CRM Automation: How To Streamline Operations For More Profit

Last updated on August 7th, 2023

In this guide, you’ll learn the power of CRM automation, best practices, and key distinctions you should know about. By the end, you’ll have the right knowledge to be successful with CRM automation in your business. 

Tired of managing those boring, repetitive tasks that come with running a business?

You may be thinking:

“Well, I guess this is just how things ought to be.”

But it’s not.

Using CRM automation could be the tool that changes everything for your business. 

Having an all-in-one CRM to automate the essential, repetitive tasks of your business can drastically improve your profit.

You’ll learn:

• What is CRM Automation?
• Why CRM Automation is Important
• What Else Does CRM Automation Bring to Your Business?
• CRM Automation vs. Marketing Automation
• How Do I Customize My CRM to Fit My Business & Automate Important Tasks?
• 5 Examples of CRM Automation to Consider for Your Business
• CRM Automation Best Practices to Be Successful 
• The Best CRM & Marketing Automation Tool

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What is CRM Automation?

CRM automation is when you utilize tools and sequences from a CRM to make your business tasks a whole lot simpler. 

Think of it like an automatic car that shifts gears for you, rather than you shifting the gears like in its manual counterpart. 

Automation makes things more efficient.

CRM automation saves you a ton of time with tasks and reduces errors that happen because of human forgetfulness.

It can come in many shapes, sizes, and capabilities. 

For example:

You can have automation for closed sales, where the prospect gets an onboarding form emailed to them.

You can have automation that reports your sales for the month ( the list goes on).

Why CRM Automation is Important for Your Business

Automation ultimately beats the old-school method of inputting your lists, tasks, and sales deals into a spreadsheet. 

This method was always prone to human error and was just manually taxing. 

McKinsey Digital reports that 45% of current paid activities can be automated by today’s technology, an equivalent of $2 trillion in total annual wages.

That’s a big chunk of revenue…and time.

Sure, you can hire someone specifically to input this data, but as a business owner, which will add more efficiency while reducing overhead? 

Think of it like using CRM automation versus hiring a data entry specialist.

What Does CRM Automation Bring to Your Business? 

Let’s break down further benefits of using CRM automation. 

For starters, it allows you to scale your business without onboarding more team members.

Here’s what I mean: 

Scaling a business is all about putting more money into marketing channels to bring in more customers and eventually increase revenue. 

But the more leads and customers you have, the harder it all gets to manage.

So you either have 2 solutions to manage an increased load on your business:

1. Hire more team members
2. Use automation

Many businesses run into problems when they don’t have automation in place to help them handle the giant load of work.

So what happens? 

Customer service takes a hit, service delivery may worsen, and team communication may become poor since everyone’s so busy. 

This can seriously hurt your business’s client satisfaction.

Using automation to grow and run your business will go a long way in helping you sustain scaling!

Leads and customers are what grow your business, so having automation that services them well is essential. 

This is a solid middle ground that benefits both the customer and the business.

CRM Automation vs. Marketing Automation 

You may have used CRM automation synonymously with marketing automation or sales automation, but there are several distinctions: 

Marketing automation is software that helps you automate repetitive marketing tasks. 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be via a CRM.

An example of marketing automation is using an email drip campaign that goes out to people that opt-in to your free eBook lead magnet. 

And let’s say this drip campaign goes more in-depth about your other products and guides your prospects up your value ladder. 

Now let’s cover how CRM automation differs from this.

CRM automation can involve marketing, but it also includes other tools that help with tasks, sales, and account management.

Think of sales pipelines, task reminders, schedulers, reporting, and interaction management.   

But if a CRM software has sales & marketing automation (like VipeCloud) — that’s even better because you’ll be able to grow your client base — all in one place.

How Do I Customize My CRM to Fit My Business & Automate Important Tasks?

Think of customizing your CRM like arranging furniture to your taste when moving into a new home. 

Here are 5 ideas on how you can customize your CRM to automate things and fit your business: 

1. Sync Your CRM with Your Day-to-Day Operations

Running a business (especially an online business) often requires a handful of software and platforms. 

So it’s important to have as many of them working together as possible.

For example:

Maybe you want your social media accounts to connect with your CRM to streamline your social media presence. 

Something like this can bring a new degree of efficiency to your team — helping you manage your SMM in the same place as your sales pipeline.

2. Edit Your Sales Pipeline & Stages to Match Your Business

This one is slightly more obvious but is very crucial if you want to have an organized sales cycle and if you want to understand your deal priority. 

Deal priority can be measured with “lead scoring.” These are measurements that represent how you rank your prospect based on perceived value (deal size, needs, a timeframe of doing business, etc.). 

How you score your leads can be customized to fit your sales processes.

Another way you can use customization is by listing as much data about your prospects as possible. 

