Boost Your Efficiency with Sales Process Automation for Organizations

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all right uh let's go ahead and get uh get started so thank you again to everyone uh joining us uh here today we're really looking forward to the discussion and in conversation around uh sales automation and how we can help your sales team sales leaders gain better insights into opportunities customers market trends really the the data points and information are endless so looking forward to a great conversation uh a couple of admin things before we get started is you all are um muted so if you do have any questions comments or want us to go back to any topics we touch on today please feel free to use the chat and q a window and we'll be addressing anything that that comes through to throughout today's discussion um to get started here we'll uh we'll get started with with introductions on the uh the panel side of the house so michael i'll uh i'll kick it over to to you and doecon for for a brief intro yeah thanks john uh thanks everyone for joining us today my name is michael mcclure i'm the automation delivery leader here at e-capital advisors i've been doing automation and rpa for about four years now i actually started in industry at anheuser-busch fell in love with the technology and then helping our clients implement automation solutions um for the past couple years now so really excited to talk about automation um tie it back to sales use cases and share some of our customer stories so um thank you thanks for being here and do con i'll pass it on to you hi everyone my name is duo kang uniden i'm automation consultant e-capital advisors i work closely with michael to implement automation solutions using various tools and i'm really excited about talking about technology and how it can impact your day-to-day life and looking forward to discussion and how you can use automation to sales perspective so i'll kick it off to john yeah no thanks so much and john kerth with ecapital i've been with ecapital for the last several years now and uh i lead our automation go to market strategy and sales from a practice perspective so partner very closely with michael and dokon and the rest of the e-capital team with our our clients to uh to ensure they're successful with their uh automation journey so today's discussion is uh definitely from from the heart and and something that i can can relate to so we we have uh an action-packed uh agenda and topics that we'll be covering and looking at today first uh very briefly we'll look at why automation uh what's so important about it what it is and then dive right into some of those typical sales automation use cases that that we have as as well as some sneak peeks just looking at the uh the folks in industries and organization sizes we have from an attendee perspective here today um definitely recognize each organization has their unique sales process go to market strategy various industries as as well uh some manufacturers others providing you know professional services so uh what we'll be covering today maybe a little more generic and and generalized but we hope you can find the connection to your own uh business and and sales objectives and of course we're happy to connect on a one-on-one basis after today as well and dive further into your own unique specific uh needs but let's uh let's jump right in so one of the first questions we always like to ask sales leaders our customers is hey if there was a way that we could remove the least favorite hour of your sales team your day management's uh date and replace it with the thing that empowers you invigorates the the sales team or you or the organization would you jump at that that opportunity and having done this for the last several years across the board um michael dokkan and i have never heard anyone say no definitely not i want more of the things that that i hate doing or um i i want to focus from a sales perspective on the things that you know don't help me close more sales of course that that's not the case so that's really how we view the the goal of automation is to take away those tasks and and things that we have to do as as sales people sales leaders or business leaders and empower our our employees to achieve those objectives so from a sales perspective of course that's going to be closing more deals bigger deals more quickly more effectively and providing a better client experience and a healthy organization across the board so now that we understand you know what the goal is of automation then it becomes okay what are we focusing on or doing in our day-to-day what are some of these menial tasks that that we have and of course from a sales perspective and overall business perspective you know we have to be managing our team our clients with interactions and that experience defining the strategy of our individual territory if we're sales contributors team strategy business strategy and then there's all these other things like responding to emails or for the sales leaders and sales people out there entering the data and notes into the the crm is is always a fun one and something that's often uh forgotten analyzing different data sets whether it's industry trends customer data really the list goes on and on and if we can look at those tasks that are highly repetitive not thought provoking not necessarily helping our sellers close more deals more quickly and we can automate that improve communication and information across the organization just think of the huge benefits from a sales perspective and revenue perspective to the the organization so one of the ways that we can focus and achieve this objective of closing more business and providing a better experience is through robotic process automation or rpa so what rpa is is it's a software solution that integrates into our business environment and simulates those employee actions so having to enter call notes meeting notes information into the crm is something that we could look to automate actually extracting information out of the crm or other systems that we have access to