ConvergeHub Blog for 2019

Key Reasons Why You Need A Cloud Based CRM For Your Small Business

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the most popular buzzword in today’s competitive business landscape, as most of us know that easy to use cloud based CRM can bring significant benefits to your business. It really does not matter if your organization employees 10 or more than a 1000 people. Since when it comes to choosing a CRM solution, the first thing that we should look at is that this tool should be able to help you right here, right now; should be capable of handling all your unique business needs without any major customization, help you to establish closer connections with your leads, prospects and customers; can be accessed day and night in and out of your office, should not be complicated to use, must be affordable for startups and small businesses and lastly make your business sell more and grow faster in your marketplace.

It really does not matter if your organization employees 10 or more than a 1000 people.

Cloud-based services will continue to grow in 2019, predicting a 23% growth compared to what it was 5 years ago- International Data Corporation Click To Tweet

Since when it comes to choosing a CRM solution, the first thing that we should look at is that this tool should be able to help you right here, right now; should be capable of handling all your unique business needs without any major customization, help you to establish closer connections with your leads, prospects and customers; can be accessed day and night in and out of your office, should not be complicated to use, must be affordable for startups and small businesses and lastly make your business sell more and grow faster in your marketplace.

So let us steer you in this article through these unchartered CRM waters, help you to find the best small business CRM software for your SMB, and make you appreciate and understand the advantages of using a cloud based CRM software over traditional on-premise CRM solutions that are still available but rarely sold in the CRM space.

What is cloud based CRM?

Cloud based CRM or SaaS CRM software solutions, defines an easy to use CRM solution that is hosted in the Cloud.

Cloud based CRM software platforms like Salesforce and many other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions can be accessed through the internet, making it convenient for all users to access the same info at any time through desktop, mobile or tablets, irrespective of their geo-locations across the globe.

Why lifting your business up to the Cloud?

IT Cloud services, in general, have seen stellar and unprecedented growth in the recent times. According to an IDC (International Data Corporation), report spending on cloud-based services will continue to grow in 2019, predicting a 23 percent growth compared to what it was 5 years ago.

Therefore here are some of the key reasons why easy to use cloud based CRM software is a tool that all businesses (especially small business and startups) should sincerely consider to harness rapid business growth.

Trouble-free installation

There is a deep-rooted fear even today that CRM solutions come with complex installation processes. Nevertheless, in 2019, this is completely erroneous and untrue.

Unlike traditional on-premise CRM solutions, modern cloud based easy to use CRM software solutions are extremely easy to learn and can be up and running in no time.
Simple as it is, all you need to install a cloud based CRM software is just an access to the internet.

Seamless access

Accessibility round-the-clock is by far the biggest advantage of using a cloud based CRM software.

For example, imagine you need to make a game-changing and urgent sales call while on the go, or quickly find a contact’s phone no. or email, or amend a sales proposal when you are out of your office. Well, in all these varied circumstances, cloud based CRM software is the only solution that can let you access your best CRM for small business from anywhere using a desktop, laptop, tablet, or even a cheap smartphone. Again all you need to access your easy to use CRM software remotely is an internet.

Therefore, as your employees can access and remain connected with the centralized CRM database using a cloud based CRM even outside working hours (if need be), cloud based CRM software platforms are particularly handy for any modern businesses.

Ease of use

Using a CRM cannot get easier than using a cloud based CRM software platform.
All you need to do, to use a SaaS CRM solution; you need to buy a software package at a fixed monthly pricing and thereafter log-in with the access code provided by your CRM vendor while making sure that you have reasonably fast internet connectivity at all times.

Cloud based CRM software solutions are maintained by the vendors of the CRM and it is also accompanied by a wide range of self-service online system maintenance tools.

Affordability

Another major benefit of using cloud based CRM software over on-premise traditional CRM systems is that this business-enhancement software will certainly never break your bank or rip your budget.

This is because no business especially if it is an SMB or a startup organization likes to allocate a big sum of their budget for a one-off purchase, but prefer to use a business solution which can be availed by smaller regular installments.

Now, all cloud based CRM software platforms operates on the pay-as-you-go subscription business model, which, needs minimal upfront investments. Moreover, there are no hidden costs associated with the tool, such as buying additional hardware or license fees.

For example, if you are using ConvergeHub, the best small business CRM software, which is an award-winning cloud based CRM platform, the subscription can be as low as $11 per user/ month (billed quarterly) or $9 per user/month (billed annually).

Uncompromised security

An extremely serious concern for all businesses using cloud based information storage system is undoubtedly security.

Truthfully, the security of the CRM database is one of the most prevailing reasons as to why companies were wary of installing a cloud based solution for their businesses.

Nevertheless, in recent times, CRM vendors that offer online SaaS solutions know that very well and therefore take security issues most seriously.

Not surprisingly, in 2019, the information security levels in cloud based CRM software solutions are much higher than on-premise CRM tools.

This is because, cloud based CRM vendors offer advanced and automated data backup strategies that have an impeccable data recovery plan, two-step verification, and also strong password protection (more after the introduction of GDRP on May 25^th, 2018) to counteract any data breach in their systems.

Reliability

No business wants to deploy a system that you use every day to crash at a moment’s notice, bringing potential financial meltdown for your business.

The good news is that with cloud based CRM software such a situation almost never occurs as its server has multiple replicas in the cloud. Therefore, if one server fails it is immediately replaced by another and so SaaS CRM software systems continue to remain operational 99.99% of the time and are hence reliable enough even for the fussiest of organizations in the business world.

Flexible potential

When adopting their chosen best small business CRM software, most SMBs like to start with only the features that can help with them with their unique needs.

However, with time as your company expands, you may come to a decision that you need, for example, new features, integrations and more for your business growth.

In this case, if you are using a cloud based CRM, you can immediately update the CRM to satisfy your novel business needs.

For example, you might like to integrate QuickBooks accounting software that you have been using since long for your business with your CRM, and so by easily integrating the two software use QuickBooks CRM you can make your idea come true which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free.

Hence, cloud based CRM offers bigger and better integrations and is capable of developing more innovative and robust CRM software solutions that can be provided to you straight away.

Enhanced compatibility

Silo products and solutions have little chance of success in today’s IT world.

Therefore, the exchange of information between already available technologies is considered paramount nowadays.

Hence, much like QuickBooks CRM, several other integrations and compatibility with other products and services is the key to ensure the longevity and effective utilization of your cloud based CRM software platform.

Cloud based CRM can easily integrate with software and applications, such as email clients, MS products, predictive dialers, business automation, and documentation software solutions and more, which make SaaS CRM software the appropriate choice for modern startups and small businesses.

Takeaway

Hence, when you are adopting a cloud based CRM solution, after reading this article make sure that your vendor provides a flexible SaaS solution that is able to sustain your business growth .

Now if you want to know further and learn more as to how cloud based CRM can impact your business, request a personalized demo by clicking the link below.

Quickly Meet Customer Experience Expectations with Easy To Use CRM

The executive VP of Comcast who is in charge of CX (Customer Experience) for the brand Charlie Herrin once said: “Customer service is what happens when customer experience breaks.” Well, this is indeed an insightful observation that suggested that if businesses do their job rightly, understand their customer’s intent, get into the minds of their customers, anticipate their customer’s needs and thereafter deliver world-class experience, we may no longer need contact centers across the globe to field communications from disgruntled and confused peoples.

The executive VP of Comcast who is in charge of CX (Customer Experience) for the brand Charlie Herrin once said:
“Customer service is what happens when customer experience breaks.”
Well, this is indeed an insightful observation that suggested that if businesses do their job rightly, understand their customer’s intent, get into the minds of their customers, anticipate their customer’s needs and thereafter deliver world-class experience, we may no longer need contact centers across the globe to field communications from disgruntled and confused peoples.
In fact, customer communication cannot be confined to any single channel in this age of digital transformation but rather should be designed to match your modern customer’s wants and needs.
Hence primarily businesses should build a 360-degree view of their customers using easy to use CRM software to engage their customers more effectively.

