Five Ways to Empower Sales Teams with Automation for Productivity

Over the past several decades, automating various business processes was a steady, sometimes uphill battle. As technology progressed and automated solutions became “smarter” over time, partial or even complete automation of menial tasks became a reality.

Most importantly, automation became accessible for growth-oriented businesses. Today, thanks to the proliferation of AI-powered solutions and the rise of generative AI, business automation is becoming more accessible.

So, what does this mean for sales empowerment, e-commerce businesses, and sales performance in 2024 and beyond?

Let’s explore what modern-day automation means for sales productivity and how sales teams can use AI, automation, and smart tools to achieve better results in five practical ways:

Sales Teams Rely on Effective Outreach

While effective cold outreaches promise high conversion rates, the time spent on prospecting, communicating, and potential lead generation often bogs down efficiency.

Leveraging automation here can speed up the transition from cold emails to warm leads, thus maximizing productivity and minimizing waste.

The sales team can, for example, use automated email outreaches. Using email lookup tools, they can find legitimate email addresses and immediately plug them into the pipeline for cold outreaches.

The same goes for direct messaging outreach on professional networks such as LinkedIn. You can even automate outreach messaging altogether with generative AI to simultaneously spark conversation with multiple prospects.

Thus, automation eliminates the manual and repetitive tasks of searching for email addresses – a boon for sales experts with mobility impairment.

Sales Chatbots Are Becoming More Common

Real-time chatbots powered by generative AI are transforming how potential leads communicate initially. Advances in natural language processing allow custom-made sales chatbots to understand human intent, contextualize information, and address complex problems that prospects face.

What this means for sales teams is that human experts can focus on resolving advanced problems and selling to the most lucrative prospects. At the same time, chatbots deal with upselling, cross-selling, and low-to-mid-tier customer acquisition.

So, use sales chatbots as your first point of contact. Plus, you can use data collection from these systems to allow sales agents to master their outbound sales calls by analyzing behavioral data and other essential customer metrics.

Even better, integrate chatbots into other elements of your eCommerce business. This way, chatbots, customer support staff, and sales agents can support each other, collaborate to streamline workflow, and empower each other to achieve the best possible results.

Needless to say, chatbots will also empower your customer support agents with the same data.

Boosting Sales Team Performance through HR

HR and Payroll automation can be instrumental in sales enablement. It provides the organization with concrete data regarding the sales team’s performance. This information helps decision-makers and sales experts compare their performance indicators and adapt based on complex data.

This, supplemented by sales-specific data from their own automation and dashboards, gives a comprehensive overview of the team’s performance. Thus, you can employ strategies like timeboxing sale-generating tasks—outreaches or follow-ups–to ensure crucial elements are not sidelined by repetitive work.

Visualization is also a key component here. Automated visualization dashboards that show real-time performance metrics and past performance will be invaluable in sales enablement.

Educational Sales: Automating Webinar-Based Selling

Educational content makes prospects 131% more likely to buy. Amongst all, webinars are some of the most widely used sales tools for educational sales–courtesy of their interactive nature.

Your sales team can use webinar automation software to automate key aspects of their pitch and the entire experience for the attendees, creating a more efficient way to deliver value across the board.

Tools like autoresponders will keep people in the chat engaged throughout the webinar, while asynchronous responses will deliver chat replies directly into the attendee’s email inbox. With many other automated features, educational value-based selling like this is becoming more feasible for sales experts in every industry.

Leveraging Generative AI for Sales Enablement

Generative AI-powered automation is boosting performance not only in sales but also in eCommerce teams overall. From leveraging it in chatbots for automated customer service to using the technology to summarize large data sources and turn them into actionable reports and insights – it gives an astounding boost to productivity.

You can also use generative AI to perfect their sales pitches or craft entire outreach sequences to engage with prospects and push them through the sales funnel, thus empowering sales teams to sell more efficiently and effectively across platforms.

Over to You

Software and hardware automation are becoming more accessible in every industry, and innovative technologies and AI advancements are making them more effective than ever before. What this means for sales teams and E-commerce operations is that automation can reduce workload and cut costs while elevating productivity, sales data accuracy, forecasting, and more.

Automation can empower sales experts to achieve better results and to monitor their performance with key data points to reflect, course-correct, and build better sales strategies moving forward. In 2024 and beyond, start implementing AI and AI-driven automation in your business to achieve better results.

About Ciara Byrnes

Ciara Byrnes has written 10 posts in this blog.

Ciara Byrnes spends most of her time reporting on digital marketing for an over-stressed audience of marketers and business owners trying to keep up with the fast pace of change. To center herself, she has become a wellness enthusiast, reaching "highs" like morning yoga on the porch of her family's summer lake cabin to "lows" like failing to convince herself that wheatgrass is actually yummy.