Year: 2017

Golden Tips for Closing Deals with ConvergeHub in Partner-Client Opportunities

Teaming up with the right partner can bring enormous success for your company. Hence, if you are capable of working with the right industry leaders and understand how to work this valued partner relationship in an effective manner, like we do at ConvergeHub, your products, solutions, or services are more likely to be chosen than that of other vendors to address your partner’s customers’ business needs.

Teaming up with the right partner can bring enormous success for your company. Hence, if you are capable of working with the right industry leaders and understand how to work this valued partner relationship in an effective manner, like we do at ConvergeHub, your products, solutions, or services are more likely to be chosen than that of other vendors to address your partner’s customers’ business needs.

Nevertheless, when you are working with your partner, it is extremely important that you should always strive to pose a sense of balance between two goals:

  1. Closing deals with the customers and work towards new businesses and
  2. Strengthen your hand by ensuring a long-term relationship with your partner.

Although at times achieving this balance can be challenging, however, if you are prepared, you can take a few additional retainers into play, and thereby successfully win deals and relationship in partner-client opportunities.

Enhance your existing relationship within your partner’s company

The more trust you are capable of building with your partner’s company the smoother the process will run between you and your partner in the end. Therefore, if you still do not have a strong relationship with your partner, make it strong. Do it in advance and not right before walking into a meeting with a prospective customer of your partner’s choice.

Enter with confidence and expertise

Understand your industry expertise (for example, for ConvergeHubCRM it is CRM) and never be shy on highlighting your expertise during the sales meetings, whereby you can add the most value for your presence during the sales calls. While it can be true, that your partner may be an expert in his or her domain, make it implicitly clear that you are the right person who holds the right knowledge about your product offerings to your partner and his or her customers who are there to buy from your brand.

Remember different stakeholders have dissimilar business goals

It must be considered, that in the majority of partner deals you will face multiple key stakeholders- both in your partner’s and customer’s company, where you are selling your product or services. Hence, be mindful of different deliverables, agendas, timelines, and goals. The better you are prepared and can understand the needs for each of your stakeholder’s desired outcomes, the better off everyone will feel at the end of the deal.

Consider a working relationship

Primarily, understand that the customer is always the highest point of value for contact, in any business relationship that you are entering. Hence, even if your partner has brought you the opportunity, both you and your partner should understand, providing the optimal solution to the customer, should be the first and foremost agenda in your to-do list.

Secondly, it is extremely necessary that you must involve your partner’s subject matter expert or client account executive(s) since they are the ones who are likely to know their customers the best.

Thirdly, take advantage of your partner’s trusted internal business advisors; they can always assist you in navigating the client relationship and untangle any issues that may affect the sales cycle.

 Develop a strategic sales engagement process

Having a reliable sales engagement process in place ensures that every business interactions you have with your partner include the goal of a sale.

In ConvergeHub, we have proven sales engagement processes in place for customers of different industries and size, in order to get ourselves engaged with them most effectively. Be patient, yet confident and clear about your processes, since both the client and your partner might have different business requirements and approaches in their mind.

Hence, while trying to close a deal in partner-client opportunities, describe your process to your partner first, showcase your successes and build momentum with your partner’s internal sales champions, which will help them to go into a successful pitch with their clients.

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If you are interested in growing a business partnership with ConvergeHub CRM, you can easily fill in the reseller’s application or write to us in the comment box below.

We at ConvergeHub provide our partners with numerous sales tools, persuasive Power Points, market info, detailed competitive matrix, recognition, special spiffs, promotions, and more to reach their desired business goals.

 

3 Reasons Why Creative Agencies Should Use CRM

We understand creative agencies do not always feel in the same way as a business selling a physical product does. In fact, creative agency owners sometimes even do not conjure up the same mental imagery that retail sellers do and so may not feel the need for using a platform to improve their efficiency. Nevertheless, there are valid reasons why creative agencies should adopt CRM since this technology marvels around organizing and streamlining information and enhancing customer engagements. Here are three specific reasons why your agencies need a CRM.

We understand creative agencies do not always feel in the same way as a business selling a physical product does. In fact, creative agency owners sometimes even do not conjure up the same mental imagery that retail sellers do and so may not feel the need for using a platform to improve their efficiency.
Nevertheless, there are valid reasons why creative agencies should adopt CRM since this technology marvels around organizing and streamlining information and enhancing customer engagements.

Much like any other businesses a creative agency also need to have a regular flow of customers to sell their beautiful arts, witty slogans, or stunning designs. Hence, without a constant and reliable way to manage and engage leads, creative agencies can find fewer customers, which may consequently affect their ROI.

Comprehensive data analysis, data tracking, marketing, and communications help in keeping the customer and leads on track. Problems that can be easily solved with creative agency CRM software meant for advertisement, art galleries, event management, and other related creative businesses.

Here are three specific reasons why your agencies need a CRM:

Data, Data and Data

Given the many communication channels that all businesses use to interact with their customers nowadays, managing customer data can mean either amazing financial success or a premature death of your business.

CRM is a technology, which when accompanied by business practices and strategies solve this data management crisis, by serving a single platform for collecting and tracking every interaction that your team has with their clients. CRM helps your sales and marketing team view the same data by making them remain on the same page. It also allows your employees to quickly check your customer preferences and past concerns, as converged CRM as ConvergeHub provides a 360-degree view of your customers.

