Tag: Buy CRM

Primary Reasons For Buying CRM To Boost Sales and Revenue

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is time-tested software, which is not just the application of technology but is also a strategy to learn more about your customer’s needs and behavior in order the build a stronger relationship. However, as it is true that getting an easy to use CRM for your SMB too early is a wrong thing, similarly you can inflict a negative impact on your business if you buy CRM and its implementation gets too long. Even CRM guru Paul Greenberg the writer of the bestselling book “CRM at the Speed of Light” admits that it can be an accepted fact, like many others, your business may not be ready for CRM, for if that is the case, you will be wasting your money and efforts if you adopt easy to use CRM for your business growth.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is time-tested software, which is not just the application of technology but is also a strategy to learn more about your customer’s needs and behavior in order the build a stronger relationship.
However, as it is true that getting an easy to use CRM for your SMB too early is a wrong thing, similarly you can inflict a negative impact on your business if you buy CRM and its implementation gets too long.

Using CRM software can increase sales conversion rates by up to 300% - Cloudswave Click To Tweet

Even CRM guru Paul Greenberg the writer of the bestselling book “CRM at the Speed of Light” admits that it can be an accepted fact, like many others, your business may not be ready for CRM, for if that is the case, you will be wasting your money and efforts if you adopt easy to use CRM for your business growth.

So, is your business ready for this business growth technology and tools?

To find an answer to this critical question, here are 3 indicators that can guide you to understand whether you should buy an easy to use CRM for your business right now or your company needs to grow further till you adopt this business growth technology for earning even better revenue.

1. Are You Losing New Sales?

Selling would have been a lot easier if none of the companies would have lost in their selling process. However, if you are losing sales because your lead and customer information got misplaced, or you failed to follow-up because your CRM database is disorganized, or your sales team is spending more time updating and managing their Excel spreadsheets than selling, then it is high time you should move towards implementing an easy to use CRM for your company.

At the most basic level CRM is a tool where you can store all leads and customer information in the CRM database that allows the user to collect, store and use the data for alerts and future sales and customer service activities.

CRM also allows rapid access to all collateral materials as and when they are needed, understand where sales may be going wrong, and find an immediate solution to the problem.

So the answer to what is CRM can be summarized that CRM software is a technology that helps in performing actions that are hard to do with a pure manual, spreadsheet-based approach.

2. Are You Loosing Existing Customers?

Apart from gaining new customers, CRM is even more valuable when it comes to retaining existing customers. Hence, if you are losing existing customers because of failure to follow-up, it is the time that you must introduce ‘Sales Force Automation’ or SFA with the help of easy to use CRM, into sales and customer service operations in your company.

3. Is Your Customer Data Too Large?

The longer you retain your customers, the more you know them. However, it is impossible to carry all the details of your customers, such as their payment terms, buying patterns, things they respond to, and even their personal information and others, in your head.

Therefore, when your organization needs to remember the large volume of data about your leads, prospects, and existing customers, it is the time that you need a CRM database to keep your entire information safe in one central repository.

Endnote

Although implementing CRM can be challenging, but if you are losing sales for any of these above scenarios, it is the time you must understand what is CRM, and adopt this most popular business growth technology for optimizing your organization’s sales and customer support efficiently.

sign up

How Can You Successfully Convert Operations In Customer Care To A Work From Home Set-Up

In light of this recent COVID-19 Pandemic outbreak, several organizations across the globe are now opting to manage their day-to-day works remotely from their residence and homes. In fact, thousands of businesses across China, USA, India, Korea and many other European nations have recently adopted this measure in order to protect their employees and hence reduce the impact of this deadly Coronavirus that is spreading like a wildfire in most nations across the globe. Now, in this era of digital mobility, it might bring you some peace to learn that you make your customer care and support teams to work from their homes, attend to incoming support tickets and issues raised by the consumers without much of a hassle, and to do that all that is needed is access to the right easy to use CRM, a trouble-free internet connection along with a handheld or a mobile device to let your support employees manage their most essential support activities from anywhere and at any time across the globe.

