Tag: best CRM for small business

Working With A Reduced Sales Team? 5 Reasons Why You Need A CRM For Small Business

The entire global economy has slowed down because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sales have fallen, and businesses have to work with reduced Sales Teams. 64% of businesses are reporting a moderate decrease in sales pipeline while 16% are reporting a significant reduction. The top reasons for the shrinking sales pipeline are businesses compelled to reduce their Sales teams due to budget compulsions and sales personnel working from home.

And, It’s a lot worse for small businesses.

If your business is facing a similar situation too, there’s a way to make your smaller sales team better and mightier than any sales team and bring your sales pipeline to life again.

With a CRM for Small Business.

“But do I need a CRM? We are managing fine with our excel sheets and mobile phones.” Well, there’s a reason, and not one but five, why your team needs a CRM for small business more than ever.

5 Reasons Why A CRM For Small Business Is A Must

1. Drives SalesForce Automation

You may be working with a small team but you don’t want to miss out on available sales opportunities, do you?. According to Mckinsey, over 30% of sales-related activities can be automated. Automation can help you do more in less time with lesser efforts. A top CRM software can help you automate a lot of your activities and ramp up your productivity even with a reduced sales team. Activities like generating a quote, checking the past buying history of a customer or previous orders, etc., that take your sales team hours to do can be done in a few minutes.

Sales force automation with CRM

2. Convert Leads Faster

When leads are difficult to come by, you need to improve your lead conversion rate and convert them fast. Sales responsiveness is key to converting your leads. Research shows that 50% of buyers choose the vendors that respond first. A CRM software can enable creating alerts to your Sales Reps whenever a new lead enters into your system. This way he can respond faster and convert the prospect into a customer.

A CRM also allows you to build a lead management process to convert leads better.

Sales CRM for Small Business

3. Run Highly Targeted Campaigns

As sales opportunities dry up, every company is aggressively pursuing the prospects. A one-size-fits-all lead generation method will not deliver expected results. You need to run focused and personalized campaigns to reach prospects with higher potential for conversion.

A CRM for small businesses can give your team capabilities to process volumes of customer data, segment them into various categories, and then run highly targeted email campaigns. You can use ready-to-use email templates, schedule your campaigns and automate them.

And the results can be surprising!

Email open rates CRM

4. Improve Engagement With Existing Customers

In our quest to find new customers, we often forget the value of our existing customer base. These are people who have tested and trusted your product. Happy customers can give you repeat business. But more than that they can promote your business to their friends. A real treasure trove!

Most of the small businesses are not able to drive engagement with their customers. An occasional phone call from your sales reps is not enough. A CRM can help you regularly engage with your customers so that whenever there’s a need for your product/service, your company name is at the top of his/her mind. You can even run and manage a referral program using a CRM and convert your customers into brand advocates.

5. Prepare For The Future

Businesses were adopting various digital technologies before Covid-19. The pandemic has only accelerated the digital transformation of businesses. The same is with Sales. Most of the sales activities have gone online and experts believe it will be the new normal. A CRM can be the backbone of your digital transformation journey and help you go digital faster.

A good small business CRM allows you to integrate it with other software and apps such as billing, accounting, and even telephone systems. You can make it the central hub of your Sales Teams.

Ready to try a CRM!

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Recently, global IT News Magazine ZDNet has named ConvergeHub as one of the Top 10 CRM Software in 2021.

To know more about how ConvergeHub can help your business, click here.

For a 14-day free trial, click here.

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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Boxes You Must Check Before Adopting A Sales CRM Software For Small Business

The incredible impact that technology has on business growth is fairly recognized now, especially in marketing, support, and sales. However, for this, you have to choose the right business growth technology and tools for your company or you will surely run the risk of it not being used at all. Now, the most popularly used tool for marketing, support, and sales teams is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system because if you buy a sales CRM software for small business it helps SMB organizations to be more productive by working more efficiently and understanding the customer’s experience with your brand that boosts sales and revenue. However, to reap the full benefit of a business CRM solution, your teams must use the software application, even though it is often stated that the employee adoption of CRM is neither easy nor assured be it an enterprise-level CRM solution like Salesforce or other Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by small businesses and startups in the CRM space.

The incredible impact that technology has on business growth is fairly recognized now, especially in marketing, support, and sales.
However, for this, you have to choose the right business growth technology and tools for your company or you will surely run the risk of it not being used at all.
Now, the most popularly used tool for marketing, support, and sales teams is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system because if you buy a sales CRM software for small business it helps SMB organizations to be more productive by working more efficiently and understanding the customer’s experience with your brand that boosts sales and revenue.

43% of CRM customers use fewer than half the features they have on their CRM. - CSO Insights Click To Tweet

However, to reap the full benefit of a business CRM solution, your teams must use the software application, even though it is often stated that the employee adoption of CRM is neither easy nor assured be it an enterprise-level CRM solution like Salesforce or other Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by small businesses and startups in the CRM space.

Therefore, it is always a smoother process if you can understand what your teams (especially sales) need once you purchase a sales CRM software for small business and so here are the four most important qualities your team members will absolutely want to see in a new easy to use CRM tool, since purchasing bad technology is even worse than none, as adopting a wrong technology for your startup or small business can rapidly scale down your business growth.

1. Buy CRM That Automates Your Processes

The best sales CRM software for small business should be both easy to use and automate processes for your sales, marketing, and support teams.
This is because; fancy features that are not essential for your business processes can be not only pretty distracting but it can also make the whole CRM adoption more complicated than it should be for your startup.

Hence, before you buy CRM for your company, think of the bells and whistles (which might seem attractive) if they are absolutely necessary for your business.

Rather, look for features in your best CRM for small business that will save you time and not take it away by complicating your business workflows.

Now, the ability to automate tasks and processes by using functions like Sales Force Automation is the most time-saving qualities of a CRM.

Therefore, buy CRM that is capable of automating your staff’s daily mundane and repetitive tasks.

Moreover, CRM also saves time by automatically pulling all customer data into one place which not only saves efforts but also provides the great benefit of establishing one source of truth about your leads, prospects, and customers.

2. Buy CRM that is user-friendly

We all are aware of the feeling of frustration that happens when you are unable to make out how a piece of software or an application works.
This is because, when something is difficult to use or confusing, we normally tend to quickly work it out or stop working with it if it takes too long to understand.

This same thing even applies to CRM software systems. Since the very moment, a CRM solution starts becoming a source of friction that very moment people also stop using it.

Hence look for a CRM solution that is intuitive, and has a clean design so that it can be easily used by your employees.

