Year: 2019

User Guide

The user guide will help you to thoroughly explore all the features and characteristic you have in the ConvergeHub suite. This CRM suit is developed keeping in mind all the functionality and behavior required to manage your valuable customers efficiently and effectively so that it will help you to generate more and more business and hence revenue. Thanks to the contribution of our experienced business specialists, experts and analysts who have put their ideas and continuous effort to put together and present this unique and powerful money generator machine to you.

You will learn following sections:

Recycle Bin

Recycle Bin is the repository of all those data that is deleted from any module of the CRM system. Through the Recycle Bin, the user can restore the deleted data to its original place or remove the data permanently from the system.

Recycle Bin can be accessed by clicking on icon at the left column.

  • Search: Use the search field to find a specific item by typing in keywords.
  • Advanced Search: For a more refined search, click the Advanced search link and fill in the search criteria.
  • Checkbox: Use the checkboxes to select one or more items to restore or permanently delete.
  • Restore: Click the Restore icon to restore a deleted item.
  • Permanently Delete: Click the Bin icon to permanently delete an item from the CRM.
  • Action: Additionally, you can also choose “Restore” or “Permanently Delete” from the Action dropdown.

How To’s

ConvergeHub How To section equips business professionals with an explanation on the most common CRM terms and functions. Use it to get get an insight into the basics of ConvergeHub, to explore its various features and know the application better.

Admin Guide

Admin Guide will help the company administrator to manage his account efficiently.

You will learn the details from the following:

How to Best Align Sales and Marketing through Lead Generation and CRM Software

Are you aware that aligning sales and marketing draws the potential to drastically boost the performance of your business? Although marketing and sales teams most often do not agree to this, nevertheless when both of them work towards a common lead generation goal, companies typically see more than 38% greater sales win rates. And there are no effective means to align sales and marketing than by adopting easy to use CRM software for lead generation, management and nurturing of the leads.

Are you aware that aligning sales and marketing draws the potential to drastically boost the performance of your business? Although marketing and sales teams most often do not agree to this, nevertheless when both of them work towards a common lead generation goal, companies typically see more than 38% greater sales win rates.
And there are no effective means to align sales and marketing than by adopting easy to use CRM software for lead generation, management and nurturing of the leads.

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM.This figure has now increased to 87% - Cloudswave Click To Tweet

Therefore, here are a few ways your business can better align sales and marketing through a CRM software platform:

Build a Strategy Together

In general sales and marketing teams do not always see eye-to-eye, for one obvious reason, as both these teams have different goals.
This is because, while marketing has a much larger scope, concentrating on growing marketing, retaining customers, introducing new products and most importantly bring in qualified leads, the sales department, on the other hand, is solely focused around working with their sales pipeline.

Hence, to make sure that both sales and marketing teams are on the same page when it comes to generating and then qualifying and converting leads, we recommend implementing an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

What is a Service Level Agreement?

Well, in a layman’s term SLA is essentially a contract that highlights the conditions and terms of which one party has condescended to provide another.
While Service Level Agreements have been traditionally utilized for customer-related activities, in modern times it even plays an important role internally across all the departments in any organization.
According to a survey done 2017 by a global research firm, it suggested that businesses with a proactive SLA process are 34 percent more likely to find greater Return on Investments made (Year-over-Year).

Therefore, an SLA between marketing and sales would similarly highlight each department’s agreed-upon commitments to each other.
This is because SLA between these two teams not only allows them to hold each other accountable, but it even serves as a critical component for communication and interaction that educates the marketing and sales departments of one another’s responsibilities, roles, targets, and processes.

When developing your SLA for marketing and sales, here is a list of items you need to focus on that include:

  • Clearly define your ideal client’s profiles and buyer personas that you set in your easy to use CRM software.
  • Assign clear and transparent goals for your marketing and sales teams
  • Determine how leads will be handed off between your sales development reps
  • Identify and develop protocols for managing leads
  • Define the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that both marketing and sales will use to judge the progression and effectiveness of the company’s demand generation process

Now, once you have implemented the SLA we are sure you should very soon see consistency on how leads are created and working in your easy to use CRM, which is enough evidence to prove that the reports across both these teams align and they are working towards a common goal.

Streamline Interdepartmental Communications

According to a research study by PandaDoc, it states that:

“51 percent of marketers are not satisfied with the level of communication between the teams and 53 percent of sales professionals are not pleased with their marketing’s support.”

Hence communication is one of the biggest hurdles that boost conflicts among departments in any workplace.

Therefore, if you are a small business or a startup on the rise, implementing best small business CRM software aids in minimizing conflicts as it helps in centralizing information in the CRM database , making it easy for all in the organization to access updated sales pipeline data and communication history about leads, prospects, and customers in one place.
This is because marketing and sales teams meet frequently to analyze performance reports which are often pulled directly from their easy to use CRM software.
Potential reports for building dashboards or the frequently shared KPI reports that are built for performance analysis might include:

Top of funnel reports: Total monthly (Marketing Qualified Leads) MQL, and (Sales Qualified Leads)

Middle of funnel reports: Marketing generated opportunities by stage

Bottom of funnel reports: Sales generated by individual lead source

But how does this streamlines interdepartmental communications?

