Influencing your manager’s mind concerning marketing or sales strategy change isn’t an easy task. Switching to automation, too — it demands a sufficient budget, restructuring of roles within a team, extra coaching, and much more. Not a surprise your boss isn’t ready to accept your growth ideas!
But what if you are sure it’s high time your company implemented a CRM to automate and streamline the company’s processes? How can you convince management to start using a reliable sales automation tool?
We’ve written this post to help you present your idea in the best way possible and show how you can use the example of Snov.io CRM as a strong justification.
But let’s clarify the basic terms first to make sure you understand what to fight for:)
Outline:
What is sales automation?
Sales automation is the process of using software for automating and eliminating repetitive manual tasks like receipt tracking to help your team focus on closing sales, which streamlines your sales processes, resulting in higher productivity and revenue.
Sales automation tool vs. CRM
You can often hear how one and the same software positions itself as a sales automation tool and a CRM. But are these notions the same?
Theoretically, the difference does exist:
- CRM (customer relationship management) mainly focuses on customer satisfaction and all the benefits of customer retention. It manages the relationship between a company and its customers by gathering and organizing customer data from interactions (by phone, email, and social media), queries, and purchase history. Sales teams analyze this information and adjust their solutions based on existing clients’ needs.
- On the other hand, a sales automation tool focuses on the sales process and how to make it efficient and transparent to the whole team. It usually embraces sales and pipeline management features, providing sales teams with a clear picture of prospects, recent sales, and overall sales performance.
In this context, CRM is often perceived as post-sale software, while a sales automation tool comes up as sales acquisition software.
In practice, however, you’ll find more and more tools that combine features of both. And that’s the software we’ll be talking about in this post.
How to convince your boss to invest in a sales automation service or CRM?
Now that the terms are clear, let’s take a look at the main steps you need to take to present the value of investing in automation to your management.
1. Collect information about sales automation services
Before you start justifying why switching to automation is a sound idea, you should do solid research on the sales automation solutions on the market and consider their main features, benefits, and pricing.
Make a list of these tools or study one of the automation services more precisely. To make this job easier for you, we’ve compiled a comparative study of such solutions in one of our blog posts, so feel free to use it to simplify your research.
Alternatively, I would advise you to take one service and use it as an example in your discussion. In this post, I’ll show you how to do it with Snov.io 🙂
2. Start with the automation benefits
The main directions where your company or department will benefit after investing in sales automation are profitability, time, and workload. Any information is best processed in the form of a list, so make sure you present these pros as a list as well, supporting your statements with statistics and examples.
More efficient lead generation
Sales automation tools allow you to spare time by automating how you’ll generate leads. Their functionality helps you collect contact details of prospects in minutes from their websites or social media platforms, save them to your CRM, and segment the list for further outreach.
About 80% of companies agree that an automation tool can bring you 451% more leads. Besides, with sales automation software, you don’t need to drown in a sea of browser tabs to search for your leads – it does everything from a single tab.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Snov.io Email Finder extension can parse any website you need to get a perfect list of emails fast, ready for enrichment, segmentation, and further use. Meanwhile, Snov.io LI Prospect Finder extension will help you generate quality leads from LinkedIn in several minutes. And you can be sure the contact details of your prospects are valid – Snov.io ensures each email is verified upon finding. Alternatively, you can always check your customer base for validity with Snov.io Email Verifier and control the quality of your email lists. |
Multifunctionality
Even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time. Meaning, every time you or your employees have to switch between platforms to generate leads, create outreach campaigns, and analyze results, your productivity falls, and simple tasks drag on forever.
Having all tools on a single platform will solve this problem and offer a comfortable, efficient way to navigate everyday workflow.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Snov.io is an all-in-one sales automation platform and a free CRM that will help you deal with a plentiful of tasks. With it, you can find leads anywhere online, create targeted emails for your sales outreach, organize your sales campaigns from scratch, manage deals in a pipeline view, and stay in constant control of all your tasks, sales funnel stages, and prospects. |
Higher productivity
Sales automation not only helps companies get rid of manual tasks by processing them in bulk, but also makes them transparent for the whole team. This allows team members to access the same customer information, collaborate, and achieve better business outcomes. As a result, their total productivity grows considerably.
Not a surprise, businesses that leverage CRM software see sales productivity increase by 34%.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Be it email search by domain or email verification, Snov.io offers tools to automate tasks in bulk. You can upload your domain or email list to the platform and let it take care of the rest with Bulk Domain Search and Email Verifier. Snov.io supports multiple formats (Excel, CSV, and TXT). Meanwhile, Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns allow creating long chains of emails and program them up to specific recipients’ reactions. To crown it all, with Snov.io CRM, you can ensure all your sales team members stay aligned as all tasks are transparent and accessible. |
Better conversion rates
Since sales CRM automates processes and frees up so much time for sales reps, they can focus more on closing deals. In particular, they can dedicate more time to building and nurturing relationships with prospects, understanding their needs, and making all interactions personalized, where sales automation tools also have a significant role to play. In fact, using CRM software can increase sales conversion rates by up to 300%.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Snov.io sales automation platform cares much about making sales outreach personalized. It offers possibilities to play with email variables, while its integration with Hyperise allows making emails even more targeted with highly customized images, boosting the conversion rate. |
Increased ROI
Woah, that’s a lot of benefits! But perhaps the most deciding factor for your boss to agree to start using sales automation tools will be their affordable pricing. For businesses that use a CRM, the average return on their technology investment is $8.71 for each dollar spent.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: The all-in-one nature of the platform and affordable subscription plans make Snov.io a real bargain your whole marketing and sales department can utilize daily without draining the budget. |
3. Speak about tools and features
You can significantly support your pros presentation if you focus on specific tools and features of sales automation software that help businesses gain these benefits. So, after studying the market, prepare the essential list of features to talk about:
- CRM — CRM can be a separate sales automation feature, coming up as a single platform for all sales tasks.
