Year: 2017

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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If you have liked this post, we would love to hear from you in the comment box below.

See Who Opens Your Email With ConvergeHub (The #1 CRM for Small and Medium Businesses)

We all know being in sales is not always an easy job. Nevertheless, users of ConvergeHub are equipped with the right tools, which help you to start your day guiding you through your most pressing tasks. Taking a step further, how would you feel if you can also see who has opened your emails? ConvergeHub email tracking and delivery status update keep you informed on all emails sent from ConvergeHub, CRM for Small Businesses.

We all know being in sales is not always an easy job. Nevertheless, users of ConvergeHub are equipped with the right tools, which help you to start your day guiding you through your most pressing tasks.
Taking a step further, how would you feel if you can also see who has opened your emails?

ConvergeHub email tracking and delivery status update keep you informed on all emails sent from ConvergeHub, CRM for Small Businesses.

Once your customers have opened the email, using ConvergeHub you will be able to see how many of them have viewed the email.

Pretty neat, right?

Using ConvergeHub CRM, once you know your engaged prospects who have interacted with your email message, you can easily interact with them for cross-sell or up-sell activities.

CRM ConvergeHub

So connect your email account to ConvergeHub now and start tracking your emails to customers. With email tracking, we have left behind those days when you had to speculate if your customers are opening the emails, you have sent to them.

Every email in ConvergeHub has an open and delivery status:

Sent/Attempted: Total number of email sent to recipients.

Viewed:  Number of recipients that opened the email any number of times.

Opted Out: User has chosen not to receive any promotional emails.

Bounce/Invalid: The total emails sent that could not be effectively delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

Click-thru Link: The number of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in a given email.

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Hope you find these email statuses helpful. Happy Selling!

Tips to follow for achieving 100% CRM adoption and engagement

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM increases sales by 29% (SalesForce), according to Nucleus Research the average ROI of any CRM is $8.71, for every dollar spent on this platform. However, having said that, one fact we cannot choose to ignore, is that not all CRM implementations are successful. The main reason behind lagging implementation of CRM is poor user adoption rate. Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM.

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM adoption increases sales by 29% (SalesForce), according to Nucleus Research the average ROI of any CRM is $8.71, for every dollar spent on this platform.

Therefore, as cost-cutting measures are the need of the day, in order to survive in businesses companies has no other options but to outperform their competitors without inflating their budgets, which has made CRM more important than ever nowadays.

To improve productivity and fine-tune business processes several small businesses and enterprises have accepted the gaining widespread popularity of CRM for retaining and finding new customers, as cloud-based CRM software applications are pretty simple to use.

However, having said that, one fact we cannot choose to ignore, is that not all CRM implementations are successful.

The main reason behind lagging implementation of CRM is poor user adoption rate.

Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM.

Moreover, as many CRM vendors have done a good job of touting the simplicity of their applications, many customers have taken the user-friendliness of CRM implementation of their Customer Relationship Management platform for granted.

But, just because something looks apparently simple and easy you must not take it for granted. Since, if you do not learn to implement and neglect the best practices, it will almost inevitably lead to a failure in reaping the maximum benefits from your CRM.

For an example, although brushing your teeth is relatively simple, but if you neglect to brush or do it altogether in the wrong way, this can lead to several maladies and even tooth loss.

Similarly, using your CRM software inefficiently or not using it consistently can cause detrimental consequences for your business.

Ineffective use of any CRM may not only lead to failure in follow-up on scheduled tasks and appointments, but it can also mismanage customer relationships, fail to capture important customer data and insights and in severe cases end up with the loss of potential customers in your business.

Here are some of the crucial low adoption rate statistics on CRM:

  • According to CSO Insights, 43% of CRM customers use even lesser than half the features they have in their CRM.
  • According to Really Simple Systems, 4 out of 5 senior executives say that their biggest challenge was getting their staffs to use the CRM consistently.

