CRM Automation: Features, Benefits and Top Solutions

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CRM software has become almost legendary at this point. You’re probably familiar with the common benefits touted — data organization, improved sales performance, higher customer retention and so on. Well, you can add several more things to that list, thanks to CRM automation.

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  Product Analyst ScoreAwardsUser Sentiment ScoreStart PriceFree TrialCompany SizeDeployment
Salesforce Sales Cloud 87 Best for Team Collaboration

88%

Great
$25
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Yes
Small
Medium
Large
Cloud
On-Premise
HubSpot Sales 83 None

88%

Great
$15
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Yes
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On-Premise
Creatio 81 Best for Lead Management

95%

Excellent
$25
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Yes
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Freshsales 78 Best for Lead Management

93%

Excellent
$9
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Yes
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Zendesk Sell 66 None

87%

Great
$19
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Yes
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Two of the main goals of using software are getting organized and making complex tasks easier to accomplish. Automation makes both of those possible when it comes to handling your customer relationships.

Whether you’re on the hunt for your first CRM or looking for more automation out of your current solution, you have a lot of options. Let’s dig in to find out how you can make CRM automation work for you!

What Is CRM Automation?

CRM automation refers to a CRM system’s ability to automate repetitive, manual tasks to streamline work and improve productivity. Automation of a CRM can encompass a range of functions across marketing, sales and service activities.

Automation in CRM is particularly useful for marketing, with 78% of media planners using automation and media planning tools and 30% using automated CRM templates for better marketing campaigns.

CRM Automation Stats

CRM tools are all about making it easier to manage every external interaction and relationship that’s essential for business success. Automation can free up time to focus on more meaningful, strategic work.

The rapid advancements in AI capability over the past few years have played a key role in helping companies automate CRM to achieve these goals.

For example, marketers are using AI to automate interactions on social media and messenger apps, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing report. The same study revealed that 64% of marketers automate their metrics measurement and attribution. These are just some of the many ways users are gaining value.

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Marketing Automation vs. CRM

No discussion of automated CRM would be complete without mentioning marketing automation. While it sometimes gets confused as being the same thing as CRM, they’re actually different.

Common CRM Automations

Marketing automation serves the top and middle of the funnel. It also focuses (surprise surprise) on automating recurring tasks the marketing department faces at multiple points of the customer lifecycle. This covers everything from the time they first come into the system to the moment they turn into a customer and beyond.

Meanwhile, CRM mainly focuses on the bottom stages of the funnel. However, it typically involves a much broader approach that considers the entire span of your relationship with customers.

Here are some common capabilities of each that illustrate the differences.

Marketing Automation Software

  • Campaign management for lead generation
  • Lead nurturing or re-engagement, often using email campaigns
  • Lead prioritization, using lead scoring and win probability

CRM

  • Contact management, which includes a database for storing a record of contact information (think email, company size, etc.)
  • Visual sales pipeline to easily track each lead’s status and progress
  • Quote and order management to facilitate the purchase process
  • Reporting, so you can get high-level or granular snapshots of how you’re performing against KPIs
  • Customer service functionality, such as creating a customer portal and ticketing system

As you can see, marketing automation is more narrowly focused, while CRM encompasses a much wider range of activities, goals and functional areas. CRM can — and often does — include marketing and service tools, in addition to its more commonly known sales features.

While CRM and marketing automation are different, they work well together because their features complement each other to help maximize the efficiency of the marketing and sales departments.

They’re often tightly integrated for a seamless experience and two-way flow of data that removes the silos traditional marketing and sales teams had to deal with. And in reality, many CRMs have built-in marketing automation capabilities if you’d rather not deploy the two systems separately and integrate them.

When CRM and marketing automation are properly implemented, you can more easily track specific actions. For instance, the email open rates for each lead will get immediately added as data points to both your CRM and marketing automation databases.

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Other Key Areas You Can Automate

Apart from marketing, you can automate CRM tasks for the sales and service realms. Let’s see how that works.

