Year: 2020

Tips For Predicting Sales Cycle Using Business CRM Software For Rapid Revenue Growth

Most sales cycles are too difficult to understand. Since we can never perceive when you will get introduced to a new prospect, and more importantly when your new prospects will actually close the deal and become your customer, even if you are using a business CRM software for predicting the outcome of your sales pipeline. As a sales representative, it is your responsibility to stay on top of things as much as it is possible, try to understand, and even predict your prospect’s very next action for ensuring long-term success in your business.

Most sales cycle is too difficult to understand.
Since we can never perceive when you will get introduced to a new prospect, and more importantly when your new prospects will actually close the deal and become your customer, even if you are using a business CRM software for predicting the outcome of your sales pipeline.

Data accessibility for salespeople shortens their sales cycles by 8-14% - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

As a sales representative, it is your responsibility to stay on top of things as much as it is possible, try to understand, and even predict your prospect’s very next action for ensuring long-term success in your business.

Therefore, let us find what are some of the best practices to predict the result of your sales cycle and understand whether or not it is set up for the success of your brand?

Enter The Mind Of Your Customers

The life of any sales rep would have scored much better if they could enter and read their prospect’s mind.

However, predicting the behavior of the customers may be much simpler and easy than you think.

To do this, primarily mastering the industry that you are doing business with, by understanding your business is indeed a great place to start. Since being knowledgeable about your industry will provide you with context and empower you to make predictions that management and customers can rely on, which in turn will allow you to find a competitive edge in your marketplace.

Therefore, lean on your business CRM software, which is capable of providing you with all the necessary information that you need about your leads, and prospects that are stored in the CRM database.

Right from apprehending something generic such as the size of your deal, to any small comments that your prospect might have stated on a call, your easy to use CRM is the most preferred tool that you can use to help you predict the outcome of your sales cycle.

This is because the best small business CRM software platforms are filled with actual real-time data of your prospects stored in the CRM database.

Develop Listening Skills Of A Therapist Throughout The Sales Cycle

It is no brainer that we must learn to listen carefully to other people while working in support and sales. However, it is shocking to learn the degree to which the talk-to-listen ration can affect the success of any sales call, which furthermore translates to the length of the overall sales cycle in every business.

This is the reason why listening more during your sales calls empowers sales reps to tune into exactly what their prospects are looking for and develop a better idea of how their sale will move in the sales pipeline.

Even scientific research has proved that that top performers talk significantly less on calls than their lesser performing peers.

Therefore, next time you feel that you have something interesting to talk, remain alert, since keeping your sales-speeches on hold will fetch you better rewards.

Keep Out Of Gut Feelings

For many sales reps, sales cycles are based on “systems” that comprise a variety of perceptions.

Therefore, basing your sales cycles purely on gut-feelings and intuitions, or even at times solely on unfound perceptions is most unlikely to bring the sales that you need. Since by doing this, the outcome of your sales cycle will be based on banking more on conjectures instead of relying on an analysis by looking into different acceptable metrics in your sales CRM system.

This is because the predictions that you require needs to be based on reliable and accurate data, which can only be found by analyzing information stored in your CRM database.

Better Discussions On Price Equals To More Predictability

No matter what is your experience in sales, you like most salespersons probably do not like talking about pricing to your prospects in a call.

However, the better you can understand how your prospects are feeling or how much they are responsive about the pricing of your offerings, the easier it will be for you as a sales rep to predict the outcome of your sales.

In terms of timing, if you are using a lead scoring system in your easy to use CRM software, it can show you the right time to mention about your pricing to your prospective leads, and you will be surprised to know it may be much later than you probably guessed.

Actually, according to certain studies done on business growth ideas and best practices in sales, introducing the pricing to your prospective leads is three-quarter of the way into a sales call.

Therefore, while top and average grade performers in sales mostly mention their pricing after 13-20 minutes once they are on a call, top sales reps hold back their ultimate and final pricing discussion with the prospects until the very end.

This is because, once you are capable of keeping the main pricing discussion till the end, you will find a longer chance to impress your prospective lead with the benefits of your offerings that will make the pricing less an issue during the closure of the deal.

Conclusion

In a gist, your prospects will always be temperamental, but with appropriate human behavior, and using the right tool such as a business CRM software, you can actually statistically predict by analyzing your sales cycle and thereby make a better forecast for rapid revenue growth.

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Business Growth Training: Why Inbound Marketing Is Required For Lead Generation In Startups

The most challenging task being a marketer is to bring and engage customers on your businesses’ website. Therefore if you want to find success in terms of your business, you must find out better ways to build trust with the audiences visiting your website and thereafter convert them into leads. What Is Inbound Marketing? According to Wikipedia: “Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding.” Hence, in the present time, with the stellar rise in SEO, digital marketing, and social media platforms, companies are progressively using inbound marketing strategies to boost the consistency of their customers and generate more leads from their websites. In other words, inbound marketing nowadays as a business growth training is the best way to attract, engage, and delight your potential customers which helps in adding value to your businesses’ productivity.

The most challenging task being a marketer is to bring and engage customers on your businesses’ website, which is why we want to discuss on this topic as a part of business growth training in this blog.

Therefore if you want to find success in terms of your business, you must find out better ways to build trust with the audiences visiting your website and thereafter convert them into leads.

Inbound marketing is the primary marketing approach for 74% of marketers worldwide. Click To Tweet

What Is Inbound Marketing?

According to Wikipedia:

“Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding.”

Hence, in the present time, with the stellar rise in SEO, digital marketing, and social media platforms, companies are progressively using inbound marketing strategies to boost the consistency of their customers and generate more leads from their websites.

In other words, inbound marketing nowadays as a business growth training is the best way to attract, engage, and delight your potential customers which helps in adding value to your businesses’ productivity.

This is the reason why organizations (especially startups and small businesses) in modern times are using various tools to implement their inbound marketing strategies which can help them to enhance their business growth.

Now, before implementing any strategy is most important you should also know about its benefits.

