Year: 2017

Experience Sales Lead Management Using ConvergeHub

According to Sales lead management principles – Leads are the lifeline of any kind of businesses. Therefore, converting leads to customers is what it really takes to remain and thrive in business. Once you know how to manage your leads in a structured and systematic way, you can, not only increase the number of leads that you generate but also amplify on how many of those leads you can convert at the end. Here are some of the interesting steps suggested by sales lead management teams, which can be also followed by using ConvergeHub CRM for SMBs.

According to Sales lead management principals– Leads are the lifeline of any business. Therefore, converting leads to customers is what it takes to remain and thrive in business. Once you know how to manage your leads in a structured and systematic way, you can, not only increase the number of leads that you generate but also amplify on how many of those leads you can convert at the end.

Most of the organizations use a 3-step technique for converting leads, such as:

  • The marketing team nurtures the leads
  • The inside sales team qualifies the leads and then turns them into opportunities
  • The sales team works with the opportunities

Some other companies even follow a 2-step technique, such as:

  • The marketing team converts the leads to sales opportunities (when the lead’s meet certain criteria, like high score)
  • The sales team works the opportunities

As with most things in a matured CRM system like ConvergeHub, and others, the lead conversion process can be endlessly customized.

While this is an excellent attribute for organizations and businesses, those have been able to iron out their lead management process there are also many customers, who have started out with CRM adoption but have run into a sticky spot trying to figure out when and how they can convert the leads.

In a recent conversation in the SMB Business group in the Quora community, we have sensed varying approaches and emotions around this topic.

Working with Sales lead management processes people say, “Leads do not work” or “It is different for every company,” one thing is amply clear that this is a hot topic.

Therefore, we are set to compile some of the best practices for lead management, which suits the users of ConvergeHub CRM as well as many other Customer Relationship Management platforms, which cater to both large enterprise solutions and SMBs.

What is Lead Management?

In brief, the definition of lead management can be broken into five following step:

  1. Lead acquisition and data capture
  2. Lead import and data cleansing
  3. Lead distribution
  4. Lead enrichment, lead scoring and lead prioritization
  5. Lead cultivation and lead conversion

However, one of the principal problems with this process is within its first step of “creating a new lead”; because duplicate records most often cripple the CRM’s ability to see the true history of an individual lead and cloud the ability to measure and track outcomes accurately. This is why we advise users to dedupe their contact database while or after importing any new leads and using ConvergeHub CRM; it is not as hard as it seems.

Here are some of the exciting steps suggested by many lead management teams, which can also be followed by using ConvergeHub CRM for SMBs.

  • Always take a note to track the ‘lead source,’ and ‘lead type’ of all your new leads
  • Generate detailed information to help your sales reps follow-up from your email campaigns. For this create a detailed email template and prepare a call list with qualifying questions, to help your internal sales team follow-up from your campaigns. Many organizations using ConvergeHub CRM are even able to indicate which products their customers are most likely to be interested individually, based on their campaigns
  • Define lead status values, lead scores, which are mostly needed for tracking the stages, and conduct the next best action for each lead. Here are the lead status values ConvergeHub uses:
  1. New
  2. In Process
  3. Recycled
  4. Dead
  5. Lost
  • Much like other lead management processes, ConvergeHub also considers inquiries from current customers as new leads. Treating inbound leads in this manner from existing customers as new opportunities help to cross-sell more to that client, by making these leads go through the same lead maturing process, while many other CRM companies want the contact to go directly to the sales reps
  • Create a report to track leads that have NO activities, for seeing which leads are not being touched and to ‘shame’ the sales reps those are associated with those leads
  • We all know asking more question on a landing page often leads to decrease in conversion rate. However, if the person is a qualified hot lead, consider testing. If longer forms drive more sales-ready leads the getting it is the way. This is because if an individual is interested in buying your products or services, he or she will be most interested and willing to give additional information before closing the deal
  • Implement web-to-lead to integrate your web leads in your CRM’s database with ConvergeHub.

Once you have these systems in place, do not forget to monitor your reports and view the trends.

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Lastly, at the end of the day, ensuring your awareness of communication with your customers both during the lead and contact stages is an essential part. We are also in agreement with leading lead management practices that by creating a lead nurturing workflow for new leads and getting a series of drip emails can boost up your conversion ratio. However do not forget about regular communication with your contacts, which can heighten your lead conversion in a more targeted way.

How to Choose the Best Mobile CRM Solutions for Small Business

In the recent times, it has been observed that mobile devices (like smartphone, tablets etc.) have become an ever increasingly important tool for small business owners looking for an advantage in this cutthroat competitive world. Here is a list of the advantages of using Mobile CRM solutions for small businesses.

Are mobile CRM solutions for small business a must for all SMBs? How can you choose the best CRM? Which is the best mobile CRM platform?

In this article, let us answer these questions and a few others.

In the recent times, it has been observed that mobile devices (like smartphone, tablets etc.) have become an ever increasingly important tool for small business owners looking for an advantage in this cutthroat competitive world.

Truth be told, the mobile version of Customer Relationship Management technology has indeed taken business productivity beyond 10 to 5. With mobile CRM solutions for small businesses, field workers can now access the central database of any organization and update the information on the go. Executives can also view reports in real-time in order to finalize on instant decision making, round the clock.

Ray Grainger, the CEO of Mavenlink, stated in a report that he believes mobile CRM technology will become a necessity in 2016 and afterward, as he quoted:

“This is the year that mobile CRM will finally take off, as businesses of all sizes continue to hire remote workers and provide them with devices that support mobile versions of reliable CRM applications.”

However, irrespective of whether his predictions are coming true or not, for any small and medium business owners, the advantages of using mobile CRM application is extremely hard to ignore.

Here is a list of the advantages of using Mobile CRM solutions for small businesses:

  • Lets you manage your business from anywhere
  • Allows you to perform critical business activities like Lead Management, Contact Management, Sales Analysis, Task Management, and others, right from your smartphone and tablet
  • Taking productivity beyond office hours reduces downtime
  • Enhance the accuracy of sales forecasts through real-time updates from your field staffs
  • Build up customer intimacy
  • Reduce telecommunication and IT costs
  • Offer the freedom to do things that you could not have done otherwise, i.e. record videos and voices, take a photo, use and monitor GPS data, voice calling the contacts on the go, etc.

Best practices for choosing a mobile CRM

 Before you pick up any mobile CRM solution for your small business, make a note of the specific benefits that you want to achieve by implementing this business management system in your company.

The most important thing that you must keep in mind before purchasing any mobile CRM is your end-users and so you must plan a “mobile strategy” which is most helpful for them.

Now, after you have planned and defined yours end user’s needs, it is time to select your CRM platform. Different CRM vendors offer mobile CRM designed for different devices (like iPhone, Android etc.), so as an SMB (Small and Medium Business) owner, you can minimize all sorts of costs, which may include device cost, administration cost, data cost etc. by buying a standard platform for mobile CRM implementation.

If you have a larger setup, before rolling out your mobile CRM solutions for small business, across your entire organization, it is highly time and cost effective, to test the CRM by making it operational for a smaller set of people in your company.

Most popular mobile CRMs like ConvergeHub are quite simple and do not require any training. However, if you are opting for a multifaceted CRM, never skip their staff-training programs. It is because, if your staffs fail to use the application properly, your whole investment may as well do down the drains.

At the end, always make sure that you perform an extensive evaluation and then analyze how going for mobile CRM application as a whole, has affected your team’s performance.

Methods for implementation of mobile CRM

Essentially, there are two main approaches for implementing mobile CRM:

Web Based Mobile CRM

This type of mobile CRM solutions for small business usually makes use of HTML5 and so do not require any download or installations. The biggest advantage of using this type CRM is that you can use it one any device and on multiple Web browsers to instantly access your required data.

