POV: You’re feeling frazzled trying to bring in new clients.
It could be the sheer number of calls you place and emails you send every day. It could be the worry of keeping up with your current clients’ needs. It could be the stress of wearing many hats as a service professional.
But what if the root cause of your tension isn’t what you have on your plate but how you’re completing all of this work? Reaching out to prospects will feel overwhelming if it’s only piling on more manual tasks.
Even though the act of selling requires individual conversations and personalized attention, parts of the process can — and should — be automated. Let’s talk about how to replace your current habits with new, more efficient workflows.
Why Automate Sales Tasks?
To establish real connections with prospects and build relationships that last, you need the time and energy to interact genuinely and frequently with each new contact. Unfortunately, all of the small but important tasks you do behind the scenes can keep you from engaging in outreach in a way that closes deals.
Your pipeline is your business’s life source, and neglecting it can be costly.
When you tighten up your sales process by reducing redundant work, you up your chances of reaping the full value of every sale. Automation is one accessible way to make your internal operations support how you show up with future clients.
Trying to improve sales while working with a limited team? Our latest guide can help.
Powerful Examples of Sales Automation
It can be hard to concretely connect the idea of greater sales efficiency with what it looks like in practice. We’ll cover some specific examples of different types of helpful automations for sales.
In Accelo, there are built-in automations, status progression actions and trigger automations. The latter is what we’ll focus on here. A trigger can be set up to carry out an action or series of actions based on conditions, filters or rules.
For sales, some of the best ways to use trigger automations are for internal notifications, prospect detail updates or follow-up. Here are some scenarios in which you might use a trigger to save time and effort:
A potential client submits an information request via your website form. It comes through Accelo’s request inbox and the platform checks to see if the associated company is in your CRM. If not, it creates a new record and sale and assigns the sale to the person you’ve designated.
When a new sale has been created as above but your team is out of the office, Accelo steps in. You tell it to wait 30 minutes to check if there has been any outbound communication or status change. If not, Accelo sends a templated email thanking the person for reaching out and explaining when they can expect to hear from you.
After sending a quote, you set a prospect’s status to "Quote Sent.” If it's been in that status for more than three days with no inbound activity, Accelo sends a check-in email from your sales rep, then sends a second one if there’s been no reply after seven days.
You’ve received no communication from a prospect for 31 days. Accelo automatically updates the contact’s status to "cold."
All of the above are only examples of the many possible combinations of triggers you can create. Statuses are completely customizable, as are time frames and associated actions.
BONUS: You can set triggers to run at all times or only at certain hours or on certain days of the week.
As you can see, automating parts of your communication, internal updates and email cadence can relieve your team of the pressure that comes with keeping up with active leads. Automation can also help you determine when there’s an opportunity to upsell existing clients.
3 Tips for Making the Transition to Sales Automation
Establish detailed workflows. You and your team may do things a certain way out of habit. Perhaps you’re unconsciously entering a prospect’s details in two systems, spending more time than you think on email follow-ups or manually creating new quotes. Putting each process in writing can help you see exactly where you spend most of your time — and which steps are ripe for an efficiency boost.
Vet software platforms that aren’t limited to sales. The real value of automating one part of your client journey comes when you can pass the benefits on to another stage. For example, you can move seamlessly from sales to project management in Accelo using the quote-to-project conversion feature.
Talk to your team early and often to get them ready for new software. Some people may be resistant to the idea of automation and wary of it replacing their jobs. If you have a dedicated sales professional or team, reassure them that the platform you’ve found will make their day-to-day simpler and increase their chances of success with new leads.
Success Stories Featuring Accelo’s Sales Product
Many service professionals we know have applied the power of automation to the sales and quoting process with profound results. Here’s how four firms that use Accelo did it:
Comit Developers, a leading web firm in Louisiana, found they were engaging in a lot of double entry before adopting Accelo because they were logging sales and projects in separate platforms. Now, they can track opportunities in the same place where they keep track of client requests, tasks and more.
DH Glabe & Associates, a team of engineers in Colorado, used to struggle with the quoting process. With detailed reports driving their estimates and templates helping them quote faster — not to mention Accelo’s one-click quote-to-project conversion — they onboard new clients in far less time.
The Genesis Group, a software development company in Texas, set up triggers for ticketing to alert them to clients that were primed for an upsell. Sales and customer service worked together to find new opportunities for expansion.
Tegrita, a marketing technology consultancy in Toronto, didn’t have a way to visualize their entire sales pipeline — until they adopted Accelo. Thanks to what their CRO calls “the best CRM view of all time,” the firm’s leadership can check the status of any lead at any time.
Your Chance To Become a Well-Oiled Sales Machine
Your business could follow in the footsteps of these Accelo users. If you’re curious about how to simplify quoting, outreach and all the other key components of sales, it’s time for a new approach.
Accelo's blog posts are brought to you by a team of experienced subject matter experts. With a deep understanding of client and sales management, resource planning, and project efficiency, we aim to share our knowledge and practical insights to help you navigate the complexities of operating a service based business.
Our goal is to provide you with expert-driven content, up-to-date information, and actionable advice on Professional Services Automation, designed to help your business succeed.
