7 B2B Sales Processes That Should Be Automated

In the world of B2B sales, representatives often find themselves consumed by time-consuming tasks such as sending emails, making calls to leads, and constantly updating call sheets. These repetitive activities can drain their energy and distract them from focusing on what truly matters: selling. However, with the advancements in automation technology, B2B sales processes can now be fully automated, revolutionizing the way inside sales teams operate.

By implementing automation, sales managers can empower their teams to reclaim their time and energy, allowing them to devote their efforts on the most important aspect, selling! It’s crucial for inside sales managers to select flexible automation solutions that aligns with their specific requirements, enabling their teams to enhance productivity, drive a strong sales pipeline, and ultimately boost revenues.

How to Automate Your Sales Processes? 

Lead Generation and Follow-up

Generating and following up on leads is a crucial aspect of B2B sales. However, the manual process of capturing leads and ensuring timely follow-up can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Additionally, as the volume of leads increases, it becomes challenging to provide personalized attention to each prospect. 

Solution: To automate lead generation and follow-up, B2B businesses can leverage marketing automation platforms. These platforms enable the automatic capture of leads from various sources, such as website forms, social media, or landing pages. They also provide features for lead nurturing, including personalized email campaigns, lead scoring, and drip marketing, helping you ensure that leads are properly nurtured.

Sales Funnel Management

Managing the sales funnel effectively is essential. However, relying on manual methods for lead assignment, activity tracking, and pipeline management can lead to inconsistencies, missed opportunities, and delays in the sales process. Automating sales funnel management processes is crucial to ensure efficient tracking and management of prospects throughout the sales cycle.

Solution: Implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can automate sales funnel management for wholesale distributors. These systems enable businesses to track and manage leads effectively, ensuring that each prospect receives the appropriate attention and timely follow-up. 

Quoting and Proposal Generation

Creating accurate and professional quotes and proposals is vital for B2B businesses. However, the manual process of configuring products, defining pricing rules, and generating quotes can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Additionally, integrating the quoting and proposal generation process with the overall sales workflow becomes challenging when done manually. 

Solution: Adopting a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software solution enables wholesale distributors to automate the process of creating quotes and proposals. Additionally, this B2B software can integrate with CRM systems, streamlining the quote-to-order process and ensuring seamless workflow throughout the sales cycle. 

Customer Onboarding and Support

Efficiently onboarding customers and providing timely support is crucial for wholesale distributors. However, manually handling these processes can be prone to errors, and may lead to delays in addressing customer needs. Additionally, as customer inquiries and support requests increase, it becomes difficult to provide prompt and accurate assistance. 

Solution: Implementing a customer onboarding and support automation solution enables wholesale distributors to automate and streamline these processes. They provide self-service portals, chatbots, and knowledge bases that enable customers to onboard clients and find answers to common questions without the need for human intervention. 

Order Processing

Efficient order processing is crucial to ensure timely fulfillment and customer satisfaction. However, manual order processing can cause delays, and inefficiencies, especially when dealing with a high volume of orders. Additionally, managing sales order information, inventory updates, and order tracking manually can lead to discrepancies and fulfillment issues. 

Solution: Implementing a comprehensive B2B sales order system  enables wholesale distributors to automate order processing from start to finish. By implementing  B2B order automation through solutions like OIS Pro App , B2B companies can improve order accuracy, reduce processing times, and enhance customer satisfaction through efficient order fulfillment.

Pricing and Discount Management

Managing pricing and discounts effectively is vital to remain competitive and maximize profitability. However, manually managing pricing rules, price lists, and applying discounts based on customer segments or volume can be time-consuming. Additionally, ensuring consistent and real-time pricing updates across different sales channels can become a significant challenge. 

Solution: Implementing a pricing management software solution allows businesses to automate pricing and discount management. These solutions provide features to define pricing rules, manage price lists, apply discounts based on various criteria. It’s worth noting that some order management solutions, such as OIS Pro App, offer the flexibility to add custom pricing, discounts, and trade promotions per customer.

Returns and Refunds

Managing returns and refunds in the B2B context can present significant challenges for wholesale distributors. The process often involves complex workflows, multiple stakeholders, and the need to reconcile inventory. Manual handling of returns and refunds can be a headache and may result in delays in issuing refunds or properly tracking returned products. 

Solution: To automate returns and refunds processes, B2B businesses can adopt a returns management system. These systems, such as specialized software or platforms, offer functionalities that facilitate return authorization, track returned products, process refunds accurately, and help reconcile inventory. 

In Conclusion 

It’s important to stay focused on the main objective of sales reps: making sales. Sometimes, sales processes can get sidetracked with tasks that take them away from their core purpose. By providing the necessary tools to automate these sometimes tedious parts of the job, businesses can have a positive impact on their overall performance and revenue. 

If you want to know more about how Orders in Seconds can help you in your sales force automation efforts and boost sales, schedule a free demo today!