Marketing and sales professionals have a lot weighing on their mind: economic uncertainty, finding qualified candidates amidst the #greatreshuffle, new waves of Covid-19, and as always, increasing revenue.
Yet in spite of these challenges, we continue to thrive. So, how is it possible to keep meeting ambitious sales and revenue goals with all of these obstacles in the way?
In short: the best sales and marketing teams rely on automation.
That’s right, bring out the bots! (Not really.) But smart automation technology IS the future.
And as we know, it’s vitally important to future-proof your teams to be adaptive, nimble, and prepared for whatever might come their way – so you can keep accelerating sales and crushing those targets.
One of the most effective ways to press down on the sales gas pedal is to pair tried and true sales techniques with automation. Let’s take a look at how automating speed to lead can reward you with fewer lost prospects and greater revenue gains.
What is Speed to Lead?
Speed to lead is an important sales metric that measures how quickly a new lead is contacted by your company. Research suggests that following up with an interested prospect within 10 minutes significantly increases your chance of a sale.
If it takes your sales team more than 10 minutes to reach out to a prospect who expressed interest in your product – let’s say by requesting more information on your website – it’s more likely that person has already moved on, forgotten about your product, or shopped around and found a competitor.
Why Speed to Lead Automation is Important
Human error is inevitable. You see a lead come through, you mean to follow up, and another pressing task distracts you. It’s virtually impossible to manually reach out to every lead that comes through, especially when your business is scaling.
Enter: Automated speed to lead workflows.
Keep reading for 3 steps you can take to accelerate your sales and ensure your speed to lead is as fast as possible, so no new leads fall through the cracks!
Step 1: Rely on Automation Software
We already said automation is the future – but if we haven’t convinced you why you should be using automation in your contact center yet, here are several things you can let automation software do for your sales team to free up hours of your reps’ time each day:
- Send follow-up SMS messages
- Send follow-up emails
- Schedule an outgoing call from a sales rep
- Record inbound and outbound calls in the CRM
A sales dialer software like Kixie can automatically call and send a text message to a prospect *seconds* after they submit their information. This saves your sales team valuable time. Plus, when integrated with a CRM like HubSpot, you’ll never have to remember if you’ve followed up, when you should reach out again, OR if you remembered to log that call. It’s all automatically triggered from your CRM after you add a prospect to a workflow. And it will never get sleepy and forget to trigger a message after a long lunch.
Let’s take a look at an example to give this speed to lead automation software some context.
Imagine you’re working in marketing for a booming e-commerce business: Taylor’s Tees. You sell some pretty awesome graphic tees, and rely on Shopify to track your orders.
Let’s say 20% of your website traffic each month visits your site, but abandons their carts after putting in some information (like their email address and phone number) – or hey, maybe they’re a recurring customer with an account so you already have their details.
With automation software, you can trigger follow-up emails to remind potential customers that they’ve left something in their cart. You can also send them a text message with a coupon code, encouraging them to complete their purchase. (After all, 2022 research from ZipWhip found that 64% of customers think businesses should text them more often!)
Or, maybe you really want to get in touch with them ASAP, so you decide to call them 10 minutes after they abandon their cart by setting up a phone call to be triggered from an available agent at that time.
Combined with a focused sales funnel, automation software can help fill the gaps where your team may have previously been spending too much time (or didn’t have time for in the first place!) so Taylor’s Tees can reach its revenue goals this year!
Step 2: Integrate Your CRM
Do you really want to accelerate your sales? Yes? Then having reliable data is key. And what better place to store all of your customer data than in HubSpot – HubSpot’s user-friendly design and in-depth reporting capabilities allow sales and marketing teams to drill down on the parts of their business that need more attention… AND to celebrate big wins.
Having a central source of truth, whether that be in HubSpot or another CRM, is essential to growing your business. Plus, integrating your sales engagement platform with your CRM makes growth and speed to lead even easier.
Let’s take the example of Taylor’s Tees from above. By connecting your CRM with Shopify and your sales dialer, you can easily set up that auto-SMS follow-up or an entire outreach sequence – and have every point of contact automatically logged in the contact record of your CRM.
Step 3: Use a Sales Follow-Up Cadence
The sale doesn’t usually happen on the first try or after the first conversation, even if you’ve used automation software to have lightning quick speed to lead, and are tracking all your touchpoints in your CRM.
On average, it takes 5 follow-up attempts to close the deal (source: IRC Sales Solutions). Because, let’s be honest: the first two times you reached out, the person you were trying to reach probably ignored you. The third and fourth times were at a bad time, and the fifth time they were finally ready to buy – and you happened to call – bingo!
You can automate some or all of the follow-up attempts you make with new leads by entering them into customizable workflows on HubSpot.
The Future of Sales is Automated
To recap: if you want to stay ahead of the sales curve and prepare your business for the future, it’s time to start automating your sales process.
We recommend focusing on increasing your speed to lead with awesome tools like HubSpot and Kixie (did we mention we’re a HubSpot platinum solutions partner?) and being intentional about building your sales funnel and follow-up schedule.
To all our fellow sales and marketing professionals out there, let’s keep pushing!
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