Sales Automation: Essential Tools for the Early Stages of the Sales Cycle

Sales representatives often waste time on tasks that don’t make money, such as time-consuming CRM activity updates. 

Sales leaders rely on precise data for effective management, but they also expect their sales reps to focus on fostering customer relationships. To simplify tasks, sales leaders and sales operations provide sales automation tools to streamline mundane tasks, giving salespeople more time for sales activities.

Understanding Sales Automation 

Sales automation refers to the software solutions designed to streamline various aspects of the selling process, enhancing efficiency and profitability. These tools can help with multiple stages of the buyer’s journey, including lead generation, contact management, and sales performance analysis.

A lot of time and energy goes into your selling process, and it’s important that the majority of that process be spent working with customers to find solutions to their pain points. More specifically, the unique solution your product or service can provide to them.

Sales automation makes that possible. 

It reduces tasks like logging data in your CRM, sending back-and-forth emails to schedule meetings, and researching your prospects. With sales automation software, sales professionals can focus their efforts on driving quality meetings and revenue-generating activities. 

Sales Automation in the Early Stages of the Sales Cycle

The prospecting and discovery phases of sales are often packed with administrative tasks, making them prime candidates for sales automation. By instituting robust sales automation methods during these stages, companies not only save time, but also improve the accuracy of data, crucial for evaluating sales effectiveness. This newfound efficiency enables teams to concentrate on later stages of the sales process, maximizing their potential for closing deals.

Examples of Sales Automation in Prospecting and Outreach

Scheduling Automation

Customer and prospect meetings are a leading indicator of real buyer intent and forecast accuracy.  Scheduling automation makes it easier to customize and share calendar availability with external prospects and customers for easy scheduling across your teams. Here’s how scheduling automation tools can help your sales team increase sales velocity and meet quota goals.

Scheduling Integrations Across Multiple Teams - Scheduling automation tools allow Account Executives (AEs), Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and even Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to book meetings on behalf of team members.  When it’s easier for customers to schedule meetings, an organization has a better chance of converting them. This leads to more people attending meetings and higher chances of closing deals.

Scheduling Integrations from Your Website - Integrating automation that connects qualified website visitors to the appropriate sales representative’s calendar can significantly improve the user experience. By eliminating gaps between lead capture and outreach, your brand can stand out in a competitive landscape. With the right technology, such as Smart Scheduler, you can achieve this while adhering to all your lead management rules.Scheduling Integrations from an Email - Sharing your schedule availability with a simple link in your email makes it convenient for your qualified prospects to book time with you. Additionally, some scheduling automation solutions even allow you to customize your calendar availability when sending personalized meeting links. By making it simple and seamless to send accurate meeting times to your customers and prospects, you’ll likely start to see higher outreach-to-booked-meeting conversion rates.

Whether it’s your individual or team availability, Cirrus Insight has a solution that will automate the process.

Sales Activity Data Sync to CRM

Syncing Email to Salesforce - Logging all activity in Salesforce can be a repetitive task for sales teams. It's a chore that sales leaders often have to repeatedly nudge their teams about, which can be quite exasperating.

A sales activity data sync boosts sales process efficiency and effectiveness. This automated system keeps tabs on email threads, calendars, events, and tasks, seamlessly syncing activities with the relevant CRM records. It's a top tool favored by high-performing sales teams.

A solution such as Salesforce Sync eliminates manual data entry by syncing emails, calendar events, and tasks directly to Salesforce standard and custom objects for standard reporting.

Nesting Salesforce within your Email Inbox - Your sales team lives in their email inboxes. If they are toggling back and forth between their inbox and Salesforce to verify customer data, or even to update contact information that is an easy fix.  With a solution like Salesforce Sidebar, you can bring your customer and pipeline data to your email inbox. 

Mass Email, Sales Cadences and Tracking Buyer Engagement

Sending Personalized Mass Emails - To accelerate the sales process, high-performing organizations implement smart tools to communicate at scale with customers and prospects. Mass Email is an inbox toolset enabling you to use email templates to send personalized emails to a list of contacts.

The result? Higher email-to-meeting conversion rates.

Email Blast gives customer-facing teams access to high-performing email templates and personalization using Salesforce fields. With Email Blast, you can improve your email engagement by 42%. Scheduling Sales Email Sequences - A Sales Cadence is a planned series of interactions between a salesperson and a qualified prospect to advance them through the sales process. It's a scheduled sequence that can take place over a set number of days and across multiple channels. A Sales Cadence automatically triggers personalized emails, calls and calendar reminders.

Tracking Buyer Signals - Tracking Buyer Engagement shows you how customers interact with your business. You can then take quick action based on their behavior. Buyer Signals’ automatic tracking features let you know exactly who’s been reading your emails, clicking your links, visiting your website, and when.

Examples of Sales Automation in Discovery and Qualification

Researching your Prospect 

Top-performing sales reps dedicate time to researching prospects before the initial meeting. Collecting data on the prospect and their company from the CRM, social media, and external databases is time-consuming but essential for a personalized and successful discovery call.

Aggregate your fragmented prospect data from multiple sources into one convenient reference email. Streamline your buyer data research process with Meeting AI (coming soon).

Prioritizing Sales Automation Solutions

Many new software solutions are being released that make big and shiny statements about how much they will improve your pipeline. We’ve all been tempted by them. We’ve all tried some that didn’t live up to their hype. The sales automation solutions in this article are proven foundational tools trusted by leading sales teams. 

When the pressure is on to consolidate the sales tech stack, these are the ones sales teams fight to retain because they are proven and practical. 

As one sales leader told us, “These are the tools that saved my team the critical time they needed to invest in solving the larger challenges in the sales cycle. Time they’ve spent beating the competition with a more personalized sales approach. These are the tools that got used. And, these are the tools that got me complete data in Salesforce so that I could report, forecast and manage effectively.”