Well, by knowing and understanding what and when a prospect has last talked along with the context of the conversation, both sales, and marketing departments can work more productively.
It not only keeps your sales reps from having overlapping outreach but it also aids marketing to communicate with the prospects knowing where the interactions left off and so what type of content might be suitable to the prospects in their buyer’s journey, which has according to certain stats delivered 73 percent enhanced conversion rates.

Improve Quality Of The Leads

While there are several ways by which brands can improve the quality of their leads, nevertheless if you are using an easy to use CRM software solution for your business implementing lead scoring for your marketing and sales teams is one of the most effective options for boosting the quality of your leads.

You can also use marketing automation in your easy to use CRM for optimizing lead distribution among the marketers in your team and also connect these two technologies for your teams to assess, vet, nurture and segment leads before they are passed to the sales teams.

Lead scoring helps your marketing teams to prioritize on the hottest leads and reduce considerable time which is wasted on unengaged prospects providing sales reps more time to concentrate who are likely to convert most quickly.

When building out your lead scoring formula, teams should evaluate items like:

  • Contents that the leads have viewed
  • Nurturing campaigns the lead has engaged
  • Website pages leads have visited
  • Whether the lead fits into the demography of your present customers
  • Whether any lead has raised their hands and asked for more info on your offerings

Finally- Enhance your Personalized Outreach

Last but most importantly personalize every single communication that goes out both from your marketing and sales teams.

Using all-in-one CRM software that provides a 360-degree view of your leads, prospects and the customer’s history with your brand allows you staffs to get really smart with their communications.

Therefore, use an easy to use CRM that helps in mapping certain fields in your best small business CRM software (like lead source and others) which can enable your sales reps to get personal with their follow-up strategies that are more relevant to the leads for becoming your customers and thereby help sales to make quick wins.

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The Key Benefits of Deploying a Customer Loyalty Program in Small Business

With the growth of easy to use CRM software platforms, customer loyalty programs have been entrusted with a new recognition in recent years for many reasons.
Primarily, customer loyalty programs have gained so much prominence as they have become an expected part of customer experience with any brand that is looking for stellar business growth.

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM. This figure has now increased to 87% - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, in today’s competitive marketplace, simply implementing a traditional customer loyalty program for the consumers of its brand is not enough.
In fact, in a recent survey conducted by a global research and advisory firm providing advice, insights, and tools for leaders in IT, customer service and support, finance, HR, marketing, legal and compliance, sales, and supply chain functions across the world, it has been found that more than 42 percent of Millennial(s) in American will stop buying from a brand that they had been loyal to after just two bad customer experiences.

Therefore to boost the productivity of loyalty program’s ROI and consumer retention in an overall manner, companies have taken to expanding their loyalty rewards to incorporate behavioral and social actions, like referral points and referral rewards for user-generated contents, while also trying to provide their customers with some more personalized experience using easy to use CRM software solutions for harnessing growth.

So here are some of the advantages of customer loyalty programs that can boost CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) with your brand using CLM CRM (Customer Lifetime Management CRM) software:

Ten Advantages of Customer Loyalty Programs

  1. Increase in Revenue

A boost in the retention of the customer aid in increasing profits for the company, since loyal customers already have faith and trust in your brand and are so likely to spend more on your company’s offerings.

According to research increased retention by just 5% with the help of customer loyalty program can boost revenue anywhere between 25-95%.

  1. Save Money

While creating and thereafter implementing a customer loyalty program with the help of an easy to use CRM is indeed an investment, strategies that revolve around customer retention are mostly less expensive than acquiring new customers.

This is because; acquiring new customers can be as much as 25 percent more expensive than retaining old customers.

  1. Gather Valuable Data

Most customers of modern times prefer personalized experiences, since greater than half of the Millennial(s) and Gen K populations in the USA reported that they prefer personalization as a high priority goal.

Therefore, encouraging customers to fill out profiles as a part of their loyalty program can let you find access to data, so that you can not only personalize customer experience using easy to use CRM software solutions, but also create targeted marketing campaigns using this CRM tool, that will help to boost your bonding with customers and even provide the advantages of implementing your referral programs.

  1. Make Consumers Feel Valued

A personalized and comprehensive loyalty program will make the consumers of your offerings feel like they have an emotional connection with your brand that will boost customer patience just in case of any mishaps.

You can increase this appreciation by incorporating “delightful surprises” by offering rewards and points for special occasions such as a customer’s anniversary or birthday.

  1. Increase in Sales

By personalizing the customer’s shopping experience through gathering data in your CRM database, you can make better suggestions to the consumers of your products, which will increase the likelihood that your customers will purchase a suggested product when you try to up-sell or cross-sell to them using your easy to use CRM as a relationship generation tool.

  1. Calculate Loyalty Through Engagement

Loyalty program data in the easy to use CRM software allows users of the CRM to track down analytics and also view reports. Appraising the efficiency of your customer’s loyalty on your marketing and sales efforts can be easily measured by digging into critical customer retention indicators such as Repeat Customer Rae, Purchase Frequency, Program Engagement Rate, and others.

