Year: 2019

Unique Ways To Use Your Easy To Use CRM For So Much More Than Sales

Now that you know what is CRM software, do you also know that easy to use CRM can do much more than just manage and monitor sales? In general, most businesses would use their CRM tool to predominantly manage activities like sales. Nevertheless, you should not just assume that your CRM is just a tool developed for daily monitoring of prospects, customers, and leads. The real fact is there are also several ways you can make use of your easy to use CRM solution, like for competitor tracking, HR support, or even something as simple as creating a content calendar- the right CRM system be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software can carry out all these tasks for you and more.

Now that you know what is CRM software, do you also know that easy to use CRM can do much more than just manage and monitor sales?

In general, most businesses would use their CRM tool to predominantly manage activities like sales. Nevertheless, you should not just assume that your CRM is just a tool developed for daily monitoring of prospects, customers, and leads.

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

The real fact is there are also several ways you can make use of your easy to use CRM solution, like for competitor tracking, HR support, or even something as simple as creating a content calendar- the right CRM system be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software can carry out all these tasks for you and more.

Therefore, here in this article let us guide you with some other unique ways you can use your best small business CRM software if you are in an SMB to automate time-taking manual tasks:

  1. Integrate email marketing processes

Any recurring email marketing task or program can be automated and enhanced with easy to use CRM. If you are in a small business you can use an all-in-one CRM like ConvergeHub to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Hence, here is a basic snapshot of what you can do:

  • Completely synchronize your email’s inbox to any popular email provider like Gmail, MS Outlook and others
  • Use a variety of customizable email templates to save upon time preparing recurring customer communications
  • Email to all your contacts in the CRM database directly from ConvergeHub, which will be synced back to your inbox
  • Look at any specific contact or deal and view all emails associated with that person or deal at a glance
  • Find real-time notifications the very moment a prospect opens your email or even clicks on a link to help you with your follow-up strategies
  1. Hiring and onboarding

You can use your easy to use CRM for tracking your job hiring and company onboarding processes. Just consider the similarity between tracking your contacts through the sales-pipeline and moving a suitable candidate through a structured induction or hiring process.
For this, you do not need a customized HR CRM since an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub can also handle both.

  1. Account management

There are several people those that think to track their primary sales is the only work of a CRM. However, it is also true that your best small business CRM software can even be used to up-sell to the customers or build a robust relationship with customers over time.

In other words, your job is not completed once you sign a deal. Customer churn is the enemy of sustainable business growth. Therefore, you should use your CRM tool to manage the customer’s entire buying journey to help increase your revenue per customer and most importantly the average lifetime value of your buyers which can be measured easily using CLM CRM software like ConvergeHub.

  1. Project and event management

Do you have an exciting and new event or project going on in your organization? Do not pay for another business software tool; use your easy to use CRM to track those processes as well.

  1. Track your customers

If your customers accept cookies, there are CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub that can be linked to your website that provides you visibility of the user’s behaviors. It acts as a tracking tool to let you see which pages your website visitors have visited and whether they have dropped out before making a purchase. Once armed with this valuable information you can use this data to retarget the customers with advertisements.

  1. Cut down on administrative tasks

Using easy to use CRM software platform you can automate repetitive tasks that do not need human intervention. Simple day-to-day tasks such as typing and sending emails, creating activities, developing reports, and also gathering background information on prospects, all can be handled by your CRM.

Hence, using CRM software not only saves your employee’s precious time, but it also slashes the cost you spend on your existing resources.

  1. Handle all customer data correctly

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) imposes limitations on how businesses in the EU (European Union) can store and then manage a customer’s personal data.

However, even if you are based outside the European Union, you still have to adhere to the GDPR norms if your company handles the data of any European resident in the CRM database.

Easy to use CRM is a system that is capable of storing and securing your prospect and customer data to ensure that no third-party can see or access it.

Conclusion

Therefore, whatever be the requirement of your business, the right easy to use CRM software tool will definitely be able to assist in making all avenues of your business operations more efficient.

Hence remember your best small business CRM is not just a sales tool, as every department in your company can benefit from this software.

However, the question remains are you making the most of your easy to use CRM software ?

If it is not, click on the link below and try ConvergeHub CRM, for you never know how powerful and scalable ConvergeHub is if you do not use it.

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How Data Science Can Boost Customer Experience For Rapid Business Growth

While content marketing may still remain the number one means to reach out to the customers on the internet, but in 2019 making use of data science is also the number one way to keep your customers around once you have caught their attention on the web. Data science which is also synonymous to big data or machine learning helps businesses that are already using easy to use CRM software platforms to develop a kind of customer experience or CX that leave consumers of your offerings satisfied and looking for more. We all know by now, that building customer loyalty is the golden key to longstanding success in any market, irrespective of which industry you are in. Therefore, in this article let us explore different avenues as to how you can use data science to help your business succeed over time, and provide exceptional customer experience.

While content marketing may still remain the number one means to reach out to the customers on the internet, but in 2019 making use of data science is also the number one way to keep your customers around once you have caught their attention on the web.
Data science which is also synonymous to big data or machine learning helps businesses that are already using easy to use CRM software platforms to develop a kind of customer experience or CX that leave consumers of your offerings satisfied and looking for more.

When assessing the most important CRM features, 18% of organizations stress the ability to see a clear snapshot of their data- Smart Insights Click To Tweet

We all know by now, that building customer loyalty is the golden key to longstanding success in any market, irrespective of which industry you are in.

Therefore, in this article let us explore different avenues as to how you can use data science to help your business succeed over time, and provide exceptional customer experience.

Personalize Services to Net Rewards

While it is equally true that consumers get bothered when services are too customized, recommendation services that are geared towards advocating new products and services to the customers, and are of high quality have the potential to rapidly improve sales per customer and price point per order for any brand in the present competitive marketplace.

Spotify, Amazon, Netflix are all benchmark examples of business and services that do a great job recommending the customers about their new products that entrance and excite the customers.

Give Customers What They Need

One reason that Uber faced recently is that potential customers of this transportation network company might avoid using its services for not being able to know how much their fare will be at the end of their rides.

Therefore, to address this grave issue company like Uber nowadays creates fair price calculators that allow the customers to find the best guess of what their fare might be even before they book their rides.

This can be considered as a great example of two ways that big data can be used.

Firstly by aggregating data, Uber apprehended that one of the main reason customers were restraining their need instead of booking the rides was the uncertainty they were facing about what the price of the ride might be at the end of their journey.
Secondly using a fair price calculator, customers can get a near-to-the-actual estimate of what their rides may cost even before they book the ride, and can make sure that what they end up paying is not too far-off from their expected rates.

Although after all, it is impossible to determine the cost of any single ride before it is complete. But calculators like this that uses big data technology to look over thousands of customer-related data of riders who have traveled similar distances at analogous times, found that they can be fairly accurate while providing their customers with their fair price suggestions.

Fix Issues Even Before They Happen

As a negative story about any brand nowadays can spread like wildfire on the social media platforms, therefore it is extremely essential that businesses must avoid issues with their customers, more important than ever to keep away from meting out unpleasant customer experience whenever it is possible, while selling their products and services in this competitive marketplace.

One way big data technology with the help of easy to use CRM software can improve customer experience is by spotting issues that the average human simply cannot see.

For example, several disconnected customer support representatives for a brand might all get separate service calls from customers complaining about a minor issue with their offerings, which can go unnoticed and disregarded for its simplicity.

However, an intelligent system dedicated to machine learning technology can easily identify that problem across an array of call logs in easy to use CRM software and instruct the CRM to send automated alerts to someone higher-up in the organization to investigate the issue immediately.

Optimizing Product Locations

In both online retailing and brick and mortar stores, organizing products and services in an optimal pattern is always necessary and an interesting thing to do.

For example, if a customer is browsing laser printers, having refill cartridges and other accessories for the printing device nearby may seem logical.

But big data is a technology that can perhaps even tell you that someone purchasing a laser printer might also need a new chair or table for their office, or a laptop that perfectly matches that specific customer’s needs.

Therefore big data when used with easy to use CRM software that has all the customers data in its CRM database , can allow your business to better arrange your offerings online and also in brick and mortar stores by creating product association, which greatly increases the amount of customer purchase per visit.

Conclusion

However, businesses also need to careful of the extent to which they should use big data technology for boosting customer experience and consumer satisfaction for their business growth .

In the modern times, there are even many customers that do not trust companies with too much information about their leads, prospects, and customers, and so will opt out of cookies and other collection options whenever they visit your brand’s website.

Therefore the best way for brands to improve customer willingness to share their information is to act responsibly towards their customers, which means companies should protect their customer’s information in their CRM database , never sell their customer-related data to other third-party sources, and use the information they have in their easy to use CRM platforms carefully, only for the benefit of their consumers in the days to come.

