If you are spending precious time and money on mundane, repetitive tasks, understand that this is time that you could use for more important tasks to help generate more revenue. 

You can never grow and scale as long as you are stuck carrying out repetitive tasks every day, week, or month. You could (and should) hire other employees and build a team. But, as you know, you cannot expect them to work 24/7.

Maybe, you are starting out and do not have the budget to hire more people just yet. So, what do you do? Use sales automation tools. 

What is Sales Automation? 

Sales automation involves the use of software and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to perform manual, repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks. There are sales automation tools for just about every function you can think of:
 

  • CRM
  • Report and Analytics
  • LinkedIn outreach
  • Cold call outreach
  • Email outreach
  • Prospect tracking
  • Meeting Scheduling
  • Lead scoring

…and so on. 

Benefits of Sales Automation

Here are the primary benefits of sales automation tools: 

Saves You Time

As you may have already guessed, using a sales automation platform helps you save critical amounts of time. If you were to spend your time on activities like lead scoring, reporting, reminders, scheduling, etc., you would be wasting tens of hours every week. Automating such activities saves your sales team a lot of time, helping them focus on forging solid relationships with their prospects. 

Increases Productivity

This point ties in with the first one. If you automate low-value, repetitive, mundane tasks, your sales reps will be able to focus on essential tasks that help you nurture and close more leads. Sales automation platforms also help you keep track of each prospect as they go through the customer pipeline, allowing you to close them at the right time and accelerate your sales overall. 

Consistent Data

Any task performed by humans is bound to be plagued by human error. This means you can expect to find duplications, mistakes, and overall inconsistencies in data - all of which will cause confusion and affect your sales significantly.

With sales automation, you never need to worry about the integrity of your data. You can safely use the data in your sales operations and close prospects without worrying about in discrepancies. 

Improved Communication and Customer Satisfaction

Since sales automation tools serve as a centralized entity that has everything you need, your sales reps will be able to communicate with each other and their prospects easily. In other words, there will be lower response times, less confusion, streamlined communication, and as a result…improved customer satisfaction. 

Easy Reporting

Reporting is one of those vital but tedious tasks you have to carry out if you want your business to grow. Unfortunately, creating manual reports will cost you large amounts of time and most likely lead to confusion due to inaccuracies. Automating your reporting will help you track your:
 

  • Sales reps
  • Teams
  • Sequences
  • Replies
  • Open rate

,..and much more. 

What to Look for in a Sales Automation Platform

Now that you know what a sales automation tool is and why you should use one, here are a few primary features to look for in your search for the right sales automation tool: 

Integrations

Today, just about any tool you use has an integration or two. You especially need integrations for sales automation platforms since they serve as the “go-to place” to handle all your sales operations. Examples of commonly used integrations are Google Calendar, Calendly, Slack, CRM integrations, and so forth. 

Email Templates

In your email outreach, you will inevitably end up sending specific types of emails to certain types of prospects under different circumstances. A sales automation platform with pre-written email templates will help you save a lot of time in your prospecting. 

For example, if you want to send a bunch of follow-up emails, use a template. Of course, you will need to make sure these are tailored to each prospect to get their attention. 

Meeting Scheduler

You are going to be severely limited in your prospecting if you do not have a meeting scheduler. If you plan on sending multiple emails back and forth to fix an online appointment:

  • You are going to waste a lot of time back and forth
  • There’s a high chance of confusion and the prospect not showing up

With a meeting scheduler, all you need to do is send your prospect a calendar link with a list of free time slots and they can choose one at their convenience. 

Automated Reporting

We’ve already mentioned the benefit of automation in reporting. Creating a report manually, taking screenshots, etc., can take you an hour or two. Plus, there is a high chance of making a mistake while drawing up a report. Instead, use your sales automation platform’s integrated CRM to automate your reporting. 

Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment is the process of adding and modifying information on your prospects to help you qualify and manage them efficiently. The more information you have on your prospects, the easier it gets to connect with your prospect and establish trust. It also allows you to qualify the right leads after based on parameters like company size, budget, industry, etc.

So, if you have a tool that fetches vital data on your prospects, you will be able to significantly increase your lead qualification process. 

Best Sales Automation Tools on the Market

There are many sales automation tools on the market that claim to be the best. Here are some of the best automation software we think you should use: 

1. Outplay

Outplay is your go-to stop to make selling easy. With a barrage of intuitive tools (and we continually come out with a new tool or feature) at your disposal, there’s no way you cannot close deals. 

Unlike a lot of tools on the market, Outplay offers you a multi-channel outreach platform. If you are used to only LinkedIn outreach or email outreach, you can maximize your outreach across multiple channels, including LinkedIn, email, SMS, WhatsApp, cold calls, etc. 

Besides this, here are a few features you will find interesting:

  • Meeting scheduler
  • Lead sourcing
  • Free chrome extension for one-click prospecting
  • Email template library
  • Sales analytics

2. Mailshake 

Mailshake is a powerful outreach tool that prides itself on helping you reach your prospect's inbox and not their spam folder. Mailshake allows you to automate your cold outreach. You can use Mailshake to:

  • Send personalized cold emails at scale
  • Use one dashboard to manage your entire operation
  • Engage your prospects on multiple platforms

Here are some of its primary features:

  • Automated email outreach
  • Sales metrics tracking
  • Integrations with LinkedIn, Calendly, Pipedrive and many more
  • Multi-channel outreach

3. Outreach.io

Outreach.io is one of the more popular sales automation tools on the market with a focus on closing the sales execution gap, which is the gap between the performance of the organization and the sales it achieves.

Outreach’s sales automation platform:

  • Optimizes your seller productivity with high-impact workflows
  • Helps accelerate deals with actionable insights
  • Helps increase your sales reps’ execution speed

Here are some of Outreach’s primary features:

  • Streamlined workflows
  • Meeting scheduler
  • Team analytics
  • Galaxy integrations
  • Automated data sync

4. Salesblink

Salesblink helps you find leads, personalize your outreach campaigns, and automate your follow-ups to help you find your ideal customer. Besides its integrations with tools like Zoho, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and so on, Salesblink’s primary features include:

  • Drag and drop visual campaign builder
  • Multi-channel outreach
  • Automated multi-channel follow up
  • Meeting scheduler
  • Database of 250M leads

5. Reply.io

Reply.io helps you create new opportunities at scale while keeping every touchpoint personal. Reply.io provides a variety of solutions, including inbound sales, outbound sales, outreach, etc. It also has a selection of essential integrations like Pipedrive, Salesforce, Gmail, Calendly, and more.

Here’s what Reply.io offers:

  • Multi-channel sequences - email, calls, SMS, LinkedIn, etc. 
  • LinkedIn Automation
  • Email templates
  • Calendar for appointment booking
  • Reports and analytics
  • Contact management

Conclusion

There you have it - a quick overview of everything related to sales automation tools. To recap, sales automation tools take care of mundane, repetitive tasks that would otherwise take you a lot of time to perform.

No sales team can function without a sales automation platform. While looking for the right sales platform, you should consider:

  • The platform’s key integrations
  • Email templates
  • Meeting scheduler
  • Lead enrichment
  • Automated reporting

…among other features. Outplay has a comprehensive suite of all the tools you will to streamline your sales operations. You can check it out here. If you want to learn about sales, get started with our blog.