Outbound sales is evolving, thanks to the next generation of automation tools. With cloud-based software that automates tasks like lead generation and cold calling, sales teams can spend more time engaging potential new customers—not plugging names and numbers into a spreadsheet.
What Automation Can (And Can’t) Do
Automation doesn’t mean getting rid of your salespeople and relying on robocalls. Rather, it’s about freeing your salespeople from mundane, manual tasks so they can spend more time with prospects further down the sales funnel—and focus on nurturing leads and closing deals.
It also means they aren’t wasting valuable time on time-consuming tasks, like researching prospects, manually inputting data and making cold calls—most of which don’t get a response.
The success rate for cold calling varies, though the baseline success rate is generally considered to be about two percent. However, most salespeople know from experience that they need to make a lot of cold calls before they land a new client.
By integrating outbound sales automation software with your customer relationship management (CRM) system, automation tools can help with lead generation, sales prospecting, cold outreach, targeted messaging, follow-up automation and lead nurturing. CRM integration can also help with sales funnel automation, sales acceleration and workflow optimization.
What automation can’t do is build relationships with prospects. But by freeing up salespeople to build those relationships, outbound sales automation can help them achieve their sales targets while minimizing what are arguably some of the hardest (and most mundane) parts of the job.
3 Ways Outbound Sales Automation Can Help
1. Lead Generation
This is a critical part of the sales process, but doing this manually (such as inputting data into a spreadsheet) is a painstaking, time-consuming task. It’s also easy to make errors, such as data duplication. With CRM integration, outbound sales automation provides high-quality leads from the get-go, at scale. It can also help your salespeople track, organize and manage leads, so they have the information they need at their fingertips when approaching prospects.
2. Cold Outreach
Cold calling is also a painstaking, time-consuming task. Using predictive dialer technology, cold calling can become much more efficient. Readymode’s predictive dialer, for example, can call multiple lines at the same time, using statistical analysis to predict when a prospect will answer—only passing along answered calls to agents.
3. Prioritizing Leads
With CRM integration, outbound sales automation can help salespeople prioritize leads further down the sales funnel. That means they’ll spend their time with warm or hot leads, not cold calling. And with Readymode, advanced routing capabilities allow you to pair the right lead with the right agent; the software can even help create custom sales scripts with embedded lead data.
Automating the grunt work involved in prospecting—particularly cold calling—could also help with attracting and recruiting salespeople, since they can use their skills and talents to do what they do best: close deals. And that’s a win-win for everyone.
Vawn Himmelsbach
Vawn Himmelsbach is a writer and editor specializing in enterprise IT, writing for national newspapers and technology trade magazines on everything from AI to zero-day threats. She also spent three years working abroad as an Asian correspondent, covering all things tech.