Customer service is what happens when customer experience breaks - Charlie Herrin (Comcast) Click To Tweet

As Scott Rice at Sprint sums up the challenges faced by businesses for delivering modern customer experience stats:

“It isn’t just a cool website…. Digital needs to be applied across every interaction channel because it affects how you make decisions and use information to solve a problem or to sell.”

According to Forrester, in the present times as we have entered the “Age of the Customer” in a global survey done by Oracle it has been found that more the 75% of consumer feel brands provide inefficient customer service, and 25-30 percent of consumers feel that they would remain more loyal to brands that use chat, voice, video and other modern customer engagement technologies to instantly route support tickets to the appropriate people having the information they desire to resolve their issues.

Now, if like most organizations you also know that you need to boost the customer experience of your brand with technologies like adopting easy to use CRM software, but is perplexed to find where to focus; here are five places that can get you started:

Create a One-Stop Mobile Experience

According to Comscore (an American media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises), it has been stated on average consumers spend 70% of their media time on their smartphones.

Therefore, any organization that is looking for delivering better customer experience for its consumers needs to create a mobile app for its brand to boost its engagement with the customers.

Moreover, this mobile app should also make it simple for the customers to directly interact with the brand within the app, so that the branded mobile application can be a one-stop-shop for anything that a consumer needs to resolve their pain-points and issues.

Eliminate the Waiting Game

According to a survey done by Oracle, it has been observed that long waiting time is one of the most predominant factors (approximately 51%) that leads to customer dissatisfaction and consequentially increase in churn.

In this digital age of cutting edge technology and easy to use CRM platforms customers hate to be put on hold or navigate complex IVR
(Interactive Voice Response ) systems for information to solve their issues, whereby they often end-up speaking with the wrong agents.

Now, with bots powered by AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning, these types of problems will soon vanish as cloud based CRM software platforms both Salesforce and Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions are gearing up speedily for including both these technologies to counteract these issues and provide enhanced customer experience to the consumers.

Engage Customers throughout Their Journey

Always expecting the consumers to take the first step to contact a brand and tell them about their needs is a traditional scenario, not liked by several Millennial(s) who are becoming the biggest consumer in the U.S.A.

Since according to the U.S Census Bureau:

“Millennial(s) are expected to overtake Boomers in population in 2019 as their numbers swell to 73 million and Boomers decline to 72 million.”

Therefore, customers now expect more from businesses and so brands also must now invest in understanding, identifying, and deploying new means for connecting with their consumers and service their customers throughout their customer journeys.

Comcast’s Charlie Herrin notes that the first thing that his company did for the transformation of customer service was to proactively reach out to their consumers throughout their customer journey with updates about anything that is affecting their customer’s experiences.
For example, by incessantly monitoring communications of the customers on social media platforms made Comcast decreased its response time from weeks to 10-15 minutes, while on the other hand expanding it SMS database from zero to 6.5 million users for sending text-based “stay in touch” messages to its customers, and presently disseminates approximately 15 million SMS messages per month with the help of Marketing Automation solution in their easy to use CRM software.

Give Emphasis to Context in Customer Journeys

Always remember, you need proper technology to handle your brand so that your support employees never have to ask security questions when your customer is already dialing to your call center or logging on to your business website or app.

Therefore, it is most important that businesses that are proactively working to provide stellar customer experience to their consumers must use easy to use CRM so that they can remain totally prepared for every call with relevant information about the caller which they can view in front of them at a moment’s notice.

This is because contextual data of the customers stored in the CRM database , like who are they, what they already searched on the website or app, if they are a preferred member, and more, can be easily made ready in all situations using easy to use CRM software for businesses.

Always Be Listening and Learning

In addition to what the customers see, your organization must invest in back end systems that can help to optimize your organization’s ability to capture, analyze, and mine data across all their customer channels integrated with their easy to use CRM.

All media types and interactions with your customers (like screen sharing, video, text, voice, etc.) should be recorded in real-time so that they can be available for insights later, which will ultimately allow the businesses to modify their customer experience scenarios and provide even better customer experience for rapid business growth.

Conclusion

Therefore, irrespective of your business model and industry personalized and proactive interactions with the customers are both mission-critical for understanding the mindset of today’s empowered customers which can be only done by leveraging on technologies like easy to use CRM software solutions which makes businesses remain better prepared to avoid “breaking the experience” and meet their customer’s needs.

Tried Techniques For Getting More Sales Referrals Easily

No matter what industry you belong to, referrals are the key to dominating your competition. Why? This is because there is simply no better approach for finding qualified prospects to fill your sales pipeline in your easy to use CRM software. According to Nielsen Holdings Inc., 92% of consumers in the US market trusts referrals from the people they know. Moreover, in a report published by MarketShare, it has been stated that word-of-mouth can improve the effectiveness in marketing by as much as 54%, and by using referrals as a part of regular marketing strategy businesses can see their conversion rates growing up by 70%, along with 69% faster deal close time.

According to Nielsen Holdings Inc., 92% of consumers in the US market trusts referrals from the people they know.
Moreover, in a report published by MarketShare, it has been stated that word-of-mouth can improve the effectiveness in marketing by as much as 54%, and by using referrals as a part of regular marketing strategy businesses can see their conversion rates growing up by 70%, along with 69% faster deal close time.

Therefore as the numbers show, consumers trust referrals. Since hearing positive things has a significant impact on the decision making of the consumers about an offering .

91% of customers want to provide sales referrals, but unfortunately even less than 11% of sales reps ask for it.- Nielsen Holdings Inc. Click To Tweet

Hence, here are few proven and time tested strategies to step up your referral game and drive business growth in organizations of all kind and size.

Commit to Asking For One Referral Every Week

According to statistics published by Nielsen Holdings Inc., it showed that more than 91% of customers want to provide sales referrals, but unfortunately even less than 11% of sales reps ask for it.

Therefore, if you are already prospecting as a sales rep asking for just one referral every week should not be an overwhelming task.

Create a follow-up sales strategy to bring in referrals by creating reminders in your easy to use CRM software .

Try to snag one new customer every week, although which contacts you must reach out to all depends on timing.

Time Your Ask Right and Create A Follow Up Schedule

Just like sales, referrals are required to be timed and primed correctly. It has been observed that salespersons who actively seek out referrals bring in 4 to 5 times more business than those who do not explore this market.

Here is how a typical referral asking timeline should go:

Make the first contact with your customer when your customer is most happy with your offering, which can be right after the sale or even after a new product or service promotion of your brand.
Send a ‘thank you’ message to your customers and ask for your first referral from your customers no more than three days after you find your customer satisfied with the means you resolved their problems.
Check in one week later to see how everything is going with your product or service, and again ask for your referral if have not received one or thank them for the one they did send over.

Keep communicating with your customers using an easy to use CRM software and reach out personally at least once every other month to stay on top of their mind.

Get Specific About What You Want

Referrals come in several different forms. However, all referrals must contain just one vital information: To personally recommend and vouch for your ability to solve a problem as promised to the customer.

Here are types of referrals that you can ask for:

Reference or introduction to one in your customer’s network who may require your offerings
Testimonial or online review to show people in your customer’s network that you can be trusted to deliver what you say
Social media post for sharing info about your work with a wider audience in social media networking websites

For any types of referrals give your customers all the details that you need in their referrals so that it becomes easy for them to fill in the blanks instead of getting too overwhelmed by the task.

Take Advantage Of Email Templates

Do not waste your precious selling time on sending these repetitive ‘requests for referral’ emails. Instead, create templates for each stage of your referral follow up program in your easy to use CRM software just like you would have done with your normal sales cadence after selecting the contacts from your CRM database.

Set up an automatic drip email campaign using SFA (Sales Force Automation) in your easy to use CRM to trigger a series of messages for the customers you are seeking your referrals from.

You can also always try asking a few questions in your referral follow up program’s emails as asking one to three questions have more than 50% greater chances of being replied to than those without.

Here is a list of few questions that you may want to close your emails with:

Are you happy that you choose our products/services?
Do you have any questions or suggestions regarding our products/services?
Who else do you know may benefit from our products/services or our solutions?
Which among your networking connections could be in a position to use our assistance?

