Year: 2016

How to increase buyer engagement with enhanced revenue

In this blog we define the concept of Continuous Engagement that most marketing experts are advocating. Designed for the present digital era, it empowers the companies to successfully engage with the customers during each stage of the customer lifecycle.

How to increase buyer engagement with enhanced revenue helping all to achieve their dreasm in business. Every company works diligently throughout the year to accomplish ONE objective: Increased sales and revenue.

However, what differentiates the successful companies from the not-so successful ones is the approach that they take towards achieving the goal.

So if company A takes route 1 and company B takes route 2. Who maximizes its value faster depends on the quality and potentiality of the route taken.

And it is precisely at this point that most companies falter. With every expert proclaiming some new theory of sales and revenue – companies are bombarded with excessive tips and advices. Confused and panicky at the same time – they take the wrong route.

For example: in a survey, when a group of 100 entrepreneurs were asked – which was their companies’ biggest asset?

-> More than 90 percent of them said products and services

-> Remaining companies said employees.

While there is no doubt that product/services or even the people are the USPs of any organization – the biggest valuable asset are no one but the CUSTOMERS.

Marketo states – The most successful companies succeed for the simple reason that they prioritize their customers over everything – be it their people, processes or even their product and service offerings. And this is what we need to do as well.

Especially in today’s Digital Era where competition is so stiff and customers so informed – companies cannot afford but to become customer-centric. Or else the margin of survival (forget success) is too thin.

And it’s not just we but even greater research bodies like Forrester and Gartner who advocate Customer Lifecycle Management as the key to growth and value.

The formula of Customer Lifecycle Management

Till now what we learnt is that in this digital era, customers are the most valuable asset of any company and the companies who successfully engage the customers from the start to the last become the real champions. But how should companies go about it? And who plays the biggest role in engaging the customers throughout the buying cycle? Find out next-

Today’s buyers: More empowered than ever

The internet gives buyers instant “information gratification”. Right from knowing the total number of elephants in the African Jungles to the total number of products a company has – the internet shows all. Plus, social media channels encourage the buyers to share and compare all these information from practically any location.

What does this imply?

Buyers already have an unambiguous perception and knowledge of the company when they come face to face with the actual sales representatives. They just want to draw the last conclusion to decide whether or not to make the action (purchase).

All of which means that the role of the Marketers increases 100 times more.

Marketers need to engage the informed customers, persuade them and pull them through the sales funnel. Functioning as the stewards of the customer journey, it’s their task to build a strong bond with customers wherever and whenever possible.

And to do this productively, marketers need to master the Continuous Engagement Marketing Strategy – that enables them present a unified experience to customers across devices.

What is Continuous Engagement?

Marketo states – As evident from the term itself, continuous engagement is about building multiple and meaningful interactions with the buyers across different levels. Here the marketers do not promote any particular product or service. Neither do they indulge in on-off campaigns which often intercept the customers.

Continuous Engagement marketing strategy emphasizes upon interacting with buyers continuously over a time. In short – it’s an unremitting process.

Example: Starting a conversation with a customer on one channel and then continuing that conversation even when the customer moves to other channels as well. The catch here is that when the customers move to other channels, the interaction should look like a natural continuation of the previous conversation.

Contrary to the traditional email blasts, the idea here is to create targeted campaigns. Referring to cloud CRM solution that stores all the data of the buyers, marketers find out:

• Who the buyers are?

• What they do?

• What is their preferred channel of communication?

• What are their buying patterns?

Based on these insights, they deliver personalized communications and contents to the buyers. This is why you can say that continuous engagement requires both: creative vision as well as hard data. And because of which, the result of such marketing campaigns are faster than the conventional marketing programs.

Final Thoughts

Today, Marketing is about being multi-channel i.e. to meet customers wherever they are and provide an integrated customer experience across every single platform.

Continuous Engagement precisely helps the marketers in accomplishing this objective of multi-channel marketing. It enables them shift from siloed communications and create a consistent experience for the customers – one that presents a unified message across dissimilar channels.

Most importantly, it allows the marketers to spend a considerable amount of time with the buyers. As and when they spend more time with the buyers across channels – the more they come to know about them and the deeper the relationships grow.

How to Be a Successful Social Media Marketer

As things are now shaping up, if you are not on social media you don’t exist. The presence of social media in our lives has become ubiquitous. Engaging customers on social sites is the latest trend for organizations to secure more business and as a result. they are constantly striving to find new ways to keep the customers hooked to their brands on social platforms. An increasing number of brands are now turning to social platform to initiate interactions with customers. Web 2.0 has opened new channels of communication for them by facilitating both way interactions.

How to Be a Successful Social Media Marketer, a guide towards best social media success. As things are now shaping up, if you are not on social media you don’t exist. The presence of social media in our lives has become ubiquitous. Engaging customers on social sites is the latest trend for organizations to secure more business and as a result, they are constantly striving to find new ways to keep the customers hooked to their brands on social platforms.

An increasing number of brands are now turning to social platform to initiate interactions with customers. Web 2.0 has opened new channels of communication for them by facilitating both way interactions. As a result an increasing number of CRM solution providers are integrating social media to their software that can help businesses grab, store and analyze social performance of their customers to anticipate future changes. However, merely mining social data isn’t enough. Organizations need effective social media strategy and engage resources in deriving useful insight from it. In order to be successful on social media one needs to keep the following points in mind.

Be selective: Your success on the platform will depend upon your efficiency in selecting the right audience. The demography on the social sites is varied. Therefore a careful analysis of your customer base will help you get an idea of who your customers are. If you want an insight on your customer demography, peep into the customer relationship software.CRM solution has come a long way from being a contact management system to transform into business intelligence (BI) software.

Be relevant: Sharing anything that you may like isn’t an option in social media. Your social media communication needs to be relevant and useful to the customer. It is very important to identify what your customers want to hear. Sharing useful and insightful content is the key to succeed in social media platform.

Be timely: Being timely is everything on social media. Today’s customers live on real-time information and if you can’t keep pace with that you are sure to lose your audience. Whenever an opportunity occurs don’t delay to strike a conversation to engage your audience. Be urgent and timely on your timeline.

