you can create automated emails that will be sent out in a certain number of days if someone doesn’t respond to previous emails and then you can set yourself a reminder to put a call in if they don’t respond to that email. You can create a whole sequence of activities that involve email, phone calls, social media outreach and any other types of sales tasks. Don't worry the sequence automatically switches off, if your prospect responds.

Use lead scoring to prioritise your efforts

If you are lucky enough to have a big database of prospects, it can be a challenge to know the right time to re-engage them. That's where lead scoring comes in. Imagine a situation where a prospect plans to hold a procurement exercise at the end of the year and so you set a diary reminder to get back in contact with them then. However, they decide to bring the procurement process forward and they start to do research of you and your competitors. With lead scoring you would be told if that prospect hits a threshold of activity that indicates they might be a live opportunity again. For example, they visit your website many times, read your blog or share your social media posts.You're able to automatically keep track of any interactions with your website, your social profiles or emails. The sales-team will automatically be passed details of these leads to follow-up.

In summary, the technology now exists to make the salesperson super efficient and focus more time on high value activity to close deals.

If you would like to know more about this technology please get in contact. Equally if you need help in understanding how you can increase your inbound sales pipeline and to better support your sales team we can help with that as well. Email grow@bbdboom.com to find out more.

If you'd like to dive deeper into how to enable your sales team to close more deals, check out our 10 Sales Enablement Necessities Checklist, below.