Tag: All In One CRM software

How Can You Best Use Customer Data in Your All In One CRM Software For Revenue Growth

In order to be successful in business nowadays, you have to go beyond selling your offerings and have to nurture and build your relationship with your customers. The good news is that thanks to technology like all in one CRM software solutions, there are plenty of opportunities today to understand your customer and their requirements, and remain engaged with them regularly. Customers in the present times interact with businesses more than ever before via email, phone, online purchases, or social media platforms. Moreover, brands often encourage their consumers to offer opinions and share purchase preferences, provide feedback, at every interaction in their journey. However, when customers think that those revelations are going unnoticed, they shift to more engaging brands in the blink of an eye.

In order to be successful in business nowadays, you have to go beyond selling your offerings and have to nurture and build your relationship with your customers.
The good news is that thanks to technology like all in one CRM software solutions, there are plenty of opportunities today to understand your customer and their requirements, and remain engaged with them regularly.

Mobile access to CRM increases sales force productivity by an average of 14.6% - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Customers in the present times interact with businesses more than ever before via email, phone, online purchases, or social media platforms.
Moreover, brands often encourage their consumers to offer opinions and share purchase preferences, provide feedback, at every interaction in their journey.

However, when customers think that those revelations are going unnoticed, they shift to more engaging brands in the blink of an eye.

Hence failing to listen to the customers has never been more injurious to the success of businesses than what it is now.

Nevertheless, the same technological advancements that permit so much customer interaction also helps smart organizations to manage and act upon the data resulting out of these communications.

Scalable and modern cloud-based storage options like CRM database, computing technologies, intuitive API integrations, and others have created unprecedented opportunities for businesses nowadays to know their customers, decrease the time needed to act upon this knowledge and thereafter finally create more profitable and stronger customer relationships.

Now, the key to doing this is to deploy the right technology and understand how to use it and so you need to understand how data stored in the customer database in CRM can help to build stronger relationships.

Therefore, here are three smart ways for data collection using cloud based CRM systems and its use that can help your business create meaningful and profitable relationships over time.

1. Provide a more complete understanding of customers

Many large organizations have already figured out means to leverage data to build better relationships with customers of their offerings.
Nevertheless, SMBs have been hampered by a paucity of resources to appropriately collect and manage customer-facing information even a few years back in the past.

Now as the tools to generate customer data proliferated with the growth of Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, many SMBs began collecting data only to become overwhelmed with how they can manage and apply that information for their businesses.

However, by centralizing marketing and sales activities in a well-integrated CRM database, you can even easily merge artificial intelligence through CRM integrations and recognize opportunities and intersections for sale, operation, and customer support reps once you are using all in one CRM software for your business growth.

This centralization of information not only allows enhanced personalized and accurate up-selling of products and services but it even aids in better and faster resolution of customer-facing issues that helps in building long-term relationships and trust between businesses and their customers.

2. Eliminate bottlenecks to better customer sales and service

No customers like to reply to the same question(s) times and over again. Conversely, no organization likes to deploy different resources to serve its customers because their internal business process discourages or prevents effective internal communications.

This is exactly where an integrated customer data in a CRM database solves both of these above-stated issues by aiding to eliminate or reduce internal barriers between siloed business responsibilities.

For example, an easy to use CRM software that enables all team members to securely input data make sure that at every step customers are treated with non-redundant and relevant interactions.

With the help of a small business CRM software, SMBs can not only note customer details which includes email communications, key conversations, customer preferences, project requirements, and more, so that every internal touch-points gains a comprehensive and holistic view of the customer, but it also helps to make the employees know their place in the process.

Hence consolidating information about the customers in a business CRM software solution’s database helps in streamlining the delivery of services which results in maintaining appropriate follow-ups when required which makes the customers feel that they have a cohesive team working on their behalf.

3. Encourage long-lasting relationships

Like any relationship, communication is the key for all businesses. However, maintaining an ongoing understanding of your customer’s requirements (and truly relate them with your business) is what helps in nurturing and maintaining long-lasting and meaningful relationships.

