A typical day in most sales department offices involves routine activities like writing emails and follow-ups, finding and tracking leads, and creating reports among others. While all these are necessary tasks that contribute towards the overall success of a business, they could easily consume a sales rep’s entire day. What this means is that the rep hardly finds adequate time to do the valuable tasks that matter the most – connecting with leads, building relationships and partnerships, and making actual sales. In fact, research shows that the average salesperson today spends only about a third of their time selling directly to leads.
Has the development and profitability of your business stalled due to poor sales growth? One of the easiest ways to get out of this frustrating situation is by automating as many customer relation management (CRM) tasks as you possibly can. These are the often repetitive, mundane activities that sales reps carry out nearly every day including emailing, lead scoring and prioritization, writing reports, and invoicing.
In this post, we show you three key ways in which you can apply automation for CRM tasks. Worth noting is that businesses which invest in automation record improved chances (54% higher) of achieving their sales goals compared to those that don’t. If you wish to join the league of the former, here’s how:
Use email templates to speed up email creation
A large section of sales rep consider writing emails from scratch as one of the key factors to successful email campaigns. Most also think that leads are capable of sniffing email templates which of course can be detrimental to a business.
And yes, we agree with them to some degree.
However, it’s worth noting that when done properly and using the right tools, pre-written emails can be a game-changer for anyone looking to expand their business fast. Templates help to free up loads of time and also enable you to reach many leads in a very short time.
Some tools allow you to create email templates from scratch that you can then use to easily send numerous personalized emails using one template. These can be used for your welcome, thank you, FAQ, and check-in emails. As if that is not enough, these services work in conjunction with other tools like CRMs and email services to make it easier for you to send emails to your saved contacts. For example, this OroCRM Cloud App integration by PieSync allows you to use OroCRM with other cloud apps in a plethora of different ways. You won’t find many time-savers like this anywhere today.
Lead scoring
One of the prerequisites of successful customer relations and the larger sales strategy is knowing how to prioritize available leads. A study by Eloqua shows that adopting a lead scoring system can help increase a business’s close rates by up to 30%.
You don’t want to mistakenly ignore high-quality leads while chasing low-quality ones that add little to no value to your business.
When done manually, lead scoring consists of scouring and sifting a lot of data including email conversations and listening to recorded calls. The aim is to try and uncover the most appropriate leads to pursue. While the entire process is crucial and one that’s completed with good intentions, it’s often very time-consuming.
Save significant amount of time by adding eCommerce automation to your lead prioritization process. With a tool like OroCRM, you can assign points to different leads based on the type of action they take when visiting your business. Some of the actions to consider here are subscribing to your newsletter, clicking product links, opening emails, or commenting on social media accounts among other behaviours. Thereafter, the CRM automatically compiles all these points to give you a 360-degree view of each customer including their journey and experience with your business.
In the end, you’re able to find the most qualified leads that are likely to buy from or hire your company. This way, you can focus more on this group as you try to create stronger connection and increase your chances of doing business with them.
Reporting
As an entrepreneur, one of your most important tasks is to keep tabs of everything that’s taking place in your business. This can range from tracking the performance of your team to investigating how customers are engaging with your business and making purchases. An effective way to gather this information is by having a reporting system or strategy.
If you’re like most business owners that are yet to automate their sales processes, you’ll likely settle for traditional methods of reporting such as using spreadsheets or even physical records such as files and notebooks. Expectedly, these methods not only pose major risks of losing crucial business information but also results in massive time wastage.
The good news is that reporting can be automated quite efficiently and, in most cases, at a very affordable cost. For example, a proven CRM software can assist you in monitoring your team’s performance in real time and also provide you with information about any action taken by your contacts during a given period. You can also use free tools such as Google Analytics that gives you insights on visitor behaviour on your website or ecommerce platform.
Conclusion
If your sales team is spending all its day entering data, updating reports manually, and doing the same repetitive tasks, it’s likely that your business is paying a very high opportunity cost. Luckily, you can put this to an end by investing in automation. A great place to start is by acquiring an effective CRM or any other related tool to help you manage both your team and the leads. Automation for CRM will enable you to create and send emails, help you target the right customers for your business, and minimize human errors in your reports.
