The digital transformation of your sales teams is essential to the survival of your business. But this transformation goes beyond replacing door-to-door visits with emails.

Thanks to online tools, you can automate the entire sales process and optimise the performance of your sales team.

What is a sales process?

A sales process or commercial process is a set of activities and tasks that a sales team develops through different stages. These range from prospecting to the final closing of the sale.

Elements of an automated sales process with CRM

A good CRM system offers a balanced structure among all the elements that make up the proper functioning of a sales process, regardless of the sector or line of your company.

From the seller's point of view, a sales system must meet two priorities:

- The first is an increase inefficiency, in terms of time and resources.

- And the second priority is quality and relevance.

It is about how the software manages to create a positive environment in each of the sales interactions, and that itsfunctionalitiess also provide valuable information and statistics.

The combination of both increases' productivity. That is, a CRM system that supports the sales team, generates:

- More chances

- Shorter sales cycles

- Larger business sizes

- Better closing rates

If a sales rep knows they can get that out of a system, it's easier to motivate them to use it. While at the directive level, management receives the monitoring and information that itso muchh desires in an immediate and revealing way.

What to automate in a sales process?

The automation of the sales process, especially in cases where the prospect's purchase cycle is long, allows optimising the work of both the commercial director and the sales team, streamlining all those routine tasks that waste a lot of time and do not generate added value.

To gain efficiency, optimise the work on the sales team and improve the profitability of the company, it is essential to automate the sales funnel, especially when sales representatives have a high volume of prospects and day-to-day tasks.

Here are some tasks that you can automate:

- Prospecting

- Owner Assignment and Lead Rotation

- Lead enrichment

- Contact rating

- Creation of contacts and businesses

- Meeting scheduling

- Tasks, calls and alerts

- Report automation

Why do you need to automate your sales process?

According to data from Hubspot, sales teams only spend a third of their time selling, which in theory should be their fundamental task. The rest is lost on tasks that are not related to business results, such as:

- Write emails (21% of team time)

 - Data entry (17%)

 - Find customers (17%)

 - Attend meetings (12%)

 - Schedule meetings (12%)

 - Training (11%)

 - Search for information (11%)

Your main objective with automation is to recover this time and dedicate it to selling and adding value. If you think about a 38-hour workday a week, you’re losing more than 15 just between writing emails and entering data, two tasks that are easy to automate. The potential to free up 15-hours of your team's time and energy per week is a saving of more than $23,500 per employee*.

You have to be an active part of the conversation in digital media, position yourself as opinion leaders and generate opportunities over time. It is important to note that this is along-term bet. You not only have to focus on closing the sales this month, but also on creating the contacts that are going to convert in 3 months or in a year

What are the advantages of automating the sales process?

Although we have already mentioned some inthe previous point, we want you to know what the advantages of automating thesales process are, discovering them will convince you that it is the bestoption for your company, they are these:

- Information in real-time: If informationis power, knowing it in real-time will give your company a key tool for itsgrowth. It will allow you to take better advantage of sales opportunities andyou will be able to improve decision-making.

- Management of sales opportunities: Itallows you to detect sales opportunities and manage them better. In addition,the data of each prospect will be better preserved and will not be lost.

- Sales team: You will get a moreeffective sales team. Your work will be easier, as it is part of the automatedprocedures. They will be able to fully control the entire process in a simpleway.  

- Coordination of the company's departments: There are several departments that participate in the salesprocesses: Marketing, Sales, Administration, Production… and all of them willbe able to easily access the same information.

- Improve the customer experience:Automating the sales process will not only serve to close more operations, butalso to serve your potential customers in the shortest possible time andoptimally. Thanks to all the comments, you will improve the customerexperience.

How can you automate your sales process?

To automate your sales process, you musthave a tool that allows you to do so, such as HubSpot. There are manypossibilities that it offers you and all of them will help you to be moreeffective. Next, we want to show you the main ones:

- Visits to your website: You will be ableto know who visits your website and do it in real-time. You will find out whichpages they visit and how long they stay on them. This way you can focus onthose sales opportunities that show a greater interest in your products. Inthis way, you will not be able to waste time on users who have little chance ofbecoming customers.

