Year: 2018

5 Ways To Increase Sales Productivity With Mobile CRM App

Every company wants their salespeople to be successful, which means- close more deals.
However, as the completion rises, it is crucial for your sales reps to remain on the top. So how do you do that? What can you do to improve the conditions of your sales and support people, with mobile CRM app so that they can close more sales?

Statistics have proved that easy to use CRM can become one the greatest productivity booster for your sales team.

Mobile CRM increases sales volume and business growth by 15%. - Nucleus Research (2016) Click To Tweet

Sales and marketing CRM platform can not only save hours out of your busy week but also help manage and follow up on your prospects and leads.

According to a study by Gartner, a well-implemented and affordable CRM software can increase business revenue by a whopping 41% for every sales rep working with any business.

How to stay productive while being away from office

Those work in sales would all agree that there is one magic formula for closing any deals. It is about being in the right place at the right time.

To get most out of your CRM, it is important that you log every single information and interactions with your customers, as you will certainly benefit from accessing those data when it is needed.

But what happens if you are away from your office desk?

As a successful and active salesperson, it is natural that you can mostly remain out on customer calls when a prospect reaches out to you. Turning on your laptop for browsing on information while you are on the go is not an option, which is convenient nor is it advisable to tell your prospects that you get back to them after you return back to your office.

Surely, you as a businessperson or as a salesperson will never want to consider your traveling hours as a nonperforming downtime or a window of complete ‘communication brownout’. Rather, you will always want to come up at a meeting equipped with all relevant and vital information that you require to nail down a sales-ready prospect, as well as be capable to update and record actions while traveling.

If you find this true, then say “hello” to a Mobile CRM app, which allows you to stay on the top.

Hence, having your team prepared with a mobile CRM provides flexibility and it is even a great way to enhance the numbers of your sales.

According to a research done by Innoppl Technologies in the USA, 68% of salespersons who work with businesses that have said yes to Mobile CRM adoption have reached their sales targets, as opposed to 21% of sales team members from non-mobile CRM oriented companies.

Moreover, in a study done by Nucleus Research, it has been found that mobile CRM increases sales volume and business growth by 15%.

Aided by a Mobile CRM app, you not only get the access to all CRM data you require but also with cloud based CRM tool you can speed up your abilities to act, respond and increase your conversion rates,

If you are still thinking about how this can be done, then here are 5 key benefits of using a mobile CRM on the go:

#1. Stay well prepared and focused all the time

You can always assume that you have everything under your control. Yet, this cannot be refuted that having your dairies, calendar, and contacts integrated into the mobile CRM is a huge time-saver. Using a mobile CRM, you can not only get yourself notified of an upcoming meeting but also have all the notes and information on the customer on the palm of your hand.

Mobile CRM gives a direct access to your customer’s database in the CRM so that you can get an immediate access to all the vital information that your company has on the customers, partners, prospects, suppliers and even your colleagues.

With a Mobile CRM, you can confidently leave your office knowing that you have access to all information that you might require whenever you need.

#2. Close more sales in less time

Mobile CRM helps you to close more deals with lesser interactions, which can provide you more time to work on new prospects or new sales opportunities.

Imagine you are out of your office and a prospect calls you whom you have been chasing down for a month and the prospect is willing to close the deal, provided you can give a quick summary of all the options that you can offer to the prospect before closing the deal. In this case, “I will email you the details tomorrow” will certainly not be a good way to respond. You know you have all the prospect’s offers and quotes stored in the database at your office, but unfortunately, you are miles away from your office desk right now. So when you are on the clock and trying to close a sale ASAP, having a mobile CRM system where can find all the vital information of the prospects is an ideal weapon to win the sale, as the CRM software can take care of the entire process via your mobile device.

#3. Capture new opportunities

Mobile CRM is an excellent tool to interact with customers and update all their information at the source. When you are in a middle of a meeting it may not be that convenient to open your laptop, but then again if you are incapable of entering the data immediately, there are chances that you may forget several crucial information at the end of the day.

Moreover, if you are on the go, and receive a phone call from your prospect or from your office staffs about changes regarding the sale in progress, you can even update the quote as you go. There is no need to delay it until u get back to your desk.

In the same manner, if you meet someone important on the road, you can add them to your contact list, create networking events, book appointments, or plan activities using a mobile CRM straight away.

#4. Share information across your team

Mobile CRM helps you to share information across your sales, marketing, billing, and customer support departments when contacting a customer or a lead.

For example, if you come across some important information or discover new opportunities during a customer meeting and then the information needs to be circulated quickly to your team, just in case the new prospect decides to contact you or your colleagues, having a mobile CRM can be extremely helpful under this circumstance. Since if your colleagues at the office do not know what you are doing, you may miss out on your next big opportunity.

#5. Stay on track and keep your management informed

With every new sale and contacts, you are gathering valuable information. Mobile CRM app lets everyone involved in the sales and marketing process to access information that they need and most importantly in real-time. Moreover, it also helps the user of the app to organize and present the data in a clear way.

Hence, Mobile CRM enables both the sales reps and their managers to take control over the sales pipelines and update sales forecasts with a few clicks, making you always ready to plan and answer the question about your sales targets at any moment or provide valuable sales coaching to your team on the go.

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Conclusion

Therefore, to conclude, mobile CRM helps the users to keep in touch with a higher number of prospects and use the same tools that you have on your office desktop, which increases your own productivity with ease while you are away.

Do you use a mobile CRM app? If so let us know by leaving a quick comment below.

The Only Reason Why Small Businesses Fail to Grow Without CRM

According to a report published on non-CRM adoptors by Small Business Trends, it has been seen that more than 50% of small enterprises fail in the very first year, and greater than 95% small startups fail within the first five years. Therefore, businesses, regardless of their size, are regularly challenged with finding unique means to capture new customers, improve their up-sell and cross-selling opportunities, increase sales and along with it keep their existing customers happy so that they return times and again.

According to a report published on non-CRM adopters, it has been seen that more than 50% of small enterprises fail in the very first year, and greater than 95% small startups fail within the first five years.

Here are some greater surprises for you:

  • 40% of SMB are profitable
  • 30% of SMB reaches break even
  • 30% of SMB are constantly losing revenue
  • 9 % of SMB gets the chance to survive beyond 10 years

Businesses, regardless of their size, are regularly challenged with finding unique means to capture new customers, improve their up-sell and cross-selling opportunities, increase sales and along with it keep their existing customers happy so that they return times and again.

Make your customer the center of everything that you perform and everything will fall into place - Superoffice Click To Tweet

Apart from this above-mentioned fact, small businesses also experience added challenges that inhibit their growth. These are varying causes around issues such as, management, leadership, cash flow, which sometimes can or even cannot be changed.

However, the primary reason that makes a small business fail is that the establishment does not care about their customer service. This is a surprise since providing good customer service is one thing that all businesses can always do something about, regardless of their size.

