Sales play a crucial role in business success, making the sales force an important aspect of any company. However, the sales process can be bogged down by repetitive tasks like lead generation, email follow-up, and appointment scheduling. Sales automation tools offer a solution. Streamlining the process and freeing up valuable time for sales teams to focus on selling.

Efficiency through Automation

Sales automation tools automate routine tasks, allowing sales teams to focus on what really matters. From lead generation to email follow-up, these tools streamline the sales process, making it more efficient and effective. By automating repetitive tasks, sales teams can save time and focus on selling, leading to increased productivity and results.

Maximizing Sales Potential

In addition to streamlining the sales process, sales automation tools provide valuable insights and data analysis. This information helps sales teams make informed decisions and drive better results. Choosing the right sales automation tool can be a challenge, with many options available on the market. Consider your business size, budget, and specific automation needs when selecting the best tool for your sales team.

What is a Sales Automation Tool?

A sales tool software that automates repetitive sales tasks and streamlines the sales process. These tools help sales teams manage their sales pipeline, track leads, and communicate with potential customers, all from one platform. Automating routine sales tasks enables sales teams to save time and concentrate. More important activities, such as selling and closing deals.

Pipeliner CRM as a Sales Automation Tool

Pipeliner CRM is a leading sales CRM software to empower sales teams. It is a cloud-based platform that provides a comprehensive suite of tools for sales teams. With Pipeliner CRM, sales teams can manage their sales pipeline, track leads, set KPIs, and communicate with potential customers. Analyze sales data and process visually all in one place. Pipeliner CRM also offers integrations with other tools and platforms, making it a powerful solution for automating the sales process.

How to Do Sales Automation?

To automate your sales process, choose a sales tool that best suits your needs. There are many sales automation available, each offering different features and integrations. When choosing a sales automation tool, consider factors such as your business size, budget, and the specific tasks you need to automate.

Once you have selected an automation tool for your sales team. You can start automating your sales process by integrating it with your existing sales tools and platforms. For example, you can integrate, email, tracking leads, and marketing automation tools, allowing you to automate tasks such as lead generation, email follow-up, and appointment scheduling.

Which Tool is Best for Sales?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best sales automation tool will depend on your specific needs and requirements. However, some popular options for automating the sales process include Pipeliner CRM, Zapier, Apsona, and Ditto. These tools provide different features and integrations, so it is important to consider your specific needs and requirements when choosing an automation tool.

In conclusion, sales automation tools are essential tools for any sales team, helping to streamline the sales process. Freeing up time for the sales force to focus on what really matters: selling. Whether you choose Pipeliner CRM or another sales CRM.  It is important to choose a tool that best suits your needs and helps you automate your sales process effectively.

Automatizer is our new, groundbreaking feature within Pipeliner CRM. It has a broad positive impact on business, today and into the future.

Traditionally, company growth has followed a regular trend. For example, as the staff becomes more numerous within an organization, you need someone responsible for the upkeep of all the laptops and devices. That would be IT. IT is also responsible for your data center, whether on-premises, in the cloud or a hybrid.

If your company isn’t automated, rapid growth can only mean adding more and more people. For that, you need office space furnished with desks and chairs. Staff need some infrastructure, too, such as break rooms with kitchen facilities, and free coffee and water. Some startups have gone totally overboard with wildly designed environments, color-coded t-shirts, game rooms and other elements designed to make the staff feel entitled.

We can clearly see, though, that this trend has completely disappeared. Not only because of covid-19 (although that certainly was a contributing factor) but, because of automation, we no longer need most of these extravagances. A fantastic example, one I give often, is Amazon. This is a company largely operating on automated processes, and they’re now the most successful company on the planet, with their CEO being the richest man in the world.

Today, there are many factors of company structure that can be automated, which provides enormous cost savings. Many departments become less important when you have a real digital automation structure.