Now, if you are further interested in knowing how your organization can engage technology for rapid business growth; continue reading our “Business Growth Manifesto”.
Since even the best CRM software and big data technology in the world will not improve your business if your business process is in shambles, your workflow is disjointed, or your employees do not feel the necessity of using the software.

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Recent Trends and Developments in Chatbot Customer Support Strategies in 2019

The developments in Chatbot services have traveled a long way and have also achieved huge success and milestones since its beginning that started back in the 1950s. During the initial years after the launch of this technology Chatbots were only used as an interface for web development services to enhance business interactions, however times have now changed and technology has also evolved greatly over the last few decades just like it has happened with easy to use CRM software in the CRM marketplace.

The developments in Chatbot services have traveled a long way and have also achieved huge success and milestones since its beginning that started back in the 1950s.
During the initial years after the launch of this technology Chatbots were only used as an interface for web development services to enhance business interactions, however times have now changed and technology has also evolved greatly over the last few decades just like it has happened with easy to use CRM software in the CRM marketplace.

80% of businesses want Chatbots by 2020- BusinessInsider Click To Tweet

Now, if we look at the Chatbot technology we will certainly accept the fact, that although Chatbots were their all along, however, this technology has gained unseen momentum and popularity over the last few years. Especially in 2018-19 the trends in Chatbot technology has shown some amazing runs that portrays several tweaks to its traditional technology as it is becoming more and more useful for rendering support to the customers and prospects in small and medium-sized organizations that are using best small business CRM software platforms to enhance the customer experience associated with their offerings and find rapid business growth.

This is happening because, the recent development in the field of Big Data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) has significantly improved the level of technology usage in Chatbot development, helping Chatbots to evolve from simple answering applications to the advanced Chatbots that are smart and intelligent enough to effectively interact with prospects and customers in the CRM database .

Hence there are many organizations that are looking to hire app developers for implementing Chatbots in their business websites and integrate its functionality with an easy to use CRM for leveraging its power in providing world-class support to their prospects and customers.

Advancements in Chatbots nowadays are allowing the implementation of AI tools which is the main reason for Chatbots to gain this large consumer base, like small organizations with limited resources those that are most essentially in need of remaining online 24/7 using Chatbots.

Since Chatbot technology aids in providing instant response to the requirements and questions of prospects and customers living in completely different time zones across the globe.

According to the Harvard Business Review and InsideSales:

“A five-minute delay can result in your chances to attract lead decimation. In ten minutes the delayed answer will reduce your chances to get the effective contact up to 400%.”

Therefore, it can be easily said that with the extensive area for development, Chatbot technology just like easy to use CRM software, has a boundless unrestrained space and future to thrive and grow, but what seems to be the trend for this year provides us the picture as depicted below, as according to BusinessInsider:

“80% of businesses want Chatbots by 2020.”

Replacement of Legacy App Interfaces

There are several web and app development services in 2019 that have already adopted the trends with legacy app interfaces replaced and interchanged by unique interfaces, which results into using Chatbots for making interactive conversations with a customer instead of simply navigating through the UI of the app.

This way it has been found that businesses using Chatbots gets high-level of engagement with their customers, as irrespective of whether your customer is a Baby Boomers (age 55+) or a Millennial (age 18-34), people are looking to Chatbots for providing them on-demand answers to their questions in real time, since 55% of people in the USA believe the top benefit of interacting with a Chatbot is getting instant responses to their inquiries.

Follow-line of Google Duplex

Built on an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) using ‘TensorFlow Extended’, a general purpose Google machine learning platform, Google Duplex is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chat agent that can perform definite verbal tasks.

It has been recently observed that small and medium businesses that use best small business CRM software is using this innovative tool to book appointments and orders on the command of the users, which in the years to come can also be followed by other similar ideas, because technology never waits to evolve, which is more so pertinent in the present times.

Human-like Chatbot Experience

The entire race in the Chatbot technology is for rendering human-like experiences to the users of the application. Therefore, business establishments that are working on Chatbots are also slowly becoming smarter to deliver human-like experience through Chatbots, using technological advancements in AI, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.

Additionally, in an HBR survey, it showed that decision makers and business leaders are turning towards the broader umbrella of business automation technologies that also most importantly includes CRM integration with Chatbots, for things like marketing, sales, and customer support services.
According to the HBR study:

“Forty-two percent of participants believe automation technologies in these areas will mostly improve the customer experience. And 48% said that they already use automation technology for these business functions, with 40% planning to implement some form of automated technology by 2020.”

Chatbot powered UI

It has been found that UI or User Interfaces that are Chatbot enabled helps the UI to deliver information quickly, as interacting through Chatbots is a lot more simpler than using app-based UI tour.

Automatic Customer Support Center

The most advanced artificial based voice and other devices are the server-less technology that is currently deployed Over-the-Automated-Call-Center.

In the present times smart Chatbot development companies can help you to set up the automatic call center and infuse them with the deep domain knowledge base to serve the customers 24/7, and that too without any reduction in efficiency.

In-depth Customer Data Analysis

In the present times as AI is helping data mining and analysis activities that are most necessary for finding customer insights for businesses, hence Chatbots in 2019 are getting integrated with Machine Learning which is aiding Chatbots to solve even technical tasks.

Moreover, this effective analysis of Chatbots about customer insights and pattern recognition using Big Data and Machine Learning technologies integrated with the app along with data collected inside the CRM database is helping Chatbots to gain an advantage in real-time scenarios over the human mind.

Conclusion

As the ultimate goal of almost all businesses is to engage the customer, show them their plans, sell the customers their offerings, and provide world-class support services an innovative and futuristic Chatbot technology will definitely help businesses to achieve these goals.
Since looking at the trends in Chatbot technology although friendliness and approachability” are not areas where consumers believe Chatbots are particularly strong, according to a Drift report 15% of consumers in the US have used Chatbots to communicate with businesses in the past 12 months and this number is on the rise steadily.

To know more on how you can use technology to find massive business growth read our “Business Growth Manifesto”, to identifying areas that can be optimized or automated in your organization and then implement technology that will optimize, automate and improve your business processes.

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Key Customer Experience Metrics That You Must Measure and Cannot Leave Behind

In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization. In a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states: “One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”

In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization.

By 2020, more than 40 percent of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer experience- Gartner Click To Tweet

In a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states:

“One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”

Well, this is indeed an irony since businesses spend a considerable amount of their time and resources in sales and marketing but ultimately they do not keep a track of how many of those acquired customers have been retained or try to find what were the reasons for their attrition.

Hence, how big or small your business is, and in which sector your company belongs to, here are key 4 top of the line Customer Experience metrics that you should track and measure at all times using your best small business CRM software.

What are the CX top of the line metrics?

Top of the line metrics in CX are those that bear minimum stats you should measure which are outcome indicators and lag measures that can be easily found in your easy to use CRM platform’s dashboard. These metrics help to keep us tied to our organization’s long term visions and goals for strategic business growth . Therefore, to show an improvement on these metrics, we need to improve other independent or lead Customer Experience (CX) metrics in your CRM database.

The most vital top line CX Metrics that you should always measure are:

  • Net Promoter Score
  • Customer-Lifetime-Value/Cost-of-Acquisition-of-Customer
  • Customer-Churn
  • Customer Effort Score

So let us talk about each of them now briefly.

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Possibly, there is no need for a detailed explanations since NPS has gained tremendous popularity in the recent times, as in a report published by Forrester it indicated that more than 70% of both big and small organizations listed in the Fortune 1000 companies use Net Promoter Score to measure the loyalty of their brands.

The biggest advantage of this metrics is its simplicity (you can use a single question format) to evaluate the customer’s intentions to recommend your offerings to their trusted ones, like friends, colleagues, and relatives.

The uniqueness of the NPS question lies in its 11 point survey, which is scaled from 0 to 10, with 0 to 6 as detractors, 7 and 8 as passive, and 9 and 10 as promoters of your brand.

In order to calculate your brand’s NPs, detract the percentage of Detractors from this percentage of Promoters.

For an example, if 60 percent of your respondents in the Net Promoter Survey (which you can perform using email campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM) are Promoters and 10 percent are Detractors; your brand’s NPS is 50.

The importance of NPS is that it provides an insight into the customer loyalty spectrum for your business so that you can identify the weak points in your customer experience that needs improvement.

  1. Customer-Lifetime-Value/Cost-of-Acquisition-of-Customer (CLV/CAC)

What is interesting and we are looking for in these two metrics is the ratio of CLV to CAC that can be easily measured in all best small business CRM software platforms.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) which is also known as LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) is the net economic or financial value associated to the relationship between the customer and the brand or the company.

