Four Automation Mistakes to Avoid

Technology Corner

Four Automation Mistakes to Avoid if you want a Streamlined, Revenue Generating Sales Process

By Kevin Snow

For 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 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.

2. USING DISJOINTED SYSTEMS

Business owners are notorious for identifying that they have a problem and then rapidly finding something to fix it. This is normally a great trait but when it comes to sales and marketing technology it usually results in a mishmash of tools that are each focused on one specific feature (ie: CRM, SMS, Chatbots, etc.).

A common problem with this situation is that these systems don’t “talk” to each other, meaning that your CRM database doesn’t connect with your lead management system, which are both, mostlikely, completely separate from your marketing and lead generation tools. This causes you or your sales team to have to do a LOT of redundant manual data entry to make up for these communication gaps. This often results in missing data in one or more systems, missed opportunities because of a lack of follow up (see number one above) and it also prevents you from having a 360-degree picture of your customer and the ability to send them relevant follow-up messaging.

An all-in-one sales automation platform protects against this and ensures that your team is following a cohesive sales process.

3. NOT PROPERLY SCORING YOUR LEADS

For most salespeople, there’s nothing more annoying than wasting time on leads who don’t match their specific client avatar or just aren’t ready to buy yet.

Automatic lead scoring helps you to immediately identify who the most engaged prospects in your database are, and who are the coldest and in need of re-engagement. You can set up the lead scoring so that scores are determined based on specific information that your leads provided you (ie: demographics, title and industry), behavioral information (engagement, website visits, email clicks, etc.) and the length of time that they have been in your database.

But to set up your lead scoring so that it is accurate, you first need to know what a “hot” lead looks like. If you’re a business coach or consultant, your ideal lead could be someone who has identified himself or herself as a business owner and has visited your pricing or programs website page. By understanding the characteristics and behaviors of your ideal client, you will be able to assign specific traits and behaviors higher point values while others get lower values.

4. NOT SPLIT TESTING YOUR AUTOMATED FOLLOW-UP EMAILS OR LANDING PAGES

Even if you‘ve fixed number one in our list and you now have a fully automated sales follow up process, the last thing you should do is sit back and forget about it. You should be actively testing different elements on your webpages and emails, including copy, design and images.

Split testing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to continually improve the performance of your automation. The first items you should test are your automated follow-up emails. Test one part of an email at a time to see which option gets a better conversion rate and then optimize them for better results.

Some of the most effective elements to test within your follow-up emails are:

• Subject lines

• Pre-headers

• Header images

• Calls to action

• Body copy

By avoiding these common mistakes and fully incorporating sales automation software into your small business, you can completely streamline your sales team to boost efficiency and drive revenue.

Kevin Snow is the founder of Time On Target, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses effectively use technology to grow their business. Kevin has helped companies all across the United States shorten their sales cycle and increase their closing rates by utilizing sales automation to increase the time sales teams are in front of prospects selling. You can reach Kevin at kevin.snow@ time-on-target.com.