If you also want to gain competitive differentiation in your sales process, you need the help of advanced automated technologies.
In other words,’ Sales automation‘.
Sales automation is not something new; it’s already being deployed by big giants in overcoming the challenges in sales processes.
Sales automation assists you in simplifying processes and improves productivity and morale value.
Sales automation is the only solution to all your sales ills. For instance, you might have-
- Lost a deal because you failed to recognize your customer
- It took a longer time than usual in understanding the issue
- DId manually record your sales prospects or leads
- Unable to manage the appointment with the prospects because of too many requests.
- Spent half an hour or more than that just finding the history of the sales prospects.
If you have already suffered from these, it’s time for you to adopt sales automation.
To your surprise, more than 30% of sales-related tasks can be automated. (McKinsey)
This article tries to understand the urgency of sales automation in your business.
What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation is an opportunity for companies, customers, and sales representatives. The advancement in AI And ML has introduced a new idea called customer support chatbots.
Sales automation uses advanced technologies such as AI and ML to boost sales. You can automate the entire pipeline management and workflows to SLA tracking, lead scoring, and more.
To further add, 44% of sales leaders who will surpass revenue in 2021 use market data and AI. (HubSpot)
Now you are clear with the sales automation concept, let’s understand-
Why is Automating Sales Important?
Sales automation is vital to you primarily because it saves a most valuable asset of yours that is time.
It assists your sales representatives and managers perform most of the repetitive and administrative tasks and much other data entry-related stuff. Sales automation frees up the sales team by reducing the work burden.
It assists the sales team in managing the sales cycle much more efficiently- for example, it ensures the sales team your prospects on time or simplifies the overall interaction with the customers.
So when you adopt a sales automation strategy, you can easily improve productivity and revenue. Companies that have already adopted sales automation are in gain, and they have given a positive response to it.
Let’s discuss how sales automation helps sales representatives and managers complete their day-to-day tasks.
Where does Sales Automation Help Sales Representatives?
In general, sales representatives have a multitude of day-to-day responsibilities. Sales automation assists them in handling tasks in a timely and appropriate manner so that they will not miss the customer at any point in the customer lifecycle.
AI deployment in sales has been forecasted to improve 139% between 2020 and 2023. (Salesforce)
Here is the list of some of the areas where sales automation helps the sales representatives-
- Prospecting
- Lead Enrichment
- Contact and Deal Creation
- Email Templates
- Sales Email Automation
- Meeting Scheduling
- Sales Calls
- Deal Management Automation
- Proposals
Where does Sales Automation Help Sales Managers?
Sales managers hold a different level of sales responsibilities than sales representatives. Let’s look at the areas where sales automation helps sales managers-
- Reporting
- Lead Rotation
- Lead Scoring
When talking about the benefits of sales automation concerning sales representatives and managers, we can’t miss the customers that play a prominent role in deciding.
Let’s discuss how sales automation helps the customers during their sales funnel.
Chatbots help the customer in taking the next step of the sales easily. If you do not have an idea of a sales funnel- it’s a marketing model that describes the entire customer journey from the point of contact to their next purchases in the future.
Sales funnel are categorized into different categories, but the most popular are divided into four categories- let’s discuss here in detail.
Awareness
It’s the category where the customer is aware that your product exists in the market. You can use a chatbot here to grab the customer’s attention and improve their product knowledge via various media such as websites, apps, or social media channels.
For example, when you deploy a chatbot on your website, visitors who visit your website might go away without reading the complete details provided on the website. If they find a chatbot on your website, they might be interested in clarifying further product details.
Interest
It is where chatbots play a prominent role; the customers who are already aware of your product might pay attention and want to know further about your product to make a purchase decision.
Chatbots are always available to your customer to welcome them whenever they visit a website and provide an option to assist them by answering all their doubts and information about the product.
Decision
It’s the phase where customers decide to buy your product or not. During this phase, your sales team can come up with the various reasons why customers must buy your product and how it is useful to them by describing the product features and offers, if any, at the right time.