Be share worthy: If you are taking your digital marketing seriously, be share worthy. Create content that your audience would love to share. Ask yourself the following:

  • Is your content engaging?
  • Does it make you audience laugh?
  • Is it adding value to your audience?
  • What is in it for your audience?
  • Is your content worth creating a viral?
  • Will your audience share your content?

Content marketing has really become very important for organizations. Sharing exciting and valuable content now can make all the difference between successful and not-so-successful digital marketing strategies. Here is what sells on social media:

  • Informative: Create content that would add some real value to the reader.
  • Funny: Being funny and witty is always attractive. Fun videos get most number of shares.
  • Controversial: Judiciously created controversy can actually benefit your brand. But it’s a very fine line to tread and you need to be careful that you don’t attract unwanted criticism.
  • Emotional: Emotion sells. Yes, they always do.
  • Call for action: That would inspire your audience to make a decision.
  • Polls: Run polls to learn about customer preferences. Social media polls are really popular.
  • Questions: Encourage your audience to offer their input. This would help you engaging your audience better.

What’s your gain?

One may wonder what his gain in all social media marketing process is. Well, the returns are both immediate and long term. Once you offer value to your customers first you can then ask them to return the favor. Often direct sales approaches fail due to this. Direct mailers ask the customer to buy without showing him his exact benefits in doing so.

In social media you need to be valuable, genuine and authentic and of course, must actually discuss about profitable propositions for your audience to make them coming back to you for more.

Lastly, most important factor is integration. Many marketers consider social media marketing separately from the rest of the marketing efforts. But what they actually need is an integrated platform where email marketing and social media marketing will work hand-in-hand to build, promote and maintain brand value.

How small and medium businesses increase sales

2 out of 5 small businesses have ranked time management as the biggest organizational challenge. Surprisingly ¼ of them will not mind paying $500 for an added hour. How does ineffective time management affect small businesses? Ineffective time management causes a host of problems. The most important one worth mentioning is – LOW REVENUE (Surprised?) Sales expert comments – “Apart from low organizational efficiency, low revenue is also the outcome of inadequate time management.”

How small and medium businesses increase sales and boost the revenue, learn with us. 2 out of 5 small businesses have ranked time management as the biggest organizational challenge. Surprisingly ¼ of them will not mind paying $500 for an added hour.

How does ineffective time management affect small businesses?

Ineffective time management causes a host of problems. The most important one worth mentioning is – LOW REVENUE (Surprised?)

Sales expert comments – ‘’Apart from low organizational efficiency, low revenue is also the outcome of inadequate time management. This is precisely why, solving time management problems is not just essential for increasing organizational effectiveness but to usher in an era of increased sales too.’’

How ineffective time management minimizes sales?

With less time, finding the right set of potential customers turns out to be an uphill task for the sales representatives.

Sales reps can smoothly bring in a steady flow of customers in less time only if –

  • Leads are routed to the appropriate sales rep
  • Informative data on potential data is provided to the sales team
  • Sales team have a proper visibility to forecast the future pipeline

Experts suggest – ‘’Most often sales managers in small and medium-sized organizations are occupied manually tracking down colleagues to make sales. Once the sales reps are appointed, sales managers waste another large chunk of time, keeping the sales reps in loop during the sales process.’’

While selling takes time, sales reps in small businesses take extra time because –

They do not have the functionality with smartphones/tablets that further delay their selling time. As a result – they make less efficient communication and wait more time for approvals.

How can small and medium businesses increase sales growth?

Considering the above-mentioned situation, many SMB owners are considering new business approaches/strategies to give their sales reps more constructive time to sell. One of these is the tried and tested approach – implementation of collaborative CRM application tools.

CRM expert Richard Boardman has described CRM as an ‘eye-opener’ considering the value of productivity it brings to an organization.

Boardman explains: “CRM systems simplify the selling process to give sales reps more time to sell. Consequent to which, CRM implementation brings small improvement in productivity, which together have a big impact on overall profitability.’’

How ConvergeHub CRM ( cloud based CRM for small business ) increases sales productivity?

  • Quality leads on check: Most often a lot of sales time is spent on leads that aren’t ready to buy at the moment. ConvergeHub CRM filters out the poor quality ones to ensure that sales effort is focused on the more promising opportunities. ConvergeHub CRM allows to score leads based on the prospect’s interaction with the sales professionals. For example, leads which enquired about the different pricing packages and signed up for a webinar might score more highly than those that just generated a basic interest over the product/service. It offers robust lead management processes which avoid wasted effort and have a huge impact on sales productivity.
  • Quick Quote production: Most sales reps consider the creation and generation of sales proposals a real chore. However, ConvergeHub offers a range of predefined quote templates integrated into the CRM system. Inevitably, it speeds up the generation of quotations, and simultaneously improves the quality of the sent-out quotations.

ConvergeHub allows you to raise quotations from your user account. You can see a listed view of all your quotations in one place in the listing page. You can add new quotes directly to the list and adjust the fields displayed in the listing page. In addition, you can mass update the quotations and export the list of quotations in Microsoft Excel and PDF format.

  • 360 degree view of customers: Information held in different customer management systems, is often not readily accessible to the sales team. Unavoidably, this restricts the sales team to maintain healthy on-going relationship with customers.

Implementing ConvergeHub CRM significantly reduces the time involved in handling customer queries. It provides ready access to the information that sales need to better retain the customer.

  • Report generation: Sales managers spend a lot of time creating reports for team review. Post the implementation of ConvergeHub CRM, sales-related information will remain consolidated in CRM system. With slight changes, sales reports can be tracked there easily. Thus, this helps streamline the reporting function and improve the immediacy of management information.

Final Words

Boiled down to its essence, ConvergeHub CRM increases sales productivity by simplification. It shows your customer information and sales data all on one screen. So be it viewing client history, replying to emails, interacting with clients, editing accounts, your salespeople will be able to this entire in one app. This will save their time and increase your sales productivity.

