Should You Automate Your Relationships in Sales?

Sales: it’s about the human touch. The best salespeople don’t sell, they communicate and connect, having conversations that center around helping people with people problems – so adding automation into the mix is a no-no, right?

It’s clear, however, that finding the right ways to automate your relationships in sales benefits both ends of a potential deal. As tech gets smarter, our processes get smoother, and smoother processes hugely enhance a customer’s experience.

The research bears this one out. Reports show that a massive two-thirds of salespeople’s time isn’t spent on selling at all, but on “non-revenue generating activities.” Some of the biggest time drains include administrative tasks and writing and responding to emails for sales-related purposes.

In fact, automation can step in to assist with:

Automation of repetitive tasks

Lead generation and management

Task delegation

Marketing and sales personalization

Ready to see how? Here’s our guide to why automating your relationships can be brilliant for sales.

Ensure customers feel like they’re getting your fullest attention, and blend it into a human experience

Customers notice when they’re being treated like an afterthought. Using automated responses can give the feel of a fully bespoke sales experience when you are actually automating the majority of your process – just well enough that a client doesn’t notice. Tech that lets you fire out emails automatically, or send manually with customizable templates like TextExpander, saves time but keeps communication going.

Chase Clymer, a TextExpander user from Electric Eye, shares his insights:

“We use a lot of automation at Electric Eye to create relationships with partners and prospects. You can easily use automation in outreach, but once the other person has responded, you need to be an actual human being on the other side of that conversation or they’re going to not want to work with you.”

Perfect the blending of automation with human interaction to make the transition completely seamless.

Never miss another follow-up again

No one wants to be picked up and dropped, and there are few places where doing so is as detrimental as this is in sales. Time really is of the essence for closing a deal. According to CallHippo, response rates drop dramatically by eight times after the first hour, and every time you miss a touchpoint with a client your response rate is going to crash even further. 92% of sales pros give up after their fourth call with a lead, but 80% of buyers say no four times before they say yes, so finding a way to make follow-ups happen is vital for closing more deals.

It might be an email sent through an automatic schedule or a reminder in your calendar, but either way follow-ups are a huge area where automation can make a difference.

Manage, rank, and nurture leads with more ease than ever

It’s not just about cutting down your inbox time. Automation can also make huge waves in how you manage your leads, given that there is now technology out there that will do everything from texting your leads a reminder that you’ve got a call booked in, to letting you rank the viability of the leads in your sales funnels.

That’s right: there are automations out there that can pick up the engagement of your leads throughout your sales process and will use the number of clicks, opens, and replies to rank them for your team. Not only that, you can use this technology to score and segment your leads so that different strategies and processes are applied to convert them, using more automations that help you do this. You can then nurture leads in ways that are targeted and thus, you got it, more personal.

Keep your team motivated, rather than stuck in the mud

Salespeople are hired to sell, but the majority of teams spend significant time and energy doing anything but. There are plenty of benefits to automating sales relationships that serves your customers, but the impact for your team will be massive too. It’s possible, and surprisingly straightforward, to automate repetitive tasks that your team does again and again. If there’s information that needs to go from one portal to another, there are plenty of automation options that will get it done.

Improve accuracy throughout your workflow

Automation is also the unsung hero of one more human flaw: accuracy. There are a huge number of tasks your team just cannot do with perfect accuracy. It doesn’t matter who that team is: humans are prone to making mistakes where computers are more efficient and more effective. Human error has a negative impact on companies’ bottom line, as well as on the experience leads have from our team. It may be that a lead’s email gets mistyped and the sales funnel heads out to no one at all. It could also be that communication from one client is sent to another by mistake, or that a team member’s mixup degrades trust in a lead that could have been converted.

Takeaways

Automated communication gives leads a sense of being invested in, even when input from your team is minimized

Automations improve follow-up performance, vital for the 80% of buyers who say no four times before agreeing to a deal

Automation improves lead management for targeted sales strategies

Teams are motivated when their time feels productive

Human errors drops when automations perform tasks that humans are ill-suited to

For more productivity insights, we recommend these TextExpander articles:

How to Automate Support without losing the Human Touch

Why Email Reply Times Matter and How to Improve Them