Sales force automation (SFA) tools are a great way to expand the functionality of CRM systems. Like marketing automation, they exist as standalone systems but are also often incorporated into CRM solutions as a built-in module.

SFA software allows you to manage all aspects of the sales cycle so you can convert leads into new customers. It brings an extensive range of features that help you navigate, monitor and enhance the entire sales process.

Sales force automation relies on tracking every single interaction with a customer during the sales process: calls, meetings, emails and so forth. That way, you can ensure your marketing efforts aren’t overlapping while being optimized to bring maximum results.

Another outcome is that sales force automation makes the lives of sales reps much easier by tracking relevant information and revealing gaps where your team can be more efficient.

By managing the entire sales funnel, SFA tools can help streamline sales operations and automate many of the manual tasks that come with the job. This lets your sales reps do more of what they do best — close deals. That’s a win-win all around.

Customer Service Automation

Customer service tools (also called help desk software) are available as standalone applications as well — Zendesk being a well-known example. But keeping with our theme, they’re also often included as part of a CRM system. This offers great benefits for finding new ways to improve the customer experience.

Customer service automation provides:

  • Chatbots powered by AI
  • Customer self-service (FAQ page or a knowledgebase)
  • Automated responses, such as resetting a password
  • Case routing when a customer creates a new ticket

These capabilities and more help greatly reduce the manual labor required with supporting customers. For example, using chatbots for automated responses allows you to promptly solve customer issues and minimize ticket volume. 54% of consumers prefer using a chatbot to ask product-related queries. Letting automation share some of the workloads lets your agents focus on more pressing, complex tasks.

However, human touch to your customer service with automation is imperative. A blended approach is the best way to serve customers. Some will prefer the fast, simple responses automation can provide, while others will want to interact with a human.

While improved efficiency may be an important motivator to automate aspects of your customer service, an even bigger reason is the potential to greatly improve customer satisfaction.

88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. Aside from this, there are a host of stats that show the value of acing your customer service. If you want to survive, it’s imperative to use tools that can help ensure your customers are taken care of and satisfied.

Customer Service Stats

Key Functions

CRM automation solutions come with a dynamic range of tools and functions to optimize business processes and ensure you meet sales targets.

Contact Management

Most CRM automation solutions provide a centralized database that helps manage customer information like their name, contact details, social media profiles and the company they work for. With this function, you can easily access customer data, quickly respond to queries and ensure the whole team is on the same page.

Lead Management

You can capture, track, manage and nurture leads throughout the sales funnel. CRM automation software lets you collect and store data from various touch points, including emails, texts, calls, social media and websites. It ensures proper lead segregation based on crucial demographic and behavioral metrics and automates repetitive processes.

Document Management

Businesses deal with a lot of documentation like RFPs, contracts, quotes, invoices and transactional documents. CRM automation software helps handle document management so your sales team can share, collect and refer to customer files with ease.

Integrations

Many automated CRM systems allow integrations with various platforms such as ERP, help desk, calendar, email systems, project management tools and more. This function helps salespeople interact and track customer conversations on the same platform, boosting data accuracy and minimizing delays. It also improves team collaboration and saves money you would otherwise spend on multiple platform subscriptions.

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Specific Components You Can Automate

We’ve looked at the general functions of CRM automation with marketing automation, SFA and customer service automation. Now it’s time to see concrete examples of what you can automate.