It’s vital since it gives whoever is in charge of the account enough information to properly handle prospects.

Don’t think a name and phone number is enough, be sure to take an extra 2 minutes to list as much information about your prospects as possible, especially in the B2B space. 

3. Upload Customer & Lead List Data in Bulk

This one is huge. 

Many CRMs allow you to upload your customer list into the software rather than wasting tons of time manually inputting their information. 

This is known as bulk importing, a terrific automation, especially if your customer list is humongous. 

4. Designating Team Members to Specific Tasks

Synergy and understanding in an organization are highly vital. 

When everyone understands their responsibilities, things get done faster and better. 

Assigning your sales reps or account managers to be responsible for specific deals is an excellent way of achieving this. 

In VipeCloud it’s as simple as assigning a task to the appropriate team member. 

5. Create Task Automations Around Your Unique Workflow

Your CRM should have workflow automation that helps your team.

Call reminders, task reminders, and email templates are all resources your team should take advantage of.

Customize your CRM to utilize these automations, and it’ll be like an extra hand is helping you out.

5 Examples of CRM Automation to Consider for Your Business

This section is all about specific CRM automation that helps businesses become sharper around the edges. 

Let’s get into some CRM automation you should consider.

1. Form Submission to Email Follow-up 

Form submissions are seen everywhere online because it’s how information is passed from the consumer to the business. 

This is also a great way to start your sales funnel.

Whether it’s a signup form or a form to book a call:

Having automation that fires and guides your prospect through the next step is a must. 

Without automation like this, you may take too long to follow up or just forget about the prospect altogether.

On top of that, manually following up just isn’t as scalable. 

Russel Brunson was able to promote Clickfunnels very effectively by leveraging his webinars and email follow-up automation. His company is worth about $360 million as of today.

In VipeCloud you can use autoresponders to launch workflows after a sign up form is submitted.

2. Sales Deal Automation 

Throw that “revenue from sales” notebook in the trash and automate your deals with your CRM.

CRMs nowadays can put your revenue and deals front and center to make everything clear. 

VipeCloud does a fantastic job of this, and it allows you to make the right decisions based on organized sales data. 

On top of that?

You can draft sales reports based on specific timeframes you care about. 

Check out our article on sales reporting for more information about maximizing your future deals.

3. Tagging & Contact Organization 

Having a place to organize all of your contacts, leads, and clients is one of the main benefits of using a CRM.

One way you can organize your list of contacts is by adding tags.

Tagging may be a small automation, but it can be a game-changer.

Especially if you have a big customer list. 

Tagging is when you assign your customers a tag in order to segment them. 

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say a personal trainer trains people interested in CrossFit or calisthenics — but they’re all mixed up in his customer list.

What he could do is add a tag that says either “Calisthenics” or “Crossfit” to a customer so that when he sends emails, he can curate it to a specific audience based on who has a certain tag next to their name. 

This will help an email convert better than just sending a general email about fitness that goes to everyone.

4. Appointment Reminders 

How many times have you forgotten about an appointment?

Your prospects are prone to forget, too, even if they love what you’re offering. The truth is, everyone has other things going on in their lives. 

An appointment reminder, be it through email or text, is a simple way of confirming the call and reminding the prospect that they have one. 

What’s so great about this automation is that you can set it to fire at different hours and frequencies.

Maybe you only want one reminder after they book the appointment.

Or maybe — you want 2-3 reminders leading up to the call. It’s up to you or how your organization wants it to be.

Some medical practices do an amazing job of this when you book an appointment. 

They have this system to ensure that everyone (the practice and the patient) is on the same page. 

It gives your staff extra help, making their job easier. 

5. Trigger Automatic Workflows

Having a person go from a lead to a loyal client will take a specific workflow that will cost you countless hours to repeat manually.

But if you use a CRM automation feature like a series, you can streamline any process significantly.

For example, as a lead goes through your sales journey — they’ll need to be sent various emails and you’ll need to complete various tasks — to convert them into a client.

Put your processes in a series and automate as much as possible without being a robot to your lead.

Business Insider mentions an amazing statistic about invoice automation from Kofax: 

“All sides benefit from this process, as automation can cut costs by  81% and improve efficiency by 73%.”

CRM Automation Best Practices to Be Successful 

Use Automatic Emails, Texts, & Notifications

Most of us are familiar with push notifications. After all, our mobile phones have them all the time. 

The best part of them?

No human hours required.

You can set up automatic emails to give your email lists updates, offers, or to promote content. 

Or when a lead reaches a certain point in your sales process, you can automatically send out a relevant email that nurtures them to the next point in the sale.

It’s a great added way of staying on top of things without you being as involved. 

