What sales processes can be automated?

In our previous blog,  the first of this series, we’ve talked about how Sales Automation is defined and why we should implement it.
Now that we know Why we need to implement Sales Automation in our everyday sales processes the question is: Where do we start?

Here’s is a list of sales processes that can be easily automated with the right sales tools.

1. Automate the basics

Every day you need to send maybe hundreds of emails to cold prospects. (We all know that no Sales Rep exists that wants to send 100 emails per day manually.) 

And because of the time consumption and the agony these processes brought to the Salespeople, they started optimizing it. 

And this is nothing new! We all know of software that you can use to automate your email outreach and send those emails to all 100 cold prospects at once.

What emails can we automate?

Every email! From the first cold email to the later nurture phase, you can automate your emails with an email sequence.

But there is a price to it.

Email automation can harm your domain or can make you look like a spammer if you don’t automate the whole process properly.

What you can do to automate your email outreach is to use software that:

• enables you to warm up your domain first
• enables you to set a daily limit of how many emails will be sent
• gives the option to set up a sequence of more emails 
• has defined conditions to know which email to send when

Plus, you need to pay good attention to the data you have about your prospects. One missing information about their Name or Company can cost you your reputation if the prospect receives an email with the wrong name or just an empty greeting. 

Having all this in place, you can automate your emails with a simple setup and just monitor the outreach.

2. Automate your outreach through other channels

Is that even possible?
Yes! There are tools that can help you automate your prospect outreach outside of your email inbox.
Image you have a prospect on LinkedIn that ideally fits your Customer Profile. 

First you send them a connection request (cause we all know LinkedIn won’t let us write to people whenever we want!). Then you wait for them to accept it and start tailoring your message. You’ve sent your first message, but no reply?! You then try to grab their attention with a simple reaction on their latest post, a like or a comment let’s say. Then it’s time to act again with some follow up email…
But to follow all these steps for each prospect? Are you kidding me?!

Yes! You can automate this as well. And this might be the next best thing you do in your outreach process since using different channels for outreach makes your prospecting look human-like, but catches the attention at the right moment.

3. Automate your Lead Research

Let’s admit, one most hated task of a Sales Rep (more than sending manual emails) is the Lead research. You spend hours on forming your Ideal Customer Profile, and then when this is done you start finding people that fit this profile..

One… by… one.


And not only names, but you also need other information on these prospects as well like their email address to reach out, maybe their phone number to follow up with a cold call, research the company they are working for, their job title to determine if they are the right person to sell to or are they the decision-makers and much more.

You can’t just send an unidentified email out of the blue am I right?

Well here is the thing: You can automate this process as well. (At least the process after you identify your Customer Profile).
As previously mentioned, there are software that will give you access to a database. But not just any database. You need access to a b2b database containing all the necessary details you need to make an automated email outreach with personalized content.

Sales Automation Platforms like Sales.Rocks work based on an advanced filtering system that can shorten your research by 89% percent. You just choose the filters matching your ICP and within seconds you’ll receive a highly-targeted lead list of hundreds of leads containing all the above-mentioned information you need for prospecting. 

The best part is, you won’t need to do further research. All the company information is already there, so you can start doing the 1st step of your Sales Automation (the email automation) in no time. 😉

4. Automate your Inbound Outreach

Let’s go over the “undercover” outreach. 

The Inbound Outreach is based usually on the marketing efforts and the passive leads coming in from different sources ( speaking here of a LOT of sources: website visits, newsletter subscriptions, form applications, lead magnets, file downloads, social media click and messages, paid ads from all channels…)

How can you automate an outreach that doesn’t really depend on you?
Integrations between different tools should do the trick.

To start with the most anonymous leads – the website visitors, you’ll need a tool that can track the visitor’s IP when they come to your website. A good IP tracking tool must be connected to a very good database, that can easily and (more importantly) accurately determine who visited your website. Tools like Happierleads, Albacross can track website visitors and give you a rough idea that ‘someone’ from a ‘certain company’ was scrolling around. The privacy policies of an internet user are strict, and this is understandable (otherwise it would be like letting anyone enter your garden uninvited). So that’s why we can’t determine who exactly visited your website. But we can do a proper and highly-targeted guess according to our ICP and try to reach out to a person that would fit. (we know someone from the company was interested in what we offer, so we might just hit the right one, or at least spread the word 😉 )

You can start with a simple setup of emails. Remind them about their visit on your website in the first email, and craft a personalized landing page similar to the one they visited with the info they need and a custom offer for them. (you can do this with a software for custom landing pages). Personalization is everything!
Next step is to send them an automated reminder about what they are “missing out” on and some next steps they should do.

They’ll either qualify or be not interested. Either way you can adjust the email automation to their reaction on your emails. Remember, even the absence of a  reaction is a sign of a reaction 😉

Lastly you can transfer them in a nurture phase where they’ll receive only educational content and work with them passively on their qualification.

The social media leads are easier to identify. They leave at least one information about themselves, usually their email address, so this is a head start. You can then import them to your CRM and start the outreach from there.

5. Automate your deal proposing

When we get to the deal-proposing part, as an SDR you think you won the battle. And you might, but you still have to prepare everything for the client to get presented as smoothly as possible.

Having multiple clients at the same time in the same phase can be quite exhausting for the SDRs, so this process should be automated as well. Sending a proposal in the form of a Landing Page or email, but personalized with all the information needed for each client can save you time in the process.
You just need to make sure you have all the necessary information about the client.

Gather as much data as you need and follow the automated signals that are occurring in their company. When you see that their quarterly revenue went up, adjust your proposal with the proper offer, and when you see there are changes in the leadership, make sure you get in touch with the new decision-maker in time, so that you can do the deal at the proper moment.

Let’s sum up

Every aspect of Sales you can automate, you should automate. A centralized approach of sales automation is what makes it effective and according to Harvard Business Review really increases the productivity of the teammates, the managers by more than 30% and the revenue of the company by more than 25%, cutting their costs by 13% and increasing the customer satisfaction by more than 10%. (and I bet this is incredibly good in actual numbers 😉 ).