CRM Sales Automation is the Key to Efficient Sales Processes
CRM sales automation enables sales teams to automate repetitive, manual tasks to streamline processes and improve organizational productivity. If you’re thinking about leveraging CRM sales automation, you’re not alone. Consider the following adoption statistics sourced from HubSpot:
- 42% of sales teams use a CRM to automate meeting scheduling.
- 40% of sales teams use a CRM for content automation.
- 36% of sales teams use a CRM to automate quote generation.
- 34% of sales teams use a CRM to automate meeting follow-ups. 28% of sales teams use a CRM to automate lead scoring.
The truth is, sales automation is key to sales efficiency. By easily automating time-consuming manual tasks, sales teams are better able to spend their time on value-adding activities. For example, selling! As you read this blog, you’ll discover how much more efficient your sales team and processes will be with the help of CRM sales automation.
Where in the sales process can you implement CRM sales automation?
Luckily, there are many areas of the sales process that can benefit from automation tools and practices. Let’s take a look at three potential areas below.
Record creation and data entry
The process of manually inputting contacts and creating new records takes time and is often riddled with human error. To hasten the creation of and boost the quality of your records, it’s best to use CRM sales automation tools. For example, say a new lead fills out a form to download an educational guide on the ROI of sales enablement technology. Once the lead submits the form, you’ll typically receive an email notifying you of a new lead.
From here, you’ll have to input the new contact information into your CRM. This manual input is likely to cause mistakes during the transition of data into the CRM. However, with CRM sales automation, the lead’s contact information is immediately transferred to the right fields in the CRM once the form is submitted. Thus, leaving you with little headache and ensuring the exact information the lead provided is added into the CRM.
Lead assignment
CRM sales automation is also beneficial when it comes to assigning leads to specific sales reps. In fact, 29% of sales teams use a CRM to automate rep assignments. The best sales automation platforms will allow you to choose specific criteria a lead must meet in order to match up with a certain sales rep.
For instance, imagine you have two sales reps on your team, Sally and Mike. Sally excels at selling pediatric health insurance and Mike is great at closing deals regarding individual health insurance. So when a new lead comes through that matches criteria for pediatric health insurance sales — showing interest in pediatrics or denoting that they have children — this lead will automatically be assigned to Sally. Similarly, when a lead comes through sharing information that they are single and have no children, this lead will be automatically assigned to Mike.
Now, assigning leads is easier than ever and the automation behind it allows your sales team to spend time qualifying, reaching out, and executing actual sales activities!
Activity logging
With all the meetings, calls, and emails sales reps go through on a daily basis it’s understandable that most sales reps do a poor job of logging their activity. However, activity logging is crucial to sales teams as it helps collect the insights necessary to make data-driven selling decisions.
With CRM sales automation, your activity will automatically be logged. This automation enables:
- Tracking a lead’s qualification
- Recognizing which stage of the buyer’s journey a prospect is in
- Automating content creation like follow-up emails
- Staying up to date on sales interactions
Marketing automation vs. CRM sales automation
Often, CRM sales automation is confused with marketing automation. While both are beneficial to sales success, there are a few major differences between the two. For instance, marketing automation tools support the automation of:
- The lead qualification process (MQLs)
- Email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns
- Social media marketing initiatives
Meanwhile, CRM sales automation encompasses activities and goals such as:
- Managing contacts (deduplicating, adding new contacts, and merging contacts)
- Tracking each lead’s status with a visual sales pipeline
- Quote and order management
- Reporting and activity logging
Sales automation efficiently streamlines sales processes
CRM sales automation is key to accurately monitoring and measuring the health of your sales cycle. In order to make improvements, a CRM sales automation tool will allow you to keep track of your most critical KPIs. Only then, will you be equipped to make data-driven decisions to optimize and streamline your sales process. Overall, sales automation fortifies sales teams’ performance by:
Reducing human error
CRM sales automation tools eliminate manual error and ensure that all information and data is up to date and accurate. Having fewer mistakes throughout your sales process creates the opportunity for greater efficiency and enhanced sales performance.
Enabling sales reps to spend more time on value-adding activities
By removing time-consuming tasks, your productivity increases. Without being bogged down by admin activities, you’re able to spend more time doing what you do best — selling!
Simplifying and shortening the sales cycle
CRM sales automation also shortens the sales cycle. With the right automation tools, you can determine where a prospect or lead is in their buyer’s journey. This will allow you to adequately nurture each lead with the right content at the right time. Then, based on the collected data, you are better able to serve prospects and convert them into customers. Thus, the data eliminates the guesswork of figuring out what a prospect needs to motivate them to become a customer.
Final Thoughts
It’s safe to say that if you’re not already leveraging CRM sales automation to simplify your sales process, you’re falling behind your competition. The time to optimize your sales process is now. And automation is one of the most critical ways to do so.
Get in touch with us to begin your sales transformation — request a personalized demo of Prezentor’s sales enablement platform.