If you’re in sales then you know all too well that time management is a critical skill you need to master sooner than later. In fact, not knowing how to make the best use of your time, or implement tools that can help you balance multiple priorities throughout your days and weeks, can be disastrous to your success and sanity. Regardless of your industry, when you think about it, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of sales channels that you can actively pursue at any given time to generate new business and close more deals. From up-selling existing accounts, networking, cold calls, cold emails, and focusing on new verticals, the lists and sub-lists therein are endless.
At the end of the day, there are only so many hours available to create new opportunities while managing your current pipeline. It’s not easy. Knowing that time can be both an asset and an enemy, you need to automate some of your prospecting and follow-ups. By reducing the administrative tasks required in your sales activities, you can spend more time focusing on the relationship objectives. Detectives can’t be out solving crimes when they’re writing-up paperwork and sales reps can’t be generating new opportunities when they’re writing-up proposals. So how can you be doing both at that same time? It’s easy: Sales automation.
When focusing on pipeline activity, sales reps often neglect building relationships through a variety of channels or following-up with older opportunities simply due to priorities. That’s why email automation is an essential tool for every sales rep and their organization. Automating your communication and follow-ups helps you pursue sales opportunities that could have a lower probability of closing while allowing you to concentrate your efforts on the hotter deals.
Here are 5 email automation sequences every sales rep should be using. If you are new to email automation, this is a great place to start.
Website Visitor Follow-ups
Getting leads through your website is great! Having your website drop new leads right into your CRM is even better. But email marketing statistics tell us that only 1 in every 4 website leads are actually ready to buy. In other words, 75% of your website leads are just fishing for information, reviewing options and not ready to commit to a sale. That’s why automating your follow-ups with website visitors is one of the most important follow-ups to automate. In fact, it serves two purposes. First, when you automate the initial contact, you don’t need to worry whether or not they respond. Second, you can continue to automate additional follow-up sequences, adding multiple attempts to reach them, and continuing to stay in front of them until they are ready to buy.
Cold Emails
Sending out cold emails is always a shot in the dark. Often times you might not even know if you’re connecting with the right person. Additionally, you may not even get a response the first, second or even third time or at all. Imagine writing 25 cold emails with 3 follow-ups each? That’s 100 emails! Who would do that? Well, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t cold email, it just means you need to automate the process to truly benefit from it.
Automate your Follow-ups
Every sales professional knows that the easiest sale you can make is to an existing customer. Checking-in with your existing customers from time-to-time is a great way to stimulate sales and improve your customer relationships. It’s also an activity that is often ignored because of time limitations when pipelines are full. But it doesn’t mean they can’t be done! Automating your customer check-ins and follow-ups is another effective way to continuously generate new business.
Birthdays
Building personalized relationships with your customers can ultimately lead to generating more sales and sustaining customer loyalty. Though birthdays only come around once every year, sending your customers an automated personalized birthday greeting is a great way to passively put your brand and services in front of them. Depending on your industry, you might want to schedule sending them an e-card, birthday greeting or include a discount or promotional offer to celebrate their special day. No matter what you do, the point is simple; remember their birthday and they will remember you.
Holiday Greetings
In addition to birthdays, every organization should plan their yearly listing of holidays, and all customer contacts should be included in these sequences. Sales reps should take this opportunity to recognize the importance of a holiday, by wishing their customer the best and participate in the celebrations with a limited time special offer or incentive.
Automating some of the more mundane sales activities will help widen your sales net and keep your funnel filled with opportunities you might not have pursued or generated using manual methods. It’s true that sales is a numbers game, so the more sales channels you can access and the more strategies you can implement, thanks to automation, then the more successful you will be attaining and surpassing your sales goals.