internally maybe it's erp maybe it's a contact database something like zoom info if we're using that or sales loft outreach etc to then compile reports and analyze and identify what are our top reps and and the a players doing differently that we can train or be and and see players on to elevate them and impact the business and with sales too it's so cross-functional across the organization that rpa fits so well so as long as the process can be mapped and repeatable we can look to to automate that and from a sales perspective as well we can start to think about all the different other tentacles that our sales team is maybe involved with or needs information from thinking about the the war on talent with the great resignation or the great reshuffling going on right now it's top of mind and very tough for organizations to find those field sellers account executives to come in so if we start looking at hey from an hr and talent acquisition perspective how can we streamline that onboarding process providing that great experience for prospective employees and use that to our competitive advantage to land more a players to then help help them close more business get them onboarded more quickly have the setup you know ready to go that's a use case for for rpa as well cross-functionally and i'm sure michael can kind of speak to this a little bit further from his own experience but if we're in a manufacturing or order fulfillment business as well is having sales in the operations supply chain team make sure that that everything's flowing correctly or at least we're communicating with our customers if they if there are delays uh within the supply chain or a support ticket issue so really the opportunities are endless for automation from a sales perspective obviously that can be hugely uh overwhelming to start asking yourself okay where should we get started and we can help with that as well and there's other tools available to us that we can can provide and assist and help with the the justification and identify hey is this a good place to start or not but through our experience these are some of the top use cases and lowest hanging fruits we see to get started with in most organizations obviously we'll be focusing in here shortly on these uh sales topics of data management lead qualification order processing in terms of new customer setup uh order fulfillment uh burst reporting out et cetera but again kind of cross-functionally and where sales just interacts across the entire business in many organizations we can help or automation can help with those functional areas as as well so let's get into you know what does this maybe look like in a real life example and again kind of going back to my comment earlier is organizations you have your own unique selling process cadence industry information and we can definitely tackle some of those bottlenecks that that you and the team may be experiencing but let's just kind of look at from the quoting process ultimately to when the organization gets paid what this commonly looks like and just from the the quoting part again there's so many different touch points the seller having to create the quote email it out then the customer or prospect providing a purchase order maybe there's an initial deposit that you have to receive before you can fulfill the order or ship it out then collect payment on the rest of the invoicing and ultimately you know receive cash as the organization and for sellers sometimes this directly impacts their paycheck which we know sales people are motivated by so being able to say okay if we can provide better insight and streamline this process overall so that our sales people feel empowered maybe they uh we can change the compensation plan in terms of the payout to be maybe the next the following month versus having to wait a quarter as an example that's something that's going to help motivate empower our sales team and through automation that now becomes possible instead of spending you know several weeks in some cases over a month going through that process what if we could streamline that so it's just a few days that our sales person in salesforce creates a quote that interacts obviously into systems send it off via super streamline payments received and processed quickly and ultimately we receive you know cash right away so again just removing those bottlenecks and administrative tasks that we as sales leaders have to do or our sales people have to do to allow our sales people and sales team to get out in front of customers be proactive be closing business and ultimately generating revenue is where we see our clients succeed and i think that's a great kind of transition right to a real life use case that i know michael was deeply involved with and not only what we've done with that but kind of what's on on the roadmap in the art of the possible starting to think about things like ai business data science as well in a real life sales capacity so michael i'll uh i'll turn it over to uh to you here yeah i appreciate the setup john so i wanted to go through and share a story with one of our customers which is hearth and home technologies and i personally worked on this project and have been engaged with them for over a year now helping support automation goals this is actually the second project we worked on with them and was focused on their sales team so hearth and home just to give a little bit of backstory sells primarily stoves and fireplaces to local retailers that we would go to to actually purchase um that so you can think you know your local ashley furniture store that's who um hearth and home is selling to so the challenge that they really had in frustration was that they were doing these on-site visits to help support the sales cycle right depending on the size of the client going on site having a quarterly by yearly review trying to obviously upsell get more of their product in the store and also do a health check-in on how the store is doing and in order to support that on-site visit they wanted to have data-driven conversations so what they would do is go out to many of their platforms