How to automate sales workflows in CRM

If you are looking for ways to automate your sales process workflows in CRM, then you are at the right place. With increasing competition in sales, it is essential that your sales team delivers the best results. It is only possible when the team has the right sales tools and technologies at place to work with better productivity. Automating sales workflows in your CRM can significantly boost efficiency of your team and help reduce manual and time consuming efforts.

Here is a detailed guide you can follow in order to start automating workflows in your CRM system.

1. Identify Processes

Before you automate any workflow in CRM, you need to identify what needs to be automated. There can be a range of processes which you want to automate, however sooner you may realize that either some of them are not-feasible to be automated or some of them end up not giving the required ROI on the effort spent automating the workflows. Hence, this steps is crucial step in your sales automation journey. Start with collecting the list of sales tasks which your team spend the most time upon. Next, try to identify which all tasks are redundant and repetitive in nature. 

2. Check Automation Feasibility

Once this is done, the next step is to assess the technical feasibility of automating the task in your CRM system. Your CRM system should support your use case, otherwise you may be required to contact your CRM service provider in order to help you with add-on features or customizations. 

3. Decide Automation Priority

Once you have identified this, try to assign an order of priority in which you want to automate the processes. The priority can be set basis Business urgency or potential ROI to be generated post automation or based on the expected time savings for the sales staff.

4. Create Workflows in CRM system

Once you have identified the priority, you can start creating workflows in your CRM system for the processes which needs to be automated on first priority. Depending upon your CRM vendor, your CRM should allow you to create workflows by defining the automation trigger points and the corresponding action which should happen. An example workflow trigger point can be the time when a new lead is added, and an action which should happen can be a welcome introductory email sent to the new lead or creation of tasks in the CRM for follow up activities, etc.

5. Test, Iterate and Refine

Last but not the least! Teams should try to test the implementation automation, and iteratively refine up the automation. CRM workflow automation is not a one-time effort as it may appear to be, it should be adopted with an innovation mindset, where in teams should constantly try to identify the redundant and repeatable tasks in their day to day activities and try to automate them in order to improve business efficiency.

By the way, if you are yet to try out a CRM software for your business. Do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM Software. It’s Free!

Automated Emails on Lead assignment in CRM

We just did a major release this month with a new feature on ToolsonCloud CRM. With this update, we introduced Workflow Automation module in the CRM. 

To start with, users will be able to create an automated workflow to send email notifications upon creating and assignment of any new lead in the CRM. 

Here is a brief about this release…

Need

There was a need where CRM users wanted to create their own custom workflows based on certain events or actions which are happening in their CRM account.

Some of the examples of these workflows may include but not limited to: 

1. Notification to be sent to the Sales owner whenever a new lead is assigned them, 
2. Sending a welcome email to a newly added lead or deal’s prospect, 
3. Automatically assigning the sales representative of the leads or deal based on the deal value or type of leads, etc.

Hence we wanted to introduce a Workflow Automation module in CRM to equip the users with the capability to create custom workflows to automate their sales processes.

What’s New?

With this new update, we have introduced a new module in CRM for Workflow automation.

Using this module, users will be able to create custom workflows against various event triggers in the CRM. To start with, users will be able to create workflows against the “Lead created” event trigger.

Users can create various actions against the event trigger. To start with the new update, users will be able to create an action to send email notifications to the Sales owner using a custom made email template.

To use this feature, all users can go to Settings > Common Settings > Workflow Automation

To create a new workflow, users can click on “Create workflow” button.

In the next page, users can give a custom title for the workflow,

In the next step, users need to select the Trigger Entity as “Lead” and Event as “Created”. This implies the custom workflow will be triggered when a new lead is created in the CRM.

In the next step, users need to select the Action Type as “Send Email” and Attribute as “To Sales Owner”. This implies that the action i.e. an email notification will be sent to the sales owner of the lead whenever the selected event gets triggered (i.e. a new lead is created).

In the next option, users need to select the Email Template which system should use while sending this email. If you have not created a custom email template, then you can do so in Email template module by visiting it from “Email” menu on top navigation bar and selecting “Email Templates” from sidebar menu links.

Once you are done creating the workflow, you are all set. You can do a test run by creating one test lead in your CRM account to check if the emails are sent or not.

Soon we shall add a host of new trigger events and actions to support more such use cases for our customers.

I hope you will like using this feature. Do let me know your thoughts and feedback.