CLV is an ideal metric that illustrates and lets us know how much revenue we are making from each customer. Additionally, when CLV is averaged out, any organization can easily generalize it for its entire customer base.

CLV is an important measurement that you must measure using your easy to use CRM software since if you are not making enough money from your relationship with your customers, it is no brainer that you may sooner or later seize to be in business.

Calculating net contribution (profit margin) or net financial value from an ongoing relationship with your customers will definitely involve the contributions that your buyers have made in the past and an ongoing estimate of their future contributions for your brand. Therefore, CLV or LVC is estimated metrics.

Hence, to explain it in its simplistic form, Customer Lifetime Value is the average sum of purchases made by your customers till they retire or churn.

Therefore, CLV takes into consideration the “average contribution from each customer per period” and the expected number of periods that the customer remains with the company.

For an example, if the average revenue of a CRM company like ConvergeHub is $59 per user/ month for its Premium Edition billed yearly, and if the cost of offering the service is $40, then its average customer contribution is $19 per month. Now, if the customer stays with the organization for 24 months before churning out, then the CLV for that customer is $456 ($19 x 24 Mt.)

This calculation takes into consideration, the Customer Retention Rate (or in a reverse way the Customer Churn Rate) and average contribution per customer.

We all know that the future value of cash flow is at all times less than its present value, therefore, this formula can be improved or adjusted also to include this aspect.

As Customer Lifetime Value engages an economic value to Customer Relationship strategy, CLV is considered as an excellent metric for the following:

  • Evaluate if your delivery model is viable
  • Helps to refine your customer support strategies, so as to increase your CLV
  • Sensitize your team members about economic value and inculcate ownership into their actions

Apart from this, evaluating each customer individually as against average CLV, to find out whose relationship is more precious for your brand can also help in customer segmentation for up-selling and cross-selling your other offerings.

What is the Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC)?

CLV alone may aid you to a certain extent to refine your organization’s operations and service delivery models; however, we all know that Customer Experience (CX) begins right from Marketing.
Therefore, now you need a metric that considers an end-to-end impact, and that can only be measured by considering the Cost of Acquisition of Customer for your brand.

Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC) is the average cost of acquiring a customer which can include right from marketing and sales expenses to offers and discounts that your organization (if required) provides to its customers.

CLV/CAC

The ratio of CLV to CAC is extremely important and useful to evaluate the complete business model and its viability for any organization.

We say this because, when the CAC is greater than CLV, it clearly indicates that the business model is not a viable proposition at all.

Therefore, as a thumb rule, your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) must be 3 to 4 times more than your Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC).

There are several factors which drive this; however, CX professionals can play a significant role in optimizing this ratio using different levels of Customer Experience strategies to the purchasers of your offerings.

Apart from this tacking the trends of CLV and CLV/CAC ratio can also aid CX professionals to gauge the impact of CX initiatives that have been implemented in your organization.

  1. Customer-Retention or Customer-Churn

Over the course of time, Customer Churn rate has become one of the other most popular metrics as most CX professionals talk about it while assessing ‘Customer Experience management’ of any organization.

Nevertheless, according to the NPX and CX benchmark report published in 2018, it states that:

Only one-third of companies proactively track their Customer Retention Rate (CRR) in their organization.

In simple language Customer Churn is the percentage or proportion of customers those who have discontinued or left after using a brand as against the total base of its active customers in the list.

In fact, the Customer Retention rate is just the inverse of Customer Churn rate, for which the math is:

1/Customer Churn Rate

Although apparently, it might look extremely easy, however, in reality, there are several scenarios such as non-recurring business models, pure subscription models, businesses with lock-in periods and without lock-in periods, and others that needs to be taken into consideration while measuring CCR. Therefore calculating CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for a brand is actually a very tricky process, which is one of the major reasons as to why businesses do not most often like to calculate their Customer Churn.

Nevertheless, we have found that base-lining an organization or brand’s historic churn rate is a far superior way to access the efficacy of that company’s Customer Experience initiatives as even lack of accurate data for benchmarking across industries is not a matter of concern to perform this calculation, which is a good metric to know the effectiveness of an organization’s Customer Experience strategy.

Revenue Churn Rate

Revenue Churn Rate is a variation of Customer Churn Rate since this metric portrays how much revenue got lost within a given period of time.

In other words, Revenue Churn Rate as the name suggests is a very pertinent economic and financial indicator of customer loyalty in ‘subscription-based business models’.

The math over here is, if $100 K is the recurring revenue of last month and if that has decreased to $90 K in the present month, there is a revenue churn of $10 K this month. Which means the Revenue Churn Rate is 10% [=100-90/100].

However, it must be most essentially remembered over here that you should take only into consideration the base of installed customers and should never add new acquisitions to the current month. Moreover, another simple version of the Revenue Churn Rate also ignores customers who have upgraded their subscriptions (a refinement that is not cover in this article).
Therefore RCR (Revenue Churn Rate) is as good as CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for all types of subscription-based business like Cloud Based CRM software solutions, except that downgrading a subscription would impact the RCR but not CCR.

  1. Customer Effort Score (CES)

This is a CX metric that is mostly neglected by several organizations across the globe. According to an NPX & CX Benchmark report published in 2018, only 15% of businesses use CES and hence it is one of the most under-utilized metrics by the CX Management fraternity.

However, it must be acknowledged that Customer Effort Score has a greater statistical correlation with both repurchase and enhanced spending rates than NPS.
That implies CES is a better metric to predictive repurchase and spending behaviors of your customers than Net Promoter Score.

For example, most of us would cherish to use a web-based check-in facility rather than stand in a check-in queue while boarding flights in an airport. This reduction in the customer’s effort by helping the customer to “get their job done” can radically increase brand preferences.

Much like NPS, Customer Effort Score (CES) is also measured through a single question but with a 5 point scale.

Another advantage for measuring CES is that the same question can be asked to the same customer times and again after every transaction as it obviously makes sense to find out if the customer has found it effortless to transact after each and every deal.

 Conclusion

There are also many more metrics such as Turnaround Time, Service Levels, Compliance Percentage, and others that can also be tracked to measure CX of a brand, which we shall discuss later on.
So subscribe to our blogs for learning more or read our Business Growth Manifesto, which is a definitive guide on how to use technology to fuel massive business growth.

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Top Benefits Of Contact Management And Easy To Use CRM Software

Talk about Customer Relationship Management software, to start with it can be said that CRM is a much broader concept than contact management. Since at the core, CRM is a practice of managing and nurturing your organization’s customer relationships. However, while we say it is a concept, it is largely implemented through a CRM software solution, and all CRM platforms include built-in contact management capabilities.

The difference between Contact management and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is often confusing for people who are not aware of what is CRM software. This is because both are very similar concepts. However, they have some distinct characteristics that differentiate these two.

Last year in 2018 we found out that overall CRM usage increased from 56% to 74%- Buyerzone Click To Tweet

Therefore, let us start by clearing up this trivial confusion.

What is Contact Management?

To explain in a gist, contact management is often a part of your easy to use CRM strategy. That means contact management is the practice of organizing and storing data of contacts so that anyone in your organization can access it effortlessly.
In other words, contact management is just what it sounds like- the process of managing your contact’s data irrelevant of the fact whether it is stored in a Rolodex, spreadsheet or inside your CRM database.

What is CRM?

Now to talk about Customer Relationship Management software, to start with it can be said that CRM is a much broader concept than contact management. Since at the core, CRM is a practice of managing and nurturing your organization’s customer relationships. However, while we say it is a concept, it is largely implemented through a CRM software solution, and all CRM platforms include built-in contact management capabilities.

Nevertheless, a best small business CRM software be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce alternative CRM platform does a lot more than performing simple contact management processes.

Easy to use CRM software solutions allow you to automate loads of manual tasks, which eventually save time and your resources.

All-in-one CRM systems like ConvergeHub provides built-in marketing automation and sales enablement capabilities, help-desk module and even aids the finance departments in your company if you are using a QuickBooks CRM platform that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free.

Therefore, since the key takeaway in the modern times is that contact management is built into all easy to use CRM software platforms, so let us now consider the benefits that apply to both these concepts as illustrated below:

Top Benefits of Contact Management and CRM

Long-lasting and better customer relationships

A main aspect of CRM is that it permits you to store an extensive amount of data about all your customers, which also include demographic data such as location, industry, gender, age, apart from just names and emails.

An easy to use CRM software can also track and store behavioral data in the CRM database, such as, when a customer, prospect, or a lead clicks and opens an email; visits your website, subscribe to your email list, downloads contents, make purchases, and many more.

This information gathered in the CRM database , helps your sales, marketing, and support teams to maintain a much clearer picture of who your customers are, how they have interacted with your organization in the past, problems they have faced, and others.