How first time buyers can convert into a loyal customer

Acquiring a new purchaser is easy; the real test starts when you have thousands of competitors trying to snatch that one-time purchaser from you. It’s no hidden fact that customer retention has always been a tough process. With the term ‘monopoly’ no longer existing in the business sphere, every company indeed takes all measures to retain its purchasers. A purchaser travels through 6 stages to develop loyalty for an organization. Realization: The company offers the products/services I require Convenience: The product/services are easily accessible Trust: The quality of the products/services is fine Satisfaction: The transaction is gone smooth Relation: The company understands my needs and acts in my favor

How first time buyers can convert into a loyal customer, learn and earn. Acquiring a new purchaser is easy; the real test starts when you have thousands of competitors trying to snatch that one-time purchaser from you.

It’s no hidden fact that customer retention has always been a tough process. With the term ‘monopoly’ no longer existing in the business sphere, every company indeed takes all measures to retain its purchasers.

A purchaser travels through 6 stages to develop loyalty for an organization.

  1. Realization: The company offers the products/services I require
  2. Convenience: The product/services are easily accessible
  3. Trust: The quality of the products/services is fine
  4. Satisfaction: The transaction is gone smooth
  5. Relation: The company understands my needs and acts in my favor
  6. Loyalty: The relationship is mutually beneficial and most importantly on my conditions.

In the above-mentioned cycle, the last two steps are where the purchaser finally becomes a repeat customer for the organization. Once a potential customer becomes a first-time buyer, this is when the sales professionals brainstorm ideas to come up with a solution – How to turn the purchaser into a regular customer? How to make him travel through the 5th and 6th stages?

What should be the conversion strategy?

When a purchase is made, inevitably the company gets the primary details of the purchaser. These details are no less than an opportunity for the marketers/sales professionals to start the conversion process. What needs to be understood that instead of direct promotion (which can be a turn off for most purchasers) company newsletters or delivery confirmation emails can be a smart way to start targeted communication.

An intelligent sales executive can use order and delivery confirmation email to cross-sell/up-sell products/services. Based on the first purchase, the sales professional can choose those products/services which will likely interest the purchaser.

In reference to the subject of converting one-off customer to a repeat buyer, there’s a new trend that has come up. Most leading organizations are now following proactive personalized communication through multi-channel data.

Social Feeds

Most often a one-time purchase does not tell much about the preference of the purchaser. In such situations, marketing/sales professionals look into other mediums. For instance, the purchaser’s interactions with social media; his likes & shares

Customer analytics

Monitoring the purchaser’s online behavior can give volumes of information to make the conversion strategy more accurate. This is why cookies are a great way to get an insight into the customer analytics. With the help of the cookies, marketing and sales professionals can find out –

  • How often the purchaser has visited the website?
  • How long the purchaser has stayed in the website?
  • What are the products/services the purchaser has browsed through?
  • Has the purchaser participated in any campaign?

Combining the online behavior with the purchase pattern, sales professionals can further drive their communication in the right direction. Let’s say if the purchaser has mostly searched for smartphones in your website, sending him a birthday greeting with personalized special offers on smartphones can encourage him to act (make a second purchase).

The above-mentioned tactics are a few examples of proactive personalized communication. Sales professionals can use other ideas/mediums to initiate a personalized communication with the purchaser.

Before concluding, it is important to note that converting a purchaser into a customer is much easy with web based CRM solution that provides a combined view of the purchaser details and his/her transaction. With accurate data available instantly, sales professionals have the convenience to easily frame personalized content or adapt the existing ones as per the online customer behavior.

 

 

Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter: @convergehub

How to convert website visitors into a strong lead

Capitalizing on the website visitors is one of the best ways of lead acquisition. But then is it so easy? Many small and medium-sized businesses complain of a high bounce rate from their websites everyday. In spite of spending dollars on website designing and ranking, the ROI does not meet the mark because of the high number of visitors who quickly flock in and flock out.

How to convert website visitors into a strong lead, learn the best possible methods. Capitalizing on the website visitors is one of the best ways of lead acquisition. But then is it so easy? Many small and medium-sized businesses complain of a high bounce rate from their websites everyday. In spite of spending dollars on website designing and ranking, the ROI does not meet the mark because of the high number of visitors who quickly flock in and flock out.

One of the leading SMB owner elaborates on the situation – ‘’While my company website does get good traffic, the result is disappointing. Visitors come and then quickly switch over. And what makes things worse is that that we are unable to do much about it because we do not know the customer details and their preferences. ‘’

The challenge of acquiring details from an unknown browser is faced by all organizations. What makes the large organizations survive it is the personal online experience that they offer to their visitors. And this is precisely what now SMBs need to do. When I say personal online experience, I mean use of a few personalization techniques that make the browsers feel engaged to the website.

How to create immediate online experience for better involvement of website visitors –

Understand that when a visitor comes to your website, most likely he has typed a keyword that is related to your line of products and services. And considering this there are high chances that the visitor will search for the item in the on-site search field. This is the perfect moment which holds opportunities for you to create an engrossing experience for the visitor.

Based on the search term that the visitor has put in the on-site search field or the products/services the visitor is exploring, you can understand the exact preferences of the visitor. To get a broader understanding, you can monitor if the visitor has entered into the price and offers section or is checking out the online payment process.

In addition to the behavioral data, technical details can be a great help too. For instance, whether the visitor is using a smartphone, a tablet or an old desktop; or the type of browser being used to check the website, can help you know if the website representation is proper.

Preference based content

Content is one of the fundamentals of online marketing – we all know right? And this same fundamental works for converting unknown browsers into potential customers. With a complete insight into the online personality of the visitor, you are at an advantage to present relevant content that grips the attention of the visitor.

Let’s say you have an e-commerce website dealing with apparels, footwear and cosmetics. If a visitor comes to your website searching for evening make-up, you can always have a content displayed to talk about the festive offers on evening make-up products.

Displaying the right content at the right time will make the experience of the visitor more enhancing which will most likely result into a purchase/registration by the visitor for emails about future deals.

Concluding

The above-mentioned situation is just one of the examples. SMB owners can use several other tactics depending on the nature of their business. Remember once a positive experience is created for the first-time web browsers, they can be willing to share their personal details which can be feed into your online CRM for marketing and sales professionals to work on.

