As the owner of a growing business, you’ve got a lot of spinning plates to manage. I’m sure you often feel like your to-do list is never-ending. What if I told you there were a few simple tasks you could tick off your list? Discover the 5 easy parts of your sales process to automate. Forever. The work still gets done, but you don’t have to spend your time doing it.
That’s the power of automation. AI, software or digital tools can handle some of those manual tasks in your business. By automating just a few of your processes, you can give yourself the breathing space you need to focus on other things. Those key lead generation tasks will tick along merrily in the background, growing your business for you.
The question is; where to begin? If you’re just getting started with automation, these are the easiest parts of your sales process to automate.
Create an email nurture sequence
Let’s start at the top of the funnel.
Imagine a potential customer has just given you their email address. They’re saying that they want to connect with you and find out more about your business. Of course, you want to make them feel welcome, seen and valued straightaway.
Why not automate an email sequence for your new connection? You’d start with an immediate thank you. Then you can follow up with a friendly set of nurturing emails. You can help your new connection get to know you - explain more about what you do, and the ways in which you can help them. You might include a freebie like an e-book, template or guide for good measure.
Once you’ve crafted your content, those introductory emails are easy to automate. It’s a great way to keep yourself front-of-mind with your new leads, at no extra effort from you or your sales team.
Schedule calls and meetings efficiently
Now that you’ve built a rapport with your new connection, it’s a good time to schedule a free consultation. You might invite them to book a call in the final email of your welcome sequence.
But we all know that finding free time for a call is a little tricky. The best way I’ve found to avoid endless to-ing and fro-ing about your availability is to use a scheduling tool.
In just one click, your client can choose a time that’s convenient for them, and which also suits you. The appointment goes straight into your diary, so all you need to do is turn up. As an added bonus, this simple time-scheduler looks pretty slick and professional. So you’ve saved yourself time, and impressed your client with your professionalism.
Keep tabs on your sales pipeline
When you’ve got a lot of clients to manage, you can be forgiven for forgetting exactly which touchpoints they’ve received.
With a CRM tool, you can see at a glance where all your clients and prospects are in your funnel. That means that you can tailor your services to each individual client. With that sort of personal service, each client feels valued. You’re quickly building trust and loyalty with your client base, which leads to more sales for your business.
Prepare pre-designed email templates
Now, this fact might surprise you. Did you know that email marketing is one of the most effective tools for lead generation? Email is definitely not dead. Quite the opposite - this sort of marketing promises significant return on investment. But the key to good marketing is consistency. So effective email marketers send quality content at least once a month.
That sounds like an onerous task if you’re starting from scratch every month. But with a pre-designed email template, you invest the time once at the beginning of the process. After that, you need only spend an hour or so every month crafting the content into the template. Then it’s sent seamlessly to your email list to build rapport with your clients.
Invoicing and payments
Finally, automating your payment system is a simple way to make your life easier. You can set up online payments for quicker transactions. And you can avoid the awkwardness of a late payment conversation with automated reminders that are sent for unpaid invoices.
How to begin
So now you know the 5 easy parts of your sales process to automate, how do you actually go about doing it?
The first thing to do is to invest in a quality CRM tool. At Solofusion Ltd we always recommend Keap, for its range of functionality at reasonable costs.
Ideally, you want one tool that handles all of your automation processes. That way, you can continue to automate parts of your business as you gain confidence, and build your client base. Keap will do all of those things for you and you can use more of its functionality as you get more comfortable with it.
Of course, your clients still need personal contact so that their experience of you and your business isn’t robotic. You’ll always need a mixture of automatic tasks and personal engagement. But picking the right parts of your process to automate will boost your productivity, performance and efficiency, helping you win more sales, with less effort.
Please get in touch if you’d like help with your automation. We can guide you through the process, or we can set the whole shebang up for you. Whatever assistance you need, we’ll help you get there and get your processes working seamlessly.