Year: 2016

Three most popular top Resolutions of Small Business Owners

With the curtain down upon 2014 and New Year festivities to an end – the focus is back on business. However, chances that are that most businesses will be in a trap. Reason being that amidst all this New Year hula-hoop, they’ve missed out on forming business resolutions. If you are a business owner, then making resolutions for this year should definitely rank high in the to-do list. This blog teaches you three TOP New Year Resolutions that feature high in the list of every small business owner.

What are the Top Resolutions of Small Business Owners, let’s share them with you. With the curtain about to come down upon 2014 – it’s that time of the year when we all are gearing up for the New Year festivities and carnivals. But amidst all this hula-hoop, we cannot really miss out on New Year resolutions. And if you are a business owner, then making resolutions for the next year should definitely rank high in the to-do list.

So here we are, compiling three New Year Business Resolutions that have been found in common in the list of most small business owners. Read, understand and do add in your own resolutions to the list.

1. Experiment with Marketing Strategies

When marketing has become ‘oh so dynamic’ – we cannot really tackle it if our approach continues to be stagnant and static. Although there is no fixed formula towards attaining marketing success, it’s advisable that this year we try out different marketing strategies. Al least that’ll give us the opportunity to understand what really works for our business and what doesn’t.

So in 2015: ditch the traditional marketing stratagems and go all out on the new-age marketing tactics. Implement cloud based CRM and try out multi-channel marketing through it. Experiment the different channels and zero in on a good fit for your business. Keep leveraging that medium (s) later.

2. Focus on Partner Relationships

Yes, that’s what majority of the experts have to say in common. In fact you can see the fad of partner relationships already budding now. One of the best examples to corroborate this is the cross-blogging process which has become a BIG phenomenon. Nowadays many companies are exchanging blogs once or twice a month. Plus, some have gone to the extent of inviting the managers of their partner firms to write for their own internal blogs.

Implement these initiatives or something in similar lines to this. Imagine the benefit that you’ll get. Your business will get introduced to entirely new audiences that you might not have otherwise been introduced to. Besides that, you’ll gain new, unique content for your blog every month. Amazing isn’t it?

3. Look into your Customer List

Sounds silly but most often, businesses spend a lot of time trying to sell their products to people that do not have the money or the interest to buy. These are whom we call the ‘’maybe prospects’’ or the “tire kickers’’ who take ages to pay. Separate from the real buyers, they move at the speed of a tortoise to reach the end of your sales funnel.

Now imagine the time and effort that gets wasted on these ‘will be-will be not’ prospects. Now imagine what could happen if you spend the same time and effort on the real buyers. Definitely much better sales ROI?

So this year, make it a point to look through your customer list. Determine factors, namely – customer’s budget, decision makers, and timeframe and identify the tire-kickers who take ages to pay, or who argue and quibble about every aspect.

However, overhauling your customer list doesn’t mean that you have to throw these prospects out of your database. Remember lead nurturing can be really powerful in converting the cold prospects to hot leads. So send them back to marketing for further nurturing and work upon them afresh once they are sales-ready.

Struggling to meet the expectations of the Modern Customers?

There’s always a major difference between the way how the big companies and smaller companies deliver customer service. To bridge this gap, SMBs need to thoroughly analyze the practices of their larger counterparts. What we bring to you in this blog is exclusive insights into Bill Payne’s IBM Report. It showcases three key customer service lessons from the MNCs that small businesses can implement to boost customer satisfaction; improve customer retention and drive more revenue.

If you are Struggling to meet the expectations of the Modern Customers then the time has for you to know the secrets of managing customers with modern CRM like ConvergeHub.

2017: Customers demand and expect a consistent brand value proposition across all channels and touchpoints. Is your organization equipped to do so?

This blog takes excerpts from Bill Payne’s IBM Report to showcase how the big companies are delivering customer experience across different channels and how the SMBs can implement these too.

1. Single Customer View

Managing the entire customer experience through a single application has become high on agenda for most big companies. The key is to create Unified Channel Communications by tracking and summarizing customers across interactions, channels, products and time. Once done – businesses create a common language that helps get all processes ‘on the same page’.

Should The Small Businesses Follow The Same Route Too?

Yes.

The benefits of doing this are enormous. SMBs deliver a unified customer experience that gives them a significant competitive advantage to others. Just one word of caution – Merely streamlining customer interactions is not the end of the road. They need to act on this unified view to achieve a positive experience.

Bill Payne states – ‘’Many organizations see this as a difficult area requiring huge investment in a new customer platform. It doesn’t have to be. Have you looked at some of the niche technologies that are now mature to integrate customer data without the need for a huge replatforming initiative?’’

What he says is precisely correct. In fact the New Age Customer Management Platforms like Small Business CRM solutions have been designed to function as Complete Business Management Applications. They manage the entire customer lifecycle for you starting from marketing campaigns, sales deals to customer support.

In short: One Product to manage the whole business. A good deal, right?