- Order of prospects: As you are seeing,with HubSpot you will be able to sort your prospects using different filters.You will consider whether they are individual or business prospects, theirlocation, or their interest. In addition, your team will be able to view theinformation in such a way that they can focus on the most important prospects.Less time is spent searching for customers and more time is spent turninginterested users into buyers.

- Notifications: HubSpot will allow you toset up daily notifications and summaries for your team via email. They willknow all the information they need about the best-qualified prospects who aremost likely to become customers. In addition, you can create alerts so thatyour team knows when they enter your website in real-time so that you caninteract with them as soon as possible.

- More agile work: Automating your salesprocesses will make work easier, more agile and avoid a myriad of complicationsthat only delay the sale or even prevent it.

How to automate sales processes with CRM

In the market, there are many tools thatallow us to automate the sales process, manage leads and personalize communications.The idea is to optimize the processes of obtaining leads to the maximum butleaving room for the human factor when we are close to achieving the sale.

We are going to talk about thefunctionalities of Hubspot, which is a leader in the inbound marketing sector,but there are many other similar solutions, such as Salesforce or other localCRMs. We have to look at which one best suits us based on the type of clientswe have and the characteristics of the company.

When automating  a sales process, thefollowing steps must be very clear:

●       Identify and detail the currentpurchasing or sales processes. No tool can replace strategy and planning: wehave to be very aware of the stages that a potential client must go through inorder to automate them.

●       Describe the needs of the CRM:what are we going to need in the long term?

●       Design the CRM automationstrategy: which channels and which processes are we going to launchautomatically so that the sales team does not have to be aware of manualprocesses and can dedicate themselves to generating value.

●       Implement the new strategy inthe automation tool, configuring it based on the steps we have defined.

●       Train the team's professionals,so that they learn to use the tool correctly and detect sales opportunities. Wehave to unify the way of working of the whole team, so the challenge will begreater when more professionals train it.

●       Constantly optimize actionsbased on objective reports of results. The team has to be constantly measuringdata and proposing improvements.

Depending on the needs that you havedefined, you’ll configure different workflows that respond to the behaviour ofthe users. This work must always be coordinated between marketing and sales:you will define the steps that a lead goes through.

Sales process automation tools: the Hubspot example

Hubspot offers specific sales software todesign and automate the entire process. Let's see what features it offers, asan example of what you can achieve by implementing a sales automation tool.

●       Email templates. As we have seen, morethan a fifth of the sales team's time is lost in managing emails, so optimizingthis task is a priority. Using pre-designed templates, we can go from taking 10minutes to write each email to sending it in just two clicks, which allows usto work with many more leads per day.

●       Notification and follow-up of emails.The system automatically notifies us of the actions of each lead, such asopening an email, clicking on one of its links or visiting its website. It caneven let us know when a person is reading a specific document. In this way, wecan send you a personalized offer or call you just at the right time.

●       Track visits to the web. Allinteractions of a lead with our website are saved in a tab that we can consultbefore interacting with it. Thus, we will be able to know which are the topicsthat interest you the most and guide the conversation around them.

●       Assignment of tasks. We can dynamicallycreate tasks for the sales team based on the behaviour of the leads or evensend them automatic communications when they go from one state to another.

●       Schedule meetings. The tool includes acalendar shared with leads so that they can reserve a space on the salesrepresentative's calendar themselves. This way, we can save a lot ofunproductive time that was lost managing schedules.

●       Email sequences. We can create and sendpersonalized email sequences at different times, for example, to send automaticreminders to qualified leads for sales.

●       Sales pipeline. All contacts and thetime of the process in which they are stored here, allowing more efficient andproductive forecasts and sending proposals in a matter of seconds.

●       Online signing of contracts. The clientreceives the offer and can sign the contract on the platform itself,facilitating the process.

●       Metrics and optimization. The dashboardmakes all the information available to us in real-time. So with all the time wehave saved on repetitive tasks, we can ask our team to be more analytical andlook at the information to refine the process more and more.

*15hrs per week for an employee on an annual $60,000 equivalates to $23,684.

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