8 Ways to Automate a CRM using SmartSuite Automations for people who hate Data Entry

By now you probably know that a CRM or client relationship manager can be helpful for your sales teams to help you keep track of prospects, contacts and where people are in your sales journey. Well, if you're going to use SmartSuite or really any tool as your CRM, it's really important that you think about ways to automate it. Because if we're not careful, CRMs just become a place to lose hours and hours and hours and hours of your life to manual data entry. And no one, particularly no sales repair, wants to spend their day in an office doing data entry. In this video, I'm going to be going through eight examples of how we can incorporate automations into a smartsuite based CRM. These same automations could apply across pretty much any platform though, and these really are just the beginning. So to build out our automations for our CRM in SmartSuite, we kind of need a CRM in SmartSuite. So I'm assuming at this point you have some kind of relationship management system in SmartSuite, but just in case you don't, over the next two minutes or so we're going to build one out together using a SmartSuite template. In order to follow this part of the tutorial, make sure you have your SmartSuite account open. And if you haven't already signed up for an account, use our affiliate link below to sign up for free and also support this channel because it'll probably be easier to follow along if you can actually be inside SmartSuite. All right, so let's pretend you've already created your account using our link. You're inside the home area here. The first thing I want us to do is create a new solution. Assuming we don't already have a CRM inside here, we want to click Start with Template and inside the search bar in the top left corner we want to search for the CRM templates that exist. So CRM, once you're in here, you'll see a bunch of different CRM solutions, but the one we're going to be focused on is the sales CRM. That'll be our kind of generic starting point. If you have a different CRM format that you're using, if you already have a CRM or don't let this hold you back, you'll still be able to learn from the automation examples we're showing. Heck, even if you use a different software, you'll be able to follow along with this. But this will be our dummy account in our kind of workshop for today. And to be Clear. I probably should and could make a whole separate video about setting up a CRM in SmartSuite but that is kind of out of the scope of today's video. If you want to see that video be produced, please write the word CRM in the comments and let me know. Maybe we'll come out with one in the future. But for now let's focus on the purpose for today, which is automations. The first automation we're going to create is a way to automatically send a checking in personal email whenever someone clicks a certain button. We're going to create this automation at the account level, but we really could create it anywhere and to do it we're going to have everything triggered based on a field we're going to create. So first things first, we need to create the field that will trigger the email to be sent. Currently inside each of these records here, each of these accounts, there isn't a great field for me to say hey, send a check in email. So I'm going to go ahead and create one. I'm going to go into any existing field, click on add field to the right and choose a field type that I would prefer to have trigger this automation. I could have something like a number field, I could have something like a single select. I could have something like a yes no box. I just need some kind of field to exist to say hey send that email if I wanted to do yes no it could be something like send check in email and have this be a box that's in the McCack to say yes send that email. Personally I prefer to have a little bit more clarity as to what I am exactly checking. So I've actually changed this in my own setup to be a single select drop dropdown meaning it's a dropdown field giving me some options to either send, not send and so on. And once I've selected this format preference, I've chosen either an icon and a color or an emoji to represent each of these steps. In this case, I have not yet send it and sent. This is going to let me track not only when to send it, but whether or not it went out. I'm going to have this formatted as a dropdown and I'm going to have a default option of not yet always. Whenever a new record is created created, I'm going to save that field as is and this is going to give me the required trigger to set up my automation. That automation is found up here in the top inside of automations. I already have it mocked up so I'm going to show you the inside of it so you can create it for yourself. The first part of this automation is when the record is updated. That's our kickoff. That's when everything begins. And in this case I say when the accounts area, when any record in that accounts app has a check in email number one field change from not yet to send it. When this is happening, when this kicks off, we're ready to do the second step which is send an email. Now in this case, in this just example, I have the account manager's email. We probably want the account contacts email, but I didn't set that up in here for this example. But we want to send an email and we're going to have that subject line say hey, how is it company name doing? That'll be my subject line. It'll be dynamic based on the variables I add. Then I can say hi, account name again. We might want to have the person's first name here, but for the example we'll keep it like so. Then we can have the body of a message such as I just wanted to check in. How are things going? Sincerely, Person. You'll notice at the bottom of this message I have last updated by that's operating off of the assumption that the person who left last updated it at the time of this