Tips and examples
If you have ever worked in sales, you probably know how tedious and repetitive some tasks and processes are:
Email: Sending reminders, replying to messages
Data entry: Filling in information in the company's CRM system
Prospecting: Finding leads through various channels
Research: Providing leads with valuable information before the sale
Documents: Drafting offers, contracts and other presentations
Yet the core of sales should actually be selling and not administration. At the same time, good selling is based on the above-mentioned points and on correct and qualified data: both sales staff and customers must have sufficient information to be able to sell or buy well. Nevertheless, sales should not spend more time on data maintenance than on selling itself. If you want to optimise sales, it is therefore essential to take a closer look at the existing processes and ask yourself:
Do these recurring tasks necessarily have to be carried out by my employees?
The answer is no. Because if you want to optimise sales, automation can be the solution. How exactly? We'll show you in this blog post with concrete examples that should give you an idea of the potential you might currently be missing and how much more time your team could spend on sales instead of administration if the underlying processes and tasks were automated.
Optimise sales now: book a free consultation
Sales automation is nothing more than the mechanisation of boring, everyday tasks. It is the next step after digitalisation, because sales processes are integrated by means of software. For example, you use different applications every day for the tasks mentioned above: E-mails (e.g. in Outlook or GMail), a CRM system and possibly a database. No doubt your accounting software also shares some of the same data with the CRM. But instead of entering the same information in all tools or searching for information for a long time, these data flows can run completely automatically.
This allows sales staff to concentrate on other important tasks and goals related to sales. The examples below illustrate this. Automation is so well suited to sales because processes are often linear and recurring:
Reduce errors through automatic synchronisation between tools
Improve productivity with reminders
Shorten customer response times (e.g. with chatbots)
Increase the speed of sales
But how can you automate recurring sales tasks to optimise sales? Automating sales processes is not a new concept. Companies like Oracle have been helping businesses streamline sales processes for decades. However, their solutions tend to be geared towards large companies and are not always accessible to the millions of companies that are very successful but do not operate on that scale.
Fortunately, there are options available to businesses today that are powerful, affordable and not nearly as technically challenging as the solutions offered by established industry players. These options are based on cloud automation, which connects different cloud software via programming interfaces, so-called APIs . Thus, we are able to exchange data across different applications and run defined sales processes automatically.
Appropriate tools, such as Zapier or Make , provide us with a platform that connects a wide variety of applications into a workflow. For example, CRM (Pipedrive, Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.), emails (Outlook, G-Mail, etc.), accounting (lexoffice, bexio, sevDesk, Fastbill, Easybill, etc.), newsletter marketing (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, sendinblue, etc.) or your website (WordPress, Webflow) including forms (Typeform, Jotform, etc.) can be connected. In total, we are able to connect more than 3,000 cloud applications and thus get more out of your sales.
Curious? Start now free of charge with Make
Let's illustrate the principle explained above with concrete examples. The processes mentioned here are only examples and can of course not be transferred one-to-one to every company. Nevertheless, this food for thought can help to give you ideas for your own company.
The majority of information that is inserted into a CRM system is basically copy and paste input. For example, information from social media is added to get the most comprehensive profile of your customers: City and state, previous businesses or even common connections. How can automation optimise sales? By replacing exactly such data entries with an automatic data query.
Information, for example from Linkedin, is automatically added to the CRM for the corresponding contact. Without any manual copying and pasting. This way, your leads are maintained and you save valuable time that you can use to further improve your sales process.
Arrange a free consultation now
Contracts, offers, marketing materials, presentations, invoices, brochures: all documents that can be sent to your customers in the course of a sales process and are usually compiled individually. These documents are necessary, but shouldn't your team focus on the relationship with customers instead of creating documents?
This is exactly where sales automation comes in and can create exactly such documents automatically. For example, an invoice or a contract template can be generated from the information in the CRM or the database. Product catalogues can also be automatically generated based on a template that represents the current stock.
If the sales process is not yet complete, timing is enormously important. That is why quick responses to enquiries are the first step for successful lead generation. Chatbots are now a tried and tested tool for this. Contrary to the assumption that they are impersonal and far too general, they can be a great help to sort enquiries in the first step. This way, initial information can be provided automatically, complaints or questions can be dealt with or contact with your team can be established.
But let's face it: most of the communication with your customers is most likely done via email. Fortunately, there are also numerous possibilities for automation that optimise your sales. For example, automatic emails can be sent to the leads at defined times - depending on their current status in your CRM system. Has a lead not contacted you for a while? Reminder emails can remind them of the offer in a polite but unobtrusive way.
Information from your customers that is necessary to submit an individual offer can also be automatically queried and processed. For example, customers can use a web form to answer questions or provide important documents, which are then qualified and made available to your sales team. Or they are processed directly for the preparation of the offer.
Arrange a free consultation now
It should never happen, but has certainly happened before: A call or appointment has been forgotten. As more and more meetings and appointments are made, the likelihood of forgetting them increases. But in sales, this can be crucial. Presentations, sales calls, follow-ups or team meetings can quickly fill up the calendar. This is where (of course) automation helps: no matter which calendar or channel is used to enter appointments, the synchronisation of tools or automatic reminders can create structure and organisation.
It's done, a prospect became a lead became a:r buyer:in. But the sales funnel should not end after the sale or project has been completed. Through structured follow-up, not only can quality management benefit, but a long-term relationship with customers can also be built up. Again, automatically sent emails can help and optimise your sales. Because depending on how long ago the last contact was, your customers are in a different stage. After a few weeks, a first email can ask about satisfaction. Is everything correct, are there any deficiencies or complications?
After a few more weeks or months, the request for a review on the common portals can help that on the one hand your reputation benefits but also reminds again of you and your company. After a few more months, you can ask again about satisfaction and possible interest in further interviews.
We love automation. But we also know about its limits. For one thing, successful automation builds on good, stable processes that have to be defined beforehand and, if necessary, standardised. On the other hand, there are tasks in sales that simply require people and their attention. That's why we have a few rules that we would like to pass on to you:
Do not exaggerate: Automations can be individualised, but only to a certain degree. Human interaction is still the most personal.
Testen, Testen, Testen: Genauso wie es niemand mag, eine E-Mail mit “Hallo {{Vorname}}” oder dem falschen Namen zu erhalten, mag es niemand eine generische, automatische E-Mail zu erhalten, die überhaupt nicht auf die eigene Anfrage passt. Probiere also aus, was am Besten für dich passt.
Appreciation for people: Significant steps like negotiations or problem solving require human interaction and are a great way to build a relationship. Your sales people are not just a cost factor, they are also a great added value.
A good rule of thumb is to start with something easy; if it works, you can take the next step. In this way, automation can free up a lot of time and resources for human interaction, relationships and value creation. Because optimising and automating sales does not mean making people redundant, but empowering them.
If you are curious and would like to find out whether your processes and tools are also suitable for sales automation, please contact us. We are happy to support you in the analysis and subsequent automation of business processes, explain possibilities and individually address the company processes.
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
