N.E.A.T. selling in 2025: close more with AI workflow automation

The evolution of automation and AI technologies presents sales teams with a unique opportunity to seriously ramp up how business is done. Smart sellers are seizing this chance to keep up with the latest tech trends and supercharge their game across the board.

Is NEAT your sales methodology of choice? Then what do you say to automating the framework’s repetitive tasks? Discover and plug our solutions right into those mundane workflows.

Automation is here to stay. Ready to 5x your N.E.A.T. sales workflow? Bardeen can help. From finding leads to writing messages, use Bardeen’s AI to save time. Give it a try, it's free.

N.E.A.T. selling and why it still converts

The N.E.A.T. sales methodology is Richard Harris’s guiding philosophy. It can be used for net-new business, cross-selling, or to upsell existing conversations. The acronym stands for:

• Need
• Economic impact
• Access to authority
• Timeline

To focus on each element, sellers look in-depth into four vital aspects of the buyer journey. While strengthening seller-prospect relationships.

Automating NEAT sales operations

We all know N.E.A.T. selling has monotonous parts. So here’s how to automate some with Bardeen.

N: Better understand customer needs

Identification of a prospect’s business needs leads to alignment with their unique requirements, goals, and pain points. But how’s it done?

• Size up leads to see if they’re a good match. Are they ready for the sales journey?
• Ask questions about challenges the customer might be facing.
• Focus on uncovering why it’s important to solve the issue.
• Highlight other functions or areas that might also be affected by not fixing the problem.

To make it faster, we can automate research using AI to answer questions (using customer websites).

Get questions answered for websites from Google Sheets

Now you’re one step closer to outreach relevance. Just focus on showcasing how valuable your offerings are.

Stack the deck in your favor for more conversions with a playbook (or Bardeen automation) that makes scraping LinkedIn lead profiles a breeze.

Get LinkedIn profile data

E: Create awareness around economic impact

Quantify the customer’s value proposition with data. How to do that?

• Dig deep to uncover what really makes customers tick and solve their pain points effectively.
• Address rebuttals and reiterate how your solution can meet needs.
• Ask the right questions that focus on costs and finances for specific processes.
• Use that data to compare with the financial opportunities your solutions may provide. 

For that, you can use another automation to summarize it from their website. Neat, right?

Get the value proposition for websites using Bardeen AI

But, do you want to help customers feel good about their purchases? If you do, it’s worth considering they’re probably already thinking about the cost. So guess what?

Bardeen has an automation that grabs their pricing information in seconds. So you can tailor your offer to their financials.

Get pricing information for company websites

A: Define access to authority

Maneuver the red tape that bottlenecks the decision-making process by identifying the customer’s access to authority. How’s it done?

• Ask questions that encourage customers to reveal the key influencers in their organization.
• Pick out the real MVPs with easy-access to decision makers to fast-track that close.
• Then target them in your outreach campaigns. 

Maybe this playbook for capturing email addresses helps you move faster.

Find and save email addresses from the currently opened website to Google Sheets

By creating a direct pipeline of communication to authority, sellers accelerate the sales cycle. Reducing the risk of deal stagnation. And with more automation to create outreach emails, what’s there to stop you?

Create an AI-generated outreach email for the currently opened LinkedIn profile

T: Effectively manage the timeline

Keep a pulse on the prospect’s timeline or urgency in completing their goals. How to do that: 

• Ask questions to find what compelling events or goals customers are working towards.
• Prioritize this and allocate resources and people accordingly.
• Time to seal the deal. Iron out the sale deadline with customers and close.

Mitigate any potential delays by expediting the entire sales cycle, further reducing risk for stagnation.

Continue using automation tools to boost (personal) productivity and free up precious bandwidth in the day-to-day. 81% of surveyed sales professionals claim saved time on redundant or manual tasks such as scraping data and creating outreach messages.

The N.E.A.T. workflow

While the NEAT acronym encompasses the sales methodology, there are specific actions attached. To optimize, use workflow automation extensions (such as Bardeen) to integrate your favorite apps.

The goal? To boost productivity using “playbooks” or step-by-step workflows that help sellers save time on redundant tasks.

Bring automation together in a NEAT package

If you want to try out some of our individual app integrations instead, here are some options.

Apollo.io

Lead prospecting and data enrichment are easy if you’re using Apollo.io. Sales professionals can quickly and intuitively add relevant information to existing datasets. Like customer demographics and social media profiles.

With that data, sales teams can have a better idea of what the customer’s business goals and needs might be. What apps will you integrate Apollo.io with?

OpenAI

Once you’ve gotten past lead prospecting, integrate with OpenAI for market research. It’s an AI-powered natural language processing model that interacts with users conversationally.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT plugins are a vital component of its functionality because they can:

• Provide secure access to relevant information.
• Make sure only the right people access crucial customer data (gain security and trust).
• Run computations (help sellers assess large amounts of data, fast).
• Interface with third-party services (to speed up tasks such as payment processing, customer relationship management, order and tracking information).

Want to see how these apps (& more) can integrate? Just download our Chrome extension. Free forever and comes with a 14-day trial of premium features. 

Endnotes

With automation and AI, sales teams can be proactive in cleaning up their NEAT selling. In 2024, this proven methodology transforms by integrating SaaS for efficient workflows.

AI-powered tools help automate lead qualification and enhance outreach for sales teams. Bardeen is your own personal AI assistant, helping enrich client info and keep track of meetings and notes. All so you can have more meaningful talks with your prospects. That convert.