What is Sales Automation? A complete guide for streamlining your sales using Zoho

When it comes to sales, every step in the process is important. For example, a delay in following up with a lead can cost you a sale. Similarly, forgetting to share important data with a customer can lead to an unconverted potential.

Thankfully, problems like these can be avoided by implementing sales automation within your workflows. Sales automation also eliminates the manual effort involved in collecting, organizing, and analyzing your leads, letting you act faster and offering you an advantage over businesses that don't have a comprehensive sales automation solution.

What is sales automation?  

Sales automation is the process of automating or streamlining your sales tasks and processes with the help of software or artificial intelligence (AI). Since there are many mundane and repetitive tasks involved in the sales process, like reporting, analyzing, and organizing data, sales automation can help you automate these tasks, so you can focus more on the conversion front.

Here's how sales automation can positively impact your business:

• Increases sales productivity by eliminating the manual effort involved in reporting data
• Helps you identify more quality leads
• Helps reduce response time with your leads
• Ensures data consistency across platforms
• Automates scheduling of sales calls, meetings, and appointments
• Expedites lead nurturing by sending personalized automated emails
• Automates answering basic questions and filtering leads
• Improves data accuracy and ensures a better conversion rate

Sales automation can transform the way you run your business, offering you increased efficiency and helping you convert leads at a much higher rate.

But sales automation isn't about replacing sales reps or making major tweaks to your sales process—you'll never be able to automate every aspect of your sales process. However, sales automation can help you handle the basic and repetitive tasks that can make the job easier for your sales reps and increase your sales productivity and efficiency.

Implementing sales automation within your organization requires the involvement of multiple sales automation tools, which will ensure that the automation is consistently happening on the backend, letting you focus on the more important task at hand—converting your leads.

Here are some sales automation tools that can help you automate your sales processes efficiently.

CRM   

A CRM is the central tool for your sales automation cycle, as it contains all your customer data related to sales and marketing. Every bit of information you generate about your leads should automatically become a part of your CRM, and this platform can help you organize your data more efficiently.

This can offer you a much quicker way to track down important information about your leads. In addition, it can also keep data about every deal consistently updated, letting everyone in your organization stay in the know on all business information.

Recommended Zoho app: Zoho CRM

From managing your sales information efficiently to helping you identify important information about your leads, Zoho CRM can be a comprehensive sales automation tool. It allows you to streamline business strategies, automate workflows, run campaigns across multiple platforms, and more.

Business intelligence  

While a CRM platform can help you organize and stay updated on your customer/lead data, business intelligence platforms can help you derive valuable insights from that collected data. This sales automation software lets you organize data to your requirements and analyze it to help you understand your lead/customer base better.

This information can help you when you're about to have a conversation with your leads or when you want to create personalized lead nurturing activities for them.

Recommended Zoho app: Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics can enhance sales automation, as it offers direct connection with multiple applications, like social media platforms, CRM, and more. This makes it easier for you to create insightful and interactive views of your data and generate sales reports in different formats, offering you deeper insights that can help you understand the behavior of your leads or customers.

Email marketing  

Despite the emergence of new marketing strategies, emails are still one of the most efficient means of lead nurturing. This is because emails offer you the ability to connect with your target audience in a personalized way, and let you do it at a very affordable cost.

Email marketing tools can offer you the edge when it comes to sales automation, as you're able to automate templated emails for your leads based on their stage in your lead cycle, offering you a quick head start that won't be there if you have to manually draft emails every time.

Recommended Zoho app: Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is a powerful marketing tool with features that can make email marketing simple for your business. With Zoho Campaigns, you can import subscribers from other applications, test your campaigns, and schedule nurturing emails quickly, helping you build a powerful email marketing strategy that can enhance your sales process.

Appointment scheduling  

The closest you can get to converting a lead is when you're able to connect with them over a call and discuss the details of the deal directly. This gives you an even more personalized approach and lets you build connections with your leads. However, it's important to schedule those calls or appointments as soon as possible.

To do this, you'll need the help of appointment scheduling applications. This sales automation software can help you schedule calls with your customers/leads quickly, and help you reschedule your appointments without a hassle, making it easier for you to get in touch with your potentials.

Recommended Zoho app: Zoho Bookings

Scheduling a sales call with your prospects can happen in a matter of seconds with Zoho Bookings, making things easier for both you and them. Zoho Bookings makes it simple, letting your potentials decide the time and day of the meetings, with the additional advantage of quickly rescheduling meetings and notifying both parties whenever necessary.

Team communication  

Communication within the organization, when it comes to sales, is as important as all the lead generation and nurturing activities that happen with your leads/customers. Converting a lead might require help from multiple teams within your organization, like support and marketing, and it's important to ensure a seamless and quick way to communicate with your colleagues.

Team communication applications can offer you the ability to do this by providing relevant details about each member in your organization and the means to chat with or call them quickly. This way, any time a lead comes to you for clarification on a detail that only another team can answer, you can instantly get back to them by checking with the relevant team at your organization.

Recommended Zoho app: Zoho Cliq

Zoho Cliq can help your sales team get in touch with anyone in the organization instantly, letting you answer questions or redirect leads to different teams without any hassle. With features like video conferencing, customizable messaging channels, and availability settings, it lets you work as a team, providing better chances for converting leads.

Proposals or contracts  

In sales, quickly completing the next step in the process can provide you with the edge you need to close deals. Sending out proposals or contracts to your leads is generally the final step in converting them, and having it sent to them as soon as possible can avoid confusion and help you seal the deal.

Contract management apps help you enhance your sales automation process, as it expedites the process of creating and sending proposals and contracts to your potentials.

Recommended Zoho app: Zoho Contracts

With contract management solution apps like Zoho Contracts, the need to manually create a proposal or a quote from scratch can be eliminated, as it provides you with numerous predefined contract templates and a built-in editor, to make the required changes at any time. Additionally, it lets you provide controlled access to counterparty contacts via password-protected links, ensuring a safer and quicker way to seal the deal.

While these are some of the many apps that can help you automate different parts of your sales process, it's important that all these apps work cohesively—and to ensure that happens, you'll need an integration platform.

How an integration platform can enhance your sales automation  

Integration platforms are used to build integrations between different applications, helping you create automated workflows. They let you bring all your sales automation tools together and make them work as a single unit, eliminating data silos and seamlessly transferring data across different apps.

This is helpful for sales automation, as it streamlines all the tasks that happen separately within each sales automation tool. For example, by integrating your CRM platform with your business intelligence platform, all the information updated in your CRM will automatically be reflected in your BI apps instantly. This ensures data consistency in all your applications, and it'll happen without any kind of delay or manual effort.

Similarly, by integrating sales automation tools like Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns, every time a lead registers for your business, they'll automatically be added to your mailing lists, eliminating the manual effort involved in adding leads to different mailing lists separately.

The right integration platform for your needs  

Zoho Flow is a hybrid integration platform that lets you integrate both cloud and on-premises applications with each other, helping you automate and streamline your sales automation workflows. It provides integrations for more than 900 applications along with 1,200+ prebuilt connectors that make integrating easy.

Zoho Flow could be the right fit for your sales automation needs, as it allows you to build custom integrations based on your requirements, including adding custom logic to your workflows. And with the additional advantage of being a part of the Zoho ecosystem, Flow can help you seamlessly connect both Zoho and third-party applications together, making automating your sales tasks much simpler.

Sign up with Zoho Flow and start integrating today!