Of course, it must be remembered that none of this is achievable without a robust and easy to use CRM in place, which can perform this works for you seamlessly.

Show Your Appreciation

Finally, although customers refer more out of wanting to help both you and their contacts, nevertheless do not forget to offer a small token of appreciation for their efforts (especially when their referral turns into a sale).

You can also create a referral incentive program for your customers that may offer them a chance to enter a contest for a discounted subscription/fee for your services, or a free product or even larger gift cards like a ticket for a vacation or an event.

Wrap Up

Creating referral programs using your easy to use CRM software for customers in your CRM database is a secret to growing your brand awareness without spending much resources or money to do so.

Remember, you can never lose a sale for asking for a referral, but you can surely lose revenue and business and leave money on the table if you do not ask for one.

Common Mistakes That Kill Sales and How To Avoid Them

All businesses big or small fundamentally rely on sales for their sustenance and for reaching their desired goals. Therefore every business in the market strives hard to close and win more sales, as it is directly proportional to the revenue earned by the company. Now, achieving more sales does not only depend on the technological improvements (like implementing an easy to use CRM solution) that you lay down for the growth of your business but accomplishing more sales is also underpinned by the extent to which your sales reps are willing to rectify the mistakes that deliberately affects it. Hence, here are a few most common mistakes that inevitably affect the performance of sales in any business, as well as ways that can help you to avoid them.

All businesses big or small fundamentally rely on sales for their sustenance and for reaching their desired goals.
Therefore every business in the market strives hard to close and win more sales, as it is directly proportional to the revenue earned by the company.
Now, achieving more sales does not only depend on the technological improvements (like implementing an easy to use CRM solution) that you lay down for the growth of your business but accomplishing more sales is also underpinned by the extent to which your sales reps are willing to rectify the mistakes that deliberately affects it.

Each year, 70% of businesses state they plan to increase spending on technology. The figure remains the same in 2019 - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

Hence, here are a few most common mistakes that inevitably affect the performance of sales in any business, as well as ways that can help you to avoid them:

Not Knowing Your Customer Base

After you have started a business, you and your employees may have seriously brainstormed on things like methods to market your offerings, pricing it, adding improvements, calculating your profit margins and so on.

But have you thought of who you are going to sell it?

Mistake #1

Once people are all set for starting their business, people mostly ignore the importance of identifying their ideal customer or the crowd that is striving to buy it.

Therefore it is most important that businesses must explicate their target audience and reach out for the right prospect which will help them to augment their sales.

Creating buyer personas for your offerings by using an easy to use best small business CRM software if you are a startup is one of the most crucial pre-requisites for increasing your sales.

How you can find your ideal customers

Do research as to who can benefit from your offerings, whether it is for youngsters, kids, senior citizens based on what it does
Create a customer profile based on the psychographic and demographic information of your target audience
View the success and failure factors of your competitors in the marketplace to understand more what the preferences of your ideal customers are
Hear from your customers why your offerings satisfy them and what makes them retain to your brand, which will help in creating better buyer personas
Conduct research with the help of social media to sort out the behavior of your prospects

Cluttering Product/Service Pages With Inferior UI Design

Nowadays most businesses smart sell to customers using social media and several other online channels.

Therefore, to grab the credibility of your offerings among customers is really hard while selling online.

This is because, online customers do not see your face, but they judge you by the looks of your application or your website.

Mistake #2

Not concentrating on creating a convenient and legit layout.

Overseeing errors in category collaborations, using random colors, including too many types of fonts, and others create major impacts such as:

Increase in bounce rate
Diminish credibility of your online app or website

How to create a great interface

Make it simple

People looking for their requirements online have an affinity towards clear and simple website interfaces, rather than complex UI.
Therefore, leave more space; think about increasing the number and size of characters per lines, and navigate buttons using hierarchy.

Design for mobile use

According to research done by Gartner, it has been found that nowadays 88% of consumers those that want to buy your offerings have already searched your business on their mobile device like Smartphone.
Hence make your application and website responsive so that it can fit all type of popular devices that will help the users to easily navigate through your enlisted offerings.

Connect emotionally to users

Colors are an effective way to stir people’s emotions. Therefore, use relevant colors to create emotional bonding with the users of your app and website.
You can also upload convincing images of your offerings along with emotional touches to feel the pulse of your visitors.

Not Paying Attention To The Online Customer Reviews

Once you are selling online, every day you will definitely find members of your customer base posting countless reviews, comments, and rating related to your offerings, that help other prospective customers of your brand to narrow down their research and make faster decisions with greater assurance on your offerings.

Mistake #3

Neglecting the online reviews made by your customers and thereafter not taking actions based on those reviews can greatly impact the reputation of your brand.

While negative reviews will for certain affect your credibility and sales, every star from the customers will also provide a chance to increase your revenue.

How to handle reviews

Engage a resource to handle reviews

Allocate an employee in your organization just for handling online reviews will deliver shrewd results, as doing this will make sure that all the comments and reviews are addressed relevantly.

Reply to negative reviews

Negative reviews published online can shoo-away potential prospects and customers from your brand. Therefore to overcome this challenge respond promptly to the reviews like a person and not like a company. Admit your mistakes and thereafter provide adequate and effective solutions with appropriate comments.

Deal with positive reviews

Positive reviews are a boon to any business. Hence, if you are not responding to positive reviews you are definitely missing out on your opportunities.
Convey your gratitude by saying thank you, ask your customers what you can do better and then reinforce your offerings as per their suggestions.

Not Including Call-To-Actions

All your online marketing endeavors are expected to fetch some action from your prospects and customers.
Call-to-Action (CTA) is a functionality that asks them to take that action whenever you ask your prospects or customers to do something or respond in some way.

Mistake #4

Not asking your prospects and customers to take the required action. Since it is of no use in putting forward a marketing content to the customers and not asking them to do anything with it.

How to make most out of a CTA button

Place CTA in the right location

Although you can place the CTA anywhere on your landing pages, however, some placements are more convincing than others.
For example, placing a CTA just above the fold on your landing page or sometimes even below the fold along with a directional clue helps in generating more engagements.

Keep the CTA convincing

As mentioned earlier a right combination of text, design, and colors helps in establishing an emotional connection with the customers.
Therefore, select persuasive shapes and colors for your CTA.
Moreover, be sure that the text in the CTA is clear and readable by your prospects and customers.

Wrap Up

Capitalizing on the power of sales is indispensable for all businesses, whereby every win adds up to the continuing growth of your business.
Therefore, by avoiding these aforementioned mistakes and by acting out these suggested methods you can easily reinvigorate the diminishing numbers in your sales process and as a result find rapid business growth.

How to Transform from Good to Great Customer Support Progressively

In the modern scenario, customer experience and customer satisfaction have become the most important factor for any organization, brand or an enterprise. Companies today strive hard to make their Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as possible using easy to use CRM software to help them in the process, a recognition that is the product of globalization and consumer awareness. Hence, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is more vocal now than ever as they are dictating the policies of most companies be it big or small across the globe.

In the modern scenario, customer experience and customer satisfaction have become the most important factor for any organization, brand or an enterprise.
Companies today strive hard to make their Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as possible using easy to use CRM software to help them in the process, a recognition that is the product of globalization and consumer awareness.

Hence, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is more vocal now than ever as they are dictating the policies of most companies be it big or small across the globe.
Many companies nowadays even take up social stances to support overwhelming public opinions on several issues.

80% of businesses use customer satisfaction scores to analyze customer experience and improve it. - Harvard Business Review Click To Tweet

Therefore, in such a consumer conscious marketplace, it is important and most necessary to understand the process and strategies you need to handle your customers while providing solutions to their issues.

Here are some of the ways you can provide world-class customer support to your customers:

Chat Integration

Chat integration with your easy to use CRM software platform helps to store previous customer interactions in the CRM database so that the information lets your support team instantly access relevant customer data while resolving customer-facing issues.
Moreover integrating chat application with CRM software helps support agents to recognize the customers and thereby be more productive while providing solutions to their problems.
Additionally, as the chat application automatically greets the customer while a support agent is assigned to provide human-touch, it keeps the customer engaged until they are attended.