  1. Better Communication

Loyalty programs provide you a direct means to communicate with the customers that can be especially useful in an emergency such as a product recall.

By matching purchase dates, you can email relevant customers about a recalled offering instead of sending generalized emails which are mostly ignored by unhappy customers.

Moreover, you can even utilize your loyalty programs to promote special events, sales, and showcase your new offerings to your existing customers.

  1. A Good Program Is Self-Sufficient

Although it takes a lot of man-hours and other resources to structure a strong and effective loyalty campaign using your easy to use CRM software, the program itself is self-sufficient.

This is because, while it is highly advisable that you must monitor the metrics of your campaign, if you are using automation found in most easy to use CRM software solutions the program will continue to run on your chosen settings.

  1. Attract New Customers

An efficient loyalty program can attract new leads and customers in many ways.

Primarily, if you are offering discounts and points for signups points, you will automatically be able to add fresh customers to your campaign’s mailing list simply because most customers prefer to take advantage of discounts.

Additionally, when a customer views a good loyalty program, where the rewards are within their reach, they are most likely to try your brand and offerings just because the rewards are easily available.

On the other hand, customers that are satisfied with your offerings may even share their happy experiences with their relatives, colleagues, and friends even without a referral program.

  1. Plenty of room for growth

An effective loyalty program does not need to be stagnant.

Therefore, while customer loyalty programs are in most instances self-sufficient you can also incorporate changes and thereby improve the quality of your loyalty programs by incorporating even-more marketing aspects like referral marketing and visual commerce to your customer loyalty program campaigns.

Conclusion

Therefore, by creating a comprehensive loyalty program with the help of your easy to use CRM software that allows for modern marketing techniques, you can easily turn your loyal customers to brand advocates for your company, since modern customer trusts their peers over traditional advertisement marketing strategies, people who will speak out on your behalf, which is simply just another smart business move.

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Great Tip For Personalizing Your Email Campaigns For Business Growth

In our present digital world, where a person’s attention span is under incessant assault, a single email sent from an easy to use CRM might not stand much a chance to win the attention of your prospects, and customers. Nevertheless, if that email appeals to a customer’s specific interest or needs, its odds of finding the desired attention increases significantly. According to Campaign Monitor, just by personalizing the subject line of your emails, you can boost up the email opening rate of your campaigns by 26%, while personalized emails are clicked 14% more and they convert 10% better than any other non-personalized emails.

In our present digital world, where a person’s attention span is under incessant assault, a single email sent from an easy to use CRM might not stand much a chance to win the attention of your prospects, and customers.
Nevertheless, if that email appeals to a customer’s specific interest or needs, its odds of finding the desired attention increases significantly.

Personalized emails are clicked 14% more and they convert 10% better than any other non-personalized emails - Campaign Monitor Click To Tweet

According to Campaign Monitor, just by personalizing the subject line of your emails, you can boost up the email opening rate of your campaigns by 26%, while personalized emails are clicked 14% more and they convert 10% better than any other non-personalized emails.

The rub over here is that while it is true that personalized email campaigns can be a potential weapon for the marketers, blunders are also far too common, which happens all the time.

Therefore here are some of the dos and don’ts that you need to remain aware of before launching your email campaigns next time:

Do This!

Use Sign-Up Data as More than Just a Source for First Name

You can make illations based on what your customers are signing up for or where they are signing up from using the power of your easy to use CRM software.

Therefore, if you find that a sign up happened from a webinar, or from a piece of content that you published on the website do your research and send additional reading suggestions or your product and service recommendations based upon similar topics.

Help Customers Find What They Are Looking For

Big ticket purchases like buying a car or a house, can have an extended decision-making process. Therefore even when the customer or your prospect in the email campaign’s list is taking a break from activity looking into your email, they will always appreciate reading targeted emails that can alert them about new opportunities.

Wish Customers a Happy Birthday

One of the easiest personalizations for email messages culminates to two small words – Happy Birthday. This is because; getting your prospects and customers to provide that info is relatively easy, especially when there is no year attached to it, and it provides an opportunity for offering a highly personalized message once every year, as long as they choose to remain as your customer.

Now, if you do not have your customer’s date of birth, you can substitute it with a “happy anniversary” message based on the date the customer signed up with your brand.

Remind Them of Their Abandoned Shopping Carts

In recent research, it has been found that most customer’s open more than 44% of shopping cart abandonment emails. This is because “shopping cart abandonment emails” works as a persuasive reminder to the customers how close they were to making a purchase. One of the best subject lines for such emails can be “Not yet ready to commit?” and others.

Look For Creative Ways to Personalize

GrubHub Inc. an online mobile food ordering and delivery service based in Chicago, pings customers when it is raining, encouraging their buyers and foodies to order from their offices and homes to avoid the foul weather.
Toeing the same strategy, tire companies can remind people to put on their snow tires once those first flakes fall, or footwear retailers can persuade their customers with a sale of flip-flops on the first beach day of the season.

Don’ts!

Firstly, never fret too much about little mistakes.

