When I was a kid, I thought sales was a bad, shady activity where you tricked people into buying things they don’t need. Now I understand that true salesmanship is about building relationships and helping people find solutions to their problems.
As businesses evolve, though, sales professionals face a huge problem: customers are growing tired of the good old sales methodologies. They don’t trust salespeople anymore. In such a “hostile” sales scenario, how can you build solid relationships with new customers?
Here’s where automation comes in. Sales automation allows you to earn your prospects’ trust and provide a better customer experience in the process.
Today, we’ll discuss how. Let’s start with a fundamental question.
What is sales automation?
Sales automation is the process of using AI to streamline your sales activities, aiming to achieve hyper-efficiency.
Keep in mind; we aren’t talking about specific software but an approach.
By merging the human with the machine, you can accomplish more, serve more people, and drive massive growth to your business while adding a personal touch to every customer interaction.
Some of the main activities sales automation helps you with include:
- Task delegation
- Lead generation and management
- Marketing and sales personalization
- Automation of repetitive tasks
- Plus many more
We’ll explore this a bit further later, but first, let’s answer a crucial question…
Why do traditional sales processes not work anymore?
Imagine that you’re a sales manager at a large corporation, and you decide to experiment with automation.
You split your sales team into 2 groups: one will use the traditional sales approach, whereas the other will tap into AI.
The “traditional” group collates a list of prospects and starts cold-calling them. They use the same pitch for everyone, which makes it feel generic.
The second group uploads the prospect list to CRM software, where each lead will be scored based on engagement.
Before calling prospects, this group sends an email campaign introducing the solution from different angles. Every time a potential customer engages with an email, they send the contact to a subsidiary list of “engaged prospects.”
Finally, based on the lead’s engagement level, they send a more personalized follow-up campaign, inviting prospects to schedule a call.
Which group would do better?
The second one, of course.
Research reveals that 72% of consumers only engage with personalized messaging. By tapping into personalization, the second group increases its chances for success.
Since roughly 50% of prospects aren’t a good fit for a given product or service, the first group would spend lots of time talking to unqualified prospects — time the second group would’ve saved by filtering the list.
That’s the power of sales automation.
Remember, customers don’t want to be sold to — they’re looking for an experience, a meaningful conversation with a brand to which they can relate.A well-structured automation process can give you the competitive advantage you need to provide that experience.
How can you find the right sales automation platform?
Now that you understand what sales automation is and its impact on current businesses, let’s step into the practice.
We’d like to answer the question: what does excellent sales process automation look like in the real world?
To do it, we’ll focus on the vital features and benefits any sales automation platform must offer.
Let’s break them down.
Lead management
Leads are the fuel of your business, right?
But not all leads are created equal.
Some leads are ready to buy right off the bat, while others need to get to know you, like you, and trust you first. That’s why you need a system to store your leads and manage communications.
Here’s where lead management comes in.
In short, lead management is the process of attracting, storing, and managing leads from the first contact to the point where they become customers.
This process might involve:
- Scoring leads based on engagement
- Sending automated emails
- Segmenting your audience based on different triggers (e.g., clicks, opens, replies, etc.)
- And a lot more
For instance, with monday.com’s lead management template, you can not only store all your leads but also visualize the progress of your deals.
This helps you get more control over your sales cycle, making sure none of your leads gets mismanaged.
Pipeline management
Let’s say you’re the owner of a small business and want to attract more customers with digital marketing.
What would you do?
Assuming you’re entirely new to the topic, you’d probably go to Google and search for, say, “digital marketing agencies for small businesses.”
After reviewing a few options, you’d decide to move forward and schedule a call with one of those agencies.
During the conversation, the salesperson would ask you questions about your business. If it seems like you’re a good fit, they will send you a proposal. If you like that proposal, you will hire the agency to manage your marketing, right?
Well, though extremely simple, this is an example of a sales pipeline in action.
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales funnel that helps you see where your leads stand in the process.
By distributing your leads across the “pipeline,” you’re able to communicate more naturally with each lead rather than rushing the sale.
Now, any effective sales software must help you manage your sales funnel with efficiency.
For instance, with our pipeline management template, you can record every step of your sales process and track progress with ease.
You can even see the leads each sales rep is dealing with and visualize your pipeline’s progress at a glance.
In other words, this template will help you manage your sales process from start to finish.
Workflow automation
This might sound a bit obvious, but it’s not.
Many software companies state that they offer automation when all you get is simple contact management (plus a bit of email marketing).
Before you choose a specific platform, make sure it offers true automation.
What do we mean by that?
For instance, at monday.com, you get the opportunity to automate more than 250,000 human actions, which gives you the flexibility you need to streamline any type of workflow.
With our automations center, you can build “if this, then that” recipes to automate tasks, status changes, item creation, recurring tasks, notifications, and more.
That’s what “true automation” really means.
To dig deeper on how our automations work, here’s a quick overview:
Integrations
Siloed teams are the killer of sales productivity.
No sales team can achieve great results without marketing, customer support, management, and every major department in an organization.
If you rely on multiple software to handle operations, you must integrate them into a single source of truth. This will foster transparency and improve collaboration.
At monday.com, for example, we offer native integration with more than 40 of the most popular tools and apps on the market, including Gmail, Slack, ZenDesk, MailChimp, Zoom, and more.
You can also create integration recipes to perform different actions automatically.
It looks something like this:
It’s possible to create an automation that will notify a specific Slack channel every time a new lead fills out a form on your website.
Or, try building a recipe to turn specific emails into items within a board.
You can even turn Zoom meetings into tasks, so your team never misses important calls.
With monday.com, bringing your team together and working under one roof has never been easier.
How to automate your sales processes with monday.com
Now that you understand what great automation software looks like in the real world, you might be wondering: is monday.com the right software for me?
To answer that question, why don’t we quickly cover what monday.com is all about so you can make a more informed decision.
Let’s start with the basics.
What’s monday.com?
monday.com is a flexible Work OS where you can build custom digital workspaces for your team.
With dozens of building blocks and native drag-and-drop functionalities, you can design a platform that truly fits your needs.
Brands like Coca-Cola and Universal Studios, as well as 100,000 others, trust us to manage their teams and projects.
Some of our core features include:
- Automated workflows: get access to custom and pre-made automation recipes you can set in one click.
- Customizations: use our drag-and-drop building blocks to design a workflow that feels perfect.
- Integrations: seamlessly integrate the tools and apps your team relies on.
- Visualizations: visualize your boards and data with views like Kanban, calendar, and timeline.
- Task management: assign tasks to teammates and measure the progress of your projects.
- Reporting: automate your reporting and make sense of data with ease.
To get a more thorough understanding of our platform, we suggest you read our product overview page.
Sales automation templates
From the start, we provide you with 200+ pre-made templates for different use cases and industries. This includes marketing, construction, manufacturing, project management, software development, and many more.
In the context of sales automation, some of our most popular templates include:
Ready to automate your sales operations?
Now that you understand the importance of sales automation software, the question is: what will you do about it?
Will you continue operating your sales processes manually? Or will you tap into the power of automation?
If the latter, then monday.com can help.
From automating repetitive tasks to streamlining complex sales funnels, we’ve got your back. And with our fully customizable sales process template, you can implement automations in minutes.
So, what are you waiting for?
Let’s automate some tasks.
Get started