ConvergeHub Blog for 2017

Desperate Moves Ruin Sales show how a CRM Can Help

Once you are reading this article, we can very sure you must have seen sales scripts before. These are the Scripts which educates and show us exactly what to say to get a prospect’s business, in the shortest span of time.

Business Worries, learn How CRM can help in sales? Moves Ruin Sales show how a CRM Can Help, With ConvergeHub we are trying to prove the same. As you are reading this article, we can assume that you have seen sales scripts before. Sales scripts are wordage, which educates and show us exactly what to say to get a prospect’s business, in the shortest span of time.

But often what you should not say is also just as important, as to what you should.

There are hundreds of words, phrases and expression that sales people unconsciously use that are not only ineffective, but can also turn off the customer, right at the onset of the call.

Although, different industries have their own set of rules as to what is acceptable and what is not.

But still then, saying any of these 8 following phrases is most likely to hurt you when it comes to sales:

1. “Do you have 90 seconds?”

By saying these words in the beginning of a conversation, you might be trying to illustrate that you won’t take much of your customer’s time. Still, whenever you say this, always remember, you are starting your conversation with a lie. So, never try to makefalse promises right at the beginning of your call that you are going to break.

2. “I am going to be absolutely honest with you.”

Many sales people are in the habit of saying this clichéd line, because they often believe it to be an effective selling technique. But from the customer’s point of view, you words may not be too comforting, as the customer may think –‘if you are going to be honest now, does it signify that you have not been honest before.”

3. “I really need this deal.”

This is one of the wildest statements that sales people most often make while trying to close their deals. Never talk to your customer about your personal plights. It just makes you look pathetically desperate. Ask yourself, why should your customer care about what you are offering, when sales is all about solving your customer’s problems and not your own.

4. “Usually I don’t do this for anyone, but let me see….”

Although far too many salespeople think that it is one of the most effective way to close their deals- but it is not. The problem with statements like this is that most of the people can see right through these words. So it hardly works out.

5. “Harry, let’s take a look at this one. Does this sound good Harry?”

Nothing can be more infuriating than to listen to an unknown salesperson who keeps repeating your name over and over in an attempt to build a misguided rapport. It is always good if you took the time to remember your customer’s name, but better stay cautious before you repeat it too often. So know when and where to stop.

6. “I am just touching base.”

Just retire immediately if you have been using this phrase while making your sales calls. This phrase often obscures the real purpose of your call. So don’t say you are ‘just touching base’ as it makes you sound that you are making the call because it’s merely an obligation.

7. “My competitor’s products are awful…”

Badmouthing your competitor is one of the sure shot ways to turn off your customer. Of course, you must remain extra-vigilant while praising your competitors. But praising your competitor in a subtle manner, before pointing out the value difference between your and their products is always the best way to go, if you want to win over your prospect with a smile.

8. “Would you like some time to think over it…”

Telling this to a customer is practically saying in other words ‘Why don’t you get back, whenever you feel like’. So, using this sentence in a sales call often makes the sales person give the prospect a way to quickly end the conversation, by giving the would be customer time to think about buying your product or services on their own.

In a shocking study shared by Herb Greenberg,the Founder and CEO of Caliper Corp, who wrote in his book “How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer” along with Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney, comparing results from thousands of assessments, that:

“55 percent of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else.”

Here are some of the few other bad habits that in reality repel instead of selling to your potential customers:

Begging For a Meeting

While eagerness has been always healthy- desperation is not.

Pushing a prospect to meet is rather awkward, especially when the prospect has already expressed no interest in the sale.

Rather, it is better to ask your prospects“Do you not see enough value in for you to schedule with me another call?” However, if their answer is still negative, thank your prospects for their time and move forward with other promising opportunities in your call list.

Reaching The Solution Too Fast

In an ideal sales scenario, the potential buyers discover how your product or service is the best solution for solving their issues. So try to learn about your potential customer’s pain points and resist the urge to blurt out ‘we can solve that for you’, too early on the call.

Giving Ultimatums

Threats are no way to nurture business relationships. Although many sales reps weave words like ‘I’ll keep on calling you unless you are ready with an answer’ or ‘I will lose my job, if I don’t get this deal’, but these words often put the potential buyers in a really uncomfortable zone.

Always remember, a sales speech which accompanies the voice of frustration and fear is never the best way to make a customer feel good about your company.

Speaking With a Shaky Voice

If you are feeling nervous or chocked-up, your voice just won’t hide. So never let desperation creep into your vocal cord. Always take a deep breath and picture the confidence that you want to share with your prospect before picking up your phone.

Not Taking the Hint

It is true every time, that some sales processes simply don’t go anywhere.

Many prospects delete your emails and neglect your calls, without responding even for a single time.

So sending a dozen of emails or leaving ten different voicemail messages, especially if the potential customer has never responded to your first message, often comes off as a sign of desperation, which affects the future buying decision of the prospect in an unhelpful, negative way.

According to Sales Pipeline Management, any comprehensive sales process has steps which are required to be followed for how often and when one should ideally reach out to a potential customer, before deciding that they are no longer a fit as a prospect in the sales funnel.

Use CRM to take your sales to the next level. CRM is one modern day business tool, that not only keeps your sales process in mind, but it is also capable of incorporating these steps into your selling system, so that your sales team is capable of reaching out at strategic points of the sales process, helping reps to know when and how to knock on their prospects in time.

Do you know about any other bad habits that make sales reps look desperate?

If you do- share with us your story below.

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Learn how you can build trust and acceptance on the first meet with your potential client. With these three lessons in sales you can turn the prospect into a client.

How to measure Sales and Marketing KPIs in CRM

Customer Relationship Management’s KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are meant for evaluating the success of specific activities that an organization is engaged in, for the growth of its businesses.

How to measure Sales and Marketing KPIs in CRM that increase productivity. Customer Relationship Management’s KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are meant for evaluating the success of specific activities that an organization is engaged in, for the growth of its businesses.

KPIs in CRM are also elsewhere defined as tools which can be used by an organization to track the progress in its job and to rate the success in the accomplishment of its mission and plans.

The Key Performance Indicators in a company’s CRM consist of a number of predetermined measurable goals, which are deemed vital for its success.

However, to build an effective KPI which is also known as ‘Performance Metrics’, the organization’s goals must not be ambiguous, rather they must be realistic which can be expressed in measurable terms.

Even though there are several performance metrics which are vital in an organization, but still CRM KPIs are considered most important, as these metrics are data, which provide an early warning sign when businesses go off-track.

To begin with, over here in this article we are going to primarily deal with CRM KPIs that measures Marketing and Sales activities in SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses), which can be found mainly in these three areas of operation:

Leads
Sales Opportunities
Account Activities

LEADS

Although, the most important KPI in the Leads section of the CRM platform is to measure the number of leads that has been generated over a period of time, but then again, to get a better vision of the performance index we need to focus on from where these leads were compiled.

The most common and tried subheads which can be used to segregate the origins of accumulated Leads are:

Website generated Leads
Social Media generated Leads
Sales Team generated Leads
Referral generated Leads and
Leads that have been generated from other miscellaneous sources

In order to measure the KPIs from these multiple databases first and foremost, we must set a monthly target against which the measurements are periodically checked for assessing the up and down trends.

Measuring ratio over time for every quarter or checking for Year on Year results are also often performed by organizations with the aid of these data- when one is looking for viewing the business trends.

It is important to say over here, all the CRM users in the organization should make use and fill in the ‘Source’ field while registering any Lead in the CRM to obtain these crucial KPIs, as and when it is required by the organization.

SALES OPPORTUNITIES

Sales Opportunities much like Leads is also measured as an integer, but using a CRM we can also track measurements such as:

Value of an opportunity against a number
Value and number of opportunities at each stage of the sales process (For example: the initial stage, the demonstration stage and the closing stage)
Estimated closing dates
Average value of sales
Average open days for an opportunity and
The number of opportunities received from existing and new clients

As modern CRM systems are highly customizable, hence users can easily configure their CRM to reproduce the exact report that they need.

Also, for most sales opportunities as the biggest question that arises in our mind when sales calls do not close easily is- ‘What is happening next?’, one must make sure that one can see this easily in their CRM reports, which can also be considered as an important part of CRM KPIs.

