Discover the Top Sales Proposal Automation Software for Administration

Top sales proposal automation software for Administration

I'll cover the Crums you shouldn't use like notion or air table and the Crums you should consider like copper or [Music] folk here at aish app we've worked with hundreds of businesses over the past decade to help them set up and Implement their CRM and we also have tens of thousands of visitors coming to our website with people looking for software advice so I promise you we will not lead you astray we're confident that you're going to walk away from this video knowing exactly which CRM you should use especially if your team size is between 1 to 300 and stay until the end of the video to hear one of the most common mistakes that people make when setting up their CRM all right let's get into it before we get super deep into it let's cover what a CRM should be used for and you're going to see why I'm covering this in just a moment so a CRM is used to manage your business relationships this can be anything from your leads to your prospects to your vendors to your colleagues to Partnerships and a CRM should be the central Hub of communication for your business meaning that it should ingest all of your team's communication with all the different people that your business is interacting with in one central place if you have worked in sales and you've ever contacted the same person twice and they've replied back and said someone from your team just messaged me yesterday you know how unprofessional that is and that often is the result of a team that's not using a CRM or at least not using it properly so when you're choosing a CRM you want to make sure that they're doing all of those things that I mentioned out of the box at the very minimum okay so which CRM should you use now I know I know there's so much hype around air table and especially noce but you're going to see in just a moment why they don't make for great crms well the first reason why air table and notion don't make for great crms is because neither tool will automatically ingest your team's emails into the CRM this means that that super basic feature of a customer relationship management tool of centralizing your communication is totally missed when using air table or notion this also means that you're missing out on important information like which hot lead you should follow up with next because in a traditional CRM you'll be able to see how many interactions you had with someone when the last interaction was when they last opened your email are they opening your emails but all of this data is missed out if you're using air table or notion okay and as a side note I have to address this because I know there's some of you watching that are going to say hey Andre you know you can set up an integration with make or zappier to ingest all of your emails if you're using notion or air table as a CRM instead of explaining the Myriad of reasons why we think this is a bad idea pause this video to see our responses to some of these comments in a previous video reason number two of why you shouldn't use air table or notion as a CRM is because they weren't built to be a CRM Z notion is a knowledge base not a CRM air table is first and foremost a database which means it helps you add more structure to your data so think of it as a replacement for a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel which by the way if you're using Google Sheets or Excel as a CRM please don't do that either and just keep watching this video for our recommendations of what to use instead the tools that we'll talk about in a second we're built to be first and foremost customer relationship management tools which means all of their features actually fit Under the Umbrella of being great crms their entire company is dedicated to building the best tool to help you manage relationships so with air table or notion you might get excited because you're thinking wow these tools are super flexible so I can actually built my dream CRM for my company but what happens in that case is you end up turning into a product manager you are now building a CRM instead of actually just using a CRM that was built now this is especially problematic if you're a business owner because my bet is your time is way better spent actually doing sales or training your team to do better sales rather than than building a software tool especially if your business has nothing to do with building customer relationship management tools okay so now that we've gotten the tools that we don't recommend you using out of the way let's talk about the tools we do recommend PS if you've learned something so far please like And subscribe it just supports us and it allows us to make more content like this okay so let's talk about folk folk is a fantastic CRM if you are an individual or a small team that is really focused on contact management and building relationships if you clicked on this video and you are even remotely considering using notion or air table as a CRM folk is going to be our top recommendation for you and that's because the tool is actually built similar to a database structure it actually allows you to bulk update fields and edit data in line just like you would in a spreadsheet or a database so with all of that it's going to feel the most familiar all while having those really powerful CRM features built in setting up folk is is incredibly easy they have dozens of pre-built templates that you can use for different processes that are basically just plug-and-play so with folk you really have a great Foundation out of the gate it also has a beautiful minable interface and great design which we love one of my favorite features when it comes to folk is how easy it is to add contacts I'd say folk is probably the friendliest CRM when it comes to adding contacts into the tool they have a Chrome extension and once you've installed it there's a button that appear years whether you're in Gmail LinkedIn or X that says add to folk and you literally have it integrated with all of these tools right there done for you once you've added the contact to folk you can use their inrich feature which helps you more easily find the right email address or their job title or their phone number Etc if you want to bulk email a group of contacts folk will allow you to do that and you can also set reminders to follow up with people one-on-one specifically honestly for sales teams especially sales teams that aren't using a CRM at all folk will feel like a game changer another cool thing about folk is that they're experimenting with some AI features to help improve your experience within the tool while it still has a way to go it's far from perfect you can experiment with it by inserting your own prompts and different variables where this could come in handy is if you want to use the AI feature to generate an email that you're going to bulk send to a bunch of people or a social media DM while the drafts aren't perfect they will will help you get the ball rolling and at least get you start thinking perhaps in the right direction if you are a solopreneur or a small team that is really wanting just a structured tool to help you better manage your contacts and relationships would highly recommend folk it's great for fundraising basic Recruitment and just managing all of your relationships in one place to give folk a shot use our affiliate link down in the