ConvergeHub Blog for 2020

Why And How Customer Experience Is Ruling The Buyers Decision Nowadays

Businesses’ approach to tempting new customers for buying their products has evolved a lot over the last few years. In the past, it was easy to sell anything that was affordable and of high-quality for business growth. Well, in modern times, that has changed and we all know it will also continue to change in the days to come. Today, customer experience has become an element that is more important than product or price, when it comes to the consumer’s buying decisions for satisfying their needs. In a report published by Walker Info, it has been noted that by 2021 within the next one year CX will replace services or products as the key driver instead of price behind most decisions made by the consumers on whether they will buy an offering.

Today, customer experience has become an element that is more important than product or price, when it comes to the consumer’s buying decisions for satisfying their needs.

In a report published by Walker Info, it has been noted that by 2021 within the next one year CX will replace services or products as the key driver instead of price behind most decisions made by the consumers on whether they will buy an offering.

With stellar customer-experience, an increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent. Click To Tweet

Therefore with so much competition in the marketplace, it is much easier for customers to leave you for a competitor that prioritizes customer experience for the buyers of their offerings.

Below we will dive and dig into the importance of providing world-class customer experience and how it can benefit you for your business growth .

Why is customer experience so important?

As in 2020 the biggest consumer demography in the USA are the Millennial(s) all businesses will definitely see a change in the customer-vendor relationships, since now if the customers are unsatisfied they can very easily spoil a brand’s image by spreading deadly comments across various social media platforms over the internet.

Therefore, with customers having so many choices when making a purchase, creating a reputation as a customer-centric brand is most crucial, as if you do not, consumers will buy from your competitors that do.

Consider these statistics, to drive home the importance of providing your customers with world-class customer experience:

• With stellar customer-experience, an increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent.

• It costs five times more to get hold of a new customer than it takes to keep holding on to an existing one, and it is only a great customer experience that can generate loyal customers and reduce customer churn.

• Because of bad customer experience, 95 percent of customers say they have left or have taken action towards a brand.

• 86 percent of customers will be ready to pay 25 percent more for an offering from a brand that delivers excellent customer service to its consumers.

Hence, you see if you want to remain competitive in your industry and make the wish for your business growth come true, delivering stellar customer experience is now the baseline standard for all successful businesses.

Here are a few best practices and tricks for delivering excellent customer experience for business growth:

Stay in constant touch

Reach out to each of your customers individually to check how things are going on a routine basis, which you can easily do using your best small business CRM software and ask them what you could do to improve upon your services.

Make use of campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM software to create a survey and ask your customers if they need any help from you that they presently do not have.

This outreach can be done with the help of phone calls to make the interaction more personal.

Performing this type of regular outreach makes the customers feel them as your valuable partners, that you truly consider their opinions, and you are ready to do anything you can to improve their experience with your brand.

Always remember that once you have planned changes based on their feedback, communicate to your customers that you are making the changes they asked for since this will win big points for your organization’s reputation and also ensure that your customers are satisfied with the experience that you provide to them for their loyalty towards your brand.

Deliver stellar customer support

Customers form their opinions of your ability to deliver stellar customer experience based on several variables.

This includes how accessible you are to them, the contents your marketing teams provide, interactions with your sales and support reps that show empathy, and the list goes on.

However, the most important among all these factors is the quality of customer support, which is the one that provides the greatest impact on the customer’s perception of your brand.

Hence here are some of the most helpful tips for maintaining a powerful customer support presence of your brand in the marketplace.

Provide multi-channel support

If customers are made to wait, when they need assistance it is natural that they grow increasingly impatient and frustrated.

Therefore use Chatbots for providing your customers 24 hours support and Live-agents for providing support during the working hours to field more complex questions.

Apart from this, you can also use the telephone and email for those customers who prefer these modes of communication.

Finally, if you are using your best small business CRM software for increasing customer experience with your brand, you should also integrate social listening and social media monitoring tools to receive alerts when someone mentions about your brand on social media websites.

It has been observed that people are increasingly asking support questions on social media. Therefore, it is important that you must respond to these questions quickly with the help of these tools, which results in delivering stellar customer experience to your consumers in the marketplace.

Increase the rate of FCR

FCR or Fast Contact Resolution rate refers to the incoming help desk support tickets that your support reps can resolve on their first try.

The easiest way to boost your FCR rate is by hiring or training top talents in your organization to manage your support efforts or create dedicated help desk groups (support groups that are specialized in a specific product, services or any other areas of your business) to ensure that your customers receive superior customer experience every time.

Make employee satisfaction a priority

Employees who are happy working in your organization cares more about your customers, and go that extra mile to support them to resolve their pain-points, which eventually help deliver excellent customer support.

Therefore, create employ survey programs to measure the satisfaction of your employees in their job, and identify areas where you can improve and increase their satisfaction in their workplace.

Since when employees are stressed, tired, or overloaded they are more likely to be curt or rude with your customers which can easily damage the reputation of your brand.

Conclusion

As customer experience is becoming increasingly important and will be the most crucial determining factor in the consumer’s purchasing decision making process, following these tips and positioning your company as a customer-centric business along with the use of best small business CRM software to aid the process will help your company to deliver a world-class customer experience that will increase your revenue and solidify your future business growth .

How To Make The Best Use Of Inbound Marketing Skills For MCA Businesses In These Trying Times

The usefulness and popularity of the methodologies on inbound marketing in all sectors in the business including Alternative Lending businesses have been rising steadily since inbound marketing practices found its acceptance in the 2000s and thereafter evolved considerably, supported by the meteoric rise of the internet and introduction of fresh channels for marketing to deliver tailored and personalized contents to new prospects and existing customers, using MCA CRM software solutions which is more needed in this Pandemic times. However, do you know what is inbound marketing and what are the means by which you can excel in it? Well, in this article let us, therefore, dig into the nuances of this popular marketing strategy and discuss certain tactics that can be used in inbound marketing as we face this menacing COVID-19 tragedy along with some of the best practices that will help you to master it. Even not in the distant past, marketing was a totally different ballgame even in the MCA industry, than it is today.

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

However, do you know what is inbound marketing and what are the means by which you can excel in it?

Well, in this article let us, therefore, dig into the nuances of this popular marketing strategy and discuss certain tactics that can be used in inbound marketing as we face this menacing COVID-19 tragedy along with some of the best practices that will help you to master it.

Even not in the distant past, marketing was a totally different ballgame even in the MCA industry, than it is today.

As before the rise of MCA CRM software and the internet, marketing for Merchant Cash Advance business mainly consisted of overtly trying to convince leads and prospective customers to buy their services, which in fact was not much different than traditional age-old advertising.

However, this marketing strategy changed as the internet and social media began to provide marketers with novel ways to deliver content to leads, prospects, and customers, shifting the focus from touting the advantages of their services to providing educational information that helped MCA prospects and customers to solve common problems.

Effective MCA inbound marketing tactics and best practices using Merchant Cash Advance software during this COVID-19 outbreak:

Although there are several common inbound marketing tactics that you have surely seen, nevertheless here are also a few of the most effective inbound marketing tactics that you can use for your Cash Advance business, especially when you are also using Merchant Cash Advance CRM software.

