5 sales automation mistakes that are hurting your pipeline and how to fix them

Introduction

Sales automation is a great way to scale your business: less manual effort, more leads, and better conversions. Sounds like a dream, right? Wrong. When implemented poorly, sales automation can have precisely the opposite effect: indifferent prospects, a bloated pipeline, relationships that never develop, and soaring operational costs.

The trouble with automation is that most organizations jump in without a solid plan. Sure, they have a set of mailer templates, feed them into an automated mailer system, and keep firing emails at prospects until prospects turn into customers. But prospects are more likely to become frustrated with this approach.

In this blog, we'll break down five prominent sales automation pitfalls and how to avoid them with careful planning and execution.

1. Bad data

Sales data is often messy, incomplete, or incorrect—but businesses often accept this as the price of doing business. After all, how could bad data harm business? Other than leading to missed opportunities, there aren't many ways that bad data can dampen your sales efforts—right? Wrong!

Consider this: You're a bank who's looking to send out credit cards on trial to a thousand long-standing customers. But the address field in your CRM is as old as your CRM itself. If you go ahead with this campaign, some of your sample credit cards could end up in the wrong hands. Imagine the extent of financial strain this campaign could cause, or the damage to your bank's reputation.

Bad sales data has far more repercussions for businesses than just lost opportunities; it can trigger a domino effect, with implications that affect every corner of your sales funnel.

Bad data -> improper segmentation -> ineffective lead scoring and optimization

Incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated data such as email addresses, job titles, industries, or customer names can really mess up your outreach programs. Customers don't appreciate brands who send them irrelevant emails or get their personal details wrong. They're more likely to remember these emails and form negative associations with your brand.

"Spray-and-pray" tactics rarely work. Bad data renders your prospects' segments ineffective, and every campaign you create around these segments will result in more unsubscribes than curious prospects.

Data forms the basis for lead scoring, qualification, and lead prioritization. Without reliable data, lead scoring is often erroneous, and your sales team will waste their valuable time on unqualified leads and miss out on hot prospects.

How to fix it: 
Bad data isn't a dead end; it's more like a wake-up call. The minute you identify the root cause of your bad data, it becomes something you can fix.

Based on our experience as a CRM vendor, bad data can be traced back to missing information (phone numbers or addresses), duplicate entries (one customer under different email addresses), outdated personal data (wrong job titles or brands a customer is associated with), manual errors in data entry, and inconsistent data formats (phone numbers with and without the requisite hyphens).

Avoid incomplete entries in your CRM by marking critical fields like contact information as mandatory. Add more fields to the list of mandatory fields as your business matures and evolves.

Use AI to filter out duplicates and unify or delete duplicate data. You could also connect your CRM to an ETL application to clean your data of duplicates and flag missing or incomplete records. Salespeople can then manually update the missing fields.

Keep track of your records' last activity times. Leads who haven't responded in a year are unlikely to do so later, so mark such customers. Consider a re-engagement campaign to spark interest and boost engagement. If you don't receive any response from their end, mark those customers as inactive and proceed cautiously when marketing to them.

2. No personalization

Implementing automation is a means to help you scale with limited resources—but it shouldn't come at the cost of that personal connection. The key to a successful automation project is to send messages or emails that recipients have no clue were automated.

Personalization doesn't end with adding your recipients' first names or their company names to emails, nor is it adding a line about the weather or a recent sporting event. Customers are so used to receiving mass emails that they can spot impersonal emails from a mile away. A McKinsey report sums it up in figures: 71% of customers expect personalized outreach and a solid 75% are frustrated by the lack of personalization in email outreach.

Personalization is even more prominent in the age of AI, where every other piece of content is created by generative AI. Authentic, curated, and personalized content that talks to the recipient is the only way to stand out and get your brand noticed. 

How to fix it
Any salesperson worth their commission knows it's important to personalize, and that it's the only way to stand out amid a sea of competition. The challenge is in personalizing outreach without compromising quality—and doing so with a quick turnaround time.

