The 5 best CRM automation tools + how they help

Customer relationship management platforms are a requirement for sales-driven organizations that need to manage communication with customers and prospects effectively and efficiently.

Spreadsheets and manual recordkeeping can only take teams so far, and implementing a CRM platform is a clear sign that your organization is prioritizing growth, streamlining workflows, and optimizing the sales process.

When done right, a CRM can increase lead conversion by a staggering 300% while increasing purchase value by 40%.

How do you keep your systems streamlined and efficient as customer tracking gets more complex? The key is CRM automation.

In this CRM automation guide, you’ll learn how to increase efficiency, save time, and improve your sales team’s results by automating the functions of your CRM software. We’ll also explore the most significant advantages and functions of CRM automation and how modern CRMs use new technologies to increase value to B2B organizations. We will look deeper at five of the best CRM automation solutions on the market.

What is CRM automation?

Customer relationship management (CRM) automation is the process of automating marketing, sales, and customer service functions to help teams track their engagement with current and prospective customers or clients. Automating your CRM eliminates tedious and repetitive manual data entry, boosts productivity, and saves team members’ time so they can focus on high-value activities like lead generation, relationship building, lead nurturing, and deal conversion.

Some common cloud-based CRM automation platforms include Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and FreshSales.

New, relationship intelligence-focused CRM platforms are also available for teams that rely on relationships to source, influence, and close deals. Learn more about how relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity compare to traditional CRM platforms.

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The primary functions of CRM automation

CRM automation tools perform many functions, but some of the critical things you should look for when you’re investing in an automated CRM tool include:

1. Contact management: An automated CRM system helps manage contact information and customer data, including first name, last name, phone number, email, social media profiles, and company details.
2. Lead management: Your team can track their deals or sales pipelines by managing all lead-related activity with CRM automation. This includes lead identification, tracking, scoring, and end-to-end workflow management. With automated CRM functionality, salespeople always have the most current data at their fingertips to engage effectively with leads and prospects.
3. Email marketing and marketing automation: Your customer relationship management software can empower your marketing teams with the ability to create welcome messages, email campaigns, and follow-up messages. List segmentation for personalized email messages is also possible with automated CRMs that track email opens, map out changing customer preferences, and help you plan new marketing drip campaigns.
4. Integration with other applications: Intelligent and automated CRM platforms easily integrate with other applications and tools, including calendars, email systems, help desk platforms, and project management tools. Automated email and calendar integrations facilitate company-wide collaboration and ensure that interaction histories are always up to date and available in one place. This reduces or eliminates the need to track down the last person who had a phone call with a client or spend hours researching the right person at your company to ask questions about a prospect.‍
5. Analytics and reporting: CRM automation systems include customizable reporting features that help you optimize sales processes and marketing efforts with more data-driven decision-making. Streamline all your reporting on KPIs and key metrics with high-quality, always up-to-date data.

The benefits of CRM automation

CRM automation trends run the gamut of business activity. Here are some of the ways CRM automation can benefit your company:

• Streamlining tasks so you can get more done in less time.
• Generating more leads and increasing qualification rates.
• Increasing sales conversions by focusing on your best leads.
• Improving the customer experience by attending to issues more quickly.
• Executing multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously by working with marketing automation software.
• Boosting profits by driving higher customer retention rates.
• Freeing up service agents and sales reps to spend more time building relationships and solving complex issues.

Best practices for CRM automation solutions

Automating CRM functions is meant to make life easier for your sales and marketing teams—but to get a high ROI from your investment, you must ensure optimal adoption of your CRM and keep your data clean. Follow these best practices for the smooth implementation of your automated CRM.

1. Choose a user-oriented platform

Successful CRM data automation starts with choosing the right tools. Your platform should include a clear, easy-to-use, intuitive user interface that responds quickly to search queries and provides the user with complete customer data.