Content marketing

Content marketing is considered the bedrock of an inbound marketing strategy. Some of the most used content marketing tactics that can be used in Alternative Lending business are:
• Blogging
• EBooks
• Social media contents
• Videos
• Infographics
• Whitepapers
• Case Studies
• Email newsletters and others

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Next, once you have created your valuable content, you need to make it easy for your potential MCA customers to find and benefit from it.
This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play.
As most consumers use Google to search for content, SEO is a practice that helps in optimizing your Cash Advance website so that your web-pages appear higher-up in the search engine results.
However, although SEO remains a critical piece in every inbound marketer’s playbook, as Google constantly alters its search engine’s algorithms, nailing down SEO tactics for your Alternative Lending business is like aiming at a constantly moving target.
So learn more about updated SEO strategies that you can easily assimilate into your inbound marketing plans. Remember creating content without doing SEO is of no value, as content marketing is useless if you do not find a way to drive traffic into it.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has utterly altered the way present-day marketers approach their works. With the escalation of people using social media on a daily basis, social media platforms have become the primary channel through which MCA businesses can also reach their potential customers.
According to a report published by Social Media Examiner in 2018, it has been stated that social media marketing increase brand exposure by 87%, website traffic by 78%, and helps in generating more leads by 64% in the US markets.
Therefore, as an inbound marketing tactic, use social media to increase customer engagements and post your content on your social media platforms since if your content is outstanding, people will definitely share it and your Cash Advance businesses’ followers will grow.

Create buyer personas

Despite what many marketers may think, it is difficult to make a broad generalization about what your customers need or want without any research. Creating hypothetical profiles of your businesses’ ideal buyers or buyer personas helps to zero in on their requirements and deliver inbound content that addresses those needs.
For developing buyer personas, it is useful to launch a customer survey email campaign that allows you to focus on the most common pain-points that are felt across your customer base.
Using an MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub for collecting these data in the CRM database and for conducting these surveys helps in effectively address your customer’s needs.

Score Leads

Lead scoring is the practice of providing leads points for actions that they have taken and the demographic data they provide using MCA CRM software.
For example, when someone views or downloads your inbound contents, like eBooks, white papers, or visit your pricing page and others you can award them points for their interest to buy your services.
Lead scoring helps to view most sales-ready leads easily.

Develop engaging landing pages that convert leads

When someone clicks a link to view or download your content, ‘landing page’ is the place where they land on that offers the content for free but request personal information in exchange.
A landing page is a lead generation tactic, so make your Alternative Lending businesses’ landing pages engaging, which makes it amply clear what they are offering.

Takeaway
Unlike COVID-19, inbound marketing is here to stay. Since inbound marketing using Merchant Cash Advance CRM bridges the gap and enables modern, digital marketers to show that they care about the customer experience than anything else for creating a customer-centric business.

Tips Guaranteeing Success For Startups And Small Businesses In 2020

Let us say that you have found a great and novel idea for building a small business or a startup organization that you are absolutely confident to succeed, or maybe are you already running an SMB and is stressed to find out how you can make it grow.

Now whatever be the fact, in either of these scenarios both startups and SMBs face a lot of challenges in their up-hill climb for business growth.
We say this since it has been recorded in several statistical observations that 9 out of every 10 or more simply speaking 90% of all startup ventures fail in their growth path.

Therefore, even though you must be wondering by now that if this is the hardcore reality faced by startups, how can you find your way for survival in this cut-throat marketplace, where most businesses die in their infancy.
Nevertheless, although running a new startup can seem to be an uphill task if you stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends like adopting an easy to use CRM and embrace these top growth hacking tips, we are sure that your businesses’ chances for survival in this competitive marketplace will be much higher than if you do not.

77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience - Temkin Group (2019). Click To Tweet

Therefore, in this article, let us uncover some of the most used tips for business growth in 2020 so that you can use them, and hence, most likely outperform your competitions:

TIPS FOR BUSINESS GROWTH TO SECURE YOUR SURVIVAL

1. Automate As Much As Possible

Now one of the most critical steps that an owner of an SMB can ensure to its organization for maintaining optimal productivity is to buy a business management software that will help to automate time taking manual processes within the company.

To be candid and truthful, you can consider the above-stated fact as one of the most pertinent growth-hacking best practices that we can recommend for your small and medium business this year.

Hence after you have evaluated the needs for your business try to research and decide on the type of software that would aid in promoting and growing your business on an immediate basis.

While there are a plethora of business hacking software solutions in the marketplace nevertheless these two, in particular, are must-have for all businesses irrespective of its size or the industry they are in.

– CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

If you know what is CRM, be it Salesforce the most popular enterprise-level CRM software in the CRM space or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform, CRM is a software solution that not only helps in automating loads of manual tasks, but it also aids in permitting all your teams (marketing, sales, accounts, production, and support) to work with the same data stored in the CRM database, providing all its users the ability to find a 360-degree view of each leads, prospects, partners and customer contacts in the database, and more.

Now you can adopt a cloud-based all-in-one CRM for SMB, which includes automation for marketing, sales, and support, all in the same platform.
Additionally, apart from automation, you can integrate loads of apps (using built-in plugins) like email, telephony, document management software, accounting software (like QuickBooks CRM) and many more with your CRM software so that you can complete nearly all your tasks using the same tool.
In the present times, startups and small businesses are increasingly vying for this option in most easy to use CRM for small businesses since it not only saves time, but it also increases collaborations within and outside the company and reduces the investments involved in purchasing separate siloed technologies.

– MA (Marketing Automation)

Now that you have finalized on an easy to use CRM you must also find a CRM solution that has an integrated MA solution, which will help in nullifying the need for purchasing a stand-alone or a silo MA system for your company.

Since, if you do not do this, then you need to spend in a disconnected marketing automation solution to drive and automate your marketing and support efforts of your company.

MA solutions not only streamline your business processes but also increases brand awareness by automating tasks and make it easier for businesses to attract leads.

With built-in features like landing page builders, preconfigured email marketing templates, lead generation web-to-lead forms, metrics, analysis and more, marketing automation when it is installed in easy to use CRM or used just as a siloed software is even a critical tool for hacking on to your competitor’s marketing growth.

2. Train Employees On The Software You Use

When you invest in technology to streamline operations and automate your works, it is obvious that you must fully train your staff on how they can efficiently and successfully leverage that solution.

Hence, invest in software solutions that provide high-quality free onboarding and training during installation and implementation of the software platforms, which will help your employees to use the system with ease and make them ready to leverage the technology to its fullest extent seamlessly.

3. Prioritize on customer experience and satisfaction

According to studies conducted by multinational research agencies, it has been found that in the present time Customer Experience (CX) is overtaking product and pricing as the key factor influencing the consumer’s decision-making process.

This, in other words, means that consumers are prepared to spend more for any brand or organization if they find that the customer experience delivered by that company is of ‘world-class’.

Well, it is natural that great CX (customer experience) of any brand also increases customer satisfaction of the consumers of its offerings.
Therefore, as satisfied customers stay longer and spend more on any brand, it is necessary that as an SMB you must increase your level of customer satisfaction for the consumers of your offerings as it is 5-10 times more costly to get hold of new customers than to keep a hold on to your existing ones.

4. Dive Head First Into Social Media

It is a well-accepted fact of the modern times that Millennial(s) are steadily becoming the members of the largest demography across the world, those who are practically addicted to social media which they use for harvesting information from every place across the globe.

Hence becoming active on social media websites and platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others are one of the other most vital tips for the prosperity of any startup or small business.

Therefore below are a few most important tips to make your business succeed with its social media presence:
– Join social media groups to share important insights and grow your reputation
– Share your inbound marketing contents in the social media channels
– Ask questions in your businesses’ social media posts to encourage engagements
– Incorporate CTA (Call to Action) in your social media posts
– Use social listening tools
– Run contests on social media platforms, and…more.

5. Measure Your Results Constantly

Measuring your efforts is one the most significant growth hacking tips, especially in times when your business is in its early stages or you have just launched your business.

Now, with all the best small business CRM software, you have excessive access to metrics and CRM reporting that can help you in your decision-making processes.

Metrics found in easy to use CRM solutions not only aids in monitoring your small businesses’ sales pipeline, but also measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, gain forward-looking revenue estimates, and a lot more.

Now, we say this since all SMBs need to take up and ensure data-driven decisions to uphold and sustain its growth.

Hence, the analytics and metrics offered by your best small business CRM software solutions provide the numbers and insights you require to make informed decisions for your business growth.

