Sales Automation: How to Boost Productivity Without Burnout

No one gets into sales because they love filling out spreadsheets or logging every little task. That’s where sales automation comes in. It takes care of all those repetitive (but important) admin chores, so your team can stay laser-focused on what they do best: closing deals. And it’s not just about basic stuff like entering contact info. These tools can automatically update prospect profiles based on what they do on your site, follow up depending on how they interact with your emails or texts, and even whip up personalized messages for your leads.

Some sales tools only work with the information that’s neatly logged into your CRM — like names, dates, and deal sizes. But what about the quick hallway chat between reps or that months-long group thread where a new sales process got hashed out? Traditional tools miss that kind of unstructured info, but smarter AI sales tools can actually make sense of those messy, real-world convos. They can sift through mountains of data — both the structured and the not-so-structured — to surface insights and keep your team in the loop on what matters most.

Read on to learn more about sales automation, common use cases, and how you and your team can get the most out of it.

What is sales automation, and what are its benefits?

Sales automation is all about handing off the low-effort, time-consuming tasks to tools that can handle them — so your reps can stay focused on actually selling. It’s not just a win for reps, either. For sales leaders, business workflow automation can make it way easier to spot coaching moments and keep things moving faster, and an integrated work operating system can bring sales automation into the environments you already use. Many CRMs already have this kind of automation baked into their higher-tier plans, so you can put all that data your team’s already entering to better use without adding extra steps.

When you tap into the benefits of sales automation, you can:

Free up sales reps to focus on selling

Salesforce research shows that sales reps only spend 30% of their week actively selling. They’re often burdened with updating deals, manually prospecting, or searching for information. But when background systems driven by AI sales technology handle routine tasks like moving leads through a pipeline and capturing important conversations with natural language summaries, it changes what sales reps can achieve.

Lower costs to support sales

You need human sales reps to close deals, but sales automation amplifies their power without the expense of hiring additional staff. With automatic appointment scheduling, meeting transcription, note-taking, prospecting, and other tools, your reps can focus on making calls and engaging high-value leads.

Improve prospect interactions

Even the most organized salesperson has tasks that can slip through the cracks. A properly configured sales automation system ensures leads and existing customers get swift, personalized responses. Whether it’s a chatbot that helps resolve issues or provides auto-generated follow-up reminders, potential buyers can have a better experience with reps who use sales automation.

Onboard reps and transfer accounts faster

Training new hires and transferring accounts from one rep to another can require digging for documents and details. Sales automation can provide playbooks for them to follow and clear tasks automatically assigned to them in their CRM. It can also surface relevant files, conversations, and stats right on cue. This means new reps can spend less time asking questions and ramp up their productivity sooner.

Make data more accurate and accessible

If the sales and customer data you use is unreliable or locked in silos, it can make you less effective. Sales automation brings everything together, making it easy to pull insights from conversations and meetings, and suggest actions that can be performed without leaving your work operating system.

Understand your customers better

You can get a much clearer picture of what your leads need — and where they are in their buying journey — by tracking their activity across your website, apps, and even social media. All of that can be pulled together into a timeline that shows exactly how they’ve been engaging with your brand. With sales automation, you can stay one step ahead, ready with resources that are easy to grab and tied directly to the pages they’ve visited or the links they’ve clicked.

Convert more leads

Selling all comes down to closing deals. Automation helps boost your conversion rate by making sure customers get the right info at the right time — when they’re most likely to take action. Automation also helps sales reps be prepared with pertinent insights as they talk with customers. 

Common uses and examples of sales automation

Sales automation works seamlessly in the background, helping salespeople boost partner sales and keep leads warm. Here are some other use cases that illustrate the benefits of sales automation for sales teams:

Automate lead capture and qualification

Sales automation tools directly input leads into your CRM system and categorize them based on qualities such as the likelihood of buying. You can set up lead scoring tools to assign a value to each trackable action they take. When they score well enough, they’ll qualify to receive individual attention from reps.

