Three key lessons for sales managers

So you have hired a whole bunch of people for your sales process; also implemented the CRM with sales force automation module; and you regularly take morale boosting sessions too. Still your sales team is not giving you the desired numbers? In spite of doing all, are you lacking somewhere? We’ll tell you –

So you have hired a whole bunch of people for your sales process; also implemented the CRM with sales force automation module; and you regularly take morale boosting sessions too. Still your sales team is not giving you the desired numbers?

In spite of doing all, are you lacking somewhere?

We’ll tell you –

Is your sales team being too pushy?

We all know: As sales managers, you have immense responsibilities on your shoulders. Answering to the top management why the company sales did not meet the target is your headache. But that doesn’t mean that you make your sales reps too aggressive in the first stage.

It is this attitude of yours (My way or the Highway) that harms the sales reps’ approach. For them it becomes nothing but cracking the deal anyhow. Result: sales reps forget to first build a rapport with your prospects.

From the word go, they pitch the product/service aggressively, that scares off the prospects and makes them apprehensive.

Lesson to Learn:

Form the correct sales process and apply it in the CRM. Emphasize upon correct lead management i.e. building customer relationship with the prospects. Rework upon the sales pitch. Keep it friendly, positive and optimistic. Teach your team to never pass off any frustration to your prospects.

Is your sales team jumping to the budget?

Yes we agree that asking about the prospects’ budget is important. It helps sales reps in taking the discussion in the right direction. However telling your sales team to inquire about the prospects’ budget is half job done. Along with this, you also need to tell them the exact situation when they need to pop up this question.

Understand that asking the prospect to identify a budget upfront, kills the deal. In most cases, prospects are not willing to talk about costs early in the sales process. Result: They become apprehensive and disinterested in taking the conversation further.

Lesson to Learn:

Train your sales team to learn more about prospects’ business needs. Then start gathering budget-related information. Make the prospects excited about the product/service by mentioning about how they will benefit. As the prospects get convinced about the benefit of the product/service, gradually pitch in the cost.

Is your sales team not listening to your prospects?

So what does your sales team do? Look into the CRM, Call up the prospect and start telling all the great things about the product/service. And if that’s not enough, then offer exclusive discounts. But few of these calls lead to a successful sale.

Wonder why? For the simple reason that you have trained your sales team to deliver a monologue. So they just pick up the call and shoot

Result: Prospects become highly disgusted. Sales process does not work.

Lesson to Learn:

Train your sales team to listen to your prospects. Teach them to study prospects’ background (through the CRM (Customer relationship management); ask the right questions and then tailor the products and services according to the needs.

Objective should be one: Prospects should feel that your sales reps are not just behind increasing numbers. Finding a solution to the clients’ problem is what drives them. (Sounds little idealistic but then this is the fact) Customers want to be understood. And the company who best understands them and offers the exact solution at the lowest price cracks the deal. That simple!

So the next time, your sales reps call up a prospect – ensure that they do not pitch on baseless assumptions but on thorough understanding of the needs.

How to convert leads into clients

It’s surprising to see that even though companies collectively spend millions on marketing, the lead generation process continues to stagger. There’s a sharp mismatch of the number of leads getting generated and the number of them actually getting converted from there. One of the strong reasons for this plight is the deteriorating lead management system. This blog converses on this topic in detail and illustrates the benefits of using Modern Marketing Software for effective lead management.

Know how to convert leads into clients as this has bought $275 billion dollars a year – that’s the average amount spent annually by the B2B companies on lead generation.

The above projection clearly illustrates that Companies have realized the importance of lead generation in sales and hence are splurging more on marketing endeavors.

Good news? Experts say No. Let’s find out why –

According to a section of analysts like Jon Miller (VP and co-founder at Marketo), while Lead Generation is on the top of the memorandum for most B2B companies – it’s not helping sales in the way it should. In spite of the high numbers of marketing generated leads, the sales teams are not being successful in converting these numbers into deals.

Why this discrepancy between Marketing and Sales?

The answer lies in the difference between the old and new marketing model.

Old School of Marketing: Marketing rep generates a lead and straight away transfers it to the sales. This is what we all have been doing since ages. But today as we’ve entered the so called digital world, what we encounter are Informed Customers.

Why do we call the Customers Informed?

Because they come in contact with the marketers already possessing some basic knowledge of the product/service and even the company. Most importantly, they do not want to engage with sales so early. They take their own time before moving down to the sales funnel. And in this process, they are not solely dependent on the marketers to provide product/service information. Buyers use the web, search, and social media to get the right and unbiased opinion of the product/service.