Moreover, creative agency CRM helps prevent data redundancy by removing data duplication in the process cleaning up old data from the database, which helps your team to maintain and update information with one integrated system.

Provide a Jump in Your Revenue Stream

CRM is proven to increase sales productivity, sales rate quotas, and even increase the size of purchases made by the leads. According to our findings, it has been seen that using ConvergeHub CRM, sales teams have seen a boost of more than 26% in their productivity.

In fact, these numbers get more interesting when sales and marketing teams have an access to mobile CRM like ConvergeHub. According to one study, more than 65% of sales reps hit their targets using mobile CRM technology versus 23% without the mobile CRM software.

From a creative perspective, agencies those who often have to focus on artistic pursuits have to bounce between several tasks at the same time, like creating art, designs, and contents, pitching the project to the customers and make necessary modifications based on their client’s requirements.

A CRM is a perfect tool under this circumstance, where it helps to maintain schedules of your employees so that your account executives will never have to miss a client’s call or forget when they need to contact a client once again.

Lead Segmentation

Although we all wish that this was not the case, the truth is, not all leads become your customers. Moreover, different customers, leads, and prospects have different priorities. CRM is a time-tested software that helps you to classify clients and thereafter allows your team to determine the level of attention needed by your clients, individually.

CRM helps in segregating hot and cold leads in your sales funnel, as lead and contact segregation functionality within a CRM is the best way to tackle this challenge.

As creative agencies have to meld sales with more artistic endeavors, in some ways, creative agencies have more to manage and juggle with their clients than traditional companies.

Due to the nature of the business, even the product of a creative agency has the potential to change during the customer’s journey, whereby a CRM is the best tool to keep your clients happy over the course of creation through to execution.

This is because one academic study found that “CRM is the most effective approach in maintaining and establishing relationships with customers.”

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Conclusion

Hence, it can be summarized adopting CRM can be a true game-changer for marketers of many creative agencies by connecting with their customers in one of the smartest, scalable and reliable ways to increase retention and boost acquisition of their business establishments.

 

Find More Value From Your Software With CRM Workflows

Workflow is the core building block of any CRM, which is an infrastructure, built on procedures and processes. Hence, for sound business management, here are three key recommendations to get started with workflows using CRM for enhancing your company’s growth and ROI.

It has been widely found that CRM system is mostly used for following up with contacts, doing bits and pieces of marketing, managing opportunities and relying on a few good reports. That is all. Nevertheless, Customer Relationship Management is a platform, which is capable of performing greater things once people who want to maximize the value of their investment, use workflows.

By getting proficient at setting up CRM workflows, you can tune your CRM system to run at its most productive level and use the software to automate tasks, which will ensure that you always get your work done, regardless of whether you remember to do them.

Workflow is the core building block of any CRM, which is an infrastructure, built on procedures and processes.

Hence, for sound business management, here are three key recommendations to get started with workflows using CRM for enhancing your company’s growth and ROI.

Workflow # 1: Website Visitors

When someone visits your website or business landing-page, you can configure your CRM to receive the visitor’s data and let the CRM send you an email, notifying you of the visit. Now, when the information is received, you can generate a workflow process to look at the information and assign a task to the sales reps who are in charge of that visitor’s region to follow-up the visitor on your website. You can also design an automated email that can be sent along with your product and service information and then if the visitor opens the email, a sales manager is notified to pursue every visitor visiting your site.

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Workflow # 2:  Trade Shows

Most businesses spend an inordinate amount of their revenue on trade shows and then do not do enough follow-ups. Workflows are capable of fixing this problem. Hence, when you return from your next trade show, be sure that you have all the contact information of every visitor who visited your booth, which most trade shows provide on a spreadsheet. Once you import the spreadsheet into your CRM, you can then launch a workflow to assign those leads to the right salespeople in your organization based on demographical preferences, specialty, or product line. Using workflow automation, you can even send a thank you email to the prospects who visited your booth and if no action is taken, ensure that a manager in your company is notified under such circumstances.

Workflow # 3:  Lost Customers

Every month create a workflow in your CRM system, which scans your database and looks for contacts who are in your existing customer lists and check their purchase history to run a drip email campaign educating your customers of your new products or services. In the same way, you can also create workflows in your CRM software, informing you of customers those who have not purchased your products for the last six months, so that you can nurture those customers who may have inadvertently fallen through the crack.

Setting up a workflow in a CRM system like ConvergeHub is not at all difficult. However, if you find that you are not an expert, do not let this stop you. Find and hire CRM consultants who are experienced with CRM applications and let them create and support the workflow that you need for your business.

Although, it may cost you a few hundred bucks, creating a proper workflow, it will surely provide you with greater business gains, and bigger returns on your investments.

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If you have liked reading this article, or want us to contact you for further knowledge on setting up workflows, write to us in the comment box below.

7 Ways CRM Software Can Help Besides Sales

Beyond tracking customer’s behavior and creating sales dashboards, CRM software is becoming a tool that is capable of providing support for other functions as well, which is far removed from the sales department. Therefore, if you are looking for ways and means to fetch more ROI out of your CRM investment, here are 7 ways that Customer Relationship Management software can be used, even beyond the realm of sales.

