A comprehensive guide for automating sales related tasks in Vtiger CRM

When selling, have you ever:

• Spent your valuable time on entering contact and opportunity details into CRM?
• Wasted time calling unqualified leads because they appeared first on your contacts list?
• Let a lead go cold because you forgot to follow-up?
• Exchanged a ton of emails with a prospect for finalizing the time for a demo?
• Spent an hour digging through files to find a quote that you had to send 30 minutes ago?

If you have found yourself in at least one of these situations, then you need to try Vtiger’s powerful sales automation tools today.

Vtiger CRM automates the mundane and time consuming tasks that you do at every stage of the sales cycle. This not only accelerates sales process but also gets rid of manual errors and improve efficiency. Here is a list of features that you can use to automate tasks in Vtiger:

Sales Stage: Lead Generation

Generating leads is the first step in a sales process. There are various methods for sales prospecting. Everyday you send out a dozen or more sales prospecting emails and make a ton of cold calls in search of leads who might be interested in your solution. You receive queries from potential customers through emails and web form submissions. You find prospects seeking suggestions and advices on social channels before making a purchase. Vtiger gives you tools to prospect more efficiently and automatically capture lead information inside the CRM.

Tools for prospecting:

Webforms:

Businesses use web form to convert website visitors into leads. Vtiger lets you create custom web forms that can be embedded into your company’s website. When a website visitor submits a webform, a lead record is automatically created in Vtiger. And all data submitted through web form will be automatically pulled into Vtiger. Prospect’s name, email ID, designation, company name, location are a few information that you can capture from a web form. You can set up advanced automation with workflows to take quick actions. For instance, if you have prospects across the globe, you can collect the location in the web form. And in Vtiger you can have a workflow to automatically route prospects from a certain location to the respective region’s sales team or even to a specific sales associate. This whole process eliminates the minutes spent on manual data entry and manual lead allocation.

Emails:

When you send sales emails, the one thing you never want your prospects do is hit the “Delete” button. And personalising email messages improves the engagement rate. A research by Aberdeen shows that personalized emails improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.

With Vtiger’s email automation you can personalize every email without having to spend several hours manually typing every sentence of the message. Vtiger lets you create reusable custom email templates that you can quickly customize to the need before hitting the send button. You can use merge tags to easily add the elements of personalization such as prospect’s name or company’s name automatically. Be careful, though. You don’t want your prospects sniff automation in your messages. Nobody likes robotic tones or sales pitches. Try to keep the message in conversational tone and use merge tags to give a personal touch. With Vtiger, in a few minutes, you can email a 100 prospects greeting each one by name and asking how bright the sun in shining in one’s city. Vtiger even lets you set automated personalized responses that trigger based on specific actions your prospects take on your email.

Phone calls:

Everyday you make dozens of prospecting calls. Vtiger allows you to place calls on a click and auto logs every call you make or receive through the CRM. No wasted minutes on dialing numbers or manually logging every call. You can go back and reference these calls anytime. Vtiger integrates with popular telephony services such as Twilio, Plivo, ViciDial, Exotel and Asterisk. You can configure multiple gateways and choose one gateway when placing a call. If the prospect is interested in your product, you can create an opportunity record in the CRM on a click. If the prospect asks you to follow up after a couple of weeks, you can instantly set up follow up reminder to ensure that no follow up falls through the cracks.

Sales Stage: Lead qualification

Lead qualification is the process of evaluating prospect’s willingness to buy from you. Lead qualification helps you save time spent on prospects who never buy from you. Vtiger’s profile scoring and engagement scoring features enable you to identify and focus on your most valuable prospects.

Profile Score:

On creation of a new contact or organization record, Vtiger automatically scores the profile to show how attractive the prospect is to your business. To score profiles, Vtiger lets you assign a score between 0 and 100 for each of the fields in Contacts and Organization module. Once the profile scoring is set up, Vtiger automatically calculates the score on every Contact and Organization record and places a 5-star based rating on each record. Potential customer profiles that match closely to your ideal customer profile will receive a higher star rating than those that aren’t. This star rating helps you to quickly pick high quality prospects for further engagement.