This type of mobile CRM application is useful organizations where the users want their freedom to use different devices and do not mind the unavailability of their information when they are offline.

Client-Server based Mobile CRM

If you want to opt for this type of Mobile CRM, you will have to install a client side application, which will interact with your CRM vendor’s server. Unlike Web-based Mobile CRM, these CRM offers limited offline usage, but on the flip side, these CRM applications are device and platform specific and are much more costly than the former one.

Levels of Mobile Maturity

There are 3 levels of mobile maturity which you can choose from while buying your CRM solutions for small business, depending on your business requirements and goals.

Personal Productivity

This is the lowest level of mobile CRM usage, whereby the system provides the field staffs access to personal productivity tools, like calendar, contacts, and emails. Using this information user can stay on top of their personal schedules and keep up with their customers and colleagues.

Corporate Application Access   

The next level of mobile CRM usage gives a larger subset of mobile workers in your organization the access to your corporate database. For effective synchronization of customer data and emails, organizations usually deploy an in-house server for this type of CRM usage. Moreover, this type of usage of the CRM also helps in accurate sales forecasting and so increase the productivity of your entire sales, marketing, and customer support team.

Comprehensive Mobility

In the highest level of mobile maturity, your staffs have the real-time access to your entire business data. Therefore, field workers those who use mobile CRM of this type can have full functionality of the CRM with just a smartphone or tablet, as it is found in converged CRMs like ConvergeHub.

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Which is the best mobile CRM?

In fact, there are no one mobile CRM solutions for small business, which you can label as the best. For a CRM ideal for one organization might be a sheer disappointment for another. However, if you are looking for one Web-Based Mobile CRM that is #1 easiest converged CRM for SMBs, you can opt for ConvergeHub, which is an ideal CRM designed for your small-scale business needs.

Watch Out For These 4 Deadly Signs- Which Can Make Your CRM Fail

If your CRM software is on the brink of failure, instead of blaming on the system, have you thought what signs you would look for? How can you save it from a point of no return? Fortunate here is help so that you do not have to experience your CRM falling over the edge. Here are some early warning signs that indicate all is not well in your CRM-land, and some advices for addressing them.

If your CRM software is on the brink of failure, instead of blaming on the system, have you thought what signs you would look for?
How can you save it from a point of no return? There are many sales and customer service managers, who simply do not initially realize that their CRM is failing them until they understand that when it is already too late. Further, standing on the edge of a disaster it also really becomes hard to accept that you need a new system when most of your employees are already so deep-rooted using the existing CRM platform.
Fortunate here is help so that you do not have to experience your CRM falling over the edge.

Here are some early warning signs that indicate all is not well in your CRM-land, and some advice for addressing them.

1. WARNING: Your CRM only works in silos

It really becomes hard for any business establishment to work in tandem when each department (e.g. marketing, sales, accounts etc.) is seeing something different. Therefore, the right CRM is a Customer Relationship Management software that provides a holistic view of each contact in your database, so that all the departments in your company can glean the relevant information to send a unified and cohesive message to the customers.
The same applies also to functional areas. For an example, let us discuss customer support. If a customer calls with an issue and you are capable of solving the problem over the phone- that is good. But, what happens, if the same customer calls and then wants the answer by SMS or email, which you cannot since your CRM does not have the desired functionality- that is not so good.
So CRMs which are most effective should be capable of handling customer support via all communication channels that your customer may use.
Good CRMs are the ones, which cater to your customers rather than forcing your customers to alter their communication style to adhere to your system.

The Solution:

Try to configure your current CRM to show information that is more pertinent to various users in your organization. Find out from your CRM manufacturer if there are any reports or metrics that you have not used so far, that can bring real value to your business. However, if you find that you do not have the liberty to customize what information appears to whom, it is unfortunate that you might have to look beyond your current CRM software. In this case, consider integrating necessary applications that work with your existing CRM or buy an entirely new system, depending on what other functionalities your present CRM offers.

Watch Out For These 4 Deadly Signs- Which Can Make Your CRM Fail

2. WARNING: Your CRM “supports” vague processes

Even the best-stocked toolbox is of little help if you are not aware of what you are trying to fix. The same thing is true even with CRM. If you have purchased your CRM even before establishing a process to nurture your leads to sales, CRM can be of no help to your organization. So, if you are unable to name the specific steps in your sales cycle, then it is for certain that you are just not taking full advantage of your existing CRM’s capabilities.

The Solution:

Break out the process flow and clearly identify how you will communicate with your prospects. Right from their exposure into your organization until the point they become your loyal customers determine how the process can be improved and figure out how CRM can help in enhancing the efficiency and quality of your services.
For an example, brainstorm what are the steps that are involved in nurturing your leads by email. Find out how many emails you will send to your leads and what will you reply to their emails. Once these are ready, create a defined email process that can be now facilitated through the functionalities of your CRM. For an idea, you can now auto-assign tasks to your sales team, when a lead is ready to receive the next email in the series, or you can also use automated email functionality from your CRM if your Customer Relationship Management platform provides integration with an email marketing solution.

3. WARNING: You have “users” who don’t (or won’t) use your CRM

If your CRM goes unused, then most certainly it is of no help to anyone. Rather implementing CRM in such an organization is a sheer waste of both time and money.
Here are a few likely reasons why your users may reject using the CRM:
– Users feel it is a monitoring mechanism, a tool that has been imposed by the management against their will.
– The user believes that using CRM complicates their job.
– The functionalities of the CRM are not relevant to the process.
– There are other important information and data which exists outside the CRM and not within, which makes the users look into other resources, which kills time.

The Solution:

If the CRM that you have purchased for good is so unpopular, talk with the non-users of the CRM and hear the reasons behind their dissatisfaction. Find out what makes them feel frustrated. Learn about what exactly they wished the software would do. These answers may help you to decide what you need to re-configure and re-introduce in your current CRM system that can make it work for all.
To do this you can choose an advocate from each department in your organization and consult with them what tasks would be best to automate with your redesigned new CRM. Allow these individuals to encourage their colleagues to use the re-configured system and establish best practices for the future CRM users in your company.

4. WARNING: You are unaware of what success looks like

You do not have to be a genius to understand this simple fact that you just cannot accomplish your goals- if you do not have any.
Many CRM users make the dire mistake of implementing CRM without even deciding what they want to achieve out of it.

The Solution:

Ask yourself and find out your ultimate wants. Deduce what kind of impact you want to achieve by implementing CRM in areas such as lead generation, lead readiness, closing rates, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and retention, customer feedback and others in your company.
Once you have your end goals defined in a measurable, quantifiable and achievable term, you can always go ahead, purchase a CRM and track your progress towards achieving them.
Also, let your teams know about your company’s goals and show them how using CRM will help in achieving faster and stellar growth in your businesses.

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If you find this article helpful in avoiding CRM related damages in your company, write back in the box below. We will be happy to know about your experiences.

Are CRM and Marketing Automation Software 2 Different Things?

Do you remember someone, who told you that England and Great Britain were not actually the same? Well, your mistake is completely understandable. Actually, Great Britain is composed of England, Scotland, and Wales, and so England is just a part of Great Britain.People often have the same kind of reaction when they realize that Marketing Automation software and CRM are different as both these software serves two distinctly different purposes.

Talking about CRM and Marketing Automation software, let us begin with an example.

Do you remember someone, who told you that England and Great Britain were not actually the same? Well, your mistake is completely understandable. Actually, Great Britain is composed of England, Scotland, and Wales, and so England is just a part of Great Britain. It is confusing, we know.

People often have the same kind of reaction when they realize that Marketing Automation software and CRM are different. If this is news for you, it is okay! Since even though at face value both appear to be the same thing (like England and Great Britain), however, both these software serves two distinctly different purposes.

The main and the biggest difference between CRM and Marketing Automation software are their targets. Therefore, while CRM is more sales focused, Marketing Automation software is marketing focused which is very much apparent by its name.