2. Customer Analytics

In a survey of more than 15,000 executives across the globe, 90 per cent of CEOs have rated getting closer to the customer’ as top of their strategic business priorities.

So it’s clear that the MNCs are doing every endeavor to understand their customer needs and deliver experience based on those preferences. And today to a large extent they are getting successful too.

However, a few years back, the scenario has not been like this.

Generating high-quality, sophisticated, meaningful customer analytics has been both an opportunity and a challenge for the MNCs. While most leaders have realized that analytics offers profound opportunities to drive revenue and loyalty – they’ve struggled with the right skills to optimize analytics capabilities.

However, thanks to the New Age Customer Management Platforms, MNCs have largely advanced their capabilities in this area. Today majority of them are gathering, analyzing and implementing customer analytics to drive revenue and loyalty.

Are The Small Businesses Lagging Behind In This Area?

Yes.

Statistics suggest –

  • 56 percent small and medium-sized businesses still do not have enterprise strategic initiatives to understand customer dynamics and behaviors.
  • 42 percent organizations want to optimize analytics capabilities; however, the execution of this objective is failing. The reason is:

Traditional CRMs that does not give a holistic view of the entire customer journey

Again, it’s high time that the business entrepreneurs of the small and medium-sized businesses make the switch to the New Age Small Business CRM Solutions.

If not, how can they expect to compete with the 90 per cent of MNCs who are turning every stone to rightfully use customer analytics?

It’s no less than a golden opportunity for the small and medium-sized businesses to develop stronger customer relationships with the advanced CRM solutions.

Modern cloud CRM solutions capture and analyze customer interactions and provide in-depth insights into customer behavior:

  • Which marketing campaigns customers have preferred the most?
  • What are the buying patterns of the customers in general?
  • Which customers have the highest value?

Having customers’ behavior analytics in hand – businesses make changes in product and service offerings and frame personalized marketing and sales strategies. These data-driven initiatives foster an engaging lifelong relationship with the customers.

3. Brand Experience across Multiple Channels

Managing consistent brand experience across multiple channels ranks high in the list of CMOs’ priorities Today the MNCs do not solely focus on merely managing the channels, but put equal effort on managing the brand experience across them.

However, things were much different three years back –

Bill Payne states – ‘’In a survey of more than 1,700 marketing executives across the globe, the IBM 2011 CMO study revealed that while the digital era has created a transformative shift in the way companies engage with their customers, most CMOs felt they weren’t ready or equipped to respond to the change.’’

This smooth transformation from ‘’how do we offer multi-channel customer experience’’ to ‘’it’s all easy and hassle free’’ happened because of the rise of the New Age Business Management Solutions like Web CRM.

Functioning as Complete Business Growth Enablers – web CRM solutions have enabled organizations to manage and coordinate customer interactions and deliver a cohesive service to customers across multiple lines of business.

Using the CRM, the CMOs are maximizing the value of every customer interaction; to achieve excellence in customer experience and drive superior business performance.

Should The Small Businesses Join The Bandwagon Too?

Yes.

Gone are the days when CRM solutions were an asset of the large-scale organizations. Today the best cloud CRMs are a complete fit for the small and medium-sized businesses. With no issues like upgrading or hardware costs – these small businesses CRM solutions are up and running within minutes.

Once implemented, SMBs reap rewards from cloud CRMs in several ways:

  • Improved customer experience and satisfaction across channels
  • Reduced delivery channel costs by moving customer transactions from costly channels to less expensive ones
  • 360-degree customer view by listening to customers on every platform and then analyzing their behavior
  • End-to-end customer-driven marketing, sales and service activities
  • Increased customer wallet share
  • Convenience for customers to interact with the organization anytime, anywhere.

In short – customers receive a consistent coherent experience that makes them feel that the organization recognizes them and values them at every touchpoint.

What factors prevent Social CRM to capitalize on it

What factors prevent Social CRM to capitalize on it a discussion to understand the facrtors. Nike, Nokia, Tesco, American Airlines and O2 are names most of us will be aware about. Although these names belong to industries of different verticals, there is one common factor that binds them together – prompt and responsive approach to customers via social media.

It is interesting to see that all the above-mentioned names have credited social media as a major part of their customer-service strategy. Their incredible responsive rate in social platforms has resulted in their improved reputation worldwide.

As these leaders of different spheres have taken social media by storm, the SMBs and the SMEs are also not left behind. According to one of the reports, SMBs and SMEs have grown to be a large section of social CRM buyers. By incorporating social analytics in their CRM customization, they too are gearing up to capitalize on social media.

Why are SMBs and SMEs failing to make use of social CRM?

In spite of the fact that most small and medium-sized companies have adopted Social CRM, very few of them have actually gained out of this investment. While there is a clash of opinions about the exact reason behind this occurrence, given below are a few assumptions –

1. Inadequately trained employees – Incorporating social CRM is not an overnight solution to a strong social media strategy. Nor does it guarantee increased customer-responsive rate. To actually gain the benefits of this enterprise customer relationship management tool, organizations need to work upon their workforce.