First, segment your communications into two types: unknown prospects and known prospects. In other words, contacts to whom you've reached out before and those to whom you haven't. An example of outreach could be a response to an email or a social post, a call, or a demo request.

When targeting an unknown audience, break them down into as many nuanced segments as possible. Start with industry, then move on to company type, size, revenue, service offerings, or job title. Curate a sequence that will appeal broadly to that audience group. Buyer journeys are never linear, so account for this and create content that's likely to appeal to each audience group. The objective here is to evoke a response from prospects and convert them into known prospects.

Here are a few tips to get communication at this stage right:

• Get people's names and their companies right: No one appreciates a brand that gets their name wrong. Better yet, let the customers provide their names themselves at the first point of contact. That way, you eliminate any chance of getting names wrong.
• Cater to their industry: When talking to prospects from manufacturing, mention upfront how you can address issues that are relevant to that industry. List your awards and recognition in that vertical and make it known you're already trusted in that field.
• Speak their language: Learn jargon that's relevant to various industries and craft content using this knowledge.
• Refer to relevant industry events: Was there a recent research paper published for your target industry? Have they recently experienced a tectonic shift? Refer to those events and propose how your solution relates to any related changes.

Once you have your segments and have curated content for each one, it's time to set up outreach automation.

Automating outreach to known prospects is slightly different, but interesting because you've already collected a little bit of information about them. Further interactions will provide you with more data, which can further help you personalize and nurture the relationship.

Start with geography-specific campaigns. Sponsor local events or host your own in specific geographies—then send out a drip campaign to prospects in the region. After the event, create outreach programs to convert attendees and non-attendees by sending a series of messages with highly curated content.

If you manage to discover your contacts' specific interests, craft sequences around that. For example, a prospect interested in your CRM application may have a particular interest in workflow automation or marketing automation.

You can even hone in on shared interests with your prospects. Notice a few prospects love the same baseball team as you? Create a view for these prospects in CRM, connect with them over your shared love for baseball. But as always, be cautious with this approach.

3. Clunky workflows

Automation has the greatest potential for delivering exponential productivity gains and immense cost savings, but it's not a silver bullet for solving process-level issues.

Let's say an enterprise technology company wants to automate their quoting and approval operations—a process which, until now, has been performed entirely manually. They pick this area because it appears to offer the biggest boost to efficiency, and because it's the smallest team in the organization, with just 12 employees.

The team responsible for automation discovers that the organization is selling 15 different software applications, with four pricing tiers for each one. Also, discounts are offered to customers as needed, and the process is entirely manual: Salespeople supply the discount details, which are approved or rejected by regional sales managers, and then the quotes team provides a quote after calculating state and central taxes. All of this takes place over seven different applications.

After months of hypothesis, the automation team suggests a solution with workflows that involved hundreds of different combinations and permutations based on data entered manually into dozens of different fields in the CRM. This process also involves manual interventions at multiple points, which, ironically, now involves 15 employees. As a result, they drop the automation idea and continue with their manual quoting and approval process.

Automation can deliver great benefits, as long as the process isn't broken. Process complexity isn't as much a hindrance to automation as irregular systems are. Hyper-complex processes can still be automated as long as the workflows are digital, clear, well-defined, and efficient.

How to fix it
Before you think of automation, ensure all processes are ironed out and don't depend on the cognitive capabilities of humans. If your process involves requiring a sales head to offer arbitrary discounts, as in our example above, then standardize the process first—or don't consider that process for automation.

Create an end-to-end mind map of your processes. This is where features like Zoho CRM's blueprints are handy. You can map online and offline processes from start to finish, break down hyper-complex processes into smaller chunks that can be automated, and ensure your process is clean—i.e., that it no longer has a mix of offline and online activities.

Work with senior management to define automation objectives clearly. For instance, you could focus on improving ROI by reducing the time required to complete a process, or you could target boosting productivity. Next, find processes that are ideal candidates to help achieve your objectives.
 