All of this breaks down into unbelievable changes in 4 major areas:

1. People versus technology. I often find myself in arguments with anyone who says that “technology sucks.” The fact of the matter is that technology is never a problem. Technology is a constant, while people are complex with ever-changing issues. I believe that if we examine the last 8 months, we’ll clearly see that technology has not been the problem, but human beings have.

Human beings are unpredictable. You never quite know what they’re going to do. They get sick. They take unexpected vacations. You never know how loyal they are—you build a relationship with them but one day they are gone.

Sometimes the knowledge of the job disappears with them. As an example, a banker within a particular private bank can build great relationships with customers. The question is, are people more aligned to that banker, or to the bank itself? The fact is that you can bank anywhere. If that banker moves on, he or she very possibly takes customers with them.

Building a structure with human beings, as we can see, is tremendously costly.

2. Budget considerations. Before you build this structure, you must budget out the financial resources required for hiring, educating, and onboarding. In sales, we talk about “sales yield,” which is the time it takes for a salesperson to become productive.

As you grow, you need layers of management. A pointed question could be asked about a manager: in addition to managing, are they also producing revenue? That person might be costing more than they’re making for the company.

3. Internal conflict. As a company grows, more internal conflicts can occur.

I’m not saying such conflicts are impossible to manage—otherwise, why would we have so many large companies? Of course, when we examine demographics, the majority of US companies are small and medium companies.

4. Focus. A company is constantly focusing on product innovation, marketing, and sales. As they do so, they are learning. The more lessons learned, the more efficient the company becomes. From efficiency comes productivity, and from productivity comes profitability.

If a company becomes more productive with fewer staff, there is reduced payroll, vacation, and sick pay. The company is also far more profitable. And that is where real automation is leading—higher productivity and profitability without the human risk involved. Conversely, the more human error involved, the more of a decrease in company performance. That also means a decrease in profitability.

Once more the best example I’ve ever seen of fewer staff, applied automation, and outstanding profitability is Amazon—something they’ve achieved in a very short 25 years. It’s incredible to think about the fact that for years after the company was founded, it was ridiculed, and it was said that Amazon would never turn an actual profit. Look at them today.

This is precisely the direction in which we’re heading with Pipeliner CRM’s Automatizer feature. Just within our own company, we’ve evolved hundreds of processes with Automatizer that we can instantly put to work. Without them, he’d have to hire (or re-hire) a considerable number of employees. We have tremendously increased company productivity and greatly reduced the risk factor and cost.

Guess what? With Automatizer, so can you!

It’s no secret that the covid19 pandemic has pushed the digital world many years ahead—I would say at least 5 years, perhaps even more. We now see (whether you believe it or not) that with the “3rd wave” of covid19 we need to prepare ourselves for this to be an ongoing situation. The pressure to have a digital strategy is now crucial, and I would say it’s impossible to function as a business if you don’t have one.

The pandemic has caused a transformation in society that is changing everything we do, and how and why we do it. We see these changes in how we produce, how we consume, in transport and endless other sectors. A primary change that has come about is in the way we communicate. Zoom rapidly transformed from a company no one had ever heard of to a world brand. It’s the platform through which much business is conducted and schooling is even done.

Something I find very interesting is that G5—5th generation wireless—was implemented just in time for the pandemic. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it sure made the difference when we all had to work from home. A couple of years ago, the internet would not have supported the sheer amount of video conferencing that is taking place. The mobile web is just the beginning of this tremendous revolution.

Now, through technology, every company needs to learn to truly focus, and out of that focus to become more efficient. From efficiency comes productivity, and from productivity comes profitability.

Automatizer

Let’s take a look at the crucial role that CRM is playing in this transformation, and why Automatizer is, for the future, the core of our CRM product.

In a recent article, I was discussing the need, throughout time, to reduce and eliminate repetitive tasks. But in fact it’s not so much about reduction, because the word “reduction” is somewhat negative. It’s more the need for support in such tasks. Above we were discussing efficiency, and efficiency is how you optimize work. When you’re at home and you have multiple processes, optimization is difficult when you have to do everything manually.

