In 2024, Salespeople must be more versatile than ever.
One watchword: performance! 📈
Repetitive and time-consuming tasks, closing sales, generating new leads, demo scheduling, reaching numbers, lead searching... All these aspects are essential for good prospecting.
What if I told you that some processes can be automated? Well, say hello to sales automation! 🤩
Dropcontact provides you with an exhaustive guide to better understand the challenges behind sales automation.
Ready to enter the wonderful world of sales automation and make your business evolve? Well, let's go! 👊🏼
The harsh reality of sales teams 😩
Before exploring the topic of sales automation, a little context is necessary.
The daily activity of sales teams is not only about selling. That is their ultimate purpose, but it requires many actions before and after the sale
You need to keep one thing in mind: your leads evolve quickly. The sales team's technology must keep up with this evolution.
Sales teams face several challenges:
- Find new leads
- Follow up on leads
- Centralize information on the prospect's status
- Make sure that contact data is up-to-date and valid
- Meetings and demo scheduling
- Segmentation and assignment of leads to the team-members
- etc.
The daily activity of the sales teams is therefore highlighted by several management-related tasks. Converting leads into customers is not as easy as it looks and requires lots of time. And as you probably know: time is money.
What is Sales Automation? 👀
Sales automation is about using technology to improve the sales process. Several software allows you to automate a huge part of the sales process and lighten the load on your sales team. They can focus on their main mission: selling.
⚡️ Thanks to sales automation tools, the sales cycle is significantly optimized. Each sales automation tool solves one (or more) problem(s) encountered by sales teams.
What are the benefits of Sales Automation in B2B?
Sales automation tools provide multiple benefits. With these tools, the company, the sales teams, and the sales cycle go to the next level. 🚀
There are several areas for improvement, depending on the type of sales automation software:
👉🏼 Sales teams can manage a higher volume of leads
👉🏼 Sales teams save significant time
👉🏼 Sales teams gain in efficiency and performance
👉🏼 Sales teams get reliable lead information without spending hours researching
👉🏼 Sales teams reach more leads
👉🏼 Therefore, the company increases its turnover
👉🏼 The number of potential mistakes due to repetitive tasks is reduced
And many more.
Which sales tools should you use for sales automation?
Different types of sales automation software exist to optimize the sales process. All of these solutions answer several issues to improve the efficiency of sales teams.
Let's have a look at the main types of sales software you can integrate into your sales cycle and process.
CRM tools
First things first, we introduce you to what a CRM is.
A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management tool. This kind of tool is essential for the general organization of sales teams.
A CRM allows you to store a large volume of data and contacts. Using a CRM tool is essential when your company grows.
In addition, a CRM manages the relationship between the company, prospects, and customers. These allow you to track your leads, centralize information, analyze interactions, and segment your prospects.
Several CRMs exist, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc.
Dropcontact is natively integrated with HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce to update, enrich, verify, and validate your database in real time 💚
Dropcontact works with proprietary algorithms that generate your contact information for you making it a 100% RGPD-compliant solution 💪
With only the first name, last name, website, or even just the Linkedin profile..., the algorithms generate the email addresses and all the useful information of your prospects to boost your CRM and your prospecting 🚀
You only have to connect Dropcontact with one of these 3 CRMs, updating, cleaning, enriching, and verifying your data is done in real-time, continuously, and with each added contact.
👉🏼 Although they offer a number of features, CRMs are not sufficient. CRMs do not let you to automate your whole sales process.
There are several types of sales automation tools that can be integrated directly into your CRM.
Scraping
Scraping tools are used to extract information about prospects.
These scraping tools can be integrated with your CRM and allow you to gather and centralize your leads' data from different sources and platforms.
Most scraping tools extract information from LinkedIn. Thus, you can get information such as:
- Current company
- Position held
- Full name
- Professional background
- Certifications and degrees
- etc.
However, some scraping solutions use other networks. Such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Several scraping solutions are available to automate your sales tasks: CaptainData, Phantombuster, La Growth Machine, Waalaxy, and Surfe. And Dropcontact is integrated with all of them 😉
Cold Email
Email is one of the main aspects of outbound and inbound strategies. Two types of emails can be distinguished:
- Cold-email: sending an ultra-personalized email to a prospect who does not know you (yet!)