 The Cost of Bad Customer Service

In today’s competitive market, where social media is the channel for venting out our satisfaction, as well as our discontent, the cost of not providing optimal customer service is paramount.

Let us look into some of the facts we discovered in some of our few in-depth customer research surveys:

  • 78% of customers have bailed out from making an intended purchase because of inferior service experiences.
  • 12 positive experience is needed on an average, to make up for one negative experience
  • News of bad customer experience reaches more than thrice as many ears as news of praises for good customer service experience
  • For every complaining customer, there are 26 other who remains silent
  • Only 4% of dissatisfied customers are heard by any typical business ( and we do not want to think what happens to the rest)

Easy To Use CRM System Is One of the Secrets to Making Customers Feel Special

More than 72% of buying experiences are related to how the consumers feel they are being treated. We guess you will be surprised to know that although more than 85% of companies say that they deliver “excellent customer service” but only 8% of their customers think that these businesses really deliver “excellent customer service”.

However, it is not too time-consuming or difficult to close this gap and make your customers feel special. It is all about centralizing your customer related data and making use of this information by understanding what is a CRM database in a smart way to improve the relationship and find growth.

In other words, every small company needs a CRM software for small business and make use of the best CRM tools to centralize your customer’s information.  Therefore, if your business is already not using a CRM system, we think it is a good time to consider getting it. With today’s Cloud CRM solutions, which are available as a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, adopting a CRM for small business is completely affordable, while its benefits are priceless.

Here are 4 benefits that your small business can find by using an affordable CRM software:

  1. Collect all your information in one central place

Many small businesses keep all their customer information scattered in various places. It can be in Excel spreadsheets, Rolodex or in their Emails. Although at the time the information was captured you can remember the customers but three months down the road becomes hard to remember where you stored the information and why even kept that note on a specific customer in the first place. Moreover, since the information is probably kept on your personal PC, others in your organization may not have an access to that data and communication trail and that will eventually create problems. Having an easy to use CRM software can help you to forgo all that pain.

Best customer management software like CRM provides you the ability to store several communications with your customer like calls, emails, meetings, in a central place and let everyone in your business retrieve the information instantly. Therefore using a customer service CRM software not only creates a better experience for your customers, but best CRM tools also save a lot of time and headaches.

  1. Help to keep you more ‘in sync’ with your customers

We all like immediate gratifications. Therefore, there is nothing more annoying than having to repeat your issues to different departments for resolving your problems. A customer relationship management software actually helps you to become more ‘in sync’ with your consumers, because Converged CRM systems such as ConvergeHub combines all sales, marketing, customer support and billing data in one database.

CRM system help improves the quality of customer communication and your support staffs level of responsiveness by connecting different departments in your organization by using this software.

  1. Help improve trustworthiness of your brand

We all know that people get busy and consequentially forget things, especially sales and customer support reps in the company. However, when the market is as competitive as it is today, your word should be your bond. Commitment and trust create a solid foundation for customer relationships. CRM software for small business is a valuable tool that helps you to forge a trustworthy relationship with your customers. Using CRM tools you can create follow-up activities on your customers and can monitor the stages that your open sales are at, and so can be easily warned if you are about to lose any customer due to lack of attention on your side. Therefore, once you use an easy to use CRM, you do not have to use age-old yellow stickers and your customers will never feel that they are neglected.

  1. Offer relevant products easily to your customers

Generic offers and messages often do not make your customers feel that they are special, which a targeted and personalized content does.

Sales and marketing CRM lets you slice and dice customer data, in thousand different ways, so that you can create and send messages and offers towards specific customers, showing that you care about their needs.

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Conclusion

There are several reasons as to why a small business can either make or break within a few years or months. However, for this while some reasons are truly out of our control others like providing awesome customer relationship is something that can be easily controlled and improved by all small enterprises.

Concisely, the business success mantra is simple- Make your customer the center of everything that you perform and everything will fall into place.

Small business CRM certainly does not have to expensive. If you are on a tight budget download the free trial version of our ConvergeHub CRM software and let your business, bloom successfully.

 

4 Key Regions Your CRM System Needs to Excel In 2018

Modern CRM solutions like ConvergeHub delivers workflow management, sales and marketing automation, customer support, and other essentials that help provide an end-to-end business platform for managing all aspects of the customer journey. It supports a variety of third-party tools and technology to refine your broader customer engagement ecosystem. However, as these varieties of extensions in the system can be overwhelming when adopting a CRM system for your business, it is best to consider your needs to these 4 critical areas while buying a CRM.

A cumbersome and outdated CRM system typically offers you with just a simple storage of customer data and along with it, a few relevant fields for keeping track of tasks for your sales team to follow up. Most of the times with these fields in the outdated CRMs are overwhelmingly confusing and unstructured in their appearance. In other words, legacy CRM platforms are not at all up to our modern day business standards as they simply put, do not fit the requirements of most people in the modern day organization’s workforce.

The user interface has become mission-critical, even though you might not think of it as an ordinary part of CRM selection. - Paul Greenberg Click To Tweet

Fortunately, not to worry about CRM has come a long way since its inception. Modern CRM platforms deliver consumer-grade system interfaces to render best-in-the class user experiences, which are specifically tailored to the different departments in an organization.

According to many of our customers, they do not even think ConvergeHub as CRM but look at it as a comprehensive business platform to enhance productivity, ROI and customer experience.

Modern CRM is a platform that will do more than just assist businesses to organize their customer data. Per say, today’s Customer Relationship Management technology has grown to become a proactive and integral piece of your customer engagement strategy. A system that apart from just being a central location for storing customer data is also a platform that helps automate data collection, data analysis and more importantly helps find customer insights.

Modern CRM solutions like ConvergeHub delivers workflow management, sales and marketing automation, customer support, and other essentials that help provide an end-to-end business platform for managing all aspects of the customer journey. It supports a variety of third-party tools and technology to refine your broader customer engagement ecosystem.

However, as these varieties of extensions in the system can be overwhelming when adopting a CRM system for your business, it is best to consider your needs to these 4 critical areas while buying a CRM:

#1. Intuitive user experience

The largest challenge with most CRM deployment is user adoption. According to Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research:

It’s important to simplify the focus, to put just the information in front of the user that they need to make the most effective decision or to make the next best action.

Hence simply speaking, if a CRM is not easy to use, it will never help your employees to perform their jobs better, but instead make the tasks more complex and harder to complete and consequentially people will not use it.

Therefore, to streamline your employee’s processes and optimize customer interactions, CRM solutions need to provide different ways to interact with the system. Whereby, you need to purchase a CRM system that helps create different user types and roles, which will allow the users only to view information that is relevant to them for their respective activities. Moreover, insights should be delivered visually whenever it is possible to help the users act decisively. The CRM platform must also have an intuitive interface (for both desktop and mobile) so that your field staffs can find the same experience of using a CRM platform regardless of location or device.

