Do you often feel bogged down by repetitive tasks like data entry? Wouldn’t it be great if you could leave the busywork behind and focus more of your time on actually selling?
Of course!
That’s why so many sales teams leverage AI-powered sales tools and automation software to put those time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot. Whatever your goals or the size of your team, technology can help streamline your sales process, so you can put your time and energy into activities that really move the needle.
From sales prospecting and data entry to lead enrichment and contact management, there are plenty of ways sales automation can make your job easier at every step of the sales process.
Ready to find out how you can use technology to close more deals and bring home more wins for your team? Let’s take a look at how different types of sales automation can help you overcome 10 of the most common sales challenges.
10 Challenges You Can Overcome with Sales Automation
Challenge #1: Filling your pipeline with quality leads
Without Sales Automation
In order to keep your pipeline flowing, you need a steady stream of new leads and opportunities. Unfortunately, manual prospecting can eat up tons of your time and energy – which can leave you struggling to balance lead generation with time spent selling.
How Sales Automation Can Help
Take advantage of sales automation from the very start of your sales process. When it comes to lead generation software, there are a few different options that use artificial intelligence to save you time and effort. For instance, Growbots uses AI to build a targeted list and automate outreach with a custom email sequence.
You can also use automation to qualify leads based on how closely they match your ideal customer profile. By using technology to identify high-quality leads, you’ll save time that would otherwise be wasted on leads that aren’t ready to buy.
Challenge #2: Verifying and maintaining your list
Without Sales Automation
Your list of prospects is worthless if their contact details are wrong or outdated. If you don’t verify the accuracy of your list before sending an outreach email, your message might not even reach their inbox. That means you’ll end up with a high bounce rate, low deliverability, and waste time testing out different address combinations before you get through to the right person.
How Sales Automation Can Help
If you know who you want to reach out to but don’t have their contact information, you can turn to technology to automate the process of digging up their email or phone number. Not sure how to find a prospect’s email address? You can experiment with different tools like Clearbit, Datanyze, and Hunter to search for and verify leads’ email addresses.
Challenge #3: Gathering sales intelligence on every prospect
Without Sales Automation
Whether you’re prepping for a sales call, a virtual sales demo, or visiting a lead’s office in person, you can never know too much about a potential customer. As you research their company online and scope out their LinkedIn profile, you’re learning more about your prospects and gaining a better sense of how likely they are to become a customer.
How Sales Automation Can Help
Sales automation can help by taking care of time-consuming research for you, so you’re always prepared to meet with a prospect. For instance, tools like Datanyze and InsideView gather information from a range of online sources and provide you with insights and details about your future customers. You can also lean on your CRM to help manage your opportunities, understand their pain points, and cater your pitch to address any potential sales objections.
Challenge #4: Standing out in your prospects’ inbox
Without Sales Automation
After building your list, the next step is to reach out to your prospects. This initial outreach is the beginning a potential customer relationship, so it’s important to make a strong, positive first impression.
Since personalization is key to successful outreach, you need to create separate lists and track the results of different campaigns for different audiences. If you’re tracking leads in a spreadsheet, then you must first group leads based on whatever data you included in the sheet and then copy and paste those lists into your email client.
How Sales Automation Can Help
Propeller CRM is built right into Gmail, which makes it simple to run targeted outreach campaigns without the hassle of a spreadsheet. You can instantly segment your list based on specific criteria, so it’s easy to run, test, and track outreach campaigns for different types of prospects.
You can autofill details like their first name, company, and industry to personalize the subject line, greeting, and message contents. Pull information directly from your CRM to show prospects that you’ve researched their business needs and understand what they’re all about.
Challenge #5: Following up with every lead at just the right time
Without Sales Automation
The more open opportunities you have on the go, the harder it gets to manage and track each lead. If you’re managing contact and lead data manually, you risk losing out on sales due to missed follow-up opportunities.
How Sales Automation Can Help
The number one mistake sales reps make is not following up enough times. In fact, 80% of all sales require five or more follow-ups to close – and the majority of sales reps give up well before that crucial fifth follow-up.
Fortunately, with the help of your CRM platform, you can be part of the 8% of sales reps who do follow-up at least five times.
By automating follow-up emails and reminders, you can close more deals and prevent lucrative opportunities from slipping through the cracks. Since your prospects receive tons of emails every day, we recommend using Propeller’s sales email automation to schedule a series of follow-up emails that automatically pause when leads respond.