Beyond tracking customer’s behavior and creating sales dashboards, CRM software is becoming a tool that is capable of providing support for other functions as well, which is far removed from the sales department. The convenience and efficiency that CRM software offers in many cases have nowadays made it more of an operating system for several big and small businesses, rather than using it as a platform for single use.

Therefore, if you are looking for ways and means to fetch more ROI out of your CRM investment, here are 7 ways that Customer Relationship Management software can be used, even beyond the realm of sales.

1. Marketing

It is not altogether a surprise that CRM can also be an excellent asset for your marketing team. Beyond the ability to track customer-related communications and data, CRM is also helpful for the marketers in showing the effectiveness of their efforts. For example, CRM can easily show you how a specific marketing campaign is performing among your targeted audiences and help you to drill down to see who exactly became your new lead or customer, and which method can help you to convert these leads in the shortest possible time.

2. Customer Support

CRM is a platform, which stores customer information that can be shared with any member of the organization, which is especially important when a non-sales member of an organization is interacting with the customers. Hence, the members of the customer support team can use CRM tool, because they can have access to the customer’s personal information and purchase history, which can aid in providing a quality customer experience and help in sustained nurturing of the relationship.

3. Team Performance

CRM software is an excellent tool that can provide a real-time look at the performance of your team. Using a CRM your managers can view any agents’ activity, break it down by specific timeline, and also track the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the agent related to your company goals. This can allow the management to find out the gaps in productivity and make adjustments right away instead of waiting for monthly or quarterly performance reviews.

4. Recruiting and Onboarding

You may be surprised to know that you can even use a CRM much like a project management tool. It can help you to develop programmed workflows for establishing the application process when your talent acquisition team is recruiting and employing new people for your organization. In fact, CRM when combined with contact management features, makes it a perfect hiring tool.

CRM software can also set up a process for complete onboarding of your new employees, where you can use the task management and file sharing functionalities of the CRM. Although this is a less than common use of this software, however, if you are trying to save funds by running different areas of your business from a multi-tasking platform, then it is worth trying it.

5. Direct Mailing

Over the years, we have become so dependent on technology that our preferred modes of communication have changed as we have forgotten the use of paper and ‘snail mail’. In fact, receiving something by mail has nowadays become something special. CRM system can become your personal relationship manager and help you to decide when it is time to reach out to customers in a more attractive and engaging way, like sending an old-fashioned letter. With third-party integration, you can also automate a part of this process and trigger letters to be sent based on buying stages and appropriate lead scores of your customers.

6. Content Management

By now, everyone in online business understands the use and importance of content marketing in this digital world. However, it is not only important to create contents, but it is equally necessary to develop a plan for your target audience and create an editorial calendar based on the requirement. In many cases you can use your CRM as a tool for scheduling, managing and tracking your content marketing plans to make sure that your content calendar is full and ready to release the contents online, well in advance, and that you have the ability to track all your content assets through the CRM platform.

7. Product Development

There are several strategies you can use to even implement CRM software into product management; however, the system used depends on the requirement of the company. Managing feedback and communications from the customers allows Product Managers to find a better idea of what is working in the market and what can be further improved for development of the brand. Moreover, notes from user researchers can be logged next to a contact using a CRM, and if this information is pertinent to other team members, attention can be brought to redress the situation. Product Managers can also identify which customers can contribute to validate certain features in the products and then develop a roadmap that reflects the user’s voice while manufacturing new products for your brand.

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Conclusion

To end this discussion, your CRM is your best tool for you to manage your data quickly and efficiently. Hence, rather than viewing your CRM software as a sales management tool, start looking at your CRM as a customer intelligence and performance management software, which provides better customer support opportunities, increase team performance, aid in hiring your employees and help you managing your content marketing plans that ultimately cumulates in bring better revenue for your company.

3 Types Of Emails Which You Should Automate with Your CRM

Email automation is the perfect way to educate and move your leads, prospects, and customers through your sales funnel, with further wasting any more time. In a recent study done on sales, it shows that sales reps spend more than half of their time at the office doing administrative CRM works and another 29% of their time searching and creating contents to pitch their products and services, which eventually leaves them with just one-third time for actually building a relationship and achieving winning businesses.

Chances are there that your sales team actually spends less time than they should spend for selling your products and services. In a recent study done on sales, it shows that sales reps spend more than half of their time at the office doing administrative CRM works and another 29% of their time searching and creating contents to pitch their products and services, which eventually leaves them with just one-third time for actually building a relationship and achieving winning businesses.

Now, to ensure that your sales team can utilize more of their time in closing deals, it is important that you must leverage your Customer Relationship Management system. You should understand that CRM is just not the software used for tracking and managing relationships, but it is also an extra pair of hands in your office for all those things (apart from selling) that your sales need, but should not have to do once they implement a CRM platform.

One of the best CRM tools that fall in this category is email automation. Automating emails shaves down the prolonged numbers of hours that your reps would have otherwise spent on customizing emails and remembering to send them on time.
Here are three most important email campaigns that you can automate with a CRM to keep your customers engaged without even bothering for your constant manual efforts:

1. Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are meant for new subscribers and lead to introduce them to your brand. Creating and automating welcome emails can generate substantial ROI, as studies have proved that welcome emails are viewed three times more by subscribers than other subsequent promotional emails. Moreover welcome emails help in educating your prospects and are likely to weed out any non-interested parties through the unsubscribe link.