According to Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light:

The user interface has become mission-critical, even though you might not think of it as an ordinary part of CRM selection.

#2. Workflow automation

Any modern day CRM platform must excel at automating processes (whenever possible) for outshining in workflow management. Advanced automation in CRM systems help enforce best practices in an organization, improve performance and productivity indices, and hence reduce cost. Intelligent workflow can deliver unparallel value across the organization in several key areas like:

  • Intelligent call routing facility
  • Predictable cash flow
  • SLA (Service Level Agreement) compliance in the entire service resolution lifecycle of the prospects and customers

#3. Process alignment

Businesses that use CRM as a platform in their organizations are capable of aligning their business processes across their entire organization to manage the following areas of work, which includes:

  • Contact management
  • Order management
  • Service delivery of goods
  • Claim process management
  • Purchase request management

Enabling workflow in the post-sales processes ensures timely alerts and to enforce other critical parameters around sales, returns, billing and payment and many more purchasing activities.

#4. Platform and built

Modern-day CRM solutions for SMBs are typically SaaS or in other words, Cloud-based. However, if your organization has a team of IT staffs you can also think about CRM vendors who offer hybrid hosting options and freedom of choice on Cloud storage. Moreover, some of the CRM systems are built on open standards, while others use proprietary codes.

Conclusion

Hence, as you evaluate your current CRM system, or even if you are in lookout for a better one, keeping these four areas in your mind will help you for these are critical factors are which that will ultimately affect the value you will be getting out of your CRM  and on your ability to reap a better ROI.

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4 Ways Dirty CRM Database Can Hurt Your Marketing Efforts

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all? Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database. And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. Here are how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them.

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all?
Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database.

And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. For when scores are shared between duplicate leads, it implies that neither of the records gets a high enough score to proceed down the sales pipeline.

15% of a business’s annual profits are misspent owing to bad data residing in their CRM database as CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. - Gartner Click To Tweet

Additionally, pitiable marketing results along with time wasted following up with the wrong lead drastically lower marketing and sales productivity, increase CRM’s and other marketing software costs, and finally damages the reputation of the company.

Here are 4 how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them:

#1. Duplication

Data of the customers are gathered through several sources, which includes tradeshow lists, web forms, webinars or other third party sources.  Hence, duplicates of records end up on most marketing lists.

Cloud-based CRM system and marketing software charges are most often based on the amount of data that is stored in its database. Therefore, retaining too many duplicates in your system inflates the cost of storage. Duplicate records stored in the CRM database also skew performance reports, making it complicated to base critical business decisions on inaccurate results.

The Fix:

  • Boost the performance of your system with CRM database duplication prevention tools.
  • Make sure that the likely places for duplicate entry, like manual data entry and data import, are duly covered.
  • Create a duplicate-free workflow for all teams in your organization, not just for marketing and sales departments in your company.

#2. Lead Scoring

There are several prospects who often use more than one email addresses or interact with your business in different ways (downloads, trail requests, email opens etc.) causing the CRM system or other marketing automation tools to create innumerable duplicates.

Duplicate entries in the CRM database affects lead scoring by:

  • Score sharing between duplicate leads, whereby neither of the leads scores high enough points to qualify either of the leads.
  • By treating each and every email addresses as a unique record in the CRM system, a score actually referring to the same lead can be split between two different emails of the same entity.
  • Shared email addresses, when they are shared between different members of the organization, all the addresses are saved to one unique lead.

The Fix:

  • Assess the quality of your CRM database and persistently track down all new duplicate records in the database.
  • Be thorough in cleaning your bad data and make sure that no duplicate records are left behind on a recurring basis.

#3. Inaccuracy

It has been found that CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. Hence, remember your CRM database’s quality always changes over time.

Outdated contact information, organizational changes, errors during entry, and also external data sources affects the quality of your existing CRM database.

Bad data unnecessarily stored in the CRM database, escalates storage costs, which results in creating a devastating effect on your marketing plans. This is because; multiple communications with the same prospect or lead and wrong targeting can have a crucial effect on the reputation of your brand.

The Fix:

  • Verify and then enrich all customer data.
  • Verify all third party data sources before adding the contacts or other related information in the CRM database.

#4. Limited Visibility

Most businesses depend on several systems for gathering their customer data, where CRM is just one of these sources marketers use in building the customer profiles that help them in targeting.

To access the customer information across, on-premise, cloud and also third-party systems, marketers need to be capable of finding data easily and quickly, regardless of errors or differences in form (like acronyms, nicknames, or misspellings).

The Fix:

  • Find a 360-degree view of your customers using a Converged CRM (like ConvergeHub) for creating more personalized campaigns resulting in better targeting of your customers.
  • Integrate every customer-based data into a unique workflow.
  • No matter where it resides, make data easy to be located in your sales, marketing, and support teams.

Conclusion

Are your campaign rates dropping?
Evaluate the current state of your CRM database with data quality report of your database from professional CRM data cleaning services in your city.

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How to Find Salesforce Alternatives- As Bigger Is Never Always Better For Your Business

Salesforce CRM is a first-rate cloud-based CRM solution, but several businesses are also there those that are not that happy using Salesforce and hence they look for Salesforce alternatives, as- ‘Salesforce is not for everyone.’ So if you are considering replacing Salesforce or just starting out on your search for buying a Customer Relationship Management platform, but is not sure of which one will be the best for your business, it is a good idea to try our several Salesforce competitors available in the CRM marketplace.

Salesforce CRM is a first-rate cloud-based CRM solution, but several businesses are also there those that are not that happy using Salesforce and hence they look for Salesforce alternatives, as- ‘Salesforce is not for everyone.’

The main reasons why small and medium businesses looking for Salesforce alternative are:

  • Cheaper prices
  • More customizability options
  • Simplistic features for easy adoption and learning
  • Ease of use to meet their CRM requirements.

So if you are considering replacing Salesforce or just starting out on your search for buying a Customer Relationship Management platform, but is not sure of which one will be the best for your business, it is a good idea to try our several Salesforce competitors available in the CRM marketplace.

Much like Salesforce, there are also several (practically all) Salesforce alternative CRM that provides a free of cost trial of their services. Some of them even offer a free account. Hence, go ahead, use these risk-free and safe alternatives, and attempt to evaluate as many Salesforce competitors as you like, and then after your search, select the winning CRM that fits your sales and marketing team.

Salesforce CRM holds just 21.1% share of the global Customer Relationship Management software market.- IBM developerWorks (2017) Click To Tweet

Here are some of the parameters that can help you to find the right CRM that you need for your business:

Price

Of course, for all businesses understanding your budget is an important element of any purchase. Moreover, do not always consider the upfront cost, but do your research on the long-term costs versus the benefits that your CRM solution is going to deliver over time. Consider the cost of upgrades, training, and ongoing services, which generally comes out of the same fund allocated for the initial payment. Apart from this, you also need to take into account the cost of software customization, system integration, and the price of additional equipment, like PCs, server or notebooks. Avoid buying a cut-rate Customer Relationship Management application that may suddenly inflate your overall price tag while looking for Salesforce alternatives in the marketplace.