;'[‘“A strategy for managing all your company’s interactions with current and prospective customers.”

A CRM system is a platform that saves customer names, addresses, phone numbers, and most importantly the interactions of the customers with your company.

On the flipside, leading marketing development software companies describe Marketing Automation software as a platform that:

“Allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows”.

Hence, although Marketing Automation software, stores similar information as a CRM software, such as your lead details (addresses, phone numbers, email, job title, company namiye etc.), this is all they typically share – and no moredifference between marketing automation and crm

marketing-automation-vs-crm

Marketing automation lets you follow any prospect or lead’s “top-of-the-funnel” activities. Like, when your lead visited your web page and blogs, opened your emails, or filled out a lead magnet form.

Scheduling or tracking marketing campaigns is also done by marketing automation software. Especially mass business communications like email campaigns.

Some of the advantages of using Marketing Automation software platforms are:

  1. It provides you with the ability to conveniently segment leads and prospects into separate mailing lists based on their previous interactions with your organization or their preferences and interests.
  2. Ability to nurture leads, so that you can automatically send triggered emails when a prospect is found most interested in your products or services.
  3. Activate “drip marketing campaigns” by scheduling a series of emails, so that your company remains at the top-of-mind with your prospects.
  4. Once your campaign has ended, Marketing Automation software also helps you to generate analytics to show and measure the success rates of your campaigns.

In other words, Marketing Automation software is one that helps to nurture leads and foster them to make the leads ready for the sales team.  Now, once the lead has graduated to the bottom-of-the-funnel, and has become a sales lead (and then a customer), that is where business organizations start tracking the interactions with those leads through a CRM.

Customer Relationship Management platforms typically stores how long a contact has been your customer, record the number of purchases made in the past by your customer, the date and notes of the phone conversations you have had with your customer, records of your customer’s inbound emails that they have sent to your customer care and sales team, and others.

To optimize the one-on-one interaction between the customers and your company, Customer Support team and the Sales reps use this data, to increase customer satisfaction and sales.

Some of the other advantages of using a CRM are:

  1. You can send more targeted promotional materials, which is more likely to lead to a sale, and foster a good relationship between you and your customer.
  2. While speaking to a customer, your employees using the CRM can get a full 360-degree picture of the customer’s interactions with your company, which helps in making the conversations more personal and successful for your organization.
  3. By viewing where a customer is in the sales process, your sales personnel can find additional help in closing the deals.
  4. Many CRMs can also synchronize social media outlets so that you can understand which social media websites are generating more traffic and what your customers are saying about your company online. These CRMs are commonly known as SCRM (Social CRM).
  5. CRM can send internal alerts to your team, informing them when a call has been scheduled, when a customer’s birthday is coming up, or when a customer’s account is set for renewal, which helps your sales and service team know exactly how to reach out under these specific circumstances.

Simply speaking, CRM helps to generate sales by making the sales process a more personal experience for the customers.

Hence, although at a first glance Marketing Automation systems and CRM may look similar, they cater to dissimilar roles in an organization and this difference makes these two systems more valuable to the unique teams they serve.

Marketing Automation Vs CRM

Now you may wonder, why would you track half of your prospect’s interactions using Marketing Automation software and the other half in CRM?

Good question!

Most Marketing Automation software allows you to synchronize your business data with your CRM, which in turn helps you to see and record your entire customer and prospects’ activities through one solution.

There are several companies those who synchronize their data both ways so that the marketing teams know what is going on in sales and the sales and customer support teams know the history that your marketing team has had with a specific prospect or customer.

Moreover, many CRM companies like ConvergeHub and others have developed or acquired Marketing Automation software thereby including both these business solutions on one platform.

Typically, SMBs begins to adopt CRM to optimize the bottom of their sales funnel and close more deals, but as they grow and prosper, these companies use CRM for SMBs, invest more in marketing by opting for a Marketing Automation system that will integrate with their CRM platform.

Learn the 6 reasons to use marketing automation with CRM

Infographic-6Reasons To Use Marketing Automation with CRM

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Now, that you know the basic difference between these two business intelligence software, if you are still unsure and need further help to guide your decisions, write back to us on the box below.

What You Must Ask- For Finding an Easy CRM for SMB

For finding an easy CRM for SMB, let us first break down the Customer Relationship Management software platform into individual components for a better understanding of this misused tool, which will most importantly help small business owners to make informed decisions when opting for their preferred CRM and bring growth in sales.

Customer

Definition: The person who gives you business for your product and services.

  • Who is your customer?
  • Why did your customer choose to do business with you in spite of other options in the market?
  • Who is/are your competitor(s)?

Relationship

Definition: The process of connecting with other human beings.

  • Whom would you like to communicate?
  • How do you like to communicate?
  • How do your prospects like to communicate?
  • How do your existing/new customers like to communicate?

Management

Definition: The act of manipulating and cajoling people to perform tasks and duties from afar.

In business, you cannot manipulate people but rather you can nurture them. Therefore, add a little love and see what happens.

So when you are looking for an easy CRM for SMB, ask yourself some primary questions that start with “What must I have?”

1. Do I need Salesforce automation?

What is Salesforce Automation?

SFA or Salesforce Automation is a technology that helps in automating common online business management tasks like inventory tracking, processing sales, logging and reporting of your customer’s interactions and others. SFA can also aid you in creating and for analyzing performance and sales forecasts and handling:

  • Lead management
  • Contact management
  • Region / Quota management
  • Opportunity management
  • Implement sales methodology
  • Partner management

2. Do I need Marketing Automation?

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is a technology and a software platform, which is designed exclusively for the marketing department of an organization, to more effectively market their products and services. Marketing Automation covers multiple channels both online and offline and automates repetitive tasks.

Here is an example:

Online Marketing Automation channels

  • Email
  • Social Media
  • Web site and others

Offline Marketing Automation channels

  • Direct mail
  • SMS
  • Fax
  • Voice broadcast and others

Automated repetitive tasks

  • Registration reminders
  • Live events
  • Trade show attendance
  • Webinar and others

Marketing automation also helps in Web forms submission, List segmentation and creates Follow-up sequences.

3. Do I need Reporting and Analytics?

If you cannot measure your company’s performance, you cannot improve it. Here are a few most common report structures that you need in your easy CRM for SMB.

  • Scheduled reports
  • Customizable forecasting reports
  • Proactive alert reports
  • Comprehensive library of pre-made reports

4. Do I need a shared database?

The shared database helps everyone on your sales, marketing, accounts, and customer support team to access the CRM database.

You can opt for shared database functionality in a CRM for performing the following:

  • Sales tracking
  • Customer service
  • Email marketing

5. Do I need an “In the Cloud” or “On Site” CRM?

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a technology that has been prevalent in the market for decades. Most easy CRM for SMB are cloud based CRMs, like ConvergeHub, which is the #1 Converged CRM for SMB.

According to a study done by Nucleus Research, more than 80% of SMB organizations that adopted cloud-based CRM achieved a positive ROI.

Therefore, unless you want to mess with your oven server and bear the maintenance and support costs associated with it, it is best to outsource your CRM from customer relationship software development companies.

The benefits of using a cloud-based CRM are:

  • Easy upgrades
  • Predictable costs
  • Fast deployment
  • Enhanced security
  • Reduced need for staff expertise
  • Reduced “customization fever”

6. Do I need third-party integration?

There is no perfect, all-in-one CRM software platform out in the market today for small and medium size businesses. Even large enterprises are bolting on additional tools to get more out of their CRMs. Here is a list of the most used third party tools used by small and medium businesses for enhancing the efficiency of their CRM software.

7. Do I need a mobile CRM?

Constant and seamless access to customer information means that time away from the office does not necessarily mean you have to be “away from the office.”

Being able to be connected to CRM software from remote locations allow your team to be far more productive than ever before.