For the first time in this technology movement we’re in, we now have a system with which someone can automate many different processes. We’ve created an engine for this purpose, that becomes the center of CRM technology. Almost anyone can configure and use it.

I’ve talked before about the most widely used application in history: Microsoft Excel. Just about anyone can pick it up and use it immediately, so extensive study is not required. At the same time, you can dive deep and take years to learn Excel’s more complex functionality in-depth, which many have done. With scripting skills, you can even create automation in Excel.

Today we need different technology, one for the purpose of automating as many repetitive tasks as possible. It must be as simple to pick up and use as Excel. This is why Automatizer, the heart of CRM of the future, was created. It is the hub around which everything else revolves. Like a wheel has spokes, many functions radiate out from this Automatizer hub.

And also like Excel, Automatizer can be used for more sophisticated tasks. It is not only useful for automating the simpler daily repetitive activities but for more complex work, it allows you to regularly assemble data from multiple touchpoints and summarize or otherwise analyze or utilize it.

The Problem Being Solved

In many ways, the Automatizer is the next in a very long line of time and labor-saving devices going back to the beginning of time. Just one example is that somewhere sometime back, somebody got sick and tired of having to wash dishes after every meal, and decided to invent the dishwasher. Another task people became weary of—washing clothes—resulted in the washing machine. When buildings became higher and climbing stairs became too much of a chore, the elevator was invented.

It’s a similar situation today. There are many tasks performed as part of sales that rob the salesperson of value, simply because these tasks could be automated. Such tasks are not only boring, but any intelligent person would ask, “Why do I have a computer? Why isn’t the computer doing this?” As an example, copy-paste was one of the core concepts for the Macintosh computer. It’s now everywhere, and we’ve become very used to it. But if someone performs copy-paste 100 times a day, they would rightly think, “Why can’t the computer do that? It’s a waste of my valuable time.”

Not to Replace Humans

We are definitely becoming wiser with the way we utilize technology. We’re using it to remove repetitive work that normally hinders people in building relationships. That is the heart of automation—it should not replace people, but should free people to pursue their actual purpose, whatever that may be. People were not made to perform repetitive tasks; they become depressed, angry, or upset when they have to do the same thing over and over.

We’re now living in a world where technology can take over simple or complex repetitive activities, which in fact technology can perform much better than humans. Machines never make mistakes, they are never sick, they work 24/7, and don’t require vacation pay.

The processes you can create with Automatizer are endless. Through creating these processes you become more focused. Here we circle back to the beginning of this article, because out of being focused you learn and become more efficient. Efficiency makes you more productive, and from that productivity comes profitability.

When your organization focuses on the right technology utilized for the right purpose, it can’t help but be successful. As technology is utilized, it needs to be constantly fine-tuned. This fine-tuning should be so easy that everyone can learn it. That is something else we’ve accomplished with Automatizer.

I invite you to come with me as we dive deeper into Automatizer through the next few articles—learn how it works and how you can use it.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
—Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Our grandparents often told us that, back in their day, they knew how to get things done, and that today, with all our complexity and complication, we’re seriously lost.

Well that might be true…but in the case of technology, sales automation will be bringing us back to something very beloved in our collective memory: the town General Store.

Believe it or not, it all falls under the topic of data automation.

Improvements Only the Beginning

We’ve seen many improvements in recent years with regard to data. An example is the business card scanner which we ourselves at Pipeliner have added to our mobile CRM solution. Reading the card is a simple scan. From that scan, contact fields can be auto-populated within Pipeliner. In the old days, you might have attended a trade show and come home with dozens of business cards that you’d then have to manually enter into your contact database. Very fortunately, those days are well behind us.

