Sales Automation Playbook: Scale Without Losing the Human Touch
Automate repetitive sales tasks while maintaining personalization. Covers email sequences, CRM workflows, lead routing, and reporting automation.
The Automation Opportunity
Sales reps spend only 36% of their time actually selling. The rest goes to data entry, email, scheduling, and admin tasks. Automation reclaims that time.
What to Automate (and What Not To)
Automate These:
- Lead scoring and routing
- Email follow-up sequences
- Meeting scheduling
- CRM data entry
- Pipeline reporting
- Task creation and reminders
Never Automate These:
- Discovery conversations
- Proposal customization
- Negotiation
- Relationship building
- Strategic account planning
Automation Workflow 1: Inbound Lead Processing
Trigger: New lead submitted via form
- Auto-score based on firmographic data
- Enrich with company and contact data
- Route to appropriate rep based on territory/segment
- Create follow-up task (respond within 5 minutes)
- Send personalized acknowledgment email
- Alert rep via Slack/notification
Result: Response time drops from 24 hours to 5 minutes. Conversion rate increases 3x.
Automation Workflow 2: Outbound Sequence Engine
| Step | Day | Channel | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | Personalized cold email | |
| 2 | 2 | Connection request | |
| 3 | 4 | Follow-up with value | |
| 4 | 7 | Phone | Call attempt |
| 5 | 10 | Case study | |
| 6 | 14 | InMail | |
| 7 | 18 | Break-up email |
Auto-pause when: Reply received, meeting booked, or opt-out requested.
Automation Workflow 3: Pipeline Hygiene
Set up weekly automated checks:
- Flag deals with no activity in 14+ days
- Alert managers when deals exceed average stage duration by 2x
- Auto-update forecast based on stage and activity
- Generate weekly pipeline report for leadership
ROI Calculator
| Manual Task | Time/Week | Automated Time | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data entry | 5 hours | 30 min | 4.5 hrs |
| Email follow-ups | 4 hours | 20 min | 3.7 hrs |
| Scheduling | 3 hours | 15 min | 2.75 hrs |
| Reporting | 2 hours | 5 min | 1.9 hrs |
| Total | 14 hours | 1.1 hours | 12.9 hrs |
That's nearly 13 hours per rep per week — or 2.5 extra selling days.
From the LeadFinder Sales Team — automate your outreach sequences and focus on closing.
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