When researching CRM platforms, you will come across two solutions: traditional CRM tools and decentralized blockchain-based platforms. Most businesses prefer the former because they are well integrated with other business applications. However, centralized ownership increases security risks and can lead to a loss of customer data.
But traditional CRM tools are cumbersome and often too complex to use – emailing invoices or managing sales efforts becomes a competitive game of “find and replace” instead of providing real-time insights into customer interactions and opportunities.
As Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications continue to grow in popularity, a new breed of marketing automation tools has emerged that complement and enhance the CRM system. Marketing automation software is a function of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that encompasses e-commerce, offers an interface to manage prospects and customers, and helps with overall online marketing.
Where Automation Comes In
Sales development is an integral part of a modern sales process. However, sales development can be hampered by its current iteration: Many B2B businesses focus purely on the number of outbound, cold calls, and inbound leads coming into the funnel.
While those are important metrics to ensure pipeline management and to hit your number each quarter, they don’t reveal many things that would elevate your sellers and truly empower them to spend time engaging with potential buyers while they are in the decision-making stages ─ the most critical time in the buyer cycle.
Every sales team, large or small, has issues with sales and marketing operations regarding automation. No matter how it’s executed, there’s a lack of efficiencies in sales operations that restricts the ability of companies to scale. Salespeople often spend too much time on repetitive tasks and less time communicating with prospects.
Sales automation is sales efficiency — if flying a plane was similar to selling. Sales tools are the pilot’s flight suits, tray tables, and air vents as they try to maximize every second to get their plane—AKA deal—to its landing point—AKA closed deal.
Sales automation is a set of specialized applications that work together to improve how sales teams and leaders interact with potential clients. These applications help streamline the sale process, effectively reduce and remove sales barriers, and support an organization in turning leads into orders efficiently and seamlessly.
Eliminating the Noise and Focusing on What Matters
Automation has the potential to increase seller efficiency and improve sales productivity, but despite its success in marketing, automation has yet to be fully embraced by most sales organizations. Why? It’s partly due to limitations in automation solutions, but it’s also because many sales leaders don’t yet understand how automation can translate into quantified business outcomes.
Gain a competitive advantage by optimizing your support and success processes. You know that it’s imperative to keep your customers happy. To prevent costly churn, you must ensure your customers get the valuable information and resources they need to succeed.
But providing customer support manually is expensive and inefficient. Moreover, when agents respond to customer calls, chats or emails, there’s no way for you to know if the response was helpful or if there was a meaningful resolution.
The actual value of automation is that it increases efficiency, which saves time and money. This leads to higher performance and happier people, directly improving the bottom line.
Automation is more critical in the modern sales environment than ever. With a global economy that continues to grow to new heights, companies are now operating in an increasingly complex environment. Unfortunately, this complexity has made creating and maintaining a data-driven sales organization extremely difficult.