 

Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter: @convergehub

How to provide the best customer services and support

The race to delight the customers has become so ingrained, that most businesses are taking resort to immoral ways of doing it. According to a report published in the Harvard Business Review, business managers are so hell bent on delighting their customers, that examining the nature of techniques has taken a backseat. Impressing customers at all cost – has become the ruling mantra. In the words of Błażej Szperliński, ‘’Delighting the customers has given rise to a set of bold statements of customer service –

How to provide the best customer services and support to your clients. The race to delight the customers has become so ingrained, that most businesses are taking resort to immoral ways of doing it. According to a report published in the Harvard Business Review, business managers are so hell bent on delighting their customers, that examining the nature of techniques has taken a backseat.

Impressing customers at all cost – has become the ruling mantra.

In the words of Błażej Szperliński, ‘’Delighting the customers has given rise to a set of bold statements of customer service –

  • WE are available 24/7
  • WE are flexible
  • WE hold in depth expertise
  • WE are agile and responsive and understand your concerns
  • WE WOW our customers always

While companies have left no stone unturned in coming up with the most innovative declarations; in most instances all words and no actions has been the scenario. Put simply, in the lieu of promoting quality service to their present/potential customers, companies have gone too far (more than what they can actually deliver).’’

Consequently, failed customer expectations and poor customer service has come to the forefront.

What experts suggest?

Remain relevant. Proclaim high-end promises only when you can deliver. If you say your customer service is 24/7 available, make sure it is. If you say you can help get things done, do it. Remember the last thing customers want to hear is that you cannot deliver because of so and so…..reason.

Substantiating this point further, Harvard Business Review has stated – The inclination to punish bad service is higher than the impulse to reward a delightful one. Multiple surveys have been conducted that shows

Customer loyalty gets influenced by –

How well a company delivers on its basic, plain-vanilla promises?

And

Customer churn is likely to get caused by

False customer service claims

This is precisely why the number of customers patronizing a company because of its over-the-top service is less than the number of customers cutting from companies because of terrible service.

Example –

A customer is more likely to revenge an airline that has lost his bag than return to a hotel that has attentive staff.

Focus on delivering the basics

As per the research carried out by the Customer Contact Council (part of the Corporate Executive Board), over more than 75,000 customers along with hundreds of customer service leaders,

Customer service strategy should be –

To minimize the effort of the customers to get their problems solved i.e. after-sales support should be fast and effective.

In the words of Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman, ‘’Making tall customer service claims that are rarely in line to the day-to-day reality will do irreparable damage to a business. Businesses should first get the basics right, before setting the eye on creating a dazzling experience. ‘’

What makes up for a basic but satisfying customer service?

As aforementioned, evidence shows that customers do not tolerate the rushed and inconvenient service. They are looking for a satisfying experience and businesses that provide it win their loyalty.

In the words of Dave Dougherty, ‘’When customers contact companies for service, they only care about two things:

  • Knowledge of the frontline employee
  • Issue resolve on the first call.

Source: Harvard Business Review

Yet, most customer care managers do not prioritize these two aspects. This could be because in most instances, businesses are not aware about the right area to concentrate upon. Hence, traditionally customer service quality gets measured on

  • Time on hold
  • Minutes per call.

Inevitably, these parameters force the customer agents to rush through the calls, thereby creating a dissatisfying experience for the customers.’’

He recommends measuring

  • Percentage of problems resolved within the first contact
  • Reason behind the problems that aren’t resolved in one call.

Further, investing in high-end cloud CRM software plays an integral role in keeping the first contact resolution rates high. With all crucial information consolidated in one central platform, it is easy for the customer agents to instantly respond to the customer query.

‘’Hourly response rates is amplified through Cloud CRM software. For those who think otherwise, can take a look at all the major (customer-service renowned) firms – feature-enriched cloud CRM solution is the common factor. Not only CRM ensures fast initial response rates, but high-quality interactions between customers and frontline employees too.’’

Final Thoughts

Businesses who do not implement this tactic experience loss through wasted investments and high customer attrition. Disgruntled customers leave them without the slightest warning. Even when companies rebuild themselves, they cannot choose to ignore the high attrition rate that represents lost opportunities in terms of customer revenue and brand promotion.  Conversely, businesses who act on these insights are bound to benefit in multiple ways – improved customer service, reduced customer service expenditure, and low customer churn.

 

 

 

Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter: @convergehub

How can you unify your sales and marketing teams

How can you unify your sales and marketing teams, a challenging task that is made very easy in this article. In the last few years, there has been a radical shift in the traditional roles of Sales and Marketing. In experts’ opinion, it is the onset of the Age of the Customer that has made it a mandate for all organizations to unify their sales and marketing. In the words of Ellie Mirman –‘’ Miscommunication between sales and marketing has started working as an anchor in the company’s growth rate. Companies who have not aligned their sales and marketing teams have experienced a revenue decline by 4%. Further, organizations who have accomplished this challenge have witnessed a marked difference – 20% revenue growth (approx).’’

In consideration to the above statement along with statements of other business experts, it is clear and proven: unified sales and marketing is necessary for every organization who wishes to move up the path of growth and revenue. Result: organizations (big and small, local and international) have started working towards the accomplishment of this goal. However, the success rate is not so high.

While many organizations have implemented ways to generate better communication between sales and marketing, cracks between the two groups have continued to develop. Resultant to which – there is a cry among organizations regarding the right sales and marketing business process management.

So the question is: How can companies unify sales and marketing teams? How can they streamline their activities to ensure they work together and share a common goal?

Below enlisted, are a few ways to unify your sales and marketing teams:

1. Give a combined picture of the funnel

There is often a discrepancy between the sales and marketing professionals regarding the number of stages a lead passes to convert into a customer. Surprisingly, both teams have different terminologies to describe the stages. To get your sales and marketing together, firstly you need to remove this conflict of understanding. Your sales and marketing reps should have one combined picture of the sales funnel/cycle.

For this they should understand:

Lead Quality: Remember this is a crucial hand-off point between sales and marketing. There should be a defined set of parameters to judge whether a lead is ready for sales follow-up. It is advisable for marketing reps to categorize leads before passing them on to the sales reps:

  • The lead is a good fit to our products/service offerings
  • The lead is interested in our products/service offerings
  • The lead is a good fit to our product/service but not interested to purchase
  • The lead has shown high interest but does not fit the ideal customer profile.

