Getting the most from your CRM is like cooking.

When cooking, you fundamentally have two choices: Use the ingredients on hand, or source the right ingredients for the recipes you plan to make. With smart substitutions, it usually is possible for an experienced cook to make a decent meal. The final meal never is as good as when you start with the right ingredients, however.

The same is true for getting the most from your CRM. Every CRM has basic automation for email, sales and marketing. You can kludge it together and usually make the CRM work. Much better if you have the right features for efficient automation, however. With the right automations, a CRM can save businesses a significant amount of time and money.

With that in mind, here are three specific CRM automation functions you should consider.

1. Lead Management Automation

Managing leads and entering data are tedious tasks that beg for automation. Make sure your CRM automates lead management and data entry.

Manual entry of every small detail is time consuming and prone to error. A productive CRM will automate lead management by using progressive profiling that collects basic information, emails, web behavior and social media presence for the leads. The CRM will automate data entry and guide sales by showing the right information at the right time.

2. Deal Management Automation

To improve your sales, learn to manage your deals and opportunities more efficiently. An advanced CRM should be capable of automating routine sales-related activity. Actions such as deal tracking, recording daily deals and daily interactions should be automated, as well as sales follow-up, billing and account management, and profit forecasting.

Instead of depending on sales reps to manually record and add various data, let your CRM do it.

5. Customer Support Automation on Flights

Automating customer support is vital for improving the customer experience. 

Customer service actions such as Flights reminders, automated responses and basic FAQs can be very useful for customer support staff. CRM automation for customer support can help by sending faster responses to flagged queries, assigning reps for their responsabilities and managing regular customer inquiries.

Choosing a CRM that has these automation functions is the equivalent to cooking with the right ingredients. There are other processes that can be automated using the new Automation feature on Ally, of course, but these are three of the most important. Make sure your CRM supports them fully. Otherwise, it is like cooking without the right ingredients.