But scanning business cards is only the beginning. The data on that card might not be totally correct due to printer errors. Or, the person or business might have moved. If you wait a bit to contact them, the person might have even changed companies. You’re lucky if the person hasn’t changed phone numbers, too.

Unprecedented Data Access

Fortunately, though, we have unprecedented data access today. Data providing services, to which you can subscribe, grab data from other databases and off the internet so that your database can be automatically updated.

Previously you had to log into such a provider and purchase data. This was before the advent of APIs (discussed in our last article). Now everything is done through an API. With a technology called Webhooks, data can be pulled and pushed. The kind of tasks that were in the last few years long and complex are becoming incredibly fast and easy.

Data is not only grabbed from the internet, but that data can be updated, enriched, deduplicated and merged.

Importance of Data Automation

Marketing costs can eat into a company’s budget. When contact details are incorrect, that means the email you send will bounce, which is a waste of time, effort, and money. It is even more so when you’re sending physical items such as letters or packages.

With data, we do have to make one fundamental assumption: that the person named is indeed the person. Beyond that, it shouldn’t matter where that person lives or how often they move. The only thing that matters is, how can we keep that data current—mail, email, and phone—and use it correctly and efficiently?

Today that’s the point of data automation—to keep that data current.

The Near Future

I believe that a next step, coming in the near future, will be data history. That means not just the current data, but the evolution that data has gone through. Where has the person worked before? Where have they lived? What kind of social media interaction have they had?

I also believe that connections and relationships will also be available. It’s not just about the person you have on file, but their connections—who they are and how they are related. This isn’t simply contact connections, such as those shown on LinkedIn or Facebook, for these aren’t actual relationships. For example, I have close to 8,000 contacts on LinkedIn, but am I really connected to those people? No. But in the future, someone will be able to find out who is actually connected to me, who has interacted with me.

Such details mean that the salesperson can customize a product or service for a prospect, and hit it right on the mark.

We’re definitely on the way there. We can now keep the information up-to-date and enrich it. Next will be history and connections as well.

Privacy

Of course, along with such innovations, privacy is an enormous issue, which we’ll be taking up in a separate article. The General Data Protection Regulation—GDPR—is already in place in Europe, and will soon roll out worldwide. As businesspeople, we certainly want access to as much data as possible, but at the same time as citizens, we certainly don’t want our privacy violated.

Customer Insight and the General Store

Going back to the beginning of our article, it seems that in very appropriate ways, we’re going back to the General Store of American history.

What are we looking for with all this automation? Customer insight. And nobody had more customer insight than the proprietor of the General Store.

That proprietor always knew their customer. Not only the customer, but the customer’s family—children, spouses, and relations. They would greet a customer with, “Hey, Mary, how are you? How is John doing? How are the kids? By the way, I’ve reserved a couple of bottles of bluing that I knew you needed, and I kept aside a couple sticks of that penny candy that I know your kids love.”

That proprietor had a 360-degree view of their customers. They knew everything about them. What is amazing is that we now depend on databases to keep track of customer data—but everything that proprietor knew was right in their head.

Where We’re Going

This is where we’re headed, with data automation. When someone contacts you personally and has insights into your issues and preferences, how much difference does it make from someone just cold-calling you and giving you a pitch for a product or service you may or probably don’t need?

Our product Pipeliner is already quite flexible with our business card scanner, data enrichment, data migration, data cleansing, duplication checker and relationship mapping.

In 2 or 3 years, who knows? We may very well have the Pipeliner General Store.

There are many things we can say about automation—but probably the most relevant thing is that the goal is interconnection. This means connection between all sites, companies, and systems where such connection is required and sensible.

From the Past

Coming out of the past, each individual system has its own peculiarities. That is why, in today’s attempts at interconnection, the old legacy systems—mainframes or physical servers—are the biggest problems.

In the old days, this wasn’t an issue, because each company was totally isolated from others automation-wise. It didn’t matter if they all ran different technologies, had different protocols, and different ways of communicating—they were never intended to be interconnected. They were all isolated off in their own computer centers.

