Maximize ROI from your RPA: Part 5 – The RPA sales edition

What is RPA, and how can it help benefit your organization’s sales functions?

With growth and efficiency being such important objectives for businesses, automation tools have become an integral part of achieving this goal. Using robotic process automation (RPA), you can improve your organization's efficiency. RPA is a software technology that enables organizations to automate repeatable tasks instead of relying on humans. The tool can be used for many different things, including moving data between systems, interacting with consumer programs, and accessing information in files.

RPA is fundamentally changing the way we approach work.

It's easy to imagine how these technologies will positively affect productivity in the future. The sales operation is just one of many business functions where you can use automation to streamline and power up the end-to-end process.

Real-world statistics prove the benefits of RPA implementations in the sales process:

Meet your newest sales resource: RPA

RPA excels in performing detailed and repetitive work, so finding automation opportunities in your sales operation is a great place to start. RPA can be used to automate repetitive and mundane tasks such as storing existing and new customer information, extracting sales data from different formats, and sales order processing.

With RPA, your sales professionals can dedicate more of their time to high-value, prospecting, and relationship-building tasks that equate to new clients. Your business will reap the benefits of reduced costs, increased accuracy, and fulfillment of business processes in less time.

Sales operations-specific benefits of RPA:

Companies that implement RPA tools in their workplace see certain overall benefits including higher productivity, improved accuracy, and cost savings.

Beyond that, your sales operation could benefit in other ways, such as:

• Reducing the time it takes to manage repetitive, administrative tasks and data entry
• Efficient sales cycle management with scheduled follow-up, demos, and touchpoints, from lead generation to closing
• Consistent data quality, across all platforms and tools

Maximize your ROI with these 3 RPA sales process automation use cases:

1. Sales order processing

Salesforce monitors an inbox and creates a case when a new purchase order (PO) is received. Here’s how it works:

• the creation of that case triggers the bot to get to work
• the bot picks up the PO and sends it for data extraction using Document Understanding
• the data is sent to UiPath Action Center for users to finish entering some "tribal knowledge" to complete the needed data
• the bot takes all that data and enters it into Salesforce to process the sale

Microsoft (MS) dynamics uses a bot to receive a purchase order by email:

• the bot picks up the PO and sends it for data extraction using Document Understanding
• the bot logs into MS Dynamics to process the order

Some of these purchase orders contain 50 – 100 line items! Using RPA saves the sales professional hours of work each day on data entry so they can focus on selling. Using RPA in sales not only makes your sales order process faster but also helps reduce errors from manual entries and frees up your staff to spend more time with the customer.

2. Automated proposal generation and digital signatures

Often, proposals are created based on product details and SKUs that are stored in the SAP ERP. It’s easy to leverage bots to auto-generate both simple and complex proposals that pull product and pricing data automatically from SAP along with data from your CRM solution, such as Salesforce.

In addition, this can be taken all the way to close by incorporating digital signatures and then integrating the signed document and details back into the SAP ERP system. These are all repetitive tasks that can be automated to help your sales be far more productive. RPA in this use case also helps companies achieve better data management and an improved customer experience.

3. Sales data hygiene

When reading customer data from sales orders or inquiries are already part of your automated process, you can use the data being processed to further validate the master data in your ERP system as well as your CRM system, such as Salesforce.

The simplest way of handling this is to check the data on incoming orders or inquiries against your master data in your ERP system and in your CRM. If there is a deviation from one of those systems, the bot can send an alert to have the master data checked and updated. In a more sophisticated version, your bots can also act according to certain rules or certification steps to determine the correct data and update it automatically.

These automation processes are simple to set up, non-invasive, and do not require extensive programming skills in system integration.

Start your sales team on their RPA journey

Automating sales processes can help ensure efficient, accurate, and timely results. Since those processes are so vital to a company, it’s important to get off to the right start.

RPA is a complex, constantly evolving technology, but it doesn’t have to be intimidating. Get expert guidance and a solution customized for the needs of your sales operation. In the world of RPA, one size doesn’t fit all. Your business is unique, your solution should be too. By leveraging RPA in sales, you can create a tailored solution that meets the needs of your business.