Hence, before you buy a CRM, remember employees of your business organization may always have different preconceived notions and perspectives about CRM system. While some may love it, others may hate using it too.

Therefore, before most of your employees get reluctant towards CRM, it is best to make them understand the benefits of this software and show them how it will make their work a lot easier every day.

Here are 7 awesome golden tips to make your CRM implementation a success story.

Give value to business needs and requirements

To make your CRM implementation worthwhile for your business, you must not only possess a good understanding of your business but also understand how your business interacts to satisfy your potential customer’s needs. CRM is more than a mere software solution. Rather Customer Relationship Management is a process of dealing with your customers through intelligent communications that call for a holistic approach. CRM consists of people, processes, and technology that combine to manage business relationships with your customers.

Involve employees from the beginning

Your employees are the ones who are going to use your CRM, and so they play the most significant role in successful implementation of your CRM platform. Hence, it is always wise to involve your employees from the very first stage of your CRM implementation itself. Exhibit to them how the new system is going to diminish their workload and make them understand how CRM is going to take their work on the upbeat.

As an additional gesture for early adoption of your CRM, encourage your employees to provide their opinion and feedback on the system. This will not only help in trimming down uncertainties of the software but also help you to acquire necessary support for proper utilization of your CRM system.

Hire a CRM Project Manager

It is always a good idea to get a CRM project manager on board in your company, who will act as a technical ambassador and a problem-solver of your employees in respect to your CRM system. As your CRM project manager is the one who will be responsible for overall implementation and management of your CRM platform, the person must possess good communication and IT skills. It is the project manager whose steps your employees must follow, as he/she will drive the project and also measure the achievement levels of your CRM related goals.

Remain patient and move one-step at a time

Once you buy the software, do not attempt to achieve too many tasks with your CRM at once or implement the customer relationship solution in a haphazard manner. As it is very natural, like many other buyers of CRM you may always find yourself being carried away and find it absolutely exciting to implement the new system which is capable of streamlining all your business processes but don’t forget all complex projects needs to be broken down into manageable and measurable phases with achievable goals. Hence, for successful implementation of your CRM, go slow with the platform and implement the software without hurrying, one-step at a time.

Train your employees

As every employee in any organization has different capacity to understand and accept changes, it is always advisable that you must arrange training sessions for all your employees. Also, make sure during the course of the training you must train each department, like marketing, sales, accounts and customer support reps, on their specialized needs. Appropriate training on the CRM’s functionalities often brings forth positive momentum of enthusiasm among the employees, for implementation of the CRM.

Set guidelines for your employees

It is really important that you must lay down guidelines in consultation with your CRM project manager, on what kind of data (as per your company’s goals), your employees should input in the CRM. Since, for proper utilization of your customer relationship software, it is utterly necessary that you must manage all tasks and activities with proper reporting structure as a part of your guidelines.

Make the CRM available anywhere

Last but not the least, in case your sales team also includes sales reps working in the field, you must buy a CRM, which has a mobile application in addition to the web-based version of the platform.

User experience should also be taken into consideration while implementing mobile CRM app. As desktop and mobile environments of any app need to be different, the mobile version of your CRM platform should be intuitive and fast. It should also be data contextual, minimizing keystrokes and automating information as much as possible, to streamline workflow.

It is only when your sales team, see that the CRM helps them to sell, and there are little or no difficulties involved in using the platform, it will escalate the adoption rate of your customer relationship software.

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Takeaway

Remember, CRM adoption is a journey and not a destination. By following the tips and guidelines given above, it will be easy for you to overcome the early hurdles to CRM adoption and make certain that your business reaps the best benefits offered by CRM.

If you have found this article helpful, let us know about your CRM adoption success story in the comments below.

Small Business Marketing for Black Friday

Timing is everything. Understand the logic of where and when to find your customers heavily weighs on your skills as you develop your holiday marketing strategy, which is especially true if you are working with a limited budget. Here is an illustration how you can manage your holiday promotions and strategize your Black Friday plans in a few different ways.

