Year: 2022

As we are in 2023, businesses are more focused on getting their sales processes more streamlined. Thanks to the sales automation software, the sales representatives have more time available to them for selling. 

Stats reveal that there are sales teams who spend almost 50% more time on sales tasks than can be done with automation. No wonder the concept of Sales automation has already taken the business landscape by storm, taking over many manual people-driven tasks. 

Some studies found that more than 80% of businesses are eager to integrate sales automation solutions to streamline the most critical processes. They understand how it is going to change the trajectory of their business for the better. 

If you are here looking for ways to automate your sales process, this article is surely going to help you out. There’s no doubt about the impact of sales automation. It will help with closing more deals and free up lots of time from routine tasks. You will have more time to spend on high-value activities that grow your revenue. 

Why will it be easy? It is because of all the powerful tools that the automation software provides to make the process easy as pie. You will get powerful tools like automated follow-up emails, automated email campaigns, automatic segmenting, and leads assigning.

Streamlining Workflows with Sales Automation

CRM or customer relationship management and sales automation software streamline sales organizations by automating workflows and sales tasks. 

Sales automation smoothes out the sales process across partners, sales teams, distribution channels, and customers. For the salespeople, it really helps them focus more on deal-closing with high-value prospects. As the sales reps get more time on their hand, they can nurture relationships with their existing customers. 

The fundamentals of sales automation involves automating the mundane administrative tasks in the sales process. It updates customer contact information and manages the calendars, besides processing opportunities. It saves a lot of time that’s otherwise wasted in manual entry of data into the system.

As sales automation solutions come with pre-built applications, sales professionals get to manage the sales pipeline instantaneously. Also, the sales reps can follow up with their leads simultaneously instead of waiting for the leads to contact them first. The automation helps with recording the touchpoints with their customers and closing the sales way faster.

So, how does the sales automation process helps the sales team to work at their best? 

Clearly, it involves seven prominent steps. These steps weave together to help your sales team:

Automated Guidance

With this type of automation, as you can see in ConvergeHub, your sales team will receive notes and reminders from the sales automation software. it helps them focus on tasks and don’t miss important prospects. After all, missing prospect equals to losing a considerable amount of high paying customers. 

• Lead Management AutomationBut how do we convert prospects into customers? For that, the software offers lead management automation. With ConvergeHub, you can apply rules and filters to build lots of curated lists of leads. 

  Based on the characteristics and behavior of leads, the sales automation system can segregate and score the leads. Post that, you can get a segregated list of the leads, so that you can pitch accordingly. 

  So, what are these KPIs that help the software to do lead management with ease? There is real-time data on click-through rates, email-opening rates, social searches, and more.. 

• Communication Automation“Communication is key” has become a phrase that we use more often nowadays, and it’s a fact. However, communication has to be effective for the success or failure of the intention. The same runs true in sales as well. Communication automation is a very important aspect. From automated voicemails to sales email automation, personal email sequences, and appointment scheduling tools, everything is communication. 
  • Email automation features makes updating email contact list automated. This way, you no longer need to manually remove the subscribers and take care of the spam content.
  • Another feature, the personalized sales email sequencing, helps customers to keep receiving information in pieces about services or products on sale.
  • The built-in Calendar at ConvergeHub enables the sales reps to work with the customers conveniently. Also, it helps them to schedule meetings quickly, based on both parties availability. This sales automation software does all of the tracking, freeing everyone from taking any manual notes. Via the software, salespeople, as well as customers, get reminders. Stats say that more than 80% of the brands rely on consistent customer interaction for sustainable profits.
• Automated Data EntryThough data entry is one of the important aspects of any sales process, it is a tedious task. Also, it’s time-consuming. But it is unavoidable, and thanks to the sales automation process, the task has become easy. 

  ConvergeHub reduces half of the tasks by auto-filling the sales data like product details, prices, and contact details for the leads and customers, the sales automation software streamlines contact management. So, valuable hours of the sales executives go into other high-value tasks, like closing a sale.

• Automated Research ProcessHowever, ConvergeHub doesn’t stop with automated data entry; it goes beyond that. Its automated research capacity is huge compared to the human ability of the sales team. It can shake down social media and the web to find key information about customers and prospects.

