Tag: Best small business CRM software

ConvergeHub Teams Up with Augutech to Deliver Enhanced CX Powered by Predictive Dialing 

ConvergeHub Teams Up with Augutech to Deliver Enhanced CX Powered by Predictive Dialing. The partnership between ConvergeHub and Augutech is poised to reshape the landscape of CRM and customer communication.

In the ever-evolving world of customer relationship management (CRM), businesses are constantly seeking ways to enhance their customer experience (CX) and communication efficiencies. The partnership of ConvergeHub, a leading provider of enterprise CRM solutions, with Augutech, a pioneer in new-age contact center solutions, represents a significant leap forward in achieving these goals. This strategic collaboration, forged on August 25, 2023, aims to provide a revolutionary CX enhancement for industry leaders in Lending and Merchant Cash Advance (MCA). Let’s delve into the details of this exciting partnership.

The Power of Integration

Shampa Bagchi, CEO of ConvergeHub, expressed her enthusiasm for this partnership, stating, “ConvergeHub’s strategic partnership with Augutech will significantly benefit the Lending & MCA Industry. It will help us enhance our comprehensive suite of tools that streamline operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive business growth.”

At its core, this integration empowers ConvergeHub’s customers to harness the full potential of their CRM system by infusing it with Augutech’s cutting-edge dialer system. The result is a transformative customer outreach strategy that can take businesses to the next level. Here are the key features that make the ConvergeHub-Augutech integration a game-changer:

1. Predictive and Power Dialing

Augutech’s state-of-the-art dialer system equips customers with the ability to engage in predictive and power dialing. This means reaching out to clients and prospects becomes faster, smoother, and more efficient. It’s a game-changer in terms of reducing the time spent on manual dialing and increasing overall productivity.

2. Bi-directional Data Flow

The integration facilitates a seamless two-way data flow, ensuring that any updates made in Augutech’s system are automatically captured and integrated into ConvergeHub. This results in accurate and up-to-date customer records, essential for effective CRM.

3. Effortless Call List Generation

Generating call lists becomes a breeze through this integration. Customers can directly create call lists within ConvergeHub, optimizing their dialing campaigns and maximizing productivity. This feature simplifies the process of targeting specific customer segments.

4. Custom Field Integration

Augutech’s integration with ConvergeHub makes incorporating custom fields a straightforward process. This flexibility enables customers to tailor their communication strategies to align perfectly with unique customer attributes, providing a personalized touch in every interaction.

5. Smart Automated Workflows

ConvergeHub allows customers to automate processes triggered by updates from Augutech’s dialer system. This automation streamlines and enhances efficiency in workflows, ensuring that crucial tasks are executed promptly and accurately.

6. Comprehensive Record-keeping

All status updates pertaining to customer interactions and communication interactions are automatically recorded. This serves as a valuable resource for future reference, analysis, and research. It enables businesses to learn from past interactions and continuously refine their strategies.

Taking Customer Relationship Management to the Next Level

The Augutech-ConvergeHub partnership offers numerous benefits to customers. It provides access to top-notch dialer technology alongside intelligent CRM solutions, resulting in improved connect rates, enhanced answer ratios, and superior operational efficiency. Augutech’s comprehensive dialer system boasts several advanced features, including:

High-Speed Dialing: Augutech’s dialer system ensures efficient outreach with high-speed dialing capabilities, enabling businesses to reach more prospects in less time.

AI-powered Scam Mitigation: The system uses AI-powered tools to identify and mitigate “Scam Likely” situations, ensuring that agents focus on genuine leads and prospects.

Advanced Answering Machine Detection: Augutech’s system is equipped with advanced technology for detecting answering machines, enabling live call connections and reducing the likelihood of wasting time on voicemails.

Robust Carrier Routing System: The platform offers a robust carrier routing system, allowing for seamless lead engagement across different regions with a local presence. This regional targeting enhances the effectiveness of communication efforts.

ConvergeHub has been a prominent player in the CRM marketplace for over a decade. Today, it boasts a strong customer base across the USA and Canada. ConvergeHub’s cloud-based CRM software provides a comprehensive suite of sales, marketing, and customer support tools, enabling businesses to manage their customer relationships more efficiently. To learn more about how ConvergeHub can benefit individuals, teams, and companies, visit our website

Augutech’s core platform combines a patented predictive dialer solution with inbound switch functionality into an intuitive, user-friendly interface. Over the past 18 years, they have served Lending and MCA organizations across the United States, Canada, and the UK. Augutech’s platform offers intelligent agent routing, rapid dialing speeds, unlocked carrier routing, spam likely encounter minimization, advanced reporting metrics, and more. To explore how Augutech can empower individuals, teams, and companies, visit their official website.

Wrapping Up

The partnership between ConvergeHub and Augutech is poised to reshape the landscape of CRM and customer communication in the Lending and MCA industry. The integration of these powerful platforms opens up new horizons for businesses seeking to optimize their CX, streamline operations, and drive sustainable growth. With innovative features like predictive dialing, bi-directional data flow, and smart automated workflows, this collaboration is set to empower businesses in delivering an enhanced customer experience. The future of CRM has arrived, and it’s powered by the ConvergeHub-Augutech partnership.

