Most businesses have the same overarching mission: to drive sales and grow their company. Yet, at the same time, they’re being challenged to generate and convert leads in today’s hyper-competitive market without sacrificing the quality of their sales process or incurring significant costs as a result of inefficiencies. That’s where sales automation enters the equation. Automation helps cut down the time and energy sales teams dedicate to repetitive tasks, such as contract renewals, lead scoring, and meeting scheduling, so they can focus on building, maintaining, and growing their customer relationships.
The proof is in the pudding: According to McKinsey, companies that have embraced sales automation report higher rates of customer satisfaction, operational efficiency improvements of 10% to 15%, and a higher likelihood of sales uplift in the future. This article explains how sales automation works, the many ways in which it delivers value for sales organizations, and where businesses can focus their energies to reap the greatest return on their automation investments.
What Is Sales Automation?
Sales automation refers to the use of technology, including AI, to free sales professionals from rote, manual tasks. Less time spent on functions like lead qualification and data entry means more time for closing deals.
Manual tasks—things like contract renewals and commissions management—are important elements of smooth and successful sales operations, but they’re labor-intensive. Sales teams frequently spend a disproportionate amount of time performing these duties at the expense of doing what they do best: selling. Sales automation software offers a remedy by handling repetitive sales tasks, including data entry, email templating, customer pipeline management, and sales forecasting—or at least reducing the extent of the manual labor required to complete them.
By automating repetitive processes, companies can empower their sales teams to focus on developing and executing effective sales strategies that help them close more deals and hit their targets. Indeed, businesses seem to be onboard with the promise of a software-based approach to managing sales, with the global sales force automation market expected to reach $21 billion by 2032. That said, automation tools are meant to be used to help—not replace—sales representatives; no software is a substitute for the human connections that underpin healthy customer relationships. Instead, businesses should consider how automation tools can make life easier for their sales teams so they can, in turn, make life easier for their customers and prospects.
Many companies integrate sales automation tools with their broader customer relationship management (CRM) software. This combination benefits sales teams by ensuring that their decisions are based on complete, up-to-date customer data. Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is making sales automation software even more powerful by enhancing the way sales professionals score leads, personalize their communications, conduct data analyses, and inform decision-making. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of AI report, more than 40% of sales professionals already use AI at work, and nearly one-quarter use the technology to personalize their outreach efforts.
Key Takeaways
- Sales automation software is used to handle and streamline repetitive tasks so sales teams can spend more time selling and generating revenue.
- Automation delivers many benefits to modern sales organizations, from reducing human error to improving lead scoring.
- Though powerful, automation software should complement the work of salespeople, whose interpersonal skills and expertise are crucial to closing deals and nurturing customer relationships.
Why Should You Automate Your Sales Processes?
Automation helps sales teams become more efficient and productive, which, in turn, puts them in a better position to generate and convert leads. Time is money, as the saying goes. Given more bandwidth to focus on customers, salespeople can improve their level of service and efforts to build loyalty, both of which are instrumental in creating long-term customer value. Below, we dive deeper into the benefits of sales automation and how it ultimately elevates performance and curbs costs.
Automation Helps Prevent Manual Errors
Sales representatives can make mistakes as they juggle multiple clients who are at different stages of their purchasing journeys. Errors, such as misspelling a customer’s name in an email or forgetting to follow up with them after a request for more information, can compromise a relationship and—in the worst case—delay or kill a sale altogether. Automation software eliminates many of these errors by automatically recording customer details in the company’s CRM system, scheduling calls, sending out follow-up emails to prospects after a specified time period, and managing important invoicing processes, among other tasks.
Automation Helps Qualify and Prioritize Leads
To boost conversion rates and avoid wasting time on irrelevant prospects, businesses must be able to identify and prioritize the leads that are most likely to convert to paying customers. Sales teams can achieve this by using automation software to score leads based on specific criteria, such as customer behavior and demographics, thereby ensuring that salespeople focus only on ideal customer profiles, instead of squandering their time on low-interest prospects. Many businesses have even begun leaning on automation to generate leads directly, such as through online chatbots powered by AI that engage with customers as they move through the purchasing funnel.
Automation Helps Maintain a Consistent Customer Experience
The customer experience covers every interaction a customer has with a business—from their first website visit to follow-up calls with product experts and sales support representatives. To convert prospects into long-term customers, companies must make things easy at every turn, which means being able to deliver fast and comprehensive responses to customer questions. Automated bots, acting as virtual sales agents, can deliver seamless customer experiences online and via mobile apps through AI-powered chats. In addition to boosting customer satisfaction scores, using automation in this way allows sales teams to improve their efficiency and throughput, which translates into time spent developing additional leads.