Now, customizing features in easy to use CRM software enables businesses to build these more productive (and more profitable) relationships with their customers.

This is because by using all in one CRM you can easily collect and use key data, such as customer interests, and also payment and financial information, if you are using a QuickBooks CRM and other relevant information, with available technologies like CRM and email integrations, mobile CRM apps, web forms, as these tools, ensures that all data in the CRM database are accurately tracked and reported throughout the pipelines.

Hence information in your CRM database not only aids in delivering custom offering(s) to your consumers but also makes them feel like they have a partner they can count on, which results in loyalty, referrals, and most importantly rapid business growth.

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How Automation In All In One CRM Can Reduce Documentation Works Easily

In modern times educated and connected customers expect the salespeople to remain available at any given point of time to provide, direct, immediate, and tailored responses to their issues. This is because investing too much time on activities apart from selling is no longer an option if sales reps are to meet their demands in the companies. Therefore to avoid falling behind, sales teams in all organizations must arm them with business growth technology and tools like an all in one CRM that aid in maximizing productivity and efficiency and allow them to concentrate on important things: the customer and driving in revenue.

In modern times educated and connected customers expect the salespeople to remain available at any given point of time to provide, direct, immediate, and tailored responses to their issues. This is because investing too much time on activities apart from selling is no longer an option if sales reps are to meet their demands in the companies.
Therefore to avoid falling behind, sales teams in all organizations must arm them with business growth technology and tools like an all in one CRM that aid in maximizing productivity and efficiency and allow them to concentrate on important things: the customer and driving in revenue.

With 48% of Marketers using Marketing automation it is one of the 4 most popular methods to create personalized customer experiences. Click To Tweet

Now, this is no longer a secret that salespersons do spend a lot of time performing activities outside of selling.

According to a survey done by CSO Insights, only 36 percent of sales rep’s time is focused on primary sales functions as a large number of their working hours are instead spent on conducting admin and other manual tasks, several of which stem from the workflows and processes that are required to generate documents, and so in order to make sales teams more successful and highly functional this less impactful activities must be automated with the help of an all in one CRM tool for sales and revenue growth.

Therefore, since it is inevitable that if documents are created manually there is likely going to be issues and problems, hence here are a few common problems that generate from manual document generation processes:

Improper visibility into the status of the documents

Documents that are not stored and gathered in a centralized repository (like a CRM database) and hence cannot be tracked leads to compromised and improper visibility.

This is the reason why when many times sales teams are required to answer questions quickly it becomes a time-consuming, challenging, and unreliable activity when a central repository of data does not exist and so it requires searching through a plethora of resources such as local drives and sent emails.

Inconsistent document formatting and branding

When sales reps in your organization generate and distribute documents manually it is impossible to make sure that the documents will have a consistent feel and look which is in accordance with your company’s branding.

This is because when documents sent to customers and prospects are not consistent in their look and branding, this inconsistency most often erodes the company’s brand integrity and can diminish the company’s image and reputation among its consumers in the marketplace.

Copying and pasting

While this may seem natural, nevertheless copying and pasting to create contents for any document wastes valuable time and at the same instance makes way for introducing errors, which can not only cause delays but also creates reworks in the sales process, which becomes a cause of frustration for both sales and customers of your offerings.

Therefore, to help solve these issues, sales teams need a process that can automatically produce a document (Excel spreadsheet, Word Document, or an HTML email) that can help to streamline the entire sales process and eliminate the pain points by:

Gaining enhanced visibility into documents

Once you buy CRM and use it as document generation software it helps in saving a true-copy of the document generated in the company’s CRM database, that in turn permits every member in the organization to find more visibility into the documents (such as date and time when the document was created and sent) as well as provide transparency in referencing the document contents for more visibility across other departments in the organization.

Therefore, by storing documents inside their easy to use CRM platforms sales and support teams can easily locate and find a reference for quick access to document contents during customer interactions which increase sales, and boost customer relationship and productivity.