Customer Acquisition Or Retention – Which One Should Be Your Main Concern Today

Have you ever thought about which one is more important for your business: new customer acquisition or retention of the one that you already have? We all are aware of the fact, that acquiring new customers is one of the most important criteria for any business. However, this must also be remembered that retaining your present and old customers is also critically important if you are running a subscription-based business (like cloud based CRM software) or have repeat customers. Hence, we can see both acquiring fresh customers and retaining the existing ones are equally important for the growth of any company.

Have you ever thought about which one is more important for your business: new customer acquisition or retention of the one that you already have?

We all are aware of the fact, that acquiring new customers is one of the most important criteria for any business.

Acquiring new customers costs 5 times more than retaining their existing ones. Click To Tweet

However, this must also be remembered that retaining your present and old customers is also critically important if you are running a subscription-based business (like cloud based CRM software) or have repeat customers.

Hence, we can see both acquiring fresh customers and retaining the existing ones are equally important for the growth of any company.

Nevertheless, it is really a big question for many as to how do they know which one to focus more on customer acquisition or retention when forming the strategies needed to boost their business growth.

Now, the answer to this question is subjective, and highly complicated, as it involves several variables like your long-term business goals, customer acquisition cost, your business model, and so on.

Hence to answer this complex topic, whereby we need to consider several things, let us dig into the topic and shed some light, as to which is the right strategy for your company based on the business model you work on.

Basic of Customer Acquisition

So let us start with the obvious. It is no brainer that you just cannot run a successful business without winning fresh customers, which is particularly true for small businesses and startups.

Now, acquiring the first few customers does always seem to be a monumental up-hill task when you start your business. Since building your brand reputation can be most difficult without any customers.

Mostly the first customers for any business come from the existing contracts of the company and its stakeholders in the business. However, as your business evolves acquiring new customers becomes exponentially easier, since an increase in brand awareness helps in growing your customer base.

Nevertheless, how you approach your sales strategy for customer growth largely depends on your business goals.

Therefore, let us now look into how you can develop the right sales strategy for your business to find customer growth.

Potential Pitfalls of Customer Acquisition

Although it has been agreed that your business needs new customers and hence the sales pipeline in your best CRM software should never remain empty, nevertheless, several organizations make the blunder of devoting too many resources for customer acquisition and not enough staffs for retaining them, since they remain confused about understanding whether customer acquisition or retention which should supersede the other as their goal.

Therefore, customer churn is an obvious phenomenon that happens when you acquire a new customer but do not take the appropriate measures to ensure that your customer is happy using your offerings, which results in losing them quickly.

Therefore, the key to keeping your customers happy is to provide a world-class customer experience (CX) right from the very beginning after your sale that in turn boosts customer satisfaction and renewal rates.

According to a survey done by Invesp, acquiring fresh customers in most businesses costs 5 times more than retaining their existing ones.

Therefore, when you win over a fresh customer, there is your chance to solidify their trust in your businesses’ ability to support them successfully.

Never sign in a new customer and then leave them to fend for themselves on their own, for if you do this you will surely dissatisfy the customers, who will most likely leave your brand for competition.

Hence while you onboard a new customer, ensure that you also provide high-quality training to the customer to increase their customer satisfaction which will eventually make the customer stay for long with your brand.

The Basics Of Customer Retention

Retaining your existing customers is not always as difficult as it seems.
This often-overlooked factor in business which determines the success and failure of your brand can be easily done by delivering a world-class customer experience that you can do simply by delighting your customers.

Here are some basic tips as to how you can retain your customers for long:

  • Start out on the right foot by ensuring that your customers have everything they need, which must begin from their first day.
  • Distribute contents that can solve some of the common problems faced by your customer base, which will help in building trust and also aid in positioning you as an authority in your marketplace.
  • Reach out to your customers on a regular basis, to check out how things are going.
  • Keep your customers informed about your brand’s new developments (like info on new products, bug fixes, forward-looking plans, and more).
  • Create a customer advisory board to let your customers suggest you in the evolution process of your company.
  • Focus on resolving customer issues on the first attempt by creating a dedicated helpdesk group.

Now, this is only a partial list of many other things that you can do to keep your customers loyal and satisfied with your brand so that they stick around and provide recurring revenue for your business.

 Benefits Of Customer Retention: Not Pitfalls

To be truthful there is really no drawbacks focusing on customer retention, as there are a plethora of statistics that back this up which even hints at your business growth:

  • Long-term loyal and satisfied customers spend more than the new ones. – Business.com
  • 80% of key business revenue comes from 20% of existing customers those who are satisfied and happy. – Forbes
  • Just a 2% growth in customer retention decrease up to 10% overall cost of the company – Amazon

Food for thoughts:

Would you rather have 50 new customers each year that leaves after that year or just 15 customers that stick with you for a decade?

Well, the answer seems to be pretty obvious.

Talking about customer acquisition or retention, new customers eat up more resources and administration costs, and they also do not produce enough revenue for your company.