Automation Helps Detect Trends and Identify Issues
Automation is well suited to rapid data analysis, especially in cases where tackling large and dispersed datasets would be impossible for humans to monitor. For example, sales teams can use automation tools to create 360-degree customer profiles that merge a customer’s buying behavior, preferred communication channels, and browsing history into a single dashboard view. By tracking customers at this granular level, sales teams can identify those most likely to churn and target them with offers and incentives to keep them engaged. Organizations can also use automation to track and optimize customer pipelines. Continuous data analyses reveal when pipeline activity deviates from a sales team’s projected key performance indicators (KPIs), in which case automated triggers can recommend ways for sales representatives to address issues and keep precarious opportunities in play.
Automation Helps Sales Teams Focus on Revenue Generation
As mentioned, salespeople spend hours each day on repetitive tasks, including performing data entry and drafting and customizing follow-up emails, as well as administrative tasks, such as contract renewals and invoicing. By automating these processes, businesses can free up their sales teams to spend more time closing deals and generating sales revenue. With more bandwidth to engage with prospects and customers directly, salespeople can play to their strengths, despite being facilitated by software behind the scenes.
Sales Tasks That Can Be Automated
To make the most of sales automation software, businesses first need to identify which functions to automate and how these enhancements can make their sales teams more productive and profitable. Here are nine sales tasks that are commonly streamlined or handled entirely by automation software to free sales representatives to focus on what they do best—building genuine human connections that turn prospects into customers and lead to measurable revenue growth for their business.
Meeting Scheduling
Scheduling sales meetings is rarely as straightforward as it sounds. Representatives may spend hours setting and rescheduling meeting times with prospective customers, and even more time when they have to manage multiple stakeholders in different time zones. Sales automation software cures many of these headaches by automatically generating meeting links for invitees, sending reminders ahead of calls, and adapting call times to different time zones to avoid confusion. Just as important, these tools allow salespeople to eliminate common administrative frustrations that make prospects feel they’re wasting their time, such as manually copying contact information between systems or repeatedly sending follow-up emails to confirm meeting details. This, in turn, establishes representatives as serious and professional partners who value their customers’ time.
Contract Renewals
Contract renewals are a keen area of interest for sales organizations, especially those at the growing number of service-based companies and IT providers that offer solutions on a subscription basis. To that end, many sales teams use automated software to set reminders for contract expiration dates, create renewal templates, and send automated emails to their customers ahead of renewal deadlines. Besides simplifying and standardizing the contract renewal process for customers, these software tools enable sales representatives to track their installed base and renewal pipelines so they can maximize upsell opportunities.
Commissions Management
Automation software can quickly and accurately inform sales leaders which commissions are owed to which individuals and teams in their organization, ensuring timely payments that keep employees happy and motivated. Automated commission tracking lets sales leaders set aside any commissions that need to be deferred until teams hit a specific target or that must be paid out in accordance with a predetermined payment schedule. Automation software also helps improve transparency and compliance, providing companies with a complete and auditable audit trail of all their sales commission payments.
Sales Forecasting
Sales teams regularly monitor their performance to see how they’re tracking against monthly sales goals. To support their sales organizations, many businesses set up monthly sales dashboards as part of their automation software so everyone involved in the sales process—from individual sales reps and managers to the entire marketing department—can monitor their performance. This visibility gives teams peace of mind when they know that they’re on course to hit their targets and motivates them to step up their efforts when they’re lagging. To ensure accurate sales forecasts, companies should verify that key business software, such as their CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, feed data into the dashboards to populate them with the real-time information employees need to track their progress against sales KPIs.
Email Templating
Personalized communications, including emails, help sales teams engage with customers and inspire conversions. However, it’s neither sustainable nor productive to write unique emails and follow-up messages for every prospect in the pipeline at every stage of the purchasing journey. By using automated email templates, sales representatives can standardize most of the text in their emails and add personalized touches so that their customers feel seen, perhaps an opening sentence that mentions a recent milestone. In addition to saving time, automated templates allow sales representatives to strike a better balance between personalization and productivity in their email outreach.
Proposal and Document Generation
Creating proposals is a lengthy process that requires sales professionals to scour their emails, notes, and data records and copy-paste the relevant information into a proposal document. Customers also often require salespeople to address specific questions and terms in their proposals to see that their needs have been considered. Today’s sales automation software accelerates document creation by means ofdrag-and-drop functionality that simplifies the process significantly. Other recent advances in automation software include natural language processing, which allows sales representatives to find the information they need quickly, using AI-powered searches of many files and data points.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring involves assigning a numerical score to sales leads based on how likely the prospective customers are to buy; this lets salespeople prioritize which leads they choose to engage with. Using automation software, sales teams can easily score, qualify, and rank their leads following a consistent set of criteria, which, in turn, informs them where to invest their valuable time and energy. Lead-scoring criteria might include information about a prospect, such as their job title or company size, or details about past engagements. For instance, a prospect who recently visited a company’s website or proactively reached out to a sales manager via LinkedIn would be ranked as a highly qualified lead.