Customers usually value the effort it takes to personalize an email and can be quite forgiving at times. However, if you are new, a startup or have a small business here are certain major mistakes that you should make every effort to avoid while sending your email campaigns using the best small business CRM software.

Do Not Leave Variables Visible

In many instances emails that open with “Hello {First_Name}” are ludicrously common, which is just an example of how bad and incomplete emails can alienate the readers and reflect poorly on their brands.

However, mistakes like these can be easily prevented, but simply creating logic that will help to populate variables with necessary alternatives for information that are missing in the emails.

For an example, if no first name exists for the customer in your CRM database , you might create a logic that will automatically replace that variable with something like “Friend”, “Buyer” or leave the field blank.

Do Not Get Things Wrong

Now, if GrubHub Inc. sends you an email that they should have sent on a rainy day when in reality it is bright and sunny outside, it is a small gaffe that can be easily overlooked and forgiven. But if brands like Net-a-Porter or Forever21 send emails to unengaged customers, congratulating them on their upcoming marriage ceremony in 2019, or wish them on the birth of babies they did not have, that can be considered as a major unforgivable faux pas.

Never Get Too Personal

There is a fine line that differentiates great personalization and acting creepy. Therefore, it is best for brands to stick with personalization that is based either on data your customers expect you to possess or on illations that will not creep them out (especially in light of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal).

For an example, a retail giant in the US did this mistake when they guessed that a young woman was carrying relying on her “pregnancy score” and did send her maternity-themed offer that was unfortunately intercepted by her ‘very surprised’ father.

Takeaway

Therefore, to conclude if you avoid these common pitfalls pulling off a successful personalized email campaign is not at all difficult, since customers expect and appreciate personalized interactions, which is a great way for boosting your email open rate and usher rapid business growth.

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Recent Trends in Customer Retention Programs to Implement This Year

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task. Therefore, if retaining the customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy. This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with the job it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn. Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task.
Therefore, if retaining the customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy.
This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with the job it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn.

Customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95% Click To Tweet

Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

What is a customer retention program?

In simple words, a customer retention program is your best means to keep your customers happy. Since, when you keep holding on to more customers, you can easily decrease your businesses’ churn rate, boost company revenue and thereby increase profitability.

According to a popular statistical report, customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95%.

However, to make your businesses’ customer retention program really work, you need to make it a part of your businesses’ daily routine.

Therefore, to let us get started here we have put together a few key customer retention programs that you can implement immediately for decreasing churn and find rapid business growth .

  1. Create a onboarding program

The very first program for customer retention that you must have in your checklist is implementing a customer onboarding strategy into your daily routine.

Customer onboarding is the process you require to make customers use your products and services in the easiest possible way in order to make them achieve their goals.

To conduct a proper onboarding of your new customers, primarily thank the customer for coming on-board and choosing your brand.

Apart from it during your onboarding calls you can also cover the following points mentioned below:

  • Discuss with your customer as to how they want to get started and line up your efforts to match their expectations.
  • Offer your customer additional services to start-up.
  • Make your customers familiar with all your community websites, videos, and webinars that you can offer and also help them to overcome the common obstacles faced by others.
  • Send a welcome mail to your new customer after the primary onboarding conversation, with a small picture of yourself, so that the customer has a face to go with your brand.
  1. Create customer follow up programs

According to a survey done by Econsultancy, more than 82% business organizations acknowledge that customer retention is less labor-intensive and cheaper than closing a new deal, which makes it the main driver of any company’s revenue.

Now, do not be worried thinking that you have to use up all day calling each and every customer in your CRM database.

According to the Pareto principle, which most of us are aware of, only 20% of your customers generate 80% of your organization’s revenue.

Now, if you are using easy to use CRM software it can create clear indicators that can aid you in identifying the customers those that must receive most of your attention, and help you to spend your time on the right customers efficiently.

To do this set up your CRM software solution to segment your customers into three basic groups.

  • A customers or large accounts
  • B customers or medium sized accounts
  • C customers or small accounts

Now, while for large accounts you can schedule face-to-face meeting with the customers or follow up with the customer once every month with medium-sized and small accounts, you can provide them a half-yearly follow up, send newsletters and keep them updated on seasonal price offers or any other campaigns your company is having for the consumers of your offerings.

  1. Identify risk customers

In most cases, customers will stop doing business with you because they are not satisfied either with your products or your support services.

Therefore, to retain customers and prevent churn it is crucial that you must identify risky customers as a part of your daily customer retention program.

According to Forrester, it cost 5 times more to acquire new customers than retain your existing ones.

Here are some of the ways you can identify the risky customers in your business:

  • Be proactive and create an overview of customers with too many open tickets, which is a red flag and should be managed with proper follow up.
  • Create an overview of customers that shows disruptive buying patterns. If a customer has bought every month over a year and then all of a sudden do not order any product for the next six months, pick up the phone to check out what is going on.
  • Create an overview of customers who are calling up regularly with questions and complaints. These demanding customers most often need training or another services to get them up and running.

Easy to use CRM software be it Salesforce for enterprises or Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by startups and small businesses, CRM is a tool that can easily create this overview so that you can provide better support after identifying your risky customers to reduce churn and grow your business.

