Trying to hang a shelf with a screwdriver is a lot like using Excel or an address book to manage your prospects, clients, activities and deals. Sure, they are viable tools, but they can be inefficient and leave you with a lot manual effort to complete a simple task. Instead of all that manual work, you need something more powerful to hang your shelf or manage your sales processes. You need a CRM with automation, just like you need a power drill to hang the shelf, to help you work smarter and eliminate manual effort.
CRM applications have become household applications for small, medium and enterprise businesses alike. Sales, marketing and service teams have benefited from CRM’s by organizing their data, improving sales, increasing customer retention and promoting accountability. While these are all important features of a CRM what’s really beginning to drive the CRM industry and become essential in today’s business is automation.
Automation is a term widely used when referencing software and can serve many different purposes. So, what’s the main purpose of automation in a CRM? To eliminate manual work and according to Zachary Totah in his recent SelectHub article, “making complex tasks easier to accomplish.” Totah goes on to explain how automation can benefit every area of your CRM team.
As a marketer, you may think automation only serves to benefit sales and service representatives. In fact, marketing teams stand to reap the automation benefits as well. Features like automated email campaigns (think drip campaigns), lead qualification and generation all can benefit marketers and help them prioritize their efforts.
As important it is to incorporate automation into your marketing processes, building these practices into your sales teams’ workflows can be even more effective. “Sales is King” and automation in CRM tends to agree. The CRM industry is starting to team up with AI. This is great news for sales reps who are often on the road or like to focus their time actually selling (as they should) rather than completing mundane tasks like entering data into their CRM. Automation and AI are helping reps sell smarter and more efficiently by automatically scheduling meetings, providing a rating or score letting them know which lead or opportunity is ready to convert, and removing the misery of manual data entry.
Not only can CRM automation increase sales by eliminating everyday tasks – it can also improve customer and prospect engagement with features like marketing automation and mass mailing. AMPED is a Sales Automation platform that puts marketing tools directly in your hands for better outreach and engagement. With a unique Campaign manager inside AMPED, sales teams get the best of both worlds of sales and marketing automation.
As you can see, automation is changing the CRM game for the better and now is the time for you and your team to jump on board. If you are looking for a CRM with automation capabilities, you can try AMPED for free.
Overall success for your business relies on acquiring, and more importantly, retaining customers. To improve customer retention, companies must create a strategy that ensures a positive view of your business, adds to market value, and leads to increased sales.
An effective strategy to improve customer retention is through one of the simplest forms of communication, emailing. In this article from Destination CRM, Whitney Blankenship defines five pivotal types of emails that will boost your email strategies and help improve customer retention.
Creating the best emailing strategy for your business can be difficult and choosing the right application to execute your plan can be even harder. It is important find a solution that meets your company’s needs.
AMPED has the tools to help you achieve your email strategy goals. Through features like personalized mass emailing, email access counts, and easy follow-up scheduling you can understand how successful your email efforts are and determine the best ways to replicate that success.
How do you currently strategize your email sending? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook. We’re happy to offer additional insights and best practices we’ve seen be successful.
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