A social CRM that is not properly utilized by the employees will never benefit an organization. This is precisely why training sessions hold such high importance. A few interactive sessions stating – social media goals, organizational vision, social CRM features/benefits will make the picture crystal-clear for the employees. They can easily comprehend the purpose of implementing a social CRM and work in accordance to that.

2. Reluctant replies over social media – A careless attitude toward customer’s concerns can result in CRM failure. Many instances from the past can be cited that show how companies’ unwillingness to respond to customer queries have cost them dearly. Considering the importance of this fact, most business experts recommend an agile approach across all social media platforms. So whether a customer has expressed a grievance or just stated a suggestion, a quick acknowledgement of the message needs to be a compulsion.

3. More focus on negative comments – Most organizations engage themselves more in negative feedback. While quick address to customer’s complaints is a good approach, too much of it can work against the organization. Sales, marketing and customer-support teams should equally give importance to advocates. Doing this is a smart way of customer retention.

Small rewards to customers (who always promote your company) can be a rewarding social media marketing tactic.

4. Social media compliance policy – Now, this is the most important step to be taken prior to the implementation of the social CRM. With a strict social media compliance policy, organizations can prevent employees from unauthorized engagement with customers. They can ensure that the employees do not spread offensive or incorrect information to the customers.

Best way for you to grow your business in the coming year

The end of 2014: and you’re all set to plan for the next year. Make sure you do not repeat the mistake that your competitors are doing. Cutting down the costs that often springs in the mind as the easiest tactic to business growth – is nothing but a temporary solution. Rather you need to shift your focus from these easy gimmicks to the real crucial areas of your business like – investment in right technology for increased sales & marketing.

Best way for you to grow your business are many, but here you will learn the concepts that are well researched and used. There are many you would say. But few steps are so vital you can not avoid them. Let’s Check them out. It’s that time of the year when you review your progress, identify how you performed till now, what market position you established and accordingly decide where to take your business next. You update your business plan with your new strategy in mind and introduce the changes.

Fair enough….every company does the same but very few manage to get any fruit out of it.

Gerry Moran comments –

‘’The endeavor of all the companies are same but how they strategize for the coming time is what differentiates them and sets one section of companies apart from others.’’

Confused? Read further…

As a business owner, you’re always looking to increase profits. And one of the easiest ways to boost profits is by cutting expenses. Even if you’re having a quarter full of no customer purchases, reduced expenditure automatically increases the profits by a meager percentage. So 5 out of 10 businesses perform this exercise at the start of every year (and probably you are one of them).

But isn’t this a regressive step? Is it not that you’re taking your business one step back by controlling the expenses on those fronts where it’s actually required.

Understand: decreasing costs cannot be the solution for your business – Until and unless you see your cash flowing in lump sums in wrong areas.

We suggest: Keep close track of your expenses and cut them whenever seems obligatory. But don’t use it as an easy leeway to up your profits. Your competitors might do exercise these tactics, but you don’t

Rather improve your sales.

Don’t worry it’s not as difficult as reaching the moon (although it seems like). Especially now when you have the best in-class sales management and monitoring tools in the market. And with the introduction of the new-age modern CRMs – you really do not need to look somewhere else. These cloud CRM solutions are integrated with Sales Force Automation (SFA) module that drives sales force performance and profitability. It automates the sales process and frees your sales reps to concentrate on other crucial tasks like creating leads and closing deals.

Cloud CRMs provide one common interface to store and manage complete information details relative to sales opportunities. As a result, it becomes easy for the sales reps to do a quick assessment of the sales opportunities. With insights from the CRM, they get in a better position to improve future deals.

Here’s what Rachel Miller, has stated about her experience of using the CRM –

‘’Using the CRM has put our sales on the accelerator mode. With features like reports and dashboards and fields like sales stage, deal closure probability and expected revenue – sales reps get an exact view of the status and value of the sales opportunities currently in the pipeline. From the respective insights, the sales teams prioritize the leads and modify their approach towards every sale.

Overall, CRM automates and enhances the most crucial process of sales by acquiring, managing and tracking leads through their entire life-cycle

And most importantly – sales team do not work in siloed processes but actually collaborate and share information (via the CRM), eliminating redundancy and aligning goals.’’

So what are you waiting for? This time – make the difference and opt for a progressive step.

Choose to increase your sales instead of cutting down your costs. Remember increased sales will keep your cash registers rolling where you’ll never feel the need to reduce your expenditure.

Five tips to grow your business

Often, SMB owners see business growth planning as being synonymous with gathering funds from different sources in order to use it for their own business. Undoubtedly, a major portion of business growth is related to making new investments or expanding processes, but that not’s the only way you can grow your business. Read further as we give you five compelling tips on how you can grow your business in the coming year 2015, without struggling with your finances.

Five tips to grow your business and make profit. Whether you have just started or already running your business for a couple of years – whether your business is on an upward track or on its way down – what you essentially need to focus on is improvement. In this scenario of cut throat competition – you really cannot let your business remain stagnantly working for long. So making improvement to better it should be proactively done. And what better time to plan for it than now when we are about to enter a new year.