  1. Win back lost customers

Why spend your resources on winning new customers when you can use those efforts to win back lost customers in your CRM database.

According to Jill Griffin’s book “Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers-And Keep Them Loyal” most businesses have 20-40 percent chance of selling to their lost customers, whilst the chance for selling to new customers are only 5-20 percent in this competitive marketplace.

Here are some of the key reasons why you should focus on winning back lost customers:

  • Lost customers have once shown that they are interested in your offerings, and so they are superior prospects than arbitrary leads on your cold calling list.
  • Lost customers already know your brand, and so you require lesser time to educate them.
  • You can use technology to keep track of customers that you already know, follow their past buying patterns and create tailor-made offers to win them back.

Winning back lost customers can have a snowball effect, whereby when you succeed in winning lost customers, and they become satisfied with your brand, it might generate word of mouth advertisement, which will help you to boost your chance of winning new prospects, as 91% of B2B customers are influenced by word-of-mouth and referrals when they make their buying decisions for new products and services.

Wrapping Up

Therefore, stop managing your customers in an ad-hoc manner, since retaining customers not only requires hard work, but it also requires the right customer retention program that you must implement in your daily routine to see an increase in customer satisfaction score, revenue growth, and productivity.

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Three “Not” Easy To Use CRM Features That Can Overcomplicate Your Small Business

In a world of Walmart(s) and Amazon(s), startups and small businesses are ever-wondering how they can compete against million dollar establishments if they are incapable of spending more on marketing, sales and customer service for the growth of their business. This is because; enterprise companies can easily afford to throw in thousands and even millions on finding the right customization, and spend on robust CRM software solutions, while on the other hand small businesses, are always on tight budgets and therefore cannot afford to spend on CRMs like Salesforce but look for same feature-rich solution in Salesforce Alternatives CRM solutions like ConvergeHub and others in the easy to use CRM space.

In a world of Walmart(s) and Amazon(s), startups and small businesses are ever-wondering how they can compete against million dollar establishments if they are incapable of spending more on marketing, sales and customer service for the growth of their business.
This is because; enterprise companies can easily afford to throw in thousands and even millions on finding the right customization, and spend on robust CRM software solutions, while on the other hand small businesses, are always on tight budgets and therefore cannot afford to spend on CRMs like Salesforce but look for same feature-rich solution in Salesforce Alternatives CRM solutions like ConvergeHub and others in the easy to use CRM space.

More than 13% of startups and small businesses plan to augment their spending on cloud based CRM software solutions in 2019- Keap Click To Tweet

Now, it might seem like increasing the budget on your CRM software will also increase the benefits of the software, which explains as to why according to Keap (a private company that offers an e-mail marketing and sales platform for small businesses) more than 13% of startups and small businesses plan to augment their spending on cloud based CRM software solutions in 2019.

However, SMB establishments should be cautious of buyer’s remorse, especially when it comes to adopting costly CRM software like Salesforce, as according to Amazon Web Services nearly 50% of its CRM licenses remain unused.

Hence, where is the disconnect?

Why is it that so many startups and small businesses are leaving their hard earned money on the table?

This is because, more often than not, small businesses are using a piece of software that was not built with them in mind.

The Power of Simplicity

In the past, CRM vendors sold feature-rich and pricy CRM software platforms because at that point of time Customer Relationship Management software solutions served only large organizations that needed the complexity.

However today’s CRM solutions are accessible to all businesses of all sizes, but nevertheless what works for an enterprise does not necessarily translate to the SMB space.

For example, there are CRM companies that started by marketing their products to small businesses, since the early versions of their CRM software solutions were too simple for enterprise needs.
However, with the passage of time it is not uncommon for these CRM companies to move up-market as their CRM platforms became more complicated in order to acquire those enterprise level sales, which when happens makes the CRM that once fit a small business just right becomes excessively expensive and complicated, and ultimately unusable for the initial users of their software.

Admittedly, bleeding-edge CRM features are not going anywhere. Large establishments can afford more complex software solutions as organizations of their stature demands high-tech solutions, but it must also be remembered that a product is only valuable as long as it meets your needs.

Therefore, here are three CRM features that are usually not needed by small businesses and so indicate that these features might be designed for a business having a bigger budget and different needs.

  1. AI and Machine Learning

Over the next couple of years, we will see more and more business software companies promoting AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning in their cloud based CRM software solutions with the promise of delivering dead accurate forecasting in sales, lead scoring and for predicting the future health of a company.
However, the question that immediately comes to our minds is how much of this is a marketing hype with very little payoff for startups and small businesses?

Considering that Machine Learning is capable of combing through massive data-sets in order to find patterns, ML and AI might be valuable for big enterprise-level organizations; however, SMB(s) do not have enough data in their CRM database to justify this investment.

This is because, as a startup or a small business, you simply do not need a CRM with ML to understand which lead to focus on and which ones are most likely to close.

In fact, what you need for your SMB setup is a bird’s-eye 360-degree view of all your deals, with a customizable sales pipeline feature that permits tacking of existing customers, prospects, and projects which is readily found in most easy to use Salesforce Alternative CRM software and so using easy to use CRM solutions like ConvergeHub and others that are exclusively designed for small businesses you can use its sales pipeline to sort or filter your leads by priority and glean other insights from reporting.

