Sales automation in 5 steps with Kommo

Sales teams come in every shape and form: big, small, remote, centralized, independent; there comes the point where you reach an efficiency bottleneck. Your sales folks are not happy, they are too busy doing things that are not sales. There is an answer: sales automation — it’s something that always will improve your team’s efficiency and bring in more sales.

Here’s everything you’ll learn:

Sales automation is an automated process that helps your sales team in a lot of different ways. It can, for example:

• Reduce the number of repetitive tasks
• Make data entry secure and ensure no contact data is lost
• Stay online 24/7 and assist your customers at any time of the day
• Schedule calls and meetings automatically
• Launch lead nurturing campaigns
• Grab leads from various sources

At the end of the day, automation does not replace your sales team, but it helps it to become more active and to focus on selling more rather than doing administrative work.

Lack of sales automation, however, also has its disadvantages, that can, in the long run, cost you time and money. For instance:

• Tons of repetitive work, which can be soul-crushing to sales representatives, can drive talent away
• Your client database might get lost or stolen (happens a lot to SMBs)
• Data entry is a huge chore
• Low lead generation due to lack of proper lead generation and capture
• Lack of lead nurturing leaves prospects uninterested and cold
• Lose out to competition that tied all the loose ends already

And it’s awful. But sales automation is not a holy grail of all sales; it can hurt your business too if you’re not careful. Over-automating your outreach may make your business look robotic and repel potential customers. Only use automation where it’s a great value to your customers and it does solve real problems. Automating for automation’s sake is meaningless.

Alright, so that's all good. How do we get started with sales automation when it comes to using Kommo? Here are five steps you can easily follow in order to get started.

Make leads come to you! No more entering phone numbers and names into excel spreadsheets. There are tons of lead generation tools that can be connected directly to Kommo. Let’s have a look at them:

A Webform is a handy form for collecting requests for potential customers. Whenever you want your leads to fill out their contact info and other details manually — that’s the way to do it for you.

The Webforms in Kommo have fantastic flexibility. You can configure how they look, what data the prospect will need to enter. What’s great is all of that data will then make it to the correct fields in the lead card. The data is not “raw”, so to speak.

To create a Webform, you would need to open your Kommo account, go to the Lead section and click Setup. Click Add source and select the Webform!

That’s the Webform Builder. Now you can let loose your creative genius and build a webform your prospect will have a good time filling out.

📌 Pro tip: Don’t make too many fields. Only request data that is absolutely crucial to you. No one likes long forms!

The fields you select on the right will decide where the entered data will go. Make sure to match the fields you want your customer to enter with the fields in the Lead card. For example, by requesting a phone number in the form, use the “Contact phone number” field, and thus the entered data will go there automatically.

Once you’re done configuring your awesome webform, switch to Form placement tab and press Preview your form. That’s how it will look like on your website!

An old-school communication channel that’s not going anywhere — let’s make the most out of it. A lot of new requests often arrive via email, especially if you are a small business. It’s important to have these new emails visible in the system and easy to get data out of it.

Connecting your inbox takes a few seconds if you’ve got a common email address, like on Gmail or Yahoo.

To connect your email address, go to the Mail section and click Settings. Click Add Email, enter it and there you go!

Now, to make sure your incoming emails are recognized as leads, go to the Leads section, click Setup, click on Add source and select Email. Pick the email box you want to use and ta-daaa! All incoming emails from unknown email addresses will become new leads in the system!

You can take it even further by giving Email parsing a try. It’s capable of reading particular lines of text within the email body and dissect to different parts! Nothing an easy thing to learn by all means, so tread carefully.

Of course! I won’t go into detail on each one — that’ll be a handful to read. In the Digital Pipeline, you can also utilize the following lead sources:

• Facebook Lead forms
• Messengers and the Salesbot (more on these below)
• Twilio SMS (for texting!)
• API (aka build your own lead source)

Aaand a ton more integrations that can bring in leads! See the whole list on our Kommo integrations page.

The main benefit of connecting all these sources to a single place is the order in the seas of chaos. Things don’t escape you, no forgotten meetings or lost contact data. All in one place. Not to mention that it saves your team a ton of time and you — a lot of money.

So calling is and will be a common part of business communication strategies everywhere. Manual entry of each number and keeping the whole thing in your memory is a drag, though. Whenever the calls made become a consistent day-to-day schedule, without automation this routine will start to chip away at your precious time.

So, to be efficient, your sales representatives need super easy access to phone numbers — make a dial and let’s party. Good thing Kommo supports a ton of VoIP phone integrations.

How does it work?

• You connect your VoIP telephony
• You can make and receive calls to connected numbers from Kommo
• Once a call is made, the call recording is automatically added to the Lead card
• For further convenience, your sales rep is offered to write down notes after the call
• Queue numbers in a call list and keep the phones ringing

To see our available phone integrations, see our Integrations page in the Settings and find the one that you like best. Connecting takes a few steps and you’re ready to go.

