If you run a venture, you would know that sales are an integral part of your journey to grow. It is all about getting a perspective of your customers and understanding what they need. However, today many of the ventures spend 50% of the sales time on unproductive prospecting, which can lead to a chaotic situation for your business. What is required is an intelligent tool to overcome this hindrance and boost your company’s profits.
Currently, the madness with which the sales teams have to do their minimal tasks seems to be ever-growing. They have to focus on effective email creation, eliminate erroneous data, swiftly generate documents, and that’s just the beginning of their daily work. But with the technological advancement that robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) have made to devise a system called the intelligent process automation or IPA, it can become really easy for the sales team to execute all those tasks like a cakewalk.
According to research presented by a team at McKinsey Global Institute, 40% of tasks within the sales team can be easily automated. Imagine having 40% less workload in your company and how it can tremendously prove beneficial to come up with better revenue and ideas.
Sales automation is a powerful way to enhance productivity, improve sales, and increase revenue while eliminating laborious and time-consuming tasks and saving those important work hours. By lowering the burden on your sales team, it allows the freed employees to focus on other essential tasks like generating leads and selling. It is the maximum level of optimization that a sales team can achieve at the moment, as the only task left for the sales rep is to worry about selling.
What changes can sales automation get?
With the introduction of sales automation to ventures, the operations role will probably be required to bring a shift in the mindset as well as the knowledge base. After all, change is the only constant. Here are some of the changes that can be foreseen:
Moving away from short fixes
Instead of placing short-term productivity tools to solve problems, the sales operation team will begin thinking about the long-term plans and changes for their venture. They must sensibly come up with a solution that can be implemented at their organization and automated in the near future.
Becoming Technology experts
Sales operations need to effectively cut through the noise and get their message heard more quickly than ever. For this to happen, they need excellent know-how of the latest technology in the market and how it can affect the sales at their organization. They may as well specialize in systems integration.
It is even more imperative for them to seamlessly integrate their solution in the existing technological framework. Sales operations have to have a clear understanding of their needs and work together with IT for implementing, configuring, maintaining, and supporting these systems.
Data Engineering
The sales operations team is already the owner and manager of all the available sales data. Now all they will have to do is properly collect, store, process and analyze these massive chunks of data with the help of sales process automation. They will need to develop a better understanding of how to build an automation flow and handle data using their Integrated Process Automation (IPA) solution.
Bring the revolution
It will be the responsibility of the sales operations to bring that spark of digital transformation and acceptance for their sales organization. They will need to bring out in the open the long term ROI this technology will get for the business and even persuade the stakeholders to get on board with this change. An important aspect of this would be to break the myths and notions of employees about ‘automating away’ the sales team.
Benefits of automating sales operation
With that being said, automation in sales operation comes with a great deal of force that has the ability to rejuvenate your venture completely. It is believed that businesses that would utilize marketing automation to cultivate relations with prospects may experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. On top of this, according to the Forbes magazine, 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors make use of one or the other kind of automation tool.
Having so much potential for the sales operations, automation brings with it a myriad of benefits for your company. Sales ops require a lot of focus on the customers and automation allows the reps to focus on improving customer interactions instead of wasting time on following up. With all the data available, reps can even place their pitches better and create specifically targeted campaigns. Additionally, the sales manager at the firm can keep a track of the representative’s performance and help them to improve upon their weaknesses.
According to the Aberdeen Group, companies that have placed sales automation in the picture achieve a 3.1% higher annual revenue growth rate. By automating the time-consuming tasks, companies not only boost sales but also remove a lot of errors as compared to the manual sales process system. Tracking customer behavior and generating regular reports to make the system better also gets easier through automation.
Summing it all up, sales automation is like that autopilot system which will increase your company’s efficacy by allowing the employees to focus on many important tasks and become a real asset to their organization. Automation does not mean loss of jobs or laying off of employees, it is a wiser outlook to work that will always require some human intervention. Yes, sales automation might finish 80% of the operations, but that essential 20% lies in the hands of the sales managers and reps who need to effectively build relationships and establish some trust with the customer to deliver satisfactory services. After all, it is a tactical business choice that can do wonders.