Clearly-Outlined Business Objectives

Before purchasing your CRM, involve your sales, marketing, and customer service departments to provide you a compilation of wish lists and their mandatory requirements so that they can champion and support your decision. In addition to the IT department, you should secure buy-in from one of your C-level executives for your selected CRM platform, so that the person can provide the required capability needed for the yet-to-be-acquired software.

Apart from these, create a checklist of weighted, measured, and prioritized requirements for your CRM software selection, which can act as a benchmark for follow-up analysis of the success of the new software and its return on investment before looking for Salesforce competitors in the marketplace.

Scalability

While finding a CRM for your business always measure the scalability of the software, to ensure that your present choice will not become next year’s lament. You need to understand that you are buying the CRM for helping it to make your business grow, and so the CRM also needs to grow unless you are ready to buy a replacement system a few years down the road.

Ease of Use

Consider the expertise level of your office staffs before purchasing your Salesforce alternative CRM platform. Since, if your chosen CRM software is extremely complex and cumbersome to operate, your employees may shy away from using the software that will at once decrease the software’s value and therefore hit hard on your ROI.

Vendor Strength and Reputation

Scrutinize the reputation of your selected vendors on your short-list. Check into social media networks which give user reviews and independent analysis of CRM software. You can also speak directly to existing customers of your short-listed CRM software and know about the brand’s strength and weaknesses; especially how well the CRM support staffs helps their customers by keeping them in the loop on future developments and updates of the CRM platform.

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Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, never be in a haste to clinch a new CRM solution. To find your Salesforce alternatives, always carefully consider your objectives, expectations, and requirements and then meticulously plan your purchase to ensure your purchasing decision delivers both savings and improvement in your business’s workflow, by truly living up to its promises and benefits until the end.

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7 Golden Selling Skills All Sales Professionals Must Develop in 2018

As a sales expert, there are 7 key selling skills that you must develop, which are prospecting, creating rapport, finding out the needs, laying out the solutions, answer objections, finalizing the sale and getting referrals and reselling opportunities. These key selling habits proceed in order. Hence, regularly thinking about each of these 7 elements, which are essential to the sales process, and how they can be enhanced, is the only key to increasing your revenue, sales and profitability.

As a sales expert, there are 7 key selling skills that you must develop, which are prospecting, creating rapport, finding out the needs, laying out the solutions, answer objections, finalizing the sale and getting referrals and reselling opportunities. These key selling habits proceed in order.

Hence, regularly thinking about each of these 7 elements, which are essential to the sales process, and how they can be enhanced, is the only key to increasing your revenue, sales and profitability.

The most popular sales tools include CRM, social prospecting, data and list services, email engagement, phone, and sales cadence. - HubSpot Click To Tweet

#1. Find the ideal customers

To achieve greater success in sales, you should spend more time nurturing people who are better prospects. For this, you must look around for new prospects and remain busy looking for new businesses 80% of your time. Never relax in your prospecting efforts. Keep on prospecting morning, noon, and night; unless you develop so many customers that you do not have enough time left in the day, to satisfy and sell all the people who want to buy your products or services.

#2. Focus persistently on building relationships

The second most important habit for finding success in sales is to develop a keen habit of focusing on the relationship building before anything else. Right from the first contact, you must focus on establishing trust, rapport, and credibility with each of your prospects, since most successful sales reps devote as much time as necessary for establishing trust with their customers. Winning sales reps are those who ask an intelligent question to their prospects and listen attentively to the answers. Some even use a CRM platform as they seek to understand their customer’s situation and needs even before they go ahead and attempt to discuss their products or services.

#3. Clearly identify the needs

The third greatest habit of excellent salespeople is that they develop a habit of asking questions and then identify the real needs of their prospects related to what they are selling in the market. It has been found, that most of the prospects are seldom aware that they can improve their work situation or their life when the primarily meet you. This is the exact reason why prospects often say things such as, “I cannot afford it,” or “I am not interested,” or “We are very happy with our present situation or suppliers.” However, if you probe and ask more questions, ask about the customer’s situation and then when you start linking your products or services to those needs, the more customers start learning about what you can offer and eventually buys your products or services.

#4. Be persuasive

The fourth key habit, which every successful salesperson must develop, is the habit of presenting logical, creative, and well-thought-out presentations of all the features and benefits of their products and services. Once you have identified the prospects that can benefit from what you are selling, after establishing a level of rapport and trust and identifying their requirements, your presentation is where you can show your prospects why it makes sense for the prospects to act on your recommendations.

#5. Handle objections effectively

The fifth golden key to effective selling lies in creating the habit of resolving concerns and answering objections in a competent and confident manner. You can only excel in doing this, once you are capable of thinking through all the conflicts, the objection that a qualified prospect can make, and thereafter ideate a logical and complete answer to handle each of these objections and so keep yourself ready as, and when such situations arise. The crème de la crème, sales professionals always develop a completely clear and logically sustainable “bulletproof answers”, so that when it is needed they can easily put their prospects concerns to a rest.

#6. Ask for the decision

The sixty most vital part of selling is developing the habit of asking the prospective customer to make a buying decision. Since, no matter how strong your presentation is or how high is the level of credibility and trust that is there between you and your prospects, all prospects face their moments of tension or stress before making a buying decision. Therefore, as a good salesperson, your job is to move professionally and quickly through this stressful moments and request the prospects for their orders in a confident manner to wrap up the sale.
In fact, the best of the sales professionals plan their winning closes well in advance. What they do is that they watch for the buying signals from the prospects, make certain that there are no lingering objections and then promptly as the prospect to take action right away in a straightforward manner.

#7. Ask for referrals and cultivate re-sales

To conclude, top sales professionals never forget their customers even after the sale, but develop the habit of proactively asking for referrals from their happy customers. This habit of thinking in terms of referrals and re-sales is the key to high profitability and soaring income both for the salesperson and their organization. Repeat businesses are what makes companies grow.
According to a survey by BIAKelsey: “Sixty-one percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers.”

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Tip and Tricks for Users of Merchant Cash Advance CRM

If you are using MCA (Merchant Cash Advance) CRM to help you run your business lending company, you should definitely be aware of the best practices of using MCA CRM for getting the most out of your customer relationship management platform. Knowing the best practices that you should follow while using MCA CRM is most necessary, as, at the end of the day, you must have invested a lot on the CRM system and also have spent a considerable amount of time in it. The primary benefit of using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM is- Workflow, which is the foundation stone of any CRM platform regardless of its use in any kind of businesses.

