Automated CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) automation is the process of automating sales and customer service functions. It enables both these teams to track and manage their engagement efforts with current and prospective customers.

CRM automation allows sales teams to automate redundant prospecting and customer management tasks which are otherwise time-consuming. These tasks involve day-to-day activities such as data entry, contact updates, communication details, calendar management, and lead and opportunity updates.

Beyond automating tedious sales processes and freeing up the sales person’s time to focus on more strategic work, automation in CRM automation also provides functionalities that empower sales teams to make complex decisions using advanced analytics. It facilitates easy collaboration between sales and marketing, which is a priority for many businesses.

It really depends on your company’s specific needs. As a sales organization, you should at least have a streamlined system in place to manage customer data and communication. You can start with a CRM your team is fully comfortable using before implementing other systems. Your CRM should serve as the foundation upon which all other automation is built.

If your organization has a widely adopted CRM, here are some signs you could also benefit from having marketing automation:

Leads are slipping through the cracks — If, during the lead hand-off from marketing to sales, you find there is not a structured way for your marketing team to share lead information and context with sales for a thorough follow-up, you may benefit from adding marketing automation to your CRM.

Reporting becomes tedious — For many sales reps, reporting and administrative tasks can be a huge time suck. However, with CRM automation, this doesn’t have to be the case. In the event that sales reps are spending hours each week running reports or managing data manually, creating an automation that periodically exports data from your CRM could be a simple solution that will pay dividends when it comes to saving time.

Here are the processes you should start automating.

Trigger new CRM entries from online form submissions and purchases — If a potential customer fills out a form on your company’s website or makes a direct purchase, have their information automatically added to your CRM.

Automatically segment contacts to specific email lists — Having one giant contact list can be a headache to sort through. Try setting up an automation that segments contacts to relevant lists based on past purchases and product interests.

Nurture new CRM contacts — Build relationships with potential customers with automatic welcome campaigns.

Create follow-up reminders — If you like to have periodic check-ins with prospects and customers, you can set up automatic reminders for yourself to reach back out and engage with them.

However, remember that your CRM software should have built-in integrations with other tools that can create automation to make your job easier. If you find there is automation that you are not able to create through built-in integration, use a platform such as Zapier to connect your favorite tools to your CRM.

Most marketers and sales professionals realize that a solid marketing automation and CRM integration can minimize costs and increase productivity, but there’s more to it than that. The right CRM and marketing automation combination enables you to take full advantage of each tool’s capabilities and empowers you to transform and improve how you engage with customers in the following ways.

Prioritize Your Marketing and Sales Efforts

Combining these CRM marketing automation tools will organize and streamline your company’s prospecting and customer retention activities by consolidating vital activities and information. This enables marketing and sales teams to gain more advanced insight into the customer journey, which they can then use to prioritize their efforts. Throwing good money at poor leads is a Cardinal (and all-too-common) Sin, and smart companies do everything they can to avoid making this mistake.

Speak Consistently to Prospects and Customers Using Your CRM and Marketing Automatio

Another benefit of CRM integration is that it helps ensure consistent messaging across the board. Too often, Sales and Marketing work at cross purposes (usually unintentionally), communicating with prospects and existing customers using different verbiage or attempting to appeal to different pain points. Again, integrating these platforms will increase your visibility, which will ensure uniform and targeted messaging to various audiences and individuals. And if you ever update or alter those communications, both teams will be able to view those changes and adjust accordingly.

Guide Users Through the Customer Journey

Of course, the whole point of integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM is to enable your marketing and sales teams to attract more leads and guide potential and existing customers through the purchasing cycle to generate more revenue. When these two systems are automated and in lock-step with one another, your teams can review the available data to better understand how they’re engaging with your company’s website and products and services, which enables you to serve them the sort of valuable content that helps inform their buying decisions.

Marketing and CRM Software Integrations Improve Data Hygiene

Much of what you’re hoping to accomplish through your sales and marketing efforts is heavily reliant upon the overall health of your email lists. Unfortunately, many companies struggle with data hygiene.