Year: 2019

How To Create The Right Strategy Once You Buy CRM For Business Growth

Maintaining a proper relationship with the customers is indeed an important aspect for the growth of any business. Therefore, to achieve certain benchmark for the things you require for your business growth, you need to follow a comprehensive easy to use CRM software strategy, since without it you just cannot maintain the right kind of relationship with your customers and leads, and achieve the goals you desire for your company. There has been a drastic change over the past few decades in the customer relationship, which we are about to discuss in this article below.

Maintaining a proper relationship with the customers is indeed an important aspect for the growth of any business. Therefore, to achieve certain benchmark for the things you require for your business growth , you need to follow a comprehensive easy to use CRM software strategy, since without it you just cannot maintain the right kind of relationship with your customers and leads, and achieve the goals you desire for your company.

23% of B2B CMOs see improving customer experience as a top three objective - Forrester(2019) Click To Tweet

There has been a drastic change over the past few decades in the customer relationship, which we are about to discuss in this article below.

The Makeover in the Nature of Customer Relationship

In the present world ruled by social media, customer relationship has seen a major change in its nature over the last decade or so.
Businesses nowadays over the course of time have realized that there is an ever-increasing opportunity for engagement with the customers through social media platforms that can be utilized effortlessly.

On the other hand, if any customer goes through any bad experience with any product or service, they can also very easily get the facts vocal in the social media to tarnish the image of the brand, which has led businesses to take customer relationship matters seriously.

In fact, the stellar growth of the social media platforms has lead to a massive increase in the interactions between the companies and the customers, as it is the easiest medium in the present times to raise awareness or to share both good and bad experiences online.

Therefore, in order to minimize the damage to customer relationship, businesses are nowadays resolving their customer issues as soon as possible to help redeem their lost reputations and thereafter grow a solid relationship with the consumers of the offerings.

Best CRM Strategy That We Must Follow

  • Set A Definite Goal

When you want to achieve something for your business, the primary thing you need to do is to set up your goals for yourself and your company. Try to visualize where you want to see yourself in the next 2 to 5 years.

Online lead management software or any best small and medium business CRM software is a platform that can easily help you to achieve both your personal and your company’s business goals. However, for the CRM strategy to be effective, you have to identify the goals first and understand what needs to be accomplished, or when you should decide how you must progress with the plan to arrive at your desired objectives.

By far, it is always a better idea to split up your goals into lesser but achievable objectives and at the same time maintain an easily reversible and flexible plan.

  • Always Keep Communicating With Co-Workers

Keeping an effective and constant communication with your co-workers, help in many occasions to resolve several critical issues.

Therefore, use a cloud based CRM software , be it an enterprise-level tool like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM used by SMBs, which is designed to handle a large amount of information and can facilitate communication between various workgroups.

Buy CRM , which ensures that all data is being shared between accounts, sales, marketing, and support departments to help them have a clear idea about the objectives of your company.

Hence, to get your job done, integrate policies and use business growth technology and tools that would benefit your organization in several ways.

  • Target Customers Wisely

If you cannot target your customers better, you may never be able to improve your business revenue. Therefore, in order to become a successful business establishment, you need to target your consumers wisely enough to help generate profits for your company.

Always remember returning customers are more valuable than new customers since they tend to spend more for your company.

Hence, you can use a cloud based CRM system, to identify your valuable customers and target them intelligently, by proper segmentation of such targeted customers, which is also a great strategy for building the right sales cadence for your sales team that can predict revenue growth.

  • Track The Interest Of Your Consumers

Keeping a comprehensive trail of your consumer’s interest is a valuable way for closing sales and wining deals for your company. Therefore, it is most important to analyze the kind of things that your leads, customers, and prospects shares or like across the social media channels for up-selling and cross-selling of your products and services.

The CRM database is the storehouse of customer interests in every stage of the customer journey with your brand.

Hence, synchronize everything in the CRM and revaluating your approaches by identifying weaknesses in your system, since properly evaluating the customer database in the CRM, help to identify the scope of improvement for your organization.

Conclusion

Therefore, now that you know what is CRM software, and how it can help in the implementation of your best CRM strategy and build up stronger relationships with your customers, buy CRM to quick pace your business growth.

sign up

New and Upcoming Trends in Customer Experience in 2020

We have all observed that the expectations of our customers are growing exponentially, and even though business growth technology and tools are helping companies to facilitate its CX (Customer Experience) strategies, nevertheless without human touch our consumers and our employees both are vulnerable to poaching. Therefore keeping abreast with the nine trends that have been monitored and observed by the TCFCR (The Center For Client Retention) here are certain predictions of the upcoming trends in CX to help your business thrive in 2020 and beyond for maximizing revenue growth:

We have all observed that the expectations of our customers are growing exponentially, and even though business growth technology and tools are helping companies to facilitate its CX (Customer Experience) strategies, nevertheless without human touch our consumers and our employees both are vulnerable to poaching.

86% of buyers will pay more for a better brand experience, but only 1% feel that vendors consistently meet expectations - Oracle(2019) Click To Tweet

Therefore keeping abreast with the nine trends that have been monitored and observed by the TCFCR (The Center For Client Retention) here are certain predictions of the upcoming trends in CX to help your business thrive in 2020 and beyond for maximizing revenue growth:

A Proactive Workforce To Provide Exceptional Customer Experiences

We have known this for years that happy employees are one of the biggest keys to delivering an exceptional CX, however, it is also true that it is hard to retain our best people in such a competitive labor market.

Now while high compensation can be regarded as a strong inducement, nevertheless it is no panacea.

This is because according to the experts in workforce management at Strategic Consulting, it has been observed that Millennial(s) which is the largest generation in the present U.S labor force, are demanding a more engaged workplace.

Moreover, Millennial(s) of this modern era want to work for organizations that are ethical and are will to invest in business growth technology solutions to enhance the experience of their employees.

Hence as per the present trend owners of companies must look for increasing their investments in AI (Artificial Intelligence) and business growth technology like easy to use CRM platforms which are designed to reduce busy-work and let employees find time to focus on the customers and also create financial wellness programs for the employees to decrease stress and increase productivity leading to consistent revenue growth.

Put Super-fans to Work for Your Brand

Consumers shopping on social media platforms want instant gratification and accurate, fast information from the advertisers, however, how can a brand respond 24/8 without sacrificing its human touch?

Chatdesk which is a Tech firm has found an apt solution to this issue whereby they suggest businesses to recruit “super-fans” like stay-at-home parents, students and others who are passionate about your brand to offer after-hour support to the consumers of your offerings.

This is because applying this strategy brands can very fast augment customer support affordably with the help of engaged human agents who can be paid on a per-ticket basis.

With technology at their disposal, “super-fans” can not only select answers from pre-approved responses but they can also use technological enhancements to connect them with AI to generate personalized messages that can dramatically boost conversions.

Therefore in 2020 and beyond ‘super-fans” can motivate the growth of your businesses’ customer-base and promote your brand and so putting them to work-works.

Structural Decentralization Provides Better CX Outcomes

The tradition of customer experience being solely owned by a CXO (Chief Experience Officer) or CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) are steadily graduating to an end.

This is because presently CX is affected by every single department (be it customer-facing or not) as businesses are fast realizing the requirement for inter-departmental customer experience teams and accountability that is spread across all staffing functions.

Now this concept goes well-beyond Amazon’s model of bringing in an empty chair to meetings to symbolize the customer with the idea of empowering the employees to do what is best for the customers by decentralizing the way we communicate nowadays and rewarding those employees those that challenge the status quo.

According to a report published by iPerceptions (a CX management company), it has been noted that experience-driven businesses have in the recent years have enjoyed average annual revenue growth of more than 15 percent compared to less than 11 percent for other firms.

This shows that as more businesses are restructuring their organizations to include CX objectives and goals in their workflows and processes in everyone’s roles, in 2020 and beyond businesses will watch for a rising top rate of growth as well as find an ever-widening gap between companies that ‘get it’ and those that do not, as it has also been predicted that by 2023 more than 51 percent of marketing organizations is expected to decentralize their marketing operations a trend that will affect corporate marketing departments starting this forthcoming year.

