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  • August 7, 2018

Transformative Benefits of Adopting Sales Automation CRM

Sales automation CRM is one of the greatest tools ever to become available to salespeople, as it makes the sales process run more smoothly and keeps the sales team organized, focused, and always moving forward.

Here is why you may want to adopt tools like sales automation CRM:

  • If your sales are lagging,
  • If your sales team is disorganized,
  • If you are missing out on stalled opportunities,
  • If you are having trouble producing an accurate forecast,
  • If data entry is taking over your life,
  • Or if everything, from your prospecting to your closing, needs improvement.

This article will cover how sales automation CRM can:

Whether you’re a sales manager looking to implement CRM, or a sales rep looking for solutions to bring to your manager, sales automation CRM is the answer.

What Can Sales Automation Do For You?

Generate More Leads

Sales automation software automatically finds and qualifies leads found in your email and adds them to your contact database. Through natural language processing, a sales automation CRM can decipher which email conversations are real leads, and which aren’t. Only sales opportunities are brought into your pipeline, automatically alerting you to possible new deals.

With a sales automation CRM, intake forms on your website can be synced to your CRM, pushing new leads directly to your reps. Once a potential prospect fills out this form, they are created as an opportunity in your CRM for one of the reps to pursue.

Sales managers can see all leads being generated and have the ability to re-assign these leads to their reps. It’s a win-win situation; managers gain more insight into leads coming in, and leads are automatically distributed evenly among their teams.

Easily Create Opportunities and Contacts

With a sales automation CRM, creating contacts, opportunities, and companies within your CRM is simpler than ever. Sales automation CRMs can do these things without requiring a second thought from you. Here is how it works: you forward an email from a prospect to Spiro’s CRM’s “email assistant,” and it automatically creates a contact, opportunity and company.

Sales automation tools eliminate both data entry and room for human error. Today’s sales automation CRMs are smart enough to recognize if the contact already exists in your database, therefore preventing duplicate records from being created.

Incorporate Social Data

By appending data from social websites, a sales automation CRM gives you a more holistic understanding of your contacts. All salespeople know how important it is to research a prospect and be completely prepared before a call. Sales automation CRM can find important details regarding each prospect that will make the difference and ensure that you make the sale – where they work, company website, social profiles, title and other important data points that give you a fuller picture of the contact you are selling to.

You probably know how frustrating it is to call a number tied to a lead to find that it has been disconnected, or to find out that the person you were trying to call no longer works at the company. Well, sales automation CRM also keeps information about your contacts updated in real time by constantly validating the information it contains. That means you won’t need to worry about whether you have the most updated number for a prospect. (Now if only it could make them actually pick up the phone.)

Recommend Next Steps

A huge pain point for sales reps is making sure they are contacting the right prospects at the right time. Sales automation CRM helps solve this problem by proactively suggesting who you should call, and when. This is done by setting up the salesperson with a virtual sales assistant that creates a to-do list for them.

Spiro’s sales automation CRM uses specific algorithms based on data of over 20,000 salespeople, which allows it to intelligently provide customized recommendations. Using these algorithms, Spiro sets the priority level for each prospect in your pipeline and makes suggestions accordingly. The CRM tells you which prospects need to be followed up with, and creates a list prioritizing who to call and when.

Some tools even keep track of the best time to contact a prospect. For example, if you call John five times, and he picks up only between the hours of 3 and 4, it will recommend that you call him at those times in the future.

Reach More Prospects

One of the biggest issues outbound prospecting teams face is the sheer volume of dials they need to make to actually reach their prospecting goals. A full sales automation CRM usually includes a cloud communication platform, or VOIP (Voice Over IP), allowing you to make calls directly from your CRM.

This provides you with calling and texting capabilities through your CRM, and automatically logs your call activity without doing any manual dialing or typing. A CRM with built-in phone capabilities automates the dialing process and keeps you moving to your next call faster.

With an automatic dialer, you can get through that proactive daily to-do list even faster and reach more prospects. This will then result in more conversations that convert to more closed deals.

