Why automate? The quick answer is to minimize human effort and interference while also increasing efficiency.
Being efficient and having time to innovate is a boon in this era of digitalization. Every business is trying to approach the same customer set with the same aggressive strategy. If you have some additional time to experiment and learn a trick that will make your business stand out; that’s a dream.
Now, the second question is, is it possible to effectively automate tasks within your sales team? Not only is it highly recommended, but also convenient to do the same. With advanced CRM systems, it has become elementary for businesses to automate their sales.
Here are six practical and proven ways to improve sales by automating your CRM workflows:
1. Ensure that your business’s web-based leads are contacted instantly
Leads generated from the web are like assets that no business should miss out on. However, it gets tricky because of the fleeting nature of this whole process. The lead comes online with a query and looks for answers that solve his purpose. If your business doesn’t attend to his question instantly, some other business will be happy to do it.
Like the old saying, “hit the iron when it’s hot,” you have to attend to the lead when he needs most. The urgency of the situation is at the highest at that very moment and might subdue with time. Researchers have shown that leads that have been attended to instantly are 20 times more likely to convert than the ones who are not.
The chances of the lead buying your offering are highest when he is the one who has come to you with a need. However, you will need to have a very proactive CRM system and efficient salespeople to work with.
2. Start automating follow-up calls on email campaigns
An email campaign could be about anything. It could be about a product launch, a demo, a meeting, or just an awareness campaign. However, it is never going to be easy for an ideal lead to open up your mail as religiously as you would want them to. The reason behind this isn’t necessarily the lack of good product or active campaigning.
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The reason is the hectic lifestyle and the digital crowd that the lead is a part of. This is why your leads must be thoroughly followed up with and convinced into reading your valuable emailers. On a side note, a business should always be cautious about the effort and time a busy lead invests on them. This is why businesses need to provide clear and informative data without diverting the lead.
There are a lot of CRMs that integrate with email campaigning facilities. This software’s allow the user to check which leads have opened their emails and other crucial details.
- See to that, that the email campaigns are reported in those easy to function CRMs.
- Eventually, see which people in your contact lists have opened your email outreaches.
- You can also push all the contacts into the dialing software that is installed with your flexible CRM.
- And from here on, let your sales representative dial-up each number and then connect them to a responsible representative.
3. Call fast by calling directly from the contacts page:
Shuffling between different windows is not only inefficient but highly time-consuming too. This habit can hurt you when you are a human sales representative who has to deal with multiple calls by the end of the day. One can make use of the CRM contacts window and make all the calls from here. One can also avail facilities like hold, mute etc. on this homepage. This is one of the most time-saving ways to boost CRM productivity.
4. Make sure that missed calls don’t turn into missed leads
Most of the recent CRMs in the market are designed in a manner that they capture incoming leads 24*7. The reason behind this is simple; the digital world never sleeps.
This facility, however, doesn’t entail that you do not take a holiday or not be occupied on another call at a given point of time. You can always miss a call during off-hours, holidays, shutdowns, or when your representative is attending to someone else. So what happens to these calls that were missed? Does this mean that it is okay to lose the lead by assuming that they moved somewhere else?
The answer is, absolutely not! As a business, make sure you attend to all the calls that your CRM receives unless a lead says otherwise. This is why your business must have a workflow to attend to such calls. This will ensure you do not miss out any lead opportunity.
- Your telephone system should be able to recognize if the call is from a number from within your database.
- Your CRM system should be able to raise a ticket for the same and send you an alert into your inbox.
5. Send voice messages to your entire contact list at once
There can be times when you want to remind your contacts of a specific date; it could be the last date for registration or payment. In times like these, you must use a configurable IVR to structure a message. This can then be broadcasted to everyone in your contact list, in just a click. This is highly effective as it saves a lot of time and effort.
6. Make use of sticky agents to customize relationships with leads
There can be situations when a lead wants to get in touch with his or her specific sales representative. This could be because of the personal equation or the trust benefit provided by the sales representative. This is another method of successful sales management that has not changed in years.
So how does this connection happen? Do your sales representative provide their number for their leads to get in touch with them? A simple workflow can help in guiding a lead to the assigned representative when they call. The system can map a ticket number to a representative, and the call can be diverted to them when the ticket number calls back.