Creating brand consistency

Once you buy an all in one CRM company leaderships and sales teams no longer are required to worry about sending documents with irregular banding and inconsistencies thanks to the business growth technology that incorporates document generation functionalities within the CRM software.

Instead, CRM software can build common document types and store them for use in the CRM database that is predefined and can be easily managed, to make sure that the current version of the document is distributed to the prospects and the customers.

Abolishing manual copying and pasting of data into a new document

In this instance, one or more templates are created beforehand and used when a document is required to be developed, which easily eliminates the requirement to copy and paste data from other unreliable sources, preventing errors that can happen when it is done manually.

Hence once you buy business CRM to eliminate copying and pasting (which is also a labor-intensive activity) creating documents by using automation saves time and adds to productivity.

In a report published by Aberdeen Group, it has also been shown that using an easy to use CRM for abolishing copying and pasting even shortens the length of the sales cycles as it helps in generating quotes quickly and automatically in the target language of the customers with the correct set of terms and conditions making sure and providing accuracy and consistent world-class brand experience for the prospects and customers across quotes.

Conclusion

Therefore document generation plays a central role in the sales cycle and so once you buy CRM it empowers the sales teams to create sales process optimization through the support of document generation solutions helping sales reps to focus on the most important aspect of selling which in turn boosts business growth.

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Proven Means For Providing “World-Class” B2B Customer Service

Faulty and poor customer service cost companies billions of dollars every year. Therefore, if your business delivers poor customer service, it is natural that not only you will lose money but your customers will stop shopping with your brand and move to competition within a few days of receiving pitiable customer service. In fact, in a survey done by Bain & Company in 2005 on 362 firms they found that only 30 percent of businesses organizations uses the functions of their company to deliver “best-in-class” customer service, although it was even found that more than 80 percent of brands that assume they deliver great service only 8 percent of their customers believe that they have received great service from these companies.

Faulty and poor customer service cost companies billions of dollars every year.
Therefore, if your business delivers poor customer service, in spite of using an easy to use CRM for boosting relationship with your customers, it is natural that not only you will lose money but your customers will stop shopping with your brand and move to competition within a few days of receiving pitiable customer service.

After one negative experience, 51% of customers will never do business with that company again.- NewVoiceMedia Click To Tweet

In fact, in a survey done by Bain & Company in 2005 on 362 firms they found that only 30 percent of businesses organizations uses the functions of their company to deliver “best-in-class” customer service, although it was even found that more than 80 percent of brands that assume they deliver great service only 8 percent of their customers believe that they have received great service from these companies.

Nevertheless, over the last 12 years there are also several businesses in the modern times that have stood out from the rest of the group, and were able to deliver high quality support services that just ticked all the boxes needed for delivering world-class service to their customers which we have highlighted in this article, since providing such excellent service is not just a buzzword, rather it is the lifeline for ushering business growth .

Respond to all customer service questions

According to a survey done by a CRM vendor of repute, it was found that while the average response time for best in class businesses was 3 hours, most company’s average response is pitiably 12 hours 10 minutes.
This means while the right departments at the best in class businesses that have the correct support procedure in place receive the requests in the right time and thereby handle it accordingly, most companies do not respond to their customer support emails.

Hence if you are also looking forward to providing world-class support to your customers primarily respond to all your customer support emails, and create rules in your customer service software (like an easy to use CRM) that will allow you to automatically forward the requests to the correct departments in your organization for faster resolution of their problems.

Create automated responses to accept a support request

Companies that provide world-class services to their customers let their customers know that their support request has been received and are begin handled.

While most than 90 percent of companies do not use auto-responders for acknowledging that an email has been received, according to a survey more than 10 percent of customers state that “waiting too long for a response” is one of the biggest problems that customers face when it comes to finding appropriate customer service.

Hence, do not make your customer wait, instead set up an auto-responder in your easy to use CRM solution integrated with your email client, and use an email template in the acknowledgment mail that will include a unique ID and support work hours to track the request, along with supporting links to a self-service online FAQs or knowledge base.

Follow up to see if the customers are happy

Even though most companies forget to do this, follow up on your customers to see if they are happy with your service, since this is an easy opportunity to get your brand ahead of the competition in the marketplace.

For this much like creating an automatic acknowledgment email, you can use market automation in your easy to use CRM software to set the follow-up to be sent after 3-5 days after your service response to see if your level of service was satisfactory.

Answer all questions in the first response

It has been found in surveys that only 20 percent of businesses are able to answer the support service emails in full upon their first reply.

A good customer service is all about answering your customer’s questions in full.

Therefore if you want to provide world-class support to your customers answer as many questions as possible and for the ones you cannot answer include a footnote in your reply that you will surely follow-up on them at your earliest with regards to any unsettled and unresolved issues.

Make it easy for the customer to contact support

For your customers always remember finding a businesses’ contact details is the first step to getting their problem solved.

Therefore, if you want to provide best-in-class customer service to the consumers of your brand make your email address, social media links, and phone number(s) clearly visible on the homepage of your business website, making it easy for your customers to contact your company for resolving their issues.

Moreover including these details on your website also adds an element of trust as best companies never feel afraid to hear from their customers.

According to a survey done by KoMarketing Associates, it has been found that more than 79 percent of B2B buyers will abort purchasing from any brand if the contact information is not visible in their websites.

Use an all-in-one CRM to empower your team

Companies that end up delivering great customer service usually do so since they have the right business growth technology and tool (like an easy to use CRM) and the right process to accomplish their job.

All-in-one CRM software platforms that are capable of helping marketing, sales, and support teams allows businesses to set up automated internal processes that aid them in acknowledging, tracking, managing and create reports on all customer support requests and tickets, which in turn helps your support teams to respond and answer to more customer requests easily.

Therefore if you do not have a customer support tool in your organization, it is high time that you must get started and invest in easy to use CRM, so that your support strategies can help your company become best-in-class by having the right business growth technology and tool, to begin with.

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How To Make The Best Use Of Customer Data Using Easy To Use CRM For Business Growth

In order to be successful in business nowadays, you have to go beyond selling your offerings and have to nurture and build your relationship with your customers. The good news is that thanks to technology like easy to use CRM, there are plenty of opportunities today to understand your customer and their requirements, and remain engaged with them regularly. Customers in the present times interact with businesses more than ever before via email, phone, online purchases or social media platforms. Moreover, brands often encourage their consumers to offer opinions and share purchase preferences, provide feedback, at every interactions in their journey.

In order to be successful in business nowadays, you have to go beyond selling your offerings and have to nurture and build your relationship with your customers.
The good news is that thanks to technology like easy to use CRM , there are plenty of opportunities today to understand your customer and their requirements, and remain engaged with them regularly.

93% of executives expect that using more customer data in their campaigns will create a noticeable shift in their ability to meet disruptive and competitive challenges. - Forbes Click To Tweet

Customers in the present times interact with businesses more than ever before via email, phone, online purchases or social media platforms.
Moreover, brands often encourage their consumers to offer opinions and share purchase preferences, provide feedback, at every interactions in their journey.

However, when customers think that those revelations are going unnoticed, they shift to more engaging brands in the blink of an eye.

Hence failing to listen to the customers has never been more injurious to the success of businesses than what it is now.

Nevertheless, the same technological advancements that permits so much of customer interaction also helps smart organizations to manage and act upon the data resulting out of these communications.

Scalable and modern cloud-based storage options like CRM database, computing technologies, intuitive API integrations, and others have created unprecedented opportunities for businesses nowadays to know their customers, decrease the time needed to act upon this knowledge and thereafter finally create more profitable and stronger customer relationships.

Now, the key for doing this is to deploy the right technology and understand how to use it and so you need to understand how data can help to build stronger relationships.

Therefore, here are three smart ways for data collection and its use that can help your business create meaningful and profitable relationships over time.

  1. Provide a more complete understanding of customers

Many large organizations have already figured out means to leverage data to build better relationships with customers of their offerings.
Nevertheless, SMBs have been hampered by a paucity of resources to appropriately collect and manage customer-facing information even a few years back in the past.

Now as the tools to generate customer data proliferated with the growth of Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, many SMBs began collecting data only to become overwhelmed with how they can manage and apply that information for their businesses.

However, by centralizing marketing and sales activities in a well-integrated CRM database, you can even easily merge artificial intelligence through CRM integrations and recognize opportunities and intersections for sale, operation and customer support reps once you are using all-in-one CRM software for your business growth.

This centralization of information not only allows enhanced personalized and accurate up-selling of products and services but it even aids in better and faster resolution of customer-facing issues that helps in building long-term relationships and trust between businesses and their customers.

  1. Eliminate bottlenecks to better customer sales and service

No customers like to reply to the same question(s) times and over again. Conversely, no organization likes to deploy different resources to serve its customers because their internal business process discourages or prevents effective internal communications.

This is exactly where an integrated customer data in a CRM database solves both of these above-stated issues by aiding to eliminate or reduce internal barriers between siloed business responsibilities.

For example, an easy to use CRM software that enables all team members to securely input data make sure that at every step customers are treated with non-redundant and relevant interactions.

With the help of a small business CRM software, SMBs can not only note customer details which includes email communications, key conversations, customer preferences, project requirements and more, so that every internal touch-points gains a comprehensive and holistic view of the customer, but it also helps to make the employees know their place in the process.

Hence consolidating information about the customers in a CRM database helps in streamlining delivery of services which results in maintaining appropriate follow-ups when required which makes the customers feel that they have a cohesive team working on their behalf.

  1. Encourage long-lasting relationships

Like any relationship, communication is the key for all businesses. However maintaining an ongoing understanding of your customer’s requirements (and truly relate them with your business) is what helps in nurturing and maintaining long-lasting and meaningful relationships.

Now, customizing features in easy to use CRM software enables businesses to build these more productive (and more profitable) relationships with their customers.

This is because by using easy to use CRM you can easily collect and use key data, such as customer interests, and also payment and financial information if you are using a QuickBooks CRM and other relevant information, with available technologies like CRM and email integrations, mobile CRM apps, web forms, as these tools ensures that all data in the CRM database are accurately tracked and reported throughout the pipelines.

Hence information in your CRM database not only aids in delivering custom offering(s) to your consumers but also makes them feel like they have a partner they can count on, which results in loyalty, referrals, and most importantly rapid business growth .

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How to Best Align Sales and Marketing through Lead Generation and CRM Software

Are you aware that aligning sales and marketing draws the potential to drastically boost the performance of your business? Although marketing and sales teams most often do not agree to this, nevertheless when both of them work towards a common lead generation goal, companies typically see more than 38% greater sales win rates. And there are no effective means to align sales and marketing than by adopting easy to use CRM software for lead generation, management and nurturing of the leads.

Are you aware that aligning sales and marketing draws the potential to drastically boost the performance of your business? Although marketing and sales teams most often do not agree to this, nevertheless when both of them work towards a common lead generation goal, companies typically see more than 38% greater sales win rates.
And there are no effective means to align sales and marketing than by adopting easy to use CRM software for lead generation, management and nurturing of the leads.

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

Therefore, here are a few ways your business can better align sales and marketing through a CRM software platform:

Build a Strategy Together

In general sales and marketing teams do not always see eye-to-eye, for one obvious reason, as both these teams have different goals.
This is because, while marketing has a much larger scope, concentrating on growing marketing, retaining customers, introducing new products and most importantly bring in qualified leads, the sales department, on the other hand, is solely focused around working with their sales pipeline.

Hence, to make sure that both sales and marketing teams are on the same page when it comes to generating and then qualifying and converting leads, we recommend implementing an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

What is a Service Level Agreement?

