Automating Sales and Marketing with CRM Archives - Best Small and Medium Business CRM Software

How Best Small Business CRM Solution’s Sales Automation Software Separates The Amateurs From The Pros

When you think of activities that are most important for making a sale, you must be probably thinking about several actions that need the human touch of the sales reps in your organization. Like listening to the needs of your leads and prospects, developing a solution to their pain points, and thereafter ask for the sale. Sales automation refers to any software tool that facilitates or automates manual tasks for your sales teams. Therefore, the most popular purpose of using sales automation in your best small business CRM software is to eliminate tasks that do not involve direct interaction or relationship building activities with your customers and reduce the amount of effort a sales team spends on managing and organizing their sales processes.

In 2018, 87% of the businesses are estimated to use cloud-based CRM, while a mere 13% are pegged to use on-premise CRM. Click To Tweet

However, apart from selling there are also several other tasks that your sales reps need to perform on a regular basis, as according to a recent survey done by InsideSales stated:

“Sales reps only spend 35.2% of their time actually selling, with the majority of their day spent on administrative tasks, research, and other non-selling obligations.”

These non-selling obligations can be things like:

Updating lead records and logging activities in their best small business CRM
Finding prospect’s phone number before making a call and then writing call notes afterward
Researching on the prospects (like finding their job titles, social media accounts, and location)
Emailing customized contents to the prospects with respect to their stage in the buying cycle

For the managers in your sales teams, the most widespread non-selling activity may include assigning leads to their sales reps or training new salespersons on the team’s sales processes.

What Is Sales Automation in your best small business CRM?

Sales automation refers to any software tool that facilitates or automates manual tasks for your sales teams.

Therefore, the most popular purpose of using sales automation in your best small business CRM software is to eliminate tasks that do not involve direct interaction or relationship building activities with your customers and reduce the amount of effort a sales team spends on managing and organizing their sales processes.

However, in spite of what the word “sales automation” may imply, it cannot replace the basic task that a sales rep do- Selling.

In fact, sales automation is a process that makes the actual work of a sales rep more valuable, as it permits them to invest more attention and time on quality sales-related actions, like improving the sales process, qualifying leads, or give the best prospects more attention to hasten the sale.

Types of Sales Automation

Sales Automation is a general terminology that can take many different forms.

Many organizations use silo sales automation platforms that focus on one specific part of the sales process (like prospecting or sending cold emails), while other those who rely on their best CRM for small business like ConvergeHub, can automate numerous activities throughout the sales process with salesforce automation integrated into the CRM.

Here are some of the key areas that sales automation can help to undo some of the frustrating and busywork out of a sale rep’s daily work, using salesforce automation (SFA) friendly CRM like ConvergeHub, which caters to almost all of these helpful tools.

Automate Record Creation

Sales automation in best small business CRM software can instantaneously generate easy to use CRM records when a business card is scanned, a web-form is filled out by a visitor, whereby it saves the reps from having to create new lead records and fresh contacts manually.

Automated activity logging in best small and medium business CRM software

One of the most annoying and frustrating “non-selling tasks” for any sales rep is the need to log in phone calls, emails, and several other customer communications for the benefit of the managers and other employees in the organization. Sales automation software is capable of logging those activities into your easy to use CRM software as soon as they happen, without the sales rep having to do the task times and again manually.

Automated research

A sales automation software integrated into an easy to use CRM that has the ability to scour the Web for information can aid the sales team in several ways, from gathering publicly available data on the prospects and adding them to the CRM database to searching social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to identify potential customers.
Per say, users of ConvergeHub CRM for small business can also avail its FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL for visiting anyone’s social media page and capture all information instantly with no manual typing.

Automated data entry

Sales automation software platforms are also capable of doing many more things that involve typing. For example, if you need to create a proposal for your prospects, sales automation can auto-fill your leads’ and prospect’s details like name, address, pricing, and particulars of your offerings. Additionally, an automated dialer like Click-to-Call when integrated with an easy to use CRM software solution reduces the need for the salespeople to punch in phone numbers manually for outbound calls.

Communication automation

Although no sales automation software even when integrated with an online lead management software like an easy to use CRM solution can put one-on-one communication on autopilot, nevertheless, many of the grunt-jobs involved in connecting with the prospects, delivering customized contents, or following up with the prospects at the right time, can be automated.

Sales email campaigns for prospecting targeted leads, scheduling meetings, and sending automated voicemails that permit sales reps to drop pre-recorded messages to the prospect’s mailbox when they do not answer their phones, can be easily automated using salesforce automation in a CRM.

Lead management automation

One of primary thing that a sales manager needs to do when a lead comes into the sales pipeline is to assign the lead to the most capable rep that is most likely to close the deal, which is based on factors like demographic preferences, or how comfortable the sales rep is with the specific product line.