If planned and implemented right, 2015 can indeed be the year of your business to rise and shine.

In what follows are five compelling tips that hold the potency to take your business to the next level. Read, understand and implement and see your business grow like never before –

#1 Minimize your unnecessary Costs

Is a major chunk of your capital getting spent on acquiring, managing and integrating different business applications? If yes, think of a solution that fills this gap of budget and resources. For instance – why not opt for the new-age small business CRM that function as an all-inclusive solution for the SMBs. Right from sales, marketing, customer service and collaboration – it streamlines and manages all from a single source point. And what’s best – CRMs built on the cloud platform deliver flexibility, agility, and extensibility to configure it as per the business’s current and future needs. Utilizing its open APIs – you can build custom solutions, and other organization-specific application enhancements.

#2 Keep Score

Even if you have the best of professionals in town to manage your processes – do not keep yourself in the dark. Know –

  • Where your company is progressing in terms of sales?
  • Which leads have the maximum likelihood of getting converted into deals?
  • Are your customers really happy with your service or is it only in your mind?
  • Are your marketers following the new age targeted approach?

It’s amazing how small businesses do not have much idea of the daily, weekly, and monthly sales, marketing and service stats of their organization. Do not be in that category anymore. Spend the necessary time keeping these things on check. Once you have the stats in hand, start thinking ahead. Collaborate with your managers and plan what you will need to keep growing, going forward.

#3 Monitor Industry Trends

You cannot operate in vacuum. Whether you like it or not: the changes in your industry have an effect on your business too. So stay current on trends. And the best way to do is to monitor what the industry leaders are doing.

So if your competitors are using the BYOD policy; see what benefits lay behind doing that and if found useful embrace the trend too. Virtualize your workspace with cloud based applications. Shift all your business data to the web based CRM solutions and give your employees the benefit of working effectively from anywhere by accessing the data from any internet connected device.

All in all – make working smarter, faster, and more enjoyable.

#4 Sharpen your Selling

Talented and motivated sales people can impact the most to your bottom-line. Learn what motivates your sales employees to higher levels of performance. Assist them with all the tools and technologies. Ensure that they are at par with the sales teams of your competitors.

#5 Establish Priorities

Making a profit is an obvious goal, but there can be infinite ways to do so. Be more precise with your aims. Do you want to double the lead generation in the next quarter? Do you want to open more channels of communication to make it easier for your customers to reach you? Do you want to accelerate lead generation, sales opportunities, service cases and marketing campaigns by using a collaboration platform that lets your customers, partners and employees engage with each other easily?

UNDERSTAND: Identifying your priorities will determine the future course of your business, and help you invest time and money on the right area that makes the biggest impact.

Read More: 9 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business Faster

How Marketing Automation is changing Buying Process

Gone are the days when leads and customers would purchase products on a whim. Today every company – big or small has to deal with a longer buying cycle. The good news: Longer buying cycle means your team gets more opportunities to convince the lead or the customer. The bad news: 75% of these opportunities happen before the lead/customer comes in contact with the sales person.

How Marketing Automation is changing Buying Process, online market places uses it including ecommerce companies. It is now seen in many organizations building organizational strength and effectiveness. Gone are the days when leads and customers would purchase products on a whim. Today every company – big or small has to deal with a longer buying cycle.

The good news: Longer buying cycle means your team gets more opportunities to convince the lead or the customer.

The bad news: 75% of these opportunities happen before the lead/customer comes in contact with the sales person.

Lesson to Learn: Marketers now have a bigger role to play in the buying process. From capturing the buyers attention to locking in customer loyalty – marketers undertake the entire responsibility.

– Marketo Report

What companies have to say about this changed scenario?

Marketing has always been seen as a ’cost center’. And with the bigger role of the marketers in the buying process – things have become more challenging for the companies. For instance – they know what to do but do not know how to go about it.

This is because of the lack of visibility regarding which marketing strategy impact revenues and which don’t. Julie Hopkins, puts it – “We know half of our marketing strategy works, but do not know which half.

And this is where Marketing Automation comes in place…

According to Marketo Report – Today marketing is no more about a range of guess-work and manual processes. All thanks to the upbeat marketing software – Marketing Automation that manages and tracks website, landing pages, social media, email marketing, direct mail, and events under one platform. And yes, most importantly it directly integrates with the other business intelligence systems.

Chris Fletcher, Gartner analyst comments – ‘’Marketing Automation helps marketers guide prospects through the buying process, and – when the prospects are converted to leads – hand them over to the sales team. Doing this, they precisely know which marketing interactions help in the buying process and which don’t. They successfully map these efforts to revenue to prove the impact of every penny spent. This is a boon for all the marketers who always have been struggling trying to justify the marketing budget used.’’

Four core functions of Marketing Automation Platform:

1. 360-degree view of leads and prospects: Marketing Automation tracks all details of prospects (contact information, demographic data and behavioral data) across every interaction. Most importantly all this information gets available to the marketers into one data repository which helps in lead and customer engagement.

