My 3 Favorite Sales Automations

Scale your personal or team's sales activities and production

Nov 12, 2022

In challenging markets, we need to innovate to do more with less.

Most of us have experienced the natural reactions to business down cycles — growing pressure to produce more, slashed budgets and expenses, and possibly layoffs.

How do you do more with less?

How do you sustain or even grow your production?

Sales automation!

black and white robot toy on red wooden table — Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Don’t worry; none of this is hard. You can do this without an IT person if you're an individual sales agent. If you are a sales director or sales operation manager, you can do all these strategies at scale and help your whole sales team improve.

Start your sales automation with outreach, lead nurturing, and aged lead campaigns.

I recommend starting with outreach.

There is a general assumption that everyone immediately jumps on any new lead.

However, if you review your data, I can guarantee that your average time to contact new leads (without the discipline of automation) will average in the hours, not minutes.

Now, before you start beating up your sales agents, there are a lot of reasonable excuses for this lag. Most sales agents have a variety of responsibilities beyond contacting new leads. If they have a healthy pipeline, they are probably juggling many follow-ups on leads with a much higher probability of closing.

These are all cases for more automation in any sales process.

Outreach Automation

I like to set automation to trigger from statuses or tags I use to manage my pipeline.

Using tags like new lead, unresponsive, bad number, or not interested, I can craft and trigger relevant sales cadences to handle all my follow-ups.

These sequences include voicemail drops, text messages, and emails, allowing me or all of my sales agents to focus only on responsive leads.

My automation does all of the chasing.

Here is an example of the worksheet and templates I use to build these outreach sequences.

Here are some of the critical advantages of consistently using automation for all of your initial outreach on inbound or outbound leads:

All leads are instantly contacted
Your sales process is followed with 100% fidelity. This is great for data analysis because no anomalies or unknown factors impact your assessments.
Sales agents can focus on more complex tasks and responsibilities associated with closing deals.
Sales agents are not frustrated dialing for dollars and are only engaging with responsive prospects.
Sales agents can significantly scale their sales activities and production

Next, begin nurturing your leads.

Surprisingly, lead nurturing is almost always overlooked with any new client.

Adding lead nurturing to all leads as they enter your CRM is a huge opportunity.

The strategy is to send a weekly or biweekly newsletter to all contacts in your CRM and stay top of mind — keeping your entire database viable.

Of course, as you can imagine, you need to be creative and offer a little broader content if you want to keep your clients engaged and subscribed.

Therefore, I encourage you to create a newsletter with news, trends, and insights loosely related to your industry. The best way to keep this interesting is to curate third-party content and add your unique perspectives.

If you have a blog, share some of your articles. But don’t make it all about you. Third-party articles make your newsletter more interesting, diverse, and ultimately easier to create a consistently excellent read.

For example, here are a few items I might include in a mortgage newsletter.

Rates are a vital concern for consumers, and a sudden drop like this is likely to spark a conversation about whether it’s a good time to buy that home or maybe refinance a mortgage on a recent purchase at a much higher rate.

Unique homes, projects, or design ideas are always fun and get people clicking.

Don’t forget to add a call to action in every email to remind them to reach out to you with any questions, get a mortgage review, or check current mortgage rates.

Finally, dig out all those aged or dead leads and get them re-engaged and back in the pipeline.

For your aged lead campaign, do something like what we do in our outreach sales cadences. Our goal is similar — getting the prospect engaged and scheduling an appointment.

Here is an example of my aged lead campaign template.

You’ll notice I’m using voicemail drops, text messages, and emails again.

Ideally, these leads have requested information in the past and raised their hand to be contacted.

If done well, this will become one of your best lead sources.

All these campaigns automate your prospecting, continually kicking out new leads.

You can trigger alerts or queue calls when customers open or click on emails to get a little more advanced.

Outreach and aged lead campaigns can be set up in most CRMs. I have also set up this system in Pipedrive, MailShake, QuickMail, and Woosender.

You can create a newsletter with various email service providers, like MailChimp, ConvertKit, or Substack.

Invest time and money in becoming a better copywriter.

My final recommendation is to spend time and money on becoming a good copywriter.

The magic of an exceptional subject line or opening hook could be the difference between a 20% open rate and 40-50%, which is 2X the opportunity for a fresh lead.

What do you think?

Thoughts, questions, or better ideas? Drop a comment below.

Let me know if you’re enjoying this newsletter.

Or, impress me with what you’re doing this weekend.

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