  1. AI Powered Automation

Large organizations require AI-powered automation since they are trying to turn their processes into an assembly line and they need to make sure that their individual employees is adhering to a specific procedure.
However, heavy automation is not only expensive but it is also most confusing to many and most importantly it eliminates the human touch that is required for the growth of small businesses.

This is because startups and small businesses require personal interactions rather than lightening-speed efficiency to provide them with a competitive edge.

Therefore, instead of relying on your AI-powered computers to tell you when and how you should interact with your leads, prospects, and customers it is more pragmatic to rely on simple reminder feature in the CRM software to schedule purposeful and effective follow-ups.

According to a study by a leading Salesforce Alternative CRM platform on lead management studies, sales reps should call their leads and prospects at least 6 times before giving up and therefore by staying on top of the reminder tool in your easy to use CRM, most small businesses will be more likely to close their deals more effectively.

  1. Advanced Reporting

In large establishments, executives, departmental heads and managers require a plethora of sartorial and customizable reporting dashboards in their CRM make sure that they hit their business goals.

However, in a small business, managers and entrepreneur(s) often do not require complex reporting, but just need a quick snapshot of all the prospects and leads, a summary of their last month’s deals, each support and sales rep’s activities, which are not vanity metrics but data that you can actually work on.

Conclusion

Therefore, as a startup or a small business, you need to invest in an easy to use CRM that works for your business, and not against you.

It is natural that companies like Salesforce and others will never stop from developing CRM solutions that are bloated with features (it is how they make money), but you as an entrepreneur of an SMB you need to understand and evaluate what you require out of your best small business CRM software and what you do not for rapid business growth .

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Advanced Ways for Leveraging Your CRM Database to Boost Online Sales

As most e-commerce brands use easy to use CRM to help them with a plethora of business activities leveraging data is one of the biggest advantage e-commerce organizations have over their brick-and-mortar stores. Therefore brands that sell their offerings online can glean insights not only from the numbers in their sales, but also from indicators like click-through-rates, impressions, bounce-rate, and several other data points found in easy to use CRM software solution’s CRM database. Nevertheless, as a vendor of small business CRM software, we have observed on several instances that most startup brands in e-commerce businesses are just scratching the surface of what they can do with the information gathered in their CRM database for their e-commerce businesses.

As most e-commerce brands use easy to use CRM to help them with a plethora of business activities leveraging data is one of the biggest advantage e-commerce organizations have over their brick-and-mortar stores.
Therefore brands that sell their offerings online can glean insights not only from the numbers in their sales, but also from indicators like click-through-rates, impressions, bounce-rate, and several other data points found in easy to use CRM software solution’s CRM database .

64.2% of companies rate CRM tools as impactful or very impactful- LinkedIn (2018) Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, as a vendor of small business CRM software, we have observed on several instances that most startup brands in e-commerce businesses are just scratching the surface of what they can do with the information gathered in their CRM database for their e-commerce businesses.

However, in this modern business landscape as technology continues to evolve the gap between brands that leverage the full potential of e-commerce data and those that do not, will make a major difference in their business growth as most businesses keep on improving their customers’ shopping experience, learn from buying behaviors, and optimize their campaigns using information in their CRM database.

Hence here are four advanced tips for using e-commerce data to increase sales and thereby find rapid business growth.

  1. Streamline the Path to Purchase

No matter how good is the product page on your e-commerce website, there are many consumers that prefer buying from their preferred and favorite retailers.

Therefore, always remain cautious that your consumer’s loyalty to your brand’s offerings should not be at odds with fringe benefits like these which include:

  • Verified ratings and reviews
  • Fast and free shipping
  • The convenience of BOPIS (Buying Online and Picking up In-Store)

Now for an example, what happens if one of your prospects goes to your e-commerce website and finds that your product is out of stock, or its real price is currently higher than what is listed in your website?

This is why more and more e-commerce sellers are presently bent upon using software that automatically pulls stock information and pricing in real-time so that they can display the data in their product page.

Easy to use CRM when used in the right way can let consumers choose the product they prefer and also ensures that you do not send them to a dead end.

Additionally, by reducing the number of searches and clicks intuitive CRM software can help both the consumers and the retailers to dramatically increase the numbers of visitors who become customers of their online brand.

  1. Follow the Entire Customer Journey

Let us begin with an example, where some consumers open your email and thereafter clicks through your product page.
Now, after doing their research about your product, let us assume that the consumer decides to buy.

But what happens next?

Does the consumer buy your product, ditches your product for a competitor, or what complementary product does the shopper buy?

Now, without data from your CRM software, it is impossible to gauge how your marketing campaigns are doing and so information collected in the CRM system helps to follow your consumer’s path so that you can focus on the campaigns that provided you the biggest results on your investments.