Voice-Enabled Shopping Expands Rapidly

According to a press release by OC&C Strategy Consultants, it has been projected that U.S voice commercial sales are predicted to reach $40 billion by 2022.

This is because it has been found that voice assistance conveys more personality and warmth and so we will certainly see this shift into higher gears in the years to come as businesses and brands will rapidly expand their ‘voice-commerce’ options to let consumers buy products through voice shopping before picking up at the local store.

Now, during these calls, customers can even engage this app in conversation asking for advice on choosing the right product as we are finding consumers are slowly growing increasingly at ease interacting and shopping via voice commands which will in 2020 lead to boosted availability of products across myriad new voice-enabled platforms.

Social Media 2.0

A basic Twitter or Facebook account when it comes to interacting with customers is no longer enough as consumers in 2019 are increasing their use of social media, and therefore brands and businesses in 2020 must keep up to this trend by adding new support channels and continue refining as to how they must use their established tools.

According to a study published by Conversocial (a provider of social customer service), it has been estimated that more than 87 percent of businesses will utilize Twitter DM and more than 51 percent will use Facebook Messenger in 2020 to connect with their prospects and customers.

However to get fixated on these options is no recipe for success as in the same study it has also been mentioned that 79 percent of companies in the next 12 months are planning to implement WhatsApp and 94 percent of organizations WeChat as there are also channels that offer tremendous value across sales, marketing and customer support functions.

Therefore it is predicted that businesses, as we head towards 2020, will be eager to exploit the latest inventions in social media as modern consumers expect any new platform to offer accessible and reliable customer-focused service from Day One.

CSAT Surveys and Analytics Make the Perfect Marriage

After years of serious debating whether CES (Customer Effort Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is the best metric for gauging CX, businesses are coming to realize that it takes more than just one method or number to determine success and business growth.

Moreover, even the father of NPS, Frederick Reichheld, is forecasting text and data analytics as to the new way for uncovering customer sentiment and satisfaction.

Therefore it is best not to count on just Artificial Intelligence as a one-size-fits-all customer experiance solution since without the right follow-up surveys the complete effects of certain transactions cannot be truthfully assessed without additional steps.

Nevertheless, this must also be remembered that businesses should never ask their customers to document their satisfaction if they do not have a mechanism in place to satisfy their customers in a timely manner.

Customer Experience is Determined by Best-in-Class Companies

Best-in-class organizations like Amazon, Apple, Nordstrom, and others drive consumer expectations no matter what might be the size of our business of the type of offering that we sell nowadays.

However, as we enter 2020, it is predicted that companies that strive to understand how expectations of the customers are developed will soon realize that modern customers just do not care about policies and logistical limitations and so consumers expect the same level of interaction and care whether they are shopping in a local flower boutique or online at Amazon.

In other words in 2020 just developing CX strategies based around what our direct competitors are offering is no more sufficient as businesses must emulate irrespective of its size ‘only the best-in-class CX’ for the consumers of their offerings.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the New Frontier

It has been found in an industry report by Fortune Business Insights that presently more than 14.2 billion IoT devices are connected in 2019, which is predicted to outgrow 25 billion by 2025.

Now, this explosion of connectivity provides brands with the opportunity need to boost their customer experience as never before, as by 2020 we will be producing an annual data volume of more than 45,000 exabytes, which is predicted to vastly improve personalization of our interactions through AI and machine learning.

Nevertheless, even though one victim of data sharing is, of course, our privacy, it is predicted that businesses will increase their security of customer data through stronger technologies like blockchain and robust strategies as data security and privacy will be one of the greatest concerns for businesses in building exceptional CX programs while remaining extremely cautious and vigilant in every step of their journey.

Takeaway

Hence to conclude while there are still many businesses that continue to confuse customer service with customer experience a.k.a CX, it must be understood that customer service which is a critical element for any business tends to be transactional but customer experience, on the other hand, begins with the very first touch-point where marking entices the customer to engage, and therefore CX is a never-ending process that is relationship-driven with periodic road markers to activate, nourish and inspire customer to reengage with brands since in 2020 consumers want romance and not one-night stands.

Therefore, in the year to come ensure that your brand’s CX strategy delivers trust, hope, and intimacy that helps in building strong relationships as it is true that consumer expectations will keep rising, and it is only building strong relationships that will help you to combat your competition next year and so businesses that are able to navigate these TCFCR’s 2020 trends will remain as the winners over the next decade.

sign up

Why Many Sales Closing Techniques in Your Sales Cadence Fails with B2B Deals

There is a general misconception among certain sales reps that by following the right sales cadence and the right sales closing techniques they will even be able to get a reluctant buyer to say “Yes”. Now for this let us take two examples of sales closing techniques with colorful monikers the “Thomas Jefferson” and the “Something for Nothing” close. In the Thomas Jefferson close, you draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper and label either of the columns in the paper as “Pro” and “Con”. This is what exactly the American statesman did when making important decisions while he served as the third president of the United States.

There is a general misconception among certain sales reps that by following the right sales cadence and the right sales closing techniques they will even be able to get a reluctant buyer to say “Yes”.

Now for this let us take two examples of sales closing techniques with colorful monikers the “Thomas Jefferson” and the “Something for Nothing” close.

By 2020, customers will handle 85% of all business contact without ever interacting with a human - Gartner Customer 360 Click To Tweet

In the Thomas Jefferson close, you draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper and label either of the columns in the paper as “Pro” and “Con”.
This is what exactly the American statesman did when making important decisions while he served as the third president of the United States.

The idea behind this exercise is to aid the fence-sitting or analytical and indecisive buyers to make a purchase decision by listing the pros and cons as to why they should buy your offering.

Warning: Do not use this one unless you find a lot of good reasons in the “Pro” column.

In the Something for Nothing closing technique, you just nudge a fence-sitting buyer into buying your offerings by throwing the last-hour freebie (like: “If you sign-up right now, we will include a free…)

Now the issue with these techniques is that they place a greater emphasis on the psychological tactics and tricks designed to “coerce” the buyer into making a purchase, but at the same instance ignore what happens immediately before or after you force you buyer for making a commitment.

Now while such tactics might work out with individual buyers, these selling tricks are less effective with B2B (Business to Business) purchasers, since in B2B deals not only the asking are two high but the risk of making a mistake is greater than the B2C (Business to Consumer) sales, with multiple decision-makers who just cannot be collectively pressurized or tricked into saying “Yes” and buy your offerings.

Hence when the time is right to gain commitment from a B2B buyer, it is best to keep things simple and close the sale using the right sales cadence that works for your business, applying the ASK process as illustrated below:

  • Align priorities
  • Secure the commitment
  • Keep the commitment alive

Align Priorities

To do this begin by summarizing your knowledge and understanding of your customer’s business, their needs, and their priorities.
Make the summary of your observations short and to the point using verbiages like “ Based on what you said it is important to….” Or “You have said that efficiency and streamlining processes are your key priorities…”

Now if the purchaser has any other requirements, then ask additional questions about them and ensure the buyers that your proposed solution is addressing these needs.
After this ask for your buyer’s feedback by saying “Is there anything that I am missing?” Or “Did I understand that correctly?”

Now once you summarize their key priorities and receive their feedback, proceed and ask for the sale.

Secure Commitment

Summarize in a paper the key ways your purchasers will benefit by moving forward with the sale, and thereafter link the major features and benefits of your products or services to their needs.
While doing this exercise, if you find a few benefits are of vital importance just focus on them before you ask for your buyer’s commitments.

Here are the most common three non-manipulative ways of asking for an assurance from your B2B purchasers of your offerings:

  1. Direct

“Do you think you would like to move ahead with this?”

There are many sales reps who are afraid to use this approach of selling as it can place the purchaser(s) on the spot that can lead the buyer to say “No” right away.
Nevertheless, asking for a commitment in a straightforward way is one of the most effective methods to get buyers of their fence and say “Yes” and make you win the deal.

