The Fundamentals of Sales Automation Software

“Digital transformation” has been the trending topic for more than a decade, which is not surprising: business execs are right to start drooling when they describe how they optimized their overall operations, enhanced their productivity, and also improved the overall customer experience while cutting costs.

While it’s true that successful digital transformations are more than just technology overhauls and that simply putting an “AI” sticker on the box doesn’t make it that, automation is one of the key pillars of any digital transformation dreamforce.

Automating the key business processes is critical for businesses looking to improve their resource efficiency, scale-up effectively, keep their talented employees, and satisfy the increasing customer expectations created through innovative, technology-driven startups that aren’t held by Jurassic legacy systems.

A sales process is under the same bandwagon.

Keep reading as we go deeper into what sales automation software is, discuss the different use cases and also the top SaaS companies in this very space, while also examining some of the many benefits a sales automation software brings to the table.

Sales Automation Software- What is it?

Sales are actually a lot of work:

Hours after hours of identifying and filtering leads, building and even managing relationships with customers individually, keeping a note of their needs, and then identifying the best products and related specifications.
Constant follow-ups.
Endless questions from the prospects resulting in a constant back-and-forth with product or engineering teams. (Not to forget selling those products that don’t exist yet, leaving the engineers in a free fall to make them a reality).
Keeping track of vast product catalogs, not to mention those countless possible configurations of every product.
Keeping a note of which stage of the purchase process a customer is at and accordingly taking action to the next level.
Keep an accurate record during every stage of the process and then making sure that the orders are fulfilled as per the requirements.

It’s a lot to keep track of, more so when your customer list and product catalog keeps growing.

When you take care of all this manually, there are a lot of chances for human errors. An incorrect product recommended, or a customer being misinformed about product specifications, customization requests not being noted down, a comma in the wrong place, the irregular keeping of sales record, forgetting the follow-ups on a customer inquiry – these errors lead to unhappy customers and loss in sales.

In a way, sales automation software takes over all the manual and repetitive parts of the entire sales process. You design the rules that are automatically followed when all the conditions you have crafted are met. This streamlines the entire sales process to get rid of the most admin work associated with sales, meaning that your reps now get to focus on selling rather than just mindless hassling.

Let’s now go into more details.

Best Sales Automation Software for Use (with Use Cases)

Sales automation software can be used for the automation of a wide variety of tasks at different stages of the buyer journey.

There are some solutions that offer automation capabilities spanning a lot of different use cases, while others focus on a specific to be used with other automation solutions.

While a majority of such solutions got created with integrations on priority, you need to be sure whether all of your automation software choices will come together nicely if you decide to mix and match.

Automated Needs Assessment

Identifying all the unmet needs allows you to initiate a conversation with your prospects and then match your products to their issues and then identify the demand for new products.

Software like Qualtrics makes it pretty easy to automate data collection and analysis for a better understanding of how to create an outstanding customer experience.

Marketing Automation

In today’s omnichannel world, marketing translates to the creation and publishing of content across a number of platforms, which also includes the content for your website, email, SMS marketing, social media posts, and more – managing factors like scheduling and ad spend not taken into account.

Even with a large marketing team, there are chances that your marketing efforts would be more efficient and effective with a marketing automation software like Hubspot, SAP Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, Marketo, or CoSchedule.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) software takes note of all your customer interactions and brings all the data you have on your prospective customers in just one place. This makes it very easy to track and then analyze the behavior of your leads, present clients, and even the past customers, responding accordingly to establish relationships as well as increase the conversions.

Popular CRM software like Salesforce allows you to microsegment your customers and then set up customized customer journeys to actions taken by leads and then the present customers as well.

Solutions like Leadsquared are used to automatically assign the sales leads to reps with factors like geographic location, stage of your purchase funnel, what is the product of interest, specific actions – like clicking a particular link in a mail or spending a lot of time on the checkout page – or even some other criteria.

Automated Reporting

Sales automation software creates a digital record of all relevant sales activities, creating data that can be used for producing detailed reports in just a few moments, saving your sales team a huge number of hours in recreating spreadsheets and then drafting the reports. Solutions offering advanced reporting and analytics make it pretty easy to display this data visually to gain actionable insights.

Configuration, Pricing, and Quoting

Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software ensures the automation of complex product configuration, calculationof prices, and the creation of sales document.

CPQ is prettty useful in the case of engineer-to-order products, which involve an endless back and forth between the sales reps, customers, and even engineering. “Are these options compatible?” “Is there a more cost-effective alternative?” “How will changing this feature affect the price?” “Is the customer OK to wait for a few days while we check?” This list is endless.

Advanced CPQ solutions like KBMax provide visual product configurators that can easily configure complex products on absolutely any device. With a highly intuitive drag-and-drop user interface, customers get to add, remove, upgrade, or even resize the parts, and then change colors, all by simple clicking, dragging, and dropping different sections. They can then view their configured product in 3D, rotate it a full 360°, zoom in and out for product inspection, or even make use of AR or VR to get an idea of the products before actually making a purchase.

Marketing and Sales Automation Software Advantages

Sales and marketing go together, and then using automation to include these two vital business operations can bring wonders for your end motive.

Let's have a look at some of the most amazing benefits of marketing and sales automation software:

Sales and marketing automation saves a lot of time, energy, and funds by taking repetitive tasks entirely out of the equation, rendering your business more resource-efficient, and also liberating the employees for more important work – which in turn brings better job satisfaction and even better employee morale.
Automation software helps the sales reps to stay updated with your product catalog as it evolves, which can be useful in onboarding and training new reps in becoming product experts.
If you have a complex product catalog, sales automation software can assist your reps in ensuring that the customers are matched with the products and bundles that best meet their requirements.
Marketing automation creates consistency across all your marketing collateral to reuse your content across multiple platforms, making it easier to scale your marketing capabilities.
Sales automation brings the elimination of human error from a sales process. This translates to no more of those incorrectly documented order specifications and even the invoicing inaccuracies, lesser delays, fallen returns and refunds, and more satisfied customers as well.
With a marketing automation software, it is effortless to sync all your marketing campaigns across multiple channels, for example, when launching a new product or offer.
Automation cuts down on the silos, encourages collaboration, and boosts marketing-sales relationship. Your marketing team thus reaches out to more leads for your sales team to provide detailed information–prospects’ behavior gets tracked from the very first interaction itself.
With algorithms making intelligent suggestions, sales automation software like KBMax can boost your profit margins by suggesting upgrades and add-ons.
Over time, such algorithms learn the methods that bring the highest conversions and also optimize the sales techniques.
Sales automation software that have smart pricing rules updates the prices in real-time. Dynamic pricing incrementally adjusts the prices in response to dynamic market conditions (like competitor prices, demand, inventory level, and order history.) Reps and customers get the most accurate prices, contributing to better customer experience with no unpleasant surprises.
Automation cuts down the time spent on tasks like sales document generation, bringing reduced sales cycles and also freeing up your agents’ time for better tasks like creating crucial relationships.
Sales and marketing automation software ensure data generation, allowing businesses to be focused about their pricing, marketing, as well as discounts to boost slow-moving products, development of new products, and also give them an update on competition.
Top CPQ automation solutions can reduce your load by automation of CAD and design on engineer-to-order products. As soon as all the product specifications are finalized, the CPQ solution creates technical renderings, as well as the bills of materials, cut lists, CNC plans, and other related documentation needed for manufacturing. Engineers get more time for R&D and innovation.