When you hear the word “sales”, you would likely associate it with the mere act of selling. It might bring up images of negotiations, pitches, and (ideally) lots of closed deals. However, it’s more intricate than that. Surprisingly, statistics reveal that an average salesperson only dedicates about 35% of their time on actual selling. The rest of their time is often spent on admin tasks such as planning, reporting, analysis, and data entry.
To truly excel in your sales endeavors at a SaaS startup, it is vital to have a robust sales stack that maximizes productivity. While it’s understandable for startups to be cautious about adopting too many tools, a well-chosen sales stack can be a catalyst for growth. One of the most important tools to integrate into your stack is a CRM. We know that some of you may think that you’re too premature to adopt one, but even we at Attio started our journey with (our) CRM. If you want to give it a try, we even have a program dedicated to startups like you, allowing you to experience the power of CRM at the start of your business journey.
Within the CRM stack, there is something called sales force automation (SFA), which is a tool designed to streamline your sales process through automation. Automations, our very own automation feature, will help you speed up tasks from scoring leads to autofilling data, ultimately giving you more time to focus on actually doing sales.
Prioritize your MQL scoring
Navigating a bottomless pit of leads can be overwhelming, but it is crucial to find the most valuable from within. With our MQL scoring workflow, you no longer have to sift through thousands of leads and instead, you can prioritize on your prospecting strategy and reach out to them efficiently.
Understanding what qualifies as an MQL requires a definitive metric to gauge lead value, and in our automation we use Estimated ARR as that metric. Enriched and embedded in every Company record, changes to the Estimated ARR will dictate whether the lead gets triaged to the MQL shortlist and announced to your Sales team via Slack. With real-time alerts and automatic sales pipeline integration, you can be assured that no high-value lead goes unnoticed.
Communicate with your closed deals
Use the add closed deals to MixMax template
Often, sales triage is used for prioritizing leads but it shouldn’t end once a deal is won. What needs to be focused on after a deal is won is a set of strategies to ensure activation, customer satisfaction, and expansion opportunities. With this template, your newly closed deals can easily be routed to the right email nurture cadences in MixMax.
Integrating MixMax and Slack with Attio creates a robust stack enhancing your internal communication and outreach capabilities. This workflow taps into the strength of both platforms, enhanced by AI, to streamline your sales triage process. Once a deal is won, this workflow will be triggered, which will prompt AI to generate and send a concise summary of the deal to your designated Slack channel. What’s cool about this is an added ability to link actions directly to your MixMax right within Slack. So when you see a high-value deal come through, you can route it to your high value MixMax sequence by simply pressing a button. All of these integrations combined will elevate your sales process to new heights.
Ensure effective Customer Success
Use the pass won deals to Customer Success template
When a deal is won, it is essential to optimize for customer success when you can because an inefficient approach to your customer relationship post sale could contribute to potential churn. This template speeds up the transition between your Sales and Customer Success teams and helps push for effective activation.
This workflow will get triggered whenever a deal’s Deal Stage attribute changes to Won. The filter acts as a gatekeeper, sieving out any irrelevant entries which helps maintain the accuracy of your Customer Success list. This precision ensures that the team interacts solely with validated customers, eliminating the chances of miscommunication or misplaced efforts. As a result, the onboarding process will become error-free and focused, providing a positive experience for your new customers.
Gain insight from your lost deals
Use the lost deal reason template
There is no such thing as a 100% close rate, even if you’ve been in Sales for decades. Sometimes lost deals signal gaps in prospecting and a potential misalignment with your ICP’s needs. Other times these losses are simply out of your control. The key is to gather feedback and refine your approach accordingly, which can in turn help with finding PMF and nailing your ICP. Recognizing the reasons for lost deals is pivotal, and this template will be your guiding tool.
Ensuring that you have an attribute that tracks the reasons for your lost deals can help you spot trends in customer feedback. To make sure that these reasons are consistently documented, this workflow will send you a reminder if the Lost Deal Reason field is unfilled after a set amount of time. If it is still empty, a task will be auto-generated for you to complete it. This way, you’ll always stay on top of capturing feedback and improve your strategy when needed.
Automate repetitive data entry
Use the customer renewal date autofill template
Manual data entry is not only tedious but also prone to mistakes. For data with a consistent time periods such as renewal dates, automation is a practical solution to address these challenges. This workflow will make sure your customers’ renewal dates are all filled, which can optimize your customer success operation.
Each time a new entry is added to your Customer Success list, this workflow kicks into action, scanning for any records without a populated Renewal Date attribute. Once detected, you don’t even need to do anything and the system will fill it out for you by drawing upon a pre-configured standard contract duration. This will ensure data consistency, efficiency, and more time to focus on customer success initiatives rather than repetitive admin tasks.