  1. Assumptive

“Can we start on the 10th?”

This technique leverages the power of suggestions by assuming that the purchaser(s) has already decided to buy.
Using this technique in your sales cadence makes the buyer then focuses on secondary issues such as quantity or delivery date for receiving the offering.

Now if this sales closing technique is difficult to use and you have confidence issues, then in such a case as yourself these two questions:

  1. What about your offering is unique?
  2. How will your buyer benefit by using your offering?

To sell it is most necessary that you must believe that your purchase will benefit from buying your products or services and so if you do not make a list of the ways your buyer will benefit by buying your offerings.

  1. Choice

“Would you like to set a follow-up meeting for Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon?”

Offering a choice to the buyer makes your purchaser’s decision easier by providing them a choice between “which” rather than between saying “Yes” or “No”.

This is because we all know that decision making for some people can be a difficult thing because it forces them to assume responsibilities and which they consider as a risk.

Now in B2B purchases, the least risky path is to say “No”, using choice as your weapon makes it easier for your buyer to say “Yes” because in fact, they will eventually benefit by saying “Yes” and buy your product or service for their businesses.

Keep Commitment Alive

Well, as a seller you must always remember that even after the buyer says “Yes” you have a lot of works to do.
Therefore once your prospective buyer agrees to purchase, you must immediately clarify the very next step and logistics required to fulfill the sale.

Find out if your buyer understands the contracting process?
Do you need to schedule a delivery or finalize on an implementation meeting with another department or person from your buyer’s end?

This is because if there are some formal and extra implementation processes that involve other persons or departments from your establishment, you as a salesperson should personally make the hand-off, and thereafter follow-up even after the implementation is done to confirm that everything, as discussed without any ambiguity, went smoothly.

Moreover once you win the deal also confirm to your buyer past your sales cadence processes that the buyer has made a good decision by deciding on purchasing from your company, since after any buyer decides, it is human nature that they will start having doubts and qualms (i.e., buyer’s remorse) and so it is most important to strengthen your buyers (especially in B2B deals) of their decisions right after they make it.

Finally, there is one more thing that all B2B seller must remember, which sometimes sales reps forgets. Send your buyers a follow-up thank-you email or a note few days after they have signed the agreement to make them come back and ask for more.

sign up

The Necessity Of CRM Data To Build The Right Sales Cadence For Business Growth

In this present world of ever-increasing data and information with respect to its variety and volume the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your business growth is the cardinal point for starting revenue-generating sales and marketing solutions for your company. Now, whenever we discuss customer data residing inside your lead management software, the most often cited response is that…“all data in the CRM database is important”. Although this may be true, to help you in deciding which data elements are most necessary during the initial phases of building your customer relationships, can be illustrated by a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your business.

In this present world of ever-increasing data and information with respect to its variety and volume the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your business growth is the cardinal point for starting revenue-generating sales and marketing solutions for your company.

With revenues expected to reach over $80 billion by 2025, it’s no surprise that CRM is the fastest growing software market - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

Now, whenever we discuss customer data residing inside your lead management software, the most often cited response is that…“all data in the CRM database is important”.
Although this may be true, to help you in deciding which data elements are most necessary during the initial phases of building your customer relationships, can be illustrated by a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your business.

With several implementations of online lead management software solutions, we have seen many types of data including “favorite color”; “pet names” and even “number of car seats and doors” all have prospective value to different buyer’s markets of best small and medium business CRM software .

While “pet names” can be an important data for pet supplies retailers using easy to use CRM , “favorite color” can be an essential data field for retails in the clothing industry and “the total number of car seats and doors” for users of business growth technology solutions like CRM in the motor insurance industry.

Therefore, when you primarily consider the necessity of each data element of the customer-related database in CRM, the ability to classify the data can help in determining how valuable the data is or in which phase of a sales cadence it should be delivered, if at all.

This following list provides examples of the data elements that can quickly identify the critical pieces of information, which are needed for creating customized sales cadence workflows and thereby accomplish your business goals from an array of different data sources.

The priority order of this data is as follows:

  1. Identity Data in CRM Database

In the heart of the customer database inside the easy to use CRM lays the individual, so knowing the customer or the individual and to view and maintain that information in a single customer view supplies the initial data type which is known as identity data.

Identity data can include any information about an individual that enables the individual to be uniquely identified, which include:

Name Information

Title, First Name (Forename), Last Name (Surname), Designation, etc.

Postal Address Information

Building Name, Building Number, Town, County, Zip/Postal Code, Country, etc.

Person Information

Date of Birth, Gender, etc.

Telephone Information

Home Telephone, Work Telephone, Mobile, etc.

Emailing Information

Personal Email, Work Email, etc.

Social Network Information

LinkedIn Identifier, Facebook Identifier, Twitter Address, etc.

Account Information

Details of your customer’s account ID or User ID.

Professional Information

Company Name, Department Name, Job Title, etc.

Permission and Suppression Data

Although this not essentially an identity element of data, it is important for finding information concerning permission to communicate and the reason for not communicating (suppressions).

  1. Quantitative Data in CRM Database

Now once you identify who these individual persons are in your CRM database , the next element is to find focus on the measurable operational data that enables you to find how the customer behaved, reacted or has transacted with your brand. This data includes any info, which describes the activities completed between the customer and your business.

Transactional Information (Offline and Online)

Quantity of products purchased, Subscription/Order Value, Renewal/Order dates, Abandonment rate (abandoned shopping), Product returns, etc.

Online Activity

Product views, Website visits, online registrations, etc.

Social Networking Activity

Twitter interactions, Facebook likes, etc.

Customer Support Information

Customer complaint details, Customer query details, etc.

  1. Descriptive Data in CRM Database

Knowing your customers and the type of activities they have completed with your brand provides a good starting point for any marketing activity, building your sales cadence for up-selling and cross-selling your offerings. Therefore, to find a more entire and broader perspective of your customer’s supplementary information, beyond the indemnity and quantitative details, you must include any info, which may include.

Family Details

Marital status, Name of Spouse, Number of children, Children’s age, etc.

Lifestyle Details

Property type, Car type, Pet ownership, etc.

Career Details

School name, College/University name, Education level, etc.

  1. Qualitative Data in CRM Database

The concluding type of data, which you will come across apart from the one, mentioned will provide additional description of your customers and their potential behaviors is the data acquired by information captured by questioners where your customers present data on motivation, attitude, and options that include.

Attitudinal information

How do you value our product, How do you rate our customer service, How likely you are to purchase our products and services again, etc.

Opinion based information

What is your favorite holiday destination, What is your favorite color, etc.

Motivational information

Why was the product purchased (personal use, a gift for someone), What was the key reason for purchasing our product (quality, price, locality), etc.

Takeaway

Using this easy data classification strategy and connecting them with your business goals, will not only enable you a quick identification of which data is vital for the success of your business, but it can also help you to understand the value achieved from each of this data element that helps in most advanced customer modeling, micro-segmentation of your customer base, and use an automated engine like Sales Force Automation (SFA) for building your sales cadence in your easy to use CRM platform.

sign up

Tactics To Close More Sales This Holiday Season For Business Growth

The winter has set in and so like every year this holiday season also brings with it an added excitement and rush to go shopping. This is because people look forward eagerly during this time of the year for special discounts and the items on sale that are always up for grabs. Hence retail and online business owners surely can expect a surge in customer walk-ins and their website traffic during such a period and therefore find the best ways to make the most out of this holiday shopping frenzy by doing something out of the ordinary in order to boost the flow of their prospects and customers. Therefore here are some of the most effective and all-time popular sales closing techniques that you can try out this holiday season for your brand’s prosperity and business growth.