  1. Unify Your Brand Across Storefronts

Suppose someone is interested in purchasing your product but wants to buy from a retail outlet to take the benefit of a reward program.
Now while buying or reviewing the product online, whatever be it, the consumer finds that the images of the product are little different or its description is not quite right. Remember even a little discrepancy and doubt on the part of the buyer can make them go away since they do not want to get stuck with an outdated version or model of your product line.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you must always update your own brandings and ensure that your brand and product’s feel and look remains consistent wherever they appear which can help in relieving any dispute created by incorrect copy, and other discrepancies like previously uploaded images remaining in your e-commerce website.

  1. Give Priority To Your Highest-Converting Retailers

It is natural, that you will never want to send your customers to retailers that are doing an appalling job by representing your products in an inefficient manner for the products that you sell online.

On the other hand, you may also have some of your retail partners who are probably doing an outstanding job and so have a stellar review of all the products in your brand.

Therefore, by using this information that you can find in your easy to use CRM, you can easily find which retail partners are worth promoting and investing in (and who you need to drop).

Hence if you use a “where to buy” widget on your e-commerce website, you can elevate your retailers that convert and also reduce the importance of those ones that do not.

Doing this is not only going to increase your sales but also ensure that you find the best of opportunities for converting visitors who hit the product pages on your e-commerce website.

Conclusion- Use Data to See the Big Picture

As more robust data solutions are developing every day, tech-savvy brands using easy to use CRM software platforms are finding more ways to leverage the information in their CRM database and thereby making use of this data revolution to increase sales.

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Where To Start While Creating A Unified End-To-End Service Excellence For Your Brand

Nowadays for catering to modern customers, brands must support a wide range of different touch-points using easy to use CRM software. Now the question that arises is how can brands deliver an impeccable end-to-end experience that surpasses the expectations of your customers? The real challenge for organizations is that nowadays service journey of brands can encompass a multitude of different touch-points, distributors, channels, and partners- and the consumers expect all of these components to work in tandem seamlessly.

Nowadays for catering to modern customers, brands must support a wide range of different touch-points using easy to use CRM software.

Now the question that arises is how can brands deliver an impeccable end-to-end experience that surpasses the expectations of your customers?

The real challenge for organizations is that nowadays service journey of brands can encompass a multitude of different touch-points, distributors, channels, and partners- and the consumers expect all of these components to work in tandem seamlessly.

One of the key factors behind the growth of CRM is accessibility.Companies want access to customer data in real-time, with mobile and cloud solutions leading the way.- SuperOffice Click To Tweet

Broadly speaking these touch-points can be broken down into three main categories, and businesses that are willing to differentiate themselves with their service must explore how each of these pieces makes a contribution to delivering a unified end-to-end experience to the customers of their brands.

No-touch service

This touch-point covers self-service support solutions such as online knowledge base, phone lines, and chatbots.

Business seeking to provide end-to-end experience to their customers should be exploring questions in this touch-point such as:

  • How can you help customers help themselves?
  • How can you help customers to seek out solutions to their own issues, without ever having to engage them?
  • How can you possibly do that using Knowledgebase, IVR, Chatbots and/or online communities?

Low-touch service

This touch-point covers self-service support solutions such as social media, chat, email, and SMS.

Business seeking to provide end-to-end experience to their customers should be exploring questions in this touch-point such as:

  • When a customer is in contact, how can you find how they got to this point?
  • What info can you access that will aid in the conversation?

High-touch service

This support facility is concerned for more complex needs and thereby requires well-trained staffs, which also include field-support agents apart from partner networks to solve the issues.

Business seeking to provide end-to-end experience to their customers should be exploring questions in this touch-point such as:

  • How do you send a field support technician to fix the issues in a most effective way?
  • How can you select the field support technician who has the appropriate skills?
  • How do you understand whether it is best to use your field support agents or one from the partner ecosystem?
  • How do you find the field support agent who is in a closer geo-location to the customer?

Support infrastructure

The infrastructure that is required to be in place to help businesses answer all these questions must understand that a united end-to-end experience can be supported only by three key components that include:

  • Communications infrastructure
  • System of records
  • Customer listening platform

Communications infrastructure

With the right channel infrastructure in place, it is feasible to take all the different inputs and thereafter prioritize the customers appropriately.
Easy to use CRM is a business solution that helps you to connect to your social channels, phone lines, SMS gateways and so on.

Hence, if you are an SMB, best small business CRM software would ensure, that if a customer is emailing for support to your company, it will help you to read the email in the context of the importance of the customer, correlating the customer’s info from the easy to use CRM database , as opposed to just another email and let you understand that responding to that email could be more important than replying the ringing phone from another customer.

Systems of record

Having a system of record like cloud based easy to use CRM software helps support teams in businesses to manage the expectations of their customers.

For example, if there is a delay in shipment because of a natural calamity in North America, or if your organization needs someone with the right level of technical skills to solve the customer-facing issue, and you have just one person to accomplish the job and he is on a holiday for the next seven days, you need to have that understanding recorded into your system of records so that although customers do not like getting bad news, nevertheless they prefer to be informed than deal with a brand that is not aware of what is happening.

Customer listening

The final part of creating a united end-to-end experience is how your company’s support teams learn to listen and improve.