Timing is everything.

Understand the logic of where and when to find your customers heavily weighs on your skills as you develop your holiday marketing strategy, which is especially true if you are working with a limited budget.

Hence for an example, the time to start building and executing your Holiday Season’s is now.

If you wait to launch a Black Friday or a Christmas page until the last week of the upcoming events, you will miss the bulk in your potential traffic. Why?

It is because of this simple reason that people will be looking for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas and New Year’s items well before these festive days. Moreover, the web page you have created or added to your web site with the purpose of promoting your business during these holidays needs sufficient time to begin ranking and getting indexed by Google and other search engines.

So plan ahead.

Be really goofy and creative with your holiday promotion strategies. One thing that you must remember about the holidays is that general people remains usually in a good mood during these celebrated days of the years. Therefore, people look forward to getting away from the hustle-and-bustle of their daily mundane lifestyle during these days and actually spend quality time with their families. This means if you are promoting your holiday promotions for a faster response in your social media channels, your publications need to be in a good mood as well, as personification is fun sometimes. Hence, even if your brand’s voice is not usually humorous, use the holidays during this time of the year as an excuse to get a little lighter.

Here is an illustration how you can manage your holiday promotions and strategize your Black Friday plans in a few different ways:

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The Past, Present, and Future of AI in Customer Experience

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses. Nevertheless, at present we have just starting to realize the potential of AI and understand the potential implication for Artificial Intelligence applications, to make a more than welcome impact in the field of customer experience.

You can thank IBM’s Watson for creating an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that was integrated into a plethora of businesses and customer facing applications. You can credit Facebook and Skype for their recent buzz about chatbots and the gold rush of venture capitalists and developers creating an onslaught of bot developing companies. You can laud Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri for applying intelligence into mundane everyday devices and bringing to life; voice, as the new user interface.
Nevertheless, the truth remains that we have also at present just starting to realize the potential of AI in customer experience.

The-Past-Present-and-Future-of-AI-in-Customer-Experience-CTA

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses.

Websites, call-centers, apps, emails and other offspring of modern digital technology have offered companies scopes to scale and automate customer engagements, while also ushering in process efficiency and cost management systems. However, this also came at a price. As over the years, numerous customers have complained that these very processes and systems were the very elements that undermined and hindered satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

Think about it now. When was the last time that you enjoyed calling up and talking to customer service representatives? Or, for that matter, when was the last instance you were transferred between customer support executives, where the next support personal was already plugged-in into your customer account details and had the precise knowledge as to why you were calling?

It is really a matter of grave disappointment even today that many aspects of the customer journey are still disconnected. A symptom of outdated business models, where many important touch-points are independently run, in many businesses. Of which, many of these touch-points do not connect or even talk to each other, the way customers expect them. Pragmatically, in several cases, they even actually compete or conflict with one another, over the course of the customer journey.

The main reason behind this slow growth for improving customer experience is that businesses are most often viewed as cost centers rather than long-term investments.

However, in the recent times with stellar improvement in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, AI opens up an unforeseen opportunity for introducing more personalized intelligent and scalable engagements with the customers, to help them solve problems and accomplish tasks, which contributes to improved overall satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

However, for AI to break new grounds and introduce new values, customer support and marketing strategists must step into an innovative approach regarding CX and so consider its impact beyond its novelty. Moreover, this growth of AI in CX cannot be hampered or throttled by existing CX perspectives and processes that abound today’s customer experience analogies.

AI applications in CX

Whether you are a CEO (Chief Experience Officer), CIO, CCO (Chief Customer Officers) or CMO in marketing, IT or service industry, Artificial Intelligence represents a blank slate for ushering improvement and innovations in CX. For, with a mix of right vision and intent, customer experience can thrust businesses into an accelerated path of maturity that can guide any organization with a new purpose, which is based on customer centricity.