Therefore, a CRM system helps your teams to get to know and interact with your leads, prospects, and customers in a more personal manner.

Using an easy to use CRM platform helps your customers to perceive you as a human being, and not just an abstract entity that charges them for their purchases, which in turn, results in forming a closer bonding, customer loyalty and help build trust with your brand among your customers.

Improves management of data

It is no brainer that when you store your contact database in a spreadsheet, you naturally run the risk of performing human errors in the data entry process. Additionally, if any of your colleagues or employee needs any information about a specific contact, you will have to send them the entire spreadsheet or dig up the information they requested and then send it, which will take a considerable amount of resource and time.

However when you have a CRM in place, you can find all your marketing, sales, customer support, and even accounts data (if you are using a QuickBooks CRM) stored in one central location which can be accessible to all.

Moreover, once you know what is CRM, you can easily understand that a CRM solution is the best application for eliminating data processing errors, as most customer data in the CRM is collected using web-forms and then they are added to the CRM database.

Reduced spending

If your company is a startup organization or a small business enterprise, once you adopt the best small business CRM software solution, with so many processes automated, you will not need as many employees to man the ship, which leads to less money spent on employee salaries.

Additionally, if you are using an all-in-one CRM software that comes with built-in sales, marketing, and support automation, you also do not need to invest in separate silo software systems, which will save you the cost of purchasing multiple systems for accomplishing various business-related functionalities.

According to Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research, in Nucleus Research:

“With a return of $5.60 for every dollar spent, investing in CRM is a no-brainer. Further, that investment has significant staying power. As vendors add social, marketing, analytics, and mobile access capabilities to their offerings, organizations have an opportunity to gain even more returns from CRM.”

Personalize customer interactions

Irrespective of whether you are using a CRM like Salesforce or any Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub, personalizing interactions with your prospects and customers helps your teams to communicate in a more relevant manner that resonates with them.

With all that personal data of your prospects and customers stored in the CRM database, your teams can easily prepare themselves for a call by viewing through the customer’s and prospect’s demographic data and interaction histories, touching on elements that will interest the selected audiences and thereby increase their level of engagement.

Moreover, looking into issues that your customers have faced in the past, your support teams can find an understanding of each customer’s use cases, and pain-points, before they interact with someone submitting a support ticket, helping them to personalize their support requirements to the specific needs of the customer.

Improved customer satisfaction and experience

Customer satisfaction is the main element to foster increased revenue and rapid business growth.

Customers feel themselves valued when you pay close attention to their requirements and what they need to be successful, which your company representatives can easily cater to when they are using an easy to use CRM and see a full history of the customer’s history of interactions with your company.

Studies show that by 2020 customer experience with a brand will surpass its product and price factors as it will be the key brand differentiator in the marketplace.

If you know what is CRM, you must also understand this by now that contact management and CRM software allows you to deliver world-class customer experience.

In reality, with your business processes automated, team aligned, and hence more time freed-up to interact one-on-one with your customers, easy to use CRM help your business to deliver an even better customer experience that would never have been possible without a CRM in place.

Better collaborations and alignment across teams

Aligning your team’s efforts can be challenging, which is especially true with sales and marketing, as each of them has their own agendas and therefore works in silos.

Easy to use CRM is a software that bridges this gap.

Using an all-in-one CRM software that provides a 360-degree view of every leads, prospect, and customers help all teams to work with the same data from the CRM database, whereby marketing can see what sales reps are doing and vice-versa.

For example, using a Converged CRM software like ConvergeHub your marketing team can easily collaborate with sales on developing a lead scoring model and ensure MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) are passed to sales as quickly as possible, which can be automated.

Moreover when customer support data is attached to each contact’s personal records in the CRM database, sales and marketing reps can gain insights which problems each customer has experienced before up-selling or cross-selling to the existing customer base, and if necessary delay reaching out until the customer’s issues are resolved and they are happy once more, as a consequence aligning the two team’s efforts.

Insight into and data-driven decision making

If you know what is CRM software, you must know how CRM platforms are capable of providing extensive reporting, metrics, and analysis of data, which helps to keep your finger on the pulse of how your teams are performing in real-time.

Metrics like sales-funnel analysis, campaign performance metrics, sales closing rate, customer retention rate, and others found with the help of CRM system help company leaders to make data-driven strategic decisions about their businesses’ present and future growth.

Most easy to use CRM solutions has customizable dashboards that display these metrics in a way that they can be accessed in a moment’s notice, which makes the decision-making process a breeze.

Conclusion

Therefore, contact management and CRM is a process and software that elevates collaborations, increase productivity, raises the level of satisfaction among your customers that adds-up to faster revenue and better business growth.

Hence, now that you know what is a CRM if you are not using a CRM to manage your contact data and business processes, today is the time to start.

Implementing an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub is no brainer.

So click on the link below and avail its free trial right away.

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How To Manage Your Brand Reputation With CLM CRM Software

The reputation of your brand is more important now than ever. This is because consistently maintaining a positive reputation not only increases customer loyalty, but it also helps build the confidence of your prospects and customers in the market, which aids to position your brand as a leader in your market place. Now, with strategic brand reputation management skills assisted by a CLM CRM software, you can easily improve your brand’s reputation in your space.

The reputation of your brand is more important now than ever. This is because consistently maintaining a positive reputation not only increases customer loyalty, but it also helps build the confidence of your prospects and customers in the market, which aids to position your brand as a leader in your market place.

Now, with strategic brand reputation management skills assisted by a CLM CRM software , you can easily improve your brand’s reputation in your space.

77% of strong omni-channel companies store customer data across channels, compared to 48% for weak omni-channel companies- Aberdeen Click To Tweet

We all know, being positioned as a brand with a positive reputation is extremely important in today’s ruthlessly competitive market. Since it has been found in a research done by Forrester that consumers nowadays will typically read about 10 product or service reviews before finalizing on their purchases, which is why having a positive reputation is so crucial in today’s marketplace.

Key Brand Reputation Management Best Practices

Here are ten time tested highly-effective brand reputation management tactics for improving your brand’s reputation with CLM CRM software for business growth.

  • Excel At Content Marketing

For finding a positive brand reputation, content marketing is a critical element of effective brand reputation management.

For an example, content marketing such as producing educational contents that help solve common problems faced by your audience is considered as a key component of inbound marketing.

Therefore rather than distributing sales-oriented contents, it is more beneficial to generate Blogs, eBooks, Infographics, and others, that can educate your audience rather than attempt to sell your offerings.

Now, once people take notice of your contents and it starts to make its rounds, your audience will share the contents with their friends, relatives, and colleagues, which will surely expand your brand’s presence in the marketplace.

It has been observed that brands that focus on empowering their customers with helpful and novel ideas increase their brand’s reputation significantly, which results in rapid business growth.

  • Improve Customer Satisfaction

This is no brainer that, satisfied customers stay with your organization for a longer time, and therefore spends more on your offerings, which helps to create a long-term and reliable revenue stream for your organization.

Therefore, using a CLM CRM software helps in increasing customer satisfaction which is not only the key to business growth , but it also helps in creating a direct impact on your brand’s reputation as satisfied customers share their positive experiences with your offerings with their colleagues and friends that surely acts as a boon for your reputation management efforts.

  • Focus On Customer Experience

Put your spotlight on customer experience as it is rapidly overtaking products and price as the most crucial variable in the consumer’s decisions to purchase your offerings.

This is no surprise since according to a Walker Study it has been stated that:

“By the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.”

Therefore, if your organization does not believe in adopting a CLM CRM software that helps in delivering stellar customer experience, you can be sure that your prospects will soon look for a competition that does.

There are several ways to deliver a great customer experience using an easy to use CRM software platform, those that include but are not limited to:

  1. Reach out individually to each customer once every quarter to personally check in their pain points.
  2. Send customer surveys using marketing automation in your CLM CRM software to find-out areas where you can improve upon your services and offerings and then implement their feedbacks.
  3. Make use of campaigning functionality in your best small business CRM software if you are an SMB or a startup organization through email newsletters or any other forms of product or company updates.
  4. Deliver world-class customer support.
  • Deliver Impeccable Customer Support

The quicker and more effectively you can solve your customer’s pain points and issues, the better the reputation of your brand will be in your marketplace. Using help-desk automation functionality in your CLM CRM software platform, you make the easy to use CRM work as a reputation management software and thereby streamlines customer support for your brand.

Always remember to offer multiple support channels (live chat, phone, email, social media etc.) so that your customers with their problems and issues can reach out on the channel they prefer to communicate with your brand respectively.

Apart from this also make sure to increase your organization’s First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, which can be easily traced and analyzed with the help of a CLM CRM software platform.