Other than the above stated KPIs, organizations can also measure several other parameters using CRM such as:

Moving Annual Total or the Average monthly value of total opportunities in the pipeline
Track the sales closing ratio and work on the Win/Loss reason
Use CRM to stay in touch with lost opportunities, schedule follow-up call after 3 to 6 months (since no one knows if the lead is completely dead).

ACCOUNT ACTIVITIES

For the Accounts team, CRM can help the team members to measure KPIs based on the number of new business face-to-face meetings per month done by each team members in the group.

CRM can also aid in tracing the number of sales calls made per day/week against the targets and even measure the aggregated time of the real calls made against calls that went unanswered by the customers.

In Accounts Activities, CRM can also be used to compare the results of different team members, once every team member has got a common reason for making the calls and have use some common terminology that can be viewed and understood easily.

Take Away

Even email marketing campaigns finds an upper hand when CRM is used for automating the email marketing tools.

One can easily measure email marketing KPIs such as newsletter open and read rates, offers opened and its read rates, which helps in measuring marketing expenditures spent in dollars against businesses that have been generated by using a CRM that has email marketing tools integrated in the platform.

So if your goal is to keep track of all the touch points with your customer and use KPIs as measurement benchmarks, CRM is the best place you can find them all under one single roof.

If you are interested in knowing more, write back or comment below to let us know of your questions- so that we can help you to resolve your wants.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM

We all CRM users have often faced several cumbersome situations when we have to distract our mind from the CRM platform just to make a phone call from a different telecommunication system, wishing all the while if these two applications can be merged.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM has been one of the biggest USP for us. While working on CRM platform, users often face situations when they have to call the customer or lead, and so they have to login to a completely different telecommunication system just to make that phone call, wishing all the time that these two applications could be merged.

Saving time and money are two major concerns for all of us in every vertical of the industry, for improving workflow and productivity.

ConvergeHub as a SMB CRM development organization has all along invested heavily in building strategic partnership with several third party applications, which can help in saving the customer’s money and time.

As a latest example of this vision, ConvergeHub has recently integrated Skype with ConvergeHub CRM, for all its customers who were seeking an advanced combination of experiencing cloud telephony along with CRM functionality within the Customer Relationship Management platform.

According to a recent report, Skype has 74,000,000 users all across the globe, out of which 35% of SMB owners use Skype as their primary communication service. This undoubtedly makes Skype enter the league of some of the most used VoIP apps, perfect for people who want to have a reliable voice service for effectively managing customer phone calls.

So integrating Skype with ConvergeHub, whereby users can dial and log calls through Skype inside the CRM, is a smarter way for enhancing collaborations, enriching customer interactions and boosting workforce productivity.

Benefits of using Skype with ConvergeHub

1. Click-to-Dial facility

Save you time, you can now initiate calls to all your CRM leads with a single click of the mouse. So no more hassle of switching between devices or screens.

2. Advanced Call Control

Check the customer’s number and the duration of your conversation in your CRM screen after disconnecting your call.

3. Gather Customer Information

Gather all the relevant information regarding your leads in the sub-panel of the ConvergeHub CRM screen, which help in ensuring optimal customer interaction.

4. Speed Up Workflow

Plant now and harvest later. Dynamically create new contacts and add other necessary information of the customer while on call with prospective leads within ConvergeHub CRM.

5. Record Call Logs Automatically

Keep a track of all conversations with prospective customers and leads with automated call logging in ConvergeHub History tab.

Make use of this information for generating call-detail-analysis as per your need.

6. Quick and Hassle-free Installation

Installing Skype in ConvergeHub just takes a few munities. All you need is a Skype login credential to get started, with no tedious setup process to ruin the productive hours of your day.

Steps-By-Step Guide for Skype Integration with ConvergeHub

1. Click on the User Icon

2. Click on Admin Settings

Steps-By-Step Guide for Skype Integration with ConvergeHub 3. Expand “App Setup” section in the left panel.

4. Click on “App Store” option.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM Step 3/4 5. In the “App Store” page “Skype Call” App purchased by the user, is displayed in “My Apps”.

Skype Call” app purchased by the user, is displayed in “My Apps 6. Go to “Sales” Menu and click on “Leads”.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM 7. Enter the listing page of “Leads” module. Click on any Lead to view the details.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM Step 7 8. Click on the “Skype” icon beside the phone number to initiate the outbound call via Skype.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM Step 8 9. Popup will open up to launch Skype. Click on checkbox to ‘Remember’ the selection.

10. Click on ‘Launch Application’ to open Skype.

Skype Integration with ConvergeHub CRM Step 9 Calling to the specific Lead using Skype app.

11. Save Call Disposition “Status” and “Note”.

Call Disposition Status in Skype Call Through ConvergeHub CRM 12. The “Call Disposition Status” and “Note” will be logged in the “History” tab in the sub-panel of the Lead.

Convergehub CRM Call History Check We hope that you have liked this extremely useful and much sought-after integration.

So take a few minutes to test this now in your ConvergeHub account. We will be waiting to hear your say on how you are using these new additions in the comment box below.

6 Lead Scoring Techniques That You Should Use With Your CRM

When most of us start implementing inbound marketing, the primary concern that worries most of us is finding enough leads in the sales funnel. But then once that is over, and we have a lot of leads, what concerns us more is trying to figure out who are really interested in our products and services and who have just started to look around. This is exactly where the Lead Scoring process comes into action.

Best Online lead management software that can help any business. 6 Lead Scoring Techniques That You Should Use With Your CRM ConvergeHub. When most of us start implementing inbound marketing, the primary concern that worries most of us is finding enough leads in the sales funnel.

But then once that is over, and we have a lot of leads, what concerns us more is trying to figure out who are really interested in our products and services and who have just started to look around.

This is exactly where the Lead Scoring process comes into action.

How Does Lead Scoring Work?

Lead scoring is a process, which lets us assign a value or a certain number of points against each leads.

These points are based on professional information that we have received from the leads, which is measured by how they have engaged with our brands and websites across the internet.

Lead scoring helps the marketing and sales teams prioritize and increase the conversion efficiency of the leads.

Each organization employs a different model for assigning points to score their leads. However, the most tried and common way of calculating the lead scoring points is using Logical Regression Analysis for creating this value system.

Lead Scoring Rules

Although it apparently seems very easy, your lead scoring process can quickly become complicated depending on your business model and the number of leads in your database.

So, let us guide you through the basics of creating a lead score and suggest what data you should look for and how you can find the most important attributes for creating a lead scoring spreadsheet.

Types of Data Used For Creating a Lead Scoring System

- Demographic Information

Ask questions pertaining to the demography of the visitors in the forms on your website’s landing page. You can use the answers to see how well they fit with your target audience, whom you want to sell your products or services.

If you are selling only to a certain age or geographic location, with this information you can give a negative score to any lead that falls into a category where you don’t sell.

Similarly, you can also award an extra score if someone has provided optional information on your form field (e.g. phone number).

- Company Information

If you are trying to sell to a certain type, size or industry, you can also ask questions like these in your landing page.

For example, if you are more interested in selling in B2C or B2B organizations, you can give points to leads that fit with your target audience and take points away from who are not what you are looking for.

- Online Interaction

Looking at how a lead interacts with your website can provide you with many interesting facts about those leads that have already purchased your products or services. Take a look at their online interactions.

Find out which pages and how many pages they visited on your site before becoming your customer.

Comparing this data with your new leads may help you to provide a higher score to those leads who visited the high-value pages in your website (e.g. pricing page) or have filled out a high-value form (e.g. demo request).

Similarly, you can also provide a higher score for those leads who had 40 page views on your site, compared to who just visited 3 times.

We all know how leads often change their behavior over time.

So if a lead has stopped visiting your website or have paused downloading your offers, you can take away points from all the non-engaging leads while measuring your lead scoring statistics, after a certain period of time.

- Email Engagements

Email opening and click-through rates (CTR) often gives a better idea of the interest level of your leads.

You can give higher scores to the leads who seem most engaged with your products and services and have clicked through your high value emails (e.g. special/seasonal discount offers).

- Social Engagement

The amount of engagement a lead shows with your brand on social networking sites can also give you an idea as to how much interest the lead is generating for buying your products and services.