  1. Email drip campaigns. Automating email campaigns is one of the biggest time-savers you’ll find. They can range from a simple sequence to complex, multi-faceted campaigns based on a number of criteria and triggers.
  2. Reports. No more manually putting numbers together to build your reports. With an automated CRM system, you can quickly pull whatever metrics you need to generate reports in a fraction of the time. Many solutions also support exporting reports and automatically emailing them to everyone who needs access.
  3. KPI tracking. Dashboards are a main feature of CRM systems. They give you a visual summary of key metrics in a format that’s easy to digest. Instead of going through complex steps to compile and measure your KPIs, all you need to do is configure your dashboards so they display the information you want to keep track of. This can be anything from overall sales to the number of leads each channel generates.
  4. Notifications. You can set the system up to send automatic alerts for any number of situations, such as a lead moving to a new stage of the sales pipeline or an upcoming sales call reminder.
  5. Invoices. Rather than manually sending out each invoice, you can set the system to trigger when a customer makes a purchase. This is especially helpful for B2C companies that handle a high volume of purchases.
  6. Welcome emails. Use this when a new contact enters your system via a specific action. For example, if they sign up for a newsletter or fill out a form to download a piece of content.
  7. Lead assignment. You can take the guesswork and time out of assigning leads to a sales rep by setting up rules so the system does it for you. You can base the match on sales region, industry, product or any other number of criteria.
  8. Pipeline stage transitions. If you have a sales pipeline with multiple stages, you can automate the process of moving a deal from one stage to the next. If a lead gets an email about scheduling a sales call and takes action, that would trigger the system to move the lead to the next queue in your pipeline.
  9. Data sync. If you’re using multiple systems, such as a separate marketing automation tool in addition to your CRM, you can configure them so that a change in one is reflected in the other. For example, when a new lead enters your marketing automation platform, it automatically creates a contact profile in your CRM.
  10. Re-engagement efforts. This is useful for when leads abandon a shopping cart. You can set up an email that re-engages them and potentially determines their reason for leaving right before purchase.
  11. Task assignments. Sales reps can automatically receive a list of tasks they need to complete based on interactions — e.g., send a follow-up note after a sales call. This prevents important details from disappearing into the void.
  12. Activity logs. Let’s be real — manual data input is tedious. Instead of manually entering every customer interaction, your CRM can automatically log phone calls, email interactions, form submissions and other communications with leads and prospects.
  13. Upselling and cross-selling. Upselling is one of the oldest sales techniques in the book. Almost every salesperson tries to persuade customers to upgrade or add a supplementary product or service to the existing order. However, manually sending upselling and cross-selling recommendations to clients is time-consuming. Building an automated upselling process enables you to capture client interest at scale and send customized offers automatically.
  14. Segmentation. Sometimes contact lists run as long as the river Nile and sorting through them is exhausting. CRM automation allows you to categorize contacts based on variables like history, behavior and interests, making your job a lot easier.

The automation possibilities don’t end with the list above. When you’re researching specific CRMs, have a list handy of what automations you’re looking for so you can weigh each solution’s value and fit.

It’s also essential to have built-in integrations at your disposal to aid automation. For example, you can’t automate email tracking or send automated follow-up messages without integrating with Gmail. Similarly, integrating with solutions like CPQ, accounting and messaging apps facilitates automated data migration.

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Primary Benefits

As you’d expect, automated CRM can save you loads of time every week.

Just imagine, for example, what automating an email campaign could mean. How long would it take you to manually send out an entire sequence of emails to a list of 550 contacts? Even if you had superhuman speed, that would be a huge time suck.

But with a CRM in place? You build the workflow and triggers, create the content, and sit back and let the system handle the rest. Much more manageable.

CRM automation comes with plenty of benefits besides giving you back time to focus on more important tasks.

Benefits of CRM Automation

  • Streamline tasks so you can get more done without sacrificing precious hours in the process
  • Generate more leads and increase qualification rates by following up more quickly
  • Increase sales conversions by focusing on the hottest leads and pairing them with the best sales reps
  • Execute multiple campaigns effectively, often with the ability to create them using drag-and-drop features
  • Improve customer satisfaction by attending to customer service issues promptly
  • Retain more customers, which can boost profits
  • Free service agents up to spend more time solving complex problems
  • Reduce manual errors
  • Pull data from disparate sources to see the big picture
  • Boost customer engagement by integrating with AI-powered chatbots
  • Quickly resolve issues with intelligent routing that automatically routes queries to the relevant agent

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Industries Leveraging Automation in CRM

Over the years, CRM went from being a prized asset of a few large corporations to a must-have for every organization. Owing to the rise of CRM SaaS platforms, CRMs are now an affordable option catering to industries and businesses of every size. 91% of companies with more than ten employees implement a CRM.