Conclusion

Hence to be a part of the 10% of startups and small business that succeeds, following the business growth tips laid out above, will not only make you prepare your business for success in 2020 (than those that do not), but it will also set your brand apart from your competition and prepare your company to confront the initial storm that most small and medium organizations face for sustaining rapid and consistent business growth.

Steps For Creating Effective And Successful Marketing Campaigns In SMB

If you are like several of our customers using our easy to use CRM software, and you are in the thick of developing and executing numerous marketing campaigns at once, it is natural you must be using different forms of contents for a variety of selling channels to address your leads, prospects, and customers. In a recent marketing event where we were discussing about measuring Marketing, a participant asked for a list of metrics that can be used to measure the campaign’s performance.

In a recent marketing event where we were discussing about measuring Marketing, a participant asked for a list of metrics that can be used to measure the campaign’s performance.

65% of the users of mobile CRM are achieving their sales quotas. While only 22% of reps using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

However, if you are not aware in the very first place at what you are aiming at, how is it possible for you to measure whether you are hitting the right goals?

Therefore, just as a pilot works through a pre-flight checklist before hitting the runway, similarly, every marketer should adhere to these three pivotal steps when creating and executing marketing campaigns to measure its goals.

1. Know Where You Are Aiming

There is no marketing organization that has unlimited resources. Hence, every marketing campaign must serve a clearly defined specific purpose that will bring a positive impact on their business.

Therefore, before creating any campaign, you must recognize what the campaign is expected to impact and how this impact can be measured using your easy to use CRM software.

In other words, do not execute any campaign if its business outcome is not well-defined in advance.

2. Define Performance Targets Before Executing

Next, geared up with a solid business outcome, since your subsequent step is to set each campaign’s performance targets, which can be illustrated as a specific goal the campaign will accomplish within a set period of time.

Executing on time and within (or under) budget is not the performance target. Rather, create measurable and relevant performance targets that you want to relate to your business needs, which you are trying to move.

For example, if your desired business outcome is related to expanding your market share among a particular customer segment, or acquire a specific set of customers in a new market, your performance target for this campaign (taking into consideration the buying cycle that has been deployed) may consist of a certain number of inquiries, appointments, and quote requests.

Nevertheless, whatever be the performance target, the target should be defined in advance, so that all can understand what result the campaign is expected to bring. It is only by pre-setting your campaign’s performance targets you can understand if your aims are viable and true.

Therefore if you are using the best small and medium business CRM software and you do understand the importance of Sales Force Automation, be sure that you remember to incorporate your performance targets before firing your campaigns.

3. Plan How to Measure Your Results

Measurements cannot remain as an afterthought. Your performance targets and business outcome provide insights into what data you will require to measure your campaign’s performance, and how you will strategize to manage that captured data, in addition to what analytic parameters you will apply on that info.

Therefore, to apply any cloud-based business growth technology to support your measurement reports, such as a CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM tool, you need to do your planning in advance, put your elements in place, and thereafter test your performance before you hit the “send” button. Since the only way by which you can truly determine whether your campaigns are moving the needle is when you view their analytic reports.

Takeaway

Following this above-stated process for each of your campaigns will do more than just enable you to measure the success of your campaign, but it will also ensure that each campaign is linked to a business outcome and therefore help you to find out the expenses the campaign will incur accurately.

As per our knowledge, most easy to use CRM users follow this process during budgeting and marketing planning, for this process can be used to justify your budget, renegotiating goal and for applying bonus components to the employees of your company as a result of business growth.

How To Monitor Customer Service While Using Easy To Use CRM As A Tool

In modern times the competitive environment in businesses has made ‘quality score’ a critical factor for customer service which determines the promotion and growth of loyal customers. However, in spite of the truth being said, there are still several businesses that are not yet ready or geared to use an easy to use CRM for measuring, monitoring or even manage the quality of service that their contact center agents provide to their customers. Although the fact remains ever true that just one single interaction between the agents and the customer, can make or break a business relationship. American Express recently carried out research in 2019 looking at the state of customer service in the USA, and what they found is devastating.

In modern times the competitive environment in businesses has made ‘quality score’ a critical factor for customer service which determines the promotion and growth of loyal customers.

However, in spite of the truth being said, there are still several businesses that are not yet ready or geared to use an easy to use CRM for measuring, monitoring or even manage the quality of service that their contact center agents provide to their customers.

Only 1 in 26 customers will inform a business about their unhelpful experience, the rest simply go away according to customer service facts - Esteban Kolsky Click To Tweet

Although the fact remains ever true that just one single interaction between the agents and the customer, can make or break a business relationship.

American Express recently carried out research in 2019 looking at the state of customer service in the USA, and what they found is devastating.
They found that despite the current booming economic climate, 78% of customers have given up on a transaction because of negative customer experience. While Esteban Kolsky a California based Customer Strategist puts forward that only 1 in 26 customers will inform a business about their unhelpful experience, the rest simply go away according to customer service facts.

So how can you build up your customer relationship and create a loyal customer base if this is the real state of customer service among businesses in the USA?

Possibly the solution to this issue lies in making organizations understand the need to ensure that whatever little interactions a customer has with their contact center agents are handled efficiently, which makes certain that the customer feels satisfied.

Making Quality The ‘Norm’

While the customer’s personal experiences cannot always be totally captured or analyzed, this information like customer’s social media interactions and emails, call recordings in contact centers, when combined along with customer satisfaction survey reports, can provide any organization with an enhanced idea of the customer experience with their company.

Now, these important insights which can be monitored easily with an easy to use CRM on the behavior of the customers provide businesses to boost their services and at the same time customizer their products and services to what the consumers of their offerings want, which as a natural consequence improves customer satisfaction and also loyalty.

Unfortunately, the hard reality in many business organizations is slightly different, as businesses most often struggle to manage their basic call monitoring functions, or strive to arrest additional insights from other channels like instant messaging, emails or even social networking websites.

This means, it has been found too often that the reports for gauging customer experience received from CRM solutions like Salesforce or Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms are put on straightening out in-house performance metrics, tightly monitoring call routines, meeting time SLAs, while the true assessment of the customer experience with the company and the outcome of the calls are put aside and neglected as brands just places a blind eye to these attributes obstinately.

Hence by treating calls as one-off customer-facing issues, the contact center agents risk ignoring the fundamental underlying commonality of the problems, which otherwise could have helped to identify the root cause of the tribulations and thereby forsake the possible ways to prevent the issues from happening again.

What needs to be changed?

The golden key to effective and quality customer experience monitoring includes six vital steps:

Primarily listen to your customer’s questions and needs by monitoring their interactions. Ask yourself pertinent questions such as- are these customer interactions connected to your company’s objectives and goals or are these interactions associated with particular areas of apprehension such as customer attrition? This is where analytics found in easy to use CRM tools sets into motion for the contact centers. You can use text analytics that identifies chat, email communications that should be supervised, and speech analytics or audio mining for filtering calls that are important for evaluation using business growth technology and tools.
Capture all your customer feedback channels for assessment and apply the same quality standards that you used for text-based interactions (chat and email), and calls.
Ask your customers about what they think. Therefore, instead of pondering on your organization’s internal metrics found inside your easy to use CRM solution’s database to evaluate the quality of a call, simply ask your customer- “What did you think of your experience and the customer support agent you worked with?” else, you can also ask- “Did your service experience match the promises we mentioned in our ads?”
It is highly necessary that you must map all high-quality interactions with your customer’s expectations and compare the internal evaluation scores in the CRM with the customer scores, for properly measuring the quality of a call.

Use holistic quality monitoring to help your service agents improve their skills. Evaluate interactions to spot skill-gaps, and thereafter suggest individual learning opportunities where deficiencies are identified.
Remember not to view agent development as a one-time activity, but provide continuous training that can improve the agent’s performance and productivity. Always bear in mind that uninterrupted coaching of your service agents is the golden key to unswerving customer service.
Gauge and monitor your results and thereafter keep on monitoring the feedback’s from your customers incessantly to find your agent’s progress in their jobs.