According to research, it has been found that salespeople spend more than 60% of their time using various business growth technology and tools and so they just cannot afford to use a CRM that they do not understand.

As an early warning sign check out if your preferred CRM comes with a long training guide, since the less training a CRM system requires, the more likely it is that the software will be easy to use and can be conveniently adopted by your teams.

3. Buy CRM that can be quickly implemented

Some businesses (mostly large enterprises) require a full-time staff member to implement, train, and manage the CRM software platform.
However, for startups and small organizations, this is neither realistic nor necessary with limited capabilities.

Therefore your organization’s best small business CRM software should not be complicated to set up and maintain.

Buy CRM that has an easy implementation process.

Moreover, it is never a great beginning to your team’s CRM experience, if it starts with a lengthy and drawn-out onboarding process.

Hence always buy a CRM with which your teams can get started right away.

4. Buy CRM that integrates with your existing software(s)

Think about all the business growth technology and tools that your teams already use along with the ones that you may also need in the days to come even before you buy your CRM.

It is most essential that you must check your best small business CRM software’s integrity with the tools that you use every day since if it does not, adopting a CRM for your business will only add to your team’s existing workload and that will naturally lead to further frustrations.

Moreover, when you use an all-in-one CRM that does bring in all the data from all your disparate silo software applications, the system helps your employee’s to find a bird’s eye 360-degree view of the information they need about their leads, prospects, and customers in a quick and easy manner.

Takeaway

Therefore to conclude for startups and small businesses, simplicity must be the key driving element behind your CRM software section process, since the less complicated the software is the more likely is it that your employees will understand the system and use it immediately.

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How Can Businesses Inspire Their Customers To Share Personal Data Effortlessly

It is of little surprise that there is a gradual shift happening in terms of the consumer’s attitude to the value of the data they are willing to share with brands and businesses. Since, as the digital economy is growing and expanding consumers and people, in general, are becoming less sensitive about sharing their data with brands for their business growth. This is because, many consumers have learned by now that sharing their data can make them benefit through offers and rewards and so brands should feel themselves presently empowered to request data from their customers, or use information by a prospect’s interaction with a brand’s website, to inform their marketing teams if the persons in their email campaign’s list have actively opted-in to their marketing efforts.

It is of little surprise that there is a gradual shift happening in terms of the consumer’s attitude to the value of the data they are willing to share with brands and businesses. Since, as the digital economy is growing and expanding consumers and people, in general, are becoming less sensitive about sharing their data with brands for their business growth.

A recent survey revealed that for companies that use a CRM, the average return on their technology investment is $8.71 for each dollar spent - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

This is because, many consumers have learned by now that sharing their data can make them benefit through offers and rewards and so brands should feel themselves presently empowered to request data from their customers, or use information by a prospect’s interaction with a brand’s website, to inform their marketing teams if the persons in their email campaign’s list have actively opted-in to their marketing efforts.

Hence for brands that are willing to stay ahead of the pack, here are some of the top tips that will help businesses to build strong relationships with their customer base, and implement effective methods for building motivations among their customers which even help create brand loyalty in the long haul resulting in business growth.

Be clear about how personal data will be used

Extracting valuable information and insights by requesting the customer to understand their likes and pain points and thereafter define their requirements is most important when it comes to boosting their relationship with your brand.

However, the framing, and context of this request are vital, as it provides clarity on how this information most often stored in the CRM database will be used if you are a user of an easy to use CRM system.

In a recent survey conducted by a popular vendor of CRM for small business, it has been found that while many consumers are willing to share their personal info with a brand or company they trust, there are also others that proclaim that they are ready to do it if they are aware that parting with their information would make them receive rewards or discounts in exchange of their data.

Therefore, ensuring your customers and making them learn why you are requesting their personal data, and what they can expect in return, is incredibly necessary for building trust and credibility of your brand for consistent business growth.

Use data in a timely manner, and use it effectively at regular touch-points

You must take adequate care to avoid dropouts during the registration process with your brand, and also make sure that any information shared is effectively and swiftly deployed into a nurturing process. Hence, once the information about the leads and customers is collected in your CRM database , it must be acted upon quickly to decrease the risk of losing that customer forever.

According to a survey it has been found that 84% of participants said that they would not register with a business if they are not subsequently contacted more than twice, which amply implies how necessary it is for the information to be used instantaneously and thereafter at regular intervals.

This is because, like with any other relationships, the primary stages are extremely critical for building a long-lasting impression on your leads and customers.

Hence after a new customer or lead signs up for your newsletter send a tailored offer in an email to the customer or send a helpful post-purchase email containing further information about your offerings that will aid in creating engagements at every touch-point and reflect the present context of that relationship by anticipating the customer’s needs.

Follow and match your customers’ communication preferences

While well-established channels for marketing like email are still adding value for the brands but presently according to studies even less than 10 percent of customers feel that their favorite brands are ‘excellent’ at anticipating and understanding their customer’s needs.

Therefore, modern marketers must gain and manage insights from all touchpoints at all times for their business growth.

Businesses are also required to bring in continual refinement to their marketing and support strategies so that they can reflect and understand how their customers are adopting new behaviors.

This is because; influential contact points and emerging channels such as SMS, and social media are becoming more important nowadays which is especially true for the younger audiences in today’s B2C and B2B marketplace.

Therefore, to be able to identify how to effectively engage a customer across this mix, and understand the complications of today’s data-driven customers is the key to creating relevance nowadays.

Hence it is only be orchestrating channel preferences you can improve the customer experience of your brand by building upon each contact points, which is capable of generating seamless interactions that lay the foundation of an effective and impactful nurturing program through deeper customer interactions, a process which can be aided by using an easy to use CRM software platform.

Reward and measure

Discounts and vouchers are one of the leading triggers to purchase for all cash-conscious customers.
According to a survey some 74% of the surveyors that used vouchers while shopping, proactively engaged to access them in several ways.

Therefore, after looking at this redemption behavior, ensure that you must continue to optimize the impact of offering rewards and offers, whilst creating a parallel control group in your organization that must provide a true test of the purchase’s uplift value that your email campaigns have driven for business growth.

However, while providing offers and discounts you must also remain sure that you are not just encouraging promiscuous buyers who only shop with incentives and for that ensure that all your communication with the shoppers adds high potential value and relevance to their purchasing experience.

Keep on top of your data

Finally, according to a survey, it has also been found that more than 81% of the consumers welcome and like brands that make their decision to buy easier, by suggesting inspirations for future purchases based on their previous shopping- as long as these recommendations are accurate and appropriate.

