A Beginners Guide to Microsoft Power Automate for Marketers and Sales Reps

jason-goodman-Oalh2MojUuk-unsplash
Power Automate

A Beginners Guide to Microsoft Power Automate for Marketers and Sales Reps

If you are a marketing professional or a sales rep with no coding background, then Microsoft Power Automate is just for you. With its no-code, drag-and-drop interface, sales and marketing teams are automating their everyday manual processes. These include manually generating sales invoices, notifying your sales team about new leads, scheduling appointments and meetups, and whatnot! Hence, with Power Automate, you get to automate almost everything that can be done digitally.

We understand that not everyone is tech-savvy and that sales and marketing departments have tons of manual processes that can be automated. Why not let Power Automate do that while you get to concentrate on tasks that are less routine and therefore more appropriate for you? Go no further if you want a step-by-step guide on using Power Automate for marketing and sales purposes. Learn to use Power Automate via the top 3 example use cases that are perfect for marketers and sales reps to get started with Power Automate. But before that, what exactly is Power Automate and why is it so popular?

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

Famous for its simple and interactive UI, Microsoft Power Automate is a drag-and-drop work-flow-based automation app. Originally released under the name Microsoft Flow, it is the one-stop solution to automate your repetitive tasks. Built for both coders and non-coders, Power Automate is being used by leading companies and individuals alike. It helps to automate repetitive tasks and paper processes.

With its wide range of capabilities, no doubt MS Power Automate is an enterprise solution. It is helping organizations optimize, modernize, and streamline tedious and time-consuming processes. Moreover, access to hundreds of prebuilt and integrated templates is what makes it practicable. It facilitates both companies and individuals alike to improve collaboration, innovation, and growth.

Although Power Automate is an enterprise solution from Microsoft, it is free to use by anyone wanting to step up their daily processes.

Though Power Automate allows organizations to automate everyday business activities, it is not the sole reason for its popularity. With several other automation apps also offering the same functionality, what exactly makes it stand out? Let us see why Power Automate has such a large user community, being the most famous automation app out there.

Power Automate is Free to Use

Of course, this had to be the first on the list. Why? Because, unlike MS Power Automate, many similar automation apps only offer a free trial. They have premium licenses that need to be purchased as a subscription. Power Automate too offers premium licenses that anyone can buy. But, its standard and free license comes with enough functionality and admin rights to let anyone create automated flows on the go.

Nevertheless, for bigger organizations wanting to scale their automation, Premium Licenses are a natural fit then. However, for users like you and me, Power Automate’s Standard license comes with virtually everything we would need on a daily basis. What is even better is how Microsoft keeps adding new features to the standard license. Hence, promising the massive user community an optimal user experience even with the basic version.

Requires Only a Microsoft, Student, Work, or Personal Email ID

Back to Power Automate, Microsoft now provides it as a part of the Microsoft 365 suite. As you might know, Microsoft 365 is itself a host to many other smaller software suites. This includes MS Office, and individual apps like MS Teams, Sharepoint, and more!

Back to Microsoft 365, it can be accessed by anyone who has a school or work id. And do not worry if you do not have either of those. Power Automate also comes as a stand-alone desktop app. And it can be used by any id user except those that end at .gov or .mil. But if you have a Microsoft account, you are already halfway through the process of automation!

Access to Hundreds of Prebuilt flows for Free!

One thing that sets software solutions by Microsoft apart from the rest of the tech world is its extensive user community. Millions of people use cloud solutions such as Power Automate. And open-source collaboration ensures that the technology continues to get better. This is exactly why Python programming language is gaining such a large fan-following. With users sharing their prebuilt flows with the rest of the community, anyone can access them. Moreover, there are good chances that the custom flow you are looking for might already be there! Hence, the first thing everyone does is search Power Automate for existing flows that match the keywords. This is a great help to people with a little tech background who just want pre-built, on-button click flows ready to be used.

Moreover, this saves time that would otherwise be spent on learning Power Automate from the scratch – honestly, you do not have to. Consider yourself lucky if you are a Microsoft user as the extensive user community will always help you make the most of your day.