Weigh Your Deals

It can be hard to know which deals to focus your attention on. Oftentimes sales reps’ decisions are based in gut feelings, which are not particularly reliable. It’s a human tendency to focus on the prospects we like, or accidentally forget about prospects altogether. However, it is crucial that you know the best place to focus your energy in order to close more deals and avoid wasting months chasing a deal to have nothing come out of it.

With sales automation CRM, you rely on hard data to prioritize your deals rather than human feelings. This means that the margin of error regarding the prioritization of these deals is reduced significantly. By eliminating any guesswork, you can start saving time and closing more deals.

Enhance Your Emails

A CRM that utilizes sales automation functionality connects to your email account. This means that it automatically pulls in any emails you send to existing contacts in your CRM and attaches those emails to their contact record.

A sales automation CRM is able to schedule emails to send at the most optimal times, meaning that you are more likely to get the desired response. It also allows you to create customizable email campaigns with ease.

Many sales automation CRMs even contain pre-written email templates that are proven to successfully generate the desired responses from recipients. Since email is a science that relatively few salespeople have mastered, it makes sense to take advantage of this feature.

Guide Your Selling

It has been shown that for maximum efficiency, salespeople should follow a process with each and every prospect. Your sales automation CRM can guide you through that process, so that no step risks being forgotten. Much of the sales process is knowing the right length of time between follow-ups, which your sales automation CRM can determine for you. You can have your CRM trigger events based on your sales stage, or change the sales stage based on things that happen. For example, if you send a contract, it can change the sales stage to closed-won, thus automating your sales process.

Using a sales automation CRM can help you understand your sales process more fully. A sales automation CRM can help managers rest easier by establishing a company-wide sales process, then ensuring reps are actually following through with that process. For example, you can tell if a rep is not following up with prospects regularly, and address that issue immediately.

Know Where Your Deals Stand

A sales automation CRM allows sales reps to see the status of every deal in their pipeline. Reps can see a detailed portrayal of their pipeline, and exactly how many of those deals they need to close to meet their quota. With complete visibility, there is no risk of a rep missing on a deal because they weren’t sure where it stood.

For managers, this increase in visibility can also provide an increase in confidence in your reps, and identify areas where you may need to provide more training or guidance in. You can see each and every point of communication between your reps and prospects. If you see that a rep is not recording any details about their calls, you may want to highlight the importance of doing so. Your sales automation CRM can help you pinpoint exactly what your reps need from you, and address those needs.

Create More Accurate Reports

Sales automation CRMs automatically collect more data. The data out is only as good as the data in. Because of this, the reports generated by sales automation CRMs are more accurate and reliable than ones produced by traditional CRMs or spreadsheets.

Most CRMs include both pre-built and custom reports, which allows you to pinpoint any areas that need to improve, or those that are doing well. Spiro’s sales automation CRM analyzes your deals to highlight opportunities that are stalled or at risk. This can only be done because we capture every email, phone call, and activity automatically.

With manual reporting and forecasts, some data is often not incorporated in the reports, meaning that the reports are based in incomplete information. Other times calculations are done incorrectly due to human error. Accurate reports generated by sales automation CRMs eliminate any over or underestimating that could otherwise throw off your forecast. Because of this, these reports provide definitive quantitative data with regard to performance, which results in valid solutions to improve your sales pipeline.

Another great feature of intelligent sales reporting is that sales managers can get status updates showing how many calls, emails, and meetings the team engaged in, allowing them to really understand what their reps are working on.

Eliminate Data Entry

If you asked all salespeople using CRM what they didn’t like about it, the vast majority would put unnecessary required data entry at the top of their list. Luckily, a sales automation CRM can eliminate this headache. This means not only a time savings, but potentially a huge increase in job satisfaction.

A sales automation CRM is able to create contacts and incorporate tons of data to ensure that you are fully prepared for every single call you make. It also logs your calls, texts, and emails for you, and provides summaries of each contact you make that you can look at later. You don’t even need to think about entering these things; they are simply done for you.

The Future of Sales

Adopting sales automation CRM for your team is priceless, as it reduces the amount of work for each team member, helps the manager maintain an organized and flowing pipeline, and keeps prospects and customers engaged with regular contact. There are so many tasks that can be easily automated that the increase in productivity will start to amaze any team immediately after implementation.