These are few points you should remember while sending your welcome emails:

  • Introduce prospects and leads to your brand’s products and services
  • Prepare your prospects and leads into buying your products or services
  • Encourage your leads and prospects to connect with your brand through other channels and opportunities
  • Provide your leads and prospects with basic incentives to buy your products or services

2. Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing with emails can be really tricky. For without an organized process, it is easy to find opportunities slipping through the cracks that can eventually inundate your leads with too little or too much communication from your side. Therefore, automate your lead nurturing process through email campaigns without putting too much pressure on your leads.

Here are certain things you can do in your lead nurturing emails:

  • Educate your leads and prospects what your brand is capable of doing for them
  • Tell them a story about your brand and what sets your products and services apart from the competition
  • Occasionally, refer leads to your website or special landing pages for availing seasonal discounts and offers

3. Customer retention Emails

According to a study done by Forrester Research, it has been found that existing customers spend 69% more than new customers. So putting brakes on communication after the primary sales would definitely be a costly mistake. Therefore, after you have made a sale, start an automated email campaign with your customers. Keep them in the loop with subsequent offers on your new and other products and services.

These are few points you should remember while sending your customer retention emails:

  • Thank your customer for their businesses with your brand
  • Let them know when their purchases will arrive or how they can activate your services
  • Check to see how much they are satisfied with their purchase
  • Check to see if they need any further help regarding your products and services
  • Request a review by sending a survey form tailored to your customer’s interests
  • Offer interesting contents as a ‘gift’ to your purchasers without pitching only on your brand

Now that you know how much a CRM can help you, you should also understand equally that CRM cannot replace the natural and earned skills of your sales representatives. Hence, use your CRM to free up your sales team’s time and help them to do what they are hired for.

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Email automation is the perfect way to educate and move your leads, prospects, and customers through your sales funnel, without further wasting any more time.

7 Undemanding Ways to Earn Trust and Confidence of Your C-Suit Prospects

Unless you are selling Boy Scout popcorns to your friends and families, remember your prospects are not making their purchasing decisions based on how they know you. C-Suit prospects are far more concerned with buying their company’s products and services from someone they respect and trust. Hence, if you want to be a trusted advisor and close more sales with high-level prospects, stop trying to be everyone’s friend. Rather, be intentional about earning the trust of your C-Suit prospects.

Unless you are selling Boy Scout popcorns to your friends and families, remember your prospects are not making their purchasing decisions based on how they know you.  C-Suit prospects are far more concerned with buying their company’s products and services from someone they respect and trust.

Hence, if you want to be a trusted advisor and close more sales with high-level prospects, stop trying to be everyone’s friend. Rather, be intentional about earning the trust of your C-Suit prospects.

Here are 7 undemanding and easy ways to get started:

1. Check body language

Body language often plays a vital role in influencing how a prospect looks at you even before you get a chance to introduce yourself or utter your name. In fact, according to Barbara Pease the author of the book ‘The Definitive Book of Body Language: The Hidden Meaning Behind People’s Gestures and Expressions’ states that tonality and body language accounts for more than 95% of how you are perceived by your customers and prospects. Hence, it is critical that you need to pay serious attention to those little details. Since research shows people are always more inclined to trust those who seem similar to them, so try matching each prospect’s body languages. Does your prospect lean in, stand tall or crosses his/her arms? Pay close attention to your prospects and customers and match your body language to create an invisible connection with your prospects.

2. Be a handshake Pro

Handshakes typically can fall on a scale between super strong to passively soft. If the handshake with your prospect falls on the opposite end of the spectrum, you will both immediately feel disconnected. Hence, try to avoid that ill at ease situation by acting like a handshake pro. Pay close attention to your customer’s or prospect’s approach and then match it instantly. Studies on human behavior show that this is an excellent way to connect with any prospect, and it also increases the likelihood that your prospect will believe in your words and trust you for the rest of your meeting.

3. Show your expertise

C-level prospects often consider themselves as experts in the own fields. However, the good news is as a professional you are also an expert in your field. Nevertheless, while high-level professionals only see the challenges they are facing in their organization, you can observe the industry trends from a wider bird’s eye view. Therefore, when you meet any C-level prospects, begin your meeting by listing a couple of common challenges that you have seen and then ask if any of those rings true to your prospect. Once you do this, your prospect will appreciate your valuable insight and start trusting you as an expert in your field.

4. Match your prospect’s tonality

In most cases, while making a sales call, what you say is not as much important as to how you express it. Tonality is what constitutes the volume and pace of your speech. Although the meaning of ideal tonality differs from person to person, so the safest bet is to match your tonality with that of your prospect in this arena. Try to gauge whether your prospect speaks loudly and quickly or softly and slowly and match your tonality accordingly so that they can remain comfortable talking to you.

5. Trade enthusiasm for a low-key approach

To make your offer sound irresistible you do not always have to be overly enthusiastic. Rather, being too excited does make most salespeople sound cheesy. Record your next few sales calls and playback them to yourself later. Do you feel that your voice sounds louder than it should have been? If it is so, slow yourself down and focus on forming a genuine connection with your prospects with a low-key approach.