On the other hand, a loyal and happy existing customer who remains with your business over the long haul not only allows you to predict your businesses’ future revenue more accurately but also provides you the peace of your mind.

Conclusion

Therefore, the future of all successful businesses remains with maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction using the best small business CRM software if they are a growing startup. Since doing so naturally results in a higher level of customer retention and helps in creating brand advocates that ultimately can do wonders for your brand reputation management efforts.

According to a report published by Corporate Visions, more than 80% of businesses spend more than 70% on their marketing budgets for acquiring new customers and unfortunately even lesser than 30% on customer retention initiatives.

Therefore, to conclude on this topic it is recommended that as a modern business organization using Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub for managing the relationship with your customers you should at least spend 50% of your marketing budgets on strategies and processes for retaining your customers since it is one of the best tactics for ensuring long-term business growth.

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6 Reasons Your SMB Needs A Small And Medium Business CRM Software Tool

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth. In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments. Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth.

CRM is considered as one of the most important aspects of business operations as it integrates sales, marketing, customer support, and customer feedback in one system - Super Office (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments.

Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

Still, need further persuasions?

Do not worry, here are some of the other big reason why having a CRM software solution is a must for your small and medium business:

1. It Nurtures Leads and Increases Sales

Do you know that the most basic reason why small and medium businesses adopt a CRM for SMB is that this business growth technology helps to streamline and boost their revenue?

How?

Well, it all begins with lead nurturing and management of the lead after initial lead generation. Modern online CRM permits small businesses to capture more leads from their business websites, social media platforms, emails, etc., and then track those leads throughout the entire sales process.

With your small and medium business CRM stocked up and filled with new contacts, your sales reps can easily start nurturing prospective buyers in the sales pipeline with personalized and targeted campaigns until they are ready to purchase your brand’s offerings.

That means using a CRM your sales teams can not only prioritize the leads but also spend less time trying to persuade unqualified leads who are never going to pull the trigger by taking endless time for closing their deals.

Another big plus of purchasing a small and medium business CRM tool is that the software helps to deliver key insights so that you can make smarter decisions for your company in sales.

This is because a small business CRM software solution can promptly let you know which lead source drives most sales for your brand so that you can allocate more time and money where it is needed. Moreover, it is also a tool that can point out which sales reps in your team are stressed to hit their goals or shed light on what your long-term and short- term forecasts about sales look like so that new business growth ideas and strategies can be tested as per need.

Are you aware that late follow-ups are one of the main reasons for businesses losing customers or failing to convert prospective leads stored in their CRM database?

Now CRM solution helps the sales reps to provide their contacts with appropriate and automated follow-ups to turn present customers into long-term buyers of their brands easily.

2. It Helps You Understand Your Customers

You must be knowing that the best way you can serve your customers is by understanding exactly what they need. Rather say, you must understand your customer’s pain points even though it might seem like a monumental task to gather such information when you have thousands of customers in your database.

Now, this is exactly where CRM comes into play since it is a tool that can gather information about all your customers at a granular level and thereafter even analyze those data to gain valuable insights that might help your business to make more customer-centric and intelligent business decisions for your company.

CRM can track trends, identify opportunities, assess behaviors – all with a few clicks of a button.

Therefore small and medium business CRM tool is particularly useful for SMBs selling complex solutions or for startups with longer sales cycles.

This is because the constant data collection by the Enterprise CRM software allows your business to relentlessly perfect how you interact with each and every customer, since when months of customer-related data is effortlessly recorded and analyzed it allows businesses to understand the different decisions that guided the customers throughout their entire journey.

You can even use this information stored to improve your small businesses’ marketing strategies, tweak your email marketing campaigns, sales approaches, website designs until you can find the optimal way to reach your target audience in the marketplace.

Additionally, another way you can leverage the insight that you have gained through CRM is to create a more personalized experience for your customers.

This is because, when you have accurate oversight into the preferences and behaviors of your clientele, you can easily tailor messages or improve your offerings so that they align more closely with your customer’s expectations and needs, and thereby help develop more meaningful and deeper connections with your customers which can promote loyalty and increase chances of customer referrals for your brand.

3. It Improves Workflow

Irrespective of how small is your business, your marketing and sales processes will always have room for improvements.

Now, the reality here is that most businesses have a plethora of manual processes in their organization and use sticky notes and spreadsheets that kills productivity.

CRM software for small and medium business is a tool that can help to remove the bottlenecks and make it easy to create effective workflows you teams can stick to on a daily basis.

No matter if it is just automating flow-ups on new leads or delivering a reliable onboarding process for new customers, a CRM for SMB can boost your entire team’s efficiency right from lead generation, through sales to customer support – which leads me to my next point.

4. It Escalates Customer Support

Now providing world-class support is one of the strongest pillars for every small business and startup, which not only impacts the retention rate of their customers but also their revenue.

But how can you deliver a consistent world-class customer experience?

Well, you can easily do it by providing your support team’s instant access to detailed information about each and every customer.