2. Lead nurturing: Marketing automation enables marketers to automate the process of delivering personalized content and messages across different mediums. These contents match to the leads’ interests and demands.

3. Marketing schedule: Marketing Automation helps marketers streamline and automate department’s operational functions – planning marketing timetable, tracking marketing strategy, and managing the overall marketing budgets.

4. Marketing Analytics: Marketing Automation provides effective analysis of data – to unlock the potential of the marketing initiatives.

This helps the marketers to:

– Segment prospects based on behavior and demographic data

– Build marketing strategy that is more effective

– Prioritize marketing budget for different marketing campaigns.

Overall – Marketing Automation enable the marketers to stay competitive with current marketing strategy, best practices, and knowledge for data-driven decision-making.

Stay Connected with ConvergeHub CRM

Read More – Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business Faster

Best way to promote any product during christmas

Celebrating Christmas is a yearly statement of religious beliefs. For many it is the ideal time to exchange presents, and indulge in the more secular aspects of the season. Whatever is the reason for the celebration, Christmas is a time for concerned turkeys, popping shirt buttons and not to forget people spending money. According to an analysis, we are now spending money more than ever on Christmas. This is precisely why that Christmas today stands as the golden period for enterprises to capitalize upon. But then extracting optimum profits out of Christmas is that easy? With so many ways for people to shop and spend money and so many businesses trying to take people’s money, the million dollar question is – How can you ensure that your business gets the best chance to cash in on this festive holiday spending spree?

The best way to promote any product during christmas are those which not only understand the cultural need but also the ritualistic need and the fun involved with it. Celebrating Christmas is a yearly statement of religious beliefs. For many it is the ideal time to exchange presents, and indulge in the more secular aspects of the season. Whatever is the reason for the celebration, Christmas is a time for concerned turkeys, popping shirt buttons and not to forget people spending money.

According to an analysis, we are now spending money more than ever on Christmas. This is precisely why that Christmas today stands as the golden period for enterprises to capitalize upon. But then extracting optimum profits out of Christmas is that easy?

With so many ways for people to shop and spend money and so many businesses trying to take people’s money, the million dollar question is – How can you ensure that your business gets the best chance to cash in on this festive holiday spending spree?

Analyzing the present scenario, online shopping has become the new ‘it’ thing in Christmas. According to a survey, 47% of US participants and 59% of UK participants have decided to carry out the majority of their Christmas shopping online.

The concept of showrooming

At present, the brick and mortar shops are struggling to keep their sales live. Thanks to the technological advancement that has enabled people to access the internet on the move. As a result, most shoppers are now using their mobile to compare prices and products while shopping in store (showrooming). This has turned out to be quite scary for businesses as there is a good chance that customers might find better offers online.

What different can you do?

Experts believe that the rise of the concept of showrooming is not the end of the road. With some forward creative thinking, businesses (holding brick and mortar shops) can use this new trend to their advantage.

Mobile marketing – As the owner of an offline store, you can cash in on the ubiquitous presence of the mobile phones. Mobile marketing has many useful functions and has been used creatively to help businesses and brands flourish. Using any of the mobile marketing techniques, you too can convert the Showrooming trend as the perfect way for your business to connect with customers (who use their mobiles to hunt down a bargain).

SMS Marketing

What most customers want now is the assurance that they are getting a good deal; a feeling that they are special to you and not just another dollar sign. SMS marketing can help you do this by letting your customers know about in-store discounts through messages. Asking for phone number details (through feedback forms) from customers who drop in by your store can be a good tactic for SMS marketing.

This can help you in two ways:

  • Firstly, you will build up a database of customer numbers that are interested in your business and so you can send them promotional messages.
  • Secondly, it means you will hopefully get more purchases from the high percentage of customers who are Showrooming.

Get into the Christmas spirit through Converge CRM

Converge CRM Multi-Channel Marketing functionality expands the marketing prospect for the users. It includes functionality for better management of E-mail marketing, SMS Marketing, FAX Marketing, Voice Broadcast and Social Marketing.

SMS Marketing: Converge has tied up with a third-party associate called Twilio (a leading cloud communications company that allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages using its web service APIs). To execute SMS marketing through Converge CRM, all you need to do is buy an account in Twilio to send text messages to all your prospects at one go.

The role of Converge multichannel CRM in an organization is to help business entrepreneurs make use of all the channels of communication. Opting for this cloud CRM software will certainly assure benefits such as increased customer acquisition, satisfaction, wallet share and retention for your business.

 

 

What is the difference between CRM and CLM

Learn about the unique relationship between customer relationship management (CRM) and customer lifecycle management (CLM) Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are not the same! Research suggests that majority of businesses categorize CRM sand CLM together. Yes, they are related to each other but miles apart in terms of definition and scope of functionality. Let’s clarify this first

Let’s know what is the difference between CRM and CLM and learn about the unique differences between customer relationship management (CRM) and customer lifecycle management (CLM)

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are not the same!