Power Automate Drives Innovation with UI Flows, Virtual Agents, and Azure Cloud Services

With the leading RPA software companies competing in the RPA arena, everyone works to grab a bigger market share. Hence, innovation and product differentiation become the sole unique selling point. As if the multitude of pre-built templates were not enough already, Microsoft just had to do better. Now Microsoft differentiates Power Automate in the best practical way. It does this by offering powerful functionalities like OCR, AI-driven features and analytics, and more. Microsoft ensures its useability to businesses as a SaaS. Moreover, it is backed by the robust Azure Cloud functionality and the ability to create virtual agents. We can see how businesses improved their marketing efficiency and increased their revenues using Power Automate – customer success stories.

How is Power Automate being Used by Sales and Marketing?

Getting Notified about your Business Activity Across your Social Media Pages

If you have an extensive business network across different product niches, you just have to take everything together. And knowing customer views about your personal brand becomes important. With most industries going online after the pandemic, social media has become a hub for buyers, sellers, and product reviewers. People now comment directly on your brand page expressing their opinion about your products. Moreover, by using hashtags, buyers, competitors, and critics can run campaigns for or against your business.

By creating customized Power Automate flows, you make sure to tailor them to serve your needs. Hence, you can link all your social media account-related activity to one common platform. By doing this, you ensure to stay tuned to whatever happens around your business.

Besides, by linking all your social media to one place, you save yourself from a lot of manual hassle. You no longer need to check each of your individual business pages across your social media. What is better than being able to find time by cutting out extra work? Thus, stay updated on what people are saying about your business. And take action against any false campaign before it gathers momentum.

Automating Sales Management in MS Teams via Power Automate

If you are facing challenges in streamlining your sales processes, then Power Automate offers a solution. As MS Teams becomes a one-stop collaborative workspace, connecting and aligning it with your CRM becomes critical. It is here that Power Automate provides a non-code solution to improving your sales management at scale. For instance, it automates repetitive tasks like teams or channel creation for individual sales deals. It can also automate Planner and opportunities sharing across your departments.

Automating Vendor Onboarding via Power Automate

Companies working with vendor onboarding always find themselves amidst repetitive manual tasks. They need to manage relationships with vendors and coordinate activities amongst them. They also have to look after the end users, providing immediate support. Once again, Power Automate helps to automate and streamline the vendor onboarding process.

By linking a vendor form with an approver’s notification workspace, you can now automate the cyclic approval process. It does not matter if the vendor’s submission was accepted or rejected. In any case, the vendor will always automatically receive a notification about that. So, whenever a new vendor sends his details via Microsoft Forms, you may relax if you are using Power Automate. This is because the next steps of approval are all automated thereby saving you a lot of manual checks.

A Beginner’s Tutorial to Microsoft Power Automate for Marketing and Sales Teams

Setting up Your Microsoft Account

Creating a Microsoft account is just as easy as signing up for Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Follow the free sign-up to Microsoft here and fill in your credentials. Those who already have a work or student ID, they may choose to sign in directly with their current credentials.

Assuming you are done signing up, go to the official Power Automate website and click sign in at the top right corner. You have the choice of either running it on your browser such as chrome, downloading the desktop version, or both. However, for cloud solutions, running it on your browser is suggested. And for desktop flows, having the desktop version of Power Automate is a must.

Get Familiar with Power Automate Dashboard

Get Familiar with PA
Power Automate Dashboard is Interactive & Highly User Friendly!

Having signed into Power Automate, you are likely to see a dashboard just like the one in the GIF above. See, how the interface is highly user-friendly – everything it has is self-explanatory. While there are many sections to explore, for beginners, the most important ones to get used to are Templates, My Flows, and Connectors in Power Automate. Let us know them one by one.

Templates in Power Automate

By far, the Templates section is the most important for beginners and individuals with no coding background. Unless you need to build an automated process that is not already there, Power Automate has hundreds of pre-built flows to offer you. Specifically, when you have a lot on your plate, these templates can save you plenty of time. Moreover, they are tried and tested by the Microsoft community so you do not have to spend time troubleshooting them. Just grab one and start filling in the details it asks from you. What is even better is that this guide on Power Automate will teach you how to use these templates from scratch.  