It will help the customers to make purchase decisions and prevent them from shifting to your competitors.
Action
This phase is important, many times when customers decide to buy the product, but when they try to check out, some errors will happen such as website crash, not acceptance of payment, or any other errors.
Sometimes customers may get busy when they get a sudden call, a message or visit from relatives, or any other similar reasons.
Chatbots can pop-up notifications to the customer to resume the action they left in their free time.
What Kind of Things Can Be Automated?
When we talk about the sales process, they need to handle tasks apart from sales generation. The tasks include-
- Forwarding relevant information to leads,
- Assigning tasks to team members
- Passing missed calls to a different person
- They keep up-to-date information about the various sales team members and which customers lie in which stage of their lifecycle.
Let’s discuss it in detail.
Lead Distribution
Sales automation segments the customers based on various factors such as zip code, city, state, interest, behaviour, age, prospects, leads, and many other ways. The sales team needs to categorize the customer to prompt action whenever they query customers from a particular segment.
Lead Prioritization
Chatbots can hold the capability to categorize your customer based on how soon they are likely to get converted from the database access and AI & ML capabilities it has. Generally, customers lead prioritization is done through modelling your ideal customers and ranking the lead based on your criteria.
Sales Alerts
Sales alerts help the sales team to get alerts whenever a lead visits a website or takes any action on-page. You can set some time limit to notify the sales team, and you can set this notification on mobile or email.
Automated Reporting
It’s an excellent option or helping hand for the sales managers to keep track of the sales team throughout the day. For example-
Number of calls they made in a day,
The number of follow-ups they attended
The number of complaints are there in the pipeline,
And how much sales they can expect in the future. Similarly, you can automate the report of your sales team on the field. Like-
- Distance they travelled,
- The number of meetings they have attended,
- The number of meetings got succeeded, and many others.
- Even you have the option to track your sales representatives live on a mobile app.
Here are the Ways Chatbots Can Improve your Sales Automation Strategies
Deploying a chatbot must be a priority task for any business as its benefits are many that can lead to building strong customer satisfaction and retention rate. Let’s discuss out here-
1. Sales Automation Minimizes Human Error
Chatbots completely remove the errors generated by humans. Many times customer support executives forget to reply to the customer’s message when they get multiple queries at the same time or sometimes replies out to customers in emotional swings. This you will not experience with chatbots and get completely removed.
Big giants are 61% more likely to deploy automation into core business process automation. (Hinge Research)
Chatbots help the sales team completely remove the errors made during the sales process and improve the efficiency and complaints of the customer drastically.
The other thing is that chatbots won’t get frustrated and reply with the same patience to multiple customers simultaneously.
These you need to compromise at the side of support executives; often, they may feel frustrated and reply wrong due to customers’ multiple queries. The sales team works more efficiently with chatbots, and customers get instant replies.
2. Always Online
Chatbot ensures your availability to the customer round the clock; they will not miss any queries for any reason. You might feel you can handle the customers 24/7, but it won’t be possible in real-time.
You need to compromise with the support executives because they may not be available for various reasons. The reasons may include- shift change, negligence of duty, multiple queries simultaneously, offline times, etc.
Chatbots replies completely satisfy your customers, as chatbots transfer the call to executives if they meet with any complex issues; thus, it frees up your customer executives.
The chatbots handle all the repetitive and initial contact queries and leave humans to take only the complex questions.
It improves customer satisfaction, and they are more willing to purchase you in the future.
3. Shopping With Chatbots Cut Cost and Improve Revenue
Initially, deploying chatbots may be costly for you based on your chosen vendor. But once you deploy, it will reduce the overall cost of customer support as chatbots can handle multiple chats simultaneously, that too 24/7.
For this, you might need to hire extra sales representatives at the peak times, train them, cost incurred due to infrastructure, salaries, and many more expenses.
You can completely avoid that by just deploying a chatbot for your business.
