Written By:

Sarah Burt  |  Director of Consulting

Task Automation is the concept of leveraging your CRM solution to streamline, report on, and manage the tasks necessary to power your organization.

We all complete dozens of repetitive tasks on a day-to-day basis, whether they are part of a personal routine or tasks specific to a work initiative. We spend a lot of time managing the work we need to do – why not automate it?

It’s more important today than ever to find ways to improve efficiency, spend less time thinking about task and process management, and more time on meaningful work to differentiate yourself as an individual contributor and your organization as a fierce competitor in today’s economic landscape.

Benefits of Task Automation in Salesforce

By identifying tasks that could benefit from workflow automation, you can expect to experience the following benefits over time.

• • Reduction of manual errorsImproved data accuracy and reporting metrics
  • Enhanced and consistent customer experience
  • More effective and organized team members
  • Forecast capacity based on current and upcoming tasks

Creative Ways to Use Salesforce for Task Automation

Automate Marketing Tasks:

If you are an organization that leverages Account Engagement or Marketing Cloud, you have already seen the efficiency these automation platforms can create within your organization. For some, Marketing Task automation is the most valuable as it’s likely the first impression of your company to the outside world.

• • Instead of manual tasks to create lists and send emails to leads and clients, automate a Customer Journey by adding leads or clients to drip campaigns with intelligent decisions to ensure your leads and contacts receive relevant, consistent follow-up communications and your brand stays top-of-mind.
  • Instead of sending webinar invites each time a new registration is completed or using a webinar tool to send a reminder manually (if you remember on time) – Use Salesforce’s out-of-box campaign features to track and manage webinars your organization hosts to automate registration confirmations, reminder emails, future events invitations, and more.
  • Instead of using an external tool to manage your social media calendar – Leverage Salesforce Social Studio to automate social media engagement by scheduling and publishing posts, monitoring social media conversations, and responding to follower comments.

Automate Sales Tasks:

Salesforce can intake new leads using a Web-to-Lead Form and further automate lead scoring, ownership assignments, and immediate communication. Leverage these out-of-box features to create a consistent experience for your leads and shorten your sales cycle.

• • Instead of manually checking Sales team members’ lead counts to figure out who should be assigned the new lead – Use the free Round Robin Assigner app by Salesforce Labs to automate your Sales Team lead assignment in a sequential order automatically.
  • Instead of relying on users to recognize high-scoring leads and sorting their views correctly, automatically alert a Lead Owner when a lead reaches or exceeds a specific Lead Score and on what date this threshold was met.
  • Instead of Sales Opportunities going weeks or months without engagement – Automate task reminders to Sales users on their ‘neglected’ opportunities to ensure no leads or sales fall through the cracks.

Automate Administrative Tasks:

Our day-to-day responsibilities can sometimes be the most time-consuming and mundane tasks to knock out, often getting pushed to the bottom of the list. However, these different tasks are often the most crucial within business processes to complete in a timely manner.

• • Instead of getting to the office earlier than everyone else on Mondays to prepare and deliver reports manually – Leverage Salesforce’s out-of-box Report & Dashboard Scheduler to automatically deliver weekly management KPIs.
  • Instead of using spreadsheets for onboarding checklists – Automate human resources by leveraging tools like Action Plans or Taskray— two native tools that provide the ability to create task templates that can be assigned to various team members, and reused time and time again.
  • Skip the data entry. Instead of copying emails into Salesforce manually -Salesforce Inbox will allow you to quickly sync email threads to your lead or contact records to be visible to all of your team members.

Using Flow to Prioritize Tasks

Salesforce’s Flow makes it simple to create or change native task records. Here are some simple yet high-impact examples The CRM Firm has implemented to allow users to focus on the most meaningful interactions for your organization.

• • Using a Scheduled Flow: At the end of each work day, review all open tasks with a due date of the following day. For those tasks, change the priority of the task to ‘High’ so they are at the top of the user’s sorted by priority Task Home Page component. Additionally, send a summary email to each “assigned to” user stating they have X tasks due the following day.
  • Using a Record Triggered Flow with the Non-Profit Success Pack: When a new contact is marked as related to a Board Member, apply an Engagement Plan to the contact. An Engagement Plan is a templated set of cultivation and relationship-building tasks that are applied in real-time and assigned to relevant users. The task priority is determined and assigned according to the contact’s prior donation history.

Third-Party Apps for Task Management with Salesforce

If your organization already leverages other software tools or prefers task automation software outside of Salesforce, that’s ok too. There are countless ways to be productive using task automation tools.

Zapier is a user-friendly integration tool that provides the power of APIs with a no-code solution. Zapier is also a low-cost solution for organizations with a large tech stack that need to centralize data and tasks into Salesforce. Integrate other tools like Asana, Trello, Calendly, ClickUp, HootSuite, and more.

If your stakeholders see the value in task automation but prefer to start with a full solution on day one, Taskray is a native Project Management app that recognizes the efforts and complexities of onboarding and other task-heavy work streams.

They have created a task-centric tool that lives within Salesforce that includes functionality to make task management even simpler, such as a Kanban drag-and-drop interface, task dependencies, task assignment notifications, and more.

Getting Started with Task Automation in Salesforce

If your organization is responsible for anything from simple tasks to complex tasks, to recurring tasks, there are countless ways to use automation on the Salesforce platform to ensure that you are contributing in the most effective ways possible.
Contact The CRM Firm to discuss how to leverage Salesforce for your organization’s specific task automation use cases.