However, the essential part in achieving this success lies in assimilating and updating your customer data and integrating it across your channel mix, by using technology systems like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions that facilitates centralized and automated analysis across all touchpoints.

Conclusion
Therefore, balancing trust and data sensitivity through contextual and meaningful customer interactions is most needed to ensure that your prospects and customers will continue to view the benefits of data exchange, as nowadays “Average” experience in an age where customers can pick from a growing number of alternative options will not cut with the demanding shoppers that rule the modern marketplace.

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Not Customer Experience — Customer Care Is The New Mantra To Move Ahead Now

As the business world is desperately searching for the answer to the key question raised in every industry: “How can brands exceed ever-increasing customer expectations?” the growing appetite of the customers are now taking a toll on every enterprise irrespective of its business model, right from retail to healthcare, banking, telecommunications, and more. Therefore to solve this ever-heightening challenges, even though companies use time and efforts on customer experience as the final competitive differentiator, but now standing in the middle of a Pandemic, customer experience is not of much help anymore for business growth, since now it is mostly regarded as dealing with the outcome of bad service or reflective learning from mistakes that have occurred in the past.

As the business world is desperately searching for the answer to the key question raised in every industry: “How can brands exceed ever-increasing customer expectations?” the growing appetite of the customers are now taking a toll on every enterprise irrespective of its business model, right from retail to healthcare, banking, telecommunications, and more.
Therefore to solve this ever-heightening challenges, even though companies use time and efforts on customer experience as the final competitive differentiator, but now standing in the middle of a Pandemic, customer experience is not of much help anymore for business growth, since now it is mostly regarded as dealing with the outcome of bad service or reflective learning from mistakes that have occurred in the past.

Because CRM software greatly improves data accessibility, sales reps at companies using a CRM can shorten their sales cycles by 8-14% - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Hence if you want to reap visible results now in the form of customer loyalty, customer retention, and ultimately sales for business growth, Customer Experience or CX has to be replaced with Customer Care as it more human-like and proactive version in these present times.

We say this as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative   CRM in the SMB domain as customer care not only is capable of decreasing the customer’s efforts at every touchpoint but it even aids in targeting each individual customer instead of focusing on a particular segment or the entire customer base at a time.

Apart from it, care for the customers also is about predicting the requirements of the customers even before they articulate it themselves.

Now do all these sounds difficult?
In fact, it is.

Hence it is the reason why customer intent prediction is a hot topic today, with a fair share of AI (Artificial Intelligence) deliberation added to the mix.

Care Does Not Mean Customer Service

While this might seem obvious to many, nevertheless this distinction must be highlighted.

Now, customer service is a different element and function altogether in businesses, which is mostly carried out by dedicated departments in an organization, the scope of which encompasses complaints and customer requests as well as guidance for the usage of any products or services.

Even though customer service makes a part of the customer’s journey with any brand, there are several improvements that can be applied to this area in business to deliver customer care promises for business growth.

For example, this can include demolishing departmental silos and letting reps working in customer service into a pool customer data in their easy to use CRM as when service representatives can grasp the context of the customer requests, they can personalize communication for every particular case individually.

Care Is for New Customers- too

In the past customer experience management traditionally was only reserved for the existing customers in any company.

However, the idea of customer care can be well extended even too the new customers helping you in boosting business growth.

As one of the best CRM for small and medium businesses, we can assure the readers that doing this primarily makes the new customers feel welcomed, which in return help earn your brand a few points on its own as a result of this endeavor.

Secondly, care for the customers when done proactively can even propel the relationship with your new customers and turn them into regular purchasers of your brand.

Now although it is easier said than done, with nearly zero information on each new customer’s intent and needs, it might be extremely difficult to deliver personalization, consistency, responsiveness, and continuity of your customer care programs.

Nevertheless, with the latest business growth technology solutions that are there in the present marketplace it might offer some way outs, and so let us look at the customer care strategies, approaches, and technologies from here on in this blog.

Customer Journey Mapping, Revisited

We are all aware that in the present time one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective for both traditional and digital businesses. Rather modern business strategies educate us that companies need to serve each customer individually which is where full-scale customization and personalization enter the scene.

Additionally, customer journeys are also unpredictable as they vary from one customer to another, and so advanced approaches to customer experience which is customer care call for revisiting classic customer journeys, whereby in its “Micro-Moments Guide” tech giants like Google has come up with the phrase “customer decision journey” where the purchasing decision is made through an almost inexhaustible string of sessions across screens and channels in their digital journey.

Micro-Moment Marketing

This term “Micro-Moment Marketing” was coined and became popular in 2014 when it was found that device usage has started increasing, whereby this term stands for the consumer’s deliberate intent to look up for more information about their desired purchases online.

Now according to the tech giant Google these intents falls into four key categories, which are:

• I want to know…
• I want to go…
• I want to buy…
• I want to do…

Now one of the main characteristics of micro-moments is that they can hardly be owned by any brand or company.

Therefore, only targeted advertisements make brands visible to all major search engines, and in this context, every primary encounter happens for both the brand and the buyers in an exceedingly competitive marketplace, which cannot be controlled even by the business or the brand itself.

Hence nowadays once any prospective customer has landed on your business page, as a brand you need to show you are a company that truly cares for its customers by providing proactive help, delivering useful and pertinent information on the spot, and thereafter entice visitors with tempting intent-based offers on your products and services for business growth.

Now all this is impossible without any technological foundation and so this where the major battle is happing right now.

What Are the New Battlefields?

Even though it weird to think that tasks like making relationship building more human-like are often entrusted to machines, nevertheless in the absence of face-to-face interaction in the digital world, technology is the only possible answer and solution to this issue.

But over here the problem lies that dispersing budgets and efforts on every technology solution will do no good. Rather, businesses should only focus on areas that have a truly significant impact on building customer relationships, which more precisely implies technologies like easy to use CRM tools that support mobile and also at present business intelligence.
This is because today consumers favor mobile over all other channels, and so catering to that recognizes the fact that your business is taking one step forward in your customer care efforts.

Irrespective of whether you are an owner of a brick-and-mortar store or is involved in doing business absolutely digitally, mobile will allow the majority of your customer interactions, forcing your business to focus on mobile-first experience for your brand’s business growth.
For this, you can use mobile apps to complement your online website or even provide mobile-exclusive offers, like mobile-only branded mobile wallets, loyalty cards, or mobile extensions which can be used for engaging customers to come to your brick-and-mortar store.