Find out how many times your leads have clicked through your company’s Tweets and Facebook posts and award them points according for perfecting your lead management tool.

- Spam Detection

Lastly, you can also provide a negative score to all those leads who have filled your landing page forms in an improper way, which may sometimes indicate that those leads are spams.

For example, if the company name, first name and the last name are not capitalized, you may assume that those leads are not serious. Else, you can also see which type of email addresses, your leads are using (is it a personal or a company email) and take away or add points to your leads.

You can also create an Attribution Report of your previous customers and see the conversion path that your existing customers took before they became your customer and set your predictive lead scoring numbers accordingly.

According to research done by Marketing Sherpa, it has been found that:

When any fresh lead is added to the database, an average of only 27% of these leads will eventually qualify to a point where they will be ready to interact with sales. The rest, 73% who have not reached there yet, have to be nurtured further.

The most common scoring system followed by most lead management software is:

Lead scoring System 2 At times, many organizations also use Lead Grading techniques, which can be really useful ina B2B marketing setup.

In the previously said lead scoring technique, we can learn only about the level of interest of the leads based on their types and number of interactions, but it will not tell anything about how fit a lead is for closing the deal.

To do this we need a separate letter based grading system, which is most commonly used by all lead scoring CRM platforms.

In other words Profile Fitness statistics of any leads are only used to increase their lead score.

For example, Level A which indicates a great fit, is provided to C-suit employees and owners of an organization who has more budgetary control, while Level E indicates people who use free version of the software and does not have enough financial power and budget for a paid subscription.

Here is a typical Profile Fitness table use by many B2B organizations:

Lead Scoring System 1 In this diagram, leads which falls in the category ‘A1’ can be demarcated for subsequent follow-up by the sales team, whereas ‘A4’ can be nurtured further by email and ‘E2’ does not warrant a call unless the lead interacts more.

Conclusion

Every business as per their requirement and previous customer accusation experiences need to change the threshold scores for understanding when they will pass on a lead to their sales team as a marketing qualified lead.

So, if you find this article helpful and effective for your business, tell us about your thoughts in the comment box below.

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Top Lead Generation Tactics We Love

Lead generation defines the process of stimulating interest about a product or service in the target audience, for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. However, in contrast to the earlier times, most businesses find it challenging now to generate high quality leads. That’s because, they still use old school ways to generate sales opportunities. This blog describes the 8 new-age tactics that businesses should use to double their leads inflow into the sales pipeline.

Top Lead Generation Tactics We Love to use these days. Lead generation defines the process of stimulating interest about a product or service in the target audience, for the purpose of developing sales pipeline.

However, in contrast to the earlier times, most businesses find it challenging now to generate high quality leads. That’s because, they still use old school ways to generate sales opportunities. This blog describes the 8 new-age tactics that businesses should use to double their leads inflow into the sales pipeline.

You’ve got the best product or service on the market but you’re still struggling to keep the ship afloat.

You’re not alone…

80% of businesses report that their lead generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective. (BrightTALK)

There are so many options out there when it comes to lead generation but all are not created equal. Some work really well and some don’t work as well – each business is unique therefore results will vary.

This list breaks down 8 different lead generation techniques and how you can incorporate them into your business as early as today:

1. Social Media Marketing

Social media is all the hype these days. But the question is, does it really work?

You’re probably looking for a definitive answer to that question — the answer is it depends. The crystal ball isn’t so clear in this case; results will vary for each business.

Social media marketing is a great way to give your brand a presence online, connect with your customers, and position your brand as the authority in your niche. There are upwards of two billion users amongst all of the major social sites – this is a huge opportunity for you to get in front of your customers.

There are so many platforms to choose from. Here’s a list of the most popular social sites and what they’re good for:

Facebook

Great for B2C and B2B
Monthly users as of March 2016: 129,658,552 (Hootsuite)
More than 1 billion people use Facebook daily (Hootsuite)
E-commerce features (buy button, sign up, etc)
Facebook ads available for your business
Can help with driving online sales, increasing local sales, increasing brand awareness, promoting your app, finding leads, and social customer service (Hootsuite)

Snapchat

Great for B2C
76% of Snapchat users purchase things online
100 million daily users
7 billion video views per day
Intimacy at scale — Snaps provide a personal window into the way you and your friends see the world. (Hootsuite)
Passionate and engaged audience

Great for B2B networking
50 percent of users have some form of higher education (Hootsuite)
Knowledge and information sharing hub (Hootsuite)
Allows like-minded people to find each other, form communities, and network professionally (Hootsuite)
Position yourself as a thought leader

YouTube

Great for B2C marketing
Monthly users as of March 2016: 215,690,880 (Hootsuite)
Over 1 billion users
2nd largest online search engine

Twitter

Helps you increase brand awareness
Discover what’s happening right now (with your customers, in your community, with your competitors, and in your industry)
Engage with customers
Peek into the minds of industry leaders

Great for B2C
Huge female user base
Popular amongst creatives and used heavily to get inspiration for different life events (weddings, birthdays, baby showers, homes, etc)

Instagram

Picture-based
Highly engaged and more likely to click on ads than any other social network
80 million photos are shared daily on Instagram (Hootsuite)

So how do you decide which platforms to focus on for your brand? Great question!

Again, the picture isn’t crystal clear here. The real question to ask yourself is ‘who do I serve?’ and ‘where do the people I serve hang out?’

The answers to those questions can give you some direction. The idea is to spend more resources on the social media platforms that can give you the most bang for your buck.

LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the best social media platforms out there, particularly for B2B sales lead generation.

Here’s a look at what Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot has to say:

‘’Our customer research showed that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor to lead conversion rate (2.74 percent), almost three times higher than Twitter (.69 percent) and Facebook (.77 percent).

First and foremost, LinkedIn has a high percentage of professionals, so the likelihood, especially for B2B marketers, that you’re dealing with people in your target audience is higher than some other channels. Moreover, LinkedIn Groups are organized around the concerns and challenges faced by many buyers and/or their geographic location and profession, so LinkedIn makes it easy to view and contextualize what your potential buyers are talking about and tailor content on your LinkedIn Company pages accordingly.”

When you’re prospecting on social sites, particularly LinkedIn, you want to base your strategy around giving value and building genuine relationships with people.

Contextualize what your potential buyers are talking about and create content that is highly shareable and relevant. Ideal content for social media include things such as quick tips or demonstrations, these kind of posts foster engagement and position you as the expert in your field.

Tip: Use RocketReach to find upwards of 250 million email addresses and phone numbers. If you’re using LinkedIn, for example, you can copy and paste the LinkedIn URL for that profile into RocketReach and it will find the email address and phone number for you.

The best part about this is that it’s free up to 3 contact lookups per month.

Their paid plans are extremely reasonable as well should you need more searches. You can also just search by the name or company to get contact details and get directly into the inbox of the people you need to talk to – instead of sending your messages to a general mailboxes such as hello@acme.com or info@acme.com.

2. Email Marketing

Do you have a monthly newsletter? If not, you’re missing out on one of the simplest and best ways to generate more leads.

Newsletters are an essential part of lead building strategy. They can make a huge impact in your business starting day one because you’re capturing customers in the most intimate way possible – directly in their inboxes.

Customers who receive email newsletters spend 82% more when they buy from the company. (iContact)

With that in mind, try to work this into your lead generation strategy. Get in the habit of emailing weekly newsletters out to your target market. Avoid fluffy content, trashy sales pitches, and the dreaded “spammy” mail.

Only hit ‘send’ when the e-mail is rich in information and provides a ton of value to your target market. This will keep your potential customers engaged with your brand, keep them opening your emails each week (as opposed to opening just one and realizing that it was junk mail), and keep them coming back to buy more and more from you.

Incorporate pictures, stats and quotes in the newsletter to make it visually and mentally appealing to your readers.

Also, include relevant links to your website and social media profiles. To ensure your newsletters convert, add multiple call-to-actions (CTAs) throughout the newsletter (naturally work these in without sounding too “salesy”). Examples of CTAs include: comment below, take our survey, follow our Facebook page, like us on Instagram.

Tip: Use ConvergeHub CRM to run your newsletter lead nurturing campaigns. From monthly newsletters and special offers to personalized follow-up emails – you can send it all. Choose from a set of pre-defined templates within the CRM or use the editor to customize the email templates specific to your requirements.