Well, in a layman’s term SLA is essentially a contract that highlights the conditions and terms of which one party has condescended to provide another.
While Service Level Agreements have been traditionally utilized for customer-related activities, in modern times it even plays an important role internally across all the departments in any organization.
According to a survey done 2017 by a global research firm, it suggested that businesses with a proactive SLA process are 34 percent more likely to find greater Return on Investments made (Year-over-Year).

Therefore, an SLA between marketing and sales would similarly highlight each department’s agreed-upon commitments to each other.
This is because SLA between these two teams not only allows them to hold each other accountable, but it even serves as a critical component for communication and interaction that educates the marketing and sales departments of one another’s responsibilities, roles, targets, and processes.

When developing your SLA for marketing and sales, here is a list of items you need to focus on that include:

  • Clearly define your ideal client’s profiles and buyer personas that you set in your easy to use CRM software.
  • Assign clear and transparent goals for your marketing and sales teams
  • Determine how leads will be handed off between your sales development reps
  • Identify and develop protocols for managing leads
  • Define the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that both marketing and sales will use to judge the progression and effectiveness of the company’s demand generation process

Now, once you have implemented the SLA we are sure you should very soon see consistency on how leads are created and working in your easy to use CRM, which is enough evidence to prove that the reports across both these teams align and they are working towards a common goal.

Streamline Interdepartmental Communications

According to a research study by PandaDoc, it states that:

“51 percent of marketers are not satisfied with the level of communication between the teams and 53 percent of sales professionals are not pleased with their marketing’s support.”

Hence communication is one of the biggest hurdles that boost conflicts among departments in any workplace.

Therefore, if you are a small business or a startup on the rise, implementing best small business CRM software aids in minimizing conflicts as it helps in centralizing information in the CRM database , making it easy for all in the organization to access updated sales pipeline data and communication history about leads, prospects, and customers in one place.
This is because marketing and sales teams meet frequently to analyze performance reports which are often pulled directly from their easy to use CRM software.
Potential reports for building dashboards or the frequently shared KPI reports that are built for performance analysis might include:

Top of funnel reports: Total monthly (Marketing Qualified Leads) MQL, and (Sales Qualified Leads)

Middle of funnel reports: Marketing generated opportunities by stage

Bottom of funnel reports: Sales generated by individual lead source

But how does this streamlines interdepartmental communications?

Well, by knowing and understanding what and when a prospect has last talked along with the context of the conversation, both sales, and marketing departments can work more productively.
It not only keeps your sales reps from having overlapping outreach but it also aids marketing to communicate with the prospects knowing where the interactions left off and so what type of content might be suitable to the prospects in their buyer’s journey, which has according to certain stats delivered 73 percent enhanced conversion rates.

Improve Quality Of The Leads

While there are several ways by which brands can improve the quality of their leads, nevertheless if you are using an easy to use CRM software solution for your business implementing lead scoring for your marketing and sales teams is one of the most effective options for boosting the quality of your leads.

You can also use marketing automation in your easy to use CRM for optimizing lead distribution among the marketers in your team and also connect these two technologies for your teams to assess, vet, nurture and segment leads before they are passed to the sales teams.

Lead scoring helps your marketing teams to prioritize on the hottest leads and reduce considerable time which is wasted on unengaged prospects providing sales reps more time to concentrate who are likely to convert most quickly.

When building out your lead scoring formula, teams should evaluate items like:

  • Contents that the leads have viewed
  • Nurturing campaigns the lead has engaged
  • Website pages leads have visited
  • Whether the lead fits into the demography of your present customers
  • Whether any lead has raised their hands and asked for more info on your offerings

Finally- Enhance your Personalized Outreach

Last but most importantly personalize every single communication that goes out both from your marketing and sales teams.

Using all-in-one CRM software that provides a 360-degree view of your leads, prospects and the customer’s history with your brand allows you staffs to get really smart with their communications.

Therefore, use an easy to use CRM that helps in mapping certain fields in your best small business CRM software (like lead source and others) which can enable your sales reps to get personal with their follow-up strategies that are more relevant to the leads for becoming your customers and thereby help sales to make quick wins.

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