Sales automation software could double your productivity

Sales automation software can make the lives of your sales people easier, removing repetitive and tedious tasks from their working day and letting them get back on the phone. The impact this can have cannot be understated - in fact, HubSpot has found that most sales teams are multi-tasking far too much.

Skipping the warm up

Athletes generally don’t like warming up. It’s tedious, repetitive and not what they’re passionate about; they want to score screamers, break records, be adored. However, we know it has to be done to prevent injury. 

Artists don’t enjoy washing their brushes after painting a masterpiece either, but it means that when their next bout of inspiration fires, they can start creating straight away.

Similarly, recent research from HubSpot shows that your sales force is likely spending more time warming up/washing their paintbrushes than actually working their magic on leads.

“A recent study showed that reps spend less than a third of their time actually selling - compared to a full 50% spent between administrative CRM tasks and searching for content.”

Let’s just take a minute to think about that. Some sales teams can spend less than one third of their working hours actually selling. Just imagine what they could achieve if they were working to their full potential!

Unlike athletes though, it is actually possible for salespeople to leave much of the essential preparation tasks to someone else – or something else, more specifically. Introducing, drumroll please, sales automation software.

What a sales team wants

When it comes to lead generation, your sales team doesn’t want to be doing endless admin, inputting data into an excel sheet and guessing which leads are qualified. Anything that will take time away from a salesforce is, in essence, a waste of their time and your money. Their primary role should be to guide a lead towards a purchasing decision.

The best analogy I’ve heard for the tempestuous relationship between sales and marketing teams without sales automation is a baton exchange in a relay. Someone drops a baton, another runner fumbles the swap, and chaos ensues.

Instead of this, consider another analogy. Imagine a team of rowers. When you have marketing and sales teams working together in unison, and everyone is rowing in the same direction consistently. Progress will be a lot faster and a lot smoother.

So, how do we help these teams to work together seamlessly without adding to their workload? Essentially, marketing and sales need to agree on what is it that makes a good lead.

Implementing sales automation software

The best way to implement new sales automation processes is to identify the pain (whether it’s a big one, or an accumulation of small ones) which is getting in the way of business growth. Once you’ve found these road blocks, it’s time to find the marketing and sales automation solution which can address the issue.

For instance, one of our clients reported an issue with some leads having incorrect phone numbers. Their sales team was wasting time trying to call low quality leads who were based outside of the UK, hadn’t updated their Facebook account details in the last five years, or had simply entered 0123 456 789 as their contact number.

Our solution was to introduce a HLR check to automatically check whether contact numbers were live, and a HubSpot lead scoring system which would only share leads with the sales team once they were of a certain quality.

A duff phone number means a low HubSpot score, which sends leads into an automated nurturing workflow, with the aim of extracting their genuine contact details. Until the lead’s HubSpot score improves, they won’t reach the sales team, keeping timewasters to a minimum.

Implementing sales automation software

To start with, you have to bear in mind there might be some initial foundation laying. However, it will all be worth it when your marketing and sales automation is up and running.

How you go about integrating sales automation into your existing setup is also important. To follow on with my beautiful array of analogies so far, it’s important to make sure your front door is easily accessible from your back door. In other words, make sure there is a clear and well-defined route between marketing and sales departments. Lead hand-off needs to be effortless if you want to quash tensions and boost productivity.

HubSpot sales automation

Six & Flow has plenty of experience using HubSpot’s sales automation software, both for ourselves and for clients across various industries. We’ll make sure the implementation process is as quick and painless as possible, and we can even educate your sales team on how to use the platform. Whether you’re looking for a sales enablement workshop, or a long-term agency partner, give us a call and try us on for size.