FCR mentions the number of help desk incoming tickets that your support teams can resolve on their first attempts, without having to look and search for a solution and then get back to the customers at a later point of time after their initial contact with the customer.

Using dedicate help groups to ensure that each of your customer support tickets get handled by a subject matter expert and is hence resolved on the very fast attempt every time, helps in enhancing your brand’s reputation. Since the longer your customers need to wait for a solution, the more frustrated they will get with your brand.

  • Use Social Listening Tools To Respond To Negative Comments

When anyone posts a negative comment about your brand on social media websites, it is utmost imperative that you must respond as quickly as possible since negative sentiments spread like wildfire on social media networking sites.

To do this you can leverage social listening tools found in most CLM CRM software platforms to get notified about alerts any time someone refers or mentions about your brand and organization on the social media websites.

Always be empathetic in your responses. Since you must remember that your response will be publicly-visible for the world to see, and so responding in a humble way, will surely help your organization to generate a reputation as a customer-centric brand.

Personalize Your Customer Interactions

When you use an easy to use all-in-one CRM platform, you can find access to 360-degree contact views of your leads, prospects, and customers, which provides deeper insights into each customer’s needs, challenges, interests, products purchased, past support tickets and more.

Therefore, using a CLM CRM software your support agents and sales reps or anyone else who interacts with your customers can dig out information from the CRM database , even before reaching out to a customer, which helps in finding common grounds before their customer interactions and deliver more personalized contents to your customers.

When outreaches are personalized, it makes customers feel valued, creates rapport with the customers, which in turn generates customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and improves your brand’s reputation management efforts.

  • Increase Employee Satisfaction

It is a big mistake if you overlook the satisfaction of your employees when developing brand reputation management strategies for your company.

According to the Institute of Employment Studies:

“Satisfied employees perform 20% better than unengaged employees and are much more likely to become brand advocates.”

That implies, satisfied employees not only work harder, have higher morals but they also help deliver superior customer experience as they most often go out of their way to satisfy the needs of their customers.

Therefore, start a program in your organization by which you can survey your employees about the satisfaction in their workplace and implement necessary changes based on their feedback.

Nurture Brand Advocates

Brand advocates can be anyone right from your customers, employees, or anyone who loves your brand enough, likely to speak positively about your brand and recommend your offerings to others.

Arguably, brand advocates are the most effective tool for managing the reputation of your brand.

Brand advocates can really elevate your brand’s reputation from average to exceptional, by recommending your brand in the social media websites.

Therefore, use social listening tools to find when someone makes a positive comment about your brand. This is because, by engaging the right person in the social media platforms, you can open the door for creating new brand advocates, whom according to researches shows that consumers trust way more than traditional brand promotion activities.

  • Generate Customer Testimonials And Success Stories

As we said even earlier, researches indicate that consumers place more trust in brands and their offerings which are recommended from peers, friends, and colleagues rather than just counting on traditional advertisements.

Therefore, allow your current customers to share their positive experiences with your brand through customer testimonials and tell the market how great your offerings are which you can also distribute to your prospects as your success stories.

  • Increase Social Media Engagement

It has been predicted by social media experts that there will be approximately 3 billion social media users by 2021.

Hence, an upbeat, positive, and an agile social media presence can be a major driving factor behind a superior brand reputation strategy, as the importance of engaging your prospects and customers on social media will continually increase over time.

Conclusion

We are sure using these best practices to develop your brand reputation management strategy assisted with a CLM CRM software, and implementing it as soon as possible, will definitely help you to maintain a positive reputation for your brand by focusing on customer experience, employee and customer satisfaction, and catering to all your customer’s needs to create a customer-centric brand that will steadily make your business grow.

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How To Measure Sales Skills For Phenomenal Business Growth

If you are a trainer or a sales manager you must have spent plenty of time and effort trying to quantify and measure your sales rep’s skills. You must have also in the process come up with useful training methodologies and tests, most of which your sales teams have failed or performed poorly during the sales training programs, but nevertheless closed their sales in flying colors that enhanced your company’s business growth. However, from our experience as a vendor of small business sales CRM software platform, we found that there are no other better indicators for sales growth than viewing sales pipeline metrics for evaluating a sales person’s skills.

If you are a trainer or a sales manager you must have spent plenty of time and effort trying to quantify and measure your sales rep’s skills.
You must have also in the process come up with useful training methodologies and tests, most of which your sales teams have failed or performed poorly during the sales training programs, but nevertheless closed their sales in flying colors that enhanced your company’s business growth .

65% of businesses adopt a CRM within their first five years- Software Advice Click To Tweet

However, from our experience as a vendor of small business sales CRM software platform, we found that there are no other better indicators for sales growth than viewing sales pipeline metrics for evaluating a sales person’s skills.

To be more specific and precise, we would like to highlight just four sales pipeline indicators for your business growth, which can be easily found from your CRM database, such as:

  • Pipeline Velocity
  • Size of the deals
  • Number of deals accomplished over a period of time
  • Number of conversions done over a period of time

Now if you are someone who has just purchased an easy to use CRM platform like ConvergeHub and is getting started with sales pipeline management, before reading these four metrics that can help to measure sales skills check the “Sales Cycle” in your business, which is according to Trackmaven:

“The sales cycle is the process that companies undergo when selling a product to a customer. It encompasses all activities associated with the closing sale. Many companies have different steps and activities in their sales cycle, depending on how they define it.

Finding a clear cut definition of a sales cycle that spans across the sales industry is tricky. This is because many variations of the definition exist. Some people define it as the time it takes from starting from nothing to closing a deal. Others define it as the time it takes to bring a qualified prospect to close.

Regardless of the definition, however, businesses should keep track of the length of their sales cycle to ensure that their selling process is efficient.”

Why is the sales cycle important for business growth?

Keeping track of the sales cycle provides businesses deeper insights into the efficiency of the operations in sales. Tracking, analyzing and comparing the length of the sales cycle to the standard length across your industry provides information on business growth. For an example, if an organizations sales cycle is shorter than the average length of its industry, it can mean that the organization’s sales department is more efficient than its competitor, whereas a longer sales cycle indicate higher chances of sales falling through the crack.

Here is how the above mentioned four metrics help to measure your businesses’ sales skills:


  1. Measure how fast deals go through the pipeline

You can measure the average age of deals at each stage of the sales pipeline or the average across the whole length of sales cycles, or alternatively measure the average length of time it takes to close a deal.

Now, let us compare two hypothetical sales people and see why measuring sales cycle plays a big role for your business growth. If Tom closes a deal in 6 weeks on an average and Tim does it in 3 weeks, there must be a substantial difference in their work methods and skills.
Since, based on the these numbers we can easily assume that Tom does not have the tendency of gaining small-sized agreements (or mini-closes) during the process of sales, while Tim’s pipeline velocity is a good indicator to show that he uses confirmations like:
“So if I am understanding correctly, are you willing to consider our offering if it helps you save more than $2000?”
Furthermore, Tim probably takes matters into his own hand during the sales process, and continuously checks at a regular interval if another decision has been made by the potential customer.

It is no brainer that pipeline velocity increases with time.
That means sales pipeline velocity must remain higher with experienced sales reps in your organization since it is a sign of danger if that is not.

You can be even more specific in measuring your rep’s sales pipeline velocity using information stored in your CRM database, by starting to measure deal age by each sales stage that you have made in your easy to use CRM software for continuously monitoring predictable revenue for your business growth.


  1. Measure the average size of a sale

Much like deal velocity in the sales pipeline, the average size of deals is another aspect that should increase with time, (assuming that the business you are into does not have any constraint for deal size).

The average size of deals that can be monitored from information stored in the CRM database of your easy to use CRM software is an excellent indicator of the negotiation skills and confidence of your sales teams.

Average deal size shows whether your saleMeasure the number of leads or deals in the sales pipelines reps do have the courage to go after the ‘Big Fish’ and whether they can identify the requirements of the prospective customers during their meetings and calls.

In other words, the average size of the deals indicates how well are your sale rep’s in choosing the right prospects for your organization’s business growth, or how good are your salespersons at finding out the real requirements of the prospects and thereafter skilled enough to match them to the premium products and services offered by your company.


  1. Measure the number of leads or deals in the sales pipeline

It is extremely important that you must measure how many leads or deals someone can add within a specific period of time and what is the total number of deals in the sales pipeline in your CRM database.

Now, if the numbers of new leads/deals are scarce, it is a good enough indicator to show that either your sales reps are not very good at initiating their first contacts or they are simply not working hard enough towards generating new leads.

Therefore, that number of deals added within a specific period of time shows sales skills as well as the work ethics maintained by your sales teams, which is one of the best indicators of success in sales and business growth that can be easily measured using a best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub the award-winning CRM for small and medium businesses.


