It’s much easier to influence a regular Joe to make an impulse buy online than convince a business that you’re the right supplier for them. That’s why B2B companies have it much harder, and their sales processes tend to be longer and more complex.
However, there are now various tools that can help you automate many activities and focus your human resources elsewhere. In fact, about a third of all sales-related tasks can be automated, so why not do it?
Sales automation can help your business thrive, and here’s how.
Robust Analytics and Reporting
We live in the information age, and data is everything. If you start using an automation platform, it will allow you to analyze vast amounts of data very quickly and make decisions based on cold, hard facts. In a way, sales used to be all about intuition and talent, but now, your sales team can rely on data instead of some elusive gut feeling.
You can also follow your sales team’s metrics to see how they’re doing and what they should work on. Analytics and reporting tools can help you identify their individual strengths and pair the right agent with the right client.
What’s more, by using pipeline management tools, you can get notified if a great opportunity arises anywhere down the pipeline so that your team can act on it swiftly. You can also get alerted as soon as a problem emerges and solve it straight away.
Connecting Sales and Marketing for Optimum Results
An effective sales funnel starts with a great marketing job. This step is essential since B2B companies don’t have to reach an extremely wide crowd as they often collaborate only with a few clients at a time. In order to attract the right clients, you just need to reach the right audience.
Thanks to AI, if we want to stand out in search results, we just need to focus on creating the best user experience for our target audience. Marketing automation tools can help companies do just that. They can analyze their brand and specific needs to tailor the marketing message and personalize it just for them.
Digital marketing is a complex endeavor that needs to combine many elements — lead generation and nurturing, social media, email campaigns, etc. — to reach the target audience and keep the existing clients happy. Luckily, all these things can be automated.
Smoother Customer Journey With Chatbots
Chatbots are a great solution for any business since they have become extremely advanced and can take on a great number of increasingly complex processes. They can interact with a customer in the natural human language and provide assistance along the sales funnel.
A good example is an insurance bot, which can streamline an entire customer journey, from providing a precise and carefully calculated quote to managing onboarding, claims, renewals, etc. It’s a practical self-service solution that is always at the client’s disposal.
Sales teams can benefit from these AI-based chatbots because they can take on a lot of work and free agents up to deal with the most important tasks. What’s more, clients will love them because they save a lot of time, allow them to access any information quickly, and can assist them with a lot of issues.
Another great thing about chatbots is the fact that you can use them across many different channels and thus allow your clients to reach out in various ways.
Smarter Operational Decisions
B2B businesses often have to deal with bulk orders. What’s more, they have repeat bulk orders, and it’s essential that they know what to expect. That’s where demand forecasting software comes into play, helping businesses, especially large suppliers, predict the future demand based on a variety of factors.
This type of software analyzes current orders and order histories, as well as market trends and other factors to help you plan for the future and manage your inventory and production with great success.
Demand planning relies on predictive analytics to best prepare you for upcoming client demands and anticipate their needs. With greater accuracy in prediction, you’ll save a lot of time and money and better cater to your clients.
Automation Can Help You Scale Your Business
Since automation allows you to streamline your sales processes and frees your team of administrative tasks in favor of innovation and creativity, you get the opportunity to scale your business.
When your sales agents don’t have to spend hours on creating proposals or prospecting, they can do more in less time. An integrated system where all the client data is stored and interconnected makes all the relevant info available to them whenever they need it. They don’t have to analyze it themselves.
They can also utilize automated scheduling platforms for booking client meetings to achieve efficiency and make sure they never double-book or run into a similar problem.
So with sales automation tools, you can take your company to a whole new level and scale your business with ease.
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