Tips for Choosing the Best Sales Automation Platform

What should you take into consideration when choosing the best sales automation platform for your business?

1. Identify your needs
2. Look for specific features
3. Ease of use and cohesiveness
4. Understand the security risks involved
5. Take note of your service needs

With the help of sales automation platforms, your business can experience substantial growth. You can improve your business process by saving time, maximizing efficiency, and minimizing human error! But with all the benefits that you can get from these, you’ll eventually have to face some risks as well.

With that in mind, choosing a sales automation platform is not something that you do spontaneously; you have to clearly think about it. With the large collection of sales automation platforms out on the Internet, your only problem is finding the one that will benefit your business the most!

To make sure that you’ll get the best sales automation platform for your business, here are a few tips to follow in choosing one!

Identify Your Needs

Think of your business processes and which ones you want to automate. Not all sales automation platforms are created with equal capabilities, so you have to find one that will fit what you need thoroughly.

Other than that, you should also take a look at which figures you want to improve. And this doesn’t stop with your initial business reports or marketing results, either. You should also take into consideration your ongoing performance and your forecasted values for the quarters.

Once you have a solid grasp of both the things you want to automate and the numbers you want to achieve, you should already have a clear understanding of what you’re looking for!

Look for Specific Features

Once you have an idea of what your goal for your sales automation platform is, you’ll have to look up the features that you want your platform to have. There are a plethora of features found in sales automation platforms. Here are 10 of the most sought-after ones:

• Two-way Email Sync – work faster by sending and receiving email through the same platform where you access contacts, leads, and deals!
• Contact and Lead Segmentation – create sub-classifications of your contacts and leads so that you can create messages and/or initiate sequences that are targeted to their interests, lead status, recent activity, and demographic!
• Email Template – pre-written email templates can save a considerable amount of time that is usually devoted to proofreading, drafting and personalizing your sales message!
• Email Tracking – provide a sense of how email campaigns are performing through simple data such as when emails are opened, how many times it was opened and the last time it was opened.
• Search Filters – Look past inactive leads with accuracy, setting aside the inactive ones and emphasizing those with potential!
• Call Scripts, Recording, and Transfer/Forwarding – Make your calls easier to deal with through tailored scripts that are segmented based on leads, automatically recording calls for future purposes and automatic forwarding of calls to mobile phones or other devices.
• Automatic Logging – automatically note the time and date of inbound and outbound communication and take note of the activity timelines of relevant contacts, leads, and opportunities.
• Notifications – Define the triggers that they think should be worth a notification.
• Reports – track agent activity and record updates, allowing for forecasts, and performance analysis!

Ease of Use and Internal Cohesiveness

If possible, try out your chosen platform and see just how easy it is to use. Make sure the user interface is smooth and understandable, and that it can be set up easily.

Integrating this can be hard at first, with all the calibrations that you would need to do, but once it is fully programmed and functioning correctly, it should work smoothly and require little operating efforts.

Choose the platform that will give you the most convenience when you use it. The easier it is to set up, integrate, and operate, the better a choice it will be.

Understand the Security Risks Involved

Sales automation, as with any other software that relies on the Internet, has this looming threat of becoming the target of cyber attacks. With that in mind, you should choose the solution with all the possible security measures applied to it in order to repel any kind of cyber attack.

The drawback of most sales automation platforms is that it makes your business process a little bit more vulnerable to outside intervention. So you should be ready and prepared for anything that might happen!

Take Note of Your Service Provider

When choosing your sales automation platform, don’t just look at the product; you should also have a look at the provider. They should be trustworthy and responsible – a business that is sure to give you qualitative services for the period of your time working together.

Key Takeaway

Sales automation platforms are no longer a luxury for businesses. It is more of a necessity for any kind of organization that wants to put out good numbers and improves their operations and processes. Keep an open mind on when you’re choosing your automation platform—consider these tips when choosing one and you’re sure to find the best sales automation platform for you!