Sales Automation: How To Do More In Less Time

In order to grow your business, you need to be able to organize your daily tasks and focus the majority of your time on what’s truly important. The best way to do so is by automating repetitive tasks and leaving enough time for the ones only you could do. 

Sales automation tools can help with the vast majority of your sales efforts and provide you with amazing results fairly quickly. Not only can you speed up your sales cycle, but also gain a better understanding of your clients through data analysis. 

In this article, we’ll explain the importance of sales automation and how you can utilize Better Proposals to streamline your sales process. From proposals to payments and reporting, we’ve got you covered. 

What is sales automation?

Which decision makes more sense to you? Spending time on repetitive tasks or finding a way to automate them? The answer is straightforward.

If you automate parts of your sales process, you can spend more time on the creative parts of the business, as well as anything else that needs to be done. 

That’s why sales automation is essential for any growing business. It can include: 

• Business proposals
• Automated emails
• Lead generation
• Follow-ups
• Managing the sales pipeline
• Onboarding new clients
• Managing your invoices

With the right sales automation tools, you can gain more control over your sales process as well as more insight into your clients. That way, you can not only raise your profits but also understand your existing clients better and upsell them. 

The more data you have on your sales process, the better you can analyze it. After all, anything you can measure, you can manage. You can even combine your sales automation tools with marketing ones and take your revenue-generating teams in the right direction. 

Importance of sales automation

In order to provide all your potential customers with the same level of service, you need to automate parts of communication. That way, you’ll ensure that everyone is welcomed and receives the right information, no matter the platform they reached out to you on. 

Otherwise, your clients depend on the person covering the specific platform (social media, your website chat or other), which can lead to slow and incomplete answers. 

Automation can also help you save time. Research shows that a third of all sales tasks can be automated. This doesn’t mean that you should move away from the famous - People buy from people saying. But you should figure out which tasks are draining your time and effort and find ways to simplify them with automation. 

There is no need for your sales reps to manually collect and sort data or waste time on leads that have a very slim chance of converting. 

Take a look at your current sales process and how many tasks your sales professionals currently have. If they are amazing at closing deals on the phone, relieve them of other tasks. Find ways to speed up lead generation and prospecting and give your team members more time to focus on direct sales. 

Speaking of leads, investing in a good CRM that will help you track potential clients and qualify them without doing too much leg work. Once you have a list of prospects, you can save time by focusing your sales efforts on them. 

Utilize sales automation in reporting

In order to know exactly which parts of your sales process work and which don’t, you need to improve your reporting. If you have the right data, you can utilize it in your sales forecasting, which will help you grow your business. 

From this type of detailed data, you can calculate your future revenue on a monthly and annual basis. Furthermore, with detailed reporting on your sales process, you’ll see which parts of the process need to be improved and which sales professionals need more attention. 

Once you learn about the customer journey your audience takes, you can shape your marketing messaging and understand exactly when to strike communication and how to guide a potential customer to convert. 

Start by looking at which of your emails, landing pages, blogs and other types of content have the best opening and conversion rates. Also, look into how long your sales cycle is and which of your sales professionals are closing more deals faster. 

Measuring all these different aspects of your sales process empowers you to make changes based on real data and your target audience. 

Reporting used as an educational tool

As we’ve mentioned before, reporting can help you find the best-performing sales professionals. We’re not saying that you should find out who isn’t performing and fire them, but use this data to organize educational workshops and help your team members better themselves. 

If you’ve found that a more relaxed approach works better than a salesy one, explain to your team members how they can soften their communication. 

Make sure everyone understands how important it is to work as a team and help whenever they can. Your sales team should be able to openly communicate with each other and hire ups. 

Furthermore, you can utilize this data to create a universal purchasing experience for all your clients. If they receive a varying degree of service, based on the sales professional, they will get a sense of unprofessionalism from you. 

Once you understand what works best for your target audience, make sure that every potential client gets the same special treatment. This is the best way to approach sales and see consistent results. 

Will sales automation tools lead to fewer sales professionals?

Absolutely not. Automation is just a way to help sales professionals sell more products and services quicker. Just like field service software didn't replace field workers, sales automation software doesn't replace salespeople. The human factor is still essential in sales and we would never suggest replacing your sales team with software. 

Sales automation can help you speed up your sales process and give you more time to focus on what’s truly important, but you still need to participate in communication with clients. 