• Example: A potential buyer visits your website, views your main product and pricing pages, and completes a form to access an ROI calculator for the product. The information they provide in that form, along with their site activity to date, are logged into your CRM. After clicking the link in the welcome email that came soon after completing that form, they are tagged as a qualified lead. The sales automation system assigns this lead to a sales rep in the appropriate territory and designates tasks, including “call lead.” This rep has all the customer’s basic contact information, plus insights into their interests and intent based on their activity.

Streamline lead nurturing with automated workflows

Sales automation platforms make it easy to keep leads engaged in a way that’s tailored to them. Simply program emails, SMS texts, and chatbot interactions to nurture leads until it indicates they’re ready to take the next step with one of your team members.

• Example: After filling out a form, a lead receives a welcome email but hasn’t shown enough interest to be qualified yet. At planned (and automated) intervals, customized emails based on the pages the lead has visited are sent, each providing an opportunity to request a meeting with a sales rep.

Boost sales productivity with task automation

Sales automation software removes the need for sales reps to assign tasks themselves or have a project manager do it for them. Tasks can be set to auto-generate in response to triggers such as the creation or qualification of a lead, changes in deal status, and more, ensuring nothing is missed.

• Example: An opportunity moves from the pitch stage to the negotiation stage in your pipeline. The sales automation solution creates tasks with due dates set a few days out, including “Follow up with lead” and “Draft SOW.” A task called “Review and approve SOW” is assigned to the rep’s manager for a day after that. The system also pulls up the latest SOW template and suggests customizations based on the lead’s contact profile so the rep can start immediately.

Keep reps on task with in-context assistance

Sales automation pulls information from multiple sources and puts it right in front of your salespeople. While working from a shared workspace like Slack, integrations with CRMs like Salesforce can pull relevant deal and pipeline information. Slack sales solutions have two-way syncing that ensures actions taken in one platform will update in the other platform.

• Example: When a cloud contract is signed, a deal moves from the negotiation stage to the won stage. Then an AI agent starts a new Slack chat with the deal owner to suggest follow-up actions and provide files, links, and tasks in one app.

Research prospects and customers quickly

Sales automation often features research capabilities. This includes the ability to scrape social media sites and news publications to compile useful information, like posts with keywords relevant to your industry or companies you’re targeting. For existing leads and customers, some sales automation tools use generative AI to help create personalized pitch decks, pulling from the files and resources your team has already shared.

• Example: You receive a notification from your sales automation platform about a LinkedIn post in which an executive announces they’re hiring at a targeted company. The tool suggests right in your work operating system that you reach out, and generates a draft message you can send. It also surfaces a white paper your company produced about that executive’s industry.

 

How to plan your sales automation strategy

Carefully evaluate how you implement sales automation solutions, whether you’re updating an old system or starting from scratch. Follow these steps to start:

Identify sales processes for automation

Review everything that your sales team does and how. This is a great opportunity to get things on paper if you don’t yet have an existing process documentation. Consider these types of processes:

• Prospecting
• Lead capture
• Lead scoring
• Lead nurture and email communication
• Lead qualification
• Appointment booking
• Sales document drafting, sharing, discovery, and management
• Meeting recording and note-taking
• Follow-up and finalization
• Contract creation and management
• Pipeline management
• Reporting

Set goals and determine KPIs

You’re automating to try and achieve previously all those mentioned benefits, so it’s important to set goals related to those. Your key performance indicators (KPIs) might include:

• Pipeline value
• Average time to close
• Win/loss rate
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Sales rep churn rate
• Self-reported time spent selling versus admin tasks

Choose sales automation tools and software

With your processes and goals set, build a tech stack supporting sales automation throughout your organization. Here are some to consider:

