Automated CRM: Here are 6 Benefits for your Sales & 8 Features to Look Into

B2B and B2C businesses use CRM systems to organize business processes and ease complex and time-consuming daily tasks, such as customer data management and entry, marketing team support, contact updates, calendar management, lead and opportunity updates, customer support… and many more.

Are you fully aware how an automated CRM helps you streamline processes and improve productivity by automating these manual tasks? We tell you all about it in this article, along with the best CRM automation systems on the market and their benefits for your business.

CRM automation software refers to systems that have the ability to automate tedious and repetitive tasks.

Customer relationship management (CRM) automation software makes it easier to manage external interactions and relationships that are critical to business success in sales, marketing, and service activities.

The purpose of CRM software is to help teams track their engagement with current and prospective customers. It helps them save the time they need to focus on high-value activities like lead generation, relationship building, lead nurturing, and deal conversion.

In a nutshell, CRM automation software is here to boost both productivity and efficiency in your business.

It is important to distinguish between Marketing Automation and CRM Automation. Even though both often get confused as being the same thing, they are actually pretty different. Mainly, CRM automation and marketing automation target different stages of the sales funnel. CRM is mostly used as a sales tool, whereas marketing automation is a lead generation and nurturing tool.

Here is how it works.

Marketing automation serves the top and middle of the funnel when leads first come into the system. It also takes care of the daily tasks of marketers across the customer lifecycle.

Marketing Automation software handle:

• Lead generation, lead scoring, win probability, lead prioritization ;
• Lead nurturing or re-engagement, often using email campaigns ;
• Campaign management for lead generation. For example, it will automate sending welcome emails, order confirmation emails, and email newsletters to a large contact list based on triggers or via broadcasts and drip campaigns ;
• Social media campaign management…

CRM automation focuses on the bottom stages of the funnel, where leads are almost converting into customers or are already paying customers while considering your entire customer relationship.

CRM Automation software handles:

• Contact management, with access to recorded data like email address, company size, customer profile, etc ;
• Automated quote and order management ;
• Customer service function management, such as creating a profile for each new customer and managing the ticketing system ;
• Visual sales pipeline (which makes it easier to visualize lead’s status and progress) ;
• Sales metrics reporting (that helps visualizing your performance against KPIs)...

💡 Even though CRM and marketing automation systems are used for different purposes, combining their strengths can be an excellent way of maximizing their benefits and efficiency.

In fact, to avoid deploying and integrating two separate systems, you can opt for a CRM with integrated marketing automation capabilities. This will allow your marketing and sales teams to function as a cohesive, well-aligned unit that will allow your business to grow.

As we've mentioned before, automating tedious tasks can save you a lot of time each week. But in addition to helping your sales and marketing teams be more efficient, CRM automation offers many benefits that we'd like to share with you.

By taking the time to create well-thought automated workflows and triggers, repetitive tasks can then be reduced to a single click. This ability to streamline tasks allows sales and service reps to focus on high-value missions like lead development, lead nurturing, and personalized phone calls directed at leads for example.

By making better use of the skills available in your company, you are guaranteed to increase productivity.

Automated CRM allows your teams to follow-up faster. This means they can generate more MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) with higher qualification rates.

Automated CRM improves and speeds up your sales pipeline by pushing prospects down the funnel faster.

Leads and customers’ information being easily and quickly accessible by your teams improves lead scoring and helps connect high-performing sales reps with high-value leads. Another time-saver for the sales cycle is the ability of CRM software to automatically generate quotes, manage orders and process legal documents.

Overall, automated CRM makes interacting with customers easier and improves your sales cycle.

Detailed analytical reports, multi-source data, and AI-powered forecasting are all tools available in CRM that can make your insights more accurate and your business stronger.

Automated CRM gives you access to complete and precise data that helps you identify opportunities and make decisions.

CRM systems tell you with great accuracy who your customers are which means you can tailor sales interactions. All the valuable information collected by CRM allows you to offer a personalized journey, interact with customers in a way that resonates with them, and get more engagement.

By tracking leads and prospects activity, CRM automation provides valuable information that helps your business offer personalized services and outstanding experience to your customers.

CRM automation can assist in quickly identifying customer concerns, needs, and desires in order to come up with the proper response actions. It helps you boost customer satisfaction and enhance customer retention. 

CRM automation software offers many useful features that can help you automate tasks. Here are some of the best features we recommend:

A core function of any good CRM automation software is contact management. This feature manages prospect and customer data using specific fields such as:

• name,
• email address,
• contact information,
• social profiles,
• company details,
• past interactions, etc.

The interface for this feature should be organized and clear so that teams can search and access customer data efficiently.

Lead management function helps sales representatives keep track of lead activities in order to engage with leads and prospects in a personalized and informed way. Lead management features include:

• lead identification,
• lead scoring,
• lead pipeline management,
• lead workflow management,
• and lead tracking.