In light of this recent COVID-19 Pandemic outbreak, several organizations across the globe are now opting to manage their day-to-day works remotely from their residence and homes.
In fact, thousands of businesses across China, USA, India, Korea and many other European nations have recently adopted this measure in order to protect their employees and hence reduce the impact of this deadly Coronavirus that is spreading like a wildfire in most nations across the globe.
Now, in this era of digital mobility, it might bring you some peace to learn that you make your customer care and support teams to work from their homes, attend to incoming support tickets and issues raised by the consumers without much of a hassle, and to do that all that is needed is access to the right easy to use CRM , a trouble-free internet connection along with a handheld or a mobile device to let your support employees manage their most essential support activities from anywhere and at any time across the globe.

How can you convert a support center to a work-from-home model at such a short notice?

Well, even though it might make you seem to be at a loss, nevertheless, the truth is that it is indeed highly possible and easy to convert your customer support operations to the work-from-home model and thereafter get it running in minutes.

We say this as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools in the CRM for SMB marketplace since it can be suggested that you can conveniently turn your support centers to a work from the home process if your business uses the necessary tools and route all incoming tickets (chat, emails, calls, and social media communications) to agents through a cloud-based CRM software that can be connected by anyone living anywhere near or far across the globe.

And all these ticket allocations can be done by creating triggers and rules in the CRM that are unique to your businesses.

That implies the support tickets can be easily allocated using an easy to use CRM based on the source of the tickets, type of the query, agent availability and so on.

After which the support agents can use their respective login IDs to log into the CRM software and thereafter attend to the tickets right from their homes and so successfully sustain their efforts in providing world-class support even in these troubled times that we are all are encountering across the world.

Approximately 5.2 percent of workers in the U.S. currently work from home. That works out to be about eight million people, and more folks are joining the work from home workforce each year. Click To Tweet

Golden Tips For Conducting Remote Customer Support Activities

Primarily to track the agent’s performance the Team Leads can track their agent’s performance and also monitor their agent’s SLAs (Service-Level Agreement) by going through the reports and analytics that can be made available using a CRM platform that includes an hourly ticket dashboard and “ticket aging report”.
The Team Leads can also find an “agent productivity report” and many other forms of reports that can easily be configured in a CRM tool’s dashboard based on hierarchy and departments in their organization.

Now even after reading all these hopeful information if you are still concerned about the implication of this process, we might recommend you to follow these understated five golden suggestions to ensure that your remote customer support teams are working efficiently:

1. Boost the flow of communication

It is really a matter of great concern that this sudden change of workplace can be stressful at times, for your
customer-facing support representatives.

Hence in order to keep their spirits high and motivated and to increase their productivity, you can introduce some simple processes, which can include a morning hurdle online, or announce the “performer of the day” for the best performing support staff of any given day.

2. Provide your staffs the right tool

Make sure that all your support agents are geared up with the right tools and software platforms that are essential to aid them to work remotely.

Now one of the most important tools that are needed for this purpose is an easy to use CRM, along with data management and web-conference software solutions, which can allow your agents to handle their daily workflows even in stressful times in an efficient manner.

3. Create an internal knowledge-base

Once you buy CRM for your organization’s growth you can use it as a centralized knowledge-base that can aid your support staff to access and refer to necessary information and data that are needed for resolving their customer issues.

4. Specify your performance metrics

We found that there is always a way long common but unuttered fear in the minds of the management that the work from home model might bring a sudden stop to the optimum productivity index that is required for their business growth.

Nonetheless, if you are using modern-day business growth technology and tools, you can easily prevent such things from happening in your organization by laying down a clear, well-defined and quantifiable metrics that can include:

• The specific length of hours that an agent has to work
• The specific number of calls they need to attend each day…and more

Additionally, you can even conduct regular review sessions with your support teams which can not only help in improving their productivity but it can even aid the agents to focus better on their work as they can view their goals easily.