Research suggests that majority of businesses categorize CRM sand CLM together. Yes, they are related to each other but miles apart in terms of definition and scope of functionality.

Let’s clarify this first.

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Customer lifecycle management is all about developing and constantly improving your company’s relationship with your clients. In total there are 5 stages of the customer life cycle:

  • Reach
  • Acquire
  • Develop
  • Retain
  • Advocacy

The idea behind CLM – is managing customer lifecycles to maximize customer retention and profitability rates. Considering the fierce competition in the marketplace, it has become necessary for every company to pay attention on this area.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM system allows businesses to manage its interactions with prospects, leads and customers. It centralizes and streamlines customer engagement and the data associated with them. It functions as a central repository where you can store, accounts, leads and sales opportunities, ideally in the cloud so the information is accessible by all, in real time.

What are the factors that tie CLM and CRM together?

Customer Lifecycle Management is a slow process, involving different facets of customer interaction. This includes parameters like

  • Purchase History (Frequency and quantity)
  • Customer Acquisition/Retention cost
  • Post sales service and support
  • Duration of the customer’s relationship with the business.

And it is precisely at this juncture that CRM comes into action. Although there is no hard and fast rule that you need to have CRM for CLM – we all know how beneficial modern CRMs have become when it comes to customer lifecycle management.

For modern CRMs, it’s no more about post sales customer service BUT complete customer engagement management right from Prospect, progressively maturing into a Lead, and then to Customer. Not to forget that the modern CRMs come up with integrated collaborative features like GoToMeeting, Twilio and DocuSign that facilitates all customer communication/collaboration from the CRM platform itself.

Hence, all-in-all CRM is the new face of the customer engagement platform that acts as a business growth enabler.

How CLM metrics can tell you the success/failure of CRM

Here’s a trick: not sure whether your CRM is generating enough ROI for your business or not? Your answer lies below:

According to experts – Effective CRM solution brings about a positive change in the Customer Lifecycle Management metrics. And if it doesn’t, you know where the problem is? right?

So how do you take the measurement to evaluate your CRM success?

Compare the below-mentioned CLM metrics before and after CRM implementation:

  • Frequency of customers purchase (Did the customers purchase more frequently/more rarely after the CRM implementation?)
  • Size of the transactions (Did customers have larger/smaller transactions after the CRM implementation?)
  • Cost of customer service (Has the customer service cost got shrunk/grown after the CRM implementation?)
  • Response to marketing initiatives (Have responses to marketing campaigns reduced/increased after CRM implementation?)
  • Cost of customer acquisition/retention (Has the customer acquisition cost got shrunk/grown after the CRM implementation?)

Note: Positive answers to these questions will precisely mean that your Cloud CRM solution is a good fit to your business and customers. If not, it’s time to make the SWITCH.

How to improve sales pitch, Tips to better sales pitch

Worried about your sales teams failing performance? Learn the best four ways sales managers can improve their teams’ sales pitch Wondering why your salespeople are failing to motivate prospects? We suggest: look into the mirror and ask: Is my sale pitch compelling? Would I have agreed to fix up a meeting, provided any of my sales rep would have called me up as a prospect?

Worried about your sales teams failing performance? Learn the best four ways sales managers can improve their teams’ sales pitch

Wondering why your salespeople are failing to motivate prospects? We suggest: look into the mirror and ask:

Is my sale pitch compelling? Would I have agreed to fix up a meeting, provided any of my sales rep would have called me up as a prospect?

One of the possible reasons for low sales can be your own lukewarm approach that is weakening your salespeople. So if your own story lacks the spark to compel others to want to do business with you – you can’t expect your sales team to perform brilliantly.

Here are four things you can do as a sales manager to make your sales pitch more compelling and enable everyone in the team to win more prospects:

1. Emphasize upon solving customers’ problems

Problems catch human attention more quickly than opportunities. The more you and your sales team emphasize upon solving the problems of the prospects – the better! You will get an instant attention of the prospects which will help you take the interaction further.

Tip: Look at the earlier customer problems that you have solved through your products/services. Make a list of the probable problems that your product/service solves. Discuss it with your team. Develop a starting point (based on it) for the sales pitch. Include it in the sales process and update it in the CRM.

2. Show the Benefit

Majority of the sales transactions get stuck at the final point: COST. To tackle this, make your prospects understand the value of your product/service. Give compelling comparisons to make the message clearer.

Example: if you offer a product at $40, compare it to the similar $150 product offered by your competitors. This huge price difference will make your prospective customers feel more compelled to purchase your product.

3. Write compelling Proposals

What attracts you to read a story in the newspaper? Headlines right? The same applies for sales proposals too. Especially if you deal with high-end prospects who juggle with hundreds of mails per day. Dealing with them, there’ll be high chances that your sales proposals might go unnoticed.

The only way you can grab their attention is through a compelling headline. Include the practice of writing headlines for the sales proposals. Make this an important part of the sales process. Train your sales people to write compelling headlines for all sales proposals. Very soon, you’ll find improved quality of your proposals with more positive responses from the prospects.

