Future of Sales - Empathy Driven Automated Workflow Software

Workflow automation is a process where mind-numbing, repetitive, tedious, error-prone tasks are automated to reduce human intervention. Automated workflow software transforms manual business processes into a self-run software program. This software reduces manual tasks, saves time, and boosts productivity.

What Departments Use Automated Workflow Software?

• Finance - To manage expenses, claims, invoices, payments, credit control, bank reconciliation, financial reports, financial planning, financial analysis, budgeting, debts, and taxes.
• Legal - To review contracts and client-intake forms.
• Information security - To monitor cyber threats, manage cloud ecosystems, and mitigate security threats.
• Human Resources - To digitize payroll, employee onboarding, training, employee resignation, leave requests, employee performance, clocking time, and attendance.
• Marketing - To run campaigns, promotional emails, surveys, and feedback. Also, for audience segmentation, client behavioral analysis, monitoring websites, and securing leads.
• Purchasing - To streamline vendors, inventory pricing, and capital approvals.
• Operations - To monitor maintenance requests, allocate workforce, manage complaints, and implement product ideas.
• Sales - To identify prospects, manage customer relationships, deal follow-ups, phone calls, customer response, track documents, sign contracts and generate leads.

Benefits of Automated Workflow Software in Sales Departments

The following are the benefits of using this software in sales departments.

1. Save Time

Workflow management software helps optimize redundant tasks. They have a series of workflows with elements such as sales outreach templates, sales campaigns, personalized cold emails, and client response tracking features to ease your job and save time. You can use the predefined features from getting your prospects and managing them to delivering the client's requirements. Automating minimizes your work and saves time. A 2021 survey indicates that 94% of the workforce indulge in repetitive and time-consuming tasks, out of which 65% find that automated software can aid in streamlining their day-to-day activities, saving time, and increasing productivity. Another study indicates a 14% reduction in sales administration time was obtained due to sales automation.

2. No Worry About Mail Follow-ups

It is essential to respond and do regular mail follow-ups to prevent your potential customers from leaving your sales to funnel at any point. You may be involved in sales planning, order management, or post-sales activities and miss out on follow-ups, which can eventually hamper sales. Manually tracking multiple clients is a daunting task and can cause errors. The automated workflow software creates personalized and scheduled follow-ups at every stage of your client's journey. You can sequence automated follow-ups at your convenience, engage with your prospects and nurture leads.

3. Hassle-free Content Creation And Management

Valuable and trustworthy content connects you with potential clients. You should plan content, discuss with the marketing team, promote it on social media handles, conduct audits, and find opportunities to improve. The entire process is time-consuming and involves a lot of effort and bottleneck situations. With automated workflow software, you can collaborate with creators, editors, and stakeholders in one place. You can create multiple contents using a content calendar and perform bulk actions like checking plagiarism and grammar errors in a single go. You can track and manage content progress using workflow status. The workflow in the software also allows you to send content for approval and share it on social media handles.

4. Easy Scheduling of Meetings

Sales personnel market a product/service to many customers. To schedule meetings, your prospect should wait till you reply or call back. If they don't talk to you on time, they become frustrated and choose to quit. Your busy schedule can hamper the relationship with your potential client. If your prospects have access to your calendar, they can schedule meetings by looking at each other's leisure hours. An workflow automation software integrates text messages, web chat, and calendars, enabling you to share meeting links with your prospects at preferred times.

5. Better Reporting

When you deal with multiple clients, you are susceptible to performing error-prone reporting activities. Automated software can minimize human errors in reporting. You also gain insight into sales analytics to alter the sales strategy. Moreover, using RPA (Robotic Process Automation) makes report generation and distribution quick, standardized, and error-free.

Use Cases of How It Helps in the Sales Department

There are multiple use cases all along the sales value chain. The below list of use cases helps to tame your sales process.

1. Sales Strategy And Planning

Automated workflow software helps to gather market intelligence data and identifies the target audience. It gives insight into territory planning and customer profiling and devises suitable sales strategies.

2. Automating Sales Interaction

A bot-driven engagement methodology can enable on-time customer interaction. Automating provides hassle-free and prompt messaging to clients. Your prospects can reach you with just a click.

3. Lead Distribution

When you get multiple leads, there is a possibility that leads go unattended. Due to ineffective lead distribution, you lose them to competitors. You can set up a lead assignment rule through workflow management tool to sort leads depending on age, geography, and source and assign them to different sales reps. You can categorize the type of leads and allocate time. The workflow notifies the sales rep of the lead assignment. Also, the workflow triggers mail notifications with the wait time and informs your leads.

4. Nurturing Opportunities

Prospect journey workflows can automate customer communication and notify the sales team. They help you segment your prospects, study their interest, and trigger emails from time to time, showing how they benefit from the product/feature. Automated nurturing identifies communication gaps that could impair relationships with customers, thus impacting sales. You can get automated engagement reports and plan lead nurturing campaigns.

5. Sales Discount Approval

The sales approval process is time-consuming because you need to ask permission from various stakeholders. You can automate a workflow with different buffers where discount sales get auto-approved below a certain threshold, go to the next approval level, or get rejected.

6. Onboarding Clients

An automated workflow to onboard, collect client information, send contracts, and collect e-signatures leads to error-free and faster process completion.

7. CRM Integration

Automated workflow software provides omnichannel support for emails, calls, and chats with your prospects. CRM integration boosts customer satisfaction and uplifts your sales revenue.

8. Email Scheduling

When you identify a new prospect, you need to send an alert to your management, send supporting documents to clients, invite for meetings, welcome/onboarding emails, etc. The workflow enables automatic email scheduling at every stage, sending out mail alerts and reminders on a timely basis. Additionally, you can schedule predefined emails for onboarding and payment for all your clients.

9. Predefined Proposals/Approvals

You can design a workflow that standardizes proposal templates and send them to your prospects for immediate action. Predefined templates reduce the workaround time as well as standardize decision-making.

10. Processing Sales Orders

Processing orders manually is a daunting task where you need to monitor what goes wrong, where it goes wrong, and how to resolve it. Instead, you can receive order requests through Robotic Process Automation from multiple clients, manage inventory, generate invoices, and track SLA and product reviews with a well-designed workflow. You can expedite sales orders without errors.

Summing It Up

Incorporating automated workflow software into the sales department can make a real impact on time and productivity. A survey suggests that one-third of the sales cycle can be automated. You can standardize sales processes, centralize sales support, use Robotic Process Automation for lead generation, ease sales interaction, do customer profiling, optimize follow-ups, and much more.

If you lost a deal as you missed follow-ups or overlooked a sales issue, workflow automation can identify the missing follow-ups and trigger notifications on critical issues. With automated workflow software, you need not spend hours drafting emails to your prospects or figuring out a good time to schedule meetings. Conducting surveys, taking feedback, and improving customer response are eased with the use of automation.

If you require an App integration software solution, ZapUp by 500apps is your answer. The software offers unlimited workflows for everyday activities and helps you streamline the sales cycle. In addition, you get real-time updates and manage all your sales activity in a single log. This software provides a built-in bot path for your business process automation without real-time coding. This tool allows you to make robust drag-and-drop flows that save time on manual sales process execution and boost your productivity. With automated workflow software, you can exchange data within one application and map it to similar fields in other applications.

While humans will control the future of sales, machines will contribute to providing optimal service to customers; automated workflow software can help salespeople with mundane, error-prone tasks to boost productivity.