If you are using Merchant Cash Advance CRM to help you run your business lending company, you should definitely be aware of the best practices of using MCA CRM for getting the most out of your customer relationship management platform. Knowing the best practices that you should follow while using MCA CRM is most necessary, as, at the end of the day, you must have invested a lot on the CRM system and also have spent a considerable amount of time in it. However, if you are still sitting on the fence and not using a CRM for the day-to-day operations of your lending business firm, then we can easily cite an example to let you understand your lacuna, whereby not using a CRM in Merchant Cash Advance institution is like a professional racing car driver not using a sports car.

There is currently $80 to $120 billion dollars worth of unmet funding needs among SMB, and MCA companies are in the best position to meet this demand.- Oguz Konar Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, if you are one who still does not use a dedicated MCA CRM, here are a couple of key points you must know if you want to get right from the beginning.
The primary benefit of using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM is- Workflow, which is the foundation stone of any CRM platform regardless of its use in any kind of businesses.

We are aware that with most of us, the very first thing that comes to our minds when we hear about workflow is that it sounds like a lot of work. For creating, a workflow involves going through the entire business process, documenting all activities that everyone does, registering how the files pass from one department to another and many more. We know to run a business we absolutely need to do these tasks, but for MCA CRM workflow, these are not what we ask for, rather you should ask yourself the following questions:

  • What statuses or stages do your customer’s applications fall into throughout their life cycle to get a customer-funded?
  • There are several common mistakes, which most customers make, can you avoid them by using your MCA CRM and generate more productivity?
  • Can Merchant Cash Advance CRM help to create a higher retention rate for your employees, as it can help create higher conversion rates when it comes to their marketing efforts?

Stages and Statuses are not Tasks

We have often seen many business lending organizations creates tasks instead of creating stages and statuses in their CRM workflow. However, it is extremely important to understand that stages and statuses are not the same things. For example, tasks can be created in most of the CRM systems to remind sales reps to perform their day-to-day duties. However, instead of writing “Application Out” or “Contact Sent” with MCA business if your status reflects “Merchant Reviewing Application” or for a file sent to the funder for review and underwriting falls under the status “Funder Reviewing File” it will be more productive for MCA CRM business.

Therefore, instead of just implementing workflow process that expresses tasks create a workflow that shows stages and statuses, for which your team will thank you down the road.

Keep it Simple

We have seen several customers who have created such complex workflows that it would require probably a Ph.D. in Statistics to understand. For this, we want you to remember that more complex is the workflow, the more difficult you are making it for your team and yourself to accomplish or supervise the job. An ideal workflow should always be created in such a manner, that even a new recruit in your company could look at it and understand what it means or what its purpose is.

Hence, it is best to consolidate status and stages to fill the gaps with the task. For example, MCR CRM users often create statuses like “Collect Tax Returns”, “Collect Bank Statement”, “Collect Driving License” and others, all of which can be consolidated into a single status “In Document Collection”, which is not only simple but also very easy to understand.

We must always remember Einstein’s great quote in this respect:
“Anyone can make something complicated.  It takes a genius to make it simple.”

Automated Triggers and Drip Email Marketing

We know your primary thought on this matter would be “what do drip email marketing and automated triggering have to do with workflow?” Well, to be blunt and truthful, it has everything to do with it. For any CRM platform workflow is the cornerstone to almost that goes out to your staffs or to the customers in an automated way. For example, once a status changes for a customer, with  Merchant Cash Advance CRM platform, like ConvergeHub, you can easily create an automation whereby an email can go to the customers from their assigned reps so that it looks like it is a personal email. Moreover, if a customer remains constant in a certain status for a specific period of time an automated email can to go the sales rep based on the time to make him or her attentive and look into the cause of that sudden delay.

The best part about using an automated system with nicely created workflow is that the CRM platform will perform on behalf of the sales reps and the company. Remember, using workflow management notifying both your customers and staffs can only help in your efforts to grow your business in the longer run.

Task Management

Keeping your office staffs on task every single day is truly the name of the game. Since the more tasks, your staffs complete successfully the more revenue everyone makes in your Merchant Cash Advance agency. Much like creating triggers and drip email marketing, task management also helps in creating a good and solid workflow. For example, if the status for a customer in your Merchant Cash Advance CRM changes to “In Doc Collection” a series of tasks can be automatically created like, “Collect Tax Returns”, “Collect Voided Check”, “Collect Bank Statement”, “Collect Driving License” and so on.

Conclusion

Therefore, in gist, if you truly want your MCA business to grow, by remaining on top when it comes to efficiency and productivity, a well thought out workflow will help you to generate more revenue and close more deals by using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM system.

According to one of our notable MCA agency customers of ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM, Rob Abramov of Flowrich Capital quotes on us:

“Whether you are a one-man operation or a 100 person army. ConvergeHub allows you to keep your business organized, maintain customer data efficiently, and automate the entire process from beginning to end.”

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This Is How We Show Our Love This Valentine’s Day

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers. With this tool, which presently according to SmallBizTech ranks as one of the top 20 Google Chrome extension will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms.

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. Hence, every year on February 14, brands use this day as a catalyst for email campaigns aimed to woo their customers. Nevertheless, whether your brand’s strategy in 2018 is as simple as resending previous year’s e-card or sending wine and rose, this time of the year is a good time to remind your customers that you love their unflinching support and presence and care for their engagement with your brand throughout the year.

Below are a few unique ways to cultivate meaningful customer relationship, and show your prospects and customers some gratitude on this year’s Valentine’s Day:

Listen

It may sound extremely simple- that actually it is. Your CRM platform can track your customer’s social media presence, and therefore by tuning into your customer’s daily activities, you can easily recognize which channels they prioritize, which customers are acquainted with another, or which are planning to attend certain business-related events. This intelligent flow of information through your CRM can aid your sales, marketing, and support teams to tailor their customer outreach strategy, send messages that reach the users on their preferred channels or set up in-person meetings for fostering a more better than before relationships.

Diagnose and find the trends in your customer service

When a marketing initiative or a sales process is not paying off, either you can scrap it as a tough luck or use the available data in your CRM system to better understand the behaviors of your customers.  By using keywords to sort out through your customer support requests, you can find recognizable patterns, identify common customer complaints, and deal with them proactively, rather than holding back and wait for the customers to bring the problems to your attention.

Automate your ‘To-Do’ list

In every business verticals and in all departments and positions there are always certain tasks which are more repetitive than others. Regrettably, these monotonous tasks many times lead to errors, which in turn send unfortunate messages to your prospects and customers that you do not seem to appreciate their businesses. Nevertheless, there is help at hand.  Automating a workflow in your CRM platform can trigger of a set of actions whenever you add a new customer to your CRM system, like a welcome email, or special offers for new users, or dictate automated reminders to aid your team to customize the user experience for weeks and months to come.

Present a gift

Think out of the box on this Valentine’s Day. No more stale chocolates, offer your customers a time-sensitive deal, a gift card, or bonus points that enhance your customer loyalty program.