Self-Service

CSS or Customer Self Service is an important feature that exists in most easy to use CRM software platforms be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM.

CSS is a functionality that allows your customers to perform standard actions like creating an account or a payment method without the presence of a customer support executive.

Hence, CSS is a feature that not only saves a lot of time for the support agents but the data that is entered also gets updated in the CRM database instantaneously.

Interactive Voice Response

IVR or Interactive Voice Response is an extremely effective and convenient means for routing the call to specific departments in your organization.

Using IVR the customer calls the company and thereafter chooses from a series of options from the prerecorded voice prompts in the system.

IVR provides customers with the options which are categorized into sections so that they can find the appropriate department or agent with the necessary knowledge to solve their issues.

Therefore, IVR as support functionality accelerates the process of customers getting solutions for their questions and issues.

Service Level Agreements

SLA or Service Level Agreement allows support and service reps to track their time spent to solve an issue.

The SLA factor is set up in such way that any unattended or unresolved support ticket gets automatically escalated, and are passed on to higher level support representatives who are well-equipped to handle the situation and solve the issues.

This is because; in SLA the support tickets keeps repeating unless the ticket gets resolved effectually.

Therefore, using SLA for resolving customer complains promotes a sense of responsibility and accountability within the support teams.

This way by assuring the customers that every question or support tickets are attended to, improves customer satisfaction for your brand drastically.

Social Media Integration

With leads being tracked from all social media websites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others, easy to use CRM platforms allows the users of the software to segregate leads generated from these websites and thereafter organize them based on priority so that support agents are capable of providing solutions at the earliest.

Conclusion

Nowadays, customers recognize the ease of doing business with a company and if they are satisfied with their services remain grateful for it.

Therefore embedding these features in your easy to use CRM software will not only improve customer relations speedily but also your enable sales and support teams to work seamlessly with each other to provide world-class customer experience and thereby find business growth rapidly.

Best Practices Of Contact Management With Easy To Use CRM Software

It is often said that it takes a decade to build a reputation but just one minute to ruin it. Any good business strategy not only signifies more closure but it also means repeat business and happy customers. Now, how can you beget happy customers? The answer is easy- by understanding their requirements and delivering their needs. However, to do this you elementarily require more information about your customers and secondly an easy to use CRM or Contact Management software that helps you to build a stronger informational customer profile.

It is often said that it takes a decade to build a reputation but just one minute to ruin it.
Any good business strategy not only signifies more closure but it also means repeat business and happy customers.
Now, how can you beget happy customers?
The answer is easy- by understanding their requirements and delivering their needs.
However, to do this you elementarily require more information about your customers and secondly an easy to use CRM or Contact Management software that helps you to build a stronger informational customer profile.

Easy to use CRM is critical for your sales teams.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume - American Management Association (2018) Click To Tweet

This is because Contact Management software aids them to dig out customer information gathered in the CRM database to find out your customer’s needs, wants and preferences.

Even though for startup organizations and small businesses purchasing a best small business CRM software could stretch their budgets a little, nevertheless, an easy to use CRM software offers certain most essential benefits that can empower your sales, marketing, and support teams.

As a part of your best small business CRM software, a Contact Management solution also features:

Centralized storage for contact information
Sales tracking
Easy to search through your CRM database
Email integration
Scheduling
Lead nurturing
Conversion management
Document management

Although the requirement for customer data is acknowledged by all in businesses, most organizations especially startups and SMBs fail to create a contact management plan that is integrated with the required touch points needed for converting prospects and nurturing existing customers.

Here are a few contact management best practices for your business using best small business CRM software:

1. Tracking interactions

When an easy to use CRM platform has an integrated Contact Management software it helps in creating a single page for viewing all the interactions between your prospects and your company, which aids sales, marketing and customer support teams in your organization to find quick access to the required information when and where they need it from the centralized CRM database.

Using the best small business CRM software all interactions of phone calls, meetings, emails, and social integrations are logged and stored with the contact information.

Therefore, once you have a CRM in place, a single click can provide you all the information of your leads, prospects, and customers and prepare your teams to make the calls with all relevant information at their fingertips.

Moreover, if you are using a QuickBooks CRM like ConvergeHub, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, you can keep on using QuickBooks for accounting, and at the same time see invoice and payment information, customer details, products, directly in your best small business CRM, which you can then use for business process automation, reminders, customer service, and follow-ups.

Hence, by bringing your different teams together Contact Management software when integrated with a CRM helps you to cross-sell and forecast which products or services of your brand can be of interest to your customers.

2. Better understanding of your customer

It is a known fact that customer service is far less expensive than acquiring new customers. According to a recent survey, it has been found that 9 out of 10 consumers in the U.S said that they are ready to pay more for enjoying a superior customer experience.

Hence, it does not really matter how awesome is your offerings, since the only thing that is of interest to the customer is how well they are being treated.

Now, equipped with an easy to use CRM software you can access everything that is needed to understand your prospects and customers, right from the history of their purchases, to their interactions in your website, their social media presences and more.

Therefore, with such homogeneous information at their fingertips, your sales and support reps can pitch their calls with more efficiency for each of your customers.

3. Up-selling and cross-selling opportunities

It is easy to access and share data when you have all the required information stored centrally in the CRM database .

Therefore, accessing customer history after implementing CRM software for your organization, according to a report published by NelsonHall, most businesses takes a great stride in up-selling and cross-selling activities.

For example, if one of your customer’s purchase histories shows that the customer has purchased several ankle-length jeans, by using automated email campaigning feature of the CRM, you can easily email the customer on sneakers or best-suited belts to match those jeans.

4. Increased profits

Can you imagine collecting a colossal number of business cards and storing them without an easy to use CRM?
We guess not.

Now even if you are capable of storing your customer and prospect’s data in silo software solutions it makes no sense of that data that is only visible to you, since it can reduce your sales and profits, as in this case your sales teams will be spending more time for finding information than leveraging it.

Additionally, manual data entry is a time-consuming and tedious process. Content management software is a platform that helps to organize data as specified and aid employees to devote their work hours to more important tasks than the administrative ones.

Now, because of the above stated reason as your business grows more efficiently by minimizing unnecessary middle work, your sales and support reps can retain more customers by offering them superior customer service, make up-sells and cross-sells by understanding the customer’s needs and find new customers through word of mouth advertising and networking and hence accomplish more in the same workday.

5. Targeted marketing

With the best small business CRM and Contact Management software in place, you can access several marketing templates and create timed and automated drip marketing campaigns.

Using easy to use CRM solutions you can not only group your potential customers by priority and interests but also create groups that fit best with your marketing plans.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, every aspect of easy to use CRM software is cut-out to perform a particular task efficiently so that it can help your organization manage marketing, sales, and support better for your company and also your customers.

Most Common Rookie Marketing Automation Pitfalls To Avoid Immediately

In modern times, marketing automation has become a vital tool for both enterprises and small businesses. Marketing automation (MA) is a tool that can aid you in gaining and sustaining competitive advantage by speeding up sales in the marketplace. Moreover, when MA is integrated into an easy to use CRM, it enables the user to personalize messages, engage more contacts and thereby builds a world-class relationship with prospects and customers. However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.

Marketing automation on average drives upto 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead- Google (2019) Click To Tweet

However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.

This is the exact reason businesses prefer to use all-in-one CRM software like ConvergeHub which includes Sales Force Automation (SFA) that is also popularly known as Marketing Automation in a CRM.

The four main benefits of using MA in an easy to use CRM are:

You can customize the MA for the unique requirement of your business
You can send multiple email campaigns 24/7 all at the same time
Automate your business processes specific to the contacts along their journey
Create alerts and reminders for enhancing your workflows

Nevertheless, there are also MA mistakes you can make along the way, which you must avoid as mentioned below:

MA Mistake #1

Send Emails to Contacts That Did Not Opt-In

One of the most important Marketing Automation best practices is that MA involves permission-based emails. This implies, you only send emails to people in your contact list that provides permissions to send them information about your brand.
You can get this permission when each of the contacts opt-in to your email, by providing their emails through authentic channels like web-to-lead forms, the free trial offers, buyer’s information forms and many more.

