4 Ways to ace your sales game with automation

Here are some ways to increase sales productivity and scale your business with sales and marketing automation tools.

If you’re an entrepreneur, then you’re in sales. There is no way around that. If you’re not out there selling, then you are focused on building relationships (which again, is selling).

If you’re not spending most of your time doing either of these things, you’re on the fast track to creating a product or service that will never see the light of day. Business is not easy. To make sure you stay on the high road to reaching your entrepreneurial goals, you have to be strategic to make the most effective use of your time selling.

1. Spice up your sales funnel

A sales funnel is a customer’s journey from the first impression to the desired action. At each step of the customer journey, you’re ensuring the lead ends up at the next step. Through this process, you’re essentially creating awareness and trust, all in the span of one guided path of your choosing.

A customer journey might look like this:

Awareness ➔ Interest ➔ Value ➔ Action ➔ Trust ➔ Sale

OR

Awareness ➔ Free value in exchange for information ➔ Value ➔ Action ➔ Upsell

 

Feeding your funnel with some value at the top to capture prospects is a great way of collecting information such as email, phone number, etc. It gives you a starting point to nurture leads. This could be done by including a free e-book, webinar, or consult. On top of this, the information collected through this lead-generation process can be tied into analytics. It can give you a snapshot of how different demographics interact with your brand, so you can get hyper-specific with your targeting.

Important note: You can easily set up A/B testing in your sales funnel (two pages per step and splitting traffic equally) to see which web page produces better results and improves the automated sales engine over time.

2. Emails as easy as 1, 2, and automate!

Gone are the days of copy-pasting and editing one email per prospect. It’s time-consuming, inefficient, and an overall drag. Today, you can email thousands of prospects with just a single email, and you can add a touch of personalization to it! Not only that, but every new prospect can be added to the email marketing campaign in a set-and-forget fashion. You never have to spend another minute ensuring everyone gets added to the list.

With an email automation system, you can write a string of emails that will go out at specific time intervals from:

  1. Lead capture
  2. Warming up the lead, to
  3. Pushing for a sale or consultation.

For better results, you can hook this into the backend of your sales funnel and have unique campaigns based on where the customer is in their journey.

If the lead disengages with your content after getting free value, they’ve had a chance to read the information, interact with your automated emails, and continue along on their journey. Email automation systems also have great analytics. You can keep track of what language your customers are more likely to interact with and tweak it over time to ensure you have the best click-through rate (CTR).

3. Get chatty with chatbots

In the world of social media, people who interact with your brand are very likely to message your page asking for information or help. It’s fairly time-consuming to have a conversation with each customer. Sometimes they have to wait extended periods of time for a reply, especially when messaging outside your business hours.

Chatbots can be used in a variety of ways. The two most common ways are:

  • Quiz-style bots (h2) are great for attaching to an ad or a specific help button. These allow you to create questions and answers so that your prospects can sort themselves into a specific demographic or interest and are automatically pointed to the relevant page.
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots (h2) are a little smarter and look for certain words, phrases, or intentions in your prospect’s message to automatically reply with a relevant response. The information your bot uses would be given by the business to make it work efficiently and be indistinguishable from humans.

Chatbots are great for capturing information from visitors and increasing your brand’s response time on social media too.

4. Cozy up with a CRM

Customer Relationship Managers (CRMs) (h2) are powerful and help your business in dealing with customers effectively. Some of their primary benefits include tracking, analytics, and reliable information storage.

CRMs track where your customers are in their journey and show you an opportunity to make a sale.

For example, Bob is a lead. The CRM will display his information and that he has asked one of your sales representatives for a demo. This information stored within the CRM ensures that Bob doesn’t need to talk to the same sales rep throughout his journey because the system has all the information and additional sales.

Other analytics software such as Google won’t show you where the prospect is within their journey on your funnel. CRMs are a robust tool to enable your team to work productively towards the same goal, keeping maximum visibility through simple collaboration.

Final Notes:

When it comes to sales and customer service, automation can offer you an edge over your competition. To do this though, you require a strategy. Most entrepreneurs and business owners hesitate at the price point, but automating your sales will save you time. You can use that time to focus on nailing your sales strategy.

Remember: Selling should be your top priority, so if you can set up automation to make your sales engine work for you, your business has a chance to scale much, much faster.

You’ll definitely notice a difference when you look up at your team. Rather than finding them squinting at their screens and monotonously typing away, they’ll be closing a lead that came through your sales funnel.

If you enjoyed reading this article, and you want to steal all my formulas and lead gen systems, then CLICK HERE – 8figures.growthlymarketing.com

 

About Oscar Chavez

I build strategic partnerships with Australia’s largest Banks & Enterprises | Revenue Enablement | Complex IT & Cyber Security Sales | M&A | Strategic Partnerships | Banking & Enterprise.