5. Ensure rigid data-security policies

Finally, as data-security plays a critical role that all businesses must remain careful of in this CCPA and GDPR era, therefore, ensure that your support teams are attending to their customers without compromising on different aspects that pertain to the security of your customers.

Hence as one of the most popular vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses and startups, we suggest you establish rigid security regulations and guidelines and even double-check to find that all these rules are communicated to everyone in your remote teams.

For this, you can provide your customer-facing staff corporate access to important tools like a VPN, security browsing facilities and so on.

sign up

Unique Benefits of Easy to Use CRM That Will Accelerate Your Sales Growth

Are you aware that according to Fortunly, just 78.5% of startup businesses survive the first year? And that implies a significant 21.5% of businesses fail in the first year itself. Now among many other reasons for failures in businesses, we also know as one of the leading easy to use CRM vendors for SMBs that 14% of startups and small business organizations fail since they pay no attention to their customer’s needs, which shows that companies shun their customers at their own peril. Therefore, once you start a business, just understanding what you are selling to your consumers in the marketplace is just not enough. Rather in the present times, companies most essentially need to know who they are selling their offerings. For which getting acquainted with the customers, understanding their requirements, and more importantly building world-class long-term relationships with them is essential to continue success for business growth.

Are you aware that according to Fortunly, just 78.5% of startup businesses survive the first year?
And that implies a significant 21.5% of businesses fail in the first year itself.
Now among many other reasons for failures in businesses, we also know as one of the leading easy to use CRM vendors for SMBs that 14% of startups and small business organizations fail since they pay no attention to their customer’s needs, which shows that companies shun their customers at their own peril.

Therefore, once you start a business, just understanding what you are selling to your consumers in the marketplace is just not enough. Rather in the present times, companies most essentially need to know who they are selling their offerings. For which getting acquainted with the customers, understanding their requirements, and more importantly building world-class long-term relationships with them is essential to continue success for business growth.

Nearly 60% of organizations expect to increase IT spending in 2019. And it remains the same in 2020. Click To Tweet

This is exactly where business growth technology solutions like easy to use CRM software steps in.

However, it is unfortunate that according to a report published by Stellaxius, still today 50% of companies with 10 or fewer employees do not use CRM for their businesses.

Therefore, if your startup or small business is yet to buy CRM , the time to do so is now.

So, here are the five most unique benefits of using an easy to use CRM software solution you should look at for accelerating your business growth.

Benefit #1

CRM Helps Make Employee Transition Smooth

Just imagine a situation: Your star sales represented is leaving your company, and you have to distribute his/her accounts to the rest of your teams until you are able to find a replacement.

Now, without a CRM in hand, all the interactions and accounts that the rep had may be scattered across several spreadsheets, sticky notes, and emails, which will make it difficult and tiresome to find a complete view of these accounts and their progress.

But with an easy to use CRM in place, you can easily and quickly conduct a sales pipeline audit, which will allow you to find a complete understanding of the accounts and comprehend deal stages and their progress, and thereby even if your star sales rep leaves can enable the rest of your sales teams to engage in contextual conversation with his/her prospects and customers.

An easy to use CRM enables your business to:

• Go through your sales rep’s accounts and clearly perceive how many deals they have in their sales pipeline and understand which stages they are in.

• Strategize your next course of action as when you review the attributes in the pipeline you can identify new ways and possibilities to take the deals forward and also find how the new reps you hire will take over.

Benefit #2

CRM Helps To Boost Collaboration

Any CRM software be it Salesforce used by enterprise-level organizations or Salesforce Alternative CRM tools used by SMBs, at its core is a platform that enables people in sales to collaborate not only within themselves but even with other different teams like marketing, support, production, partners, and accounts across the organization.

In other words, easy to use CRM solutions allows sales reps to access and share essential documents collected and stored within the system.
In fact, some of the best known CRM platforms in the marketplace come with in-built communication tools that permit salespeople to not only communicate with each other without leaving the CRM but also share interactions they collect from interactions with their customers.

