How CRM Automations Help You Save Work and Increase the Conversion Rate
We explain to you why CRM automations are so important and which CRM automations we fundamentally always recommend setting up.
- What are CRM automations?
- What’s the difference between CRM and Marketing Automation?
- Why is the automation of CRM processes important for companies?
- What are the most important functions of a CRM automation tool?
- What are the best CRM automations that should be implemented in the company?
- Examples of successful CRM automation in practice
- Which providers of CRM automations on the market are there?
- Conclusion
Whoever uses a CRM system in today's time is no longer a pioneer. It may still be possible for there to be companies that use their customer data in Excel spreadsheets and telephone from them, but this should rather be the exception than the rule. One thing that is still underestimated today, however, is CRM automations.
But why should CRM automations be so important in the first place? Where do CRM and Marketing automations differ? And what are CRM automations in general anyway? Together with our guest author Moritz Michael Mannheims, we would like to answer these and possible further questions in the course of this article. Once you are convinced that you should also introduce CRM automations in your company, we would like to help you directly and recommend some tools for CRM automations free of charge and explain to you which CRM automations we fundamentally always recommend setting up.
What are CRM automations?
Assuming that the question what a CRM is in the first place, is already directly clarified for you, then you have probably answered the explanation to this question yourself. If you thought: „With CRM automations, it is probably about the automation of all possible processes and solving problems of manual care within a CRM like lead assignment, assignment and the creation of reportings“, you are on the right track.
A CRM automation is simply and easily an automatic execution of an otherwise manual CRM process. This includes everything that takes place in the CRM or even processes that are prepared in the CRM and are played out or terminated elsewhere. The best and simplest examples for this are e.g. the automated creation of deals / opportunities after the receipt of fresh leads, recurring notifications to the sales staff or even the automatic sending of mails after certain triggers within the CRM.
What’s the difference between CRM and Marketing Automation?
A very obvious question after explaining CRM automations is „Where exactly lies the difference to Marketing automations?“ The easiest answer is that there is none. Marketing automations describe known automation with the help of special software to prioritize marketing tasks and then automate them. The automations save time and budget and work more efficiently. Often, marketing automations are carried out in cooperation with the company's CRM or even directly in this.
So one could say that Marketing automations often are CRM automations, however not all CRM automations directly are Marketing automations. A CRM automation affects all processes within and in cooperation with the CRM and accordingly everything that happens in and around the CRM in the marketing area. However, there are of course other aspects in the large CRMs, which are not directly Marketing automations.
CRM tools like Hubspot or Salesforce also offer areas where the service or even the accounting can work. Here, automations can also be useful to make the workflow of these departments more efficient. The best example for CRM automations that are not necessarily Marketing automations can be found in one of the core areas that use a CRM, the Sales.
Sales and Marketing teams do indeed often work hand in hand and are even merged into one team in some companies, but a marketer and a salesperson still have one or two individual requirements to the CRM. Many of these requirements can be automated. But not only the working processes of both areas can be different and then automated differently.
Both areas can also want KPIs, partly only for certain campaigns, or special CRM functions for which one thing is needed and that are certain values that are associated with all CRM objects or object groups in the CRM. And what does it again need for this? Automations!
Why is the automation of CRM processes important for companies?
No matter, how modern, value-oriented or even successful a company may be, to save really unnecessary costs and to increase efficiency in a suitable frame, is an important factor for every company. CRM automations here are not only a small factor, to relieve work from sales. Done right and adapted to the special requirements of every Sales team, CRM automations can save a considerable part of work and contribute significantly to leads being approached as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Who uses the CRM for several teams will not only save time and money here, but can also initiate totally new processes between the team . A simple and often used Use Case that brings together Sales & CRM Marketing Automation, there are Mailings.
The Sales team usually maintains their pipeline and shifts the leads into the corresponding funnel phases. In the background, CRM workflow automations are running, which record the date of entry into the phase and also how many interactions there have been since then and when the last one was. Now the lead first stays in the phase, because he doesn't answer any more and the responsible employee unfortunately loses sight of the lead.
Then, after a defined number of days in the phase and days without interaction, a Marketing CRM automation intervenes, which sends a personalized email to the lead. This is now an e-mail automation directly within the CRM
This e-mail then fills fields again, which contain information and thus data about the dispatch date and Co. Based on this data, the lead is then possibly played with new e-mails or the Sales team gets a task, that they should call here? The lead is to be evaluated as „dead“ by the company's definition? No problem, due to the collected data, the lead can now be set to „Lost“ according to the desired criteria through a CRM Data Automation.
An example of a Hubspot workflow
This Use Cases here is already one of the most efficient and time-saving workflow automations in CRM. In a later section, we will cover further automations and workflows that can make life much easier or even release completely new possibilities. But what this simple Use Case shows: The automation of your own CRM can, no matter how many teams use it actively, be a real enrichment for every company with CRM in use.
What are the most important functions of a CRM automation tool?