Based on the above-mentioned matrix, marketing and sales team together can form the MQL (marketing qualified lead) definition. Remember doing this will put a stop to the accusations of the sales reps about low quality of leads forwarded.

Using the lead scoring option in most CRM software, marketing reps can make it easy for the sales reps to understand the importance of working upon a lead. For instance, a lead with a high score can define the urgency with which the sales rep should work upon it.

Factors to be used by marketing reps for scoring leads:

  • Lead behavioral history
  • Recent activities of the lead (website form fill-up, campaign participation etc)
  • Common patterns of other leads which have been converted to sales

Note: several industry experts have advocated the use of lead scoring mechanism. Resultant to which, most renowned organizations use lead score facility in the CRM as a crucial part of their lead filtration process.

2. Implement a SLA

The SLA can talk about sales and marketing teams’ activities such as quantity and quality of leads, specific number of contact attempts and so on. In sum, it can formalize the commitment of both the team to share the information and work together collaboratively.

According to Thom Weerd, using the CRM, most organizations execute the below-mentioned tactics under the SLA program:

For marketing:

Creating a list of all campaigns (webinars, demos and trade shows) implemented

  • Categorizing the lead
  • Finding the connection between the recent customers and the different campaigns
  • Calculating the average revenue for each lead source
  • Multiplying average close rate of each campaign with the average revenue per customer to know the marketing qualified lead value.

For sales:

  • Selecting an X number of leads present in the sales pipeline
  • Based on the CRM records, listing the number of times, each lead has been contacted. (Creating cohorts of leads based on this criterion).
  • Calculating the total number of hour’s sales rep spends on calls. Also calculating the total number of contact attempts made per hour. Then determining the cost-per-call of the sales rep
  • Determining the profitability of the contact attempts by dividing each customer’s revenue by cost-per-call
  • Noting the ideal number of contact attempts and putting it down in the SLA

3. Use Business Growth Software

Needless to say, data is the most important element to align sales and marketing. Without having the combined data on hand, it will not be possible for you to measure marketing ROI, lead conversion, lead quality and so on. Precisely why, you need an enterprise software application that acts as a unified repository for your sales and marketing data, brochures, collaterals and other essential documents.

It should have all the indispensable functionalities of sales and marketing by which the reps of both the team can use it as a shared platform. From lead generation, to contact attempts and lead conversion, the entire process should be mapped within the single system.

ConvergeHub CRM serves as one central platform for Sales, Marketing, Service and Collaboration to give you complete visibility into your business. Instead of investing in separate best-of-breed systems (which needs to be cobbled together) ConvergeHub CRM acts as one combined platform (CRM + Marketing + Sales) to grow leads, identify opportunities, close deals and support customers.

Below mentioned are a few of the benefits that you can garner through ConvergeHub CRM:

  • Automatic synchronization between leads and customers
  • De-duplication of leads (which is possible while updating existing lead records)
  • Lead/customer categorization
  • Lead intelligence (history of their activities)
  • Contact attempts
  • Lead status updates
  • Deal acquisition
  • Lead acquisition
  • Deals by expected close date
  • Leads by source
  • Lead-to-customer ratio
  • Sales & Marketing reports and analytics.

Using ConvergeHub CRM, you can align your company’s Sales and Marketing efforts to grow your base of customers. Additionally, sales and marketing reps can use it as a common platform for managing leads and prospects and can collaborate well on –

  • Sales ready lead
  • Profile and communication history for lead tracking (as previously mentioned).

 

How CRM impacts teams productivity

Managing a business becomes difficult when there are multiple teams working simultaneously. Miscommunication within the team members can result into easy project slip-outs costing thousands of dollars to the overall revenue. In such a scenario, it is imperative for businesses to have a tool in hand that fosters collaboration and smooth communication within team members and empower them to function as a combined unit rather than different individuals. This blog takes a look at the modern CRMs, showcasing them as the perfect tool to simplify workflows and encourage smooth communication of ideas and tasks within teams.

How CRM impacts teams productivity, a conceptual study of the modern way to manage your business. It is famously said that the concept of cubicle was started to ensure that the members of the same department sat together and had better collaboration and communication. But now in the digital age, does this cubicle system suffices the collaboration needs?

Not necessarily. Any organization (irrespective of its size and industry) will agree to the fact that today making a team sit together does not result into effective internal collaboration. It certainly takes a lot more than that. In fact, even regular email communication within the team is not enough to keep everyone combined on a single task.

So what calls for the ideal remedy?

CRM

While the abbreviation strictly stands for customer relationship management that means only managing company-customer relationships, surprisingly this definition of CRM has gone for a toss.

That is because the new age cloud CRM applications are definitely much more than only handling customer relationships. While these CRMs have not left their old territory of managing customer communications, they have extended their functionality and brought in the management of company’s internal communications too.

Now they have in-built tools and functionalities to help organizations foster better internal collaboration and communication.

Not clear of how does this happen? Go through the pointers below to see yourself how CRM functions as a collaboration software and helps a business in amplifying the collaboration levels within the teams.

1. Project Workflow

An element that often impedes good collaboration is when all team members are not aware of the exact status of the project. Insufficient/irregular data transmission leads to complications and birth of insecurities and ego clashes.

To put all this at bay, CRMs have project management module that let businesses define the projects with their corresponding details, namely – Milestones, Tasks, Sub tasks, Time-sheets, Billing and Deadline. Hence, what team members get is a clear presentation of the projects’ step-by-step flow. As and when the activities get accomplished, updates happen in the CRM, and the remaining team members (whenever required) view the present status of the project which is – what’s done, what’s in progress, and what’s left to do.

This puts the entire team at one page and ensures that vices like miscommunication or misinformation do not occur within the team to obstruct the project accomplishment.

2. Assignment of responsibilities

So Tim is supposed to accomplish the first phase of the project which is the knowledge gathering process. But when Tim calls up the client to schedule the meeting for the knowledge gathering session, he is in for a shock – knowledge gathering has already been done by one of his team members Jane, two days back.