and pull data that was available that's primarily going to be salesforce.com for them their crn crm system so in order to support this on-site visit the first thing they would do is go to salesforce and they had a list of 26 different reports that they would need to pull for specifically that customer that they were going to see definitely a time-consuming task taking hours formatting these reports properly doing any data cleanup that's necessary and that was only one platform that they were having to go to to do that so on top of salesforce they were also leveraging cognos analytics and they had six reports from there primarily around their financials and also forecasting to help support those conversations and another thing to note here is that a vpn was required to get in which was annoying for the sales team to work around and finally the third platform that they were pulling reports from was ibm tm1 so there was two reports in there that they were also pulling from so you can think anytime they want to go see a customer they have over 30 different reports that they can pull they have to go out and manually run for that customer combine them into this merged pdf file so you can think a team of 15 having multiple on-site visits every week maybe these reports take we estimate an hour to two hours to put together you can see that this is a really time-consuming task for their sales team and also not one that's very fun either no one enjoyed doing this and it started to have management question is the sales team maybe not pulling all the reports that they would want to because of how long it takes so that was kind of the struggle they had and then it got worse when we got into covid so before they were doing these on-site visits and physically printing out these documents taking them and having that data-driven conversation when covet happened they had to transition and start making these for some customers in pdf form and then other customers powerpoint form so now there was a change in the process they're having to do different things for different customers based on their level of comfort of going on site to visit them and have these conversations so they really looked for a way to solve this problem and when they engaged us at e-capital they said we would love to have an easy button we want to log into salesforce we want to hit one button on the customer and we want all these reports to just feed to us so we can walk out the door print it off and go have that conversation with no friction and that's essentially what we were able to build for them so we took the same process that they're currently doing except put a button in salesforce working with their salesforce developers i'm going to go see this customer on tuesday monday i log into salesforce i go to the customer i hit that easy button and then within 15 to 20 minutes i have all those reports emailed to me in both a um merged pdf document and also a powerpoint we generate both for every single case so with that they're able to streamline this and they don't have to deal with all that annoying work and something to highlight too right not just the time save is the convenience i've had sales uh members from this team say it's so great now that i can from my phone on the road when i'm visiting customers log in not have to use a vpn hit that easy button and then it gets emailed to me within 20 minutes and i can continue having my conversations maybe there's a customer on the fly i want to go visit now i can just pull it from my phone have that email come and continue on with my day with no friction so that's kind of the setup um a common use case that we see is just getting after data from disconnected systems and i think this is a really great example of it and really supporting the sales team so with that uh just to summarize john if you want to the next slide we developed this automation working really closely with the sales team over a span of six months working with their salesforce developers really getting into the weeds of how they want to consume this data estimating that per on-site visit we're saving one to two hours of their employees time and again 15 plus sales reps doing multiple on-site visits a week hundreds of hours over the year and really seen that roi quickly and this has actually been expanded upon i know i said i said 26 reports they actually have over 70 reports now and they're only able to really support that because they have this easy button they can never tell their tell their sales reps oh now you have 70 reports and you have to decide which ones to pull and do it manually now they can support that that level of granularity for all their customers and then finally as john was saying looking forward now that we have this platform built now that we're continuing to add more reports to it what else can be done and i think that that's something that we always try to focus on is what's that next step how do we get more value from the investment and that was teaming up with our business data science team and taking a look at now that we have the connections to all your data sources what new insights can we grab from it what type of machine learning or ai can we do to dynamically find uh where we can add value and for example something that we were looking at in the data we found that the most successful sales reps actually had longer sales cycle times and higher closure rates so try not use business data science to identify those best practices what's working on the sales team how can we use this data to change our sales process and improve or another example is getting into predictive and looking at where should we focus our efforts right based on all the data we have where's our next opportunity is it by region is it by customer type how can we know where to target our sales efforts and with the highest probability of success john did i i touch on everything i you're the sales expert i so those are just some of the ideas i know we came up with and for a future state that we're trying to work with them now on yeah no michael i think you hit on the the main points