From Leads to Loyalty: B2B Sales Automation Best Practices

Nikita M.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jun 2nd, 2025

Even though today’s business-to-business (B2B) market is large and lucrative, it is also highly competitive. Looking at the U.S. market alone, we see that it has over 330 million people and 25% of the global gross domestic product (GDP), making it a super attractive environment for entrepreneurs (source).  

For this reason, sales professionals who want to attract leads, close deals, and maintain long-term customer relationships in the U.S. need a new strategy, such as B2B automation, to get ahead of the competition with the same goals. 

Honestly, working with traditional manual methods or gauging sales situations with gut instincts is not reliable or fast enough for our digital landscape. If you are looking for a way to automate sales processes from start to finish in Salesforce Sales Cloud, join us in the article below. We will discuss the best practices high-performing teams are using in 2025 for faster B2B sales. 

Let’s get started!

Workflow Automation for B2B Sales Efficiency

To ensure we are all on the same page, let’s start by explaining workflow automation in B2B sales processes. 

Smart B2B sales teams set up automation in their workflows to speed up manual, repetitive tasks like the ones listed below:

Assigning Leads to Sales Reps

Creating and Sending Follow-Up Emails to Leads or Customers

Creating Quotes and Contracts

Approving Contracts

Although these administrative sales tasks are essential, they take a lot of time. If sales reps and managers do not pay attention when performing these tasks, they could also cause many errors to pop up in business documentation and Salesforce. 

Therefore, sales teams have turned to automating their workflows in our digital era, allowing software to handle these tasks accurately and efficiently while they focus their human skills on working with prospects. 

What are the direct results of workflow automation? Many B2Bs would say:

Shorter Sales Cycles

Better Lead Conversion Rates

More Deals Closed

Loyal Customer Relationships

That’s what workflow automation for sales teams can look like! Now that we’ve covered the overview, it’s time to explore B2B workflow automation in more detail. 

Automate Repetitive Sales Tasks

In the overview of workflow automation, we spoke about software automating repetitive sales tasks. If you are optimizing your sales pipeline, you are going to want to know more about which tasks need to be automated. Here are some tasks that can be handed over to automation in sales:

Score Leads

Prioritize Leads

Help Leads Schedule Meetings with Sales Reps

Enter Data into Salesforce

Trigger Email Campaigns

Create Proposals and Quotes

Move Deals Through a Pipeline

Send Reminders to Sales Professionals to Follow-Up on Deals

Train a New Sales Representative

Sending these tasks to an automated sales process will definitely give teams their time back to work more efficiently on complex projects. 

Automation for a B2B Sales Funnel

The B2B sales funnel is a process with many stages, and each business will have its own. However, a sales funnel essentially tracks the progression of how leads become aware of a brand and the time they convert to customers. As you can imagine, a sales funnel is not a direct progression of lead conversion, since potential customers can move up and down the stages before they become actual customers. 

The sales funnel is a very useful visual tool that shows leads closer to the bottom of the model are more engaged with a business and, therefore, more likely to convert to customers. Essentially, a sales funnel gives sales representatives more information about leads and helps them to confidently close deals. 

Tracking and analyzing leads manually in a sales funnel can also take up a lot of time. By upgrading a sales funnel with automation, leads can move more smoothly between the different stages. An automated sales funnel results in a reduction of manual work for teams, allowing them to respond to leads faster than before. 

Here is what a basic automated sales funnel might look like for your business:

B2B Sales Lead Automation

A B2B sales lead is a client who might be interested in buying products or services from a business. To seamlessly identify, capture, qualify, and route these leads to a sales or marketing team and add them to a sales funnel, businesses will use automation tools.  

An example of getting B2B sales leads into a sales funnel would be when they fill out a form on a business website. This is the start of the sales funnel, where the lead engages with business content. If the business has the right automation tools, they would be able to automatically add the lead’s data to Salesforce, which could include:

• The size of the company the lead works at
• The industry in which the lead works in 

A good automation tool would also score the lead and direct them to the most appropriate sales rep on the team. And the automation does not need to stop here with handing the lead over to a sales rep. The automated workflow can also assist with lead and opportunity tracking as well as methods to nurture relationships, such as:

• Automatically sending emails to leads to remind them of available products and services.
• Automatically sending emails to sales reps to follow up with leads. 

These are some ways B2B workflow automation can help a team speed up sales and boost conversion rates. Now, let’s examine some of the benefits businesses are gaining from automation. 

B2B Sales Automation Benefits

Understanding how B2B sales automation works makes it clear that the tools don’t just save a business time; they transform how employees work on a daily basis. Whether a business needs to speed up manual tasks or enrich data in Salesforce, B2B sales automation contributes to faster deal closures. 

So, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of automation. 

Increased Efficiency of a Sales Process

A sales process can consist of many steps, depending on the nature of your B2B. Here is an example of a sales process that has seven steps:

1. Prospecting
2. Preparation
3. Approach
4. Presentation
5. Handling Objections
6. Closing 
7. Follow-Up

Teams need to be well-organized to make a sales process efficient. They can achieve a level of accuracy and consistency by relying on automation to eliminate all manual tasks in a sales process. Without the need for human assistance, automation can ensure that all data entered into documents and Salesforce is free from errors. 

