7 Sales Automation Techniques Nobody Teaches You in Theory

Modern SDRs, we know your pain! By analyzing the everyday tasks of our newly onboarded SDRs, we came to the conclusion that a lot of sales reps are not familiar with the potential of all the things they can automate, to make their work and life easier.  

The work of an SDR requires a lot of attention and focus on different steps of the buyer’s journey, with one main goal – to close the deal and get the revenue in. However, SDRs get so caught up in the manual work and time-consuming tasks from the beginning of the buyer’s journey, that they lose the focus and energy to perform their best when the closing part comes into play.

Not everything can be automated, that is for sure. For example, the best approach to warming up leads is to schedule a discovery call with them, and that is something you would need to do yourself. Or doing the research before you hold a demo call or an onboarding.

But what if you can find an extra pair of hands that will help you with the rest of the tasks?

This is not where we suggest getting an extra SDR in your team, or cutting off some of the work from your existing SDRs and slowing down the sales process, just to lift a bit of the weight from their shoulders.

We went through a trial and error period to test out different sales automation techniques and would like to share with you the ones that no one teaches SDRs in theory, but can be a real time and effort saver for new SDRs and sales teams.

“More than 30% of sales-related activities can be automated with sales automation techniques” – McKinsey Global Institute

Sales Automation Techniques to implement in 2022

If you ask them, most SDRs already know that they can automate their email outreach, that they can automate their CRM tasks with a blueprint, and that they most certainly can automatically send reminders for a meeting to their potentials…

What they might not know is that a lot more of the sales cycle can be automated, and they learn different sales automation techniques only after they start struggling to reach their monthly quotas.

1. Multichannel Outreach automation

Email Automation is a well-known practice for any sales team. And this is understandable because cold email outreach and mass emailing to potential customers is not something anyone would like to do by hand. 

When a new SDR is starting off in a team they are already aware that they need to use some sort of email automation software to set up a cold email campaign and start the outreach.

Next, they would need to work on their LinkedIn profile, and social selling techniques and start conversations on LinkedIn… 

Only a small percentage of SDRs (and these are usually SDRs with experience, that have already worked with sales tools) know that they can automate their LinkedIn outreach, as well, even combine it with an email campaign to show a real dedication to the potential and make a good impression. 

LinkedIn automation can really go into the smallest details. You can automate the profile visiting, post liking, and message sending – with custom parts of the content for each recipient, to really master LinkedIn prospecting. And the best thing about this is that your prospects won’t even know that you finding them on LinkedIn, researching about them, and reaching out to them were done automatically.

This might sound like the rise of the machines and you might think this can not beat human interaction. And you are right, however, you are just automating the first part of the outreach, the research, and the manual preparation of the process. The rest of the conversion and the closing is up to you to excel.

2. Campaign content creation

All SDRs are well aware that they would need to prepare content for their outreach campaigns. 

But, their outreach campaigns really need to stand out from the crowd in a full inbox of cold emails to grab the attention of a decision-maker, who they eventually need to convert to a paying customer. 

Having a great introduction sentence in your email content, showing that you’ve done your research about the potential, and what they work, their company activities etc. has shown us above average reply rates on cold outreach campaigns. 

And yes, you can automate the sentence creation for each prospect, if you have the proper data and the tools to do it. 

AI generation of Ice Breakers and custom tags can help you craft the email content for your campaigns faster, and fortunately, if done correctly, it’ll look exactly like the email you’ll manually write (which will take a ton of your time).

3. Data enrichment

Enriching your CRM data, searching emails, phone numbers, names, addresses for each account and potential is a real nightmare for an SDR.

This is why sales reps already, rely heavily on B2B data providers to complete their database of leads and potentials. 

But, having the data is not enough. You’ll need to segment it, sort it according to ICPs, and won’t even mention searching for the data you are missing to complete the profile. 

Data enrichment can be automated when you have the right tools connected to your CRM. Or, you can simply do the process vice versa, and enrich a targeted list of ICPs that you’ll specifically need for your next outreach with data enrichment tools (Sales.Rocks would be our “humble” recommendation). 

But did you know that you can also use a shortcut and enrich data when researching a company directly from the corner of your browser? 

There are data enrichment Chrome extensions that will search through a database and enrich the information you are already collecting. (Sales.Rocks, Clearbit, Hunter, to name a few).

4. Data integration with webhooks

We are getting to the point where sales automation techniques can be really advanced and help SDRs speed up their sales cycle with the help of webhooks. 

Webhooks are part of the developer’s language, however, if an SDR knows just the basics and how to use them, they can implement complete sales automation for their sales process.

Here is how: 

Imagine you have a cold email outreach tool that you use for your campaigns. And then you have another tool that you have integrated with your LinkedIn profile for your automated LinkedIn outreach. And then, you have the CRM, contact management system, prospect scoring tool, etc. 

Usually, developers are working on direct integration between tools, but more often than not, you’ll be stuck wiggling between different tools, contact lists, stats, and databases, which will create more chaos than help you out. 

There is a way to make at least some of the tools communicate with each other through the data you’ll push between them. And that is how the webhooks work. 

Using third-party software (like Zapier or Pabbly Connect) you can choose different triggers depending on the possibilities and the webhooks created by the developers of each tool. 

For example, here at Sales.Rocks we are working on creating webhooks that will send you the statistics from your cold email campaign sent out via the Sales.Rocks Platform directly into your CRM. 

This is how you can check if a prospect has opened, clicked, or replied to your last campaign and you can set up a follow-up email, or a nurturing campaign accordingly from your CRM.

5. Call logging

Most sales reps use the sales call, or cold calling to reach their potential prospects. Every detail about this call is crucial and shouldn’t be missed. But why would you collect all these details manually if there’s an excellent, automated solution?

Since 2020, SDRs started using video calls even more for their demos and discovery call, and these can also be recorded and automatically connected to your CRM to be stored for each of the potentials.

Check for this option within your CRM software. If there is not an integrated possibility, you can always check for third-party software that can be integrated into your CRM and push the data directly.

6. Proposal and contract creation automation

Customer communications are crucial to sales. If they aren’t well-managed and collected in one place, you might not be able to make sales like you want to. Doing this task manually is time-consuming and prone to errors – automate the process with a contact management system. 

The CRM is again the first go-to software for the SDRs, so this should be integrated with your contact management system. Apart from this, you can also look out for customer service solutions like Hiver that help you manage customer contacts and conversations.

With a set of rules and triggers, your CRM and contact management system can communicate and create the contracts instead of you manually filling in the company information, the prospect details, offer, etc, and this goes both for sending your proposal and contact when closing the deal.

7. Email Domain Warming

Did you know that you can warm up your email domain without sending emails manually each day?

As SDRs, we all know the risk of being marked as spammers when sending emails in bulk to a lead list, but we do it as part of our outbound outreach strategy. 

Using an email warmer tool will mimic a human-like interaction between a pool of email addresses, by sending emails and replying to the email automatically. 

Email service providers like Google, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. will register those interactions like the usual email sending and they’ll start considering your email address as “safe” for communication.

Wrapping up

As we already mentioned, sales automation has a wide number of applications. Instead of moving in one direction, why not explore them all? 

Sales Automation can increase SDR’s productivity and revenue goals. It can automate the majority of your administrative tasks and give you more time to focus on other important aspects of the business, but only if used correctly. 

As part of your sales arsenal, you should invest in sales tools and leverage them most, however, as an SDR you also should learn which aspects of the sales process can be automated, and implement sales automation techniques that can help you combine knowledge and tactics into practice to speed up the sales process, help you reach the target and develop your skillset even further.