Here are some of the ways by which you can apply AI to CX:

Chatbots

Chatbots are virtual agents that can perform intelligent conversation, which can be applied to various customer engagement scenarios. Under their hood, chat bots are just sophisticated computer programs that are  developed to simulate conversations with humans online- and they are a long time in the making.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg the co-founder and Chairman of Facebook, in partnership with 1800FLOWERS, demonstrated a Chabot application at the F8 development conference. In this demonstration, Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook Messenger to show how a consumer can talk to a virtual agent and order flowers of his/her choice, without leaving the window.

What was unique with this demonstration is that the Chabot was capable of picking up conversational cues to suggest floral arrangements that meet the customer’s personal needs and goals.

Although, other Chabot applications that have hit the market have borne witness to some of the challenges, such as poor design and execution, and a universal emphasis on transactions over experience, but in reality, bots can be truly so much more if we allow our imagination to unlock new possibilities.

Virtual concierge

Whether they are docked in hardware devices or messaging platforms, virtual concierges are bots that are designed for providing personalized services. In certain instances, these bots are partnered with human counterparts to perform the task as a ‘digital-butler’ to aid us in booking travels, buy or find gifts and commodities, coordinate with a human on specific experiences and others.

A recent example of using on-demand virtual concierge in the retail business is Operator, which is developed by Garrett Camp, who is also the co-founder of Uber.

Operator aims to build a new front door to eCommerce by using messaging app.

Another example of using virtual concierge in the travel business is Lola, which is developed by Kayak’s founder Paul English. Lola is a new travel app that personalizes engagements with human thoughts along with AI.

Virtual assistants/attendants

While virtual concierges are designed to aid users in achieving simple-to-complicated tasks, virtual assistants and attendants make use of Artificial Intelligence to help users with commands and questions. Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Echo, Google Now, and Apple Siri are some of the examples of virtual assistants/attendants, among others.

Recently, each of these applications is vying each other to become a platform for its implementation in common devices and appliances, collaborating with the developer communities to help extend the functionalities of these applications in horizontal and vertical planes.

Cognitive computing

Cognitive computing is the simulation of human thought process to augment human engagements. One of the most well-known platforms in this space is IBM’s Watson, the AI platform that is famous for beating-down human contestants on the wildly popular American TV show “Jeopardy”.

Cognitive computing involves self-learning systems to recognize patterns, mine data, process natural language and interact with people in a way that is intelligent, value-added and complementary.

One such example is Softbank’s partnership with IBM, for adding emotional and cognitive intelligence to its line of robots, named “Pepper”. These robots are deployed in financial, retail and hospitality settings for proving an enhanced personal form of engagements to the visiting customers.

In the present times, self-service options are limited to ATMs and kiosks, where the abilities of these platforms are limited to nurturing customer relationship up to transactions. With ongoing researches on cognitive assistance, people will soon be able to have a natural conversation with machines, where their words, gestures, and expressions will be understood by these systems.

Initial applications where AI can improve CX

Although AI pilots can be used for, testing and learning everywhere, in a customer journey mapping exercise- here is a list of where AI applications are implemented today.

  • Personalization
  • Questions/answers
  • Customer self-service
  • Pre-emptive routing
  • Product/service innovation
  • Task performance/management
  • Predictive service/sales
  • Augmented engagement
  • Digital concierge/assistant collaboration

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Takeaway

Today’s customers live in an omnichannel world, where AI provides a means to facilitate up to date and precise responses across all platforms, at any and every point in the customer journey.

This represents a new ground for what is referred to as ‘conversational commerce’. Where as an alternative for resolving disjointed touch points and instances, AI will aid the enterprises to stitch together a more natural and complete customer journey to integrate, improve, and re-imagine customer experience.

Customer engagement is not a cost center, but it is an investment in customer relationship. So whether it is integrating back-end CRM, introducing new touch points; predicting trends, behaviors and expectations successfully, AI implementation needs a new blueprint with imagination and ingenuity, which will not only enhance CX but can improve every aspect of any business in the long run.