Remaining competitive

The act of judging quality across several channels can help companies to understand from their customer’s interactions, which leads to better service, decision-making, and processes that highlight business growth.

Although monitoring, managing, and measuring service and performance quality must remain a priority, nevertheless the VOC (Voice of the Customer) analytics, across various channels, which can be easily accomplished by using an easy to use CRM platforms, is also equally important for reaching your enhanced customer experience goals.

Take away

Therefore, by adapting to the observation that quality monitoring is a strategic process rather than a tactical one, companies will begin to see an improvement of their customer experience, as customers will steady become their brand advocates since according to Nielsen Survey 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates; resulting in unimagined and unperceived business growth.

How The Right QuickBooks CRM Can Help Generate More Sales And Revenue

Typically, sales managers of any small and medium organization find it easy to see the benefits of adopting a CRM system, which becomes more effective if they use the best small and medium business CRM software that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, and is so most often also accepted as the best CRM software for QuickBooks. They appreciate that in QuickBooks CRM their sales data is going to be centrally stored and presented in an easy-to-follow format, permitting them to monitor staff performances, sales processes, purchases, billing and invoicing, and as a result, optimize sells. But what about the sales reps? Therefore, more often than not, unlike sales managers, sales reps are not all that “happy-go-lucky” about Customer Relationship Management solution in the beginning.

They appreciate that in QuickBooks CRM their sales data is going to be centrally stored and presented in an easy-to-follow format, permitting them to monitor staff performances, sales processes, purchases, billing and invoicing, and as a result, optimize sells.

Consumers in the US ranked Intuit (QuickBooks) on number 8 in terms of privacy trustworthiness among all companies - Colvin (2017) Click To Tweet

But what about the sales reps?

Therefore, more often than not, unlike sales managers, sales reps are not all that “happy-go-lucky” about Customer Relationship Management solution in the beginning.

Primarily, the extra time that the sales rep has to spend on entering data into the CRM software application adds to the irritation of the sales teams since they think that their main job is primarily selling.

However, this article is not about why sales team do not always find the goodness in easy to use CRM software, but rather it is all about how a QuickBooks CRM can improve the performance of the sales reps, and more importantly why they need a CRM for revenue growth.

So why do salespeople need CRM, preferably a QuickBooks CRM software?

Without the fear of oversimplifying the facts, the two greatest challenge that sales reps face in sales are:

How to follow up and qualify on leads?
How to prioritize sales activities?

And CRM is the only business growth technology and tool that can solve these key problems in sales, and this is how best small business CRM when used in SMB organizations, does it:

Enjoy a safe storage space

Best CRM software platforms aid the sales teams in small businesses and startups to centrally store their sales opportunities, contacts, activities and schedule plans in one central place so that they can find seamless access to their CRM database from multiple locations, and never have to fear that their data will get lost.

For example, once you use a QuickBooks CRM, in your CRM for SMB you can also view the purchase history of the customers, create invoices for your prospects and leads without leaving your easy to use CRM platform, and store them in the CRM database for future use.

Plan and manage time just like a ‘Pro’

Best CRM software for QuickBooks helps salespeople to optimize their day-to-day schedules and prioritize their tasks to make them remain assured that none of their prospects and customers are ignored and they are instead contacted on time. Though it may sound like an oxymoron easy to use CRM software, as a matter of fact, allows sales reps to spend more time with their customers, which results in closing more deals and creating stronger relationships.

No brainer activity reports

The best CRM software for SMB organizations also helps the sales reps to quickly and easily create their weekly, quarterly, or monthly reports for the management and higher-ups in their organization. The process of creating these reports is transparent and automated with business growth technology applications like CRM as it takes just a few minutes to inform other members of the team and the mangers about which sales have been won and those that are currently in progress.

Stay up-to-date on what is happening

Easy to use CRM offers document templates, shared calendars and email integrations, which helps to unite all team members in sales, marketing, accounts, and support and keep everyone up-to-date. Sharing selling patterns, and selling processes, and purchases made by the customers (if you are using a QuickBooks CRM) allows sales teams to see what works best.

This is because once you integrate easy to use best sales CRM software with Intuit QuickBooks, there can be a seamless exchange of all data between these two software application platforms.
This way, you can continue using your accounting software, at the same time see customer details, payment, invoice information directly on your easy to use CRM dashboard, and thereafter use this data from QuickBooks CRM for follow-ups, customer support, and business process automation to remind your prospects and customers of their needs.

Moreover, as there are several information that overlaps between sales, accounting, and customer service as the prospect moves through the sales pipeline from being just a lead to a paying customer if different teams use different software in the organization to store their data, it will undoubtedly result in double data entry causing waste of money, time and efforts.

Hence using a QuickBooks CRM for sales not only helps in eliminating double entry but also as when the customer data in the CRM database is updated it also changes in the financial application and vice versa.

Conclusion

Therefore, the best small and medium business CRM software for sales teams when integrated with QuickBooks correctly it will certainly help salespeople to excel in four areas that are critical to them, which include:

Reach sales targets faster
Better search, segregate and qualify leads
Prioritize follow up activities as per the urgency
Follow up on leads and customers systematically and on time

However, to achieve all these, sales reps have to unanimously understand that updating their CRM database is central to their success, which is only possible through absolute understanding and determination from the sales rep’s side.

Three Exclusive Tips for Cultivating Customer Loyalty Over Time

Pursuing new business can indeed be a pretty exciting opportunity. Capturing a qualified lead and then guiding it through an immersive and compelling customer journey that leads to a lucrative sale can be an extremely satisfying experience. This is because it is always rewarding to know that you are playing a major role in generating revenue for your brand and company and this is what keeps you motivated to find new customers for your business growth. Nonetheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective customers collected in your easy to use CRM tool is also a little overrated (at least in the grand scheme of things), that we do for our businesses. This is because, there is a lot more to marketing than just acquiring new customers since successful brands are always focused on the bigger picture, which implies that they concentrate on the LTV (Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.

Pursuing new business can indeed be a pretty exciting opportunity.
Capturing a qualified lead with the help of an easy to use CRM tool and then guiding it through an immersive and compelling customer journey that leads to a lucrative sale can be an extremely satisfying experience.

43% of U.S. customers spend more with the brands and companies they are loyal to - Fundera Click To Tweet

This is because it is always rewarding to know that you are playing a major role in generating revenue for your brand and company and this is what keeps you motivated to find new customers for your business growth .

Nonetheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective customers collected in your easy to use CRM tool is also a little overrated (at least in the grand scheme of things), that we do for our businesses.

This is because, there is a lot more to marketing than just acquiring new customers since successful brands are always focused on the bigger picture, which implies that they concentrate on the LTV (Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.

Hence (do not get us wrong) even though Top-Of-Funnel marketing and lead generation strategies are extremely critical for all businesses, nevertheless the existing customers are the most dependable source of revenue for brands, and so they should remain as the number one priority since your business just cannot grow and scale-up if you are constantly losing customers because your company provides poor or ineffectual experience to its customers.

Hence, in this article let us today step beyond just prospect marketing strategies and explore how to inspire customer loyalty using three proven methods that reduce churn and boosts business growth.

NURTURING IS NOT JUST FOR PROSPECTIVE LEADS

Most of us in business, associate nurturing with pushing and nudging prospects through the sales funnel. Nevertheless, while that is also certainly one example of nurturing, but in reality nurturing is not just for prospects.

This is because, the truth remains in the fact that since your customers are already investing in your company’s offerings, they are more primed for nurturing than even the hottest lead in your easy to use CRM tool.

Therefore, that being said here are a few ways you can nurture your existing customers to inspire customer loyalty.

