32% of sales reps say they spend more than an hour each day on manual tasks, such as tracking leads, their interests, and interactions.
With CRM automation, your team can save time while focusing on what really matters: building relationships and converting leads.
If you’re looking to be more efficient, close more deals and increase your business revenue by automating sales tasks with your current CRM, you’ve come to the right place.
What is CRM automation?
If you’re in sales, you most likely already have CRM software within your business as there are several popular CRM automation tools like Hubspot, Zoho, or lemlist.
CRM automation is the process in which you automate repetitive tasks within your CRM. These tasks may include:
- Managing outreach efforts
- Sending follow-ups
- Lead qualification
- Tracking leads
- Sales pipeline management
These tasks are time-consuming to say the least. With CRM automation, you can take care of these tasks quickly and efficiently and leave more time to actually closing those deals.
What should your CRM automate
CRM automation can help in many different ways depending on what tool you choose.
However, at the basic level, your automation should:
1. Find and manage contacts
Your CRM should be able to automatically gather, manage and update contact information like name, job title, location, company, social media profiles and even other information like preferences, position within the sales funnel, previous interactions and more.
For example, lemlist can find contacts from its people and company database, verify them and add them to your list in just a few minutes.
2. Manage leads
Automate how your leads move through your sales funnel and the accurate labels for each one.
So this could include lead scoring, nurturing and qualification. That way, your team always knows what to say to each lead because they have the right information.
Plus, they can always prioritize the most promising leads which will save time and resources.
Go a step further by automating sales tasks based on lead behavior or scoring. For example, immediately assign a sales associate to a lead with a high score and assign marketing to a lead with a low score so no opportunities are missed.
3. Automate multi-channel outreach
Set up personalized campaigns based on user behavior or triggers and stay connected to your customers.
Whether it’s via a cold call, email marketing, LinkedIn outreach or even onboarding messages within your software, you’re sure to reach them at the right place and time.
Now, don’t simply automate the personalisation to demographic fields.
Set up personalized flows based on the channels your leads, product recommendations, pricing quotes and even proposals in your messages based on the prospect’s industry, company size and previous interactions.
lemlist offers integration with popular CRMs like Pipedrive, Hubspot and Salesforce so you can import these leads faster into your preset workflows and carry out your multichannel outreach efforts from the app.
With lemlist, you can create full multichannel sequences with AI with just a few clicks, and use AI variables to add that extra touch of personalization, or clean your lists of leads to make sure your personalization is flawless.
4. Automate reminders
Set up automated reminders to check in with leads, hop on a call, attend an event and more.
This way you never have to worry about missing anything.
5. Insights and analytics
Get valuable insights about your sales pipelines and customer interactions through automated reports that are always up-to-date.
You can customize the insights you want to receive so you know what exactly to optimize for and double down on.
For example, use CRM tools that help analyze your call recordings highlighting areas for improvement and giving suggestions on how to improve future calls.
With lemlist, you get detailed insights and analytics on all of your existing campaigns, additionally with the Unified Inbox you get a clear view of all of your interactions with each lead at a glance, and add notes when needed.
Why should you use CRM automation in your business
With an effective CRM automation, your sales team can enjoy numerous benefits including;
- Increased efficiency when you can free up time spent on repetitive tasks and focus on what really matters: nurturing relationships and closing more deals.
- Acquire more quality leads for less money with contact verification
- Gain more lead conversions as a result of using the right information to provide a personalized experience
- Strong customer relationships and more satisfied customers who will likely renew their contract
- Increased productivity, especially for your sales team
- More data-driven decisions through valuable insights from automated reports
- Higher sales and profits from the reduced inefficiencies
How to get the most from your CRM automation software
Before launching a full CRM automation strategy, you need to work out how you’ll maximize your investment in the software.
Some key steps we recommend include:
1. Choose the Right CRM
The type of CRM you opt for will determine how everything else is set.
For example, if it has limited automated features, there’s not really much you can do there. So you need to research and find software like lemlist with extensive automation features that will also match your budget.
You also need a CRM that is user-friendly, mobile-friendly and easy to switch to. You don’t want to choose a CRM automation software that will frustrate your sales team. They need to be able to find whatever information they are looking for in seconds.
The average salesperson uses around 10 tools daily to close their deals. This means that your CRM automation needs to have powerful and extensive integrations.
2. Map your sales pipeline
Think of your sales pipeline as a roadmap to closing deals.
Now you cannot automate every single step because you’ll lose the overall human touch. This is why you need to clearly define each stage of your sales pipeline to identify areas for automation.
Start by defining each stage in your sales funnel, for example, lead generation, qualification, proposal and closing.
Next, have a breakdown of activities per stage like having discovery calls, sending proposals, and scheduling meetings to mention a few.
With this breakdown, analyze each activity and identify repetitive tasks that can be automated. So an example could be sending an automated email after a lead capture or assigning tasks based on lead scoring.
3. Clean your data
When you have inaccurate or incomplete data you can have many missed opportunities, and ultimately a frustrated sales team. For one, your conversion rates would be very low.
This is why an important step in maximizing automation is cleaning data. So before you activate any automation or workflows, dedicate the time to clean your existing data. Eliminate duplicate entries, standardized formats and ensure all contacts are verified.
Again, using the right CRM helps automate this step as a tool like lemlist would automatically verify contacts before adding them to your database and merge any duplicate contacts.
With lemlist you can use AI variables and the prompt library to clean all the necessary data. Simply copy your desired prompt and let lemlist take care of the rest.
4. Create a standarized process
One cause of incorrect data is inconsistency in data types and entries.
So to be able to find user data and not have any errors in your automated workflows, establish clear guidelines for data entry within the CRM. clearly define data fields, standardize naming conventions and set expectations for the data quality you want to have.
So for example, do you save dates as DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY? Setting default attributes for each data type is also a good way to enforce consistency in data entry.
It will also help in getting coherent reports post-campaign.
5. Customize and optimize your automation
While standardization is important, a little customization goes a long way in adding that human touch to your automation. So personalize your content by adding targeted content recommendations for different audience segments.
You can also switch up the flows so for example have three different onboarding flows for new leads. So one could get video content recommendations and another could get blog posts.
What you customize will depend on your business model and brand tone. Plus, you can always track the results and optimize where necessary.
6. Monitor your result and adjust
Like every other sales strategy, effective automation is also data-driven.
So set relevant performance indicators to help you assess the impact of automation on your overall sales performance.
So for example metrics like conversion rates, sales cycle length and customer satisfaction scores. Depending on what results you get, you can adjust the CRM automation to optimize and get even better results over time.
Convert more leads with an automated outreach tool
Again, the most important step in getting CRM automation right is getting the right tools first and this isn’t just your CRM, but also your outreach tool. Your outreach software should offer enough automation especially for generating leads and nurturing them to maximize your sales ROI while smoothly integrating with your CRM.
You can start with the lempire stack where you can find, contact, and convert leads while keeping your CRM in sync.
