Introduction
Typically the sales teams spend much time gathering prospect information, launching emails, following up on hot leads, and entering the data into the CRM. These tasks can take valuable time that the sales teams could use to build better prospects. Therefore, companies should invest in the latest technologies such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to streamline the sales processes. It will also empower their sales teams to focus on essential activities that help improve sales results. The main objective is to save time without compromising the quality and the necessary human-to-human relationship in prospecting. Sales automation improves efficiency and accuracy to help sales teams become more productive and contribute to the business.
This article will discuss how automation can help salespeople contribute more value to the business and ten use cases beneficial for the sales teams. Additionally, it also presents a few examples of pre-built sales bots to try now.
The changing function of Sales
The changing function of sales
The ultra-connected and informed customers have pushed the sales function to transform, and now many customers and salespeople prefer remote engagement instead of face-to-face interactions.
Today’s customers don’t depend on salespeople to finalize their buying decisions, and businesses have been reinventing themselves to adapt to the new consumption habits. They must embrace digital self-service and engage customers from a distance. They can rely on the RPA technology to deploy conversational bots to offer in-product assistance and help sales managers derive helpful information. They will use this information to target qualified prospects and create a relevant experience. It will result in a higher conversion rate and a strong and lasting business relationship.
The salespeople must make a shift from “selling” to becoming a “customer advisor.” They should embrace automation to simplify their work and serve their customers better. Using bots will make the entire sales process efficient and deliver a personalized sales experience and focus more on lead generation and selling.
RPA in sales: advantages
When businesses invest in sales automation, their sales teams can reap many benefits, such as increased productivity and performance and consistent sales reporting. Apart from these apparent benefits, automation can help sales teams:
Focus on critical tasks
Automation helps your team stay focused on sales; instead of spending their time on entering data or compiling reports, they will spend more time talking with customers, selling the products, or contributing value to the business. Another benefit of using bots is that your sales team doesn’t miss out on opportunities or leads due to disorganization.
Tag leads and target the valuable ones first
When your sales team is working on their leads, they need to determine who to contact first. If they rely on an alphabetical list for the calling prospects, they may miss the opportunity to engage the interested prospects. They can use bots to create a lead scoring system where leads are ranked based on the likelihood of conversion, so the sales team can target those leads that are ready to convert into paying customers at the right moment.
Analyze sales calls
Your sales team contacts many prospects through calls every day, and these calls present them with an opportunity to engage potential customers and answer their queries. Companies can deploy bots to analyze the pitches and make recommendations.
Of course, the automation algorithms can master mechanical (repetitive and predictable) tasks, and building relationships with prospects does not seem like a process ripe for automation.
Find the right content
Sales reps often share content with prospects that shows how their company is meeting customers’ needs better than other competitors. However, finding the right content is not a simple process, and the sales teams may spend valuable time finding relevant articles, case studies, or checklists to send.
A bot can make this process efficient by recommending what content or message to deliver to your prospects through basic web parsing. Bots are basic automation assistants; they may not perform deep analysis and recommend content, but they can help salespeople execute the search with the help of pre-set parameters such as keywords.
Another use case can be improving your content model based on bot-driven conversations. Instead of researching your audience’s questions online, a bot will document all questions asked during the chat conversations. Salespeople can forward these questions to the content team to develop answers in articles or FAQs and share them to educate potential customers.
Ten use cases: bots for sales
Use case #1: Record creation
Bots can easily extract customer information from emails, from business cards uploaded in the system, and from the populated contact forms and create new records automatically. A bot will collect the data from a document or form and add it into the mapped fields in the selected CRM based on already defined conditions. It will save sales reps from having to enter all new information manually.
The bots can automatically tag and segment the new records for record-keeping and easy reporting after generating the new records.
Another valuable case for automation is Contact list enrichment. It will take the sales team several hours to search various channels to gather prospects’ contact information. This process can be automated– a bot will automatically login to several accounts (such as LinkedIn) using the employee’s credentials, set filters based on the conditions set by the employee, and gather data from the profiles found. It will then populate the data into a separate spreadsheet and email this file to the stakeholders.
Use case #2: Schedule calls and meetings
Your sales team spends a reasonable amount of time setting up virtual meetings or calls with prospects. It takes time to set the right time for every call, and they may lose a few prospects to competitors, especially if they are efficient in making appointments.
Here automation can assist in scheduling meetings; the bot will analyze your calendar, find available slots and present these open dates and times you will be available to have a meeting (while considering the timezones for the parties). You can send the available dates and times to your prospects, and they can choose the best time for them accordingly.
Using automation also helps in preventing frequent email exchanges and helps salespeople plan meetings effectively.
Use case #3: Gather more information about prospects
Sales representatives spend many hours gathering data about prospects. Automation can speed up this process; bots will quickly extract and compile all essential information so they can view all information about their leads at a glance instead of doing in-depth research.