- Prospecting tools — Sales automation tools commonly include email/phone number lookup features that allow you to automate finding the contact details of your prospects and saving them to your list for further outreach.
- Email drip campaigns — Sales automation tools typically also offer an email marketing service that lets you send email sequences, automatically track their performance, and program follow-ups.
- Calling services — Some sales automation platforms allow you to set up autodials and save much time calling prospects.
- Virtual meeting tools — They make scheduling and conducting interviews with prospects easier, as well as help set up automatic email reminders to confirm when and where your meetings will take place.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Tip: Make sure to show exactly how much value can be gained from using an all-in-one platform in terms of both money and time. Snov.io is an outreach automation platform for marketers and sales offering a variety of tools for lead generation, email verification, email sending, and email tracking available as a web app, Chrome extension, and API. Here’s what the Snov.io toolset offers: Web app
Chrome extensions (directly connected and synchronized with the web app)
APISnov.io features can be used through a simple REST API. You can easily integrate Snov.io features directly into your platform to sync your leads, find emails, manage prospects, and more. The API rate is limited to 60 requests per minute. |
4. Focus on price flexibility
Pricing is one of those factors that matter a lot for decision-makers. Not a surprise that sales objections about price are so popular, both with customers and inner management.
Sales automation services range in terms of pricing, so you should get prepared to find the tool that would demonstrate the optimal value for the money. Luckily, Snov.io is among such platforms.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Budgets change, and with Snov.io, you can be as flexible as you want. It works on a subscription-based model and offers several plans to choose from depending on your budget and company size. Snov.io is always on a customer’s side, which is why:
|
5. Test and analyze
Make sure you understand how sales automation works in practice. The two main aspects you will be questioned on are the following:
- Profitability. Your boss will be eager to know how much money you can save by leveraging sales automation.
- Time. The tools you use have to minimize the time you spend on an individual task or, in this case, your whole workflow.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Use Snov.io free plan to test every tool and feature and measure exactly how it improved your productivity. In particular:
|
6. Use psychology
If cold hard facts are not convincing enough for your decision-maker, use psychology. Like your prospects, your boss belongs to a particular type of buyer, so you should develop the corresponding approach.
Here are some general rules that will help you:
- Talk less about yourself and more about your boss. To convince them, you have to show them how their problems can be solved.
- Use the opportunity cost strategy. Opportunity cost will show your boss how much they will lose if they miss out on the opportunity to implement sales automation.
- Before you pitch your idea, make sure you have at least a couple of co-workers on your side. Doing it alone can have its benefits, but not when trying to convince your boss. Show that your opinion is shared and supported!
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Tip: Communicate actual stats you’ve collected during your research to convince your management. Your pitch should sound something like this (don’t forget to insert your own relevant data). Purchasing a subscription plan from Snov.io will give us a [45%] increase in quality lead generation, while the automation tools they offer will improve our efficiency by [300%]. If we don’t start using Snov.io, we will be losing [800$] and [40 hours/month] on email campaigns alone. |
7. Be ready for questions
Your boss will inevitably have questions and objections regarding the tools you need for work. Be prepared to hear the following:
- We can’t afford this sales automation solution.
- What if you need some additional tools next week?
- Who exactly will be using it?
- Do we really need it?
- This platform might be too complicated to use.
|
How you can deal with these questions and objections using Snov.io example: We can’t afford it. Snov.io offers one of the most affordable and flexible subscription plans on the market. If Email Verifier is a primary tool you’ll be using, check this article for a price comparison of the top email validation services. Snov.io can accommodate any budget. What if you need some additional tools next week? Snov.io offers all tools an email marketer or sales specialist may need, from lead generation to email tracking, no additional services needed. In addition, it regularly adds new features and extensions to the platform, all covered by a single subscription plan. Who will use it? Snov.io can be valuable to any specialist. There are no limitations. You can use it alone or have your whole company on a single account. Tools like Email Finder and Email Tracker can be used by everyone, from top management to the receptionist. Do we really need it? Here I recommend that you try to create a comprehensive test case on features your company is most interested in and present the end results to your boss. A simple example of such a test would be this article. This platform might be too complicated to use. Snov.io ensures all tools are easy-to-use. If any team member has a question on how to navigate the tool, they can find detailed guides with screenshots for every feature, tool, and extension in Snov.io Knowledgebase. |
8. Use testimonials
Nothing is more convincing than competitors already using sales automation…and doing it successfully. While presenting the case, research how other companies like yours have benefited from a similar solution from testimonials.
|
How you can use Snov.io example: Using Snov.io allowed Belkins, a company specializing in lead generation services, to collect more than 80,000 leads in a month thanks to the Bulk Email Finder option. This accelerated their search for emails while reducing the cost per lead by 2%. Email verification helped the company grow their email deliverability, which reached 98-99%. As a result, Belkins Research Department increased its efficiency by 12%. You can find other Snov.io case studies on its testimonials page. |
Ask us for help
If you still don’t know how to convince your boss or feel like your case just isn’t strong enough, we’ll be more than happy to help.
If you didn’t find the answers you were looking for in our Knowledgebase, drop us a line via Support Chat or email help@snov.io with any questions regarding our service.
We are here to help you get the best possible results.
Good luck!