Therefore, going by the books, adding contacts manually or importing a list to your MA system is a violation of the Spam rules, since if you do it there are changes that doing so may compromise the delivery of emails and thereby reduce the success rate of your email campaigning strategies.

MA Mistake #2

Not Maintaining an Active Contact’s Database

Now, even after you get any contact to opt-in for your emails, you must also keep them active. This implies that you must continuously send emails with appropriate contents to keep your list engaged at least once every week. This is because, if you do not, your contacts may forget you and thereafter do not open your emails.

You can use re-engagement campaigns as an effective and time-tested method to get inactive contacts to get engaged with your emails.

Therefore, always maintain an active and clean contact list in your CRM database .

MA Mistake #3

Focusing on Wrong Metrics

Marketing Automation is an extremely robust marketing tool when integrated into easy to use CRM that allows the user to measure the results of their campaigns.

Some of the most important email campaigning metrics are:

Opt-ins
Sales conversion rate
Email opening rate
Link clicked rate
Landing page visits, and more

However, attending to wrong metrics can make you misinterpret the real results.

Therefore it is most important that you must know the metrics you are seeking to find with each campaign individually to determine your email campaign’s success using MA software.

MA Mistake #4

Not Split Testing Campaigns

All email campaigns done with the help of Marketing Automation differs by the number of contacts, type, content and more.
Hence, spit test your campaigns to find what works right for your business.
The key to spit testing your campaigns is to just focus one variable at a time like, offer, headline, price, design, target audience and others.

Take the campaign that wins as your new control and then tests other subsequent campaigns against it.

MA Mistake #5

Not Having a Certified Consultant on Your Team

We are finally talking about this mistake as MA is both an art and science. Marketing Automation in practice requires a mix of technological knowhow along with expertise in direct response marketing.

This is the reason why it is best to rely on an independent marketing automation software consultant to build your custom Marketing Automation system, train your employees and develop MA strategies for your business growth.

How Can You Manage An Underperforming Sales Team Using Easy To Use CRM Software

Your business is using an easy to use CRM but your sales teams are not meeting their goals, is a tale which as old as time. When you hired your sales reps you thought they are the right fit for your organization, so why are they not exceeding their quotes now? While at times the problem lies with the employees themselves, nevertheless many times even something beyond their control is to be blamed for a dip in their performances. Therefore, here are a few best strategies for boosting your sales team’s performance based on case studies and real-world results, so that your employees can get back and hit their benchmarks in no time.

Your business is using an easy to use CRM but your sales teams are not meeting their goals, is a tale which as old as time.

When you hired your sales reps you thought they are the right fit for your organization, so why are they not exceeding their quotes now?

46 percent of sales teams report widespread use of CRM systems - Entrepreneur(2018) Click To Tweet

While at times the problem lies with the employees themselves, nevertheless many times even something beyond their control is to be blamed for a dip in their performances.

Therefore, here are a few best strategies for boosting your sales team’s performance based on case studies and real-world results, so that your employees can get back and hit their benchmarks in no time.

Create a formal system for qualifying your leads

It is a common saying in organizations whose backbone is customer relationships and sales is that “you can never close an unqualified lead”.
Therefore the most prevailing factor as to why sales teams underperform is a breakdown in their formal prospect qualification process- or an absolute absence of a sales process in the team.

A sales process is most essential for any organization as having a workflow in place for qualifying prospects does away with the guesswork of who your sales reps should track and who to say “no”.

To do this you can start by:

Finding the ideal customer for your business

Understanding exactly the kind of person you are selling to and thereafter passing on that vision to your sales reps is the primary step in the lead qualifying process.
Therefore never fail to remember to regularly update your customer persona(s) with a change in tends and market dynamics over time.

Capturing leads

By creating a lead generation funnel through your social media channels and website that captures contact info, you can turn cold calls into warm leads for your sales.

Consulting a lead score

Several easy to use CRM platforms can aid you clearly and quickly identify quality prospects. Many do this by analyzing the behavior of the visitors on your website and generating a lead scoring method based on parameters you set for making a lead ‘sales qualified’ by your marketing team.

This is because, once you have an automated process in place using easy to use CRM software that is capable of identifying who is most likely to get converted, your sales teams can follow-up speedily and keep their sales pipeline full.

Optimize By Documenting Your Follow-Up Process

On top of qualifying leads, keeping a well-documented follow-up process bars a rep from wondering what to do next. An easy to use CRM software platform is capable of automating much of this process and remind your salespersons who they need to contact and when.

Easy to use CRM platforms also make it possible for the management to analyze and track data around all the team’s accounts so that they can find which follow-up strategy is working and which ones do not.

Therefore by developing a clear process at every stage of the sales pipeline, your sales team can find a better chance of performing consistently and meet their goals.

Rethink Your Compensation Strategy

In a study done by Associate Professor Doug J. Chung an eminent faculty of Harvard Business School he suggested that several compensation strategies such as increasing sales quota for high performing sales reps, caps on commissions, may actually hurt any businesses’ long-term revenue generation goals.

Therefore, Prof. Chung suggested big companies should use a pay system that is tailored for each individual, with different components and bonuses in place to keep average, low-performing, and high-performing salespersons engaged.

Do you want to tailor sales incentives for individual members of your sales teams? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Physical prizes

Offering latest technology-based products or accessories has the added bonus of reminding the sales reps of their achievements each time they look at it.

Recognitions

Mention at a company-wide function or in a newsletter may be just another way to remind the sales team members that their work has been appreciated.

Extra time-off

Providing bonus vacations to the performing sales reps keeps the sales reps feel refreshed and also ready to jump back fully engaged at work.

Expenses-paid vacations

This idea is for long-term motivation for your reps as they are more expensive prizes, or you can also adjust for smaller budgets by offering a sumptuous dinner or other similar experiences to team members that meet their quotas.

Prioritize Cooperation Over Competition

One common and most popular strategy for increasing productivity is sales gamification. However, it must be remembered that outright competition is not always the best technique to boost your sales team’s productivity.

Therefore, instead of investing in gamification models that pit salespersons against one another prioritize on collaborations in order to win more deals.

This is because, a sales culture that is cooperative in nature is not only essential for maintaining an enjoyable, healthy work environment but it can also help in enhancing the overall productivity of your sales teams.

Refine your product

Your salespersons most likely hear a lot of both good and bad feedback from the customers.

Now let us face it, no amount of sales finesse can really make up for an imperfect product or services.

Therefore, in this situation, you need to invest more for developing your offerings and streamline the operations of your customer support teams.

It might also be wise if you can take a step further and ask your sales team members for their sincere feedbacks during the product development process, as they have a deep understanding of the customer’s opinions and the current market trends.

LITTLE IMPROVEMENTS CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

Employing an underperforming sales team can be really frustrating. However, this is also true that turning things around can be much easier than you can think.

Therefore get to the root of the problem and use a creative approach to fix lacunas and pitfalls for your sales teams that can quickly deliver the results your sales teams are looking for.

Remember, exploring the reasons for your sales team’s underperformance will not only pay dividends in the long haul, but it will also lay the foundation for creating better processes and foster a company culture that will remain even long after your current reps have moved on and new sales reps have joined your organization’s sales teams.

Top Reasons Why Your On-Demand Startup Requires A CRM For Growth

One of the surefire ways to start a profitable and successful business is to cater to on-demand services. Irrespective of which industry you are in the present situation in businesses clearly states that the recognition of on-demand services is almost everywhere across the globe. This is because, if you see that there is a requirement for any particular product or service, you will surely find an online application that makes it feasible for the user to access that service without having to leave their current place, which justifies the mushrooming growth of on-demand startups every passing year.

One of the surefire ways to start a profitable and successful business is to cater to on-demand services. Irrespective of which industry you are in the present situation in businesses clearly states that the recognition of on-demand services is almost everywhere across the globe.
This is because, if you see that there is a requirement for any particular product or service, you will surely find an online application that makes it feasible for the user to access that service without having to leave their current place, which justifies the mushrooming growth of on-demand startups every passing year.