You can track the performance of your email campaigns in real-time by using ConvergeHub’s campaign summary feature. Here’s what you’ll be able to see:

Number of recipients
Number of people who have opened the e-mail
Number of people who have opted out
Number of people who have clicked on the CTAs
Number of invalid e-mail id (if any).

3. Press Releases

Write press releases to gain media coverage, grow a follower base, strengthen brand image and drive leads inflow. Topics can include anything newsworthy about your company, some things to include are: new product launches, special events, new website, partnerships, prominent new hires, opening of a new location or office, co-branding initiatives and so on.

Do not brag excessively and keep the language neutral. Include contact name, email address, and phone number in the release so readers know where to find your business locally or online.

98 percent of journalists go online daily—with 73 percent of them looking for press releases. (Middleburg/Ross survey)

Try to submit your press releases to distribution sites that publish content across the web. You want to make sure the distribution sites you’re submitting to are publishing your content to the right industry-specific sites.

In addition to this, reach out to the press directly. Search for reporters and editors that cover your industry. Connect with them via email with your news pitch.

To do this, you can use sites like Just Reach Out or HARO to find reporters that are covering industry-specific topics.

Tip: Include press mentions in all of your marketing collateral such as handouts, brochures and newsletters. Post company news in your social profiles and publish all of your press releases to your website. Associating your business with other outlets (press mentions) that your potential customers already know, like and trust (KLT factor) will instantly spark a sense of familiarity and trust between your brand and the consumer. Once they know, like and trust you – they will buy from you.

4. Webinars

44 percent of companies use webinars as one of their principle ways to generate leads. (B2B Lead Generation Survey, Chief Marketer)

Webinars have been the latest craze lately and for a good reason.

Hosting a webinar is one of the most promising ways to generate qualified leads. Most small and medium sized businesses prefer it over other methods because they are inexpensive and very effective.

A webinar can get your brand in front of thousands of potential customers who are more than willing to lend a little bit of their time in exchange for increased knowledge on a particular subject.

You should schedule some time to sit with your team, do some brainstorming and come up with a great webinar idea. The key here is to come up with an irresistible webinar topic that leaves your ideal prospect in awe even after the webinar has ended.

Think of what’s trending in your industry, what your ideal customers want to know, or what’s often misunderstood – those make for great topics.

Just like email marketing, the key to a successful webinar is to avoid selling. Your webinar should offer real value to potential customers. If your webinar is offering real solutions to real problems, people will sign up to attend it. Make sure your topics are informative and promote the webinar to your list and across social media to ensure the greatest turn out.

Tip: Encourage your attendees to take action at the end of the webinar. Whether that means downloading an e-book, signing up for your newsletter, or visiting your website. Also, make sure to have an automated drip sequence following your webinar to keep in touch with attendees and continue to build the relationship even after.

5. Business Lead Generation Tools

61 percent of enterprises and 46 percent of small businesses use in-house and external sources for lead generation. (MarketingAdvocate)

There are great resources out there that can help you generate leads for your business. Let’s take a look at a couple: LeadCrunch and Cliently.

LeadCrunch uses artificial intelligence to analyze your customer data and help you target the right contact at the right company at the right time with the right message.

Cliently helps small business owners close more sales by finding new clients and increasing sales conversions. Cliently warms up the lead for you so you can close the deal — you can do things like re-tweet or follow a lead on social media. And it’s all done automatically!

Both of these resources can dramatically transform your business and have a lasting impact on your bottom line.

6. Content Marketing

On average, B2B marketers allocate 28% of their total marketing budget to content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute)

This statement precisely explains how important content marketing is for lead generation. Educational and informative content, if marketed well, can stir up the industry. Content marketing allows you to bring in a heavy influx of leads daily.

Create blogs, e-books, whitepapers and case studies with a clear voice, targeting a well-defined audience. Keep it rich with information. This will enable you to win the trust of your prospects and ultimately their business.

Tip: Optimize your content as a lead generation tool. Use newsletter signups and content upgrades to capture visitors’ email addresses.

7. Podcasts

Podcasts are a great way to position yourself as the authority in your niche. Not only do podcasts give you an opportunity to share your story or the story of your company; it gives you the opportunity to connect with your ideal customer.

Podcasts can reach masses of people in your niche. This is the perfect opportunity to pitch yourself as the expert in your field.

Being featured on a podcast as a guest can elevate your brand and take your business to new heights.

You can be featured on many podcasts without eating up too much of your bandwidth – do the interviews from the comfort of your office.

Your ideal customer will have the chance to connect with you on a very intimate level. The KLT factor applies here, once listeners feel like they know, like, and trust you – they will become your customer.

To make the best out of podcasts, you want to make sure that you’re prepared. Know a little bit about the podcast, the host, and the audience. Think of ways you can provide value beforehand. Get your team to create a custom landing page specific to that podcast’s audience where they can go after they listen to your episode to get more information.

Your strategy has to be clear and well-defined.

8. Industry Events and Meetups

Industry events are extremely important. The power of personal connection is deep so make each connection meaningful and long-lasting. Make sure to get business cards of each business contact you meet at each event. Try to follow up with each of them within a couple business days following the event to keep the conversations going.

The key is to continue building the relationship, not following up does the opposite of that.

ConvergeHub has shortcuts to create new leads and contacts within the CRM. You can use the quick create forms to add leads and contacts into the CRM in a few seconds.

While your competitors are busy entering piles of information into their CRMs, ConvergeHub’s quick create forms speed up data entry and relieve you from tedious, repetitive behind-the-scenes work. You can focus your time on the things that matter most – connecting with leads.

Now that you’ve incorporated new lead generation strategies into your sales process, how do you manage them?

Lead management is just as important as lead generation. Keeping leads in spreadsheets on your local hard drive is no longer a reliable or efficient method to store your data. Using a converged CRM, like ConvergeHub can help you keep all of your leads in one central repository where you can manage them from anywhere.

Unlike many other CRMs, a converged CRM, like ConvergeHub allows you to do a quick data import and import and manage potential deals with minimal mouse clicks.

In just five simple steps, you can import your leads, contacts, accounts and deals into a ConvergeHub. Check out this blog that explains the entire ConvergeHub importing process with step-by-step instructions.

Impressed with ConvergeHub’s list of lead generation strategies?

Comment below to share your what lead generation methods have and haven’t worked for you.

How to Improve Performance by Customer Experience Management

Presently, customer experience has become one of the hot topics, both in B2B and B2C industry. And with this a vast array of outside resources have also suddenly became available to help organizations to understand and improve their CX (Customer Experience).

How to Improve Performance by Customer Experience Management, A discussion at the Leaders in CRM for SMB. Presently, customer experience has become one of the hot topics, both in B2B and B2C industry.

And with this a vast array of resources has also become available to help organizations to understand and improve their CX.

According to the Gartner report, 89% of companies will be competing mostly on the basis of CX by 2017, versus 36% four years back. In the same report, it has also been noted that 86% of buyers will pay more for feeling a better level of customer experience, whereby only 1% of customers presently feel satisfied with their vendors, who has consistently been able to meet-up with their expectations.

So, you are not alone if you have been wondering whether your customer experience efforts are in the right direction.

Here are some simple questions that you can ask yourself to gauge whether the work in your organization is on target to meet up with the needed customer experience for your organizational growth:

Can your internal team answer a few basic questions about customer experience management like:
- What makes you unique?
- How do you earn consideration from your prospective customers?
- How do you demonstrate why you’re the best option for them?
- How do you protect your customers as they buy?
- How are the voices of your customers, advocates and detractors present in your decision making?
- How do you deliver on your promises?
- How do you anticipate your customer’s next need?
Do you have the required metrics in place that can help you to measure the value of your experience for a customer?
Are the majority of your CX efforts focused on addressing the customer’s pain points?

If you are not happy with the answers to the above stated questions, consider these 4 following things you can do, to ensure your customer experience management efforts are in the right direction, and will yield results that pays off.

#1. Define the Issues That You Solve For Your Customer Better Than Anyone Else

Be extremely clear on the facts as to what problem you solve for which customers. Always remember understanding the pain points of your customers is of more importance than what you sell.