Sales automation software in easy to use CRM software, allows managers to automatically distribute leads to the reps by setting automatic lead assignment rules based on their preferred criteria.

Apart from this after a lead is assigned to a sales rep, sales automation can eliminate the need for the rep to manually advance the lead through the sales funnel in the CRM, when stage goals are accomplished, or update the lead score when a lead progresses from one stage to another and ends up (hopefully) into a sale.

Automated guidance

With automated reminders implemented in an easy to use best small business CRM software, sale reps always know what they need to do next, which ensures that important meetings, and follow-ups with the prospects and leads, are completed on time.

How sales automation separate the amateurs from the pros?

Concisely, the basic and the most fundamental difference between the amateur and the pro sales reps lie in consistency.
Therefore sale automation software when integrated with best small business CRM software creates this consistency that is needed for a team to accurately measure the health of their sales funnel and impact of their sales and marketing efforts, which ultimately helps the team to make improvements in their sales strategies accordingly.

3 Proven Steps To Follow When Creating A Marketing Campaign With ConvergeHub

If you are like many of our ConvergeHub CRM customers, you are in the thick of developing and executing numerous marketing campaigns at once, it is natural you must be using different forms of contents for a variety of selling channels to address your prospects and customers. However, if you are not aware in the very first place at what you are aiming at, how is it possible for you to measure whether you are hitting the right goals? Therefore, just as a pilot works through a pre-flight checklist before hitting the runway, similarly, every marketer should adhere to these three pivotal steps when creating and executing marketing campaigns to measure its goals.

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

CRM is used for email marketing 60% of the time for small businesses- MarketingCharts Click To Tweet

However, if you are not aware in the very first place at what you are aiming at, how is it possible for you to measure whether you are hitting the right goals?
Therefore, just as a pilot works through a pre-flight checklist before hitting the runway, similarly, every marketer should adhere to these three pivotal steps when creating and executing marketing campaigns to measure its goals.

Know Where You Are Aiming

There is no marketing organization that has unlimited resources. Hence, every marketing campaign must serve a clearly defined specific purpose that will bring a positive impact on their business. Therefore, before creating any campaign, you must recognize what the campaign is expected to impact and how this impact can be measured using your easy to use CRM software.

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

Establish Performance Targets Before You Fire

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

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

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

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

Therefore if you are using a best small and medium business CRM software like ConvergeHub and you do understand the importance of sales force automation, be sure that you remember to incorporate your performance targets before firing your campaigns.

Plan How to Measure Your Results

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

Therefore, to apply any cloud-based marketing technology to support your measurement reports, like an easy to use CRM, you need to do your planning in advance, put your elements in place, and thereafter test your performance before you hit the “send” button. Since this the only way by which you can truly determine whether your campaigns are moving the needle when you view their analytic reports.

Takeaway

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

As per our knowledge, most ConvergeHub CRM users follow this process during budgeting and marketing planning, for this actions can be used to justify your budget, renegotiating goal, and for applying bonus components for your sales and marketing teams.

7 Golden Selling Skills All Sales Professionals Must Develop in 2018

As a sales expert, there are 7 key selling skills that you must develop, which are prospecting, creating rapport, finding out the needs, laying out the solutions, answer objections, finalizing the sale and getting referrals and reselling opportunities. These key selling habits proceed in order. Hence, regularly thinking about each of these 7 elements, which are essential to the sales process, and how they can be enhanced, is the only key to increasing your revenue, sales and profitability.

Hence, regularly thinking about each of these 7 elements, which are essential to the sales process, and how they can be enhanced, is the only key to increasing your revenue, sales and profitability.

#1. Find the ideal customers

To achieve greater success in sales, you should spend more time nurturing people who are better prospects. For this, you must look around for new prospects and remain busy looking for new businesses 80% of your time. Never relax in your prospecting efforts. Keep on prospecting morning, noon, and night; unless you develop so many customers that you do not have enough time left in the day, to satisfy and sell all the people who want to buy your products or services.

#2. Focus persistently on building relationships

The second most important habit for finding success in sales is to develop a keen habit of focusing on the relationship building before anything else. Right from the first contact, you must focus on establishing trust, rapport, and credibility with each of your prospects, since most successful sales reps devote as much time as necessary for establishing trust with their customers. Winning sales reps are those who ask an intelligent question to their prospects and listen attentively to the answers. Some even use a CRM platform as they seek to understand their customer’s situation and needs even before they go ahead and attempt to discuss their products or services.

