Automate CRM | Software

With a solid pitch for stress-free sales and marketing, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why customer relationship management (CRM) has become the fastest-growing enterprise application software. In fact, worldwide spending on CRM systems is expected to reach USD $114.4 billion by 2027.

And it’s not just the CRM software itself, there is technology designed to make customer data collection better, such as automating CRM data entry. Smart companies like Laing O’Rourke—an international construction engineering company—aren’t waiting to make their investment in automating CRM data entry, they’re choosing to start growing their revenue sooner than later.

Why do you need to automate CRM data entry?
How to Choose CRM Software
What Customer Data Should You Collect?
Why is Data Entry Automation Important ?
Using Customer Data to Grow Revenue

Why do you need to automate CRM data entry?

As companies continue to dive into the deep end of customer data, many are left drowning in the reality of spending more time entering sales activities than actually selling. Even if sales reps could squeeze the six hours it takes to plug in data every week, 70% becomes outdated every 12 months. This turns tracking your customer lifecycle into a never-ending chore of batch updates, merging dupes, and waiting for bouncebacks.

Instead of every contact and conversation adding to your daily grind, it’s time to automate the small stuff so you can focus on building relationships.

Keep reading to find out how Laing O’Rourke transformed a decade of data into a synchronized network of opportunities with AI-powered CRM automation.

How to choose CRM software

Laing O’Rourke places a premium on leveraging the right technology to spark positive change for their clients, their projects, and the industry as a whole. After using the classic version of Salesforce CRM software for 10 years, Laing O’Rourke wanted to shift from recording customer information to a system of relationship intelligence.

Harnessing the power of CRM automation is a team sport, so Laing O’Rourke joined forces with BrightGen and Introhive. Together, we created a roadmap to align the features required to retain and grow customer relationships more effectively.

There are 5 essential steps to choosing the best CRM automation solution:

Know your business goals and requirements
Gather input from various departments
Identify essential features and integrations
Determine your budget
Dig into the product demo

“BrightGen implemented a Salesforce Lightning CRM system transition for Laing O’Rourke. We also implemented some functionality and reworked their data to give them a much better view of customer engagements across their project life cycles,” said James Burgess, VP of Customer Success at BrightGen.

What customer data should you collect?

Emails and numbers are fine, but a good CRM tool should deliver more. Laing O’Rourke used automation features to centralize customer data from every touchpoint. Scaling your sales team is a piece of cake when you have the right information, at the right time, in the right place.

Contacts

Contacts represent individual people. Most of your contacts will be customers or new leads for a sales opportunity. Standard customer information can include:

Contact name
Address
Phone number
Email
Fax
Job title
Company Name
Call scheduling
Meeting notes

Companies

Company records are typically called “accounts.” These records provide a single location with a complete view of all company information, including:

Company Name
Industry
Mailing address
Shipping address
Phone number
Email
Fax
Website
Billing information
Number of employees
Contacts
Sales cycle
Revenue

Opportunities

Opportunities are deals in progress. Opportunity records should track details about deals, including:

Product information
Quotes
Contracts
Sales rep tasks
Account name
Key decision-makers
Meeting notes

The lingo may vary based on the CRM automation software, but the data entry is relatively the same.

Why is data entry automation important?

Once the dust settles on your new shiny CRM automation tool, the repetitive admin work tends to get pushed down the to-do list. Salesforce estimates 91% of CRM data is incomplete or inaccurate, leaving you with an expensive rolodex of somewhat useless information.

Once you accept that no one likes data entry, you can put this task on autopilot to spend less time managing contacts and more time talking to them. Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is the secret sauce to CRM automation that helps sales and marketing teams do more, by doing less.

Smart workflows take the mundane busywork out of contact management by logging activities, notes, and tasks for you. Something that might take a person hours to accomplish can happen instantly with CRM automation tools that populate information for:

Employment history
Social media activity
Contact records
Job changes
Promotions
Company mergers
Phone calls

Laing O'Rouke on the success of Introhive

Using customer data to grow revenue

Colorful charts and clean data can only impress the c-suites for so long. Using customer insights to become more agile is the gift that keeps on giving.

Actionable customer intelligence can help you reach new revenue milestones with:

Sales forecasting
Performance analysis
Data accuracy
Win probability
Scoring qualified leads
Marketing automation

“In the past we’ve had gaps with being able to actually quantify who we hold relationships with and how well we do that. Now we have much more visibility and we’re onboarding new users, especially executives and key roles,” remarks Natalie Petty, Digital Product Owner at Laing O’Rourke.

The Salesforce upgrade and integration with Introhive enabled Laing O’Rourke to uncover 350 unique relationships and contacts for each individual user. When your data is on-demand, discovering opportunities to increase revenue becomes easier than pouring a cup of coffee.

To learn more about growing revenue with CRM automation for data entry, talk to us. We can help get more time back in your day.