Although technology has come a long way, it will never replace the human touch which is so important in sales. You need to be able to build trust with your customers, and understand their needs, wants and interests. 

When you know the expectations people have from your brand, you can shape the most successful sales strategy. This is where sales automation comes in handy and helps you better your approach. 

How to implement sales automation tools?

If you’re thinking about implementing sales automation in your process, firstly you need to assess your needs and find the best tool for your needs. Do you need help keeping track of all your leads, are you looking for an easier way to close deals or anything in between? 

We recommend you start with a single tool that helps you speed up more than one process. That way, you’ll experience benefits fairly quickly and your onboarding process won’t be too lengthy. 

Other factors you should consider are: 

• Price
• Number of team members
• Your goals
• The monthly recurring revenue
• Needs and wants of your team members

Automate your sales process with Better Proposals

If you thought that Better Proposals is only a proposal tool, let us show you what else you can do with our service. 

Not only do we help you create high-quality proposals in minutes, but we also help you streamline the whole process from a request for a proposal to closing the deal. Once you finish your discovery meeting or call, and the client asks for a proposal, you can rely on our templates to create an easy-to-follow sales document. 

Since we know the importance of great content, we offer a feature called content library which lets you save chunks of texts, photos, videos and payment breakdowns for future use. Once you finish your proposal, our proposal AI will kick in and give you advice on how to better your document. 

The proposal AI works by analyzing all the successfully signed proposals in your industry and giving you actionable advice. 

Once you send your proposal, the fun begins. We’ve purposely made all our documents web-based, which means that you can track them. You will be notified every time they are opened, signed, paid or forwarded. 

How do digital signatures work

Who still has the time to print out a proposal, scan it, and wait for it to be signed and sent back? 

Our digital signature option condenses this process down to a single click. Once your client is ready to sign, all they have to do is type in their name and click accept. Their signature will automatically get turned into a digital signature, which is legally binding and can be traced to the signer via time stamps and their IP address. 

You can, of course, track this entire process in your dashboard. 

When you don’t have this type of data, your follow-up process includes a lot of guesswork. This could lead you to offer a discount before they even sit down and read your proposal, which will cost you.

Furthermore, we’ll show you exactly how much time your readers spent on each of the sections, making your follow-up process easier than ever. By knowing how your potential clients viewed your document, you’ll know exactly which strategy to employ. 

If they opened your proposal and skipped right to the payment section, then they’re only interested in the cheapest option possible. This means that you shouldn’t spend too much time trying to win this deal. 

On the other hand, if your potential customer read your proposal, but hesitates to sign, you could engage them with a well-crafted email that showcases your previous successes in the form of a case study. 

Payment management with Better Proposals

Since our proposals come with a direct payment option, both you and your clients can save time. You don’t have to create and send invoices, one document is enough to show your offer, seal the deal and receive payments. 

We offer integrations through PayPal, Stripe and GoCardless. Based on the provider you choose, you can set up a subscription-based payment, one-off payment and more. 

You can also save your pricing sections and copy them into proposals in order to further speed things along. 

Once you send out your proposals you can manage them via our reporting tool. It will showcase: 

• The number of one-off sales
• Monthly recurring revenue
• Quarterly recurring revenue
• Annual recurring revenue
• Document statistics
• Template statistics
• Team performance
• Individual performance
• Revenue by products

This will help you keep track of which documents are signed and paid and which you need to follow up on, as well as how your team is performing. All this data will help you better your sales process. 

With all of these options and features, it’s easy to see how we’re much more than just a proposal-building tool. 

Conclusion

Saving time, while increasing your productivity and the quality of your service is the goal for all sales teams. All this can be achieved with sales automation tools. The most important step is to choose the right tool to help you out. 

With Better Proposals, you’ll not only be able to create and send beautifully designed proposals, but you’ll also get a faster way to agree to deals and get paid. On top of that, you can track all your efforts with automated reports that show you all the necessary data. 

All you have to do is utilize this information in your follow-up process. Not only is our service amazing at helping you win over new clients, but we can also help you upsell your existing ones. Whatever your needs are, our document templates have you covered. 

Let us work for you, instead of spending your time updating Google Sheets and scrolling through Asana/Jira/Monday in hopes to see updates on your offers. 

Start your free trial now and experience the best that sales automation has to offer.