description below and if you decide to upgrade then you can also use our partner code to get a discount on your first year so what if you're a team that's looking for a CRM that goes beyond contact management something that will be really powerful when it comes to Integrations reporting and workflow automations in this case you might want to consider copper or pipe Drive we've been a partner with copper for over eight years we're actually their first Integrations partner you're going to find with copper they're a more traditional CRM you're going to have your typical structure of your leads your people your companies and your opportunities like for example if you want a more simple to use alternative to HubSpot or Salesforce then copper or pipe Drive are going to be two really great choices now as a heads up copper only works with Google workspace and that is our Preferred Choice because we love Google workspace but if you are on Microsoft 365 then definitely check out pipe Drive they are very similar and in this video while I'll mainly talk about copper because it's what we use more so here just replace copper with pipe drive because they're very similar in their functionality we recommend that teams use copper that are looking to really map their processes out to a CRM so this means that you first of all know your processes or you're on your way to knowing your processes really well and you're looking for a powerful CRM that can really serve as the foundation for you to integrate other tools with it like for example your invoicing software like zero or QuickBooks or your Voiceover IP like Dad or air call or E signature tools like panad do or Ironclad like if you're looking for a central tool that can integrate well with all these thirdparty tools then copper is a really awesome Choice we've seen a lot of agencies financial planners home service companies have great success with copper and I'm going to take you through an example of an entire workflow so you can really get a picture of what I'm talking about when I talking about Integrations so let's take a home services company they have a website and somebody fills out a form on their website well that form is integrated in with the CRM copper and all of their data appears in the lead section so the team knows to follow up you may also have automated emails going out to follow up with them as well from there they might automatically get sent a scheduling link where they can book in a home visit and then your team would go out assess if they're a qualified lead and if they are they would get converted into a person perhaps a company and an opportunity and from there you're going to take them through your sales process and perhaps one of those stages is to create a proposal if you're using something like panad do that integrates in with copper you're going to have a really easy time automatically pulling contact details for example straight from copper into panad do we've seen team Save hours when using panad do and copper together perhaps after you send out the proposal you want some automated follow-up emails to go out to that lead to make sure that they are viewing the proposal and to check in with them to see if they want a close and in a perfect world now they close so they've signed their e signature document and you want to send them an invoice you can move move one opportunity to the next stage that says invoice sent and an integration can automatically create that in your accounting software and send it off to them so hopefully this gives you a picture of what I'm talking about from start to finish the CRM being the foundation of all of this but you have these other tools integrated in so it makes a really seamless workflow experience for your team and also your customer another main difference between folk and copper is that copper has something called workflow automations and there's dozens uses for them you can create autotask so when a lead comes in a task is created for someone on your team or when an opportunity gets to a stage your team member gets assigned a bunch of tasks or you can autocreate an opportunity Etc there's honestly dozens of uses and finally if you're interested in reporting at all copper is going to be your best bet in this case because they have some pretty Advanced reporting capabilities now as long as you know your way around and know how to set it up all that being said if you want to give copper or pipe drive a shot then use the the link Down Below in our description and if you decide to go with copper and you use our affiliate link to sign up you'll receive our $1,200 copper crash course for free after your first paid month the course will cover our best practices to help you set up your CRM now if you're a very small team like under 300 employees using the CRM we don't recommend HubSpot or Salesforce because they can get very expensive very quickly you can check out this article where we go into a lot more detail on this and now for your bonus tip of where most people make a huge mistake when setting up and using their CRM a lot of the time we see that teams rely way too much on individual tasks to move things forward in the CRM when you assign yourself a task for every single contact for example or opportunity what happens is you typically have a bunch of overdue tasks and all of them are falling by the wayside so we encourage teams to think of their processes more in terms of groups of tasks rather than individual tasks so for example in a typical sales process you would have proposal sent or invoice sent and Within These stages you have within your process your business process documented all the steps that need to get done in order to move this opportunity to the next stage so this takes it from Individual tasks that are everywhere to groups of tasks that live under one stage in your CRM and this way you can also see at a top level an overview of where everything is in your process and another hot tip is when you set up your CRM this way it also leaves a great opportunity for automation because for example if you have a stage called invoice sent and you're doing that manually we can also use that in the future perhaps when you scale to trigger an integration with QuickBooks online or zero to automatically create and send that invoice for you come on that's pretty cool right yeah so as a summary for this video do not use air table or notion as your CRM you're going to spend way too much time configuring the CRM trying to train your team which will likely lead to poor or no adoption leaving you in the same place as you started let us save you the time and the hours of going down that path and instead just use a CRM a tool that was built for the job from the start they say if you're going to do something do it right and that's what you're going to be doing with either folk or copper because they're both great choices all right now that you know which CRM to use Maybe you're looking for a project management tool to help you get your work done more efficiently as well and if you are make sure that you check out this video over here where we go over our favorite PM tools and no we don't recommend notion or air table for that either if you found this video helpful we would very much appreciate a like And subscribe and if you have more CRM related questions please drop them down in the comments thank you for your time and attention see you in the next video done