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Every aspect of a sales process is prone to human error when carried out manually. As a sales professional, there's a good chance you've slipped up here and there. Maybe, you lost a deal because you forgot to follow up with a prospect. Or maybe, you lost valuable time hashing out a meeting time with a potential customer.

Despite any setbacks you might have experienced, I can say that many of those issues can be addressed by incorporating automation resources into your sales process. They provide an effective way for sales teams to streamline elements of your daily routine and, in turn, improve your organization's efficiency as a whole.

Here, I've compiled some sales automation statistics - facts and figures from the benefits of sales automation to perspectives its future implications for the sales field. Let's take a look.

Sales Automation Stats

Overall Discipline

• 74% of sales professionals who use AI think AI/automation tools will make a significant impact on how they do their jobs in 2025. (HubSpot, 2024)
  
• 50% of salespeople who currently use aI say that, by 2030, most software they use will have AI or automation capabilities built-in. (HubSpot, 2024)

• 87% of AI users indicated that the incorporation of AI into existing tools has increased their AI usage. (HubSpot, 2024)
• Sales professionals can be found in the top 10 user groups of AI at organizations, ranking eighth in the list (as per when the poll was conducted). (IBM)
• Sellers in the US and Canada spend over one-third of their time on administrative duties and updating their CRM (19% on each activity). (LinkedIn)

Benefits of Sales Automation

• 88% of salespeople say that a CRM is important to their sales process. (HubSpot, 2024)
• AI/automation tools are among the top 5 tools that are most effective for helping salespeople sell remotely. (HubSpot, 2024)
• Sales professionals estimate they save around 2 hours and 15 minutes daily using AI or automation tools to automate manual tasks such as data entry, note-taking, scheduling, and so on. (HubSpot)
• A majority of sales pros that use AI save at least an hour per week across tasks. (HubSpot, 2024)
• Using AI to write content for prospect outreach saves between 30 minutes to 1 hour, 1-2 hours when using AI to qualify leads, and 1-2 hours when using AI/automation for data analysis. (HubSpot, 2024)
• Sales professionals who use AI/automation say that the biggest benefits of using such tools in their role are that:
  • AI tools save them time/automate manual tasks (35%).
  • AI tools help them use data to optimize the sales process (27%).
  • AI tools allow them to spend more time selling (25%). (HubSpot, 2024)

These results are relatively similar to the survey we ran last year. (HubSpot, 2024)

• 70% of sales professionals who use AI for prospect outreach say it helps them get a higher response rate. (HubSpot, 2024)
• 73% of salespeople who use AI/automation to assist with cold and warm calling say it somewhat to significantly improves conversation quality.
• When asked to rate the ROI of using AI/automation for specific sales tasks, more salespeople said using it to automate manual processes like data entry (43%) and translating sales materials (41%) yield positive ROI than any other sales tasks. (HubSpot, 2024)
• Research suggests that players investing in AI are seeing a 10-20% sales ROI boost. (McKinsey)
• 80% of sellers in the US and Canada who met or surpassed 150% of quota use sales tech at least once a week compared to 58% of other sellers. (LinkedIn)
• 90% of sellers in Asia-Pacific (Australia, India, and Singapore, to be precise) who attained 150% or greater of quota use sales tech at least once a week, contrasted with only 79% of other sellers. (LinkedIn)

Sales Automation (and AI) Tools And Uses

• The most commonly used tools among sales pros that use AI are:
  • Generative AI tools that help write sales content or prospect outreach messages (47%)
  • AI tools that automate manual tasks (43%)
  • AI tools that offer data-driven insights (36%) (HubSpot, 2024)

• The tasks salespeople using AI most often use it for are:
  • Writing content for prospect outreach 42%
  • Data Analysis 34%
  • Automating manual processes 30% (HubSpot, 2024)

• Sales professionals who use AI/automation feel that the most effective tools for helping them reach their sales goals are:
  • AI tools that automate manual tasks (25%).
  • AI tools that offer data-driven insights (20%).
  • Generative AI tools that help write sales content or prospect outreach messages (20%).
• Of the tasks salespeople most often use AI for, using it for automating manual processes gets the highest effectiveness rating (64%). (HubSpot, 2024)

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• 86% of sales professionals leveraging generative AI to write messages to prospects believe it is effective - 38% find it very effective, and 49% somewhat effective. (HubSpot)
• 89% of sales professionals leveraging AI to write messages to prospects say it's effective - 48% find it very effective and 41% somewhat effective.
• The most popular tasks that sales professionals use generative AI tools for in their role include (in no particular order):
• Content creation, or using generative AI to write copy, create images, or get ideas for sales enablement content.
• Prospect outreach, or using generative AI to write emails, social media messages, call scripts, etc.
• Research, or using generative AI for market research, to find datasets, summarize articles, etc.
• Training, or using generative AI to learn sales forecasting or a new Excel function. (HubSpot)
• 93% of B2B sales professionals using AI/automation find AI tools/chatbots that effectively assist with prospect outreach or lead generation. (HubSpot)
• 44% of sellers in the UK use sales tech weekly, and 25% use it daily. (LinkedIn)
• 30% of companies are using or considering using natural language processing (NLP) solutions for sales. (IBM)

CRM and Sales Automation

• Sales professionals who use a CRM are 79% more likely to say their teams are strongly aligned. (HubSpot, 2024)

• Sales pros who use a CRM say that the top benefits are that it helps them keep track of leads (34%), and increases productivity (30%). (HubSpot, 2024)
• High performing salespeople are 17% more likely to describe their CRM as important to the sales process. (HubSpot, 2024)
• 74% of sales pros that have AI-enhanced CRMs say they and their teams have been more productive since their CRM has added AI features. (HubSpot, 2024)

General Attitudes and Perspectives on Sales Automation

• 69% of sales professionals believe that sales pros should use AI/automation tools for prospecting but avoid becoming overly reliant on them. (HubSpot)
• 75% of sales professionals believe that sales people should use AI/automation in their roles, but avoid becoming overly reliant on it. (HubSpot, 2024)
• A majority of sales directors+ say headcounts will remain unchanged in the face of AI. However, they were more likely to say that there could be a slight decrease in headcount/investment for SDRs. (HubSpot, 2024)
• Salespeople view further expansion of AI in the workplace as inevitable and over 50% view adoption as growing.
• 36% of sales professionals who use AI/automation find such tools easy to use to accomplish their sales goals, while a majority (55%) find them neither easy nor difficult to use for this purpose. (HubSpot)
• 39% of sales professionals who don't currently use AI/automation tools in their role say it's because they don't want to become overly reliant on AI tools. (HubSpot)

Automating Your Sales Workflow

Regardless of your industry or how your sales org is structured, there's a good chance your business stands to gain a lot from leveraging sales automation resources.

They can take a lot of the legwork, guesswork, and vulnerability to human error out of your sales process. With so many automation tools at your disposal, you should at least consider folding one or more into your sales efforts.

Topics:Sales Strategy

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