Category: Diplomat Sales Automation

What is Sales Automation?

In the competitive world of sales, the ability to streamline processes and maximize efficiency is crucial for success. Sales automation, a transformative approach, leverages technology to automate repetitive tasks, enabling sales teams to focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals.

Understanding Sales Automation

Sales automation refers to the use of technology, primarily software tools, to automate various aspects of the sales process. This can include lead generation, customer follow-ups, data entry, pipeline management, and reporting. By automating these tasks, sales teams can save time, reduce human error, and focus on more strategic activities that require a personal touch.

Sales automation aims to create a more efficient and effective sales process by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks and providing sales professionals with the tools they need to succeed.

First Generation of Sales Automation

In the earlier days, ACT!, Siebel, and later on Salesforce, Oracle, and multiple other companies pioneered the foundations of the modern Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. These organize prospect accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and the sales funnel. Early versions started as manual card files, eventually evolving into simple databases, and then web-app frontends in front of those simple databases. This laid the groundwork for sales automation to happen, and nothing we do today would be possible without those basics.

Second Generation Starts to Automate the Grind

The second generation saw improvements in the process, many features being picked up by major CRM companies themselves. Some companies to this day are still getting circles run around them as they do not pick up even these automation practices.

  • Automated Activity Aggregation – There are tons of companies out there either not tracking sales rep activity, or making sales reps engage in manual data entry for activities. Automation here can import activities from calendars, email accounts, and automatically create and merge accounts and leads.
  • Email Automation, Cadences – This allowed sales teams to create personalized, trigger-based email campaigns that nurture leads through the sales funnel. Some of these tools can send automated emails based on specific actions, such as downloading a whitepaper or abandoning a shopping cart, ensuring timely and relevant communication.
  • Lead Generation and Scoring – Automated lead generation tools can help identify and attract potential customers through various channels, such as social media, email marketing, and online forms. Once leads are captured, automation software can score them based on predefined criteria, such as demographic information and online behavior, to prioritize high-potential prospects.
  • Notifications & Alerts – Automating pipeline management involves tracking and managing the stages of each deal in real-time. Automation tools can alert sales reps when a deal is at risk of stalling, suggest next steps, and even forecast potential revenue based on the current pipeline status.
  • Calendar Integrations – Integrations with scheduling and CRM platforms automatically sync events and activities across calendars, reducing the amount of time wasted on scheduling and data entry, while also increasing success rates of actually holding meetings.
  • Reporting and Analytics – Automation can also streamline the reporting process by generating real-time analytics and performance reports. Sales managers can access dashboards that provide insights into team performance, sales trends, and customer behavior, enabling data-driven decision-making.
  • Data-Driven Strategic Insights – Automated reporting and analytics provide sales managers with valuable insights into team performance, market trends, and customer behavior. These insights can inform strategic decisions and help identify areas for improvement.

At the end of the day though, this generation of automation technologies only go so far.

Insights in this generation are still only descriptive, not prescriptive. These platforms can tell you what already happened, but outside crude funnel forecasts, they do not and cannot tell you with any confidence what will happen.

The platforms in the current generation only open the door — the sales rep still has to walk through themselves and call those shots themselves. For many, it’s already become so complicated that there are now major SaaS companies that exist solely to act as integration hubs for all the different tools everyone is using. On top of that, sales managers still have to manually check whether a strategy is working before moving to another strategy. This manual decision making is fine and dandy if your sales team are all top 0.1% in their verticals, always operating at peak efficiency. But back here in the real world, the incredible majority of sales is still foundationally dependent on grinding out that next call, email, demo, and proposal.

These automation platforms of yesteryear are like cruise control for cars. They make that grind a bit less grueling, but at the end of the day someone still has to drive.

Next Generation Automates Growth

Enter Diplomat Sales AI. This next generation of sales automation is rapidly sweeping the industry:

  • Automated Data Collection – Diplomat Sales AI automates collection of all viable prospects from a variety of sources. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on email contact datasets and getting banned while scraping LinkedIn, Diplomat just collects and validates lead data on its own.
  • Automated Prospecting – Diplomat doesn’t just “reach out” to prospects. As one of our Diplomat users stated:
    Diplomat is the best salesperson we’ve ever had. It’s like having a salesperson who never sleeps, never takes a break, and never forgets a lead.
    Diplomat reaches out to prospects at the right time every time. Far too many companies lose on this grind alone. Fully automated follow-ups, personalized emails, and timely responses to inquiries all contribute to a better customer experience, fostering loyalty and repeat business.
  • AI Driven Lead Scoring – Sales teams must focus on nurturing the most promising prospects. By prioritizing leads with the highest potential, sales teams can improve conversion rates and close deals faster.
  • Align Departments & Updating Collateral – Let’s be honest… for most companies, sales collateral is the last thing to be updated. And when something does get updated, in practice, most companies do not successfully share that information among all sales reps. This wastes a ridiculous amount of time on confusion between product to sales to prospects, on everything from duplicate discussions to pushing unqualified leads through the funnel.
  • Mitigating Channel Conflict – Some offerings are amenable to 100% automation. The sales development representative (SDR) role can be completely automated, and in some cases, even the account executive (AE) role can be automated. But other, more complicated offerings sometimes require a longer sales cycle with requirements gathering, maybe some live product walk-throughs with live Q&A. The AE and maybe a sales engineer still has to come in and close. With our integrations, Diplomat knows who your sales reps are talking with and can avoid sending conflicting communications to current clients and active prospects that your AEs are working currently.