In a recent study done by Nuclear Research, an information technology research firm specializing in investigative research is of the opinion that mobile access to a CRM increases team productivity in SMBs by more than 14.6% with a further 4 in 10 mobile users of mobile CRM reporting improvement in productivity by more than 22%.

With tools to respond fast along with customer data always at your fingertips, mobile CRM helps employees close more deals with fewer interactions and less time.

This allows sales reps to spend more time prospecting or find new avenues for exploring untouched sales opportunities.

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Takeaway

Now that you are aware how you can choose the best CRM solution for your SMB, find a platform that has both great onboarding for new clients and great customer support. That is why when you talk about buying an easy CRM for SMB you can rely on ConvergeHub, which has all the features listed above that are needed for a modern day CRM, that too at an affordable price.

If you have liked this article and found it informative, do comment in the box below.

Why Your Business Needs CRM?

In the modern times, we operate within a global economy that buys, sells, and communicates in countless ways. Happy customers speak aloud to the world about whatever that is good about your products and services…and so do the unhappy ones. Did you ever think of why your business needs CRM when commoditization is happening with breathtaking speed? To know the answer read more

Did you ever think of why your business needs CRM when commoditization is happening with breathtaking speed? Here is the answer:

In the modern times, we operate within a global economy that buys, sells, and communicates in countless ways.

Happy customers speak aloud to the world about whatever that is good about your products and services…and so do the unhappy ones.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is the process of tracking and analyzing all the communications and interactions you have with your customers and prospects, which is why salespeople need CRM.

Typically, sales managers and senior sales representatives appreciate this customer relationship platform, as they are mostly aware when your business needs CRM, whereby they can centrally store all sales data, and present them in an easy to follow format.

The benefits of CRM technology allow its users to monitor processes, staff performance and hence optimize selling.

However, what about your average bottom-line sales staffs? Do they understand how you can grow business with CRM?

More often than not, your sales staffs who are fighting the sales-war from their trenches are never all that happy-go-lucky about adopting Customer Relationship Management system in the beginning.

Since sales reps often see CRM as just another tool, which involves more work, and is just another way for the management to keep track of their work.

So initially the extra time that they have to spend on feeding-in data into the CRM system, adds to their irritation, which makes them apparently assume that the CRM platform is keeping them away from their main task- selling.

However, this article is not about finding out why sales teams primarily do not find the goodness in CRM- rather this blog is about why you need CRM since it is an established fact that CRM technology actually improves the lives of the salespeople, in the long run, fetching more ROI for your businesses.

Is CRM a great sales tool underestimated?

Even though the benefits of using CRM technology to the organization may not be immediately recognizable, but it is indeed a game changer when implemented and adopted in the right way.

As it is shown in the chart below, the percentile of salespeople who disliked using CRM is 87 percent in 2013, those who felt that CRM was adopted by the management for policing on their activities.

Use-of-CRM-systems

Although in a report published by Tech News World in 2012, revealed that more than half of the businesses are expected to improve their revenue in the North American demography by using CRM.

Main-benefits-of-CRM

More to say, statistics of a study done by Innoppl Technologies points out that 2014 also saw an 87% increase in the use of mobile CRM, whereby 65% sales reps who used CRM achieved their targets, compared to a staggering 78% who did not achieve their sales quote and were non-users of CRM.

Here are some of the key points, which illustrate the benefits of CRM that centralizes, simplifies, scales, and secures your customer engagements:

Enjoy safe storage of your data

CRM helps salespeople to centrally store their contacts, activities, sales opportunities and scheduled plans in one place. Moreover, by adopting CRM technology sales reps can also get uninterrupted access to the company’s database from remote locations on multiple devices. It is a system, which assures you that your data will never get lost.

Manage time and plan like a pro

When your business needs CRM, this platform helps salespeople to prioritize their tasks and optimize their daily schedules to make sure that none of your key prospects (leads) and customers are ignored and are contacted on time. In other words, CRM allows sales reps to utilize more of their productive working hours with the customers that result in more closed deals and a stronger customer base.

No brainer- Activity reports

Adopting a CRM platform helps the sales department to easily prepare their weekly, monthly or quarterly reports for the management. This process of creating reports is transparent and automated while using a CRM and so it just takes a minimal number of clicks to inform others about how many sales are currently in progress.

End surfing and start targeting

CRM technology aids sales reps and managers to segment data and focuses on valuable opportunities via criteria based selections. This reduces the efforts of cutting and pasting data from several documents or surfing through a plethora of disorganized lists of customer-related databases.

Stay up-to-date with recent happenings

Customer Relationship Management system offers sharing of document templates, calendars, and email integration, which helps in uniting all team members and keeping everyone updated about the latest information about any customer or prospects.

Moreover, the ability to share selling patterns and processes allows the sales team to see which sales and marketing strategies are working best for any organization, which also increases communication between the management and the sales team.

Show up in time

By tracking all the communications with the customers, CRM helps the sales team to understand exactly when any customer needs to be contacted. This can be for contract renewals, product replacement, or an up-sell to a new product or service. Hence, another reason for why salespeople need CRM is that it phenomenally increases the chances of closing a sale.

Rationalize your moves

CRM is technology that helps in streamlining the entire sales cycle, which results in closing sales deals in your pipeline and help others within the sales team to reach their targets quickly by sharing documents, templates, and other necessary sales backups.

Since preparing quotes and order processing is automated in CRM, sales teams are able to reduce the cost of production and increase sales revenue, which is another example of how you can grow business with CRM.

Understand what your customers actually want

Since all the customer-related data are stored within the CRM platform, implementing CRM helps the salespeople to analyze their customer’s needs and also anticipate their problems- all at the right time. This helps in increasing customer satisfaction towards your product and company, thereby ensuring loyalty, as well as higher ROI and profit margins for your organization.

Reduce admin task

By adopting CRM technology in sales and marketing, it releases the sales reps from several admin tasks, which needs repetitive actions that take a lot of time but yields very little profitability. For example, CRM stores product and price details, trigger necessary reminders for sales related activities; guide the sales reps through their sales pipelines and others.

Saves money

This is a paradox. Although implementing a CRM is not cheap, but adopting CRM helps to save money. For example in respect to sales CRM reduces the errors in order and quotes, which otherwise could have increased your expenditures for the effort and costs needed for correction of these errors.

Conclusion

In a gist, although CRM and Salespeople are not an immediate “match made in Heaven” but the more time sales reps spend working on this platform, it helps them to excel in 4 areas that are critical for the sales process, such as:

  • Sort, search and qualify leads in a better way
  • Follow up with sales opportunities just in time
  • Prioritize necessary follow-up activities according to their level of importance
  • Increase target reach rate

However these above-mentioned improvements may justify why you need CRM, but it does not come without any effort, understanding, and determination from the sales team members, people who need to understand that updating the CRM is central to their and the company’s success.

Therefore, sales team should embrace the idea of registering all their activities in the CRM, which will help them to reach their sales goals.

If you have liked this article and you want to share your experience about the problems you faced while implemented CRM in your company, write to us in the comments below.

Support Software Is On The Fritz- The Future Of Customer Support Is CRM

You may be of the opinion that Support software is a boring and sleepy software category that does not call for innovations. In this article, we are going to explain why we demarcate this software is a wrecked category, which is failing to solve customer problems in this modern world. This is because CS software is going to be massively disrupted by CRM software designed for CS teams- which is an entirely new way for these teams to work in the present times.

Why The Future Of Customer Support Is CRM?

You may be of the opinion that Support software is a boring and sleepy software category that does not call for innovations.

You are right! However, this is about to change.

In this article, we are going to explain why we demarcate this software is a wrecked category, which is failing to solve customer problems in this modern world.

This is because CS software is going to be massively disrupted by CRM software designed for CS teams- which is an entirely new way for these teams to work in the present times.

Although CS is an essential team in your business, Sales and Marketing also get in touch with your customers every day. This is how CRM helps in marketing.