How Easy To Use CRM Can Work Wonders for On-Demand Startups

Simply put, implementing a robust CRM strategy will assist small businesses and startup organizations in understanding their customers and their needs in a better way, which in turn will help in boosting business growth.

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

With an easy to use CRM in place, your startup benefits from:

Improved ROI
Organized information
Scalability
Unified and collaborative interface
Automated service
Maximized up-selling and cross-selling activities

Apart from these the other most important and interesting reasons for which best small business CRM software becomes a must for any on-demand startups include:

An Easy Solution For Finding Customers

If you are assuming that easy to use CRM is just a database for collecting your contact information, you need to dive deeper to know what is CRM in reality.

Any small business CRM is a mixture of a plethora of features and functionalities that includes sales funnel, automated campaigns, web to lead forms, landing pages and much more.

Therefore, in short, once you have your best small business CRM in place, your business will not only become more efficient, but it will also steady become better with its sales figures.

It is natural that you as a startup organization cannot bear to lose even a single customer. That implies you will find it important to leverage every sign of attention and interest from your target audience.

With easy to use CRM in place, you can do this by using Web-to-Lead forms that capture the actions of the visitors on your website. You can also further track using a CRM what your visitors explored, information on their time spent (page wise), and much more, which can easily help you to research and understand the interests and buying behavior of your prospects.

Moreover, the audience who visits your business webpage also gets automatically added as a lead once they enter their details in the Web-to-Lead forms.

Now, once you get the leads in your CRM database you can easily nurture them further according to your customer acquisition strategy for driving them home and generate more sales and revenue.

Provides you all the data you need at your fingertips

Everything is data-driven nowadays in this fast-paced digital world. Right from where you as a startup should invest your marketing dollars to what are your customer’s buying habits.

This is the key reason as to why it is no wonder that you must adopt a proper data management system which can assist in sorting, analyzing and thereafter provide you with the right information exactly when you need it for your business growth.

Now, let us understand this with an example.

You have started an on-demand pet grooming application and you have a customer who is booking slots for your service, however not on a regular basis.

It is over here adopting the best small business CRM software for your on-demand business will help you to communicate and track the customer, in order to find out why he is not interested in becoming a regular customer.

Likewise, if you see that few of your other existing customers have the same booking pattern, using information from your CRM database you can easily introduce a new offer program specifically targeting them, like 5% off on every order for signing up with your program.

Will this not trigger and increase your sales?

Easy to use CRM software can provide you with all the useful data and information which can even help you to change your marketing and selling strategies in order to ensure that your business finds repeat customers.

This way, your on-demand startup will start earning loyal customers base over the course of time.

Helps in customer retention and provides better customer experience

As an on-demand startup, your first focus should be definitely to primarily acquire, retain and then engage your customers while providing them a world-class shopping experience.

Easy to use CRM software platforms facilitate all your customer related information on a single page. It involves everything related to being a customer of your offerings; including customers purchase history, activities, and feedbacks.

Therefore, using a CRM, as a startup organization you can be more geared up to respond to your customer’s questions and issues quickly and efficiently.

Moreover, if you use your CRM for profiling and segmentation of your prospects, it will further help you to take better care of your prospective leads and customers.

Viewing the purchase history of your customers can also help you to foresee the offerings of your brand that your customers are interested in ordering or find out when they will re-order again.
Based on this information out of your CRM database you can use your CRM to send push notifications, reminding your customers about your products and services or send a special offer pertaining to the last order(s) of your customers.

Apart from this best small business CRM also provides its users with an easy flow of their sales process, right from ordering till billing.
Additionally, as the most effective business management tool CRM software even provides the users with important customer data stating what you need to be prepared with for your future sales.

For example, once your company’s sales team takes the order, the billing department will access the same information inside the CRM and process the bill, after which the shipping department will look into the same information inside the CRM and prepare for dispatching the order.

Therefore, once this process is being carried out, you can update your customers in real time at every stage in the sales process to keep your customers informed about the status of their orders.

This way, best CRM for small business can provide a stellar customer experience and hence help in the retention of your customers.

Conclusion

Properly implementing and managing a CRM system for your on-demand startup can not only save your time but also create happy and satisfied customers in order to reap the maximum benefits for your business growth.

How To Better Align CRM Strategy With Easy To Use CRM Software

IT industry experts and innumerable business gurus often talk about the importance of aligning technology in accordance with the most strategic goals of your business. Now, this also true with easy to use CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, whereby for a CRM implementation to achieve success, the software must be closely aligned with your businesses’ CRM strategy for finding growth. Therefore, to align your CRM strategy with the CRM software, you primarily need to understand exactly what your organization is hoping to achieve from your CRM?

IT industry experts and innumerable business gurus often talk about the importance of aligning technology in accordance with the most strategic goals of your business.

Now, this also true with easy to use CRM , or Customer Relationship Management software, whereby for a CRM implementation to achieve success, the software must be closely aligned with your businesses’ CRM strategy for finding growth.

91% of companies with more than 11 employees now use CRM software - Buyer Zone Click To Tweet

Therefore, to align your CRM strategy with the CRM software, you primarily need to understand exactly what your organization is hoping to achieve from your CRM?

This is because, while strategies can be unique and different for every company, the following easy to use CRM system’s capabilities can be adapted and reviewed and thereafter applied for all organizations aiming to implement their CRM solution in the pursuit of enhancing customer relationship for their business.

Ease of implementation and use

Although “ease of use” in CRM software is a subjective opinion, nevertheless several organizations want to adopt a CRM system that is relatively easy to deploy and use.

This is because, if the CRM solution is not so, it may exceed the budget on start-up cost, detract their projected ROI from the CRM, or even worse the users of the CRM may not embrace the software willingly.

For example from a usage point of view, does your CRM system requires excessive keystrokes, screens, mouse click, and page refresh to perform common tasks and processes?

Or how easy it is for your employees to access the screen in the CRM’s dashboard they find most useful for their day-to-day activities and tasks?

These factors need to we evaluated and thereafter modified, as the easy to use feature is most needed and an important attribute especially for small businesses, that mostly have fewer training programs, limited support channels, and also inadequate IT resource.

Scalability

How scalable is your best small business CRM software?

Businesses, especially small organizations will undoubtedly change, and so they need to plan in advance for their future growth.

Because of this, your CRM application must be capable of accommodating the change and growth in business, which may include supporting an increase in the users of the software, or a boost in transactions without failing on its performance.

Therefore, an easy to use CRM that is not scalable will ultimately provide diminishing returns for your business growth .

Cloud based CRM software platforms offer near limitless scalability, since if you purchase a SaaS CRM you can easily scale-up or scale-down your user counts as per your business needs.

Business Process Automation

One of the major advantages of using your best small business CRM software is that it can very easily automate most of your business processes, which eventually leads to increased productivity for your employees.

Therefore, one of the key features that you need to evaluate while adopting your easy to use CRM software is the level of sales process automation or SFA (Sales Force Automation) capabilities it provides.

This is especially true with small businesses that are looking for trimming their labor costs or are bootstrapped with limited resources.

Most easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub offers workflow designers in the software, which permits businesses to set up triggers for events and automate business processes with the help of the CRM system.

Software Customization

There is possibly no CRM in the marketplace that is capable of accommodating all of any organization’s business needs.
Therefore, the ability of easy to use CRM application’s to be tailored and customized can make a great difference in business to software fit and ROI.

Moreover, the level of customization that is possible with your CRM application also makes a big difference in the success and failure of the CRM implementation process.

Best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub enable their customers to configure, customize and upgrade their easy to use CRM software solutions to their requirements or changing business goals.

Hence, before adopting a CRM look into the level of flexibility the software offers which is a differentiation most small businesses need today to compete effectively in their respective marketplace.

Reduced support and maintenance

Deployment of easy to use CRM software in an enterprise can lead to very large support requirements and IT maintenance services.

This is the exact reason as to why, a growing number of organizations are opting for cloud based CRM systems, rather than traditional on-premise licensed software products.

