CRMs are among the most important tools business owners use to store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage various marketing campaigns. However, if you want to get more from your CRM software, you have to take advantage of its automation capabilities in-built right into most CRMs. 

Integrating data from your sales and marketing teams is a very complicated job, especially if it is done manually. The only way you can effectively achieve seamless and real-time integration of data between sales and marketing is through automation. Today’s blog post will discuss the benefits of automation and how you can take advantage of it to get the best out of your CRM. Let’s dive in!

Benefits of automation

1.  Boosts the efficiency of your teams

Having to manually input data between different apps is a tedious task that most sales and marketing people hate doing. If you want your teams to be more efficient, you need to eliminate such tasks through automation. Studies show that 27% of salespeople spend an hour or more on data entry. 

Inputting data manually also leads to many errors in the data, which could eventually affect every other process that will use that data. 

2.  Enables your team to focus on non-repetitive tasks

Using automation will relieve your sales and marketing people from most repetitive tasks, such as data entry tasks, and let them focus on other exciting tasks that require critical thinking and human judgment. 

3.  Better customer experience 

When your sales and marketing teams are relieved from the tedious and repetitive tasks like data entry, they will have more time to attend to the customer. But remember, when customers are given more time and priority whenever they have issues, their experience with the business gets better. 

Customers will also get more prompt and accurate feedback, which is another indicator of a great customer experience. So, if you want your customers to have a memorable experience with your brand, taking advantage of automation is the way to go. 

How to get started with CRM automation 

The most recent marketing automation and CRM platforms have made it easier than ever before to use their automation functionalities. You can get started by making a few strategic changes that will help you achieve a more efficient sales pipeline pretty fast. Here is how you can get started. 

Company segmentation 

One of the first things you need to start with is organizing your contacts and categorizing them according to the companies they belong to. Most of the contacts usually have details of their companies or at least an email with the company domain. Some CRMs can recognize this automatically, whereas some do not.  If your CRM doesn’t do this automatically, you may have to do it yourself. 

Contract assignment 

One of the capabilities that automation brings to the table is the ability to automatically assign contacts based on the company the individual belongs to. With auto-assignment, leads are assigned to the right sales team member, which in the end improves their productivity and customer experience. While setting automation in your CRM, don’t forget to enable the auto-assignment setting so that you take advantage of the benefits it offers. 

Categorizing contacts by lifecycle stage 

Another major functionality that automation brings to your CRM is automatically grouping contacts into various categories based on their stage in the customer life cycle. Before creating the automations, you need to define the different customer lifecycle stages to allow the software to automatically categorize contacts based on their stage. 

For each stage, you need to define the actions a user has to make to qualify to be in a certain stage. For example, you may choose to place all users that download one of your free e-books into the marketing qualified lead category. The good news is that you can later make changes to these rules if there are some changes in customer behavior.

When the rules are clear, the software will automatically move the contacts from one stage to another based on their actions while using your website or application. 

Enable sales notifications 

You also have to create an automation that notifies the right salesperson when a lead assigned to them takes specific actions. This will help your sales reps to monitor leads with a high score whenever they take action and possibly offer them real-time support whenever the need arises. 

It also allows them to have personalized interaction with the leads because they are aware of all the previous actions they took while using the site. These notifications will also give your sales reps an idea of when to reach out to the high potential lead to speed up the process of turning them into potential customers. 

Partner with a marketing automation pro 

If you want to take advantage of all the automation functionalities in your CRM, it is best to work with a pro who can help you out. Getting expert assistance is essential, especially to large organizations that have extensive contacts that make their sales pipelines more complex. 

Automation professionals can also create custom automation to drive results based on the specific needs of your business. Of course, bringing on board a marketing automation expert involves incurring an extra cost, but the rewards you will get down the road are worth the investment.