Monitor ‘My Flows’ in Power Automate

Assuming you are a marketing professional or a sales representative, you are going to need many automated processes to ease your life. And this section is there for you to monitor your flows. All the flows that you are going to create will be displayed here.

Standard, Premium, & Independent Publisher’s Connectors

This is the place where you can see and search for all the connectors that Power Automate currently supports. You can even see which connectors are ‘standard’ and available to everyone. You also get to see ‘Premium’ connectors and those provided by Independent Publishers. However, all the example use cases we are going to demonstrate use standard connectors, thereby, letting anyone create flows for marketing or sales purposes.

Example Use Cases: Using Power Automate Templates for Marketing and Sales Management

Now that you are already familiar with the Power Automate dashboard, we will make use of the hundreds of templates already there for us. This means our work has already been brought down from creating a new flow to just using a pre-built one – ask about easy!

Here are the top 3 example use cases that are perfect for marketers and sales reps to get started with Power Automate.

Notify the Sales Team Whenever a New Lead Form is Submitted

Step 1: Go to your Power Automate dashboard and select templates from the left pane. In the search bar at the top, type and search for Typeform. This will bring out every template that has the keyword ‘Typeform’ in its title. From the search results, see if you can find the template built by the Microsoft Community, just like the one in the image below. Let us open the template and create the flow.   

Notify the Sales Team
Search for Typeforms in Power Automate Dashboard

Step 2: After opening the template, it is going to ask for your Typeform and MS Teams account’s connection to Power Automate. If you have not signed in to the accounts, do it now – it takes just a minute. And if your sign-in was successful, you are going to see a green check in front of the Typeform and MS Team Logos. If not, you are going to see ‘fix your connection’ should there be any problem with the account linking. Once successfully linked, hit continue.   

Notify typeform
Link your Typeform and Microsoft Teams to Power Automate

Step 3: So this is your flow and you need to fill in the fields. Make sure you have already created your sales form in the Typeform account. However, if you are working for a business that already uses Typeforms, then navigate to your sales form just like in the image below. Fill in all the details: the Typeform, the sales team on MS Team, and the channel in which you need to post. These steps have been shown in the images below. Once done filling in the fields, proceed to Step 4.

create a configuration for PA
Adding Your Sales Typeform in the Flow
Sales team identificator
Integrating your MS Sales Team with the Flow

Step 4: Now that you have filled in all the details, your sales form and MS Teams are now integrated. What is left is the message that will be posted in teams every time a new lead submits a Typeform. Go ahead and customize the message – but make it short, just like a notification message. We have filled one here. Once done, hit create.

complete your config for sales team
Customizing the Notification to Remind your Sales Team to Get Back to Potential Lead

Step 5: So hey, a new lead just posted a sales Typeform requesting help and details on the product. Let us go and check whether Power Automate has run the flow.

Responses code for verification
New Sales Typeform Submitted

Step 6: Voila! Our flow is working, what is left is to see the message Power Automate left in our Sales MS Team.

Submit response
Flow Ran Successfully the Moment a New Sales Typeform got Submitted

Step 7: See, the exact message has been posted instantaneously – that is the power of MS Power Automate!

Check result of sales team
Power Automate Instantaneously Notifies your Sales Team about Lead Form

Get a Desktop Notification for Brand Mentions Across Twitter

Step 1: By now, you might have already remembered this step. So just like before, go to your Power Automate dashboard and select templates from the left pane. In the search bar at the top, type and search for the word tweet. This will bring out every template that has the keyword ‘Tweet’ in its title. From the search results, see if you can find the template, just like the one in the image below. Let us open the template and create the flow.   

Across Twitter
Search for ‘Tweets’ in Power Automate Templates

Step 2: Go ahead and connect to your Twitter. Since this flow will give you a desktop notification, make sure to download the desktop version of Power Automate and sign in with your MS account there as well. Anyway, if your sign-in was successful, you are going to see a green check in front of the Twitter and Notification bell icons. If not, you are going to see ‘fix your connection’ should there be any problem with the account linking. Once successfully linked, hit continue.   

connect to your Twitter
Link your Twitter & Desktop Notifications with Power Automate to Create a New Flow

Step 3: With account linking done, go ahead and type the keyword you would like to track. It can be a brand’s name, a competitor’s company, your new product range, a Twitter username, or even a hashtag. Whatever the keyword, type it there and hit create. So whenever a tweet gets retweeted more than 20 times, Power Automate is going to send you a notification.