Projects usually involve a bunch of tasks that needs to get fairly distributed within the team members. Manually assigning responsibilities often leads to confusion within the team (similar to what we cited above).

Hence, it is important to assign tasks to team members, keeping everyone else aware of it in the rightful manner. And this is precisely what CRM helps in doing. Within the project workflow in the CRM, team members can be linked to the tasks, sub-tasks and activities. This can make it easy for the team to view the project modus operandi and simultaneously know which people are working on what tasks of the project. Any change in the task assignment is broadcasted to all individuals (who are working on the project) in the form of feeds and notifications.

3. Documents in CRM Library

Working with standalone document management applications results into two major disadvantages:

You can’t ensure that everyone in the team is using the updated version of the documents

You can’t control who has access to what documents according to their role in the team.

However with a CRM there is a firm control over both these two situations. The current new-age CRMs have in-built library module that makes document management easy and simple. Instead of storing and searching documents in computers, mailbox and other places, the teams store, manage and access project-specific collaterals, materials, proposals and more, right within the CRM repository.

Not to forget, that with the cloud functionality in the CRM, there is the added convenience of accessing the documents from the CRM from possibly any location and time through any type of internet-enabled device. This gives a whole lot of convenience to the team members who can access docs whenever they need to (based on set role-based permissions).

4. One Common Calendar

It often happens that members within the same team do not have a unified view on the different dates assigned for the project tasks. Inevitably, this results into double-booking that creates chaos and panic within the team. To ensure that everyone in the team follows the same time table – CRMs provide the calendar functionality.

Team members can pull everything into the CRM calendar for quick reference by themselves and the other members.

Collectively using the CRM calendar keeps everyone on the same page in relation to deadlines and task priorities. And just to make things even better and efficient, most CRMs offer smooth synchronization with Google Calendar which means that all the Google Calendar activities also get marked and seen in the CRM calendar. In short – no data discrepancy.

How customer support centers benefit from CRM Software

Cloud based CRM systems have become no less than a boon for the businesses who have been struggling to meet the dynamic customers’ needs. All thanks to the CRM’s centralized repository that houses all customer information, giving the customer support centers the ability to get an in-depth insight into each customers’ profile and treat them individually. During the course of customer interaction, customer support agents are better informed about customer’s specific needs that helps them in quickly modifying the level of service in order to match to the customers’ requirements.

How customer support centers benefit from CRM Software, Learn the tough way to benefit from it. For any brand to rise above the ordinary – it is ‘customer service’ that acts as the prime factor. That’s why the differentiating element between a successful and an unsuccessful brand is the quality of service being rendered to the customers. The ones with more satisfied customers are successful and have established a strong foothold in the market.

However, catering to the customers is not that easy as it sounds. Especially – when customers have become finicky and moved onto the digital channels.

Fortunately we have applications like customer relationship management that has taken over the corporate realm and delivered massive results in ameliorating customer service. Unlike other software applications, where the proof is still in the pudding – CRM software has plenty of real-world stories, showcasing how companies have benefited post the implementation of the software.

For those who wonder how CRM software perfects customer service, following are a few examples of CRM benefits extracted from “real-world” implementations:

Benefit One: Consolidated Customer Data

Whether you have 400 customers or 4000 customers – maintaining their data in multiple repositories is something you detest. And that’s what sums up as the prime benefit of CRM software solution. It centralizes the customer information under one common roof that can be accessed, shared and managed across the departments.

Which means that implementing a Enterprise CRM software provides customer support agents immediate access to customer data, including personal and professional details along with records of previous purchases. With the on-demand data, customer support agents have easy time handling customer inquiries. For instance, 360 degree customer view allows the agents to answer customer queries more quickly and provide more timely and personalized service.

This results into increased first call resolution and improved customer satisfaction,

Benefit Two: Productivity and Efficiency

CRM software calls for more up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

For instance, CRM provides reps with customer purchase history that assists in more effective renewal processing. Analyzing the CRM data, support agents monitor and measure the past sales transactions to find the bottlenecks surfaced before. With this enhanced insight, it becomes easy for them to frame effective up selling and cross selling strategies.

Quoting the words of Chris Ward – ”It makes all sense to replace the old, paper-based customer tracking system with the new-age CRM cloud software solutions integrated with telephony and order-entry systems. That’s because CRM software enables customer support agents to store and review customer orders for quicker and more consistent order fulfillment, customer service and cross-selling/up-selling. ”

Benefit Three: Multi-channel Customer Service

Today’s companies are dealing with a growing volume of multichannel customer interactions. The whole idea of giving complete flexibility to the customers as how they would like to communicate if they have a query or a complaint to make is challenging. Behind the scenes, there are a few companies who have made a foray into this division but have drastically failed to provide a seamless experience to the customers.

Reason being that the concept of multi-channel customer service simply does not entail mail or fax but phone, email, live chat, social media and self-service offerings.

(refer to the image below)

-in offering multichannel customer experience
And this is precisely where, cloud CRM software comes into the picture. Why? Because CRM helps to offer consistent level of service across each channel to make the customers feel that they are dealing with a single company, whether through social media or telephone.

It provides a ‘single customer view’ with the ability to track customers communications and purchase behavior across different channels.

Inevitably, this leads to a robust multi-channel customer support for increased efficiency. Customer service representatives become quick and prompt and make improved interactions with customers, helping increase customer satisfaction and higher retention rates.

In the words of Mark Earls – ”It was a disaster to handle a large volume of calls that was coming in every day. While my support team was efficient and prompt – absence of a software platform compelled us to put customers on hold for long periods while contact center reps were not aware of the support requests across channels or searched for information to reply to them.

Post the implementation of the CRM platform, we got equipped enough to accurately track the status of ongoing cases or follow up timely on complaints across multiple broadcast mediums. Needless to say, this increased the responsiveness of agents, and reduced customer wait times. ”

To conclude, these are just a few representative examples of how CRM software applications have been benefiting the customer support teams in their work. To actually experience the impact of CRM on customer service – choose and implement a CRM now and witness the significant bottom-line improvements.

