As a sales manager, you’re responsible for a lot. That includes the sorts of tedious rote tasks that consume lots of your time and, while these more administrative sales processes are completely essential, do not add new value to 
your company. With a sales automation platform, however, many of these rote tasks can be completely streamlined, making your sales force truly one to be reckoned with. Here’s how, as a manager, you can make the most of sales force automation software to take your team’s sales to the next level.
How Can Automation Be Used for Managers?
Automation systems focus on a few different areas: sales reporting, organizing leads, and prioritizing them to maximize results. Automating reporting tasks takes one of your most tedious responsibilities and makes it a breeze, while lead and sales automation tools help your team get the most out of every opportunity without ever missing a chance to convert a lead into a customer. We’ll start with automation for reporting first.
Reporting Automation
As a sales manager, you should be making the most of your team. The time you spend manually creating reports 
digs into time you could be spending selling. Automating the report generation process is a great way to free up time for what you do best, and focus on selling to customers.
With software that automates the generation of lead, sales, and marketing reports, you can reduce the need for more manual entry. For another time saver, you’ll no longer have to send screenshots or email attachments to keep your team informed of what’s going on.
Using a CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software system, you can keep all your leads and clients in one place and enable automated reporting. This lends a pair of eyes to your entire team on everything they need to know about every single lead. A CRM can send a weekly revenue report, give a daily ranking of your sales team, notify team members of changes in the status of their leads, and more. A CRM with an easy to use dashboard is one of the most powerful automation tools in your arsenal—later, we’ll dive deeper into what a great CRM can do.
For one, CRMs also help you ensure your marketing and sales teams can work together effectively. By integrating with email marketing software, you can combine marketing automation with automation of your sales and leads.
Lead Rotation Automation
Lead rotation helps keep your team motivated and on point. A CRM can be configured to automatically rotate leads as needed. Automating the assignment of leads organizes your team’s workflows, reducing the number of leads that get missed or rejected. Making the most of your leads will translate to higher sales!
You can also use CRM filters to assign leads automatically based on certain criteria. For example, if you want a new member of the team to start getting their feet wet with smaller clients before moving onto big fish, you can filter and assign leads by company size. You can also use filters such as what stage of the sales process a lead is on. Prioritizing according to your sales funnel is a great way to make sure every lead gets the right treatment at the right time.
Lead Scoring Automation
Proper lead prioritization is one of the cornerstones of closing. A CRM can automatically rank leads according to different criteria, determining how qualified a lead is and empowering your team to know exactly what to focus on and when using real-time data.
This feature of sales automation software does have one drawback. You need to have enough leads in your system
for the software to have enough data in order to score leads in a way that is helpful. Therefore, if you’re an extremely small company with a tiny sales staff and very few leads, you may not be able to take full advantage of this feature.
With enough data however, you can do a better job of prioritizing leads while doing more accurate sales forecasting. This will give you a better idea of the road ahead. More information means a better ability to plan, sell, and grow, and a CRM solution enables you to do exactly that.
Final Thoughts
As a sales manager, you have more tools than ever to help your team thrive. Lead and sales automation software will 
help with lead nurturing, so that customer relationships blossom into long-term, repeat buyers. A CRM will help you never miss an opportunity to maximize the power hidden in your leads.
Sales force automation won’t just make your job easier as a manager—it will also supercharge your sales reps, increasing sales productivity and helping you grow the business. Make the most of it!