It is essential for businesses and sales teams to store and have easy access to documentation such as quotes, invoices, transactional and legal documents, requests for proposal (RFPs), sales templates, contracts, and other important documents. Teams should be able to access them as quickly as possible as they often have to collect, upload and share them.

Businesses use many applications and third-party tools to operate. CRM automation should facilitate integration with other apps such as email systems, calendars, project management tools, etc.

Well-integrated systems help sales teams track customers and tasks, and contribute to consistency, as prospect and customer history is accessible in one place and can be used by all team members.

A core function of any good CRM software is the ability to provide accurate reports and analytics. This helps your business learn from all sales activities, optimize sales processes and enable data-driven decision making. This function is also crucial for sales forecasting.

CRM automation software helps keeping track of who is doing which specific task. CRM automation enables you to automatically assign tasks to a specific person who will see it in real time.

This also facilitates communications between sales, marketing, and service team members.

This feature, therefore, improves productivity and reduces employee frustration.

Automated CRM gives you a visual of your pipeline, or sales process, from A to Z. This is a great benefit for your sales and customer service teams as they can quickly identify what actions they need to take next.

This is also a good way of identifying friction points, for example where in the sales process people tend to interrupt their purchase and abandon the funnel.

Hubspot CRM is the first software that comes to mind when thinking of automated CRMs. It is an integrated automation tool that provides sales, marketing, and customer service automation functionalities. It is a very good solution when it comes to CRM automation.

Hubspot CRM offers all the core features you crucially need for CRM automation:

sales pipeline management, email sending, scheduling, and tracking, workflow management, database management, lead scoring, social media integration, or calls.

It also gives you access to detailed reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance, that you can use to track team performance and spot opportunities for growth.

• Free plan: wide range of features ;
• Starter Plan: from $40 per month, paid annually.

  Possible to bundle all HubSpot’s CRM software for $50 per month with a 12-month contract. Prices based on 1,000 contacts, increase for every additional 1,000 contacts.

EngageBay is a CRM automation software designed for small and medium businesses, as well as startups. Its purpose is to give you all the features you need to scale and grow your business.

Just like Hubspot CRM, EngageBay is an integrated CRM automation software for marketing, sales, and service CRM tools that all work together to offer a seamless experience to all team members.

This software will automatically handle contact management, visual deal pipeline, lead generation, data entry automation, workflow customizations, among other tasks.

• Free Suite: for up to 15 users ;
• Basic Suite: from $14.99/month ;
• Growth Suite: $49.99/month ;
• Pro Suite: $79.99/month.

All EngageBay paid plans get a 20% discount on annual subscription, and 40% discount on biennial subscription.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a cloud-based, customizable CRM platform designed to support sales, marketing, and customer services in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) contexts. It helps businesses of all sizes grow revenue, automate tasks and make data-based decisions.

The main features include lead management, account & contact management, sales opportunity management, pipeline & forecast management, workflow rules & automation, customizable reports & dashboards. It basically allows every employee in your company to easily manage their accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities, all from a single interface. It also includes a native mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones.

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a fully functional 30-day trial. After that, here are the available plans:

• Sales Essentials: $25 per user, per month;
• Lightning Professional: $75 per user, per month;
• Lightning Enterprise: $150 per user, per month;
• Lightning Unlimited: $300 per user, per month.

Freshsales is a cloud-based technology that helps businesses customize interactions and accelerate sales cycles. It is a reliable, high quality CRM that can help your team keep track of thousands of leads and contacts and solve their queries.

The main features of this system include dynamic forecasting, activity timelines, AI-driven chatbots, and predictive lead scoring. This software offers everything you need to manage multiple sales teams and grow revenue.

The “growth” package offers robust CRM automation that lessens the need for manual labor for routine tasks. The “enterprise” plan gives you access to sophisticated modifications, governance, and control.

• Growth Plan: $15 /user/month, billed annually ;
• Pro Plan: $39 /user/month, billed annually ;
• Entreprise Plan: $69 /user/month, billed annually.

ClickUp is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries. Features and tools are customizable so cross-functional teams like marketing, support services, and sales rep can manage their tasks and shorten customer lifecycle.

ClickUp features include communication and collaboration tools, task assignments and statuses, alerts, and a task toolbar. Users can assign comments and tasks to specific team members or groups. Comments and tasks can be marked as resolved or in progress, and users can create custom statuses. Projects can be viewed from an Agile dashboard or organized by assignee. The activity stream displays tasks as they’re created and completed in real time.

• Free Forever Plan, with limited features ;
• Unlimited Plan: $5/month per user ;
• Business Plan: $9/month per user.

Automated CRM is fantastic to help businesses streamline processes and be more efficient. By using CRM automation software to effectively automate time-consuming, manual tasks, they gain productivity, improve pipeline performance and sales cycle, and enhance customer satisfaction and retention.