Behind every successful sales team crushing their quarterly targets and driving revenue, there is a team of dedicated SalesOps professionals. They provide the organization with all the necessary resources, analytics and strategic planning — the key metrics for sales success. At its core, Sales Operations is all about making frontline sales efforts more effective and streamlined, with tactical inputs derived from a number of functions.

However, the daily tasks of Sales Ops professionals —  from data entry and report generation to pipeline management and forecasting — can often be quite overwhelming. In fact, over 58% SalesOps pros admit to facing data related challenges, while 27% among them spend too much time “fighting fires”, rather than strategic planning. To thrive in today's fast-paced business landscape, Sales Ops professionals must leverage technology to streamline their workflows and focus on high-value activities that drive revenue. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) automation comes into play. One of the most common examples happens to be a HubSpot-Slack integration. In this playbook, we aim to explore how this particular automation can make life much easier for an overworked, but perhaps undervalued SalesOps executive.

Why CRM Is Indispensable In Sales Ops

The CRM is a centralized repository of customer information that acts as a one-stop solution for Sales Ops professionals to track leads, analyze performance metrics, forecast projected revenue and much more. If you’re in Sales Ops, here’s why a CRM tool like HubSpot might be indispensable for you:

• Enhanced sales visibility: CRM provides you with a comprehensive view of the sales pipeline — helping you monitor deal status and recognize potential roadblocks. This will allow you to make data-driven decisions and allocate resources more strategically.
  
  

• Better sales forecasting: CRM enables Sales Ops pros to generate real-time sales forecasts based on past and present data. This gives an overall boost to your accuracy in sales predictability.

  
  

• Efficient data management: CRM offers an all-in-one database for a business to efficiently organize every piece of data important to you. By standardizing the data input and management process, one can drive consistent sales growth. 

  
  

• In-depth analytics: CRM tools offer advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. As a Sales Ops professional, you can gain valuable insights into sales performance, customer behavior, and market trends.

  
  

• Seamless collaboration: When paired with a communication tool, eg. Slack, CRM platforms can facilitate seamless communication between sales teams, thereby fostering a cohesive work environment. 

A CRM is indispensable to running an airtight sales operations function. But other users of CRM, like your Sales reps, are perhaps not its biggest fans. This generally happens because CRMs can have a steep learning curve; the UI might feel overwhelming and needs a lot of manual effort from SDRs to keep it up to date.

Do Sales Reps Hate Using A CRM? 

A common challenge that Sales Ops professionals face is getting sales representatives to embrace CRM usage fully. Sales reps have been known to express frustration with CRM systems due to perceived complexities and additional administrative tasks. 

One of the main reasons for this reluctance include never-ending data entry. A survey by Introhive shows that more than 72% of salespeople spend up to 60 minutes a day on CRM data entry. And 75% of them believe their workdays would be far more productive if they spent less time on data entry.

Here are some additional factors behind a sales rep’s love-hate relationship with CRM:

1. Time constraints: More often than not, SDRs prioritize deal closures over logging the data into CRM. While such data would be invaluable for Sales Ops, sales reps would rather focus on customer-facing activities than data entry. 

   
   

2. User interface: Some sales representatives complain about the clunky interface of most CRM tools, which is why they deliberately avoid using one in their day-to-day tasks. 

   
   

3. Duplicacy of efforts: Traditionally, sales reps tend to maintain their sales records on spreadsheets or personal notepads. Entering the same data on HubSpot is considered a duplicacy of efforts by many, who don’t want to “waste time”. 

   
   

4. Lack of awareness: At the end of the day, most sales reps underutilize CRMs or express dissatisfaction with it primarily because of the lack of awareness. Insufficient training and understanding of CRM potential is a major cause of concern among them. 
   
   

A lot of reasons for the love-hate relationship between Sales Reps and CRM can be addressed by automation. Even the firefighting that Sales Ops professionals do to ensure data quality can be automated. 

Advantages of CRM automation

To address the challenges of CRM adoption and to ease the workload of Sales Ops professionals, CRM automation offers multiple compelling advantages:

• Saves Time: Automating the data entry process within the CRM can free up valuable time for both Sales Ops and SDRs. While the latter can use this extra time to land more deals, the former can focus on revenue-generating activities. 

  
  

• Seamless integrations: CRM automation can be integrated with other tools and platforms to ensure a seamless data flow across the organization. For example, a HubSpot-Slack integration can provide tons of reports and analytics data at your fingertips. This in turn saves the need for mindless tool-hopping for any important update or data you wish to convey. 
  
  

• Long term data management: In a SalesOps role, long term data management (how the data is set up on a CRM, what to input and when) and firefighting to determine the accuracy of regular data inputs — are two of the most time consuming and arduous tasks. Automation can help SalesOps execs like you manage the firefighting as well as ensure long term data consistency in your CRM. 
  
  

• Customization: With automation, a well-configured CRM system can be tailored to match the unique sales processes of the organization, making it easier for the Sales Ops team to monitor progress and measure success.