- Emailing and email marketing: sent to customers and prospects registered to your content, without personalization. For example a newsletter.
Cold email is part of sales automation while emailing is part of marketing automation.
Cold email (and emailing) tools enable sales teams to send an email to several prospects at once. Many sales automation tools will enable you to personalize the content of your cold emails. Sales teams can reach a lead with an email containing: their name, their first name, their position, their company, etc. This way, the prospect feels like you truly know them.
And for that, we introduce you to the 7 steps to send the perfect cold email!
A tool like customer.io allows you to trigger your emailing campaigns for each new contact identified/added. After that, it's up to you to segment your customers and prospects by category in order to send them customized emails! (For example newsletters about your new products)
Other tools allow you to schedule Cold Email sending sequences, you can for example use lemlist, and QuickMail. And, Dropcontact is integrated with both tools and enriches your contacts, directly in the app 😉
Follow up
Several sales automation solutions are dedicated to lead follow-up management.
Thanks to these tools, the relationship with the leads is maintained. The follow-up management is 100% automated, and the sales teams gain in efficiency and reactivity.
Follow-up tools allow you to create follow-up sequences for your cold emails as well as for your multi-channel prospecting. Sales teams receive alerts to anticipate follow-ups and send the right message, at the right moment.
Many follow-up tools are also cold email or scraping tools.
Meeting scheduling
Meetings with customers and prospects are part of the daily life of sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
Just like data enrichment or emailing, scheduling meetings is a task that can also be automated.
The most popular meetings scheduling tool is Calendly. It gives more autonomy to the prospects. They first fill in a form. Then, they can book a meeting with a salesperson on their own.
This way, customers can access the demo when they're available for that. In addition, the sales team is aware of the challenges their prospect is currently facing. ⚡️
Dropcontact: a data enrichment tool
Enriching a CRM database with new prospects is a time-consuming and risky task when done by hand. However, finding new prospects is essential to continue prospecting and selling.
Dropcontact is an enrichment solution that gathers at least 12 features. The solution is natively integrated with your CRM and works automatically in the background. 🌟
Once integrated into your CRM, Dropcontact:
- Enriches it with new leads
- Updates and enriches the information (First and last name, professional email, professional telephone number, LinkedIn URL, company info, current job, etc.)
- Corrects mistakes (First and last name inversion, deletes wrong characters and emojis)
- Detects and merges all duplicates.
- Extracts all your contacts' email signature information (email, phone, position, address, LinkedIn profile...), from your inbox and the ones of your employees'.
- Company change alert : Dropcontact identifies when a person starts working in a new company 🔥
- Etc.
How to integrate the tools in your CRM?
Native integrations
Some tools integrate natively into your CRM, meaning that you can use them directly in your CRM without using a third-party platform.
Application marketplaces
For example, Pipedrive, HubSpot and Monday offer their own application marketplace where you can directly add the applications you use on a daily basis and connect them to your CRM.
By integrating these applications directly into your CRM, you will:
- Save time (by performing your tasks through a single interface)
- Optimize your tools (use 2 or more tools in 1)
- Become more productive (your CRM becomes more efficient and more personalized)
API integration
Other applications are not natively integrated (yet) in your favorite CRM, however, some of them can be connected via an API key.
The integration principle is the same as for native integrations, but API key integrations can sometimes be less efficient than native integrations (unavailable features, less optimized design, etc.).
On the other hand, this alternative is still advantageous because it optimizes your productivity by bringing all of your tools together.
Build your own workflows
Finally, the last alternative to integrate your productivity tools and applications is to build custom workflows. The main objective of these workflows? Automate your repetitive daily tasks via a super simple process that lasts over time.
Tools like Zapier, make or n8n allows you to create your own workflows in a few minutes, which will save you precious hours of efficiency later on!
These workflows can be modified according to the applications you use, the delays you wish to apply between the different tasks and the trigger element you wish to define. An infinite number of workflow possibilities are possible!
These three automation tools are no-code: no technical skills are required to use them. 💡
And the icing on the cake? Dropcontact is integrated with Make, Zapier and n8n to automate the enrichment and update of all your contacts, directly in your CRM and in all your tools 🌈