  1. Measure total win conversion, and conversion by stage

Most owners and sales managers measure the win ratio of their sales reps, since it is a piece of very pertinent information if you look at it by sales stages.

For an example, if Tim has a 75% conversion ratio from “First Meetings Done” to the “Proposal Made” stage in the easy to use CRM software platform, and if it is just 25% for Tom, this can mean one of two things.
It is either Tim is way ahead better at turning a prospective customer’s needs into identifiable “Pain” or that Tim tends to waste time more on nurturing hopeless leads and prospects in his sales pipeline.

Therefore, always compare this sale metric in the CRM database relative to other members in your sales teams.

Conclusion

Hence, all said and done, if you know these 4 sales pipeline metrics (pipeline velocity, size of the deals, number of the deals and conversion ratio) for each team members in your sales at each stage of the sales pipeline in the CRM database, you will have a pretty good idea of each person’s sales skills in your sale team and you can easily compare them with each other for generating more sales and find rapid business growth.

Remember, you do not always need to track every metrics found in your easy to use CRM software at all times since it is definitely wiser to pick only the metrics in your CRM database that matter the most for your business and focus on them for fast-paced business growth.

Although, in conclusion, I would once more reiterate that sales pipeline metrics are the most to-the-point indicators found in an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub and other Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions for highlighting the sales skills of your employees, nevertheless if you have found even better ones, please do add your ideas in the comment below.

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Most Important Integrations That Every MCA CRM Must Have For Business Growth

If you are an owner of a Merchant Cash Advance business, chances are that you have sat in on a few meetings with your employees to help your teams understand the best approaches to manage their leads, contacts, customers, and opportunities. Now, what begun with a Rolodex machine, a date book, and a telephone has now evolved in MCA businesses to the use of sophisticated online lead management software applications- better known as MCA CRM platforms, like ConvergeHub, which is customized for Cash Advance businesses. If you are not aware of what is CRM, you might wonder what is exactly the purpose of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, how it can help your business to attract and retain more customers, or how you can integrate your easy to use CRM with your MCA website for rapid and consistent business growth.

If you are an owner of a Merchant Cash Advance business, chances are that you have sat in on a few meetings with your employees to help your teams understand the best approaches to manage their leads, contacts, customers, and opportunities.
Now, what begun with a Rolodex machine, a date book, and a telephone has now evolved in MCA businesses to the use of sophisticated online lead management software applications- better known as MCA CRM platforms, like ConvergeHub, which is customized for Cash Advance businesses.

Integrating QuickBooks and CRM helps your business deliver a better customer experience. Click To Tweet

If you are not aware of what is CRM , you might wonder what is exactly the purpose of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software , how it can help your business to attract and retain more customers, or how you can integrate your easy to use CRM with your MCA website for rapid and consistent business growth.

So, here are the answers to your question.

What is Customer Relationship Management software?

The main task of any CRM software be it customized for Cash Advance or any other business, is that it is an application that helps your sales, marketing, support, and even accounts manage your leads, prospects, customers, leading to business growth and more sales.
It is a software that helps to keep track of your leads and customers, their relationship with your organization, keep a record of whom they work for, what they are doing, what they are thinking about buying, or keep a tab on how often they contact you, among an incredible number of other options that CRM also aids in business.

The major benefit of using Merchant Cash Advance software in your MCA business is to find the ability to streamline your sales process, increase interactions with your Cash Advance customers and prospects and finally nurture those relationships in a way you see it fit for your business growth.

Therefore, regardless of whatever easy to use CRM software that you use, for Cash Advance, Retail, Reality, Legal, or any other business, majority of CRM software platforms, gathers the same type of information and have identical types of goals, such as:

  • Perk up customer communication and customer retention plans
  • Enhance company profitability by ushering business growth
  • Increase focus in your business
  • Increase prospect and customer tracking abilities

What are CRM integrations?

The best and the most popular easy to use CRM software especially Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions are the ones with the highest user adoption rates. This is because, the more your sales, marketing, support, and accounts are willing to input data, the better will be the CRM platform’s ability to enable your employees to engage more customers and perform better over time. Hence inputting more data in the MCA CRM leads to increased business growth.

As with most easy to use CRM software platforms there is no one-size-fits-all solution, as vendors of CRM software as a whole strive to meld different functions to accommodate the needs of individual employees, to personalize their workflow, and create a uniform system that better tracks performance, ensure consistency in customer engagement, and improve productivity for business growth.

Now, CRM platforms can achieve this above-stated feat, with official and third-party integrations.
While official integrations are native collaborations between the MCA CRM and external software solutions, third-party integrations need the use of APIs or web services such as Zapier.

Here are some of the most used integrations that your MCA CRM platforms must have for increasing your alternative lending business’s growth.

  1. QuickBooks (Online)

For organizations, especially the ones that cater to financial services, QuickBooks accounting software is one of the most popular third-party software used along with their CRM platforms.
MCA CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub, offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, and is widely accepted as one of the best QuickBooks CRM software for any alternative lending business who are looking forward to using the data from their QuickBooks accounting software to build a closer relationship with their customers and generate more sales.

Once you integrate QuickBooks and your MCA CRM together, there can be a free exchange of information and data between these two software applications, whereby you can continue to use QuickBooks for accounting purposes, and at the same time see all the customer’s details, products and services for sale, along with invoice and payment information directly in your CRM.
You can then use this data from QuickBooks CRM for reminders, follow-ups, customer service, and business process automation.

  1. DocuSign

A plethora of signing on documents is most essentially required in alternative lending businesses. Therefore, most Merchant Cash Advance software users prefer integrating their MCA CRM with DocuSign that can help them to manage every aspect of each contact from preparing and sending documents for signing to managing them in their CRM platforms.

Using DocuSign with CRM for your business growth helps in remaining rest assured that everything stays legal, secure, and visible with a complete audit trail, apart from saving money and time and enhance your customer’s experience with your organization, delighting your customers along the way.

  1. Ring Central

MCA CRM is a storehouse of information about communications between your teams and your leads, prospects, and customers. Therefore, most companies in alternative lending business integrate Ring Central, which is an external software that help users to dial and log calls through RingCentral inside the CRM in a smarter way to enhance productivity and enrich customer interactions. This integration between the MCA CRM and RingCentral is perfect for small businesses who want to have a reliable voice service inside their CRM and efficiently manage customer phone calls.

  1. Google Drive

Google Drive integration for Merchant Cash Advance CRM software allows the users of the MCA CRM to share, sync, manage and access files associated with records through Google Drive right from within the easy to use CRM account. All attachments from your respective CRM records gets stored and synced into your associated Google Drive account with the help of this most important integration, used by many in alternative lending businesses.

  1. Google Calendar

Integrating Google Calendar with your MCA CRM software helps to bring all of your events, tasks, and meetings from your Google Calendar to your Merchant Cash Advance software, allowing you to stay updated by referring to what you have planned so that you never miss out any opportunities.

Once you use this integration for your alternative lending business and edit the calendar of your choice in real time, you can make a decision if you want those alterations to be reflected in either the Google Calendar, or MCA CRM software’s calendar, or both.

  1. Lead Generator Tool

If you are using ConvergeHub, the best MCA CRM for small businesses, you can also download and integrate its Free Lead Generator Tool.

Using this integration allows you to visit any lead’s social media page and capture all information instantly with no manual typing and hereafter save qualified leads from social media, other websites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse for even more sales power and business growth.

This integration (which is most often liked by all ConvergeHub MCA CRM users) helps to capture qualified leads into the sales funnel in a flash and use the power of CRM to convert them into paying customers – all for FREE.

Conclusion

Hence, the only limit to the ways you can use ConvergeHub MCA CRM is your imagination. ConvergeHub CRM seamlessly integrates with more than 30 third-party integrations, helping you to integrate your billing, call management, e-signature solution, and others, for a complete customer data, smarter selling, leading to rapid business growth .

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Marketing Trends- That You Cannot Ignore This Year For Your Business Growth

Since you are using best small business CRM software for helping your organization accomplish its sales and marketing plans, it is equally important that you must remain aware of the evolving marketing trends and changes ahead, those that predict to alter the shape of the marketing world in 2019 and beyond. Hence, understanding these new trends in marketing this year will enable you to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly and remain ahead of the completion in your marketplace, once you keep these trends in mind and formulate your strategies to ensure optimum success in your businesses.

Since you are using best small business CRM software for helping your organization accomplish its sales and marketing plans, it is equally important that you must remain aware of the evolving marketing trends and changes ahead, those that predict to alter the shape of the marketing world in 2019 and beyond.

