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How To Apply Automation To Your CRM Sales Processes

Is your business experiencing rapid growth and you’re therefore looking for ways to free up your time but still remain productive? One of the most effective strategies to achieve this balance is to automate your most repetitive tasks and processes to ensure that maximum focus goes to only those that need a personal touch. When it comes to the sales process, automation can help to enhance several key tasks like customer communication, lead management, financial management, and customer support among others.

Customer communication

Worrying statistics show that the average sales person today spends only about a third of their working day doing what they’re needed to do – selling. The rest of their time is spent on other trivial tasks, chief among them being communication with both customers and other team members via email, social media, or phone calls.

While you cannot undermine the importance of good communication in the success of the sales process, you’ll reckon that it can be time-consuming especially if not planned for properly.

So, how do you ensure you’re keeping in touch with prospects, customers, and your team members but still actively sell your products and services? The first step is to identify the channel you use most frequently when communicating. Do you spend a lot of your time on social media or are phone calls your most preferred mode of communication?

To effectively use your time on whatever communication channel you rely on, automation has to play a central role. For example, you could choose to automate your emailing by using a combination of autoresponder tools and email templates of the messages you send out often like the welcome and thank you emails. A few popular tools you can use here include Aweber, Convertkit, and GetResponse.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to cut down on the time you spend on social media, you might consider using autoposters and related tools to schedule and publish content on your profiles. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer are a good place to start here.

You can also automate your calls by using software like CallRail or RingCentral to record all your calls. This way, you do not need to make notes or multitask when making calls as this can mean more time wasted on the phone.

Lead management

One of the primary aspects of running a successful business is having a sales pipeline that works at optimal levels at all times, especially when you hire sales reps for commission only. What this means is that at any one time, there are people considering using its products (prospects), others inquiring about them (leads), and finally those in the process of purchasing them (customers). How well you manage all these groups determines how much success you enjoy in the end.

For starters, you need to gauge the level of interest that a prospect or lead has showed in your products and services. This process which is known as lead scoring helps you determine how much effort and resources you need to invest in individuals looking to buy from you. For example, you can decide to use retargeting ads on leads that visit your checkout page but don’t complete the purchase. The same effort may not be recommended for anyone that bounced back from your site after only spending less than five seconds on it.

With a good CRM tool, you can track and analyze activities of everyone visiting your online business based on the actions they take while there. Use this information to create a sound sales action plan – whether for nurturing prospects and leads into buying customers or for increasing the number of repeat buyers.

Improve other common business sales tasks

On top of the more technical sales functions like the two we’ve covered above, it’s also advisable to automate the regular administrative tasks including the following:

Invoicing

The ultimate goal of running a business is to close as many deals as possible and take home maximum profits. You can now automate how you get paid by using advanced invoicing tools or CRMs that automatically sends invoices to your clients once the deal is updated as ‘closed’.

Reporting

Reports generation can be incredibly cumbersome when completed manually, and especially when a lot of data is involved. The good thing is that you can use CRM tools to automatically collect, group, tabulate, and represent data. In addition to making your work easier, reports generated using tools are less prone to inaccuracies caused by human errors.

Data entry

Automate how you enter and sort your prospect and customer data in your business database. With a CRM or related tools, you can easily maintain the same level of consistency and accuracy which is a lot difficult to achieve when doing the tasks manually.

Which areas of your business are you planning to automate to boost your CRM sales processes? We’d love to hear your feedback,

This post contains affiliate links. Affiliate disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases from Amazon.com and other Amazon websites.

Written by Nat Sauteed

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