What Is Marketing Automation?

Sales automation uses software to eliminate repetitive, manual tasks and automates them to allow you and your sales team to focus more on closing sales and getting paid.

With sales automation tools, you can:

• Automate follow-ups
• Manage your sales pipeline
• Easily train new sales team members with a repeatable and scalable system
• Send invoices and payment reminders to clients to get paid without the awkward conversations

When combined with marketing automation, your sales automation software becomes an even more powerful tool that allows you to win more time back while growing your business.

Keep reading to explore more about what sales automation is or skip ahead:

1. How to Use Online Sales Automation for Small Business
2. Integrating Sales Automation into a CRM
3. Find the Best Sales Automation Software

Automated Sales Funnels

Your sales funnel is the series of steps that prospects need to take to become a paying customer. The stages in each company’s sales funnel can differ, but the main three are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

By leveraging a sales automation platform like Keap, you can create a flywheel effect that brings in new leads and takes them through to the decision stage, automatically.

How Does Sales Process Automation Work?

Here are sales automation examples for how to simplify each stage of your funnel:

Awareness

The goal here is to create some sort of asset that captures the attention of your target audience. And, most importantly, you want to get their email address. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to create a lead magnet, like an e-book or templates that someone can use. The content will live behind a form on a landing page, where prospects will need to enter their information before accessing it.

Don’t forget that your lead magnet needs to relate to your product or service. For example, if you work for a design software company, your lead magnet should relate to design to ensure you’re attracting the right kinds of leads.

Consideration

At this point, you’ll have leads in your funnel and you’ll have all their email addresses. Set up an automated email nurture series to send at a regular interval so you can continue to be top of mind and can educate leads on your offering. Don’t be too pushy or overly sales-y at this point — there is a time for that later on.

You'll also know your leads are interested in content, so your first one or two emails could point them to blog posts on a similar topic. Then, the third and fourth emails could start to introduce them to your product, sharing a high-level overview of the benefits.

Decision

Now is the time to close the deal. Your leads have shown interest in your content and have gone through your entire nurture series. Your final email in the series should be the hard sell and should include something to close the deal, like a product demo, free consultation, or special discount. This example of sales automation won’t work for everyone, so if some leads don’t convert, you could create a separate nurture sequence specifically for them and check back in six months with another offer.

How to Use Online Sales Automation for Small Business

Having a sales automation platform can benefit your small business in many ways. It streamlines the sales process, as sales teams can rely on their CRM for managing their sales pipeline and email campaigns, for example.

A sales automation software like Keap can systematize some of your daily tasks and integrate other programs into one central location so you can focus on finding more leads to grow your business.

Here are just a few ways:

1. Record creation

The 2020 Keap Customer Survey found that 22.9% of respondents still manually collect contact information in-person or over the phone. This process can be easily automated to save time.

Having a sales automation system in place in the form of record creation generates a new contact record whenever a form is populated by a lead or when a business card is uploaded into the system, saving sales representatives from having to manually input all of their new data each time. Once those records are created, they can be tagged and segmented for easier record keeping and reporting.

2. Client/prospect communication

Another great sales automation example is being able to nurture client relationships by staying connected and distributing content via marketing or personal email sequences. Sales reps can also program their business line to leave automated away messages when they are either tending to another client or have activated “do not disturb” mode after logging off for the day, preventing clients from feeling neglected. Another option is to have a CRM with text messaging capabilities so you can automate personalized text messages with appointment information and reminders.

3. Email templates and automation

Being able to populate pre-designed email templates can shave hours off a sales rep’s day. Keap’s CRM comes preloaded with an extensive library of templates to choose from with a variety of different corresponding scenarios, making it easier to target the right audience.

4. Scheduling

More than 30% of sales activities can be automated, and scheduling meetings with leads is no exception.

Employing a scheduling and appointments feature on a sales automation platform ensures nothing falls through the cracks. Whether it’s a new client consultation or a follow-up meeting, hassle-free scheduling prevents sales reps from accidentally double booking or missing appointments. Gone are the days where messages need to be exchanged back-and-forth to compromise on a meeting time.

5. Reporting

Using automated sales analysis gives sales reps a bird’s eye view of sales conversions, form completions, email open rates, click-through rates, marketing and campaign performance and contact engagement. Instead of having to sift through piles and piles of data, simply leverage the sales reports feature to monitor lead and product revenue, activity history, orders and billing, etc.

6. Invoicing

With automated payments and invoicing, you can create an automated selling system that accepts credit cards, sends invoices, and tracks who’s paid. Your business can receive payments and send invoices around the clock automatically, even after hours when your sales reps are not available. By sending friendly automated reminders, you can even get out of bill collecting and see the payments come in on their own.

Integrating Sales Automation into a CRM

The secret to saving time and boosting productivity is to find the right CRM to manage and trigger your sales automation. What is CRM? It stands for customer relationship management: a powerful system that connects the data from your sales leads and customers, all in one place.

A CRM helps you set the foundation for a successful sales automation process. You can track details like email address, type of customer, purchase history, current sales pipeline stage, and how often someone opens or clicks an email.

The right CRM starts to create value the minute you enter your first lead. For the best results, make sure that all your leads are processed through your CRM. By having everything in one place, you can quickly identify which reps are crushing it and which have bottlenecks. Or, monitor deal progress and brainstorm how to move forward with cold leads.

Keap is the ultimate CRM solution for client management and sales automation. It has everything a sales team could wish for as far as maintaining customer relationships and garnering leads. With Keap, sales reps can easily organize their tasks and track interactions with clients and prospects, as they leverage automation tools to streamline their sales processes and generate more growth for their business.