The winter has set in and so like every year this holiday season also brings with it an added excitement and rush to go shopping.
This is because people look forward eagerly during this time of the year for special discounts and the items on sale that are always up for grabs.
Hence retail and online business owners surely can expect a surge in customer walk-ins and their website traffic during such a period and therefore find the best ways to make the most out of this holiday shopping frenzy by doing something out of the ordinary in order to boost the flow of their prospects and customers.
Therefore here are some of the most effective and all-time popular sales closing techniques that you can try out this holiday season for your brand’s prosperity and business growth:

Announce Giveaways

To produce a buzz around your offering(s) it is a good idea to create a giveaway. Offering free accessories to the customers who shop for a certain specified amount is sure to draw more people and make them interested in buying your products and services.
We say this because attractive offers and combos will always remain a hit with customers who go out to shop during this part of the year.
According to surveys it has been found that clothing, electronic gadgets, footwear, chocolate, and cookies are some of the most purchased items in this season.
Therefore, offering giveaways to high-spending customers will definitely boost spending among loyal consumers of your brand.

84% of buyers now kick off their buying process with a referral. Click To Tweet

Email Blasts

Changing or moving your existing sales process online might not be possible within a short span of time. Nevertheless, marketing your offerings online can always reap benefits beyond measures if it is done in the right way using easy to use CRM by automating your email blast and targeting your existing customers and new prospects and leads in the CRM database with enticing offers to increase their interest.

Additionally, as a part of your sales cadence , you can even send out festive greetings to all your new and regular customers which is also a good way to remind them and keep your brand on the top of their minds.

It is a known fact that customers love brands that add a personal touch and are more likely to shop from your brand once you buy CRM and send tailored and customized emails to the consumers of your offerings.

Suggesting gifting ideas for Christmas 2019 and New Year 2020 is a surefire way to get people to look for things to buy for their family and loved ones from your brand and company.

Issue Promo Codes

Customers irrespective of age, sex or demography love a discount and so why not give them that especially during this time of the year when they are all up on their shopping spree.

Therefore, circulating special promo codes for the holiday season via social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others will help your consumers know about your special holiday season sale that you have on your offerings.
This is because curious responders will all be delighted to use discount codes on their purchases which will in return help in your business growth.

Cross-selling

Driving and closing sales is surely a challenging task for all salespersons throughout the year and it is more so during the holiday seasons.

Hence why not implement a smarter approach to sell more?

Even though cross-selling is still an underrated selling strategy and most businesses fail to focus on this concept, nevertheless, just by doing some homework and learning by using your business growth technology and tools what your existing customers had bought, it can be really worthwhile to suggest them items of relevance this holiday season that might be of their interest.

For example, consumers of your brand who have bought an iron can be suggested to buy ironing board or an iron cleaning product or clothes and accessories can go hand in hand, so that it increases your holiday sale revenue from your existing customers listed in your easy to use CRM software’s database.

Free Shipping and Fast Delivery

While shopping online it is a known fact that most consumers loathe paying money for shipping. Therefore just offering free shipping to your online customers is likely to boost your holiday season’s sale.

Moreover, if your business adds to that the premium of super-fast delivery you can be sure that there is going to be a deluge of customers flooding your website.

This is because there can be nothing more attractive to the consumers than to be assured that their orders will arrive in double quick time and will also carry no surcharge for this alacritous service.

Conclusion

Finally, to sell more this holiday season we once again reiterate to buy CRM and use analytics-driven data to get sufficient insights as to how this holiday season 2019 will play out for your business.
Employ SFA ( Sales Force Automation ) in your CRM to boost sales during these busy periods of the year, since in this digital era where everyone is moving fast, the onus is on you to keep up with the pace to secure high sales volume during this holiday season and start 2020 with a sense of assured prosperity and new hopes for your company.

sign up

The Human Touch Points In Your Sales Process

By now, most among us in small and medium businesses must be knowing what easy to use CRM stands for. We all know by now that CRM software which is primarily a lead management tool aids sales-oriented businesses to keep track of their customers and manage leads as it moves through the sales pipelines, which makes selling more easy and effective. Nevertheless, although this business growth technology continues to make the process easier, however, there is no way to completely automate the human touchpoints that are most necessary for effective sales.

By now, most among us in small and medium businesses must be knowing what easy to use CRM stands for.

The global mobile CRM market will grow 11% to $15 billion worldwide this year as businesses seek to connect with their customers through their mobile devices. Click To Tweet

We all know by now that CRM software which is primarily a lead management tool aids sales-oriented businesses to keep track of their customers and manage leads as it moves through the sales pipelines, which makes selling more easy and effective.

Nevertheless, although this business growth technology continues to make the process easier, however, there is no way to completely automate the human touch points that are most necessary for effective sales.

Therefore, in every step of your sales process, you must make direct contact with your prospects and customers and educate your buyers by informing them about your offerings, which help establish trust in the minds of the consumers of your offerings.

So what exactly are these things that you should be doing to ensure that you are helping your buyers by guiding them towards a decision for closing the sale?

Therefore, here is an outline of the most vital touchpoints that must be essentially present in your sales-related processes, with ideas to consolidate your relationship with potential prospects and buyers along the way:

Selling Touch Point #1

The prospective buyer makes contact

The primary opportunity to start a connection with your purchaser is during their initial contacts.

At this stage, the purchaser has been to your website and has shown an interest in your brand or your offerings. Like, they may have opted to fill out a web-form for showing their interest for attending a webinar or have taken an action such as downloading a free resource like a whitepaper or an eBook, or they may have just established contact with you directly with any issues or questions that they have about your offerings.

This is, therefore, your very first opportunity to create a good impression and speak out to them about their needs.

It is vital to realize that in most of the cases, this is NOT the time to make a sales pitch, but it is the moment for you to figure out what exactly your prospects are looking and how you can help them to find a solution to their problem(s).

Hence, once you decide on following up directly with your prospects try to identify the following:

  • Why did the prospect visit your website?
  • How did the prospect find your website?
  • What made them reach out for your offerings?
  • What are the problems they are facing and what are the solutions they are looking for?

This is the time for you to better understand the purchaser’s needs and pain points, and thereafter find out if your organization is a fit to suggest ways to offer help for resolving their issues.

Moreover, you can also direct the prospective buyer to several other useful resources such as blog posts, videos, FAQs, and case studies on your offerings.

You can even ask your buyers if they want to sign up for your email list or want to sign up for any of your free offers or any other seasonal promotional campaigns.

Make sure that if your buyer has questions, they can reach you via emails, phone, and live chat. Therefore, place your contact details in all your email signatures, so that it becomes easier for them to find out your address and contact info at a glance.

Selling Touch Point #2

The prospect evaluates your offerings

Once the prospect is capable of understanding how your offerings can address their issues, they advance to the mid-stage in your sales pipeline, where they will evaluate your offerings against similar options in the market.

Therefore, what can you do now to persuade your fence-sitting prospect into choosing your offerings, or rather provide them with more information they need in order to make a decision for closing the sale?

Although every sale is different, nevertheless, all purchase decisions boil down to:

  1. Do your offerings meet the purchaser’s needs?
  2. Do your offerings make sense financially?
  3. Will holding hands with your business make your buyers more successful?

To answer the first question in the list you can set up a call or a product demo, which will allow you to speak to the prospects directly, and show them how your solution can address their specific needs.

You can also invite the prospect to a webinar or invite them personally to try out for a free trial of your solution by using a test account.

To answer the second question, you can put together a personalized plan that fits the buyer’s pocket, which will let them find an idea about the exact cost of your offering that is included in the plan.

Finally, as an answer to the last question, you can provide case studies, positive testimonials of your existing buyers, or refer them to your customers who will speak positively on your behalf about your products or services.

At this stage, you may even have to provide your prospects with a bit of a ‘nudge’ by offering a time-bound discount as a final effort to secure the sale.

Post-Sale Touch Point #3

After the purchaser has bought your offering

Finally, the purchaser has decided to go with your brand and has purchased your offering(s).

Now, although you have won the sale, nevertheless it does not signify that your sales process is over and you can simply move onto the next qualified lead in your CRM database.

If you are a user of an easy to use CRM, which is one of the most widely used lead management tools you must already know that customer retention should be your very next step in developing the buyer’s relationship.