94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content strategy. Other popular platforms include Twitter (87%), Facebook (84%), and YouTube (74%) - Content Marketing Institute Click To Tweet

Hence, understanding these new trends in marketing this year will enable you to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly and remain ahead of the completion in your marketplace, once you keep these trends in mind and formulate your strategies to ensure optimum success in your businesses.

Marketing Automation

Now that you know what is CRM, as a user of the best small business CRM software, it is apprehended strongly that this year and going ahead AI-powered technological advancements will take personalized marketing a step further.

Marketing automation and lead generation that is supported by AI (Artificial Intelligence) will help organizations using best small business CRM software to enhance their customer profiling strategies, which, in turn, will aid in facilitating the development of more sophisticated and refined customer-centric marketing strategies, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and a decrease in churn rates.

According to research published by Forbes, it has been suggested that more than 50% of present-day marketers will adopt AI by 2019, for accomplishing their business growth.

So choosing the best CRM for small business like ConvergeHub , which is already working on developing such technologies for its all-in-one easy to use CRM platform , will help you to stay ahead of the game.

Chatbots

In 2019, most of us are aware of chatbots that we deploy on our company websites for business growth.

Actually, chatbots are interactive software applications that are created to mimic normal human conversations.

Apart from websites, chatbots can also be incorporated into apps, emails and SMS platforms.

This year and going beyond it is predicted that the use of chatbots will increase, as according to a study published by Gartner, it is prognosticated that 85% of all customer support interactions will be powered by chatbots by 2020.

Therefore, marketers in 2019 using the best small business CRM software should start leveraging on chatbots now by having them answer frequently asked questions online, or walk the customers through their buying processes.

Video marketing

It is also predicted that video ads will be on a rise this year.

In a recent study published by Cisco, it has been projected that more than 80% of all internet traffic will be videos by 2021.

As in the present times with the stellar growth in social media 90% of digital markets are already making use of videos as a key element of their online marketing strategy, it is no brainer to expect that live video feeds will continue to grow.

Video marketing is not only an excellent way to tell customers and prospects your brand’s stories but it can be also considered as a better way to share testimonials with leads and prospects, whereby you can broadcast your  happy customers talk about their experience with your company, or which of your offerings has helped them in their business growth .

Influencer marketing

The consumers in all industries will be putting even more trust in relationships and people they know, as well as high-quality contents.

In other words, in modern times, consumers are becoming more and more difficult to impresses with sordid sales pitches from company reps, as they are becoming increasingly resistant towards being sold.

Consumers in 2019, especially the Millennial(s) group of consumers who are gradually moving into decision-making positions in several organizations, just want brands to help them buy.

Now, when it comes to influencer marketing, present-day tech-savvy consumers are more aware of influencers who openly endorse numerous brands. Therefore you need to adopt a more transparent and subtle approach by building long-term relationships with selected influencers, who may not be a big-name celebrity, but someone who has a  following of more than 10,000 followers on social media to foster more organic endorsement with transparent communications leading to your business growth.

Semantic SEO

According to ComScore, it has been predicted that 50% of all search on the internet will be voice searches by 2020, credits to virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa.

In recent times with new updates on Google’s search algorithms search engines have started showing a preference for cluster of contents around topics instead of keywords.

This change in part on SEO requirements has happened due to the rising popularity of searches being implemented verbally, instead of typing on keyboards.

Therefore, voice search marketing and Semantic SEO that provides more value and depth around a topic are expected to become increasingly important in 2019 and beyond.

Mobile marketing

According to an article published by Google in 2017, it stated that more than 89% of online consumers are likely to recommend a brand after a positive brand experience on their mobile devices.

In another statistics revealed by Statista:

In 2018, 52.2% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3% in the previous year.

Since mobile users view contents in short intervals, contents generated for mobile marketing should be pithy, and easy-to-understand as possible.

Therefore, remember to optimize your landing pages and your website for mobile viewing so that you can engage your potential and existing customers, and evolve over time the contents that you share with your consumers for developing their brand awareness and scale up your business growth.

Conclusion

Although there are no best marketing strategies and no one can for certain predict the future with unflinching accuracy, nevertheless preparing yourself and watching out for these marketing trends will obviously help you as a user of best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub to achieve your goals this year and remain competitive in your marketplace for your business growth.

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Increase Brand Loyalty: Key Ideas For Generating Devoted Customers

Brand loyalty is just what it sounds like. However still then, here is our definition of brand loyalty: “Brand loyalty relates to the sense of loyalty your consumers feel for your brand.” Loyalty towards a brand can be generated in several ways, some of which we shall cover below. This is important, as by maintaining customers who are loyal to your brand can significantly affect your business’s bottom line, your brand’s reputation, increase customer satisfaction, and decrease customer churn. The value of focusing on keeping your customers loyal and happy towards your brand over the long run is often ignored by many businesses.

Brand loyalty is just what it sounds like. However still then, here is our definition of brand loyalty:

“Brand loyalty relates to the sense of loyalty your consumers feel for your brand.”

Loyalty towards a brand can be generated in several ways, some of which we shall cover below.

This is important, as by maintaining customers who are loyal to your brand can significantly affect your business’s bottom line, your brand’s reputation, increase customer satisfaction, and decrease customer churn.

Highly-engaged customers buy 90 percent more often and spend 60 percent more per transaction - Rosetta Consulting Study Click To Tweet

The value of focusing on keeping your customers loyal and happy towards your brand over the long run is often ignored by many businesses.

Nevertheless, as in a recent survey done by Forrester Research determined that 60% of consumers in the US marketplace tells their friends, families, and colleagues about brands and companies that have earned their loyalty, this amount of free word-of-mouth advertisement is worth considering and hard to beat.

Therefore, now that the significance of creating brand loyalty is clear to us, the pertinent question is how you can create brand loyalty among your customer base.

We have observed as a vendor of best CRM for small and medium businesses that companies build their brand loyalty through various means.

These tactics consist of delivering robust and faultless products. Devoting extra time to the customer’s requirements, treating the customers like partners instead of numerous faceless generators of revenue …and the list goes on.

Here are some of the key ideas for maintaining and generating brand loyalty.

Provide a world-class customer experience

Customer experience is an ever-increasing critical element for generating brand loyalty. In a report published by Walker Information, Inc. it has been predicted that by 2020 customer experience will overshadow price and products as the key driver of the purchase decision making process.

Now how can we define Customer Experience?

Actually, customer experience consists of all the interactions that a company or brand have with their customers.
These myriad interactions with the customers encompass everything from sales calls, customer support calls, how well your brand’s offerings serve your customers, the amount of time that your representatives devote to their requirements, and also the frequency of emails that you send them for updating their knowledge base.

Since when your customers’ feels valued and understand that you are proactively looking for their suggested opinions and conducting changes to enhance their experience with your brand, they start feeling loyal to your company.

Therefore, once you treat your customers as your partners, and involve them in your decision-making processes, it becomes a mutually beneficial relationship which makes their brand loyalty for your organization climb up to new heights.

Stay in constant touch with your customers

Although this seems to be obvious, but still this is an easy win that most companies overlook. Therefore, if you really want to make your customers feel that you want them to feel like your partners, it is beneficial to keep your customers informed of all new changes that are happening in your organization, as an when they arise. If you are a user of best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, you can easily do this by sending quarterly or monthly newsletters to your loyal consumers using sales force automation in your easy to use CRM platform.

These periodic email updates to your customers can include news like changes in management, product and service updates, new contents that you have published, and others.

Another great tactic to keep your customers loyal to your brand is to reach out to each of your customers directly in a regular basis (once in every quarter), listen to their feedback and then take actions on common grounds that evolve out of these conversations.

Conduct a robust and thorough onboarding

The best time to start building up loyalty for your brand is when you acquire a new customer. This is because the first impression is always the most important impression that you leave with your new customers that heralds the tone for your relationship in the future days to come.

Never just sign-in a new customer and then let them fend for themselves.

Rather create and implement a very useful onboarding program that can train your customers how they must use your products or services, demonstrate to them the best practices for using your offerings, and allow them to ask questions that relates to their unique use cases.

Remember, once you help your customers from day one, they will even start to display loyalty towards your brand right from the beginning and stick around longer as your offerings are meeting all their needs.

Conclusion

Therefore, to put it bluntly, all the best practices above for creating brand loyalty depends cent percent on customer experience and customer satisfaction and it help create brand advocates, which is one the most powerful sources that drive businesses and escalates revenue growth.

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Selling to Millennials: How to prepare for the future with Easy to Use CRM software

It is pertinent that we should state in the onset that the title of this blog is a bit misleading since we are not yet truly prepared for the market as easy to use CRM software users, where Millennial(s) are going to be the key consumer demography for many businesses. Therefore, marketing and selling to the Millennial(s) is a completely new ball game, and it is really necessary to understand how to succeed at it. In 2019, Millennial(s) are gradually moving into decision-making positions in several organizations, and therefore as markets using the best small business CRM software, we must adapt to their unique requirements, buying behaviors, and tendencies.

