Sales Automation

How to be as efficient and effective with your selling to boost revenue and margins

By Andrea Hill

(Originally Published by MJSA October 2023)

B2B selling has changed. It’s tempting to look at the pandemic and its trade disruptions and think, “the pandemic changed everything,” but B2B selling was changing long before we retreated to our dining-room offices.

Before the pandemic, B2B businesses saw dramatic increases in the costs of marketing relative to sales, trade shows were struggling, and the era of the on-the-road salesperson had largely come to an end. The pandemic threw in new complexities, but change was already here. So, if you’re wondering where your 2024 sales growth will come from, you’re not alone. Luckily, there is a clear path forward.

Sales Roadmaps with Automation

While most industries were trying to make the old ways work, the tech industry perfected new methods for B2B selling with sales pipelines, playbooks, and automations. These sales systems make the sales process more consistent, higher quality, and with more predictable outcomes, in the same way that processes and workflows do for your production. You wouldn’t rely on memory or personal work style to manage your manufacturing processes, and you shouldn’t rely on them to manage your sales either.

If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) system with sales and marketing automation features, you have the basic tools necessary to sell this way—and if you don’t, you need one because the future is here. This involves targeting the accounts that you would like to sell (or sell more) to, and using manageable, measurable processes to guide your sales team’s progress.

If you’ve ever wondered why you could figure out precisely what is going on in production but can’t get a straight answer in sales, here is your solution. This selling method starts by pinpointing leads, and then guides your sales team through the work of turning those leads into loyal clients by using templates, prompts, and playbooks. There are talking point guidelines for calls, e-mail templates for pre-call and post-call communications, sales support materials available at the click of a button, automated tasks, progress tracking, and measurements. Sales automation builds in processes to ensure you follow up with clients and bring them back to buy again.

For each sales initiative or program, you put together a plan (we call them roadmaps) and playbooks to support it. New product release? Roadmap. Upcoming trade event? Roadmap. A series of webinars to educate your customers? Roadmap. Customer reactivation efforts? Roadmap. Each roadmap is pre-planned and pre-written, including the content for talking point guides, e-mails, case studies, and other support materials. Once written, you plug all your roadmaps into your CRM as playbooks.

Using your sales roadmap system, your salespeople will be more focused than ever before. As the head of sales, you gain a full view into the current state of your sales pipeline. You will:

• Know the number of customers at each stage of the pipeline.
• Forecast cash flow based on the potential value and conversion likelihood at each stage of the pipeline.
• See if customers are being moved along the pipeline proactively by viewing details such as “last contacted” and “next action planned.”

Because of inflation, 2023 has seen a lot of talk of tightening belts and looking inside for increased profit margins. But 2024 is coming, and it’s time to sell. Put in the effort to be as efficient and effective with your selling as you are with your production management to see both your revenue and margins increase.