Revving up your sales process is a snap with automation.
Ever heard of the Pareto principle? Imagine the 80/20 rule at play - a mere 20% of your clients bring in 80% of your earnings.
So, the big question is, shouldn't you be focusing on that top 20%? You bet! And with a solid sales automation strategy like Odoo, you can do just that, all while keeping your clients happily engaged.
ERP software is your best friend here. It lets business owners streamline sales and zoom in on growth strategies. This blog will guide you through the benefits of sales automation for your business, effective strategies you can implement, and handy techniques to make Odoo work for you.
What is Sales Automation and Why Should You Care?
In a nutshell, sales automation is all about using tech to simplify and speed up the sales process. From enticing potential leads to clinching deals, it's got you covered. Think lead nurturing, follow-ups, sales insights, forecasting, and automated invoicing - all part of the package.
One word to describe automation? Scalable.
Sales automation is particularly useful for businesses juggling loads of customers or deals. Plus, it opens up fresh opportunities to cater to a new client segment: small businesses. By automating mundane, repetitive tasks, sales teams can handle these deals without sweating over time and effort.
Benefits of Sales Automation to Your Business
Now, let’s dive into how sales automation can become your secret weapon to thrive and outpace your competition. Here are some powerful benefits of sales automation for your business that you simply can't afford to overlook.
Eliminating manual and repetitive tasks
The first huge perk of sales automation? It kicks monotonous, repetitive tasks to the curb. We’re talking about all those hours spent inputting data, sending follow-up emails, or making reminder calls. Now, think about reclaiming all that time and using them for more important tasks.
Streamlining the sales process
Automation doesn't just eliminate tedious tasks, it also streamlines your entire sales process. With each stage defined and automated, your sales cycle becomes a well-oiled machine, running smoothly and efficiently.
Enhancing customer relationship management
A smooth process also means a better customer experience. With automation handling mundane tasks, your sales team can devote more time to what really matters: building solid relationships with customers. Because at the end of the day, it's all about them, isn't it?
Providing valuable sales insights through comprehensive reporting tools
One of the best things about sales automation is the insight it offers through comprehensive reporting tools. Want to know which products are performing well? Curious about your sales team's performance? The reports have all the answers.
Integrating with other business operations
Sales automation isn't a lone wolf. It integrates perfectly with other business operations. Whether it's marketing, customer service, or logistics, automation ties everything together. It's like having a personal assistant who ensures every part of your business is talking to each other.
It’s time to supercharge your sales automation with Odoo, an all-in-one platform that fully automates your business processes! 📈
Using Odoo for Sales Automation
We’ve mentioned Odoo several times already in this blog article, but how do we really use it for sales automation?
There are five key steps to using Odoo for sales automation. They are:
- Generate leads from your website
- Automate Lead Qualification
- Automated Lead Nurturing
- Personalized Communications
- Track, Analyze, and Continuously Optimize Your Sales Process
And we’re taking a deep dive for each step below.
Step 1: Generate Leads from Your Website
There are three main options on how to use Odoo to generate leads from your website: through website forms, events, and appointments.
Option A: Through Website Forms
With the website module of Odoo, you can build a form to provide your potential customers with a registration option on your website. You can link this form with your CRM system so that whenever someone fills out the form on your website, their information will automatically be added to your lead database in Odoo.
Option B: Events
Another powerful way to collect leads is to leverage events. By using the events module of Odoo, you can set up events and convert attendees into leads by collecting their contact information.
There are a lot of options to choose from:
- Creation: At attendee creation
- Confirmation: When an attendee is confirmed, manually or automatically
- Attended: When attendance is confirmed and registration set to be done
Furthermore, you can set up filters to only catch leads, that are relevant for you.
Option C: Appointments
Similar to the approach with events, you can also automate lead generation through appointments. With Odoo's appointment module, you can create appointments for potential customers to schedule a meeting or consultation with your sales team.
This allows you to capture leads directly through your website and automatically add them to your CRM system in Odoo.
Step 2: Automate Lead Qualification
Now that we got visitors on our websites and leads coming in, it's time to qualify those leads and identify the ones that are most likely to convert into customers.
Let's take a look at how Odoo helps to do this with minimum effort. Odoo provides the following options:
- Automated lead enrichment
- Converting visits to leads
- Lead mining
- Using Chat bots
Option A: Automate lead enrichment
Imagine you have been to a trade show and you collected many business cards from potential leads. Instead of manually entering all the information into your CRM system, Odoo allows you to automate the lead enrichment process. Odoo uses an external database to enrich leads with additional information, such as company size, industry, revenue, and more.
Option B: Converting visits to leads
Odoo provides a feature that identifies website visitors and creates leads automatically.
In the CRM module settings, there is an option to activate 'Visit to Leads' which allows you to turn your website visitors into potential leads. You can also use this information for lead enrichment by analyzing their IP addresses.
Option C: Lead mining
Lead mining in Odoo is a handy tool for CRM users. It enables them to effortlessly generate new leads and add them directly to their database. The lead qualification process is made easier thanks to various filtering criteria, including country, company size, and industry.
Option D: Use chatbots for qualification
With Odoo you can implement chatbots on your website to automate the lead qualification process.
The chatbot follows a predefined script and asks relevant questions to the website visitors, gathering information that can be used for lead qualification. It can make the interaction with the visitor more engaging and personalized, increasing the chances of converting them into qualified leads.