This type of thinking also helps to stop you from being marginalized by upcoming new technologies and new market entrants.

Since, as businesses evolve and technologies change, if you stay focused on the emotional and tangible needs of your customers, you will gradually understand which problems you solve better than anyone else in your businesses.

#2. Pay Extra Attention on Ideally What Should Happen For the Customers As You Solve Their Need

Focusing your efforts and attention in finding out what will happen to your customers once you solve their needs, will make you reach a future state which is much more compelling.

In other words, don’t just focus on current situations and pain points, but look beyond, which will help you in minimizing wasted efforts in the long run. Try emailing simple and easy to read EOBs (Explanation of Benefits) to the customers so that they can tell you how they got benefitted once their problems and pain points disappeared.

However, don’t think your customer’s will tell you how to create an ideal customer experience, since customers can never envision what they need and so any attempt to make them do so can prove fruitless.

Actually, a customer does not see a need for improvement once their specific problem is solved. Who could have described an Android phone 15 years ago? Hence, it is your job to develop innovative and ground breaking ideas after focusing on the EOBs.

#3. Focus and Identify the Critical Moments in the Customer Experience

A ‘Critical Moment’ is the point in the customer’s journey that has a disproportionate impact on the failure or success of their journey. So, by focusing and identifying on this moment, which matters the most, you can always find the biggest wins with the least amount of effort.

For this, you can develop a customer experience measurement system that will help you to measure values your customer derives and then translate them into increasing your organization’s performance. For example, many organizations in the recent times use customer satisfaction scores for measuring how customers are responding once their problem is solved.

Critical Moment analysis is best achieved by using a single and unified CRM platform that spans through all customer touch-points, as opposed to the numerous siloed customer relationship and marketing software that saddles marketers with multiple fractured images.

#4. Spend More Time on What You Need To Stop Than What Needs To Be Created

Though it is harder said than done, focus your time on investigating and eliminating things that hurt your customer experience or things your customers do not actually value or want.

Since, if you stop developing things that your customers do not care about, you can free up resources to fund other impactful activities that will help in improving your product or service’s CX.

For an example, if you find that your customers are not reading your newsletters and company reports, or have never felt the need to use certain functionality in your system, stop creating them.

In other words, cut the unnecessary to propel your customer experience management with something that is required and is in demand by your customers, to reach a new level in CX.

Not an existing ConvergeHub User?

Be one of the many thousands of businesses using ConvergeHub to manage their entire operations. Easy and effective – the best part is you get started with it in minutes.

Learn about ConvergeHub CRM through the following ways:

Thank You!

P.S. Twitter is a great place to reach us.

https://twitter.com/convergehub

Looking forward to see you there also.

Double Your business Productivity In 3 Months with CRM

As business productivity is on the decline which leaves many entrepreneurs worrying about the growth of their businesses. In experts’ opinion, entrepreneurs need to look for CRM software tools that streamline the process and make them and their team more productive. Although there are several software choices available, converged CRMs top the list of best online productivity tools. This blog walks you through 5 effective ways that showcase the benefits of using converged CRM to increase your business productivity.

Double Your business Productivity In 3 Months with CRM and gain more leads. As business productivity is on the decline which leaves many entrepreneurs worrying about the growth of their businesses.

In experts’ opinion, entrepreneurs need to look for CRM software tools that streamline the process and make them and their team more productive. Although there are several software choices available, converged CRMs top the list of best online productivity tools.

This blog walks you through 5 effective ways that showcase the benefits of using converged CRM to increase your business productivity.

“If only there were more hours in a day…”

Is this something you tell yourself daily? If so, you’re not alone!

For 69% of business entrepreneurs, ‘more time’ is something they keep wishing all too often. (Aberdeen)

Despite the earnest desire to check off all tasks on the to-do list, failure is achieved at the end, most of the days, which brings us to the MILLION DOLLAR question:

How can Business Productivity be increased ?

The path to achieving productivity might sound difficult but in all actuality, it’s not. A Converged CRM can help you achieve this.

To better understand the benefits of a converged CRM and how this can transform your business into a productive machine, let’s take a closer look below.

1. 360-Degree Customer View

Do you have your customer information stored in multiple offline and online applications?

If so, do these applications propel you forward as an asset or push you back as a liability?

On an average, you and your team spend (or rather waste) three to four hours on extracting, referencing and analyzing customer data. These labor-intensive tasks hinder the company’s ability to grow.

New-aged converged CRMs streamline customer data from all touchpoints within the centralized repository.

You’re able to see all customer information in one place. From your marketing targets and sales leads to existing customers and business contacts — all information is contained in the CRM.

Using a converged CRM, you bid adieu to the routine of spending hours trying to tie customer information from multiple databases into your CRM. You have real-time visibility and can easily get a comprehensive view of your customers in a timely fashion. Consequently, this increases productivity of your marketing, sales and customer service departments. Critical decisions are made quickly, based on accurate 360-degree customer information.

2. Email Communication

In an eight-hour work day, 2.64 hours is spent on emailing. (Management Issues)

There are two reasons behind this — multiple applications are used to fetch data and emails are constantly being checked.

Both of these activities consume one-third of a day’s work.

How do you stop emails from reducing your productivity?

A converged CRM enables you to send and receive emails from leads, contacts, accounts and partners within its interface. Instead of repeatedly going to your email service to communicate, you can integrate email clients of your choice with the CRM and make it a one-stop hub for all your business communication.

Sending and receiving emails directly within your CRM is a fantastic way to save time and effort and shoot up your productivity. While working in the CRM, you can check if your prospects and customers have responded to your messages. Furthermore, you can combine email with context and analytics present within the CRM. The analytics will help you write more powerful emails that foster better responses from your contacts and prospects.

You can track the sent emails and get insightful reports on whether your emails have been delivered, opened, and read. This ensures that there is no room for guess work when you’re sending hundreds of emails to leads, prospects, and contacts every day.

ConvergeHub CRM perfectly illustrates this point. It allows you to manage all incoming and outgoing emails within its repository.

You can also view email history, track the status of the emails, reply all, and forward emails within the CRM.

3. Meetings

Money and time spent on the road and in face-to-face meetings cost UK companies a staggering £15,979 per head, every year. (powwownow.co.uk)

Multiple surveys have been conducted which point out how physical meetings adversely affect the overall productivity and increase expenses in a business. Most businesses hold virtual meetings that avoid unnecessary travel.

Scott Cairns, Chief Technology Officer at T-Systems states,

“We are now conducting business in a digital age, where rapid innovations in communication capabilities make the world a smaller place day by day. Despite these innovations, our first thought is often still to arrange a physical meeting, even though technology could circumvent this necessity, and lead to a more productive and better facilitated meeting experience. Virtualization of the meeting experience is very much a cultural change, just as it is a technical change.”

Converged CRM solutions offer the functionality of doing quick web conferencing anytime anywhere! From screen sharing to HD video conferencing and audio conferencing, you can conduct online meetings with your clients, colleagues or business associates even if they’re across the globe.

How does this create value for your business?

Increased productivity with ample time savings! Whether you’re at your desk or vacationing to a remote island, you can quickly conduct any type of business-grade web conferencing session with leads and customers or even your own team. All you need is an internet-enabled device to access the CRM and hold the meeting.

4. Call

When customers are looking for a quick resolution, phone is the preferred method of communication followed by email. (Kana)

The good news is that most businesses offer phone support for their customers. The bad news is that it’s the most time-consuming form of communication for businesses.

Businesses fail to provide immediate solutions to customers over the phone. Customer-facing agents hop back and forth across multiple business applications but still fail to get a comprehensive data view of the customer’s situation. Businesses can’t judge the context of the current interaction and provide a speedy resolution, in most cases.

As a result, customers are forced to repeat their story, over and over again, to different customer service representatives. Here’s the statistic:

69% of customers say they have to repeat themselves multiple times before reaching a resolution. Indeed, reaching a resolution takes an average of 3 tries. Almost 2 in 10 customers call their experience a “customer service death spiral,” requiring at least an hour of repeated explanations. (Kana)

Prolonged customer conversations over the phone turn out to be dually-destructive. They impact the overall business productivity where a single call ends up totaling two to three calls. Plus, customer service falls apart as well.

How this can be resolved?

During calls, support reps need to be equipped with the right customer information that enable them to provide immediate solutions, close the case quickly and switch over to next customer in minutes.

Converged CRM software solutions such as ConvergeHub provide in-browser calling capabilities to its users (Click to learn more). This seamless alignment of phone functionality with CRM shuns the tedious task of switching between your customer data platform and telecom system while calling a contact.

You can directly make calls from the CRM interface and refer to contextual information and interaction history for better response and engagement. You and your team are in a stronger position to understand your customer’s problems. This helps you resolve issues quickly, make more calls, connect with more customers, and increase the overall productivity.

5. Calendar

Do you have sticky note syndrome? Have you forgotten to complete a task or attend a meeting because you didn’t have the right tools to keep track of them?

You’re not alone!

Whether they’re events such as meetings, seminars or appointment; or tasks like emails to customers or reports, missing out on them put a damper productivity.

Converged CRMs let you put an end to task and event mismanagement.

They allow you to:

Create activities (associated with leads, accounts, contacts, products, invoices, quotations, deals, etc. ) for weeks, months and even for a year
Check tasks and events based on their due dates
Schedule, reschedule, organize, add and edit your tasks and events
Switch between day view, month view and yearly view of the calendar as desired
Share your calendar with the team

And most importantly…See your upcoming tasks and events.

Manage your daily activities in a converged CRM and be ahead of time. Even when the day is hectic, you can plan and prioritize your appointments and tasks which lead to increased productivity.

Next Step…

Want more productivity in your business?

Comment below and let us know how you plan to be more productive in the new year.

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What Account Managers Are Doing Wrong and How To Fix

We all know how hard it is to find customers. Converting leads and prospects often takes more than a few days or even months. So keeping hold on the existing customers is one most important objective that we all dream of, for keeping our businesses running hale and hearty over time

underperforming sales team, innovate and learn What Account Managers Are Doing Wrong and How To Fix it. When we have a difficult situation in any organization. We all know how hard it is to find customers. Converting leads and prospects often takes more than a few days or even months.

So keeping hold on the existing customers is one most important objective that we all dream of, for keeping our businesses running hale and hearty over time.

But, keeping all your customers happy is not also an easy task. So, when customers are unhappy, it usually has more to do with your sales team and your account manager’s communication and relationship than anything to do with the actual work.

Some minor missteps may always be an excuse that could have blown up a relationship with your customer. But more often than not- it’s just an excuse and not the main cause.

According to some of the famous online influencers in sales and marketing, it has been noted that over 95% of the time, when accounts go sour, there is always an account manager in the process, who is guilty of at least more than one of these traits:

Over-pleasing the Customer

Agency people are often blamed for being people pleasers. There are even many who may care more for their customers than they do think about making profits for their agency.

This is exactly where the trouble begins.

When being admired is the goal, your account manager can be involved doing work for free.

The customer puts in a new deadline, and your account manager can be eager to make everyone in his team to work overtime to fulfill the customer’s goal.

In other words, the customer drops the ball and your manager picks it up.

However, in most of the cases, these extra work never gets translated into extra billing.

So if you find that your billable ratio and top line sales are plummeting down because some account manager is paying more attention to a certain customer, put an instant check on it, as this can be one major reason for less business development in your agency.

Worse than this, under these circumstances, customers often feel that your work is worth less than you are charging, for else why would you do so much for no additional cost?

Now, if this said account manager leaves or is re-assigned, the customer will surely complain that your fees are too high or your services has slipped- spelling serious trouble in maintaining business and customer relationship.

Just Unable to Say No

A close cousin to the people pleasing account managers are managers who just cannot say “NO”.

Although the manager may swear to you that he did. But you may not get a knowledge of this problem till the time you are performing a retainer review, when you will find that all projects for a customer have gone over budget and so you are loosing on your profits on this retainer.

You can also most often find that under this circumstance the scope of work has changed, with no revision in the order and budget.

So, when account managers get too close to the customer’s team, loyalties often gets confused and the motivation to keep the customer happy can over-ride your profits.

When account managers make this type of mistake, organizations go through challenging times to stop it and there is also a 50-50 chance that you will most often lose the customer when your manager do so.

Not Being Truthful

Well, over here we are not talking about outrageous lies or fraud, we are talking about situations when you bite your tongue, because you are not ready to handle the fallout, if you tell your client the whole truth.

Mostly in these cases account managers tries to put on a marketing band-aid while addressing such problems, which makes the customer feel disappointed when the campaign rolls out.

So in fear offending the customer, never allow your account manager to make short term peace, which can add some bad name to your business portfolio that you will not be proud of.

Encourage your account managers to make hard calls- a good customer will always respect you for that.

Using Overtly Effusive Communication

It is always nice to tell your customers how much you love their business or what you have done for them to develop a strong relationship, but effusive compliments made by account managers on mediocre results often leads to disastrous consequences.

For an example, when account managers who counts on personal charisma to wow their customers fails to deliver results and have to leave the company, clients often feel that they are duped and then feel angry.

In this circumstance the client easily perceives that the account manager’s enthusiasm and compliments were insincere. So do not entertain account managers who use effusive communication with the customers unless they have proved their worth in the company.

Taking Sides

There is always a difference between throwing your team under the bus and accepting responsibility for your agency’s errors.

Account managers who always blame and shame their team mates often compromises the trust of their team.

Customer relationships are also often doomed when account managers undermines their colleagues. This happens because, when customers become aware of the manager’s bullying tactics, they create mountains out of molehills by demanding billing concessions and extra work.

Stay on Equal Footing

Last but not the least, never allow your account manager to confuse a customer’s feedback with your company’s intrinsic values and abilities.

Educate your account managers that best campaigns come about when both the agency and the customer see each other in equal terms. Never allow your account managers to put the agency in a subservient role.

Conclusion

Now that you know about the habits of a toxic account manager- Put a red alert to make your managers stay out of these practices. Since if your manager is up to any of these you can be sure that your next account is doomed as well.

Not an existing ConvergeHub User?

Be one of the many thousands of businesses using ConvergeHub to manage their entire operations. Easy and effective – the best part is you get started with it in minutes.

Learn about ConvergeHub CRM through the following ways:

Thank You!

P.S. Twitter is a great place to reach us.

https://twitter.com/convergehub

Looking forward to see you there also.

How To Create Email Templates That Convert

If you are an entrepreneur, you must be probably aware that email marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal that can bring potential growth in your businesses.

How To Create Email Templates That Convert and bring more business. If you are an entrepreneur, you must be probably aware that email marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal that can bring potential growth in your businesses.

But, before you start selling to your audience, you must know who are your ideal customers, where they are from and what they are willing to buy. If you can get this right, you can easily see an increase in ….

– Email click rates

– Email opening rates

And finally (what you have been looking for all along)

– Landing page conversion rates

But, this is not an easy task. For, just creating a simple opt-in form seldom creates enough solid base for your email marketing campaign to stand on.

In reality, you need proven and actionable steps that will not only attract subscribers, but make them open your emails and most of all – ACT- on your messages.

Fortunately, help is here.

Today, we are going to show you how you can create profitable email templates that really convert, and also keep your subscribers hungry for more.

As at the end, it is the email designs that separate the winners from the losers, when your only desire is to convince your email recipient to hit the Call-To-Action button on the mail.

You may say: “But I am not a designer?”. We are really glad that you mentioned that, because the simple truth is – You really don’t need to be one.

In fact, if you are capable of understanding a few of the key elements of any email, like email layout, screen responsiveness, color psychology, and some of the coolest online photo designing tools, you can always create email templates that are working today in multiple disciplines and industries all across the globe.

Many well-known email marketers like Ed Gandia name these email templates as “warm emails”, where each email campaigning template is personally handcrafted, making it way ahead different from the other emails that hit the recipient’s mailbox.

So, here is how you can take your email to the next level- from a white bread campaign to a five star emailing experience.

#1 Place the Content in the Right Order

As more than 40% of US iPhone users read their emails for 0-3 seconds, so the most actionable area for information is considered to be ‘on top of the fold’. This means that every single little pixel on top of the fold counts.

So, it is most important, that the area which lies on top of the message needs to contain a very clear, but a non-intrusive Call-To-Action message for the recipients.