#3. Clearly identify the needs

The third greatest habit of excellent salespeople is that they develop a habit of asking questions and then identify the real needs of their prospects related to what they are selling in the market. It has been found, that most of the prospects are seldom aware that they can improve their work situation or their life when the primarily meet you. This is the exact reason why prospects often say things such as, “I cannot afford it,” or “I am not interested,” or “We are very happy with our present situation or suppliers.” However, if you probe and ask more questions, ask about the customer’s situation and then when you start linking your products or services to those needs, the more customers start learning about what you can offer and eventually buys your products or services.

#4. Be persuasive

The fourth key habit, which every successful salesperson must develop, is the habit of presenting logical, creative, and well-thought-out presentations of all the features and benefits of their products and services. Once you have identified the prospects that can benefit from what you are selling, after establishing a level of rapport and trust and identifying their requirements, your presentation is where you can show your prospects why it makes sense for the prospects to act on your recommendations.

#5. Handle objections effectively

The fifth golden key to effective selling lies in creating the habit of resolving concerns and answering objections in a competent and confident manner. You can only excel in doing this, once you are capable of thinking through all the conflicts, the objection that a qualified prospect can make, and thereafter ideate a logical and complete answer to handle each of these objections and so keep yourself ready as, and when such situations arise. The crème de la crème, sales professionals always develop a completely clear and logically sustainable “bulletproof answers”, so that when it is needed they can easily put their prospects concerns to a rest.

#6. Ask for the decision

The sixty most vital part of selling is developing the habit of asking the prospective customer to make a buying decision. Since, no matter how strong your presentation is or how high is the level of credibility and trust that is there between you and your prospects, all prospects face their moments of tension or stress before making a buying decision. Therefore, as a good salesperson, your job is to move professionally and quickly through this stressful moments and request the prospects for their orders in a confident manner to wrap up the sale.
In fact, the best of the sales professionals plan their winning closes well in advance. What they do is that they watch for the buying signals from the prospects, make certain that there are no lingering objections and then promptly as the prospect to take action right away in a straightforward manner.

#7. Ask for referrals and cultivate re-sales

To conclude, top sales professionals never forget their customers even after the sale, but develop the habit of proactively asking for referrals from their happy customers. This habit of thinking in terms of referrals and re-sales is the key to high profitability and soaring income both for the salesperson and their organization. Repeat businesses are what makes companies grow.
According to a survey by BIAKelsey: “Sixty-one percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers.”

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!

5 Secrets of Marketing and Business Automation with ConvergeHub CRM

The more your business can cultivate leads and succeed in creating long-term relationships even before your prospects are ready to purchase your products or services, the more likely you are to win your lead’s approval and thereby increase your sales pipeline’s conversion rate.
To help cultivate and nurture leads to move through the marketing funnel you need marketing and business automation software which helps you to take the tedious work out of connecting with leads as they move through the customer journey. Nevertheless, marketing and business automation should not be dealt with a “set-it-and-forget-it” manner. Since for correct utilization of marketing and business automation you are required to properly setup and maintain the objective of your marketing campaigns to achieve specific objectives and goals.

On average 51% of companies are currently using Marketing automation. With more than half of B2B companies (58%) plan to adopt the technology.-Emailmonday Click To Tweet

Let us take a look at 5 secrets of successful marketing and business automation below:

#1. Prepare and Organize Your CRM

Make sure that you clean your CRM database since it will synchronize with your marketing and business automation software. Hence, if your database has a lot of outdated or duplicate information, you are sure to land up with a bad problem on your hand. Always go through your CRM database, clean up the names of your contacts, delete duplicate entries, and associate contacts with the right accounts.

#2. Validate Email Addresses

Another vital step in making business and marketing automation software work for you is to verify all the email addresses in your CRM’s database. For this, you can run all your email addresses through an email verification service and fix the emails those are not approved. In several instances, these are small errors that can be easily fixed (i.e., gmil and gamil to gmail). In other circumstances, you may find many emails those that may no longer be active. So be careful about deleting them before importing your emails into your marketing and business automation platform.

#3. Get Everyone on Board

Before doing your marketing campaigns using business and marketing automation software, address how the software will affect your marketing and sales processes. Will it change the way your leads are presently assigned? Will it take the place of your sales outreach strategies? For this, you need to check out with the other resources in your business, including your IT department, webmaster, marketing and creative team leads, SEO team, and your CRM administrator. Since, to make your business and marketing automation software work most efficiently, you need the help of these teams with tasks such as creating contents, make email authentication, track codes, and integrate the software, if it is a third-party application with your CRM database.

Take to your automation provider if you are not sure with the answers, but answer questions early on, so that you can you can fetch the maximum from your business and marketing automation system.

#4. Test, Analyze and Update

When your business and marketing automation system is up and running, it is necessary that you continue to test and analyze the output of the software. Every aspect of your lead nurturing and marketing campaigns to your lead scoring can be a lot improved when you are aware what results you are expecting to see out of the software. Therefore, by testing, analyzing and updating the results, you can make the necessary corrections and create better strategies for your business growth.