This dynamic complexity does not make it ideal for the sales to meet the leads at an early stage of the buying cycle. Even if they forcefully meet, there’s no success. The interaction drops midway.

Consequently, marketers need to focus on proper Lead Management and Nurturing programs. They need to hone the leads to make them ‘ready-for-purchase’ from where the sales can take off.

And to do this, B2B marketing professionals need Powerful Marketing Software with strong Lead Management and Nurturing Capabilities.

Surprisingly, searching for marketing software is not an up of the hill task today. With multiple vendors offering marketing software in the market, the choices are galore for the companies. Still B2B marketers face a tough time – why?

Jon Miller explains – ‘”Lead Management and nurturing capabilities have been offered by many marketing automation vendors. But unfortunately, most of them have been way too complex to use. Without an intuitive interface, it has been more of a headache for the marketers to use the software.’”

But things are much better now. Thanks to the growing level of awareness among the vendors and companies, you can find much better Marketing Automation Solutions in the market. Designed on the needs of the modern marketers, they do not require help from IT or any other significant training.

Key elements of a modern B2B marketing software solution

To ensure that what you select is not conventional marketing software but a New-Age Marketing Automation Solution, look out for these factors:

Intuitive interface:

Do not choose a marketing automation tool with pseudo-code programming environments. Remember the last thing you’ll want is your marketers spending their entire day only learning the software. Choose something simple that is easy and quick for your marketers to start working upon.

Free trial:

There’s nothing better than first getting a feel of the solution through the Free Trial option. Not only can you check factors like design, usability, implementations and compatibility but also ensure that it aptly meets your marketing needs. Best Part: – you’ll never have to regret for buying the wrong thing.

On-demand:

As Miller states – ‘”Software as a Service is a godsend to IT-starved marketing departments. Imagine the benefit you’ll get on buying a SaaS marketing automation solution. No hassles of any installation. The vendor will take care of the maintenance and new upgrades.”

Great support:

You cannot afford to let your marketing automation software ditch you at the most crucial moment. To avert any such possible plight, choose a vendor that offers you immediate service support. Emphasize upon getting different levels of assistance in the form of 24×7 available Help Manuals, eBooks and Solution Demos.

Customer Service Tips that Forrester Research suggests

Delivering a winning customer service has become a quandary for every business. Thanks to the sudden spurt of communication channels and touchpoints – Customers have become omnipresent and companies are finding it difficult to tackle them in all the avenues. So do we take it for granted that the gap between customers’ expectations and the service will always be huge? Certainly, No In this blog, learn four most compelling tips on customer service suggested by one of the top international research bodies (Forrester).

Customer Service Tips to Improve Your Business that is Delivering a winning customer service has become a quandary for every business. Thanks to the sudden spurt of communication channels and touchpoints – Customers have become omnipresent and companies are finding it difficult to tackle them in all the avenues.

So do we take it for granted that the gap between customers’ expectations and the service will always be huge? Certainly, No

Kate Leggett (VP & Principal Analyst @ Forrester) comes up with four pointers that’ll help companies deliver stellar customer service in the present digital world. Take a look –

1. Look into your customers demographics

Customers nowadays demand prompt service over any communication channel. Inevitably, this calls for every company to be at its toes all the time. To lessen this challenge, Kate suggests looking into the customer demographics data.

In her opinion, customer demographics determine channel preference. And analyzing it extensively shows insights as to what channel the customers prefer. For instance target audience between 18 – 35 years of age prefers digital and online self-service channels. Any company having such a target audience can emphasize more upon chat, SMS & Twitter etc.

So start examining your customer demographics data; pinpoint the channels that your customers will likely want to use and deploy them according to best practices.

2. Opt for Multi-Channel Integration

Today, we cannot expect customers to start and finish their communication on a single medium. Right from phone call, email, chat or web self service – customers interact with a company over any channel that is most convenient to them at that point. And that’s not it – they expect to smoothly switch over channels without having to restart the conversation.

To deliver such high-end demand, companies need no less than an integrated solution with robust multi-channel integration capabilities. Having this by the side, customer facing agents will have a full view of all customer interactions. Not only will the channel convenience will be there but customer agents will pick up the conversation from the point it was last left off in some other channel.

3. Recommend channels to your customers

Understand the type of queries that your customers come up with. Segregate them and form channels for each type. For instance, offer a live-assist channel for time-sensitive queries. Likewise, offer other channels for remaining query categories. Convey this to your customers. In this way you can steer them to use the right channel for their questions, and maximize the value of every interaction.