2. Select an easy-to-use but sophisticated CRM platform

Boost the efficiency and productivity of your sales teams by choosing a platform that matches your workflows as closely as possible. Multiple teams will likely be using the CRM automation tool for a number of different purposes, so ease of use makes a big difference in CRM adoption rates. Keep everything together in one place for better data integration and higher utilization of the tool.

3. Make sure your CRM is mobile-friendly

In this age of distributed teams, cloud applications, and globalization, data needs to be available 24/7 on all mobile platforms and devices. Choose a cloud-based, device-agnostic CRM that provides real-time data management—and even a mobile app.

4. Track multi-channel data and connect it to your CRM

A lot happens with a prospect before that person becomes a lead—and all of that activity needs to be automatically captured in your CRM so it can be analyzed and acted upon. Make sure your CRM platform is connected to marketing analytics tools that track landing page visits, form submissions, open rates, and click-throughs to give your team full context into every customer journey.

Leading companies also use social media to answer customer questions and provide support. Integrating social media tools with your CRM to capture more conversations can help your sales team understand client behavior and expectations and respond more quickly to complaints, questions, and referrals.  

5. Define a standard CRM automation process

Allowing multiple formats for data entry and updates can damage your CRM data integrity.

Maintain data uniformity by creating clear and concise guidelines for any remaining manual data entry (including manually logged notes or custom-built fields), data updates, and import processes. To reduce errors, include drop-down menus rather than free-flow text boxes whenever possible.

Improve your long-term data quality by clearly instructing your firm’s team members about how your CRM system should be used and what will happen if your data quality erodes (i.e., incomplete or out-of-date information leads to missed opportunities).

6. Customize your automation features

You can customize your CRM platform so your automations work for your unique sales process.

Start relationships with new customers on the right foot by setting up automatic welcome campaigns or creating follow-up reminders that nudge you to check in regularly with your top prospects or high-quality referral sources.

7. Provide training

With today’s advanced automation systems, user adoption will be far less of a problem than with traditional CRMs, but your sales and marketing teams will still need to know how to make the most of their customer and prospect data.

Provide training opportunities for your team members, including workshops, Q&A sessions, and one-on-one user practice sessions through your vendor’s support team.

The 3 CRM functions every sales and deal team should automate 

You hear a lot about marketing automation platforms and the tasks digital marketing teams can and should automate through their CRM. However, for sales and deal teams, there is a different focus. 

Three main CRM functions should be automated for all deal and sales teams:

1. Manual data entry

More than 40% of workers spend at least a quarter of their work week on manual, repetitive tasks like data entry. Another study found 90% of employees feel burdened by repetitive tasks that can be easily automated.

And that’s where your CRM comes in—it should automate these repetitive tasks so that your sales team can become more efficient and focus their efforts on finding new leads and closing revenue-generating deals. You can save your team hundreds of hours with the right CRM or CRM integrations. With Affinity for Salesforce, for example, each user can save 200 hours of manual CRM work per year.  

2. Relationship insights

Relationships are the currency that closes deals.

Finding and understanding the relationship between your customers and your organization can be complex, especially in larger organizations. With the right CRM, you can confidently navigate the sales landscape, knowing you have up-to-date information about your organization’s network and relationships.

A CRM that automatically generates and updates relationship insights can help speed up the deal process. You can easily uncover warm introductions and relationship paths to help you close deals faster. Your salespeople will enter every meeting prepared with the right information and data. 

3. Data enrichment 

Data enrichment improves the quality of your existing customer data. A CRM with enriched data consolidates all relationship insights, contact information, customer engagement data, and deal intelligence to create a complete dataset that deals teams can use to drive deals forward.

However, going through your CRM is a massive undertaking unless you have a CRM or CRM integration that can automate the data enrichment process. When you can automate this process, you not only save time but also ensure you’re working from the most accurate and up-to-date customer data. 

What makes a great customer relationship management automation tool?

At its core, CRM software is straightforward—it tracks customer interactions and information, the live deals you have with them, and the relationship activity that occurs during that process. CRM automation software takes it one step further and automates a lot of the work that is happening inside the CRM. 

