Automating your business is not just a nice thing to do; These days, it is an absolute must. Why spend unnecessary time on administrative or other repetitive tasks when your time is better spent talking to prospects and clients or just working to grow your business?
With a host of online tools at your disposal, adding automation to your sales, marketing, and customer service processes can be simple.
Automate sales processes
Ideally, the only people your sales team talks to are people who are already qualified, know exactly what they want, and are ready to sign a contract. Actually? Too often, your sales team spends their valuable time talking to prospects who are simply kicking the tires, who aren’t ready to commit.
By automating some aspects of your sales process, you can help the team get closer to that ideal. One option is to add a pricing calculator to your site. This allows the potential customer to choose the level of product or service, as well as to compare features and benefits. They will be able to determine if they even have the budget to hire you, which makes the sales call geared towards the benefits of working with you rather than focusing on cost.
A great example of a pricing calculator is on the revamped HubSpot site, or the free 401 (k) quote estimator on Summit CPA.
Automating the sales follow-up process means that the sales department spends more time talking to and closing potential customers who are really interested.
Another way to free up your sales team is to set up a service to automate meeting scheduling. Your sales team dreads having to e-mail potential customers back and forth, trying to find a time for a meeting.
Ask your team to set the blocks of time they have available, integrate with your calendar, and voila, prospects can choose which schedule works best for them. This makes the process of talking to sales easy; Your prospects (and your team) will appreciate it.
Finally, automating follow-up emails for sales means they don’t have to spend all day chasing leads, but rather talking and closing leads who are genuinely interested. Setting up a tool like HubSpot CRM Sequences means you can have a phone call, put the prospect in a sequence, and let them lead the next steps. You can provide reference material, case studies, and other helpful information in subsequent emails and schedule another call to close the deal.
Automate marketing processes
Marketing is by far the number one source of time-saving automation ideas. It starts with automatic targeting of your list in your marketing tool. You can create lists based on your contact record information and view your Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, and those leads who are in your system but will never buy – all at a glance. You can also see, based on their forms, what they are interested in, what their greatest need is and when they are looking to solve your problem.
Based on the lists above, you can set up workflows or drip campaigns to email leads over time and point them in the direction of sales. Someone interested in one of your services may not be interested in another service; you want to be able to send them content relevant to their interests instead of sending them mass emails to everyone. You can use workflows as a way for HR to manage potential new hires and automatically change contact records based on what they click in an email.
Finally, one task that most marketers spend too much time on is social media. Simple automation, such as having new blog posts automatically post to Twitter or Facebook, can be easily set up. Tools like Edgar let you set up topic groups and post information automatically based on a schedule you set.
Automate customer service
Supporting your customers after the sale is the only way you’ll keep them long-term, and we all know that it’s better to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. When clients or clients have questions, answering those questions in a timely and thorough manner is paramount.
You can automate part of this process using two support methods: support tickets and knowledge bases. Several project management tools also have a support ticketing method, whether it’s by sending a simple email to a Trello dashboard or a full system like Salesforce or Teamwork Desk. Whatever you use, make it easy for your customers to receive their questions in front of you and out of their email inbox.
Having a knowledge base means that common questions that come up all the time can become a valuable resource for new clients. You can transform support tickets into knowledge base items as they come in, creating that resource with each support request.
And finally, creating a feedback loop for customer support means getting quantitative and qualitative feedback, rather than relying on intuition. Maybe there is someone on your team who is amazing to retain customers and you just didn’t see it, or maybe someone is throwing the ball and you need to chat.
A great program for setting up a feedback loop that I use for my clients is Customer Thermometer. You can create different ‘thermometers’ for sales, marketing, support, and for unique moments like onboarding. Combine this with an automated workflow and you only have to set it up once.
What processes do you want to help you automate? What homework do you do all the time that you prefer not to do? Email me and let me know.
