We’re all busy, right? As sales and marketing professionals, wouldn’t it be nice to have dedicated assistants to help you with the routine tasks so you could focus on the more important ones? What if as a small business, you could operate more like a large enterprise? Well, good news, with automation, you can!  And, more importantly, there are better, more cost-effective sales and marketing automation tools that can help.

Automation sometimes helps sales teams in a little bit of a different way than they do marketing teams, but both can benefit significantly. For both, increasing revenue is one of the main goals. According to SocialMediaToday, 47% of marketers surveyed find increasing sales revenue to be the most important strategic goal of automation. Of course, in order to increase revenue, you’ll need to have more leads. In order to have more leads, you need to have more time to get more leads…OR you can use sales and automation tools to help.

Below are some of the most effective ways that you will be able to handle more leads with automation.

Tips to Handle More Leads with Automation

Tip 1: Fill Your Funnel

It takes a lot of time and effort out of both sales and marketing teams to fill up their sales funnels enough to generate steady qualified leads. Imagine, if you will, the ability to fill that funnel with personalized email marketing, newsletters, sales calls, web popups, etc. without having to lift a finger.

Sales and marketing automation can do these tasks for you, probably better than you due to its accuracy and ability to avoid human error. The more leads you collect in your funnel, the higher amount of qualified leads, ultimately resulting in more sales.

Tip 2: Qualify Your Leads

Of course, in order to qualify your leads from your full sales funnel, you’ll have more work to do, right?  Not necessarily.  This is another way automation can help sales and marketing teams.  For instance, your marketing team can send marketing material that is appropriate for each stage of qualification and for each type of buyer persona.

Sales teams can subsequently work their magic with automated lead scoring and the ability to segment contacts automatically.

Tip 3: Segment and Nurture Your Leads

Your teams’ automation capabilities don’t end there.  Lead segmentation can be based on email opens, link clicks, web browsing activity, custom tags, and more. Segmenting will allow you to target your leads more effectively based on whether they are still just browsing, but not yet interested in purchasing, considering purchasing, or ready to make a decision. Neil Patel explains the benefit of automation more succinctly. He states that, as a result of automation, sales teams are able to supercharge lead nurturing because of the ability to track and access so much more data, allowing you to segment, target, and speed-up the path through the sales funnel.

Once your customers’ interest level is understood, you can nurture your leads more effectively to get them to the next level. Automation can also help with lead nurturing because of your ability to personalize your emails in each of your campaigns.  Plus, with full knowledge of where they are in the buyer’s journey, you’ll be able to tailor your messages for their particular interest level.  You can also time your emails so they are spaced out appropriately without having to be actively engaged in the process.  That way, you won’t annoy anyone with too many emails, but you won’t lose their interest with too few either.

Tip 4: Increase Your Productivity

Of course, with all of the automated sales and marketing tasks, your teams should show marked improvement in their productivity. When you implement your sales and marketing automation tools, ensure your teams won’t be required to do the tasks that can be done for them. With all of the leads being collected, vetted, and nurtured, your sales teams can focus on the tasks that require a human touch, especially as you get to closing your sale.

Tip 5: Control Your Marketing

With marketing automation tools, you can control your marketing much easier.  Set your automation tools up to ensure your marketing team can see all of the data that your sales team can also access. Your marketing team will be able to view each lead and determine how the various channels are working in terms of reaching them and getting them to engage. From there, you can make adjustments and continuously improve your strategy for reaching leads and getting them to the next level of interest.

Tip 6: Focus on Your ROI

When using automation, consider which processes bog your teams down on a daily basis and start with automating those. Give your teams the ability to work on closing sales while automation sets up their leads for success. Sales and marketing automation tools are extremely cost-effective, if you choose the right ones. With the ability to do considerably more with fewer resources in shorter amounts of time, you’re already ahead of the game. The fact that you will not have to spend a great deal of money will be the factor that allows you to increase your ROI.

Tip 7: Do More in One Place

Handling more leads is ultimately about being able to do all of the sales and marketing automation tasks in one place. Instead of hand-offs occurring between sales and marketing, handling all tasks, leads, and customers in one place will speed up processes and allow you to handle the maximum number of leads possible for your organization.

Sales and Marketing Automation Tools

The key to all of it, of course, are the sales and marketing tools that make it happen. Though there are several options on the market, choosing an all-in-one customer tool such as Agile CRM will tick all of the boxes on your list of requirements.

Agile CRM includes the contact, task, and project management solutions your teams need to begin automating their processes and handling substantially more leads.  It also includes the ability to track deals, score leads, and receive real-time alerts.

Agile CRM provides marketing automation such as web popups, email newsletters, autoresponders, personalized campaigns for email and social media channels, plus contact segmentation based on several criteria. Agile CRM also has deep analytics for sales and marketing teams so you know you are on track and your teams have all of the resources they need to do their jobs to gain more leads and handle them effectively.

Plus, as part of the 500apps Infinity Suite of productivity apps, you will have numerous options to help your organization do more with less.

Conclusion

According to Forbes, it’s recommended to tackle one process at a time when automating your sales and marketing in order to avoid frustration. This may be a good idea for some organizations. However, we found that using all-in-one sales and marketing automation tools like Agile CRM, you will be able to hit the ground running since all of your data is in one place.

It’s up to you how you decide to tackle your automation. Using the tips outlined here, you can be sure that your sales and marketing automation will help you handle more leads, resulting in higher revenue.