Tag: Best small business CRM software

2018: The Year in Review

When the year-end arrives, all of us find the incessant urge to recall the various things that happened, going down the memory lane and refresh the timeline to view the goals that were fulfilled with the passing year. We live in the age of the customer, where consumers (not business executives) decide on how customer-centric companies are. Since in 2018, among many other things, we understood that good customer experience can help to control cost, and so business executives in both small and large B2B organizations are presently more interested in their potential to fuel sustainable top-line growth

When the year-end arrives, all of us find the incessant urge to recall the various things that happened, going down the memory lane and refresh the timeline to view the goals that were fulfilled with the passing year.

We live in the age of the customer, where consumers (not business executives) decide on how customer-centric companies are.
Since in 2018, among many other things, we understood that good customer experience can help to control cost, and so business executives in both small and large B2B organizations are presently more interested in their potential to fuel sustainable top-line growth.

Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.- The Annuitas Group Click To Tweet

Easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub is the foundation building block of an organization’s customer experience strategy to win, serve, and retain their customers, enabling organizations to integrate many new technologies and business strategies, which are constantly being rejuvenated by new trends.

Nowadays, consumers across all industries want to connect easily with companies to interact, make a purchase, or get services from organizations.

In a recent survey done by Forrester, it was found that:

More than 72% of consumers say that they value their time and consider it to be the most important thing that an organization can do to provide them with good service.

Therefore 2018 showed organizations that they must offer customers means to easily engage with them to foster an ongoing relationship based on omnichannel dialogue that can enhance loyalty and strengthen retention.

Here are a few notable trends that we saw in the B2B industry using CRM software in 2018:

CRMs Have Split Out By Vertical

In the past CRM has been largely kept as its own category of software, more like a separate companion to whatever other business systems, you are already using for your industry.
Implying, when you purchase an easy to use CRM platform, it does not necessarily mean that the software will have all the compatibility and functionalities for what you do every day.

However, over the last few years and more so in 2018, CRM companies have realized that there is a critical need for highly specialized CRM software platforms. Therefore, 2018 has been a year which showed the mushrooming growth of vertically specialized CRM solutions, which are specific to such B2B industries like Real Estate, Merchant Cash Advance business, E-commerce, Field Services, Legal and others.

It has been predicted by renowned CRM vendors and stalwarts that it is extremely likely that within the next 5-10 years CRM platforms will no longer come as a standalone solution, but will be a part of industry-specific requirements.

Personalized Workflow Automation Through AI Technology Platforms

Another most important and prominent advances that this year has shown, is that Artificial Intelligence will power up our CRM platforms to learn from our sales, marketing, and support rep’s interactions by analyzing data, helping AI to find answers to our questions, predict our requirements, or take care of forgotten and tedious tasks so that we can focus on more important issues.

2018 has been the take-offyear which illustrated how AI-powered CRM systems can access untapped and unseen activity patterns to uncover insights on leads or an existing customer, predict trends, and make critical decisions which will significantly reduce cold calls and save hours of work.

For example, in 2018 we have seen how B2B organizations will continue using AI-powered analytics to prescribe the right action for customer-facing employees and use prescriptive advice to identify high-quality leads, send relevant sales collaterals to the buyers, or use optimal discounting to maximize revenue per contract to enhance business growth.

This year has shown us how AI-powered rules can help pinpoint the right prospect, recommend issue resolutions, use machine learning and predictive analysis to uproot guesswork out of critical marketing decisions, help create appealing and innovative campaigns, and route leads to appropriate resources in the organization.

Businesses Are Supporting Digital Customer Journeys Evermore

The present year has seen a sporadic growth in personalized product recommendations, automated product configuration, price negotiations, and order taking. Even for post-purchase support, we have seen more B2B companies offering customer facilities for online issue submission, tracking and scheduling for service technicians, apart from exploring the value of offering automated conversational interactions with chat-bots and virtual agents.

Hence, small business CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub has taken a step ahead in 2018 for providing the right customer experience for the right customer at the right time in his or her customer journey.

Tighter Integration With External Tools

Another noteworthy trend that we have visualized this year is the improvement of tighter integrations of CRM software with external tools and services to improve the usage of small business CRM software systems.

CRM developers in 2018 are keen on understanding the need for industry-standard interfaces to connect multiple B2B solutions and services, integrating new technologies across sales, marketing, business accounts, and customer support.

For example, successful collaborations with accounting application like QuickBooks CRM that allow intelligent synchronization across platforms using REST-based APIs are the key to winning collaborations by permitting systems to effortlessly communicate with one another privately and securely for enhanced user productivity of the CRM software.

In the days to come, the future of CRM technology will definitely see the need for the growth of integrating mobile and web-based solutions with a CRM for using information from different but tightly related sources to generate meaningful relationship intelligence.

Social And Mobile CRM Are Flying High

This year has witnessed a surge in social CRM technology as CRM vendors have realized that the key to keeping your customers engaged lies in harnessing the power of social media channels for marketing and customer support.

This surge in the growth in social CRM technology and increasing emphasis on customer sentiment analysis and social influence in B2B organizations are factors that not going to determine where your business is today, but where you want to be a year from now, once the pace of sales and customer acquisition has gained its speed.

Moreover, in this time of change, CRM companies in 2018 have also recognized the need for enhanced mobile CRM technology as they have recognized most of their B2B customers want to be able to take their CRM system with them everywhere, as this year we can see creation of CRM brands that are solely available via app, focusing on mobile-first.

Big Data Is Getting Into The Legal Weeds

In the present times, B2B companies are now having an insane amount of information about their customers, data that could (in theory) be used to really invade someone’s personal life.

Therefore, governments across the world have started paying attention and growing interest in protecting their citizens from businesses’ interests in their personal lives.

The European Union, in particular, is interested in setting up laws surrounding adoption of Big Data in CRM technology, and so this year CRM users and vendors have started learning how they should be storing and collecting personal data of their customers, now that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect to support the collection and management of personal data in a secure way.

Finally- CRM Adoption Will Rise

Looking for technology to help the CRM industry to overcome the adoption challenge (that has long been one of its greatest obstacles), 2018 has seen the rise of ‘Gamification’, by which several CRM vendors are making it more enjoyable for the B2B users to easily adopt this excellent and unparallel business tool.

By stimulating competition and participation while using the CRM software among employees, this year B2B organizations are driving engagement across the board, by applying easy to use gaming procedures to non-gaming business applications, which is the latest elements to motivate and inspire employees, praise their accomplishments, improve their performance and eventually maximize returns for business growth.

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Do you have any other ideas of new trends that we saw in the B2B industry using CRM software in 2018? Share it with us in the comments section below!

 

Real Customer Retention Strategies That Works With MCA CRM Software Platform

Is your alternative funding business focused on acquiring new customers or is it that you are more interested in retaining your existing ones? Although it is always appealing to acquire new customers, nevertheless customer retention (that many companies ignore) is, in reality, the key revenue driver of any small business organization. Here are a few customer retention strategies that will aid you to maintain a competitive edge over other MCA businesses in your alternative funding market.

Is your alternative funding business focused on acquiring new customers or is it that you are more interested in retaining your existing ones?
Although it is always appealing to acquire new customers, nevertheless customer retention (that many companies ignore) is, in reality, the key revenue driver of any small business organization.
Now, if you are a user of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, which is also popularly known as MCA CRM, for your Cash Advance business, here are a few statistics that you simply cannot ignore, to drive home the importance of customer retention strategy for your MCA business.

Americans borrowed an additional $17.5 billion outside of business loans to pay for business-related expenses in 2017- Finder.com Click To Tweet
  • You will spend 5 times more to get hold of a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
  • Existing customers spend 67% more on your offerings than new customers.
  • Increasing CRR by just 5% will amplify your company’s profits by anywhere from 25% – 95%.

Therefore, with so much importance on customer retention, it is most essential that you need to incorporate customer retention best practices in your alternative funding business strategy to increase your MCA businesses’ customer retention rate.

