Sales automation is essential for tech startups looking for efficient and data-driven directions for their marketing. Without automation tools on your side, the grind of getting your startup off the ground will seem impossible at times.
Sales automation, like customer data collection, pre-recorded voicemails, communication management, and list-building tools, supports companies with efficiency and potent business strategies. Targeting the right niches and individuals, with aisles, makes all the difference for a startup. This article will give you some insight into the five best software options for using sales automation for startups.
Why are Sales Automation Tools Important for Startups?
The importance of sales automation boils down to an essential truth: the more effectively you work with your customers, the better your sales and marketing will be.
Sales automation helps companies collect and organize customer data with efficient and easily accessible methods. It provides a more detailed glimpse into the mind of your clients more quickly and efficiently than traditional sales techniques.
Centralized Communication
Not only are sales automation tools quicker to set up and easier to use, but they are also better for centralizing communication within a team and with a company's clients. The best sales automation tools allow for streamlined and intelligently organized interactions with clients, making them clearer for all parties involved and easier to assess for a business owner.
Standardized Processes
The process of sales management and its various steps sometimes gets muddled without an automated sales service. This becomes especially apparent in situations where salespeople go through similar orders or interact with the same client time and time again.
The most significant benefit of standardized procedures is the efficiency that minimizes process errors and, thus, reduces unwanted expenses.
Sales automation tools for startups consider the processes and tasks of your company and align them for all members via clear and straightforward policies. Once the processes of outreach, communication, conversion, and customer retention becomes standardized, your company will start to deliver a uniform user experience — irregardless of the team size or number of clients.
Exceptional data insights
The depth of data that automation creates for your startup may seem daunting; however, it is best to use sales automation technology to uncover information about your customers’ behaviors, habits, pain points, etc. — to give your sales team the insights necessary for consistent and efficient communications to attract, convert, and retain quality customers.
Improved utilization of human capital
Automation keeps sales managers and other team members engaged in the working process and relays available resources to those areas where their presence or participation is most needed at the moment.
When automated tools are put to work in a startup, they help companies avoid situations where resources are left idle.
Instead, the automated system red-flags wasted human capital or other resources and allows managers to rearrange and distribute these resources so that projects get done better and faster.
Multi-departmental visibility
Sales automation tools limit excess tasks and process overlaps, reduce mistakes, and give business owners a predictive vision of the company and what steps need to be taken to improve efficiency and customer service, or reduce the time needed for a sale to go through. An automated system will make failures, successes, and progress more visible, allowing for improved day-to-day operations across different departments within a company.
Five Best Sales Automation Tools for Startups
After researching some of the most popular sales automated tools for startups, we've decided to outline five off-the-shelf tools that, in our opinion, can offer the most relevant functionality in terms of sales and marketing for startups.
Prospect.io
Prospect.io allows startups to build email lists and measure their marketing results across multiple platforms. Prospecting for new clients is available with a Chrome Web Store extension which discovers email addresses, imports your email lists, and verifies if the email addresses are legitimate or not. The drip campaign features allow for detailed and scheduled interactions with clients, prospects, and long-term customers.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud-based sales automation system. It is known for its simple interface and ease of adoption. Salesforce also allows for quick upscale for large companies because of its architecture.
Data collection and campaign creation with Salesforce are all about keeping current customers happy and finding out what prospective clients want. Salesforce supports many third-party apps that can be synced for outreach, data collection, and analysis.
Hubspot Sales Hub
The interactive nature of the Hubspot Sales Hub gives teams graphs and data points on a dashboard interface, allowing multiple managers on a team to process customer and prospect data, and collaborate with messaging and other communication tools. The inboard nature of the platform helps companies attract customers and retain them with many different features.
Some of the best features of the Hubspot Sales Hub include creation and editing of content, seamless social media sharing, automation of workflows for teams, management of customer relations through email and other communications, lead capture, and a map of performance tracking and sales.
Prospero
Prospero is a cloud-based proposal creation software that quickly identifies the reproduction of a business proposal. It is centered on limiting duplication of submissions through a series of different checks that its automated system makes.
Prospero offers over 30 templates for business proposal creation, or allows for free document creation. These templates are focused on niches and different areas of interest. Along with your proposal formatting and text, you are also able to create a logo, images, videos, and other facets of your marketing campaign within the platform.
Docusign
This is one of the top sales automation tools because automation with DocuSign allows for the digital signing and sharing of professional documents. DocuSign is one of the only streamlined platforms that supports all of your professional documents for signature on any device or platform.
Uploading any document with a phone’s scanning feature creates a digital PDF copy of the document. This document is editable by creating drag-and-drop fields anywhere on it — where a user on the other end can input their digital signature or initials.
Disadvantages of Existing Sales Automation Tools
Pricing options are often not relevant for the company's needs
Since most off-the-shelf solutions are distributed under a subscription-based model, they come with a predefined set of features which are grouped into various pricing plans. So, even though the startup may only be using one or two features from the sales automation tool, they must usually pay for the entire subscription cost of the service. This makes using some off-the-shelf services too costly for the newly established businesses.
Vendor's spam
Some automation platforms include vendor content that often floods the inbox, or embedded ads that clutter the interface and cannot be skipped over — unless you upgrade to the most expensive package. So, even if you are paying for a subscription service to automate your business, the platform may still consistently push spam and notifications your way.
With some vendors, you may simply turn off the notifications or unsubscribe from their newsletter; however, that's not always the case. So, before opting for a particular sales automation service, do your research and figure out what the vendor's policy is regarding push notifications, ads, email communications, etc.
Software rigidness
This point is directly related to the software limitations that come with off-the-shelf solutions due to their subscription nature. Here, the company will definitely lose some functionality if the automation tool is too rigid and difficult to adjust — which is probably the case for most subscription-based solutions. So, even if your team has insights they would like to exploit, it may not be possible with pre-defined pricing packages that don't allow for any refinement.
Moving to another solution is tedious
Moving all of your data is a complicated and tedious task, especially if you need to take into consideration the different standards or requirements for the formatting of data that may come with different off-the-shelf automation tools. With some vendors, shifting your data to another platform may, at times, be close to impossible and require additional efforts to restore or manually complete fields or data sections.
Our Successful Cases
After years of working with various businesses, we have built quite an extensive portfolio of completed projects, one of which is Pitch59 — an advertising platform that helps companies promote themselves via sharable, bite-sized video business cards. Our team wasn't engaged in the development of this project from day one; instead, we were in charge of fixing all the problems that came up from the previous development company. We were also responsible for improving the product in general.
We've adjusted in-app research, eliminated memory leaks and code flaws, optimized SQL queries, reduced the app size, significantly improved the app loading time, and added some extra features. As a result, the client was fully satisfied with the outcomes of our cooperation and provided us with 5-star feedback!
Conclusion
Sales automation tools for startups are critical when getting your business off the ground. Make sure that you do your research and find the best fit for your company. Even though some of the best sales automation tools seem great, you might be forced to pay a premium for other features you are not even using.
WTT-Solutions is an experienced partner for startups that want to implement sales automation software but can't find the right solution on the market. We develop sales tools that bridge data collection and client communications, allowing for more efficient and scalable operations.
If you have any questions or want to request a quote for your project, simply fill out the form in the top right corner of this page and one of our professional service members will get in touch with you shortly. WTT-Solutions is ready to stand by your side with the development of automated business solutions for your startup!