Beyond these standard functions, every CRM is different and has different features to help you and your team become more productive. It may allow you to manage marketing tasks, automated workflows, or chatbots. It may also have customer service, SMS marketing, or email marketing tools built-in or offered as CRM integrations. 

Together, these features can save you and your team time and money. But how do you decide which tool is best for your organization? Every organization’s needs will be different, but there are some key features you should keep an eye out for:

• Customer and sales management: The main function of a CRM is tracking customer information, interactions, and deals in a visual sales pipeline.
• Ease of use: CRMs handle many complex tasks, and the goal is to make those tasks easier to manage. Look for a tool that will be easy for all your employees to use. 
• Reporting: High-quality reports are important—if you can’t analyze your data, you won’t be able to improve and grow.
• Customization: Each organization’s business model is unique. You need a solution that can adapt to your needs, not the other way around.
• Automation and integrations: A CRM that allows you to automate your workflow is essential. Whether it’s through integrations or through the CRM itself, you need to be able to automate repetitive tasks and more to effectively save time and money by using a CRM.

CRM automation software to help you get the most from your data

Now that you know what to look for in your CRM automation software, let’s look at some of the popular options on the market. 

Affinity

Designed for relationship-driven industries, Affinity is the next-generation relationship platform built to help you close deals faster. 

Affinity integrates relationship intelligence, deal sourcing, deal flow management, portfolio support, fundraising, and analytics directly into your current workflow. Affinity supercharges how teams manage relationships by integrating the billions of data points in your organization’s emails, calendars, and other disparate systems.

By automating manual data entry, uncovering warm introductions to key decision-makers, and keeping you in the loop on all your important leads, Affinity helps deal teams save time and close faster. 

If you’re in a relationship-driven industry like venture capital or growth equity, you can tap into the power of artificial intelligence to automatically populate your pipeline and map out your team’s relationships.

Pros

• Automatically captures relationship insights.
• Uncover warm introductions to key decision-makers.
• Automate manual data entry, saving 200+ hours per person per year.
• Automatically enriches data.
• Display deal data alongside your browser and in your email.
• Send notifications when relationship scores drop.

Cons

• Designed for relationship-driven industries. 

Pricing

Pricing starts at $2,000 USD per user per year. 

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Salesforce

Salesforce CRM is a platform used by many organizations for various sales automation needs across industries. If you are a larger organization or require a highly customizable solution, Salesforce may be right for you. 

Because Salesforce has been on the market for over twenty years, thousands of integrations and apps can help you tailor Salesforce to your needs and create an all-in-one solution.

Customization is one of Salesforce’s strongest features—many CRMs limit what you can do to customize your sales pipeline, but that is not the case with Salesforce. Even if Salesforce doesn’t have the tool or feature you’re looking for, there is most likely an out-of-the-box tool on the Salesforce AppExchange that can help you.

Salesforce has 24/7 customer support via telephone or live chat. 

Pros

• Contact, lead, and opportunities management.
• Lead scoring (with the Unlimited Plan).
• Extensive customization options.
• Powerful reporting functionality.

Cons

• There is no free plan.
• It takes time to set up.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $165 USD per user per month, and every plan starts with a free 30-day trial. 

Affinity for Salesforce

If you’re already using Salesforce in your organization but would like to access some of Affinity’s automation features, you need the Affinity for Salesforce add-in. 

Affinity for Salesforce ensures you can access all your deal data without the heavy lifting—it syncs with your inbox and calendar to automatically create and enrich Salesforce records. Much like Affinity, Affinity for Salesforce brings relationship intelligence into the picture by providing network and relationship insights to help you uncover warm introductions and new sales opportunities within your network data. 

With Affinity for Salesforce, you have a clear view of every relationship across your organization directly inside your CRM—no need for additional tools or switching from one screen to another. 

If you prefer to work in your inbox or browser, the Affinity Chrome and Outlook extensions allow you to access and update records without ever opening Salesforce.  

