Sales Operations on Autopilot
- Pius Schmid
- Feb 10
- 7 min read
A risk management solutions provider with approximately 400 employees faced a significant challenge: optimizing its entire Sales process - from the first point of contact to closing deals and onboarding. As one of the company’s key value-driving workflows, the Sales process was heavily reliant on manual effort. Employees struggled to manage around 1,000 new leads each month while keeping CRM records up-to-date and staying organized amid the 400 - 500 first meetings the Sales team conducted monthly. The complexity of these repetitive workflows, combined with the company’s reliance on multiple disconnected standard SaaS tools that created isolated solutions and fragmented data pools, led to inefficiencies. These issues hindered the productivity of the company’s 21 Account Executives and 12 Sales Support employees. Instead of focusing on what truly mattered - closing deals and delivering a seamless customer experience from the very first touchpoint - the team was overwhelmed by administrative tasks. Meeting the company’s growth goals required generating at least 130 qualified opportunities each month, but inefficiencies in their processes made this a constant struggle. That began to change when they partnered with NOA.
Challenge
The company’s Sales process faced several key challenges, each contributing to inefficiencies and creating barriers to scalability.
The first challenge stemmed from the use of numerous standard SaaS tools across the organization. While each tool served a specific purpose - Salesforce as central CRM, HubSpot for management of inbound leads, Cognism for lead enrichment, and others - the lack of integration between them led to what can only be described as tool chaos. Data was scattered across isolated solutions, with no cohesive system in place to connect or synchronize information. This not only drove up monthly SaaS costs but also made data management extremely difficult. Employees had to jump between multiple platforms, manually transferring data and struggling to maintain consistency, which made already complex workflows even more cumbersome.
The second challenge was the highly manual nature of creating, sending, and monitoring sales documents such as offers and contracts. Drafting these documents, sending them out for signatures, and tracking their status required significant manual effort. Even after a document was signed, adding the latest version back into the CRM often required additional time-consuming steps. This lack of automation wasted valuable time that could have been spent on more strategic tasks, like nurturing leads or closing deals.
The third challenge involved the lack of real-time insights into the sales pipeline and overall team performance. Because records in the CRM were not consistently up-to-date, Sales leadership struggled to get an accurate picture of current standings for individual leads or the team's progress toward monthly goals. This made it difficult to identify bottlenecks or provide timely guidance, leaving the team without the strategic oversight they needed to perform at their best.
The final challenge was enriching leads with critical data that went beyond what standard enrichment tools, such as Cognism, could provide. For instance, when working with traditional German SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), essential information often had to be manually gathered from sources like the Bundesanzeiger - a government publication that required employees to crawl through pages of data. This labor-intensive process further slowed down the Sales team and added to their already heavy workload.
Taken together, these challenges made it clear that the company’s existing tool-setup and processes were not sustainable for achieving their ambitious growth goals.
Solution
By leveraging their extensive expertise in the SaaS-tool market and advanced low-code tools, NOA addressed the company’s core challenges. NOA’s deep understanding of how to combine tools effectively, coupled with their ability to automate repetitive tasks, empowered the company to streamline its processes, improve data management, and cut costs. The key solutions are outlined below:
Comprehensive Tool and Process Audit
The first step was gaining a clear overview of the company’s existing tool stack and current workflows. NOA conducted a comprehensive audit, mapping out all tools in use, their associated costs, and the specific role each played in the company’s processes. This analysis highlighted inefficiencies and redundancies, such as overlapping functionality and poor integration between tools.
Based on this audit, NOA created a master plan to streamline processes, minimize tool chaos, and connect systems in a more cohesive way. This consulting phase focused on recommending the right tools and integrations to lower monthly SaaS expenses while ensuring data consistency and improving usability.
Low Code Automation with MAKE and Retool
At the heart of the solution was the use of MAKE.com as a central orchestrator for automating processes. MAKE allowed NOA to seamlessly connect the company’s disparate SaaS tools, automating data flows and eliminating the need for manual data transfers. Tasks like synchronizing CRM records, updating lead statuses, and automating handoffs between platforms were streamlined using MAKE’s deterministic workflows.
To further empower employees, Retool.com was implemented as a user-friendly interface for monitoring and managing these automations. Moreover, Retool enabled the creation of centralized dashboards, providing Sales management with real-time insights into lead progress and team performance. Sales leaders could access live data and trigger specific actions with just a few clicks, ensuring smooth operation and better decision-making.
Simplified Document Management with Pandadoc
A specific focus was placed on optimizing document creation and management processes. Pandadoc was fully integrated into the workflow through MAKE, enabling the automation of tasks like generating contracts and offers, sending them for signatures, and tracking their status.
Once a document was signed, the latest version was automatically added to the CRM, saving the team hours of manual work. Pandadoc’s seamless integration with the existing tool stack helped streamline document workflows, reduce errors, and ensure that all documentation was consistently up-to-date.
Data Enrichment with Axiom.ai
For data enrichment, NOA introduced a powerful solution to handle the manual task of scraping information from old-school websites like the Bundesanzeiger. By combining Axiom.ai with MAKE, NOA set up workflows to automatically extract and process key data from these traditional platforms.
