7 Ways to Automate Your Sales Process: From Lead Generation to Closing the Deal

You need sales to make money, but you need leads to bring in sales. So it begins.

In B2B marketing, generating leads is key to generating sales. Together, they help identify potential customers, build relationships, and drive revenue.

But managing both can feel like you’re in a never-ending cycle of finding leads and trying to close deals.

Luckily, there are tons of different strategies and software platforms you can utilize to automate your sales process. Let’s jump in.

Why should I automate lead generation and sales management?

We’ll start with some quick definitions. Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting prospects into potential customers. It’s the foundation of any business. No leads = no sales.
Sales management is (you guessed it) the process of managing sales, like tracking leads and nurturing a smooth relationship from prospect to customer.

Ultimately, lead generation and sales management determine the success and scalability of your business.

By automating lead generation and sales management through things like lead capture, follow-ups, and reporting, you can better prioritize prospects by finding and engaging with quality leads.

How to automate your sales management & boost lead generation

Automating your sales cycle will rapidly expedite your processes so you can scale and convert those high-quality leads you’ve always dreamed of having in your pipeline. But how do you actually put your sales management on autopilot?

1. Automate lead capture

If you want customers, you’ve gotta capture leads first. But let’s be honest, tracking down every prospect yourself is about as efficient as painting a wall with a toothbrush.

There are plenty of ways to automatically capture leads that come to you. For example, you can set up landing pages and online forms that can catch contact information and filter it into your database. You can also utilize chatbots and messaging tools. Not only can they interact with potential customers and gather contact information, but they can also redirect to a sales representative.

2. Lead scoring and prioritization

When it comes to leads not all are created equal. Quality matters over quantity—you could have 20,000 leads but if only two are actually serious about investing in your product, the other 19,998 aren’t going to matter.

By analyzing user intent, you can see who’s most likely to buy based on customer behavior. Lead scoring is going to help identify those high-value prospects so your sales team knows who to prioritize. In fact, according to Aberdeen Research, companies that successfully implement lead scoring see a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than their counterparts.

To automate this process, there are dozens of tools out there that allow you to set up your criteria for a lead scoring model. These are going to increase accuracy and save your sales team tons of time manually analyzing the quality of each lead.

3. Email campaigns for relationship-building

You’ve got the right leads. Now you need to nurture them to make sure their interests are being understood and met.

The best way to nurture leads is through automated email sequences that send personalized content at just the right moment in the sales cycle. Prospective buyers can use this information to make potential purchasing decisions. Plus, it’s a great way to maintain personal relationships.

Whether you’re onboarding a client or creating upsell opportunities, it’s always best practice to schedule automated follow-ups. That way, you can keep current customers engaged and stay top of mind when they need your product or service again.

By using an email platform, you can develop messages that get sent by automatic triggers on the dates and times you want the emails to go out.

Let’s say you’ve identified a quality lead— you’ll send your initial message, then trigger additional messages one week or two weeks later to keep them engaged. The goal is to guide them right down the sales funnel until they convert.

4. Create demos and guides to use in automated outreach

In the B2B space, your leads will want to see how your product or service operates. However, scheduling a call for every prospect isn’t feasible as you grow.

Creating short demonstrations, step-by-step guides, or YouTube tutorials ensures you answer all of your client’s potential questions without actually having to talk with them at every stage. (It saves your customer support team time, too!) It’s also a great resource to have on hand to include in the outreach process or in email automations.

Speaking of outreach…

Love it or hate it, social media is essential these days for capturing leads at the top of your sales funnel. You’re not expected to be a social media expert, but using automation tools to engage with prospects on social platforms reduces the need to manually monitor them.

Plus, you can easily include links to your demos or guides in a message so prospects can understand right away what your product or service has to offer.

5. CRM integration for streamlined sales management

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is crucial to identifying and managing all of your leads. CRMs manage your entire sales pipeline—essentially, they allow your business to collect, store, and manage your customers' data.

By integrating a CRM into your sales system, you’ll save time on the manual part of data entry and lead tracking. You’ll also increase sales by automatically identifying opportunities, plus collaborate better with your team by having all of your sales information centralized in one place.

6. Automated sales reporting

Automating reporting streamlines the process of tracking and analyzing sales data to help your team make informed data-driven decisions and identify areas for improvement. With automation, reports are consistent in metrics and can be generated in real time, providing up-to-date insights.

Automated sales reporting frees up the time it takes for repetitive data entry, so teams can focus on strategy instead of admin tasks.

7. Contract and proposal automation

You’ve got the sale. Now it’s time to make it official with a signed contract. But the constant back and forth can add extra friction that slows things down.

By automating contact creation and signature collection with tools like BreezeDoc, you can speed up the closing of the deal to get the ball moving on what comes after. Saving your contract templates for future use also makes it easy to switch out basic info without having to redo all of the other legal and logistical work.

Top tools to automate sales management

Today, if you want to get more done in less time, software is a non-negotiable. SaaS products can boost efficiency and productivity by handling routine operations allowing you more time to focus on building relationships and growing your business.

At AppSumo, we have tons of software for automating sales management that can significantly streamline tasks, from lead tracking to reporting. These tools are all lifetime deals so you only have to pay once—zero monthly fees.

Here are a few to put sales on easy mode:

• Octolens: Identify leads that are ready to buy using AI social monitoring. Octolens tracks brand mentions and keywords across platforms. That way, you can find B2B leads with high buyer intent so you can swoop in and close the deal.
• LeadRocks: Searching for high-quality leads just got a whole lot more efficient. LeadRocks has 100M+ records and LinkedIn profiles of reliable B2B contacts for hyper-targeted outreach.
• Claspo: Create personalized pop-ups that automatically capture leads with advanced targeting options to collect more leads.
• SendFox: Schedule automated emails that nurture leads and drive them straight down the sales funnel. Plus, with SendFox, you can easily create landing pages and forms to collect lead information.‍
• DocPro: Access 2,500+ lawyer-reviewed documents and legal contracts that you can tailor to your specific needs so you’re not slowed down by the onboarding process.

Conclusion

Automating your sales cycle is critical for maximizing efficiency and driving growth. It allows businesses to scale while consistently finding, qualifying, and nurturing leads without overlooking potential customers.

By automating these processes with the right software, you or your sales team can prioritize high-quality leads and focus on closing deals.