Let’s take a look at how some of the industries utilize automated CRM systems:

Healthcare

AI and automation in healthcare became prominent since the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Hospitals, clinics and private practices across the U.S. incorporated robotic process automation (RPA) and electronic health records (EHRs) to improve efficiency and provide inpatient and outpatient care.

According to CAQH, the healthcare industry has already avoided $166 billion annually by automating administrative transactions. Presently, the industry uses automated CRM for managing appointments, billings, insurance verification, sending patient reminders and more.

Additionally, you can use the data generated by healthcare CRMs to adjust staffing to accommodate patient inflows and reduce the waiting period in ambulatory services.

Fitness

Due to the pandemic, the fitness industry transformed from physical gyms to online virtual training sessions (cue: the Peloton craze). Automated CRM systems came to the rescue of fitness companies and gym trainers struggling to adapt to the new normal.

The automation of back-end processes frees up workers to focus on primary goals like customer engagement and retention. For example, instead of manually adding clients to your software, pre-made workflows automatically add them from emails, leads or in-app purchases.

Since fitness is a customer-oriented industry, CRM automation enables companies to optimize interaction with tools like automated welcome packets and workout reminders.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce platforms leverage CRM automation for a plethora of reasons — from customer engagement workflows to reporting and analytics.

Customers are buying products day and night, and orders go through 24/7. CRM syncs customer information with central databases after every order, making it easier for future communication and campaigning. It pulls data from multiple touchpoints to help with lead nurturing and ensure customer profiles are up-to-date.

Business owners can use automated workflows to segment customers, manage inventory and even print shipping labels. Setting up automated emails for cross-selling and upselling and sending abandoned cart recovery reminders helps increase average order value (AOV). Automatic analytical tools can track purchase histories, conversion rates, engagement stats and website hotspots.

With these capabilities at their disposal, small business owners without heavy pockets can automate CRM to run their storefronts with low operating costs.

Legal

According to Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report, the legal industry has not only recovered from the pandemic — it’s actually grown. As of March 2022, lawyers have been opening new files at a rate averaging 24% higher than the 2019 baseline. CRM automation enables law firms to continue on this upward trajectory and maximize productivity.

Automated CRM systems mainly cater to process-related aspects of a lawyer’s work. It frees up their time from low-value administrative tasks like document review, hours tracking, appointment scheduling and task coding.

CRMs enable law firms to simplify client management and prioritize new leads by storing all crucial data. They can build scalable workflows to automate processes like contract generation, billing, and risk and compliance management.

CRM Automation Tools

Before diving into the best CRM automation systems in the market, let’s take a look at different types of CRMs you can use to improve your business.

There are two types of CRM automation solutions based on installation:

On-premise

As the name suggests, you can operate the solution on site within a defined network and permitted systems. This type of CRM is particularly useful for businesses that deal with sensitive information, like banks, healthcare, defense and government bodies.

While it’s more expensive and complex to install, maintain and scale, the platform ensures data security – making it a worthwhile investment for those that need it.

Cloud-based

You can access this software online via the cloud through a third-party vendor. Cloud CRMs are cheaper, scalable, customizable and offer numerous integrations. Easy installation, updates, maintenance and training are a plus.

Some people worry that cloud CRMs don’t offer data safety, but that’s far from the truth. Frequent data backups and robust security measures by top-rated vendors prevent accidental loss of valuable customer data.

Based on functionality, there are three main types of automated CRM systems:

Operational

This solution is best for businesses with linear sales processes and heavy customer focus. Operational CRM helps optimize sales, marketing and customer service and manage a range of marketing campaigns. From leads to KPIs, you can track critical information to measure sales performance and identify bottlenecks in the process.

Analytical

As the name suggests, analytical CRM deals with customer, marketing, sales, service and channel analytics. It lets you create detailed client journeys and buyer personas to boost customer retention rates. It’s especially beneficial for service providers and account-based sales organizations that deal with huge data sets.

