A Business Owner’s Guide to Sales Automation Tools
Business automation helped 63% of businesses navigate the pandemic. They didn’t have to worry about how to manage manual business tasks during lockdowns. They could quickly adjust and move on.
Sales automation tools enable your sales team to spend less time on mundane administrative tasks and focus on the actions that close sales.
Sales reps spend most of their time on email, prospecting, and outreach. They don’t spend enough time on sales calls to close sales.
A nice side effect of automation tools is that employees are happier and more productive. Business owners benefit because it’s suddenly easier to scale up and compete against big companies.
Which sales automation tools should you get for your business? Read this guide to learn which sales automation tools are worth a look and how to find the best one for your business.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
B2B sales teams use LinkedIn to connect with decision-makers and business managers. LinkedIn allows salespeople to develop relationships with these people without gatekeepers.
Prospecting on LinkedIn is challenging because there are so many people on the platform. Sales Navigator is a sales prospecting tool that lets you search for leads according to job title, industry, location, and keywords.
The platform integrates with some CRM systems and you can automatically receive lead recommendations.
2. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a lead generation tool that gathers intelligence about your website’s visitors. You don’t get an individual’s name, but you do know what company they work for.
Leadfeeder gathers this data based on a visitor’s IP address. It’s powerful enough to identify remote workers as well.
The insights you get from this sales automation tool are incredible. You know what information companies are looking for.
Your sales team can follow up with an email to someone at that company. That immediate connection speeds up the sales cycle and closes deals faster.
3. Growbots
Growbots is a true sales automation tool. It prospects and conducts initial outreach automatically.
You start off by creating your target market. Select the locations, job titles, and companies. Pick the leads that seem like a good fit.
Set up an automated email campaign with follow-ups. You can include LinkedIn messages and calls in these campaigns.
You can also test different emails to optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Personalization is an important part of outreach, particularly at the beginning. Growbots lets you personalize emails with customizable fields in the templates.
Sales reps spend a lot less time prospecting and they spend more time on warm leads.
4. Keap
Keap is a CRM, sales, and marketing automation tool for small businesses. You might be familiar with its former name, Infusionsoft.
This is a great solution for ecommerce businesses. You can drive traffic to your website and let Keap do the rest. Here is why Keap is worth a look. It also helps you get paid faster, so you can effectively manage your cash flow.
5. Reply
Automating your inbound and outbound sales is tricky. You have so many channels to reach out to customers, it’s hard to track and manage, even with the best CRM.
Reply is a compliment to your existing CRM and sales tools. It enables sales reps to reach out to prospects automatically over LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email, email, and text.
The messages are customizable, so they reflect your brand’s personality.
6. Pipedrive
If you’re a small and growing business, you need a CRM tool to automate outreach and manage your pipeline. Pipedrive does just that.
Pipedrive is a simple and robust CRM with a clean user interface. You can manage leads, activities, and estimate sales based on your close rate.
You can track deals in various stages so sales teams can focus on the leads in the latter stages of the sales cycle while keeping the pipeline full.
How to Select the Best Sales Automation Tools
Look at your business needs and goals. You want to align your investment with your goals.
Ask your sales team where they spend the most time and where they can improve the sales process. You’ll find that sales teams struggle with managing tasks and lead generation.
How does the automation tool integrate with your existing systems? If you’re already using a CRM, you need to make sure that it integrates easily with the platform.
It should integrate with your email platform because that’s how most reps prospect clients. If you can save templates, that’s even better.
One feature that a sales automation tool should have is the ability to autofill proposals and contracts. Sales teams can spend an hour or more getting the paperwork ready to send to customers.
There should be plenty of reporting features. The more data you have, the easier it is to spot failures in the sales cycle and fix them.
Lead scoring features tell your sales reps which leads are most likely to close. The reps can focus on those leads and convert them, rather than spending too much time on leads that aren’t ready to buy.
Keep the cost of the sales automation tools in mind. While you want something that fits in your budget, you have to understand that there’s a return on investment.
Calculate the time savings and improved close rates as you work the cost of sales automation tools into your budget.
The Best Sales Automation Tools for Your Business
Sales automation tools are the secret to competing with larger companies. Your sales team is more productive and happier because of them.
They can close more sales, do less administrative work, and earn more commissions thanks to sales automation. The best sales automation tools are powerful partners in your business.
If you enjoyed learning about sales automation, you’ll enjoy the other business and technical articles on this site. Check them out today!