happening is the person who should be sending the email. If that's not the case, we could also go ahead and add an additional variable here of something like the account manager's name if the account manager is who should be sending this email. And we could also add the account manager's email if we want to make an old school signature in here. This is the body of our message. Below this we have the option to add attachments either dynamically or manually and a few other fun things and as well as notify people inside SmartSuite. But honestly, this is about all I needed. I just want to send an email. Once that happens though, I'm going to have one additional step and adjust the check in value that dropdown field to the value of sent. I want my future self to know that this is sent. I'm also going to go ahead and update the account notes field to say hey, the check in was sent on this date by this person. These two things are just some safeguards. So I have an audit trail later on of what automated action happened. Oops. Oh, and one quick note here. I am using the send from SmartSuite feature here. If you'd rather have an email come directly from your Gmail account You can also choose to do that here and also at the time of recording this, there are several other integrations coming out. So there are a lot of options should you want to go beyond just these two. But that's the basics right now and that is our first automation. If we want to send a check in with somebody, we want to follow up with them. We now have this magical field that anybody, regardless of their tech skills can go in here and say, hey, send it. And as soon as we do that, that automation is going to be running in the background, send off that email and update that field back to sent. In fact, that's exactly what just happened. If we go inside this A and P Industries piece and we go down into the account management notes, we can see we have the note of what was sent, when it was sent and who sent it. So cool to see and all in there. So that's our first automation. Yes, we could choose to have this loop or have additional fields for other emails. We but this is our basic flow for right now. Our second automation is for the unfortunate situation when you have team members who are in a CRM and are forgetting to update things that enforcement automation we're going to talk about is this one here Automated reminder to update an inactive opportunity. This automation triggers when an opportunity was last updated on or before one month ago, meaning one month in the past or so and the next actions, meaning our checklists for things we need to do are resolved, meaning there's no action steps planned for the future and the actual close date is empty. Basically something is sitting in limbo. We're not working on it, but it's also not closed, it's not killed. What is happening with this lead that is going to be our trigger. Anytime a record matches this condition, it'll kick off this automation here. This is created using the when record matches a condition trigger and adding these conditions as you see up on the screen, which is just selecting them from the dropdown. This one is in our Opportunities app though not the accounts 1. Whenever this trigger is satisfied, we then have this action happen. The action we're choosing here is update a record. Basically change something about that record when this condition is satisfied. In this case we're having a new action be added. The next actions area is our checklist where we're tracking the tasks we we need to do for a given opportunity. So if something's sitting for a long time, this automation is going to automatically add an action step of hey, review this and either follow up, post an update or maybe close this lead and with this we can set a due date and using this little plus we can choose what kind of due dates we want, whether it's date actions dates from trigger specific date like we want it to be on tomorrow. We can do that here. And we can also have an assignee. So in this case we could either type something manually or choose something from the trigger task such as the account manager or the owner. This is just a kick in the butt to our team to say hey, work on this or close it. We don't want things just sitting here. And that's our second automation. Our third automation is for situations where you want to have a status report on where leads stand regularly. This is definitely something that would be more appropriate for smaller lead volume. For larger lead volume you might just want a more automated report using a dashboard. But for smaller leads that matter a whole lot more. What we can set up in SmartSuite is a @ a scheduled time automation. So for example, every Tuesday we could have an email go out telling people hey, this lead is still in progress. Just reminding you this is great for the sales leads or the sales reps who maybe aren't in SmartSuite so much and could use a little bit of a prod to remind them of which deals are in progress and which deals are worth following up on when they're out on the road today. What this looks like is at a scheduled time as as our trigger. So right this one right here, once we have that, we're going to say hey, inside the opportunities area every one week on Tuesday or maybe Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, you know, whatever dates you want. We can have a time of day such as 4am starting from whatever date we choose. This now will be the trigger for our automation, meaning anytime these dates arrive, anything that falls into this range, we'll have the action happen. And in this case, once again we have an email. This is using the email from SmartSuite. Again you have the option to choose text or Slack or whatever else you prefer as well. But I'm sticking with the basics. Once I'm in here, I can choose to have an email send to whoever I want, whether it's a whole team in my SmartSuite universe or a particular team