Collaborative

Collaborative CRM is all about optimizing internal communication to better serve your customers. It focuses on providing the right information and tools to your teams to ensure better interaction management and data-driven customer conversations. Businesses with various products in multiple locations can use this solution to enhance cross-team collaboration.

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Best CRM Automation Systems

Based on our data, we’ve identified the following systems as the top automated CRM systems in the market. For more in-depth knowledge, you can visit our Jumpstart Platform and run a score-based comparative analysis with other products.

Creatio

Creatio is a low-code solution that helps organizations digitize workflows and optimize their customer and employee experiences. You can access ready-to-use templates and connectors to build complex integrations and custom apps. Other capabilities include email marketing, pipelines, dashboards, project management, SLAs and more.

Creatio

Customer Contact Info Tab in Creatio. Source

Top Benefits

  • Holistic Customer View: Create comprehensive customer profiles to quickly access relevant details like industry, company size, location, history, contacts and more. Identify email addresses, social media profiles and phone numbers from open sources through Creatio’s data scientist.
  • Card Scanner: Automatically recognize and export card data directly into the system by scanning business cards.
  • Sales Forecasting: Its forecasting modules allow sales managers to analyze team performance and individual efficiency. Businesses can plan their sales volume according to filters like managers, accounts and industries.
  • Email Marketing: Creatio offers built-in integrations with email marketing tools to facilitate mass emails. You can analyze bulk email clicks, monitor engagement rates and test several versions before pressing send.

Primary Features

  • Marketing Automation Integration: Through PieSync, Creatio connects with third-party solutions for automatic two-way contact sync. Common integrations include HubSpot, Mailchimp, Copper, InfusionSoft, Salesforce, Marketo and more.
  • Automatic Lead Distribution: You can automate CRM to distribute leads according to variables like location, industry, budget and current workload of sales reps. Automatically assign disqualified leads to lead nurturing campaigns.
  • Process Automation: Automate internal tasks like document approval and multi-team projects with a process library. You can manage several operations like process modeling, execution, monitoring and analysis. Create organization-specific workflows with recommended next action options.
  • Automatic Order Creation: Configure order registrations from the organization’s website automatically. Integrate it with your website to process all orders in a single window.
  • Email Association with CRM: Automatically link emails to the relevant account, order, opportunity and other objects.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t provide real-time notifications when prospects open your emails.
  • No out-of-the-box AI capabilities for opportunity management.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a configurable, cloud-based solution that helps streamline sales and customer service activities for B2B and B2C organizations.

It facilitates customer retention, process optimization and better communication with capabilities like sales forecasting, real-time tracking and intelligence, automated workflows, and collaboration tools. It comes equipped with a native mobile app for iOS and Android devices.

Salesforce Sales Dashboard

Sales Dashboard in Salesforce. Source

Top Benefits

  • AI Insights: Salesforce’s in-house AI, Einstein, provides businesses with deep customer insights based on their interaction history. It also improves employee productivity with recommendations, next best actions and intelligent case classification.
  • Personalizations: Deploy personalized campaigns by accessing a library of market-approved email templates. The Salesforce Engage tool provides a comprehensive history of prospects’ interactions with your brand within the system or on the mobile app. Real-time alerts and activity tracking ensure you follow up at the right time.
  • Mobile Access: Allow your sales team to take their office out on the road. They can log customer calls, view dashboards, add notes, chase leads and more remotely.
  • Optimized Sales Performance: Sales managers can monitor sales reps’ performance using real-time leaderboards. They can also gain complete visibility into the pipeline to make informed decisions.

Primary Features

  • Marketing Automation: Integrate with Pardot to access marketing automation capabilities and gain insights into campaign effectiveness. It also integrates with Mailchimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Sendinblue.
  • Lead Distribution: Create rules to assign leads to sales reps with pre-defined criteria like location, partner tier or specializations. Intelligent routing assigns the right sales rep for follow-ups.
  • Email Association: Use Email to Salesforce to automatically group emails with the system’s leads, contacts, opportunities and other specific records.
  • Workflow Automation: Automate complex processes and approval requests using drag-and-drop actions with built-in tools like Process Builder and Flow Builder. Create workflows to guide sales reps through qualification conversations and recommend next steps. You can automate CRM to create automatic email alerts and auto-assign tasks.
  • Call Logs: Automatically log calls to related records with the lightning dialer add-on.

