10 Examples of CRM Workflow Automation to Consider for your Business

Unwavering focus on improving customer relationships is a must whether you are a small business owner or the owner of a large enterprise. The right customer relationship management (CRM) system can supercharge your business by intelligently storing and managing customer and prospect information.

A streamlined CRM workflow helps businesses deliver better service to customers and build strong long-term customer relationships. CRM workflow automation is the technology that enables holistic customer relationship management.

This blog explores CRM workflow examples, the need for automating CRM workflows, and ways to create CRM workflows. 

What is a CRM Workflow?

Customer relationship management (CRM) first gained prominence in the early 1990s. CRM refers to the holistic approach that organizations take to manage their relationships with customers, which includes managing policies related to customers, and collecting, storing, and analyzing customer information.

The technology for performing CRM tasks is also included under CRM. The main aim of CRM is to build customer equity, which is the sum of the lifetime values of all the customers. Popular techniques adopted by CRM analysts to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships are data mining and developing data warehouses. 

CRM is very important for business owners. Here are a few compelling reasons why you must have a CRM system for your business.

1. Better customer service

A CRM system provides several avenues for customers to communicate and explain their requirements to the organization. When customers get personalized services and customized products, their satisfaction with the business increases and they feel valued. 

2. Customization of business offerings

A CRM system gathers and analyzes customer data effectively to understand customer requirements. Armed with this information, an organization can customize a product or a service offering based on customer requirements. The business can facilitate customer-company interaction through the company’s contact center and website. Such active interactions help develop customized products and services.

3. Increase in long-term relationships

Some companies treat their customers as partners, by involving them in the design of new products or to improve their services by soliciting their feedback. This way customers feel more valued and stick to the firm for longer periods of time. 

4. Increase customer equity

Firms use CRM to increase customer equity by using customer data to focus on the marketing efforts of the most valuable customers (MVCs). More focus on MVCs will enable a firm to increase customer equity. 

CRM workflows are powerful sales acceleration tools for leaders looking to increase productivity across their sales departments. These workflows cut down on countless manual tasks in the sales process and enable the sales teams to create a frictionless sales process. Some of the processes that are included in a CRM workflow include –

• Sales lead follow-ups
• Lead scoring
• Account management
• Support Ticket management 
• Lifecycle management 

What is a CRM workflow? CRM workflows may be considered as a sequence of actions designed to be automatically executed in a CRM system when certain conditions are met. A CRM workflow achieves conditional routing based on the “if-this-then-that” sequence that triggers automated actions when customers complete an action item like submitting a form, opening an outreach email, or going inactive for a specific number of days. 

The CRM software comprises all the company’s prospects who are at different stages of the sales process. At each stage of the sales process, sales representatives have to engage with prospects to get them to the next stage of the sales lifecycle, until they convert.

Depending on the number of prospects that your team is following/processing, this can get overwhelming and result in leads falling through the cracks and prospects growing cold and churning. This is where a CRM workflow comes in handy!

A CRM workflow can customize the workflows of sales processes based on “if-then” sequences that automatically carry out tasks when preceding actions are completed. Some examples of these conditions are –

• Deal is created
• Prospect engages with an outreach email
• A record field value changes
• A deal is closed
• Deal assigned to a sales representative
• Prospect is inactive for a number of days
• Prospect meets certain lead scoring criteria

The workflow in CRM directs the system to take appropriate action when any of these conditions are met. For example, when a prospect engages with an outreach email, the CRM system notifies sales representatives automatically.

Using CRM workflows is a great way to improve customer engagement and gather a wealth of information to know how customers engage with your business. From getting customers to sign up for an email list to working with customer feedback, and all the activities in between, a CRM workflow helps sales reps to waltz through each stage in the sales lifecycle. 

Need for CRM Workflow Automation

So what does a CRM system do to your business? A CRM system helps you find new customers, win their business, keep them happy, and establish long-term relationships with them. The net result of happy and satisfied customers is faster and sustained business growth.

How does a CRM system work?

These systems start by collecting information about the customer, like their contact details, website, social media data, and other information across multiple sources and channels. The system is also capable of pulling other information like recent news about the company’s activity, or the client’s preferred or most frequented communication channel.

Comprehensive customer/prospect data is stored, managed, and organized in such a way that you derive useful insights into their preferences and behavior. Deep insights into customer/prospect preferences throw light on their behavior. This in turn helps engage them effectively and build long-term relationships. 

