Starting a business is an exciting and challenging endeavor. As an emerging company, you have a lot on your plate – from developing your product or service to building a team and establishing your brand. But one crucial aspect that often gets overlooked is sales.
Sales performance is a critical factor in the success of any business, especially for emerging companies.
With the rise of technology, powerful tools are now available to help supercharge your sales efforts and drive growth. This article will explore the power of sales automation platforms to help emerging companies generate leads and help you achieve your business goals.
Why Sales Performance Matters for Emerging Companies
As an emerging company, you are in a critical stage of growth. Your success depends on your ability to acquire customers and generate revenue. This is where sales performance comes into play. After all, without sales and profit, nothing is possible.
Lead Generation: The Key to Customer Acquisition
Lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting potential customers for your business. It is a crucial aspect of sales performance, directly impacting your ability to acquire customers and generate revenue.
Lead generation is essential for emerging companies as it helps you establish a customer base and build brand awareness. With the right lead-generation strategies and tools, you can reach your target audience and generate interest in your product or service.
Sales Efficiency and Productivity
Sales efficiency and productivity are also essential for emerging companies. With limited resources and a small team, making the most of your sales efforts is crucial. This means streamlining processes, automating tasks, and optimizing your sales strategy.
Our research suggests an average salesperson only spends about 28% of their day talking to prospects. That means salespeople waste 78% of their day on non-revenue activities like attending internal meetings, hunting for prospects’ contact information, creating powerpoint presentations, and manually creating and sending one-off emails.
By improving sales efficiency and productivity, you can maximize your team’s efforts and achieve better results with fewer resources. This is where sales automation comes in.
The Power of Sales Automation for Emerging Companies
Sales automation is the use of technology to automate sales processes and tasks. It can range from simple tasks like email automation to more complex processes like task management and lead nurturing.
Streamlining Processes and Saving Time
For emerging companies, time is a valuable resource. Sales automation can streamline processes and save time for your team. By automating tasks like data entry, lead nurturing, and follow-up emails, your team can focus on more critical tasks like closing deals and building customer relationships.
Improving Sales Efficiency and Productivity
Sales automation can also improve sales productivity and efficiency. By automating repetitive tasks, your team can focus on more important tasks that require human interaction and decision-making. This can lead to better results and a more efficient use of resources.
For example, instead of manually sending emails to anyone who matches our ideal customer profile (ICP), you can break up your prospects lists into two segments—top targets, a list of top companies who match your most profitable ICP, and everyone else who matches your ICP go into a secondary target list. You drop your secondary list into automation while you drop your top targets into an account-based email list (ABM). This allows you to focus your sales efforts on the top accounts that are most profitable while your sales automation campaigns help fill your pipeline.
Leveraging Sales Analytics for Data-Driven Decision Making
Sales automation also provides valuable data and insights to help you make data-driven decisions. Tracking and analyzing sales data, you can identify patterns and trends, understand customer behavior, and optimize your sales strategy for better results.
For example, SalesProphet’s reporting engine provides insights into which job titles, levels, industries, and company sizes are most receptive to your sales automation campaigns. This data is much more valuable than simply reporting on email open and click-through rates and helps you create future campaigns targeting prospects most likely to respond.
The Role of Lead Generation in Sales Automation
First, we must understand what is lead generation. Lead generation has one task: generating leads for your sales department. That’s why lead generation and sales automation go hand in hand. By automating lead generation processes, you can reach a larger audience and generate more leads for your business on autopilot.
Remember, sales automation isn’t just about sending and reporting on your sales emails. A good sales automation platform also provides an easy-to-use CRM for tracking all communications down to each prospect, tracks all tasks and opportunities, and allows you to forecast sales.
Compared to other sales automation platforms, Sales Prophet also provides some marketing automation capabilities that enable you to send mass emails supporting your demand generation campaigns, capture leads on your website, and nurture leads that aren’t sales-ready, all on the sample platform.