  It uses the information to create and update the lead profiles, score the leads for their win probability, and identify the hot sales opportunities. This helps the salespeople incredibly because it saves them time and ensures up-to-date information about their contracts and prospects.

  The whole sales team can access the information easily as the plethora of knowledge is stored in the central repository. 

• Automated Activity LoggingFrom in-person visits, phone calls, sales emails, to sending out personalized sales messages, ConvergeHub logs in everything at real-time. So, other representatives know how far one rep has gotten with a prospective customer. 

  Automated activity logging is a savior for the agent. It saves a lot of time and helps the agents to focus more on lead generation and closing deals. 

• Automatic Record GenerationAutomatic record generation is possible when you have a sales automation system. Your sales team receives lots of newsletters with opt-in confirmations and scans various business cards. But when the automatic records and profile saving are possible, why input the data manually?

  As record creation can be automated, sales professionals are relieved from wasting time on the major task. Thanks to the software, it pushes them forward to focus on closing various deals as the hot leads approach them. 

• Stages of Automating Sales Process
  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Decision
  • Action
• AwarenessYour potential customer can learn about your businesses from many different sources, whether it is social media, Google search or may be simply by word of mouth.  Which means, when they search out to you , they already know  about your brand . Since they are already aware  of you,  you get a  good chance to make a limited time sales offer to grab their attention.  
• InterestSo, you have tapped on their interest and once this  stage is  done,  you can easily go to the next step and take the lead through the first level of interaction with the sales personnel of your company. Like, they get a call for a price quote or receive the email newsletter.

  That’s when you have gained their interest, but it’s time to maintain it. This is when you sprinkle the lead with information about why your products or services stand out for them. For that part, eBooks, whitepapers, and blog content can be of great help. 

  When they subscribe to your newsletter, you can send automated emails to welcome them. Also, you can send automated reminders to your sales executives to call both new and existing leads when they click via the emails. The stage is about building interest and automating the process to save a good amount of time.

  The stage is about building interest and automating the process to save a good amount of time. 

• DecisionNow is the third step of decision-making. You want to save your time here and let the automation process keep in touch with the leads. Let the automation system share key information to them about your products and send crucial information like pricing contracts, documentation of the product, invoice details, and so on.

  Sales automation tools can automate the whole process of storing information, updating them, and sharing the documents with the leads without the intervention of sales reps. 

• ActionOf course, the final step is payment from the customers and the confirmation process. Here, you have to send the product to new customers, get them started with the services of your company, and more. 

  You definitely know that these processes take up lots of time when done manually and keep you away from skipping more hot leads. But when sales automation software is here, why do it manually instead of saving a lot of person-hours? Your software can inform every detail that takes place in this step. You will be able to see who has made a payment, received the products or services, or is yet to make payment and receive products. 

The Final Takeaway

Sales automation mostly uses cloud-based sales software to streamline sales processes. Also, enables the salespeople to automate repeating sales tasks. If you are looking for the right CRM and sales automation software, ConvergeHub comes with an array of features to simplify your jobs. It not only streamlines your sales process, but also helps you scale up your sales process to a new level. 

Sales Development Representatives are the team members of the sales team of any company. Their focus is on reaching out to leads and deciding if these leads are qualified or not.

Previously, only some tech companies had a niche role. However, the sales development representative is now an important position in companies across various industrial sectors. If you are planning to be an SDR (sales development representative), this post will help you to decide whether it is the right post for you. When you have a better idea, you will be able to stand out from the rat race in the job world. Also, sales managers must know what they should look for in candidates when hiring sales development representatives.

Sales Development Representatives

Primarily, SDR is a role inside the sales team. SDRs solely focus on outbound prospects with the goal of generating a sales pipeline for the sales team. As the role is considered an entry-level position without years of experience, it can be seen as a good way to start your journey in sales.

In order to achieve this goal, SDRs typically research potential prospects before connecting with them. A particular objective of this role is passing sales leads that match the proper criteria and taking them forward to the account manager or account executive.

This is called outbound sales. In outbound sales, SDRs identify their potential customers and connect with them. After that, they pass the customer details to the other sales team members. Inbound sales are where a prospect or lead contacts you after seeing your marketing campaigns or hearing word of mouth.