Once your calling schedule is all polished, why don’t we have a look at another classic — an email campaign!

We know that emails make an awesome lead source. But it’s not all about capture — let’s talk about nurture. How do you keep in touch with your contacts, what do you send when a promo time comes? That’s right, you send a nicely-crafted email. Now imagine sending these in bulk manually. Nooope, you deserve better. Here’s how you should get started:

You can create email templates and personalize them however you want. You may think “where is the sales automation here?” Well, this template you made will automatically parse contact data or any other data you have in the system and insert it into the email.

Imagine: you want to include the lead name, the contact name, some deal data into the email. You send these emails en masse. Something like standardized offers, yet you want them personalized. Manually, it would take forever. Not with Kommo, though — a few templates and you’re all set.

How do you make one?

To make an email template, go to the Email section, press Settings and click Email templates. Go wild with your templates, and select the fields you want to parse in the email body. The system will automatically add data there when the email is sent.

📌Pro tip: keep a clean house when it comes to contact names. Without a contact name, an email with {{contact.name}} code in it may result in an email with nothing instead of the name in there.

The next logical step is to set up the automatic sending of these templates. It’s done in the digital pipeline! You can use these templates you made to automatically send emails to prospects on a certain stage of your pipeline. Set up the action in a logical order based on the action: if a lead arrives in this pipeline stage, send that template from this responsible user...

Pretty awesome, right? In case you like to use external services like MailChimp or Active Campaign, Kommo has integrations with these services. Simply set them up in the Digital Pipeline (Leads > Setup pipeline) and all done.

You can play a lot with emails and how you do them. You can even subscribe leads to mailing lists and unsubscribe them automatically.

The main enemy of any multi-tasker (that is, all of us) is time. And getting more time under your belt can only be done by sorting out the little things: tasks, data administration and data entry. It’s that every extra bit of time saved every day that begins to count, and makes automation worthwhile.

What you need now is to actually track your leads: where they go and what tasks your sales reps have for each one of them. Tags are a great help to separate one kind of lead from another (added in the lead card in one click).

You can automatically create tasks for your sales people based on your particular sales pipeline stage. At one pipeline stage, it may be a reminder to make a call, on another — to report something. I can’t know about your sales pipeline. To create that sort of automation, head over to Leads section and press Setup pipeline. Click on an empty space and select Create task.

All the parameters of a Create task automatic action

Play around with the other automation available. You can set up:

• Automatic movement of the lead to another stage
• Add or remove tags
• Create or close tasks
• Change lead card fields
• Send a form

And many others. You can automate the whole process so that you don’t need to do anything much — just observe and do things only humans can do.

Messengers are one of the most promising communication channels with fantastic capabilities you don’t want to miss out on. Especially if you’re a small business. The best thing about Messengers is that the notification from you goes straight to their pocket. There are no spam screen folders like in your Gmail or no discomfort of picking up an unknown number. Whoever is in your messenger contact list, they are already pre-qualified.

What’s more, it takes just a couple of clicks to connect your favorite messenger. How about Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, Skype or even WhatsApp? All these are available in Kommo.

Here’s how to connect messenger to Kommo:

Go to the Leads section, click Setup pipeline (a route now familiar, right?), then Add source and connect your favorite messenger. Before you go further, check out this awesome article on automating sales with messengers for in-depth feature review.

All new messages you will receive will automatically land in the Incoming lead’s stage of your pipeline. If you already have a contact of the person in Kommo, be sure to link the chat to it, so that you can chat with them immediately from their lead card!

Kommo’s messenger support is quite a catch as a package: chat templates, net promoter score (to assess customer satisfaction), AI-based text recognition and even a chatbot you can create without coding skills.

The real automation with messengers lies in the Salesbot — our special chatbot, tightly integrated with Kommo. You can even build it yourself with no coding skills! The Salesbot can act as a 24/7 butler for online business, helping your customers get feedback, receive quotes, schedule meetings and more any time of the day. All the data you receive through the chatbot will be in the respectable lead card.

To set up a chatbot, head over to Leads section, press Setup pipeline, click on an empty space in the grid and select Salesbot. That’s where the magic will begin!

Navigate through the visual chatbot builder and construct the chatbot however you wish. Be sure to consult our knowledge base on more information on how you can do it.

Many a sales team faces tough targets, stingy clients and lots of distractions. One real motivation killer, though, is when you don’t even get to sell — you’re stuck with data administration. Enter the data, sort the data, log what you do. Bam, your day is gone. That’s why the key to success is sales automation, and Kommo is a super-easy way to get it right without too much hassle.

Give it a go with Kommo’s 14-day trial and see what kind of awesomeness you can introduce to your sales team’. It’s not a big-time investment, but it's not small either, so plan accordingly. Good luck and tons of sales to you!

✅ Kommo is a pioneering Messenger Based Sales CRM software that helps businesses achieve more sales and create long-lasting relationships with their customers. It is a tool that enables companies to reach better results and increase their profits.