Assign Leads & Deals to Team Members 

A great habit to instill is assigning your deals to specific reps and adding their names to the account. 

It can be an account manager or salesperson. Whoever is responsible for the account should have their name under that deal. 

It makes it a lot easier to simply go to that one person when you have questions about that customer or deal. 

Keep Track of Customer History

I’m sure you’ve heard of the buyer journey, basically the road the customer takes before they purchase a product or service from you. 

It’s vital to have a way of tracking how that customer found your business, who they spoke to, what they read, and what they did before buying from you. 

Why is this a best practice for CRM automation?

Here are other benefits of tracking customer history: 

• You can create future automation based on customer activity 
• You can better understand why your customers buy and create marketing that tailors to their desires. 
• You can forecast how long your sales cycle will be
• You can predict future customer behavior if you see similar buyer journeys.

The list goes on…

Segment Your Customers 

Earlier, we spoke about contact tagging, which helps categorize your customers and prospects. But this is just one way of segmenting your accounts. 

Account segmentation can also be about separating prospects and customers by industry, deal size, geography, etc..

You can get very creative with this approach; using specific platforms to reach specific customers, email templates for particular customers, and so on. 

So, why would segmenting your customers be such a great practice? 

Segmentation helps businesses to better tailor their efforts to various kinds of accounts. 

In other words, it gives you insight into how to handle different types of accounts while communicating that with others on your team automatically. 

AKA, this is part of knowing the buyer persona. 

Personalize Your Messaging

You have the templates and CRM marketing automation ready to bring you more deals. 

But don’t forget the human side of things.

Take time to personalize your emails and other messaging to help you stand out more. A degree of personalization is always helpful when reaching prospects or speaking to existing customers. 

Personalization also means speaking to the pain points of a particular audience when sending out your newsletters. 

Know where your prospects are at.

If they’ve already gone through a demo of your product but didn’t buy, an email that tries to sell them on another product may not be the best idea. 

Based on where they are in your sales cycle, you could offer them an email with more information. 

You can combine segmenting accounts with personalization by creating different templates for each categorized account.

Migrate Your Data

Maybe you’re looking to change your CRM, and you’d like to transfer all the information you already have. 

It totally beats starting from scratch.

VipeCloud helps you migrate all of your previous data into your new CRM.

CRM data migration can be an extensive process so take your time to understand what data you want to keep (customer lists, revenue) and what information you can do without. 

Update Your Contact List Consistently

As you gain more and more contacts, you may experience some contacts with incorrect information. 

Duplicates can occur and spam as well. 

You should take measures against this by deleting fake emails and putting anti-spam checkboxes on your opt-in pages. 

You can also have your leads confirm their email or number. This is done so that you won’t experience an abnormally high bounce rate when you send emails and SMS campaigns.

Set Goals & KPIs

You won’t know if you’re making progress unless you have a goal, right?

Think of your CRM automation as a powerful ship that you have to steer in the correct direction. 

Once you set a goal, i.e., a destination for your automation to aim for, you’ll be in a winning position. 

Maybe you want to create CRM automation to increase your lead conversion rate because it’s lower than your industry average. 

Let’s say your conversion rate right now is 2.5%, and you want to get it above 5% (your industry average).

This is a KPI you set, and now you can measure how much better your conversion rate gets as your sales & marketing automation improves. 

Measure Your CRM Automation Results

Now that you’ve set goals and KPIs for your automation, what are your results? 

Whatever KPI you’re tracking when marketing or selling, the results will tell you what’s working and what’s not. 

This best practice shows the importance of reporting (which CRMs like VipeCloud have).

Sales reporting allows you to see the results of your campaigns in specific time frames ranging from days to years. 

Get Started with CRM Automation Today

CRM automation may sound complicated, but it’s actually a matter of simplification.

It’s about creating sales and marketing systems that make your team’s job easier and services your customer in an efficient manner. 

The cost benefits of automation are astoundingly better when compared to hiring a new team member.

When it comes to CRM automation, remember that it’s not about setting it and forgetting it.

You have to clearly know what you want to accomplish (your goal) and measure how your automations are helping your organization reach it.

There are tons of ways to tailor your CRM to your needs, which makes this technology so powerful and popular.

The Best CRM & Marketing Automation Tool

What is the best CRM for your marketing and sales automation?

Vipecloud’s Sales & Marketing Suite is your all-in-one CRM solution.

It’s made for small to midsize businesses — putting all of your important tasks in one place and paving the way for more efficiency — and more revenue. 

Not to mention:  The VipeCloud team is ready to guide you through customizing your CRM in a way that will bring tons of value to your team and customers. 

And guess what?

You can try the VipeCloud CRM for a free 15-days to see how you like it. 

Or want to talk to a marketing CRM professional? Request a demo today.

CRM Automation FAQ