Your sales process defines the revenue generated for your business, and ideally, you must automate and optimize this process to make the most of it. As a result, automation has emerged as a strategic imperative for many businesses rather than a desirable upgrade.

At the very least, automation can take care of the repetitive tasks in your sales process, so your professionals can focus on closing deals and building strong customer relationships. In fact, employees across the world reported a 20% decrease in errors because of sales automation.

But like every business transformation, automation can make or break your sales process, depending on how the other processes adapt and align with it. Your financial and accounting processes can get affected before any other business area due to their direct relationship with your sales performance.

Before delving deeper into how this relationship between sales automation and financial control works, let us first identify and understand the perks of automating sales processes.

Why is Sales Process Automation So Important?

In the current age of automation, sales process automation plays a crucial role in boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of your business processes. Not to forget, sales automation can boost your productivity and reduce operational costs to a very large extent. No wonder the global market for sales automation has increased from $7.8 billion in 2019 to $16 billion in 2025.

With that in mind, here are some of the benefits you can gain from automating your sales processes:

• Reduced Errors: Sales process automation can help you not only minimize the manual processes and data entry, but also cut down on costly mistakes
• Increased Efficiency: You can automate repetitive tasks to speed up your sales processes and cycle, so that you can free up your resources to carry out more valuable work.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: With sales process automation, you can enjoy faster response times and accurate order processing, and consequently enhance customer satisfaction and experience. 
• Optimized Costs: Automated processes can eliminate a lot of resource costs that you might otherwise incur, thus optimizing your overall costs significantly

How Can You Balance Sales Process Automation and Financial Control Effectively?

With so many perks and benefits to gain, businesses can often treat implementing automation in your sales process as a knee-jerk reaction. However, for your automation to truly work and generate results for your business, you must account for the financial benefits it can offer, and its impact on your financial control:

#1 Assess Financial Touchpoints

Identify your financial touchpoints — the specific points in the customer’s journey where financial data is exchanged, validated, or generated, where critical decisions and financial commitments are made. Automating financial touchpoints, such as managing invoices, payment receipts, and order processing, and integrating them with invoice generator and accounting tools can help you boost efficiency, but increase the risk of errors or fraud.

By identifying and mapping these financial touchpoints, you can ensure that your automation enhances some of your vital financial controls, such as compliance checks, approval workflows, and audit trails. Ultimately, you can also safeguard these touchpoints to boost the speed and accuracy of your sales automation without sacrificing financial oversight.

#2 Implement Role-based Access and Approval Workflows

For your sales process automation to be truly effective, you must level up your financial governance. Consider restricting sensitive actions such as discount approvals, payment releases, and contract sign-offs to companies and authorized personnel so that you can maintain a safe and auditable trail.

For instance, automated accounts payable systems can help you set monetary limits on invoices, route high-value invoices for managerial approval, and ensure compliance.

#3 Start With a Phased Implementation

When you want to automate your sales processes, you must choose the high-impact and low-risk processes, like invoice processing and routine approvals. Carrying out your implementation in phases can help your team adapt gradually and minimize disruptions and errors during the transition. 

By starting small, you can test your financial workflows, gather feedback, and refine your approach. For instance, you can use sales force automation software to effectively scale your automation and to redesign and improve complex financial operations.

#4 Monitor and Optimize Workflows Regularly

Sales process automation is far from being a one-time solution. You must continuously assess the automated processes to deliver intended results and adapt to your business’s evolving needs. Also, implement mechanisms that help you regularly solicit feedback from users and stakeholders, monitor your KPIs, and identify new automation opportunities.

By doing so, you can ensure better control over your budget and finances, thus trimming your costs. You can even reduce bottlenecks and manual intervention to align your workflows with your compliance and efficiency goals, so you can manage your costs better.

#5 Ensure Data Accuracy and Integrity

Automating your sales process is a lucrative undertaking considering the many perks it offers, however, these systems must be capable of processing large amounts of data easily without compromising their accuracy. Consider implementing automated validation and reconciliation processes to check and compare records across the system.

Also, consider implementing regular audits and exception reporting to protect and safeguard your data integrity. For instance, automating accounts receivable solutions to update and reconcile payment records and invoices must go hand-in-hand with your automated sales process.

#6 Maintain Human Oversight for Complex Financial Decisions

Even with the most effective automation in place, that takes care of all your rule-based tasks and routines, you may deal with complex transactions and strategic decisions that require human judgment and intervention. 

It is important to understand the significance of human oversight in such cases and not consider it a limitation of your sales process automation. In fact, human interference at this point simply means that some of the critical and outlier decisions that might affect your financial control receive the required scrutiny.

Concluding Remarks

Sales process automation is a necessary step for businesses that want to scale their sales operations and make them more productive. However, your strategy for automation can only be effective if you balance it with appropriate financial control. By following some of the practices and approaches suggested in this article, you can ensure that you generate the desired results from your automated sales processes and strengthen your financial strategies simultaneously.