How security companies can improve retention with sales automation

Sales reps for security & integration companies have a lot of tasks to juggle and entering data into a CRM is usually the second to last on the list of to-dos. The last on the list is usually creating tasks for follow up so that managers have visibility into sales pipelines.

With a growing audience and leads are pouring in, your sales team may be having a hard time keeping up. While it’s a great problem to have, you also don’t want to short-change the amount of follow-up and guidance your sales team is able to provide to interested prospects.

Thankfully, Ignite RMR provides marketing automation and CRM tools & services that can help automate part of the sales process.

Our sales automation services allow your reps to spend more time with prospects who are ready to buy by freeing up the time previously spent chasing cold leads. Leads that aren’t ready to buy aren’t ignored – instead, they’re carefully nurtured.

Sales and marketing automation ensure that teams work together, and no leads or customers fall through the cracks.

What is Sales Force Automation?

Sales automation sometimes shortened to SFA (sales force automation), is an integrated service that automates frequent sales processes and tasks such as tracking customer interactions, as well as analyzing sales performance and forecasts.

Sales force automation services provided by Ignite RMR come with a web accessible and mobile app database, an email application, tracking software, and sales email templates.

Some SFA features can include:

Salesperson tasks and goals tracking
Customer contact records
Appointment scheduling and tracking
Lead scoring and assignment
Workflow management

While previously you may have needed separate applications for sales automation and customer relationship management, Ignite RMR offers an integrated CRM and marketing automation platform that includes a variety of sales automation tools.

Getting Started With Sales Force Automation

Despite being supported by an inbound marketing team that specializes in the security industry, like most aspects of successful Sales and Marketing, you need to take a step back and ensure you have a solid plan for how you want to sales force automation to enable your business.

Ignite RMR marketing automation services can enhance your strategies and bring greater efficiency and reliability to your sales teams execution, but you should be sure to know your sales process first.

During our initial marketing assessments, we will help you answer questions like:

How will you want to automatically assign leads to your reps? Round robin? Based on geography? etc.
What sales tasks do you want to create based on demonstrated prospect interest? Send a follow-email? Alert a sales team member?
How would you like to increase (or decrease) lead scores based on initial interest from your prospects (website interactions, sales emails, etc.)?

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’d like to accomplish, we can begin the process of setting up your sales force automations.

Setting Up Your Sales and Marketing Automations

For this example, let’s assume that you’d like to automate the sales process once a lead visits your website and signs up to receive additional information about your offerings.

What should the automated workflow (aka your “automation”) accomplish?

It should automatically send a thank you email, acknowledging the prospect’s form submission and interest
It should tag the lead with information about the submission (site page, demonstrated interest, etc.) within the CRM so that your sales team can easily segment this contact and understand where they come from
It should assign active leads to your sales rep for personal follow-up
It should send a follow-up email to the prospect and alert their assigned sales team member if a link is clicked
It should increase the lead’s score based on the email open and click activity

Now that we have laid out exactly what processes we want to be automated, it’s time to create our automation.

Creating the Automation

Using our marketing automation services, Ignite RMR constructs actions and triggers to create a new sales force automation workflow. Here is an example of how this could be set this up in our system:

When a lead submits their information through a contact form, we apply a “requested more information” tag and send an email for more information. From here, the automation wait until a link is clicked in the email. If no link is clicked within 3 days, the automation will send a follow up email on day 4.

If the lead opens and clicks a link in the initial email, it will alert your sales team, increase the prospects lead score, and send a follow up email. From here, the sales team could make a determination of how hot the lead is and schedule additional follow-ups.

Now you have assurance that all of these “we should…” tactics in your plan will happen automatically.

Automation After the Sale

It’s easy to see how sales force automation benefits your team during initial sales stages, but what about the engagement and retention stages for new & existing customers/ subscribers?

Benefits of using sales force automation for customers:

Instead of having your sales team or customer success team create tasks to check in with customers, Ignite RMR will create a workflow via marketing automation that automatically does this for them.

One popular schedule includes creating automated check-ins at 30, 60, 90 days and beyond to make sure customers are happy and gather feedback. Much like during the initial sales process, automating these steps will help your sales team feel less overwhelmed while still keeping your customers happy.

Other ways to use automation after the initial sale

There are a variety of ways that clients of Ignite RMR can use automation to increase the productivity of their sales force.

Use lead scoring to build a segment of purchasers who have bought more than one product or become repeat customers.

Send automated emails to customers to cross-sell and/or upsell them based on information in their CRM profile.
Use CRM tags to mark customers who have cancelled or paused their account with your billing department. Send automated emails to these customers to ask them why they decided to cancel and what could your business do to improve for the future.

The ultimate goal of sales force automation is to increase productivity of your sales team and make sure no leads or customers fall through the cracks.

Ignite RMR is a leading provider of inbound marketing & sales force automation services for dealers and integrators nationwide. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation and demo of our inbound marketing platform.