According to a survey done by Harvard Business Review, it has been found and documented that:

“Acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more costly than retaining the present and existing ones.”

Therefore, it is most important that you should maintain sustained efforts to keep your existing customers happy and not spend your time simply on pursuing new businesses.

At this juncture, to reduce customer churn, you must make your recent purchasers feel that they have made the right choice by continuing to stay with your brand and leverage your easy to use CRM software which an excellent business growth technology and tool to start building a long-term relationship.

Now, what can you do to ensure that you are doing the correct things?

Here is a list of suggestions that can make your customer’s transition to your brand a smooth one.

  • Thank the buyer.
  • Help the buyer set up your solution.
  • Provide fast delivery
  • Reach out often to see if your buyers need help
  • Make sure your customer support reps are easily available
  • Send use cases of other existing and happy customers
  • Send consumer surveys like:
  • How content are your buyers with your offerings?
  • How happy are the purchasers with your customer support?
  • How easy or hard do your buyers find your solution to use?
  • What unanticipated problems are your buyers experiencing after buying your solution?

Post-Sale Touch Point #4

Continue the relationship

Ultimately, the most crucial post-sales customer relationship management touchpoint that you need to continue to make your relationship with your customer going forward is to keep on caring about the buyers of your products and services.

You can buy CRM to help you do this job, whereby you can track and measure your performance to ensure that your customers remain happy with your brand.

Additionally, here are also some unique ideas that can reduce customer churn in your company.

  • Create a loyalty program
  • Set up a referral program
  • Send your customers freebies (like small gifts, PDFs, and eBooks)
  • Up-sell or cross-sell your customers with your other offerings

Conclusion

Therefore, to wrap up, although any easy to use CRM software can make your life much easier, it is still important that you must maintain the “human-touch” with your buyers, to not only increase the efficiency of your sales process but also for building long-lasting and stronger relationships.

sign up

Salient Features Of A CRM That Can Really Save Your Startup

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, circumventing nine to five jobs and throwing them into the bin. Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, on business growth it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money. Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real Kryptonite of your super idea and how buying CRM can change that for you.

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, circumventing nine to five jobs and throwing them into the bin.
Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, on business growth it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money.

About 79% of leads do not convert without CRM - ThomsonData (2019) Click To Tweet

Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real Kryptonite(s) that can stall your super ideas and how buying CRM can change that for you.

What is CRM?

CRM is a business growth technology and a strategy that integrates several prospects of customer relation to convey value to the customers and retain the same for businesses. With IT solutions, world-class customer relations can be easily achieved and utilized to establish brands in the marketplace.

In other words, CRM is a tool that helps one understand their target customers, their needs and how brands can sustain that customer relationship to propel your startup on the basis of that relationship.

Now there are three types of easy to use CRM software that is available in the marketplace:

  1. Strategic CRM

This is a CRM software that is based on delivering value to the customers, better than the rest of the competitions and integrates the same in product development and structure of the business.

  1. Operational CRM

This CRM software focuses on the automation of sales, production, and service as per the requirement of the consumers.

  1. Analytical CRM

This CRM software focuses on gathering, storing, distributing and thereafter integrating and analyzing consumer-facing data to cater value to both customers and businesses.

There are several models of CRM tools available in the marketplace. Nevertheless, in this article, we shall discuss the IDIC model which aids businesses to ascertain the customers who are of high value and loyalty towards the brands.

Identification: Find out who is the customers and understand them well.

Differentiation: Identify which customer has the greatest potentiality and thereby have more future prospects.

Interaction: Makes sure that businesses can perceive the customer’s desires, and understand the customer’s possible relationship with other brands.

Customization: Personalize offers a means of communication to make sure that the customer’s desires can be fulfilled.

So now that you are aware of what is CRM let us move on to the five most important reasons as to why you must buy CRM for your startup organization and stick to this cutting-edge business growth technology and tool.

THE “KRYPTONITE(S)” TO YOUR SUPER IDEAS

  1. Cash Crunch

According to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that more than 29 percent of startups fail because of cash crunch and more than 18 percent for cost and pricing issues.
Therefore it is important for any startup business to keep their pricing compatible and yet generate enough profits to keep the krypton of cash crunch at a bay.
This is over here small business CRM software comes into play as it can help businesses to understand their customer’s choices and buying patterns to integrate the same in product development and provide pricing that predicts good business growth.

  1. Poor relations with the customers

Relations with its customers is the spine of any business, especially startups as they are more consumer-based models of business and this is why more startups are in need of incorporating CRM strategies for their growing businesses.

According to reports among all startups that fail more than 17 percent are those that failed to develop and deliver a user-friendly product or service and another 17 percent failed because of inappropriate business models that underlined their offerings.

Therefore, this data even illustrates the growing importance to buy CRM in developing a consumer-based model for business that can help in building user-friendly offerings.

  1. Need for the right team

The idea of delivering a customer-friendly offering, for any startup is a challenging task, which needs the right team to pull that off.
As per statistics and data that we referred before about 23 percent of startups fail due to their team’s inefficiency in catering a customer-friendly offering to the consumers in the marketplace.

Therefore as a startup entrepreneur, you need extensive staffing and training programs that can aid you in employing the right team to focus on providing value to the needs of your customers.

This is over here CRM for small business once again comes into play as it can help you to identify the right persons for your job and even train the marketing, sales, and support teams with strategies to reach customers and sustain them over a long period of time.

  1. Need for research

Just as there is no way that we can write an article without any proper research, similarly the same applies to any startup, as comprehensive market research is most important and a must for the growth of any startup business across the globe.

According to research, it has been found that 42 percent of failed startup ventures were not successful since they did not start their business after performing any market research about their proposed offerings.
Additionally 13 percent of startup businesses failed and are so ill-fated because they launched their business at a bad time, statistics which show the extent to which startup organizations ignore real-time market trends while starting their businesses.

Therefore, once you buy CRM, it is a business growth technology that is capable of storing, integrating and analyzing consumer data which aid startups to find and focus on the right market at the right time to launch the right product or service in the marketplace.

  1. Marketing woes

As per statistics and data that we referred even before 14 percent of startups fail due to poor or ineffectual marketing and another 14 percent for ignoring their customers.

But why do startups fail at marketing or while conducting their after-sales service?

Even though there can be multiple reasons that can make it happen but one of the most important of all these factors is because of not knowing your customers.

CRM for SMB and startups helps growing businesses to understand their customers thoroughly so that they can cater to their customer’s needs.

This is exactly where Analytical CRM comes into play which aids in gathering consumer-related data and with Operational CRM that can ensure faster services to their customers and Strategic CRM that can help in marketing their offerings strategically to target relevant consumers based on their behavioral and purchase patterns which can be easily collected, stored and thereafter analyzed once it is hived inside the CRM database.

Conclusion

Therefore now that you know why your startup needs to buy CRM and implement CRM strategies for your business growth, and the right type of CRM to go for to overcome each of these hurdles at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, it remains without any doubt that small business CRM software is that much-needed firepower which your startup needs as the next big weapon for victories in this competitive global marketplace.

sign up

How Easy To Use CRM Can Help Sales In Small And Medium Businesses

CRM software can help your business grow by managing several sales processes, starting with lead scoring to creating long-term customer relationships. In a study done by Aberdeen Group in 2010 revealed that, many organizations that are growing at a rapid pace use Customer Relationship Management technology to convert more leads into revenue. In the same study, it was also shown that 63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use easy to use CRM technology for their success. Here is how easy to use CRM software helps in the growth of your organization.

CRM software can help your business grow by managing several sales processes, starting with lead scoring to creating long-term customer relationships. In a study done by Aberdeen Group in 2010 revealed that, many organizations that are growing at a rapid pace use Customer Relationship Management technology to convert more leads into revenue.
In the same study, it was also shown that 63% of organizations, which have very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use easy to use CRM technology for their success.