Here is Why a CRM System is Required for Your Business

Improve your bottom line

Introducing a CRM platform into your sales cycle has been shown to produce direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM platforms have a proven record of increasing lead conversion, deal size, win rate, qualified leads, campaign effectiveness, and qualified leads. 

Identify and categorize leads

New leads can be easily identified and categorized accurately with a CRM system. Identifying and categorizing leads helps the sales team prioritize opportunities that will close deals, and marketing can easily identify leads that need more nurturing and prime them to become quality leads. 

Increase referrals from existing customers

The data gathered by the CRM system helps understand customers better and clarifies cross-selling and upselling opportunities. This clarity and deeper understanding enable the organization to win new business from existing customers. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers are known to spend more on your business. 

Offer better customer support

The basic expectation of every customer is fast and personalized support. A CRM system helps you provide the high-quality service that customers are looking for, and sales agents also get a record of customer interactions so that they can provide answers faster. 

Improve products and services

A good CRM system gathers information from a large and varied source pool, which gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are saying about your organization. These insights help you improve the quality of products/services offered, spot issues easily, and identify process gaps. 

Future proof the business

A CRM platform provides unprecedented insights into the customer base. Armed with real-time insights into customer behavior and preferences helps them reach customers in a better and more innovative fashion, and garner a whole new customer base. 

When Do You Need CRM Workflows?

How do you decide that your business needs a CRM workflow? Here are 7 signs that indicate the need for a CRM system. 

1. You are unable to keep up with the lead flow – Even if you are receiving a flood of new business leads, if you don’t keep up with it, it would be of no use. An intelligent CRM system will quickly sort and prioritize your leads so that you can respond to them in a timely manner. 
2. Your customer data is hard to locate – Emails, spreadsheets, and sticky notes may work just fine at the infancy stage of a business. As the business grows, these tools become inadequate and limit your ability to make informed decisions quickly. 
3. You don’t have visibility into what the sales team is up to – You find it difficult to keep up with the sales teams and how they are performing. A powerful CRM system allows team members to update details from mobile devices, so that information is instantly available for you to see what is going on with the business. 
4. Customer service is inadequate – The last thing a business would want is to lose customers to sub par customer service. If you find your customer service team spending more time reacting to customer complaints, rather than proactively anticipating customer customer needs, then it is time to consider a CRM system. 
5. Your reporting process is lengthy – Manual data entry by the sales team makes it difficult and time consuming to generate sales reports. Spending too much time on reports would rob them the time spent on important work. 
6. You find it difficult to manage long-term accounts – No sales team would want their biggest and most valuable customers to feel unappreciated. Tracking customer milestones and important events can get really cumbersome with a manual sales lifecycle. 
7. You are not sure about your growth path – Are you sure about your company’s ability to scale effectively? Do you know how your organization will handle a potential rush of new business? If you don’t think your processes and tools are up to the task, then it is time to go for a CRM system. 

A truly worthwhile CRM system is extendable and customizable enough to overcome any business challenge as your company grows. If one or more business scenarios hit a little too close to home, then it is time to move forward and look for a CRM solution for your business. 

10 Workflows that CRM Can Automate

CRM software can automate a variety of business processes effectively. We have listed out 10 examples of CRM workflows you can effectively automate. 

1. Deal Management Workflows

Deal management refers to overseeing and tracking potential deals that are currently in the sales pipeline. All the activities for generating leads through initial email or cold call campaigns, qualifying and nurturing them, conducting sales presentations or product demos, sending proposals, and even deciding on a won or lost deal can be effectively automated in CRM. The core of CRM is “if-then” conditions that route the workflow. Assigning tasks with deals is another core feature of CRM automation. 

2. Email marketing campaign workflows

Mail marketing is an important part of marketing initiatives. Activities like deploying standard or drip campaigns to potential leads, current prospects, and customers are more effective when automated with CRM. Automated email workflows enable the marketing team to send specific messages to particular target audiences at specific times to optimize relationship-building strategies.

Moreover, automation lets you personalize emails as well as campaigns for larger market segments. You can also configure the system to follow up with other emails depending on how prospects interact with your previous messages. Automation also enables marketing teams to send large-scale campaigns to mass audiences that are tailored to a specific segment, this way you can send one set of content to one audience while sending another set to a different audience. The settings of emails can be adjusted based on how the audience interacts with your content. 

3. Email newsletters workflow

Any time a customer joins your email list, the CRM system can set up an automated workflow to send the new subscriber thanking them for joining and informing them what they can expect from future newsletters or emails. 

