Five sales tasks worth automating, and one that is not
Where automation genuinely speeds up sales enablement, sourced from Forbes and industry data — and the one part of the job it should leave alone.
Selling a good product isn’t enough if the sales team spends most of its day on administrative work instead of talking to customers. Sales enablement is the fix for that: giving reps the training, content and technology to close deals without re-doing the same manual steps for every one of them.
Automation is the technology part of that equation. Here’s where it earns its keep in sales enablement, and the one part of the job it shouldn’t touch.
What sales enablement actually means
Sales enablement is the training materials, content, processes and technology that let a sales team close deals faster and more consistently. Done well, it means reps spend less time hunting for the right case study or re-entering the same data, and more time on the conversation that actually moves a deal forward.
Five things automation genuinely speeds up
1. Prioritising which deals to chase
A CRM can surface how often a lead has been contacted, whether they’ve opened a proposal, which email format has worked before, and which pages of your site they’ve visited — all signals a rep would otherwise have to remember or dig for. That lets a team spend its limited selling time on the deals most likely to close.
2. Personalised outreach at scale
Rapid proposal creation, instant contract edits, e-signatures and communication on a customer’s preferred channel remove the friction between “yes” and a signed deal. A consistent brand experience through that whole sequence also does real work: it’s what makes a buyer trust the company they’re about to hand money to.
3. Understanding which leads are worth pursuing
Sales analytics can build a profile of a prospect’s likely interest from how they’ve engaged so far, which helps a team spend effort on leads that are actually likely to convert rather than working every lead the same way.
4. Freeing up time that was going to admin
According to Forbes, sales reps often spend around 64% of their time on administrative tasks and 75% of their day on non-core internal activities — hunting for collateral, manually entering data into a CRM, scheduling meetings, chasing signatures. Sales enablement tools can cut this kind of low-value repetitive work by up to 23%, which is time returned directly to selling.
5. Keeping sales and marketing pointed at the same target
Teams that stay aligned see customer retention 36% higher and close rates 38% higher, according to ZoomInfo; misalignment costs companies an estimated 10% of revenue a year. Yet Forbes reports that up to 65% of sellers forget to use the content marketing built for a campaign, and up to 70% of B2B marketing content goes unused. A CRM that both teams work from — rather than a CRM sales uses and a content library marketing maintains separately — closes that gap, because the material is sitting inside the same workflow as the deal.
The one thing not to automate
Everything above is about removing friction before a conversation happens. The conversation itself is the exception. A templated sequence can get a proposal in front of the right person at the right time, but it can’t read the hesitation in a client’s voice on a call, or know that this particular account needs reassurance rather than another feature list. That judgment is what a rep is actually for, and automating around it — never automating it away — is the point of sales enablement in the first place.
OneHash CRM handles the five: lead scoring, drip campaigns, proposal and contract workflows, and a shared record between sales and marketing. What it hands back is time for the sixth. See it running on your own process, or get in touch if you’d rather talk it through first.