There are so many tasks that no one is ever thrilled to tackle, the ones you have to do over and over for every new customer, new sales sequence, new promotion, new spreadsheet loaded into your CRM…the list goes on. Those repetitive tasks are never-ending, and there’s never enough time to deal with them. Even worse, they all exist in their own apps, forcing employees to log in here, log in there, and switch their attention between different systems.

That’s where workflow automations come in. Rather than leave different employees to handle these tasks manually in a dozen different software ecosystems, automate them in your CRM. Workflow automations are low- or no-code (drag-and-drop) features you design to handle specific repeatable tasks. When triggered by a specific user-defined action, the workflow takes over to complete the task. Workflow automations ensure that a task is completed in the same way every time, helping with compliance, scalability, adaptability, and the minimization of errors.

Marketing Automations

It’s easy to give a handful of customers a personalized experience in the form of a special promotion or experience designed just for them. But when you’re serving dozens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, you simply don’t have the time or personnel to reach out to each one individually.

Marketing automations solve that problem of scaling up the customer experience. One of the more useful workflows involves entering different customers into different email sequences based on different actions. For example, you can set up a workflow to send a welcome email to visitors to your website the first time they enter their email address on the site, a promotional email to visitors who return but haven’t purchased anything, and information about requesting a quote to visitors who frequently visit your catalog or product pages.

Doing all of this manually would take up hours of your day, or would require a whole team of people just monitoring and analyzing traffic and behavioral data. Setting up a workflow might take about an hour, and that workflow can be used over and over for different campaigns and promotions.

Sales Automations

Just as marketing automations can get the right message to the right customer at scale, sales automations can help salespeople keep up with customer inquiries, track leads as they move through the sales pipeline, and receive notifications as soon as leads open an email. Workflows can assign leads to particular salespeople or add them to a particular email sequence according to user-defined criteria. And when a sale is made, that event can trigger a workflow that sends confirmation to the sales department and an invoice to the customer while adding the customer to a post-sales nurture sequence.

Data Automations

To glean good insights from your data and use it to make strategic decisions, you need clean data. Data cleanup involves removing outdated records, fixing typos and other errors, standardizing abbreviations, and making sure everything is in the right place. This can be time-consuming, as it's easy to miss small details in large databases. Automation can help fix these errors and irrelevancies that crop up in databases over time.

Make Time for the Important Work

I know…sometimes, when technology promises to “take the drudgery out of work” or “free up employees to do more creative tasks that require strategic thinking,” it ends up making more of a different kind of work. That’s not what workflows do. What you automate are the things that, if you have too much on your plate, you’d push to tomorrow, or the things that have to be done quickly, automatically, and the same way every time. You automate the delivery, not the deliverable.

The tasks to automate do not comprise a job on their own; they comprise the work that takes up the time of people who are best served doing other things: creating marketing materials, following up with leads that need personal attention, handling customer inquiries, and making strategic decisions. Workflow automations bring the repetitive, repeatable tasks into your CRM so that your employees can focus on what they do best: using their skills and experience to create real value for your business.