Your lead pipeline, or a sales pipeline, describes where leads are in your sales process. Businesses have had a rough understanding of lead pipelines for decades, but now, new applications give organizations a precise overview of the lead pipeline.
Leading-edge CRMs provide robust pipeline monitoring and reporting capabilities and enable you to automate a wide range of tasks, saving your sales representatives from putting more time into admin tasks than closing sales.
For example, a recent report found that 42% of sales teams use a CRM to automate scheduling when meeting with new clients. Removing the need for a sales rep to exchange emails with leads allows these teams to focus on the appointments rather than mundane scheduling tasks.
Automating your sales lead pipeline can do wonders for your business. You’ll close more sales, cut operating costs, and lay the foundation for profitable scalability. Read on to learn more about automating your lead pipeline and how it will affect your sales teams.
Benefits of automating your lead pipeline
A company's lead pipeline is the lifeblood of the business. Retaining existing customers is crucial, but acquiring new customers is required to keep growing your business. Automating your lead pipeline provides many significant benefits, including:
- Save time on administrative tasks: Your growth will be significantly hindered if your sales reps are spending hours per day on administrative tasks instead of contacting new leads or retaining existing customers. Automate tedious, repetitive tasks throughout your lead pipeline so your teams can focus on contact leads.
- Close more sales: The more efficient your sales teams are, the more sales they can close. Automating manual tasks allows sales reps to use their time better to build a connection with leads, close deals, and ensure customers are retained.
- Create a better customer experience: Once someone has become a lead, they want to move through your sales pipeline so they can decide if you’re worth their business or if they should look elsewhere. Automated scheduling, faster contacts, and quicker quotes all add up to a better experience for the lead, encouraging them to become longtime customers.
You’ll undoubtedly experience even more benefits as you start automating your lead pipeline, leading to leaner operations and more sustainable growth.
Implementing automation in your lead pipeline stages
Efficient lead pipeline management is crucial for lasting success. Sales reps need to track the progress of each lead and move them through specific stages, taking them from a prospect to a customer.
Let’s explore specific stages in the general lead pipeline model and how automation helps at every step.
Prospecting
The lead pipeline begins by finding new customers. Prospecting is often the stage where marketing and sales teams intersect. Therefore, it is crucial to have lead handoff processes or simply integrate your systems so sales reps can immediately work on new leads.
Automation helps with the initial lead generation pipeline stage by replacing repetitive tasks, which may include:
1. Initial contact via email templates
2. SMS outreach
3. Prospecting tracking
Making these types of tasks entirely automated allows leads to be contacted faster while allowing reps to spend their time on more impactful tasks.
Lead qualification
Lead qualification focuses on learning more about the lead, providing more information about your product or service, and determining if they’re a good fit.
You can automate your CRM's lead scoring and grading processes to remove that process from sales reps’ plates. Both of these processes are important but can be tedious:
1. Lead scoring helps salespeople prioritize their effort by focusing on the leads most likely to convert. Automated tools can help score leads based on specific criteria from both the customer and the rep.
2. Lead grading allows reps to segment leads into different categories and provides a similar use as scoring — letting sales teams focus on the most likely leads to convert.
Small to medium-sized businesses may not use both processes, but automating either system allows reps to move away from scoring and grading, shifting focus to answering questions and providing valuable information.
Demos and meetings
After a lead knows enough about your product or service, it’s time to show them. This will look different for every company, but for most, a demo or meeting will give the prospective customer a chance to learn more.
Scheduling these meetings can be entirely automated by integrating existing availability into a customer-facing interface, allowing them to pick any available date and time.
Beyond that, automation can also help reps prepare for meetings by generating specific reports or information that the specific lead may need. You may even be able to automate the demos themselves, letting the sales rep focus on providing the human touch.
There are likely additional opportunities to automate demos and meetings unique to your business. Explore the capabilities of your CRM and tech stack, consider your product and service, and understand where sales reps spend their time before a meeting. Then you can discover what you can automate to help them focus on making the sale.
Proposals and quotes
If the meeting goes well, the next stage is crucial in closing the sale. Quotes and proposals need to be the right price and provided quickly. Automation helps generate and send quotes, sidestepping the time-consuming process of relying on manually creating quotes.
There are a few key ways automation can help depending on your business and offering, which include:
- Provide templates with specific fields automatically filled in, allowing the salesperson to review and customize the quote before it’s sent.
- Integrate third-party quote generation tools with the CRM to handle specific calculations and formatting.
- Send automated follow-ups to the lead after a predetermined time frame has passed.
Sales teams will still need to be involved, but next-gen CRMs and other tools make generating proposals significantly more manageable than in the past.
Negotiations and commitment
The final stage in lead generation depends on document sharing and the accuracy of all information in those documents. Human errors during negotiations or contract creation can become costly or risk losing the customer — automation avoids these errors.
Creating templates and automating the creation of new customized documents significantly decreases the workload on the salesperson. The sales rep must only double-check the fields, complete any remaining information, and send it to the lead.
Like other steps, automated follow-up emails can be configured to stay in contact with the lead, all without the salesperson needing involvement.
Best practices for successful lead pipeline automation
We’ve explored how automation helps with every stage in the lead pipeline. Now, let’s briefly touch on best practices to make the most of your automation initiatives:
- Use the right CRM: Your chosen CRM is at the heart of the lead pipeline process — finding the right platform to power your pipeline automation is crucial. Explore any CRM solution's capabilities, customization, and integrations before making your decision.
- Integrate sales and marketing processes: Having a seamless handoff between marketing and sales is vital for your sales teams to conduct additional prospecting and begin qualification. Ideally, new leads will be available within your CRM and be ready for sales reps to begin the process.
- Keeps humans involved at key steps: A common misconception about sales automation is that you’re trying to remove the salesperson. However, the goal is to remove repetitive, manual tasks and allow reps to focus on the human element of sales. Ensure your focus is enabling sales teams to do what they do best.
You don’t need to immediately start by implementing all the automation opportunities we’ve discussed. Instead, you can start with a few processes that improve the efficiency of moving leads through the pipeline and then automate more over time.
Automate lead pipeline processes with Fireberry
Organizations of all sizes have never had more options for managing customer relationships. However, not every platform will have what you need to automate critical processes and integrate the rest of your tech stack.
Here at Fireberry, we’ve built an industry-leading CRM with a strong emphasis on customization and adaptability through APIs and integrations. Our CRM allows you to automate processes unique to your sales pipeline and integrate other applications necessary to boost efficiency.
Ready to streamline your lead pipeline with customizable automations? Reach out to us today to learn how Fireberry can help.