Hence, when your CS team interacts with your customers for years, it is the time that you need to provide them with a new software that they need for their daily chores.

  • The Problem: Support Software Really Sucks

Still date, bad CS scenarios are very common everywhere across the globe. If you enquire in a room full of people, when they faced a bad customer oriented experience, most people will cite a date within the range from the last months. Mostly, these customers are those who had been kept on hold or had interacted with agents who could not answer their problems or provided impersonal services.

There are hundreds of articles, which confirm this fact.

According to Edison Research, while more than 80% companies boast about delivering unparalleled Customer Support service, only 8% of the customers, in reality, agree about the same.

However, legacy software does not only suck the customers. During the past couple of years, while we were developing ConvergeHub CRM for SMBs, the best CRM software for small business, we discussed with hundreds of CS team members to locate their pain-points, and their top complaint was that the software they use sucks. According to the users of legacy software, these software are hard to use, clunky and fails to unify all customer touch points and data, which are essential for serving the customers.

If you are not okay and you would not think about carrying a phone that is 10 years old, why then is it agreeable to use legacy CS software that is equally old as your dumb phone.

In fact, all major legacy CS software are crammed with so many unnecessary and outdated features that for today’s CS agents it may take weeks to learn how to properly use these systems.

  • The Problem: Does not solve the “Data Chaos”

While using a legacy platform, CS team members often find themselves overwhelmed by the myriad number of applications that contain customer data in such support-oriented software. While building ConvergeHub, as the numero-uno CRM for SMBs, we came across several team members who still use 10 or more applications in the process of resolving an issue.

It is very natural, that it is impossible for any team member to offer a high level of service if they are spending all their productive hours going back and forth between different applications and screens. Moreover, as legacy software are usually built on closed architectural platforms, it becomes painful to integrate any third party app in these systems (especially in a security compliant way).

  • The Problem: Most CS Software Is Built On A Lie

If you view any website of a Support software provider, you will most possibly see several images of people and mentions of the term ‘relationships’. Hence, although these software gives the impression that these software enables high-quality personal communication for upholding relationships between the company and their customers, in reality, the opposite is true.

Legacy software treats customers like tickets, which highlights and promotes a transactional approach while dealing with the customers that are completely opposite of ‘building relationships’. So, getting a 360-degree view of the customers along with their transactional and purchase history is really a hard thing to accomplish with these traditional CS platforms.

1. The Solution: CRM for CS

Before launching ConvergeHub, the best CRM software for small business we talked with several team leaders through meetings, online forums, dinners, conferences and happy hours, listen to their complaints. During those prolonged conversations, we kept hearing to a common theme “We do not want just another silo (stand alone) CS software. We want a CRM platform that unifies all touch points and is built around the customer”. This feedback proved astonishingly valuable for us and it served to confirm the founding vision for ConvergeHub, which is a converged CRM that gives a 360-degree view of the customers across all departments, right from Sales, Marketing, and Billing to Customer Support.

2. Solution: Everything In One Place

CRM created for CS unifies all the customer data in one place. Remember, every time you keep a customer on hold while you search between applications, you are alienating your customer by not giving them what they need. ConvergeHub is a CRM, which uses an open architecture that helps in easy integration of any application within its platform.

3. Solution: Treats Customers Like People

The central focus of CRM for CS is to keep its spotlight on the customer timeline since CRM is built around the user experience of the customer. CRM integrates everything related to the customer, which includes conversions, transactions, events, and your company’s data into a cohesive and unified experience.  Hence, while using a CRM, rich customer profile aids agents to learn more about customers, so that they can provide more personalized services.

4. Solution: Fun to Use

Gone are those days, when CS team was stuck with old software. CRM for CS is easy now. Converged CRMs like ConvergeHub are Customer Relationship Platforms that are as easy to use as Snapchat or Facebook. Modern day Converged CRMs have extensive collaboration features so that you can work in tandem with other members of your team. Moreover, present day CRMs have built-in intelligent workflows, which automate all the cumbersome admin stuff, like reminders and routing, so that you can utilize your time helping customers instead of sticking post-it notes on your office desk.

CRM for CS Empowers The Most Important Team At Your Company

Traditionally, CS was seen for a very long time as an unavoidable necessary evil needed for keeping frustrated customers at a bay. A cost center for the company, whereby CS teams were almost never given a seat at the big table. According to Forrester, in a research done in 2012, more than 50% of the senior executives never focused on customer experience over sales and marketing departments.

However, today CRM for CS has radically changed the previously held concept, which has subsequently altered the productivity and happiness quotient of the CS teams.

Here is a list of enhanced abilities that CRM has accomplished for the CS team members of a company:

  • Increased Productivity

Unifying CS applications and data in one place have made the team members a lot more efficient. Automation of tedious processes and daily admin works enables the team to concentrate more on important things like serving the customers.

  • Deeper Customer Connections

By increasing the rate of customer retention, best CRM for SaaS companies like ConvergeHub has enabled business establishments to increase customer lifetime value, which translates to a substantial growth in ROI.

  • Create New Leaders

CRM has enabled team members to find a strong leadership role in the company. Modern CRMs like ConvergeHub not only amalgamates and improves customer data but also export the data to other applications so that CS information can be used in making decisions throughout the company.

  • Grow Revenue Faster

When you capable of having a full picture of your customer, you can easily find where you can benefit from an up-sell. Cross-selling and personalized automated email campaigns are more likely hit the mark and perfectly position products and services to drive-in revenue.

Takeaway

When CS teams see ConvergeHub, the best CRM for SaaS companies they usually switch over to us in a few weeks. We have a talented team that can help you to get started with our #1 CRM for SMBs within a few weeks and that too with limited hours needed for its configuration time.

So, if the future of Customer Support is CRM, now we would like to hear you talk.

If you have found this article useful, comment in the box below.

5 Proven Practices for Building Client Relationship with CRM

The success factor of any good B2B (Business-to-Business) company depends largely on strong client relationship, which is especially applicable for small companies and organizations in its early stage. Here are lists of points, what we believe it takes companies to transform them from a vendor consideration set to trusted partners of an organization.

The success factor of any good B2B (Business-to-Business) company depends largely on strong client relationship, which is especially applicable for small companies and organizations in its early stage. Exceptional client service marks the core value of any business, whereby the organization aims to become a trusted partner of the customer, rather than viewing them as a vendor for their buyers.

Client relationship helps to differentiate companies from their competition by building strong relationships, whereby the level of service is one of the primary reasons customers prefer working with these organizations.

Here are lists of points, what we believe it takes companies to transform them from a vendor consideration set to trusted partners of an organization:

1. Be patient while building relationships

Whether you are using a CRM or using other means to develop a relationship with your clients, building relationships take time. Do not indulge in insincere schmoozing, as it can sidestep your objectives. Rather, take the time to understand your client, and in the process share a little bit of yourself. It is always important to remember that what you serve to your client, your work, is paramount in building a relationship. For at the end, no amount of personal connections can substitute for a great work.

2. Get to know your client’s industry and company

Always keep yourself updated with information about your client’s company as well as news and reports of their industry. You do not always have to be an expert, but knowing your client’s business will not only help you to speak the same language as your client but also understand the factors what are keeping them up at night. Knowing your clients better will help you to cater your interactions and offerings accordingly.

3. Go the extra mile

As you are growing your business and your client relationship, many times you will reach crossroads when you will have to make a decision on when to expand or adjust your core offerings to cater to the need of a specific client. The advantages of offering customized solutions to your clients are mainly two-fold:

  • Clients remember and always appreciate when you came through for helping them
  • It can open up additional avenues for new product offerings that you have never thought of, leading to increase of your revenue

However, it is best to remember over here, if you are making a noteworthy departure from your primary offerings always see that you are sufficiently compensated for rendering your services.

