10 Everyday Sales Tasks You Didn't Know Could Run Themselves

Cut to the chase. In the sales world, time is not just money; it's everything.

Yet, 62% of a salesperson's time is spent on tasks that don't directly generate revenue. Think about it. More than half of your effort isn't directly contributing to your bottom line.

Instead of having calls with clients and building relationships, you're writing emails, entering data, updating the CRM, preparing a contract, and most of the time, providing a mediocre sales experience.

Time to change the game.

Disclaimer: Every automation is worth it, don't complicate the process. If you don't know from where to start, reach out and I'll guide you through it.

1. Chasing Leads

Fact: The average sales rep spends 21% of their day researching prospects.

What you can do: Streamline lead identification by setting up alerts for specific keywords or interactions on social media and industry forums. Use a basic automation to monitor these platforms and notify you when potential leads engage with content related to your field. This direct approach allows you to immediately reach out with a personalized message, leveraging the lead's recent activity to start a meaningful conversation.

Sounds difficult? Start with one simple lead, one social media platform.

2. Entering Data

Fact: Salespeople spend 23% of their day on data entry.

What you can do: Leverage email and call logging features in your CRM that automatically capture and store interaction details. For emails, use BCC or a CRM integration plugin that syncs with your email client. For calls, a mobile CRM app can log calls and even transcribe them in some cases. This reduces manual entry and ensures all data is captured accurately.

The upper game? An automation that captures information from calls using an AI algorithm, and updates the CRM automatically. What you would do is simply verify the accuracy of the information (30s), and move on to the next lead.

3. Personalized Emails

Fact: Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates, but manually customizing each one is a time sink.

What you can do: Start with templates for different stages of the customer journey, then use data to insert personalized fields including names, company website data, lead's engagement, LinkedIn profiles, history, etc. Create a rule-based system where certain actions by the lead trigger specific type of emails, ensuring relevance. For instance, if a lead downloads a particular resource, send a follow-up email with related information or a case study.

However, this should be completely personalized from start to finish - and yes, you wouldn't do it, it's automated.

Upper game? Automate the personalization not only based on companies and individuals names, but also current events, holidays, etc.

4. Following Up

Fact: 44% of sales reps give up after one follow-up.

What you can do: Develop a series of follow-up automations for different scenarios: no response, interest shown, or asked to check back later. Use your CRM to tag the lead accordingly, click on the appropriate follow-up sequence. The email will include personal touches by using merge tags for names, company details from the website, data from their profiles, and any personal information shared during your interaction. This ensures follow-ups are relevant and timely, with minimal effort.

The upper game? Follow-ups with voice recordings - and yes it's automated.

5. Creating Proposals

Fact: Creating a proposal can take up to 10 hours for complex B2B deals, and an average of 40 minutes for simple B2B deals.

What you can do: Create a library of proposal automations that cover various scenarios, services, or products. Utilize a document automation that integrates with your CRM to pull in specific details about the lead and the proposed solution. This allows you to quickly generate personalized proposals by simply selecting the relevant template and letting the automation fill in the details.

6. Upselling

Fact: Identifying the right moment and the right offer for an upsell can be challenging without a systematic approach, potentially leaving revenue on the table. Worse? Not personalized.

What you can do: Use customer data analysis to automate the identification of upsells. By tracking customer purchase history, product usage data, and engagement levels, you can set up an automated system that flags customers when they meet certain criteria indicating readiness for an upsell.

For example, a customer who has shown having a problem with home security might receive an automated, personalized security camera offer after they bought a solid door. The same goes for B2B services.

7. Retaining Customers

Fact: Maintaining customer loyalty in a competitive market requires continuous engagement and satisfaction monitoring, which can be overwhelming to manage manually. 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers with a 60-70% probability of selling.

What you can do: Automate customer engagement and satisfaction monitoring to proactively address retention. Set up regular automated check-ins via email or SMS that ask customers about their experience and if there's anything they need help with.

Pair this with an automated analysis of customer behavior, such as decreased usage or interaction with your service, to trigger personalized outreach or special offers aimed at re-engaging them.

Think of congratulating them, wishing them happy holidays, you name it - everything automated (and of course, it should be genuine).

8. Qualifying Leads

Fact: Only 56% of sales reps feel they have enough information before making a call.

What you can do: Implement a simple, automated questionnaire for new leads captured on your website. Design questions that qualify leads based on your ideal customer profile, such as budget, need, and decision-making timeline. Responses can trigger different follow-up actions, ensuring you spend time on leads that truly fit your criteria. This can be done using basic form builders with conditional logic.

The upper game? Don't use questionnaire, make data gathering automated from company public information (revenue, traffic, etc.), decision makers profiles, etc. Once gathered, it'll go through a Leads qualification automation based on your criteria.

9. Sales Reports

Fact: 90% of all spreadsheets (including those used for sales reporting) contain errors.

What you can do: Use the reporting function within your CRM to set up standard reports that run automatically. The automation will select which metrics to track and will generate data hourly, daily, weekly, you name it. Send them to your communication platform, or use dashboard features to have a real-time view of your sales pipeline and performance metrics without manual intervention.

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10. Onboarding customers

Fact: The onboarding process can often be manual and inconsistent, leading to a less than optimal customer experience and longer time to value.

What you can do: Automate the customer onboarding process by creating a series of welcome emails, educational content, and task lists that guide new customers through the initial setup and use of your product or service.

Remember - This will be personalized. This can be triggered by the customer's sign-up date or product purchase, ensuring they receive timely and relevant information to get started.

What you focus on is simply the human interaction, calling the customer, nurturing the relationship, and being a human.

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Lastly..

As we've went through these 10 everyday sales tasks, it's clear that the average salesperson is losing half of their time and half of their bottom line on the line.

Automation isn't a prestige; it's about cutting costs, improving productivity, increasing revenue, and focusing on what matters.

Staying ahead will require intelligent sales departments. The future of sales isn't about replacing humans; it's about leveraging it and letting it be the center of the human experience and hence, the center of automation. Freeing up our most valuable resource—time—to invest in activities that drive growth and foster meaningful connections.

By doing so, you're not just keeping pace with the times; you're setting the stage for scale.

Want to leverage time? cut costs? increase both the revenue and the bottom line? scale without operational burden? and make your salesperson happy?

I'll be glad to help.

Happy Reading,

- Ahmed Adli