Learn the benefits of using CRM Software and Join Us at ConvergeHub

Infographic What are the benefits of CRM

How to determine the right path to Digital Transformation

To win in the oncoming Digital Age – businesses need to start transforming today! But while what to do is clear in the mind of every entrepreneur – how to do it is the question of dilemma. That’s where this blog comes to the rescue of the businesses. Taking inputs from the best of business experts in town, ConvergeHub guides you to determine the right path to Digital Transformation. Read, understand and imbibe the pointers to flourish in this new, always connected digital world.

The right path to Digital Transformation, determining the best path to digital transformation is not really easy. That’s because with rapidly-evolving technologies, changing consumer preferences and ever-increasing competitors, many organizations hurriedly move to digital transformation with not much deliberation over the right strategy. Later they struggle to meet the challenges of this new, always connected digital world. They find it difficult to take the strategy from planning to implementation to create engaging and consistent digital experiences across every touch-point.

Experts suggest the entrepreneurs to first evaluate whether their organization is ready for digital transformation or not. And this can be done by answering to the below-cited questionnaire:

Reshaping customer value proposition

What are the customer engagement strategies followed by your organization?

How are your customers’ needs and expectations predicted to change or are changing in the digital environment?

In what different way can the the digital technologies create new value for your customers?

Reshaping the operational model

How do you plan to merge the traditional, online and social media touch-points across your enterprise?

How do you plan to optimize the digital and physical components across your operating model?

How do you plan to realize the benefits of digital transformation – in relation to your enterprise, customers and partners?

To go forward with the best strategy for digital transformation, it’s essential that businesses develop a structured approach that involves thorough engagement with customers, partners and employees. Businesses need to:

1. Identify the opportunities

Before jumping into the bandwagon, experts suggest the entrepreneurs to gain an in depth understanding of the digital technology. This will enable them to find out exactly what prospects lie for their business in this trending field. They can determine the extent to which their products and services can be digitized. If required, they can observe their competitors’ stratagem in relation to digital transformation and how are they meeting the changing expectations of the modern customers.

2. Understand the customers’ psyche

The primary force behind digital transformation is to meet customers’ expectations. To do it rightly, it’s necessary that entrepreneurs first have an exact notion of their existing and potential customers expectation from their business. For instance – in the name of digital technology, what are the customers expecting and will expect in the next five year span?

Based on these insights, they can plan to revamp their products and services to create new packages that the existing and prospective customers are likely to pay now and later.

3. Design an optimized operating model

An operational model that’s compatible with your digital transformation strategy and supports the new value proposition is necessary – states Jim. M Morrey.

That’s precisely why, business entrepreneurs need to invest time and effort in understanding the current organizational capabilities and opportunities and build a model that supports digital transformation elements like cross-channel integration and customer collaboration. Most importantly, entrepreneurs need to optimize the work process across online and physical interactions and build a a new set of digital capabilities.

Always be in the mode of continuous improvement

Customers expectations are dynamic. Their requirements and preferences change with the onset of new technologies. As a result, it’s important that businesses continuously evolve using customer insight and advanced analytics. Entrepreneurs are required to employ tools like customer relationship management to analyze customer interactions at grass root level and gain a fresh source of insight always.

Brian Solis, (a renowned business expert and blogger) has discussed in detail on the topic of Digital Transformation in his latest blog titled – Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences

In his viewpoint, digital transformation involves investment in new digital technologies to better engage the modern and digitally-savvy customers at every touch-point.

He stresses upon the importance, of understanding the conception of digital transformation before making any substantial investment in this realm. To explain this further, he has cited three key elements that define digital transformation. Take a look –

1. Vision and Leadership

Digital transformation is an emergent movement. Businesses looking forward to capitalize it and gain competitive substantive advantage need to have a solid story and a vision for what their digital business strategy should look like and what should it deliver. The strategy should be aligned to business objectives, leveraging all possible digital capabilities and market advantages.

2. Digital Customer Experience

To create a new, robust and effective digital customer experience, businesses need to do extensive research. They need to thoroughly study customers persona, behaviors, and expectations throughout every stage of the lifecycle.

Based on these insights, they need to give shape to their digital transformation strategy by aligning it with the customers’ expectations.

3. The Digital Transformation Team

It’s advisable to appoint a separate team for executing Digital Transformation Roadmap. Some of the top shot companies have done this earlier and benefited. So it makes all sense for the new aspirants to bring people together who will be dedicatedly putting the digital transformation strategy into motion.

Once all these elements are implemented, entrepreneurs can smoothly re-align and re-invent current processes and infrastructures for an effectual digital transformation.

Stay informed and inspired with ConvergeHub CRM

ConvergeHub Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Solution

A study points out that 60% of the customers use at least 8 “touch-points” when it comes to communicating with a company. Obviously, it is a BIG challenge to coordinate all these touch-points and streamline the interactions together to deliver a seamless, integrated experience to the customers. This blog delves upon the concept of cross-channel customer engagement and further discusses how the companies can adopt an integrated approach to successfully engage with customers across several touch-points.

ConvergeHub Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Solution, how it can improve performance and increase leads. It’s harder than ever to hold onto the client base. After all, dealing with the customers of today, you deal with their shorter attention spans, fickleness, and their tendency to be media savvy always. It’s a straight outcome of this that old school marketing techniques are out in the trash. To continue forming long-lasting relationships, you need to take your team wherever your customers are, showcasing the products/services whenever they want and assisting them through the entire buying process.

In short – an omni-channel approach.

And that is precisely the buzz in the business world. Right from B2B and B2C companies – all are hell bent on delivering a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels and touch points. But as evident very few have a high success rate.

Below enlisted are three such dynamic ways which you can employ to thoroughly engage your customers. Read, understand and imbibe these pointers to up your game of customer engagement.

1) Engage with customers on their terms

Any customer will always love to engage on their terms than be beholden to the company. So give the reins of power to your customers and allow them to dictate the experience. Let them decide if and when to communicate. Letting the customers interact as per their time and convenience will leave them more satisfied. With them calling the shots, you will win their trust and build the loyal customer base you need to grow.

As a company, you just need to ensure that you use a tool that makes the communication easy and natural. The tool should be intuitive enough to facilitate different types of ongoing conversations across multiple channels.