member that I have in here. I can also choose to CC BCC and specify my from name if I so prefer. And I can then add the body of my email. So this is where I can add either an update around a smart specific deal or some kind of digest like including a public link. I have something that's interesting about how SmartSuite has this setup is that at the very bottom, in addition to being able to attach different files that are relevant, I can also have a field comparison. So this is pretty cool. Any fields that are new will be updated in a different color. So you can highlight changes to a deal over a period of time. I think this has some pretty specific use cases, but again, if this is something that might help you, such as if the deal's close date has changed, you might want to highlight that here. Below this we have once again another notification. But that is what this automation is all about. Every week at a set interval, send everybody automatically a notice about the relevant deals that they need to know. In this particular setup we have right now, we're kind of having it set up so it'll be one email per area. So it'll be for the whole app, we'll just send one email a week. But you could also set this up to be per deal too. So if you want to have one email for every active deal, feel free. Same kind of automation would apply. And that's our third automation example. For our fourth automation example, we want to think about scenarios where a deal is about to close and other people need to have a heads up, particularly perhaps your fulfillment team, people who actually deliver the thing you're selling. In that case, we are going to use this automation. And once again, I am using emails here. You don't have to, but I just know that emails often are still one of the best ways to contact folks. So what we have going on here is whenever an opportunity has a close date, meaning the actual close date is set on or before a week from now, which again is a value we're able to set here. And the likelihood to close is greater than 75%, meaning the value in that field that we have called likeliness to close is above that percentage, then notify the relevant people. So we could email the owner, we could CC anyone who's following it and we could say, hey, this opportunity is closing soon. This is a reminder that it's closing soon. Make sure that you do this, that and the other. Get everything ready and so on. Now I have three and a half more automation examples to share with you, but if you're enjoying this video so far, please do give it a little like and subscribe means a lot and helps this video perform in the YouTube algorithm, which I would really appreciate. So anyway, let's go into that next automation example. This one, which is a bit outside the box, is actually outside the automations area in SmartSuite. It's kind of not in automation, but in some ways it is. So what I've done is I've actually added in an additional view into the sales CRM template and this is something you could easily do on your own. But where I've done it is I've gone inside of the app called Opportunities, I've clicked on the views and I've added a new view called a form view. We probably want to make it not a private view, so we're going to add a form and give it a name. The view that I've already created prior to this recording is one aptly named form. It's very exciting. And this particular form is a form I can use to allow leads to input themselves into my CRM. Or I could rework this form to be used for internal use to allow my team to input their leads into the system. The whole purpose of this form is just to give us a structured way to create new pieces of information inside our CRM. We can create this form by taking fields that exist over on the side which are just the same fields as exist inside our overall app, clicking that little plus to add them into the form. We can then rename them if we so choose, add some help text and drag them around on the form itself to suit our preferred style. We can make them required or not, but the end result is a shareable form we can give to outsiders or insiders to collect data. Ooh, and a quick little geeky detail I want to highlight here is that these forms do allow us to use linked records aka relationship fields inside of SmartSuite directly in a form. And in our automation we can also reference these linked and related to information. We don't have to only use the fields that are in the record itself, we can also use the related information. Okay, that's my geeky little side note here. Back to the video. How is this an automation? Well, I kind of consider forms an automation because when this form is submitted it can automatically create a new record inside your SmartSuite account, which is saving you time, right? Because you don't have to do it. And eventually, at least according to this feature request, SmartSuite will also be allowing us to update existing records through a form submission, which is pretty darn cool. So that's our fifth non automation automation forms. Our sixth one however is back in the traditional route by going up here into our automations area and actually using this form to trigger, you guessed it, an email. So I actually have an automation set up here that says when a form is submitted, send an email. The application I'm thinking of in my mind when I'm setting up this automation is hey, if we're going to have this form be able to be submitted by people like our prospects, our clients, almost like a lead capture form, then I want to make sure people know that we received the email. How many times have we all submitted one of those contact us forms and then never heard back? And we want to make sure we're not like that. So here we can set up a SmartSuite based email or a Gmail based email, whatever you want to integrate here, and actually send an email to the person who submitted the form letting them know, hey, we've received your, your your