Welcoming/ Thank You and On-boarding Emails

Whenever you make a new sale or sign in a new customer, ensure to follow-up immediately over email or SMS, thanking the customer for their purchase.
Now, if your business is using a CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM you must also launch an automated drip campaign using the software, providing the new customer simple directions on how they can get started with your offering(s).
Additionally, as the campaign progresses you can even add conditional logic and more details to the program to make sure that your customers are getting the very most out of your offerings.

Finally, ensure including recommended contents in all your outbound communications to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities which can help in further galvanizing your brand’s relationship with the customers.

Celebrate milestones with awesome promotions

It is extremely important that as an entrepreneur you must know a few key bits of information about all your customers, like their work and marriage anniversaries, birthdays, and obviously the history of their purchases.

Now armed with this knowledge, you can send emails celebrating these milestones and offer special discounts or any other perks based on the products and services that you offering to your customers.

For example, while an auto insurance firm might offer discounted renewal rates after three years of safe driving, restaurants and online apparel stores can provide BOGO (Buy One Get One) promotions on their customer’s marriage anniversaries and birthdays.

This is not only a great way to stay top of mind with your customers, but it also provides a signal that you care about your customers and are happy to invest in them in their success and/or for continuing business with your company.

Send new product and service announcements

Great brands always diversify and add new products and services to the offerings. This sort of innovation proves that they are serious about improving their existing business and are always eager to provide the best goods and services.

Therefore, whenever your business rolls out a new launch, ensure that your existing customers are the first to know.

You can also consider offering discounted pricings or free trial offer for early adopters of your brand’s new products and services.

Moreover, you can even ask your existing customers if they are willing to sign up for a waitlist, which is an excellent strategy that not only helps to build anticipation among your customers for your new launch but it also helps businesses to measure the demand for their upcoming products and services.

As a popular vendor of the best small and medium business CRM software we have observed in several surveys and studies that customers appreciate this sort of preferential treatment, therefore make sure to show your customers that they are valued by your company whenever it is possible, and at all times.

PRODUCT EDUCATION AND ADOPTION IS CRUCIAL FOR LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS

In several instances, businesses are so used to their own products and services they offer to their consumers at large, that they take their offering’s ‘ease of use’ for granted.

Another common mistake that brands most often make is to assume that their consumers are using their offerings to the fullest potential.

However, in most cases, this is not true.

Therefore to keep away from this, you can build several different campaigns for marketing to your customers to ensure sound practical knowledge and the most favorable usage of your offerings.

Automated triggered campaigns

Earlier in this article, we discussed creating on-boarding campaigns to aid the consumers to get a hang of their products and services. Nevertheless, despite our best efforts as marketers, there are several consumers who do not open those text messages or emails (much less click on the helpful links therein).

Therefore persistence must be your key to ensure optimal adoption of your products and services.

Now, with marketing automation integrated within your easy to use CRM tools, you can track the behaviors of the users in your CRM app or even on your website, after which you can segment these individuals based on their purchase history and/or usage and then launch an automated email campaign to familiarize them with your offerings and thereby encourage adoption.

In the contents of these campaigns, you can include direct and concise instructions and even add links and prominent CTA (Call To Action) to helpful resources that can boost usage of your offerings.

Additionally, you can even A/B test your emails to learn what is working and what is not to optimize your onboarding campaigns, which will help in making sure that your CTAs, subject lines, and contents are all resonating properly with the targeted consumers of your offerings.

Training and pro tips

Depending on your offering, your customers even might need some advanced training.

Hence it is best to make use of progressive profiling and create adaptive forms to make it easy for your customers to sign them up for a session on digital training across your preferred marketing channels like social media, on your business website, in your monthly newsletters and login page of your app.

However, remember never to overcomplicate the training materials, but just ensure that your customers just have fundamentals they require to find great usage out of your offerings and remain loyal when their date of renewal comes around or they are ready to make another purchase from your company.

Now, if your company does not have enough resources or manpower to host training sessions regularly, consider creating short videos of your weekly pro-tips and thereafter share those videos clippings on your preferred social media platforms and in your monthly newsletters.

Customer webinars

Apart from the above-stated activities if you want go beyond, holding customer webinars can be of extreme help in improving product education and adoption of your products and services, as these digital events provide an excellent opportunity to dig in deep regarding more complex features of your offerings and guide customers through salient functionalities or use cases they might not have tried to do without your help.

We have observed that as a large portion of consumers would rather like to learn by watching than by reading through pages, webinars usually draw a lot more visitors, which even provides businesses to promote additional products and services in real-time.

Lastly, the best part of holding webinars is that you can reserve some time for Q&A sessions, where as a brand you can interact directly with the consumers on a personal level and thereby discover their frustrations that you can work to solve internally.

PROACTIVELY LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING

Without any arguments, the customer feedback loop is any businesses’ proverbial ear to the ground, which allows brands to identify their biggest fans and thereafter leverage them as advocates.

Proactive listening also allows businesses to feel the pulse of dissatisfied customers so that they can reach out to them directly to correct the issues and show that their company cares.

On a larger scale, the said customer feedback loop is the best means to collect information about your brand’s reputation, and the usability and the real value of your offerings, which is an excellent way to determine if updates or changes to your business model are having a positive or negative effect on your customers.

Now once you have a clearer understanding of the public’s perception of your brand, you can easily leverage this knowledge to boost that perception and your offerings.

This model is pretty simple (at least on papers):

Collect customer opinions via social media listening, surveys, NPS (Net Promoter Scores) and third-party review websites such as G2 and Yelp.
Next consider creating a master spreadsheet that can aid you to visualize positive, optimistic, and negative feedback.

Analyze the information by digging out patterns in the responses and then begin to map solutions to the core problems., as understanding your customer feedback will aid you segment and group your audiences when you decide to take actions based on your findings.

Apply what you have learned through sound customer outreach strategies and product and service improvements.

This whole exercise might take the form of a comprehensive public relationship initiative or a basic email campaign to improve or restore the confidence of your consumers on your business and offerings.

It is important to note over here that the customer feedback loop is both a model and an ongoing process, therefore businesses must apply this method times and again to promote a culture of excellence and thereby build a more positive perception of their brands.

Now what works for one business might not work for another, hence be sure to research multiple feedback channels and only use the ones you feel are more informative and accurate for your company.

Conclusion

USE EASY TO USE CRM AND LAUNCH GREAT CUSTOMER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

It is a proven fact that an effective marketing campaign using an easy to use CRM transcends lead generation and passing MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead) to sales.

Therefore, in a nutshell as sustaining and boosting growth across the business is the name of the game. Hence focusing on customer loyalty in the present times is truly the real terra-firma of this strategy.

Some Of The Easy to Use CRM Trends For Business Growth In 2020

To toe, the line with the stellar advancements of technological developments is one of the most important errands in modern times for businesses both big and small. Similarly, it is even most important to update your sales, marketing and customer interactions as per the ongoing easy to use CRM trends for users of business growth technology, especially in small and medium organizations across the world. We say this because keeping a note of the growing technologies, helps small and medium businesses to not only drive their existing customers to make repeat purchases but it even helps in attracting new customers, which further aids in boosting their ROI and revenue. On a comprehensive note, users of the best small business CRM, once they watch and follow these latest trends, it assists these small firms to expand the connections with their customers and boost sales as an inevitable outcome of this activity.

84% of respondents ranked the importance of experience at the same level as products or services- SFDC (2019) Click To Tweet

We say this because keeping a note of the growing technologies, helps small and medium businesses to not only drive their existing customers to make repeat purchases but it even helps in attracting new customers, which further aids in boosting their ROI and revenue.

On a comprehensive note, users of the best small business CRM , once they watch and follow these latest trends, it assists these small firms to expand the connections with their customers and boost sales as an inevitable outcome of this activity.

