Sales sales department: where to start

Automate what gets in the way of selling

A sale is a conversation where a person decides about money. You can't automate it entirely, and attempts to do so all end the same way: the client realises they're talking to a machine, and leaves.

But around the conversation there's work that isn't conversation at all. Replying at night with "hello, we'll sort this out." Finding out someone's sizes and deadlines. Recognising that this client will buy for three million, and that one wandered in by mistake. Writing a week later to someone who said they'd think about it. This is exactly what's worth handing to a machine.

The owner of a China delivery company described her situation like this: "The girls just sit on the phone all day — how many kilograms, what material, please send the spec." This isn't sales. It's work that people do because there's no one else to do it.

First reply

Speed of first response is the one part of a sale where you gain an advantage without any skill at all. A client writes at eleven at night, gets a clear answer within a minute, and keeps talking to you instead of whoever answers in the morning.

The owner of a gate manufacturing company puts it plainly: "Doesn't matter if it's night, day, morning, everything's on fire around — it still answers 'good afternoon.' The faster we respond to clients' enquiries, the better our chances of getting richer."

It's important not to confuse speed with a brush-off. A reply like "your enquiry has been received, a manager will contact you" is worse than silence: it consumes the client's attention and gives nothing back. What works is different — answering the actual question and asking the next one.

Handling inbound: the ones who will never buy

Any incoming flow includes people who've come to the wrong place. Not through any fault of their own — ads are broad, search is imprecise, a friend gave a recommendation. A sales rep has to talk to them politely and figure out what doesn't fit.

The owner of a gate manufacturing company put it more precisely than any textbook: "Wanting to buy a Lada Largus and submitting an enquiry at a Porsche dealership." He also noted the cost of it: "Five minutes with one client, five with another, five with a third — that's already an hour gone. And in that hour you could get plenty of other important things done."

An hour a day is twenty hours a month from a single rep. Spent on conversations that were never going to lead anywhere.

The agent does this sorting on its own, without any irritation: it clarifies the request, politely explains if it's not something we handle, and doesn't drain anyone's mood in the process.

Qualification: who to call first

Filtering out the wrong leads isn't enough. Among the rest, you need to know who matters more — and know it before a manager spends a day working through them in the order they came in.

There's usually one signal: the size of the order to come. And there's no need to ask about budget — most clients won't answer that anyway. What they say on their own is enough. "I have a house in a gated community, I need panoramic gates" — that's one category. "I have an old garage co-op, want to replace the old swing gates" — another. "I'm an architect, a project is coming up, who should I talk to" — back to the first.

The agent sorts enquiries by these markers and tags them in the CRM. From there, a simple rule applies: those with budget and timeline come first, the rest follow. Without this sorting, that order is impossible to keep — enquiries just get handled in the order they arrived.

“Do you repair washing machines?”“House in a village, 5-metre driveway, need it before winter”“Just checking prices”“We’re building a warehouse and need four sectional doors”“I’ll talk to my wife and get back to you”“What’s your most basic option?”

The agent finds out the taskpolitely, without irritation, at any hour

Wrong address1

washing machine repairExplained it isn’t our line

Later3

just checking pricesI’ll talk to my wifemost basic optionFollow-ups on schedule

Now2

house, 5 m driveway, before winterwarehouse, four doorsTo a manager first

Illustrative example. No need to ask about budget: clients usually reveal the size of the order themselves — a house, a warehouse, the number of doors, the deadline.

The second, third, and fifth touch

Everyone makes the first contact. What comes next is where money gets lost: the person asked for time to think, promised to come back, went off to talk it over with his wife — and disappeared. And most often he didn’t change his mind — nobody simply wrote to him.

The owner of a gate manufacturing company called this out as a pain point of its own: "the pain of the second, third, fourth, and fifth touch." The owner of a delivery company put it differently: "They submit an enquiry, then we call — they don't pick up. Or we send a proposal — no answer."

Here the machine has an advantage a person doesn't: it doesn't forget, and it doesn't feel awkward. A sales rep feels uncomfortable writing for the fifth time, so they put it off and never come back to it. The agent writes calmly, on time, and to the point — and half of the "vanished" leads respond.

What happens to an enquiry inside the CRM

Sales department automation is not a messenger bot. The bot replies, but the work lives in the CRM, and if nothing reaches it, there is no automation.

Done right, it looks like this: an enquiry from any channel — the website, WhatsApp, Telegram — becomes one card, not three. The card shows what the person asked, what the agent answered, which category it falls into, and what to do next. The manager opens the card and picks up the conversation where it left off, instead of starting over from scratch.

If the CRM is still empty after the bot goes live and the chats live separately, what was built is an autoresponder. It never got as far as automation.

A plan for the day instead of a task list

The next level begins when the system looks at the entire database, not just new leads. Any company that has been around for a while has hundreds of deals sitting in its CRM that nobody got to: someone was thinking it over, someone was waiting for a quote, someone simply got lost.

You cannot work through this backlog by hand; it is bigger than a working day. For a machine it is doable: every morning it goes through the database and tells you whom to call today and why. The list has two dozen deals instead of a thousand, and each comes with a reason: here an invoice was issued and not paid, here there has been silence for eighteen days after the site measurement, here the customer asked a question and never got an answer.

Deal base1,000+ open deals nobody got round to

Call today8:30

Sergey, housePriced sliding gates in spring and asked to be contacted when the season starts. It has started.Call before lunch

Warehouse in an industrial parkReceived a proposal and were waiting for budget approval. The budget is approved this month.Message today

The other deals — not today, and that’s a decision too

Illustrative example. The plan is built not from the manager’s memory but from where the money actually is.

The manager gets a plan for the day. It is built around where the money actually is, and there is no longer any need to keep everything in your head.

What not to automate

The exact price. A machine can calculate it from dimensions and parameters, but quoting a final figure to a client without a measurement is a good way to end up in an argument during installation. A ballpark figure is fine — the exact number comes after the measurement.

Deadlines and discounts. These are promises the company keeps, not the agent. It doesn't negotiate them.

A conversation where the person has doubts. When a client hesitates, they need a person. That’s simply how selling expensive things works; it isn’t a weakness of the technology.

And separately: don’t pass the agent off as a human. It comes out, and it comes out badly. People are fine with a program answering them — what irritates them is silence.

Where to start

Not with buying a platform, and not with choosing a model. With a single question: where in your sales department is time spent on work that isn't sales.

The answer usually turns up within ten minutes, and it looks similar for everyone: first reply, sorting incoming enquiries, follow-up touches. That's the first stage.

The first wave, area by area: what to hand to the machine and how to tell it has worked.

Next, launch the simplest version and watch it on live chats. The first working version takes days, not months. Its job is to show where your assumptions were wrong. Adding complexity makes sense after that, not before.