Sales is traditionally a time-consuming process. You have to find potential leads, research them, reach out to them, nurture them, and—if everything has gone to plan—make the sale. In sales, as in everything, time is your most valuable resource. We all have the same amount and once you use it you can’t buy any more of it.
Except you can. Kind of.
Sales automation can save you hours of time in the sales process and at the same time scale up your sales far beyond anything you could do manually. By learning to automate sales, you can buy more time, the time you can use to focus on the important, highly personal parts of selling. Or use it to watch more Netflix—I won’t judge.
First of all, if you’re looking for an all-in-one sales automation platform, you should check out Reply. It includes tools for lead generation, email verification, contact management, templates, and powerful outreach automation. Whatever kind of email campaign you have in mind, whether it’s for your inbound or outbound leads, Reply is the sales automation solution you’ve been looking for.
However, there are lots of options out there. If you’re looking for some more specific software, here’s a summary of some of the best automation tools.
Lead Generation
Before you can sell anything you need leads, but finding your ideal leads can be hard work. It’s exactly the kind of task that’s meant to be automated and there’s plenty of software that can help.
If you’re looking for a free option, Leadsfinder is a great place to start. Type in any company domain and Leadsfinder will let you know any emails it has for the site, with zero fuss.
There are also options like ContactCloud that give you access to their database in exchange for connecting your work email and contributing ‘signals that enhance data coverage and accuracy,’ with no price tag attached.
If that doesn’t turn up any results, there are plenty of other tools to pick from. They’re not free, but if you’re looking for phone numbers then ZoomInfo is a good option, while those in the market for international leads should check out Leandro, who have details for companies in over 90 countries.
Email Search and Verification
Once you have your leads, you’ll likely have to find their email address. Getting the specific email for the right person can be trickier than you think, as people grow increasingly protective over their inbox.
Even if you do have an email address, it’s still a good idea to verify it. Contact details can change overnight, and having too many bounces can hurt your sender reputation, meaning your messages are more likely to be marked as spam.
Name2Email is a free Chrome extension that generates potential email addresses based on your lead’s name and company, then makes it easy to find the right one. If that doesn’t work I recommend Hunter, which lets you search for 100 emails each month for free.
There are also tools that’ll give you valuable background information on your leads. Clearbit Connect and Contact Enhance are both options that’ll find details related to an email address, giving you all the information you need on your leads and saving you hours of background research at the same time.
Email Content
Even if you’ve written thousands of emails, there’s nothing quite like a blank page to strike terror in the hearts of salespeople everywhere. As part of our complete list of sales automation tools, we highlighted Drip Scripts as a great solution for getting your email content taken care of.
Simply pick a sequence that matches your situation, add your custom variables, then download the finished email. It’s a free and simple way to get tried and tested email content for your campaign.
If you’re happy with the content, it’s still worth using a tool like Grammarly or Hemmingway to check your work. A grammatical error is easy to miss, even when you reread your work, but these tools will help you avoid any embarrassing mistakes or overly complex language that might hurt your chances of a sale.
Finally, make sure that all your hard work doesn’t end up in the junk folder. EmailAnalyzer checks the spamminess of your email against a range of criteria, for free, without any registration or sign-up required. It’s a great way to make sure there are no unpleasant surprises before you hit send.
Helpful Extras
While not specifically sales automation tools, there are a few other tools out there that every salesperson should be familiar with.
One of my personal favorites is Zapier. Every salesperson I know has a stack of software they use in their daily work and, while some of them have native integrations, most of the time you’re stuck copying and pasting information from one app to another. Zapier can end all that, making it easy to create automation between over a thousand different apps.
For example, you could set up an integration automatically sending you a DM on Slack everytime you receive a PayPal payment, or add contacts to Reply whenever a new row is added to a specified Google Sheet.
It’s so easy to use, your biggest problem will be not getting carried away and spending all your time thinking up new integrations.
Another task that traditionally involves way too many back-and-forth emails is arranging meetings. Solutions like Calendly work well by letting your leads pick from slots you’ve already marked as available.
However, Ahoy.ai offers an interesting alternative, promising to schedule your meetings with just one email. It doesn’t even require you to sign up; all you have to do is cc the Ahoy.ai in an email requesting a meeting and it’ll do the rest.
You may not be able to buy time but you can certainly save it with these sales automation tools. By finding software that automates the frequent, repetitive tasks in the sales process, you can get back to focusing on the work that really matters.
Analyze market stock. Blurred background,film effect.– stock image