In businesses, sales development representatives are still popular as the company can have groups within the sales team. SDRs are one particular team with a specialization in a particular process. These segmented efforts of the sales teams help the business to divide and conquer many strategies, and challenges and streamline the processes systematically.

Work and Responsibilities Of Sales Development Representatives

The role and meaning of sales development representatives differ. In some companies, the SDRs may deal with inbound prospects who show interest. Sometimes, they may have to search for their outbound leads. Depending on the organization, the sales development representatives may have to do both.

Lead Generation And Lead Qualification

At the beginning, SDRs find out the potential leads. Therefore, potential sales become qualified leads. If you are an SDR, you have to reach out to the prospects and connect with them through inbound and outbound channels.

However, before you contact your prospects, you must conduct some preliminary research. You will find that prospects who have similarities with your existing customers are going to be a good fit.

Things an SDR needs to consider:

• Does your prospect match the buyer’s persona of the company?
• Prospects’ top priorities
• What do the prospects want to achieve?
• Prospective challenges that are pressing
• Decision-maker of the prospect’s company
• What tools do their company use currently for solving a problem? (if there are any tools).

Though we know that SDRs decide the qualified leads, BANT, or (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing), or similar criteria, helps us to determine who may buy the products or services.

Initial Outreach

When you find a quality lead, you can decide which is the best way to reach out. Depending on the leads’ availability or where they spent their time, you can reach out to them via social media, cold calls, and/or cold email.

Each of these channels has a different type of approach:

• Are you connecting to them over LinkedIn or commenting on a particular Facebook post?
• Are you going to talk to them by phone or send a voicemail?
• Will you send a video message or a plain email?

In most cases, you may want to touch multiple touchpoints through multiple channels. You have found out that it’s the best course of action.

Whatever channel you choose, the research work will help you to personalize all the messages. So, you will go beyond the given industry information and do targeted research on specific leads and their companies.

So, you are balancing effort and personalization with time management. As a self-development representative, you have to spread a large net, but don’t forget to notice the details of the leads. You must make your leads feel that they are valuable as your potential

Lead Nurturing

No matter how enthusiastic your inbound leads are, you can’t make them ready to meet after just a single call. On various occasions, the timing can be wrong even though you have a good prospect. As a result, you must nurture those new leads and further educate them on your service or product.

Of course, there is a difference in pitching. If your words appear to be too expensive to sell, the prospect is unlikely to be impressed. But if you can offer the right value and deliberately help them tackle their most pressing challenges, prospects may trust you more. It creates a genuine interest in achieving a positive outcome. Your prospects will reach out to you as they will trust you and that your product or service will serve their needs.

Moving Leads Through The Pipeline

As soon as the leads are qualified, you then pass them to the account executive. For the SDRs, this is the main object. Most organizations have a reward system for SDRs. The reward depends on metrics that reflect the number of meetings booked with sales-qualified leads.

Skills to Be a Sales Development Representative

In order to excel in a sales development representative role, a candidate needs to have the following key skills:

• An unfaltering mindset
• Excellent communication abilities
• A resilient attitude
• Boundless curiosity and creativity
• Active listening skills
• Multitasking ability
• Self-awareness and empathy

The traits of an SDR and a good salesperson are almost similar. That’s why it is a wonderful position to step forward to higher-level sales positions.

According to some, there are three key areas in which any SDR must develop in order to be successful in the role:

• When SDRs have a gritty mindset, buyers’ personal knowledge, and added sales skills, they move above the competition. Having the right mindset for the role is critical, along with having a resilient attitude to get things done. Also, having curiosity and creativity makes the outcomes better. With their impeccable sales skills, they will be capable of handling conversations and increasing the sales rate. Besides these skills, buyers’ personal knowledge means they know the customer’s problems, their pain points. It helps the SDRs articulate the prospects and how they can be of help.

Being an SDR means you have to have quality research skills. This skill will enable you to discover all the information you need. Of course, you can get help from many tools available for finding demographic details. However, if you put some extra effort into research, you will reveal the psychographics of the customers.

For a budding sales development representative, communication is the number one skill to master. It is not similar to having an email template or a good script that contains powerful words of persuasion. Here, SDRs have to listen to the prospects instead of thinking about what they are going to say to them. If you have good communication skills, you will be able to help them better.