Hence, let us take a look at the various reasons that will help you to understand “Why you need to implement inbound marketing for your business?” and learn it as a part of your business growth training.

Cost-effective

The primary focus of marketing in this digital era is to drive more traffic to the websites and also save a huge chunk of money.

According to research studies it has been found that content marketing strategy costs 60 percent less as compared to other traditional marketing approaches.

Therefore, marketers, these days use content marketing for boosting their inbound marketing approaches for attracting more customers on their business websites and thereby at a far lesser cost than traditional marketing help generate more marketing qualified leads.

In other words, inbound marketing is really a blessing for small businesses as it helps them to generate leads at an affordable price.

Convert your blog into a valuable resource

If you are not able to generate leads and traffic to your website through your content marketing endeavors and are not aware of the reasons, let us help you out to find the desired outcome.

There are primarily two main reasons that your blogs and contents are not finding enough leads.

Firstly there is no back-link(s) in your blogs and secondly, there is less search potential for your content.

Therefore, to overcome these two major obstacles you can use inbound marketing approaches to convert your blogs into valuable lead generation resources.

This is because according to studies done on business growth training it can be said that inbound marketing is the best way to boost engagements, increase customer retention rate, and thereby scale-up business revenue steadily.

Make better marketing decisions

By using inbound marketing tools in startups and small businesses, you can easily analyze all your business practices and thereby make better decisions using an easy to use CRM software solution, like the number of landing page conversions, email clicks, customer interests, and more.

Best business CRM software, when used for inbound marketing practices also helps in analyzing customer journey at each stage of your sales pipeline and thereby helps SMBs to take effective decisions that result in amplifying revenue growth.

Boost your brand awareness and social media presence

There is no doubt that in this era of digital growth, most target audiences for any business remains active on social media websites.

Therefore, if you are thinking of a marketing methodology to strengthen your social media presence to build stronger relationships with your customers, inbound marketing is the tool that helps to create your brand awareness and increase your social media presence that translates to a growth in your ROI.

According to studies it has been found that in more than 89 percent of businesses used blogs in 2019, to engage more customers in their social media websites.

This is because; the higher is your website traffic, the more leads you generate for your business.

Aids in creating customer-focused contents

To build trust and acquire the interest of your prospective customers, you need to provide them with real engaging content, which primarily focuses on the interests and fluctuating demands of your leads and customers.

Inbound marketing when done with easy to use CRM software, helps to streamline all your marketing campaigns and so aids in proving your prospects what they are looking for.

Moreover, when inbound marketing is done with the best small business CRM software it helps SMBs to create customer-centric content and helps businesses to send messages to the right prospects at the right time.

This is because; once you can create contents that are reliable to your audience you can easily remain ahead of the competition and find rapid business growth.

Conclusion

Therefore in a gist inbound marketing strategy when done in the right manner using a CRM for small business as a tool, it not only helps to increase your website search results and generate more leads but also aids in automating repetitive tasks and therefore deliver world-class service to your prospective leads and customers that aids in creating sustainable long-term growth.

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Six ‘No Regret’ Moves Of Customer Engagement Solutions For Small Businesses

Customer engagement solutions and strategies are the key objectives that need to align with the vision of your organization. This is because according to research done on customer experience management it shows that more than even 63 percent of consumers say the businesses must consider getting to know their customers better as their top priority in modern times. Therefore, having a strong focus on engaging with the consumers and customers of your brand and thereby delivering appropriate customer experience across all touchpoints in the customer journey should be the prime objective your business should aim to achieve nowadays.

Customer engagement solutions and strategies are the key objectives that need to align with the vision of your organization.
This is because according to research done on customer experience management it shows that more than even 63 percent of consumers say the businesses must consider getting to know their customers better as their top priority in modern times.

72 percent of businesses believe that improving customer experience is their top priority nowadays. Click To Tweet

Therefore, having a strong focus on engaging with the consumers and customers of your brand and thereby delivering appropriate customer experience across all touchpoints in the customer journey should be the prime objective your business should aim to achieve nowadays.

In the era of the internet digital customer experience is an important part of any businesses’ strategy that contributes to the success (or even failure at times) of the overall brand experience of any company, since if the experience is good, it is imperative that customers are most likely to become loyal customers and repeat purchasers of your offerings.

Hence in order to meet the demanding customer experience of modern times, having a sound customer engagement solution and strategies is essential for all businesses, especially small businesses and startups who are more in need of rapid growth.

What is a customer engagement strategy?

Now for a layman, customer experience strategy is defined as building long-term relationships with the customers by understanding their journey with a brand and focusing on how they interact with their business across multiple interactions- both online and offline.

According to research done on this subject, it has been studied that more than 72 percent of businesses believe that improving customer experience using customer experience solutions and tools like an easy to use CRM software is their top priority nowadays.

This is because, supporting customers through digital engagement channels aids in fostering not only brand awareness, but it even helps in building strong customer loyalty and nurture the customer-business relationship for acquisition to the retention of the customers.

Hence it is needless to say that brands that create a customer engagement plan which focuses more than other things on value creation are the ones that can provide a meaningful and end-to-end customer experience, which can be acquired by providing great content and prompt support to the customers.

Hence broadly speaking, Customer-Brand-Engagement (CBE) or Customer Engagement (CE) is a customer’s relationship with any business, which explores the quality of that relationship (both positive and negative) and how customer participation occurs or how often it happens with the brand.

Therefore, the dimensions of the CE can include:

  • Longevity- The length of time over which the interactions are spread with a brand.
  • Proactiveness- Whether a customer engages with a brand of their own, without any prompting.
  • Repetition and frequency- Whether the interactions are sporadic and varied, or frequent and similar in form.
  • Context- The situation when the interactions happen (for example, during consideration, post-purchase or only when promotions happen, and more).
  • Volume- The number of interactions that take place over the whole customer lifecycle with any brand.

What does customer engagement look like?

Before we discuss the six ‘no regret’ moves of customer engagement solutions, let us understand that CE can be both general and also selective.

This means customers might get engaged with your brand and business at different levels.

For example, for some customers, it might happen at the product level, like a new business CRM buyer joining a cloud-based CRM adopter’s group on Facebook, or for others, it is at the level of the brand, like an Apple enthusiast patronizing their preferred brand’s promotions and offerings.

Customer experience can also be quite abstract or highly specific like a consumer expressing their preference for Visa or Master Card or a customer patronizing a particular branch of a retail brand in their region because it is better managed or more welcoming than others.

Therefore this being said, here are six examples of what world-class customer engagement solutions might look like in practice, which includes:

1. Resolving a complaint

An unhappy customer reaches out to ask or provide feedback for a problem to be remedied. Now, irrespective of whether they lodge their complaint via email or in a public forum can be a telling measure of the customer’s sentiment and loyalty for your brand. This is because, particularly if a customer cares enough to make a complain, it can be considered as a valuable break to close the experience gap and gain the loyalty of the customer by exceeding their expectations.

2. Responding with a comment on Facebook

A customer sees an ad for an offering they have recently bought and might add a comment along with the lines of “this is exactly the thing I was telling about Patricia!” or “bought two of these but have no idea how to use.”

Now, this is a word-of-mouth advertisement that reflects positivity or negativity and for the brand, it can act as a form of social proof, which can help bring more engagements, if responded promptly.

3. Answering reviews on a third-party site

A customer waits for hours on hold, and while the minutes pass, leave a one-star review on a third-party site like TrustPilot, or G2.

Now in this scenario, even though the customer might be a Detractor of the brand, however unlike social media they are not sharing their opinions with their relatives and friends in their sphere of influence, and are rather doing it anonymously, which can be resolved with proactive support to the customer from the brand.

4. Encouraging participation in loyalty programs

A customer signs up for a brand for a loyalty card that they wish to collect for harvesting points on future purchases. Now the moment a customer signs up and enjoys collecting points and achieving rewards, it becomes a secondary motivation on the part of the customer in itself.

It is natural, they will choose your brand above others since they can collect points with you and not with others.

5. Asking for suggestions, ideas, and requests on a brand’s social spaces

A loyal customer of your brand, comments of your Instagram post asking when and if you will be restocking a product they love.

They might even make contributions like “can we have a gift set with this” or “would love to see this in red”, which shows that the customers are interested in providing ideas and suggestion which if answered properly and at the right moment can increase your engagement with the customers and bring in more revenue.

6. Promote the use of online support and customer service

A subscriber to a SaaS platform like QuickBooks CRM software or a CRM that integrates easily with online accounting software like QuickBooks wants to know how to use the tool to solve a specific data transfer problem. Nevertheless, unable to find the answer in the product’s knowledge base, the consumer contacts customer service via live chat to ask for suggestions and is referred to a product specialist who answers the question.

This is an example of somebody engaging genuinely with a service they have already paid for, and is therefore expected to have an enhanced experience and increased customer engagements as a consequence if they are responded instantly.

Conclusion

Remember customer engagement is the ultimate key to conversion and upselling opportunities in this digital marketplace.

This is because irrespective of how good is your offer or how deeply your products and services can benefit the customers you as a brand need to instigate and nudge the customers and make you home in their minds, and the only way you can do it in business is making your customers get engaged with you using effective techniques and also including them in your marketing strategies.

Therefore this post is all about helping your small business to get a grip on these six customer engagement solutions and strategies from us as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, which can help to bring in more customers who shall remain loyal to your brand.

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How To Write and Deliver An Effective B2B Sales Pitch In Less Than 10 Minutes

Almost in every industry, all B2B sales team members have been told times and again to sell the value of their products and services- not the features of their offerings, which is one of the most important factors that constitute the essence of any successfully delivered B2B sales pitch. This is because when you call it value, benefits, or outcomes, the message to sale is clear, which is- tell the prospective customer the reasons they need the offering, but just not all of the things that the product and services can do. And as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions, we consider this as a piece of sound advice, since even the Harvard Business School’s famous economist and professor at, Theodore Levitt once aptly said in one of his lectures: “customers want ¼-inch holes, not ¼-inch drills.”

Almost in every industry, all B2B sales team members have been told times and again to sell the value of their products and services- not the features of their offerings, which is one of the most important factors that constitute the essence of any successfully delivered B2B sales pitch.

It takes an average of 18 calls to actually connect with a buyer. Click To Tweet

This is because when you call it value, benefits, or outcomes, the message to sale is clear, which is-
tell the prospective customer the reasons they need the offering, but just not all of the things that the product and services can do.

And as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions, we consider this as a piece of sound advice, since even the Harvard Business School’s famous economist and professor at, Theodore Levitt once aptly said in one of his lectures: “customers want ¼-inch holes, not ¼-inch drills.”

A survey of advice on common sales pitch can lead to an outline like:

What is the issue that you want to solve?

How big is the problem(s)?

Why should a business care about the problem you solve?

Who are the people that your business serve?

What success or results you had?

Now this can be considered as a great outline for creating a successful B2B sales pitch since we discussed in one of our recent other blogs on supporting the consultative sales process that thinking about the prospect’s pain points and issues should be the beginning of any sales process, and outlines like this are also often accompanied with the advice to solve the greatest issues they can for their prospective customers.

Referring to the quote that we stated above, well, selling the holes (instead of the drill) is just the beginning of the thinking process- why do customers really want that hole or what big universal human need are you solving by helping to create the hole for your customers?

Now the danger with the advice to solve the biggest problem of the prospect by focusing on the value is that it is easy to take it too far, by which we imply that that sales reps can quickly find themselves with a jargon-filled, generic pitch that at best leaves the prospective customers unable to connect or at its worse makes the sales pitch sound like a flimsy promise which makes the prospect suspicious about the reps and their company.

This happens because the salespersons get so focused on elevating the problem and selling the value that they actually forget to say what the offering is or how it can work for their customers.