Now, traditionally VoC (Voice of the Customer) meant collecting an NPS (Net Promoter Score) at the end of every month to take a look and find how happy your customers are.
But, what happens if there is a major issue, can you wait until the end of the month to improve it?

Therefore it is extremely important that you should constantly listen to your customer feedbacks and work out means to engage and respond to their issues.

Using easy to use CRM software helps businesses to deliver real-time engagements, and thereby recognize and understand the pulse of the customer and also learn how to respond to their problems speedily.

Obstacles to overcome

Now, with all the technologies and tools readily available along with the growing awareness of the completive advantage of providing world-class customer experience, it does raise the question of why most businesses are not delivering unified end-to-end support excellence to their customers.

According to many it is believed that the tradition of “point solution” approaches is to be blamed, whereby businesses adopt a “sticking plaster approach” to solve tactical customer support challenges as and when they happen, rather than moving a step back to find a more holistic look at what is needed to improve the customer experience of their brands.

Therefore organizations that are encumbered by legacy infrastructures prevents them from delivering a joined-up experience and so using a business tool like easy to use CRM software that combines sales, marketing, collaborations, and support in a unified platform and is hence better aligned with the bigger goals of the company is the only solution for providing end-to-end service excellence to the customers which help eliminate creating tactical resolutions in isolation for your business growth.

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5 Vital Things In Business That You Just Cannot Do With Spreadsheets

Widespread usage of traditional business tools such as spreadsheets causes sales teams to make use of them for bigger jobs- jobs that spreadsheets are not meant for. This is because sales activities conducted from shared spreadsheets places serious limitations and creates frustration on what your team can accomplish. Now while spreadsheets are rightfully useful for data sorting and offer a way of organizing your contacts, they actually do not help you to make sales like any easy to use CRM software.

Widespread usage of traditional business tools such as spreadsheets causes sales teams to make use of them for bigger jobs- jobs that spreadsheets are not meant for.
This is because sales activities conducted from shared spreadsheets places serious limitations and creates frustration on what your team can accomplish.
Now while spreadsheets are rightfully useful for data sorting and offer a way of organizing your contacts, they actually do not help you to make sales like any easy to use CRM software.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume.- American Management Association Click To Tweet

Why Salespeople Use Spreadsheets?

Any change is scary.
Therefore, people fancy cobbling together a solution that they are comfortable with, since; it is less frightening than thinking about getting used to and learning a new program.

Additionally, most of us have access to a free online spreadsheet program or existing spreadsheet software on the desktops.

Yet these much familiar rows and columns simply are not created for managing collaborations, leads, customers and prospects with other members of sales, marketing, and support teams.

Try us. Here are 5 things you just cannot do with spreadsheets:

  1. View a chronological record of all interactions

A spreadsheet is capable of telling you when you primarily contacted a prospect but is incapable of doing anything more.
However, being able to view a chronological timeline of every single interaction with a prospect decimates the requirement to look into your notes before each sale call, and allows your sales reps to hand-off any prospect to a teammate, without the need to explain everything that has been discussed so far which can be only possible if you are using easy to use CRM for your business growth.

  1. Build a standardized sales process

Creating a standardized sales process begins with identifying the activities in sales that produce the best results for your sales teams, and turning those proven methods in sales into a formalized template that every one of your sales reps can follow.

The sales process is a strategic move that provides an easy means for training your fresh employees in sales, set targets, streamline sales efforts, and thereby build up a foundation of consistency that makes your sales teams more efficient and confident in their job.

There is no spreadsheet that can replicate the creation of a sales process which is one of the most important things that you can only do for your sales team with the help of easy to use CRM software .

  1. View status of your sales pipeline

There is nothing more challenging than searching through layers of spreadsheet data and trying to fetch a coherent and reliable sales forecast or analyze the state of the deals in progress.

However, there is also nothing more critical in any business than to understand your sales pipeline management and know how your sales are performing against their targets.

It is only a platform like easy to use CRM software that can provide you with a dashboard view of this crucial information for your business growth.

  1. Communicate and collaborate.

Although spreadsheets are shareable, however, it necessarily that does not mean that they are an excellent tool for collaboration.

This is because; the process of reviewing and editing a spreadsheet in tandem is an inefficient process.

The comment fields in the spreadsheet are meant for keeping brief notes, and not for back-and-forth communication.

It is only easy to use CRM that can help sales reps to trade notes, collaborate, and even receive notifications to move their prospects quickly through their sales pipelines.

  1. Integrate with other business tools.

Even what the best of spreadsheets can just do is to export data in CSV (Comma Separated Value), which is also not of much help if you cannot integrate the spreadsheet program with email platforms, or other support business software solutions most needed for the growth of your company.

Best easy to use CRM software solutions are all compatible with your business tools, which allow your staffs to work within an all-in-one CRM platform, instead of having to jump back and forth between multiple tools.

Conclusion

Therefore, unlike spreadsheets easy to use CRM is a software that helps your sales teams to gain control over their data, automate sales processes, fine-tune marketing and sales communications with prospects and customers, boost response time of your sales and support teams and thereby help in obliterating missed opportunities and enhance customer experience of your brand for rapid business growth.

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