Solopreneurs, automate your sales process — The Startup Sales GuyAs a solopreneur, your time is your most valuable and limited asset. Automating your sales process is easier than you may think. Almost every CRM now has a marketing system built-in or available as an add-on option. Making effective use of these tools can save a huge amount of time and ensure your sales follow-up happens. If you don’t have your CRM setup yet make sure it has this feature enabled.
Start with a map
Let’s start with a simple email outreach. Begin by deciding how many times you want to contact each prospect. Then lay out the path you want them to take. Map it out on paper so you can visually see the flow. Here’s a simple example:
In this example the first email is sent to a prospect. If they open it but don’t respond they get a second email, if they open it and respond, they are invited to schedule a consultation. If they didn’t open the first email they receive a third different email. As you can imagine these maps can get quite complex, but the actions are similar.
Next automate the sales process in your CRM
Each CRM will have a different way to automate the steps above. Create each email as a template and include personalization so they don’t look like mass emails. Then go through your list of leads and segment them to allow for further personalization. Adjust the templates accordingly.
Decide how many leads you want to target with each set of emails. It doesn’t make sense to send 200 emails if you won’t have the time or resources to follow-up on them.
Most CRMs will allow you to control how many emails you send in each batch. I recommend starting small until you get an idea of the response rate and then meter them so you’ll have time to follow-up on each response.
Email is just the beginning
Here are a few other things you can automate in your sales process.
Sales process automation can save you hours every week and make your sales process more efficient. How many of these are you already doing and how many more can you add to save even more time? Almost any repetitive manual task can be automated. This will not only save you time, it will also reduce errors and eliminate things falling through the cracks and missing opportunities.
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Originally published at https://thestartupsalesguy.com on June 3, 2021.
