How Sales Automation Can Improve Scalability

Like any ambitious business owner, you’ve got growth on the brain. But is your company’s infrastructure equal to your ambitions? Growth isn’t just about selling more units and acquiring more customers. It’s about ensuring you have the operational capacity to keep pace with an increase in workload, customers and sales volume. 

In other words, you can’t have growth without scalability. Scalability ensures that your growth doesn’t come at the expense of your operational efficiency, or the quality benchmark your customers have come to expect. However, implementing automation in the sales process can enhance scalability and allow you to increase sales volume without massively increasing your workload.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation involves using specialist software to carry out the routine administrative processes that often occupy too much of your sales team’s time. Reducing sales professionals’ administrative load inevitably means leaving them with more time to close deals, generate revenue and potentially expand into new markets. 

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that up to one-third of all sales tasks can be automated. There are a wealth of applications on the market to help automate:

• email creation and delivery

• prospecting and lead enrichment

• meeting scheduling

• deal management

Just imagine what your team could accomplish with 33% more time and capacity.

Benefits of automating the sales process

Sales automation is beneficial to your sales team, your bottom line and your company as a whole. Here are some of the ways in which it can aid scalability.

Improves productivity and performance

When sales professionals spend less time on admin, they’re likely to be much more productive and motivated. They feel like they have more time to thrive in their natural habitat and dedicate less time to admin. And with a steady automated stream of qualified leads, they have all they need to exceed their targets.

Improves reporting

Automated selling systems help you to get accurate and actionable reports and forecasts  without the legwork. Most sales automation tools feature sophisticated analytics. What’s more, they also integrate with other parts of your infrastructure, such as your CRM and social platforms, to provide real-time accuracy.

Helps you get the most out of customer data

Scaling up your business often means trying to engage a different type of customer or expand into a different type of market. Automation can ensure that customer data is accurate and up to date, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI applications can work with CRMs to help you better understand customers and prospects, enabling you to build accurate customer profiles. 

Helps to expand your reach

Sales automation enables you to increase the operational capacity of your sales team, while also making your sales process more cost-efficient. This can help to eliminate barriers to global expansion, enabling you to conquer international markets.

GoCardless makes it quick, easy and cost-effective to take international payments from customers in over 30 countries using a wide range of currencies. 

Building an automated selling system

The beauty of sales automation is that it is highly customisable, enabling you to build an automated selling system around your company’s unique needs, goals and operational bottlenecks. 

However, it’s also important to choose a system that integrates your existing IT infrastructure to ensure operational efficiency and get the most out of your data. We recommend that your system includes:

• a CRM

• a proposal and electronic signature tool

• a sales engagement platform. Many of these (such as Salesforce) also double as CRMs

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.