One of the biggest barriers to growth for SMEs is the resources and time required to make sales, especially when selling to other SMEs. This is because SME business owners are notoriously careful decision makers, wanting solutions are not just products, and needing to achieve the best value from their limited budget. Sales cycles can also be lengthy because SME business owners are busy people, difficult to pin down.
Sales admin is another consideration, especially during growth drives or campaigns, with hours each week required to painstakingly update the CRM, manually reply to emails, make calls, and keep the cogs turning on the road to a sale. With multiple leads to follow up on and sales to close, it can quickly become overwhelming for business owners and their teams to manage everything manually.
HubSpot’s automation tools can streamline your sales processes, making it easier for you to stay in touch with your target customers and cutting back on your admin burden.
Can SMEs sales really be automated?
SME sales is a strongly person-to-person process, with prospects needing a lot of personalised attention, so can small business sales really be automated? Yes. Automation doesn’t and can’t replace the personal relationship element of sales, but it can automate repetitive tasks, giving you more time to focus on value-driven activities such as relationship building and finalising deals.
These ‘repetitive manual tasks’ are everywhere in the sales process, from data entry and enrichment, to scheduling meetings, updating colleagues, lead scoring and routing, responding to routine emails, correcting errors, and sending out sales content and messages.
Some business owners save 3 to 4 hours a week, or more, simply by automating core sales admin and processes.
Lead management and follow-ups
Delays are the graveyard of sales. In an ideal world, every prospect would be responded to promptly and followed up appropriately, but it’s not an ideal world, and with many tasks to juggle, it’s easy for lead communication to slip. Unfortunately, this can quickly result in opportunities going cold. HubSpot’s automation tools make communication and follow-up easier by providing automated task reminders, ensuring that no lead falls through the cracks.
This can help your sales team stay organised and focused on high-value activities, prioritising the leads that are most ready to convert. Automation also has a strong role to play in lead nurturing, sending out email sequences and workflows based on behavioural triggers and the prospects lead score.
Automation can also help you respond more promptly to customers without direct input, for instance by sending an immediate follow-up when they email you, rather than taking hours or days for you to get back to them in person. This ties automation into deal progression - HubSpot automated workflows can move leads through different buyer stages based on custom criteria or actions. This streamlines your deal progression strategy and encourages consistent actions and interactions with your prospects.
Next steps
To find out more about HubSpot and how its automation tools can help you make more sales in less time, while also reducing the time you spend on admin, please get in touch with one of our specialists today by clicking here.
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