6. Keep an unwavering focus

C-level prospects only care about themselves. However, unfortunately, the same stigma can be placed on most salespeople. Therefore, if you are too hasty about pitching the features and benefits of your products and services that you are offering, you will be marked as someone who is little more then necessarily eager about closing the sale. On the other hand, if you let your prospect talk, you will earn their trust when they recognize that you are a person who cares to understand and is ready to serve them according to their needs.

7. Dig deep into challenges

It is just not enough to find out what your prospect’s problems are, superficially. Instead, if you dig deeper to find out your prospect’s deepest frustrations you can establish yourself as a trustworthy expert. Doing this will not only create a massive value around the solutions that you present later on to your prospect, but it will also make you stand apart as a knowledgeable salesperson, someone who is different from the crowd.

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Are you still struggling to earn the respect of your C-level prospects? Let us know in ConvergeHub how you will use these tips to adjust your sales approaches in the future, in the comment box below.

5 Steps to Create an Invincible Customer Success Team

You create a marketing team to find new leads. You hire a sales team to make new customers. And finally, you develop a customer success team to retain those customers whom your marketing and sales team has acquired and keep them happy. When it comes to cracking customer retention problems, there are so many places to get the ball rolling that it is nearly impossible to understand what you should tackle first. Here are 5 actionable steps that your customer success team can carry out to increase customer retention and see success in half the amount of time that you may need otherwise

You create a marketing team to find new leads. You hire a sales team to close new customers. And finally, you develop a customer success team to retain those customers whom your marketing and sales team has acquired and keep them happy.

When it comes to cracking customer retention problems, there are so many places to get the ball rolling that it is nearly impossible to understand what you should tackle first.

Here are 5 actionable steps that your customer success team can carry out to increase customer retention and see success in half the amount of time that you may need otherwise.

1. Customer Success Starts with Talking to Your Customers

This may sound weird, but the number one action that your new customer success team must follow is to figure out your target market.

Make two lists, one consisting of customers who have found success and the second one who have canceled or have given a negative review and feedback of your product. Once you have acquired this list start reaching out to these people. Understand the reason behind their sentiments and highlight the trends for your unhappy and happy customers.

This is the basic step in your persona development. If you fail to bring in the customers you are creating your product for, you will always be fighting an uphill battle. Hence, make sure that you take care of this step right in the beginning.

2. Create Survey at Each Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

As your customer grows you will need to develop a more consistent feedback mechanism to find the level of customer satisfaction.  Deploy regular survey system and prioritize on getting feedback in all areas of your customer experience.

The most common way to survey customer’s satisfaction with your brand is to do a Net Promotion Score (NPS) survey. You can also add in surveys to other parts of the customer lifecycle but remain aware that you are not overdoing the communication with your customers. The best time for sending out a survey is after initial onboarding of a new customer and thereafter at the point of cancellation. The more you can find out about when and why the customer is canceling your products and services, the better you will be able to help and understand your customer and consequently retain more customers in the future.

3. Be the Voice of Your Customer

One of the most important reasons to build up a customer success team is that by working directly with the customers, you become the best person to represent their feelings about your brand and company. Compile your customer’s feedbacks by writing a paragraph every week titled “What is like to be a customer at {Your Company Name}. Doing this you can illustrate the highlights and lowlights of all the feedback that you receive from the customer’s point of view, and thereafter circulate that note wither through email or any other form of internal communication to make it visible to all employees in your company.

If it is required, plan a weekly meeting where your customer success team can meet with your product development representatives to communicate with the product engineering team about your customer’s pain points.

4. Focus on Your Resources

It is necessary that your customers find quick and simple answers to their questions when they are using your product. This is where a Knowledge Base comes into action- like ours in ConvergeHub.

The most simple way to create a Knowledge Base is to write about any question your customers asked more than two times. Hence, once any customer generated question reaches this threshold, you need to include that question in your Knowledge Base and help your customers to solve their common roadblocks.

Never think that your help resource always have to be perfect, for the more you agonize about the quality of your contents the lesser efficient you will remain in creating your Knowledge Base. This is because, as your product changes, the frequency with which you need to update these articles will not be sustainable if you always remain worried about the quality of your contents.

You can also create videos since 4X customers prefer to watch video helps rather than reading the same. Therefore, if you have not created any help videos, get started and create one right away.

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5. Send weekly customer success reports

To keep all your support, development and sales team members on the same page, send them weekly report card tracking KPIs.

The weekly report card should contain metrics such as:

  • Customer narratives
  • Team process updates
  • Relevant product changes
  • NPS and others

This will help all the members of your customer support team to keep a pulse on what is happening to your team on the front lines.

Lastly, empower your team to learn from their past errors, so that you can provide better customer support in the days to come.

How To Find The Ideal Prospects In Your Sales Pipeline

Although a healthy sales pipeline helps your team to meet its targets, but are you getting an insane number of customers into your sales pipeline due to the success of your team. Indeed, sales team requires healthy pipeline for its growth, but then again chasing anything that moves will surely cram your pipeline and make it fall sick. It has been often observed that having a large number of prospects those who do not fit your ideal customer profile prevents your team from reaching its optimal performance. Here are some of the most important facts about customers to help you find a healthier and more manageable pipeline.

Although a healthy sales pipeline helps your team to meet its targets, but are you getting an insane number of customers into your sales pipeline due to the success of your team.