Though SDRs look after one part of the sales process, one still has to take care of lots of tasks. And it is a time-sensitive task. But as the market takes a turn, SDRs also have to juggle research work, outreach, and follow-up. If you are not aware of the difficulty of the role, you may feel overwhelmed by it. Therefore, having time management and organization skills is vital for all SDRs. So, if you embrace your curious nature, you will stay motivated as you try to learn more about the industry, products and services, customers, and their pain points.

Qualifications To Be Hired As Sales Development Representative

The sales manager must conduct extensive research when hiring SDRs for your company. After all, it is unlikely to have lots of candidates with experience being sales development representatives. Therefore, the sales manager must focus on the transferable skills of the candidates, like:

• How much does each of these candidates interact with people, if they work in retail or other places like bartending? They don’t have to have any prior roles in the sales department to show their people skills. But people skills are one of the key qualifiers for the role of sales development representative.
• Do the resumes of the candidates show adaptability in their previous roles? It will indicate that they can look beyond the popular templates and stand out from a creative point of view.

Sales interviews require qualified candidates because sales teams are a key part of any industry. It is advisable for sales managers that they do not sugarcoat all the challenges the SDR role presents. SDR is a hard-working position. Unless candidates are prepared for the hard work, they can’t last long.

Sales interview shows how the candidates will talk with any prospect. Besides paying attention to what these candidates say, sales managers must take notes on what they are saying. Are these candidates skilled communicators? Do they listen intently? Do they ask the right questions? A candidate with good communication skills can engage easily with your potential customers.

Salespersons get regular sales opportunities. The opportunities appear from happy customers, unexpected phone calls, and unplanned meetings (sales). However, most times, sales teams are not attentive to the opportunities presented before them. The reason is they are either doing some sales process or attending some meetings.

But sales reps have to look out for various sales opportunities or seize the opportunities whenever they come to the surface. So, there must be some ways that your sales team can identify sales opportunities before the competitors. Here are six easy ways to point out the new prospects, and they work for both B2C and B2B sales:

Great Ways To Spot The New Sales Opportunities

Let’s not wait to dive into the six best ways of identifying sales opportunities for your B2B or B2C small business.

• Work With Sales-qualified Leads

  In sales, lots of sequential steps take place, leading to the ultimate event, the sales transaction. Sales-qualified leads are mostly leads that have an interest in buying the product or service from you. Mostly, these prospects can afford it at the moment and are ready to make the purchase.

  Sales-qualified leads or SQLs are mostly generated from efforts of sales prospecting like salesperson-to-salesperson communication, cold calling, or marketing sales campaigns. However, lead generation is a lengthy process and can be expensive for SQLs. The reason is that SQLs require a great deal of sales resources. So, sales experts have to ensure spending the sales resources on only sales-qualified leads with the most potential of converting to sales.

  But what are the ways? You can just ask leads a few questions regarding their budget. For example: “What’s your ideal budget for the complete purchase?” “Can you share the highest amount you have spent on a similar object”? It will not only help you to save an ample amount of time but also prevent you from following up on any unqualified leads.

  There are some other ways you can qualify your leads for sales offers, like sales forecasts. It will depend on sales history, financials, or competition analysis. Also, you can qualify for a few sales leads scrutinizing the sales cycles of other companies. Check the leads who have bought similar products from the companies, the length of the buying process, etc.

  From the buying patterns of these leads, you will understand whether they will be interested in your product or not. Sometimes, the prospects already know their limitations and share clear information with you about their problem and want them solved. Then it will depend on your solution and what you are offering for them to buy it.

• Create Buyer Personas

  Sales-qualified leads go through the filtering process, but they come out on the other side as ready to buy. However, not all of those leads come from one place. Most times, the SQLs come from all sides of the world and of different age groups and different genders. Besides that, income levels can vary due to different occupations.

  Not all of the leads have the same needs to be catered. When it comes to SQLs, you won’t be able to apply the same blanket sales tactic. Therefore, the marketer must know that not every message is for every lead. The messages have to cater to a particular category of potential customers.

  As it is not possible to connect with all the leads one-to-one, there has to be some alternative. So, the sales team and marketing team must create buyer personas. The buyer personas give a general portrait of the audience of your business. It’s almost a fictional profile.

