2024 promises many things, including more AI, changes in the business marketplace, and ever-increasing competition. What does that mean for your small to medium-sized business? You need every advantage you can get.
Automating your sales pipeline is one of the most effective ways to improve sales performance and drive revenue. We’ll show you how in this blog post.
The sales pipeline is the process that drives a lead to become a prospect and then a client. This process includes steps such as lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and closing. In the past, these steps have been a largely manual process. With AI, sales pipeline automation is increasingly becoming an automated powerful tool for SMBs like yours to increase sales efficiency and raise volume and revenue.
Increase productivity and efficiency. 70% of the average salesperson’s time is wasted on tasks that aren’t sales. Data entry, scheduling follow-up calls, going through email, and other items need to be done, but they take away from sales. Automating these tasks can dramatically free up time for your sales team. In fact, according to a study by Nucleus Research, companies that automate experience a 15% increase in productivity and can lower their marketing costs by 12%.i
2024 brings exciting new tools as AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes mainstream. Additionally, some already used tools are becoming even more usable for sales and client service teams. These tools that are offered by TigerLRM include:
Email Sentiment: Incoming emails get scanned, and keywords are identified. This helps your sales team deal with the large volume of emails they receive, as the AI will tell them which emails are most likely to convert. Then, your team can respond to the most promising emails first.
Lead Scoring: Lead scoring rates your leads with a numerical score. A higher score is more likely to convert. This can be done manually, using AI, or with a blended method. This helps your sales team prioritize their efforts on leads most likely to close.
Automated Contact Follow-Up: Automatic email sequencing or SMS messaging to nurture leads can save your team a lot of time while keeping your leads engaged. When your leads express positive interest, your team gets notified, and the sales process can continue, person to person.
Activity Tracking and Reporting: It takes an average of 8-12 touches to get a lead to respond, and sales team leaders need to ensure their sales team follows department guidelines. AI and automation can ensure that these protocols are left so no lead is left behind.
Using a manual system, be it paper leads or Excel, it isn’t easy to track the progress of leads, even with fancy Excel formulas. Excel is great at many things, but no formula can find sales roadblocks or when a lead needs to be followed up.
Sales Pipeline Automation, Sales Enablement, and AI provide a centralized platform for managing, nurturing, assigning, and even closing all of your leads, prospects, and clients. You can track the process of your lead journey, discover the leads most likely to close, and enable your team to use their limited resources most efficiently.
In addition to tracking leads and enabling your team to find the leads most likely to convert, the benefits of automating your sales pipeline include using data-driven insights in your sales process. This helps you improve your sales strategy and make more knowledgeable decisions about where to use your resources. With sales pipeline automation, you can:
Understanding these data points can help increase your company’s sales efficiency, identify bottlenecks, and improve your sales process.
With sales pipeline automation, you can now get real-time reports and dashboards to track your sales performance daily, weekly, or monthly. You can track your specific KPIs, including conversion rates, sales cycles, revenue growth, etc.
30% | According to a study by Mckinsey.com, more than 30% of sales-related activities can be automated, but that figure does not include the impact of AI.ii
Sales pipeline automation is a powerful tool that can help small and medium-sized businesses improve their efficiency, productivity, and sales performance. If you're not currently using sales pipeline automation, we encourage you to consider it. It could be the game-changer your business needs to achieve explosive growth.
By taking advantage of sales pipeline automation, you can free up your time to focus on what you do best: building relationships with prospects and closing deals.
To assign a sales enablement user, simply go to Administrator > User Management > Edit User.
Once you are on the user's information, you can select if you want them to be "Non-Admin," "Admin," or part of the "Enablement Team." Save this information, and your desired user will have the right access.
You can access your Dashboard here.