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Sales Automation Secrets: What to Automate (and What Will Kill Your Deals)
By Johnny-Lee Reinoso
Sales is a game of leverage. The more leverage you have, the more deals you close. And in today’s world, automation is one of the greatest sources of leverage available to sales teams.
Done right, automation frees you from repetitive tasks and gives you back hours every week to focus on what actually moves the needle: conversations with real decision-makers. Done wrong, it strips your outreach of personality, damages trust, and leaves you sounding like a robot in a sea of robots.
So let’s talk about what to automate in B2B sales, and just as importantly, what not to automate. Because if you blur the line, you’ll end up automating yourself out of commission.
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What to Automate
1. Research and Data Enrichment
Every salesperson knows the grind of looking up company size, industry codes, job titles, or recent news before making a call. It’s important work, but it’s not high-value work. Tools today can pull that information for you in seconds. Automated enrichment saves you from the copy-paste hustle and delivers a clean, ready-to-dial list. Instead of spending five minutes per prospect, you spend five minutes on the whole list. That’s leverage.
2. CRM Hygiene
Manual data entry is where deals go to die. Notes get lost, follow-ups slip through the cracks, and the pipeline turns into a guessing game. Automating CRM updates — whether through call recording integrations, email sync, or task triggers — ensures that every activity is captured without you lifting a finger. The result is cleaner data, better visibility for leadership, and more accurate forecasting.
3. Reminders and Notifications
A great salesperson never misses a follow-up, but if we’re being honest, human memory isn’t perfect. Automating reminders through Slack, email, or push notifications ensures you’re always on top of the next touch. Whether it’s a callback two days after a voicemail or a quarterly check-in, automation keeps you consistent. And consistency is one of the most underrated skills in sales.
4. Email Sequences for Initial Outreach
Cold emailing is a numbers game, and automation lets you play it smart. With the right platform, you can build multi-step sequences that drip out messages, adjust based on prospect behavior, and stop the campaign once you get a reply. The beauty here is that you can scale to hundreds or thousands of prospects without burning hours in your inbox. Just remember: the automation is only as good as the personalization you put into it. A thoughtful line or two in each email can make the difference between being ignored and getting a meeting.
5. Call Summaries and Recaps
This is one of my favorite use cases. Imagine finishing a sales call and within minutes, an automation delivers a neatly formatted summary with next steps. No more scrambling through notes or forgetting critical details. You can forward the recap to your prospect, strengthening your reputation as someone who’s organized and dialed in. It’s a simple automation that pays dividends in trust and credibility.
What NOT to Automate
1. The Cold Call Itself
This one should go without saying, but it’s worth repeating. You cannot automate a real-time human conversation. Cold calls are where trust is built, objections are handled, and energy is transferred. Automating the actual voice on the line reduces you to spam. And decision-makers can sniff it out instantly. So never stop picking up the phones. That’s where the magic happens.
2. Personal Rapport
When you’re face-to-face with a buyer or live on Zoom, the subtleties matter. The way you listen, the way you pause, the story you share — none of this can be faked or scripted by a machine. Authentic rapport requires empathy, and empathy isn’t programmable. Automate around the conversation, but never automate the conversation itself.
3. Pricing and Negotiation
Prospects don’t just buy the product, they buy your confidence in the value you deliver. If you automate pricing responses or negotiation workflows, you risk collapsing that value before you’ve even built it. Every deal has nuance — budgets, priorities, politics — and it takes a skilled salesperson to navigate those waters. Keep this human.
4. Closing the Deal
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: sales is about transferring belief. No automation can look a buyer in the eye (or speak into their ear) with conviction and passion. Automation can prepare you, support you, and even follow up after you’ve closed. But the moment of decision is yours to own. That’s the privilege of being a closer.
5. Over-Personalization at Scale
Yes, I just praised automation for outreach. But here’s the trap: pushing too much personalization into an automated system makes it feel mechanical. You’ve probably seen emails with “Hi [First Name], I love what you’re doing at [Company Name]…” — and you know exactly how they were generated. Don’t insult your prospect’s intelligence. Instead, keep automation in the background and bring your own words to the foreground.
Final Words
The line between helpful automation and harmful automation is thinner than most sales teams realize. Automate the grunt work: research, data entry, reminders, email drips, recaps. Free yourself from the time-sinks that pull you away from selling. But never automate the human moments. Never automate the trust-building, the conversations, the energy transfer.
Because at the end of the day, automation is leverage, not a replacement. It’s meant to support you, not substitute you. If you can remember that, you’ll work smarter, sell faster, and still keep the authenticity that prospects crave.
So go ahead and automate boldly — but keep the heart of sales human. That’s how you scale without losing the spark.
Until next time…
Johnny-Lee Reinoso