  The function of the buyer personas is to group your audience into one bracket with similar individuals. Buyer personas create avatars for each type of strong personality that we come across. There can be a fast, active person who needs to do a quick reading before their purchase. As there are lots of personas, the buyer personas must accommodate them all.

  There’s a way to choose criteria for each avatar. During sales, you may have to organize the prospects based on buyer readiness. You can also segment the SQLs based on pain points, location, income, or occupation. When a SQL lead matches a particular buyer persona, it creates a quick sales opportunity.

• Use Customer Referrals

  Let’s be honest; sales opportunities don’t have to come out and be presented in front of you. Why not create opportunities? But how can you do it? You will need customer referrals.

  This is the time to turn your focus from sales-qualified leads; you can tap into the existing customers of your brand. Of course, you have to do the segmenting, like which customer is loyal and who buys most often from you. Also, do not forget to connect with those customers who have been with you for a long time.

  Then, you can reach out to existing customers via email or a phone call. You have to inform them that you are starting a referral program. Do ask them to refer your service, product, or brand to anyone of their knowing. When word of mouth about your company reaches people via your satisfied customers, it impacts sales positively.

  But why would your customers participate in the referrals? To make the referral program a huge success, you have to give incentives to the participating customers. Freebies or discounts are some ways to incentivize. There can be some big discounts or rewards for the most active participants in these referral programs.

  Never neglect the importance and strength of “word of mouth”. When the lead hears a recommendation from your existing customers– family members, coworkers, friends, etc.-there would be a higher chance of your offer to work.

• Establish Affiliate Programs or Third Party Referrals

  Affiliate programs or third-party referrals can drive the sales of your company higher. As you know about it, you won’t be able to wait to milk the opportunities coming your way from everywhere. So, we will suggest you build a third-party referral relationship.

  There are billions of companies striving to boost their sales besides your company. All are attracting their own leads, qualified or less qualified. What if you connect with another company or influencer’s new qualified audience?

  When you have a third-party referral program or affiliate program, you will have it. It boosts sales opportunities just like the customer referral program. Your affiliates also earn revenue from you when someone buys from the affiliate links of your services or products. In such cases, you should offer them money instead of freebies or discounts.

  In today’s time, it is one of the best ways to get the word out about a product, service, or brand name. It pays off heavily. When you leverage social media to initiate affiliate marketing, it generates optimal results. As consumers see referrals via social media, they are more likely to buy. Affiliate marketing leads to higher sales.

• Go To Events, Expos, And Conventions

  There are no better ways to get leads than going out of your office and visiting events, expos, and conventions. Of course, don’t want to visit the places randomly. You should visit the places with the right strategy. Before you get any event ticket, create a list of the potential customers that are at a convention or expo. But do make it intentional to visit such events where you will find your target audience.

  However, do not talk to potential customers forcefully. It’s best to keep your conversation friendly and casual while discussing your company and its services or products. Business cards are the best tools to hand out. You should end the conversation on a decent note before you move on to the next person.

  When you evaluate the contacts thoroughly, they can get in touch with you. Keep all the contact info in one place through some CRM software. It will help you to follow up with sales calls and close some deals.

• Use CRM Software

  Software CRM nowadays manages customer relationship management or CRM. Here, you can manage all the contacts in one place, segment them, nurture them, contact them, and send automated responses. Also, the software lets you send newsletters and SMS broadcasts to your customers.

  Sometimes, fewer sales opportunities can be an issue. But, most times, sales representatives feel overwhelmed by the amount of obtainable sales opportunities. Even though they have a good amount of opportunities, they have to find affordable yet high-potential openings.

  If you use CRM software, then sales reps can organize the sales pipeline, track real-time sales progress, and identify the key factors related to individual sales opportunities. As the lead enters the sales funnel and moves through it, all the interactions get logged into the software.

  You can review customer communications through the software and track when the lead is ready for sales. Also, the software can identify the best leads with high scores for you. It can also change the customer score automatically depending on their behavior. With CRM, you can reach out to less potent leads later on.

Conclusion

There are various ways you can improve the sales strategies after you identify the sales opportunities. Therefore, you have to identify the right sales opportunities, like qualified leads and overall leads. CRM software can help you with the myriad details of the sales process with convenience.