Here are a few customer retention strategies that will aid you to maintain a competitive edge over other MCA businesses in your alternative funding market.

  1. Deliver a robust onboarding program

It is a big mistake, if after sealing a deal with a new customer; you immediately turn your attention back to acquire another, elated by the win.

This is because, it is extremely important that you must engage your new customer right from the start, and never leave them to fend for themselves once they have signed your MCA contact, and the best way for doing it is to deliver a robust onboarding program.

Train your Cash Advance business customers how to use your alternative funding services successfully, and to its full potential, so that you can generate the maximum returns on your investments.

  1. Implement customer surveys

If you are using an MCA CRM software, use automation to conduct online customer surveys of your existing customers to find out where they are struggling and how you can improve their customer experience with your Cash Advance business.

According to a nearly proverbial quote and a sage advice by Bill Gates, it says:

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Therefore, conduct customer surveys using your Merchant Cash Advance software, to let your customers voice their concerns.

You can also send one-off emails to the participating customers of your survey sharing the results and laying out the plans you made based on their feedbacks that will show your customers that you really care about their pain-points and you are taking proactive measure to address them, which increases customer retention by building enhanced customer loyalty.

  1. Form a CAB (Customer Advisory Board)

Select a group of customers from your most important customer’s list and form a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) to discuss with them about your MCA services and their experience using it.

Let CAB in your alternative funding firm, be an open forum, where your most important customers can voice out their concerns and satisfaction, which can provide valuable insights into the minds of your existing customer base.

Make it point that you share the key takeaways you receive from the CAB meetings and draft an email to all your MCA customers informing them about the changes in your business plans, which will get your entire customer base involved that will help build trust and boost customer retention for your Cash Advance services.

  1. Provide world-class customer service

Do you know more than seven out of ten customers are willing to pay better rates of interest if they receive a world-class customer experience from employees of your MCA firm?

Therefore, never make your customers wait when they require support. Since according to market survey more than 77% of consumers said that they value their time as one of the single most important things that any company can do to deliver excellent customer service.

Provide your customers to submit their help desk tickets through multiple channels (social media, phone, email, and live chat) and try to increase the FCR (First Contact Rate), by resolving customer support issues on the first attempt without escalating the support ticket and making the customer wait till you get back later on.

Hence, using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM platform like ConvergeHub that is capable of handling multi-channel customer support, and also aid in increasing the FCR by using its knowledge base for resolving frequently asked customer issue is the need of the hours for all small and medium-sized MCA firms looking for growth in their business and revenue.

  1. Incorporate personal touch using MCA CRM software

With so much information stored in your CRM Database, using an MCA CRM software, it is extremely simple to tailor every interaction that you have with your existing alternative funding customers.

Hence, suggest your sales, and support team members open the contact records in your best small business CRM software and view all the interactions your customers had with your MCA firm in the past, before trying to solve their pain-points and issues.

MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is capable of providing a 360-degree view of your customers, makes personalization of customer-facing interactions, even more, easier, allowing MCA businesses to form warmer and closer relationship that does wonders for increasing CRR (Customer Retention Rates) in your Cash Advance business.

  1. Develop educational resources continuously to ensure customers’ success

Last but not least, remember educating your MCA customers does not end with the onboarding program, being discussed at the beginning of this article.

Once the customer onboarding is accomplished in a proper manner, publish blogs articles on a regular basis (once every fortnight), which helps to continually educate the customer on emerging trends, and tips on how your customers can grow their revenue using your Cash Advance services.

If you are using the best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, you can easily use your MCA CRM software to develop a knowledge base for your customers to house these educational resources and update the existing ones, which will not only increase the satisfaction level of your Cash Advance customers, but also boost customer retention rate, help treat your important customers like business partners and assure them that you are taking their opinions and suggestions seriously.

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Do you have a strategy that works well for increasing the CRR for your MCA business? Share it with us in the comments section below!

Change Management: Just, Do Not Utter “Change”

The word “Change Management” is definitely a necessary requirement for the growth of all organizations, but with a terrible name. To most employees, the very word “change” itself is burdened with hidden meanings- personal physiological interpretations and renditions that can be negative and can create innumerable roadblocks to the successful adoption of even the best small business CRM software for your company. Do you consider that this word “change” is not that important? Well, your employees who hear the word “Change” may think of the following.

The word “Change Management” is definitely a necessary requirement for the growth of all organizations, but with a terrible name. To most employees, the very word “change” itself is burdened with hidden meanings- personal physiological interpretations and renditions that can be negative and can create innumerable roadblocks to the successful adoption of even the best small business CRM software for your company.

Do you consider that this word “change” is not that important?

Well, your employees who hear the word “Change” may think of the following:

  • Fear
  • Power and Control
  • Unknown and New Resistance
  • Pressure etc.
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress – Charles Kettering Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, certain perceptions and attitude about this word “Change” can be easily counteracted with a perceived and thoughtful approach.

Here are a few pieces of advice for helping you to find your best CRM for small business software adoption go more smoothly:

Perception #1: Your employees do not see the benefits

Most employees see “Change” as “more work”. Therefore, while adopting a new small business CRM software for your organization demonstrate the benefits (the actual advantages, not corporate-speak) of the application, so that they do not see it as an unnecessary solution and a waste of their valuable time.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

-Be ready to name complete benefits (along with drawbacks, if any)

-Have a clear vision of your business goals, and articulate it throughout the process

-Once and if there will be more work- say so to your employees

-Acknowledge that changes are difficult and provide adjustment period to your employees

-Do not obfuscate or lie- if there are risks involved, articulate it

Perception #2: Your employees feel that they were excluded from the decision

Change is always a disruptive process, even when you are adopting an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub. There will always be a set of employees in any organization who will be more affected by the change as the impact radius of your change in the business process can be even greater than you expected. Therefore, never let your employees feel irrelevant, and remember that even the slightest of change in your business strategy or the new way that you want to run your organization can affect a wider group.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

-Share your decision making and vision for growth early in the process with all employees who will be affected

-Provide reasonable time for adjustment

-Include all stakeholders in Sales, Marketing, Support, Accounts teams, who will be affected right from the beginning

Perception #3:Change will be stressful

Like most of us, even your employees are led by habits. Therefore, we have seen employees abhor change as it interrupts habits and causes stress. Change takes people out of their previous comfort zones. If you can still remember your first day of high school, you will definitely understand why the uncharted and the unknown bring ‘un-comfortableness’ to many.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

-Allow time to your employees to adapt to the change

-Never dictate

-Do not spring surprises for your employees during a change

-Deploy baby-steps while implementation of your Salesforce Alternative CRM. Let your employees get a foot wet rather than casting them off into the deep

-Never criticize the old way; it can reflect insult to many

-Work with ALL the stakeholders, not just the employees affected by your new easy to use CRM

Perception #4: Your employees feel out of control

Your employees fear that they will not have any say and so they will be unhappy and out of control.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

Crowdsource decisions, and leave room for changes. It is rare that all important decisions in your organization like changing over to a Salesforce Alternative CRM software, for saving time, vital resources, and money will be blessed by the users of the new software, but then again there is a way to make everyone in your company feel included.

Although there are certain aspects of any new CRM implementation project that are set by management buy-in or technical requirements, all your other employees who will use the new Salesforce Alternative CRM software can have their say in other relevant details.

Therefore, whenever it is possible, let your employees choose from several equally acceptable options (i.e., Blue, Yellow, or Green? Include A, B, or C). That way there will be inclusion of ideas without chaos.