Now the main areas of customer care, namely, personalization, customer intent prediction, and relevance are impossible to find and cater to without scooping up the essential details of your customers that you want to engage in.

This is where BI (business Intelligence) comes into play.

In this market-of-one, it is all about dealing and catering to micro-data on each particular customer.

Hence this is where personalization applies in the game, not through trends applied on broad segments of the customer base, but with little facts about real people that are found in one customer at a time.

For this businesses are even going further and bumping into cognitive analytics which is an amalgamation of cognitive computing and data analytics which helps in making real-time decisions in customer service and of course personalization.

Finally, when your business is dealing with BI technologies, always remember about ethical data collection policies, since be it micro-data or Big Data, security is the key.

This is because, customers appreciate being in control over what information they provide to businesses, whereby they expect transparency and clear privacy rules in exchange for agreeing to provide their personal data for tailored personalization that they expect from their brands and companies.

Conclusion

In the present times, there are several forward-looking businesses and brands that have already taken some big steps and as one of the best CRM for small business and startups in the CRM space, we can assure, that doing so, it is paying off their brands with higher website traffic and ultimately better ROI for business growth.

Nevertheless, after reading this article if plunging into the unknown seem too risky for your brand, try out the customer care approach by conducting a pilot project.

We are sure that brings together marketing thinking, imagination, determination, and powerful business growth technology can surely make your brand bring incredible results in the days to come.

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Why In Modern Times Using Legacy CRM Solutions Can Erode Your Business Growth

In modern times businesses have shifted drastically and have become digital nowadays in the ways organizations market their brands. Hence in recent years, there has been an explosion of several digital marketing technologies for increasing brand awareness and revenue. Therefore, if you are aware of what is CRM within the context of this business growth technology marketing and sales efforts have been increasingly acquiring a singleness of purpose accompanied by new trends in marketing their offerings. While in the past marketing and sales once had limited interactions between these two departments, these two functional identities have nowadays become much more technologically synergistic and unified, while working towards a common goal. Therefore, today marketers working with organizations using legacy CRM software instead of cloud-based easy to use CRM software<are often frustrated about how manual their processes are, which can be at times even downright exasperating when simple tasks and request have unattainable solutions.

In modern times businesses have shifted drastically and have become digital nowadays in the ways organizations market their brands. Hence in recent years, there has been an explosion of several digital marketing technologies for increasing brand awareness and revenue.
Therefore, if you are aware of what is CRM, within the context of this business growth technology marketing and sales efforts have been increasingly acquiring a singleness of purpose accompanied by new trends in marketing their offerings.

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

While in the past marketing and sales once had limited interactions between these two departments, these two functional identities have nowadays become much more technologically synergistic and unified, while working towards a common goal.

Therefore, today marketers working with organizations using legacy CRM software instead of cloud-based easy to use CRM software are often frustrated about how manual their processes are, which can be at times even downright exasperating when simple tasks and request have unattainable solutions.

Here are some of the key factors that cause marketers within these companies to often suffer in silence since there is nothing that can be done to alleviate the pain points faced by these employees within their current business environment, whereby the management fails to understand that there are many Salesforce Alternative CRM software platforms in the marketplace, which are economic and efficient for automating tasks and help marketers generate more leads and revenue.

1. Leads, Prospects, and Customers Are All Mixed Together

In most legacy CRM and old contact management systems there was no opportunity to import unqualified leads inside a bucket that can separate these leads from customers and prospects in the funnel, which eventually cluttered the CRM database and marketing teams were often blamed for dumping worthless contacts into the CRM software’s database over several years, which not only compromised the performance of the software but even resulted in a loss of substantial work hours spend and revenue.

2. There Is No Way for Generating Web-Form HTML

In most legacy CRM software platforms unlike cloud-based easy to use CRM software solutions, after website form submissions they are distributed as simple emails in legacy CRM software environments, whereby these lead information needs to be manually fed into the CRM system. Which often than not never gets entered or procrastinated until these leads get misplaced or fall through the crack.
However, with modern best small business CRM software platforms like many Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions Web-Form HTML helps to directly submit leads into the easy to use CRM software, seamlessly.

3. Requires Lead Assignment Rules to be Coded

In many legacy CRM software, you will mostly find that there are no admin-friendly means to set up lead assignment rules. Whereby, you need developers to code the rules that will help to determine how leads are to be assigned to specific sales reps in an organization, based on criteria like company size, location, vertical markets, and others.

4. Non-Existent or Basic Campaign Management functionalities

Monitoring and managing marketing campaigns are one of the most offered features in most contemporary easy to use CRM software platforms.
Nevertheless, traditional contact management systems and CRM tools are either devoid or have none of these campaign management features which have the important functionalities that are highly sought after by modern marketers nowadays.

5. Limited or No Integration

Most traditional CRM tools are devoid of integrations with email service providers, third-party databases, marketing automation systems, or online accounting applications which are found with most modern CRM software tools.

Per say, nowadays many best CRM for small business offers integrations with a plethora of third-party applications, which also include financial accounting software, as there are several CRM solutions today which are popularly known as QuickBooks CRM software that offers seamless integration of these business growth tools.

Additionally, marketers need the ability to segment leads, prospect, and customers based on their past behaviors for lead scoring, send targeted email marketing messages, trigger lead nurturing campaigns, develop landing pages, enrich lead records from third-party databases, or collect information about new visitors on their web page.

Although all these functionalities can be easily done by integrating third-party apps with easy to use CRM software and several other Salesforce Alternative CRM software built for SMBs, integrating these third-party applications with outdated legacy CRM systems can be exorbitantly costly and also difficult in most traditional on-premise CRM apps.

6. ROI Metrics Cannot Be Extracted Easily

Marketing, Sales, Support, and Accounts are the four key departments that are most associated with the influence of easy to use CRM systems.
Therefore metrics and KPIs pertaining to user adoption, business performance and customer perception of your brand not only helps to manage your existing customers, but it even aids in streamlining support operations and sell more to your customers efficiently.

Now even though there are some legacy CRM tools that can collect many of this information, nevertheless they lack appropriate reporting tools to make it easy for the user of the software to get the right type of reports that are needed for analyzing their business growth.

Conclusion

Hence, as sales, marketing, and support efforts are becoming increasingly intertwined, it is becoming more important to provide these teams with easy to use CRM software technology, that supports a close coupling of activities, as we find with all-in-one CRM software solutions, which alleviates most of the pains that users do experience using an outdated and on-premise legacy CRM system and tools.