#5. Continue Education

We are sure like most of us; you will not learn everything about business and marketing automation and its best practices in your first few months. Therefore, in order to continue getting the most from your business and marketing automation experience, you must continue to educate you staffs and yourself on the latest updates and best practices and more. There are several places wherefrom you can find this information, which includes forums, webinars, and user groups of the software.

Conclusion

Business and Marketing automation is a wonderful tool that can easily bring success to your business. We are sure that by following the above tips, you will be well on your way to accomplish a successful business and marketing automation experience.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!

Top 5 hacks to Automate Sales and Marketing with CRM

Discussing about Automate Sales and Marketing with CRM, alignment in sales and marketing departments in any organization can mean many things. It signifies developing shared goals, creating common definitions and metrics, lead management, combined lead nurturing, and lead evaluation efforts, which can be created by implementing CRM or customer relationship management for business with varied goals. “Alignment between Marketing and Sales is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.”

Discussing about Automating Sales and Marketing with CRM, alignment in sales and marketing departments in any organization can mean many things. It signifies developing shared goals, creating common definitions and metrics, lead management, combined lead nurturing, and lead evaluation efforts, which can be created by implementing CRM or customer relationship management for business with varied goals.

According to Marketo:

“Alignment between Marketing and Sales is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.”

A CRM helps companies analyze and manage customer communications all through the lifecycle of the customers to enhance the relationship, nurture sales, convert leads, and assist in customer retention over time.

79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. Click To Tweet

However, how does a Customer Relationship Management for business help align marketing and sales in an organization?

Here are just a few alignments opportunities for automating and synchronizing sales and marketing with CRM to increase your ROI:

Improve communication

According to Workfront’s State of Marketing Work Management 2015 report, excessive interdepartmental emails and wasteful meetings between your sales and marketing teams are two major distracters for marketers. Furthermore, for every two among five marketers, the dearth of communication or even at times miscommunication is one of the most common reasons for interdepartmental conflicts.

With Customer Relationship Management for business software, which is also shared-work-management software, both sales and marketing team members can enjoy superior efficiency. A CRM system aids managers generate focused tracking reports that help businesses to better track what sales and marketing tactics are most effective for your organization.

Shared Goals and Expectations

With your marketing and sales teams collaborating to define the sales generation, lead scoring, sales and lead nurturing strategies, successful organizations that depend on software for customer relationship management for business create bridges between both the teams. This way, instead of on working on dissimilar goals with blurred expectations of one another, CRM help teams to work together by generating common ideas, which reduces bottlenecks and help business managers understand the requirements of their customer base.

Avoid Duplicated Efforts

With the automation benefits of software that deals in customer relationship management for business, CRM software helps both marketing and sales see the same picture of where each prospect, visitors, sales, and marketing qualified leads stands in the buyer’s journey. This aids the marketing department to tailor contents and generate automated email campaigns while enabling sales to better focus outreach to all the interested customers.

Nurture Leads to Opportunities.

According to MarketingSherpa, “79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.”

Therefore, it is mandatory that once a lead is acquired, there should be additional steps which are needed to be taken before marketing handoff leads to the sales team. It is a common phenomenon, whereby most sales team members often get frustrated once they receive leads that have not been nurtured or vetted. However, by connecting marketing automation software to a platform which helps customer relationship management for a business like CRM systems, leads can be easily nurtured, assessed and segmented before passing them off to the sales teams.

Improve Lead Quality

Software that deals in Customer Relationship Management for business also help savvy digital marketers to focus on lead generation by using marketing automation tools, lead scoring and progressive profiling techniques to improve their information gathering and assessment efforts. Since, without doing so, sales team members of your organization may perceive leads to be of a lower quality whereby leads can fall through the crack. The data gathered by the marketing and sales enablement teams using updated web forms, chat tools, and other lead enrichment strategies help to get better insights on the leads.

Takeaway

Here is a list of benefits that software for customer relationship management for business can help in aligning your marketing with sales in your organization for increasing your company’s bottom-line and ROI:

Improve lead quality
Identify the best leads worth additional attention
Improve upsell opportunities
Increase overall deal values
Set shared expectations and foster better communication
Improve lead generation results
Build a more streamlined and efficient process

If you liked this article, do let us know of your ideas and suggestions in the comment box below.

Tag: Automating Sales and Marketing with CRM

3 Proven Steps To Follow When Creating A Marketing Campaign With ConvergeHub

7 Golden Selling Skills All Sales Professionals Must Develop in 2018

5 Secrets of Marketing and Business Automation with ConvergeHub CRM

Top 5 hacks to Automate Sales and Marketing with CRM

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