4. Lack of concerns over GDPR, compliance, and privacy

Privacy laws and compliance guidelines aren't hurdles; they exist to make your marketing and sales efforts more effective and boost your brand image. Generally, there are only a few major laws to consider, such as GDPR (Europe), CAN-SPAM (US), CASL (Canada), and PECR (UK). Other guidelines do exist, and it's important to learn and practice them if you market to regions where those guidelines apply.

Following compliance guidelines and respecting privacy laws can help establish your brand as one people can trust. It goes without saying that failing to comply with these laws can incur severe penalties and fines in the range of millions. Many organizations have dedicated departments that track and implement compliance with these laws, but it's best to invest in a CRM or a marketing automation application that has built-in features that enable compliance.

How to fix it
The only sure-fire way to ensure your sales outreach automation adheres to these privacy and compliance laws is to build checks and balances in your automation processes.

Educate yourself about the latest laws. As the world grows more privacy-aware, governments worldwide take steps to introduce new laws and regulations that make citizens' data safer. It's up to businesses to take notes and update their policies to keep up with these laws. 

Mandate compliance with privacy laws at the first point of contact. Whatever point of contact that is—webpages, signup forms, events, webinars, live sessions, or ads—make sure to obtain and track consent. Install double opt-ins, display your company's privacy policies and terms of service, and ensure you collect and store customers' data in data centers as demanded by law.

It's also prudent to outline how you plan to use the data customers provide. For instance, if you collect phone numbers, specify that you'll be engaging in cold calling. As a safer option, mention in the first outreach email how you obtained their data and why you're contacting them. 

Provide options for people to opt out of your emails and calls. Install an unsubscribe option in each automated email and add anyone who uses that option to a "no contact" list.

Install checks in your automation application to remove customers in the "no contact" list by default.

5. No goal tracking

So you've set up sales automation; you're sending out emails by the thousands every day; and your sales team is happy that they don't have to spend time on outreach. Is it time to call your automation efforts a win? The only way to find out is to look into the stats.

Tracking the performance of your mailers can help you identify mailers that are working well, those that could use some minor tweaks, and those that you need to phase out of circulation.

Tracking the performance of your mailers and comparing them to pre-defined goals can help you derive actionable insights that get you to your goals faster. Running outreach without performance tracking is akin to running blind. You wouldn't invest in stocks without keeping track of how those stocks are performing, right? Take football, for instance. The coaches of your favorite football team meticulously track every second of the game, right? Because the alternative—not tracking stock performance or game performance—is certainly paving the way for failure.

How to fix it
Generally, there are a few areas you need to pay attention to:

• Segmentation
• Personalization
• Timing
• Channel
• Content
• Conversions
• Complaints
• High-value customers

Now, all you have to do is identify metrics that shed light on these areas and frame goals or benchmarks for each of these metrics.

For example, to determine whether your email subject lines are effective, take a look at open rates. To gauge if your content is contextual, take a look at clicks or CTA events. If your emails bounce, you know the data in your CRM is bad. If you receive too many unsubscribe requests, it's time to take a look at your customer segmentation and email frequency.

When setting goals for your email performance, a good approach is to consider market standards. Look into the email performance of others in your industry. Several email performance benchmark reports can help you get the figures right.

Running an A/B test on emailers is an accepted industry practice before making changes to your overall emailing strategy. Here's an example: A D2C startup that sells automotive parts finds that the last email of their three-message series is underperforming. They decide to change the subject line and arrive at two options, both with the objective of getting the customer to write them back. The two subject lines are: "Do you have a question about your recent purchase?" and "Ask me one question about your <recent part purchased>". The second subject line brings in a flood of responses about issues customers have faced with their recent purchases, questions about product usage, questions about installation, and suggestions for improvement.

In just a few weeks, the company has a winning subject line and a great collection of feedback to improve their product line.
 

Conclusion

Today's well-informed and diverse customer base responds well only to brands that are authentic, warm, sympathetic, and highly attuned to their personal needs and demands. Automated outreach can help you cater to a vast audience if you avoid common mistakes and approach audiences with thoughtful, relevant, and intelligent content in a channel that works best for them. Getting these little things right can make a world of difference for businesses.