Is the idea of work-life balance as mythical sounding to you as Santa Claus and unicorns?

It’s no secret that the pandemic and the realities that come with Covid-19 have left all of us feeling drained. If you’re working from home with children, you’re probably laughing at the idea of being able to “do it all” (or crying, which is equally understandable). Even if you don’t have little ones at home, the hurdle of mental exhaustion can still seem difficult to overcome.

Pre-pandemic, at least two-thirds of Americans lacked work-life balance. Now that our personal lives are blending into our work lives, I’m sure that number has gone up, especially for small business owners. But hitting the elusive goal of achieving work-life balance is necessary now more than ever. So is finding creative ways to work less and live more, regardless of whether your home is also your office.

So, as someone who manages your small business’s email campaigns, social media, sales efforts, and customer support, what do you do when the work still needs to get done, but you need more balance? You turn to an automation and CRM tool, along with all of the benefits they can afford you.

Let’s break down those benefits so you can see what you may be missing out on.

Five Benefits of a CRM and Sales Automation Tool

Tracks and organizes customer data

The work activities that cut so deeply into our “me” time aren’t necessarily the big projects and to-dos. More often, they’re the little things — the rote tasks that aren’t high priority enough to schedule during the main hours of your day, but that still need to get done. For example: tracking and organizing customer data in order to create personalized email campaigns, provide better nurture, and improve customer satisfaction down the line.

With sales automation and a CRM, you can manage all of this data on the back-end, without the need for regular, manual input, and organization. Your CRM automatically tracks the activity of each prospect so you can see which emails they’re engaging with the most, what pages they’re visiting, and which landing pages and CTAs they’re clicking through on. It can also track previous interactions you and your team have had with any particular customer, storing information in one place for easy access.

The result of all this compelling customer data? Well, for one, it’s tracking information that you would have never had access to otherwise. And second, it means less time you have to spend on this rote task so you can create more time for everything else – even if that “everything else” is a bubble bath and a glass of wine.

Does your vetting

Sales automation and CRM tools are sort of like robot assistants, particularly when it comes to vetting your contacts. You can use tagging capabilities to label your leads based on various actions they’ve taken, like:

• Downloading a whitepaper
• Filled out a particular form
• Opened an email
• Clicked on a CTA within an email

Say someone visited your site and downloaded a guide for creating soy candles. You can use your CRM and automation tool to tag that contact with an applicable identifier that also enrolls them in a soy candle nurture campaign.

You can save yourself a ton of time by relying on these platforms to tag contacts based on their qualifications. This leads to better list segmenting so you can send them more personalized outreach. The hard part of selling will still be on you, but by knowing what your leads are interested in and at what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at, you won’t have to waste nearly as much effort on those unlikely to convert into customers.

Creates tons of efficiencies

There’s no denying the utility of automation when it comes to taking over the big work of all the little stuff that eats up your day. Both a sales automation tool and a CRM create tons of efficiencies throughout each step of the sales process — many of which you might not even notice.

From simple things like pre-built email templates to not-so-simple things like communication tracking and analysis, you’ll free up plenty of time for putting your focus elsewhere so you can actually log off at 5 p.m. Oh, and you won’t have to worry about keeping track of your follow-up either. Your CRM allows you to create tasks for yourself and set reminders so that nothing falls through the cracks after you incorporate more balance into your day.

Sends emails

I mentioned personalization earlier, but it really is one of the biggest perks associated with a CRM and automation, so let’s dive in deeper, shall we? Personalization is an extremely effective sales tactic, and with the right tool, it doesn’t require the painstaking process of starting every new email from scratch.

Being super busy all the time means that certain strategies just take a backseat. A lot of our customers tell us that without a tool that integrates and sends emails for them, they probably wouldn’t be sending emails to their leads at all. They love that they don’t have to spend a ton of time on personalized, individual outreach. All the work is upfront – selecting a template and setting up the general text and body of your emails. But, there’s no need to worry about timing, sending, or maintaining manually. You can set up your campaigns based on particular actions, schedule them, and then track the results while they’re being implemented.

Makes work life easier

At the end of the day, sales automation and CRM are all about making your day-to-day work efforts more manageable and more efficient. Small businesses use every inch of their resources, so tools that can help them do the things they know they should be doing but don’t have time for, is priceless. With CRM and sales automation, small business owners are able to not only employ tactics that give them a competitive edge and improve their sales, but they are also able to make their work duties much easier.

You can’t create more time in the day, but you can create efficiencies that make every minute you have more productive. How you spend those minutes is up to you, but if work-life balance is what you’re after (and it should be), then make it a priority just as much as you make doing your job a priority.

Never feel guilty about putting yourself first some of the time. And if you’re using productivity tools like sales automation and a CRM, never make sacrifices in terms of what you can accomplish. Look into tools that offer just the right features for what you’re trying to achieve each day. And, in addition to considering your budget and your big picture objectives, make sure to factor work-life balance into your decision — your future self will thank you.