and and i think just to add a little more color for the group to you know how automation can pull data from several different systems that an organization may have internally or access to industry information as well it to michael's point is thinking about how can we better reallocate the sales team too so just naturally having access now to better information more quickly and be able to see the differences between the a players on the team you know be players and and just be naturally curious about the business to say hey what is you know michael doing differently than john and dokkan um how can we clone michael if you will and teach the rest of the team with what michael's seeing success with and also just naturally asking those curious questions again about the business to start thinking about if we're geographically you know situated as a sales go to market perspective why is minneapolis performing better than chicago atlanta san francisco like what are those attributes what's not working but maybe more importantly what is working and how do we then disperse that information across the entire team and that's something you know obviously future down the road but just starting with these initial reports and alleviating that preparation work that sales people and sales leaders know the team needs to do but it's not something that gets necessarily prioritized all the time with that easy but and then gathering all that information obviously a huge impact to to the business so um i think there's just so many different applications based on how you and your sales team are set up in your go to market strategy that uh could touch on this as well you know from a lead qualification even standpoint as well who are our best customers what else should we be talking to them about how does that apply to our prospects as uh as well so without uh kind of further ado and maybe seeing some real life uh automations of hey what could this look like you know for us let's get to the uh the walkthroughs so doecon all uh go ahead and stop sharing and turn it turn it over to you thank you john so what i want to do is actually kind of have a detailed look of what automation looks like what what is the tool how do we automate because it is not simply just like black box that we don't know what's doing but we can actually understand it and incorporate our daily lives so with that i'll go ahead and share my screen so what you see on my screen is automation anywhere it is an rpa tool that we use there are many out there uh and the way the best way to put it is the rpa tools are your digital workers so think of it your digital assistant that doesn't get tired and can do any tasks that you tell them to do so it is a simple url page that we go to here there's so many settings that you can change from managing devices to schedules and process discoveries but the bread and butter happens under this automation tab so if you're going to click this automation tab you see all these bots and folders and these are all the tasks that you ask your digital worker to create and i want to show how easy it is uh to use this tool it does not require computer science degree but it is simply how you can mimic and replicate your actions every day and have your digital assistant do it for you so let's go ahead and click create a bot this will pop up a page for you to create a task for your digital assistant let's say sales webinar build out this will create and open up this page and as you can see we have this clean uh page that and have actions on the side and the one of the greatest benefits of rpa tools is these are no code low code so what that means is these are actions that is just drag and drop so you can see there's so many detailed things happening here but let's go with something basic right and the most often use case that we see as like engaging with excel because excel is everyone's like day-to-day activity we are doing so many things on that let's try to automate something on xl so here i have a simple excel worksheet right here there's inventory data with some information here and i have a quick macro that simply just sorts this sheet right i click this it will sort the sheet i'm sure some of us have these macros that we need to run that we come in every day click and it takes 20 minutes and you go grab a cup of coffee but it is something that can be automated you don't need to go there and click every day and wait for it it can be done before you when you start your day and let's say i want to open this sheet run this macro from the automation tab and i want notified after each step so let's close this sheet go to automation right where do we start well it is simply what do you do in your day-to-day life well you would open the excel spreadsheet so i will just type open and here it will filter out and here you can see excel address so i will just click that open excel drag and drop fairly easy and it will show up here and on the settings part here on the side i will pick which file do i buy okay let's click desktop file and this when i click browse will take over my computer and prompt me to select a file so here i can go to my desktop click run my macro and what this will do is simply just go ahead and open that excel but here there's another setting that we need to say is create an excel session because the bot can be interactive with so many excel worksheets at the same time so i will simply put default here so if i click save and then just click run the bot will deploy my computer and just open up the excel page so download dependencies run the bot simply just open the excel spreadsheet and then it will say your bot has run successfully okay let's add something more let's run the macro that we want so i will simply type run macro and here excel advanced run macro i'll click that and it will ask for the macro name let's type source because that was the macro that i want to run and it's going to ask the session name which was the default that i put and say so if i click run again what it's going to do is open up that excel page and run the macro and see the page is sorted out by