Sales is a hefty process. It can get messy and out of hand very quickly. Have you ever experienced a messy and impossible-to-navigate lead list? A missed sale due to a forgotten follow-up? Or ended up spending too long talking to a bad prospect? All of these things directly affect your bottom-line revenue.
Time spent cleaning your lead list takes your attention away from sales. A missed sale is, well, a missed sale. And prioritising a bad prospect means spending less time closing bigger deals.
That’s where CRMs come in. CRMs, or customer relationship management software, are basically platforms where you can organise all sales information and activities in an orderly way.
CRMs are great. But even some of Silicon Valley’s finest software has its limits. Whether it’s having to manually enter data on Google Sheets, dragging info around Trello, or generally updating customer information, there’s still a lot of manual (and menial) work required to upkeep your sales process.
That’s where CRM automation comes in.
CRM sales automation: Here’s how it works
CRM sales automation is all about making sure every part of your sales process runs as smoothly and effectively as possible, while requiring as few repetitive, manual tasks as possible.
It uses AI technology to automate as much as it can and win your time back so that you and your reps can spend less time managing and more time on income generating tasks. Ultimately, it’ll help you hit those KPIs and smash your yearly goals.
We obviously can’t speak for all CRMs but many have this automation built into them.
Here’s how CRM automation will rock your sales process and improve your bottom-line revenue:
No more exhausting data-entry – Many CRMs allow you to automatically pull in data from third party sources, such as LinkedIn and other social media. That way, you don’t have to manually enter all your leads’ data into a list. The prospect does it for you, merely by being on social media! Less data-entry means you have more time to, in the words of the Wolf of Wall Street, ‘pick up the phone and start dialing’.
No more missed follow ups – The best CRMs allow you to set automatic task reminders, helping you to never miss a follow-up. Some, like Clarity, also allow you to automatically sequence email or messaging follow-ups so that you don’t even need to remember to follow-up.
No more task withdrawal syndrome – Your team will no longer be slowed down by data-entry or sharing cumbersome information with team-mates as data is stored teamwide. In Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work, he stresses that when you switch from one task to another, it takes you tens of minutes to completely refocus on the task at hand. So, by removing the tedious, intermediate tasks, you’ll also help them to focus better.
No more wasting resources on low priority/low value leads – As part of lead nurturing, you can automatically designate specific tasks based on the quality of the leads. For leads worth above a chosen amount for, you can automatically assign follow-up tasks. If the leads aren’t worth the amount, they won’t be prioritised in the task list.
No more time spent on lengthy reports – Automatic sales reporting allows you to create lengthy reports, that would normally take a matter of hours, in a matter of seconds.
And no more taking forever to personalise your off-the-phone conversations – You can group leads together so they can be sent specific, relevant material based on their group. For example, you could have a template message that you send as a follow-up to leads who’re interested in a specific offer.
Want to know how you can start automating your CRM for sales? Check out our blog: How to Automate Your Sales Process in 4 ½ Steps