Indeed, sales team requires healthy pipeline for its growth, but then again chasing anything that moves will surely cram your pipeline and make it fall sick. It has been often observed that having a large number of prospects those who do not fit your ideal customer profile prevents your team from reaching its optimal performance.

How To Find The Ideal Prospects In Your Sales Pipeline

Here are some of the most important facts about customers to help you find a healthier and more manageable pipeline.

  1. Your customers should be at the core of your sales related processes
  2. Not all customers are equal
  3. Contrary to popular belief, your customers are not always right
  4. There are always many wrong types of customers for your business model
  5. Only having more of the right type of customers makes your business profitable

Here is how these 5 points go together:

Primarily determine your ideal customer and then focus your company’s resources (time and talents) to nurture only those prospects who fit the profile.

This is what happens when you do that:

  • Your team has a greater likelihood to close more deals and so your conversion rates improve
  • Spending less time in closing deals leads to speeding up of sales velocity
  • You have lower customer attrition rate which decreases sales funnel leakage over time

Who are your ideal prospects?

People may want or need your product, but that does not make them your instant customers. There are many teenagers who may feel that they need to buy a Ferrari, but the Italian car making company largely ignores all these prospects in favor of a highly niche market they can do business with.  On the other side, there are also many individuals and organizations those who are unaware of your products and services but may eventually turn out to be your long-term customers.

This is true, that globally successful businesses rarely sell their products and services to everyone. As the small business mentor, Ray Silverstein rightly quoted while warning entrepreneurs:

The bigger your market, the greater the likelihood you’re wasting your time with undesirable prospects.

Hence, to run a successful business you need to find, nourish, and engage the ideal and best type of customers for your business, by which you can channelize your precious talents and time where they can generate the most value for your organization.

So how can you determine your ideal prospects?

For ConvergeHub’s sales and marketing team, the idea customer is “the person with whom you can find the best strategic alliance across the table”. They are the one with whom your product meets the customer’s needs and your team’s sales cycle synchronizes with the customer’s purchasing behaviors.

Hence, to find out your ideal customers it is best to use a CRM for examining the customer’s historical data and review the metrics, which answers several key questions such as:

  • What are the most common attributes of the types of customers who have the highest conversion rates?
  • Which types of customers deliver the deals with highest monetary value?
  • How long it takes an average customer to reach the final decision while purchasing your products and services.
  • How the customers who buy your products and service process purchase decisions?

A fit pipeline is better than a fat one

So to conclude unless you are very confident in your ability to find a prospect that fits your ideal customer profile, perform counterintuitive measures and trim your sales pipeline. Based on your sales cycle, clean your database of less than ideal prospects or maintain three kinds of the pipeline (hot, lukewarm and cold).
Therefore, depending on how you close your prospects you can find who fits your company’s ideal customer profile.

How Right Sales Reporting Helps You To Close More Deals

Performed rightly, sales reports can help managers quickly spot issues, analyze performances, and take necessary action to aid businesses to sell and grow faster. Moreover, good sales reports are also capable of providing income related business forecasting, budgeting plans and resourcing oriented business decisions for predictive sales. Hence, in nutshell, the bottom-line is, sales reports are priceless for any organization. Here are 3 types of sales reports that all businesses must have for understanding their growth.

Let us face the reality. In sales, there are few easy closes. According to studies on sales and marketing, only 2 percent of the first meetings with the prospects culminate in an on-the-spot sale, while the rest 98 percent of leads needs to be followed-up, advised, entertained, and therefore nurtured through the sales processes. This is why you need sales reporting.
Even when your customer count is in the single digits, you still need to keep track of your customer’s activities over weekly meetings and remember their details by putting them in a spreadsheet. However, as it happens with most businesses, as your sales team and customer pipeline grows, it is natural that you tend to lose your overview of this crucial process, especially when you as a small business owner have responsibilities to shoulder beyond sales.

This is exactly why businesses need a sales reporting system.

Performed rightly, sales reports can help managers quickly spot issues, analyze performances, and take necessary action to aid businesses to sell and grow faster. Moreover, good sales reports are also capable of providing income related business forecasting, budgeting plans and resourcing oriented business decisions for predictive sales.

Hence, in nutshell, the bottom-line is, sales reports are priceless for any organization.

Here are 3 types of sales reports that all businesses must have for understanding their growth.

Real-time sales report can be documented in several types, but these 3 reporting formats are easy to create and so can be recommended as an utmost necessity for your sales strategy:

1. Daily Sales Report

Daily sales reports are not to measure outcomes; rather it is a measurement of the number of activities that have been performed with your leads and prospects within the last 24 hours.

It helps you to evaluate how many emails or calls your sales team is sending every day so that you can monitor your sales rep’s individual performance and identify their inefficiencies.

Therefore, daily sales report is a key sales performance indicator to ensure that your team remains successful while performing their day in and day out activities.

2. Weekly Sales Reports

Beyond the granularity of the daily sales reports, weekly sales reports help in revealing any immediate trends that you need to address with your sales process.

Apart from this, weekly sales reporting also provides a good enough reason for a sales team meeting to help you address sales related pitfalls before businesses are lost.

Having a well-formulated weekly report also allows you to have a direct and data-oriented conversation with your sales team.