68% of CRM solutions will become cloud-based in 2019. The social CRM market is expected to reach $10 billion this year - ThomsonData Click To Tweet

Here is how easy to use CRM software helps in the growth of your organization:

Sales Planning

Easy to use CRM software can provide you with an overview of your projected sales targets for a specific period of time. This can help you plan marketing campaigns use using the forecasted data and prepare your sales teams for an increase or dip in the volume of sales in your business.

You can also use the information retrieved from your CRM database, to manage sales territories more efficiently. Best CRM for small and medium business allows your sales managers to view the schedules of your sales reps out in the field, along with the potentials of various territories, so that you can decide upon entrusting the right members of your sales team to the locations where they are most needed, which results in optimizing your sales team’s performance.

Improve Lead Conversion

Once you buy CRM it helps to shift the focus of your sales reps (from other mundane tasks) so that they can spend their time more in selling. The data gathered in the CRM database of your CRM for small business and startups can also help in finding deals that have not yet been closed, monitor sales quotas, and build strategies for shortening sales cycles which results in the generation of faster revenue.

CRM software solutions is a business growth technology and tool that can also track incoming leads and after assessing them, distribute the leads to the representatives most likely to close the sale. Easy to use CRM applications can also help to foster efficient collaborations with your employees in sales, marketing, support, and accounts by coordinating tasks among your employees.

Build Customer Relationships

Maintaining relationship with existing customers is just as important as acquiring new ones. Easy to use CRM platforms can store detailed information from each interaction with your customers. Customer information stored in the CRM database also helps in anticipating the customers’ needs, which helps in providing personal customer service that aids in creating loyal customers.

In fact, once you buy CRM this tool can manage sales processes as well as monitor and develop your long-term customer contracts, by sending automated reminders using SFA aka Sales Force Automation for renewal of your services.

Track And Analyze

Best sales CRM software be it Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM  used by small businesses, it also enables you to track lead data, so that you can easily calculate the returns on your investments on lead generation and on marketing campaigns on an ongoing basis. This helps you to see, which among your lead sources are generating the most revenue and adjust your strategies according.

Easy to use CRM even lets you access data for each of your leads individually, which is always a valuable asset for your sales teams.

According to us, the sales analysis aspect of any CRM software helps in monitoring the overall health of your business by proactively monitoring sales pipeline management, creating accurate forecasts, effectively manage the budgets and intelligently allocate resources to meet your company’s revenue goals.

Pricing And Order Fulfillment

Best easy to use CRM software, that allows QuickBooks CRM integration free ensure accurate pricing and quotes, by capturing customer order, confirming availability of the products and expediting order fulfillment.

Therefore the main purpose of CRM software is to:

“Provide employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers understand and identify customer needs, and effectively generate long lasting relationships between the company, its distribution partners, and its customer base.”

Conclusion        

Therefore, in a brief, most easy to use CRM solutions are created to help sales and marketing teams succeed. As when the information that these customer relationship applications collect are applied as an essential part of the sales strategy, it helps to benefit the organization as a whole, in terms of revenue generation and growth, by determining which marketing efforts and sales strategies are most effective for the development of the company resulting in consistent business growth.

sign up

5 Trends You Should Follow In Sales In 2020

Buyers in 2019 have the power to go online and then research offerings on-demand that can be made available to them in a matter of a few clicks. These are the exact reason as to which businesses, be it big or small have a singular opportunity to sell more in less time. However, with time and budget constraints added on to your sales teams, it becomes really impossible to access every business growth technology and tool in the toolbox to select the right solution to help your business grow. Hence in this article let us look at these unique sales trends that entrepreneurs are following in 2020 to boost their sales cycles and harvest more revenue.

Buyers in 2019 have the power to go online and then research offerings on-demand that can be made available to them in a matter of a few clicks.
These are the exact reason as to which businesses, be it big or small have a singular opportunity to sell more in less time.
However, with time and budget constraints added on to your sales teams, it becomes really impossible to access every business growth technology and tool in the toolbox to select the right solution to help your business grow.

CRM adoption will grow at 13.5% CAGR over the next three years - SelectHub Click To Tweet

Hence in this article let us look at these unique sales trends that entrepreneurs will be following in 2020 to boost their sales cycles and harvest more revenue.

  1. Personalized Emails

By now in 2019 most businesses out there in the marketplace have relevant data on their customers. Now, these data-points can include basic facts such a prospect’s or customer’s name, address, email, telephone numbers and birthday while also having information about their buyer behaviors.
For an example, if your customer frequently orders a few offerings manufactured by your company, you can send them personalized emails with an exclusive offer on that product or service, which will not only illustrate that you cherish the relationship that your business has built with the customer, but it will even reward the customers for their unwavering loyalty.

  1. Mobile Apps

As of date, there are a few billion people on this planet who uses a Smartphone. In fact, this will not be a surprising fact to learn if you are also reading this article on your Android or iPhone.

Hence in this age of digitalization build a mobile app for your brand so that you reach the consumers of your brand directly and on the go.

This is because, a mobile app not only provides you full access to promote your offerings that match your buyer’s personas but it also helps to do it without any middle-man getting in the way, since mobile apps can let you enable push notifications to send personalized offers and messages right into the hand of your prospective customers immediately.

  1. Social Selling

According to Forbes more than even 92 percent of B2B businesses are directly influenced by social media channels, and therefore it is of no surprise that in 2019 most sales professionals are actively engaged with customers on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Now the only reason behind this approach to sales is that high-value customers and prospects of any brand are much easier to talk to on these social media platforms.

Therefore, as a B2B brand to place yourself on the prospect’s radar, try to reach out to them with relatable and relevant content that can aid your customers buy your offerings faster and thereby provide your company with rapid business growth.

  1. Micro-influencer Marketing

In modern times micro-influencers are the farthest picks from your social media moguls and celebrities who have millions of followers online.

This is because unlike celebs, micro-influencers are passionate people who really want to explore your offerings and provide their honest opinions about your products and services.

Moreover, the contents published by micro-influences on their blogs or social media websites are viewed by hundreds of people who take their advice as peer consults.

In fact, micro-influencers are easy to collaborate with and promote your brands’ offerings without burning a hole in your pocket.

Therefore with micro-influencer marketing, you can promote your offerings at an exclusive price for a niche audience and so in 2020 using Instagram as your best bet to find the most happening micro-influencer who is interested in your industry and thereafter push your offerings to a new market.

  1. Customer Relationship Management

Easy to use CRM software is a business growth technology solution that aids in centralizing all your customer-related information on a unified and robust platform.

Therefore once you buy CRM it this tool can come handy when you have one salesperson handling an account or a customer by helping them coordinate without their teammates without leaving their desk.

Most CRM software solutions, be it a powerful CRM platform like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions mostly used by startups and small businesses they come with useful features like contact and lead management, sales pipeline management, quote building, workflow, and Sales Force Automation , invoicing capabilities and more.

Fortunate a lot of CRM vendors in the marketplace offer a free trial to help you and your sales teams evaluate their CRM software even before you buy CRM to see if it is the right fit for your business.

Conclusion

Therefore to conclude, it can be said that in 2020 you need to proactively empower your sales teams with these trends in the coming year and implement them as a part of your business growth strategy for finding more customers, leads and revenue growth.

sign up

Understanding Sentiment Analysis: The Ultimate Next Generation CX Measuring Tool

We all know that consumers are irrational beings when it comes to shopping. Hence as a brand owner if you can trigger the right emotion among your consumers there is a much higher chance of boosting your businesses’ revenue. Therefore the ultimate key to business growth in modern times is to buy CRM and thereafter scan customers’ reactions towards your offerings and adjust them accordingly for consistent sales and revenue growth. Now when you send a well-experienced sales rep to close a deal, they, in general, know what to do based on their experience.

We all know that consumers are irrational beings when it comes to shopping. Hence as a brand owner if you can trigger the right emotion among your consumers there is a much higher chance of boosting your businesses’ revenue.
Therefore the ultimate key to business growth in modern times is to buy CRM and thereafter scan customers’ reactions towards your offerings and adjust them accordingly for consistent sales and revenue growth.

Companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience - Temkin Group Click To Tweet

Now when you send a well-experienced sales rep to close a deal, they, in general, know what to do based on their experience.

However, the question that remains to be answered is how you can replicate the same in online sales? Or how can you boost your brand’s customer service just by automatically scanning reviews and emails or by judging the time your web-audiences and leads spent on your web-pages or by their mouse movements?

Initiate Sentiment Analysis

To a layman, sentimental analysis can be illustrated as an umbrella term that is used for a set of algorithms that tries hard to make sense of the user’s brand perception based on the words, phrases, and punctuations they use, and also many other parameters such as the use of emojis.

At its basic form, sentimental analysis classifies a reaction of a person as positive, neutral or negative. However, recent advancements in this technology specify and categorizes reactions in a more specific way, like identifying complex emotions like curiosity, anger, happiness, depression, stress and so on.

This is possible by mining and scanning through billions of social media posts and product reviews that aids in building a dictionary based on the context used by individual words. Therefore for sentiment analysis of the customers, it is most essential to use data sets that are very much alike to the customer’s expected inputs in terms of both the language and medium or channel used for those verbiages.

 It Is More Than Just Sentiments

Now although it is easy to understand now why sentiment analysis is an awesome tool for marketers, nevertheless it is not enough powerful on its own. Since, to be really efficient, sentiment analysis technology needs to be integrated with NLP (Natural Language Processing) to find recurrent themes in the customers’ feedbacks.

For example, if you are running a hotel and you get negative reviews, it is most critical to understand the exact reason that caused them like poor Wi-Fi, messy rooms, lack of parking space, unhygienic food and more.

This is because since people use several types of languages to convey the same idea, the original challenge is to classify all these variations correctly.
For example, the use of sarcasm can easily pose to be a linguistic issue for machine-based analysis. This is because even positive words can be at times misleading when it has one or more negative connotations in the same phrase, like the typical British phrase “bloody excellent” and many more.

Moreover, polite words can also be challenging to interpret using NLP as they can hide a negative impression masked inside a neutral word.
For example, the phrase “not bad” must be treated in the context of somewhat positive, even though both these words convey negative feelings.

Sentiment Analysis: Use Cases

Actually, sentiment analysis is all about reading your customer’s minds and finding out those actions that can change their moods for actions that include product launches, promotions, price variations, social projects and more.

Therefore here are a few practical and pragmatic ways that you can use this cutting-edge tool to work for your business:

  1. Customer Segmentation

If you are aware of what lead management is in easy to use CRM software you must have heard of this term as the fastest way to fail in any business is to remain oblivious to market segmentation.

This is because you must not address everyone in order to succeed but focus all your marketing efforts on individuals, companies or groups who are capable of naturally embracing and advocating your offerings.

Hence using sentiment analysis you can easily determine who these peoples are and what these things are which makes them remain happy about your business.

  1. Product Launch or Redesign

When gearing up for marketing a redesign or start an innovative product launch or, you can use sentiment analysis to read through the social media pages of your competitors to see what draws people to their offerings. And when you go through a redesign, you can even use this tool to make sure how your audience comprehends the new identity and adjust your communication to meet expectations.

Now once you get the results you can use your lead management software like easy to use CRM to filter these results by demography and thereafter define user categories.

Additionally, you can even borrow a concept from user experience with your brand and define user personas based on the results of your findings.

This is because by correlating the attitudes and words used by your customers with the spending habits you can set up your marketing efforts, lead nurturing techniques, or filter your sales cadence endeavors accordingly.

  1. Finding Brand Ambassadors and Brand Detractors

The meteoric rise of social media brought into our attention even new jobs like influencers and brand ambassadors nowadays.

Now, while there are several brands that choose prominent global celebrities and stars for these roles, you must not neglect the micro-influencers in the social media platforms that have small but extremely loyal communities around them and can be found by using sentiment analysis techniques.

Sentiment analysis can also be of use for finding perpetual detractors who are relentlessly talking negatively about your company.
Since once you can identify these detractors you can either block them, take legal measures or contact them directly to offer an explanation if necessary to protect your brand.

Finally-Evaluate Trends

You can even use sentiment analysis as your brand evolves to find real-time feedback(s) from your customers as well as to measure and evaluate long-term relationships.

Sentiment analysis can be also a helpful method to gauge the success of your brand awareness campaigns, to track subtle shifts of the position of your brand in the marketplace or measure the effectiveness of your crisis management practices.

This is because until now machines and cutting-edge software technologies have been mostly filtering reactions based on written texts, however the stellar growth and advancements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will bring in more ways to do this based on images, emojis and voice recordings of the consumers, which will result in producing a far more accurate result, since meta-verbal and non-verbal languages can eliminate some of the uncertainties regarding sarcasm and double-meaning words used by customers while posting on social media or while publishing reviews.

sign up

How to Outsmart Large Retailers by Organizing your Promotions this Black Friday

As the great holiday season is approaching once again this year, it appears that all the retailers around the globe are ready once more to come together with one ultimate goal: Beating Amazon, Walmart and other similarly large retailers around the world. This is because Amazon alone accounted for over 50% of all online internet deals that happened in 2017. Now while bringing down these big internet players may seem like a far-fetched idea in just a few days, nevertheless there are many things that small businesses can do to put up a good fight using business growth technology to help them to guide them in their quest for success.

As the great holiday season is approaching once again this year, it appears that all the retailers around the globe are ready once more to come together with one ultimate goal: Beating Amazon, Walmart and other similarly large retailers around the world.
This is because Amazon alone accounted for over 50% of all online internet deals that happened in 2017.
Now while bringing down these big internet players may seem like a far-fetched idea in just a few days, nevertheless there are many things that small businesses can do to put up a good fight using business growth technology to help them to guide them in their quest for success.

Customer reactivation rate increase by 106% during Black Friday. Click To Tweet

However, before we delve into the strategies and tactics for beating down the online giants, here are the Clack Friday and Cyber Monday promotion stats for 2018:

  • Black Friday online sale pulled in around $6.22 Billion in 2018 which is 23.6 % growth from a year ago, as per transactions tracked for 80 of the 100 internet-based retailers in the USA – Adobe Analytics
  • Buy online and pick up in stores still continues to be a popular option in 2018, with click-and-collect order up by 73% – Adobe Analytics
  • In online sales, 43% of all orders were completed via mobile – SFDC
  • 3 Billion emails and 82 Million push notifications and SMS were sent on Black Friday 2018 with a total of 8.8 Billion data points generated in just one single day- AdWeek

Now that we know these incredible stats let us find out how SMBs can craft a compelling Black Friday 2019 strategy and follow it up with Cyber Monday promotion for sales growth:

Build your theme

It is really hard to make customers remember your brand when your business lacks its physical appearance in this over-crowded marketplace.
Hence provide your customers with an online touch and feel to associate your brand with and to remind your customers why they should shop at your website.

Create your own strategy so that you can find a unique way of pinning your brand into the minds of your ideal customers and make them return times and again for more.

Play to your strengths

It is foolish to assume that big online businesses like Amazon, Walmart, and others necessarily have all the aces up their sleeves.

This is because while having thousands of customers is good, it often becomes impossible to offer each customer with a personalized shopping experience mostly because of the sheer amount of time that is required to invest in it.

However, small businesses do have the luxury of spending this time to understand each of their customers (or groups of customers) shopping habits and behaviors and thereafter craft a strategy that will permit them to grab a sizable of the cake.

Now if you buy CRM for understanding the buying habits and shopping behaviors of your website audience or the segregate the customers base into groups that have similar likes and wants and thereafter create personalized offers your brand is sure to make better during the Holiday Season sale this year.

Targeted email campaigns

A study done by ContactPigeon stated that email marketing alone drove 23% of all Black Friday sales in 2017, and this trend is on a rise.