the expiration date and again this is a very simple macro but imagine this being something that takes 20 minutes of your day it is something that you need to do every morning before you can actually tackle the items that require attention imagine the bot that can do this four in the morning ready for you to go in the morning but let's take a bit more because this is simple excel macro that data was already there and most of these we're grabbing data from somewhere else and engaging with throughout here i have another macro called clear so when i run it it will just simply clear the data right let's assume this data actually came from a website here we have the data on a website just sitting on a table and i want to grab this data turn that excel spreadsheet and sort it run the macro and then email it out so let's give it a try so just to prove i will open the excel let's write another macro and clear it right so we know the page the excel spreadsheet be clear and then i want to just have the bot go to page grab the data put on the excel spreadsheet and then run the macro but how do i do that how do i make the bot mimic me and go ahead do things well again the same questions how do you do it on your day-to-day life well the first thing is you open up the browser right so i will just type open and here open underneath browser simple drag and drop it will ask what to let's say new window and it will ask which browser to use google chrome what length do you want to use we want to use this link go paste it here it's going to ask how long it wants us to wait so if i close this tab and run it it will have the web page open first it will open the excel spreadsheet sort it clear it then open the browser so while that that's running just to kind of relate it back to maybe a common sales use case of a sales leader or an individual contributor maybe is using excel to look at their um activities from from the last day the last week or uh customer attributes and and so they're looking to you know refresh it so you open it you sort it how you did clear it out and then pull a new report um out of your your crm just as as an example yeah thank you john and again we opened the webpage but we noticed we actually signed out and we can't have the webpage signed in all the time and we wanted to we want our digital assistant go and sign in on our belt grab the data and normally how would you do this you'll put your email address and enter your password and then grab the data but you can actually mimic that exactly the way you're doing automation anywhere there is a great feature called universal recorder that will allow you to mimic your actions and keep track of exactly what you're doing in a screen so it is this little camera button here if i click it will take over my computer and it will ask which web page or which window that i want to interact here i will select that the webpage that i was working on log in to continue right the one that asked me to sign in and i'll click universal recorder and it will just prompt that window and if i just move my mouse around this page you will see that the little red line around certain items it is the bot picking out the elements it is detecting the buttons the things that we can enter and the baby can engage and interact with this page here i will just put email address and i will type michael's email here there is a two c's here and then i'll click continue and we'll ask for password and just for this i will just type passwords because michael probably does not want to share this password and i'll click login right and while all this is happening it is recording my actions right so here i will click finish and when we go here it actually filled out all those things that i was doing so here let me go take a look at step five it actually kept track of exactly what i was doing all the keystrokes all the mouse movements and here you can see it even tracked how i misspelled it and had to change it and go back so what i'm gonna do is just simply select all and correct it and save it so this is simply selling the bot go to that button and put into this email address and simulate a human key strip if i make this zero the bot will just type out incredibly fast but i want to mimic a human action and then it will click continue and then it's going to ask set password in this uh the password section right here you can see that i type password but we actually want to enter this website and i actually need michael's password but it is really difficult to be sharing passwords between everyone and there should be a more secure way to manage this and thanks to automation anywhere we have this exact tool where you can set credential here if i select credentials there are rules that you can pick and choose and access passwords here if i click pick it will prompt me to pick a locker so here i will click the conference number and then it will ask me to get credentialed and what do i want to pick i want to get the password and if i click that confirm now i told about to enter the password that michael shared with me without actually having to share the password let me click save and then the bot will go ahead and log so let's go close this page and see if the bot will do exactly what tom to do close this spreadsheet to and then let's run the bot again the bot will deploy my computer so it will simply take over my action items it will open the excel spreadsheet sorted cleared it open the browser and then it will type up the email click continue waited and it will enter the password and click login so great we actually got into the system so what we want to do is actually grab this data again i will go back click universal recorder again it will prompt me select the page i will select the inventory data here and click universal recorder and again if i move my mouse around it will pick up different elements it will pick these quantities side things happening here but what i want is actually get this entire table so i will just roam around to get the full beta let's wait for it to pick up because it's picking up different elements here let's go ahead