44% of companies using AI in chatbots or any other business area have noticed a reduction in business costs. (McKinsey)
Chatbots can’t completely replace the customer support executives, but it acts as a compliment and boosts the energy of your sales team to work more efficiently and improve overall sales.
4. Sales Automation Improves Customer Service
Sometimes support teams keep customers on hold for days on end before closing a deal or coming back to them with an answer that unsatisfied them—or waiting for confirmation mail for a long time.
77% of B2B buyers say that their last purchase was very difficult or complex. (Gartner)
As a customer, it’s unbearable for them though there was no fault or negligence of the customer executive team.
You can easily overcome this with chatbots replying to customer queries instantly. If they don’t have an answer, they will transfer it to the respective department for a quick resolution.
Even customers can chat live on chatbots with agents and satisfy your customer. Even chatbots provide FAQ section links or informative articles links to solve the customer queries.
5. Higher Retention Rate
Chatbots for sales maintain a high level of customer satisfaction and retention rate.
Chatbots attract the attention of every prospective customer who visits your website, provide detailed information and transfer the call to the support team for further conversion and answering of complex queries.
Chatbot initially collects the complete information from the customer to analyze the visitor’s purpose and targets the visitor with notifications, emails or push offers related to their interest.
The remaining process needs to be handled by the support team and further nurture the customer.
Customers are happier when they get instant replies and solutions to their queries, and they tend to continue the same in the future with the same brand.
6. Your Products and Services Stand Out
Chatbot automation will help the customer better visibility of the product or services in sales.
Chatbots have many options to promote your product or services and encourage you to purchase them without additional outside tools.
You can complement the customer’s replies by adding images, carousels, videos, and more to appeal to the customers. You can even add subtle ads and upload them for free on your site.
All these will make you stand out from your competitors. Though this might look like small things, these are highly noticeable.
You can even design an image ad based on customer needs, select an activation and pick the particular page location(entire website or a particular landing page).
When the ad gets activated, the chatbot automatically engages with the visitors and interacts with them using predefined content.
7. Sales Autoamtion Support Scalability
Chatbot automation automatically scales your support team, and you can handle multiple queries even at peak hours, festive seasons, or at any occasion with ease.
All these you can do without investing further in extra staff or resources.
Chatbots are highly recommendable at the time of surge periods. Otherwise, you need to hire or shed the staff based on your requirements.
It may result in the pending of requests and orders from the customer. It is where the role of chatbots starts as they ensure conversation with customers even at peak times without failing to answer any customer queries.
AI-enabled chatbots can handle multiple queries without any errors at the same time.
8. Serve Your Customers Whenever
Chatbots help you retain and consolidate your customers. Chatbot automation marketing is not just about attracting new customers; it even takes care of the customers throughout their customer journey and takes their feedback to provide further assistance to satisfy them and retain them for a long time.
Businesses need to retain their customers when they trust you and your products.
Chatbots can track an order, notify the customer on various channels of their choice. If there is a delay, open a channel for claims and returns and further inform them about the product until it gets resolved completely or a refund is received to the customer.
Moreover, chatbots take feedback from the customer and try to know their interest to push the notification to make a purchase.
Power-Up your Sales Team with Smatbot Chatbot
Sales automation gives you the power to understand your customers. It gives you a complete picture of whom to follow and when. It is invaluable information that every sales team must have. You can easily know your customer’s next move and provide them with the right solution.
You have everything to build a sales funnel and start with your sales chatbots with sales automation.
Focus on tightening your sales funnel and providing considerable appreciation value to your customers. Because, in this advanced world, brands are not just selling the products; instead, they are selling the experiences.
So you must ensure a great experience for your customer when they visit your website, app, or social media pages.
Sales automation saves you plenty of time and relieves you from performing repetitive and time-consuming tasks while handling customer queries 24/7.
If you’re going to automate your sales process to provide an excellent customer experience. You’re at the right place, and Smatbot chatbots can help you achieve whatever be your business needs.
You can take 14 days free trial or contact the Smatbot support team if you need further information.
We are glad to serve you at any time.