What Is Sales Automation? How It Can Help Small Businesses

Sales automation is an essential procedure in helping to increase leads and conversion rates.

For small businesses, finding ways to increase your leads and conversions is critical, as your competition will run you out of the market if you don’t. Sales automation software platforms help to minimize time pertinent the time it takes to complete various sales-related tasks. It eliminates the hassle of repetitive tasks and saves time.

These tools can be especially useful for small businesses, as resources are typically limited.  Let’s look at a few of the benefits sales automation offers to small businesses.

Advantages of sales automation for small businesses 

Sales automation software helps businesses to a great extent. It help small businesses to make a mark in a crowded market and really drive business.

Here are a few ways it can help you.

  • Increased brand value

Sales automation platforms can help you automate tasks like email, advertising and chatting with customers. You can more easily book meetings and appointments and keep conversations flowing that lead to a greater connection with your brand.

  • Boost to leads and conversion rates

By allowing you to stay in better touch with customers and track their activity, you can more easily boost your leads and improve your conversion rates. Notifications can let you know when a “hot” buyer visited your website or took a particular action. This allows you to send targeted info at the right time to help drive them along the pipeline.

One great example of this is Drift, a popular sales automation tool. You receive an alert as seen in the following image when a prospect makes a move that makes them a potentially “hot” prospect.

Drift sales tool notification example
Image: Drift sales tool notification example – Source
  • Enhanced prospects of CRM

 

With a CRM feature, your sales automation tool allows you to easily track the activities of your prospects. You can figure out who has the most promise and then focus your efforts there. It also allows you to track activities like phone calls, emails and other touch points so you know where you stand with each prospect.

  • Saves time and costs

Sales automation allows you to pinpoint the most likely to sign/buy customers. This way, you can stop wasting time doing the same amount of outreach to everyone and focus your time and effort only targeting specific accounts that are either more lucrative or appear to be further along in the buying journey. 

Incredible sales automation tools for small business 

Sales automation systems are an integral part small business success. These software platforms help level the playing field for small businesses who lack large sales teams, lack budget for marketing and just don’t have the resources that their bigger competitors bring to the table.

To help your small business figure out which sales automation platform might be best for you, we’ve laid out some details regarding 5 of our favorites.

1. PeppyBiz

PeppyBiz is a hugely valuable platform for automating your sales tasks. It helps the users in executing account-based marketing strategies across numerous channels.

This tool offers three great levels to help you cover the full spectrum of customer interaction. It starts with a marketing hub that focuses on pulling in your prospects and getting their attention. It then helps to drive conversions. The customer hub helps track your customers once they sign up and allows you to target them with segmenting messaging. And the service hub helps with project management and helping customers resolve issues through a ticketing system.

Peppybiz automation with targeted messaging
Image: Peppybiz automation with targeted messaging – Source

Marketers can also incorporate pre-built workflow automation.  They also can use a drag and drop editor. This software also helps the users in segmenting the customer base. It helps with capturing leads, moving customer through the pipeline, email marketing and more.

2. Agile CRM 

Agile CRM is a remarkable tool when it comes to automation of sales. This tool also helps in managing customers. This software supports marketers by extracting relevant information about potential customers.

One of the best features is the reporting. Often, sales automation tools struggle in this area. Agile, however, has it down. You can see in the following image that the dashboard very clearly display progress on a variety of levels in a super easy-to-read format.

Agile CRM user-friendly dashboard report
Image: Agile CRM user-friendly dashboard report –Source

Agile CRM has a great email marketing feature. It allows you to craft and send targeted emails and then track interactions with them. This can be hugely useful in allowing you to target specific accounts with the right info at the right time to increase conversions.

There’s really too much to list here, but you can look at CRM analytics, create landing pages, send video emails, schedule appointments, support workflows and campaigns…you get it. The list could go on and on. This is a great tool, and we highly suggest you check it out.

3. HubSpot Sales

HubSpot is a hugely valuable automation platform. For starters, users get access to numerous email templates. You can use these templates directly from a particular prospects contact. This helps significantly in targeting specific accounts and closing deals.

Email HubSpot contacts directly from the platform
Image: Email HubSpot contacts directly from the platform – Source

It also comes with a free CRM. Yep…you read that right. So you buy the automation part, and you get the CRM for free. Other platforms tend to wrap the costs of these up separately which make HubSpot a leader in this area.

This is huge platform with a marketing hub, sales hub, service hub and even a CMS hub. You can actually build out your website via HubSpot, which is hugely valuable and allows you to manage your marketing, your sales and your website all in one place.

4. Salesforce CRM

Salesforce is a fantastic software for small businesses, but it can’t be a bit on the pricey side.

One of the major problems Salesforce helps solve is contact (prospect) management. Keeping track of small business sales prospects can be challenging with limited resources, and Salesforce has a really intuitive platform that allows you to track as little or as much customer data as you want.

This platform also is very useful is forecasting sales. You can project your sales as a company, dig down to track your top sales performers by individual and more.

Salesforce sales forecasting
Image: Salesforce sales forecasting

Salesforce is the monster in the room when it comes to sales automation software. It’s likely this isn’t the first time you’ve been introduced, but if you’ve never checked it out, I highly recommend it.

5. Groove

Groove serves as a sort of complementary platform to Salesforce. It’s looked at as a sales engagement platform.

One of the best features is the ability to sync inbound and outbound emails and your meeting schedule to Salesforce. This can be challenging within Salesforce itself, and Groove makes it simple.

Email sync via Groove
Image: Email sync via Groove – Source

Conclusion

Sales automation is hugely valuable for businesses of all sizes. Small businesses, however, can often benefit significantly more, as these platforms offer a ton of value and the ability to save on adding additional staff, save lots of time and really make processes more efficient and effective.

Take some time to sit in on demos and really determine which platform is the best for you. Some are larger beasts to implement than others (Salesforce, for example), so make sure you are only buying the amount of software you can really handle.

In the end, you’ll be happy you made the leap, and your business (and revenue) will thank you.

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Sara Williams
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