4. Get away from one-size-fits-all service

Today’s Hyper-Informed Customers demand no short of a personalized service. So as a company – you ought to know your customers name; their purchased products, service issues, channel preferences and past interactions. And all this can only be possible when you integrate your customer service applications with customer databases, commerce platforms, product recommendation engines, web content management systems, and marketing automation apps.

We suggest: Investing in a unified cloud CRM application that orchestrates your customer records together and gives you a complete insight into the data. Not only does it make you more apt towards delivering a personalized customer service but you can do it freely from practically any location and time (thanks to the cloud technology).

Top Six trends of Customer Service in 2015: Forrester Report

Planning your customer service strategy for 2015? You are not alone. It’s that time of the year when most companies are busy reviewing their progress, identifying how they performed till now, and accordingly updating the business plan with the new strategy. And while they do all this – one question keeps hovering in their mind – what 2015 holds in store for them? If only they get a few hints and insights, the planning for the coming year will be far easier and effective.

It’s that time of the year when companies are busy reviewing their progress, identifying how they performed till now, and accordingly updating the business plan with new strategy. And while they do all this – one question keeps hovering in their mind – what 2015 holds in store for them? If only they get a few hints and insights, the planning for the coming year will be far easier and effective.

Kate Leggett (Principal Analyst @ Forrester) has come up with her prediction on customer service, titled Forrester’s Top Trends For Customer Service In 2015

Taking excerpts from there, we bring you paraphrased version of FIVE most popular customer service trends to be seen in the coming year.

Trend 1: Emerging Channels for Customer Service

According to recent Forrester survey, web self-service has been the most widely used communication channel for customer service. For the very first time it has surpassed the voice channel which had been dominating the customer service medium for long.

Looking at this data, Kate predicts that web and mobile self-service channels will dominate largely over 2015. Customers across every industry will demand effortless interactions over these mediums. In addition to mobile and web, video chat with screen sharing and annotation will also become popular.

Needless to say, organizations that are successful in catering to this need of new customer service channels will experience a definite advantage.

Trend 2: Proactive Customer Engagement

Proactive customer engagements are all about anticipating the customers’ needs and demands in advance and engaging with the customers accordingly. In 2015, organizations will hugely emphasize upon proactive engagement where they’ll anticipate the what, when, where, and how for customers. They’ll offer proactive chat, proactive offers and proactive content to deliver the information/resources at the right time in a customer’s pre-purchase journey.

These proactive engagements will assist the organizations to improve their operational performance and predict future customer behavior.

Trend 3: Preemptive Customer Service

Presently, many fast growing companies are using support automation to preemptively diagnose and fix issues. The benefits of doing this are multifarious. For instance, it requires minimal human involvement. Plus, it offers faster resolution at lower costs, deeply personalized engagements, better planning, and anticipation of future customer needs.

Looking at this, Kate suggests that in 2015, companies will further drive preemptive service by focusing on building and servicing smarter products. However, they’ll have to pay close attention to factors in relation to interoperability standards.

Trend 4: Cognitive Engagement

Traditional Knowledge Management for customer service will take a backseat. Rather, organizations will look forward to explore cognitive engagement solutions. These solutions will involve computing systems that will gather information, automatically build models of understanding, and communicate those in natural ways.

Benefits of using such systems will be profound. For instance knowledge creation will get automated, companies’ knowledge databases will get increased and customer service agents will get empowered with deeply personalized answers and intelligence

Most importantly, new steams will come up from where companies can learn about customers’ needs.

Trend 5: Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics will become the next BIG thing in the customer service sector. Organizations will consistently use it to offer tailored service to the customers. Factors like customers profile, past interactions and transactions, geographic location, device, and browser will be taken into consideration (as a part of the predictive analytics).

Using predictive analytics, organizations will connect a customer to the right customer service agent. Additionally, they will use it in improving their hiring, retention, and employee performance.

Trend 6: Consolidation of Customer Service Technology

In Kate’s opinion – customer service technologies fall into three main software categories:

While the vendor of all these three categories offer robust end-to-end solutions integrated with many additional capabilities – Kate predicts that further consolidation of these systems will happen in the marketplace. The reason being: rising buyer demand for integrated comprehensive technologies and the rise of robust SaaS solutions in each category.

