Year: 2021

How To Manage And Convert Leads Using A Sales Pipeline CRM Software Tool

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company. But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte. Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand. Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace. So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company.
But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte.
Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand.

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

Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace.

So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Now lead management is a technique that focuses on bagging and retaining leads until they become happy and loyal customers with a subscription or purchase or any other business interactions on to the lead’s name.

In other words, lead management with a sales pipeline CRM software helps to guide the leads through a process of qualifying, scoring, and nurturing after which businesses can hand the leads off to their sales reps who are trained to turn them into paying customers.

Now that being said, let us show you some of the most important things that we have learned as one of the most promising vendors of the best small and medium business CRM software about managing sales leads over the last 15 years.

1. Define Qualified Lead

A major disconnect between the staff working in sales and the marketing department in any organization lies in finding a proper definition of a properly qualified lead.
Research suggests that more than even 75 percent of the leads that are passed on to sales departments never get actively worked by the sales reps in most organizations.

This can happen for a plethora of reasons.

We have found one major reason for this disconnect is not being able to define what a truly qualified lead is that can provide business to an organization
Hence for better sales effectiveness, the marketing and sales in an organization need to find a very precise meaning (or rules laid down for measuring engagement) when a suspected contact becomes a definite lead that can be thereafter sent to the sales department, partners, or other channels for nurturing them so that they can convert to a customer.

Now the parameters of this definition of an ideal sales-ready lead vary from company to company, but they generally include the following factors that include:

  • The horizon for purchase
  • Title of the lead
  • The budget of the lead
  • Geography of the lead
  • Size of company (in B2B businesses)
  • Size of the prospected opportunity, and more…

2. Nurture The Leads

Leads that have not fully passed the screen test of a “qualified lead” requires proactive nurturing by the marketers in an organization by using a sales pipeline CRM software.
We have found that most “leads” generated by marketing are doubtlessly not ready to buy based on their first interaction with a company.
Therefore it is best to nurture both suspects and prospects and you will be astonished at how much revenue can be made from nurturing lead in the CRM databases, even with the leads that have been already summarily written off by sales teams.

For this, campaigns need to be run allowing you to touch your prospective leads multiple times throughout the sales process using different sales cadences until they are ready to buy.

Special offers, new product announcements, and promotions are tools that should be set into action to reactive old and long-forgotten leads and even arouse interest in the new ones stored in the sales pipeline CRM software.

Hence nurturing leads is a distinctive sales and marketing skillset that needs to be greatly enhanced, measured, and rewarded appropriately for its successes by the company.

3. Distribute The Leads

According to studies, it is clear that the sales close rate increases phenomenally if you answer back within 12 to 24 hours after a lead initiates contact with your company.

This is because, by responding fast, you truly distinguish your organization and even yourself from other sales reps and your competitors.

For this, the “contact” should not just be an automated email responder, but also a personal phone call from a sales professional.

Obviously, the magnitude of the opportunity and the buying cycle command the persistence and intensity of the follow-up cycle with a lead.

Nevertheless, cloud based CRM systems that are integrated with AI and other cutting-edge business growth technology solutions are great technology in distributing leads quickly and efficiently using round-robin algorithms and more advanced techniques among the right members in the sales team.

4. Track Lead Source

In any business, you need to determine what works and what does not and the only way to know this type of information is to capture the source of the lead.

In an ideal world, this is done using a sales CRM system tool that gets automatically populated when a new contact or lead arrives into the system.

This is because if you are incapable of capturing the genesis or the source of the lead, you have no other way of figuring out what is working to make the lead find out your brand.

Most full-featured sales pipeline CRM software systems have inbuilt reporting systems that aids in understanding the Return on Investment (ROI) on the lead management activities.

Moreover, as CRM systems give you a multitude of ways for capturing and storing leads into the system, your marketing and sales team spends even less time entering and inputting data and more time acting on the stored information in its CRM database.

Additionally, with complete visibility to all leads, there is less chance of multiple people calling the same prospect, which can reduce the efficiency of your sales processes in the long run.

5. Remember Quality Beats Quantity

When it comes to generating new sales, quality definitely supersedes quantity, since significant time can be wasted by organizations and businesses that invest momentous time and energy churning through poor quality leads.

Moreover, the more information you can capture about a prospective lead, the more energized your sales team will be about the lead.

Now this information can be captured in many different ways including things like the search string someone used to get to your website.

This information increases the “quality” of the lead and should be passed to the sales via a simple CRM system.

6. Measure Everything

Lastly, you need to determine what is exactly that you want to measure and the reasons why.

Measurements generally include cost per lead, lead source, cost of acquisition, size of the opportunity, geography, buying cycle, size of the company, and more.

Hence once you determine what you want to measure, you can put the necessary tools like a sales pipeline CRM software in place to capture the information since when you have the right information, you can determine the return on investment of your marketing and sales efforts and focus on the lead generation campaigns that will increase your sales pipeline.

Conclusion

Do not leave money on the table. Invest in CRM database management and take your business to the next level.

There are plenty of easy to use CRM tools to choose from, so take your time when making a decision, ask plenty of questions, and keep your overarching goal in mind, which is – building up a strong customer base.

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5 Reasons To Choose A Cloud-Based Low-Cost CRM Software For Small Business And Startups

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively. Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business. Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively.

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

Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business.

Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Now gone are those years when the term “CRM” bought to mind a picture of expensive and bulky software that needs an entire IT team and experts working solely on installation and maintenance of the software.

In fact, today’s modern all-in-one CRM systems are more user-friendly and technologically advance, but it even comes with a variety of business growth solutions that are designed to address the needs of all types of businesses, irrespective of whether they are big or small.

Therefore modern CRM solutions not only offer new possibilities, but they are easy to deploy and maintain, comes at a flexible cost.

This is because most CRM solutions nowadays have moved from their earth-bound domains all the way to the Cloud. And so if you are looking for a low-cost CRM software for small business and startups this is exactly in the Cloud where your business should look for a business CRM solution.

Hence if you are still not sure about cloud-based CRM solutions that are price-performance leaders in the CRM space, here are 5 solid reasons why CRM that are cloud-based is something that all businesses should consider seriously if they are looking forward to growing their business and find rapid sales growth:

  1. Hassle-Free Installation

The long innate fear that CRM comes with a complex installation procedure is no more a valid reason for not adopting a CRM for your business.

In fact, present-day cloud-based CRM tools are “IT hassle-free” and you can be up and running in no time, and all you need for that is an Internet connection, after which you can sign in online and use it.

Hence for using a modern easy to use CRM you not only do not have to pay for hardware, software maintenance, and servers you also do not need a permanent IT staff for data migration or even installing upgrades.

With cloud-based CRM all this is done by the CRM vendors remotely.

  1. Seamless Access

One of the greatest benefits of buying a CRM in the cloud is the round-the-clock accessibility of the software.

For example, imagine a situation whereby you need to make some game-changing and urgent sales call while you are on-the-go, or quickly find a contact’s phone no, or send a revised sales proposal, or an email when you are out of your workstation in the office, cloud CRM software can provide you access to the software from anywhere on any device be it a laptop, desktop, tablet or even a smartphone.

Again all you need for accessing the low-cost CRM software for small business is the Internet.

Hence using a cloud-based CRM you can always remain connected to the centralized CRM database as cloud CRM provides businesses the freedom and flexibility to what you need to do when you need to do it from anywhere.

  1. Affordable Product

Another important benefit of using this cloud-based business growth technology solution is that this business-enhancing solution certainly will never break your bank.

This is because if you are using a cloud-based Salesforce Alternative CRM tool you do not have to allocate a big sum of money for making a one-off purchase, but you can pay in regular installment which is usually preferred by SMBs.

Typically cloud CRM solutions operate on the pay-as-you-go subscription model that needs minimal upfront investments and so reduces the risk of going bust while using the software.

  1. High-Security Levels

Since the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) on May 25th, 2018, as information security levels at Cloud services are times higher than those provided by local IT firms, vendors that offer cloud-based CRM tools take security issues seriously.

Additionally, providers of cloud CRM solutions even offer advanced automatized back-up policies and have robust data-recovery plans if any breach happens while working with their software.

Moreover, most low-cost CRM software for small business also offers data safety to their customers by using two-step authentication and robust passwords.

  1. Enhanced Compatibility

Finally, as stand-alone business growth solutions have little chance of success in today’s IT world, so modern business environment requires information exchange between already available technology solutions which is paramount for all businesses.

Therefore, no one would invest in a software solution that cannot save your contacts, open your documents, or be able to integrate the email or accounting software that you are using for your business.

Hence compatibility with other products and services is the key to ensuring CRM’s effectiveness and longevity.

Now, CRM that uses cloud-based technology can be easily integrated with other software or applications, such as Gmail, QuickBooks CRM, Excel, Words, PowerPoint, Zapier, and many other tools.

In fact, it is this compatibility that makes cloud-based CRM an even more appropriate choice for your small business.

Conclusion

Now that you know what you need to look for in your low-cost CRM software for small business, the only thing that is left is to choose the CRM for small and medium business solutions’ vendor wisely.

Remember it has never been more important to improve workflow between your teams and provide full visibility of client communications between your employees than ever before.

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How To Use Automation In Top CRM Software For Improving Sales And Business Growth

If your question is: Why should I automate my workflow or use a top CRM software? The briefest answer to this is: To get the most out of your work with the minimum efforts. Now, you may be wondering if there is any scope for such effectual automation within your sales team. Yes, there is! Hence, in this article let us outline a few tested and tried ideas for automation that are certain to deliver better results while reducing the workload of your sales teams.

If your question is: Why should I automate my workflow or use a top CRM software?
The briefest answer to this is: To get the most out of your work with the minimum efforts.

Now, you may be wondering if there is any scope for such effectual automation within your sales team.

Yes, there is!

Hence, in this article let us outline a few tested and tried ideas for automation that are certain to deliver better results while reducing the workload of your sales teams.

If sales reps make contact within 5 minutes after generation of the lead, the lead is 22 times more like to get converted into a hot prospect. Click To Tweet

Idea #1

Make sure that your web-based leads are contacted in minutes

Web-generated leads are precious for all businesses. Nevertheless, your sales reps must ensure that web leads are contacted within minutes after they are generated online.

This is because, according to a study published by MIT, it states that if sales reps make contact within 5 minutes after generation of the lead, the lead is 22 times more like to get converted into a hot prospect ready for buying your offering.

However, how can you be assured that your sales team will be capable of following up with every web lead so promptly?

This is where automation in a robust CRM like Salesforce or any other reputed Salesforce Alternative CRM for small business comes into play.

  • As soon as the web-to-form is filled up, the information gets collected in the CRM database.
  • Next, your easy to use CRM taps into your integrated telephony software solutions and prompts your sales reps active on the system and mobile devices.
  • If the sales rep is busy, the CRM system automatically forwards the call to the next able rep and continues to do so, until a free sales rep is capable of making the call to the given number.
  • The sales rep finds all the relevant information about the lead on their CRM system, and therefore armed with that data just need to click to make the call. This makes sure that all calls are contacted when they are hot and that too before the stipulated 5 minutes time.

Idea #2

Automate follow-up calls on email campaigns

Irrespective of whether your email campaign is about a demo, your new product launch, or a meetup, in all cases, it is really tough for leads to open your emails.

Easy to use CRM software with integrated email campaigning functionalities, help the users of the software to view who opened their emails.

Therefore, to ensure that your sales teams make follow up calls to every lead that opens their emails here is how you can automate your CRM to do it.

  • See the email campaigns report in the top CRM software solutions’ easy to use dashboard.
  • Select all the contacts that opened the email.
  • Push all the contacts into the dialing software integrated with the CRM.
  • For hereon let the dialer do its job of persistently and automatically dial every lead in the contact list and connect them to a representative.

Idea #3

Ensure that missed and abandoned calls do not become missed leads

All sales CRM software solutions capture incoming lead 24/7.

Now it is natural that you can miss calls during holidays, after your work hours, or when your lines are busy.

However, when you are using a CRM missed calls should not mean missing a valuable lead.

Hence, here is a workflow that you can set up easily to make sure that you never miss doing a follow up on any of your missed calls.

  • Your integrated telephony system can find any phone number that goes unanswered with the numbers in your CRM database.
  • Now if the call is from a fresh lead, you can set up your top CRM software system that a new follow up the ticket is automatically generated by the system.
  • An alert on the missed call can be sent by the system to your inbox, and in case there is a voice message that can also get attached to your email.

Idea #4

Send greetings, voice messages, and notifications to all in the contact lists in one go

Do your sales team members need to remind qualified leads, prospects, and customers about their subscription renewal dates, approaching last payment due dates and others?

You can easily set a configurable IVR (Interactive Voice Response) message, and create a workflow using automation in your business CRM that lets you broadcast the message to any or all in the contact list within your CRM database with a single click.

Conclusion

Essentially all of these stated ideas depend on a smooth integration between your top CRM software tool and telephone software applications like RingCentral, NexInteractive Dialer or Twilio Call that are most essential software solutions which can be integrated with Salesforce and all other major Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions like ConvergeHub that are meant for small businesses.

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Why Do You Need A Scalable Business CRM Software Tool In SMBs For Finding Rapid Growth

The number of startups and SMBs in the US since 1982 (according to the U.S. Small Business Administration) has increased by more than 48.7%. New businesses are starting every other day by ambitious businesspersons who want to lead a company and run it on their own. But then again a startup is a completely different game than an expanding medium-scale or large business since with growth come obstacles. Therefore how do we take our team, and meet these growing demands in small businesses? How do we successfully expand to cherish rapid business growth? Many SMB owners make business growth tougher than it is. This is because, they complicate their products and services, over-think their strategies, and fear too much about the stability of their employees.

The number of startups and SMBs in the US since 1982 (according to the U.S. Small Business Administration) has increased by more than 48.7%.
New businesses are starting every other day by ambitious businesspersons who want to lead a company and run it on their own.
But then again a startup is a completely different game than an expanding medium-scale or large business since with growth come obstacles.
Therefore how do we take our team, and meet these growing demands in small businesses? How do we successfully expand to cherish rapid business growth?
Many SMB owners make business growth tougher than it is. This is because, they complicate their products and services, over-think their strategies, and fear too much about the stability of their employees.
It is beyond any doubt that these are indeed important issues, but these problems pail out when compared to the one area that contributes most to the success of any business: Sales.
Now sales teams in SMBs that follow a rigorous and methodical sales process or a business CRM software tool on average according to CSO Insights, make more than 33 percent growth in their production and revenue than the sales teams that do not.

CRM applications can increase revenue by up to 41% per sales representative – Finances Online Click To Tweet

Therefore to find rapid growth, small business owners have to invest enough time every day in ‘Sales’ and so businesses that have adopted easy to use sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform experience seamless and better growth.

The Importance of Best Small Business CRM Software for SMB

The importance of small business CRM software is the need to address the ever-growing size of the business.

This is because today’s small business is tomorrow’s enterprise, and therefore successful startup owners that have adopted a CRM solution that grows with their business are the ones that realize stellar business growth.

The proof is in the pudding:

According to an infographic published by Bizhumm, sales CRM solutions have been known to boost revenue by 41 percent per salesperson, increase lead conversion rate by more than 300 percent while decreasing the cost of sales and marketing by 23 percent.

Therefore to empower sales and grow revenue small businesses need to implement the right resources and business management tools to do it.

Now if you are shopping around for your best CRM for small business, to help in your business growth, you need to accept the fact that a business CRM software goes well beyond just record-keeping.
This is the reason top-performing establishments use their CRM to its fullest potentials for automating tasks, such as marketing and customer support while ensuring that as their number of employees grows so does the capability of their CRM platform to manage its load.

Hence in this article let us explore a few key areas that best small business CRM software solutions help startups and small businesses to grow:

Improves decision making

Easy to use CRM technology delivers visibility into vital customer data. Since the more comprehensive and detailed are your reports, the better you will be able to measure sales activities, forecast sales, and track your business performances.
It has been found in certain research that most sales-oriented organizations are 38 percent more likely to use CRM for collecting sales analytics and customer information for getting informed on their ongoing customer interactions and touch-points.

Without the information gathered from analytics found in your best CRM for small business, you will not be able to focus on the big picture solutions for your company or empower your sales, marketing, and support teams to focus on opportunities.

Enhance productivity

With business CRM software solutions, your marketing, sales and support reps can seamlessly and safely automate their tasks apart from gaining quick access to customer information as CRM ensures all critical information remains stored in a single place within the CRM database.

Therefore as your business grows, you can significantly boost your brand’s productivity by having a scalable CRM platform that grows along with your prospering business, and also keep all records of your customer’s data which includes all customer history and buyer journey information stored in its database for boosting cross-selling and up-selling activities.

Promotes teamwork        

Growing small businesses and startups requires a scalable business CRM software platform in order to make marketing, sales, customer support work in a more aligned manner since it has been found in research by Aberdeen Group, that companies that have strong marketing and sales alignment achieve more than 20 percent increase in their annual growth rates.

Now if you are using a QuickBooks CRM solution, which even integrates accounting with your best small business CRM software when it is combined with sales and customer service modules in the CRM, it not only boosts productivity but also increases customer experience and promotes seamless teamwork that is needed for rapid business growth.

Therefore an all-in-one CRM makes it possible to open up lines of communication between your teams.

Improve calling services

Easy to use CRM, helps businesses to make outbound calls, receive incoming calls, record calls, create personalized calling scripts, automate voice mails and create many other telephony-based activates, which helps employees using CRM to quickly manage, assign and resolve incidents when these processes are automated.

Therefore, scalability in a CRM becomes a necessity when small businesses have ever-growing data of customer information in their CRM database.

Provide mobile access to data

In the present times, key data no longer can remain confined to the office. Therefore mobile CRM technology provides your team instant access to data which helps them to view sales and customer support activities in real-time.

This is because, with a complete view of customer history, pricing history, and several other types of lead intelligence data which can be seen from any mobile device, the best small business CRM software makes it possible to gain access to information that is needed for any growing business.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist business CRM software is a scalable business tool that not only provides small businesses with the commitment to sell better than their competitors, but it also enables collaborations across departments that results in providing world-class customer experience which helps to create grounds for new business and aids in finding rapid revenue growth.

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How To Boost Lead Conversion Using Sales Management CRM Tools

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their sales management CRM software? Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers? Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2021.

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their sales management CRM software?

Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers?

92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. - Nielsen Click To Tweet

Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization.

Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2021.

Integrate Your Sales Management CRM With A Marketing Automation Platform

A majority of sales reps today use easy to use CRM software solutions to move leads and prospective opportunities through the sales pipeline and close deals.

If you know what is CRM software, you must be aware that CRM is a robust application that stores a plethora of information about all your leads, and customers in the CRM database, which includes details like demographic and behavioral data.

Therefore, when you use automation in CRM, which is also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA) in tandem with your sales management CRM, you can without any hassles leverage that contact details to customize and target the messages that you need to send to your prospects.

Nowadays even most Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, let you personalize your lead nurturing process and send messages based on your prospects’ past buying behaviors, interests, and more.

Since doing this allows you to send more personalized outreach. Which in turn helps in better engaging prospects that enhance the likelihood of conversion.

Publish Awesome And Informative Blogs

We all acknowledge that the stage for converting leads comes at the very end of the sales cycle. However, to persuade the leads to get to that point, whereby they become interested enough to procure your offerings- you primarily need to build up trust.

Leads and prospective customers cherish to see you as a subject matter expert and an authority in your arena and feel that you can be trusted to support them and ensure their growth and satisfaction using your offering(s).

According to Forbes, blogging is a great way of building that trust:

“The fact is that in the world of today you cannot become an authority simply by declaring yourself as one. Customers are more suspicious, and they want to see you prove it. By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure that you can become that authority.”

Prospects and leads are more likely to engage with brands and organizations once you can establish yourself as an indisputable authority in their minds, leading to more lead conversion rates.

Set Up Killer Landing Pages With Optimized CTA Buttons

As the leads move through your sales pipeline, you need ways to capture more of their information by increasing their engagement with your brand.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to create simple, yet attractive landing pages that will encourage your leads to take the desired action, like request a demo, register for a webinar, etc.

Make it painfully clear to your leads, and visitors viewing your landing page, which action you want them to take, how they can take it, and most importantly what will they receive in exchange.

If you are not sure how to create awesome landing pages, it is best to check out some examples from your competitor’s websites.

Run Lead Nurturing And Lead Generation Campaigns

It is a common fact, that to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. There are several ways you can generate new leads, from email drip campaigning to social media programs.

Now, once you have generated new leads, you need to nurture them through the sales pipeline that must consist of a series of ‘touch-points’ to move them towards a sale.

Lead nurturing aids in identifying sales-ready leads using lead scoring, since each action your leads take can be scored to move the leads closer to conversion.

Set Up Lead Scoring To Qualify Leads

Lead scoring techniques help your marketing teams to identify the most sales-ready leads in your CRM database.

While scoring leads, you can use a point system that indicates the value a lead represents, by awarding points to leads for actions they take, like clicking or opening emails, visiting your website, downloading eBooks, participating in post-sales surveys, etc.

You can also award points to your leads for demographic data such as the place they reside, their job titles, the industry they work, etc.

As these scores accumulate over time, you set a score threshold, at which a lead may be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), which once they cross can be passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Remember, while you are setting up your lead scoring system, always include your sales teams in the process, since they can better decide along with your marketing teams, which action warrants which score, and at which a new lead can be considered as an MQL.

Moreover, it is also highly advisable that you must check your lead scoring practice at least once every quarter, for finding whether the leads are being qualified too soon or too late in the process. Since, if your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to your sales teams, but very few of them are getting converted, odds are that your marketing executives are qualifying the leads too soon, and hence you must increase your MQL threshold to fine-tune your lead scoring process.

Simply put lead scoring boosts the lead quality in your business CRM, which helps in achieving a better conversion rate for your organization.

Enable Sales To Quickly Follow Up On Qualified Leads

According to a survey done by InsideSales, it states that:

“Your odds of reaching a new sales lead drop over 10 times if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of [sales] qualifying that lead decrease six times after the first 60 minutes.”

Therefore you need to enable your sales teams for immediate to follow up, using a sales cadence once a lead is qualified, since the longer you wait to reach out to a qualified lead, the lesser the chances of conversion will be along with the passage of time.

Using a sales management CRM for creating reminders and automating tasks it is easy to send alerts to sales reps the moment a new lead becomes qualified, to ensure that your sales teams do not let MQLs fall through the crack.

Share On Social Media And Use Social Monitoring To Find Brand Advocates

It is easy to engage your know leads with multichannel campaigns and email marketing.

However, what can you do about those leads whose contact data you do not have in your CRM database?

Therefore, when you create blogs and other types of content around your brand, share them on social media, so that people may share it, which in turn will extend the reach of your brand and drive in more new leads to click through to your blog or website.

Since, once people do that, you will understand that the engagement has begun, as these will be leads that are genuinely interested in your offerings, and are so easier to qualify and convert into customers.

Remember to always include some type of offer in association with your content that you are sharing to capture the contacts of these new leads.

While sharing your content on social media platforms, if you find people speaking positively about your brand, reach out, start a dialogue, and show your appreciation. You may even ask them if they want to feature in an interview or a case study of your brand.

In other words, treat these people with care and respect in any possible ways, because they are potential brand advocates for your business, who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and also help to increase conversion rates.

Here are two statistics that illustrate the role that brand advocates can play for growing your business.

  • 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)
  • Only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)

Key Takeaway

Lead conversion is the bread and butter of your business since it is a process that allows your business to grow, by bringing dollars into the coffers in your organization.

Nevertheless, as you can see, lead conversion does not happen on its own, as it requires serious planning and execution of various tactics to increase the lead conversion rate.

Therefore, always measure your lead conversion ratio, by keeping a scorecard that can help you track this metric so that you can easily identify what is working and what is not, and let you fix the nonperforming issues and focus more energy on conversion tactics that are producing results.

The math is simple. When you increase engagement levels, you boost conversion rates, and revenue climbs for stellar business growth.

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Key Features Of Sales And Marketing CRM Tools – That Can Save Your Startup Today

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, is circumventing nine to five jobs, and throwing them into the bin. Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money. Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real problems and issues that can stall your super ideas and how adopting the best sales and marketing CRM tools can change that for you and make your company find business growth.

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, is circumventing nine to five jobs, and throwing them into the bin.

Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money.

Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real problems and issues that can stall your super ideas and how adopting the best sales and marketing CRM tools can change that for you and make your company find business growth.

Paying attention to your customers is important since 14% of startups fail due to not regarding customers’ needs. - Fundera Click To Tweet

What is CRM?

CRM is both a technology and an awesome strategy that integrates into itself several dimensions of customer relations, which helps to convey real value to the customers and retain the same for businesses. With CRM related IT solutions, world-class customer relations can be easily attained and utilized to create brands in the marketplace.

In other words, best business CRM is a tool that helps one understand their target customers, their needs, and how brands can sustain that customer relationship to propel your startup on the basis of that relationship.

Now there are three types of easy to use CRM software that is available in the marketplace:

1. Strategic CRM

This is a CRM software that is based on delivering value to the customers, better than the rest of the competitions, and integrates the same in product development and structure of the business.

2. Operational CRM

This CRM software focuses on the automation of sales, production, and service as per the requirement of the consumers.

3. Analytical CRM

This CRM software focuses on gathering, storing, distributing, and thereafter integrating and analyzing consumer-facing data to cater value to both customers and businesses.

There are several models of sales and marketing CRM tools available in the marketplace. Nevertheless, in this article, we shall discuss the IDIC model which aids businesses to ascertain the customers who are of high value and loyalty towards the brands.

Identification: Find out who is the customers and understand them well.

Differentiation: Identity which customer has the greatest potentiality and thereby have more future prospects.

Interaction: Makes sure that businesses can perceive the customer’s desires, and understand the customer’s possible relationship with other brands.

Customization: Personalize offers and means of communication to make sure that the customer’s desires can be fulfilled.

So now that you are aware of what is CRM let us move on to the five most important reasons as to why you must buy your best sales and marketing CRM tools for your startup organization and stick to this cutting-edge business growth technology and tool.

5 KEY PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS (FOR STARTUPS)

1. CASH CRUNCH

According to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that more than 29 percent of startups fail because of cash crunch and more than 18 percent for cost and pricing issues.

Therefore it is important for any startup business to keep their pricing compatible and yet generate enough profits to keep the krypton of cash crunch at a bay.

This is over here small business CRM software comes into play as it can help customers to understand the customer’s choices and buying patterns to integrate the same in product development and provide pricing that predicts good business growth.

2. POOR RELATIONS WITH THE CUSTOMERS

Relations with its customers is the spine of any business, especially startups as they are more consumer-based models of business and this is why more startups are in need of incorporating CRM strategies for their growing businesses.

According to reports among all startups that fail more than 17 percent are those that failed to develop and deliver a user-friendly product or service and another 17 percent failed because of inappropriate business models that underlined their offerings.

Therefore, this data even illustrates the growing importance to adopt the best all in one CRM in developing a consumer-based model for business that can help in building user-friendly offerings.

3. NEED FOR THE RIGHT TEAM

The idea of delivering a customer-friendly offering, for any startup is a challenging task, which needs the right team to pull that off.
As per statistics and data that we referred to before about 23 percent of startups fail due to their team’s inefficiency in catering a customer-friendly offering to the consumers in the marketplace.

Therefore as a startup entrepreneur, you need extensive staffing and training programs that can aid you in employing the right team to focus on providing value to the needs of your customers.

This is over here CRM for small business once again comes into play as it can help you to identify the right persons for your job and even train the same marketing, sales, and support strategies to reach customers and sustain them over a long period of time.

4. NEED FOR RESEARCH

Just as there is no way that we can write an article without any proper research, similarly the same applies to any startup, as comprehensive market research is most important and a must for the growth of any startup business across the globe.

According to research, it has been found that 42 percent of failed startup ventures were not successful since they did start their business after performing any market research about their proposed offerings.
Additionally, 13 percent of startup businesses failed and are so ill-fated because they launched their business at a bad time, statistics which show the extent to which startup organizations ignore real-time market trends while starting their businesses.

Therefore, as one of the most recognized vendors of software solutions in the Salesforce Alternative CRM marketplace, we can assure that it is the business growth technology that is capable of storing, integrating, and analyzing consumer data which aid startups to find and focus on the right market at the right time to launch the right product or service in the marketplace.

5. MARKETING WOES

As per statistics and data that we referred even before 14 percent of startups fail due to poor or ineffectual marketing and another 14 percent for ignoring their customers.

But why do startups fail at marketing or while conducting their after-sales service?

Even though there can be multiple factors that can make it happen but one of the most important of all these factors is not knowing well your customers.

CRM for SMB and startups helps growing businesses to understand their customers thoroughly so that they can cater to their customer’s needs.

This is exactly where Analytical CRM comes into play which aids in gathering consumer-related data and with Operational CRM that can ensure faster services to their customers and Strategic CRM that can help in marketing their offerings strategically to target relevant consumers based on their behavioral and purchase patterns which can be easily collected, stored and thereafter analyzed once it is hived inside the CRM database.

Conclusion

Therefore now that you know why your startup needs to adopt the best sales and marketing CRM tools and implement CRM strategies for your business growth, and the right type of CRM to go for to overcome each of these hurdles at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, it remains without any doubt that small business CRM software is that much-needed firepower which your startup needs as the next big weapon for victories ahead in this competitive global marketplace.

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Play With Numbers: How To Turn Data Into Actionable Insights For Business Growth

Irrespective of the role that you play in your organization, having the right aptitude to convert raw business information or turn data into actionable insights is slowly becoming a must-have skill needed for the growth of carriers in all industries across the globe. In fact, according to an HBR (Harvard Business Review), it has been found that more than even 60% of business enterprises wants their senior leaders to have proper data-analysis skills that can help to contribute to providing strategic business decision-making skills that can turn them into an indispensable member of any team. Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools with hundreds of active users across the globe, to help you build the right mindset and skills here are some of the key strategies and skills that can help you to turn data into actionable insights which can predict rapid business growth.

Irrespective of the role that you play in your organization, having the right aptitude to convert raw business information or turn data into actionable insights is slowly becoming a must-have skill needed for the growth of carriers in all industries across the globe.

74% of CRM software users said that their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data. - Capterra (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, according to an HBR (Harvard Business Review), it has been found that more than even 60% of business enterprises wants their senior leaders to have proper data-analysis skills that can help to contribute to providing strategic business decision-making skills that can turn them into an indispensable member of any team.

Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools with hundreds of active users across the globe, to help you build the right mindset and skills here are some of the key strategies and skills that can help you to turn data into actionable insights which can predict rapid business growth.

1. Do Not Make Things Too Complicated

Primarily once you start learning how you can turn data into actionable insights for your business, it is imperative that you must understand that every business or company has problems that need to be solved or even things that can be improved for finding more revenue growth.

Hence look for an opportunity to reduce cost, meet evolving customer needs, dive efficiency and thereafter prepare a set of questions that will help to generate insights and decisions through analysis.

Now, for finding insights from raw and unstructured data, you do not always need to use Python or R programming to perform basic analysis tasks.

Therefore start by using Excel or other simple tools to uncover insights, trends, and patterns and thereafter convert a few rows of data into a chart which can help to reveal unexpected and hidden things about your business.
Do not worry to get things right the very first time, but rather accept your mistakes and thereafter try to improve.

In fact, if you just have the basic technical expertise of how you can work with a business CRM solution or an Excel chart, have knowledge about your business domain, and proper communication skills, you practically have everything that you need to get started with data analysis for your company.

2. Work With What You Have Got

Remember while you are building your skills to turn data into actionable insights for your business, data is messy and there are bound to be gaps, holes, and imperfections in your datasets.

Now this is true since most useful raw data required for solving business issues is often collected from social media platforms and webpages where symbols like hashtags, ampersands, dollar-signs, etc., will remain in the data, and so you have to be able to work with what you have got.

As one of the award-winning vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses, we can assure you of the good news that the underlying information for turning data into actionable insights does not have to be perfect to provide useful insights, as long as you keep a few things in mind.

For example, before analyzing the data you need to understand where the data comes from and thereafter determine which sources will be most useful to solve your problems.

Additionally, never make assumptions about the completeness poor quality of the data.

Rather go through each dataset and verify that everything is (relatively) clean and useful. Hence always perform a visual inspection of your raw data since missing data or large gaps in data needs to be taken into consideration when making observations or drawing conclusions from the finding generated from those data.

Finally, remain vigilant and extra-careful when handling missing values or filling in the blanks in machine-learning datasets, since such things might produce biased conclusions.

Therefore, to remain on the safe side, apply common sense to the insights that you have discovered from the data before recommending actions.

3. Sell Your Ideas Effectively

Remember even great business growth ideas, cannot survive bad presentations. And sadly many new and even veteran analysts fall short when they reach this part of the data analysis process since they lack the ability to sell their ideas to stakeholders in a concise, confident, and effective manner.

Hence even before you learn how to turn data into actionable insights for your business, enrich your skills of telling a story without graphs, charts, or PowerPoint slides.

Learn to condense a story into a single line “sound-bite” that will resonate appropriately with your audience.

Never use data as a crutch.

Therefore ask these simple questions to yourself before selling your ideas, which includes (but is not limited to):

  • What does this information ultimately mean?
  • What point are you trying to make?
  • How do your results and conclusions tie back to the original problem in your business?

Once you have all the proper answers to these questions craft a narrative that should resonate instantly with your target audience, since a good data analyst has to be able to present their ideas in a way that everyone can understand and you really do not need a crystal ball to predict the future or act wisely to make a lot of sense in real life.

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Tips On Black-Belt Customer Retention Program Ideas – That Works

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

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

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

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

What are customer retention programs?

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

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

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

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

1. Create an onboarding program

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create customer follow up programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Identify risk customers

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Win back lost customers

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

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

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

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

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CRM And Customer Service Skill Enhancement Tips For Small Business Growth

Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business? Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings. This is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands. Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”

Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business?

Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings.

Globally, 54% of all consumers say that they have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago. - Microsoft(2021) Click To Tweet

This is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands.

Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”

Well, even though it is one way of showing that cars with bumper stickers stuck on them like these shows that they are ready to continuously evaluate their own performances, nevertheless asking “How are we doing” is a good step in showing that your business does care about how potential customers think about your brand and your company.
This is because it takes more than just asking the public to figure out if the customer service that your company is providing is meeting the real expectations of your customers.

Companies (especially small businesses) have pretty comprehensible indications when their customer service is bad.

Therefore, it is only when it becomes just about impossible to keep up with a volley of negative remarks and criticisms on social media and when sales start to dwindle or they are increasingly having to offer ‘make good’ that managers and leaders are quick to see how they can improve the way questions and complains are handled by the service teams in the organization.

However, by the time they reach that aforesaid point, it might already be too late to keep up with a valuable relationship or prevent permanent damage happening to the brand.

Hence, most successful small businesses have learned to stop and make changes wherever it is necessary based on the variety and volume of customer complaints coming through.

In fact, successful businesses armed with CRM and customer service team take a hard look in the rear-viewing mirror before continuing on their customer support journey, to ensure that they have not missed any important markers on their way.

Therefore for ascertaining if the service provided to your customers is good enough can involve a mixture of subjective indicators and formal methods, out of which below are five to consider for your business growth:

1. Find Out What Is Good Enough

There are several anecdotal indicators of customer service metrics to choose from, and there are also a lot more of it than what is common across your industry.

Irrespective of whether you are using Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software these data can be readily captured as they directly impact your business growth.

Some of the most popular metrics found in easy to use CRM software include CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score).

Although it is really hard to reach 100% in any of them, nevertheless based on Revenue per Customer, and Customer Retention and Churn rate, determine what looks good and what appears to be great for your startup or small business.

2. Use Multiple Effective Feedback Loops

Most businesses big or small do some kind of survey to measure the quality of their customer service at one point in time or another.
This can work if your business has some sort of solid email database in the business CRM, or you know of a convenient point in the customer journey where purchasers are most willing to complete your survey questionnaire.

In other cases, several small businesses and startup organizations even offer simple online forms on their websites to collect feedback on their support services, or in modern times a ‘hashtag’ that can be used on social media for viewing their feedbacks.

Always remember that presently we dwell in an omnichannel world and so according to certain research conducted it states that more than 40 percent of customers prefer not to do business with brands if they are incapable of using their preferred channel(s) for conveying their issues and feedback.

3. Remain Aware Of Organic Feedback

Even if you have set up channels to get the opinions of your customers and find the right metrics for measuring your customer satisfaction scores, there will always be certain customers of your brand who share their experiences (good as well as bad) on their own accord.

This can be a comment made by the customer to a sales rep (once they approached for selling a new product), something said in a public forum, or on stage at an industry-specific event.

Therefore remember to check and pay special attention to these customers who take time to send snail mails even in this era of digitalization and social media as to whether they have been pleased or displeased about the customer service they received from your brand.

4. Test The Effectiveness Of Self-Service Tools

Finally, your small business might create a solid product/service manual, or create a knowledge base and an open library of necessary documentation and other content online to aid your customers help themselves.

However, if most of these generated contents go unused, it becomes pretty obvious how good these resources have been marketed or developed for helping your customer’s needs.

Self-service is just another customer service channel. Irrespective of whether it is a sophisticated Chatbot, or simply a community of online users where your customers can come up with answers aided by their peers, the use of self-service in customer support once you use CRM and customer service team to create the knowledge base shows how well they trust your brand to empower them with DIY (Do It Yourself) capabilities.

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Small Business Growth Ideas: Sales Hack For SMBs (That You Cannot Ignore)

Before you start learning some more small business growth ideas, are you aware that only 35 percent of a sales rep’s time is actually spent in selling? Well, we know these stats can be absolutely frustrating for sale reps and managers alike. Therefore, to stay successful, sales teams have to not only become an expert at organizing their time but also needs to maximize it. Hence, here are some of the most simple tried and common hacking tips that you and your sales reps can utilize in your small business to maximize their selling time.

Before you start learning some more small business growth ideas, are you aware that only 35 percent of a sales rep’s time is actually spent in selling?

Well, we know these stats can be absolutely frustrating for sales reps and managers alike. Therefore, to stay successful, sales teams have to not only become an expert at organizing their time but also needs to maximize it.

A properly implemented CRM solution can yield an ROI of 45% per dollar invested. Click To Tweet

Hence, here are some of the most simple tried and common hacking tips that you and your sales reps can utilize in your small business to maximize their selling time.

Simplify Your Easy To Use CRM Data       

As a manager looking after your sales teams, look for ways to streamline the quantum of information that you need your sales reps to collect and enter into the CRM database.

Well, we know it must seem tempting to track and evaluate every single piece of information about your salesperson’s deals. Nevertheless, in reality, doing this will not only steal invaluable time from your sales reps, but excessive data even in your best small business CRM software can bog down your team, and seldom provide any extra info that may revolutionize your sales process.

Automate As Many Activities As You Can

Irrespective of whether you are using enterprise-level CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM for startups and small businesses in either case sales automation is becoming more and more sophisticated every day.

However when we talk about data fidelity it can still feel like a gamble, and so your sales teams must identify activities in sales that are not heavily tied to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and so can be automated easily.

For example, as another small business growth ideas if you are using a separate software tool like accounting software to create proposals for your prospective customers, make sure that you are leveraging integration like QuickBooks CRM (software that integrates CRM with QuickBooks) to automatically pull data from your accounting software into your CRM database.

This is because automating tasks using Sales Force Automation (SFA) in a CRM means reducing errors that at the end save your sales teams countless hours of overtime.

Make Contents Easier To Find

It is hard to believe, but it is true that 60-70 percent of the content created by B2B marketing teams, especially in small businesses is never used by sales.

Here is a solution:

Instead of your sales reps wasting their precious time searching for contents, use a smart folder in your easy to use CRM that provides discoverability or use dedicated content distribution applications like DropBox™ or OneDrive™ that helps in sharing assets by integrating it with your CRM database.

Avoid The Back-And-Forth Scheduling            

There are several business application tools available in the marketplace these days that permit your sales reps to schedule meetings by sharing a link to your calendar instead of firing several messages and emails to verify each other’s availability and thereafter suggesting a time for the meeting.

Integrating online appointment schedules with your easy to use CRM aids in easily avoiding this time suck and therefore provides more time for doing sales for your sales teams.

Use Data To Your Advantage

As another small business growth ideas leverage applications like PandaDoc™ and others for document management and automation to provide extremely useful information like document viewing reports, document forwarding reports, and eSignature notifications that leverages the sales rep’s power to understand when to follow up.

Moreover, integrating document management software with best small business CRM software provides instant access to this type of data that helps in completely eliminating the questions of whether or not contact or a proposal has been reviewed or received by the customers that boost the likelihood of winning the deals quickly.

Conclusion

Therefore after reading through these small business growth ideas irrespective of whether you are a team of 10 or 50, remember it is always beneficial and smart to dedicate some energy and time to leverage your sales operations and use sales enablement tools that help in dramatically reducing the time spend by your sales teams on mundane admin works, so that your sales reps may find more time to sell, which directly translates to rapid business growth.

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