Perception #5: Status quo is better than innovative ideas

 “My current comfortable method is being discarded- is the way I have always done my job worthless?” Well, this can make people feel outdated and insecure. In a way, in any business or organization progress and advancements can make your employees feel alienated.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

-Create a culture in your office of embracing the new modern processes and making periodic updates

-Create an ambiance of rewarding those employees who are enthusiastic adopters of things new

-At times just saying “I know this might apparently be difficult at first”- goes a long way

Perception #6: Change will create the appearance of stupidity

There are many employees those who even think that they may look dumb since they are unable to comprehend that they will be able to learn new processes, systems, and ways of doing things.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

-Provide adequate trainingfor the new CRM system

-Provide the training documentation in different formats to address all learning styles

-Encourage the stakeholders to suggest improvements in the training

Perception #7:  Management may not know what they are talking about

Your employees do not consider you or your leaders bringing the change in their existing workflow credible since they might not consider the person trusted.

Here are a few more suggestions to counteract:

-Be prepared to provide s logical rationale for the change in your existing CRM platform

-List all the decision makers and remove hierarchy

-Demonstrate the factors that led to the decision to look for Salesforce Alternative CRM

-Combat employee distrust of conventional “top-down” hierarchy models, be able to defend the decision you took based on competent analysis of your previous CRM system

Do you have any tips for handling Change Management solutions while you adopted Salesforce Alternative CRM for your business? Let us know in the comments section below!

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A Comprehensive Guide for Increasing Lead Conversion Rates

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their CRM software? Do have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers? Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2019. Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a Salesforce Alternative CRM software platform that can help you do that? If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

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

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

Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization.
Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2019.

Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a software platform that can help you do that?

If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

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ConvergeHub's ROCKET LAUNCH 2019 can help you acquire leads, automate your sales process, improve your conversion and get more referrals from satisfied customers. Click To Tweet
  1. Publish awesome and informative blogs

We all acknowledge that the stage for converting leads comes at the very end of the sales cycle. However, to persuade the leads to get to that point, whereby they become interested enough to procure your offerings- you primarily need to build up trust.
Leads and prospective customers cherish to see you as a subject matter expert and an authority in your arena and feel that you can be trusted to support them and ensure their growth and satisfaction using your offering(s).

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

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

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

  1. Integrate your CRM with a marketing automation platform

A majority of sales reps today use easy to use CRM software solutions to move leads and prospective opportunities through the sales pipeline and close deals.
If you know what is CRM software, you must be aware that CRM is a robust application that stores a plethora of information about all your leads, and customers in the CRM database, which includes details like demographic and behavioral data.

Therefore, when you use marketing automation, which is also known as sales force automation in tandem with your easy to use CRM , you can without any hassles leverage that contact details to customize and target the messages that you need to send to your prospects.

Using Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub and others, you can personalize your lead nurturing process and send messages based on your prospects’ past buying behaviors, interests, and more.

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

  1. Set up lead scoring to qualify leads

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

While scoring leads, you can use a point system that indicates the value a lead represents, by awarding points to leads for actions they take, like clicking or opening emails, visiting your website, downloading eBooks, participating in post-sales surveys, etc.
You can also award points to your leads for demographic data such as the place they reside, their job titles, the industry they work, etc.

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

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

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

Simply put lead scoring improves the quality of your leads in your easy to use CRM, which helps in achieving a better conversion rate for your organization.

  1. Run lead nurturing and lead generation campaigns

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

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

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

As an add-on, here is a link to the CONVERGEHUB LEAD GENERATOR, which is a free tool that lets you visit anyone’s social media page (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp etc.) and capture all information instantly without any manual typing.

Using this free tool you can save qualified leads from social media, other sites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse. It even lets you create notes and follow up tasks to get a head start with that lead.

You can save the captured leads in the Lead Generator itself or save them in the ConvergeHub CRM for even more sales power.

  1. Set up killer landing pages with optimized CTA buttons

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

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

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

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

  1. Share on social media and use social monitoring to find brand advocates

It is easy to engage your known leads with multichannel campaigns and email marketing.
However, what can you do about those leads whose contact data you do not have in your CRM database?

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

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

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

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

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

Here are two statistics that illustrates the role that brand advocate can play for the growing your business.

  • 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)
  • Only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)
  1. Enable sales to quickly follow up on qualified leads

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

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

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

Using a Best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is capable of creating reminders and automating tasks it is easy to send alerts to sales reps the moment a new lead becomes qualified, to ensure that your sales teams do not let MQLs fall through the crack.

Key Takeaway

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

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

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

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

Do you have any tips for increasing your lead conversion rate? Let us know in the comments section below!

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Easy To Use CRM Hacks That All Small Business Users Should Know

Organizations depend on personal relationships to convert their prospective leads into customers for delivering great customer experiences. For small businesses and startups, this process of personalization often has to rely on collecting customer-facing data from different sources- although that era may have come to a close. Thanks to the backlash faced by Facebook dealing with Cambridge Analytics, whereby millions of user data from the social media website was improperly accessed and used, which shows the vulnerability of purchasing, sharing, and handling third-party information on the internet. Since, there are several businesses across the globe that uses third-party data, to leverage their sales, marketing, and support teams, just because they are not properly leveraging data collected in their easy to use CRM systems.

Organizations depend on personal relationships to convert their prospective leads into customers for delivering great customer experiences. For small businesses and startups, this process of personalization often has to rely on collecting customer-facing data from different sources- although that era may have come to a close.
Thanks to the backlash faced by Facebook dealing with Cambridge Analytics, whereby millions of user data from the social media website was improperly accessed and used, which shows the vulnerability of purchasing, sharing, and handling third-party information on the internet.
Since, still there are several businesses across the globe that uses third-party data, to leverage their sales, marketing, and support teams, just because they are not properly leveraging data collected in their easy to use CRM systems.

15% of a business’s annual profits are misspent owing to bad data residing in their CRM database as CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. - Gartner Click To Tweet

As a matter of fact, Facebook’s changes in the policy might actually be a boon in disguise since small businesses and startups can even find better success using the data from their CRM database to access customer insights than procuring data from third-party sources across the globe.

The eternal fight between startups and better tech organizations

In an ideal situation, founders of startup organizations will always cherish and understand the tools that get them more businesses, but in reality, that is not the case every time. Even easy to use CRM software systems, can be very difficult to maintain, which can be annoying for small business entrepreneurs.

However, at times when this irritation translates into abandonment, customer data in the CRM database becomes segmented within the company. Making sales persons lose access to the information collected by the businesses’ marketing efforts, which can hurt their growth in sales with time.

On the other hand, by providing access to real-time data on customer and leads, best small business CRM software platforms, like ConvergeHub, helps startups to refine customer service and improve marketing and sales strategies within the organization.

According to Nuclear Research, it has been found that having a real-time access to customer data in the CRM database, shortens sales cycles by more than 14%.

Nevertheless, an easy to use CRM, in and of itself, is never the cause of frustration for small business owners. Rather, this frustration stems from using the CRM software inefficiently.

In a study based survey done by Opinion Matters (a market research group), an average sales rep spends approximately 15 full working days every year entering data like phone numbers into their online customer management system.
However, it is a known fact that most startup entrepreneurs do not want their sales reps to enter phone numbers, rather they want their salespersons to make calls.

Easy to use small business CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub provide automated features like many other Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions to help. However, if the sales teams do not understand or comprehend how to use these important tools, they continue to squander time plugging in data manually.

Proper use of small business CRM software solutions does not merely drive sales, but an easy to use CRM platform can also help executive teams in your startup and small business organizations to transform large sets of data into easy-to-read reporting formats, informing better strategies that lead to shorter meetings.

Therefore, it can be easily said that “smart” small business CRM software benefits everyone in the organization.

But what does usage of “smart” CRM looks like and how can small businesses and startups adopt this online lead management software without a headache?

Easy to use CRM software can be a source of critical insight that empowers small businesses and startups to see their data from all angles and thereby deliver more personalized services to their customers.

Here are four awesome tips which can easily help small organizations to get more from their CRM software platforms and turn this potentially confusing business resource into a powerful weapon for sales and growth of the organization.

  1. Tell the CRM software what to streamline

Manual processes are not only time consuming but they are always most often liable for creating mistakes. However, CRM automation with Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions like ConvergeHub can eliminate this barrier by importing data and information, compiling related data, and thereby help make smart schedules for your sales and marketing employees.

According to a study conducted by IBM developerWorks, it has been suggested that “ease of use” is the most demanding feature in a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution, as one of the biggest lacunae of Salesforce CRM is its steep learning curve for most CRM users across the globe.

One way to make a CRM software solution easy to use is by telling the software to group information together by prospects rather than by their activities. Doing this will help sales reps to easily find everything, on a specific lead or customer, right from emails to notes, which can provide a more comprehensive picture of the sales process, allowing the easy to use CRM user to identify weaknesses and strengths in their sales strategies.

Most easy to use small business CRM software can create lists that feature industry roles with job titles of the leads, and customers and store them in the CRM database, which aids salespeople to personalize their very first calls, and thereby make the cold-call process more productive.

  1. Learn to spot at-risk accounts

Research done by Bain and Company (a global management consultancy headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts) found that just by increasing customer retention rate by a mere 5% can scale-up profits by as much as 95%.
Easy to use CRM software is the perfect business tool to track engagements of the customers, as it allows employees to step-in to aid clients when thing look bad.

For example, let us assume a company regularly receives calls from its customers related to technical issues, but without an easy to use CRM system those complaints might go without any notice, especially if they were handled by different people.
Since, with efficient tracking, startups and budding businesses can easily identify those patterns and conduct proactive calls to resolve issues even before their customers abandon the ship.

Fortunately, CRM software platform like ConvergeHub makes this task easier, simply by setting up flags for different users (such as repeat complains) and can subsequently alert sales and support reps, when customers set off one of the triggers created in the software.

  1. Make marketing and sales play nice

All business organizations, new or established, runs better when marketing and sales work together seamlessly.

Altify (a globally renowned company that delivers enterprise sales methodology) found that businesses with aligned marketing and sales teams have 26% higher win rates and 18% shorter sales cycles than the companies that do not.

Larger business enterprises are presently walking up to the benefits that alignment in sales and marketing offers, which should signal a necessary shift even to the startups.

In an article written by the by the marketing manager of MNF Group (Australia’s largest telecommunications companies) Maria Wirth, said:

With the tidal wave of content marketing and lead nurturing initiatives, the seamless handover of leads back and forth between sales and marketing becomes a crucial key to success.

Therefore, never encourage your CRM system to become the exclusive property of just one team, but instead insist both sides to contribute to the customer data stored in the CRM database.

This way, you can aid sales and marketing teams to communicate with each other and help them close deals and also aid marketers to develop effective campaigns that provide sales that they need.

  1. Use robots to make the best small business CRM adoption easy

Virtual assistants, like voice-recognition devices and Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, can work together with several best small business CRM systems to set up appointments, or add extra information on the customers to files, and even locate information without forcing the CRM users to sift through the CRM database manually.

A research conducted by Statista (an online statistics, market research, and business intelligence portal) estimated that from 2017 through 2021, the adoption of AI in the CRM sector could add $394 Billion in value over time.

Conclusion

Therefore, although most small businesses and startups know that they need an easy to use CRM software for their organization, nevertheless most often they just do not know how to use the system effectively.

Nevertheless, when a CRM system is used correctly it can be easily transformed from an operational necessity to a system that provides a competitive advantage and helps startups generate improved customer satisfaction and therefore create higher revenues.

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Key Features That You Need In Your Best Small Businesses CRM Software

When it comes to the best small business CRM software, every organization requires different features. However, in general, there are a set of key features that all small and medium-sized businesses, should make sure to include in their CRM that will work for now and also in the future days to come. Since the very last thing you want to have to deal with as an owner of a small business is a messy integration into a different system. Now, that being said what are the core features that all small businesses need to have in their CRM platforms? The core features, which all small business need in their easy to use CRM platforms are as follows.

When it comes to the best small business CRM software, every organization requires different features. However, in general, there are a set of key features that all small and medium-sized businesses, should make sure to include in their CRM that will work for now and also in the future days to come. Since the very last thing you want to have to deal with as an owner of a small business is a messy integration into a different system.

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

Now, that being said, what are the core features that all small businesses need to have in their CRM platforms?

The core features, which all small business need in their easy to use CRM platforms:

  1. Lead Management and Sales

The purpose of purchasing CRM software, not just for small and medium-sized businesses, but even for larger organizations, is to manage their sales processes and build efficiencies in their customer-facing areas.
You will be hard pressed to buy a small business CRM software that does not include some sort of contact management and sales functionalities since CRM is a software that is specifically designed to do so.
We as an award-winning vendor of small business CRM platform would recommend you to look for an easy to use CRM solution like ConvergeHub that has a robust lead and sales management functionalities that permit your teams to track leads and contacts by creating automated and customized campaigns, which will allow you to more easily scale-up your business.
We also as the creator of ConvergeHub know that the last thing any small business owner wants to implement is a CRM that meets the features they need now but does not have the required capabilities to grow with their business.

Therefore, primarily, sales pipeline management is an absolute “must have” feature for all best small businesses CRM software platforms.

  1. Flexibility and Integration Capabilities

Saying that one of the core features that all CRM needs is flexibility may sound a little vague in the first place; however, it is an absolute must for the growth of any small business.
This is true, as when your business grows, you may not have any idea what are the new software platforms that you need to include for the convenience of your business.
Per say, one day you may choose to use a CRM based on its integration capabilities with your present tele-calling software RingCentral and then maybe you make a switch to NexInteractive predictive dialing software later on. Now if you do not choose a CRM system for your growing organization that features the ability to integrate with different software applications, and is easily customizable to support your teams, your business will suffer and so would your growth.

Therefore, purchasing best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, which seamlessly integrates with more than 30 business applications, including most popular integrations like Zapier and QuickBooks, is absolutely critical for supporting your sales, marketing, customer support, and accounting teams.

  1. Project Management

Gone are those days when every different business needed a different point of solution to solve their different pain points. Times have changed and so has technology.
Therefore, now the world of CRM has grown so much that you can find a plethora of features out there- which is again just another critical factor what makes it so difficult to choose a CRM system.

As a cloud based CRM vendor recognized and recommended by many, project management is one of these new features that we shall recommend for all small and medium-sized businesses.
Why?

This is because, in a growing business landscape, most small businesses establishments have different facets of businesses and project management functionality. Small business CRM software, helps the employees to keep track of their active projects and tasks, and provides a detailed workflow of their projects for their customers, which includes taking care of multiple resources, costs, and milestones.

  1. Mobile Support

When it comes to startups, and small and medium-sized businesses, we all know that the job does never stop just because you stepped out of your office. Practically, SMB employees and owners in most cases works round the clock, doing anything and everything to make their business grow.
This is the reason for having a cloud based mobile CRM for small business like ConvergeHub (now more than ever) is crucial for any growth-oriented small organization.

Being able to log projects, access prospect data from the CRM database, send messages, and track all customer data, anytime from anywhere, is, therefore, a must for all best small business CRM software, which can be only be done with seamless mobile support.

  1. Invoicing and Order Management

This may seem like a new recommendation for many, but as a small business entrepreneur, you are always going to have to sell your products or services- right?

Well, how much do you assume that your life will be easier if your sales teams can quickly create invoices and quotes and track client billing from a single system?

Having this functionality as a part of your best small business CRM software means that when your sales and customer support executives can look up your customer’s account details, they can easily see an entire history of the customer’s billing and also track the customer lifetime value. Doing this can make your teams aware of how much value each of your customers may bring in a lifetime, which in turn increase their potentiality to up-sell or cross-sell based on the history of the offerings that your customers have purchased in the past.

Order management and invoicing are not common features you will find in most of the outdated CRMs, but it is a feature that modern-day CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub include in its software, and so it is also known as QuickBooks CRM.
ConvergeHub the best small business CRM software allows QuickBooks CRM integration free and is therefore considered as the best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

Conclusion

So do you need all these 5 Features in your CRM for SMB?

Well, the answer is ‘Yes’.

This is because, in today’s working environment, all these 5 features are an absolute must if you want to run your business as efficiently as possible to cut the cost associated with running multiple software systems for the growth of your business.

This cost factor we mentioned above, not only includes paying for multiple products, but also the time-cost that is associated with the time wasted in entering and tracking data in multiple platforms, which even forebodes the fear of creating duplicate and erroneous data entries.

Using a CRM like ConvergeHub that provides a low cost entry point and also a free trial for 14 days not only allows you to see how we would fit within your business processes, but we the best CRM for small business, fits with your existing workflow and enhance them as your business grows in the days to come.

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Steps To Stronger Customer Loyalty Using An Easy To Use CRM Platform

With the present time’s ever-expanding market, consumers have no dearth of options to choose from when determining their loyalty towards a brand. Therefore, when customer feedbacks are not asked for or not taken seriously customers tend to jump at the chance to find a brand that prioritizes it. We hope these four strategies will help you understand the feedbacks of your customers in a more evocative way, and thereby help drive greater customer loyalty by using an easy to use CRM and through your digital experience.

In modern times, customers have never-ending options when it comes to choosing new brands, products, or services. This means that the customer’s expectations are extremely high in the present times, which calls for immediacy, responsiveness, personalization, product quality that are some of the key reasons customers which will make the consumers choose to be loyal to a brand over another.
However, one major element that holds the key to solidifying customer loyalty and consequently increase earnings is correctly leveraging customer feedback with the help of a easy to use CRM for the growth of your business.

Therefore, here are 4 sure-shot tactics to help strengthen your customer loyalty through consumer feedbacks.

Customers who have engaged actively with a brand remain 4 times more likely to use the brand’s products and services even after three months following their initial contact.- ConvergeHub Click To Tweet
  1. Remain Proactive

Customers are hard-pressed to leave feedback in any form, but we often forget that there are real people on both ends of the exchange. Hence, though most brands think that they are building products and services around their customers, nevertheless in reality researches show that businesses only hear from less than 1% of their customer base (which we call as the vocal minority) and the rest 99% customers becomes the ‘silent majority’, whereby their feedbacks and loyalty are nor fostered or prioritized.

According to a study published by a leading market survey organization, it has been acknowledged that customers who have engaged actively with a brand remain 4 times more likely to use the brand’s products and services even after three months following their initial contact.

Providing a place for receiving feedback from the customer is a great way to start, although most consumers only reach out unprompted if they have an issue that needs help to be fixed. Therefore, to get in front of the customer, you need to make a proactive effort to show how important their customer feedbacks are for your business.

To do this, it is best to proactively engage the customers throughout their digital experience, whereby you can start with a simple survey asking a few questions about their recent experience with your brand, which can be easily done if you are using an easy to use CRM software, showing your customers that you care.

  1. Engage at the right moment

Now that we know that it is needed to engage the customers, let us discuss what is the ‘right moment” within a digital experience and how it actually looks like.

Encouraging feedback from the customers is all about starting a conversation with the consumers, and therefore, asking for a feedback at the right moment is needed to give this conversation the best opportunity to begin.

To do this it is crucial that you understand your customer’s journey and pick up the best point for communication (e.g. if they view a certain page, after a customer has completed a purchase, when they complete a level, etc.) and find the right time to ask for the feedback.

However, it must be remembered that you need to remain conservative on how often you ask for the feedback and that you should give the customers sufficient time to engage with their experience with your offerings, before you ask for their feedback using an easy to use CRM, for the first time.

  1. Listen (really listen) to feedback

It has been found that far too often; businesses do not take actions based on the feedback the customers provide to the companies.

Now, it must be remembered that a lack of communication can affect both brand loyalty and the customer’s willingness to provide feedback in the future.

Therefore, it is most important for customers to feel heard when they provide a feedback, which can be validated in the following ways:

Say thank you

Always reply with a big “thanking you” message even if you have heard the same feedback for a million times or the feedback was incredibly rude.

Follow up

Always follow up with your consumers after they leave their feedbacks, and consider providing them something free for their valuable time, for customers who may have larger issues.

Be honest

Sometimes it is not possible to solve a problem on the spot. Hence, if a customer leaves feedback around an issue that is in a low priority level or cannot be solved, be honest and tell them why.

Provide Credit

Always give credit where it is due by giving thanks to your customers who brought your attention to an issue with your products or services. Taking a step further by personally calling those who provided such vital feedbacks and offering them thanks privately, often makes even those customers who get their problems solved become some of your biggest fans.

Remember that whether the sentiment is negative or positive, customer feedback is critically valuable and should always be considered as an opportunity to know how you can make a better product for your customers.

  1. Measure your brand’s progress

Executing a strategy always helps in improving your customer’s experience with your brand, and therefore drives loyalty in the primary part of the battle. However, measuring success is also equally important, since without tracking your success you will never be able to measure the progress that you have made.

If you are using an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub, consider following these five metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your customer’s experience over time.

– Average session length

-The bounce rate of various pages and email campaigns

-Frequency of sessions

-Track customer sentiment through NPS (Net Promoter Score)

-Activity per sessions

Conclusion

With the present time’s ever-expanding market, consumers have no dearth of options to choose from when determining their loyalty towards a brand. Therefore, when customer feedbacks are not asked for or not taken seriously customers tend to jump at the chance to find a brand that prioritizes it.

We hope these four strategies above will help you understand the feedbacks of your customers in a more evocative way, and thereby help drive greater customer loyalty by using an easy to use CRM and through your digital experience.

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If you have other ways that you have used for strengthening customer feedback, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

What Is CRM And How It Can Unlock Massive Sales Enablement Benefits For Your Business

You may know by now what is CRM software, but are you aware of the term ‘Sales Enablement’ and what it means to your business? Well, in general, sales enablement refers to a process of providing your sales teams with the most effective tools they need to sell your offerings successfully. Therefore, sales enablement provides your sales teams with the right technology and content to better engage their prospects in the buying cycle. It is a tool that can unlock significant benefits that in turn will increase your sales and drive more revenue.

You may know by now what is CRM software, but are you aware of the term ‘Sales Enablement’ and what it means to your business?

Well, in general, sales enablement refers to a process of providing your sales teams with the most effective tools they need to sell your offerings successfully. Therefore, sales enablement provides your sales teams with the right technology and content to better engage their prospects in the buying cycle. It is a tool that can unlock significant benefits that in turn will increase your sales and drive more revenue.

Leads that are nurtured in the CRM system convert 47% of the time- Annuitas Group Click To Tweet

For example, ConvergeHub small business CRM software is a sales enablement tool that can empower your sales teams to convert more leads and prospects into customers in a much lesser time.

Therefore, with a small business sales enablement tool like a CRM in place, your business has the potential to provide more ROI rapidly.

However, what are these benefits that you can unlock with a best small business CRM like ConvergeHub?

Now that we know what is CRM software, let us dive in see!

Automating manual tasks

A sales enablement CRM for small and medium business drastically increases the efficiency of your sales teams by automating their day-to-day tasks. Therefore, when you use a Converged CRM that includes sales, marketing, customer support, and also accounts (if you are using a QuickBooks CRM), your efficiency increases dramatically.

Here are a few examples:

  1. Data Entry

Lead data is captured successfully when you leverage lead-generation forms. That means, your sales reps do not need to enter data manually, and they can use that time to focus on more important issues.

  1. Appointment scheduling

CRM helps to automate the process of scheduling the appointment process. This allows prospects and customers to schedule meeting with reps with their convenience, freeing them from having to conduct the actions manually.

  1. Lead Scoring

This process helps sales reps to take actions by viewing the propensity of the buyers. Lead scoring methods help in improving the quality of the leads. Hence, small business CRM software that includes lead scoring capabilities helps reps to focus on other things and at the same time have an insight into, leads, which are sales-ready, and those leads that need more nurturing.