inquiry or whatever it is, here's some information about us, here's what happens next, thanks for contacting us, and so on. You could choose to attach, say your welcome kit or your info packet or your price guide and move on. With all of this being automated and understanding that that form has already created a record or eventually updated a record inside your smartsuite, I don't know that I would do this for every single autoresponding situation that I might have, but this is definitely a great way to add another layer of communication when using SmartSuite with clients. So I'm going to save this automation. And for our seventh automation example I want to go to yet another non automation Weir one which is default fields. Now again, this might not feel like it's an automation and I think by traditional definitions it wouldn't be. But if I go inside this opportunities area and go back to the sales pipeline by stage, what I'm talking about here is taking the fields that exist inside our SmartSuite record and adding default values so we don't have to input data manually by default. If I were to create a new record such as John Doe right here, all of the information in SmartSuite for the most part is blank. Likelihood to close defaults to 15, but everything else, including the next actions is blank. Which means I have a ton of data entry on my hands and understanding how templates work in SmartSuite. I might be a little depressed by this, so what I want to do is leverage the features that exist to save myself time. What I'm going to do is go in to any existing record on this field and for each field here, maybe it's this description I want to modify the settings and add default values. This could be something like a fill in the blank prompt such as the note date written by if I want to have kind of a note taking framework, maybe I want to have a default estimated value because most of my projects default to about $1,000 in value. I could set a default value here. Maybe there's a default team. I could set a default priority. For every single field and especially the next actions I want to define some default values. So for this particular one next actions I'm going to go in here, go to defaults and I want to add values here for every normal action step I have in order to close a deal. So there's no excuse, no memory farts that can lead to us missing a key touch point to potentially close the deal. So that might be send check in number one, follow up with client, I don't know, send postcard, whatever your pieces are. I know I back in the day I worked with a realtor and realtors are the best when it comes to staying in touch with people. Thank you Buffini. You've given them like superpowers and they always have this like whole system for how they stay in touch with people. And if the rest of us mere mortals who aren't in real estate could steal just a little nugget out of that book, imagine if an accountant implemented some of the great follow up practices that a realtor does or oh, amazing recipe for an incredibly referable accounting business. But things like this could help us do this. If I update this field to have this as a default value, add that in here the next time I create a new record such as person 2. If I scroll down I see my default values have been added and my default action plan or checklists are all here. While once again not traditionally being an automation, this is a fantastic way to save you a bunch of time on data entry. And that's my seventh automation. Now the last automation I want to highlight for SmartSuite is actually looking beyond the tool itself. In addition to all of these native automations that are happening and at the time of recording this, I know that there are at least a dozen additional integrations here that are either coming out next week or the week after. I wish I could just wait to record this, but is what it is. Despite all of these integrations that are being built into this automation manager, this is just a small piece of what you can actually automate in SmartSuite using a tool like Zapier or my preferred tool which would be make. You can take any piece of information accessible through the API inside a SmartSuite and send it to any other tool that connects with either zapier, make, whatever else. So if I look over here we can see we can connect it with Airtable, we can connect it with Typeform, PandaDocs, Harvest, HubSpot. I mean the list just goes on and on of the thousands of tools that Zapier and or make could help you connect with, and you could connect with them through a variety of different ways. So we can see here the triggers available include the normal ones we're used to seeing in the interface, and the actions available include creation, updating and locating information. So for example, if I went to the HubSpot page on Zapier and I scroll all the way down, I can see all of the available actions here. Any combination of these are possible when you use these third party tools like Zapier or Make. Make is my preferred, as I said. But Zapier is also a great option that's more simple so it's better for beginners. And that's how you can go about building out an automated CRM inside of SmartSuite using six five and a half automations and then two two and a half sort of automations. In this eight use case example video, I hope this was helpful. I feel like I probably could have gone on for another two dozen examples. So if you have ideas of your own or examples I might have missed out, go ahead and drop them in the comments. Help me and others out from learning from your experience. And if you have any questions about what we went over or if you want to just see that CRM video, go ahead and leave me a comment below and let me know what you think. Of course, if you haven't yet signed up for SmartSuite, also do that in the description below. And again, thank you so much for watching. Until next time, enjoy the process. Thanks for watching.