Valentine’s Day- Takeaway

On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers.

With this tool, which according to SmallBizTrends ranks as one of the 20 Best Chrome extensions for Small Businesses, will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Yelp, and others. You can even use this tool to grab email addresses from Gmail and store them straight into your ConvergeHub CRM platform seamlessly.

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5 Approaches To Get Your Hands On New Sales-Ready Leads

What is the most effective and best way to generate fresh sales-ready leads? Well, we have spoken to some people over the years that swear by social media, while there are also others that prefer a more traditional approach. Nevertheless, one thing is for certain that like many other sales tactics, the just cannot be one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to lead generation strategy. However, if we are to consider all the answers and reactions that we got from people on what works the best, these would be the most popular top 5 approaches (in no particular order).

What is the most effective and best way to generate fresh sales-ready leads?

Well, we have spoken to some people over the years that swear by social media, while there are also others that prefer a more traditional approach.

Nevertheless, one thing is for certain that like many other sales tactics, the just cannot be one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to lead generation strategy.

ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation tool ranks within 20 Google Chrome extensions in Small Biz Trends website. Click To Tweet

However, if we are to consider all the answers and reactions that we got from people on what works the best, these would be the most popular top 5 approaches (in no particular order).

# 1. Search Marketing

Search engines, more specifically Google, are most often the primary place people go when they seek information. Depending as to where a person is in the sales cycle, they can search for information about any product or service, or they can also look for user feedback and reviews.

Does your brand show up when people search for you? Search marketing is one of the most valuable digital tactics, which can provide you with a plethora of inbound leads.

Search marketing includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEM is commonly described as Paid Search or Pay-per-Click (PPC).

For those you are new to search marketing tactics, SEO is more of a long-term strategy, for it takes a long time to establish your brand’s online presence as an SEO-friendly website.  Hence, do not expect your website to show up on the first page of the organic search results by just changing or adding few keywords to your website.

This is where SEM comes into play- as it is a great add-on to leverage your brand’s name in the search results as you continue working on your website’s SEO.

PPC and SEM allow the users to bid on long-tail phrases and keywords that are relevant to your business. Therefore, if someone looks for a keyword that you want to bid on, your brand’s advertisements may show up (depending on a couple of factors) on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) that increases the likelihood of receiving more leads as your target audience finds your products and services online.

#2. Word of Mouth

This remains to be another most effective lead generation strategy for customer acquisition. Do you want to know why? It is simply because people trust their peers and friends more than they can trust an online advertisement or any other marketing collateral developed by the company itself. Moreover, now with the advent of social media, it has become easier than ever to spread the news as to how awesome your product and service is, compared to other brands in the market.

Here are 4 golden points by which you can increase your customer referrals:

  • Offer great support.
  • Treat your customers well and get engaged with them on the social channels like Twitter and Facebook.
  • Always provide your customers with the information they want, not what you like.
  • Create a formal referral program for your brand.

#3. Content Marketing

By content marketing, we do not mean developing junk load sales-y contents that push the online audience to purchase your products and services. Rather by contentment marketing strategy, we mean developing contents that are authentic and helpful for your prospects.

You can always think, “I am not doing business to circulate valuable information for free”. Maybe you are right. However, in today’s world earning the trust and respect of your consumers is an utterly powerful thing that pays its dividends in the end.

According to IDG and Google, B2B consumers go through anywhere between 10 to 14 pieces of content (on an average), before making any purchase. Therefore, developing the right kind of content that can help guide your consumers towards educating them for making a perfect purchase decision can be the crucial difference between getting a sale, or losing the opportunity to your competitors.

Some of the most useful content types that help inform buyers to make their purchase decisions are:

  • Blogs
  • Whitepapers
  • How-to videos
  • eBooks
  • Webinars
  • Product demos
  • Case studies

#4. Event Networking

Attending, conferences, industry events, and trade-shows are all excellent ways to generate leads. Even better than just visiting these networking events, actually speaking in such events brings in results that are more positive. There are many events where you have “calls-for-speakers” and there you can propose someone, as well as yourself, to speak on a topic of your liking to the conference attendees. Hence, this can be an excellent way to build thought leadership and therefore gain visibility for your brand.

#5. Social Media

Before you land on social media platforms for generating leads, remember not every social media channel are right for all businesses. For example, if you are an owner of a local restaurant and is looking for right patrons, you may find more success leveraging social media channel like Facebook rather than LinkedIn. But, if you are into B2B marketing, LinkedIn may prove to be a more valuable channel to get your brand in front of the relevant audience.

Here are some tips that can help you to extend your reach on LinkedIn and other social media websites:

  • Publish content:

LinkedIn nowadays allows users to publish their contents, such as blogs and articles on the LinkedIn website. Hence, when your posts find traction among your networks, you may even be lucky enough to earn more visibility on the social media website, which can eventually help you in generating new leads.

ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation tool ranks within 20 Google Chrome extensions by SmallBizTrends website.

Actually, this absolutely free “social lead generator” captures contacts from the popular social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus and more.

Hence, this free lead generator tool helps you to add captured contacts to your CRM database with just one click for easy prospecting.

Here is how it works:

-Primarily navigate to Chrome Extensions in your browser. (You can also access this by clicking on the Chrome menu on the top right side of the Omnibox, hovering over ‘More Tools’ and selecting ‘Get more Extensions’.)

-In the Chrome Web Store, type ConvergeHub Lead Generator in the Search bar.

-Once you find the ConvergeHub Lead Generator, click on Add to Chrome and complete the installation.

– After successful installation of the extension, which appears on the side of the address bar, open any of the social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus) and view the desired profile that you want to target for your lead.

-Once the profile is open, clicking on the lead generator will extract all the necessary information of that profile and save it in the browser.

-You can even edit the saved data on the lead generator window by typing additional information regarding the lead.

-If you are a user of ConvergeHub CRM, you can save the information automatically into the CRM database for email campaigning and nurture of the lead.

-If not, you can copy the information from the lead capture form and manually enter the data into your CRM’s database.

Conclusion:

Of course, this is not the end or an all-inclusive list of lead generation processes. Here are some other tactics, which you can also use for harvesting your leads:

  • Reseller programs
  • Affiliate marketing
  • PR/media relations
  • Guest blogging

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!

5 Customer Service Experience And CX Predictions For 2018

In this Era-of-the-Customer, all business establishments understand that it is the customers who call the shots. Customers are better informed and smarter nowadays, as they have recognized that they have more options and so are more stringently demanding about the customer service experience they receive, which they expect to be right the first time and every time. The following are 5 predictions that you cannot ignore. For the most part, these are certain customer experience management trends that keep tending, and which, smart companies follow and react accordingly.