  1. Telephony

If you easy to use CRM provides telephony integrations, like Ring Central and others, it helps your sales reps make more calls in less time. Using telephony integration you can select a group of leads to call and let the software call them in sequence without your sales reps having to call up each of the dialed numbers manually, resulting in increased productivity.

  1. Voicemail Drop

Another great benefit of using telephony integrations with your small business CRM software is the ability to leave pre-recorded voice mail drops. Hence, when your sales reps call someone and get sent to the prospect’s voicemail, they click the voicemail drop they want to leave, which thereafter gets delivered automatically.

  1. More Insight Into Customers And Prospects

A CRM software that provides sales enablement stores extensive data on customer and prospects, which includes demographic and personal data of the prospects and the customers. For users who know what is CRM software and its capabilities, can easily track such data for finding behaviors such as clicking on an email, attending a webinar, or viewing a content, which can help sales reps to leverage sales enablement software to maintain more insights into who the customers are and what they need.

  1. Understanding past buying behavior

Sales enablement software like ConvergeHub software helps to track all deals that have been created by your reps.
Once you are using a QuickBooks CRM for sales teams, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, your reps can easily open a contact’s records in the CRM database to see which product has been bought by the customer in the past. It can also show which products the prospects and customers have been interested but did not purchase, which allows reps to understand which types of offerings the customers are interested in that in turn drastically increases up-selling opportunities.

  1. Knowing customer’s pain points

When you use a Converged CRM like ConvergeHub, you can track all the customer support tickets, and easily see which problems a customer has faced with your offerings by reviewing their ticket history in the CRM database. Therefore, before up-selling to any customer, using a CRM you can see if the customer is having an issue, and up-sell until the customer is satisfied again.

  1. Arming representatives with the right resources

Sales enablement is also about sending the right resources and content to the leads, prospects, and customers at the right time. Therefore using easy to use CRM software platform, your reps can check where each lead are in the sales funnel, and provide them contents that correctly aligns with the sales process, which can be leveraged by using marketing automation functionalities of the CRM software.

  1. Automated tasks and alerts

You can use small business CRM software to send alerts to sales reps instantaneously when leads become sales qualified that help to remind reps that they need to reach out immediately and start a conversation with the prospect. It is like striking when the iron is hot.

Moreover, using CRM software when speaking to a lead that would benefit from a particular resource, sales reps can simply open the saved email and hit send, which lets them quickly provide the resources and content that leads need at each stage of the sales funnel.

  1. Understanding results

Sales and marketing teams need constant insight into their efforts to improve their results. With a robust sales enablement software like ConvergeHub CRM , you can use its powerful reporting functionalities to view how they are performing against their goals. Sales CRM software helps in checking the health of your sales pipeline, see growth reports, check your rep’s call rates and much more, to identify areas that need improvement or fix broken processes and make data-driven decisions they need to improve to close more deals.

 Conclusion

Now that you know what is CRM software and how it can help you as one of the most efficient sales enablement tools, use ConvergeHub the award winning CRM platform for small businesses, to unlock the benefits described above to make your reps work faster, smarter, and convert more leads into customers in less time.

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How Best Sales CRM Software Plays A Vital Role In Building Your Sales Strategy

Best sales CRM software can help your business grow by managing several sales processes, starting with lead scoring to creating long-term customer relationships. In a study done by Aberdeen Group in 2010 revealed that, many of the fastest growing organizations use Customer Relationship Management technology to turn more sales leads into revenue. In the same study, it was also shown that 63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use best sales CRM software technology for their success. Here is how best sales CRM software helps in the growth of your organization.

Best sales CRM software can help your business grow by managing several sales processes, starting with lead scoring to creating long-term customer relationships.
In a study done by Aberdeen Group in 2010 revealed that, many of the fastest growing organizations use Customer Relationship Management technology to turn more sales leads into revenue.

In the same study, it was also shown that 63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use best sales CRM software technology for their success.

63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use best sales CRM software technology for their success- Aberdeen Group(2010) Click To Tweet

Here is how best sales CRM software helps in the growth of your organization:

Sales Planning

Easy to use CRM software can provide you with an overview of your projected sales targets for a specific period of time. This can help you plan marketing campaigns using the forecasted data and prepare your sales teams for an increase or dip in the volume of sales in your business.

You can also use the information retrieved from your CRM database, to manage sales territories more efficiently. Best sales CRM software allows your sales managers to view the schedules of your sales reps out in the field, along with the potentials of various territories, so that you can decide upon entrusting the right members of your sales team to the locations where they are most needed, which results in optimizing your sales team’s performance.

Improve Lead Conversion

Best sales CRM software like ConvergeHub CRM and others helps to shift the focus of your sales reps (from other mundane tasks) so that they can spend their time more in selling. The data gathered in the CRM database of your best sales CRM software can also help in finding deals that have not yet been closed, monitor sales quotas, and develop strategies to shorten sales cycles resulting in the generation of faster revenue.

Best sales CRM software solutions can also track incoming leads and after assessing them, distribute the leads to the representatives most likely to close the sale. Easy to use CRM applications can also help to foster efficient collaborations with your employees in sales, marketing, support, and accounts by coordinating tasks among your employees.

Build Customer Relationships

Maintaining relationship with existing customers is just as important as acquiring new ones. Easy to use CRM platforms can store detailed information from each interaction with your customers. Customer information stored in the CRM database also helps in anticipating the customers’ needs, which helps in providing personal customer service that aids in creating loyal customers.

In fact, best sales CRM software solutions can manage sales processes as well as monitor and develop your long-term customer contracts, by sending automated reminders for renewal of your services.

Track And Analyze

Best sales CRM software like ConvergeHub also enables you to track lead data, so that you can easily calculate the returns on your investments in lead generation and in marketing campaigns on an ongoing basis. This helps you to see, which among your lead sources are generating the most revenue and adjust your strategies according.

Easy to use CRM even lets you access data for each of your leads individually, which is always a valuable asset for your sales teams.

According to us, the sales analysis aspect of any best sales CRM software helps in monitoring the overall health of your business by proactively monitoring sales pipeline management, creating accurate forecasts, effectively manage the budgets and intelligently allocate resources to meet your company’s revenue goals.

Pricing And Order Fulfillment

Best sales CRM software, especially CRM platforms like ConvergeHub that allows QuickBooks CRM integration free ensure accurate pricing and quotes, by capturing customer order, confirming availability of the products and expediting order fulfillment.

According to SearchCRM, the main purpose of best sales CRM software is to:

“Provide employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers, understand and identify customer needs, and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.”

Conclusion                                                  

Therefore, in a brief, most easy to use sales CRM solutions are created to help sales and marketing teams succeed. As when the information that these customer relationship applications collect are applied as an essential part of the sales strategy, it helps to benefit the organization as a whole, in terms of revenue generation and growth, by determining which marketing efforts and sales strategies are most effective for the development of the company.

The Future Of Cloud Based CRM Systems: Intelligent, Integrated And Data-Driven

The time of an intelligent, integrated cloud based CRM systems has come, and it is one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise software solutions today. Right from startups and SMBs to big global enterprises, marketing and sales teams are adopting easy to use cloud based CRM technology to acquire new customers, retain the old, enhance customer experience, and find new customer-centric data driven insights that are paving the path for strategic changes in their companies.

The time of an intelligent, integrated cloud based CRM systems has come, and it is one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise software solutions today.
Right from startups and SMBs to big global enterprises, marketing and sales teams are adopting easy to use cloud based CRM technology to acquire new customers, retain the old, enhance customer experience, and find new customer-centric data driven insights that are paving the path for strategic changes in their companies.

Now as these new CRM technologies are rapidly evolving to meet the newfound strategic goals of businesses globally, Big Data, Analytics, Business Intelligence (BI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning are the new technological foundations of the present days fast growing CRM applications, in the market.

