Technology is assisting enterprises in every conceivable way for every possible department. Marketing and sales are also benefitting from the pervasive nature of automation technology. Most are familiar with marketing automation that is the process of letting technology do the job that would otherwise have to be done manually.

Marketing automation brings with it speed, agility, efficiency with the upshot of better sales and profits. It is used mainly in managing marketing campaigns, customer data assimilation, segmentation and accurate sales targeting. No current day serious customer relationship management plan would be complete without marketing automation.

Brands regardless of their industry segmentation consider sales as the most challenging proposition. After all whatever you do as a business enterprise is ultimately with the goal of increasing sales. Thus it is imperative that companies get the sales methodology right and technology can be of great assistance here.

How automation can help improve sales productivity?

Devolve non-core activities:

Sales productivity increase is concerned with the process of enhancing sales opportunities while reducing the resources, cost, time and effort expended. Most of the time of salesperson is spent in non-core activities and since time is of prime importance this can be effectively taken care of with the right technology. Tasks that are repetitive, less productive and do not directly add to improving the sales experience can be conveniently assigned to automation software. That way sales people have ample time to concentrate on what they do best – selling.

Make sales work with marketing:

Surprisingly even large enterprises have a tough time synchronizing marketing with sales. Marketing departments work in a bubble without taking the sales in confidence and sales departments take unilateral decisions without keeping marketing in the loop. Automation can help to bridge that gap. This way a common roadmap can be formulated based on shared ideas, insights, metrics in order to achieve common objectives.

Track the right performance indicators

Enterprises spend a lot of time chasing all the wrong metrics. This results in lost opportunities and customers jump ship much to the chagrin of sales departments. There are no straightforward ways to measure sales. But there are enough metrics that give a fair idea of how the sales personnel are faring. This needs marketing automation to put things into perspective. It is possible to track most indicators like length of sales cycle, rate of conversion, number of customer touchpoints needed, qualified leads in pipeline, size of deal, win rate and a lot more. A single dashboard gives all the required information for anybody’s easy perusal.

A data analytics tool

With all that data around it is tough for the sales people to make the right decisions at the right time. Technology can help to predict trends, uncover insights, and dictate the future course of action with a fair degree of success rate. Marketing automation can help to make inferences based on hidden patterns and complex relationships to obtain a conclusive competitive advantage. All this can help the customer-facing personnel to refer to the right set of data and pitch the right customer segment with the right product to make every sales meeting highly productive with the upshot of closing the deal.