9 Sales-Automation Tips to Win More Leads and Boost Sales

Learn How Sales-Enablement Automation Helps You Win More Meetings and Increase Revenue

No matter how well-versed you are in the art of selling, you need to constantly up your game to book more meetings, land new clients and nurture existing relationships.

This can be difficult if you’re forced to spend lots of time buried under piles of data or to-do lists, which affects most sales executives, SDRs and professional-service providers.

Sales reps spend only 28% of their time actually selling, reflecting a mistake that many people responsible for driving revenue make—manually handling back-office tasks like data organization and email followups.

Automating repetitive tasks helps you free up valuable time to focus on what you do best—selling! Intelligent sales automation can help you make lead-generation processes faster and more effective, helping you win better leads in shorter times.

Benefits of Automating Your Sales Processes

Automation is all the rage and there’s no question it can transform businesses. Modern AI-driven sales automation can scan tons of data before telling a software which leads to highlight and how to approach those leads.

From eliminating manual-data processing to automating personal followups, sales-automation tools help streamline your processes in several ways. Here are some of the benefits of using sales automation tools.

• Improved efficiency: Automated data processing translates to a streamlined workflow and a quicker, more efficient sales cycle.
• Enhanced accuracy: Automated sales processes are immune to human error, ensuring that all sales data is accurate and up to date.
• Better lead management: Automated programs help you track, prioritize and follow up with leads at the right time, ensuring no leads are missed.
• Improved customer experience: Customer-data automation tools help you create personalized and seamless experiences, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Increased sales: Automation tools identify opportunities and help close deals faster, which directly translates to more revenue.

9 Tips for Using Sales Automation in Your Outbound Sales Strategy

Here are 9 tips for how to use sales-enablement automation tools to generate more meetings and revenue. These tips cover all bases—from fully utilizing the features of sales-automation tools like an AI-powered chatbot to setting up more effective outreach campaigns.

1. Group leads into sequences to send messages in bulk and segment leads into different campaigns.
2. Use automated scoring to predict the likelihood of a contact responding to an outreach message.
3. Utilize sentiment automation to detect (based on a lead’s reply) how serious or interested they are.
4. Engage objection handling to receive automated suggestions for responses to objections in a lead’s reply to your outreach message.
5. Use CRM integration to streamline your sales process and reduce data entry.
6. Use social-media automation to increase your reach and engagement.
7. Use drip campaigns to automate your followup process and engage leads.
8. Utilize AI-powered chatbots to handle routine questions and free up your sales team’s time.
9. Leverage analytics to track your sales process and identify areas for improvement.

1. Group Leads into Sequences

Lead sequences are blueprints that dictate how your outreach campaigns function, right from the first contact to conversion.

It is always smart to group leads into preset sequences to send out messages in bulk and save time. With targeted email sequences, you can also customize your messaging to personas, buyer stages, etc.

Sales-automation tools enable you to set up different outreach campaigns with such customized touchpoints and strategically manufacture outreach sequences for better chances of conversion and more calendar bookings with prospects.

Lead sequences work with LinkedIn messages too, not just email. Writing AI-powered messages in sequences from automated lead-groupings is an excellent tactic in LinkedIn lead generation to connect with more high-quality leads.

2. Use Automated Scoring

How often do you waste time pursuing the wrong leads? It’s a much better strategy to switch to automated lead scoring, where leads are scored based on their interests, past behavior and touchpoints with your company.

All you need to do is focus on leads with the highest scores—the ones most likely to be responsive to your outreach, be a good fit for your services and show interest. This will help you prioritize leads and see which leads are likely to respond with “reply prediction.”

3. Utilize Sentiment Automation

Reading between the lines and understanding a prospect’s inclinations is a key aspect of sales.

But who has time when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of leads? It’s not always possible to pay attention to each response to figure out where the lead stands.

Sentiment automation for sales picks up on keywords and phrases, a prospect’s profile or other data points to gauge how interested a lead is to trigger automated systems or message followups so you can nurture productive correspondences with leads.

You can integrate campaigns for LinkedIn messaging with sentiment-analysis tools to effectively introduce sentiment automation to your sales pipeline.

4. Engage Objection Handling

Objection handling is another time-consuming aspect of sales that often troubles sales reps. If you work in sales or are starting to jump into doing outreach for the first time, you’ll know that convincing prospects is rarely easy.

They often have concerns regarding pricing, product fit or competitors, which you need to address to convince them to choose you. This can be a tedious task that requires individual attention from sales reps.

Automated objection handling can solve this problem by auto-generating appropriate responses to leads’ objections.

5. Use CRM Integration

This one’s a no-brainer! Data-handling tasks are often too clerical and repetitive to waste your precious time on. Choosing a LinkedIn CRM tool or any CRM tool that easily integrates with your sales automation will enable you to import and organize all your leads effectively.

With smart CRM integrations, lead lists can be arranged into sublists based on outreach campaigns and lead status, among other parameters.

Automation solutions also help you eliminate human error, data discrepancies and redundancies. That means data handling with sales automation isn’t just more efficient but also more reliable.

6. Use Social-Media Automation

To fully leverage sales-automation tips, craft engaging marketing campaigns on social media to attract prospects to your business and help establish trust during outreach efforts.

Over 55% of all consumers now learn about new brands on social media. Chances are many of your prospects are among them.

Social-media automation tools come with several features like scheduled posts and automated chat responses that can help you build a better, more trustable social brand.

And with a strong social presence, you can utilize social selling on LinkedIn by showing off your professional reputation on social media to complement how you automate LinkedIn sales campaigns and send outreach messages to prospects!

7. Use Drip Campaigns

One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make is letting a healthy lead go cold. If a prospect isn’t interested yet, maintain a healthy and amicable relationship by adding them to a drip campaign.

Drip-campaign automation sends smart email messages to engage leads so they never go cold and you can still make a sale when the time is right.

8. Utilize AI-Powered Chatbots 

Here’s a question that likely lingers on your mind when you consider deploying a sales chatbot: “Can a chatbot really attend to my clients well?”

The numbers say yes! Chatbots successfully increase sales by 67% for businesses, proving to be reliable sales-enablement automation for professional-service providers and B2B-tech companies alike. Chatbots are also a simple, cost- & time-effective way to automate yFAQs and help questions.

9. Leverage Analytics

One of the biggest advantages of using analytics is that it can optimize your sales team's approach and cater to your clients better.

For example, if you find your response times are slower than your competitors, invest in automation tools to speed up. The alternative? Hiring additional staff to ensure your team can promptly respond to all leads.

The benefits of combining sales automation with analytics include better predictions of a client behavior, increased sales velocities and personalized lead journeys.

Sales Automation to Improve Sales Processes and Win More Conversations 

If you’re trying to scale outbound campaigns for your B2B business or starting to upgrade sales processes to grow your firm’s clientbase, doing it alone sucks.

Sales-automation tools increase time efficiency, improve outreach output and win you more high-quality conversations with prospects so you can generate more sales.

With CoPilot AI, you can up your game in LinkedIn lead automation with automated reply predictions, AI-powered sentiment analysis, automated messaging suggestions and more to expedite and optimize your lead-generation processes.