• CRM: A CRM can be as simple as a spreadsheet with all your customers listed, but most purpose-built CRMs have built-in sales automation capabilities. Check if the one you’re using supports these features and how scalable the CRM is for your goals. At a minimum, these tools should have lead generation and management capabilities.
• Email automation tools: One of the biggest time-savers is automating the lengthy email communications needed to engage buyers until they’re ready to speak with one of your reps. From prospecting to sending personalized lead nurture emails and sorting leads by their interests and actions, everything is automated, allowing your team to focus on buyers who are genuinely interested.
• Work operating systems: A work OS includes tools like team chats, document management, meeting and collaboration software, and company knowledge bases, among others. Many of these systems, like Slack, support sales operations by enabling reps and leaders to access CRM data, company files, and institutional knowledge all in one place. Deeper integrations can even allow reps to access group chats or edit CRM data on the fly, without having to open the standalone CRM app.

 

Advanced sales automation techniques

Sales automation makes processes more efficient for internal operations and customer-facing scenarios. Go beyond the basics with these advanced techniques:

Personalize customer interactions with AI

Sales automation’s customer-facing AI chatbots tie directly into the backend. Programmable through low- and no-code interfaces, they allow sales leaders and reps to create optimal conversational flows. Using generative AI with strict guard rails, such as Slack AI, the chatbots can understand natural language conversations and perform tasks like providing resource links and booking appointments. Every action taken by the customer or lead is logged so the reps who interact with them can review their needs before speaking with them. This means customers can get instant, helpful service at any time of day, from anywhere in the world, regardless of the size of your inbound sales team.

Perform sales forecasting with predictive analytics

Since sales automation systems consistently run in the background, you can pull real-time reports with valuable data, such as the number of leads generated, the average time to close for specific company sizes, and more. Over time, these systems can deduce future performance based on past results using predictive analytics — ideal for sales forecasts.

Implement chatbots and AI agents

AI agents operate within your workspaces as personal assistants for entire sales teams. For example, they can locate files, set up team meetings, and answer complex questions, pulling from all your team’s databases. Agents can respond to questions such as, “Who are the biggest competitors?” for a prospect, “What are our latest product offerings?” to get up to speed on a new team, or “Do we have any case studies for the automotive industry?” to get the perfect asset for your new lead.

Measuring the impact of sales automation

Whatever KPIs you’ve chosen, the way you check progress is the same. At the start, set a benchmark and regular check-in intervals. Quarterly is usually a good pace. A solid ROI check should occur at least a year after full implementation.

For quantitative KPIs like average time to close or pipeline value, plot the data in a chart to assess growth over time. If you’re seeing growth toward your goal, stay the course; if not, it’s worth investigating with your team. Consider:

• Are the tools actually being used?
• Is the training for the tools adequate?
• Are the tools properly functioning?

To measure qualitative KPIs such as employee sentiment, quantify them through pulse surveys conducted at regular intervals. It’s important to maintain consistency in the questions and use numerical scales to gauge changes over time. Additionally, provide space for respondents to explain their feelings or share observations. Consider questions like:

• How often do you use the new sales automation tools?
• Do you feel like they’ve saved you time on admin tasks, and if so, how many hours per week?
• Have you or your leads/customers noticed any odd behaviors from the tools?

You can also quietly gather feedback from the team by setting up team chat channels and searching within your work operating system to uncover all discussions about sales automation. Sometimes, the most honest criticism comes up in these unofficial channels where the team feels less observed, allowing you to better identify issues. By consistently gathering data and letting both sales operations and leadership review it, you can work toward continuous improvement in your KPIs.

Sales automation: Your key to happier salespeople, customers, and shareholders

Sales automation is a win-win-win. It removes the tasks that sales reps don’t want to do, makes customers feel heard faster, and ultimately drives up profitability. Dive deeper by integrating sales automation features and AI agents into the chat platforms your team frequently uses. Let them simply talk to the sales automation system like they would a colleague to get the value they need out of it.

Learn more about how to empower sales teams with AI and sales automation in Slack.