Allow your support reps to discover your customer’s online history, their purchase and order information, and their past interactions with your company so that your support reps can truly understand what each customer has gone through.

Now a big advantage of CRM software is that it is a tool that can collect all customer data inside a single repository, which can make it easier to segment your customers based on their specific interests and needs.

5. It Maximizes Resources

We all know that most owners of small and medium businesses are too familiar with the challenge of wearing multiple hats.

In the present business landscape, even mid-sized companies struggle to make the most out of limited resources.

Now as technology does the heavy lifting marketing automation in a robust small business CRM allows a company of any size to do more with fewer resources in their payrolls.

Therefore using a small and medium business CRM tool even companies operating on a skeleton crew can provide high-level service and remain competitive with bigger businesses.

As it has been mentioned even earlier, CRM software can take care of the majority of repetitive admin tasks, keep records and make timely follow-ups with the contacts in the CRM software’s database, while providing you as an entrepreneur to run your business, attend conferences and meetings or provide demos to prospective customers that are ready to buy.

6. It Enables You to Develop Best Practices

Finally, the best CRM software for small and medium businesses can help SMBs to identify and implement best practices to make sure that every employee in their organization remains on the same page and that the business runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine.

Therefore CRM not only helps businesses to find ways to maximize their productivity but also aids in keeping costs down and makes SMBs operate profitably.

It helps in building best practices for making small businesses’ new employee onboarding processes easier, bring them up to speed faster, and provide new entrants with the appropriate information and tools they need to do their job effectively.

Conclusion

Hence with the best small and medium business CRM tool in place your SMB can not only drive more sales, but it can help to delight your customers and make your business more productive.

Therefore with everything, a CRM can do for your business, can you really afford not to have one for finding rapid sales and revenue growth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is CRM?

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

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

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

1. Strategic CRM

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

2. Operational CRM

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

3. Analytical CRM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 KEY PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS (FOR STARTUPS)

1. CASH CRUNCH

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

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

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

2. POOR RELATIONS WITH THE CUSTOMERS

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

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

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

3. NEED FOR THE RIGHT TEAM

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

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

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

4. NEED FOR RESEARCH

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

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

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

5. MARKETING WOES

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplify Your Easy To Use CRM Data       

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

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

Automate As Many Activities As You Can

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

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

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

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

Make Contents Easier To Find

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

Here is a solution:

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

Avoid The Back-And-Forth Scheduling            

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

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

Use Data To Your Advantage

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

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

Conclusion

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

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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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The Key Benefits Of Using A Sales Tracker CRM Software For Rapid Business Growth

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers. This is where comes the role of sales tracker CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time. Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business. The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like sales tracking CRM software include, as follows…

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers.

This is where comes the role of sales tracking CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time.

Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business.

With 44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2021, up from 38% in 2020. This is not just to keep up with their competitors, but also as a result of improving sales. Click To Tweet

The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like sales tracking CRM software include:

1. Understand customers better with enhanced and increased knowledge

When you have more and better information about your customer you are better placed to take a decision on what service you can deliver delivered irrespective of whether it is selling an offering or communicating something to your customers.

2. Improve process to find a better return on investment

Once you buy a sales CRM and set up your business processes aided by an easy to use CRM the main improvement that you can see is more conversion of the leads, better interaction with customers leading to a more satisfied and happy customer base.

3. Better coordination between sales and marketing teams

The functions of the marketing team lead to better sales output. The major gap between sales and marketing teams has always been a lack of a dedicated channel of communication. Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that bridges the gap and creates connections that result in a more cohesive operation between the employees in your company.

4. Create a world-class customer experience

As a vendor of award-winning small business CRM software, working with several businesses we have learned how to bring better customer experience and how it can change the ways most people do business in their company. In fact, a sales tracking CRM software builds standard processes that help not only the in-house employees in business but also networking partners and external agencies associated with the company.

5. Empower customer service team

It has been a worry of most customer service desk of not able to provide support because of the lack of a unified and answerable system operating for all departments within the company. CRM is a business growth technology that makes every department within the organization liable to deliver its job on time and builds a better and coordinated system to help customer service teams to provide world-class services to the consumers of their brand’s offerings.

6. Plan the ways marketing budget is spent and improving on the existing ways

Want to check how your email marketing working or how the sales team converting the prospective leads? Want to know whether leads are being followed up in time and with correct details? Buy CRM to end all your worries and get them solved overnight. Additionally when SFA (Sales Force Automation) is integrated with easy to use CRM it helps in creating a better-planned marketing campaign and thereby aid in improved business functionalities.

7. Help in accurate decision making

Easy to use CRM empowers you to take correct decisions based on many facts and data stored in the CRM database. With the power of data, this business growth technology helps you to know the working styles of the employees and whether their service gets delivered in time, which helps the management to take on time, better and accurate decisions for consistent revenue growth.

8. Find better and new prospects with the use of modern technology

These days easy to use CRM can be integrated with social media which helps you to stay connected with your prospects and customers. Social media listening enables CRM platforms not only to ushers a more cohesive work culture in the organization but it also increases point to point delivery of the work faster bringing more liability on each head. This is how better and improved prospect finding starts and continues for sales growth.