This functionality found in a CRM is essential as when leads get passed on from sales development representatives to the account executives in business, the account executives need context to get engaged with the leads, which can be easily done using an easy to use CRM whereby the account executives get access to past emails, conversations, char notes and more.

Benefit #3

Automations Boost The Productivity Of Reps

Repetitious tasks like updating and adding contact information, sending the same email to several recipients, setting up monotonous follow-up tasks and others can be simply automated using Sales Force Automationm (SFA) that is integrated with most easy to use CRM tools, which aids in freeing time for the sales reps to take care of more important tasks like interacting and communicating with prospects, and more.

Modern CRM software solutions can not only help capture prospects and customer data but it can also populate a lead with useful information such as job title, industry and company and even automatically log calls which can save reps the time required to log every call to the respective prospects.

Additionally easy to use CRM can even contact leads within minutes of their sign-up that can increase the likelihood of them answering the call by automatically assigning prospects to the right sales reps available in the team.

Finally, using CRM sales reps can allow the software to automatically create appointments and thereafter get constantly reminded to help them stay on track.

Benefit #4

Get A Forecasted View Of Sales

Wrong data is bad for any business, and so are the wrong numbers in sales.
Therefore, using a modern CRM solution businesses can find well-engineered and accurate forecasts of their sales, which can help organizations to avoid major and expensive mistakes when it comes to planning their marketing campaigns, gather leads, and conduct their overall sales process.

Easy to use CRM can do the following to provide value out of sales forecasting for any business:

• Sales Pipeline forecasting

Once a deal is initiated it passes through several stages in the sales pipeline. Modern CRM can provide the ability to set a customized percentage that can be measured for each stage to show how likely the deals will move to get to the next stage in the pipeline or how likely it is for the deal to convert to a sale.

• Goal-based forecasting

Based on the numbers and revenue of the deals that you have closed, CRM can help to forecast sales and show how likely your team is to achieve them.
Using CRM sales managers can find an idea of the number of deals that are won and thereby determine the average deal win rates.

Benefit #5

Improve Customer Relationships And Reduce Churn

CRM is known as Customer Relationship Management software for a reason.

It cannot be denied that your customers make your business- and there are no two ways about it.

Therefore you need to provide your customers with the best Customer Experience (CX) right from when they are your prospects, to when they purchase your offerings and even after that as they remain to make them stay back as your future customers.

Now providing the best experience for the customer needs a 360-degree view of the customers, which an essential feature that is found with the most easy to use CRM software solutions in the marketplace.

Modern CRM solutions come with prospect management tools, and the good ones are those platforms that are capable of telling everything you need to know about your leads and customers from a single screen.

This includes information captured from:

• Customer interactions

• Social media

• Email campaigns they are a part of

• The tasks and appointments scheduled with them

• Real-time usage statistics

• Other touchpoints

Therefore once you buy CRM all these benefits will aid your sales teams to build long-term relationships with your brand’s customers that can result in few leads slipping through the crack and also boost customer retention rate consequentially.

Conclusion

Hence as the key for providing your customers what they want mostly depends on how well you understand them, and easy to use CRM is a tool that can do it effortlessly, modern CRM software benefits you sales team and your whole organization by facilitating customer satisfaction, ease collaborations, protect data and finally by boosting productivity and revenue.

sign up

5 Killer Marketing Strategies For The Growth Of Your Small Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before You Start

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

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

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

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

• What is the demography of my audience?

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

• Where does my audience look for information?

• Which social media platforms are used by my audience?

