The Complete Guide to Sales Process Automation: From Idea to Implementation

Have you ever wondered how much time your salespeople spend selling?

According to the sales statistics collected by Salesforce, that’s only 28% of their week. The rest of the sales reps’ work time goes to administrative duties, CRM database updates, or internal calls and meetings. Inevitably, this leads to missed opportunities and lower business results. The proof? Participants of a poll held by Dooly admitted that, on average, they could drive 38% more profit if they didn’t need to focus on non-revenue generating activities (NRGs).

The potential for automation is here: McKinsey’s vendor interviews revealed that over one-third of sales, operations could be enhanced using the currently available automation tools. However, the same report notes that sales and marketing tend to fall behind other departments regarding automation adoption, such as finance or supply chain.

This blog post addresses this reluctance by discussing the benefits of automating sales processes, going step-by-step through the implementation, and providing real-life examples of three companies that enhanced their sales operations.

Sales process automation refers to tools and software that streamline manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks within the sales workflow. This allows salespeople to save time and focus on building meaningful relationships with clients, closing deals, or improving their skillset.

Automation can benefit your sales team in multiple ways. What are the most significant ones?

31% of salespeople spend more than one hour on data entry-related tasks daily. It adds up to at least 5 hours a week devoted to mundane, error-prone copying-and-pasting rather than contacting or researching prospects.

Sales automation tools can handle most data-related tasks: records migration, major CRM upgrades, or daily customer profile updates. When integrated with email, these tools can extract customer details such as email address, company name, or even industry and enter them into your CRM. You can also use automation to quickly pull existing customer data from your other systems, such as ERP or EHR. Again, the volume doesn’t matter—unlike human workers, automation tools can process data around the clock with a near-zero error margin.

Besides simply moving records, sales process automation allows you to enrich your current datasets with additional information. For example, you can sync your automation tool with Google Apps (like Calendar, Tasks, or Contacts) or program them to independently research and enter customer details such as demographics, company size, location, revenue, etc.

With all customer data in place, the next step is to assess the value of every prospect and set sales priorities. Here, sales automation tools compare customer information and actions (e.g., requesting a demo or visiting the pricing page) with pre-determined criteria to evaluate how close each prospect is to your perfect lead. The most significant advantage of automated lead scoring lies in quickly processing thousands of potential leads.

Based on the assigned lead score, the system can independently decide which prospects are most worth nurturing and which will waste your time and resources. Speaking of nurturing, sales automation can also prepare and distribute customized proposals that will help you minimize customer churn. All that is to make sure that your efforts target the relevant audience.

Reliable sales forecasts and reports drive profit and help you make informed business decisions. However, manually drawing up an accurate, extensive analysis takes time and energy. Worst of all, one mistake can bring all that effort to naught.

With automation tools, you can build report and forecast templates to generate an up-to-date sales analysis whenever needed. Since your salespeople don’t need to input any data manually, errors won’t be an issue. In addition to time savings and fewer errors, automated reporting and forecasting can enable you to create new opportunities and revenue streams.

Although customer interaction remains mostly personal, sales process automation can cover specific communication scenarios. This allows you to reach your audience immediately, no matter how many customers and little time you have.

Email marketing is the perfect use case. You can set up your automation tool to send a predefined email when a specific event occurs. For example, clients can receive welcome emails upon subscribing, reminders when they leave products in the cart, and cross-selling suggestions for related products when they purchase.

You can automate follow-up sequences and lead nurturing using more advanced and customer-specific triggers. Automation will also benefit other communication channels like SMS, messaging apps, or chatbots.

Maintaining high team morale is always essential. However, it’s even more central to success in customer-oriented jobs like sales since it can directly affect the relationship between your reps and clients.

The bad news is nearly half of the salespeople feel lukewarm about their jobs, rating their job satisfaction as “just good.” A meager 17.6% call it “outstanding.” On the upside, those who spend at least 4 hours daily on sales-related duties report significantly higher fulfillment levels than those who devote more time to other tasks.

And here’s where implementing sales process automation can also help, reducing the time needed to perform mundane work and freeing up sales teams to focus on more fulfilling tasks. Naturally, satisfied employees are also less likely to leave, which brings the added benefit of improved staff retention: all that increases productivity, happier clients, and better sales results.

Automating individual stages of the sales workflow already makes an impact, but to see the real difference, you must look at the whole cycle.

Over time, you’ll notice that your sales specialists can now focus on contacting leads, selling, and closing deals. At the same time, processes that used to take days are now completed in hours. The combination of boosted productivity and efficiency will eventually accelerate your sales cycles, enabling your business to make more profit in less time.