Managing a team requires many parts working together to run smoothly. You’re dealing with colleagues, clients, data, upper management, and software, all of which can become overwhelming.
Sales automation can alleviate many of those problems and make sure that your team is running better than it has before.
In a recent study, two-thirds of respondents claimed to experience burnout from too many administrative tasks. Much of this was from failing to implement sales automation strategies to streamline the most time-consuming sales tasks.
Good Team Management is Important
Good team management isn’t just important, it’s vital. It strengthens the team’s commitment and purpose towards your company’s common goals; it saves time and money, and leads to more sales.
Broadly speaking, team management is the successful collaboration between members of a group. It requires a team leader and their team in constant agreement towards an end.
The most important step in this direction is effective communication. This acts like the oil in an engine. Without it, your motor grinds to a halt.
Sales automation tools can solve effective team management. Especially with all that data on an expansive internet, automating time-consuming tasks is essential for that successful collaboration between team members to take place.
What is Sales Automation?
In short, sales automation is the reduction of manual tasks through software and automated processes to save time and reach more deals. Automation makes it easier for you to move leads along your sales pipeline without more effort from staff members. For a more detailed breakdown, check out this in-depth guide to sales automation.
Here’s a brief list of some of the important tasks and projects that you can automate.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the all-important first step that can greatly affect your business. Finding the perfect clients in a timely manner separates excellent businesses from the best. For example, if you want to generate leads a perfect place to start is by forms or by actively switching between sales calls. There are many tools available to help you with this step, which we will discuss below.
Lead Qualification
Lead qualification is the culmination of finding and solidifying the leads generated from the first step. Much of this is extremely time-consuming data entry, so automation tools are perfect for acquiring and sorting through this information.
Email Templates
Email templates are something we all wish we’ve had after spending hours crafting slightly similar versions of emails repeatedly. No more. Repetitive tasks like these make little sense of spending so much time over.
Data Entry and Management
Over the course of the sales cycle, you will collect a lot of information on potential and existing clients. Therefore, you should automate the management of data to organize properly. Also, it should improve your sales staff’s ability to make sales.
Meeting Scheduling
Completing tasks can benefit tremendously from automation. Especially when you need to schedule meetings. Like email templates, scheduling meetings is a tedious process you must do over and over, with only slight variations. So, automate it!
You can solve most of these steps through the combination of sales automation and team management spearheaded by an effective team leader.
Sales Automation and Team Management
Simply put, sales automation helps team management by completing all the tasks required for a team to work together as effectively as possible. That means knowing how to improve and measure a sales team’s effectiveness. This requires a sales manager that knows the ins and outs of their team as well as what will make the team run smoother in the future.
Sales Managers
While sales automation has the obvious advantage for sales reps in helping them close more deals, it has the greater yet less obvious advantage for sales managers looking to boost productivity in managing their team. After all, sales reps require effective team management to achieve their own goals.
Here’s a breakdown of the positive benefits for how sales automation can improve a manager’s life:
- Task Management: tasks and projects are the core of the manager’s work when delegating for their team. Many tools can improve this work, especially regarding project management automation for sales reps.
Team leaders require the best and most accurate information on clients as possible to lead a team of sales reps. The best managers are those that line up tasks and projects according to the team members’ skills and attributes, but they can’t do that efficiently without the proper data.
Therefore, this step helps managers achieve high-level management skills and provides the sales reps with a superb manager.
- Lead Scoring: Scoring leads is a sub-task from those mentioned above but is important to single out regarding the benefit from automation. In short, lead scoring is the ability to rate the worthiness of potential customers according to their behaviors and needs.
This step requires a lot of time and attention to gather a lead’s information. You can then rank them against other leads and assign based on sales reps’ specialties.
Much of this work falls to the team leader, which in the end usually separates the good managers from the bad.
- Effective Communication: aside from tools designed to collect data and find promising leads, there are many automation tools designed to enhance the communication between the leads, clients, sales reps, and managers. The goal in the end should be to increase productivity for long-term growth.
Communication is arguably the most important to improve team management, even though it doesn’t have a direct connection to increasing sales. To build trust and run a successful team means effectively managing communication skills.
Automating services like scheduling meetings and communicating on an all-in-one platform allows managers that extra push needed to rise above the competition and get the best deals.
Sales Reps and the Marketing Team
Team members have as much to gain from automation as team leaders.
With the rise of remote work creating a digital barrier between your communication, it’s important for sales reps to have all the support they need to spend their time making sales, rather than the busy work that automation can manage.
To do so, companies are adopting sales enablement strategies, which are methods and structures designed with the sole intention of aiding the sales reps in selling your products and services. If properly adopted, these can soar your ability to close more deals faster and convert leads through your sales funnel.
Team tasks require a centralized platform that everyone, from managers to sales reps to the marketing team, should have access to. Regarding sales enablement tools, the marketing team needs to have the best data available to create the most accurate content as possible for the sales reps to use.
Therefore, sales automation tools are extremely important for the functioning of each part of your business.
Sales Automation for Leads and Clients
After closely examining how automation tools can improve team management, it’s important to look at how you might oversee potential leads and existing clients. Sales team automation tools are the best methods to ensure a smooth collaboration.
Customer Service
If you’ve been online lately, then you’ve noticed the proliferation of chatbots popping up on websites. These are effective automation tools designed to guide the random website visitor through your site and services. It can accurately and quickly find what they’re looking for, which is a solution where everyone benefits.
Other sales automation software, like the enablement tools mentioned above, provides a direct and simplified communication channel between customers, potential and existing, and sales reps. Because your sales reps and customers interact with many parties, it’s important to have a solid service for organizing and arranging everything.
Leads
Finding and organizing leads is the most time-consuming step in the sales process because of the near infinite users online. There are advanced AI-powered software tools to go through this massive amount of data and provide the best possible leads.
Once you have these potential leads available, getting the email address of potential customers is much, much easier. Automating this step more than others is best for small businesses without enough resources to scrape the internet looking for customers.
Email Sequences
Email sequences apply automated email templates into the sales cycle. Knowing when, and at which step, to send an email to a qualified lead can vital to the success of your sales team. However, you can automate email sequences so your sales reps never forget emails that could have landed a sale.
Conclusion
Automation tools can also manage 99% of the work for email campaigns, which are brilliant strategies to employ, without using up too much of the sales team’s time and get existing clients interested in other products and services you offer.
Overall, these steps focusing on leads and clients can’t function without excellent and effective team management skills. Find out more for yourself on how you can improve revenue through sales and marketing automation.