#2 Make It Appeal To The Eye

Many a times, we all have opened emails being sent with bad color choice, poor quality of photographs and lack of interesting media.

But, the ground reality is, when you are selling any product or services online, you need to capture your customer’s attention with beautiful email designs. Here are a few key suggestions, as to how you can do so:

- Always ensure that you upload good quality photographs on your email templates. Even if you don’t have a professional graphic designer by your side to assist you in building your email campaign templates, try to make your photographs look interesting by using free online photo enhancement and editing tools.
- Always choose your template colors with utmost care. A recent study done on colors and how it affects our brain, has revealed that men tend to like brighter colors while women prefer more neutral shades. So take the right color into consideration while designing your email templates. If you are unsure about what color you can apply to your email templates that will evoke the right emotion which will suit your target audience and your product, here is one example you can find helpful that can help you to dive deeper into the colors and their individual psychologies.

Color psychologies

#3 Don’t Underestimate GIFs

GIFs are becoming increasingly popular within emails nowadays. It is so, because GIFs most often do an excellent work for presenting information in a more palatable way while showcasing a product in action.

However, always take into account that your GIFs are not distracting from the actions that you want your customers to take and so are in-context with what you want your readers to do after opening your email.

#4 Make it Responsive

Developing email templates that are not designed for viewing both on mobile and desktop is like putting a big sign on the door of your e-shop reading “Mobile Viewers Not Welcome “.

According to a recent survey, it has been found that 1st and 3rd most popular email client’s in the US are iPhone and iPad mail apps, respectively. So, if your email template is not responsive, more than 80% of your customers on most occasions will delete your email- once it doesn’t look good on their hand held devices.

So, designing a responsive email template means creating a template that is proportionally scaled and optimized for all devices it is viewed on.

Here are a few golden tips that you can do to make your email templates responsive:

- - Opt for HTML emails
  - Add ALT tags to images
  - Include a link on the email to a web-based version
  - Bring your styles inline
  - Use lots of tables nested together
  - Slice the images and link them separately to the email

#5 Keep To The Right Size

Always optimize your emails so that they are neither too long nor too short. For it is needless to say, emails that are too short, mostly gets directed by all popular ISPs to the customer’s SPAM box.

Again, emails which are too long often gets truncated (cut off) after they have reached the maximum size. For an example, Gmail is one unforgiving web mail service which displays only 102KB of the email and chops off the rest.

This means, if your email template is big, there is every possibility that most of your essential elements in your email (like your Call-To-Action button, tracking codes and unsubscribe link) may get truncated as a penalty for not adhering to the rules.

So, as a rule of the thumb, keep your emails within ≥ 500 words to avoid them getting flagged as SPAM.

End Note

All said and done, now that you know how you can create beautiful email templates that will keep your visitors coming back for more, write to us if you have any other suggestions- we are always here to learn anything new.

Not an existing ConvergeHub User?

Be one of the many thousands of businesses using ConvergeHub to manage their entire operations. Easy and effective – the best part is you get started with it in minutes.

Learn about ConvergeHub CRM through the following ways:

Thank You!

P.S. Twitter is a great place to reach us.

https://twitter.com/convergehub

Looking forward to see you there also.

How to Increase Sales with Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most useful ways to spread the word about your product and services and build up your brand. Furthermore, if it is done properly, it helps in increasing sales and bringing more businesses.

How to Increase Sales with Email Marketing, A lesson and plan needs greater insight to be benefitted. Whether you’re trying to sell information, services or physical products, email marketing can bring incredible results.

Email marketing is one of the most useful ways to spread the word about your product and services and build up your brand.

Besides, if it is done properly, it helps in increasing sales and bringing more businesses.

You will be surprised to know that according to a market survey report:

“Black Friday email marketing services are considered as one of the major lead magnets and drivers of sales, which contributes to more than 25.1% to the bottom line of businesses- on that day alone.”

So you see, email marketing really does make sense.

This is because, an email that you send to a list which you have built, allows you to communicate directly with people who have requested information about your product and services.

However, if you have been running an email campaign that is not showing any results, or is not as desirable as you thought it would be, try improving on the points listed below.

Here are a few golden tips on how you can increase your sales by fixing some common email marketing loopholes that you might have overlooked:

Write an Appealing Subject Line

The subject line is always the first thing that your email marketing recipients will see, so it must be done in a right way. To stand out among all other emails that your recipient has received in the inbox, an email with a well-written, enticing and intriguing subject line most often compels the recipient to explore the email further. As per statistics:

“67% of marketers say that delivering highly relevant content with a click-bait subject line is a strategic goal their organization wants to achieve through email marketing.”

– MarketingSherpa, Email Benchmark Survey, 2013

Always, take your time to think and find out the right subject line that will tempt the recipient to open your email. The best way to do so is to think of what would have enticed you, or has appealed to you personally, to open an email and buy from a company.

So, while writing the subject line of your email, avoid using words that trigger the recipient’s spam filter like, “Help”, “Free”, “Percent Off” and others.

Include A Clear and Simple Call-To-Action

Writing down a clear call-to-action, could make all the difference between a successful and an unproductive email campaign. Never try to confuse or overwhelm your email recipients.

Always be focused on one and only one specific call-to-action. Also, be sure that your call-to-action content should be highlighted prominently on the upper half of your email. A good call-to-action is the one, by which the recipient can understand why and what they are clicking, on the subject matter of your email.

Optimize Your Email for Handheld Devices and Mobiles

Mobile marketing is the latest uptrend of the day. So, as nearly everyone has access to their emails through mobile and handheld devices, always make sure that your emails are properly optimized for mobile viewing.

Test your emails, on mobile devices even before sending them. Emails that are optimized for mobile viewing can be easily accessed by your recipients. Also make sure, if you are linking any page through your email campaign, it is also optimized for viewing on mobile and handheld device.

Send Your Emails at the Right Time

To increase your email campaign’s click-through rate, the day and time that you are sending your emails is also an important aspect while trying to increase sales with email marketing.

For an example, for B2B marketers, the best days to send marketing emails are usually Tuesdays and Thursdays. During these days, since most people remain at work, they are more likely to access their emails.

However, when your products or services are targeting B2C segments in the market, you can always find that your particular audience may respond better on a different day of the week or at completely different times.

Hence, run your tests on different days and time. And then track your end results, which help to pinpoint exactly when you should send your emails.

Create a Landing Page for Every Email Campaign

According to The Landing Page Course:

“Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. As we’ll see, this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.”

So, there is always a requirement for a specific landing page for your email to focus on, rather than linking your email campaign to a general page. This is so, because when you use a specific landing page, you can tailor the landing page to the exact message in your email- resulting in more conversions.

The landing page is the place where your email recipients will “land” when they click on the inbuilt link in your email.

Landing pages can include your main website page, a specific product related page or even a webpage created specifically to highlight a single email campaign.

You must also let your recipient know at all times, where your email link will take them. And they should always receive more information on your offer(s), once they reach the landing page.

It is essential that your landing page should tie-in and add consistency to your email, which essentially measures the aesthetics of your email campaign.

Conduct A/B Testing

The best way to optimize your Open Rate and CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is to conduct a A/B testing. It’s always recommended that you should try out different designs, subject lines and contents in order to figure out, what works best for your email campaign.

Ideally, try to send out two versions of the same campaign, so that you can find out what can be changed to improve your email marketing results.

According to Neil Patel:

“A/B testing can enable you to make careful, focused changes to improve your conversion rates.”

So, tweak your email, according to the A/B testing results, until you find the right kind of conversion ratio that you are looking for.

Endnote

We are sure, once you focus on all these aspects for your email marketing campaign, you will surely find an increase in your sales through stronger engagements with your target audiences.

If you find these email campaigning strategies helpful in increasing your sales- share your experience with us in the comment box!

ConvergeHub Knowledge base Features Focused

Times have changed and so have the rules. In today’s world, digitally savvy customers seek seamless and personalized experience right from the beginning of their interaction with any business establishments.In stark contrast to traditional plain-vanilla CRMs new age converged CRM technology like ConvergeHub use Knowledge Base as a tool for handling customer support tickets.