and wait for this just hovering around for it to detect the table so let's grab actually one simple thing here and if i click finish it can allow us to grab this it's actually ticking table let's say get table and i'm asking this to get the entire table right if i click save what i want to do next is i want to just put it all back here and what i do is simply write into excel file so if i type right it will prompt excel that right from data table to excel but now i'm going to pick which data table well i didn't save it to somewhere so i need to go back here and select down here where to save it so if i create a variable use capture data table write it here save it now go back here enter the data variable capture data write it active worksheet and first cell to write let's type it a1 and which session the session that we just opened now [Music] so if we run this you'll ask the bot to open the excel sort it clear it go to the browser get the data and of course before signing in then write it back to excel page so let's close this as well let's run how the bot is done and each time the bot is actually taking over my computer opening things sorting it clearing it again open the webpage oh it will actually wait because now it's expecting to sign in but it's actually signed out so i will simply pause it here sign out and have the bot do its thing before let's pause the bot here on the page real quick so let's go back to page let's quickly log out go back here get locked out let's close this again when we restart the bot now the bot will expect to sign it again it will do the same thing open the spreadsheet sort it clear it and open the webpage wait for the login enter the email address pay for data capture it and push it back to worksheet and if you go back now we can see it actually grabbed that data just put it all into excel spreadsheet and again we can run that macro again email it out and practically do all these before we start in our day but again this is just to show how easy to build out on your own under like 15 minutes but yeah let's go with like a more sales oriented example that we want to work on yeah i was just just gonna add real quick as as we're going through this we want to show how quickly you can throw some of this together without needing programming knowledge but think about in your day right what are some of these tasks happening on a daily weekly basis interacting with some systems just repeatedly um rpa is great because it supports any website you go to any excel document you're looking at so just try to think about what some of those tasks are in your day so uh here i have and licensed exploration data right let's assume this is the data that you pull from your crm and it's simply some client names their industries their software package and their license expiration right so every day what you would love to have is an email just notifying you when they're expired and the notification of those are written expiring within 30 days 90 days 6 months and let's see if we have a template like this so imagine that you have an empty excel spreadsheet like this with different tabs expanding 90 30 180 and in a year what we would love to bought to do is go into this excel spreadsheet take a look at this data that it might be getting from your crm or running a macro to refresh it and then put it here under different tabs then email them emailing it out to you and imagine having this every day every morning you can check your inbox and there's a new email sitting but just separation of like different things that you need to do and just keeping you on a line keeping you just keep making sure that everything is on track you're reaching to your clients on the spot as needed and again if we take a look at the the code for that it's actually not that long of course it will take slightly more time to build it but it is simply doable under an hour and when you see this task might take someone uh maybe an hour of their day just going to uh that spreadsheet that they're grabbing from their crm sorting the date then putting in different tabs that may be saving is somewhere else but the bot will do that under a few seconds so if we run this again the bot will take over my computer it's going to open some spreadsheets and close it do different things and then it's it's done before i even know so let's take a look at what the bot actually did if i go back to my email there's already a new email waiting for me and it says please read the attached file and the contact clients with expired licenses so if i open this output now that excel spreadsheet is sorted out with different clients with different expiration dates and it can run every day it can learn every day split them into different categories and let you know uh when you need to contact them and maybe you can even want to take it next step you want to email the clients you want to let them know and send notifications when their license expired now again when you have a digital worker that doesn't get tired can move a lot faster than you do uh the possibilities are passed it is more so just coming up with the idea and deciding how you want the bot to help you on your day-to-day life so with that i will just open the floor for questions any points that we can clarify or any other things that you want to ask the team we'll uh we'll continue to monitor the uh the q a and um any chats that that come through um hopefully you all enjoyed today's discussion and presentation uh we do have several other upcoming meetups here in the coming weeks and months as well i alluded to earlier uh in hr and talent acquisition uh webinar in session looking at mid-june as well so for any updates to any and all of our upcoming events whether virtual or in person across the us feel free to check out our website and the event section if you did have uh questions or want to chat offline for a more personal approach and discussion we're obviously happy to do so i appreciate everyone's time and we'll hang out if there's any questions or q a things that come through but again appreciate everyone's time and joining us here today