9. Build long term relationships

CRM brings many important things on Sales Force Automation which your customers need like an immediate and timely response of their queries, easy availability of information, and automation of business process helping them stay with you for more by keeping them happy and satisfied over time.

Takeaway

Therefore with the clear intent to keep customers happy and to keep all other related processes well placed and automated buy a sales tracking CRM to keep your entire organizations focus on not only keeping customers satisfied but also reduce churn leading to increased business growth.

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Killer Strategies On Email Customer Engagement Policies That Can Fuel Business Growth

Email marketing is most probably the most popular customer engagement strategy and the most widely used terminology of today’s digital marketing world. Thanks to the rapid swell in internet usage across the globe, this term has become nowadays a familiar word even for ordinary people living around us. In fact, email marketing is the hottest and the most potent trend in the digital marketing field which can make or break any brand’s presence in the marketplace. This is because email marketing when done with the help of an easy to use CRM software, is not only budget-friendly, but it is an effective digital marketing practice, which has undoubtedly become any digital marketer’s weapon of choice to make their brands stand out in the crowd.

Email marketing is most probably the most popular customer engagement strategy and the most widely used terminology of today’s digital marketing world.
Thanks to the rapid swell in internet usage across the globe, this term has become nowadays a familiar word even for ordinary people living around us.
In fact, email marketing is the hottest and the most potent trend in the digital marketing field which can make or break any brand’s presence in the marketplace.

Nearly 60% of organizations increased IT spending in 2020. And it remains the same in 2021. Click To Tweet

This is because email marketing when done with the help of an easy to use CRM software, is not only budget-friendly, but it is an effective digital marketing practice, which has undoubtedly become any digital marketer’s weapon of choice to make their brands stand out in the crowd.

What about- Assurance of Success

For boosting customer engagement of any brand, email marketing as a strategy holds immense importance in a sender’s or user’s life. Nevertheless, this process is not entirely faultless nor reliable. This is because the senders of these emails may need to face some unpleasant experiences at times since recipients of the emails can tend to unsubscribe to the list or change their registered email id or even the email that you send can inadvertently land into the recipient’s spam-box.

Hence, since these paramount challenges can often remain there, as an email marketer, you are required to come up with a spotless email marketing strategy to overcome these trivial yet of consequence hurdles and find success over time.

Build your Email List

Any weathered email marketer well understands why building a potential database of their customers with the help of a business CRM is a critical urgent cry.

Now, if you as an email marketer have a long list of subscribers who are all enthusiastic to know more about your brand and your offerings, it can be a boon for the marketer, as the mindset of the recipients is the ultimate factor for deciding the success in sending the emails to your customer base.

Hence, in other words, the efforts of an email marketing strategy for boosting customer engagement can go in vain overnight, if the recipients of the email are reluctant to open and view through the emails shared by your company.

In fact, a fall in open rate while doing email marketing can not only affect your CTR (Click through Rate) but it will also increase Bounce Rate whereby your overall customer engagement strategy may come to a standstill.

Now to grow your email list, you can use lead magnets and opt-in forms, which are the two most essential elements that work hand-in-hand to help grow and sustain your subscribers list substantially over time.

Time of using Email Marketing

Even though to most in common, email marketing might sound simple, however in reality only the digital marketer understands how hard it can be if the sense of creating perfect timing is found to be missing from their email marketing plans.

This is because as one of the most popular vendors of small business CRM software, we know that a sender of the email must have a clear understanding of when to start sending emails to increase customer engagement activities.

Therefore, here are a few important practices which any email marketer must adhere to while sending their emails which are mentioned below:

  • As personalized mailer contents tend to find more views and thereby customer engagements, try to personalize the communications that you have with your prospects and customers.
  • Since the main motive behind pursuing an email marketing practice is to let people get aware of what kind of offerings that your brand provides to the consumers in the marketplace, hence try to deliver messages in such a manner that it will help to enhance brand awareness among your consumer base.
  • Take out time to invite your email subscribers to provide their personal information once they are receiving your emails, and so brainstorm and come up with unique ideas that can be beneficial to your subscribers, since you will only get your desired information from the consumers if they find your click-bait plans too tempting to resist.
  • Lead nurturing is another important factor for conducting a successful email marketing strategy that boosts customer engagement. Therefore see that your users remain happy with the type of content that you are sending to them (which must be useful and pertinent) that can solve their pain-points and issues.
    Hence, as email marketing can do wonders in relation to your content management strategy, email marketers can use this tool to share relevant assets, case studies and articles to provide a more realistic approach to his or her email marketing skills.

USEFUL EMAIL MARKETING STATISTICS THAT CAN SURPRISE EVERYONE:

  • More than 86 percent of marketing professionals prefer email as their primary mode of communication.
  • A well-researched email copy can fetch more than 47 percent higher CTR.
  • Emails that include emoji(s) fetch higher than 56 percent open rate than any normal emails.
  • More than 60 percent of marketers believe that email marketing when done with an all in one CRM software can bring in more ROI without investing an excess amount on other business growth technologies.