Cloud based applications do not require internal maintenance and support issues because SaaS CRM vendors handle many frequent problems with the software on behalf of their customers in a shared service setup.

System integration

Another key consideration that you must watch out while adopting your easy to use CRM, is the level your CRM system integrates with other applications like ERP or an Accounting software that will help in contributing to your CRM strategy for your business.

There are several CRM applications in the market that provides their software platforms with the capability of enabling simple integrations and data exchange with third-party applications.

For example, small business CRM like ConvergeHub, which is also known as the most popular QuickBooks CRM provides QuickBooks CRM integration free and so allow the seamless transfer of data between the CRM and the accounting app, which helps in generating more revenue.

Versatility

Before adopting a CRM, you need to find how much functionality your company is looking out of your easy to use CRM?

Many CRM systems deliver SFA (Sales Force Automation), marketing automation, sales order processing, PRM (Partner Relationship Management), customer support as part of their basic offerings.

Additionally, you even need to understand what kind of analytical capabilities and business intelligence, such as online analytics processing, data warehousing or predictive reporting that you require for your business.

This is because, once you get these questions answered, during the CRM selection process, by understanding your business needs can prove invaluable during implementation and for aligning your CRM strategy with the software.

Remote access and mobility

Nowadays as most of the workers are mobile, they prefer the CRM application’s ability to be accessed from various locations and types of devices on the go.

Now, cloud based CRM applications allow the users to access their easy to use CRM even via a Web browser, regardless of their location and thus do not make them remain tied to any particular desktop.

Information Security

Confidentiality and strong information security are most essentially required, especially for applications and systems that house sensitive information like customer data, sales forecasts, and others.

For example, security considerations for a CRM include encryption, access control, and also an array of layered security protocols.

Therefore, before purchasing your CRM apply extra due intelligence to the CRM service provider’s security infrastructure as physical and logical security should always be on your highest priority while using this technology for your company.

Takeaway

While the CRM software’s capabilities and features should not be used for laying down your CRM strategy, nevertheless, understanding what to look for and what is available in the CRM can help to identify opportunities and craft a workable strategy that can be easily implemented within the constructs of the software.

Why You Need Marketing Automation In Your Best Small Business CRM Software

Approximately 9 out of 10 buyers in the B2B segment nowadays begin their buying process online. They start their buy cycle journey by searching on the internet to find independent product reviews, while also asking their friends and colleagues in social networking websites who they recommend and read contents in customer forums to view what existing customers have to say.
Research has shown that B2B buyers educate themselves with online contents and therefore approximately three-quarter of their buy cycles gets completed even before they have started their engagement with a vendor.
In other words, B2B buyers usually shortlists a vendor even before they interact with those vendors.
Therefore, it is tragic for the vendors that if they are not found in the online discovery process, they get excluded from the sale opportunities.
Now, marketers are also keenly aware that the previously held vendor-led sales cycle has been completely replaced with an online buyer-driven sales cycle in modern times.
Hence modern day marketers are also presently shifting their marketing budgets towards digital marketing campaigns or doing content marketing, email marketing, marketing in social media, paid marketing using their best small business CRM software platform, which is gradually becoming the most preferred methods for engaging and attracting online buyers with their offerings.

76% of B2B marketing professionals strongly agree that their ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect - Forrester Click To Tweet

The Problem Areas

Now, even after increasing their investments on online marketing methods markets are incurring several tactical challenges, which include:

How do marketers track, identify, and engage anonymous online prospects?
How do marketers link the volume of digital history to each online buyer?
How do marketers identify which online prospects can be ranked qualified and which are not?
Once the marketers find an online prospect in the company website, how do they convert them to a recognized person?
How do companies do all these activities without adding new staffs?

Therefore, now we need to consider how these tactical obstructions contribute to much larger challenges.

When sales are slow, sales reps rants that they are just not getting enough leads to convert from the marketing teams. Although this may be at times right, then again when sales are good, sales reps even then opines that the leads delivered by the marketing teams are not up to the mark.

In a recent study published by Insights (a global leader in business development solutions), it has been found that more than two-thirds of sales reps rate their lead generation capabilities as “needs improvement”.
Additionally, in the same study, it has also been highlighted that marketers only supply on an average only 30% of the leads sales needs on a day-to-day basis.

Viewing from a lead generation perspective, the marketing department in any organization, is made responsible to bring segmentation, relevant and personalized contents, highly tested messaging, and scale up demand generation campaigns using their best small business CRM software, to acquire the required volume and quality of leads which is needed by the sales teams to achieve their revenue objective for business growth .

However, this becomes a tall order for marketing, when the leads buying intents are unknown or the sales reps harps for more leads, whereby in several instances marketers throw all their leads over the fence, which consequentially incurs several ramifications, which include:

Good lead falls between the cracks when marketers also combine unqualified leads in their lead distribution to sales.
Productivity in sales drops when sales reps become lead qualifiers rather than lead verifiers or are forced to become their own marketing shops.
The CPL (Cost per Lead) increases drastically when sales reps are made to acquire their own leads one at a time, as opposed to the marketing teams that apply repeatable process to acquire leads in bulk.
Leads that are not acquired by the marketing do not benefit from lead nurturing campaign and other marketing programs and so they have higher chances to be languished or get lost.

The Business Solution- Marketing Automation Software

The solution to all these above-stated issues lies in making marketing to acquire the bulk of leads using repeatable processes and thereafter transfer only those leads that are qualified to the sales teams.

Does it sound easy? Well, it is not.

Nevertheless, in the modern times marketing applications like best small business CRM software platforms have responded with automation and methods to tackle both these online marketing problems and their overarched lead generation objectives.

Marketing automation is a software application which not only brings process and precision but it also capable of analyzing lead generation campaigns. To be more specific marketing automation in easy to use CRM software helps to acquire, track, score, nurture, and thereafter send sales-ready leads to the sales team.

Here is how marketing automation in best small business CRM software do it.

Digital Tracking

Marketing automation systems when integrated into CRM software is capable of tracking website visitors using cookies, store click-stream data by cookie ID and after that apply IP reverse to identify the leads. Now, using this technique when anonymous visitors become known, the cookie history is associated with the lead records.

Additionally, marketing automation software in a CRM software helps marketers to create landing pages along with registration forms which are also capable of converting unknown visitors into know contacts, to be stored in the CRM database.

Moreover, by tracking the lead’s digital footprints, marketing automation applications can easily find out what contents the leads have consumed, what searches they have made online, which can help marketers to understand the buyer’s preferences and where they are in the buying cycle.

Lead Scoring

This is a process which can be performed using marketing automation in a CRM, whereby leads are assigned points for the lead’s attributes and behavior in order to measure if a lead is fit and has the propensity to buy the offerings.

By capturing actionable data points which helps in scoring buyer’s behaviors like the volume of the lead’s visit to your company’s website, the type of searches they performed, the specified pages they read on your website, and the number of contents they downloaded, marketing automation software in a CRM automatically update lead scores and thereafter once the leads reach a threshold score, the system automatically forwards the sales-ready leads to the designated sales reps for immediate follow-ups.

This way using lead scoring techniques marketing can forward fewer but higher quality leads to the sales teams.

According to a study, it has been found that 10 percent increases in lead quality can generate 40 percent increased productive for the sales teams.

Lead Nurturing

The over-abundance of information about products and services in the internet has changed the way buyers search and research for their requirements.

According to a research, it has been found that in the B2B space:

“25-30% of new leads are sales-ready when received, about 45-55% are not sales-ready when received but about three-quarters of this group will eventually become qualified, and about 25-30% of new leads are not sales-ready when received and never will be.”

Therefore using marketing automation businesses can build lead nurturing campaigns which are capable of delivering educational and informational contents to the leads to engage and advance the required leads until they are matured and becomes sales-ready.

In other words, lead nurturing creates high impact revenue opportunities that can go untapped in your business if you are not using marketing automation in your easy to use CRM software.

Lead Transfer

Marketing automation software is an application that can forward sales-ready leads automatically to the sales teams once those leads have reached a preapproved threshold score by implementing lead nurturing processes.