  
  

• Less administrative task load: A lot of the administrative tasks like scheduling meetings, setting reminders or handling follow-ups can be easily automated, leaving you more time on hand. Moreover, setting up automated workflows on HubSpot can improve communication with leads throughout the sales cycle and boost the chances of conversion for your sales reps. 
  
  

• Improved customer experience: CRM automation can also be useful at the customer front. By centralizing customer data and interactions, it can enable sales reps to deliver personalized and targeted communication. This can help immensely in fostering stronger customer relationships.

CRM Automation Playbook To Simplify Your Sales Ops

Irrespective of the size and nature of a business, SalesOps teams are almost always drowning under a load of responsibilities. Running automation plays using HubSpot-Slack integration like Sidekick, can make these tasks way easier and more manageable for Sales Ops professionals. While its difficult to summarize their contribution in a few words, their key responsibilities can be broadly categorized into:

Opportunity and Lead Management

1. New Lead Assignment

If your organization is doing marketing the right way, there will never be a shortage of new leads coming in on HubSpot. With a HubSpot-Slack integration, sales reps can be directly notified on Slack when a new lead appears. 

Plus, with Sidekick, the sales rep can update contact properties and other details for that particular lead directly from Slack. In this example below, the Sales Rep gets all the details of the lead on Slack, and can Qualify (assign Lead Status), apply Lifecycle Stage and even assign SDR or AE from the Slack message itself.

There’s also an option to Add notes for this contact.

If you set this workflow from Sidekick, you can choose which properties you want to show in the Slack message. Teams using this workflow have also seen a big drop in their Lead Response Times. One customer reported their Lead Response Time drop from 5 days to 12 hours!

2. Weekly Recap

Before wrapping up the work week, send a weekly sales recap to your SDRs to keep them on track with their lead responses. There usually are cases where the SDR has followed up with the lead, but did not update the property on HubSpot.

In this example, every SDR receives a weekly recap of leads that were assigned to them, that have Lead Status (HubSpot property) marked as Open and are not enrolled in any sequence. These property filters can be updated based on each organization's sales followup process.

This automation is directly beneficial for sales leaders, as they can:

• Ensure none of the assigned leads are left out

• Make sure there is minimal delay in lead response times

• Prompt SDRs to prioritize lead follow ups directly from Slack

3. Deal Rooms

Create Slack channels for high value deals or deals with Tier 1 Target Accounts. These channels can serve as a place for discussion on everything related to the deal.

With Sidekick, this is a simple workflow. If enabled, Sidekick will create a Slack Channel for a new Deal and add all relevant users to the channel based on your criteria. It can even update the channel description with HubSpot Deal properties that you might find valuable, like Close Date or Deal Amount.

You can customize each alert message, create custom workflows within Deal Channels and even add any Call to Action buttons that you want to.

Data Hygiene

1. Meeting Update

This particular automation will remind your sales rep to take notes during every important sales meeting. After every meeting, they (organizer) will get an auto-generated message with a brief summary and call notes. 

If this process is automated, sales reps can:

• Log meeting notes from Slack itself while it’s still fresh, without hopping onto Notepad or another task manager app.

• Customize notes with details from any sales call.

• In case of no show or cancellations, mark it directly from Slack.

  
  

These notes will be immensely useful for Sales Ops in the long run, to assess the quality of each sales call and analyze how and where to improve. 

2. Data cleanup reminders

Avoid data hygiene issues and ensure every important property in HubSpot is up to date. In this example, we have a workflow that alerts Deal Owners on Slack when their Deal is about to expire or the Close Date is overdue. Along with possible next steps as Call to Actions along with the message. Let them decide on the next step — be it pushing the date further or closing the deal immediately. 

Like with every other use case, this is also completely customizable and can be used for any Object Property that you want to ensure is always up-to-date.

Report Snapshots

Finding reports in HubSpot is a gargantuan task in itself. With the newer updates, report building has only gotten more complicated. But you don’t always need an in-depth, multi-object report to know how your team is progressing. 

Say your VP of Sales wants a high-level overview of new leads and subsequent deals. Create a snapshot for them using Sidekick!

You can choose the frequency of report updates that works best for the team. 

It helps sales teams to:

• Track important metrics on Slack itself

• Spares the trouble of rummaging through countless reports on HubSpot

Conclusion

Sales Operations (SalesOps) is a crucial component of any successful sales team—particularly for optimizing processes and ensuring strategic effectiveness. An integration between CRM systems like HubSpot and communication platforms like Slack can further enhance the capabilities of SalesOps professionals. 

In fact, HubSpot-Slack integration can address the SalesOps pain points associated with data entry, managing time and increasing productivity. The integration also streamlines lead management, improves data hygiene, and provides valuable insights through reports and analytics. 

Overall, leveraging automation through HubSpot-Slack integration provides sales teams with a powerful toolset to boost efficiency and drive revenue growth.