Actually, as one the most popular vendors of business CRM software solutions, we have found that even though it seems like common sense, nevertheless, too many B2B sales pitches leave out this critical information that ultimately hinders the sales process, especially when it comes to selling complex products or services.

Hence here are some of the most important elements that you must keep in your mind while making a B2B sales pitch for your offering:

Get specific about the problem

Well, solving the biggest problems can always seem to be attractive. After all the Big Problems- things like improving quality, saving time and money, adding comfort and ease, or eliminating barriers, are the factors that have always motivated people to buy things from the marketplace.

Let us as an example imagine a commercial for a bar of dishwashing soap.

The dish soaps in most commercials claim to save the homemaker’s time, by eliminating the burden of scrubbing dishes.
Now, every dish soap commercials will promise some sort of technological advancements over their competition that makes the soap capable of eliminating dirt and food directly from the utensils with a mere swipe.

Now, this is a very good sales pitch, as it connects to a Big Problem- every one of us wants more time and less housework.

Nevertheless, this a specific commercial can even narrow on another pain point specifically – a sink filled with dirty dishes, whereby the solitary visual image of that dirty sink full of pots and pans can cause the ad viewer’s back start to ache.  Hence by the time the viewer embarks on the vision of finding a better future—a clean and sparkling kitchen, the viewer has already started to imagine what they will do with that time they have regained.

Hence always remember – Without the detailed pain points, and issues all sales pitches become the same.

Now dish soaps are simple and familiar products and it is tough to imagine any dish soap commercial that would not highlight the problem of stuck-on-food and sink full of dishes.

However, when we look at more complex sales, especially the B2B ones, we have often seen that sales reps skip from the Big Problem right into the vision of a better future, without even trying to dig into the specific pain points faced by the prospective customers, whereby as we said without a specific pain point all sales pitches becomes the same.

But, on the other hand, with an unambiguous pain point, a sales pitch not only differentiates itself from the other sales pitches but doing this also makes the sales rep demonstrate expertise, which can only happen by just correctly identifying the problems and its origins, which immediately also enhances the credibility-factor in the minds of the prospects that you might be the one to solve it.

Show how it works

Now once you have named the problem with as much granularity and specificity as you can it is time to show how exactly your offering is going to help to deliver on that vision.

For example, going back to that dish soap commercial and thinking about those and unwashed dirty dishes. The scriptwriter does not just call them grimy, dirty dishes, rather he tells you about baked-on lasagna, messy sauces, and gooey cheese. This is because, for anyone who has ever done dishes, knows that these troublemakers are their biggest pain points and would appreciate that the dish soap manufacturer considered them.

Now we have observed that many sales reps are afraid to “give away” their secret sauce, or at times afraid to reveal too much about how they do what they do.

Nevertheless in a B2B sale for a complex product or service, always remember your customers are most likely already have quite a bit of domain knowledge and so they need granular and tangible information about your product in order to correctly assess it.

Therefore, giving detailed information about how your offerings really work not only helps to build your expertise but understanding that you clearly know how to solve the problem of the prospective customers also builds trust and confidence, since they now know that you are the only one who can deliver, so in such a scenario the prospect will never pull back the curtain.

Use plain language

Never in order to provide details of how your offerings work, use a sales pitch that can become a hard-to-understand word salad filled with technical jargon or esoteric descriptions with confusing words. Rather focus on explaining the features and processes of your product and services in plain language that everyone can understand easily.

As the Center for Plain Language which is a non-profit organization defines plain languages as:

“A communication that your audience or readers can understand the first time they hear or read it.”

In fact, they even state that plain language is not removing or just simplifying information, but rather it must focus on improving communication.

So sales presentations or B2B sales pitches should proving information to their prospects in a manner that boosts communication since prospective customers are never going to purchase what they just cannot understand.

In fact, the Center for Plain Language has listed out six criteria for plain language, which can be used as a key for creating a great B2B sales pitch, and help businesses to make sales presentations that can bring value to their brands that include:

  • Using active voice
  • Using short sentences
  • Using common, everyday words
  • Using “You” and other pronouns
  • Using easy-to-read design features
  • Using lists and tables

Use visual explanations

Finally, in addition to plain language using visual explanations, that can act as fog-lifters helps to speed up the sales process while continuing to build trust for the brand in the mind of the prospective customers in the marketplace.

Hence in your B2B sales pitch, as one of the most popular vendors of easy to use CRM tools, we advise the readers to use visual explanations to show how their offerings can fit into the prospect’s business process, or what systems that the brand is offering will connect with or even how the customer experience of your offering will be different from the other once they purchase your product or services.

We say this since we have seen that there are many sales reps who are afraid to dive into details, and they hence want to keep the conversation at a high level, just focusing on solving the Big Problem of their prospects or create a vivid vision of the future world.

Now, while these are indeed important parts of the story making process in a B2B sales pitch, nevertheless they are not enough to make a sale.

This is because to make a sale of a complex product or service in the B2B landscape, sales reps need to show expertise and trust by naming pain points with absolute specificity and provide granular details to how your solution works with engaging visuals accompanied by plain language since as the old English adage goes ” a picture is worth a thousand words”.

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Things To Know: How Business CRM And Email Marketing Can Increase Your Revenue

When you are doing business online, you will find several things that require your attention. This is 2020, fully digital, everything is available online and if we talk about email marketing and business CRM solutions, according to research it shows that more than 82% of businesses in B2B and B2C are using email marketing automation nowadays. Now, this question might hit your mind: How email marketing can boost my businesses? What is Email Marketing? Generally speaking, email marketing is a part of internet marketing, which encircles online marketing via social networking, websites, blogs, and more. In fact, it is the same as direct mail but instead of sending the mails through postal services, over here messages are sent electronically through emails. Now once we are speaking about marketing, emails always stand out in the crowd and are still considered the best way for communicating with consumers in the marketplace.

When you are doing business online, you will find several things that require your attention. This is 2020, fully digital, everything is available online and if we talk about email marketing and business CRM solutions, according to research it shows that more than 82% of businesses in B2B and B2C are using email marketing automation nowadays.

Average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. Click To Tweet

Now, this question might hit your mind: How email marketing can boost my businesses?

What is Email Marketing?

Generally speaking, email marketing is a part of internet marketing, which encircles online marketing via social networking, websites, blogs, and more.
In fact, it is the same as direct mail but instead of sending the mails through postal services, over here messages are sent electronically through emails.

Now once we are speaking about marketing, emails always stand out in the crowd and are still considered the best way for communicating with consumers in the marketplace.

Hence, email marketing is considered as a highly effective digital marketing strategy as it helps to communicate with all the prospects and customers through electronic channels, whereby using marketing automation found in easy to use CRM software tools email marketing empowers businesses to create campaigns that speaks to their audience on a much more personal level.

Therefore, in this era of digital communication, when marketers are required to do more with less, your marketing staffs need to connect with hyper-targeted buyers lurking within the crowd of prospects, which brings email marketing at the forefront of other strategies in the digital marketing field.

Why your company needs Email Marketing?

  • Better reach to your prospects and customers
  • Hyper-targeted segmentations
  • Beats social media platforms for selling online
  • Create dynamic personalized emails
  • Find easy email exchange at an affordable rate
  • Drive more revenue

According to marketing ninjas, emails are the best ways to hold your customers in-touch if you occasionally say – “Hi, we have got a special offer for you.”

It has been observed that using this technique gradually increases the customer’s interest in your brand, as it provides a favorable impression that you have been thinking about them.

Hence email listing based on demography, behavior, or social features of the prospects and customers provide highly relevant and contextual emails that really work for ushering business growth.

Do you know, according to a poll done by a major Salesforce Alternative CRM solution, it states that 91% of your target audience in the marketplace uses emails?

Additionally, as per polls done by Campaign Monitor, it states that 320% more revenue can be generated by automated emails using business CRM solutions, as against the non-automated ones.

This is because, the beauty of triggered emails is that, once they are programmed to run, they continue to mechanically drive earnings from the intended and targeted audience without you or your employees having to do anything more.

Hence email marketing is the weapon of choice for SaaS-based offerings and online stores as there are several CRM solutions that can help businesses to create startling email marketing campaigns, track the behaviors of their targeted audience and even optimize earnings through repeat purchases.

EMAIL MARKETING IDEAS FOR BOOSTING YOUR REVENUE

Now, in email marketing, it is not sufficient to simply send your prospects and customers plain vanilla emails, rather you need to have a good plan in place to make your emails work effectively.

Hence here are a few concepts for email marketing, which can help you to increase the impact of your efforts:

Get Personal

The most successful emails are those that make the audience feel that they are customized just for themselves.
Now, it is natural that you just cannot manually customize all the emails that you send to your targeted audience in the marketplace.

Hence automation is essential if you would like to treat each of your targeted audiences in a private way that can elicit a reply from the recipients of your emails.

Therefore, firstly if you want to find more traffic through emails, then you should collect sufficient data about your prospects and customers, which you can easily do if you are using a business CRM solution that can provide you the information you can use like the name, date of customer sign up, contact numbers, birthdays, a conversion event, and much more.

Hence, by segmenting the customers and prospects into different groups that are stored in the CRM database, based on their interests, behaviors, buying patterns, and more you can create personalized emails that can fetch replies and actions from the recipients of those emails.

For example, if you are aware of your customer’s preferences, it is possible to notify them over emails when your brand has new items that can pique the interest of your customers and are on sale.

Remember, emails are less about making sales and more about building a trusting relationship with your customer base, so concentrate on the entire customer journey for finding a better response to your emails.

This is because by offering useful incentives and information to your prospects and customers, you can create a loyal customer base that can eventually bring in repeat sales and more revenue.

Moreover, since emails are a part of a set of interactions with your brand, do not create emails that will simply send users to your brand’s generic homepage. Rather invest time to create customized landing pages and take your email recipients to those pages for finding deals that they might consider worth once they click on the CTA (Call To Action) buttons in your emails.

Now, even a simple welcome email can be quite effective as a part of your email marketing strategy, when potential customers are first showing their interest in your brand.

Finally, in the realm of email personalization if your customers are young, make them laugh since inspiring them and teaching them will make them come back to your brand for more.
For this send assignment quotes, short clickable videos, and pictures embedded in your emails that can make your target audience get identified with your brand, which can make them much more likely to turn into loyal customers.

Reward Loyal Customers

Placing a loyalty program with the help of email marketing is a fantastic way to cultivate a relationship with your customers. As a company cannot ensure growth without loyal customers hence consider providing existing customers points for their future purchases which is just one means for creating a loyalty program for your customers.

For this, you can segment your customers stored in your easy to use CRM who have spent above a specific amount while purchasing from your brand and send them email campaigns with exclusive offers like early access to sale, special product bundles or discounts. You can also offer incentives to your existing customers on their special occasions along with their birthday emails or for their first anniversary of shopping at your store.

Moreover, you can also give special discounts to your customers who refer other customers, bring in new visitors, or incentivizes referrals for your brand.

Target Dormant Customers

Sending targeted emails for customers that have not purchased for a while, with incentives to re-purchase could act as a gold mine. For this use emails to remind your dormant customers that you are still around. Send then gift cards in their emails that can encourage them to come back for more.

Utilize Social Proof

The power of providing appropriate social evidence is huge in the digital marketing field. This is because there is no way around the fact that people always trust other people and so think about providing some user-generated reviews and testimonials of your loyal customers in your emails. You can always boost sales significantly by revealing how many customers have used and are happy with your brand’s offerings.

Final Thoughts

As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software solutions, which is mostly used by alternative lending businesses, we trust these email marketing ideas shall surely help you to get the most out of your customer relationships.