It is pertinent that we should state in the onset that the title of this blog is a bit misleading since we are not yet truly prepared for the market as easy to use CRM software users, where Millennial(s) are going to be the key consumer demography for many businesses.

Therefore, marketing and selling to the Millennial(s) is a completely new ball game, and it is really necessary to understand how to succeed at it.

In 2019, Millennial(s) are gradually moving into decision-making positions in several organizations, and therefore as markets using the best small business CRM software, we must adapt to their unique requirements, buying behaviors, and tendencies.

At the end of 2018, CRM software revenues overtook database management systems to become the largest of all software markets- Super Office Click To Tweet

Most of the difference between these Millennial(s) and their predecessors revolve around the pervasiveness of technology and the Millennials’ familiarity and comfort level with it.

Hence, to adapt alongside the evolving business landscape driven by these Millennial(s), it is utmost important to understand how they are changing the playing arena and what you can do as a user of small business CRM to accommodate those changes.

Here are 5 tips covering the key areas, in which Millennial(s) are altering their buying approaches, and tips on adapting your strategy and find success when marketing and selling to these Millennial(s).

Millennial(s) will become America’s largest consumers in 2019

Baby-Boomers have all along been the largest consumer demography in the US. However, it will no longer remain so, as Millennial(s) are set to overtake them in 2019.

Millennial(s) have different buying behaviors and expectations that marketers need to take into consideration.

Tips for embracing this change:

Get to know the Millennial(s) and their interests, needs, goals, etc. Although you can use traditional research methods for finding these, but for getting a more accurate data for building your marketing strategies, you can send an online survey to all your Millennial customers and thereafter collate their feedbacks in your CRM database.

Millennial(s) have grown up with technology

Millennial(s) are extremely tech savvy as they have grown up with technology.

Unlike the previous generations who were accustomed to using landlines, and paper maps to provide directions, Millennial(s) have grown up with technology in their hands.

Therefore, Millennial(s) are extremely tech-savvy and they carry their mobile devices everywhere they go, which provide a distinctive opportunity for digital marketing professionals to engage them on digital channel platforms.

Tips for embracing this change:

As Millennial(s) carry their smartphones anywhere and everywhere they go, hence they are always reachable. Therefore using easy to use CRM with social marketing capabilities is a great way to engage Millennial(s) as most check their accounts daily.

Hence, to market to the Millennial(s), businesses must maintain a robust presence on social media and make sure that their contents, website, and emails are always mobile responsive.

Millennial(s) do not respond to irrelevant ads and messaging

Companies like Amazon and Netflix that excels at personalized marketing has changed the game. In the recent times, personalizing the experiences so that customers and leads see what is needed and relevant is the need of the hour, as Millennial(s) have also come to expect personalized interactions and are turned off by irrelevant messages and ads.

Tips for embracing this change:

Using an easy to use CRM software solution like ConvergeHub that offers a 360-degree view can help businesses to acquire maximum insights into individual customers and thereafter personalize their outreach in a way that touches on common grounds.

It is easier than ever for Millennial(s) to leave you for a competitor

In the present times, cutthroat competition in the market also implies that customers can easily leave you for your competition if you fail to meet their needs. Therefore, if you do not maintain enhanced customer satisfaction level with your Millennial customers they will very soon look for vendors that do.

Tips for embracing this change:

Focus on delivering world-class customer experience using an easy to use CRM software. Remain in constant contact with your Millennial customers and check in routinely to remain sure they find everything they need. Since low level of customer satisfaction can kill your Millennial customers in a flash.

Millennial(s) share more on social media

In 2019 Millennial(s) place a lot of value in brand recommendations; they receive from their friends, peers, and colleagues on social media.  Moreover, they will also never hesitate to share it with the world, if they have a bad experience with your company.

Tips for embracing this change:

Use social monitoring and social listening tools in your best small business CRM software, to alert you immediately when someone talks about your brand on social media networking websites.

Keep your Millennial customers always engaged and respond as soon as possible to thank them for commenting, or sharing your content marketing efforts in a way that makes sense.

Takeaway

Consumer interests, behaviors, and buying patterns are evolving and will continue to change as new generations grow up, join their workplace, and become active consumers.

Therefore, marketers in 2019 must understand their Millennial audiences and adapt these strategies to embrace emerging trends and adapt to changing times for growing their business over time.

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Tried-Techniques For Getting Sales Referrals With CLM CRM Software

Ask a customer for a referral after keeping him happy for months and years using CLM CRM software to assist you in the process, is like asking a friend to help set you up on a blind date. You must be a little nervous since you are admitting that you are incapable of finding this new person on your own. However, you are also hopeful that you might just find your true love- or a big deal, from the referrals that you receive from your customers. Nevertheless, the probability of success in this process depends on whom and how you ask.

Ask a customer for a referral after keeping him happy for months and years using CLM CRM software to assist you in the process, is like asking a friend to help set you up on a blind date.

You must be a little nervous since you are admitting that you are incapable of finding this new person on your own. However, you are also hopeful that you might just find your true love- or a big deal, from the referrals that you receive from your customers.

Nevertheless, the probability of success in this process depends on whom and how you ask.

The average return on investment for CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent-Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

For this, not only you need to phrase your inquiry correctly, but you also need to focus on referrals throughout your sales process using CLM CRM software platform, so that your customer is primed to say- ‘Yes’.

Use reciprocity

You must be aware of the Reciprocity Theory, which illustrates that when someone voluntarily does something good for you, you feel obligated to return the favor.

There are several sales reps who say: “I am doing a great job, so why still my customers are not reciprocating with referrals?”

Well, to any customer in all businesses, the sales rep’s “reward” for performing his job is the – Sale.

Therefore, to take benefit of the inclination of humans to reciprocate, you need to be above and beyond your usual job.

Try to stand apart from a “typical sales rep” by expressing an interest in your customers, by asking a lot of questions to them, demonstrating your curiosity and thereafter using a CLM CRM software like ConvergeHub build a relationship with your customers in the longer run.

Set up a referral rewards program

The most common reason as to why many referral-programs do no succeed is because they tend to generate sub-par leads.

Maybe Person X will never have referred to Person Y…if you are not offering a generous 10-15% discount on his next purchase, or his next monthly subscription if he is using your services.

We suggest to the users of CLM CRM software, the best way to get around this issue is by refraining from announcing to your customer that you are providing a bonus. Rather, wait till any of your customers have referred someone and then reward them subsequently.

Although this might seem counter-intuitive, nevertheless, we have seen it works.

More to say, by generating positive word-of-mouth around your referral campaigns, we have observed you will surely prime people to generate positive word-of-mouth around your offerings.

Incorporate referrals into your sales process

While it is true that you would not want to annoy and upset your customer base with never-ending referral requests, however, you can always make it absolutely clear that you would appreciate introductions or new leads.

But how can you express this desire and build it into your sales communication process?

One of our best sales reps identifies who he would like to be introduced to, even before his first meeting with a prospect.

He visits the LinkedIn page, sees whom his prospects are connected to and notes the names of those connects who he would be interested in working with. Thereafter, he asks the prospective customers if they can introduce him to those connections, at the end of his meeting.

To make a referral as a part of your sales process, it is important that you must schedule “referral request” as an activity in your easy to use CLM CRM software, and plan on asking each customer in your CRM Database , for referrals, one to three times every year.

Make referring easy

We have even observed that there are several customers who will simply reject your request for providing you referrals just because it takes efforts and energy.

Therefore, to boost your referral rate, it is suggested that you should make the process as effortless as possible for your customers.

To do this it is best to help your customers understand whom you are willing to meet.

Here is an example, you can say if you are selling Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub: “I am looking for a small business or a startup owner who wants to buy a CRM for SMB and is not willing to use Salesforce”.

But saying this you will not only provide specific help to the person doing the referring, but it will also improve the quality of your lead.

Secondly, if you are using easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub, you can create a template and send it to your customers over email campaigns that they can use to make their connections.

This template should typically include an explanation as to who you are, how your customer knows your brand, and why your customer is introducing you to his or her referral.

Doing this exercise not only helps to reduce effort and time required for your customers to refer new businesses for your organization, but it also aids you to send your customer’s referral, your own company’s message.

Final thought

In a research study published in 2011 by American Journal of Marketing, it was found that referred customers have a greater retention rate and are hence more valuable than customers bought in through the traditional methods

Therefore, if you are trying to increase your numbers in sales, finding and banking on referrals will definitely help you to grow your business in the long run.

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