Conclusion

Do you know according to Google there are more than 3.8 billion active users across the globe who uses email to stay in touch with others?

Therefore, you see, it is too simple to understand why email marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies nowadays that can really boost customer engagement without allocating more budgets.

It has been found in research that email generates 3,800 percent ROI in general, and for that, all that a marketer requires is access to an email marketing tool like a marketing CRM and the list of subscribers to make it a success any day.
Additionally, as this same research also states that emails are capable of fetching 40X more traffic in comparison to social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook, hence building a proper email marketing strategy can not only boost customer engagement but also increase the turnover of your organization rapidly.

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How To Increase Lead Conversion Rate in Small Businesses Using The Best Lead Management Software

Do you know how your sales teams are winning your prospects and making them your customers? Does your company have a defined process in place to help your teams qualify their leads so that your salespersons can concentrate their resources and time on the most sales-ready leads in the database of your best lead management software? Are you converting enough MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sent by your marketing teams? We all know lead conversion is the key to revenue and business growth in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that you can follow for increasing the lead conversion rate of your best lead management software and expand your business more sustainably.

Do you know how your sales teams are winning your prospects and making them your customers?

Does your company have a defined process in place to help your teams qualify their leads so that your salespersons can concentrate their resources and time on the most sales-ready leads in the database of your best lead management software?

Are you converting enough MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sent by your marketing teams?

If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you. - Zig Ziglar Click To Tweet

We all know lead conversion is the key to revenue and business growth in any organization.

Therefore, here are a few best practices that you can follow for increasing the lead conversion rate of your best lead management software and expand your business more sustainably.

Publish A Blog

Blogging is an excellent means to build trust as according to an article published in Forbes:

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

This is because we are all aware that converting leads lies at the end of the sales cycle. However, to get to that point whereby the leads will find enough interest to buy your offerings, you first need to acquire the trust of your leads. Your leads need to see your business as an authority in your space and find enough trust that you can support them and ensure their success after using your offerings.

Therefore, with the help of blogging, you can easily make your leads and prospect get engaged with your business once you can solidify your reputation as a subject matter expert or an authority in their mind, which will eventually lead to a higher lead conversion rate.

Integrate Your CRM Software With A Marketing Automation Platform

Most of the sales teams today use easy to use CRM software platforms to move opportunities through the sales pipeline and win deals.
A CRM database stores a gigantic amount of information about every leads in your best small business CRM software system, which includes behavioral and demographic data of your leads, prospects, and customers.

Therefore, when you use an MA (Marketing Automation) solution in conjunction with your business CRM platform, you can easily pull all that contact data stored in the CRM database to personalize your messages that you send to your prospective leads.

This is because, once you send highly relevant messages to your prospects rather than sending one-size-fits-all general messages to everyone in the database of your best lead management software it helps you to better engage with your prospects and increases the likelihood of conversion, as you make your personalization based on the interests, past buying behaviors, and social media activities of your leads.

However, to do this you must integrate your marketing CRM with an MA system, and let them share data in real-time, or use an all in one CRM which comes with inbuilt sales, marketing, and customer support automation, on a single platform.

Set Up A Lead Scoring System In Your CRM

Lead scoring is a process that helps you to identify the most prospective and sales-ready leads in your CRM software’s database. Using a ‘point system’ that aids in indicating the value every leads and prospect represents to your small business organization, you can very easily hone in on the sales-readiness of your leads.

Using the lead scoring process, in your best small business CRM software you can award (and also deduct) points to leads for the actions they take like visiting your website, clicking and opening your emails, downloading your contents, and others.
Additionally, you can even award points to your leads for demographic data (like job titles).

Now as the scores accumulate over time, you need to set up a scoring threshold at which a lead should be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). When any lead cross that predefined threshold, those leads are then passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Doing this activity aids the sales teams to prioritize their outreach to the most sales-ready leads, and not waste their efforts and time on dead-end leads that are not yet ready to make a purchase.

In other words, lead scoring is a process that improves the quality of your leads.

In a study done by TrackVia in 2018, it was found that 42% of businesses experienced a higher lead conversion rate with lead scoring in their small businesses.

However, it must be remembered that your marketing teams must get buy-in from your sales teams to fine-tune your scoring system and consolidate the alignment between the two teams for developing an effective and successful lead scoring process.

Moreover, you are also advised to reevaluate your lead scoring mechanism once every month since if you find that your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to the sales, of which only a few are getting converted, it can be that you are qualifying your leads to soon. In this case, you must increase the MQL threshold score in your scoring mechanism and fine-tune your lead conversion mapping processes.

Run Lead Generation And Nurturing Campaigns

In order to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. You can generate leads in many ways, right from using social media to making use of email drip campaigns or even use free lead generation software which you can find in certain lead management software tools.

Now, once you generate new leads, and store them in your CRM platform’s database, you need to nurture the leads through the sales pipeline with a series of touchpoints that will move the leads closer to conversion.