Additionally, automation can assist sales reps by emailing leads to follow up on purchases. All these admin tasks allow the sales team to focus on selling products and services, building long-lasting customer relationships, and doing zero admin work.

Elevated Lead Assessment and Conversion Metrics

Thanks to automation, sales teams can elevate lead assessments with scoring and behavior tracking tools. These automation tools help sales professionals quickly identify the leads most likely to convert to customers. These leads can then be prioritized and approached appropriately.

Automation also improves conversion metrics for a sales team. As we mentioned earlier, sales automation tools can send personalized emails at specific times to a sales rep to follow up with a lead, ensuring opportunities never fall through the cracks. This digital way of working helps a business convert more leads into customers while using less employee effort on manual admin. 

Enhanced Sales Team Productivity

Did you know that automation can enter data into Salesforce for your team? This means no more manual data entry tasks, saving reps time and effort that they could rather use to sell products and services. Not only does automation for Salesforce data entry boost productivity, but it also directs employee focus in the right areas.

Gain Insights into Sales Performance and Customer Behavior

Although there are many more benefits from automated workflows, the last two we would like to discuss are enhanced visibility on:

• Sales performance
• Customer behaviours

So, how is visibility enhanced for a sales team? Well, with automation, sales professionals get real-time insights on data automatically. They don’t have to search through messy spreadsheets or wait for a colleague to send a report to find the data they need. By setting up automation for Salesforce data, sales teams can pull key metrics, like lead conversion rates and deal velocity, any time they want to make the best decisions for a business. 

Ultimate B2B Sales Automation Checklist

If the benefits of creating a B2B sales automation system sound great and you are ready to build one, we recommend starting with a checklist as a best practice. It will keep everyone involved in creating the automation well-organized and ensure essential steps are not forgotten. 

Define the Right Sales Automation Tools

When you create a B2B sales automation checklist, the next best practice is to remember to add optimization strategies for lead capture, follow-up, and reporting tasks, along with any others that align with your business goals and tech choices. Next, you will want to build smart Salesforce workflows with the right B2B sales automation tools to avoid costly expenses. 

The Salesforce automation tools that you choose should make your CRM platform’s capabilities even better for your business, such as:

Automating lead nurturing tasks.

Handling communication with the sales team, prospects, and customers.

Tracking the performance of sales.

We suggest choosing a sales automation platform that integrates directly with Salesforce so that data flows freely between the projects your business requires to eliminate any manual data entries.

Automate Lead Generation and Nurturing

As mentioned, the right Salesforce automation tool will help you nurture leads. That would include sending leads emails about the products and services they might be interested in. 

Sales process software with automation capabilities also assists the lead nurturing process by sending reminders to sales reps at appropriate times to follow up with leads, ensuring that opportunities are never missed. 

But what about generating leads for a business? Automation can help here, too, by capturing lead data for Salesforce. Premium automation software can even qualify these leads for a sales team and route them to the most appropriate seller. 

Most automation tools can gather lead data for Salesforce from these various channels:

Web Forms

Landing Pages on Websites

Social Media Platforms

Email Campaigns

Then, they should automatically route them to a sales rep based on pre-defined rules, which can include the following:

• Territory the lead lives in
• The industry the lead works in

As we can see, automation tools that have lead nurturing and generation capabilities for Salesforce give sales teams access to high-quality lead data, allowing them to focus on the best opportunities and close deals confidently.

Follow a Structured Sales Automation Process

When creating a structured sales automation process at your organization, our next advice is to draw out your sales funnel. This will allow you to map each step in the funnel to an automation task in your custom sales process. Some of the stages in a structured sales funnel can include:

Awareness: A lead becomes aware of your business.

Interest: A lead shows interest in your products and services.

Decision: A lead decides to purchase a product or service.

Action: A lead converts to a customer.

If you understand your sales funnel, you can build a sales automation process to support a buyer throughout every touchpoint in their journey with your business. This way of working keeps your automation lean and consistently focused on sales.

Optimize Sales Communication and Follow-up

For optimizing your sales communication, we mentioned how automation tools can support lead nurturing and generation. Here are other ways automation can support communication and follow-up in sales:

Send sales reps reminders about work tasks.

Provide email sequencing tools to allow sales reps to message leads and customers across multiple touchpoints in a buyer’s journey.

Alert a sales rep whenever a lead or customer opens an email.

Provide dynamic templates to sales reps so they can personalize proposals and quotes in large batches.

Notify sales reps when a potential customer views or signs a contract for speedier deal closures.

Save all communication with clients in Salesforce.

Help a lead schedule an appointment with a sales rep.

That’s a wrap on our advice on automation software for B2B sales! If you have a specific question, make sure to contact us through one of our social media channels below. We would love to support you on your B2B sales automation journey in Salesforce.

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.