Diplomat Sales AI is here and now, revolutionizing the way B2B companies do sales, automating these grinds away, growing businesses to new heights. Do you want to be left in the dust, or do you want to experience this kind of growth with sales automation? Apply for Diplomat today.

Success Stories: How Diplomat Automated Outbound Sales for IT Consulting

In the competitive world of IT consulting, the ability to efficiently manage and scale outbound sales efforts can make or break a company’s success. IT consulting firms face the challenge of reaching potential clients who often require highly specialized services and solutions. Traditional sales methods, while effective to a certain extent, can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to human error.

This is where sales automation can play a transformative role. This case study explores how Diplomat sales automation helped a global IT consulting firm with offices in 3 countries and remote developers all over the globe automate its outbound sales process, leading to significant improvements in lead generation, sales productivity, and revenue growth.

The Challenge: Inefficiencies in Outbound Sales

The IT consulting firm in question was a mid-sized company with a strong reputation for providing customized solutions to its clients, particularly in web and non-gaming apps. However, like many businesses in the industry, the firm struggled with its outbound sales efforts. The sales team was responsible for identifying potential clients, reaching out to them, and nurturing leads through the sales pipeline. The team started their funnel with a classic setup of sales development representatives (SDRs) prospecting leads, setting up meetings for account executives (AEs) to jump on calls with and try to close. Especially with this firm, meetings must be qualified heavily, as AE calls frequently need sales engineers in attendance, increasing the cost of each meeting.

This process involved a substantial amount of manual work, including:

  1. Prospect Identification: Sales representatives spent hours researching potential clients, often using outdated methods like cold calling and manual data entry.
  2. Lead Nurturing: Following up with prospects was a time-consuming task, with sales reps needing to track each interaction manually and ensure timely follow-ups.
  3. Data Management: The CRM system was underutilized, with data entry being inconsistent and prone to errors, leading to missed opportunities and inefficiencies in tracking the sales process. Activity reviews show sales staff rarely logged activities, making strategic improvements and sales management even harder.

These challenges resulted in lower productivity, missed opportunities, and ultimately, poor revenue growth. The firm recognized the need for a more efficient approach to outbound sales and decided to explore sales automation as a solution.

The Solution: Growth from Diplomat Sales Automation

The firm selected Diplomat sales automation by Goliath Dynamics Inc., a leading provider of sales automation solutions designed to streamline and optimize outbound sales processes. Diplomat’s platform offered a suite of tools that addressed the firm’s pain points, including:

  1. Automated Prospecting – Diplomat’s AI-powered prospecting tool automatically identified and qualified potential clients based on predefined and evolving criteria. This eliminated the need for manual research and ensured that the sales team focused on high-potential leads.
  2. Automated Outreach – Diplomat’s platform included automated outbound emails that automatically personalized email sequences tailored to different segments of prospects. No manual definitions, no list management, no cadence sequencing. Prospects just received timely follow-ups without the need for manual intervention. The system also tracked email engagement, providing insights into which prospects were most likely to convert.
  3. Lead Scoring and Prioritization – Diplomat’s lead scoring system used machine learning to analyze prospect behavior and engagement levels. This enabled the sales team to prioritize leads based on their likelihood of converting, allowing reps to focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities.
  4. Integrations – Diplomat’s platform seamlessly integrated with the firm’s existing pipelines, automating data entry and ensuring that all prospect and lead information was accurately captured and updated in real-time. This integration reduced the risk of errors and allowed sales and executive management to have a complete view of the sales pipeline at all times.

The Results: Transforming Outbound Sales

The implementation of Diplomat sales automation had a profound impact on the IT consulting firm’s outbound sales efforts. Within the first week, they already saw new leads. Within a few months of adopting the platform, the firm saw significant improvements in several key areas of the sales funnel:

  1. Increased Lead Generation – Automated prospecting led to a substantial increase in the number of qualified leads entering the sales pipeline. Where AEs once spent a fair bit of time prospecting their own deals, their calendars are now consistently full with leads.
  2. Qualification in Writing – One key responsibility of an SDR is to qualify the prospect. Sometimes people cut corners, and SDRs set meetings for leads who aren’t yet qualified. This allows the SDR to inflate their meeting count, while pushing the qualification responsibility onto the AE, often lowering the meeting attendance rates. Diplomat gets lead qualification in writing.
  3. Improved Meeting Attendance – The industry benchmark for an SDR in B2B software is to set 15 meetings with qualified prospects per month, with an average of 12 leads successfully attending. Prior to Diplomat, this firm did not even know their SDRs’ rates of meetings set and meetings actually held by AEs. The firm did not yet even know they had some SDRs sandbagging the process, passing unqualified leads directly onto the AEs. Their meetings set per month was below industry benchmarks, and attended meetings rate was significantly below industry benchmarks. Diplomat sets more meetings per month than the firm’s entire SDR team was setting, and has now surpassed the 80% attendance rate by prospecting leads with significantly more diligence.
  4. Improved Sales Productivity – SDRs have had their positions completely automated. This allowed the firm to shift qualified SDRs into AE roles, managing a significantly larger volume of leads without sacrificing the quality of interactions.
  5. Improved, Unified Collateral – Let’s be honest… no one wants to maintain sales collateral, and even when it gets updated, those updates rarely make it out to all sales reps. For this firm, one common question during the sales cycle is about what technologies they do and do not support. Some of these questions are more suitable for a sales engineer later on in the funnel. But many of these questions can be answered up front, early in the qualification process (e.g. “Do you offer services maintaining apps written in Apache Cordova?”). Diplomat consistently identifies, gathers, and consolidates these questions so the firm can draft model answers, and then Diplomat consistently answers these kinds of questions much earlier in the cycle.
  6. Shortened Sales Cycle – The combination of automated lead nurturing, lead scoring, timely follow-ups, and more informed responses helped to significantly shorten the sales cycle. Prospects were moved through the pipeline more quickly, resulting in faster deal closures and improved cash flow for the firm.
  7. Revenue Growth – Ultimately, the improvements in lead generation, sales productivity, and data accuracy translated into tangible revenue growth. The firm has already closed over $250,000 of new business in their first few months of using Diplomat sales automation, a direct result of the automated outbound sales process.

Conclusion: A Success Story in Sales Automation

The case of this IT consulting firm demonstrates the transformative power of sales automation, particularly when applied to outbound sales. By partnering with Goliath Dynamics Inc. for Diplomat sales automation, the firm was able to overcome the inefficiencies that had previously hampered its growth. The results speak for themselves: increased lead generation, improved sales productivity, enhanced data accuracy, a shortened sales cycle, and significant revenue growth.

For B2B companies in the IT consulting space — or any industry where B2B outbound sales play a critical role — investing in sales automation can yield substantial benefits. By automating routine tasks, prioritizing high-value leads, and ensuring accurate data management, sales automation enables companies to focus on what matters most: building strong client relationships and driving business growth. This success story is a testament to the potential of sales automation to revolutionize outbound sales efforts and set the stage for sustained success.

Do you want to experience this kind of growth with sales automation? Apply for Diplomat today.

Success Stories: How Diplomat Automated Outbound Sales for Offshore Recruiting

When we launched Diplomat Sales Automation, we knew that not all offerings were created equal. Some offerings are significantly more complicated than others. But some offerings are a lot more straight forward, and the winners are those who execute most consistently.

One of our first clients in 2024 was in recruiting. This particular vendor specializes in off-shoring and near-shoring. This client saw success rapidly in multiple areas:

  • Scaled prospecting and qualifying – the realm of “all companies interested in offshore recruiting” is quite big. Trying to mine that for leads is like sifting drops of water from the ocean. Diplomat is relentless in consistently, effectively, and scalably finding the right contact with purchasing authority and qualifying the lead.
  • Closed engagement agreements – Diplomat is perfectly capable of setting up meetings and demos, automating the portion of the sales cycle usually attributed to sales development representatives (SDRs). But Diplomat doesn’t stop there — Diplomat can also close entire deals. And for this recruiting vendor, Diplomat is already signing entire engagement agreements. This leaves recruiters with more time to spend sourcing talent, and less time grinding outbound calls and emails for business development.
  • Sales collateral – Diplomat consistently answers client questions from the vendor’s sales collateral, updating the vendor when additional questions are not covered or need clarification. This also helped the vendor build out their sales collateral much more exhaustively and consistently, as their official questions and answers were not frequently updated, and even when they are, their recruiters often don’t check back in. But Diplomat doesn’t have this issue — Diplomat always takes in all updates.
  • Controlling outbound costs – this vendor had not yet performed any significant analysis on how much resources were spent on outbound business development efforts. How much does it cost them to actually sign an engagement agreement? Only with this information can they scale their business. Diplomat not only helped them figure out these sales macros, but Diplomat also got these costs under control. Flexible billing arrangements allowed this vendor to scale business development while capping outbound spending.

In 2024 alone, this recruiting vendor is already tracking for a whopping 43% increase in closed engagement agreements, and 88% increase in net revenue attributable to Diplomat. Do you want to experience this kind of growth with sales automation? Apply for Diplomat today.

Learn More
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What is Sales Automation?
Top 7 Pain Points in Sales Management and How to Overcome Them
Why CRM Systems Fail Sales Managers and How to Fix It
Overcoming Resistance to Change: How Sales Managers Can Lead Teams Through Transformation
Success Stories: How Diplomat Automated Outbound Sales for IT Consulting
The Role of AI in Sales Automation: What B2B Companies Need to Know
The Impact of Sales Automation on Customer Relationship Management
Dealing with Data Overload: Managing Sales Metrics Without Losing Focus
The Communication Gap: How Misalignment Between Sales and Marketing Hurts Your Bottom Line