Pipeline Management
Sales professionals speak to dozens of prospects and customers each week. This makes it difficult to keep track of all the moving pieces in their sales pipeline if they rely on handwritten notes and spreadsheets. Sales automation software, when integrated with a CRM system, always arms sales representatives with a clear and up-to-date view of their pipeline so they know the status of every customer relationship and can make informed decisions about whom to contact next. Automated pipeline management systems also send salespeople proactive reminders when a prospect or customer is due for a follow-up. With greater control and visibility into their pipelines, sales teams can manage leads more efficiently and better position themselves to develop accurate revenue forecasts.
Intelligent Recommendations
The ability to leverage data on customer buying patterns empowers sales teams to increase the average size and frequency of their deals. Sales automation software analyzes a customer’s previous engagements and purchases, compares these to activity from similar customers, and then uses this insight to recommend other products or services of interest, making it more likely that the customer will make an additional purchase. The software can also identify the best moments in the sales journey to present prospects with additional offers. Even the best product recommendations can fall flat if a customer isn’t in the right headspace to buy, or if they have to wait until the next financial quarter to unlock the necessary funding.
Are There Any Sales Tasks You Should Avoid Automating?
As we’ve established, a well-devised automation strategy creates a more focused, productive, and profitable sales organization. However, there’s an important distinction to bear in mind: Although automation software can deliver tremendous efficiency gains, it simply can’t replace the relationship-building ability that sets great sales representatives apart. Therefore, the best approach is to automate basic tasks, such as lead generation, data entry, and email communications, while empowering sales representatives to focus on building lasting and profitable customer relationships.
Specific tasks to avoid automating include sales conversations, product and service demos, and complex customer support needs. Sales conversations aim to build customer trust and address customer concerns directly. Automation tools and chatbots may grow more advanced every day, but no technology can re-create the interpersonal skills of a seasoned sales professional. Nor can automation software pick up on the nuanced cues a customer might express during a sales conversation, such as a raised eyebrow or exasperated sigh, and adjust its approach to put the customer at ease.
Similarly, sales teams might be tempted to automate product demos—which can be repetitive and time-consuming exercises—but, in doing so, they could miss an important opportunity to tout the benefits of their products and services. For their part, customers appreciate having an expert on hand to walk them through new solutions, troubleshoot issues, and have their questions answered on the spot. The same logic applies to customer support. While prospects are generally happy to solve simple problems with help from a company’s FAQs page or an automated chatbot, they prefer to speak to a real person when their needs are more complex. For example, a business implementing its first ERP system may require specialized expertise from its vendor’s sales team throughout the purchasing process.
Drive Revenue With Sales Automation and NetSuite
Businesses are under increasing pressure to make their sales workflows more cost and time efficient while equipping their sales teams with the tools they need to generate and convert more leads. NetSuite CRM sales force automation (SFA) was designed with these goals in mind to help businesses implement sales processes that are more unified, standardized, and data-driven, addressing such tasks as commission payments, forecasting, and order management.
NetSuite’s SFA tool features a central customer database that improves collaboration across sales functions by breaking down silos among sales representatives, accounting, credit, purchasing, and other back-office teams. The integrated platform eliminates data discrepancies when sales reps are making important sales decisions. Real-time dashboards, meanwhile, provide sales teams with unmatched visibility into every customer relationship, including purchasing behavior and support cases, as well as back-office data related to contracts, inventory, and order history. The SFA solution also supports more predictable sales through real-time forecasting, thanks to a system of checks and balances that ensures that forecasts are rooted in accurate data and proven historical outcomes.
Time is a precious commodity for sales professionals. The more hours they can dedicate to selling and nurturing their customer relationships, the more leads they can convert and the closer they come to hitting their sales targets. Automation software is critical in this regard, empowering sales representatives to spend their time focused on revenue-driving activities, such as nurturing new leads, sales opportunities, and customer relationships, without stretching themselves too thin or sacrificing quality in the name of efficiency.
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Sales Automation FAQs
Are there any consequences if a business chooses not to automate?
Automation is a valuable tool for modern sales organizations. In the face of rising stakeholder expectations and heightened market competition, the more time sales teams can spend generating leads and selling, the more successful they’ll be in hitting their targets and driving growth for their business. By contrast, sales teams that forgo automation will spend most of their time on repetitive tasks that don’t directly contribute to revenue-generation, thus compromising their ability to meet their company’s growth objectives.
What is the difference between sales automation and marketing automation?
Marketing automation helps businesses attract prospects and pull them into the sales funnel. It’s used to craft, segment, and personalize promotional activities, from email campaigns to personalized social media posts. Sales automation comes next, helping businesses to move prospects through the sales funnel from the moment they express interest in a product or service to the moment they make a purchase.
How can automation help increase sales?
Automation can be used to handle or streamline repetitive sales tasks, giving sales representatives more time to focus on revenue-generating activities, such as qualifying leads, engaging with customers, and closing deals. In addition to these productivity gains, automation reduces the likelihood of human errors occurring in a company’s sales workflows, which, in turn, leads to better customer relationships and promotes a higher sales success rate.