FOUR reasons why small businesses fail to grow

Surprisingly, on one hand while the numbers of new businesses continue to grow exponentially, on the other very few of them actually make a mark. Most often it’s not because of the lack of resources that make the SMBs hit the wall but the result of minor organizational glitches that do the harm. Read the blog as we give you top four factors that prevent the small and medium businesses to expand their processes and come in level with the MNCs.

The reason why small businesses fail? In every industry, new companies come to the horizon every day. While some grow and dominate, others stagnate or shrink and ultimately fail. There are many reasons why companies grapple to grow, despite of repeated attempts.

Two years back, NY Times came up with blogs citing the main factors that were acting as determinants to the growth of the SMBs. Taking excerpts from there, here are the top four reasons explaining why only some small companies grow while others hit the wall.

1. Poor Monitoring

You cannot be in control of a business if you don’t know what is going on. And this is precisely what happens with most of the small and medium-sized businesses. They are completely in dark about the actual happenings taking place within their processes. With no stats in hand – their company runs like a directionless car with no one to take the right turns and pull the brakes at the right stops.

SMB owners have a common — and disastrous — attitude that monthly business review sessions is suffice to keep watch over the business. In reality, business monitoring is no less than a daily job where entrepreneurs need an application like a small business CRM that gives them a bird’s view of the entire operations in minutes.

2. Lack of Implementation

Whether you want to achieve 75 percent customer satisfaction or 85 percent customer satisfaction – these are mere figures on paper until you do not do anything about it. To ensure that your business actually takes any benefit out of it – IMPLEMENT these policies.

And this is where the SMBs falter. What they fail to realize is that merely setting high standards and not taking any action upon it is as ineffective as no standard at all. They need to implement control systems that assure those customer service standards are met. Then only will their good intentions be accompanied by good results.

3. Excessive Technology

Technology can be both a blessing and a curse for businesses – it depends on how it gets used. While the larger enterprises have a better control over their enterprise systems – SMBs fall short at this aspect. In the lieu of getting the best of applications at hand, they have turned their business process into a cobweb of standalone applications.

Amassing so many applications has made it very difficult for a small company. They are spending a large chunk of their time on managing, integrating and troubleshooting these applications. Plus the added hassle of data discrepancy as the records are lying in multiple databases.

Obviously, they have not understood that while technologies can do many wonderful things, they can also be overwhelming and expensive if not implemented right. What the small and medium businesses principally require is: UNIFIED BUSINESS GROWTH SOFTWARE that orchestrates their business processes and manages them together.

4. Dysfunctional Management

Courage, Fortitude, Attitude & Passion – these are the ever important corporate cultures that drives a company. Throw in lack of Focus, Vision and Planning into the mix and you have a disaster.

Unfortunately close to seventy percent of small and medium organizations experience the second option; which precisely explains why these businesses have a dysfunctional management.

This message goes to all the SMB entrepreneurs: understand that a company is a reflection of the owner’s desires and personality. While some of you might want to take over the world, some will be happy making a reasonable living. Whichever is the goal – it’s important that you maintain a driven culture in your company. Values like Courage, Fortitude, Attitude and Passion should be there to create an inspired staff.

FIVE mistakes of SMBs on the back foot

Small Businesses are determined, bold, and competitive. The kind of effort and hard slog that SMBs put in is unquestionable. Then why is it in spite of this consistent effort, an astonishing eight out of ten small businesses continue to fail every year? Explaining this topic in detail, we bring for you a compilation of top five areas that the small businesses need to improve in order to come at par with their bigger counterparts.

Let’s Learn from the Mistakes of Small and medium business. Despite the fact that small-business owners are not leaving any stone unturned, they are facing a tough time to come in parallel with their bigger counterparts.

Experts suggest that one of the reasons responsible for such a scenario is an un-smart competitive approach of the SMBs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they can simply implement the tried and tested strategies that their bigger rivals are following.

In what follows are five such tactics (of the bigger enterprises) which are getting completely ignored or overlooked by the SMBs. Let’s explore each of these tactics in details –

1. Absence of a Business Plan

Investopedia survey suggests that poor planning is one of the crucial reasons why small businesses fail. Unlike their larger counterparts who have a well-defined roadmap for their business – SMBs survive on each day policy.

What they fail to understand is that a business plan serves two purposes:

  • It defines the immediate and long-term objectives of the business
  • It helps design a roadmap for the accomplishment of these objectives.

Developing a business plan is not as hard as it seems. Just you need to:

  • Acquire a thorough understanding of your business and your industry
  • Determine who your target audience is
  • Define your immediate and long-standing objectives.

Based on the above-mentioned pointers, create a comprehensive and concisely written business plan.