Why Should You Consider Integrating CRM With ERP?

With a plethora of consumer data, being generated on a daily basis, business owners are presently experiencing more complex business environments than ever before. Since, if this customer centric data is not handled in a proper manner, it can become the biggest pain point for efficiency with decision-making, forecasting and ultimately- the purchase and sales processes. Happy customers are the most valuable and possessed assets to any business. But, how can you successfully deal with all these challenges, whilst building up profitable customer relationships? To combat this dilemmatic issue, businesses typically buy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solutions separately or mostly integrate a CRM with an ERP.

With a plethora of consumer data, being generated on a daily basis, business owners are presently experiencing more complex business environments than ever before. Since, if this customer centric data is not handled in a proper manner, it can become the biggest pain point for efficiency with decision-making, forecasting and ultimately- the purchase and sales processes.
Happy customers are the most valuable and possessed assets to any business. But, how can you successfully deal with all these challenges, whilst building up profitable customer relationships?
To combat this dilemmatic issue, businesses typically buy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solutions separately or mostly integrate a CRM with ERP.

The advantage of integrating these two enterprise business solutions help CRM to deal with front end information such as prospecting, recording customer interactions, sales tracking, pipeline management and creating/evaluating marketing campaigns.

So, while CRM helps businesses to manage relationships and sales pipelines, understand prospect and clients, and upsell and cross-sell products, ERP software is entrusted to handle critical backend processes. These ERP back end processes include supply chain management details, purchase history, accounting information, financial data, and billing and shipping details.

Although apparently having separate systems might appear more manageable, but integrating into one complete software solution certainly, boosts productivity and streamlines business processes to a greater extent.

Statics indicates that ERP provides an inventory accuracy level of 98% whilst it increases the order-to-shipment time by 24% and considering satisfied customers are the most precious assets to any business, it is not hard to understand the benefits of a unified system.

With these in mind, here are some of the other advantages of CRM and ERP integration for business owners, pertaining to all ranks.

Why is this integration so crucial?

Firstly, if you implement ERP and CRM systems as a unified business process you do not have to constantly worry about keeping these two databases synchronized. Any changes in one system will not have to be transferred to the other manually, which most often results in slower operations and an increased risk of database errors.

So implementing an integrated CRM process to your ERP solution will make certain that both these systems use one common shared database, whereby any update in any of the systems will be visible instantaneously.

This will not only help in faster billing but it will also provide a clearer look at all levels of your commercial enterprise’s sales process.

360-degree customer view

One of the major rewards of ERP and CRM integration is that it allows an overall view of your customers. Right from sales and support to accounting and finance departments, these systems provide an unparalleled visibility on your customer’s buying habits, order history, and general needs, which in turn helps in building long lasting relationships with the customers, and finding out if there is potential for any other future growths.

This data also provides you with enhanced analytics and reporting, so that you can track any changes that may happen in your customer’s preferences and loyalty towards your products or services.

Increased mobility

Imagine your sales team is in the middle of an important touch-point thought a customer’s journey having access to all the orders and customer inventory, alongside pricing and product information- will it not help in closing deals more efficiently? Having up-to-date data during customer interactions and not afterward, indeed make a lot of difference while closing sales.

Effective integration of ERP with CRM not only streamlines information but it also helps in keeping everyone in your business on the same page.

Managers can also keep track of all critical operational issues in real time, integrating these systems that help them to make more informed business decisions on the go.

Faster access to vital information

A fully integrated CRM with ERP provides employees with access to information with a push of a button in real time. Data like inventory levels, customer financials, shipments, order history, payments, pricing, returns and more are instantaneously synchronized across different platforms, which makes employees more efficient in serving the customers.

In other words, CRM and ERP help in cutting down of loss in business which mostly happened in the past due to negative experiences of the customers, when customer service representatives had to trawl through different systems or inquire with other employees for a customer’s requested order status update.