3. Monthly Sales Report

Monthly sales reports are meant for understanding your sales performance curve and highlighting on any seasonal trends that can affect your business. It helps you to understand the state of your sales funnel, your conversion rate, and your overall team performance and so are not related to any immediate and preventive actions that you may need to take for your business growth.

How can you put together a sales report?

The ideal sales reports make use of metrics to let you become aware of how deals are progressing. Here are some of the most critical things that you would most certainly want to measure in your report:

Tools that you need to build a sales report

Although sales reports can be generated from spreadsheets, as your company grows spreadsheets gets complicated. Hence, creating timely sales reports are infinitely easier with purpose-built tools like CRM.

Customer Relationship Management software not only helps in combining detailed reporting with its user-friendly interface but it also aids in monitoring your sales process and your team.

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Hence, sales reporting when used wisely not only help in tweaking your sales process to perfection, but it also guides your business forward by helping you to close more deals.

4 Most Essential Do and Don’t of Email Marketing

According to market research data, nearly more than half of the global population nowadays uses emails, which suggests that it is possible for you to market your products and services to a potentially huge audience using email-marketing strategies. Therefore, if you want to make your email marketing campaigns a hit and more effective, then you must keep these following 4 tips in mind before you push the “Send” button.

Email Marketing might seem to be the best option that we have in this world of smartphones, apps, and social media that we live in, for if email marketing had not worked, then companies would not have used it. Nor would have they spent so much effort and time on getting it just right for their selected audiences.

According to market research data, nearly more than half of the global population nowadays uses emails, which suggests that it is possible for you to market your products and services to a potentially huge audience using email-marketing strategies.

However, it is also important that you must understand how you should design your email marketing campaign so that it bypasses the usual instinct that people have to hit the “Delete” button, especially when they realize that someone is to trying to sell them something undesirable against their will.

Therefore, if you want to make your email marketing campaigns a hit and more effective, then you must keep these following 4 tips in mind before you push the “Send” button:

1. Provide a Snappy Subject Line

The most important part of an email marketing campaign is its subject line. For, it is the subject line of an email, which determines whether someone will open your message or send it straight into the trash, unseen. Therefore, make the subject line of your emails clear and concise, and ensure that the verbiage in the subject line does not sound like an advertisement. Remember, if the subject line even has a whiff of spam about it, it will be deleted.

In addition, try to use few phrases similar in all your subject lines every time you send out new emails. This is because, if your customers are used to looking for a particular phrase, then when they see a new message in their inbox, they will know where it is from right away, instead of deleting the email for being unfamiliar.

2. Do not rely on images

Although it is necessary that you must include images in your email marketing templates, you should also know that images do not always get displayed automatically or correctly. Hence, before you send your email campaigns, make sure that you have sufficient text description to make your message clear, just in case your pretty picture does not show up.

Use images that load quickly, and choose the ones that will display on the greatest number of devices. Doing this will assure you that it will not matter if someone is checking their email on their phone, tablet or desktop.

Uploading optimized images helps your viewers to see the emails as you intended it to be, instead of seeing them as truncated and missing pieces.

3. Do include unsubscribe information and your physical address

While it may seem like you are setting yourself up for failure, but you must always include a link to unsubscribe from your email-marketing list as well as your physical address in all your emails. This is because, without the elements, your message will be considered as spam, and will be directly violating the federal law. So make sure everyone who receives your messages know how they can stop receiving them, and make this endeavor a straightforward process. Remember, even if some of the viewers of your email leave for now, if they exist easily, that will surely give them a positive impression of your brand.

4. Stop sending messages no one wants

None of us wants to receive marketing promotions, we did not ask for, which is particularly true when it comes to emails. Hence, make sure that you only send messages to people who have shown their interest in your company. Find people who want further communication from you and avoid digit cold calling, for it seldom works.

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Now that you have understood the basics dos and don’ts of email marketing, if you have any further suggestions, we would be happy to learn about them in the comment box below.

CRM Productivity Hacks For Saving Time And Money Using ConvergeHub

Talking about CRM Productivity Hacks, in all businesses be it large or small, owners are often challenged to maintain the difficult balance between trying to get the maximum out of their workforce while keeping their employees happy. Hence, to make your employees work smarter and not harder, instead of micromanaging, let us try to find other ways to streamline your office process that can make your employees’ job easier.

Talking about CRM Productivity Hacks, in all businesses be it large or small, owners are often challenged to maintain the difficult balance between trying to get the maximum out of their workforce while keeping their employees happy.

Hence, to make your employees work smarter and not harder, instead of micromanaging, let us try to find other ways to streamline your office process that can make your employees’ job easier.

In this article, we will highlight and take a closer look at what many successful companies have already found about increasing productivity that has helped them to grow their bottom-line.

Break Up Big Projects For Better Delegation

Large-scale assignments can be fearsome, especially when a small group of employees is carrying the weight on their shoulders.

However,  to foster a collaborative environment using an all-hands-on deck approach not only helps your employees to spend more time on solving problems but also save time and money for productivity as they can see the big-picture before deciding their next move.

Hence, it is necessary that you must grant your employees true autonomy, by setting small goals and expectations and providing them the liberty to control their budget for getting things done.