2. No analysis of the Competition

Competition breeds the best results. And this is precisely what most of the established and renowned businesses follow. A large chunk of their strategies come as an upshot of what their competitors are doing.

For instance, customer relationship management software is now synonymous with all the BIG brands. Initially getting adopted by ten to twenty companies – gradually every big brand has adopted CRM solely looking at the multifarious benefits that the solution provides.

To be successful, you can’t overlook your competitors too. So study and observe their working strategy and chances are they might be doing something right that you can implement in your business to make more money.

3. Weak Employee Relationships

Employees represent the company to the customers. As a result – The kind of service that a business provides depends on the kind of experience the employees provides to the customer. To ensure that the employees provide the best of experience to the customers – the larger organizations take initiatives to keep their employees happy and satisfied.

On the contrary, 9 out of 10 SMBs have disgruntled employees working under them. These employees do not feel the genuine urge to do a good job and satisfy the customers. As a result, there is no continuity of high-quality customer service and SMBs have to suffer significant expense of employee attrition and employee retraining.

So take a portion of your time and invest it on conducting regular employee sessions. Understand their challenges that they face at work. For example, Support your sales reps with web based sales software that automates much of their time-consuming tasks.

Overall, make your employees feel valued, respected and listened to. This will automatically upbeat their mindset and make them perform better than anticipated.

4. Cumbersome Pattern of Working

63 percent small and medium-sized businesses still follow the old-school pattern where their employees work in water-tight compartments – with practically no communication with each other. Lead generation, sales opportunities, service cases and marketing campaigns – all these takes a hell lot of time as they pass from one department to another.

On the contrary, big enterprises are coalesced with unified business management systems with strong collaboration capabilities. Right from the marketing head to the sales rep to the support executive – all of them can access resources and jointly collaborate on any case from the software itself.

Needless to say – such an approach speeds up their decision making process. Workflows get simplified; new ideas get captured and capitalized upon fast; and winning practices get easily shared through the collaboration platforms.

So be creative. Ditch the old school way of working in siloed departments. Streamline your processes together and use a small business CRM with strong collaboration features.

5. Poor Customer Service

One common factor combines every successful business and that is: Great Customer Service.

But most small businesses often underplay this fact. And the ones who do focus on it – only consider post sales interaction as the customer service. But in today’s age of the Empowered Customer – service starts right from the first interaction with the buyer till the time he continues to deal with the company as a customer. Basically, it entails all three – Marketing, Sales and Post-Sales Support.

So invest in customer management software and start providing a better experience to your customers throughout their journey. Better service will make your customers more inclined to come to you, instead of going to your competition.

Grow your business in 2017 with these 5 easy tips

As 2014 comes to a close, it’s that time of the year when you need to plan for your business growth for 2015. Your main priority should be to review your present business performance and use these insights to plan accordingly. In this blog what we offer you are five easy tips on growing your businesses in the coming year of 2015. Simple and effective – they’ll fuel your growth and help your business to move forward fast.

Learn How to grow your business and get the maximum from it. This year, you made a series of initiatives where you invested a lot-in terms of money, time and sweat. The objective was one: to get your business off the ground. Now finally by the end of 2014 you have successfully managed to make your business pass from the phase of just-started to a small and medium-sized business. Congratulations!

But…now what? You can’t let your business be stagnant. This is the time when you need to plan as to what will be your business strategy in 2015. How will you grow your business the next year?

Read further as we bring for you five easy ways to GROW your business. Understand and implement to see the difference. Don’t forget to share in your feedback with us.

1. Unite with Corresponding Businesses

Align yourself with a business that complements your product/service. This is the fastest way to success. By aligning with other businesses, you automatically win their prospective customers as well.

For instance, most of the current web based CRM solutions have aligned with other enterprise critical solutions like DocuSign, GoToMeeting, Google Apps and Outlook etc. It’s a move that has proved lucrative for the CRM vendors.

They are now being able to promote their application as complete business growth software where users do not have to juggle between different applications. They can manage the entire business from a single interface.

Inevitably, this has quickly attracted the attention of the businesses who are regular users of apps like DocuSign, Outlook and GoToMeeting. They are more likely to prefer the new-age CRMs that provide integration with these renowned and commonly used business applications.

2. Be Structured

Irrespective of which industry you belong to – to be successful in your business, first be organized. Not only will it give you an exact idea of the to-do things but also help you in prioritizing the tasks and getting it done quickly.

So simply create a to-do list for everyday. As and when you complete each task, tick them off. Practice this exercise regularly and you’ll stay on top of your tasks always.