In this Era-of-the-Customer, all business establishments understand that it is the customers who call the shots. Customers are better informed and smarter nowadays, as they have recognized that they have more options and so are more stringently demanding about the customer service experience they receive, which they expect to be right the first time and every time. The new age customers expect business houses to take care of their issues in a way that not only keeps them happy but also help restore their faith and confidence in the company.

While many companies see this as a big burden on their shoulders, there are others who view this as a golden window of opportunity to meet their customers, exceed the customer expectations, and so win over new customers by creating loyalty with their existing ones.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. - Jeff Bezos Click To Tweet

The following are 5 predictions that you cannot ignore.
For the most part, these are certain customer experience management trends that keep tending, and which, smart companies follow and react accordingly.

Self-service customer support is growing in popularity

Customers expect companies they do business with to provide them support in a way that is easy and convenient for the customers. It has been noticed in numerous studies that customers visit the company websites not to look for telephone numbers but to look for an answer to their problems or questions in hand. In the recent times, videos have become a powerful means to answer frequently asked questions. These “how-to” type videos not only offer answers to questions but they also show the customers and visitors how to properly use the company’s products or services. Hence, this video-based support also doubles up as a marketing tool, since enhancing customer service experience is the new approach to marketing.

AI continues to be the hottest topic in customer experience management

Computers now effectively handle low-level customer support questions and its capabilities are increasing. Much like, what reminds us of the Moor’s Law, which says that the power and capacity of the microchip (the number of transistors on a chip) will be doubled every passing year. This is exactly what is happening with Artificial Intelligence. The power and capability of Artificial Intelligence is growing at a stellar pace. The good news is, while in the past using AI for enhancing customer support experience, was prohibitively high for most companies, the modern day AI solutions that are now being developed for SMB (Small and Medium Business) can be found at an affordable price.

AI will also support the employee apart from the customers

While the majority of people are focusing on how AI can be used for communicating with their customers, there are some organizations those who are also using Artificial Intelligence to support the agents. In this case, the “machine” listening to the discussion between the customer and the agent, is capable of providing the agent with up-to-date information and data needed to respond to the customer’s questions. According to the words of Ginni Rometty (CEO of IBM) – when you turn around the letter in Artificial Intelligence, ‘AI’ reverses to ‘IA’, which means for ‘Intelligent Assistant’, and over here, the machine “assistant” extends help and support the agents instead of the customers.

Amazon will shift into Brick-and-mortar retail

We have already seen as more and more Brick-and-mortar retailers are gaining grounds online, giants like Amazon has similarly moved into the retail brick-and-mortar store business on grocery items by recognizing the delicate sense of balance between the traditional and the digital retail worlds. And, this is just the start, for this shifting economy fueled by customer service is a convenience that will eventually benefit the customers.

Convenience is the new CX and customer service strategy

The next wave of disruptors to any industry is going to include the concept of convenience in 2018. We all have seen how the conveniences of Uber cabs have disrupted the whole taxicab industry. Moreover, Amazon has also paved the path of convenience and has become one of the most convenient companies on the planet to do business with. Hence, convenience is the newest service weapon to enhance customer service experience, and customer experience management this year.

Conclusion

So make sure that you are keeping up with the trends to follow in 2018, by offering your customers the service and customer experience that are engaging, easy, and convenient, to make this year a great time for both your customers and your company.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!

The 5 Most Essential CRM Integrations For Your SMB

In the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry, CRM integrations are the connection points or bridges between two diverse software applications that permit them to work jointly seamlessly. Integrations are gangways for sharing and exchanging information across platforms so that you do not have to bear the trouble of switching between diverse applications or add duplicate information times and again. Largely speaking, integrations is a functionality that makes your CRM system much demanding and heightens the probability of your sales reps using your CRM properly, as there is practically no learning curve involved in working with their existing software.

In the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry, CRM integrations are the connection points or bridges between two diverse software applications that permit them to work jointly seamlessly.

Integrations are gangways for sharing and exchanging information across platforms so that you do not have to bear the trouble of switching between diverse applications or add duplicate information times and again.

6 out of 10 small businesses are using their CRM for email marketing- MarketingCharts Click To Tweet

Largely speaking, integrations is a functionality that makes your CRM system much demanding and heightens the probability of your sales reps using your CRM properly, as there is practically no learning curve involved in working with their existing software. Integrations are pathways that offer clear opportunities to your sales teams whether they are rooted in the CRM’s native application, through an HTTP callback (like WebHook) or over a third party application like Zapier.

Whatever be your choice for using integration, for the sales reps, the benefit of this functionality is instant, which can help you to:

Get Yourself Focused: Perform all your sales activities, with the software of your choice, knowing that all your activities will be centrally tracked.

Get Yourself Organized: Consolidate your calendar activities and your communications.

Save Time: Spend more time in selling and invest less of your day in importing/exporting activities and contacts.

The important applications in any successful sales department include calendar sync, emails, document management, marketing automation, customer support and finally, accounting.

Let us take a closer look at each of these CRM integrations below:

Calendar and Email sync

Calendar and Email sync centralize your calendar and email activities between your personal or business email and your CRM.

Most CRM’s, which include ConvergeHub, has a native integration of Office 365 and Gmail or both. If you are using an unusual email you can still then use SMTP to fetch those communications into your CRM platform, like IMAP. Using this integration when you fire an email from your CRM system or the provider of your email, it routinely synchronizes all the emails with your CRM.

With integrations like Calendar sync, you have the benefit of looking into just one datebook for your activities instead of two.

Hence, remember if you have not done your email and calendar sync, you are just adding another complexity to your day-to-day tasks, which for every sales rep is an enemy that harbors unnecessary busy work.

Document management

Would not it be a great relief if you can create quotes and proposals without leaving your CRM? This is exactly the reason why sales reps most essentially require document management integration. Nevertheless, creating the document is only one aspect. You may also need to have those applications speak to each other such as automatically sending proposal rights after the sales reps move the deal to the next stage of action. Sign a contract and others.

These applications can manage your documentation, create electronic signatures, or automatically add names and addresses from your contacts directly from your CRM’s database. These way integrations meant for document management helps in avoiding manual entry and thereby mistakes.  Pandadoc, WebMerge, DocuSign are some of the most popular document management software among the sales reps.

Marketing Automation

The subsequent integration that we are going to talk about and which matter to all winning sales representatives is marketing automation. It is an integration that provides the capacity to automatically fire ‘bulk’ emails about your new initiatives, products, or programs to existing customers, leads, and prospects, that too with a customized touch.

With the help of integrations in marketing automation, sales reps can monitor each account, keep them informed and help meet their customer’s needs. Most automation software applications offer templates that can be customized so that your sales teams can generate the exact look needed depending on the purpose of what each of them is trying to achieve.

The other demanding aspect of having an email marketing automation is that when you add a contact to your CRM system that is automatically added to the marketing automation software, which reduces the burden of manually entering data across platforms. The same goes true when you want to delete or lose a subscriber or customer. In both the cases, your lists are always in sync.