The global CRM market is predicted to achieve a 13.7% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) through 2021- Gartner Click To Tweet

Investing in cloud based CRM systems, startups are presently focusing on how easy to use CRM solutions are capable of providing new insights into improving the customer experiences, increase customer retention strategies, and accelerate new product development based on the needs of their customers.

In a recent analysis done by CrunchBase on CRM startups, it shows that the majority of the CRM vendors are investing in advanced analytics, machine learning, Big Data, and AI technologies.

To substantiate this claim McKinsey notes that the total annual external investments in Artificial Intelligence technology globally were between $8 Billion and $12 Billion back in 2016, with machine learning attracting 60% of that investment, and the same figures are on a rise.

Quick Stats

  • According to Gartner- 56% of all easy to use CRM adoptions will be cloud based CRM systems, starting from 2017.
  • According to Gartner- The global CRM market is predicted to achieve a 13.7% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) through 2021.
  • AI will be the primary catalyst of the cloud based CRM’s growth over the next 4 years, which is going to be supported by BI, analytics, and machine learning technologies, as cloud based CRM buyers will focus more on the addition of emerging technologies that cater to more efficient customer experiences.

Businesses of all sizes are now struggling to remain on the same page with their customers as the customer’s preferences as to how they are learning about their required products and services and when they are buying are changing constantly.

In other words, nowadays the customer’s psychology is fundamentally at a flux, and it exceeds the boundaries of simple demographics, or even customer segments, which ranges across B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) enterprises.

Therefore as the dynamics of the customers across all segments are changing fast, with customer experiences winning over mere transactions, getting response from any channel a customer chooses to interact with the brands, and for rendering intelligent and responsive support, modern cloud based CRM systems need to change their technology if they are going to meet these customer-centric goals.

Modern cloud based CRM systems need to find greater precision in focusing on the customer needs, predict and quantify their behaviors. In addition to this, today’s CRM platforms should also be capable of recommending or suggesting potential strategies and tactics for sales and marketing teams that should deliver results.

Customer Intelligence is the King

The better the insights, marketing data, and customer-centric knowledge-driven decisions, the more effective every marketing statistics and tactics will be. As we all know by now, that when strategies in sales and marketing are built on the foundations of customer insight and intelligence, customer experiences improves.

Positive customer experiences create loyalties, builds trusts, fuel repurchase, which consequentially lead to higher CLV or Customer Lifetime Values.

Nevertheless, this chain reaction behind customer-centric growth can only begin when the sales and marketing teams in any organization are well aware of what their customers are expecting, why they are expecting, and how their organization can deliver the offerings that will exceed the customer’s expectations.

Therefore as we predicted earlier in this blog, Big Data, AI, machine learning and analytics are the future of cloud based CRM systems, because they are being used nowadays to redefine the path to exceed customer expectations and drive in more revenue.

Hence, the days of the traditional CRM systems and its strategies for treating every customer, in the same way, are over.

In the present times- Customer Intelligence is now the King.

With greater contextual insights, predictive accuracy offered by customer intelligence of when and where to sell delivers measurable results. For marketing managers and their teams, one of the greatest challenges they encounter is in quantifying their contributions to their businesses’ growth. Therefore, with the modern technological developments in CRM technology, machine learning, AI, and analytics all these in conglomeration will provide the marketing managers and their teams an opportunity to measure how their strategies are driving profits and sales, as well as how they are contributing to their organization’s growth.

Most of the CRM solutions in the market today are cloud based CRM systems.  Since cloud based systems are capable of maturing rapidly and provide a solid foundation for the next generation of application developments. In fact, APIs or Application Programmer Interfaces that most modern CRM software solutions rely on to create real-time integrations helps in linking and bridging platforms and applications, accelerating the breadth, depth, and stability of modern cloud based CRM systems.

In a recent study done by McKinsey & Company, it has been found that businesses using cloud based CRM systems can capture greater revenue growth with APIs to integrate enterprise systems.
In other words, in CRM systems, APIs are the fasteners that make greater customer intelligence possible. Since APIs helps to integrate systems together and develop a valuable system of records that can easily reflect customer preferences, while at the same time create strategies for a successful sales growth.

API Integrations Are Designing The Most Valuable CRM Apps Of The Future Days

All businesses big or small striving for keeping their existing customers, and at the same time attract new ones, faces the constant challenge of staying on the radar of their customer’s preferences. Since customer preferences change over time, therefore, using outdated CRM applications are no longer pertinent to the sales and marketing teams depending on CRM and its features to catch the attention and win customers.

Hence, the future of CRM today is defined by new and agile application interfaces that can be customized for each sales reps and marketers by adding or changing fields in minutes, according to their varied needs.

The cloud based CRM system of the modern times no longer takes weeks or months to modify a CRM system’s dashboard or its workflow, since they can be easily modified and changed quickly by the system administrators using a cloud-based platform.

Therefore, the flexibility of customization of cloud based CRM systems to match how marketing and sales team works, rather than the other way round is one of the main catalysts that welcomed the adoption of cloud based CRM solutions and is fueling its continuous growth.

In fact, APIs are one of the main technologies that facilitate cloud based CRM platforms to flex its functionalities and respond to the sales and marketing team’s needs.

Moreover, the growth of AWS (Amazon Web Services) has also dramatically shown how APIs contribute to the development of an entirely new business model, fueling a level of analytics-driven insights for businesses, previously unknown to the users of CRM platforms.

According to a recent article published in Forbes, it points out that APIs are most essential for defining and customizing GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces) that improves the contribution and usability to improve customer experience since APIs creates the links that cloud platforms rely on to integrate easy to use CRM and other enterprise software applications.

The CRM’s Future Is a Highly Integrated One- Because the Cloud Has Won

In the present times, APIs are already beginning to become more customer-centric in their designs, which allows for greater versatility and flexibility in designing entirely new GUIs, process steps, workflows, and screen designs, which over time will redefine the nature of cloud platforms in the days to come.

Nearly every cloud based CRM providers today like ConvergeHub and others have integrated enterprise-grade APIs (some more mature and scalable than others) that signals the future of the CRM technology’s road map across all businesses.

We are all extremely apprehensive that these new APIs will become customer-centric in the coming 3-5 years and will have a strong focus on orchestrating a wide variety of data-rich applications, databases, and system of records.

In other words, cloud platforms are helping APIs to become more customer-centric by providing reliable and scalable integration frameworks and technologies.

Looking Ahead

It is presumed that in the near future a more integrated, contextually intelligent and aware cloud based CRM applications will enable sales and marketing teams to define their strategies with superior precision while measuring the results achieved, better than it was ever before.

Therefore, briefly, cloud based CRMs like ConvergeHub will continue to outmatch overall enterprise growth in software, as with a superfluity of technologies at hand, the future of cloud based CRM is the brightest among all other enterprise level cloud-based software solutions in the IT world.

10 Commandments of Customer Success Strategies with an Easy to Use CRM

Gone are the days of the uninformed customer. Today customers hold the cards, not the vendors. Now, you must be wondering what does this means for you and your business. Well, it means that just as your customer’s barrier to try your brand has dropped (e.g., through online signups, free trials, and monthly pricing plans); their barrier to exit has also dropped. Nowadays, customers are only committed to your brand as long as you are delivering value. Furthermore, customers are better informed and tech-savvy than ever before. Here are 10 key learnings we have gathered over time as customer success best practices, especially for small and medium businesses.

Gone are the days of the uninformed customer. Today customers hold the cards, not the vendors.
Now, you must be wondering what does this means for you and your business.
Well, it means that just as your customer’s barrier to try your brand has dropped (e.g., through online signups, free trials, and monthly pricing plans); their barrier to exit has also dropped. Nowadays, customers are only committed to your brand as long as you are delivering value. Furthermore, customers are better informed and tech-savvy than ever before.
Because of these trends, both traditional vendors and technology-based companies using easy to use CRM platforms alike are establishing customer success strategies and programs based on the simple concept:

“Make your customers successful, and your business success will follow suit.”

