If your business is growing, then you’re short on two major things: resources and time. Want to do more with less, but don’t know where to start? Here are 5 easy ways to automate the most repetitive parts of your sales process with Zoho CRM, so you can spend your time closing deals, and do what you do best.
1. Your leads, your rules. [lead distribution]
Without automation, you have to manually assign every new lead you get to a particular sales rep. If you’re getting 100 leads every day, that means you’ll be performing the same task 100 times!
So automate your lead assignment process once and for all. Use assignment rules in Zoho CRM to segment your leads based on a particular source or city. Or, if you want your leads equally distributed, opt for the round robin method: Choose specific sales reps, users, or groups to make your lead distribution repeat itself automatically.
2. Stop doing busy work, start doing business. [welcome emails]
100 welcome emails to send to each new lead means 100 emails to draft. But if you’re just copying and pasting the same content, and all that’s changing is the recipient’s name, why do the same thing 100 times? There’s definitely no value-add—just repetition, redundancy, and content cloning.
Zoho CRM stops you from doing mindless, busy work. Create email templates to speed up the process, so you can spend your time generating 100 more leads, not repeating yourself 100 times. And if you really want to maximize your productivity, let workflows automate your welcome-email process for you: Create a workflow rule for your Leads module so that every time a new lead comes into your CRM, they automatically get a welcome-email in their inbox.
3. Take the hint. [follow-ups]
For small and medium businesses, following up with a lead is as crucial as generating a brand new one. If you’re successful in generating lots of leads, but don’t follow up with them fast enough, you close no sales. In fact, by the time you reach out to the 50th one and send them an acknowledgment, you’re probably too late: Research shows that 78% of buyers choose the vendor that immediately responds to their needs.
On the other hand, if you only focus on following up and don’t generate any new leads, you run out of customers. So what should you do if your business is growing and your resources are limited? How can you focus on both generating leads and following up with them?
Let Zoho CRM make it faster for you to follow up. Use the views and advanced filters to find which deals are closing this month that have no follow-up email or call associated with them, or to locate leads who haven’t had any notes attached to them in the past 30 days. Or, even better, use a macro: When the system sees that a large part of your daily routine consists of sending emails, updating fields, and creating tasks, Zoho CRM prompts you with a suggestion to run a macro. Because you can use it to automatically generate the standard, short follow-up messages you normally send out, you’ll respond to your leads sooner. You’ll even get a reminder of the calls and meetings you have for the day.
4. More deals, less time. [approval requests]
If you don’t automate your approval requests for a discount or purchase order, you may delay closing the deal because it’s not placed in front of your manager as soon as possible. There’s at least a 3-step process to go through: Draft the request, send it to your manager, and wait until they give you the go ahead. But when you want to close a deal, why should you have to jump through so many hoops?
Set one-time approval rules and get your approval process going! No more long waits on your end. Close more deals in less time.
5. Be proactive. [escalations]
Theoretically, you can wait for customers to escalate issues when things are taking time on your end. But practically, you can’t: Most customers don’t escalate—they start looking at your competition.
So set case-escalation rules in Zoho CRM. You’ll help get the attention of the right people inside while proactively keeping customers informed of any delays, so nothing slips through the cracks.
Sign up for Zoho CRM today!