2. Facilitate an active online community

Customer engagement has extended from a mere one-off experience to an on-going process. And the biggest example to prove this is social media conversations. For instance, look at the number of posts that happen with a company (let’s say: Apple). You’ll see posts pouring in throughout the day.

The same applies for your brand too. If not your brand in particular, then you’ll definitely find posts throughout the day in relation to your industry. To engage the customers in this digital age you need to focus on these conversations.

So take up a CRM solution with social media management capabilities and listen to customers who are having conversations about your brand/industry over the social Web.

Participate in these conversations. Answer questions and solve problems of your customers. Open, honest interactions over time will help you foster trust and form relationships. Plus, you’ll gain more leads too.

For instance, an important fundamental of social media is peer-to-peer communication where customers talk amongst themselves. Your happy and satisfied client base will share the positive experience to others too.

3. Act on the Customers Recommendations

Do NOT make your customer engagement strategy look like a marketing and sales campaign. Instead, use this as a feedback tool and imbibe all the pointers suggested by your customers. Remember, if you listen to what your customers are saying and improve the product/service, everybody wins. Customers feel heard and get satisfied and you get more loyal customers. Plus, you attract more new customers by sheer word-of-mouth recommendation.

Overall it becomes a two-way street on the basis of mutual respect.

Final Thoughts

You need not be a scientist to understand and frame customer engagement strategy. It’s all evident – customers are in the driver’s seat and you need to build the strategy that facilitates the customers’ journey across channels.

As a company, you need to think of a new-age customer engagement platform that integrates the critical functions – marketing, sales, service and collaboration – into a single interface and support the criss-cross paths of the customers. (New Age Online CRM products are best in this. Try that).

Having a Customer Engagement Platform will provide a single view of every customer interaction. From the time they walk into your store, visit your website, post about your products/services, or call your support team for help – all of these interactions would be available in a single view at your fingertips.

Now imagine using this data how easily can you create a seamless customer experience? Amazing isn’t it?

How does CRM work for Customer Support Productivity

Irrespective of how great your product is, bad service can put a brake to your customer acquisition spree or build up cracks in your existing customer base. Reason being that majority of customers remember the last interaction they have had with the company and continue to decide the future transaction/allegiance based on that. As a result, it is of paramount importance that companies have their customer support agents well trained and equipped to handle all sorts of customer queries. And it is precisely at this point that CRM comes into the picture. Read the blog to learn how.

How does CRM work for Customer Support Productivity, did you thought of it? Well-trained and knowledgeable; Lethargic and unresponsive; or Average with moderate quickness – How do you define your customer support team?

For most of you, this can be a hard-hitting question considering the fact that you invest a lot in building and running a customer support center. But the sad reality is that often the efforts do not match with the results.

In a recent survey, more than 70 percent of consumers tagged customer support teams as highly unpredictable where the kind of customer service they get were mixed. While some customer support teams were just not up to the par, others who managed to win the hearts of the customers did not maintain the consistency.

Shocked?

As a business entrepreneur – you need to understand that although you implement training programs or put incentive structures in place to encourage good performance, these really does not suffice the need of an efficient and effective contact center. Reason – these strategies alone are not sufficient enough to improve the cumbersome process of the support teams.

So what you need to do? Your answer lies below:

CRM

To increase the productivity of the customer support team, it’s imperative that you empower it with solution like CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

That’s the eternal and proven way to achieving a truly stellar record of customer support productivity, and shift your customer’s experience from mediocre to supreme!

Paraphrasing the words of Alea Milham, (industry expert) – Expecting the contact agents to manually handle both behind the scenes and frontline interactions is way too much. This really does not serve any output and the agents get trapped under the cumbrous process, trying to manually track case histories instead of being on the phone with the leads and customers.

With a robust CRM platform by the side, the process gets streamlined and automated. Right from logging customer interactions, tracking customer data, booking new orders, responding to support tickets, and managing agent performance – they do it all comfortably.

What does the industry research suggest?

Well, industry research also suggests that approximately 50 percent of growing businesses have turned to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to manage the customer support activities.

How CRM works?

A CRM system captures customer feedback/interactions across all mediums and organizes them into one centralized repository. This provides multiple benefits:

1. Support Agents get a complete view of the customer experience in one system. They find all the customer interaction data in one place for easy tracking of the customers satisfaction level.

2. Customer data neatly stored in the CRM helps the agents to be proactive in their approach. They correct the support issues quickly and efficiently. If required, they also modify their approach of dealing with customers to improve the satisfaction percentage.

3. Working in multiple systems often leads to what we call as the ‘data discrepancy’ . This means different versions of data stored in each system. This harms your business tremendously.

Example: Your customer is called twice for follow-up if the case is marked ‘closed’ in one system and ‘open’ in the other. Now imagine the embarrassment for your company.

CRM solves this problem completely. Because it offers one system to manage the entire customer support activities.

Instead of struggling between different applications, support agents pull the information from one common point. They spend less time managing different systems and devote more time on the phone to provide consistent customer support. Amazing isn’t it?

4. Most renowned CRMs offer web to case feature. Any customer complaint registered in the website gets automatically transferred into the CRM database with an automatic alert to the respective contact agent. The customer agent does the necessary follow-up to resolve the customer’s complaint and then updates the case in the CRM system. Time-saving and effective!

5. Since every detail of the customer complaint is stored in the CRM, anytime anywhere, support agents can follow-up on the case details by accessing the CRM account from any internet supported device.

6. Most renowned CRMs also offer partner management and collaboration feature. This empowers the support agents to share customer data across departments. Using the collaboration module, in a flash of a second, agents share the data within or outside the organization.

Final Thoughts

Irrespective of what your business is – your objective is always to achieve the highest outcome at the lowest cost and this is precisely what CRM lets you do.

Once, you have the CRM in place, think how well can your customer support agents perform. CRM will systematically order all the customer data which will allow the agents to easily administer all case histories and follow-ups.

In short – CRM will empower your customer support agents to provide on-time effective customer service and boost the customer retention rate!

So what do you think? Isn’t CRM a perfect solution to increase your customer support productivity? Do share your comments below. We will love to hear your opinion on this subject.