Below are 10 key learnings we have gathered over time as customer success best practices, especially for small and medium businesses.

By 2018, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations -Gartner Click To Tweet
  1. The Customer Success Team Is Not The Only One In Charge Of Customer Success

Preventing customer churn is everyone’s job in an organization. Therefore, just like the members of your customer success team, the CEO of your business should greet as many numbers of customers as he/she can and have direct communication with the customers of your brand. Additionally, the salespeople that won the initial contract should also check with their customer base to up-sell and see how things are going, just as the head of your customer onboarding department should also touch base with the customers to make sure that they do not need any new refresher or information on your products or services.

  1. Make Your Customers the De-Facto “Head of Product and Services”

The feedback from your customers on products and services should provide the direction of your offerings. Always make sure that your customers know that their feedback is important for your business and make them feel the power of ownership. This will make the customers feel appreciated and therefore think about investing in your brand.

  1. Contact Structure is Important

All contacts should have an auto-renewal (with a small increase in pricing). Additionally, instead of paid pilots, provide your customers a 14-day trial when they sign up, which will lower the barriers of customer acquisition.

  1. Provide Free Onboarding If Needed

Although you must always try to charge your customers an upfront fee for onboarding, nevertheless, if your customer is not ready to pay then give them a free onboarding anyways. Remember customers are won and lost during onboarding, so make sure that they know how to use your product or service effectively. We as an easy to use CRM vendor have found from our knowledge gathered over time that 40% of those customers that did not receive proper onboarding churns out in 6 months.

  1. The First 3 Months Predicts The Next 9 Months

Your sales and support teams should especially remain in ‘high-touch’ with their customers during the first 3 post-sales months. This is because the customer’s experience in these primary stages, when the customers pay their greatest attention to your product, must necessarily go well. For this, remain especially proactive and attentive to the customers during these 3 initial months.

  1. Not Willing To Adopt Features Can Be Warnings

Remember a customer reaching out to you for help is always a good thing. Therefore, if a customer is not actively making use your product and at the same time not getting in touch with you with his/her questions, or if the customer is not adopting your brand’s new features after their purchase, reach out and make sure that nothing is wrong.

  1. The Rule of 40

If you are a SaaS-based company, (like us) with enterprise level customers, in general, we found that you need one customer success representative for every 40 customers. Therefore, do not overwhelm the customer success team with a ratio far outside 40:1.

  1. Educate The Customer

Make your customer better at using your products and services by providing them continued education, and share with them how other customers are using your tools. Customer feedback driven product road-map makes the customers feel like they have an ownership of the product.

  1. Your Old Customers Are Your Best New Customers

Remember you old customers are the cheapest source of your new customers. Therefore, you should always be exploring new ways to up-sell and cross-sell your current customers and make sure that you are maxing out their interest in your brand.

  1. Make Sure You’re Selling To The Right Customers

Not all revenues are created equally. Therefore, your sales teams need to make sure that the customers they are signing up for your brand are fit for buying your offerings.

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Bringing in sales, revenue, and customers just for mere growth, which then churns out, does not provide any value. Rather it just exhausts your onboarding resources and customer success strategy.

Takeaway

Finally, using a customer success management software like an easy to use CRM solution like ConvergeHub (one that is ideal for the members of your whole organization), can help your team to work better, create a more efficient customer success workflow, resulting in happier customers.

How Doing Business without Online Lead Management Software Can Kill Your Sales

Do you find your CRM or online lead management software as just another software tool for you and your team to log our sales in, but do not really understand the reason for doing it? If it is so, have you also experienced long stretches of low sales, squandered sales opportunities, and unsolicited small errors getting on the way of your sales performances? This is the very reason as to why the benefits of using online lead management software or a CRM solution should never be underestimated by the sales team. There are multiple ways even skilled sales reps miss potential sales prospects when their business does not adopt easy to use CRM software. Here are some of the most common reasons for underperformance in sales.

Do you find your CRM or online lead management software as just another software tool for you and your team to log your sales in, but do not really understand the reason for doing it?

If it is so, have you also experienced long stretches of low sales, squandered sales opportunities, and unsolicited small errors getting on the way of your sales performances?

This is the very reason as to why the benefits of using online lead management software or a CRM solution should never be underestimated by the sales team.

An Easy to Use CRM solution decreases sales and marketing costs by 23% -SmallBizCRM Click To Tweet

There are multiple ways even skilled sales reps miss potential sales prospects when their business does not adopt easy to use CRM software .

Here are some of the most common reasons for underperformance in sales:

  • Incapability to understand the customer’s needs
  • Ineffectual sales performance tracking
  • Too much of time being spent on focusing on back-end support activities and not making sales

How online lead management software works to improve sales

  1. Improve contact information

An easy to use CRM solution provides you and your entire team a complete 360-degree view of your leads and customers, giving everyone in your business access to the same information, and thereby helping them to remain on the same page.

When everyone in your organization access a single customer list, it becomes much more convenient to sort and analyze your lead and customer information. Additionally, an online lead management software solution also aids you to track where your leads are in the sales cycle with opportunity tracking abilities, which helps your sales teams to predict the likelihood of closing a prospective deal.

  1. Better interactions with the customers

A key feature of a cloud based CRM systems is tracking interactions with your leads, prospects, and customers. Being able to keep a log of outgoing and incoming emails, phone calls, visits, and more; allow your sales teams to remain updated with what is going on with their customer relationships. An online lead management software solution helps to keep your sales teams organized, speeds up their follow-up activities, and most essentially improve the quality of their communication with leads and customers. A CRM solution also ensures that no two sales professionals in your organization are approaching the same lead, which makes your sales team more efficient in closing their deals.

  1. Automate mundane tasks

One of the greatest benefits of using a customizable easy to use CRM (like ConvergeHub), is creating end-to-end workflow. With ConvergeHub, you can make your online lead management software work the way you do, and automate several mundane manual processes, such as sending a follow-up email after conversion of a lead, converting estimates to invoices, or even manage your businesses’ inventory.

By customizing your best small business CRM software solution to fit your business, your sales and support teams become more efficient, as they can free up their time, focus on closing deals, and thereby grow your business.

  1. Improve reporting and analytical data

Finding valuable insights into your customer data in the CRM database provides priceless information on what makes your leads get converted at a higher rate and also gives you an in-depth understanding of your customer lifecycle.

An online lead management software like ConvergeHub CRM also easily tracks the history of all the interactions your sales reps had with their customers, so that you are able to view, for an example, which are the leads that received a specific email marketing campaign converted to customers at a higher rate than those that did not.

Therefore, using a CRM solution you can easily find out and understand now which emails you should send to convert more leads and as a natural consequence grow your business.

  1. Increase time to make sales

By investing less time on tedious administration tasks in the office, using an online lead management software that has marketing automation capabilities like ConvergeHub CRM, your sales teams can focus a considerable amount of time tracking new leads, forging new relationships and thereby increase sales.

Using an easy to use CRM software solution, your sales team members need not request other employees in your organization to get a purchase history of the customers or reach a customer with outdated contact information, which allows your team to generate more sales.

  1. Create happier customers to encourage returning sales

By having a comprehensive 360° view of all your customers, you can easily view their entire history, making interactions between you and your customers easier.
As better perception of your customer’s needs results in more efficient customer service, that inspires your customers to return back for more businesses.

What should you do?

Therefore, if you find that the sales teams in your small business organization are desperate for perceiving a change in their sales strategies for escalating their plummeting sales goals, try ConvergeHub CRM software today.

ConvergeHub is an award-winning CRM solution for small and medium-sized businesses, which provides an online lead management software solution to startups and SMBs that have requirements as large business organizations but do not have the required budget to spend on several standalone software applications and their integrations for increasing their ROI.