Power Automate twitter connection
Type a keyword: brand’s name, competitor’s company, or a hashtag to Track

Step 4: And this just does not end here. You might be wondering if the number of tweets retweeted can be changed – of course, it can! Go to the advanced options right above the create button. And you will be navigated to the next screen.

Get a push notification
Type a keyword to track or customize details in Advanced Options

Step 5: On the ‘check the number of the tweets’ dialogue box, you can set the number of retweets after which you get the notification. And this is helpful. For smaller businesses, setting a smaller number will make sure that the company starts by tracking whatever the number of potential customers there is. However, for bigger businesses, setting a bigger number like 1000 retweets makes sense. As a big company would already have a strong and wide customer base and would want to see the bigger picture. Once done, hit save. Congratulations, you are done creating this flow! Every time the number of retweets goes beyond the set count, you are going to get notified right on your desktop. The next time you see this reminder, go ahead and check in what people are talking about you and your business.

When a new tweet appears
Set the retweet count as per your Business

Remind Your Sales & Marketing Teams of Daily Stand-up Meetings

Step 1: Let us create our daily reminder of stand-up meetings. Go to the templates section in your Power Automate dashboard. Search for meeting reminders and see if you can find the template: Send a meeting reminder to MS Teams during weekdays. Once the template appears, click it and proceed to step 2.

meeting reminder
Search for ‘meeting reminder’ in Power Automate Templates

Step 2: For this flow, you only require your MS Teams connection and nothing else. So sign in to your MS Teams and wait until you see the green check in front of the MS Team logo. Once successfully connected, hit continue.

Send a meeting reminder
Link your MS Teams to Create a New Flow in Power Automate

Step 3: On this screen, you really do not have to do anything except choose the team, the channel you would like to post the reminder in, customize the message, or change the reminder settings. Let us start by picking a sales team from the list of all MS Teams. You see which name your sales team is listed with and select that. If it is a marketing team, you may choose that. Just make sure to select the right one.

Sales team
Fill in the Details and Select Your Sales Team for Integration with Power Automate Flow

Step 4: Having selected the team, pick the channel to post your reminder in. Here we have selected a General channel for our sales team. You may also customize the reminder notification. We have left it as it is. By default, the reminder has been scheduled for every weekday and will be sent exactly when you hit create. This means that if you created the flow at 4 pm, then the reminder will be sent for the stand-up meeting at 4 pm every weekday.  Once done filling in the details, hit save. Let us go back and check whether the flow ran successfully.

Recurrence
Customize the Meeting Reminder and hit Save to Create the Flow

Step 5: Voila! The flow successfully ran the moment we saved our flow. The small green checks above each dialogue box show that there was no problem with running. What is left is to open MS Teams and double-check this – better be safe than sorry, no?

PA Recurrence
Double-Check Whether the Reminder is Set Successfully – Got to ‘My Flows’ to See That

Step 6: Having opened our sales team, we see the reminder posted. And this marks setting up the reminder for stand-up meetings for your sales team and/ or marketing team.

Sales team notify
Check Your MS Sales Team if they have been Reminded of Daily Stand-up Meetings

Final Thoughts

The capabilities of Power Automate that we demonstrated are just the tip of the iceberg. With Power Automate, you can create flows that link up as many connectors as you want. Just imagine how vast such an automated process can and does get.

For instance, consider a sales scenario. Potential leads submit their details and your sales team gets notified. The leads then get an automated reply either to book an appointment or an auto-generated quote is delivered. Once this is done and the leads have been successfully converted, automated processes allow for continuous monitoring of customers and their feedback. The only time these processes request human intervention is when executives are called to take final decisions and approve a sales deal.

See, how deeply businesses have integrated RPA into their daily chores. And with Power Automate, they get to pull off this feat quite nicely. If you are a sales representative or a marketing professional, stay tuned to Citizen Development Academy for amazing guides and tutorials.

 

Comment (1)

  1. Jeanne

    Thank you for this blog! I’m a marketer, and it was great to learn how I can automate many of my work processes

Leave your thought here

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *