Your side hustle will witness exponential progress if you automate your sales process. This is because, for someone who has a job or main business, you’d struggle to devote time to your side hustle.
But when you automate your sales process, you free up valuable time to handle revenue-generating tasks in your side hustle. As a result, your ROI swells and your side hustle grows accordingly.
This article explains how automating your side hustle’s sales process can free up time for your primary business. But before we go into that, let’s find out what sales automation is.
What is Sales Automation?
Sales automation is the use of software to get rid of certain repetitive, manual tasks in the sales process. Tasks like data entry, account checking and follow-up, calls and meeting schedules, and even lead generation require valuable time from you. The good news is that you can automate them without disrupting your sales process. In fact, automating these tasks allows you and your sales team to focus on the key tasks that actually produce the major results.
Why Should You Automate the Sales Process of Your Side Hustle?
As someone who has a job or primary business, your attention to your side hustle would be limited, making you miss out on important deals. Imagine losing a deal that has the potential to shoot up the numbers of your business simply because you failed to follow up. What about the valuable time, effort, and resources wasted in sending emails, scheduling meetings, and nurturing leads?
These are things you can easily handle with a good sales automation system. The advantages of automating the sales process of your side hustle are numerous. You would be able to prioritize valuable leads, concentrate on tasks that will generate income, and stop crucial sales from slipping through your fingers. You’ll also get to know firsthand the questions your prospects are asking and the objections they may have by tracking their calls.
It’s essential to know how sales automation benefits your side hustle. But it’s even more important to know which processes to automate and how to do so.
How to Automate the Sales Process of Your Side Hustle
Here’s how to automate the sales process for your side business, so you can devote quality time to managing the activities that actually produce income:
Define Your Sales Process
You can’t automate your sales process if you don’t know the activities involved in it. Therefore, the first thing to do is to make a list of all the tasks involved in your sales process, from lead generation to the closing of the sale.
Once you’ve figured out the tasks involved in your sales process, map out the ones that can be automated. Then go in search of the tools you need to automate them.
Automate Lead Generation
Lead generation is the first step in the sales process. It is the process of gathering qualified leads and sending them to your sales funnel.
Moving from one platform where your prospects are gathered to another, extracting their contacts, and saving them is a time-consuming process. You can spend a lot of time and resources doing this manually, yet you still won’t be able to gather enough contacts to sell to.
But the good news is that lead generation can be automated. If you’re using LinkedIn for your lead generation, you can set up custom filters that let LinkedIn send you profiles of new prospects every week. These are people who have recently joined LinkedIn and fit your preferred demographic.
You can also automate lead generation on your websites or blogs. This process requires a valuable lead magnet that your web visitors would be tempted to have. As a result, they wouldn’t mind dropping their emails and other contact information you might seek in exchange for the lead magnet.
Automate Lead Enrichment and Nurturing
Once leads are gathered, you’d need to nurture them until they become customers. But you can’t do that with just their email address as the only information you have. That’s where lead enrichment comes in. It’s the process of gathering sufficient and precise information about your prospects to enable you to properly tailor your sales pitch to suit their needs.
Software like LeadGenius and LeadFuze can be used to automate the lead enrichment process. They’d automatically search for your prospects’ company and contact data and every other relevant information you need.
Once you have all the relevant information you need about your prospects, you can use customer relationship management tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Suit, and Zoho to build and nurture a relationship with them.
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Automate Call and Meeting Scheduling
Calls and meeting scheduling are other tasks that take away from your productive time. With meeting scheduling tools like Calendly, you no longer need to spend time emailing prospects to fix an appointment.
Your prospects only require your calendar link to figure out days and times when you’re free. Then they can choose free dates on the link based on how convenient it would be for them. Outsourced call management is one of the highly sought-after jobs in Canada and in many parts of North America.
Automate Proposals and Document Creation
Sales proposals take time to create. You need to copy and paste information from your emails, notes, and other sources to fill up the proposals. Doing this manually would mean abandoning other productive tasks you could have done on your side hustle.
But there are many proposal tools that offer drag-and-drop functionality, which streamlines this process for you. Tools like Panda Doc can be used to create proposals, quotes, and contracts.
Automate Lead Scoring and Prioritization
Lead scoring allows you to make better use of your time when speaking with prospects. Based on your prospects’ movement on the sales funnel, your CRM tool can qualify them based on their chances of conversion. This helps you spend more time with those who have a higher chance of making a purchase.
This is one of the most important tools you need to automate your sales process, as you don’t have all the time in the world to dedicate to your side hustle.
Conclusion
The best gift you can give yourself this year is to automate the sales process of your side hustle. It not only saves you time spent on repetitive tasks, but it also saves you money while significantly improving your ROI.
If you have a sales team in your side hustle, automating the sales process ensures every one of them spends their time on productive business activities.
Hopefully this article has given you insights on how you can get the most out of your side hustle this year.