For each step of the interaction you can define what will happen next:
- Forward to a human operator
- Create a lead
- Send an e-mail
- and more
Step 3: Automated Lead Nurturing
With Odoo, you can create automated drip email campaigns, offer personalized content based on lead interests and behaviors, and provide timely follow-up through automated reminders to effectively nurture leads and improve your sales automation process.
Automating these tasks increase efficiency while providing a more personalized experience for your potential customers.
With Odoo you can set up automated campaigns based on different triggers. For example, personalize your campaigns and set up automatic actions (like requesting a sales call, sending an email, or setting a reminder) triggered by specific events (such as no activity for 20 days, response to a promotional email, report of an issue, etc.).
You can also dynamically change email content based on a prospect’s score, industry, page visited, job title, or even their position within the sales cycle.
Step 4: Personalized Communications
For marketing automation in Odoo, there are two important modules: e-mail marketing and social marketing.
E-Mail Marketing
The e-mail marketing module allows you to create and send personalized emails to segmented customer groups, track email performance, and automate follow-up actions based on customer behavior.
Segmenting your audience is critical for sales automation success. By dividing your customer base into specific groups based on interests, behavior, or demographics, you can tailor personalized messages that resonate with them and boost engagement rates.
When sending e-mails to your contacts via the E-Mail Marketing module, there are unlimited options to segment your customers. Some options worth mentioning are:
- Demographics
- Order history
- Comments in the CRM
- Behavior on website
- Financial options
You can also set up multi-step automated workflows, where specific actions are triggered based on customer behavior. For example, if a customer clicks on a specific product in an email, you can automatically send them more information about that product or offer a promotional discount.
Social Marketing
The social marketing module integrates with your social media accounts and allows you to schedule posts, track engagement metrics, and automate responses to comments or messages.
You can manage your social media accounts, web push notifications, and live chats in a single place. This gives you the ability to create content much faster, schedule posts for the future, and keep an overview of all engagements. The system keeps track of their journey and pulls metrics for you to see how many leads and even how much revenue they're bringing.
You can even set up push notifications to the website visitors - even when they are not on the website right now via Web Push. Push notifications have much higher click-though-rates than e-mails.
Step 5: Track, Analyze, and Continuously Optimize Your Sales Process
Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) regularly provides valuable insights into what is working well and what needs improvement. Utilizing dashboards for real-time tracking of sales activities empowers you to make data-driven decisions quickly.
The most important strategies to continuously optimize your sales activities include:
- Macro-level: High-level overview of your KPIs in real-time dashboards
- Micro-level: Drill down into specific metrics to identify areas of improvement and explore and discover new insights from the collected data
- Utilize A/B testing to test different sales strategies and determine the most effective approach
Let's take a look at how this can be done in Odoo.
Macro-level via real-time dashboards
Dashboards in Odoo are dynamic and configurable and they are linked to Odoo spreadsheets. This allows you to use Excel formulas to make some computations and visualize data in a way that is meaningful to your sales process.
Odoo already provides you with a variety of pre-built sales dashboards, such as the Sales Pipeline, Revenue by Product, and Sales Performance dashboards. There are also useful filters available to drill down into specific segments of your sales data, such as by region, product category, or salesperson.
If you want to create your custom dashboard you have to go to the Odoo Documents module and create a new spreadsheet.
In your spreadsheet you can integrate data in 3 different forms:
- Graph view
- List view
- Pivot view
To insert data into your spreadsheet you simply navigate to the relevant module in Odoo, such as the Sales module, create the view that you like to have via filters and grouping, select the visualization form and simply click on "Insert into spreadsheet".
After you have inserted everything into your spreadsheet, you can add this spreadsheet to the Odoo Dashboard module.
Micro-level on specific modules
Each module of Odoo has its own set of metrics and reports that allow you to dive deeper into specific activities. When it comes to Sales Automation, the relevant modules are CRM, Sales Automation, Mail Marketing and Social Marketing.
1. CRM module; Forecast Report
All opportunities in the CRM module will have an automated calculated probability based on the stage they're in and other variables. If your sales team adds the expected revenue and expected closing dates Odoo will provide a forecast report that gives you a clear overview of your projected sales revenue - called "prorated revenue".
2. Marketing Automation module; Campaigns
Every step of the automated campaign has its statistics. You can monitor the delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate of your email campaigns.
3. Email Marketing module; Mailings
The module gives you a clear overview of the metrics of your mails, including the number of sent emails, open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes.
A/B Testing
Probably one of the most powerful tools of mass mail marketing activities are A/B tests. Odoo allows users to conduct A/B testing for their mail marketing campaigns.
This means that you can create multiple versions of an email and test them against each other to see which version performs better in terms of open rates. Not only that, Odoo can automatically decide on a winning version and use this for the majority of the recipients.
You can define how many recipients the test will be executed and define how Odoo should select the winning version:
- Highest Open Rate
- Highest Click Rate
- Highest Reply Rate
- Leads
- Quotations
- Revenues
Embracing the Future of Sales with Odoo
In a rapidly evolving business landscape, embracing change and automation is no longer optional—it's essential.
Leveraging a powerful tool like Odoo for your sales automation needs empowers your team to streamline processes, enhance customer relationships, and unlock the potential of data-driven insights. Moreover, by eliminating tedious tasks, it provides your sales professionals with the golden opportunity to focus on what truly matters—building relationships and closing deals.
Every thread matters in the grand scheme of business operations, and Odoo ensures that they all weave together seamlessly. Start your sales automation journey with Odoo today, and experience firsthand how this robust tool can catalyze your business growth.