Therefore taking into account the same, here are some of the key CRM trends of 2020, which can add more viability to your sales, marketing, and customer support and relationship building skills this year:

Increasing Requirement for Adoption of Mobile App

In recent times, both small and mid-sized firms across the globe have started deploying easy to use CRM as their new-age marketing tools.

Nevertheless, this year, in 2020, due to the stellar rising sale of mobile and handheld devices, it has been noted that CRM integration with different mobile apps will also escalate for helping the customer service representatives.

Mobile CRM will also help the sales reps to receive notifications, capture relevant notes and contact or call the customer from their mobile devices, using online mobile easy to use CRM app.

Therefore, mobile CRM, which was earlier just an option for owners of large enterprise-level organizations, is fast becoming a very important part of managing customer relationships successfully even in SMBs.

Improved Predictive Analysis

All the best easy to use CRM software vendors for small business, help their users to find out the number of interested customers, the preferred mode of communication and the preferred time of communication of their customers.

However, going by the CRM trends of 2020, the latest improvement in the predictive analysis will offer greater insights pertaining to the ideal engagement approach to small businesses, by uncovering the history of their customer transaction and along with with it other customer details for executing sales to their ideal customers.

Improved Integration

In the past, small business owners who are fully aware of what is CRM technology also faced several obstacles while integrating easy to use CRM solution with all the main elements of their businesses.

Considering this fact, this year, CRM integration, and connectivity are going to expand radically as SMBs will be able to include new products and services into their CRM software.

These integrations will include powerful solutions for workflows, social media, customer sales and product tracking, which will no doubt offer a holistic solution for a 360-degree view during communication with the customers.

Importance of Social Media Networking

Finally, it cannot be denied that the members of your customer support team will have their own work hours and specific day-offs. Nevertheless, customers nowadays always expect faster responses online. Hence, customers when they fail to communicate with their preferred brands through conventional communication channels, they tend to follow their brands on social media channels to get the latest news and developments about new product launches in the company.

Hence all easy to use CRM for small business in 2020, are trying to improvement upon their technology to become pioneers in social CRM (SCRM) functionalities, whereby they can promote your business via social media channels, which will allow their users to find 24/7 accessibility to their customers, which goes true with CRM solutions like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM tools that are mostly preferred by medium and small businesses.

Tips For Avoiding Footfalls In Data-driven Marketing

For reasons that deliver better outcomes, marketing in the present times is all about working with a plethora of data. Hence if your business is using a CRM solution as a business growth technology and having data for backing up the strategies in your business, it is best to provide marketing a place in the table which will help them to create more successful campaigns for boosting lead generation and revenue growth. Nevertheless, as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors, we have experienced that in modern times there is a mad rush to get recognized as marketers who are data-driven, using software platforms like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms in the marketplace.

For reasons that deliver better outcomes, marketing in the present times is all about working with a plethora of data.
Hence if your business is using an easy to use CRM solution as a business growth technology and having data for backing up the strategies in your business, it is best to provide marketing a place in the table which will help them to create more successful campaigns for boosting lead generation and revenue growth.

The average CRM user adoption among sales professionals is 73% and the average ROI period is 13 months. Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors, we have experienced that in modern times there is a mad rush to get recognized as marketers who are data-driven, using software platforms like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms in the marketplace.

Therefore here are some to the three most critical errors that businesses do while handling their data and things that you can accomplish to rectify them:

Concentrating Just On Vanity Metrics

Not all metrics found in the CRM database are tied to business results. Since there are many data points that are totally superficial and may make the performance of the marketing, and sales departments in the company look good, nevertheless, it does not necessarily imply or indicate that a campaign is effective in generating quality leads that can predict sales.
For example, the number of downloads of content, followers on social media websites, are mostly considered as vanity metrics by most companies.

Now, let us state one aspect very clearly- vanity metrics found in the easy to use CRM platforms are not essentially bad.

There is utterly nothing ‘wrong’ if you want to track your businesses’ shares, likes, or followers on social media websites since it obviously aids in gaining a wide-ranging view of brand awareness of your business in the marketplace. Likewise, tracking the number of total page views of your business website or the number of content downloads can help you to see which topics and messages resonate with your targeted audience most effectively.

Nevertheless, the main lacuna that comes into play when you use vanity metrics as a marketer and permit these metrics to represent more meaningful information that denotes the rise and fall in your business.
Per say, having a very large number of page-views of your website actually means nothing for highlighting your revenue goals, if most of those visitors immediately bounce off, or seldom make any purchase.

-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake

The solution to avoid this above-stated mistake lies in focusing on clarity metrics, which is, in fact, the real operational data in the CRM database that can make a difference to your businesses’ bottom line.
For an example, the amount to time your prospective customers need to wait before they are contacted by a sales rep from your organization, or the number of new leads being generated, is what counts as clarity metrics.
Therefore, the most important thing that you can do to keep away from focusing on vanity metrics is to repeatedly ask yourself how each of these data points in your easy to use CRM directly relates to your business outcome.

Always keep in mind that what counts as vanity metrics depends on whether or not that data supports a business outcome for your specific industry.
Like if your company is a media house that makes it revenue advertising to followers on social media, then the number of shares or the number of followers can also be a very important metric that plays a big role in your digital marketing strategy.

Never Questioning “Why”

Now without relevant and proper context, data is just a cluster of number in the database of your easy to use CRM software. Hence, if any of the email campaigns that you have sent had an awfully low open rate that for sure does not necessarily mean that it was really a bad email. We say this because it can also suggest that the campaign was fired at the wrong time. Similarly, if a blog post did really good, it can also mean that it could have happened due to a sudden growth of subscribers from your previous day’s blog posts, else it can also be due to an unexpected rise in Google searches for that topic.
Therefore, if you never look for reasons why the numbers in your metrics have turned out in a certain way, you will never be able to avoid mistakes from occurring times and again or might not even be able to take the benefit of some action that has turned out to be really successful and good for your business.

-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake

Question every action. Since in order to find the context you need to really understand what your marketing data is telling you in-between the lines. Therefore constantly ask yourself and brainstorm with your teams, why the data in the CRM database is what it is. Hence do not play with your assumptions that are based on a single data point in your CRM for small and medium businesses.

Failing To Meander Course

Finally, the biggest mistake that marketers most often do, is not being able to adjust their preset course based on what the easy to use CRM data say to the data-driven marketers.

As marketers, it is easy to find yourself accustomed and acclimatized to a certain course of action, and therefore focuses on the CRM data or the metrics that support your activities.

Most often, this occurs owing to pressure from the management or simple stubbornness on their part that if an email campaign can just run its course, as planned, like many others it will also work out well.

-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake

Never be too proud to admit that something is just not working. Always keep in mind that a major part of working in a data-driven manner in sales and marketing is to have an objective resource to guide you with your strategies.
Therefore, be open to accepting what the data reveals- even though it can be not all that favorable. Additionally, it is even more important, that you must remain bendable enough to flex and change your strategies and make alterations when it is required. Since by being open to changes, your flexibility will certainly pay off, as your future campaigns will be more effective that can user in stellar business growth.

Buy CRM And Double Your Sales Productivity For Rapid Business Growth

Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth. In certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff. Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.

Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth.

With 379 CRM systems listed on G2, only 18 % have a 4 or 5-star rating, which includes ConvergeHub - G2 Learning Hub (2019). Click To Tweet

In certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff.
Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.

In other words, adopting easy to use CRM software for the organization most often means a decrease in productivity of the sales reps, and this happens so often that according to DMNews (operated by AC Business Media, Inc) 63% of all new CRM rollouts fail.

Nevertheless, the paradox lies in the fact that there are also several studies that show that sales teams using easy to use CRM software platforms most often outperform teams without online lead management software across several growth metrics in an organization.

Therefore, the good news is that it is possible for easy to use CRM software platforms to give you the best of both worlds, assist you to drive in strategic growth, and so in reality increase productivity consistently.

