Automation holds many possibilities to reduce the cost of sales by freeing up time spent on admin tasks and reporting by unlocking additional income. This can be done by automating outreach to customers in the sales funnel. However, many decision-makers and senior executives are not mindful, or have not taken advantage, of the value that sales automation can create across a growing range of use cases. As stated by Forbes, many sales executives spend up to 65% of their time on tasks that are not even related to sales. According to various reports, time is usually spent on researching potential prospects, sending follow-ups, or updating customer relationship management (CRM) systems. At a recent GDS RevGen Summit, Hindu Somashekar, Senior Director and Global Head of Business Applications at Tray.io talks about mastering automation and boosting sales productivity. Hindu highlights several key topics about fostering automation transformation to drive success in sales.
Common Sales Ops Challenges Harming Innovation
Hindu and his team speak to a lot of sales operations teams and high growth companies such as Outreach, Gong, Notion and Udemy. It doesn’t matter if they have a centralized REV OPS functions or a separate sales operations team, Tray.io see the same set of challenges applications overload. Marketing and sales teams have some of the largest and most fragmented application stack. According to their State of Automation Research, teams across the go-to-market landscape are typically running more than 100 different applications. That means more manual work that requires maintenance and support with the team spending more time managing the operational work in spreadsheets and manual data entry.
Nearly 90% of the team members from the State of Automation Report stated that they feel continuous process improvement is out of reach for them. Without overcoming these barriers, the customer and partner experience will be sub optimal and affect company growth.
How Digital Transformation Requires a Shifting Mindset
Your company may be going through a digital transformation process, or you might be thinking about digital innovation to take the revenue operations team to the next level. With the existing point-to-point or spaghetti type of integration between so many applications, some apps are connected, and some are not. Enterprises may be facing a lot of data integrity issues and challenges, and this will cause seeing a lot of process gaps. It will restrict a company to drive a successful digital transformation and innovation journey.
A breakthrough in this area requires a different mindset on how you align and integrate your business applications with robust processes. At the same time, a strong reliable automation is required to drive better data quality, improve operational efficiency, and help your sales team to be more productive so that they can focus more on selling than dealing with operational work and handling the systems.
The Automation Potential to Transform Organisations
When it comes to how automation can transform organisations, Hindu shares these findings. IBM reported a 90% reduction in reporting response time, Mixpanel have a 25% reduction in order-to-cash time, Jellyvision have 3x faster lead response times and Udemy have saved 300+ hours of manual work per year. The results speak for themselves. Several teams who invest in automation see great results. It creates less manual work and, more importantly, anyone can see the holistic view of the sales process that are aligned end-to-end. The process should be easy and should not take months of effort to implement these changes and you do not have to rely heavily on your IT development stack. So, how does it all work?
Define Your Operational Goals and Objectives
It should be simple, efficient, and engaging to drive user adoption and support port frictionless process. The data should be trusted and accurate so that you can forecast and predict your organisations growth better. Many of your processes and workflows should be automated, reliable, and scalable. Lastly, it should be future proof to support the scale of your enterprise and understand the impact of any processes when a go-to-market strategy changes.
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