It is true that you pay your most experienced and talented employees enhanced salaries for a reason. Therefore, instead of letting them spend their time on minor details of the project, you can rather devise a system whereby less experienced employees can take care of the project’s grunt works.

Prioritize Tasks and Set Up Workflows

Teamwork is capable of expediting a project, but it is also necessary that we must stay organized. Hence, setting up objective benchmarks for all individuals ensures that your team forges ahead seamlessly.

For example, if you are setting up a house, you cannot start working on the framework unless you have laid its foundation. Therefore, you should always plan ahead and chart out all the details of the project and then set up deadlines and schedules that help in keeping your employees accountable and productive.

One best method for doing this is to list task in order of importance and set up weekly and monthly goals to help the most essentials works get done first. If you know what is CRM, you can also use this platform for automatic task creation by using marketing automation which can act as an unique CRM productivity hack for enhancing your project management skills.

What would be a good ironsmith without his tools? Similarly, it is necessary to keep your desk area clean and organized so that you can maximize your productivity.

Providing necessary tools that your project team needs to accomplish their tasks always helps you to get the project completed in time.

Organizing is the key to smooth running of your workplace. While delivering a project as it is important that you must have enough supplies on hand, it is also vital that you should not waste precious operational funds on overstocking items unnecessarily.

Keep the Office Organized to Accelerate Performance

Many project management teams in small business benefits with CRM platform by letting the system monitor their usage. This helps them to understand what and when they need to order their supplies for delivering their projects in time.

For instance, if you are using ConvergeHub CRM for SMB, you can use QuickBooks for accounting, Google Drive for taking care of your file management and DocuSign for facilitating electronic exchanges of contracts and signed documents. All these applications can be easily integrated into the CRM system for better management of your projects.

Put A Check On Work-Life Balance

Lastly, while your business and work may be the central focus in your life, it is even more necessary that you must create the right type of work environment that keeps your employees happy, which is important for your company’s long-term growth.

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Hence, before you hire someone new, be certain that you are getting the maximum output from your existing team, which can be only monitored through an effective organizing software, like a CRM, which helps you to make your office work like a well-oiled machine.

How To Create Click-Bait Newsletters That Make Your Readers Want More

Many of us think that we know how to create click-bait newsletter, as we assume it very simple. However, think again about the number of bland newsletters that we see in our email’s inbox every day. Following these best practices while sending email newsletters will guarantee that your subscribers will actually open and read the newsletters the moment it reaches their mailbox.

Many of us think that we know how to create click-bait newsletter, as we assume it very simple. However, think again about the number of bland newsletters that we see in our email’s inbox every day.

Following these best practices while sending email newsletters will guarantee that your subscribers will actually open and read the newsletters the moment it reaches their mailbox.

  1. Find out if you really need to write a newsletter

Ask yourself before you decide upon writing a newsletter whether you are doing so because you have relevant content and information to share with your audience or if you just want to post a newsletter because you want to follow what others are doing online. If your answer is affirmative for the first question, then proceed. However, make sure that you have set clear and measurable objectives before emailing your content. Do you want your newsletter to close more deals, drive more leads, or boost retention? Understanding what you want to achieve will definitely help you to focus your efforts, measure success and set goals for your newsletter email campaigns.

  1. Set expectations

Do your subscribers know what they are signing up for? Be absolutely clear to your audience as to what they will be receiving from you. Is it special discount coupons, an early view of your new products and services, inspirational blogs, or how-to information? Hence, make sure you are meeting your email recipient’s expectations so that you do not bombard them with contents that they do not want.

It is also wise to let your email recipients know how often they will hear from you. Once a month? Once a week? Establish a routine cadence with your subscribers and stick to your plan. Remember your subscribers shared their email addresses only because they trust your brand. Abusing that trust will soon enough end up all your emails in a spam folder or you will register a very high unsubscribe rate.

  1. Keep balanced content

Unless you have set a predefined expectation, a good thumb rule for any newsletter contents is 10% promotional and 90% educational. This allows room for a focused call to action, however, you must primarily make sure that a large majority of your content is meant to serve your customer first.

  1. Stick to your brand

Like other communication verbiages, your newsletter should also adhere to your brand’s standards for voice, tone, and design. Although you can also at times write just for fun since users who have subscribed to your newsletter are the ones who are most engaged with your brand and are so ready to hear something different from you occasionally.

  1. Think mobile first

It has been found in a research done by Litmus “54% of emails are now opened on a mobile device”. Moreover, the number is growing every day. So get your email templates optimized for mobile devices.

This means, keep your content limited to fit on a mobile screen. Make sure that your CTA buttons are large enough to tap. Additionally, limit the image size in your newsletters to avoid lagging load time.

  1. Make your newsletters exclusive

Remember your newsletter subscribers are likely to be some of your most engaging brand fans. Hence, reward your subscribers with exclusive and early access contents.

  1. Track, test, and refine your newsletter

Measure what is working well and what needs improvement by going back to the goals you defined to yourself at the beginning of your email campaign. If you find that, your goals are met, go ahead, and set a higher one. If not, then question yourself why and keep on testing and tweaking your newsletter’s images, templates, contents and subject line till it meets your goals.

It is beyond any doubt that newsletters are a great way for staying connected with your prospects, leads, and customers. So go ahead and start building an exceptional email journey with the help of your CRM right today.

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