Challenge #6: Keeping track of all your leads
Without Sales Automation
Having so many leads you can’t keep track of them all is a good problem to have. But if you’re still tracking lead and customer data manually in a spreadsheet, you’re limited in your ability to scale.
How Sales Automation Can Help
With the help of a CRM platform, you can grow your business and your contact list with the confidence that you’ll never lose track of a lead again. Your visual pipeline allows you to track leads’ movement through your sales funnel, so you’ll always know where things left off, remember to follow-up at just the right times, and know what action to take next.
Challenge #7: More efficient and effective lead nurturing
Without Sales Automation
There’s no question that lead nurturing can eat into your schedule. Depending on how close a lead is to making a purchasing decision, it can take tons of effort and energy just to keep them interested. However, it’s also a vital aspect of sales process. If you don’t nurture your leads with relevant, timely messages, then you could end up losing out on potential business.
How Sales Automation Can Help
Putting part of your lead nurturing processes on autopilot frees you up to focus on moving leads from one stage to the next. An easy way to do this is by setting up automated drip campaigns with messaging designed to engage, educate, and help leads see the value in purchasing your product or service.
You can also schedule automatic follow-up emails and reminders to ensure you always follow-up with leads in a timely manner.
Challenge #8: Figuring out where your best leads are coming from
Without Sales Automation
You might not know which leads originated from what sources – but as long as you’re bringing in revenue, it doesn’t matter where your leads are coming from, right? Wrong. There’s tons of value to gain from tracking lead sources. Being able to pinpoint and analyze where your best leads come from allows you to better optimize those channels and increase sales.
How Sales Automation Can Help
Using sales automation to track and record where every single one of your leads comes from, means you can uncover your best lead sources. Capture details on where you found your highest-quality leads, how you contacted them, and how long they spend at each stage of your pipeline.
When you know which referral sources produce the most value – be it in the form of deal value, consistent closes, or short sales cycles – you can focus your resources on the most successful channels with the greatest ROI.
Keep in mind that the source of the most leads isn’t necessarily the source of your best leads. Think quality over quantity; value over volume.
Challenge #9: Improving your conversion rate
Without Sales Automation
In an ideal world, if you’ve got plenty of leads coming in, that translates into plenty of new customers. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. There are many reasons why viable leads don’t always make it through your pipeline. However, sales teams often struggle to pinpoint why leads aren’t converting.
Between balancing all of your prospects, cold calling, and sales demos, it can be hard to find the time to sit down and figure out why your deals are stalling. So, you shrug and carry on – leaving money on the table and losing out on countless opportunities.
How Sales Automation Can Help
When it comes to identifying bottlenecks in your pipeline, sales automation can help you get to the heart of the issue, quickly. By tracking your entire sales pipeline in a CRM, you can figure out where things are going wrong and take action to fix it.
For instance, if most of your prospects aren’t responding to your initial outreach, you may want to rethink the messaging in your cold email campaign or focus on targeting sales-ready leads who are ready to buy.
Challenge #10: Forecasting future sales accurately
Without Sales Automation
If you don’t have your sales data all consolidated in one place, it can be hard to know where you stand – and your forecasts may be missing the mark as a result. When you record sales activities and track open opportunities by hand or in a spreadsheet, you’ll struggle to draw meaningful conclusions from it.
How Sales Automation Can Help
Sales forecasting shouldn’t be a guessing game – and when you set up your sales pipeline in Propeller, it doesn’t have to be! A visual pipeline makes it easy to get the perspective you need for faster, more accurate sales forecasting.
Plus, you can instantly generate sales reports based on the number of leads in your pipeline, which stage they’re at, potential deal value, sales cycle length, and your average win rate.
The Power of Sales Automation Goes Beyond the Pipeline
In order to build long-lasting, profitable customer relationships, you can leverage sales automation tools beyond the sales pipeline. A reliable CRM allows you to maintain accurate customer records, so you always have the information you need to make a connection, build rapport, and even personalize suggestions for cross-selling and upselling.
The best way to optimize your productivity and results with sales automation? Making sure it aligns with your existing workflow. For you, that could mean integrating some of the sales tools mentioned above or taking total control of your sales process with the help of a CRM like Propeller.
Ready to find out how easy it is to optimize your sales process with a robust CRM and sales automation? Start using Propeller for free today.
