10 Essential Workflows for CRM Automation

With countless leads to manage, follow-ups to remember, and customers to engage, these tasks can quickly become overwhelming. This is where CRM automation comes into play. Imagine having a trusty assistant who never sleeps, never forgets, and always executes tasks with impeccable precision. In this blog post, we'll give you the top 10 CRM automation workflows you need to implement straight away!

Benefits of Using Workflows for Automation

Automating your CRM processes not only saves you time and reduces errors but also allows you to focus on what truly matters – building strong, meaningful relationships with your customers. Whether you’re a small business owner or part of a large enterprise, integrating these essential CRM workflows can transform your operations and drive your business forward. Before we dive into the specific workflows, let’s explore the key benefits of using automation in your CRM:

1. Time Savings: Automating repetitive tasks frees up valuable time for your team to focus on high-impact activities that require human touch and strategic thinking.

2. Improved Accuracy: Automation minimises the risk of human error, ensuring that your processes are consistent and reliable.

3. Enhanced Customer Experience: By automating routine communications and follow-ups, you can provide timely and personalised interactions with your customers, enhancing their overall experience.

4. Increased Efficiency: Streamlined workflows mean that tasks are completed faster and more efficiently, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall productivity.

5. Better Lead Management: Automation helps prioritise leads based on their behaviour and engagement, ensuring that your sales team focuses on the most promising prospects.

6. Proactive Engagement: With automated reminders and alerts, you can proactively engage with leads and customers, staying ahead of their needs and expectations.

7. Scalability: As your business grows, automation allows you to scale your processes without a proportional increase in manual effort.

10 Essential Workflows for CRM Automation

1. Lead Scoring and Routing

Objective: Prioritise leads based on their engagement and assign them to the appropriate sales representatives.

Workflow: Picture this: your marketing efforts have generated a flood of new leads. Fantastic, right? But how do you know which ones are ready to buy and which ones need more nurturing? Enter automated lead scoring. By setting up criteria based on actions like website visits, email opens, and content downloads, your CRM can automatically score each lead. Higher scores indicate hotter leads.

Once scored, the CRM can automatically assign these leads to the right sales reps. Maybe you assign high-scoring leads to your top closers or distribute leads based on geographic location or product interest. This ensures no lead is left unattended and every opportunity is maximised.

Benefits: This workflow ensures that your sales team focuses on the leads most likely to convert, improving efficiency and increasing sales. It also removes the manual guesswork and potential bias in lead distribution.

2. Automate Internal Processes (Follow-Ups, Reminders, Tasks, Notifications, Renewals)

Objective: Ensure timely and consistent internal operations.

Workflow: Automate reminders for sales reps to follow up with leads or contacts after specific actions, such as after a meeting, demo, or quote is sent. Create tasks and send notifications for important activities, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Additionally, you can automate contract renewal alerts, notifying account managers months before contracts expire.

Benefits: Prevents leads from slipping through the cracks, ensures consistent follow-up, and helps in managing contract renewals proactively, increasing customer retention and saving time from manual tasks.

3. Lead Nurture and Email Series 

Objective: Engage new leads with a series of onboarding emails or move leads through the sales funnel with targeted content.

Workflow: First impressions matter. When a new lead enters your CRM, an automated welcome email series can kickstart the relationship. Imagine your new lead receives a friendly email as soon as they sign up, welcoming them and introducing your company. A few days later, they get another email with some useful resources or a guide to your services. Follow up with a case study or a success story showcasing how you’ve helped others like them. Additionally, automated lead nurturing campaigns can help by delivering targeted content based on where the lead is in their buyer’s journey. For instance, if a lead downloads a whitepaper, they might automatically enter a nurturing sequence that follows up with related case studies, blog posts, or webinar invitations.

Benefits: By providing valuable content at each stage, you keep leads engaged and informed, gradually guiding them toward a purchasing decision without feeling pushy.

4. Update Lifecycle Stage 

Objective: Automatically update a lead's lifecycle stage based on their actions and engagement.

Workflow: As leads interact with your business, they progress through different lifecycle stages, such as subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead (MQL), and sales qualified lead (SQL). Automate the process of updating these stages based on predefined triggers. For instance, if a lead attends a webinar, their status might change from subscriber to lead.

Benefits: Keeps your CRM data up-to-date and ensures that leads receive the appropriate communication and attention based on their current stage in the buyer’s journey.

5. Run Marketing Campaigns (Re-engagement, Upsells/Cross-Sells, Events)

Objective: Re-engage inactive leads or customers and increase customer lifetime value with targeted campaigns.

Workflow: Over time, some leads or customers may become inactive. Automated re-engagement campaigns can bring them back. Send a series of emails to those who haven’t interacted with your brand for a while. Offer special promotions, share exciting updates about new products, or simply ask for feedback on why they’ve been quiet. Additionally, use customer purchase data to trigger personalised upsell and cross-sell recommendations or run other marketing campaigns for your events. 

Benefits: Revives interest among dormant contacts and boosts sales by encouraging additional purchases, enhancing customer satisfaction with relevant suggestions.

6. Customer Feedback Collection

Objective: Gather valuable insights from customers.

Workflow: Feedback is gold. After key interactions like a purchase, a support call, or an event, your CRM can automatically send out feedback requests or surveys. Did a customer just buy a product? Send them a follow-up email asking for their thoughts. Completed a support ticket? Request feedback on the service provided.

Benefits: Gathering feedback helps you understand what’s working and what’s not. It provides insights to improve your products and services, leading to better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

7. Abandoned Cart Follow-Up

Objective: Recover lost sales from abandoned shopping carts.

Workflow: Shopping cart abandonment is a common challenge in e-commerce. But with automated follow-up emails, you can recover lost sales. If a customer leaves items in their cart without completing the purchase, an automated email can remind them of their abandoned items. Sweeten the deal with a discount or highlight the benefits of the products left behind.

Benefits: This simple yet effective workflow can significantly reduce cart abandonment rates and boost your revenue.

8. Deal Stage Automation

Objective: Streamline the sales process by automating deal stage progression.

Workflow: Set up automated triggers to move deals through various stages in your sales pipeline based on specific actions or criteria. For instance, when a proposal is sent, the deal stage can automatically move from "Negotiation" to "Proposal Sent".

Benefits: Keeps your sales pipeline up-to-date, reduces manual data entry, and ensures that sales reps focus on closing deals rather than administrative tasks.

9. Customer Health Scoring and Alerts

Objective: Monitor and act on customer health indicators to prevent churn.

Workflow: Create automated health scores for customers based on their engagement, product usage, support tickets, and other relevant data. Set up alerts for your customer success team when a customer’s health score drops below a certain threshold, triggering proactive outreach to address any issues. For example, you can set up triggers such as high support tickets, a drop in NPS score or email engagement to indicate a decrease in health score. 

Benefits: Allows you to proactively manage customer relationships and address potential issues before they lead to churn, improving customer retention.

10. Advanced Lead Segmentation and Targeting

Objective: Improve marketing precision with advanced lead segmentation.

Workflow: Automatically segment leads based on detailed criteria such as behaviour, demographics, or past interactions, job role, etc. Use these segments to deliver highly targeted marketing campaigns. For example, create segments for leads who have shown interest in specific products and tailor your marketing messages accordingly.

Benefits: Increases the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by ensuring that messages are relevant to the recipient, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Conclusion