ConvergeHub Knowledge base Features Focused as the Times have changed and so have the rules. In today’s world, digitally savvy customers seek seamless and personalized experience right from the beginning of their interaction with any business establishments.

Nowadays, marketing, sales and support are no longer watertight compartments. But, they are a unified entity that aids in providing a holistic support to the customer right from pre-sales inquires to post-sales distress calls.

To experience stellar growth in business, which is mostly the result of providing excellent support to the existing customers, small and medium business houses need to implement best customer support technology that can handle each and every customer complaint in the shortest possible time.

According to an article published in BizReport (2015 Aspect Consumer Experience Survey) 76% of the consumers view customer service, as a hardcore reality test of how much a company values them.

Thus, it is high time that businesses look for a robust technology that can help them embrace a customer support strategy, for winning more customers and retaining the existing ones.

In stark contrast to traditional plain-vanilla CRMs new age converged CRM technology like ConvergeHub use Knowledge Base as a tool for handling customer support tickets. Whereby, the system helps in cutting down man-hours, while doing the same kind of tasks.

Knowledge Base is a repository of answers to frequently asked customer complaints and inquiries which are stored in the cloud for replying back, with the aid of canned messages.

Benefits of using the Knowledge Base

The first and foremost advantage of using this automated built-in feature is that it helps in resolving similar customer support issues in the minimum possible time.

It also empowers the customer facing agent to eliminate manual data entry and thereby make way for utilizing their working hours for other customer centric activities, which eventually results in fostering better relationships with new and existing customers.

The customer support agent can also edit and modify the canned messages in the Knowledge Base and add attachments for supplementary information, before replying to the queries.

Also, built-in automated alerts and notifications found in ConvergeHub CRM helps the customer agents to manage timely follow-ups, which makes the customers feel that the company is proactive and attentive to their needs.

Who are in need of Knowledge Base?

As an example, IT, Telecom, FMCG, Accounting and Insurance firms, where juggling endless complains and questions of multiple customers is most essential, using Knowledge Base aids in quickly resolving repetitive common complains of the customers.

Reusing FAQs using Knowledge Base hence just not meets what the big enterprises need. But it is also the need of the hour for most small and medium CRM vendors, who want to understand the voice of the customers and provide exceptionally fast solutions to their clients.

Are you are still wondering how you can use Knowledge Base and be a brand differentiator, by expanding your support skills?

Here is a step by step illustrated guideline, which will make you learn how to use this exceptional feature in ConvergeHub CRM.

1. Click on Knowledge Base from the Service Menu

ConvergeHub CRM Knowledge Base

2. Write or Add Subject
3. Choose or Add Category
4. Write the body of the message
5. Attach files (if required)
6. Click on Save

Procedure of Knowledge Base from the Service Menu 7. View Knowledge Base Listing Page to perform Add, Edit and Delete functions

Knowledge Base Listing Page to perform Add, Edit and Delete functions

8. Add Case
9. Attach files (if required)
10. Check on “Send notification to Account/Contact” and “Send notification to Assigned User(s)”To send alerts and notifications
11. Attach canned messages from Knowledge Base by clicking on “Insert from Knowledge Base”

Attach canned messages from Knowledge Base by clicking on “Insert from Knowledge Base

12. Attach the canned message from the Knowledge Base pop-up

Attach the canned message from the Knowledge Base pop-up

13. View inserted Canned Message from the Knowledge Base
14. Check on “Send notification to Account/Contact” and “Send notification to Assigned User(s)”To send alerts and notifications
15. Click on Submit button

View inserted Canned Message from the Knowledge Base Now that you have learnt the ropes, hope you’ll find the use of Knowledge Base easy and effective.

We would love to hear your feedback.

Not an existing ConvergeHub User?

Be one of the many thousands of businesses using ConvergeHub to manage their entire operations. Easy and effective – the best part is you get started with it in minutes.

Learn about ConvergeHub CRM through the following ways:

Thank You!

P.S. Twitter is a great place to reach us.

https://twitter.com/convergehub

Looking forward to see you there also.

Remember Search features launch for ConvergeHub

You have have always asked for a functionality in ConvergeHub CRM that will remember your searches with a single click of the mouse. So, here it is now!

Remember Search features launch for ConvergeHub

The final countdown is on!

Tomorrow, we will be launching the much awaited Remember Search feature that will completely change the way you do your searches in ConvergeHub.

This is just the feature that many of you have been asking for – and we can hear your shrieks of excitement, all the way up to our office in California!

You have asked for a functionality in ConvergeHub CRM that will remember your searches with a single click of the mouse.. and we obliged.

Knowing that having to search again and again for the same information is annoying in a busy working environment, we at ConvergeHub, have introduced a SINGLE CLICK Remember Search functionality that:

Remembers Your Last Search Results Even If You Have Left The Search Results List Page And Have Moved To A Different Page or Module In ConvergeHub.

Note: You can even click on a specific row of the search results List page to visit the Detail page and after viewing its detailed contents navigate back to the search results List page, and your search results will still be there for you.

There’s More:

If you have searched for certain values in any module and have clicked on the Remember Search checkbox, and then moved to any other modules and have made individual searches, while also checking on those Remember Search checkboxes- all the individual search results will be retained in all the modules, no matter how many times you have jumped back and forth between them.

Watch this short video to learn how you can use this all new Remember Search functionality in ConvergeHub:

Here is a step by step guide with screenshots, on how this functionality can be used in ConvergeHub:

Open any Module that has Search functionality
Click on Advance Search and add your search criteria
Click on Search button and your search criteria will be displayed in the Current Search Window

Advance Search ConvergeHub CRM

Check the ‘Remember’ checkbox to remember the search criteria and search results

Remember Search ConvergeHub CRM

Visit any other Module or Page in ConvergeHub
Go back to the previous Module, where you had searched
See that the remembered search criteria and search results is retained

Search Criteria ConvergeHub

You can even remember previously saved searches from Saved Search functionality. To do this:

Click on Saved Searches dropdown
Select any Saved Search from the dropdown
The Current Search section displays the Saved Search criteria

Saved Search Criteria ConvergeHub

So apart from the Advanced Search section which helps in:

– Displaying all the search criteria you have searched and

– Saving a search criteria in Saved Search dropdown as needed

The Remember Search functionality in ConvergeHub CRM helps in remembering and retaining the search criteria and the results of your search, in all the modules individually, till your work gets done.

If you have any suggestions or questions on this functionality, write here in comment section. We are always here to help.

Not an existing ConvergeHub User?

Be one of the many thousands of businesses using ConvergeHub to manage their entire operations. Easy and effective – the best part is you get started with it in minutes.

Learn about ConvergeHub CRM through the following ways:

Thank You!

P.S. Twitter is a great place to reach us.

https://twitter.com/convergehub

LEADS

SALES OPPORTUNITIES

ACCOUNT ACTIVITIES

Take Away

How Does Lead Scoring Work?

Lead Scoring Rules

Types of Data Used For Creating a Lead Scoring System

Conclusion

1. Social Media Marketing

2. Email Marketing

3. Press Releases

4. Webinars

5. Business Lead Generation Tools

6. Content Marketing

7. Podcasts

8. Industry Events and Meetups

#1. Define the Issues That You Solve For Your Customer Better Than Anyone Else

#2. Pay Extra Attention on Ideally What Should Happen For the Customers As You Solve Their Need

#3. Focus and Identify the Critical Moments in the Customer Experience

#4. Spend More Time on What You Need To Stop Than What Needs To Be Created

1. 360-Degree Customer View

2. Email Communication

3. Meetings

4. Call

5. Calendar

Over-pleasing the Customer

Just Unable to Say No

Not Being Truthful

Using Overtly Effusive Communication

Taking Sides

Stay on Equal Footing

Conclusion

#1 Place the Content in the Right Order

#2 Make It Appeal To The Eye

#3 Don’t Underestimate GIFs

#4 Make it Responsive

#5 Keep To The Right Size

End Note

Write an Appealing Subject Line

Include A Clear and Simple Call-To-Action

Optimize Your Email for Handheld Devices and Mobiles

Send Your Emails at the Right Time

Create a Landing Page for Every Email Campaign

Conduct A/B Testing

Benefits of using the Knowledge Base

Who are in need of Knowledge Base?

Company

Product

Resources

Solutions

10X Hub