In the competitive world of sales, the ability to streamline processes and maximize efficiency is crucial for success. Sales automation, a transformative approach, leverages technology to automate repetitive tasks, enabling sales teams to focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals.
Understanding Sales Automation
Sales automation refers to the use of technology, primarily software tools, to automate various aspects of the sales process. This can include lead generation, customer follow-ups, data entry, pipeline management, and reporting. By automating these tasks, sales teams can save time, reduce human error, and focus on more strategic activities that require a personal touch.
Sales automation aims to create a more efficient and effective sales process by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks and providing sales professionals with the tools they need to succeed.
First Generation of Sales Automation
In the earlier days, ACT!, Siebel, and later on Salesforce, Oracle, and multiple other companies pioneered the foundations of the modern Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. These organize prospect accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and the sales funnel. Early versions started as manual card files, eventually evolving into simple databases, and then web-app frontends in front of those simple databases. This laid the groundwork for sales automation to happen, and nothing we do today would be possible without those basics.
Second Generation Starts to Automate the Grind
The second generation saw improvements in the process, many features being picked up by major CRM companies themselves. Some companies to this day are still getting circles run around them as they do not pick up even these automation practices.
- Automated Activity Aggregation – There are tons of companies out there either not tracking sales rep activity, or making sales reps engage in manual data entry for activities. Automation here can import activities from calendars, email accounts, and automatically create and merge accounts and leads.
- Email Automation, Cadences – This allowed sales teams to create personalized, trigger-based email campaigns that nurture leads through the sales funnel. Some of these tools can send automated emails based on specific actions, such as downloading a whitepaper or abandoning a shopping cart, ensuring timely and relevant communication.
- Lead Generation and Scoring – Automated lead generation tools can help identify and attract potential customers through various channels, such as social media, email marketing, and online forms. Once leads are captured, automation software can score them based on predefined criteria, such as demographic information and online behavior, to prioritize high-potential prospects.
- Notifications & Alerts – Automating pipeline management involves tracking and managing the stages of each deal in real-time. Automation tools can alert sales reps when a deal is at risk of stalling, suggest next steps, and even forecast potential revenue based on the current pipeline status.
- Calendar Integrations – Integrations with scheduling and CRM platforms automatically sync events and activities across calendars, reducing the amount of time wasted on scheduling and data entry, while also increasing success rates of actually holding meetings.
- Reporting and Analytics – Automation can also streamline the reporting process by generating real-time analytics and performance reports. Sales managers can access dashboards that provide insights into team performance, sales trends, and customer behavior, enabling data-driven decision-making.
- Data-Driven Strategic Insights – Automated reporting and analytics provide sales managers with valuable insights into team performance, market trends, and customer behavior. These insights can inform strategic decisions and help identify areas for improvement.
At the end of the day though, this generation of automation technologies only go so far.
Insights in this generation are still only descriptive, not prescriptive. These platforms can tell you what already happened, but outside crude funnel forecasts, they do not and cannot tell you with any confidence what will happen.
The platforms in the current generation only open the door — the sales rep still has to walk through themselves and call those shots themselves. For many, it’s already become so complicated that there are now major SaaS companies that exist solely to act as integration hubs for all the different tools everyone is using. On top of that, sales managers still have to manually check whether a strategy is working before moving to another strategy. This manual decision making is fine and dandy if your sales team are all top 0.1% in their verticals, always operating at peak efficiency. But back here in the real world, the incredible majority of sales is still foundationally dependent on grinding out that next call, email, demo, and proposal.
These automation platforms of yesteryear are like cruise control for cars. They make that grind a bit less grueling, but at the end of the day someone still has to drive.
Next Generation Automates Growth
Enter Diplomat Sales AI. This next generation of sales automation is rapidly sweeping the industry:
- Automated Data Collection – Diplomat Sales AI automates collection of all viable prospects from a variety of sources. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on email contact datasets and getting banned while scraping LinkedIn, Diplomat just collects and validates lead data on its own.
- Automated Prospecting – Diplomat doesn’t just “reach out” to prospects. As one of our Diplomat users stated:
Diplomat is the best salesperson we’ve ever had. It’s like having a salesperson who never sleeps, never takes a break, and never forgets a lead.
Diplomat reaches out to prospects at the right time every time. Far too many companies lose on this grind alone. Fully automated follow-ups, personalized emails, and timely responses to inquiries all contribute to a better customer experience, fostering loyalty and repeat business. - AI Driven Lead Scoring – Sales teams must focus on nurturing the most promising prospects. By prioritizing leads with the highest potential, sales teams can improve conversion rates and close deals faster.
- Align Departments & Updating Collateral – Let’s be honest… for most companies, sales collateral is the last thing to be updated. And when something does get updated, in practice, most companies do not successfully share that information among all sales reps. This wastes a ridiculous amount of time on confusion between product to sales to prospects, on everything from duplicate discussions to pushing unqualified leads through the funnel.
- Mitigating Channel Conflict – Some offerings are amenable to 100% automation. The sales development representative (SDR) role can be completely automated, and in some cases, even the account executive (AE) role can be automated. But other, more complicated offerings sometimes require a longer sales cycle with requirements gathering, maybe some live product walk-throughs with live Q&A. The AE and maybe a sales engineer still has to come in and close. With our integrations, Diplomat knows who your sales reps are talking with and can avoid sending conflicting communications to current clients and active prospects that your AEs are working currently.
Diplomat Sales AI is here and now, revolutionizing the way B2B companies do sales, automating these grinds away, growing businesses to new heights. Do you want to be left in the dust, or do you want to experience this kind of growth with sales automation? Apply for Diplomat today.
