Time-draining manual sales processes are often the norm, but in the challenging business climate, you can’t afford to have your recovery slowed down by inefficient processes.

When it comes to sales, it can be hard to quantify how much time is being spent on manual activities, such as inputting contacts into your CRM, speculative emailing, and cold calling.

Manual processes create friction in the selling journey. The inefficient nature of manual sales means you could be squeezing much more out of your sales efforts. but there’s a better way of doing things- automating your sales efforts can be the best way to maximise your sales performance.

Here’s why manual sales processes slow you down:

Slow lead follow-up

If your team have to trudge through your data to call leads, follow-up can be slow. Getting the timing of a follow-up call or email is critical, and often leads are lost because follow-up is slow. When your team don’t have the information they need being passed to them in a seamless way, things fall through the cracks.

Calling leads alphabetically

With no way to determine the quality of leads, your sales team are left calling leads in alphabetical order. This is a common sales practice, but it’s not the best way of doing things. This method means that a perfect fit lead for your business might be the last to receive a call, by which time they have disengaged. Doing things manually make it impossible to prioritise leads by best fit and can lose you valuable customers.

Adding contacts to CRM manually

Precious time is often spend manually adding all new leads into your CRM- this absorbs your sales team’s time. If your team need to input data every time a new contact is made, contacted, or converted, its likely time is being lost where it could be spent elsewhere. With agility and timing so crucial in sales, your business can’t afford to be wasting time with manual data input.

Why you need automation

The short answer? Automation can solve these problems. Automation streamlines your sales by taking away the pain of manual processes. Get data automatically inputted and updated when a contact is made to save your team bags of time.

Using automation, you can score leads based on how well they fit your business, meaning you can prioritise the order in which you contact leads, rather than trudging through your list from A-Z. This will help you get your timing right and mitigate losing leads because of time taken to contact them.

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