Set Up Killer Landing Pages

As your leads move through the sales pipeline, you need to find a means to capture more information about the leads which will help to increase their engagement with your business over time.

Irrespective of whether you are using an enterprise-level, highly expensive and robust CRM like Salesforce or mostly used by small businesses and startups a Salesforce Alternative CRM software, one of the most effective ways to do this is by creating simple landing pages, with only one objective, to encourage your leads to take an action like register for a webinar, download specific content, request a demo, and others.

Use examples from peers in your industry; check their format, images, contents, and CTA (Call to Action) buttons for creating killer landing pages.

However, always remember to make it amply clear to the visitors in your landing pages, which action you want them to take, how they should take it, and what they will receive in exchange for sharing their personal information with your brand.

When done rightly, using an effective CTA can significantly increase your lead conversion rate.

Incorporate Data Verification

Typically, all landing pages will have forms to collect information about the prospects to store them in the CRM database.

Now, it is also most often found that many people will provide you with false information, like fake email id, or phony mobile numbers to receive your offers.

To avoid this include data verification measures in your lead generation forms, like using reCAPTCHA, and other data verification processes to reduce the accumulation of fake leads in your database, and increase the ability of your sales teams to qualify high-quality leads in the CRM system.

Use Social Monitoring To Find Brand Advocates

Using social CRM which is also known as SCRM software you can practice social listening and social monitoring which will help you to find instant alerts when someone mentions your brand or offerings on the social media platforms.

Therefore, if you find someone speaking positively about your organization or brand and are happy about your products or services, reach out to them to demonstrate your appreciation.

Treating these people with respect and catering to their needs can help you to find brand advocates, those who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and increase conversion rates.

According to a survey done by Nielsen and Forrester Research, it has been found that:

“92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates while only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers.”

Routinely Measure Your Lead Conversion Ratio

Routinely measuring your lead conversion ratio aids in keeping track of your efforts. The lead conversion ratio is most essentially the ratio of the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) that your sales teams have converted to customers over a specific period of time.

Therefore, create and keep a monthly scorecard that can help in tracking these metrics from your easy to use CRM. This is because; maintain insights on how well your lead scoring process is working will aid you to make data-driven decisions, and also find which processes are working and what is broken in the lead conversion workflow.

Takeaway

Lead conversion is what allows you to grow your business. However, you need to carefully plan and execute various tactics to increase your conversion rates.

Therefore, if you are running a small business following the above-stated points and using the best lead management software (which integrates MA and an easy to use CRM), will not only help you automate your lead conversion processes but also aid in streamlining your efforts for rapid business growth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Provide a more complete understanding of customers

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

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

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

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

2. Eliminate bottlenecks to better customer sales and service

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

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

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

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

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

3. Encourage long-lasting relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Inbound Marketing?

According to Wikipedia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cost-effective

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

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

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

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

Convert your blog into a valuable resource

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

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

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

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

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

Make better marketing decisions

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

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

Boost your brand awareness and social media presence

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

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

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

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

Aids in creating customer-focused contents

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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5 Killer Marketing Strategies For The Growth Of Your Small Business

The daily grind of any solopreneur can be really overwhelming. While it might be true that you have this wonderful product or service that makes people more efficient and happier, nevertheless when it comes to sharing this offering with the world, it looks like you have hit a dead end. Now, when you read about marketing strategies for business growth all that you see are these great examples of Apple and Coca Cola, which must have worked for them, but then again as a small business or a startup, you do not have the budget to ask Kendall Jenner of sponsor a baseball team to promote your offerings. This is because the truth is, you do not need that as a small business, since most big brands create advertisements for brand exposure, like Budweiser sponsors major NFL teams to make their fans say “Oh, look I know these guys” when they go for buying Bud Light at the local supermarkets

The daily grind of any solopreneur can be really overwhelming.
While it might be true that you have this wonderful product or service that makes people more efficient and happier, nevertheless when it comes to sharing this offering with the world, it looks like you have hit a dead end.
Now, when you read about marketing strategies for business growth, all that you see are these great examples of Apple and Coca Cola, which must have worked for them, but then again as a small business or a startup, you do not have the budget to ask Kendall Jenner of sponsor a baseball team to promote your offerings.

CRM is considered one of the most important aspects of sales right next to lead generation and lead engagement. Click To Tweet

This is because the truth is, you do not need that as a small business, since most big brands create advertisements for brand exposure, like Budweiser sponsors major NFL teams to make their fans say “Oh, look I know these guys” when they go for buying Bud Light at the local supermarkets.

Now your small business probably does not need that kind of reach or advertisement since in really small business and startups ideally require marketing that works with a small audience who are likely to purchase your offerings.

Therefore, instead of millions or thousands of people seeing your products, in small businesses if a dozen good leads in your small business CRM software platform’s database gets converted you can consider yourself as a winner and thereby grow your business.

Hence in this write-up here are five killer strategies that will for sure grow your small business or startup for little to no money at all.

Before You Start

Now if you want to grow your small business, it is most important that even before you start your marketing efforts, you need to build a plan which is one of the most vital tips for any small business trying to grow using digital marketing.

