Success Champions
technology corner
Four Automation Mistakes to Avoid if you want a Streamlined, Revenue Generating Sales Process By Kevin Snow
“…a lot of businesses fail to take advantage of some key functionality that automation tools offer”
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or a solopreneur or a business owner with a small team, using sales and marketing automation can have a huge impact on your business. It not only helps your team be more efficient with their time and close more deals, but it can also help you generate high quality prospects and turn them into leads that are ready to talk to you about buying. But…a lot of businesses fail to take advantage of some key functionality that automation tools offer. And not applying this technology can have a huge impact on just how effective your automation efforts are. So, to help you not make the same mistakes some of your peers have, here are the top four sales automation mistakes that businesses make:
1. NOT AUTOMATING YOUR FOLLOW-UP Expecting your leads to buy the first time they visit your website or right when they become
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aware of you is unrealistic. This impiles an enormous amount of extra pressure on you and your sales reps. Simply capturing leads isn’t enough, you need to provide consistent, personalized, and relevant follow-up if you want to keep leads in your pipeline until they’re ready to buy.
But the number one mistake that small businesses make when it comes to follow-up is expecting their sales reps to manually follow up with all their leads. Think of it this way: business owners and salespeople are normally overwhelmed with work, and the first thing that gets sent to the bottom of the to-do list is business development tasks (ie: follow-up). Even if they do get around to it, a high percentage of salespeople give up after one attempt. That’s why having a set sequence of automated follow-up messages makes such a drastic difference. And we aren’t just talking about sending email or SMS messages either. The best automation tools include the ability to assign task to a specific person on your team and then track the outcome of that task. These tasks and outcomes allow you in inject person-to-person interaction throughout the follow up process rather than just sending an endless steam of emails. The outcomes can be used to trigger what happens next in the sequence base on how the person-to-person interaction goes (or doesn’t in some cases). These could trigger sending the prospect to specific follow up email campaign, scheduling a future follow up call, or end the follow up all together. Automating your follow-up processes allows you to manage your follow ups so that you have a more consistent flow of prospects into your pipeline.