Here are some of the other interesting facts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales:

  • Cart abandonment emails perform the best during Black Friday.
  • Customer reactivation rate increase by 106% during Black Friday.
  • A series of 3 automated emails send with the help of business growth tools lead to a 90% boost in orders during Black Friday.

According to the same research done on Black Friday sales (based on 2.5 million emails sent during Black Friday promotions in 2017) it has been found that 4 PM as the go-to time for sending emails during Holiday Sale in the USA.

Start your Black Friday promotion early

Consumers all the globe are simple beings, and so it does not requires something big and extraordinary to earn their favors or get them excited.

Now when they are left unattended, it is true that most often they visit the biggest online stores owing to high chances of finding what they are looking for, nevertheless, if your brand can make a resonating promise, you will definitely be able to steal them away from the competition, at least during the Black Friday promotional days.

Hence start your promotions now (a couple of days ahead). For these Emails are the best channel followed by social media and SMS.

Make sure that you showcase different offerings to different customers or groups of customers with each email.
This way your brand will not only improve its overall effectiveness of the sales but also provide the given consumers’ number of deals to look forward to.

Therefore, do not wait for the last hours but showcase your Black Friday promotions on a regular basis during the Holiday Season sale this year.

Additionally, providing special discounts on your offerings to the new subscribers of your emails will also help in generating a lot of fresh leads in the process during this time.

Learn from the best

It is a known fact, that good businesses invent, but great ones copy. Hence there is no shame in copying other businesses’ tactics that have proved to deliver results.

For example, providing additional items (like a mouse and a cooling pad with a laptop) that go well with the Holiday promotions is a killer tactic that every brand should utilize for Good Friday and Cyber Monday sales growth.

Offer an excellent mobile experience

Each year mobile e-commerce is growing exponentially. In fact, in 2018 mobile users accounted for more than half of e-commerce sales and shows no sign of stopping even this year.

This is because according to research it has been found that mobile users spend at least twice as much time browsing online shops compared to desktop users nowadays.

Lastly, pay attention to mobile transactions. 84% of users encounter issues/have a hard time completing a mobile payment, which can lead to losing hundreds of deals and thousands of dollars.

According to a recent survey, it has also been found that 40% of prospective mobile users will not go to a competitor after a bad mobile experience.

Therefore incentivize your consumers to download your mobile app and then make a purchase through it so that you can offer your customers a highly user-friendly mobile app and provide “lightning deals” that can be only accessible via mobile.

Superior customer service: the key to every Black Friday promotion

World-class customer service always goes a long way.
Hence to remain on top of the game make sure that your offers must mark all these checkmarks that include:

  • Free shipping and return
  • Resolve all customer issues in less than an hour
  • Ensure fast delivery
  • Instantly response when a customer contacts your company over live-chat, phone, social media or email

Therefore if required as a small business it is advised to double your customer support team during these promotional periods, and keep up your increased support resources well beyond the Holiday Season and turn it into a weeklong or a fortnightly experience.

Your greatest revenue stream is your returning customers

Convincing your consumers to make a purchase from your eCommerce website is only the beginning. This is because it is more important to make sure that your customers are satisfied with their shopping experience with your brand and will make them return in the future for more.

Here are a few well-accepted stats to prove the veracity of our statement:

  • Happy and stratified customers, in general, relate to 11 people about their great shopping experiences
  • According to Pareto principles, 80% of your revenue in all businesses comes from 20% of returning customers
  • It costs 5X more to attract new customers than it does to retain the existing ones

Therefore, offer free gift wrapping, include a small present for rewarding loyal customers that are directly linked with their purchases, offer faster delivery for over $X purchases so that you can show the consumers who have been shopping continuously on your eCommerce website for at least a year that your brand treats them with special care.

It does not have to be big, you can even send your loyal customers an email with 5-10 percent discount code for their first 3 transactions and they will be more than happy to support and remain a loyal customer of your offerings.

Utilize easy to use CRM software to your advantage

All these tactics and strategies mentioned above can be implemented with greater efficiency and ease if you buy CRM and use this cutting-edge business growth technology during the Back Friday sale of your offerings.

CRM is a lead management software and more that helps in storing customer-related data, and gauge the buying habits and the offerings your consumers are most interest in, using lead tracking and email integration features than can help in automating tons of workflows and processes, allowing you to focus on research and selling your products and services, by providing all the information needed to push a prospective customer towards a purchase.

Conclusion

Competing with big online retailers is hard, but not altogether impossible.

Hence reward your loyal customers, provide excellent customer service, deliver a great mobile experience, and utilize your easy to use CRM data to your advantage, and you can be ensured to customers will come to your brand this Black Friday, without even considering Amazon, Walmart and others for fulfilling their needs this year.

sign up

Track Your Customer Service With These Four Vital Tips for Rapid Business Growth

Great customer service will obviously get you loyal customers and bump up your revenues resulting in business growth. Ask any satisfied customers why they liked your services and one thing they will all probably say is “Because your support team solves problems quickly”. Hence quick turnaround time when it comes to dealing with customer issues is of utmost importance to your customer service reputation in the marketplace.

Great customer service will obviously get you loyal customers and bump up your revenues resulting in business growth .

Ask any satisfied customers why they liked your services and one thing they will all probably say is “Because your support team solves problems quickly”.

Hence quick turnaround time when it comes to dealing with customer issues is of utmost importance to your customer service reputation in the marketplace.

Worldwide, 67% of people believe that customer service as a whole is improving - Microsoft (2019) Click To Tweet

However, it is needless to assume that you always need money to deliver prompt customer services.

This is because, you can even run a lean customer service machine, on a shoestring budget, if you are aware of what is CRM technology that can even be the envy of any Fortune 500 company.

In fact, according to Gartner Research, it has been found that if you are having a small business, odds are in your company’s favor that your establishment can deliver a higher level of customer satisfaction by customer tracking with the help of a business growth technology like CRM software.

Being small as an organization, you have the advantage of being nimble and approachable by your customers and so in general, small businesses are not staggered by inter-departmental politics, and red tapes that big organizations face in their business establishments.

Hence, here are a few strategies that can help you to quickly deal with your customer issues. Most of these tools fall with the low to no cost category, but they definitely need investment in time and training if you want to enjoy the full benefit of these tips for decreasing the time needed for resolving your brand’s customer issues.

  1. Use social media monitoring tools

Social listening on social media platforms may be one of the most helpful ways to track customers and solve their problems.

Encourage your customers to reach you out on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and advise your customer care representatives to respond to them rapidly.

Now easy to use CRM software, especially those that are integrated with social sharing features, better known as SCRM can help you listen into the conversations of your followers on social media and thereby take necessary actions rapidly.

  1. Take Advantage of Google Alerts

Although it is not a shiny and new applications like social platforms, Google Alerts is also efficient if you need to keep an eye on what customers are saying online about your products or services.

Create a series of alerts with suitable keywords and set it up so that you can get necessary alerts by either RSS or email feeds

And the best part is as a Google product, it is free.

  1. Use CRM software

You do not need to be on the list of Fortune 500 business establishments to buy CRM solution for keeping your customers happy.

In the present times and with the growth of cloud based SaaS technology, depending on the scale and size of your small business, you can purchase Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions that are price-performance leaders and are best suited for startups and small businesses.

However, if you want to spend more but stay with big names, vendors like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce have also scaled down versions of their lead management software for small and medium businesses but might prove extremely heavy on your pocket.

  1. Use feedback apps for brick and mortar businesses

Although there are several options for receiving online customer feedback, never neglect spot feedback from customers when they visit your brick and mortar store.

One of fast deploying technology in many niches is QR (Quick Response) codes. Small businesses can team up with vendors of QR code apps that insert quick response codes on products in the store.

By scanning, the code customers are redirected to a mobile-optimized form while they are still shopping in your store and leave suitable feedback that can be examined in real time and so complaints found can be resolved rapidly.

Conclusion

Hence, to fetch up, it is necessary that all small businesses must focus on customer satisfaction in this ever increasingly competitive marketplace, with the help of these vital tips that are sure to bring more happy customers and increased your ROI.

sign up