Unlocking The Full Potential Of CRM with Automation

One of the most critical tools for aligning the operations of a company's marketing, sales, and customer success teams today is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While it is an index of marketing contacts, it can also be used to do so much more. It can streamline marketing and sales efforts and improve customer satisfaction. However, CRM’s best potential can only be realized with automation.

Manually entering information not only makes people unproductive due to monotony but also invites a large margin of errors. Hence, getting consistently high and accurate results is only possible through automation. Now, let's see how automation can make your life easier and what steps to take to have your CRM automated.

Deep Dive On Why You Should Automate Your CRM

CRM is where your complete library of marketing leads is, period. However, for the marketing and sales team, having a place for the contacts is just the tip of the iceberg. It is quite evident that sales and marketing teams' efforts are best spent on customer satisfaction. Such efforts, in turn, lead to more lead conversion and customer retention. However, employees cannot focus on guiding the leads if they have to track everything manually.

According to a study by HubSpot, data entry takes an hour or more for 27% of salespeople daily. Additionally, 23% of these salespeople have mentioned that constantly entering data is their biggest CRM challenge. As the data suggests, data entry naturally brings monotony, which can lead to unproductiveness and errors. Additionally, even if a company hires people specifically for data entry, it unnecessarily becomes expensive. 

This is where CRM automation enters the scene. When we set up automation after thoroughly considering every variable, the marketing and sales operations become streamlined.

The flow of Leads > MQL > SQL becomes seamless and error-free with real-time access to precise information as leads move through the funnel. Additionally, the sales teams are alerted about each promising lead, and the segmentation of those leads tells them who to prioritize. 

Where does all this lead to? Faster, easier, and more effective workflow.

How to Automate Your CRM

It might seem like that getting started with CRM automation is quite complex. However, it only takes a few steps, from strategic decision-making to implementation. Here are a few practical ways to make it work -

Preferred Contacts Segmentation 

Different companies choose to divide contacts for marketing and sales purposes in different ways. While some CRMs like HubSpot have the built-in ability to segmentate those contacts, some don't. 

For example, many CRMs sort out several contacts from a company in one place, observing the email ID domain - ‘@company.in. However, setting up this automation is vital for CRMs that don't or companies that want their contacts sorted depending on a different variable.

Accurate Contacts Assignment

Companies divide their pool of contacts among their salespeople according to several variables. CRM automation ensures that all the contacts and information seamlessly flow to the specifically assigned salesperson. As a result, the salespeople have all the information to convert the leads while focusing on maximum customer satisfaction. End result? Higher chances of leads moving down the sales funnel easily.

Furthermore, CRM automation prevents two sales representatives with similar skills from working on the same lead.

Lifecycle Stages Segmentation 

To make the most of your CRM, it's crucial to automate the process of classifying contacts into specific categories as they move through their customer journey. This requires first defining customer lifecycle stages and mapping key touchpoints and actions to them. Analyze past deal data to identify patterns in lead behavior and use this information to improve your decision-making.

For instance, you may define a lead downloading a gated ebook as becoming a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Once your lifecycle stages are defined, you can create rules through CRM automation to classify leads based on their actions.

Automatize Sales Notifications

After contacts are sorted according to their companies or lifecycle stages, it's important to focus on getting to those contacts at the correct times. And, automated notifications can do this. Consequently, when a lead with a high score within the predefined threshold performs a particular activity, such as opening an email or filling out a form, an automated notification is sent to the assigned sales representative. They will then go through more information on the lead’s lifecycle stage, pain point, and buyer persona. 

Such classification from CRM Automation assists the sales teams in effectively engaging high-potential prospects. This eliminates guesswork and alerts the team to potential deals, allowing them to allocate their efforts efficiently and effectively.

Get Help From The Pros

CRM is a tool that can help a company's productivity go up with seamless marketing and sales-aligned efforts. However, it's important to automate non-productive tasks within your CRM to reap its full benefits. Whether it's a big company with a huge pool of contacts or a small company with a complex sales process, CRM automation can be an overwhelming process. 

Hence, it can be beneficial to seek out an implementation partner. An experienced pro can set you up with custom automation features tailored to your company's needs. With your CRM automation set up perfectly, productivity will never be an issue.