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

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

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

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

1. Create authority

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

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

2. Focus on long-tail keywords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Hire micro-influencers

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

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

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

4. Outbound prospecting

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

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

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

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

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

• Find the right person to contact

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

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

• Follow up every week with your prospective leads consistently

• Always ask for referrals

5. Automate

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

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

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

Takeaway

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

sign up

4 Ways To Prepare For Ad Hoc Easy To Use CRM Training In Disturbed Times

The of late rapid outbreak of COVID-19 across the globe implies that the human race is now faced with living in an uncertain, undeniable, scary and distracted time. Now, while the far-fetching impact of this new challenge on both society and economy is still unknown and so sales and business do not have to immediately succumb to the pressure. As a matter of fact, with the right easy to use CRM software and business growth technology solutions many businesses do not have to close down or reduce their outputs at all. Rather CRM is a cutting-edge tool that can empower businesses to support their teams with remote working facilities which implies businesses can conduct their operations as close to usual as possible even during this COVID-19 Pandemic times.

The of late rapid outbreak of COVID-19 across the globe implies that the human race is now faced with living in an uncertain, undeniable, scary and distracted time.
Now, while the far-fetching impact of this new challenge on both society and economy is still unknown and so sales and business do not have to immediately succumb to the pressure.
As a matter of fact, with the right easy to use CRM software and business growth technology solutions many businesses do not have to close down or reduce their outputs at all.

Rather CRM is a cutting-edge tool that can empower businesses to support their teams with remote working facilities which implies businesses can conduct their operations as close to usual as possible even during this COVID-19 Pandemic times.

From customer service and email marketing to personalization, companies now expect to be able to connect platforms and technologies with customer data, in order to provide a more personalized experience. - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, this technology does not take into account what personal trials your team members and employees might be going through, and therefore training any team in this time will be a challenging task. This is because it really makes sense with a constant cascade of news practically spelling out economic meltdown, not to mention the concerns people are having over one’s own health and the well-being of their loved ones.

Even though all said and done, time is the only element that will gradually diffuse the latter concerns, sales-oriented businesses can help to ensure that their sales teams about stability in their jobs by allowing remote working, which is not only true for enterprises but even effective for small organizations and startups by implementing an effective easy to use CRM training.

So where should brands, companies and businesses start for training their teams?

As one of the most popular vendors of award-winning Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions to help your team get acclimatized with a new remote easy to use CRM or sales tools, the ideal place to begin is by uniting your teams and getting them onboard and enthusiastic about the innovative changes in these trying times.

1. Rallying Your Team

The golden key to success in any business is having a passionate team of employees that is enthusiastic about the work they are doing, and the key to achieving this is usually through excited leaders who are able to inspire.
Now, while finding this source of inspiration at these present times, with frightening distractions by the over flooding Coronavirus news, can be a problem, nonetheless, it is possible through honest and open discussions with your teams.

Hence, for this those that are conducting training of the easy to use CRM should consider asking questions around the best possible ways to communicate with their teams.

Some of these questions might include:
• What are your biggest issues of concern right now?
• How can your role in your organization address these concerns and issues?
• How can you best communicate with your team members right now?
• What are the aspects of processes and tools that you are struggling to understand today?

These above-stated questions will enable managers and leaders to perceive the scope of distraction and the amount of work thereby necessary for training, even before finding engaging and creative ways to communicate with their teams, based on which those conducting the CRM software’s training will be able to communicate the benefits of the chosen easy to use CRM tool more efficiently.

Doing this will not only get their teams excited about using the software but also understand the benefits of using an easy to use CRM, since if it is not done rightly teams may not opt to use the new software or even make use of it begrudgingly which can result in decreasing the adoption rate of the tool.

2. Make Easy To Use CRM Training Profoundly Appealing

While it is of utmost necessity to recognize the present stressful impact current global and regional events about Coronavirus Pandemic are having on your employees, nevertheless it does not mean that training should not be conducted.

Rather, it implies that the training of the CRM software needs to be as strategic as possible.

Therefore conduct the training by taking a step back and viewing the scopes of what you are asking your team to be familiar with.

For this some of these questions you can ask yourself might include:
• Are you try to train your team on multiple platforms and tools at once?
• Are you trying to totally change the way your team is working and overwhelming them with unnecessary and boring materials?
• Is there any way you can simplify and make their training easy?