Marketing Automation for Demand Generation
Marketing automation is the use of technology to automate marketing processes and tasks. It can include email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing. By automating these processes, you can reach a larger audience and generate more leads for your business.
Marketing automation is ideal for generating demand for your products or services. Unlike lead generation, demand generation requires a mindset of being a helpful thought leader vs. generating a lead. This often requires helpful content designed to educate your target audience while building your company’s brand in the marketplace.
Some critical aspects of demand generation include the ability to syndicate your content through multiple marketing channels including mass email. Most marketing automation platforms dont allow mass email and require you only to send emails to opt-in subscribers. While sending emails to only opt-in subscribers is ideal, it’s not practical for an emerging company to follow this strict policy.
SalesProphet is one of the only platforms with an email infrastructure that allows you to send emails one at a time using your existing email accounts or mass email using SMTP providers like Mailgun, SparkPost, or SendGrid. However, we strongly recommend you properly set up your SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records, control your email volume, and only send educational content to relevant contacts.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with leads and prospects while guiding them through the sales funnel. By automating lead nurturing, you can provide valuable information and resources to leads at each stage of the sales process, increasing their chances of converting into customers when they are sales-ready.
Sales Optimization: The Key to Success for Emerging Companies
Sales optimization is the process of continuously improving your sales strategy and processes to achieve better results. It involves leveraging data and insights to identify areas for improvement and implementing changes to drive growth.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Sales optimization relies on data-driven decision-making. By tracking and analyzing sales data, you can identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions about your sales strategy. This can lead to better results and a more efficient use of resources.
Continuous Improvement
Sales optimization is an ongoing process. You can identify trends and patterns by continuously tracking and analyzing sales data and changing your sales strategy to drive growth. This allows you to stay ahead of the competition and adapt to changing market conditions.
This is why Sales Prophet added A/B/C test split capabilities to their sales automation campaigns and their mass email and lead nurturing campaigns.
Real-World Examples of Sales Automation and Lead Generation for Emerging Companies
HubSpot
HubSpot is a leading marketing and sales automation platform that offers a range of tools to help businesses grow. For emerging companies, HubSpot provides tools to automate lead generation, track and analyze sales data, and optimize sales processes for better results.
However, HubSpot doesn’t provide contact data and will not allow you to send unsolicited emails to non-opt-in contacts. This limits your ability to reach new customers forcing users to rely more on their inbound content marketing efforts.
Sales Prophet
Sales Prophet is an emerging sales and lead generation automation platform with invaluable value adds through its sales automation and lead generation solutions. The platform comes with unlimited access to over 80 million b2b contact records for adding ideal contacts to your sales and marketing campaign that match your ICP. The platform also offers both sales automation and marketing automation capabilities, by adding the ability to send both HTML-branded emails ideal for lead nurturing and Text-based sales emails ideal for lead generation.
Sales Prophet also offers an easy-to-use CRM for task and opportunity management. This helps these companies streamline both their sales and marketing processes, save time, and increase efficiency.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform that offers a range of tools to help businesses manage their sales processes. For emerging companies, Salesforce offers a range of tools to automate lead generation, track and analyze sales data, and optimize sales processes for better results.
However, salespeople have reported a dislike for their platform impacting user adoption. Salesforce.com also doesn’t allow you to send unsolicited emails to non-opt-in contacts. Salesforce doesn’t include prospect data or email verification capabilities but you can pay for a third-party integration that provides these features.
Who Is Responsible for Sales Automation and Lead Generation?
Sales automation and lead generation are typically the responsibility of the sales and marketing teams. However, as an emerging company, you may not have dedicated teams for these functions. In this case, it’s important to designate someone to take charge of these efforts and ensure they align with your overall business goals.
Takeaways
Sales performance is a critical factor in the success of any business, especially for emerging companies. By leveraging sales automation and marketing automation platforms, you can streamline your demand generation and lead generation processes, improve efficiency and productivity, and optimize your sales strategy for better results. With the right automation tools and marketing strategies, you can supercharge your business launch and drive growth for your emerging company.
