In today’s increasingly digital society, automation is no longer a “nice-to-have”—it’s a “need-to-have.”
In order to stay competitive, companies are innovating far beyond the automations we rely on to eliminate simple manual tasks. Automation is now responsible for streamlining complex processes, integrating a complex ecosystem of business applications, and syncing data across departments.
And contrary to popular belief, IT is no longer the only team that can build or work with automation. Teams across the business can easily build their own automations with the help of low-code/no-code software—this includes the teams that fall under Revenue Operations, or RevOps: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. According to HubSpot, in 2020, 61% of organizations that leveraged automation reported surpassing their revenue targets.
If you work in RevOps and are looking for ways to increase time efficiency, productivity, and revenue at the same time, here are some examples of workflow automations you can implement to make your job a little (or a lot!) easier:
Marketing automations
Marketers are focused on attracting new customers and driving sales from existing customers, as well as building and sustaining brand recognition. Over 75% of marketers now utilize some form of automation, and 77% of those who have switched to automated solutions have seen an increase in conversions. The use of marketing automation software is what helps marketers automate repetitive tasks, not just to improve efficiency, but also to give a more customized experience for their prospects/customers.
Below are three marketing workflows you can automate:
- Lead management
Lead management refers to how a company interacts with potential customers before they make a purchase—lead generation, lead routing, and lead contact are all part of this process. According to Harvard Business Review, there’s a 10x decrease in your chances of converting a lead if you don’t respond to them within 5 minutes. This is where you can count on automation to help you win. When a lead comes in, automation can help enrich lead data, sync with your marketing automation platform & CRM, and route the lead to the assigned SDR or AE through your internal communication platform (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) quickly and effectively. The more you nurture your leads, the higher the chances of conversion.
- Marketing lifecycle management
According to Marketo, 76% of organizations that use marketing automation receive a return on investment (ROI) within the first year, and 44% of them see a return within six months. Thousands of new growth-accelerating tools are available to modern marketers, but some still fail to truly automate work and sync data across numerous applications, making marketing lifecycle activities tough to execute efficiently. With marketing lifecycle automation, you can sync contracts, pricing, and customer data across applications, align cost center and budgeting data to campaign strategy, trigger the creation of campaign plans and work assignments, track digital assets through the campaign lifecycle, and more.
- Personalization
One of the most difficult obstacles that companies face when it comes to using automation is delivering personalized content. In fact, according to Ascend2’s 2018 Optimizing Marketing Automation survey, 44% of marketers consider delivering personalized content to be the biggest barrier to success. However, when executed effectively, the implementation of automation technology can highlight the value of a product and identify the needs of a potential customer, which results in personalized marketing. Marketing automation is the only way to reach the intended customer in your database with the content they need, at the right time. It allows for automations such as engaging mobile users with in-app alerts after they click a certain link, sending an automated follow-up email, and creating an offer of service when a customer is close to or in the middle of canceling a subscription plan.
Sales automations
Implementing automations in sales can increase productivity by 14.5%, while also lowering marketing costs by 12.2%. Sales automation includes the use of software, artificial intelligence (AI), and other digital tools to automate manual, repetitive sales activities. Sales automation benefits your company, sales team, and bottom line in a variety of ways, including boosting sales rep productivity and performance, improving efficiency, optimizing and speeding up your sales process, and ensuring your leads don’t fall through the cracks.
Here are three workflow automation you can implement in sales now:
- Upsell/cross sell
According to McKinsey, cross-selling can increase revenue by 20% and profits by 30%. Existing customers are much more likely to purchase add-ons or extra services, so it’s crucial that you make the most of every upsell/cross-sell opportunity. To increase your chances of successfully doing so, you want to leverage everything you know about the customer (which webinars they have attended recently, which marketing emails they have interacted with, what pains they have brought up in the past month) and reach out to them at the right moment. This information can be difficult for sales reps to find because it often lives in different apps and spreadsheets. Fortunately, with the help of automation, you can get a 360° view of every customer—siloed information can now be shared across multiple apps and flow directly into your CRM, so you have easy access to all customer touchpoints.
- Sales deal desk
In their sales structure, more than 70% of B2B organizations have a deal desk. Deal desks involve teams like Sales, Sales Operations, Finance, Product Management, and Legal to provide a consistent process for approving complex, non-standard pricing and contract conditions. Effective deal desk execution provides crucial information on deal decision tracking, trend analysis, and deal integrity. Create an automation-driven deal desk to increase efficiency and reduce error. Automation allows you to create quotes, manage approvals, update a deal status in seconds, log all sales activities in a single interface, and automate reporting and reminders on key accounts.
- Order to Cash (O2C)
The O2C process covers the financial and business processes that link buyers and sellers when they work together. It begins when they connect to conduct business and ends with the financial processes that close the deal. IBM Institute for Business Value found that an automated O2C flow can boost a company’s performance by up to 83% and speed up a company’s end-to-end cycle time by up to 60%. You can use automation to add a product or service to your ERP whenever it is uploaded to your CRM, issue a sales order automatically when an opportunity is marked as closed won, and streamline other processes to achieve a smooth handoff to customer success.
Customer Success automation
Customer success is about people and connections just as much as it is about numbers and bottom-line influence. Customer success process automation offers your team useful customer insights that they can dive deeper into at any time to have a better perspective before a customer meeting or impending contract review. By automating some of the tedious and time-consuming tasks, your customer success team will be able to focus more on developing actual, long-term connections that provide value to each customer. In fact, compared to non-nurtured leads, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases.
Below are three examples of customer success automation that can help with customer satisfaction and retention:
- Churn prediction and prevention
Leverage automation to predict the potential for churn and engage with customers when it matters most. Attracting new customers costs five times more than retaining existing ones, so you’re going to want to make sure that your existing customers are seeing value and getting the most out of their investment. How do you do this? You can use automation to uncover product usage data. With this data, you can learn more about important usage trends like how many active users are on your customer’s team, how often they use your product, and if there are any features they still haven’t used because they’re not aware of them. By understanding this, you can be proactive (instead of reactive), identify areas that need improvement, expand your relationship with them, and prevent churn.
- Real-time engagement
59% of customers are more inclined to buy from a company that responds to their questions in under a minute. However, many organizations still fail to respond quickly for a variety of reasons, including a lack of real-time alerts, support teams’ difficulty to access particular apps, the lack of a live chat/chatbot capability, and more. However, whatever the challenge is, automation will almost surely be able to resolve it swiftly and effectively. Implement a chatbot to help with priority-based ticketing workflow, which will then assign tickets to the appropriate support team based on urgency and type of issue. Use automation to connect your ticket management system to your communication platform to receive live notifications and respond to queries faster.
- Customer feedback
Asking for customer feedback on a regular basis is the most effective way to find out how your customers feel about your products and services. Pay attention to what your customers have to say and take action. Customer Experience Management (CXM) platforms provide automation capabilities that allow you to come up with predefined responses that will be sent out automatically when a specific event occurs. You can draft a customized reply or send automated conversation starters to customers who don’t leave feedback. You can also implement customer feedback directly into your products by integrating your support apps with your development tools to close the loop on other support issues relating to enhancements.
Have you been automating your RevOps processes? Want to find out what other workflows you can automate to make your job easier? Join Systematic to learn best practices and automation tips and tricks from other RevOps experts!