Moreover, using marketing automation applications marketers can deliver more intelligence with their sales-ready leads, which can empower the sales reps to close their deals in lesser time, and also deliver updates when previously transferred leads gets engaged in an unusual behavior or any new activity.

Lead Analytics

Business intelligence gathered from a closed-loop reporting system helps in continuous process improvement and thereby helps in business growth.

When marketing automation software is integrated with easy to use CRM system it is capable of tying every lead, customer, and revenue dollars back to the marketing program that created them.

According to Forrester Research:

“76% of B2B marketing professionals strongly agree that their ability to track marketing ROI gives marketing more respect.”

Conclusion

Therefore, if marketing automation which is also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA) is used with easy to use CRM software, it does not only offers a tremendous potential for generating new leads from anonymous visitors and nurture them till they become sales-ready, but it also makes your sales teams more efficient by helping your sales reps concentrate more on what they do best (sale) for generating more revenue and bring rapid business growth.

Methods And Benefits Of Measuring Customer Satisfaction With Easy To Use CRM

Customer Satisfaction or CS is an extremely important, however mostly overlooked aspect of a successful business endeavor all across the globe. This is because, companies concentrate too heavily on acquiring fresh customers and spend little time or resources on satisfying the existing ones, which can be quite damaging for sustaining success in business, for both small and large enterprises. That is why measuring CS is so important with the help of easy to use CRM software, to find out whether or not your purchasers are truly happy using your brand.

Customer Satisfaction or CS is an extremely important, however mostly overlooked aspect of a successful business endeavor all across the globe.
This is because, companies concentrate too heavily on acquiring fresh customers and spend little time or resources on satisfying the existing ones, which can be quite damaging for sustaining success in business, for both small and large enterprises.

That is why measuring CS is so important with the help of easy to use CRM software, to find out whether or not your purchasers are truly happy using your brand.

Existing customers who are happy with your brand on an average spend 67 percent more than your new customers. Click To Tweet

Therefore, in this blog, let us discuss some of the main benefits of preserving satisfied customers and thereafter cover the three most common techniques and metrics for measuring customer satisfaction easily.

BENEFITS OF KEEPING CUSTOMERS HAPPY

Cost Effectiveness

Do you know that your existing customers who are happy with your brand on an average spend 67 percent more than your new customers?
Additionally, it costs 5 to 10 times more for acquiring fresh customers than retaining your old ones.

Now, considering these above-stated statistics, it is naturally pragmatic to assume that you should be spending a decent sum of your marketing budgets on customer retention programs.

Nevertheless, in a report published by Corporate Vision, it has been stated that 80 percent of small and big enterprises, mostly spend 70 percent of their marketing budgets on inbound and outbound marketing, and therefore less than 30 percent on customer retention programs for their brands.

Hence, companies that concentrate on customer retention as their main priority will be those that will come out on the top not only today, but also in the days to come.

Brand Loyalty

Customers who are loyal not only stick around longer, but they bring in more revenue and help to develop brand loyalty for your company.

In a report published by Capgemini, it has been found that 8 out of 10 customers are willing to offer more for enjoying enhanced customer experience, which in turn builds up loyalty for your brand.

Therefore, simply speaking, if you provide world-class customer experience and generate loyal and satisfied customers, your customers will reward you with recurring business effortlessly.

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

According to a report published by Accenture, it has been found that 55 percent of consumers in the U.S express loyalty for companies and brands they love by recommending them to their friends, relatives, and families.

Therefore, once your customers are satisfied with your offerings and support activities, they are more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Now, as it has also been found that 83 percent of consumers trust products and services that are recommended by friends and family, as satisfied customers in several instances share their product recommendations on social media websites, therefore, this free advertising is one of the most effective types of advertisement for brands in the modern times.

Market Differentiation

Last but not least, creating stellar customer experience helps to differentiate your business from the existing competition in the marketplace.

Therefore, in today’s extremely competitive business environment, if you do not focus on world-class CS and CX, you can be sure that your customers will leave you for any vendor that does.

THREE METRICS FOR MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

There are 3 key models for measuring CS using easy to use CRM software , which we are going to discuss next in this article for helping your brand find rapid business growth.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

CSAT which uses a scale of 1 to 5 is most often used for gauging the level of customer satisfaction with any particular offering.

The ratings that customers use to rate their satisfactions in CSAT are:

Very Unsatisfied- 1
Unsatisfied- 2
Neutral- 3
Satisfied- 4
Very Satisfied- 5

Now, if you want your Customer Satisfaction Score survey to consist of 5 questions, take the average of each of your customer’s response, which will provide you that individual customer’s CSAT score for your brand and your offerings.

Next, once you have enough responses gathered up in your CRM database after sending your survey, take each individual customer’s CSAT score, add them up and thereafter divide them by the total number of respondents, which will provide the overall CSAT score for your offering.

According to Marketo Inc. generating and evaluating CSAT score is the most effective way for measuring short-term CS at a granular level.

However, using your brand’s CSAT score in conjunction with any one of the other customer satisfaction metrics (stated below) in your easy to use CRM is advantageous for better measuring the customer experience of the consumers of your brand.

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

While Customer Satisfaction Score can be used to measure short term satisfaction of your customers, NPS or Net Promoter Score is a metrics that is used more to measure the long term satisfaction level of your customers.

Now, unlike CSAT, which consists of several questions, NPS relies just on a single one.

“How would you recommend our brand (product or service) to others?”

The response to this singular question in an NPS survey is measured on a scale of zero to ten, where 10 is the ‘most likely’ and 0 being the ‘least likely’ answer in the survey.

The intermediate scoring patterns in NPS are:

Promoters (who will stay and buy more in the future from your brand) – 9 to 10
Passives (who do not have any strong emotion for your brand) – 7 to 8
Detractors (who are not satisfied and may leave your brand or dissuade others) – 6 to 0

Math for calculating NPS

Let us assume the NPS survey that you performed using your sales force automation in your easy to use CRM has collected answers from 100 respondents, where 70 or seventy percent are ‘Promoters’, 20 or twenty percent are ‘Passive’ and 10 or ten percent are ‘Detractors’.
Now to find the NPS score for your brand, you need to subtract 10 from 70 (ignoring 20 percent those are Passive) to come up with 60, which will be the overall NPS for your brand.

Remember, you can also have negative NPS, which would happen if you have more Detractors than Promoters in the survey.

Because of this while any NPS above zero is considered ‘Good’, a score in-between 50 to 60 is considered ‘Excellent’ and a score above 70 is accepted as ‘World-class’ in this customer satisfaction metrics for your brand.

CES (Customer Effort Score)

CES or Customer Effort Score is different from CSAT and NPS in that it does not directly measure customer satisfaction, but rather measures the amount of effort the specific customers have put into an interaction with a brand.

There are several businesses across the globe that makes use of CES to find out the effectiveness of their customer support functions.

In other words, CES measures the level of reduction of the efforts made by the customer while interacting with a company. Since the lesser headache a customer has every time they call up customer support, they will leave satisfied, which will, in turn, increase the CX with your brand.

In general, CES is a metrics that is calculated by asking the customer the amount of effort they had to put into interaction in the scale of 1 o 5, where:

Very Low Effort – 1
Very High Effort – 5

Now, once all your responses are in after your CES survey, calculating the average of the numbers produces the company’s CES.

While calculating CES a score of 2 or lower implies that your brand is successful in making your customer’s life easy, while a score above 4 suggests that your company must rethink how they can support their customers more efficiently.

Conclusion

As maintaining satisfied customers is more important in the present time because of increased competition than ever before, focusing on measuring customer satisfaction and enforcing changes based on the customer feedback, will not only help to continually improve the customer experience for your brand, but also pave the path for a bright future and rapid business growth.

Year: 2019

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Ease of implementation and use

Scalability

Why You Need Marketing Automation In Your Best Small Business CRM Software

Methods And Benefits Of Measuring Customer Satisfaction With Easy To Use CRM

BENEFITS OF KEEPING CUSTOMERS HAPPY

THREE METRICS FOR MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Math for calculating NPS

CES (Customer Effort Score)

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