Limitations

  • Users need to build a custom code widget to capture contact and company information from a LinkedIn search.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

Freshsales

Freshsales is a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to personalize interactions and shorten sales cycles. Its primary capabilities include AI-powered chatbots, predictive lead scoring, activity timeline and dynamic forecasting.

The “growth” package provides powerful CRM automation that reduces manual dependency for repetitive tasks. You can access advanced customizations, governance and controls with the “enterprise” plan.

Freshsales Leads Management

Leads Tab in Freshsales. Source

Top Benefits

  • Customizations: You can create custom fields, modules and sales activities to capture relevant information. Customize the system to your preferred language and automate currency conversion.
  • Collaboration: Stay in the loop with internal notifications triggered for activities like lead sign-ups, cancellations, upgrades and other custom actions. Create tasks, reminders and appointments and view them on the activity dashboard.
  • Omnichannel Communication: You can communicate seamlessly across multiple channels such as phone, email, chat and SMS.

Primary Features

  • Auto-Assignment: Assign leads to relevant sales reps according to predetermined lead routing rules.
  • Workflows: Save time by automating sales-related processes. Automate personalized emails, lead qualification, invoices and follow-ups, and renewal reminders. Set behavioral triggers to automatically update contact statuses and move them along your onboarding pipeline.
  • Marketing Automation: You can optimize conversion rates and analyze visitor behaviors through tools like heatmaps, session replays and A/B testing. Create web forms and landing pages to capture visitor information. Target your audience through smart segments based on location, demographics, behavior and more.
  • AI: Automate chat messages on your website by setting up custom bots. Leverage Freddy AI to analyze historical data, prioritize leads and detect duplicate contacts.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t offer predetermined email responses to FAQs.
  • Users can’t convert offline documents into web-based versions.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell is a sales-centric CRM app that helps businesses maximize their productivity, increase pipeline visibility and deliver better customer experiences. Suitable for both B2B and B2C organizations, it offers email intelligence, activity reporting, call analytics and reporting capabilities. The platform is accessible via web, Android and iOS.

Zendesk Contact Management

Contacts Tab in Zendesk Sell. Source

Top Benefits

  • Mobile CRM: Receive email insights and alerts on your phone with a native mobile sales app.
  • Sales Prospecting: Increase conversions by creating targeted prospect lists using industry, company size and role. Automate outreach efforts by integrating with communication tools.
  • Analytics: Gain complete visibility into your sales pipeline with sales performance metrics. Predict deal volume and revenue growth and break down trends based on regions and teams.

Primary Features

  • Email Intelligence: Zendesk Sell enables you to automatically engage leads by setting up task sequences. Streamline email campaigns with access to unlimited email templates.
  • Dialer: A built-in native dialer allows you to generate call lists for automated dialing. Teams can make a call by hovering over the phone number. Log and record incoming and outgoing calls in real time. Zendesk Sell scores a perfect 100 for its call logging capabilities, according to our Jumpstart Platform data.
  • Marketing Automation Integration: Integrate with marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot via Zapier.
  • Automated Lead Distribution: You can automate CRM to assign leads, contacts and deals to team members in the distribution pool. Allocate them to users using a round-robin mechanism.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t provide predictive lead scoring.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub is a cloud-based solution that helps companies save time by automating sales processes. It facilitates lead nurturing, improved conversion rates and efficient pipeline management through modules like sales automation, management playbooks, automated reminders, dynamic dashboards and document tracking.

Its code-free interface doesn’t require any technical expertise. You can add more capabilities and connect with third-party systems via the app marketplace.

