4 Things to Look for in a Sales Automation Tool

Outbound sales is still one of the most effective ways to build pipeline.

For many companies, however, scaling an outbound sales operation can seem like a daunting (and costly) endeavor. In an era when top talent is increasingly hard to come by, many organizations are looking to maximize the productivity of existing staff rather than recruiting more reps.

An outbound sales automation tool, such as Mixmax, can be an excellent way to scale your pipeline-generating activities—without adding headcount. Let’s explore four important features to look for when selecting a high-impact sales automation tool.

1. Automated Email Sequences

“Drip campaigns” aren’t just for marketing teams anymore. By utilizing an outbound sales automation tool, sales reps can unlock the power of drip marketing, too—all from the comfort of their email inbox or CRM.

Keep in mind that not all automated tools are created equal. Simply automating your sales messaging offers no guarantee of engagement. To maximize the effectiveness of your sequences, look for a tool that delivers the following important features:

Intelligent follow-ups: Overwhelming your recipients with a never-ending flow of communication is not wise, especially after they have taken the time to respond. An ideal system monitors opens, replies, and engagement with your content to help you understand what works best with your audience. This has been proven to save you money.

Mass personalization: Sending a generic, canned message to every prospect reduces the probability of engagement, but personalizing each email is usually not scalable. An outbound sales automation tool should offer the best of both worlds by making it easy to customize individual messages with custom data from your CRM.

Transparent analytics: Which message yields the greatest level of engagement? Does time of day influence a prospect’s willingness to respond? What percent of automated emails are actually getting read? To move faster and build more pipeline, your sales team needs data-driven answers to questions like these.

2. Email Tracking & Alerting

Empower your sales team to follow up smarter (and faster) by arming them with real-time email engagement data. Detailed analytics keep reps informed about important interactions, such as opens, clicks, RSVPs, and downloads, making it easier to know who to follow up with next.

Desktop notifications take email tracking to a whole new level, alerting your sales team within moments of an open, click, or download. Notifications create a continuous feedback loop for your reps, thereby increasing the chances for engagement.

Receive alerts when your email is opened

3. One-Click Meetings

Realistically, only a small percent of prospects will ever respond to your sales team’s emails. That’s why it’s vital to make life as easy as possible for those who do choose to engage. Wasting a prospect’s time with endless back-and-forth to schedule a demo is the opposite of “easy.”

One-click meetings simplify scheduling for prospects and your sales staff. For example, our Mixmax tool integrates with Google Calendar, enabling your reps to insert a block of available times into the body of any email. Prospects simply click on a time slot, and Mixmax handles all of the calendar invitations, meeting confirmations, and emails.

One click meeting scheduler

4. Rules

Your sales reps send and receive a ton of emails every day. Why not leverage this activity to automate other time-consuming aspects of running your business?

Let’s assume that your outbound email sequence encourages prospects to book a 15-minute appointment. When a prospect selects a meeting time (via your one-click meeting link, of course), this could trigger several other downstream activities. For example, if you’re using Mixmax, you might build a Rule to automatically update the associated CRM lead record, send a follow-up email with pre-meeting materials, and post an update to an internal Slack channel.

For more examples of how to leverage Mixmax Rules, watch this brief video:

Scale Your Outbound with Mixmax

Leveraging an outbound sales automation tool like Mixmax can be a highly scalable way to build pipeline faster. Create personalized, multi-stage email sequences, gain total transparency into what works, and automate scheduling and other time-consuming tasks.