Eliminate mind-numbing data entry and duplication

Although both CRM and ERP hold the same data (account and contact information), it is used for different purposes.

While CRM focuses on sales, support, and prospecting, ERP, on the other hand, centers on keeping track of warehouse inventory, shipping, billing address and more. The ERP/CRM integration terminates the tedious necessity of duplicating data entry, whereby eliminating human errors during the duplication process.

Moreover, any change, addition, removal of new entries, custom fields, or database is also instantly altered in an integrated CRM/ERP system, which lessens the time needed for editing of the data.

In addition, while quoting for a customer or a prospect in CRM, sales reps can quote the most accurate prices and discount pricings using the integrated ERP solution to retrieve real time inventory and updated pricing information.

Reduced IT and training overheads

In a report published by Association for Talent Development, it showed that businesses spend an annual average of around $1,208 and approximately 31.5 working hours on training their employees, which is a substantial amount and time lost on the part of the company.

So, when CRM is integrated into an ERP, the training session also goes down, as instead of individual systems the training can be implemented on a combined platform.

Moreover learning ERP and CRM as silo software at the same time can be a challenging task for any employee, which can result in poor adoption rates.

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Now that you have learned about the core advantages of integrating these two most important systems required for running your business, we would also like to hear your comments on this article below.

Why Startup Companies Need A CRM System?

Even before asking why businesses need CRM system, it is really important to understand exactly what a Customer Relationship Management system is. In short, CRM is the practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and feedback, with the ultimate goal of executing better customer relationship leading to customer retention in the long run. Although CRM is a fairly new concept, this SaaS technology has so many inherent advantages, that most organizations of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises are quickly catching up with this platform. Now the question we need to ask is, does your start-up establishment needs a CRM? In this article, let us review a few points from this aspect.

Even before asking why businesses need CRM system, it is really important to understand exactly what a Customer Relationship Management system is.

In short, CRM is the practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and feedback, with the ultimate goal of executing better customer relationship leading to customer retention in the long run.

Although CRM is a fairly new concept, this SaaS technology has so many inherent advantages, that most organizations of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises are quickly catching up with this platform.

Datachart from Salesforce Showing the Top 5 Marketing Metrics

Now the question we need to ask is, does your start-up establishment needs a CRM?

Why Startups Need a CRM System

Let us review a few points from this aspect:

  • Understanding a customer’s point of view often becomes difficult, due to several mismanagements of the communication chain. However, CRM ensures that literally nothing is lost in transition.
  • The latest research on customer experience shows that 88% of high performing marketing team acknowledges that in a customer journey strategy is essential for the success of overall marketing endeavors.
  • A workforce that comprises of all different aspects of any company is primarily important when you are dealing with any customer. CRM system helps this by unifying Marketing, Sales, Management, Finance, and Customer Service, which are of prime importance in this respect.
  • A dynamic converging CRM, like ConvergeHub, ensures that you can keep track of your progress with the customers no matter what devices you are using (PC, Tab, mobile etc.).
  • A CRM system can easily keep your organization up to date on sales and revenue aspects with the timely reports and since all these processes are completely automated, you can be very sure that you will never miss-out on an important benchmark once you use a CRM.
  • CRM is a scalable system, which ensures that you will never be at a disadvantage for want of more computation power.

Why your startup needs a CRM now?

The primary question lies not in whether you need a Customer Relationship Management system, but in why you do so. For example, ConvergeHub CRM, as opposed to pen and paper, is much easier to work.

To be honest, no company wants to remain as a startup forever and this is the main reason why CRM is important for all budding organizations.

As companies grow bigger, it slowly becomes inefficient in manually handling data and needs a platform that will help them to quickly organize and analyze data and identify their ideal customer base.

This is where CRM comes into play. CRM is also a platform for your sales team to meet and discuss central ideas, which are needed for identifying potential areas of growth that is most crucial for the development of any start-up organization.

