Using sales automation software to streamline sales processes can impact business growth. Besides optimizing team efficiencies and helping to boost sales output, sales automation software can help sales teams deliver better prospecting campaigns in a timely and organized manner.
However, when it comes to adopting and implementing sales automation to drive sales processes, entrepreneurs and sales leaders are still seen to make some common mistakes.
What some of these most common sales automation mistakes and how can sales teams prevent them?
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Not Automating Different Types of Cadences
Sales automation helps sales team automate a large part of their sales follow-up emails and cadences.
But in order to ensure more ROI from some of the strongest features in your sales automation, it is important to focus on A/B testing and setting up different variations of sales cadences.
This can help sales leaders compare results to identify what kind of sales messaging actually resonates more with prospects.
Sales automation allows sales teams to automate their sales funnel. Using different messaging for different kinds of audiences and implementing variations in email copy, landing page design, images, etc allows sales teams to also know what kind of campaign can be further optimized to deliver double the results in future.
Lack of Streamlining in Lead Qualifying and Lead Handoff Stage
Knowing how to automate lead scoring can allow sales teams to update their high priority list regularly while also allowing sales teams to focus their best efforts on high quality leads. Automated lead scoring can help sales teams identify their most engaged prospects and also signals marketing teams who needs more re-engagement campaigns.
To optimize this process, it is important for sales and marketing leads to jointly come to a conclusion as to what defines a hot lead or high priority list in their system, at what point should leads be handed off to sales from marketing and what key parameters should be must-haves in SQL pipelines.
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Improved Tracking of Sales Team Performance
Ensuring a consistent sales pipeline by setting up a good tracking system to measure quality and consistency of lead flows is easier with sales automation.
But to optimize how your sales automation helps you track company sales performance and team-level / individual-level performance, it is important to implement a good reporting and measurement culture. Measuring individual sales rep performance against KPIs and Quotas while also measuring sales team performance as a whole are crucial in identifying problems with sales pipeline or forecasts.
Sales automation platforms allow sales leaders to track sales team and sales rep performance and most platforms allow dashboards to be customized to give deeper insights into the number of leads generated by each sales rep, each rep’s close rate and a lot more.
Better tracking of team output and performance also helps sales leaders understand where a rep may need some training and what needs to be improved in the team as a whole.
Not Integrating all Sales Tech Systems
Salestech and sales automation are meant to give a sales team a holistc view of their data and performance. Using a CRM to measure prospect campaigns but not integrating it with the marketing lead generation or lead management system only creates silos. Sales teams and marketing teams need to have a structured tech stack to allow both sides sufficient access to data on customers. All-in-one sales automation platforms are useful for smaller teams, for larger, distributed teams, even if there is a bigger martech or salestech stack, integrating analytics and customer data to serve a unified view will help centralize and improve processes and team output.
Sales automation can improve sales performance and reduce operational costs. A well-planned sales automation suite that is implemented with the right sales processes and strategies can push your sales results and improve company bottomline.
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