To clarify this question, the first question is important: „What is a CRM automation tool?“. The question what CRM automations are, we already clarified here, but what are the tools behind it? And how do they work?
Basically, it is the case with the known CRMs like Hubspot Sales Hub, Pipedriveor also Salesforce Sales Cloud, that there is usually no need for separate tools for the automations. The CRMs themselves often offer exactly this inside the CRM with the function „workflow“ or simply „automation“. And the best thing about it? You don't need a fully trained developer for many of the basic and so helpful automations. Only an employee who brings time and desire to work into logic connections. These are mostly what the automations inside the CRMs are. It is only a logical query of activities that need a trigger, that means a Why / when? and then the steps that follow.
Can everyone build this? In principal yes, but you should bring some frustration tolerance, enjoy tinkering and also good, logical and rational thinking. The reason why big companies or some Sales agencies still have their own Operations or CRM Manager who can't develop, is however, that the amount of functions, no matter how simple they are, still require quite a lot of time to get used to and really use. In addition, you have to keep an eye on the automations and the logic in the interaction of these. Automations can also hinder each other and in worst case slow down or even crash the system. Someone here should therefore know what he is doing and appropriately know his system well.
With the automations directly in the CRM a lot can be achieved. One can capture Data in CRM based on the actions of leads or teams, send mail, perform calculations, send internal notifications to certain employees or also trigger tasks through the actions of one team at another team.
The importance of the functions of course strongly depends also always on which company / product the CRM is used for and by which departments. Do very critical processes in the CRM are displayed, their delay someone from the management team or even the executive board should be informed about? Then is the structure of alarm notifications necessary. The system can not only inform the sales team about internal notifications, but also external contacts. Accordingly, it doesn't matter whether the executive board is in the system or not, they can receive the alarm message.
What are the best CRM automations that should be implemented in the company?
The basic functions of CRM automations were already described here as well as the one or the other Use Case. But of course there are many more specific application possibilities. Especially in combination with certain interfaces and corresponding tools like Make or Zapier, the one or the other completely new option for your own Sales system arises.
Here are some Use Cases and its composition:
1. The automatic creation of deals
That it is not necessary to import the new leads manually in today's time, is already known and a very simple automation. Forms that are integrated on LPs ensure directly that the leads fly directly into the CRM with all important information. In the Hubspot example, the leads are now only introduced as a contact. But what doe the Sales want to work with? They want to work in a pipeline and in deals. But these have to be created first. This is of course done quickly and easily by workflow.
Some sales teams see it as useful to create the deals themselves, but it only costs time. And also the argument „not every lead shall be a deal“ is not counting here, because also this process can be adjusted according to the own wishes that the manual work simply costs time. The implementation is simple. One thing that is needed is:
- The trigger, that says that this lead should become a deal. : This trigger can, when every lead is a deal, also be directly linked to the form for lead acquisition. Alternatively, it is triggered by actions from the Sales team or per field input automatically.
- Then, the step „create dataset“ has to follow. Here the deal is created: This step can either be made directly or is lead by „If/Then branchings. Those branchings make sense if there are different pipelines or the deal is sorted into different deal phases by certain parameters. Of course also these parameters can be taken as trigger and one can build an own workflow for every phase and every new pipeline. What is important here: at the end, one can set the setting for the linking of the deal with matching company and contact. Here, everything has to be seen according to the wishes and requirements of one’s own CRM and the working processes.
- Then, the workflow can be finished or follows the adoption of contact or provison of properties for the deal. In Hubspot, also this step can happen directly with the action „dataset create“.
2. Automatic Losting
A important basis, so that the leads are properly approached by the salespeople and there is a clean pipeline, are rules for this same pipeline. These should be adapted individually to the product / products or to a branch.
This includes about a rule, when a lead is definitely to be set as „lost“. Besides the concrete reasons that can come up during the conversation, often it makes sense that a maximum number of unsuccessful contact attempts are defined here. So a rule could be: „If a lead cannot be reached 3 time by phone, 2 time by personal email and once by automated marketing email, he is regarded as lost.“
If there are such rules, which are based on clear values, that are recorded in the CRM, the corresponding leads cannot only first automatically addressed by email, but directly set on „lost“.
- First, one has to see which triggers will trigger the „lost“. The number of call attempts? The sent mails? The time without activity at the lead? One now has to look if all these factors are deposited in the CRM in such a way that the system can work with it. Best example for this are leads, that can buy several products and get a deal for every product. The corresponding activity information have to be clearly in the deal or taggable per deal for the CRM. Otherwise the automation cannot differentiate the deals and pushes the wrong or both deals to Lost.
- After that, these triggers are set on the corresponding data record level. After this, the deal then only has to be moved to „lost“ in the automation. There are several KPI-related reasons why a lead can be set to „lost“? Then a differentiation clearly makes sense. Here, it is often useful to create a separate automation for each of these reasons.
At the end of each of these automations, it may make sense to record further information. So, data / properties should be set in the workflow. For different workflows, so e.g. which have set the lead to „lost“ and the reason for the „lost“. Also, the date of the shifting of the lead can be set here, if it is not already somewhere else in the system.
