Speed is one of the main requirements for the sales department. The team is expected to close deals quickly and make a profit. Employees strive to do more with less time.
To relieve employees of the burden, companies are implementing technologies that help the sales team increase the percentage of successful deals and accelerate revenue generation. This is achieved by automating simple but time-consuming processes that can be bottlenecks in the sales cycle.
However, automating one or a pair of random processes may be inefficient. In this case, individual processes in sales remain inconsistent, which makes the team work uncoordinated. Sales staff have to switch between different programs and applications, wasting time.
Therefore, when implementing a new technology, it is important to take into account the operation of existing processes and their impact on the business. The sales process is too important to suffer from inefficient workflows, information loss, managerial forgetfulness or mistakes.
Comprehensive automation of sales stages will allow the sales department and other employees to work as a team, quickly access relevant, important data, and improve the quality and speed of customer service.
7 Sales Processes You Should Automate
By automating the key stages of the sales process, the manager has a clear view of the customer journey and can adjust it to improve the user experience. In addition, leaders can increase the productivity, efficiency, and accuracy of their team by automating repetitive tasks and processes. They will also be able to assess scalability and eliminate the risk of workflows not keeping up.
- Calculation of commercial applications.
The commercial offer is very important. However, this process is often poorly established in companies. Often, employees manually make the calculation and then collect the data into corporate document templates. Often these corporate templates may be outdated or not in line with the brand style. This increases the risk of error, negatively affects the quality of service and slows down the sales process. With automated proposal generation, you can expect to increase efficiency and accelerate sales, which will benefit your business and your customers.
If you decide to automate the process of creating an offer, your business will receive three main advantages:
- Saving time for managers to perform routine tasks in favor of sales.
- Error protection.
- Improved pricing and aesthetically designed commercial offer.
- Sales forecasting.
An important part of the sales process is understanding the future opportunities that the business needs to exploit. Identifying high-value leads that can move from «prospect» to «act» can help sales teams make more informed decisions about where to put resources and energy. Accurate forecasting requires up-to-date and high-quality data that sales departments do not always have.
By choosing to automate sales forecasting, your business can look forward to:
- Improving the quality of sales forecasts that will help make important decisions about the future sales strategy.
- A clear view of the results of the sales department.
- Teamwork and facilitating collaboration between different teams.
- Negotiation of contracts.
No matter how smoothly the sales process goes, it can get stuck at the contract negotiation stage. Often, discussing the terms of a contract with a client takes a lot of time, and without the use of competent digital solutions, it becomes completely confusing. Searching for up-to-date versions of documents among many copies can be confusing, the process can be lengthy and require constant monitoring of employees, wasting time. Automating this process can be beneficial to both your customers and your employees.
Key benefits of contract negotiation automation:
- Convenient storage of contracts. They are easy to find and work with.
- Improving the quality of customer service
- Accelerated conclusion of the contract and, accordingly, the acceleration of profit.
4. Signing of documents
Fast signing of documents helps move sales and other business processes of the company. But the classic “signing with a ballpoint pen” is a slow and laborious process. In addition, it is almost impossible to track the status of documents after they have been sent for signature. Signing documents should not slow down the work of the company. An electronic signature can help speed up your company’s workflow process.
Electronic signatures provide your business with benefits such as:
- Speed up the signing process
- Acceleration of the document approval process
- Authentication and protection of signed documents
- Billing
Billing errors can create a lot of problems for customers and businesses. Errors in prices, payment terms, details and other things can negatively affect the quality of customer service. Inaccurate billing can not only damage a company’s reputation, but also make it impossible to track subsequent payments, which will negatively affect the bottom line, creating additional work for employees. That’s why billing automation can be a profitable solution for your business.
With automation, you can expect:
- Increasing the transparency of the sales process;
- Accuracy of billing and invoices;
- Speeding up the payment process
- Customer Onboarding.
Getting started with a client is an exciting time when it’s important to make a good first impression. During the onboarding process, important documents accumulate that need to be reviewed and signed by both parties. But the client can be confused if documents, regulations, work reports, etc. are provided to him by different people in different ways and at different times. When automating customer onboarding, the transparency of this process increases.
The company can receive the following benefits:
- Providing high quality customer service
- Improving the quality of information and documents for client onboarding
- Better communication between in-house departments
- Extension of contracts.
Extension of the contract is an important point. It provides an opportunity to re-start or continue cooperation with the client, and sometimes expand it. Delays in the renewal process increase the risk of customer churn and spoil the user experience, which hurts sales. A non-automated process can lead to human errors, which will further delay it or even lead to the fact that managers forget to take care of renewing the contract.
Automating the renewal process can benefit both the company as a whole and the sales team in particular:
- A clear understanding of the client’s place in the sales cycle, increasing repeat sales.
- More time to interact with customers and improve their customer experience
- Increasing customer loyalty
Automate the sales process to increase the percentage of successful transactions and increase the company’s revenue.
Today, the client considers not only the quality of services or products, but also the simplicity, convenience and speed of the sales process itself. Mistakes and delays resulting from a poorly streamlined process can alienate even the most loyal customers. A well-thought-out and automated sales process will increase the percentage of successful transactions, improving the user experience of customers, making them come back again and again.