HubSpot Sales Dashboard

HubSpot Sales’ Dashboard. Source

Top Benefits

  • Templates: Shorten sales cycles by converting your top-performing emails into shareable templates. All your sales reps have to do is personalize templates with CRM data and press send.
  • Instant Notifications: Close deals faster and follow up at the right time by receiving instant notifications when a lead opens your email.
  • Mobile CRM: Sales reps can keep up with deals and tasks without being tied to their desks.
  • Document Repository: Build a knowledge base of helpful sales content for your team.

Primary Features

  • Sales Automation: Automate your sales operations by setting up a series of personalized emails and follow-up tasks.
  • Call Tracking: HubSpot Sales Hub automatically captures call details. You can unlock coaching tips with AI-powered insights. Get a further detailed study with our Jumpstart Platform.
  • Marketing Automation Integration: Access native integration with HubSpot Marketing. It also connects with Marketo, Pardot and Act-On.
  • Lead Distribution: Automate CRM to distribute leads equally among your sales reps. Create workflows to automatically assign leads based on location. Use a custom user field type to assign additional users.
  • Process Automation: Build automated quote-based approval processes and add custom actions to workflows.

Limitations

  • It doesn’t offer AI-based sales recommendations.
  • No custom tags for calls.
  • It doesn’t automate the approval process for travel and expense reports.
Price: $$$$$
Deployment:
Platform:

Company Size Suitability: S M L

How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

  1. Closely match the topic
  2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

FAQs

Automated CRM systems relieve pressure off sales teams, allowing them to focus on complex tasks. By automating repetitive manual tasks, your teams can design personalized customer journeys and quickly resolve queries to enhance customer satisfaction.

Many people confuse CRM automation with marketing automation for one and the same, but there are some key differences. CRM automation helps sales, marketing and service teams by speeding up business processes through automation.

Marketing automation is a part of CRM automation with a narrower focus. While CRM automation is designed for many teams, marketing automation is mainly for the marketing department.

In a nutshell, it depends on what unique features and capabilities your company needs. You don’t always need separate CRM and marketing automation software. A platform that combines a mix of both functions is an ideal solution.

Absolutely! A good automation system is flexible enough to integrate with many widely used CRM solutions. It allows easy data transfer and integrates with various third-party apps to streamline sales processes.

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Next Steps

Do you need an automated CRM system? The answer is probably “yes!” However, the specific areas of automation depend on your type of business and interactions with customers. The main areas CRM automation covers encompass marketing, sales and service activities, either through integrated tools or a robust CRM. They serve as a good starting point when considering CRM automation.

As you search for the perfect automated CRM system to meet your needs, our free comparison report can show you how solutions stack up in the automation realm.

What are the top ways CRM automation can benefit your company? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Manogna Chandrika MattaCRM Automation: Features, Benefits and Top Solutions

3 comments

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  • ALMA DULDULAO-YBARRA - October 19, 2021 reply

    Finally, an article that gives a clear comprehension of what a CRM is it’s integration possibilities, and innovative strategies to make it robust for targeted stakeholders. THANK YOU! Our organization is conducting design thinking around what we need for our multiple stakeholders: Shoppers, Donors, Team Members, and Workforce Members, and Community Partners. This sounds like a full course meal, yes. Your article helps me break down the necessary elements we need and also articulate them in industry terms.

  • Leona Quiroz - August 7, 2019 reply

    Nice Article! CRM automation for customer support can help by sending faster responses to flagged queries, assigning reps for social posts and managing regular customer inquiries.CRM automation is a process that automatically records and store email, social media and even phone interactions. Customer relationship management is a word that gives a detailed account of the entire strategies and techniques applied by companies to manage all sides of the business relationship. Workflow automation enables to automate of CRM-related tasks that are handling manually. For better understanding and to stay updated on new developments, innovations in technologies you may follow some AI-based tools CSAT.AI and Salesforce Einstein.

    Zachary Totah

    Zachary Totah - August 8, 2019 reply

    Glad you enjoyed the article, Leona! And thanks for sharing your thoughts. Really good insights.

    AI is definitely playing more of a central role in quite a few ways. We just covered that and some more CRM trends in a recent article, if you want to check it out: https://www.selecthub.com/customer-relationship-management/crm-trends/.

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