Future of Sales.

Learn how to build an automated highspeed funnel with sophisticated workflow automation in 10 clear steps and put your sales process on steroids.

May 9

First things first: Future of Sales is fast, automated and smooth. It is comparable to a digital high-speed funnel, in which you guide your customers and employees as if on rails. A quick side note upfront: the following process is about products and services, which are in need of an explanation or a certain effort to sell them - I am not talking about basic commodities here. That being said, imagine the whole process as a chain of milestones, that are connected to different contact points between your customer and your company. The chain is built like this:

1 - Marketing: Grab the attention

Your first goal is to grab the attention of a potential customer. You should aim for the stars here and think big. It´s best to start with a bang. You need the proper amount of attention. So it´s best to go where the eyeballs are and learn to think outside the box. It´s easy to think about Facebook, LinkedIn, Google AdWords or other well known digital marketing channels. But it´s probably better to look for an email newsletter with 5 million recipients, or any other channel where you can reach potential customers. I say probably. It´s all about the right strategy for your product or service and your brand.

The trust in your brand and your visual appearance plays a vital role. Keep in mind: How well known and trusted your brand is, plays a major role in the decision making process, whether someone will listen to what you have to say. So if you are offering a new service, building trust in your brand is key. Don´t expect people to jump on your new thing in no time. Repetitively pop up on their screen, bring patience and have an eye on the numbers (CTR, Impressions, etc.). The goal is to create as much attention as possible within your target group, for the least amount of money. CAC (customer acquisition costs) are key!

It´s always good to think about the four windows, through which humans can be reached. The attention span in this phase is about 1.5 seconds, enough for 6-8 words.

Window 1 “Fun”: Most people will always look at funny content, no matter what they are doing at the moment. Fun is a strong option to get peoples attention.
Window 2 “Benefit”: probably the most promising window, following the super important question What´s in it for me? If you can communicate the benefit in a strong, short form, do it!
Window 3 “Advantage”: Does your product or service give your contact a possible head start?
Window 4 “Security”: Does your topic somehow support (or threat) the security of the recipient? Example: House owners with solar-panels on the roof are in imminent danger. If you don´t do X, then Y. Get it?

2 - Marketing: interest and desire

So now that you have grabbed the users attention, it´s time to build up interest and desire. How? Usually by guiding your contact to a landing-page or other forms of further information, for example like whitepapers or PDF-guides. Be aware: You now have about 10 seconds to catch your audience, so choose your introduction well. If you send the right messages, people are willing to give you more time and are open to dig deeper in your messages. Depending on who your audience is, it might be very important to enrich your content with interesting graphics and pictures.

This step ends with your potential customer being willing to enter their data in to a contact form. To achieve this, there should always be a clear call to action (CTA).

3 - Marketing: LEAD

Congratulations. You have transformed the potential customer into a lead by making him or her type in the contact information into a contact form (action). For this you can use several systems like Salesforce, Hubspot, Clickup and so on. There are numerous providers on the market. Which one is right for you has to be researched with your individual situation in mind. However, you have achieved the first and probably most important step in your Future of Sales process. Generating leads, and later on sales qualified leads, is a high value skill in and of itself.

4 - Marketing: first automated response

The incoming lead triggers the next steps. Your marketing technology (e.g. Clickup, Hubspot) sends an automated response with customized content, based on the information the potential customer typed into the contact form. Important: in the auto responder guide your contact to the next action and make clear offers like these:

You are looking for specific information? Click here for our 10-step PDF-guide.
You want to order our product? Click here to open the order form (could be a PDF or an online form on a website).
You want to use a Robo-Advisor? Click here …

I guess you see where this is going. A piece of advice: Try to keep things as automated as possible. Giving the option of talking to a sales consultant to early in the process, might lead to too many calls that are hard (or not) to handle. The goal is to filter your leads to a point, where you can talk to high-quality sales qualified leads, who have a real interest in buying your product or service and are able to afford it.

This step ends with the automated response being sent to your customer.

Quick note at the end: If your process contains another email, probably following up on a whitepaper that was sent/downloaded earlier, consider this part of the auto responder, since there was no reaction of the customer in between.

5 - Sales: switch

Now the sales process starts and its time for your sales team to take over. Your customer could react in different ways to the automated response. So let´s break it up into the following possibilities:

Customer orders via order form. The deal is closed without further ado. More about this on point 6.
Customer needs an appointment. This could be, amongst other things, a test drive, a viewing appointment or a personal consultation. More about this on point 7.