4. Create that USP for your self

Having a generic sales pitch with the prospects will not help you. Chances are that your competitors might also be telling the same story. Be different and come up with your own USP.

  • Refer to old case histories where you have solved significant problems of customers.
  • Start sending informational newsletters and other value-generating contents as part of the sales process
  • Invite the prospects to the upcoming online/offline company events
  • Maintain punctuality in what you do. Use Sales Force Automation software to automate sending follow-up emails to prospects.

Customer Service challenges troubling your Business?

In this age, it’s the customers who determine the success of the companies. Resultant of which, more and more companies are focusing on customer service programs. In spite of this, the success rate is low. Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey stated that 66% of users globally switch to competitors due to poor customer service. In this blog, we talk about common customer service challenges and how the new age small business CRM solutions help companies tackle these

Understanding what a good customer service is – is not difficult. Its essence is still the same as it was years back. Let’s say when you grapple to understand your customers expectations, simply ask – what would I’ve expected from the company as a customer? And you’ll get the answer as to what your customers are expecting from you. However, in spite of things looking so easy on the surface, many organizations are struggling to meet customer expectations – let alone exceed them. Let’s read why –

Lack of Balance between Promises and Actual Delivery

No matter what industry a company belongs to – delivering to the expectations of the customers should always be the starting point. Quite a common rule that we all know right? But do we follow it – NO

Statistics suggest – 74% companies over promise and under deliver while the remaining ones do the vice versa (i.e. under promise and over deliver)

In both the cases – a company fails to win the hearts of the customers. Here is why –

Case ONE (when companies over promise and under deliver)

Customer Service Agents are deluged with complaints.

Case TWO (when companies under promise and over deliver)

Companies fail to attract customers in the first place.

What should be the ideal solution?

Do what you say – whether big or small

Tony Mascot (Customer opinion analyst) comments – ‘’Meeting the expectations of the customers is often a matter of common sense, but then it doesn’t comes naturally to all business owners. For some, in fact, it means over promising or under promising their clients.’’

Ideally companies first need to emphasize upon their strong points and make customer service commitments on those. Let’s say –

  • Rigorously assess the service offerings
  • Use the CRM to market those capabilities on all possible customer interaction mediums
  • Live up to that commitment by delivering consistent coherent on-time customer service through the CRM.

Once you are through with this phase – then think of going that extra mile.

Inability to connect the Dots that leads to lots of Missing Opportunities

Sales Rep: Hello Mr. A this call is in regards to our new product that has been launched yesterday. It’d be great if you could take a look at it. It’s about ….

Customer: Hello I would definitely take a look at your new product. But before doing that can you please provide some light on my support ticket that has been lying unresolved with your company since the last 10 days. I hope you’re aware of it. So what’s the status?

Company – (One minute pause) Sir, I’ll coordinate with the customer service department and get back to you within some time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Result – No Cross Sell or Up-sell

Customer gets a negative impression of your company; becomes apprehensive of dealing with you again. Customer retention becomes – A BIG QUESTION

Dumbfounded? Well – that’s exactly what happens during the time of cross-selling and up selling calls if your customer service is not up to the mark.

What should be the ideal solution?

Comprehensive view of customer interactions across all touchpoints

Opt for customer management software like CRM. The New Age cloud CRM solutions act like integrated customer lifecycle management systems – streamlining and orchestrating all the customer interactions together. So right from marketing – to – sales – to – customer service; all customer interactions is captured consistently across the increasingly wide range of channels.

The benefit you’d get:

A holistic picture of the customers’ needs and wants, and their feedback!

Basically, you understand the voice of the customer that EMPOWERS you to serve them more proactively and more effectively. And it helps your sales team in making those cross-sell and up-sell calls. Next time the customer enquires about a registered customer service case – your sales agent (using the small business CRM) can tell the exact status of the ticket. Impressive isn’t it?

Technology minus Human Strategy

Statistics suggest – 66% CRM using organizations fail to make a mark through their customer service.

Yes we are the ones who just now asked you to invest in customer management software like Cloud CRM. But then simply implementing a small business CRM solution will not do anything for your business. You need to properly strategize on how to use it.

Read what Neil Davey has stated –

‘’For many organizations, the strategies to support their CRM initiatives are in short supply. So organizations lose out because their in-house staff does not develop comprehensive stratagems to use different cloud CRM functionalities. And this lack of expertise to support customer-focused initiatives – dooms the CRM implementation.’’

For example –

You implement a small business CRM solution to manage and monitor all your customer cases from a central database. You assign cases to customer support professionals across multiple communication channels Fur further assistance you attach files (from the computer or from the CRM Library) to the cases.

Result is: On-time customer service BUT No drop in Customer Complaints

Because while you are happy gauging the voice of the customers in the CRM – you’ve not really analyzed the complaints data.

What should be the ideal solution?

REMEMBER: It takes more than technology to deliver a good customer experience.

Develop business transformation strategies and understand how to use cloud CRM solutions in the best way possible. Closely examine the business processes, and then implement initiatives (via the CRM) that improve customer service.

