Say goodbye to monotony in sales. Say hello to automation.

In many organizations, a large portion of a salesperson's time is spent on routine administrative activities rather than on sales or customer interactions. This work often consists of sending follow-up emails, creating task lists, and filling out paperwork.

While each of these routine activities plays a crucial role in your sales process as a whole when carried out manually, they can become a bottleneck to achieving your sales targets. This, in turn, results in process delays and demotivation.

If you are on the lookout for a way to end this obstacle in your sales life, then say "hello" to sales force automation (SFA). This article is meant for those of you who are new to CRM systems, so we'll be discussing each section of the sales cycle and how SFA can help optimize it. This should help you learn more about how you can save time and effort on routine tasks and make sales more efficiently.

Sales force automation refers to a method in which software solutions are used to streamline the execution of a sales cycle. So, let's digress a bit here and explain what exactly the sales cycle is.

What is the sales cycle?

Every business takes its customers through a sales journey from acquisition to conversion. You need to reach out to a list of prospects via marketing efforts, engage with them, make multiple follow-ups, and convert them to paying customers. It doesn't stop there—you should also make efforts to retain your customers and get referrals so that you can generate new business. This entire customer journey starting from acquisition to retention, from the point of view of a business, is known as the sales cycle.

Here is where CRM enters the picture. A CRM has built-in features that help you implement your sales cycle, from lead acquisition to customer retention and beyond. We are going to look at three major areas of the sales cycle where a CRM can help boost your productivity with sales force automation.

• Lead management
  
• Contact management
  
• Pipeline management
  

Lead management

Lead acquisition marks the beginning of the sales cycle. A lead is basically a raw, unqualified prospect which you may have obtained from different sources such as your website, outreach on social media, email campaigns, advertising, events, or even referrals. A lead is anyone who may be interested in your business, but you don't know for sure yet. You need to follow up to find out.

During follow-up, you aren't just asking your leads if they want your product or not—an efficient follow-up process is one in which these leads are educated well about your company's products/services, and any assistance from you in their evaluation phase is readily made available. Whether it's just another phone call, a document, or a personal demo—whatever a lead needs from you to make a decision should be made available. This process of educating your leads and assisting them with information on your business is called lead nurturing.

Overall, lead management is a key area that consists of sourcing leads from different channels, organizing them, and conducting a systematic process of follow-up and nurturing. It forms the starting point of your sales administration, and therefore it's very important that you don't lose out on useful leads or follow-ups.

How does SFA simplify lead management?

Any CRM offers the features you need to generate, track, and nurture leads. Here is a set of recommended steps for lead management automation in Zoho CRM: Create a web form in CRM and publish it on your website. Every entry on the form is now pushed to CRM, so that you don't miss out on a single lead.

• Capture leads from webforms, spreadsheet imports, migration, the lead scanner app, and APIs (from third-party systems).
  
• Set up prompt reminders for followup activities in CRM and nurture your leads.
  
• Update contact information and lead status periodically, so that your database is up to date.
  
• Automate routine emails like lead status updates for management and newsletters sent out to leads.
  

Contact management

As you nurture your leads, you will find that you are gradually narrowing down from a long list of leads to a shorter one that contains people who are much more likely to buy from you than the rest. This shortlisted set of leads will be moved to another column called Contacts.

This phase is about resuming your follow-up activities with these contacts and making sure they buy from you. Different businesses have different processes for contact follow-up. This may contain many routine activities such as sending emails, making phone calls, personal appointments, field visits, and more. Contact management is about lead conversion and making sure you have a complete, clean list of your current contacts and ensuring prompt follow-up.

How does SFA simplify contact management?

Zoho CRM comes with built-in features for lead conversion and contact management. When you identify leads who show a keen interest in purchasing from you, simply convert the lead to a contact. A contact is an existing customer or someone with whom you are pursuing a business deal. Use CRM to directly convert and bulk convert leads into contacts. All your lead information is mapped correctly to contacts by the system. You can further follow up on these contacts, associate business deals, company details update status, attach email/phone conversations contextually, and maintain an exhaustive set of details regarding the contacts in CRM.

Pipeline management

As you shortlist your customers, you may receive business opportunities from them. Each opportunity or "business deal" is said to go through a series of stages until it is successfully won or dropped—and this process of organizing deals and taking them through these stages is called pipeline management.

For example, from about 100 leads, you may have shortlisted 40 contacts who are interested in your business, and 30 of them might give you business opportunities to work on. Your sales team has to follow through and move those 30 deals one by one through the different stages in your pipeline, such as qualification, value proposition, negotiation, contract drafting, and so on, until the deal is closed.

Your sales cycle starts when you secure leads via campaigns, goes on as you nurture them and convert them to contacts, and ends with you securing business deals with them. Sales force automation involves using efficient systems to streamline this sales cycle and automate routine actions in it.

How does SFA simplify pipeline management?

Zoho CRM comes with built-in features for pipeline management.

• Track the status of your deals using the customizable sales pipeline in CRM.
  
• Set up a sales process using Blueprints. Let the system guide your teams and streamline the deal closure process
  
• Set up workflow rules to automate routine sales actions. Use the automation feature in CRM to automatically trigger routine actions, saving you time and effort.
  

With just a one-time setup, you can be relieved of mundane manual tasks. All you have to do is use the existing built-in sales force automation features in your CRM. The system will take care of it for you while you and your sales teams can do what you are meant to do—sell.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Post them in the comments section below. Feel free to share other subjects that you'd like to discuss in the CRM Admin Chat Room in the future. 

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