Besides, CRM is also extremely useful as it brings everything from prospects, dashboards, sales orders, and invoices to automatic inventory under one roof.

CRM and Startups

As a startup, your main focus should be on finding the right prospect for your products and services and then maintain those valued customers for a long run.

According to Forrester, both large and small companies have shown more than 52% growth in lead volume after collaborating with a CRM service.

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Hence, it is now an established fact beyond any doubts that CRM services actually leads to lead value generation over time, which gradually lowers the cost of operation in start-ups compared to manual safe keeping and representation of customer and sales data.

Why mobile CRM is Crucial for Your SMB

We all are aware how indispensable CRM strategies are in today’s business world. From reduced marketing expenditures to superior customer retention rates- the benefits of CRM are never-ending. With the speedy rise in telecommunication and mobile technology, mobile CRM is a perfect tool for those who are on-the-go, since mobile CRM provides essential access to sophisticated data and customized information on the field. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 24% of employees did their work from home in 2015, which shows a formidable rise of more than 20% since 2003. According to the same source, BLS predicts that more than 106 million Americans will telecommute within 2020.

We all are aware how indispensable CRM strategies are in today’s business world. From reduced marketing expenditures to superior customer retention rates- the benefits of CRM are never-ending. With the speedy rise in telecommunication and mobile technology, mobile CRM is a perfect tool for those who are on-the-go, since mobile CRM provides essential access to sophisticated data and customized information on the field.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 24% of employees did their work from home in 2015, which shows a formidable rise of more than 20% since 2003. According to the same source, BLS predicts that more than 106 million Americans will telecommute within 2020.

The great news from these stats is that ConvergeHub CRM offers both Android and iOS app for SMBs. However, if you are still indecisive and sitting on the fence about downloading our CRM app from iTunes or Android stores, here are four solid reasons why you should not wait for anymore.

More Work Completed

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

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

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

So how are teams using ConvergeHub on the go?

Using our app, users can update information and notes in between meetings or on the road, and assign tasks to their colleagues straight from their device. Moreover, if needed, users can also tag their bosses to make them remain in the loop on all events of the day.

Close More Deals

At the end of the day with all businesses, a more productive sales team signifies a healthier sales pipeline.

In a research conducted by Forrester, it has been found that more than 70% sales reps employed with companies those who have invested in CRM technology have successfully accomplished their sales targets, as opposed to just 21% of sales reps working in non-mobile Customer Relationship Management enabled companies.

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

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

Find Real-Time Information

In the present times, many companies allow their employees to work on the go or complete tasks while they are away from the office.

This could have meant in the past, that any information about a deal is not updated until the sales reps get back and log his or her activities on the CRM platform.

Mobile CRM prevents this from happening. With the help of cloud technology, any interaction an employee has with the prospect or customer can be now documented immediately in the mobile CRM. Hence, users of mobile CRM do not have to wait for information to be uploaded on site.

For an example, if a sales rep is out of the office, every other rep working in the organization will readily have access to the customer’s updated data as the rep who is out can log these changes while on the go.

Users can also refer to their contact activity feeds in the ConvergeHub app, before heading for a meeting, which helps in refreshing their memory on previous interactions with the customer making them fully prepared for strategizing a rewarding meeting plan.

Faster Data Collection

Before the age of mobile CRM technology, orders taken on the road had either to be called-in or put on hold until the orders could be entered at the office.

Now with the advent of mobile CRM, you can place orders remotely right into the system as soon as the customer agrees to the deal.

This, in turn, helps the production and shipping departments to get immediately started so that the customers can receive their products or services just in time.

Hence, we see as CRM has made its way to mobile, so businesses that hope to grow most must make a move with it.

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Therefore, not to ignore important business trends, download the ConvergeHub mobile CRM app before you scale up any more lost opportunities and get your team on the path to success now.