In the above case – You need to mine the customer feedback data to see your business systems and processes from the customer’s point of view. Understand the key drivers of dissatisfaction and then fix them.

Bring changes to your customer service process by removing the customer-service bottlenecks and other inefficiencies. This will be the best way to improve customer satisfaction.

Note: If required, hire customer expert professionals with the right expertise and knowledge. They’ll assess your business and design and implement customer experience strategies through the cloud CRM solution.

Integrations and features of CRM Software

The heading sums up the entire essence of the blog. (Yes, you guessed it right), in what follows is a detailed discussion of how the trend of Cloud-based CRM application has accelerated. Supposedly, four out of every ten CRM systems sold in 2012 has been SaaS-based. The Gartner report Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2012 published on April, 2013, includes the insights provided by authors across the globe, on exponential growth of CRM application (compared to other enterprise software categories).

The heading sums up the entire essence of the blog. (Yes, you guessed it right), in what follows is a detailed discussion of how the trend of Cloud-based CRM application has accelerated.

Supposedly, four out of every ten CRM systems sold in 2012 has been SaaS-based. The Gartner report Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2012 published on April, 2013, includes the insights provided by authors across the globe, on exponential growth of CRM application (compared to other enterprise software categories).

Following this CRM industry noticed steady growth and positive acceptance by users and organizations across the world. With many changes coming in this industry like:

  1. Integration of Social platforms
  2. Integration with other websites delivering many good services
  3. Online Data storage integration
  4. Mailing Function integratin for Individual Mail and Email Marketing purposes.
  5. Online Meeting Purpose integration.
  6. Desktop mail function manage

With many other integrations the CRM Industry have seen a huge growth and expected to see a much increased demand than ever before. The most challenging part of this is industry has been providing service and support with that managing optimal functions for the software. Providing detail indepth data analysis and other relative functions have helped the industry to see more growth. ConvergeHub brings for you a good software in reasonble cost with comparatively better service than many others.

Gartner has mentioned that the demand of CRM application has grown BIG TIME. Business entrepreneurs are driven by the thought that integrating CRM system in the business process will help acquire new customers, analyze present customer behaviors, and most importantly increase all-channel management performance. To add to this is the opportunity that CRM provides to derive more value from social network interactions.

Gartner has further cited that although on-premise alternatives are available, features such as easy-to-deploy and complementary functionality has tempted enterprise clients to seek for SaaS based CRM applications. Consequently, the complications associated with on-premise set up have encouraged many enterprises to replace their legacy systems with SaaS-based CRM systems. Cloud based CRM for small business has been a huge hit with SMBs taking a note of the Cloud CRM benefits.

A snippet of the important keynotes taken from the report:

  • CRM market has registered a 12.5% growth rate from $16B to $18B.
  • Latin America and China has seen the maximum CRM sales growth between 2011 and 2012. In fact, 80% of all CRM sales in 2012 have been recorded in North America and Western Europe.
  • In the last financial year
  • As per the statistical data from influx of investments in Customer Experience (CX) initiatives and digital marketing, the CRM software market reached $20.4 Billion in the year 2013, this is 14% growth from 2012.

Continuing the 2012 trend, Gartner has predicted a bigger and better growth rate of CRM system this year. Let’s see what the 2013 Gartner report ‘What’s Hot in CRM Applications in 2013’ (published on June 20, 2013) states –

As evident from the name, this report focuses on the CRM features that will be high in demand this year. The report has been prepared taking in consideration the opinions of all Gartner CRM analysts.

The above-mentioned features marked in red have been predicted to be the most-in demand this year. Gartner’s Ed Thompson, author of the report, has stated that the red areas are where primarily the interest of the CRM customers is.

What can be predicted for the coming years?

As we inch towards 2014, it’s important to make a few estimates regarding the CRM features/use that will be topping the popularity list in the coming years. Based on the above-mentioned report, here are a few conclusions:

  1. Integration with social data will dominate: According to the Gartner experts, social data will prove to be a strong reason for companies to opt for CRM applications. It will be seen as a must-have for better Return on Investment (ROI).
  2. Mobile-enabled support representatives: The vision of having mobile-enabled support representative to solve customer problems will soon be a necessity. This feature indeed shows the greatest profit potential.
  3. Marketing automation will lead CRM application growth: Total market value of $4.6B is estimated by the end of 2016 with a 10.7% compound annual growth.
  4. Marketing budget on customer retention will get doubled by 2015: Marketing departments will spearhead social media initiatives. Gartner reckons that using the CRM system. marketing and customer service departments will collaborate more on companies’ social strategy,

ConvergeHub Brings with it a range of CRM Software features, integrated to help you manage and solve business problems easily. And they are:

1. Gmail
2. Google Calendar
3. Google Contacts
4. Cocu Sign
5. Twilio
6. GoToMeeting
7. Quickbooks
8. Outlook
9. IMAP
10. NexInteractive
11. Fax
12. Mailchimp
13. box
14. Ring Central
15. Fonality