In this article, we are going to illustrate to you why so many CRM initiatives waste money, sabotage productivity, and suffocate the sales rep’s performance into a slowly diminishing, gasping tickle.

We shall also see how the right CRM can actually help your sales employees to track data from the CRM database , drive strategies, and actually increase productivity in the process.

First things first: Why a modern sale is really this complicated

Doing Sales (going by the books), should be really simple.

A sales rep makes a contact, qualifies the lead, and then tries to close the deal.

Hence, a traditional sale is all about:

Contact
Qualify
Close
Wash, Rinse, and Repeat

So what is it that is getting things complicated?

Well, in modern times the complicacy arises, as there are other handfuls of big problems that tend to scale up with the growth in any businesses, such as:

Leads come from several channels with varying levels of interests, warmth, and qualifications
Lead follow-ups need to be tracked and thereafter recorded across myriads of interactions
Lead data needs to be analyzed and subsequently utilized for amending sales strategies accordingly

In the modern digital world, there are numerous channels than ever for harvesting leads for businesses, and each of these channels brings in different types of leads among which some even bring in multiple unique business segments for your businesses.

Now, each of these segments must be sold to after nurturing them independently, and all these actions must be recorded, tracked, and thereafter analyzed.

Well, over here we are not refereeing to hundreds but a few thousands of data events and the larger the business grows, the more activity it needs to coordinate and track its interactions and workflows.

Therefore, to do this, it is impossible to perform such a monstrous work, without the aid of software.

Hence, when it comes to sales, the core piece of business growth technology and solution required to perform these actions is an easy to use CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software.

In reality, your easy to use CRM is supposed to be the central cog for your organization’s business machine, which bridges marketing, sales, support, customer retention, finance, and business analysis into one automated, cohesive system on which you build your business.

As mentioned earlier, the CRM’s goal is usually to help in strategic decision-making, which often comes at the cost of the sales team’s success, and productivity.

Nevertheless, instead of making day-to-day activities more efficient and easier, CRM platforms often at times end up doing the exact opposite.

Let us take a look at why?

Why is it that 63% of CRM rollouts fail?

Just as it requires two people to begin an argument, CRM failures can also be the result of both the CRM software solution and the business organization itself.

Here are four key software platform based factors, which makes even the best CRM fail:

Too expensive and unnecessary complicated setup
Shady pricing models
Limited numbers of integrations
Software not built with the requirements of the sales teams in mind

HOW CRM SOFTWARE CAN DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESSES’ BOTTOM-LINE

The best sales and lead management CRM software do not just drive strategies, but it also makes jobs simpler for your sales teams.
Easy to use CRM solutions solve all the issues we were just talking about as it allows salespersons to make contact, qualify, and close the deals.

Hence, here is how CRM software can actually DOUBLE your businesses’ productivity scores, instead of suffocating it.

Low cost, simple setup, and maintenance

While in one hand, an easy to use simple setup, which is low-cost, beats a complicated and expensive CRM setup anytime.

Nevertheless, most businesses are willing to take up an upfront hassle even if a little bit of complication is involved for a long-term boost in productivity.

This is exactly the reason as to why maintenance cost and ownership of a CRM is so important. Always remember, the more often your system is out of service or being worked on, the less productive your teams will be with that software.

Therefore, if you use an essentially maintenance-free system, that is simple and easy to use, you will never have to worry about losing your team’s productivity, while you implement or perform regular updates and checkups on your CRM.

Simple lead assignment rules

Thanks to the growth of social media and digital marketing techniques, nowadays leads can reach the sales teams with increasing diverse histories. This includes:

PPC ads
Direct calls
Content marketing
Contact forms
Offline events
Social marketing
Prior purchases
Mobile opt-ins
Partner referrals and others

Sorting through these leads, matching them to relevant sales reps, tracking their activities through the sales pipeline, and briefing sales staff on all their past activities are functions that can take an entire team of managers if it were not for lead management software platforms to do it.

Best CRM software solutions, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms most often used by startups and small business are designed to integrate seamlessly with marketing software on the front end, which helps in allowing sales managers to easily import, sort, and thereafter assign leads to staffs with an automatic briefing on each leads history of their past likings and transactions.
For when these stated actions are done in the right way, it allows the sales reps to sit down and start contacting the leads, as easily as they would have done working their way through an email inbox.

Better sales conversations through sales pipeline management

The most convenient ways to contact a lead in modern times are over email or phone calls, neither of which requires advanced online lead management software.

You can always pull out a Smartphone and can do both these without even needing to download an app.

However, although sending emails and calling is the easy part, nevertheless, the more challenging part comes with tracking and recording the conversations for the purpose of future training, and reviews required for strategic adjustments.

As we have expressed earlier that many CRM rollouts become unsuccessful because they are not built with sales staff in mind, therefore the best CRM platforms are built with salespeople in mind.

Hence once you buy CRM it not only eliminates all these issues by allowing emails and phone calls directly through the CRM platform with the help of different third-party integrations, but it also helps in tracking and recording every single activity, without the need for the sales reps to do a thing manually.

Integrating marketing, sales, customer support and accounts data

While your primary priority is to help your sales teams to send more emails and make calls, you would also certainly want to train your staff, refine your sales rep’s sales approaches, and thereafter evaluate and redefine your company’s sales strategies over time.

It is a data analysis of your CRM database that allows you to achieve this. However, in order to collect usable data, you have to track everything from the beginning until the end, from marketing to sales, customer support and if you are using a QuickBooks CRM that integrates with financial software packages, then even accounts.

Hence, the ability to accommodate third-party integrations is a fundamental part of any sales CRM software that is worth its salt.

Conclusion: Sales software does not have to suffocate productivity

As we have discussed, in spite of most conflicting debates lead management platforms, like easy to use CRM solutions in reality, does not drain your sales team’s level of productivity, but instead, CRM software platforms drive a significant boost to your team’s success in the following ways:

Easy setup and maintenance
Better sales conversions through effective sales pipeline management
Straightforward lead assignment
Integrated data transfer across departments

So, get started and buy CRM to boost your businesses’ productivity there is nothing better than a lead management software that can help your company to find business growth.

Why Do You Need To Go Beyond CRM For Delivering True Customer Service Nowadays

Several major changes have happened over the past quarter-century.
Music has gone from spool tapes to CDs and pure digital media and while cabs are still operational, ridesharing services have made hailing a ride much easier nowadays.
During this same time period, how modern companies interact with their customers has also come a long way.
Although still, today telephones retain a certain level of popularity, nevertheless, emails, chats, and social media have all gained significant grounds in modern times.
Advanced technologies like Chatbots which are powered by AI and machine learning are also nowadays adopted by businesses and customers alike.
In the past customer service teams documented their customer-facing interactions in a basic manner. Twenty-five years ago, call tracking systems might have been nothing greater than an off-the-shelf, customized database used for collecting customer details and record their problems (if at that time companies bothered at all).
Thereafter in the late 1980’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems were born and with the introduction of easy to use CRM software solutions customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, and customer support) no longer had to struggle to work with data stored in disconnected and silo business applications as all-in-one CRM presented a 360-degree united view of the customer’s purchase and service histories, which in turn could drive new insights into businesses for taking appropriate actions.

77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience - Temkin Group (2019). Click To Tweet

Although as this above-stated concept was a step forward at that point of time, but the limitations of CRM are apparent right now.
Even in the present times an easy to use CRM does nothing more beyond providing an individualized view of marketing, sales, and service department in an organization, and therefore do not provide any priority on solving customer-facing problems, which makes it difficult to improve customer experience even with renowned brands across the globe.

Hence for customer support, it is time that they must look for a different approach, (one that prioritizes on improving customer experience), by implementing a service management approach which is the next evolution in modern business workflow today.

Engage Other Departments

The main concept behind building easy to use CRM is to consolidate customer information in a unified repository, which promises greater visibility into prospects and customers, their activities and history during their journey with any company.