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How To Recapture Dormant Customers Using The Best CRM For Small Business

Smart business owners and sales representatives in all businesses using the best small business CRM system know the necessity to focus their efforts on retaining customer that are loyal as much as they need to pay attention to the acquisition of their new ones. We say this because it is much convenient to sell to the present customers rather than hunt around for finding new ones.

Smart business owners and sales representatives in all businesses using the best small business CRM system know the necessity to focus their efforts on retaining customer that are loyal as much as they need to pay attention to the acquisition of their new ones.

We say this because it is much convenient to sell to the present customers rather than hunt around for finding new ones.
According to Forrester reports, the chances of selling to previous customers of your brand are 60- 70%, while the chances of selling are 5-20% for new ones.
Moreover, in the same report, it has also been suggested that existing customers are also likely to spend on an average of 31% more than customers who are new.

Nevertheless, it is a common trait with several organizations, to abandon the existing buyers of their products and services when customers stop responding to their marketing efforts.

But, why should you abandon a customer who has already done business with you?

Hence, even if an existing customer has not responded for a long time, marketing expenses are still better spent on wooing existing but dormant customers than finding new ones.

The chances of selling to previous customers of your brand are 60- 70%, while the chances of selling are 5-20% for new ones - Forrester Click To Tweet

Now as finding new business is 4-10 times more expensive than reactivating dormant customers, here are three unique strategies that startups and small businesses can make use of to recapture the unresponsive customers stored in their CRM database:

Strategy #1

Email retargeting

By using email-retargeting strategy, you can use retargeting-cookie to set off ads on the web pages that your customer visits, after they click on the emails that you have sent them.

However, what happens if your customers are not clicking on the emails that you are sending or ignoring them completely?

Well, for this you can create a special email list of all your existing dormant customers and start an ongoing email campaign using your best small business CRM system just targeted to your inactive customers.
You can even upload this list to your retargeting program, so that people who are included in the list in your best CRM for small business will start viewing the ad’s of your brand’s across their social media websites and other web pages, without even having the necessity to click on your emails.

Strategy #2

Personalized Messaging

There are even instances when a dearth of customer activity can also occur because of your fault.

Hence, once your customer makes a purchase, always make sure that you follow up on that customer with targeted personalized messages using your best small and medium business CRM software that reflects your customer’s preference and add value to the customer’s experience with your company.

The entire point of collecting and analyzing your customer’s data with the help of the best small business CRM platform is to find out what makes your customers buy and then launch an effective marketing campaign that targets the interests of your active customers.

Using business growth technology like CRM you always have the advantage of understanding the habits and obtain the purchase histories with your existing customer. Occasionally, you can even remind your dormant customers as to how much they wished for a specific product, and send them communication with a money-off for that offering.

Additionally, you can also put forward new services and products that your existing customers might like which can be easily assumed based on their past behaviors and previous purchases.
Hence the more pertinent are your approaches in marketing, the bigger the chances you will have to recapture their businesses using your best small and medium business CRM software platform for rekindling your sales growth.

Strategy #3

Deep Linking

When you are trying to reactive your dormant customers, try to make it as easy as it is possible to make your customers take their desired actions. For this, while doing in-app marketing, always remember to include ‘deep linking’, which generates a shortcut connection to the product page that your customer is interested, without making the customer even reach on your businesses’ homepage and then search for the required product using the search bar.

It is of utmost importance that for customers who have remained unresponsive to your marketing efforts, you must primarily remove all the obstacles from their path, to make them purchase your products easily once again.

For this, many small and medium businesses also trust in sending app notifications or SMS messages with an exact link to the product that a particular customer was interested to buy in the past using SMS sending applications integrated with their best CRM for small business.

Takeaway

As re-engaging inactive ‘gone-but-never-forgotten’ customers is at all times more worthy as an investment, we are sure you will find these three strategies extremely helpful, and as a user of best small business CRM, find rapid business growth.

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Mistakes To Avoid For First Time User Of The Best Small Business CRM Software

So, you are a new user of the best small business CRM software and you want to bypass any roadblocks that could impact the successful implementation of your new and the best CRM for small business. Well, do not worry; you have come to the right place for finding some insider tips and tricks on using your easy to use CRM software platform. Therefore, here are the five most common rookie mistakes that we want beginners to avoid while working on their newfound business growth technology like a CRM tool.

So, you are a new user of the best small business CRM software and you want to bypass any roadblocks that could impact the successful implementation of your new and the best CRM for small business.

Well, do not worry; you have come to the right place for finding some insider tips and tricks on using your easy to use CRM software platform.

Therefore, here are the five most common rookie mistakes that we want beginners to avoid while working on their newfound business growth technology like a CRM tool:

Let us get started!

  1. Specifying Incorrect Account Administrator

While using a CRM when the first account is created, the member of the core CRM implementation team who pioneers the account making process will become the administrator of the account by default. Therefore, we suggest you to select an appropriate administrator to set up your CRM account, before simply jumping into the system.
Keep in mind that the administrator will be the designated license creator, bill receiver, user selector, and the gatekeeper to assign who receives permission for using specific features within this cutting-edge business growth tool.

44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2020, up from 38% in 2019 - SuperOffice(2020) Click To Tweet

However, if anyone other than the right person among your teammates has been accidentally assigned the role of an account administrator, you can even, later on, switch their roles by modifying your settings.

  1. Importing Your Entire Contact List

It has been observed that more common than not, new users of CRM will mostly import all their contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and other applications once they start working on their brand-new CRM platform. Now, when we use the phrase all contacts, we actually mean ‘all contacts’, which most often even consist of outdated, and irrelevant personal data. However, once that is done, when the user enters their Contact tab, they most often feel and realize that they need to clean up the list in the newly created CRM database.

Now, this can be an incredibly time-consuming process, like going through and selecting the inappropriate data, which may no longer be important to the user or to their company.

Save yourself this headache, by creating a list of contact within an Excel file in order to build a well thought out list of important connections that are presently required for your business. Save the file as CSV (Comma Separated Values) and simply import it to your CRM using the “Import a File” functionality. This process could save you a lot of time, and help you to get started with the best small business CRM software quickly.

  1. Forgetting To Tag Contacts Upon Import

It is most natural that after creating new contacts, the new information can always get blended within the rest of the customer database in the CRM. For this, we suggest you tag your contacts as soon as you import them, in order to classify where the contacts came from, whom they work for, or why they are being added to the easy to use CRM software solution’s database.

Hence, while a contact is being added to your team’s accounts, each member of the teams can tag their individual contracts with their name so that they can easily locate individuals that are significant and important to them while working with the software.

  1. Using Incorrect Email Addresses

All product updates, marketing promotions, and webinar news will be always sent to the email address that your CRM account is registered with right from day one after installation of the software.

Hence, using the right email address comes in handy when you are concerned about exporting your deals or contacts from your CRM account. Since CRM will automatically send these exports that have been requested to the registered email address that you confirmed while setting-up your best small and medium business CRM software platform.

Therefore, when selecting an email address for your CRM software’s account registration, be aware that all the important CRM-related outreach and data export will be received in that location.

Remember at any time if you need to reach out to your CRM provider be it a robust CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform used mostly by SMB to talk about your billing specifications and your account, it may be noted that you will need to write CRM vendor from your registered email account for adhering to security protocols. However, you can change your registered email address multiple times in your CRM settings whenever it is needed, as a safety measure or for other similar purposes.

  1. Duplicate Contact Creation Within Your CRM Account

Finally, oftentimes, contracts are listed with more than one email accounts and social platforms. Therefore importing various lists from all of your accounts unavoidably create duplicates in your best small business CRM software’s contact list. Nevertheless, most CRM platforms combine your contacts based on their individual email addresses and other specific options you can always specify to stay away since doing so creates redundant contacts and irrelevant company records.

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Tends In Customer Support To Look For In 2020

Loss of customers and revenue are the inevitable results of poor customer support, and so implementing new methodologies and trends helps to boost revenue. Therefore without ado here are the latest customer trends that you must look for in 2020.

Loss of customers and revenue are the inevitable results of poor customer support, which leads to loss in business growth and so implementing new methodologies and trends helps to boost revenue.

93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service. Click To Tweet

Therefore without ado here are the latest customer trends that you must look for in 2020:

Trend #1

True Omnichannel Experience

Potential leads and customers find your offerings on any number that are available to them nowadays.
Hence, offering your potential leads and customers the ability to continue their customer journey between different devices and platforms will be of utmost importance in 2020.
In fact, the multichannel experience that customers presently know is a significant step-up from the erstwhile single-channel experience.
Nevertheless, as multichannel tends to be siloed nowadays it allows interactions between several platforms but inhibits the continued journey between one to the next.

Therefore, in 2020 businesses is more likely to hold on a customer throughout their journey by incorporating an omnichannel experience that ensures identifying and implementing all of the platforms potentially used by their customers that is sure to boost up customer service ratings.

Trend #2

Connect Through Social Media

Using social media platforms for boosting engagements in marketing is nothing new. Nevertheless, it may be news to you that in 2020 you should no longer focus on numerous social media platforms, but rather scale them down to the ones that make more sense for your type of business, which will let you spend more quality time on the few chosen platforms rather than lose sight of engagements on some of your many platforms on the list.

For this try to evaluate your target audience and engage with them in their preferred media. Try to understand whether your audiences respond more to images, videos or texts.

Get engaged with your prospective leads and customers often and do not forget to thank them for their feedback.

Additionally, apologize to your customers and prospects for any negative experience and provide them with enhanced support.

Remember, doing so not only your unhappy customers will always remain grateful for what you did but your other customers once they see that cared enough for your unhappy customer will trust your support that they need right on your social media platforms.

Trend #3

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is getting more smarter every day. Hence, in 2020 look to implement AI in as many of the customer interactions you have. Nowadays AI assistants are changing the way we live our lives with Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri.
Hence in 2020 using AI to automate customer support processes will help businesses considerably, whereby brands should automate some of the customer-facing interactions that will help them exponentially.

Trend #4

Machine Learning

In 2020 data-driven customer service will be much more prevalent than ever before. This is because nowadays machines are becoming more efficient to ‘learn’ fro data using algorithms that are increasingly getting more competent in understanding how to connect with the customers better and thereby help customer service teams to make better decisions that aids in business growth.

Once considered prohibitively for SMB organizations customer service Chatbots are one of the intelligent outcomes of Machine Learning and can now be easily integrated even in most best small and medium business CRM software platforms.

Additionally, real-time data that are needed for Machine Learning can also help in the detection and prevention of fraud in businesses.

Trend #5

Internet of Things (IoT)

It is predicted that IoT is going to help drive sales and support activities much more efficiently in 2020. This is because according to a study published by Statista it has been predicted that there will be more than even 30 billion connected devices installed worldwide this year which is twice as many as it was in 2015.

Therefore, businesses must not underestimate the importance of IoT this year, as business growth technology solutions are trying to leverage all and any connected products to enhance the customer experience, which is becoming more important than ever.

Trend #6

Remote Customer Support Representatives

With all the cutting-edge technologies that we have in hand as we enter 2020, there will be a trend more towards remotely locating customer support representatives in all businesses.

This is because with the growth of this trend companies are becoming increasingly capable of saving their employers money on office space and on higher salaries that are required for big cities across the globe by hiring employees who can work from the convenience of their own homes.

In fact, this trend will not only attract more recruits but will also provide organizations a much larger pool to choose from.

Tend #7

Real-time Support

Nowadays with customer support reps potentially available 24/7 which can be accessed from anywhere across the globe and with the previously mentioned Chatbot technologies that can be at present even integrated into the best small business CRM software platforms, there is a need for emphasis on real-time support in several different formats.

Therefore, it can be predicted that real-time support will likely boost up conversion rates in 2020 with faster response time and quicker resolution of issues.

Trend #8

Live Video

It also can be assumed that 2020 will see a rise of live video streams which will help businesses to reach out to more people on social media channels which in turn will increase the brand’s visibility. Live videos can be used for the promotion of contests, webinars, product giveaways and more.
Hence businesses this year will find more options to announce in advance or just go live whenever they want, which in turn will encourage followers of different brands to pay attention to their brand’s social media platforms.

Trend #9

Personalized Content

Personalization will be more important than ever in 2020, with the growing trend of less human contact and more automated interactions in businesses.

Luckily, this will be easier than ever to accomplish with the assistance of AI technology whereby in 2020 personalized content will look more like targeted advertisements that are well aware of the customer’s name, gender, location, and even their likes and dislikes.

Trend #10           

Predictive Analytics

Both with robust CRM software solutions like Salesforce and with solutions like best CRM for small business establishments and startups predictive analytics will be called upon much more frequently this year.

This is because with predictive analytics helping businesses to foretell their customer outcomes, brands will be able to provide world-class customer service to the consumers of their offerings.

Predictive analytics will even help businesses to discover issues even before they arise, and alleviate those problems, by running hundreds of scenarios based on data they already have in their easy to use CRM platforms to provide proactive and personalized service to the customers.

