Modern automation solutions are making humans more efficient, and they can benefit your company across all departments, including sales. Believe it or not, automation is quickly becoming a key part of digital sales transformation in a customer-first world.

A digital-first strategy can help boost your customers' experiences and streamline routine tasks that are bogging down your Sales team so they can focus more on growing revenue.

We share 7 digital transformation trends in sales that we predict will be in the spotlight this year. We also highlight how powerful business process automation solutions are at the forefront of these trends.

1. Automatic lead qualification

Forbes states the average response time for a lead is 47 hours, just shy of 2 days. That may seem fairly fast, but this allows your competition to scoop your potential customers from right under your nose. Responding to a customer even 2 hours later may sometimes mean losing them to a competitor.

Part of the reason for longer lead response times is that it takes time to qualify leads to determine how likely they are to convert. While this is an important step to weed out leads that may be a dead-end, it's also potentially impacting your bottom line in lost revenue.

That's where sales automation solutions come into play. Wrk's Lead Nurturing Wrkflows can help you follow up with solid leads before they buy from someone else. Properly nurturing leads alone can shorten your sales cycle by up to 23%.

Read more in our Guide to Sales Automation 101.

2. CRM cleaning and organization

So you've established your lead lists—that's a great start. But it could be a long list, and it will take valuable time to follow up with each contact. So, how do you prioritize which potential clients to follow up with first? Properly navigating this step can make or break a successful sale.

You can use sales automation solutions to minimize time your team loses from sorting through lead lists. You can also use automation to organize leads based on predetermined parameters that you set, targeting the most likely customers first.

But there are other benefits to sales automation solutions. Not only can automation help qualify and sort your leads, but it can also clean and organize your customer relationship management (CRM) database. This eliminates duplicate contacts, so you're not following up with the same lead twice and wasting efforts while streamlining the updated customer information across other platforms for consistency.

Research suggests companies without data management initiatives have up to 30% data duplication rates. Furthermore, duplicate records can cost businesses up to $96 each. You can expect to see CRM cleaning and organization as a key sales digital transformation trend.

3. Timely (and personal) interactions

We've already touched on this one, but it can't be stressed enough. Time is of the essence when it comes to closing sales successfully. But it's more than just getting back to potential customers quickly—it's also about doing it effectively.

More specifically, it's about personalizing the responses. While Sales teams only spend about 15% of their time engaging prospects, this can be automated through methods such as Wrk's Personalized Email Marketing ­Wrkflows that can also help to increase your email marketing open rate using an effective email marketing strategy.

This ensures your prospects don't fall through the cracks and that they are more likely to engage. Automation can also handle automatically scheduling follow-up meetings with clients, giving them a seamless, customized experience.

Look for fast and personalized interactions with clients and prospects to become one of the biggest digital transformation trends companies will want to be part of this coming year.

4. Smooth client onboarding

You've made the sale? Great. But the onboarding process can be tedious to the point where the client changes their mind and pulls their business.

The point of the onboarding process is to reinforce to the client that they've made the right decision by making your product or service easy to learn. If they have a smooth onboarding experience, it will set a positive tone for your future interactions and can therefore boost the chance for repeat business.

However, onboarding can be tedious, from sending welcome messages to ensuring the client is properly logged and their updated data verified. This is an opportunity to take advantage of Client Onboarding Wrkflows that can reduce the time required for onboarding and create a user-friendly experience that will have your customers returning for more!

Don't forget to perform routine check-ins with your clients to ensure everything goes as planned. Your onboarding process might be frustrating without the client expressing it.

5. Seamless client reporting

Regarding checking in with your clients, client reporting is important to retaining business. More specifically, this process keeps you in contact with your clients regularly and ensures no issues get out of control before you can resolve them. Checking in keeps the window open so your customers know you can handle any issues. Client reporting is also a great opportunity to educate your customers about new features and show off their performance data to prove results.

However, client reporting is also quite time-consuming. According to Wordstream’s State of the Internet Marketing Agency per client, 59% of respondents spent an hour weekly on client reporting, while 32% spent up to 5 hours weekly.

Luckily, populating data can be simplified through automated Client Reporting Wrkflows while transforming that information into actionable insights for your clients, setting them up for success.

6. Streamlined administrative tasks

Administrative tasks are a given in any business. However, while they include important duties such as sending/paying invoices and creating proposals for clients (that can be handled through our Quote & Proposal Development Wrkflows), about 43% of digital agencies alone don't have time to handle it all.

With the numbers that high in the digital sector, it's safe to say that many other sectors also have trouble carving out space for admin tasks. That's why streamlining administrative tasks will be a standout digital transformation trend.

These tasks can also include answering emails or organizing files, which can be some of the biggest time wasters your staff can undertake. While it may seem like your team is getting a lot of work done, admin work is not necessarily going to drive any new business or opportunities. Improving your admin workflow will ensure more time to focus on bigger goals, like reaching new markets.

7. Productivity software integrations

As remote work grows across all sectors, the use of productivity software remains popular. The market for productivity software is expected to continue to grow, with a report predicting this particular software's market will grow to almost $103 billion by 2027.

Project management solutions such as Trello, Asana, Monday.com, and Basecamp provide a seamless way for prioritizing workloads while making it easier to update progress.

But while these SaaS solutions can help manage workflows within the office or from home, updating information across multiple platforms can be tedious. Automation integrations allow various productivity software to communicate with each other, so your team spends less time organizing what needs to be done.

Adopting digital sales transformation in a customer-first world

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is picking up steam, and for good reason. It can help automate routine tasks for various departments, and sales are no exception.

From automatically qualifying leads to more easily coordinating your productivity software, there are many reasons to jump aboard this trend this year.

To learn more today, connect with one of our automation experts.