6 ways to transform your CRM with automation

If you’ve chosen the best customer relationship management tool (CRM) for your team, added in your contacts, and started managing your leads—great work! Now that the hard work is done, you can make it even easier on yourself and get the most our of your CRM by implementing automation.

So, let’s take a look at 6 ways you can transform your CRM with automation and save yourself heaps of time..

Automate adding contacts to your CRM

Imagine a world where your CRM is always up-to-date with the latest information on your leads and contacts. A world where you don’t have to worry about keeping your CRM up-to-date because it’s happening automatically.

Well, that world is here! Now you can automate adding or updating contacts in your CRM from all of your sources—whether from a new form submission, an email in your inbox, or a business card—with just one click.

Here’s some examples of automations in Zapier that will do this for you.

Automate lead management

Follow-ups are important to any customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. After all, if you don’t keep in touch with your clients, they’re more likely to forget about you and look elsewhere when they need what you have to offer.

One of the biggest time sinks is lead management. It’s easy to get bogged down in manually tracking and assigning leads when there are a million other things on your plate. Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can automate the process.

Here are some tips to make your CRM work smarter, not harder:

• Automate lead scoring by creating fields that indicate each potential client’s level of interest in your product or service. In this way, you’ll be able to sort through your leads with ease, quickly identifying which ones require further attention and which ones can be more easily ignored.
• Nurture leads by setting up automated email campaigns that reach out at different stages of the buying cycle. This will save you hours of manual labor and keep clients moving through the funnel towards purchase—rather than getting lost along the way and ultimately churning out completely.
• Assign leads to specific people within your organization based on their interests and strengths. If a certain contact has already shown expertise in a certain area, it makes sense for them to own that vertical moving forward—otherwise, you might as well get them working on something else!
• Filter out any leads who aren’t qualified for what you have to offer or aren’t interested in doing business with your company at this time—it’s important not to waste time or energy on fruitless endeavors!

Automate emails and email reminders

The best CRMs help you keep track of your clients, but they don’t stop there. You can use your CRM to automatically reach out to your leads and customers, so you never miss an opportunity to build relationships with them.

For example:

Send new customers a welcome email

When you first capture a lead or get a new customer, you want to make sure they get a response right away. Sending a welcome email with info about their purchase, your company, extra documents, important links, or contact info can improve their satisfaction and keep them coming back for more.

If you don’t want to email customers as soon as you’ve added them to your CRM, you can use a delay step to automatically email them, say, 3 days later. Or, you could use a filter to just send the email when your leads are at a specific stage in your CRM (like when the deal has closed).

Alternatively you can set up a voice call or SMS message to be sent automatically at specific points in your lead cycle. If you have more specific needs, like limiting or delaying follow-up, we also offer filters and delays so that you can customize exactly how those messages are sent.

Automate task assignment

Since we have been using our CRM in Airtable, we have come to understand the importance of automating task assignment.

With automation, you can keep your team in the loop automatically. You can connect your CRM to your task and chat apps and keep everyone informed of progress on projects. If you have new leads, automation will make sure they’re added as new projects or tasks in your team’s project management or task app. Automation can also add new projects or tasks when contacts are added to your CRM or when leads reach a new stage.

Automation makes sure nothing falls through the cracks!

Here’s some examples:

Integrate your CRM with social media

Social media is a fantastic way to connect with your customers—if you use it properly!

Social media automation makes processes easier, faster, and less prone to mistakes. For example, if your company sells a product that requires assembly, you could integrate Twitter with your CRM so that whenever someone tweets about the product saying they need help assembling it, the message goes directly into their account in the CRM. That way when a customer service representative logs into your CRM, they’ll already have this information at their fingertips. Not only does this make things more efficient for both you and your customers but it also helps minimize errors by having all the necessary information right where the representative needs it without having to do any extra searching or data entry.

Integration with social media platforms can help you automate tasks across your organization as well as streamline workflows within each department.

If a customer tweet needs some kind of follow-up or additional action from another department within your company (such as sending them an email or creating an order in fulfillment), then these tasks can be easily integrated into workflows that are already established in your CRM. This eliminates extra steps for employees and reduces error rates by making sure everything is being handled efficiently via automated integrations rather than through manual actions that might leave room for human error or misinterpretation of task details (like sending an email instead of making an order).

Set up automated reporting

We’re not fans of repetitive tasks. We’re even less of a fan of time-wasting repetitious tasks like manually generating reports in the same CRM tool, over and over again. Thankfully, there is an easy solution to this problem.

Automated reports are the wave of the future and they’re here to make your life easier, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first glance. For someone like who tends to lack focus, it’s easy to get sidetracked with little things that aren’t really important, but really just take up time. An automated report can stop this from happening by giving you something else to think about while it just quietly runs in the background.

If you’re still unsure about taking the plunge into automated reporting, let me outline some reasons why you should consider using them:

• You’ll be able to save lots of time by not having to go through each individual contact record individually anymore—every step will be done for you automatically!
• Your reports will generate faster than ever before! Generating regular reports used to take hours—now reporters can have their charts in minutes. This means they can spend more time perusing excel spreadsheets on Facebook and less time staring at database tables trying to figure out if columns A and B match across records (spoiler alert: they don’t).
• Reports are generated immediately after a new contact record is added or updated. This means lower latency between data collection and report generation which means more accurate information for your analysts!
• If there are any problems with the data accumulated or reported in your system, errors will be found much sooner than they would otherwise be caught.

In summary, there are many ways you can automate tasks and processes in your CRM

Some of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks are repetitively answering emails, tracking down invoices, filing expense reports—you know the ones. And while you can hire an assistant to handle these tasks for you, that costs money: salary, benefits, etc.

Automation is a great way to take your efficiency to the next level without having to worry about shelling out cash for a new employee.

The best part of automation is that it doesn’t have to be difficult nor does it require a lot of technical expertise: there are tons of pre-built apps out there already designed specifically for your CRM or other business software—tools like Zapier can connect your systems together so you don’t even have to write any code yourself!

By combining automation with a strategic workflow, you can streamline almost any aspect of your operation: sending emails on autopilot saves time; using data from one system on another improves accuracy; getting automatic updates reduces human error; saving money by not doing something yourself makes everyone happy; and automating mundane tasks frees up time so that you have more resources available for other things.

There are a myriad of ways you can automate common processes in your business software, and especially your CRM but this list should get you started thinking about how easy it really is!

Ready to work with us?

1. Join our Facebook group NocodeVA where we share in-depth content and trainings on automation and the latest no-code tools

2. Book a Power Hour where we will hang out on Zoom, share screens, focus on your automation plan, problem solve any tech issues you have, map your workflows out or just brush up on your automation skills. The choice of what you spend the hour on is yours

3. Sign up for interactive Zapier or Airtable training. The training will help you to run your business better and faster.

4. Work with us on a 1:1 basis to create bespoke business automations specific to your workflows. Email us at info@amsuk.co