{"id":20811,"date":"2019-07-02T17:37:43","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T16:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=20811"},"modified":"2024-07-25T11:55:04","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T10:55:04","slug":"sales-automation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/sales-automation\/","title":{"rendered":"More deals, less work: How to unlock new efficiencies with sales automation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Operating a sales organization at any scale<\/a> involves a lot of tedious, repetitive work. Without sales automation, this work can become a black hole for your sales reps\u2019 time.<\/p>\n

In their \u201cState of Sales\u201d report, Salesforce found<\/a> that in an average week, sales reps spend 64% of their time on \u201cnon-selling\u201d tasks \u2013 everything from entering lead data to manually prioritizing opportunities. It goes without saying that while these tasks are necessary to run your sales organization, they’re not the best way for reps to be spending their time.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The idea of automating these \u201cnon-selling\u201d tasks isn’t new \u2013 long before the explosion in sales tools<\/a>, SAP, IBM and Oracle were already helping companies streamline their sales process. What is<\/em> new are the types of tasks we\u2019re now able to automate, from qualifying and routing leads to creating deep integrations between our sales stack<\/a> and martech stack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These advances in sales automation have enabled our reps to spend their time on the activities that matter most (hint: the revenue-generating ones<\/a>) and deliver a better, more personalized buying experience. Here are our top tips, workflows and tools for automating the sales process.<\/p>\n

What is sales automation?<\/h2>\n

The sales automation process takes manual, time-consuming tasks that sales reps have to do on a daily or weekly basis and handles them automatically \u2013 in most cases, through customizable workflows. Scheduling follow-up meetings? Updating account information in your CRM? These are all tasks that are prime candidates for automation.<\/p>\n

“With less time spent on manual tasks, sales reps can focus on more impactful work: personalized outreach, demos, negotiations”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here\u2019s a familiar example: routing leads to sales reps. It\u2019s a process that\u2019s crucial to nail if you want to maintain your sales velocity<\/a>, but having people do it adds no value and only invites human error. For leads that contact us through live chat, we use a chatbot to automatically route conversations<\/a> to our SDRs based on short list of qualification and lead scoring questions.<\/p>\n

\"Chatbots<\/p>\n

Automated workflows like this one save sales teams <\/a>so much time and improve the team\u2019s overall productivity. With less time spent doing manual tasks, sales reps can focus on more impactful work: personalized outreach, demos, negotiations and so on. Prospects are happier too \u2013 faster sales cycles benefit everyone<\/a> \u2013 and more likely to convert to customers.<\/p>\n

Identifying opportunities for automation<\/h2>\n

While sales automation is a powerful tool, it isn\u2019t meant to eliminate all the work that sales reps do. We aim to automate the parts of our sales process that are high touch but low value \u2013 that is, the activities that take up a lot of time but don\u2019t actually require human decision making or oversight to do well.<\/p>\n

\"If<\/p>\n

Using a time and motion study<\/h3>\n

A helpful way to identify all the tasks that your sales team can automate is with a time and motion study<\/a>. You can also start with a list of common time-consuming sales tasks<\/a>, if there are particular parts of the sales process you want to make more efficient.<\/p>\n

For the time and motion study, your sales reps time their tasks for an entire day. They measure:<\/p>\n