Affinity for Salesforce gives sales and deal teams everything they need to make relationship-based decisions, resulting in revenue-generating deals closing more often and 25% faster. 

Pros

• Automations that create, update, and enrich Salesforce records.
• Sync your email and calendar to Salesforce.
• Reduce manual data entry on your sales team by 200+ hours per year.
• Access relationship insights to find warm introductions and new opportunities.
• Easily nurture leads with notifications and reminders 
• Improve CRM adoption with browser and inbox extensions for Chrome and Outlook. 

Cons

• It is a Salesforce integration, so you cannot use it on its own. For a standalone CRM, consider Affinity.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $100 USD per user per month.

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Hubspot

The Hubspot CRM can support your sales, marketing, customer support, content management, operations, and ecommerce teams.

Using Hubspot, you can automate actions based on how your contact interacts with your emails and create workflows for automating sales actions like scoring leads and assigning leads to team members.

If you are looking for a solution that combines a robust marketing hub with a CRM, Hubspot Marketing is a good option. With it, you can move from posting to your company blog, to sending an email marketing campaign, or monitoring your sales pipeline.  

Pros

• It has a free plan available.
• You can store up to one million contacts.
• Extensive deal filters. 
• Mix and match the various products to create a customized solution for your organization.

Cons

• The free plan does not include sales workflow automation.
• The suite is more suited for small businesses versus larger organizations.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $85 USD per user per month.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is another tool that has various app options—Campaigns for email templates and marketing, Desk for customer service, and Bookings for appointment scheduling.

Zoho CRM lets you manage leads and deals in your sales pipeline, generate sales reports, and set up automated workflow rules. 

The company’s proprietary AI, Zia, works in the background to manage your contacts, identify those more likely to become customers and suggest new products and services to offer clients. 

Pros

• Set up lead scoring rules and automatically assign those scores in the future.
• Create an ecosystem using the other Zoho apps.
• Create up to 2,500 rules in your CRM.
• There is a free account available.

Cons

• The sales funnel software is complicated and can take time to learn. 
• Most of the advanced features are only available at the higher-priced tiers.

Pricing

Pricing starts at $20 USD per user per month. 

Run a better business with CRM automation

When it comes to automating your CRM, your best bet is to start with a CRM platform that includes advanced automation features out of the box. Affinity’s automated CRM imports every email message, calendar meeting, and contact across your entire organization and updates instantly as you build relationships with clients and prospects.

Eliminating the need for time-consuming manual contact data entry will free up to over 200 hours per person annually, which you can spend on higher value dealmaking activities.

With relationship intelligence based on your whole team’s network and activities, you’ll never have to ask, “Do we know someone at that company?” or “Who knows this contact the best?” because you’ll always have the complete history of every connection in your CRM and be able to find the best path to an introduction.

Talk to one of our team members today to find out how Affinity can help you connect with crucial contacts, create more opportunities, and close more deals.

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FAQs 

What is the difference between a CRM and marketing automation tools?

The difference between CRM and marketing automation tools lies in their function. A CRM helps store, enrich, and analyze customer and lead data, while marketing automation tools help automate various marketing tasks. Both are helpful for your business, but they serve very different purposes. 

What can be automated in my CRM?

There are a lot of things that you can automate in your CRM. Depending on your CRM, you can automate:

1. Manual data entry
2. Relationship insights
3. Data enrichment
4. Lead prioritization
5. Moving leads through your pipeline
6. Outreach to disengaged customers
7. Appointment and follow-up reminders

What is CRM workflow automation?

A CRM workflow automation is a sequence of steps that your CRM automatically runs through when specific triggers, conditions, and actions are met. For example, you can have a CRM workflow that qualifies your leads after they are entered into your system based on the conditions you program beforehand.

What is the best CRM automation tool for deal teams?

The best CRM automation tool for deal teams combines the standard aspects of a CRM and adds a new layer. With Affinity for Salesforce, you tap into the power of relationship intelligence—automatically uncover warm introductions within your network and understand the entire history of engagement with your company so you can close deals faster.

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