Finding the answers to these questions are important since if remote working has not been a part of a company’s culture until now, it can be considered that the team is likely passing through a period of adjustment or facing a learning curve trying to grasp a whole new way of working.

Now as such CRM training materials will add to their burden if they are not engaging. Therefore, those conducting the training need to simplify all training materials so that they are concise, quick and reliable.

For this one of the most successful ways to train teams is to make them understand the core basics of what is CRM and provide them with post-training guides that they can learn later on at their convenience.

3. Plan For Remote CRM Implementation

Relating to the aforesaid point, those conducting the training of the software need to also make sure that the easy to use solution can be impeccably implemented offsite.

Hence, leaders need to think not only the complexity found in the CRM solution itself but even the capability of their teams to accept certain aspects of the CRM training by themselves, more so during these Pandemic times.

This right now, when the world is observing social-distancing norms can be done by using a plethora of different technologies like video conferencing which can educate in depth several aspects of the software by those conducting the training exercise, before your teams end the call and try doing certain additional exercises on their own.

Therefore, if you are the one buying the software, you must make sure that the onboarding process within the software is also simple to follow, which in return will help in considerably reducing the cost, as implementation and training of even an easy to use CRM often use up valuable time that can be easily saved by choosing the right solution once you buy CRM during these trying times.

4. Consider Existing Platforms and Their Integration Capabilities

When buying a CRM software solution, it extremely necessary that you must look at its integrational capabilities with all your existing business platforms.

For this some of the questions you can ask yourself might include:
• Will your selected CRM platform integrates seamlessly with any platform?
• Will the CRM solution present any serious issues in migrating data from your existing infrastructure or other often-uses business growth platforms?
• Is your company looking for introducing any other additional solutions in the future that you need to integrate with a CRM?

Now, looking into these factors are important since integration capabilities will undeniably add to your team’s and businesses’ capabilities in the future, since if the CRM database cannot be imported or exported between diverse platforms, it will surely spell disaster and a lot of additional work for not only the IT personnel employed in your company but even for people who manage these solutions and also your team that needs this information to do their job efficiently.

Takeaway

Hence while humanity at large is currently faced with a lot of societal and economic uncertainties, it does not mean that sales-oriented businesses need to give up as through engaging and effective communications, streamlined and simplified training processes, inspirational leadership, and lastly with the help of an easy to use CRM, sales teams can make a transition to remote working and continue on with business as usual.

sign up

Killer Tips For Creating Email Campaigns That Delivers Better ROI

In the present times, one of the most effective means for spreading the word about your products and services is email marketing, which can even aid in creating an image of your brand. Additionally, if email marketing is conducted in the right manner using the right tools that promote business growth like an easy to use CRM, this strategy can help in escalating sales and deliver better ROI which can aid in finding unforeseen business growth. You will be astonished to learn that according to a report found in a market survey it has been noted that, email marketing services conduct on Black Friday every year are considered as one of the major lead magnets and drivers of sales, which contributes to more than 25.1% to the bottom line of businesses- on that day alone. So you see, email marketing strategies for businesses does really make sense in the present times.

In the present times, one of the most effective means for spreading the word about your products and services is email marketing, which can even aid in creating an image of your brand.
Additionally, if email marketing is conducted in the right manner using the right tools that promote business growth like an easy to use CRM, this strategy can help in escalating sales and deliver better ROI which can aid in finding unforeseen business growth.

293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day. Average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. Click To Tweet

You will be astonished to learn that according to a report found in a market survey it has been noted that, email marketing services conduct on Black Friday every year are considered as one of the major lead magnets and drivers of sales, which contributes to more than 25.1% to the bottom line of businesses- on that day alone.

So you see, email marketing strategies for businesses does really make sense in the present times.

This is because, an email that you send to a list which you have built, allows you to communicate directly with people who have requested information about your product and services.

