(Insights) What is Automation? What are the key areas where automation provides a value add?

 (Insights) What is Salesforce Automation? What are the key areas where automation provides a value add?

As organisations need to scale businesses, manually repeating tasks are costly and time consuming. Once automation is implemented to automate these manually repetitive tasks for business processes, they can increase productivity and reduce time and save money. A decent CRM system with automation that orchestrate sophisticated processes will provide a solid foundation for business growth.

According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant on CRM report , the future of automation will play a significant role in organisation’s business strategy. Long term road maps are including automation to gain insight on the automation capabilities competitors will be using.

In this article, we will discuss what is salesforce automation and key areas where automation is more effective and why is this important for organisations to implement in their salesforce org.

What is Salesforce Automation?

Salesforce Automation refers to automating sales processes using apps and workflows to create a streamlined sales process starting from managing business leads, order bookings, sales forecasts to team performance. Sales automation will helps organisations to prioritise workload, ensuring duplication of efforts, manual data entry are other redundant tasks are eliminated. Salesforce automation enables

Salesforce Automation is referred commonly as SFA, is generally part of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, which provides better management of data including contacts, customer information, deals and sales information.

SFA increases the potential to scale businesses and boost productivity of sales reps by automating repetitive steps. SFA can eliminate monotonous tasks, freeing up an admin’s time to do more profound things. These tools include Workflow Rules, Process Builder, and Flow and Apex.

What are the key areas where automation provides a value add?

Let’s take a look at the key areas in sales process where salesforce automation adds significant value to your organisation:

1. Prospecting — Prospecting is the first stage of sales process. In this stage, sales reps pursue for prospective customers, leads or buyers. While prospecting, sales reps use various communication channels to reach out to prospective customers, leads and buyers. For example, email automation enables you to deliver personalised and automated emails to target audience.

Other channels of communication includes text messages which are used to extensively to reach potential customers. SMS Messaging helps deliver customer a better experience. Salesforce has a feature to allows sales reps to send personalised and bulk messages.

So, during marketing campaigns sales and marketing teams could use Salesforce Automation (SFA) to send automated text and email messages to reach wider audience.

2.Lead Management — With lead management, sales teams can access all details required to engage effectively with potential customers. SFA for lead management helps teams manage leads by ensuring appropriate actions are taken ex. manage timely follow ups, use different communication channels and to measure team performance. This in turn increases sales volumes for your organisation.

Check out my previous article where I discussed some of the popular SFA and apps used to facilitate lead generation and management for Marketing and Sales teams.

3.Contact Management — Contact Management is a critical part of sales process. Managing contacts using SFA is both cost-effective and efficient. Contact Management gives you a complete 360 view of the customer. Using salesforce automation tools such as Salesmate, you could also have auto-profile enrichment feature where all your prospect customer’s details are added to Salesforce. This helps to sync all data at one place and allows global search to fill in various attributes of the contact information.

Contact Management software such as Talkdesk integrated with Salesforce boosts efficiency by streamlining operations via browser based call centre and provides customers with highly personalised engagements, including business card scanner which allows you to save the scanned business cards to save them as contact information inside salesforce. Sales teams could have realtime data of the customer to book more business and support teams to address customer needs in realtime.

4.Task Management — Task Management is often considered a part of Contact Management since sales teams create tasks, or reminders, to follow up on leads on a given date or time period.

With SFA task management, you could create a task or reminder in the customer’s account which integrates with your calendar. When you open the task all the customer’s data and past communications are made visible to you. Once the task is completed, it automatically appends this to the account record creating historical data for your future interactions.

5.Team Collaboration — Salesforce Automation is particularly useful for organisations with remote workforce. Salesforce Automation comes with its own technology which allows working from home or remotely have the same information as their colleagues working from office. There is no need to synchronise data as everything is updated in real-time empowering team collaboration. Multiple users all could access customer’s account at any one time, creating a central hub for doing business.

6.Cloud App Integration — Cloud computing is not a new concept anymore and we all understand the number of advantages it brings to benefit small, medium and large businesses. Not only is cloud computing very affordable but it also means that you could connect to various disparate systems to enable data to be shared between systems. Cloud Integration allows data to flow between different systems and making the systems efficient and more productive. You can automate sales process and also create custom workflows, flows to automate other manual processes.

For example, the quote-to-cash process is how your company resolves sales contracts and begins processing them for revenue. This process often involves multiple systems of record that regularly need to be synchronised. Whether you use salesforce or other tools you would need to integrate them to flow important data such as contract details, pricing and invoice status.

Salesforce Automation helps you connect apps and orchestrate sophisticated revenue processes with workflow and flows. You can map out your quote-to-cash process and test it instantly. As discussed in my previous article there are many apps which are available to use by sales and marketing teams. Using the existing technology with apps you could integrate quote-to-cash process with salesforce automation without the need to procure separate systems and once you build the process, you’ll never have to worry about this again.

7.Reports and Analysis — Reports and dashboards are key to understand a clear picture of how your business is doing for sales and leadership teams in any organisation. Pipeline Management software provides sales lead tracking information from initial enquiry through to a closed sale order. It lets you track each sales opportunity through your sales pipeline, applying probability weighting and forecasting.

Salesforce Automation enables pipeline management through salesforce reports and dashboards easily by pulling data from its contact management, sales CPQ and order management system. This provides a complete picture of how your sales teams and marketing teams are performing and what are the key trends and forecasts for next quarters.

Conclusion:

Salesforce Automation becomes a client acquisition software that focuses on sales process making it as efficient and transparent as possible. With sales management and pipeline management tools, sales leadership teams can get a clear picture of future prospects, recent sales and past performance of their sales teams. However, CRM systems like Salesforce is an all-in-one solution and becomes a powerful platform by including additional features such as Salesforce Automation, integration and Marketing Automation.