Hence never forget to personalize your emails keeping the customer journey of your consumers in your mind and offer rewards to loyal customers which can provide stellar business growth.

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Sales CRM: 10 Proven Ways To Increase The Efficiency Of Your Sales Teams

Are you trying to streamline your sales process? We all know that sales are always an integral part and a component of success for businesses since if your sales teams have trouble selling efficiently, you are surely going to see your businesses’ growth drop- which is not a good predicament for anyone. Now, in general everyone in the sales team spends quite a large span of time on admin works, which includes setting up reminders, scheduling meetings, sending emails, and several other mundane tasks that take a significant amount of time out of their day that they could have spent closing deals. Therefore how can you streamline your sales process in a manner that all of that administrative work still gets done, but still your sales reps have the time to close their deals? For many businesses, sales CRM or Customer Relationship Management software for sales is the answer.

Are you trying to streamline your sales process?
We all know that sales are always an integral part and a component of success for businesses since if your sales teams have trouble selling efficiently, you are surely going to see your businesses’ growth drop- which is not a good predicament for anyone in businesses.
Now, in general everyone in the sales team spends quite a large span of time on admin works, which includes setting up reminders, scheduling meetings, sending emails, and several other mundane tasks that take a significant amount of time out of their day, which they could have spent closing deals.
Therefore how can you streamline your sales process in a manner that all of that administrative work still gets done, but still your sales reps have the time to close their deals?
For many businesses, sales CRM or Customer Relationship Management software for sales is the answer.

Effective sales organizations are 81% more likely to be practicing consistent usage of a CRM or other system of record. - Aberdeen Group Click To Tweet

Now while some people’s opinions might be better than others, nonetheless the general purpose of an easy to use CRM software solution is to make it easier for the sales teams to foster a positive relationship with all the leads and prospects who come into their sales cycle and also eliminate a lot of busywork that keep the sales reps away from closing their deals.

In fact, back in 2012 a research published by Tech News World, revealed that even more than half of all the businesses (>54%) in the USA expect to improve their sales with the help of a CRM tool.

Now even though the real benefits that a sales CRM software brings to the sales reps may not be immediately recognizable, nevertheless CRM is a business growth technology that can act as a game-changer if implemented rightly.

And since CRM is a tool that the salespeople need to most, in this article as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions let us bring out the key reasons as to why Enterprise CRM can help the sales teams achieve their goals and thereby improve results easily.

So, why do salespeople require a tool like CRM?

In general, without the anxiety of oversimplifying the facts, the greatest challenges that sales reps face nowadays include:

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

Hence here are 10 proven ways to illustrate why salespeople need a CRM to boost the efficiency of their teams and bring revenue growth:

1. Enjoy a safe storage space

Sales CRM is a tool that helps the sales reps to safely store their contacts, sales opportunities, schedules, and activities in a centrally located CRM database, whereby they can find constant access to the information from numerous locations. Rest assured that their data will not get lost.

2. Plan and manage time like a pro

CRM is a software that helps the sales reps to prioritize their tasks and optimize their daily work schedules to ensure that the customers are not ignored and that the key prospects in their list are contacted in time.
In other words, easy to use CRM permits the salespeople to invest more time with the customers, which eventually leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base for their company.

3. Create activity reports

Once the reps in an organization use a sales CRM tool, it is a software that can help the salespeople to easily prepare their weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports for the management.
The process of creating a report is transparent and can be automated in a CRM, and it even takes just a few minutes and clicks to inform other staff within the organization what sales reps are presently working on or deals that are in progress inside their sales pipeline.

4. Stop surfing, begin targeting immaculately

CRM created for the salespeople helps the sales reps to segment their data in the CRM database to identify cherished opportunities using criteria-based selection, which prevents the sales reps from cutting and pasting from various documents or from surfing through a list of disorganized data.

5. Stay up-to-date

Once you adopt a CRM for your sales teams, it offers to share document templates, calendars and even provide email integration, so as to keep the whole team united and keep everyone up-to-date on the same page.
Now sharing selling patterns and processes allows the sales reps to view what worked best for their company.
Additionally, CRM also boosts communication between the sales reps and sales management in an organization.

6. Show up in time for the new sale

As CRM can track all communications with the customers, it is a tool that aids the salespeople to understand exactly when the customers need to be contacted, which can be for several reasons like product replacement, contract renewals, or even for upselling a new product or service to the existing customer base, which increases the chances of closing a new sales and earn additional revenue.

7. Rationalize the sales moves

If you are trying to streamline the complete sales cycle, CRM is the right technology that can assist businesses to do it.

Streamlining sales not only results in easily closing low-hanging deals in your sales pipeline but it also helps everyone in the sales team to reach their targets faster, easily.

This is because orders processing and preparing quotes can be automatically done using an easy to use CRM, which helps in reducing production costs and increase sales revenue considerably.

8. Know what your customers really want

As because all the customer-related data is centrally stored in a sales CRM software, it helps the salespeople to regularly analyze the needs and requirements of their prospects and customers and even anticipate the customer’s problems at the ‘right time’.
This the reason why CRM is a tool that helps in increasing the satisfaction of the customers and ensures their loyalty, as well as generates higher profit margins for businesses.

9. Cut down on admin tasks

As we said even before a sales CRM releases the sales reps from the majority of their admin-related tasks by reducing and removing some of the repetitive actions performed by the team, which takes a lot of their precious time, but yield negligible profitability.

Using Sales Force Automation (SFA), CRM software solutions are capable of triggering reminder activities, store and update product and price details, or take the sales reps step by step through their sales pipeline for closing the deals.

10. Help integration with other tools

Most CRM solutions are capable of integrating with a plethora of other business growth tools, for seamless transfer of data between multiple applications that can help the sales reps to accomplish their task effectively.

For example, when a sales CRM is integrated with an accounting software solution, a QuickBooks CRM can help businesses to unlock the precious customer data that is locked inside QuickBooks and use it from the CRM to drive sales and customer engagement.
This way, businesses can continue to use QuickBooks for accounting, and at the same time see the customer details, products, invoice and payment information directly in their CRM.
They can then use this information from QuickBooks in their easy to use CRM for creating reminders, follow-ups, customer service and build business process automation.

Conclusion

Hence, in a nutshell, even though salespeople and a sales CRM might not be an immediate “match made in heaven” as many sales reps do not like using a CRM as the extra time that is invested on entering data into the application adds to their irritation, whereby many salespeople think that CRM keeps them from their main task – “selling”, nonetheless, the more time these two spend together, the stronger the attraction between them becomes and makes the reps admire the software.
And this applies even to those who were not at all “happy-go-lucky” about using a sales CRM in the beginning.

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6 Key Advantages Of Adopting A Business CRM Software For Solopreneurs And Small Businesses

Making a mark online by implementing digital marketing is all about bringing in the right tools (like a business CRM solution) in the right proportion and at the right time. This is because, in order to build a relevant presence that can ultimately help to culminate into a system that brings rewarding conversions, you need tools that can help you stand out from your competitors and make your brand’s presence felt in the digital scheme of things, which includes not only an easy to use CRM but also SEO skills, email marketing strategies and much more. Now when talking about a CRM for small and medium businesses, a couple of things automatically springs to our minds, especially if you are a solopreneur running the show.

Making a mark online by implementing digital marketing is all about bringing in the right tools (like a business CRM solution) in the right context and at the right time.

64.2% of businesses view CRM tools as impactful on their bottom line Click To Tweet

This is because, in order to build a relevant presence that can ultimately help to culminate into a system that brings rewarding conversions, you need tools that can help you stand out from your competitors and make your brand’s presence felt in the digital scheme of things, which includes not only adopting an easy to use CRM for your business but also SEO skills, email marketing strategies and much more.

Now when talking about a CRM for small and medium businesses, a couple of things automatically springs to our minds, especially if you are a solopreneur running the show.

In all small business setups, one requires the ultimate bandwidth of limited resources and time in order to make the most of all the tools they use for their business, for finding optimal results in the shortest possible time.

In SMBs teams especially need to find enough time in order to fulfill the various tasks in their sales pipeline and so in this write-up let us explore how can a small business CRM solution help small organizations with this six key benefits of any easy to use, simple CRM software, in order to focus on finding new leads, nurture their prospects, automate their workflows, reduce manual labor, and ultimately provide world-class customer support to the consumers in their marketplace.

1. Manage Contact Information

The acronym CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management which straightly points at the collation of customer-related information and retention of the customers.

Hence when you buy a business CRM software for your SMB you basically buy a tool which helps in accomplishing a process which can effectively store the contact information of your leads, prospects, and customers for you all along with all the interactions that have happened with the contacts stored in the CRM database.

Now this benefit found in a CRM is very crucial for businesses, as when your team does not have to concentrate on mundane tasks that they have to regularly perform for maintaining and retrieving information of the customers, they can do other jobs which are more necessary for business growth.

2. Manage Notifications

As we said even before, CRM is a tool that is capable of pulling out the right information and at the right time, and so the capability of sending notifications in an automated manner is another key benefit of using a business CRM for your SMB.

These notifications could include, bells and whistles for incoming emails, follow-ups, on-boarding notices, birthday reminders of the customers, or any other messages that should be sent to the prospects and customers from time to time.

Additionally, these notifications can also be made to popup for sending emails after interactions and resolutions of conflicts and other grievances made by the customers.

3. Cost-Effectiveness

When you as a small business entrepreneur turn to buy an easy to use and simple CRM software, you can be assured that you are adopting a process and a tool that is extremely cost-effective since you can actually make do with a lean team of employees and also run your business effectively.

In fact, most Salesforce Alternative CRM tools used by SMBs are user-friendly and intuitive software solutions that not only stops businesses from investing in individual systems that come at a premium price, but they often have the option for SMBs to choose for a plan that is tailored for small businesses, which truly eliminates the cost of buying into an enterprise heavy CRM plan to get started effectively.

4. Accelerate Sales and Support

One of the best things about a CRM tool is that it helps to accelerate sales and provide world-class support to the customers. And that too at half the cost, since business CRM software helps to eliminate the cost that companies incur for buying various other software(s) to handle individual tasks and instead go for an all-in-one system which is capable of bringing all your business, commercial, and customer-related tasks together under one wide umbrella.

It not only makes the sales pipeline move much faster but it even helps to convert more prospective consumers in less time and thereafter retain them for long which makes the customers ultimately show up as influences.

In fact, there are several instances where automation in a CRM closed hundreds of thousands of business leads successfully, where you would have not had earlier expected to find business at all.

5. Encourage Better Team Work

When you are running an SMB, for the primary first few years it all about maximizing your limited resources.

And so in the beginning, the people that you hire or bring into your teams that you create (sales, marketing, operations, accounting, support services, etc.) are the biggest resource that you can cultivate for the growth of your company.

Hence it is imperative that you must create a high-performing team that can easily scale up your business to the next level.

However, for this, you just need to break silos, automate functions and create a central repository of data that can help in breaking all the barriers and buildup seamless communication and flow of information between all the staff and partnering organizations working in or for your company.

This is where easy to use CRM comes into play as it not only increases interaction but it also at the same instance pacify chaotic situations (in absence of proper information) that can eventually lead to better performance of your teams.

6. Provide Smoother Brand Experience

Finally, for an SMB, it is extremely essential to put up a professional demeanor without once again investing too much on highly-expensive business growth tools.

Now with the right business CRM for SMB and solopreneurs, you can provide your customers with a much smoother and professional looking front that can instantly hit all the right buttons that are required for providing the best customer experience to your consumers during their lifecycle with your company.

This is because CRM helps to automate and personalize communications and retain records of interactions for future use.

Conclusion

Hence in a nutshell the right CRM for your small business is a tool that not only provides comfort to the users of the software employed in your company, but it even makes you actually see your revenue grow really fast and thereby make your brand find rapid and consistent business growth.