Examples of successful CRM automation in practice
As Hubspot Solutions Partner of Hubspot, we at PMI GmbH with our Operations team have the pleasure to take over the automation of CRMs regularly. Thereby we have defined an own Blueprint for our Sales customers, that we support long-term and actively in Sales.
Hereby we always ensure first for the basics, which help in our opinion every CRM instance. The automated creation of deals belongs to this just as the calculation of all relevant KPIs for us like the Lead2Sales Time or the different Conversions Rates. After that, follow branch and project-specific automations, for the transmission of CRM data in other tools or automations that track, implement the set pipeline rules automatically or send a message in case of non-compliance.
The procedure is always quite similar:
First, the customer, his products and the branch have to be understood. This point is important, because one will have automations in mind with the experience and the knowledge about the system, that the customer does not know. To introduce these sensibly, has to know exactly, with whom one is working and what is it all about.
After that, the current CRM is looked at and existing automations are seen as well as the working process within the CRM of all involved parties. What also is important to remember, who takes care of the CRM and possibly sets new automations or integrations long-term. This party must be especially involved in the automation process and the automations as well as the coherences of these must be documented well for this group.
If everything was understood correctly and one knows the current processes of all groups, then now the wishes of these have to be asked for and even input, when wished, has to be given. So one creates a clear list with automations, which are wished per party and in total. As the technical part of this process, it is important that one always stays on the desired end processes and focuses on the result of these as long as one is in the discussion with all groups.
Not everyone has a deep understanding for IT topics and logical connections of processes, simply also because it is not the job of the parties. That is why one should also mostly not do an excursion into the technical implementation in this round and with all groups that are not involved in the implementation. Here, it often makes sense that one takes up the wished result, gives directly input and at the end tells all involved persons what they have to do to work in the process.
Then it goes to the realization. Hereby, the mental focus always has to answer the following questions: Is the process for the trigger of the process already automatic as possible? Is it easily understandable? Are automations getting in each other’s way? Are there data, which maybe would be sensible, when they are held by the process, even when they were not panned yet?
As soon as everything is standing, the review round starts. This can, especially in case of experimental automations or own ideas, also like to happen during the process. Simply, to show exactly these automations and to alter these possibly already before finishing the rest or to remove them. The review round shows, that all wishes are covered and all participants are satisfied? Perfect.
Now the control processes for the system and the compliance with the rules only have to be handed over to the corresponding contact persons and possibly still important information have to be documented and all parties can start.
Which providers of CRM automations on the market are there?
Basically, the automations take place in the big CRM providers in the CRM. Hubspot Sales Hub, Pipedrive and Salesforce Sales Cloud for example all have subareas, where the automations can be created directly through simple logics connection and if/then queries. The functions are not enough? The CRMs also partly offer that external tools or Java/HTML codes can be included within the automations.
Who e.g. uses Hubspot and has booked here the Professional or even Enterprise offers Marketing, Sales and/ or Operations Hub, has a very powerful automation tool at hand.
But what when the CRM does not offer any automations or if an integration of a tool without direct interfaces should be part of the automation? Also this is no problem and also possible without a developer. Is this one available, then the before mentioned option for code inclusion could already be enough. Easier and without Coding Skills then with the tools make (zuvor Integromat) and Zapier. These two tools are among the most known and successful applications in matters of API connection and automation.
Zapier in Application
Make in Application
Both work almost identically. What distinguishes them is mainly the offer of predefined or already stored software tools and the handling when building the automation. While Zapier is a kind of text form, Make is a bit like a construction kit. Here, one connects colorful symbols and shifts these simply to the right place and connects the individual actions of the automation like streets in Sims City. The decisive criteria for an easy implementation of automation, that the CRM cannot, both tools cover therefore.
Conclusion
CRM automations don't have to be witchcraft. Some of them seem so small and yet can have a huge effect on work relief and efficiency in the long run. Which automations make sense is usually very individual and also a matter of available tools and also budgets, but some basics always have a positive effect for service, marketing and/ or sales.
Having a CRM today is no longer the first big step, but rather the standard. Whoever now wants to move forward and turn the next possible adjustment screw in his company should introduce CRM automation. Experts like us are always happy to help and not only bring the knowledge for direct implementation but also the experience gained so far and insights into what else is possible. A good CRM is the finished dough, the automated and regulated CRM then the finished cake.
Moritz Michael Mannheims ist CRM-Manager und Teamleiter des Sales Operations Team bei der PMI GmbH. Zusammen mit seinem Team arbeitet er täglich mit CRM-Automationen. Dabei arbeiten sein Team und er täglich daran, das Beste aus den gegebenen Möglichkeiten herauszuholen und immer wieder die bestehenden Systeme zu hinterfragen und zu optimieren. Ihr Heimat-CRM ist dabei Hubspot und besonders das Sales- und Marketing-Hub des CRMs.