4. Treat every client as your most significant one

This is no brainer that happy clients are more likely to provide you with referrals. Provide all your clients with your best services regardless whether they are a small business or a Fortune 500 company. You can never identify whom your clients know or whom they can refer you. We have observed it on several occasions, when clients switch jobs, be it within the organization or to a new company if you have nurtured a good relationship with your client they often recommend your products or services to their new teams.

Also, remember that today’s small companies could be the big companies of tomorrow and it feels amazingly fulfilling to be trusted partner fueling your client’s growth.

5. Be more than just an email address

Despite the prevalence of using email communication for maintaining client relationship while using a CRM, email communications can be misconstrued, during taxing and stressful situations, especially when the recipient and the sender do not know each other well.  Hence, consider calling up your clients over a phone call, Skype or meet them in person to put a face to your name. Calling up your client for informing a good news, is a great way to build a better relationship.

Summarize your next steps

No matter how unimportant or quick a client meeting seems, always recapitulate the conversations with next steps. You may think that you will remember all the details (maybe you certainly will), but your client may not. Using a CRM platform helps a lot in keeping recorded history of your past conversations with your clients so that you are always aligned with them on the same page. This prevents a lot of confusion down the road while building a great client relationship.

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Now that you have learned how you can build a wonderful client relationship with your CRM if you have anything to share from your own experiences, write to us in the box below.

How CRM replacing ERP is a Myth- Now Debunked

Although CRM and ERP systems overlap each other in certain areas, the good part is, they can also be completely integrated into each other. Still, as the core functionalities of these two business applications are completely different, it is best for a business to understand the difference between CRM and ERP as stand-alone and separate systems. Since this outlook will make it easier to see how CRM and ERP individually play a role in improving competency and increasing sales.

Believe it or not, how CRM replacing ERP is one of the most searched phrases on the internet. This is why we are keen upon explaining both these enterprise automation platforms for debunking certain myths surrounding these two most needed modern day business applications.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are very much alike in several ways, as both these platforms are used for boosting the overall profitability of a business.

Although CRM and ERP systems overlap each other in certain areas, the good part is, they can also be completely integrated into each other.

Still, as the core functionalities of these two business applications are completely different, it is best for a business to understand the difference between CRM and ERP as stand-alone and separate systems. Since this outlook will make it easier to see how CRM and ERP individually play a role in improving competency and increasing sales.

CRM Meaning- What is Customer Relationship Management?

Simply speaking, Customer Relationship Management or CRM is a system that is needed for a company’s interaction with potential and current customers.  When we talk about Customer Relationship Management we generally talk about the CRM software, which is used for organizing, automating and synchronizing marketing, sales and customer support departments of an organization.

The CRM software has been developed to include all areas of customer experience (CX), keep the customers happy, and successively keep them loyal, bringing in more ROI for your business.

So, CRM is a process that helps in identifying potential prospects (leads), nurture them and thereafter guide them through the sales pipeline for closing businesses.

A quality CRM should capture all the interactions that the company has with its customers, whereby this data can be shared and used across all the board. From sales reps, managers, customer support, to the accounting department in the organization.

ERP meaning- What is Enterprise Resource Planning?

To understand what is ERP we first need to understand that Enterprise Resource Planning software is designed to make an organization’s process more efficient and effective, by better managing all the key functions, such as supply chain, warehouse, inventory, human resource, payroll, and accounting in a company. ERP software helps the organization to focus on what really matters- the data.

By integrating, ERP software, employees can update the system with vital information and make them available in real-time to all the departments in the company.

By adopting this integrated technology, ERP provides organizations with heads-up whenever a problem occurs within the organization.

ERP Examples:

If there is a problem in the supply chain, the ERP software is capable of capturing the issue and then make it available to all departments and areas which have been affected by the problem; such as the warehouse.

Therefore, ERP software not only aids in providing all departments with updated information, but it also gives the organization an accurate and clear picture of the standings at any given moment.

Some of the most popular ERP tools are:

  • SAP R/3
  • Oracle e-Business Suite
  • JD Edwards EnterpriseOne & JD Edwards World
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • Sage MAS 500
  • PeopleSoft and others

Here is a basic comparison chart between these two technologies:

Difference-Between-CRM-and-ERP

This is a list of activities that CRM and ERP Software does to manage any of the following front office and back-office activities respectively:

CRM

  • Categorize marketing efforts
  • Automates customer service
  • Handle the sales and marketing pipeline
  • Share marketing and sales collateral
  • Prioritize leads
  • Streamline your sales processes
  • Create data reports
  • Determine time used on converting leads to closing sales
  • Manage inventory based on historical sales data
  • Track a customer’s interactions with your business
  • Learn which products sell best and when
  • Manage your business leads
  • Collaborate to sell as a team
  • See where leads come from
  • Manage your business contacts
  • Share customer profiles with co-workers

ERP

  • Distribution process management
  • Facilitate better project planning
  • Supply chain management
  • Reduce redundant tasks
  • Assess business needs
  • Standardize critical business procedures
  • Automate employee life-cycle
  • Services knowledge base
  • Lower purchasing costs
  • Improve accuracy of financial data
  • Manage human resources
  • Manage accounting and financial applications
  • Manage payroll

What should you set up first- CRM or ERP?

Answering to the question, as to what should be implemented first- We would say CRM.

This is because no business can survive without customers and sales. It is very natural, that if you do not find buyers who will purchase your products or services, primarily your business will suffer a loss and so in short span, your organization will become bankrupt. Therefore, to build up and maintain a seamless sales process you need to track each customer’s integration with your brand and for that, you need to put all your customer-related data, in one place- that is CRM.

While implementing CRM in your organization, you need to teach everyone in your sales team, to use the platform all the time, so that no customer details are missed, which will help you to build strong sales, marketing, and customer support team based on the real data of your customers.

However, once your organization is big enough (especially if you in a manufacturing process), you may opt for adopting an ERP system, so that you can track them in ERP to easily manage and understand the correlations between the internal operations of your company.

Using ERP, you can not only reduce cost but also optimize the usage of capital investments in your organization.

Therefore, for an example, deciding which system is more vital for your organization is like deciding between having a steering wheel or an engine in a car. In this analogy, while CRM is the engine that drives your business, increase sales and improve profitability, ERP is the steering wheel that guides your business with precision and steers you away from obstacles well in advance, which increases profitability while reducing cost.

CRM/ERP Integration

Today business owners are witnessing a more complex business environment than ever before and so more companies are now realizing the need of CRM and ERP integration into one solution, for storing and analyzing business data that is created with the “speed of light”.

Apart from big enterprises, many more SMB (Small and Medium Business) companies are also now using integrated CRM and ERP solutions to improve and automate the management of their operations since modern converged CRM Systems like ConvergeHub and other are impeccably designed to incorporate any ERP system into its platform.

Some of the main benefits of integrating these two business management platforms are:

  • Terminate data entry and storage duplicates
  • Ability to share data easier and in a more timely matter
  • Reduce IT support cost
  • Improved Order and Quote Management
  • Reduce training cost
  • Increased Visibility and Improved Forecasting
  • Upgrade software with a few clicks
  • Increase profit margins
  • Experience mobility

Conclusion

Therefore, to summarize, ERP and CRM are either sides of the same coin that ultimately increases business for the companies, as this two software works together excellently. Hence, while either of these products can work well on its own, but to find their true potential you need to integrate CRM and ERP into one solution, which can be fully scalable and customizable to every business need.

If you have any further information on this topic, be free to write in the comment below.

 

Know How You Can Protect Your Online Reputation from Cyber-threats

Online reputation is everything in web-based businesses. Hence, keeping it secured from cyber threats is utmost important for the safety of your enterprise. Primarily controlling your reputation online deals with what information that is available to your customers on the Web. You can secure your online reputation and protect your customer’s sensitive data from data theft by several means. Some of the ways by which you can prevent this from happening are as follows.

