Key takeaways
A CRM workflow spans marketing, sales, commerce, and service communications. It gives everyone on your team, from sales to business developers, a better way to manage external and internal interactions. Better communication can help drive success, identify issues and needs, and manage campaigns — all in one place.
It can also be a giant time vacuum, if not used properly.
A CRM system in place can help a company connect to customers, streamline processes, and save money. For example, while utilizing a CRM workflow, important data and metrics are available in a collated and organized manner, making it that much easier to interpret data from multiple sources.
Because this data is shown visually, any professional with credentials can have a personalized dashboard. A customized dashboard makes streamlining workflows throughout an organization easy and lets workers focus more on their duties and less on interpreting data.
With the ultimate goal of improving business and customer relations, an optimized CRM workflow can help your company save time and money.
Also Read: Buyer’s Guide to Workflow Management Software
1. Automate communications
Sales teams spend a large portion of their day on data entry. However, setting up CRM automation will prove to be a huge time saver for these employees, eliminating major pain points.
Not to be confused with marketing automation, CRM automation serves as the bottom of the funnel and involves a broad approach to how employees communicate with customers.
Ways you can use CRM to automate communications and other efforts:
- Implement data automation.
- Set up personalized email sequences for contacting leads.
- Automatically log all customer interactions.
- Automate customer service.
Also Read: 10 of the Best Options for Workflow Automation Software
2. Reduce time spent in meetings
Implementing a CRM can help reduce the time employees spend in meetings. It’s a common complaint in today’s offices that there are too many meetings. Between daily standups, meetings to share updates or findings, and general team syncs, it’s easy to let meetings take over an entire day or week of work. With a CRM in place, some regular or shorter meetings can be eliminated or at least reduced on employees’ calendars.
How to reduce meeting time with CRM:
- Set up a team dashboard as well as individual dashboards.
- Make these dashboards visible to anyone who may need access.
- Allow employees to update their progress as you would in daily standups.
- Encourage teams to update the dashboard regularly so that everyone can see progress in real-time.
This brings us to how to gain accountability with tasks while reducing the time spent in meetings.
Also Read: Workflow Management vs BPM vs RPA
3. Gain accountability with tasks
Sometimes, especially in offices with a lot of employees, who does what needs to be clarified. That is notably true with day-to-day jobs or when more than one client is involved. With a CRM, there is one source of truth, a dashboard accessible to everyone that outlines tasks and assignments.
There are several ways to break down tasks, and here are a few ideas to get you started:
- View and assign tasks by responsibility.
- View and assign tasks by date, time, or order of importance.
- View tasks by their trigger.
- View tasks by status, such as completed, in progress, or blocked.
A CRM can help you create a workflow that automatically builds your daily task list based on the stage in each task, along with automatic reminders and alerts. This will help save time, as employees only need to reference one database and checklist.
4. Minimize duplicates
When you’re working with many clients, it’s entirely possible you’ll encounter duplicate records in your system. Of course, being human, you and your team are also likely to enter information that has errors. Manually updating and removing these duplicates and mistakes can be a costly timesink.
However, automated workflows within a CRM can help eliminate errors and duplicates with an integrated platform that allows employees to track and manage a business more effectively.
How to reduce duplicates within a CRM:
- Set up a duplication rule.
- View any duplications by criteria and delete as needed.
- Download third-party software that can detect, merge, and automatically delete duplicate entries.
5. Organize data
As we already know, a CRM is a database that contains a lot of information. This information includes marketing and sales tools, information collected and shared across the organization, and any insights gained from clients. With such large amounts of data, it’s essential to keep it organized in a way that helps your team streamline their processes.
How CRM can help organize large amounts of data:
- Set guidelines, definitions, & naming conventions with accountability measures.
- Limit user permissions.
- Be strategic about customizations.
- Delete data that are no longer useful.
Why your company needs a CRM
Through automated workflows, CRM is a tool that helps digital enterprises enhance productivity and increase revenue simply by improving the way teams work. Therefore, a CRM is a valuable tool for any digital company as they grow and learn more about its customers and how to serve them better.
Whether you’re building out your existing CRM workflow or buying your first CRM, the tips above should help improve your teams’ workflow by automating communications, reducing meeting times, gaining accountability for assignments, and minimizing duplicates in your data.
Don’t know where to start? Read our guide on CRM Types: Which CRM Software is Right for You?
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