Takeaway

Finally, with all the security breaches in the news, the security of customer data is going to be extremely important in 2020.

In all businesses, customers provide a lot of information when they buy your offerings. Hence both CRM for enterprises and even the best CRM software for SMB organizations will ensure that the customer data in their business growth technology solutions are locked up tightly that will enhance the trust of the customers for their businesses.

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Easy to Use CRM Trends To Follow For The Success Of Small Businesses in 2019

Keeping in line with the development of technological advancements is most important for businesses both big and small. Likewise, it is also extremely vital to update your marketing and customer interactions as per the latest easy to use CRM trends for users of this software, especially in small businesses. Because remaining aware of the constantly evolving business growth technology and tools, helps SMBs to drive present customers to do recurring purchases and also attract new customers, which further increases their ROI.

Keeping in line with the development of technological advancements is most important for businesses both big and small.
Likewise, it is also extremely vital to update your marketing and customer interactions as per the latest easy to use CRM trends for users of this software, especially in small businesses.

Because remaining aware of the constantly evolving business growth technology and tools, helps SMBs to drive present customers to do recurring purchases and also attract new customers, which further increases their ROI.

About 79% of leads do not convert without CRM - ThomsonData (2019) Click To Tweet

On a comprehensive and wide-ranging note, users of best CRM for small business, while they watch these latest trends, it helps the small and medium firms to expand their customer connect and increase sales for consistent revenue growth.

Considering the same, here are some of the important and best small business CRM trends of 2019, which can add more viability to your sales and marketing skills:

  1. Increasing Requirement for Adoption of Mobile App

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

However, in 2019, due to the rising sale of mobile and handheld devices, it has been noted that CRM integration with mobile apps will also escalate for assisting the customer care representatives.

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

Therefore, mobile CRM, which was earlier just an option for owners of the best CRM for small businesses, is fast becoming a very important part of managing customer relationships successfully.

  1. Improved Predictive Analysis

All best CRM software for small businesses helps their users to find out the number of interested customers, their preferred mode of communication and the preferred time of communication for their customer base.

However, going by the easy to use CRM trends of 2019, the latest improvement in the predictive analysis will not offer greater insights pertaining to ideal engagement approach for small businesses, but it will also aid in digging out their customer transaction history and other customer details for executing ideal customer sales.

  1. Improved Integration

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

Considering this fact, in the present times, CRM integration leading to better connectivity is going to expand radically as SMBs will be able to include new products and services into their CRM software.
For example, the use of QuickBooks CRM software that even helps in integrating accounts with CRM platforms.

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

  1. Importance of Social Media Networking

Finally, it is natural that your customer support team will have their own timing and a specific day off. Nevertheless, customers nowadays always expect faster responses online. Hence, customers when they fail to communicate with their preferred brands through conventional communication channels, they tend to follow their brands on social media to get the latest news and developments about new product launches in the company.

Therefore the best CRM for small businesses in 2019, will be trying to upgrade their technology to become pioneers in social CRM (SCRM) functionalities, whereby they can promote their business via social media channels, which will allow their users to find 24/7 accessibility with their customers.

Conclusion

Therefore to conclude in 2019 and beyond an easy to use and effective CRM solution can not only provide your startup or small business with an opportunity to unify and streamline disparate areas in business but it will also proactively contribute to anticipate and understand the needs of the customers which will improve your businesses’ bottom line.

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What To Do And Avoid With Lead Management Using Best Small Business CRM Software

Lead management is vital for any sales company using the best small business CRM software. Since, without lead management software that offers necessary features, your business will be left with a chaotic and bewildering mess of data that will not be useful to anyone in your company. Therefore, it is imperative that you must use your easy to use CRM software platform’s lead management system appropriately and effectively, and ensure that each member of your sales team is also using it proactively to generate more sales and revenue.

Lead management is vital for any sales company using the best small business CRM software. Since, without lead management software that offers necessary features, your business will be left with a chaotic and bewildering mess of data that will not be useful to anyone in your company.

Therefore, it is imperative that you must use your easy to use CRM software platform’s lead management system appropriately and effectively, and ensure that each member of your sales team is also using it proactively to generate more sales and revenue.

85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal. Click To Tweet

In this article, we shall explore how you can best manage the leads in your sales pipeline in order to increase your profits and ROI.

What is Lead Management?

A sales pipeline of an organization is a diagrammatic representation of its sales prospects, and to find the exact place where these leads and prospects are in the purchasing process. Visualizing a sales pipeline also provide an overview of any sales person’s account forecast and how he is to accomplish his sales quota, as well as, how a sales team as a whole is capable of reaching its target.

Sales lead management enables sales managers and reps to forecast the numbers and revenue generation of deals that are predicted to close in a given span of time.

In other words, a sales pipeline aggregates individual prospect and customer’s sales funnel into a composite visual representation that weighs the health of all the sales prospects of an organization. The sales pipeline also helps in illustrating the lifecycle of various customers and prospects from their initial interaction with your business to the closing of the deals.

These steps in lead management include:

  • Help to collect incoming leads.
  • Qualify a sales inquiry into a marketing-qualified lead by using methods such as lead scoring and thereafter into a sales-qualified lead.
  • Help to validate a qualified lead into a sales opportunity.
  • Register the deal as ‘closed’, ‘on hold’, or as a ‘lost opportunity’.

Therefore, having sales lead management embedded in your best CRM for small business helps to manage the task more efficiently.

The health of a sales pipeline is most often measured by the following metrics that include:

  • The total number of deals in a pipeline.
  • The average size of the deals in a pipeline.
  • The average percentage of deals that have been won or the close ratio.
  • The average time that is taken to close the deals or the sales velocity.

Common mistakes- what to avoid while managing the leads

Sales managers using lead management embedded in the CRM for small business most often tend to think only about numbers and statistics. Therefore, they fail to focus on what is happening with each opportunity. Sales managers do not look at people they are positioned with, the customer’s goal or buying process, the relationship strength with the customers, the competitive position of the offering, or what is in for the customer for purchasing the product or service provided by the organization.

That means sales managers who use lead management software often miss coaching opportunities and therefore produce poor results.

Here are certain things that you should not do with lead management:

  • Avoid keeping focusing only on the numbers. Instead, look into a more in-depth study of the status of the opportunities and how they can be moved forward through the pipeline.
  • Do not confuse lead management with sales forecasting.
  • Remember, sales lead management is just a coaching tool.
  • Do not believe in the idea that a bigger pipeline is a better pipeline, as smaller pipelines can be more productive, since it can be devoid of the junk deals that will never amount to any revenue, allowing sales reps and managers to focus on selling to lead that are more qualified for faster closure of the deals.
  • Do not focus on only late-stage

Best practices for Lead Management using small business CRM

Overcomplicating what you are trying to measure drives low adoption of lead management software. Therefore keep your sales pipeline management simple and to the point.