6 - Sales: order received

Great, you received the order without any further effort that had to be put in. Now it has to be processed. If you are wise, you gave your customer multiple opportunities to complete the order. Why? Because people are different. Some are very affine to online processes, others aren´t. So it´s better to provide a variety of possibilities. You want to give people who WANT TO BUY (caution: handle with care) a way they feel comfortable and secure with. The form could be printed, filled out by hand and sent via the post office to your companies address. Or, it could be done with an online form, which is the best way for you of course, because it can be processed automatically. If you receive the form in print form, then digitalize it yourself.

In both cases the order should arrive in your project management system. From there it triggers the next chain reaction. See more on this in section 8.

7 - Sales: appointment

You could summarize this as follows: someone from your company has to do something in order to get the order. In this step it is important to analyze, who will steal your time and who has a real interest to buy from you and just needs some further information. Therefore it´s important what options you give your potential customers to contact you. Keep in mind: All this follows the auto responder you sent earlier. Let´s say you sent a PDF-document that contains all the relevant information about your product or service, the order process an so on. So basically any questions should be answered. What questions are unanswered? Probably the customer wants to see view the product in real life. Understandable. Who would buy a boat, a house or a 5-figure strategy consulting project without further consultation? Exactly.

I am coming back to what I said in point 6 about different customer types. And of course your product or service have to be taken into consideration, too. If you are selling a boat, people will want to see it live. If it´s about a strategy project, a video call about the details would be a logical next step. So in your auto responder the options that best fit your situation should be included. A phone number to call, an email of a personal consultant to directly respond to or a calendly integration to directly make an appointment. What you offer is up to, but should obviously help you reach your goal of closing the deal. After the appointment, the product viewing, the video call or whatever, the customer should make a decision, if he or she want to buy your product or service, or not. So the appointment should end with a clear way for the customer to close the deal (or not). Be careful with further efforts since the probability of closing the deal decrease significantly with every further step taken.

This step ends with your customer ordering your product or service.

8 - Sales: chain reaction

This step is triggered with your customer ordering your product. Now the official commercial process has to start and be completed: offer, order confirmation, invoice and so on. With the order form arriving in your automation system, a chain reaction can be started. Depending on the information the customer put in the order form, the system sends customized emails to your team members who subsequently can create the documents and send them to the customer. Every step is locked into the project management system so it can easily be controlled and supervised at any point in the process.

A piece of advice: Of course its possible to automate basically every step of your chain, but sometimes the current situation needs certain things to be done by hand. Build your workflow automation based on your current situation and possibilities, not your wishful thinking. Build a process your team members can handle. If you want to do everything browser based for example, this might be hard to handle for certain people, resulting in various problems. Sometimes it´s better to automate parts of the process and keep things classy at certain points. Especially in accounting. That being said, take a look at the following systems which offer numerous possibilities in automating your workflows: Zapier, MS Power Automate, Clickup, Hubspot and Make (formerly known as Integromat).

This step ends with your customer receiving all proper documents.

9 - Sales: after sales

Now that you have a happy customer, let´s keep it this way. You could even try to make him or her happier by cross-selling nice additional articles or services. In the lucky case that your business is data-driven you could now make suggestions based on received data. Managing your sales using data analytics should be the goal.

In some cases it´s enough to just be a clever sales person and make the right offer in the right moment. The key take-away: Always think about follow-up business.

10 - Sales: ticked-based support

In the rare, but very important occasion, that your customer has a reason to complain about your product or service, be very aware of the situation. If you handle it properly, it is a good opportunity to turn a loss into a win, since handling problematic situations with competence is a skill and can lead to an even happier customer because people are surprised how competent you handled the situation.

Personal side note: Always give more than expected, a lot more. It will repay more than you can imagine. But since we are talking about workflow automation in this article, let´s keep an eye on the technical part. With proper technology you can easily setup a ticket-system in which you can can track all support cases.

Automated responses regarding the status of the support ticket you communicate to your customer, that you can handle the situation in a professional manner and everything will soon be handled to the full satisfaction of the customer. Handle things quick, generous and professional and even this part will pay into your Future of Sales process.

Summary

Marketing and sales technology gives you a wide variability of possibilities to automate your sales process. Picking the right technologies, methods and strategies is key to mastering this important topic. Don´t be afraid to fail. Mistakes will show you what works and what doesn´t in your individual situation. Building digital sales competence is very important. It´s a crucial skill in order to build a company that will succeed in the future. Customers are used to smooth processes. If you don´t offer it, probably someone else will. Be quicker. Hopefully this article will help you get a head start.

Best of luck with setting up your Future of Sales process! If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I will try to help where possible.

Frontscale by Christian Sauer