Online reputation is everything in web-based businesses. Hence, keeping it secured from cyber threats is utmost important for the safety of your enterprise. Primarily controlling your reputation online deals with what information that is available to your customers on the Web. Next, to that, you need to protect your business from ‘zero-day’ exploits, so that your business establishment never has to be the company that is in the spotlight for a data breach.

You can secure your online reputation and protect your customer’s sensitive data from data theft by several means.
Some of the ways by which you can prevent this from happening are:

1. Keep a Track of Your Company’s Social Media Profiles

It is most vital that you should always take the time to review your company’s online presence and make adjustments to secure its reputation online. For this, ensure that all social media profiles, which are associated with your business, are verified accounts. Verifying your business’s social media profile shows other people; your account is original and is the official page that highlights the mission, vision and products or services of your company.  This, in turn, helps to mitigate any damage that may arise out of fake profile creation in your company’s name. In addition, if any fake account on the social media platform should try to damage your company’s reputation by making false claims, you must let your stakeholders and customers know about such spurious profile-impersonation, answer to any comments made by them on behalf of your organization, and handle the damages made in a positive way.
Also periodically review all your security and publication settings on the social media sites, to ensure that no one can tag your name and publish information on your behalf, without your permission. This will stop others from accidentally publishing any information about you or related to your organization, that you do not want to be viewed online.

2. Create an Ultra-Strong Password

Using a good password is another means of securing your social media and other related websites. However, this is not a one-time procedure. So after choosing a secured password, update your password regularly, to stump hackers who are trying out millions of possibilities to crack into your account.

An ideal password should always contain:

  • Both capital and lower cases
  • Have at least one number
  • Include at least one symbol

According to a report published by Digital Guardian one should avoid using dictionary words and identifying information (e.g. anniversary, date of birth etc.) and instead use the first words of a phrase along with a number and a special character to create a password, which most often becomes the hardest thing even for the phishing aficionados to crack. For an example, take the first words of the phrase “A stitch in time saves nine” and create a password “Asits9!”, which is not only a hard password but also a secret code that is easy to remember at all times.

Also, change your password every month and never share your password using cloud networking services, digital documents or on paper, whether by accident or on purpose, for optimal security of your accounts.

3. Allow Access to Only Those Who Need

Cull everyone in your organization who does not need an access to your accounts. Extraneous access by people who do not need a direct access to your accounts, allow hackers another avenue to gain access to your data.

For an example, never give any individual other than your company employees the ability to edit or post a guest article on your blog, but instead let them send the documents to you for publication, which you can upload, to remain on top of this practice.

4. Keep All Devices and Software Updated and Secure

In most cases, we only think about updating our devices and software when something goes wrong or when we want a new and exciting feature that can cater to our need. However, this is wrong. Most updates are actually security fixes, which are released as a security patch when a program’s developer learns of a security hole in the software. Therefore, if you want to keep your device and account safe download and install the updates as soon as they are out. Else, you will be leaving yourself open to security holes that are already fixed.

However, you must remain careful about fake downloads which have always been a favorite strategy that hackers use to encourage the users to install something that is actually harmful to your business. Hence, to make sure that your updates are legitimate, only accept updates, which come from the software’s manufacturer that can be confirmed from the update information found in the software’s Help menu.

5. Use a Virtual Private Network

A VPN is a service that can greatly improve your online security, for a small fee. Technically speaking, VPN creates a secured virtual tunnel for the data to travel from the source to its destination, encrypting every individual data that passes through. Especially, companies, where multiple people or several devices are accessing the same account or information and accessing your company networks when working remotely, needs a VPN. In an article published by LifeHacker, it has been said, VPN is possible one of the best technological boons that make your device immune to most of the common hacking methods found online.

6. Move to Cloud

Cloud servers have become much more secure than ever. Nowadays many businesses are moving to cloud to protect their and their customer’s information online. Reputed cloud service providers like AWS (Amazon Web Services) which use a highly secured yet simple web service interface like S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web is often used by many businesses (like ConvergeHub), is an ideal way to enhance and empathize security of your data.

Apart from these, using software that provides encrypted database and is SSL certified are other means for keeping your company out of the harm’s way.

7. Train Everyone in Good Network Security Habits

Last but not the least; train your company’s workforce to identify threats such as phishing emails, spam, and potential ransomware. It is another key point to make sure that your data remains protected, and so your business reputation is not compromised.

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If you find these tips on cyber security helpful, do let us know of your experience in the comment box below.

10 Tips to Make Use of Influencer Outreach to Perk up Brand Visibility

Influencer outreach is definitely considered as a dominant asset when it comes to improving your brand’s visibility. Using content marketing strategy to scale up brand visibility is nothing new since you must have already used blogs and social media platforms to improve your brand’s outreach in the market. In a data compiled by B2C (Business 2 Community) research, it has been found that more than 93 percent of marketers use content marketing strategy for their business growth.

Influencer outreach is definitely considered as a dominant asset when it comes to improving your brand’s visibility.

Using content marketing strategy to scale up brand visibility is nothing new since you must have already used blogs and social media platforms to improve your brand’s outreach in the market.

In a data compiled by B2C (Business 2 Community) research, it has been found that more than 93 percent of marketers use content marketing strategy for their business growth.

However, adding an influencer to your existing marketing strategy will furthermore maximize your brand’s visibility, as it has been found that “It is the fastest-growing online customer acquisition channel, beating organic search, paid search, and email marketing.”

However, for SMBs managing and executing plans to use the influencers properly often becomes a difficult job, as small and midsize organizations need to handle and manage many activities- so using a trusted CRM Software, makes your work easy and hassle free.

This same study also suggested that 59 percent of marketers would increase their budgets in 2017 for adding more influencer marketers, which can increase the conversion rate by 3 to 10 times, by enhancing brand visibility.

Influencers are indeed marketing assets for brand awareness strategies you cannot ignore. The influencer’s public relations make their followers hang on their every single word and so their recommendations can serve to boost ranking, bring high-value inbound links, and accelerate growth.

Here are some tips as to how you can use influencer outreach for amplifying your brand’s presence:

1. Increase Marketing Efforts with Influencer Outreach

According to Jayson DeMers of Forbes magazine, higher authority links helps in enhancing your marketing efforts that help in boosting your search engine ranking and increase monetization.

Moreover, authoritative inbound links also aid in keeping your contents safe from real-time Google Penguin penalties.

It has been found that valuable influencer outreach assets can also be used for enhancing organic brand visibility using several engagements such as:

  • Develop influencer based survey plans to gain customer opinions for building new ideas
  • Gain feedbacks that help to maximize future outreach efforts
  • Making key influencers a member of your board or your marketing team to cultivate long-term business relationships

2. Let Your Influencer Tell Your Story

Do not let your influencer outreach strategy become spammy. You may lose potentially loyal customers if your influencer simply regurgitates content for the sake of analytics.

So look out and focus on these key aspects before beginning your influencer outreach initiatives:

  • Power of your influencer outreach over endorsements
  • Your brand’s reach versus brand engagement
  • Need for your brand’s story to be told through quality content

In other words, when you are deciding whether collaborating with an influencer will bring your results, consider the benefits of reach versus engagements for your brand while planning your social media brand awareness campaigns.

3. Invest In the Right Influencer Personas

For brand visibility and brand awareness, investing a sizable amount of time and identifying the right influencers is as important, as it is for identifying your buyer personas.

To improve brand visibility among the right audience, never select influencers based on their followers. Always collaborate with someone who matches your brand’s personality.

For an example, if you are launching an innovative kitchen product or service, your influencer should be in the realm of health and nutrition and not from technology. This helps to improve customer relations and thereby ensures maximum return on your marketing efforts.