This is because primarily you need to understand what people you are targeting, how many leads you need to generate to keep growing and why would your leads want to buy your offerings, which are certain most crucial factors that will define both the quality and quantity of your marketing efforts which is needed for your business growth.

Hence kick-off your marketing by defining your audience.
Now it can be an issue if you are just starting out of you do not have any leads or prospective customers to base your assumptions on, and so look at who your competitors serve and thereafter brainstorm with your teams before answering these questions listed below:

When you have that figured out, think how many clients can your team handle at once, and how many leads do you need each month to make your business grow.

• What is the demography of my audience?

• What problems and pain-points so they solve with my offering(s)?

• Where does my audience look for information?

• Which social media platforms are used by my audience?

• How long on an average does your audience take to make a decision about their purchases?

Now, in case you are targeting customers in another country, it is natural you might have trouble viewing the web as they do.

Hence, to resolve this issue, get a VPN service and use the VPN to change your location while you access foreign websites and see what your customers see while they search for your offering.

Since with these assumptions, it will be easier for you to choose one or marketing strategies for your small business, since it must be understood that a plan is also an assumption, and so always be ready to change your plan if you see that the leads that you are getting in your easy to use CRM database are different than what you are expecting for your sales and business growth.

1. Create authority

One of the best things that you can do for your small business is to establish yourself as an authority. Hence, share your suggestions, advice and expertise on popular platforms, so that people might notice your business right away.

Therefore, guest blogging is a great way to find a huge exposure. Now even though you may not be writing for Forbes anytime soon, but if you find blogs and websites related to your business that have a big enough following, and accepts contributions, leaving a link to your business website or blog will surely boost your website’s authority in the eyes of Google bots and your potential customers.

2. Focus on long-tail keywords

It is an accepted fact that organic traffic ensures a much better ROI than PPC, even though your conversion rate might be lower with organic footfall sue to the lack of precise targeting.

Now it might take years before your new business website can rank well with high competitive words like “easy to use CRM”, “buy jewelry NYC” and others, therefore focus on dominating the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) with low-competitive long-tail keywords like for example “what is the best Salesforce Alternative CRM in the US?” or “What gems to buy instead of rubies?” to make your audience find your business easily in the marketplace.

Hence make a quick search of the long-tail keywords related to your industry, look for the topics that can cover the keywords that you can rank for, create unique contents and promote them by:

• Searching and outreaching smaller blogs and offering them to repost their contents with a back-link

• Outreaching resource pages and offering to post links to necessary, helpful and relevant contents

• Asking top bloggers in your industry of their opinions, mentioning them in your posts and asking for promotion of your offerings on their social media platforms

• Searching and finding out broken links and offering to post your link instead

• Finding post in Reddit or Quora asking about the topics and providing meaningful answers with back-links to your business websites and blogs

Pro Tip:
Work on creating a newsletter and create an effective way of getting people to subscribe as you are growing website traffic with content. It has been found that the ROI of email marketing is approximately $32 for every dollar spent.

3. Hire micro-influencers

If you are selling products like something that looks good on photos and is Instagram-worthy, get on Instagram to sell your offerings.

Now, this does not necessarily mean you need to spend thousands of dollars on a post since according to a survey done by Emarketer it revealed that you can even pay influencers on Instagram as low s $100 and still get conversions.

For this send your micro-influencers a free product for their review after selecting your influencers on YouTube and/or Instagram that works in your niche. The main criteria for finding such influencers is selecting one who has at least more than 5,000 subscribers, have a good engagement in their comments and are respected for their expertise by their followers.

4. Outbound prospecting

Now, this strategy is not fit for everyone, and so this is the reason why if you are in a B2C market you should start primarily by defining your audience and your goals.

Nevertheless, if you are a B2B company and need just a couple of customers to grow each year, outbound prospecting can be your preferred match.

However never send emails to everyone, as buying a mailing list from the web is a sure way for making your emails reach the spam.

Therefore, here is what you need to do to make outbound marketing effective for your business growth:

• Study your leads and if they seem like they need your help, it implies that they are not cold

• Find the right person to contact

• Personalize your emails using an easy to use CRM can increase your email marketing ROI by 122 percent

• Never engage your lead in a conversion with a sales pitch

• Follow up every week with your prospective leads consistently

• Always ask for referrals

5. Automate

Irrespective of whether you are doing inbound or outbound marketing, it is never possible to keep track of every leads manually on your own.

Hence use an easy to use CRM, especially Salesforce Alternative CRM software platforms that are mostly used by small businesses and startups to keep all your contact’s data and history in one place.

Using a CRM for small and medium business aids in keeping track of all conversations and calls and thereafter analyze your interactions easily, which is especially helpful if you are interacting with your customers across multiple channels since once you buy CRM it can make your marketing efforts more organized and also reduce its cost.

Takeaway

Doing marketing for your small business as a solopreneur may seem hard. Nevertheless, if you know your customers and have an idea as to where you want your business to be in the future, applying the right marketing strategies will surely get you dozens of qualified leads for little or no money and make your find success and business growth.

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