They will have all the information they need to know, such as how their prospects have interacted with their website and any details they provide themselves (by filling the contact form). They will also have the prospects’ business or company details to deliver a personalized sales pitch.
Use case #4: Speed up the email process
Writing emails meticulously for every prospect is a tedious task, and it makes perfect sense to use automation to speed up this process. Automating this process will help sales reps create emails faster and spend more time interacting with prospects.
Here one of the biggest challenges is to create personalized emails to spark your target audience’s interest in your product or service. Therefore, you would want to avoid sending a general email. Here, automation can help you send the right email at a specific time:
- Welcoming/ onboarding emails.
- Follow-up emails.
- Thank you emails.
- Reminder emails.
- Invitation emails.
Creating these emails will take a considerable amount of time, and automation seems more beneficial and promising here.
Additionally, bots will keep your recipient list in order and keep track of where your prospects are in the sales funnel. You can also configure email campaigns based on the prospects’ behaviors and various triggers, such as from opportunity creation to a closed sale .
Use case #5: Improve CRM
Bots can enter data in CRM, schedule calls, create reminders, and generate sales invoices. Sales reps can use bots to gather and organize relevant details about the customers easily accessible through the sales dashboard. With all prospects’ data stored in a place, the sales team doesn’t have to find a customer’s email or past purchases.
Another benefit of automating CRM is leads scoring; bots can identify and score hot leads in real-time based on predefined parameters such as engagement, demographics, page tracking. Sales teams can use this information to target leads who are likely to convert to customers. Then sales reps can use bots to identify qualified leads for follow-ups or move an opportunity forward in the sales pipeline.
Some examples of conversion activities to assess and prioritize leads are:
- Page(s) visits.
- Videos watched.
- Time spent on pages.
- Contact forms.
- Download guide or checklists.
These activities can be used to assess prospects and determine if they are more likely to become a customer.
Use case #6: Team communications
One issue many businesses face is poor communication between different teams/departments. One misunderstanding can lead to performing the same tasks multiple times and delay the completion of other tasks. Some teams may not follow up on a task thinking that another group is doing it.
One of the many benefits of automation is the streamlining of communication between teams. They can set up automated workflows to act on specific triggers. A bot will automatically notify relevant team members whenever someone closes a deal. The bot can be integrated with internal communication channels such as Slack, where each successful deal’s important details will automatically appear.
Use case #7: Sales Invoicing
Invoicing is an essential task as a business is materializing a financial transaction linked to a sale. The sales reps can rely on bots to take care of the contract management process and gather customer data quickly.
Here, a bot will extract customer details from a CRM, spreadsheet, or database record. It will fill the field in the sales invoice, save it to an assigned cloud storage service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and automatically route it to the relevant sales rep. The bot can also take care of the next steps of the workflow, such as reminders, notifications, and invoice archiving.
Use case #8: Customer Onboarding
It is the responsibility of the sales team to offer their customer support during the onboarding process. Maybe your product or service meets demand, and a client has purchased it. However, a customer also expects guidance early in their journey, and the proper onboarding process will help him find relevance to your product/service.
The goal is to make the customer experience as good as your product/service and eliminate any friction between the initial customer point of contact and the post-purchase. Automating the customer onboarding process will result in higher customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Here, a bot will gather all customer-related documents, extract relevant details, enter them into relevant management software, schedule the next communication steps, and notify relevant people upon onboarding completion via email or messenger.
Use case #9: Analysis and Reporting
All of your sales team’s efforts will be wasted if they have no way of measuring their performance in real-time. They can leverage automation to provide daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports showing a comprehensive overview of every member’s selling efforts.
A bot can provide detailed information about your team’s activities with automated email reports, sales team rankings, transaction reports, and revenue reports.
Use case #10: Sales ROI calculation
CRM systems contain helpful information on activities of the sales team, such as the number of hot leads and deals closed. But this data may not accurately reflect the direct and indirect costs related to the sales reps. To calculate Sales ROI, the sales manager needs to gather data from accounting, sales, and management systems and manually consolidate it into a single spreadsheet.
A bot can speed up this process by collecting data from various systems, calculating the value of deals closed, and consolidate all expenses and profits in a separate spreadsheet. It will calculate the Sales ROI based on this data and send the final report to the sales manager for his review.
Conclusion
Enterprises in any industry and niche can reap benefits from these ten useful bots explained in this article. Bots will save your sales team’s time by taking over the tedious activities; they also streamline your sales processes and keep the database updated in real-time. The sales team will have more time interacting and engaging prospects to convert them into customers.
If you have already become a big fan of automation, now is the time to leverage it. But selecting an automation software can be tricky as many applications are released every day, and only a few of these can make your life easier. Here, we recommend ElectroNeek, a robust, affordable, and easy-to-use RPA platform that will take care of all the time-consuming tasks of your sales team. The ElectroNeek software also offers numerous integrations already set up, so you can be confident that it will seamlessly work with your CRM and other applications. If you want to know more about our products and services, please don’t hesitate to contact our team.