Tip: if you are the tech savvy one, then chuck this manual exercise and opt for CRM solution. Schedule your tasks in the calendar and get their reminders. With the CRM by your side, you’ll never miss the deadline and complete all the tasks timely that are essential to the growth of your business.

3. Target different Avenues

Your current market is serving you well. To capitalize upon it more, do you have other avenues from where you can target it?

If your consumer market ranges B2B businesses, think about where the decision-makers of these organizations spend most of their time. Seminars, trade shows, webinars and exhibitions….let your imagination take you where you need to be. Think about promoting your product and service offerings across all these places.

4. Provide Consistency in Service

You cannot grow your business if you are unable to provide consistent service to your customers in the long run. Especially in today’s time when customers are looking for the same level of service across channels – it’s advisable that you opt for complete and integrated CRM solutions.

They provide cross-channel, consistent customer experiences by breaking down silos. Right from social media, mobile, in-store, and call centre, CRMs map the customer journey across these mediums that enables companies deliver a seamless customer experience.

5. Keep Detailed Records

Knowing your clients just a fraction can always prevent you from being successful and growing your business. So let’s say if you have the detailed records of your customers’ last purchases in your CRM. You look at them and identify that your customers have a preference of shopping during the Christmas. Just knowing this gives you the opportunity to create strategies for up selling and cross-selling whenever December is aroufrdsnd the corner.

Read More – Powerful Marketing Strategies

Three Customer Service Techniques that will dominate 2015

We all know that customer acquisition is ten times more costly than customer retention. This is precisely why every company is more driven towards retaining its existing customers. However, considering the needs of the customers that is very dynamic, customer retention strategies that work today does not necessarily hold value tomorrow. Read further as we provide you three customer service trends that will be the most popular in the year of 2015.

We all know that customer acquisition is ten times more costly than customer retention. This is precisely why every company is more driven towards retaining its existing customers. However, considering the needs of the customers that is very dynamic, customer retention strategies that work today does not necessarily hold value tomorrow.

So as we pull down the curtain on 2014, it’s time to question – will the present customer retention strategies work in the coming year?

Well, you do not have to worry much because we have brought for you a list of customer service trends that will dominate 2015. Read, understand and implement these to keep doing customer retention next year, without hiccups:

1. Mobile Presence

2014 marked a significant time when it got officially declared that more people now use smartphones and tablets to access the internet than personal computers. With this fact, it became unambiguously clear that very soon customer-service will drift away from desktop and laptop to mobile. And the businesses who studied this underlying message quickly jumped into having a first-rate mobile presence.

In the coming year 2015, it’s sure that this trend will gain a tremendous momentum. Businesses will move on to responsive web designs, which hold compatibility across all devices. This will empower them to hold on to customers as they switch between devices. Most importantly, it will help in higher customer retention rates because when people know they can access a site on the go, they’re more likely to keep coming back there for more. So inevitably, opting for a responsive web design will be high on the priority list of every business entrepreneur.

2. Social Media

Instead of listening to commercials & jingles, today’s customers rather prefer to discover for themselves the benefits of a product or service.

And one of the best and easiest ways that have surfaced for the customers is social media. They are engaging in conversations in different social media channels to gain an insight into the probable products and services they are planning to buy. So one can say that social media has become the most dynamic medium that shape customers opinion. And looking at the never-ending hype of social media – it’s clear that this fad will continue to grow in the coming decade.

Consequently, social media marketing will take a BIGGER shape in 2015. Every marketer (in some or the other way) will have to participate in social media marketing to incite and guide their targeted customers conversations in the right direction.

Social media marketing tools will raise high in demand. However, we suggest, not investing in standalone social media marketing tool but in unified business growth software like Cloud CRM solution that offers social media monitoring. Social CRM software will eradicate guesswork out of social media marketing and make it more precise. It’ll be easy for the marketers to manage data points and tailor maximum social output.

3. Omni-Channel Support

In view of the fact that customers are using a number of devices and routes to engage with a business, it has become no less than an obligation for the companies to offer a seamless experience across channels.

While companies like Amazon have been the early pioneers to offer omnichannel customer experience, a number of fast growing small and medium-sized companies are doing likewise. They are offering a number of customer support channels to ensure that their customers receive prompt and effective support, irrespective of the path they choose.

Going forward in 2015, omnichannel customer service will become less of a luxury, and more of a necessity. With more and more customers making purchases via multiple channels, this kind of support will be required from every company.