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Effective B2B lead generation is the backbone of any successful B2B Company, as it is the initial step in building a sales pipeline. While your sales team might put their best foot forward to attain their revenue targets, some barriers during prospecting, nurturing, and closing a lead can hinder them from reaching set goals. One of the major barriers to your team's peak performance is having to spend hours doing repetitive and mechanical tasks.

Through sales automation, you can eliminate these mundane tasks saving your sales representatives more time to direct on demanding and more productive activities. It is also a perfect way to optimize your sales pipeline, doubling down on selling. This article dives deep into how you can benefit from sales automation when generating B2B leads and some of the best practices to adopt in sales automation.

Benefits of Sales Automation

Sales automation is the game-changer and provides a more effective and efficient framework to close deals. The good thing is that you are free to choose the scope of automation you prefer to implement, as well as assess the ROI before getting deeper into it; bizpedia.co got you all the information you need on this. Here is how you can benefit from sales automation:

Streamlined Pipeline Management

Managing a sales pipeline can take time and effort. By automating various lead nurturing processes like follow-ups, a more extensive section of your customer acquisition strategy will be on auto-pilot, speeding up operations.

Reduced Costs, Increased Revenues

You lower dependence on manual efforts through automation, reducing the need to increase your staff. This automatically minimizes overall expenditure. Automating lead nurturing increases revenues, with brands recording a 225% rise in sales opportunities.

Improved Lead Intelligence

Timing is everything in sales. Knowing the right time to reach a prospect can determine whether it is a conversion or dismissal. If your sales team can know when someone opens an email or views a proposal, it stands a better chance of responding timely and accordingly.

Another example is when a person visits your services or pricing page. Your sales team can be notified through an email concerning the activity and automatically capture the prospect's contact details for further engagement.

Accurate and Efficient Report

Sales involve numbers, and automation helps you to analyze these numbers accurately. Instead of wasting hours compiling reports, you can include automation in your CRM tool to generate meaningful and detailed lead reports for your sales team automatically.

Personalized Communication

On top of generating and converting leads, sales automation can take your customer retention strategy to a whole new level. It empowers you to personalize communications, from push notifications to email sequences, to foster robust relationships.

How to Best Adopt Sales Automation

According to McKinsey's research, you can automate more than 30% of your overall sales activities. Let's look at where the opportunities lie and the best way to tap into them to drive your sales automation adoption.

Map and Personalize B2B Customer Journey

There is no better way to provide a flawless customer experience before, during, and after the sale than to supplement your efforts with automation. Start by mapping the customer journey down the acquisition funnel and create automated systems to remove inefficiencies.

Mapping customer journeys will help you generate targeted and personalized communication and customer support with prospects through automation to profoundly push the lead into your funnel. This will not only help your sales representatives to save time but also enable prospects to receive a quality experience.

Prospecting and Lead Qualification Automation

Lead qualification involves filtering and prioritizing your leads list to identify opportunities for higher ROI. This process is lengthy and time-consuming, considering that you must develop a detailed workflow with various steps for setting up touchpoints with leads, collecting data for lead scoring, and qualifying the leads.

The lack of an effective lead qualification strategy is why about 40% of sales executives face poor lead generation performance. A few things to do to automate your prospecting and lead qualification processes successfully include:

• Use smart forms to automatically segment your lead into various categories when capturing leads from a landing page.
• Generate a well-charted conversation sequence to pose questions and capture data from prospects through chat.
• Automate the lead scoring process to speed up the qualification workflow while shortening the sales cycle.
• Create automated workflows to qualify website visitors based on specific actions like a webinar sign-up or an eBook download.

Embrace Targeted Reporting with Accurate Data

Shortening the sales cycle through automation can boost conversion rates by a higher margin, and the main contributors to this process are data and business intelligence. You can use a CRM tool to autopilot the reporting process and create a clear presentation of your sales performance.

This will give you insights into the success or failure of various campaigns and growth opportunities to tap to attain revenue targets. In addition, you will obtain multiple sales metrics to examine your sales team's performance, as well as rely on the sales performance and progress to set smart goals.

Accelerate Social Media Outreach

Social media selling can generate 50% or more revenue compared to other channels. Even so, the entire process of identifying, qualifying, and converting social media prospects calls for tireless follow-ups and consistent efforts.

Thanks to sales automation, you can kick all the stress out of your social outreach by minimizing manual input. One of the goldmines for social media B2B sales is LinkedIn. By integrating several sales automation tools, you can easily find targeted profiles and share cold messages with them to supercharge your sales campaigns.

On top of the personalized outreach campaigns, consider automating your social media retargeting ads. Retargeting ads will help nurture prospects collected from LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social platforms.

Streamline Ad Campaigns Through Automation

Ads serve as a bridge between sales and marketing. By using automated systems, you can strengthen this link, directly and significantly impacting your revenue. Even though ads can disrupt the users' viewing experience, you can personalize them to hit the right chord.

Through AI-powered automation, you receive accurate estimates of your customer segmentation, target audience, KPIs tracking, and performance patterns to boost your advertising potential and scale campaigns. You can rely on automation to schedule ads, obtain constructive suggestions on developing ad campaigns, and create accurate patterns and segments based on customer data.

The best way to prepare and equip your sales team for business growth and higher B2B leads is to embrace sales automation. This will not only promote lead nurturing but also drive customer engagement and boost sales revenue. It's high time your company implements a B2B sales automation strategy to collect high-quality B2B leads for the business.