Ultimate Guide to CRM Automation: 4 Critical Aspects
Routine, manual activities may take up a lot of time of your Sales team’s schedule. Occasionally, contacts will fall through the cracks in your funnel. The time drains vanish when you can automate contact management, lead scoring, deal and pipeline monitoring, and job tracking. Your entire sales process will run more easily with a sales automation CRM.
Table of Contents
In this blog post, we will be discussing CRM automation and Top CRM [Customer Resource Management] automation tools available in the market. Here is the outline that you’ll cover in this article:
Table of Contents
- Introduction to CRM Automation
- Functions of CRM Automation Tools
- Different Aspects that can be Automated
- Top CRM Automation Software Tools
- Understanding Advantages of CRM Automation
- Conclusion
Introduction to CRM Automation
CRM is the acronym for Customer Relationship Management, and it is a process of automating sales and customer service functions. It enables the relationship team to manage and track their customer engagement efforts towards their existing customer and potential new customers.
CRM Automation thus automates redundant customer engagement tasks such as data entry, profile updates, opportunity and leads update, etc. CRM Automation also helps teams focus more on strategic and priority tasks such as making complex decisions, generating insights using modern analytics, etc.
Functions of CRM Automation Tools
CRM tools provide various features to help organizations to manage their customer relationships. We have listed five main functions that companies most commonly use.
1) Contact Management
Contact management is the prime feature that every CRM tool provides. Managing content helps manage customers’ contact data such as name, emails, phones, websites, company name, social profile, etc. The CRM tool should provide a friendly, user-friendly UI to access the contacts and respond quickly to the queries.
2) Lead Management
Lead management functions in CRM tools help salespeople to keep track of their leads. The Leads may include lead tracking, lead contact information, lead identification, lead management, lead turned into an opportunity (lead workflow management), and many more. This function helps salespeople to manage their leads efficiently and makes them up to date.
3) Documentation Management
Sales and marketing involve a lot of documentation, and there is a dire need for a tool to manage all the documentation. The documents can be RFP, sales pitch, a sales record, contract, invoices, etc. It is essential to have this document stored securely and readily available to use when needed.
4) Integration
Integration with other applications is essential as one may need to import and export data from other applications like email integration, calendars, sales report to excel, etc. Email and Calendar integration is essential as it allows the person to keep track of their conversation and enables one-click email based on the events. It also facilitates company-wide Collaboration for the sales team.
5) Reports and Analytics
Reports and analytics is a core functionality of CRM automation that helps optimize sales processes and enables data-driven decision-making. From sales performance analysis to sales forecasting, reports and analytics play an essential role in automating your CRM.
Different Aspects that can be Automated
CRM tools automation has very vague lists of the components that can be automated via the CRM automation tool, and it solely depends on the tool. So let’s have a look at what basic features can be automated using CRM tools.
- Email Campaigns
- Reports
- KPI Dashboards
- Notifications
- Sales
- Invoices
- Quotations
- Welcome Email
- Lead tracking
- Re-engagement
- Tasks
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Top CRM Automation Software Tools
We have seen in the above sections how effective CRM tools are in automating redundant tasks and helping the teams collaborate and maintain customer relationships efficiently.
There are various CRM tools available in the market with their own distinct set of features and customization options. Here, let’s look at the top 5 cloud-based leading CRM tools available in the market.
1) Hubspot CRM
HubSpot CRM is a leading CRM automation integrated tool that provides sales, marketing, and customer service automation functionalities. In addition, HubSpot CRM provides essential basic features such as contact management, database management, social media integration, email integration, etc.
HubSpot CRM has a free edition as well as a starter pack from £38/year. You can find more about pricing here. A detailed guide to HubSpot can be found here.
2) Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce is another leading CRM automation tool that offers exceptional customer relationship solutions using the Sales cloud tool. The sales tool provides basic and advanced functionalities such as contact management, leads and opportunity management, events, documents, and email management.
Salesforce has excellent integration support with third-party software and allows users to collaborate with third-party tools to manage efficiently. The basic plan of Salesforce starts with $25 per user per month is a good starter pack for beginners in CRM automation. You can have a detailed look at the pricing here. A detailed guide for Salesforce can be found here.
3) Monday.com CRM
Monday.com is a project management software, but it has solid features for CRM that enable users to customize and manage their customer relationships, sales, leads, and many more. It has excellent UI and user-friendly drag and drop functionality to create charts, timelines, assign works, etc.
Monday CRM provides a 14-day free trial, and you can see more about pricing here.
4) Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a cloud-based CRM automation platform and offers basic automation features like lead management, deal management, forecasting, activity workflows, and account management.
Zoho CRM standard pricing starts with $12/month/user and can be upgraded as per the requirement. You can find more detail about pricing here.
5) FreshSales
Freshsales is a CRM computerization stage controlled by Freshworks. The apparatus makes an optimal fit for SMBs and mid-market ventures with bundles beginning as low as $18/month. With the functions like occasion following, call following, email mechanization, bargaining the executives, lead scoring, Freshsales offers top-tier CRM robotization arrangements. What makes it more ideal is the versatile amicable application accessible for Android and iOS that empowers deals in a hurry.
Understanding Advantages of CRM Automation
In the above section, we have discussed in detail CRM and its types. In this section, we can look at the benefits one can get from CRM automation.
- Boost Sales and Productivity
- Better Collaboration between Teams
- Better Visualization
- Excellent Customer Experience and Support
1) Boost Sales and Productivity
CRM is a tedious task, and it may contain some redundant tasks that take ample time from one’s productive day. Automating those tasks can boost productivity and increase sales as the person can focus more on productive things. Some of the redundant sales activities such as data entry, data updates, call logs, and sending emails and follow-ups can effectively be automated to save time and effort.
2) Better Collaboration between Teams
CRM Automation tool allows you to integrate between teams and third-party tools, thereby allowing effective Collaboration from various teams and subject areas. Also, integrating various teams into one dashboard helps others see the overall pictures and pitch in for the advice/solution/blockers, etc.
3) Better Visualization
Most CRM tools are very well equipped with Visualization that generates an excellent insight from the data and creates detailed analytical reports and AI-powered sales forecasting. With the introduction of AI, CRM tools are getting intelligent and helping the salesperson with powerful insights to prioritize leads, opportunities and make complicated decisions.
4) Excellent Customer Experience and Support
CRM Automation helps salespeople keep track of everything like sales, leads, quotations, etc., which helps them interact with the customer in a timely fashion, thereby creating a long-lasting expression on the customer.
Also, easy accessibility to prospect data such as location, social engagement, and demographics helps sales teams to communicate better with prospective customers. It is easier for sales teams to personalize every conversation that improves customer experience.
Conclusion
In this article, you were introduced to CRM Automation, functions of various CRM Automation Tools, and some aspects of the process that can be automated. You also learned about top CRM Automation tools in the industry and the advantages of implementing CRM Automation in your workflow.
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