What is Sales Automation?
Sales Automation is simply defined by the techniques and methods implemented (most often) by the Sales and Marketing teams to automate the manual and recurring tasks of the sales cycle:
- Generation of qualified leads
- Addition to the CRM
- Automatic enrichment in the CRM
- Detection and merging of duplicates (if the lead already exists in the CRM)
- Sending of Cold Email
- Sending of follow-up
- etc.
Automated prospecting or sales automation is therefore a lever of efficiency and growth for the sales teams, and Marketing upstream.
As of 2023, HubSpot has more than 158,000 customers in over 7,400 companies worldwide. It's probably one of the most well-known CRMs 🧡
The centralization of contacts and business information is becoming more and more widespread in companies.
But, the automation of prospecting through CRM is still often put aside even though it is the key to make one's sales take off without exploding the time and associated costs.
Reduce your prospecting costs with your Sales Machine
Have you ever calculated the revenue you didn't earn because of time wasted doing non-sales tasks?
Automated prospecting allows you to save costs: time of the SDR to enrich the leads in the CRM, interns to clean the CRM every summer...
Improve productivity by creating a Sales Machine with your CRM
Searching for leads' information on LinkedIn, copying and pasting them, checking them... Beyond the monotony of this task, it reduces your troops' motivation.
These tasks are not rewarding for your teams, who cannot exercise their true talent and prove their added value.
Better target your prospects automatically
Targeting and segmentation are the beginning of any successful prospecting campaign. Automating targeting based on factual criteria allows you to avoid the risk of error and segment your lead base without even lifting a finger.
Ensure sales scalability through CRM automation
Finding leads manually on LinkedIn or in targeted lists, adding them to your CRM, checking that they do not already exist, enriching it with all the useful data for prospecting...
All these actions, if they are done manually by your Sales or Marketing teams, are a real obstacle: scalability will simply be impossible!
Save time with your CRM
All the time saved by your Sales Machine set up allows your teams to... SELL
That's their real job isn't it? 😉
Before jumping into automating your prospecting or lead generation, it's vital to ask yourself a few questions.
What? What for? With what? How do you do it? Does it work?
Define your objectives
Defining the objectives of your Sales Machine is essential! Don't miss this step, which will allow you to build and optimize your automation in the best possible conditions
- Sell more?
- Do less actions and save time to Sales and Marketing teams ?
- Centralize information so that nothing is left out ?
- etc.
Identify the tasks that can be automated in your CRM
Each company and each Sales/Marketing team has different objectives and tasks but overall, the prospecting process and the Sales Machine can meet these objectives:
- Find leads on LinkedIn
- Find leads on identified websites
- Send leads to your CRM
- Find the emails of your leads
- Check the emails of existing contacts
- Enrich your leads with all the information necessary for good prospecting
- Enrich the leads' companies with their legal and useful segmentation information
- Identify duplicate contacts
- Merge identified duplicates
- Send leads in Cold Emails campaigns
- Update your CRM following the sending of Email campaigns
- Follow up on leads or customers between different departments: Marketing, Support, Supply ChainOther customized tasks...
- Other customized tasks...
Choose the right tools to connect to your CRM
Each task has its tool 🧰
From Linkedin scraping to enrichment to sending Cold Emails campaigns... Different tools exist to solve them!
Automate your lead generation by scraping LinkedIn
💡 LinkedIn scraping is a growth hacking technique that automates the copy and paste of all the information available on a LinkedIn profile.
Check out our top LinkedIn Scraper tools
Automate the sending of your leads in your CRM
Either your scraping tool is directly integrated into your CRM (the best option) or you have to send your leads to your CRM, many platforms exist such as Zapier, n8n or Make (ex-Integromat) to do so.
Enriching your contacts directly in your CRM
Enriching your contact and company data is not only about finding the email address, it is also about adding all the relevant and necessary data for your prospecting:
- Civility
- Normalization of the first and last name
- Add the contact's job
- Add the company's website
- Add the company's LinkedIn profile
- Add the company's legal information...
💡 Enriching your data in real time is the key to ensuring the freshness of the data and the effectiveness of your prospecting campaigns
Find verified and up-to-date email
Email Finder tools are essential for SDR, BDR, Sales and Marketing teams. Email in B2B is the primary prospecting channel.
Before choosing your email finder, it is important to ask yourself a few questions:
- Are the data verified and up to date?
- Are databases used? Has the resale of contact information been explicitly granted by the user?
- In short, is the process compliant with the GDPR?
To see more clearly, here is our Top Emails Finder in B2B.
💡 Also find out why you should absolutely not buy email databases to start your prospecting.
Identify and detect duplicate contacts and companies automatically in your CRM
Dropcontact is one of the only solutions on the market that automatically detects duplicate contacts and companies without even a common field in your HubSpot CRM...
Once detected, duplicates are directly merged without any information loss.
Automate the sending of your Cold Email or follow-up from your HubSpot CRM
Many Cold Emails platforms allow you to automatically send campaigns based on criteria in your HubSpot CRM: this is the case of lemlist, reply.io or quickmail to name a few.
⚠️ Be careful to ensure compatibility between all the tools you connect to each other.
Let's take a useful example for all Sales Teams: Automate your Sales Machine, from lead generation to sending targeted Cold Emails
In this example, we will scrape LinkedIn with Surfe, send these new leads directly to HubSpot CRM and enrich, update, detect and merge contacts and companies with Dropcontact, the all-in-one CRM integration.
The final step of automating your Sales Machine is to send your qualified leads to your cold email tool, to prospect by Cold Email.
First of all, you will need to download the Chrome extension of Surfe (ex-leadjet) and connect your CRM (here HubSpot).
Don't forget, if you haven't already, to create a Dropcontact account and connect your CRM.
🚁 Need help or guidance? Don't hesitate to contact the Dropcontact team, always ready to advise you in the management and integration of Dropcontact in HubSpot.
Then, all you have to do is identify your target's leads on LinkedIn and send them to your HubSpot CRM in one click!
The contact is automatically added in your HubSpot CRM and in a few seconds, Dropcontact enriches it without you even having to do an additional action. 🪄
PS: If you don't have Dropcontact integration in HubSpot (yet 😉 ), Dropcontact is also natively integrated in Surfe, so you can totally enrich your leads directly in Surfe, before pushing them into your CRM.
Now that you have new, highly qualified, enriched and up-to-date leads, it's time to prospect them via Cold Email.
Create an account on your Cold Email tool, and configure your account by connecting especially in Team Settings > Integrations your HubSpot CRM. This connection will allow you to automate the sending of your leads in previously prepared campaigns.
Beforehand, prepare your Cold Email campaigns well: subject line, content, follow-up... Your automation should seem as human as possible.
The integration of lemlist with HubSpot allows you to track all interactions made via emails directly in your HubSpot 🔥
And there you have it, your prospecting cycle, your Sales Machine is fully automated! Sales are yours!
Have the "Growth" mindset test, test, test, monitor and iterate until your super prospecting machine is well oiled and hyper performing.
Don't launch the whole automation at once. Don't launch all the automation at once. Do it manually at first and when all your tasks have been identified then launch the implementation.