There are several marketing automation programs which are capable of even tracking the email open rate, to evaluate how well your drip marketing campaigns are performing and can provide this information in a form of a report.

Some of the favorite marketing automation software that is popular among sales reps are MailChimp, Constant Contact and others.

Customer Support

Customer support is an ongoing activity that does not start or stop at the help-desk. In fact, more and more sales teams are presently keeping track of their customer support with the help of customer support tickers within their CRM.

It is an accepted fact that the value customer support integrations provides extends well beyond the sales teams. Often customer support teams have to address all problems that even include not being able to make a webinar that the customers registered for, engineering issues and billing assistance. Being able to add “@” mentioning a team member’s name helps in including others in the discussion and so resolve the issue much faster, than ever before.

The last thing that any organization asks for is to find one of your top ten customers, challenge you by telling that you know nothing about an issue, where you could have jumped in to help get an issue resolved quickly.

As to our knowledge, we found most of our customers are extremely contended using Zendesk and LiveChat for facilitating their customer support.

Accounting

In small and medium businesses, generating invoices, sales and purchase orders, are also an important activity, typically done by the sales reps themselves. For this most often, the person has either to create an entire document from its scratch, using a template or call someone who knows finance or another related department to get them generated.

Either way, would not it have been better or more efficient if these sales or purchase orders could have been automatically generated when the status of the deals was changed or got triggered by any other events.  This way thing could have been better timed and there would have been less of a chance of deals slipping through the crack.

Having the right accounting integrations makes these tasks easier. From our experience, we have registered that Xero and Quickbooks are the most favorite accounting integration of the sales reps using ConvergeHub.

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Takeaway- Be ready for the impact

All CRM for SMB markets have similar features and functionalities- vendors may disagree upon many things, which offer the most value for a sales rep using a CRM platform, but all agree that not having software integration functionality in CRM- is a deal breaker, in its truest form.

Hence, always adopt a CRM, which maximizes your sales rep’s day-to-day needs by offering the aptitude to automate as many processes (as possible) and for that has seamless integrations with the software that your sales team members use the most.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!

4 Tips on Optimizing the Lifetime Value of your Consumers in 2018

In these times of dramatic change, it is more crucial than ever before to establish a strategic focus for your business. The way we see it, businesses need to set an unwavering focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), which help provide the solid foundation that is needed to enjoy lasting growth and success in businesses. Looking through the lens of analytical and quantitative science, Customer Lifetime Value embodies the critical virtuous cycle that will build relationships and fosters customer acquisition in 2018.

In these times of dramatic change, it is more crucial than ever before to establish a strategic focus for your business. The way we see it, businesses need to set an unwavering focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), which help provide the solid foundation that is needed to enjoy lasting growth and success in businesses.

Looking through the lens of analytical and quantitative science, Customer Lifetime Value embodies the critical virtuous cycle that builds relationships and fosters customer acquisition. CLV is, in fact, a guiding strategy that helped Amazon to grow into a powerhouse of market innovation.

Brands that provide the best experience throughout the customer journey accomplish higher levels of sales, retention, and customer satisfaction than businesses, which only focus on transactional touch-points- McKinsey & Company Click To Tweet

Here are 4 ways by which you can maximize Customer Lifetime Value in 2018 and for years to come:

#1. Get ready for customer journeys; do not count on just transactions

According to McKinsey & Company, brands that provide the best experience throughout the customer journey accomplish higher levels of sales, retention, and customer satisfaction than businesses, which only focus on transactional touch-points. Hence, companies need to examine the entire customer journey, find out the root cause and work across functional areas using advanced customer journey analytics to better understand their customer behavior across multiple touch-points over time.  Better insight and visibility from marketing to sales and service, across the entire customer lifecycle, provides businesses to break down the walls between internal silos and solve the biggest pain points that influence a buyer’s next step to achieve business goals such as new-offer acceptance or increased renewal rates.

#2. Engage customers through chat-bots and messaging apps

According to a survey done by eMarketer, it has been found that more than 1.4 Billion consumers use messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and others and the number will scale up to 2 Billion in 2018. Hence, because of the ever-rising popularity of messaging applications, in 2018, chat-bots will play a pivotal role in improving customer experience and developing deeper relationships. More to say, now that chat application providers are allowing brands to use their apps to interact with the customers, brands are also using these apps for new consumer-interaction channels. Presently in 2018, it is assumed that because of advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence), NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies, machine learning, brands must engage in a more meaningful and personalized way for providing even more helpful interactions with their consumers.  Therefore, with this latest type of “conversation-commerce” customers can now establish ‘chat’ with the brand representatives for obtaining customer support, get tailored recommendations, ask questions, read on the reviews and even make a purchase without having to leave the messaging application of their choice that they prefer to use.

More to say, unlike email interactions, AI-driven conversations are not disjointed as messaging provides a continuous thread between the consumer and the brand, which makes the flow of the interaction more akin to a dialogue that, facilitate tracking and management from either side. Therefore, with this more natural flow of interactions and conversations between support and sales, there are chances for greater opportunities to cross-sell and seek or share feedback on social media platforms.

#3. Gain tangible results from machine learning and AI

Although the words “machine” and “artificial” may imply and sound impersonal in their approaches and hence robotic, nevertheless with the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence technology, this advancement is actually helping several brands to deliver greater customer experience, and to a larger audience, something that we just could not have been able to do before. For example, by pairing NLU (Natural Language Understanding) with deep-learning algorithms, retail brands can now help customers to express their requirements naturally through Facebook Messenger-based chat-bots.  Retailers can now also create a size profile for any customer by presenting a browsable inventory of curated collections, which according to several market survey reports have shown nearly three times more engagement rates, compared to that what was found while using traditional inventory browsing.

Apart from this, top-performing AI-powered chat-bots can also recognize when it is the ideal moment to transfer the interaction to a live customer support representative. The main objective over here is to make this transfer as seamless and natural as possible. This way, brands can bring in human expertise for support related issues, when it makes the most difference.

While Bots and AI technologies are still in their early phases, in 2018, as bots learn more from user behaviors, they will evolve to create a more richer experience and therefore deliver better results for both brands and their consumers.

#4. Merge customer service and sales mindsets to drive revenue

To a customer, there is practically no distinction between sales and service departments of a brand, and so in this hypercompetitive market, the company cannot let their sales and customer support teams operate in silos in 2018.

Therefore, companies this year and going ahead on time, need to adopt strategies that help blend service and sales, by adjusting their evaluation metrics and incentive plans, and the key to achieving this is ongoing training.

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Takeaway

Hence, to conclude we can say that new data and better coordination between sales and service teams are the empowering factors that can only create more sales value in 2018. For companies that shall use AI, bots, advanced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, and messenger apps will be rewarded with higher customer lifetime values, greater customer retention rates, and profitability, rather than fall back in the race by just cutting on service delivery costs.

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