“Digital transformation” has been a hot topic (or buzzword, depending on who you’re talking to) for more than a decade. And it’s no wonder: business execs are apt to start frothing at the mouth as they describe how they’ve optimized their operations, increased productivity, and improved their customer experience while cutting costs.
While it’s true that the roots of successful digital transformations run deeper than technology overhauls and that simply slapping an “AI” sticker on the box doesn’t make it so, automation is one of the key pillars of digital transformation.
Automating key business processes is crucial for businesses striving to improve resource efficiency, scale effectively, retain talented employees, and live up to the soaring customer expectations created by innovative, tech-driven startups that aren’t constrained by Jurassic legacy systems.
The sales process is no exception.
Keep reading as we dive into what sales automation software is, discuss use cases and top SaaS companies in this space, and examine some of the benefits of sales automation software.
What Is Sales Automation Software?
Sales are a lot of work:
- Hours upon hours of identifying and prioritizing leads, building and managing relationships with individual customers, understanding their needs, and identifying the best products and specifications for them.
- Following up, time after time.
- Endless questions from prospects leading to back-and-forth with the product or engineering team. (And let’s not forget selling products that don’t actually exist yet, leaving engineers in a flat spin to try to make them a reality).
- Keeping track of vast product catalogs, not to mention each product’s countless possible configurations.
- Remembering which stage of the purchase journey each customer is at and deciding which action to take next.
- Keeping accurate records at each stage of the process and ensuring that orders are fulfilled according to specifications.
It’s a lot to keep a handle on, especially as your customer list and product catalog grows.
When you manage all of this manually, there’s a lot of room for human error. The wrong product being recommended, a customer being misinformed about product specifications, a customization request not getting noted down, a comma entered in the wrong place, inconsistent sales record-keeping, forgetting to follow up on a customer inquiry — these errors can lead to unhappy customers and lost sales.
Sales automation software basically takes over the manual, repetitive parts of the sales process. You create rules that are automatically followed when the conditions you’ve created are met. This standardizes and streamlines your sales process and gets rid of most of the admin associated with sales, which means your reps can focus on selling instead of mindless busywork.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
Automation Use Cases and the Best Sales Automation Software to Use
Sales automation software can be used to automate a wide variety of tasks at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
Some solutions offer automation capabilities that span multiple use cases, while others target a specific need and have to be used in conjunction with other automation solutions.
While most of these solutions were created with integrations in mind, be sure to check whether your automation software choices will play well together if you choose to mix and match.
Automated Needs Assessments
Identifying unmet needs enables you to start a conversation with prospects and match your products to their problems and identify demand for new products.
Software like Qualtrics makes it easy to automate collecting and analyzing this data to better understand how to create an exceptional customer experience.
Marketing Automation
In today’s omnichannel world, marketing means creating and publishing content across multiple platforms, including content for your website, email sequences, SMS marketing, social media posts, paid marketing, and more — not to mention managing factors like scheduling and ad spend.
Even if you have a large marketing team, chances are your marketing efforts would be far more efficient and effective with the help of marketing automation software like Hubspot, SAP Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, Marketo, or CoSchedule.
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) software captures all your customer interactions and consolidates all the data you have on prospective customers in one place. This makes it easy to track and analyze the behavior of leads, current clients, and past customers and respond accordingly to nurture relationships and increase conversions.
Popular CRM software like Salesforce allows you to microsegment customers and set up personalized customer journeys in response to actions taken by leads and existing customers alike.
Solutions like Leadsquared can be used to automatically assign sales leads to reps using factors like geographic location, stage of the purchase funnel, which product the prospect showed interest in, specific actions — like clicking a link in an email or spending several minutes on the checkout page — or other criteria.
Automated Reporting
Sales automation software creates a digital record of all sales activities, generating data that can be used to produce detailed reports in mere moments, saving your sales team countless hours of reconciling spreadsheets and drafting reports. Solutions that offer advanced reporting and analytics make it easy to display this data visually and extract actionable insights.
Configuration, Pricing, and Quoting
Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software automates complex product configuration, pricing calculation, and sales document creation.
CPQ is especially useful in the context of engineer-to-order products, which tend to involve an endless back and forth between sales reps, customers, and engineering. “Are these options compatible?” “Is there a more cost-effective alternative?” “How will changing this feature affect the price?” “Is the customer OK to wait for a few days while we check?” It goes on and on.
Advanced CPQ solutions like KBMax offer visual product configurators that can be used to easily configure complex products on any device. With an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface, customers can add, remove, upgrade, or resize parts, and change colors, all by simply clicking, dragging, and dropping sections. They can view their configured product in 3D, rotate it 360°, zoom in and out to inspect their product, or even use AR or VR to interact with products before making a purchase.
The Benefits of Marketing and Sales Automation Software
Sales and marketing go hand-in-hand, and using automation to integrate these two vital business operations can do wonders for your bottom line.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of marketing and sales automation software:
- Automating your sales and marketing saves a lot of time, energy, and money by taking redundant tasks out of the equation, making your business more resource-efficient, and freeing up employees to do more important work — which in turn leads to greater job satisfaction and better employee morale.
- Automation software helps sales reps to digest and keep up to date with your product catalog as it evolves and can be useful in onboarding and training new reps to become product experts.
- If you have a huge or complicated product catalog, sales automation software can help your reps ensure customers are matched with the products and bundles that best meet their needs.
- Marketing automation makes it possible to create consistency across your marketing collateral and to reuse content across different platforms, which makes it easier to scale your marketing capabilities.
- Sales automation removes human error from your sales process. This means no more incorrectly documented order specifications and invoicing inaccuracies, fewer delays, reduced returns and refunds, and more satisfied customers.
- With marketing automation software, you can effortlessly sync your marketing campaigns across numerous channels, for instance when launching a new product or offer.
- Automation breaks down silos, fosters collaboration, and strengthens the marketing-sales relationship. Your marketing team can reach more leads for your sales team to nurture, and provide more detailed information–prospects’ behavior is tracked from the very first interaction.
- With algorithms that make intelligent suggestions, sales automation software like KBMax can grow your profit margin by recommending upgrades and add-ons.
- Over time, these algorithms learn which methods lead to the most conversions and continuously optimize your sales techniques.
- Sales automation software that contains smart pricing rules updates prices in real-time. So-called dynamic pricing incrementally adjusts prices in response to changing market conditions (such as compeitors’ prices, demand, inventory level, and order history.) Reps and customers are always shown the most accurate up-to-the-minute prices, contributing to a better customer experience with no nasty surprises.
- Automation reduces time spent on admin like sales document generation, resulting in shorter sales cycles and freeing up your agents’ time for more profitable tasks like building important relationships.
- Sales and marketing automation software generate data, which allows businesses to be strategic about pricing, marketing, discounts to boost slow-moving products, new product development, and more, giving them a considerable leg-up on the competition.
- Top CPQ automation solutions can lighten your engineering load by automating CAD and design on engineer-to-order products. As soon as product specifications have been finalized, the CPQ solution generates technical drawings and renderings, as well as bills of materials, cut lists, CNC plans, and other documentation required for manufacturing. Your engineers have more time available for the exciting work of R&D and innovation.