4. Never Underestimate the Strength of Micro-Influencers

A powerful question was posed on Marketing in Forbes:

“Is it better to find an influencer who can connect the brand to 20 or 30 really meaningful decision makers, or are 10,000 page views more important even if the vast majorities aren’t really potential buyers?”

To answer the question it is advised that when developing strategic brand management policy never overlook micro-influencers.

According to Entrepreneur, although micro-influencers may not have a high volume, their engagement rates have more leverage to improve brand visibility due to the meaningful relationship that they tend to develop with their followers.

You can find micro-influencers by doing research across all social media channels and peer networks where the use of business management tools is very important. We have seen these influencers to use CRM for their own purpose as well and suggest the same to many other business owners who have benefitted from the implementation of CRM or shift from old legacy tools to latest CRM converged platforms.

5. Find the “Outreach” of Influencer Outreach

Although approaching the influencers with their best interest in your mind, is certainly the best approach, but never begins your relationship with your influencer with an attitude of “What can I do for you?”

This will only help your influencers to reach their goal first, and make them leave behind their objective of gaining access to their followers.

Primarily, approach your influencers with social media touch points by liking, commenting and re-tweeting their contents.

It is only after you have formed a solid ground, craft a meaningful pitch that is individualized to approach the influencers of your liking.

When you interact for the first time with your influencer, taking a note of these points will help in stabilizing the relationship:

  • Keep it short: Since influencers may not have time to go through lengthy notes, do not write long influencer outreach pitch.
  • Be a pro: Convey professionalism and be authoritative.
  • Be transparent: Think long term and remain transparent about what you want and will give in return to your influencer.
  • Be personal: Your pitch must have a unique element for each influencer. Never approach your influencer through generic emails.

6. Develop Industry Focused Content

According to Marketergizmo, influencers need your content to be of value to their audience. So in order to improve brand visibility through influencer outreach, you need to showcase your content to get your foot in the door.

Think about these tips before developing industry focused contents:

  • What will my influencer gain from this?
  • Will my content offer solutions to my influencer’s followers?
  • How will everyone benefit from this content?

7. Turn your influencers into Brand Ambassadors

According to Bill Sussman of Entrepreneur “Brand ambassadors are influencers hired by brands for long-term relationships. They differ from influencers, who might be used only for a short-term campaign.”

So if your influencers have become an essential part of your brand awareness and marketing strategy, turn them into long-term brand ambassadors.

This can be done by scheduling time with your influencers and engaging them across several social media channels. Cultivate a relationship with your influencers in a meaningful way, by interacting with them across several touch points.

8. Build Upon Public Relations

According to Small Business Trends, “When people are looking for specific advice, they usually turn to Google, which, in turn, surfaces posts that are oftentimes written by these influencers who have a hyper-awareness of their specific niche topic.”

With the growth of the platforms such as Quora and Medium influencer’s play a big role in taking any product to the masses with huge fan following and reader base.

So, influencers are key content experts in their respective fields who you can use for showcasing your white papers, eBooks, and blogs. Influencers help you to boost the quality of your contents for their own growth, which in turn improves your brand visibility by escalating your PR effectiveness and at the same time reduce your PR agency costs.

9. Influencer Outreach helps in Expanding Recruiting Efforts

The talent pool of any industry is always filled with skilled and high-value candidates. So when job seekers look for their next big career change they do online research and are often attracted to companies that provide the best influencer content.

In this case, while the influencers gain exposure, candidates gain valuable career advice from the influencers, which make influencer outreach as a recruiting tool and undeniable win-win platform for filling your team with the brightest professionals in your industry.

10. Repurpose Contents While Improving Customer Relationships

According to Search Engine Watch, create a strong FAQ page and once the page is in place, you can repurpose the same contents again using influencer outreach. It is so because, if your influencers answer the questions of your customers, it adds perspective and authority to your existing contents.

It has also been found that once you find yourself answering the same recurrent questions repeatedly, many times these type of information turns into good blogs.

Takeaway

So for maximizing nearly every aspect of your content marketing strategy, influencer outreach is indeed a powerful tool that can help you to maximize your brand’s performance in quite a few different ways.

If you find this article helpful for identifying the right opportunity with the help influencer outreach in your businesses, we would be glad to hear from you in the comment box below.

Tips to Persuade Your Fence Sitting Prospects to Get Off the Fence

There are also customers, who you may have come across often; people who ask many questions and do get engaged with your product, but then at the end fails to buy. Such ‘on the fence customers’ are most of the times quite difficult to convert, especially if you are running a business with a low return on your investments. Nevertheless, if you are still persistent, there are certain ways you can reduce the level of friction in engagement with these prospects and can convert them to customers by following a few strategies.

When any potential customer enters your website, four major things can happen:

  • The customer leave, never to return
  • The customer buys quickly whatever that you are selling
  • The customer calls you up and asks question about buying

And lastly

  • The customer just ‘SITS ON THE FENCE’ and do not take any action because the person is not sold

There are also customers, who you may have come across often; people who ask many questions and do get engaged with your product, but then at the end fails to buy.

Tips to Persuade Your Fence Sitting Prospects to Get Off the Fence

Such ‘on the fence customers‘ are most of the times quite difficult to convert, especially if you are running a business with a low return on your investments. Therefore, it is recommended that you should avoid spending your resources to convert these customers. Because most of the time you will lose money and time acquiring these businesses.

Nevertheless, if you are still persistent, there are certain ways you can reduce the level of friction in engagement with these prospects and can convert them to customers by following a few strategies.

So, in today’s post, we will discuss how you can motivate your website visitors who fall in this category and make them get off the fence.

Let the Prospects Be Your User Even Before They Buy

Let us discuss a much talked about global problem ‘software piracy’ to let you understand what we mean when we say that you need to let your prospects become your user even before they buy. For example, no other company has faced this problem of software piracy more than Microsoft Corporation– the maker of Windows OS and MS Office suit. In developing countries, where law enforcement is weak, it is extremely easy to acquire a pirated version of Microsoft products. But, what did Microsoft do about it? The answer is- Nothing. This is because Microsoft did understand early that a user of pirated Microsoft products is not, in reality, a lost sale. So in spite of talking tough in public forums, Microsoft secretly allowed these users from the developing countries continue to use the pirated versions, in the hope that when these users buy software, they will eventually prefer Microsoft.

So let your customer use your products or services free of cost for a limited period and at the same time persuade the user to buy. It has been found that in most cases these customers eventually hops off the fence and buy your product or service after a certain period.

Reduce Bounce Rate by Deploying Voice Calls and Discounts

It is very easy to locate a customer on the fence at a brick and mortar store. Once spotted, such a customer is usually converted with the help of a quick sales pitch by the sales representatives on the shop floor. However, unfortunately, this is not possible on a digital platform, where you can only realize a lost sale once the customer has left your website. Nevertheless, you can still grab these hesitant buyers by a few ways and make them interested in listening to your sales pitch. One easy way to do this is to place a ‘Call Back’ button prominently on your website so that these hesitant prospects can leave their details before they leave, which human representatives can, later on, follow up and increase the possibility of the sale.

Another way to reduce pre-sales friction is to identify website visitors who are attempting to exit at the payment gateway and lure them with exclusive limited-time discounts, to grab their attention and hasten the sale.

Humanize Your Products and Services

Sometimes just by reducing friction in reaching out or merely letting users get access to your services and products may not be sufficient to convert leads who are sitting on the fence. In these cases, the main reason why many such prospects do not get converted is their lack of inherent trust in your businesses. According to our experience in such a situation, the trick is to provide your customer with all the details about your business, which will not only humanize your service but also make your prospects feel relatable with your product line.

The Key Takeaway

It can be said over here that not all these strategies may apply to all kind of businesses. As ultimately, you need to understand your customers better to know why some converts while others remain hanging on the fence.

But we are sure; this market research will help you to devise specific strategies what will work on your customer as it has worked for us all along.

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If you find this article helpful, do share with us about your experience in the comment box below.