4. Lead scoring workflows

A lead scoring system assigns values to all your leads on a scale that runs from 0 to 100. The CRM workflow can be set up to automate this lead-scoring process so that the system can score your lead when they sign up. The system can also notify your sales team of worthwhile leads for follow-up. 

5. Lead and contact generation workflows

There is a lot of data entry during lead generation, which takes up a lot of time for sales representatives. If you configure your CRM to automatically add records and relevant data for incoming prospects so that sales reps can exclusively focus on building client relationships. Users can auto-create records using a CRM for inquiries submitted on their website forms or through social media ads. Some CRMs have this as a built-in feature, while others require you to use an automation tool. 

6. Lead assignment workflows

The tasks associated with deals are assigned to sales reps automatically via CRM workflows. In the same manner, you can ensure that someone is held accountable for a newly generated lead with auto-lead assignment. Teams can run these workflows for records automatically generated through ad or website lead sources as well as manually entered ones. CRM software lets you design detailed “if-then” conditions such as lead source, region, and the rep’s current online status for assigning new opportunities. 

7. Lead qualification workflows

Lead qualification is the process of identifying the best leads to determine which ones have the best chance of becoming won deals and converting them into customers. Leads are qualified using the lead scoring technique. Users can establish criteria and a point system that automatically adds or subtracts points to a lead. It can be based on traits like lead sources or customer profiles and how much interest they have expressed by interacting with your marketing campaigns. 

8. Customer support and feedback workflows

Once customers have been acquired, you need to properly manage them by addressing their inquiries and obtaining their feedback. The CRM system can be configured to automatically assign customer tickets to the next available agent instead of manually trying to assign requests. 

9. Customer lifecycle management workflows

Customer lifecycle management involves managing the entire relationship with a customer based on where they are in the buying process. It goes further than deal management in considering the stages before they become aware of your business and while they are customers. Many businesses use a sales funnel to organize where a customer or lead stands based on their relationship with the brand. 

10. Account management

Workflows can be created for alerting teams to client contracts that are about to expire soon or are due for renewal. Teams can focus on renegotiating or renewing the contracts. These can be either one-time alerts or staggered, recurring notifications. For simpler contracts or monthly subscriptions, the CRM workflows can be automatically set to send renewal emails.

How to Create Workflows Using CRM?

How to combine CRM with workflow automation? CRM is a system for creating and building strong customer relationships. Workflow automation is a solution that simplifies and streamlines process workflows so that repetitive tasks are automated. What is workflow automation in CRM? CRM solutions are extremely versatile and can be used for automating customer-facing workflows effectively. Workflow automation can help identify repetitive and redundant tasks in the process.

To explore how workflow automation helps CRM, let us look at the setup process. 

1. Determine which process will get CRM workflows 

Workflow automation may not work for all workflows. Tasks pertinent early in the sales funnel are better suited for automation than processes lower down the sales funnel. Once you decide which high-funnel process you’ll automate, test your automation process. The sales and marketing teams may have valuable insights into which CRM workflows are hindering or helping their work. 

2. Set up your workflows

Setting up workflows involves some basic steps, such as, –

• Open your workflow creation tool and start by naming the workflow
• Assign the workflow to one or several employees and departments
• Set the workflow’s trigger
• Set the actions to which the trigger will lead to
• Save and activate your workflow

Workflow automation in CRM brings flexibility and scalability into workflows. Setting up automated workflows in CRM takes only a few minutes. 

3. Run your new workflows and test them regularly 

Once the workflows are set up, you and your team must closely observe how the newly setup workflows are performing. The effectiveness of workflows is evaluated based on how it helps the team achieve its goals. Run tests regularly to identify flaws, and revise workflows as needed. In order to properly use CRM, you need to run, test, and revise workflows. 

4. Keep teams informed 

Implementation of new CRM workflows must be accompanied by updating the team about the changes. You should inform your team of any adjustments you make to your CRM workflows irrespective of the task or department. 

5. Stick to universally successful workflows 

A CRM workflow that is easier for one team, may not be so for another team. Instead of using workflows that empower one team at the expense of another, stick to workflows that work well for all the teams. 

Conclusion

CRM workflows are here for enabling sales teams to build strong, long-term relationships with customers and prospects. CRM workflow automation enables the sales teams to make the most out of customer relationships.

Cflow is a workflow automation solution that can automate sales and marketing workflows quickly and effectively. Not just sales workflows, Cflow can automate key business processes within minutes.

To explore Cflow, all you need to do is sign up for the free trial.