Service: Sales Funnel Design & Automation

The Way It’s Always Been Done

We’ve heard this line from many companies: “Because we’ve always done it that way.” Companies have workflows that they’ve done the same way year in and year out and to change them would upset the apple cart. The trade-off, of course, is lost leads, decreased efficiency, and repetitive tasks that waste time and resource.

But, hey, that’s the way you’ve always done it.

Let’s Try Something New

I’m sure that you can think of a handful of things that employees do by hand, day-in, day-out. Automation is a tool that can be used to do that task and free up your employee’s time.

Sales automation is the process of using software tools and technology to streamline repetitive, manual tasks within the sales cycle—making operations more efficient, scalable, and data-driven. It’s an essential asset for any organization aiming to boost productivity, increase revenue, and deliver better customer experiences.

Okay… How?

Let’s start with a very low-level example: customer fills out a form on your website.

You got a prospective customer on your website looking at a product. They are interested so they fill out a form to ask some questions. Where does that form entry go?

Your current workflow might be that it sends an email to someone, they write down the customer on a piece of paper, and, in a perfect world, call them back to answer that question. Question answered, maybe that’s the end of the interaction. The piece of paper gets thrown away and that potential customer is never contacted in any other way.

I think we can agree that it’s a missed opportunity.

Here’s a new possible workflow:

Customer fills out form, form entry is put into company customer relationship management (CRM) platform and automatically assigned to sales staff member. An email campaign is automatically started with potential customer that tells them someone will be getting back to them in a business day or two but in the meantime, here’s some things that they might be interested in or questions that other customers have asked. Also, a task is automatically created by the CRM to remind staff to call back the customer. When staff contacts customer, they update the CRM with a note from the phone call. If the customer is not interested right now, at least they are tagged to be added to a follow-up email campaign later on.

Using automation opens up the potential for conversions without sales staff having to do anything other than follow up with customers.

At its heart, sales automation helps sales teams spend less time on administrative work and more time on selling. Tasks like lead generation, follow-ups, data entry, scheduling, and reporting can be automated through CR) platforms, email marketing tools, and artificial intelligence. This means faster response times, reduced human error, and a consistent touchpoint strategy—all of which nurture leads and drive conversions.

“I Got No Leads”

There was a time in the early days of CWT Websites where we were banging our head against a wall because it looked like we didn’t have any leads. That’s because they were written down on scraps of paper, in Excel documents, or in various notebooks that were around the office.

They weren’t in one place.

CRMs can collect, score, and segment leads based on predefined criteria like behavior, demographics, and engagement. This enables sales staff to prioritize high-quality leads and personalize outreach efforts. Imagine being able to automatically send targeted emails to warm leads while routing colder ones into long-term nurture campaigns—all without manual effort.

Follow-Through

When people are busy, following up is one of the first things that fall by the wayside. You just don’t have time for it.

Following-up is another area where automation shines. Automated workflows can send reminder emails, schedule calls, and trigger next steps based on customer interactions—ensuring prospects remain engaged throughout the journey.

They are checking in when you can’t.

Starting Slow

We’re not saying that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater (which, let’s be honest, is a horrible phrase) but there ways to do this incrementally.

Let’s set up a conversation where we can look at your current sales process and identify a few key places where we can introduce automation to deliver improved results.

We build a blueprint of your sales funnel workflow and define opportunities for automation. We then research the best tools for that automation and present to you options. Once you have chosen what you want to use, we acquire that technology, set it up for you, train staff on using it, and roll it out. We do this over and over again until everything is built and running correctly.

This can be a slow process so that your sales staff doesn’t feel overwhelmed and they can start to see the results.