Beginnings

As we move forward in history to the late 1980s, I personally remember utilizing technologies such as Token Ring and PhoneNet. These were the first networks. They were only local, however, and were very slow.

The networking technology that began the big change was, of course, Ethernet, which was key to making the internet possible. At the time it seemed as if we’d truly arrived in the future—but looking back on it, the squealing of modems and the unbelievable slowness of waiting for a picture to appear on our screens sure doesn’t seem very futuristic now!

Expansion

One company that was really able to take advantage of the expansion in connection was Cisco Systems because they specialized in connecting companies, server farms and data centers to each other.

There were still many issues, though, as all of these sites had been established with different technologies—they “spoke different languages.” The solution was to create and program connectors to bridge one system to another. A whole industry grew up around these requirements.

Despite these connections, as previously noted internet speed was not nearly what it is today. No one in Europe was thinking about connecting to a company in the U.S. and transporting all their data. They would wait forever! So the solution was to connect to places where the data already resided.

Moving to the Cloud

The next major step was the realization that we could move to the cloud. I must give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge Marc Benioff and Salesforce for pushing the cloud to its next level. Although it represented a true paradigm shift, in the beginning, no one really understood what the cloud was all about, and many were leery of it.

Once the cloud was up and running, though, we were still faced with complexity when it came to applications working with each other. We had different kinds of protocols (such as SOAP), but we realized that we needed a single layer through which applications could be integrated.

APIs

Then came the breakthrough of API management. API—Application Program Interface—meant that applications could interact with each other.

The easiest way to visualize an API, I think, is as a socket. A perfect analogy is the way Apple innovates technology. They were the first to do away with CD drives in their computers, and everyone wondered how we would live without them. Then they changed USB connections to USB-C. Both of these meant that, with Apple, you always need some kind of converter. For example, I have a converter on my computer so that I can connect an Ethernet cable to Apple Thunderbolt. In another example, others have HooToo hubs to convert USB to USB-C. An API can be likened to such a converter, to enable one system to work with another.

I personally believe the future for APIs is enormous and is with us right now. We began very early in the history of our product Pipeliner CRM to make open APIs available so that other applications could connect to ours. API documentation and code is easily available right within Pipeliner CRM. The technology for such connection is there at speeds that 10, 15 years ago weren’t even possible.

There are different types of APIs. At Pipeliner, we’ve been using the traditional REST (Representative State Transfer) API for some time. We’re now already using the next generation of APIs, GraphQL. GraphQL is Facebook’s open standard for querying data, and it is said to have a more efficient, structured and systematic alternative to REST.

All of this possibility is brought about because most systems are living in the cloud. There are many cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), IMB Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and others. Such a service means 100% access, because 99.99 percent uptime is actually guaranteed. What if your servers were local and there was a power outage? You’d be out of business for that time. This never happens with the cloud.

What Can Be Done with Automation Today?

Before you connect anything, you should, of course, think about exactly what you want to achieve. Prior to creating an API, you must create business logic.

Just to take a peek at the future, it’s all about the Internet of Things. This is coming down the road very fast.

I’m personally using the first version of this. I have milk, water, and some other staples delivered through Amazon or another company. But if my refrigerator was intelligent, it would be able to sense when I was running out of, for example, milk, and would automatically order it. The refrigerator could read bar codes on items, and the milk would just show up in the refrigerator.

In a business example, a particular bar-coded electronic component, utilized in a piece of machinery, could be kept on hand in a factory. As these components are used up in manufacturing, the container that holds these components informs the proper section of the factory, and more can be made and sent over. This could theoretically occur with no human intervention whatsoever.

This will happen more and more as processes are automated. Of course, the processes must be designed, tested and built first.

Classic Sales Automation Example

For the future of CRM, one particular function—which we already have in Pipeliner—makes an enormous amount of sense.

