Automating your sales outreach can be a major win for you and your customers. It can potentially reduce your costs by freeing up time for more value-added activities, and it can unlock additional revenue.
Sales outreach automation can give you increased customer-facing time and better customer satisfaction. If your resources limit your sales outreach, automating your processes can help you reach out to prospects while saving time and money.
What is sales outreach automation?
Sales outreach refers to all the touchpoints with prospects or old customers sought by a salesforce to increase revenue. Sales and marketing teams work together for a successful outreach campaign. Sales outreach automation is using digital tools, like software and AI, to streamline your sales processes. You can scale your ecommerce marketing and sales efforts by automating end-to-end process libraries like pipeline management and lead scoring.
While boosting revenue and reducing costs, it frees up time for your sales team to concentrate on what they do best – selling. Without sales outreach automation and even other ecommerce automation tools, professionals spend hours managing repetitive clerical and administrative tasks and data entry. Automation shoulders that workload as a third of all sales tasks can be automated.
With a strong automation strategy, you can increase productivity and enhance your bottom line.44% of companies that have adopted AI say that it has helped them reduce costs. The sales function is promising when it comes to automation potential. There are opportunities across the sales value chain for automation.
Another major benefit of sales outreach automation is that it leaves no room for mistakes. It will do only what it has been assigned to do. Automation can also be designed to personalize the outreach depending on whether your leads are hot leads, warm leads, or cold leads.
Image Sourced from scnsoft.com
Here are four of the best sales outreach automation methods that can transform your sales strategy:
1. Invest in CRM software
Whether you want to improve sales on eBay, on your website, or in your physical store, reaching out to prospects requires a specialized approach. From the first interaction to every interaction across the customer journey, your team needs to have all the necessary information about your prospects. You can’t have a returning customer reaching out, and the sales team has no idea what the last purchase was.
To offer a personalized experience, you need to centralize all your data into a CRM. A customer relationship management system is the best place to store and manage your customers’ information. It will give your sales force (and customer service teams) a 360 view of your customers and help you improve your customer relationships.
CRM software defines leads, prospects, and opportunities. You can connect it to your ecommerce stores and even sync it with your lead generation and customer support tools. For managing customer relations, phone systems for small business are also essential.
With tons of data available and organized on prospects and leads, you can successfully segment your customers and personalize outreach campaigns accordingly. Imagine if all this data were just present in a database, you would take ages just trying to make sense of it, let alone being able to utilize it meaningfully.
CRM software automates the processes of collecting, managing, and segmenting data. It excludes human intervention and thus human error, which means you’ve high-quality data available for use. CRM software should be at the center of your sales processes.
2. Send automated emails
If your outbound sales strategy has people writing emails to everyone on your email list, that is incredibly counterproductive. An email marketing tool can help you reach out to hundreds of leads. You can choose templates and upload a list of emails and names of prospects. Then choose your own cold email sequence, and voilà!
The email marketing tool will email prospects, send follow-up emails to those that do not respond, and even provide analytics to help you improve your email strategy.
An email marketing tool can help you personalize emails as per the different needs of your prospects. If you have a diverse customer base and you’re wondering how to attract customers using emails, email automation is your answer. Personalized emails can add more value, and it isn’t something you can do manually. Email marketing software can help personalize your email outreach and increase your reply rate by100%.
A personalized email creates an impression of concern. Your prospect won’t feel like this is a sales pitch. With the personal touch, you can do wonders that a generic mass email cannot. Personalized emails end up in spam and junk folders a lot less.
With your email marketing tool connected to your CRM software, you can set up tags to automatically personalize messages and go beyond just personalizing names. CRM software can help with customer segmentation according to their industry and location and send them an email accordingly.
You can use automated email for customers at every step of the sales funnel. It can be especially useful to send out post-purchase emails as a customer retention strategy.
Image Source: Pixabay
3. Automate cold calling
The world might have turned digital, but cold calling is still relevant. It might sound old school, but automation has changed how businesses make sales calls. With a state-of-the-art VoIP (voice-over internet protocol) system, you don’t need to waste any time on a prospect’s answering machine. Your hosted VoIP phone systems can allow you to send out a prerecorded message whenever you end up speaking to the answering machine.
With your VoIP system connected to your CRM software, information about your customer is always readily available, thus improving the quality of your conversation. Just like you can personalize your emails, you can also personalize your calls, and that can make a huge difference in how the person at the other end responds to you with a more effective sales pitch.
An automated cold calling system can also help you prioritize calls depending on the lead scoring of the prospect in your CRM software. Depending on how often the prospect has interacted with you or whether they are a returning customer, you can prioritize which leads are to be contacted first.
The VoIP system also records or transcribes your calls for you. You can use these to improve your team’s communication skills.
Image Source: Pixabay
4. Automate social media engagement
You can automate your sales outreach on social media. Whether it is LinkedIn or Facebook, actively managing your social presence is paramount. Social networking sites are fantastic media for increasing customer engagement and grabbing the attention of prospects. But with so many prospects visiting your social media pages, only automating your social media engagement can help you attend to the traffic and increase it.
Installing social media engagement automation tools can increase engagement by doing the following:
1.Send a prospect a private message as soon as they view or like your page.
2.Help you monitor brand mentions, replies, and messages so you can respond in a timely manner.
3. Answer basic questions through the use of chatbots.
4.Use social listening tools to help you find out what your prospective customers are talking about and help you devise a sales and marketing strategy accordingly.
5.Provide analytics to give you valuable insights about impressions, reach, and engagement.
Image Source: Pixabay
Harness the power of sales outreach automation
Automation is one of the megatrends that is shaping the global economy, and along with the four areas listed above, it can be implemented in the following as well:
1.Affiliate marketing. social media engagement and sales outreach is increased these days by affiliate marketing, especially on Instagram and YouTube. “What is an affiliate program?”, you ask. It is an advertising program where you pay a third party to create awareness about your products or services in return for a commission. Automation tools can also help you track all your affiliates and their activity.
2.AI sales tools: these use artificial intelligence to improve the sales process. It especially helps in the augmentation of the sales process by helping sales reps work smarter and giving them recommendations for cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
3.RFP generation: robotic process automation can reduce the time it takes to draft a request for a proposal. The biggest reason for unsuccessful proposals is not sending them quickly enough. Proposal automation integrated with a free e signature software can help you in your proposal writing and sending process.
Sales outreach automation gives you a competitive edge in your business. Choose a team management app and CRM tools that meet your needs and help you realize the levels of efficiency you need. Don’t waste time and pitch these ideas, and include them in your email business proposal template.
Automating your sales outreach processes means everybody wins. Your sales reps will be able to deliver value and experience greater job satisfaction, while your customers will benefit from a faster turnaround time. Automation has refined the sales process and made it much more effective. Embracing the digital transformation of the sales function means adding value to your brands and your offering to the customer.