Believe in creating holistic skill development of your employees in the sales and marketing teams. Let your sales managers help the reps to execute necessities required for managing the sales pipeline across all stages of the process, and so create targeted training for each step for every individual in the team.

Create account plans that illustrate the sales rep’s position within the organization, what are their opportunities. The strategies that you need to employ, the resources needed to be successful, and recognize the key players to help move the opportunities through the pipeline.

Train the sales team how to prospect the leads, which should include things like asking questions, writing emails and motivating potential prospects to act.

Takeaway

Once you buy CRM, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM used by small businesses and startups, allows users to manage multiple sales pipelines.
For example, suppose you run an automobile dealership and make money by selling cars, automobile parts and also provide repairs. Many customer relationship management software, will allow you to configure only one pipeline, which means you will not be able to accurately analyze or track multiple lines of business and profit centers using such CRM platforms.
Therefore, keep this in mind while choosing your lead management software embedded in the CRM for better use of business growth technology and tools that will help in the generation of more business and predict better ROI.

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5 Rocking Tips To Build A Steadfast Relationship With Your Prospective Leads

We have been hearing all along “People purchase from companies and persons they like”. Nevertheless, how much people may believe in this clichéd words, it is simply not true. In reality, people do not buy from persons and companies they know, but rather they purchase from places and people they respect and trust. So if you intend to be your prospects’ best buddy by mechanically uttering ‘Yes’ to whatever your prospects ask of you, know for certain that you are not always earning respect from your prospective leads- and consequently not closing as many sales as you could have done otherwise using your easy to use CRM for revenue growth.

We have been hearing all along “People purchase from companies and persons they like”.
Nevertheless, how much people may believe in this clichéd words, it is simply not true. In reality, people do not buy from persons and companies they know, but rather they purchase from places and people they respect and trust.
So if you intend to be your prospects’ best buddy by mechanically uttering ‘Yes’ to whatever your prospects ask of you, know for certain that you are not always earning respect from your prospective leads- and consequently not closing as many sales as you could have done otherwise using your easy to use CRM for revenue growth.

After a presentation, 63% of attendees remember stories. Only 5% remember statistics. Click To Tweet

Hence, instead of fighting hard to be always liked, it is high time that you should refocus your attention for building deeper connections with your leads and prospects, which is built on belief and respect of your leads, prospects, and would-be customers.

Therefore here are 5 rocking tips to help you learn how you can do so, right away:

  1. Curtail the phony enthusiasm

All sales reps and managers had been taught at some point in their professional run to display enthusiasm about their brand.
They had been mentored, that in order to sell their offers, their enthusiasm must shine through first.
Nevertheless, this old school thought has in fact resulted in all salespeople trying to give the identical over-the-top introduction to prospects, which is undoubtedly wrong.

It sounds more like this: “Hi, how are you? I am really so excited to meet and explain to you all about what my organization does and can do for you right now.”

Now, if you think this sales-y intro sounds perfect, try recording your next few phone calls and check if your voice becomes louder, over the pitch, when your prospects answer the calls.
If it is so, hang on, that is exactly the “fake-enthusiasm” we have been talking all along.
This is the fake enthusiasm that you need to drop off.
Hence lower your tone, speak slowly, and be authentic in your presentation.
Remember, fake exuberance sounds extremely very sales-y, but an authentic tone of voice pulls together both trust and respect.

  1. Focus only on your prospect

This might sound obvious, but it is startling to find that most salespeople start their conversations with their prospects by talking about their company, or what are the offerings they can provide to their prospects.
Now, before you make a guess and think, “I don’t do that” just grab a pen and paper and answer the question “Why should a prospect do business with you?”
Next, read what you wrote.
Did it look like you just talked about your offering(s) – or did you concentrate exclusively on your prospects, how they may profit and find advantage from working with you?
Always take it as thumb rule before you talk with your prospects in your easy to use CRM that prospects only care about themselves. Hence, make them the center of your conversation, so that it can help your prospects to find a connection with your offerings.

  1. Offer some value

Make a difference, set yourself apart from other salespeople, enhance your knowledge base, and try to offer some value right out the gate.

For small and midsized businesses that use CRM for small business, the customer relationship management software it provides a unique 360-degree holistic view of the prospect to the salesperson using the easy to use CRM software.

Therefore, use this knowledge provided by the CRM application software to list a few challenges that are common among your prospects, challenges that you can solve, and also share what you have observed in your prospect’s industry during your lead nurturing phone calls.
However, as a matter of caution, do not blab and jump into your solutions too quickly, but rather utilize the conversation as an opportunity to share helpful insights with your prospects while getting your prospect talking about their own pain point, inhibitions, and challenges for fortifying your relationship.

  1. Create a transition with a question

After you have asked your prospect about a few recurrent challenges that you have seen in your prospect’s line of business it is time to get the prospect talking. Hence, try to simply ask your prospect, “Do any of these challenges ring true to you?”

Although this approach may sound a bit provocative, where you stand the chance of coming out clear, this question will immediately ring the bell with a prospect that is going through those same challenges.

You can always think, “What may happen if they say no?”, but if your prospect does not have the challenges that your business solves, then considers those prospects simply misfits.
Rather let go of those prospect in your CRM database and move on with the next call, and find someone who truly needs what your business has to offer to its customers.

  1. Get your prospects talking about their challenges

Once you have successfully offered your prospects some value, elaborated a few key challenges and transitioned the conversation with a question, it is the time that you must keep your prospect talking. After all, prospects will only have faith in you if you can really show them that you have an ability to resolve their key challenges, and you can never do that unless you understand their pain points.

Probing the prospect with multiple questions in most cases will prompt the prospect to open up. As an apt analogy, it is like acting like a doctor who needs to know about all the symptoms of the patient’s malady to properly diagnose and offer a treatment plan.

Using this approach, you will be seen as an expert or a ‘doctor’ in the eyes of your prospect, which can easily build a connection between you and the prospect and so make the relationship move further on and surely close the deal.

Conclusion

We are very sure that by following these tips you will not only start building deep connections with your prospects and customers but holding on to these approaches will help you to connect prospects with better conversations and subsequently move towards fetching in more sales that lead to rapid business growth .

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