The main commodity that goes into CRM is, of course, data. There are many data providers—Brickstream, FullContact, Clearbit, and many others. In light of all this data being available, there is nothing more painful than having to manually enter every piece of data, every time it is needed.

If data is out there—such as with a public company—simply entering the company name and, perhaps, its web site should be enough for the rest of the data (address, phone, etc.) to be filled in automatically. At the very least CRM should supply this functionality. This is what occurs with Pipeliner.

Stay with me in this series as we discover just some of the many benefits sales automation can bring to specific areas.

People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the number of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon Prime, containing the items we were simply browsing for that morning. The entire process is a product of automation—from the visualization on the screen, to the ordering and then the delivery of a perfect product right before you.

Today’s economy, in which goods and services are rapidly delivered throughout the world, would not be possible without automation. Just getting down to everyday activity, when we run low on milk or other grocery items, we can simply click a few boxes on a supermarket website and have them delivered within a few hours.

Another radical change in our daily lives has come about in driving a car. I remember in the old days when I rented a car in a strange city and had to open up a big paper map to figure out where I was going and hope I wouldn’t miss an exit and have to backtrack. Today this is no problem at all—your GPS navigation system will tell you exactly which exit to take and when it’s coming up.

There are, of course, many other examples.

Why Automation is Crucial

As the world moves ever faster, automation becomes increasingly essential in saving time. Automation can take care of many tasks that we no longer have to, so that we can attend more important matters.

We can take a look at the number of tasks that, for many, no longer exist because automation has taken them over. Hardly anyone remembers what life was like without a washing machine, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have one or at least has access to one (such as with a laundromat).

Just as a side note, and as a sort of preview of what will come later, there were people who had jobs taking care of laundry. Has the automation of laundry done away with jobs? Not at all—it has created new ones in laundry and dry cleaning enterprises.

Another invention that many would not live without is the dishwasher. In the old days, how many of us dreaded a huge dinner party, because we had to wash all those dishes afterward? It, like the washing machine, has become another enormously time-saving device.

Automation In Business and Sales

What does automation mean to us in business and in sales? Essentially, it means that no application can any longer be isolated in its own little world. Applications—as well as devices—must be interconnected, so that data can flow across an enterprise. When all is said and done, that data must be at our fingertips, no matter where we are in the organization. In the old days, we programmed connectors between applications and devices, at considerable expense and effort. Today, we’re in the dawning of an age where this is no longer necessary.

Unfortunately, a lack of interconnection can show up in the most inconvenient ways. Recently I was in an airport in Sydney, Australia and had to purchase a power connector so I could charge my phone because Australia has a different power system than the U.S. To me this is a little bit crazy—why do we have a different power system for every country? On airlines, they do solve this, with multiple connectors.

In any case, I don’t think we’ll make it very far into the future until it is possible to literally connect everything. In this series of articles, we will explore this more deeply and how CRM actually plays a central role in automation and interconnection. More broadly, we’ll take a look at the different concepts of automation that are out there, which make sense and which will not be profitable or successful.

Best of Breed

Many want to have a holistic “all-in-one” type of approach to business issues, following along the line of Microsoft and it’s suite of office solutions under the Office umbrella. But today, because interconnection is such a viable option, you can connect to the best of breed for many of your solutions.

The other side of this coin is the infinite number of applications and solutions out there that don’t integrate. Developers of such solutions had better change now or risk failure.

As we go through this series, we’ll discuss how automation has impacted these choices and how the right choice of a CRM means being able to integrate with your favorite applications.

Replacing People

Finally, I say that no, we do not believe that automation—and further along, artificial intelligence and robotics—will replace people. This is another topic we’ll take up at length as we go, but for now, suffice it to say that automation is enabling and creating new jobs. Additionally, I believe that automation will empower the human aspect of life, not lessen or remove it.

Come with me on this journey to discover how automation is not replacing life, but enhancing it!