Now although easy to use CRM definitely helps companies with their sales and marketing efforts, nevertheless it does not offer a route to improve service and customer experience even today.

With customer management, solving customer issues becomes the priority.

There when a service management platform is integrated into a CRM, it captures customer information and thereafter identifies, classifies and documents the issue. It even easily identifies issue trends and shares them with other departments in the organization.

Per say, integrating service management platforms with easy to use CRM software solutions not connects the teams using the CRM’s unified database but also provides those departments outside customer service with enhanced awareness of customer-facing issues and the outcomes they have on the customer experience when problems occur with their brands.

Assign work with built-in accountability

When integrated with the functionalities of a CRM software modern customer management platform’s workflow capabilities are the key to enabling the entire company to work together on customer-facing issues.

Now as problems are identified, customer service assigns problems to other departments within the organization and thereafter collaborates with them as they investigate and resolve those issues, which was not possible with earlier traditional CRM software platforms that lacked this visibility and collaboration and accountability that service management offers, which affected the customers resulting in deterioration of customer experience as customers had no idea of the timeframe needed by brands for resolving their issues .

Deliver proactive service

The ease of collaborating across teams using a service management platform integrated into a CRM also offers an additional benefit- the quickest path top permanent resolution of issues.

This is because by working with other departments in the organization service management platform integrated into easy to use CRM helps in identifying the root cause of a problem and therefore can aid in fixing it permanently without offering a temporary workaround.

A modern service management platform integrated into easy to use CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce alternative CRM software for small businesses even helps in simplifying the delivery of solutions to the affected customers in the self-service channels they prefer (like chatbots, knowledge-based articles and videos, automated email notifications and more).

Now, by addressing the root cause of the problems it implies that future customers will never face the problems, which in turn improves the customer experience of the brands proactively.

Drive a better customer experience

Finally, as Forrester and other market research firms have pointed out that today’s competitive business environment in the marketplace places high stakes on providing world-class customer experience, and silo CRM software solutions for customer services are not cutting it, therefore it is time for implanting a new tool, one that does more than just taking down customer details which modern service management platform integrated in easy to use CRM does aptly by better engaging the entire organization in solving customer-facing issues.

Conclusion

Therefore in a gist while legacy CRM software solutions can still benefit marketing and sales, but to boost customer satisfaction and drive world-class customer experience easy to use CRM software solutions that integrates with customer service management tools is the next evolution in customer service as it assigns the customer’s issues to the teams who can affect a permanent solution to the problems and ensure that subsequent customers will never encounter that issue.

How To Maintain An Unsoiled Database In Your Easy To Use CRM Tool For SMB

Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that collects and accumulates all the data of leads, prospects, and customers and keeps them stored in the CRM software’s database, which becomes the single source of truth for nurturing happy customers and driving conversions. However, if your prospect and customer database in the CRM is in a mess, with data integrity issues, the same database in the CRM can do more harm than good and can be counterintuitive to the purpose of buying an easy to use CRM for your company. Hence to help the users of new easy to use CRM for rapid business growth, here are some of the most preferred ways for sustaining an unsoiled database in your CRM so that companies can maximize the returns on their hard-earned investments for the best CRM for SMB that they choose for their organization.

However, if your prospect and customer database in the CRM is in a mess, with data integrity issues, the same database in the CRM can do more harm than good and can be counterintuitive to the purpose of buying an easy to use CRM for your company.

With 379 CRM systems listed on G2, only 18 % have a 4 or 5-star rating, which includes ConvergeHub - G2 Learning Hub (2019). Click To Tweet

Hence to help the users of new easy to use CRM for rapid business growth, here are some of the most preferred ways for sustaining an unsoiled database in your CRM so that companies can maximize the returns on their hard-earned investments for the best CRM for SMB that they choose for their organization.

Bring in only important data when importing contact lists

When you are importing lists of leads into your best small business CRM, you should do so with extreme care. Always remain vigilant as to where is your data coming from? Which fields were used in the previous software and how do they correspond to the fields in your new CRM system? For example, you might be having some other additional custom fields in the previously used tool that are no longer useful for your business. Hence just concentrate only on the important and pertinent data fields that are critical for your business while importing them in your new small business CRM software.

Be sure all data is rightly formatted before importing contact lists

When you want to export data from a certain software to another system, with the intention of importing it into another, there are certain factors that you need to keep in mind. This process is done in most cases by importing and exporting data of a CVS (Comma Separated Value) spreadsheet.

Therefore, it is most crucial that the prospect and customer data in the exported file complies with the requirement of your new software system and its data importing process. This means every column header must have the exact identical titles and even the data is in the same format (i.e., data, number, percentage, plain text, and others) as it was before. Make certain it all aligns before doing the import since otherwise, you will view errors as there will be several data that will not get transferred into your new CRM software system.

Identify important data fields to avoid partial contact records

If you wish to market your offerings to these new contacts in the future, it is critical that you must define which data fields are most essential to have while importing the contacts to your new small business easy to use CRM system. For example, you can decide that without email, name, or phone numbers the lead data do not constitute a fully populated record of contact in the database.

Therefore, settle on which fields hold the most essential information important to your business model, and remain sure that your web forms also ask for that information. Even if you are manually entering data into your new CRM software, remain careful that those data collects are essential information before entering them into your CRM database.

Place validation on your phone fields and email on forms

Now it is a common issue with all businesses that someone will visit your website and thereafter place incomplete or completely irrelevant and falsified information in your web forms to receive your offerings. However, there are ways to avoid it. Allowing people to complete your form with fake information creates an incredibly messy CRM database, cutting down on the efficiency of the CRM system.

Therefore, as a remedy, place validation measures on your telephone number and email fields. In the present times, most easy to use CRM software platforms allows a user to instantly verify if an email or phone number is real and active. So put these measures in place, and do not forget to include CAPTCHA on your web forms to ward off the onslaughts of the bots.

Regularly check for duplicates

Records that are created and stored as duplicates can have a more harmful effect on the efficiency of your marketing strategies than you can even think of.

For example, if you have two or more records of the same prospect, it becomes a sheer problem for the CRM to find which one is most up-to-date or which data in the software the CRM system will utilize to create and deliver a personalized message to the prospects, leads or customers.

Because email personalization relies on the data accuracy of your best small business CRM platform, duplicate records will completely jeopardize the efficiency of your system. Duplicate records mostly occur when someone completes your form multiple times but place different information, or when someone enters a new contact manually and unintentionally enters different data into the CRM database.

For example, if you have two contacts for ‘Stephen Smith’, but one has the name listed as ‘Stephn Smith’, it is possible that the person will receive a personalized email to “Stephn” rather than ‘Stephen’, which will no doubt create a bad impression for your company.

Delete unresponsive contacts

Always keep your database clean of unresponsive contacts. This means, those unresponsive contacts have either got them unsubscribed from receiving your email or your emails are bouncing, both of which indicate that they do not want to deal with your brand and hence they must be immediately purged out from the database of your CRM system. Deleting unresponsive contacts from your CRM database will ensure that your emails are going to live email accounts, which in turn also improves the accuracy of your email tracking and reporting functionality of the CRM.

Track lead source

Lastly, you need to monitor where the leads in your CRM database are coming from, as it will allow you to sharpen your marketing strategies while engaging them during the lead nurturing processes.

Tracking the source of the leads in your easy to use CRM platform, will help you to keep strategies tightly organized around whom each lead are, where they came from, and what their objectives were with your business.

Conclusion

Easy to use CRM technology allows businesses to do much more with fewer resources. It helps you to maintain a much more personal relationship with customers and prospects. Nevertheless, all these factors depend on having a clean CRM database , since if personalized communications go to the wrong people and tell them wrong things, it will ultimately hurt the reputation of your organization, and set in motion a wave of harmful consequences that will keep coming like a tide that you just cannot escape.

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