Engagement Score:

Vtiger tracks how your prospects engage with your emails and gives you an engagement score to tell you how interested your prospects are in your product. For every action that the prospect takes on your email, a point is added to the engagement score. For instance, when the prospect opens your email, engagement score is 1 and when the prospect clicks on link shared in the email the engagement score becomes 2. More the engagement, higher the score. As the engagement score increases, you know that your prospects is becoming more interested in your product. This way you can identify and focus on your most engaged prospects.

Sales Stage: Product Demonstration

After qualifying leads, the next step is to schedule an appointment with them to present your product or service. If you’re rallying emails back and forth to set an appointment, then you’re not only handling the process inefficiently but also slowing down the deal’s momentum.

Appointment page:

Vtiger’s appointment page is designed to make your appointment management process stressless. Vtiger lets you create your personal appointment page that considers your all other calendar events and displays only the open slots. All you have to do is share your appointment page URL with your prospects and they can pick a time slot from all available ones. Once your prospect has picked a favourable time, both of you receive an appointment confirmation email. In case the prospect wants to reschedule, she/he can simply cancel the existing appointment and schedule a new one without demanding your personal intervention.

Sales Stage: Negotiation

You’ve delivered an impressive demo, your prospect is convinced to buy, you’ve sent a price quote and are waiting to close the deal. But then you hear the prospect say – “I’d like to negotiate”. While this stage of the sales cycle highly demands your negotiation skills, you can still use a few automations to manage documents and make quick decisions.

Quote approvals:

In cases of prospects asking for a discount that is over your approval limit, you have to consult with your manager or other higher level executive before sending the quote to the prospect. With Vtiger’s quote approval process in place you don’t have to waste time chasing down approvers for getting quotes approved. Vtiger auto sends quotes for approval when certain entry conditions are met. You can also include multiple approvers and the quote will be sent to each approver automatically.

Sales Stage: Agreements Review

Getting contracts and sales documents signed in time is critical to close deals by the expected close date. After all, you don’t want to stall a deal because a contract you had couriered didn’t reach the key decision makers before they left for a week long business trip. To help you get contracts signed quickly and reliably, Vtiger integrates with secure e-sign service providers.

DocuSign:

Vtiger integrates with DocuSign to enable you exchange signatures electronically. With DocuSign feature getting valid signatures from prospects located miles away is a matter of a few clicks. Digital signature eliminates mailing delays and chances of losing documents in the transit. When you send a contract for signature, your prospects can login through any device – desktop, laptop, or mobile – and place their signature. In the contract, you can add tags at places that need prospect’s signature to ensure that no signature is missed. Once the contract is signed, the status of the contract is automatically changed to “Signed” and you be notified.

Sales Stage: Close

The final stage in the sales cycle is close. When the prospect finally buys your product or service, you have successfully closed a deal. You’ve turned a prospect into a customer. Once the deal is closed, you hand off the customer account to the billing team and customer support team. The billing team will require customer and deal related information to generate invoice and the support team will also use the same information to answer customer queries. When all customer and deal information is captured in Vtiger you can hand off customer accounts on a click.

Invoicing:

Vtiger integrates with commonly used accounting softwares such as Xero, Quickbooks and Tally to streamline the exchange of invoices between the sales and billing teams. On closing a sale, Vtiger allows you to create an invoice from a quote or sales order on a click. Then you can easily sync the invoice to the accounting software for your billing team to take action. This automation ensures faster invoicing with zero manual errors.

Along with the above mentioned features, Vtiger CRM provides many other features to accelerate sales process. Quote print templates, document tracking, workflows, idle opportunity reminders, conversations with @mentions, multiple sales pipelines to name a few. Sign up for a free Vtiger trial today to explore more sales automation features.