If you’re a startup founder or the first sales hire at a startup, you understand just how harsh the market is. Consumers think your product is too immature, your brand has no reputation, your company is too young and your team is too unprofessional. The leverage you have in any deal is so minuscule, it’s almost laughable.

Ideally, you could make out a solid team of Sales Development Reps, Sales Engineers and Account Executives to get leads into the pipeline, qualify them and move each potential customer through the sales cycle. But since you’re the only salesperson in the company, you’re doing everything. You need to get resourceful in order to get your foot in the door.

A lot of time wasted getting to know your consumer and their needs, writing notes, logging data, and following up. And as your prospect and customer list grow, the management becomes exponentially more challenging.

Account data, sales records, opportunities, salespeople, products, services, prospects, customers—trying to get a handle on all of this knowledge leaves most feeling confused. And even though Microsoft excel was invented in 1985, we still see many Traditional Media Companies and Enterprise Businesses using spreadsheets to manually enter data and manage their sales processes. Data entry is killing your startup, slowly but surely.

Why Should You Automate Your Sales Process Now?

Sales automation is the process of streamlining old-fashioned, tedious, and time-consuming tasks in the sales process so your sales team can focus less on admin and more on selling. These are frequently administrative and data entry tasks that sales reps, managers, and leaders do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Automating the sales pipeline is a practical way to use technology to improve your sales results. Sales automation saves businesses time and money—both of which are valuable to businesses.

There are five specific spaces that companies should consider to fully automate their digital sales processes. These key areas outline the elements of a successful digital sales management transformation, taking a company from manual processing to automated control.

1 – Automated Marketing Needs Assessments for Client Prospecting: Begin generating a meaningful first contact with candidates. Spark conversations with prospective clients with automated marketing needs assessments.

2 – Marketing Automation: Automating marketing outreach is a fundamental component of building relationships and saving time.

3 – Pipeline Management: Get rid of manual data entry and increase communication in your organization by assembling your sales pipeline to be track and manage possibilities inside one automated dashboard.

4 – Prospect Monitoring/Lead Tracking: Automatically follow your proposed clients’ every move and track their activity with your business to properly time sales pitches and outreach.

5 – Order Management: Fulfillment teams need a channel to automatically manage/approve sales orders seamlessly without tracking sales people down for order statuses.

Get started with implementing smart technology to help your sales process immediately.  Sales automation will provide your business to acquire new clients, identify existing sales opportunities that are ready to purchase.