This integration eliminated the need for employees to manually crawl websites, significantly reducing the time and effort required to gather critical information about German SMEs. The automated data was then enriched and synced with the company’s CRM, ensuring that the Sales team always had access to complete and up-to-date lead profiles.
Business Results
The partnership with NOA delivered measurable improvements to the company’s Sales process, driving efficiency, improving data quality, and enabling the Sales team to focus on what truly matters: building relationships and closing deals. The key benefits are outlined below:
Streamlined Sales Processes
By automating manual workflows and integrating tools into a cohesive system, the Sales process was transformed into a highly efficient operation. Previously, managing CRM updates, tracking document status, and enriching lead profiles required significant manual effort. With NOA's automation, these tasks now take 70% less time to complete, reducing overall lead handling time by an average of 2 hours per lead. This has allowed the Sales team to focus on generating additional 30–40 qualified opportunities per month, directly contributing to the company’s growth goals.
Reduced Workload and Increased Productivity
Automation of time-consuming tasks - such as document creation and management via Pandadoc and data enrichment through the combination of MAKE and Axiom.ai - freed up significant resources. The time required to create and manage documents was reduced by 60%, saving the team approximately 40–50 hours per month. Additionally, enriching leads with previously manual research processes is now 5x faster, cutting down research time per lead from 30 minutes to just 6 minutes.
This increased efficiency has enabled the company’s 21 Account Executives and 12 Sales Support employees to focus more on value-driving tasks. Productivity per employee increased by an estimated 15%, directly contributing to the team’s ability to exceed their target of 130 qualified opportunities per month.
Improved Data Quality and Transparency
The integration of tools via MAKE.com and the introduction of Retool dashboards provided Sales management with real-time insights into pipeline performance and lead statuses. Records are now consistently up-to-date, reducing data discrepancies by over 80%. As a result, leadership can now quickly identify bottlenecks, track monthly performance more accurately, and make faster, data-driven decisions. Sales forecasting accuracy improved by 25%, enabling better planning and resource allocation.
Enhanced Customer Experience
With smoother processes and fewer errors, the Sales team now delivers a more seamless customer journey. Faster response times, more accurate data, and consistent follow-ups have shortened the average sales cycle by 20%, allowing deals to close faster. In turn, this has led to a 10% increase in conversion rates from lead to customer. The enhanced customer experience has also resulted in improved satisfaction scores, with prospects and new clients rating the onboarding process as more professional and efficient than before.
Project Financials
The decision to partner with NOA and implement a streamlined, automated Sales process delivered significant benefits for the company, both tangible and intangible. While many of the improvements—such as enhanced customer experience and increased productivity—are harder to directly quantify, the overall impact on the company’s efficiency and scalability has been transformative. Below is an overview of the project costs, ongoing expenses, and estimated savings:
Project Overview
Total Project Costs: 35,000 €
Project Duration: 4 months
Running Costs of the Optimized Sales Process
MAKE (Enterprise License): 1,500 € per month (shared across multiple processes)
Retool (Business plan): 125 € per month (for the Sales team)
Pandadoc (Business plan): 59 € per month
Axiom.ai (Pro plan): 50 € per month (used specifically for web scraping tasks like Bundesanzeiger)
Other SaaS Tool Costs (CRM, HubSpot, etc.): No net increase (existing tools were optimized, not replaced)
Total Running Costs Per Month: 1,734 €
Savings and Impact
Time Savings for Sales Team:
Automation reduced time spent on administrative tasks by ~250 hours per month, freeing up significant capacity across the 21 Account Executives and 12 Sales Support employees. This equates to an estimated ~1.5 FTEs saved for administrative tasks alone, valued at 6,000 € per month (based on an average salary of 4,000 € per FTE).
Tool Cost Optimization:
By streamlining the SaaS tool stack and eliminating unnecessary overlaps, NOA reduced monthly SaaS expenses by ~1,000 €, directly improving the company’s bottom line.
Revenue-Driving Improvements:
Through increased productivity, faster lead handling, and better pipeline management, the company generated an estimated 30–40 additional qualified opportunities per month. Assuming a conservative conversion rate of 10% and an average deal size of 20,000 €, this translates to an additional 60,000–80,000 € in monthly revenue potential.
Total Monthly Financial Impact:
Savings: 7,000 € per month (time savings + tool optimization)
Revenue Potential: 60,000–80,000 € per month
BOTTOM LINE
While the project’s financial returns are partially influenced by soft factors like productivity and customer experience, the direct savings and revenue potential illustrate a highly positive outcome:
Payback Period: ~6.5 months (based on direct savings and revenue improvements)
First-Year Net Impact: ~600,000 € in additional revenue potential and 63,192 € in net savings (after accounting for running costs).
Beyond the numbers, the project empowered the Sales team to focus on high-value tasks, improving employee satisfaction and ensuring that the company is now well-positioned for long-term growth.
With NOA’s expertise, the company successfully turned one of its most cumbersome workflows into a streamlined, value-driving process, creating the foundation for scalable and sustainable growth.
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