In the last two months, so much about the way we do business has changed. No more in-person conferences, meetings, or even casual chats over coffee. Everyone’s working remotely, maybe at unusual hours or while dealing with family, and they probably have worries and distractions.
In this environment, just about every type of job has gotten harder — including sales and demand generation. Sales forecasts have been thrown out the window and your prospects are harder to reach. So if you want to bring in any revenue at all, you need to be smart and efficient, and focus on your best opportunities. Workato wants to help.
We are an enterprise automation platform that specializes in automating and streamlining business processes through easy-to-use cloud technology that lets you quickly, efficiently connect business applications and share data. We offer a library of over 400,000 pre-built workflow automations and connectors.
We recently introduced a series of live, online demos of some of our favorite automations — unique and creative ways to boost your business, bring in more revenue, use your resources more wisely, help your teams feel more connected, and much more. Some of these so-called “Unexpected Automations” were developed by our user community. Others we built ourselves for in-house use, and found so helpful that we want to share them.
The RevOps approach can rev up your revenue
Our first session of Unexpected Automations focused on a topic that’s front-and-center for nearly everyone, especially nowadays: Generating revenue.
Since it’s gotten a lot more challenging, you need to make sure you’re bringing your A game. Making sales happen isn’t just up to the sales team. The marketing department has a key role too, and the two groups need to collaborate closely for the most effective lead generation, follow-up, and customer retention. This approach of meshing marketing and sales into a unified revenue engine is referred to as Revenue Operations, or RevOps. And research shows that companies that use RevOps grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.
With that in mind, we’ve developed two Workbot automations that help the RevOps combination work more efficiently. They leverage sales wisdom by targeting the low-hanging fruit in existing demand and existing relationships. They are:
- Buyer Intent Bot
- Previous Buyer Bot
Buyer Intent Bot tracks shoppers’ digital clues
The Buyer Intent Bot helps sales reps spot prospective customers long before they reach out to a vendor, by detecting their patterns of online research at review sites such as G2 and TrustRadius, as well as visits to the user’s own site and competitors. (Review sites, respected as sources of impartial information about available solutions, are used in at least 52% of enterprise technology purchases.)
The bot enriches this “intent to purchase” information with details on the prospects such as their LinkedIn profile and technology stack, and delivers it conveniently to the users’ Salesforce campaigns and Slack discussions, making it part of their daily routine. That helps them reach more decision-makers, more proactively.
And with speedy alerts on leads’ demonstrated interest in a solution category, married with enriched background information, sales reps are seeing higher success rates in booking meetings (up to three times higher), and much faster sales cycles (shortened by as much as half).
See a demo here.
Previous Buyer Bot: Stay in touch with your fans
The Previous Buyer Bot leverages the fact that people’s own prior experience with a product is the most trustworthy, influential source of information when making a decision. If they’ve had a great experience using a workplace tool in the past, they’ll want to work with it again. And that makes those people a high-ROI source of prospective new purchases.
The Previous Buyer Workbot alerts you via Slack when a champion of your product changes jobs.
So Workato built a bot that gives RevOps teams an easy way to track where prior contacts move to, so they can be targeted in their new roles. With the Previous Buyer bot, a sales rep can:
- Leverage a data source like ZoomInfo, which updates Salesforce when a contact moves companies.
- Then with Workato, immediately notify the involved account managers via Slack about the contact’s latest job.
- The new account manager is able to trigger an email campaign (through any sales engagement platform — say, Outreach or Sendoso) to welcome the contact at their new role.
And while we can’t guarantee the result, a so-called “warm contact” clearly has a better chance of success than cold-calling.
Unexpected Automations: Optimizing your SaaS spending, product usage, and more
These RevOps bots are just the first installment in our Unexpected Automations series, energetic 30-minute presentations we hold live at 11 a.m. every other Wednesday. We’ve already rolled out a second presentation, on optimizing SaaS spend, and one on automations that leverage the Snowflake data warehouse for more effective product usage insights. The next will be on May 20.
To sign up for this series of webinars, click here.
If you can’t make it in real time, these presentations will be posted on YouTube. For more automations, you can browse our recipe collections — curated groups of recipes to solve a specific business problem.
And if reading all this has gotten you curious about what Workato can do for you, click here for a custom demo.