How CRM Automation Makes Your Sales Job Easier
A customer relationship management (CRM) system often includes automation features. These features often go underused, as 43 percent of companies report using under half of the features included in their system.
When implemented properly though, CRM automation tools improve sales team productivity, help you recapture sales that would otherwise be lost, provide valuable audience insight, help educate customers to complement sales team efforts and can even score prospective leads for you. It can only mean one thing.
5 Ways CRM Automation Makes Your Sales Team's Job Easier
Potential customers can fall through the cracks if marketing hands off leads to sales manually through email, and sales may not end up with all the information they need on the lead. ittoolbox
So, how can you put CRM Automation to work in your business?
Here's 5 sure-fire ways for building momentum with CRM automation.
Schedule Follow-Up Messages
Given that up to 50 percent of sales go to the vendor who first responds, appropriate follow up is essential in handling qualified leads.
Potential customers can (and do) fall through the cracks if marketing hands off leads to sales manually through email, and sales may not end up with all the information they need on the lead.
A CRM not only lets your sales team quickly look at all customer information, you can also set reminders for follow up communication.
Use CRM automation to send out sales messages automatically on a defined schedule or based on customer action.
Educate Customers (Automatically)
Automated emails are not just for sales messages. You can also use scheduled follow-ups to provide customer education on your product's benefits.
If a customer spends a significant amount of time browsing through products in one product category, messages can provide an overview of uses for the product, how it fits into the customer's life and the unique selling points to separate it from the competition.
A well-educated customer will bring targeted questions to the sales team, instead of just rehashing questions that can be easily answered by reading the product description.
Segment Your Audience
CRM systems handle a significant amount of customer data that's invaluable for figuring out your audience segments.
A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't fit in a sales landscape where customers want relevant, customised messages that they can relate to.
By using customer activity data to segment them into distinct audiences, you can speak to the customers in a way they best respond to.
Whether that's adopting a more informal voice than your typical brand communication on Twitter, or reaching out for a one-on-one phone meeting with potential large customers. CRM automation lets you do that.
Improves Sales Team Productivity
CRM Automation cuts down on the amount of data entry, analysis and scheduling the sales team needs to handle, allowing them to focus on what they do best.
Some tasks are impossible for a human to do at the same speed as the CRM. Analyzing large customer data sets and providing real-time insights into collected data are two examples.
Let your sales team focus on the elements that require the human touch and let the CRM solution do the rest.
Lead Scoring
How much better would it be if you know whether lead you're about to contact is hot or cold?
Lead scoring is a system that calculates the quality of the lead based on several data points.
This tool helps the sales team prioritise the most valuable leads so the time and effort they spend is representative of that lead's value to your business.
With automated lead scoring, your sales team can use this data and other customer information in the CRM to determine the most cost effective way of closing the sale. It can become immediately obvious whether the customer needs more educating and lead nurturing prior to going for the purchase decision, and which sales team member to assign to the lead.
Use all the tools a CRM brings to the table to give your sales department the best shot at converting customers.
CRM Automation tools streamline the sales process and lets your sales team focus more on developing relationships with the customers and closing sales instead of manually tracking follow-up contacts, gathering data and qualifying customers.
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