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7 Easy Steps For Creating A World-Class Customer Experience Strategy

Did you know, businesses that focus on their CX or Customer Experience are capable of reducing churn and boosting their revenues which can lead to higher profits? In fact, according to Digital Marketing Trends Reports published by Adobe and Econsultancy, customer experience has been noted as the most exciting business growth opportunity to invest in this year. What is Customer Experience? CX or Customer Experience refers to the total of all the experiences that a customer has with a brand or business, which is based on all the interactions and thoughts that the customer has about the business.

Did you know, businesses that focus on their CX or Customer Experience are capable of reducing churn and boosting their revenues which can lead to higher profits?

7 Easy Steps For Creating A World-Class Customer Experience Strategy Click To Tweet

In fact, according to Digital Marketing Trends Reports published by Adobe and Econsultancy, customer experience has been noted as the most exciting business growth opportunity to invest in this year.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

CX or Customer Experience refers to the total of all the experiences that a customer has with a brand or business, which is based on all the interactions and thoughts that the customer has about the business.

Is the customer experience the same as customer service?

Now, even though both these terms do not mean the same, yet customer service can be considered as a part of customer experience indeed.

For example, imagine you contact Amazon, since you found your order has not been delivered, whereby an employee from Amazon will reply to you fast, be very helpful and provide you with your refund within the next couple of days.
This can be considered as a great show of effective and efficient customer service.

Nevertheless, Amazon as a brand does not stop over here. Even after the service is over Amazon keeps recommending to you different products, based on the past purchases that you made, sends you reminders for your unfulfilled orders, and provides you vouchers from time to time.

Now, this can be considered as an example of great customer experience.

And because of this experience, the chances for you to leave Amazon will be very low.

This because great experience implies happy customers, and happy customers mean loyalty- which at the end translates to profits and growth for the company.

Therefore, now that you have understood the benefits of providing world-class customer experience.

let us find out how brands can create a better customer experience strategy for their business growth.

1. Start from within the company

To begin with and aspire for providing excellent CX, it is really critical that even before trying to cater a great customer experience to the customers, every employee within an organization must share the same vision and the core values of the company.

For example, the core values of Amazon are frugality, customer obsession, ownership, the basis for action, and providing high-bar for talents. Later Amazon also added a sixth value which is innovation.
Now, if you are employed with Amazon it is important that as an employee you must know and live by these values.

Hence ask yourself, what are the core values of your company?

What is the vision of your company or how do you want to be remembered by your customers?

2. Understand your customers

Customer segments are very generic. As a brand, you just cannot group people age 40-50 together just because it makes it easier for you. Moreover, it can always be 45 years old Steve might not be similar to 45 years old Patricia.
This is because, it can always happen that one among these two people uses technology throughout the day at work, and the other does not know how to even use a Smartphone.

This is the reason, as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions, we insist on the importance of creating personas so that your employees understand and know better the need of each customer, in their database.

Actually, personas are fictional characters, which businesses must create based on their research in order to represent the different user types that might use their brand, website, or offerings in a similar way.

3. Build relationships with your customers

In modern times, just serving your customers is not enough, since every brand can do that in their businesses.

Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of easy to use CRM tools, we found what can differentiate any business from its competitors in the marketplace os the relationship that they build with their customers.

Show your customers that you care about their satisfaction, happiness, and wellbeing.

For example, brands like Zappos not only responds to every email they receive from their consumers but stands by to this practice even if it is to the CEO.

4. Train your Customer Support employees

Now, even though you probably would think that customer service is the last thing that you would like to invest in, on behalf of your company. But honestly, all the best technological solutions and products that your brand is offering would literally mean nothing unless your employees don not know how to talk and build world-class relationships with your customers.

For this always remember- how you say something is more important than what you say.

5. Gather customer feedback

Your customers talk about you all the time, you just have to invest in the right business growth technology solutions that can help you to listen to your customers.

Hence find out the ways that can assist you to get feedback from your customers. Use live chat tools, follow up emails, reviews, surveys, and listen to the social media interactions made by your customers.

6. Analyze your customer feedback

Ow, even though gathering feedback from the customers can be a comparatively easier task, analyzing them is not at all something that you can do easily.

This is because analyzing a large amount of data that too from different sources can get messy and confusing.

Hence buy a CRM or use AI-based tools that can do all these processes automatically. Modern business growth technology solutions are software applications that not only help you listen to your customers, but it also helps analyze their feedback and thereby make the customers happy by providing them with better customer experience.

7. If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it

You might be thinking right now “How can I measure something as abstract as customer experience?”

CX seems pretty intangible – right?

Nonetheless, three are three key metrics that you can find in most Enterprise CRM software tools that you can use to measure the customer experience of your company.

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is a CX metrics that survey the customers based on just one single question:

“How likely are you to recommend our brand to a colleague or friend on a scale of 0 -10?”

Customers who are “promoters” of your brand score 9 or 10, while customers who score 7 or 8 are “passive” and those who score 6 to 0 are “detractors”.

  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT/PSAT)

CSAT is another most popular transactional metric that is used for measuring customer experience.

In a CSAT survey, businesses ask a customer how content they are with the latest interaction with their brand, and often use a customer-service call or a purchase on a rating scale.

Unlike Net Promoter Score, CSAT is highly customizable and flexible in form, which implies you can ask different types of questions and use a plethora of formats in the survey to your customers.

  • Customer Effort Score (CES)

Lastly, businesses can even use CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys and ask their customers – “How much effort did you have  to expand to solve your request?”

CES is a customer experience metric that is used to improve processes, workflows and systems that may frustrate the customers while purchasing or availing support from the brands.

Conclusion

We are sure as one of the award-winning CRM software vendors for small and medium business and startups that by following these steps one by one you will not only be able to create a great customer experience strategy for your brand but sticking to these guidelines will also make your customers happy and thereby decrease churn and increase your revenue.

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