However, if you have been trying to run a campaign with email marketing strategies that are not showing any results, or is not as desirable as you thought it would be, try improving on the points listed below.

Hence, here are a few golden ideas on how you can amplify your sales and revenue by rectifying some most common email marketing pitfalls that you might have overlooked or not taken seriously before:

1. Create An Attractive Subject Line

The subject line as always is the very initial thing that your recipients of the email will see, so it must be done in the right way.

Now to make your emails stand out among others that hit your recipient’s inbox, your email must be enticing, well-written and most importantly contain an intriguing subject line which will make the recipient curious enough to explore the content of the email, as according to a survey it has been found:
“67% of marketers say that delivering highly relevant content with a click-bait subject line is a strategic goal their organization wants to achieve through email marketing.” – MarketingSherpa, Email Benchmark Survey, 2013

Hence take your time to decide up the subject line of your emails and find out something that will make your recipient curious to open your emails.

According to many marketing gurus, the best way to decide on creating a perfect subject line is to think of something that has appealed to you personally and made you open an email sent to your inbox.

So, while writing the subject line of your email, avoid using words that trigger the recipient’s spam filter like, “Help”, “Free”, “Percent Off” and others.

2. Include A Simple And Clear Call-To-Action

Ensure to write down a clear ‘call-to-action’, since it can make all the difference between a successful and a fruitless email campaign. Do not try to overwhelm or confuse the recipients of your emails. Always be focused on one and only one specific ‘call-to-action’. Also, ensure that your ‘call-to-action’ content should be prominently highlighted in the upper half of the email.

For example, a good ‘call-to-action’ is the one, which can make the recipient of the email adequately comprehend why and what they are clicking, by reading the subject line of your email.

3. Optimize Your Email For Handheld Devices

As mobile marketing is the in thing nowadays and most people access their emails using Smartphones, and other handheld devices, therefore is extremely important that you must ensure your emails are properly optimized for mobile viewing.

Hence always test your emails on mobile devices before sending them so that they can be effortlessly accessed by the recipients on their small screens.

Moreover, if you are linking any of your webpages with the help of your emails, make sure that those pages are also optimized for a small screen view.

4. Send Your Emails At The Right Time

To increase your email campaign’s click-through rate, the day and time that you are sending your emails is also an important aspect while trying to increase sales with email marketing strategies for sales growth. For example, for B2B marketers, according to GetResponse blog, the ideal days to send marketing emails are usually for some verticals Tuesdays and for many others Thursdays.

This is because, during these days, since most people remain at work, they are more likely to access their emails.

However, when your products or services are targeting B2C segments in the market, you can always find that your particular audience may respond better on a different day of the week or at completely different times.

Hence, run your tests on different days and time and thereafter judge by measuring your ultimate results, which will make you exactly pinpoint when you should fire your emails.

5. Create A Landing Page For Every Email Campaign

According to The Landing Page Course, “Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. As we’ll see, this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.”

Rather than linking your campaign to a general page create a particular landing page for your email to redirect your web traffic to that specific page.

This is because when you make use of a particular landing page, you can customize the landing page to the precise message that you have written in your email, which will obviously provide more conversions.

The landing page is the place where your email recipients will “land” when they click on the inbuilt link in your email.

Landing pages can be associated with your main website’s page, a specific offering related page, or even an individual webpage that has been created specifically to highlight a single email campaign.

You must also allow the recipients of your emails to find an idea as to where the link inside your email will redirect them so that they can receive additional information on your offer(s), once they are redirected to that specific landing page.

Hence, it is important that your landing page should contain related contents to provide greater reliability to your email, which will most essentially help measure the esthetics of your email campaign.

6. Conduct A/B Testing

Once you buy CRM, the best way to optimize your Open Rate and CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is to conduct a A/B testing. It’s always recommended that you should try out different designs, subject lines, and contents in order to figure out, what works best for your email campaign and measure it with your easy to use CRM tool.

Ideally, while sending emails fire two versions of the same campaign, so that it can aid in evaluating the necessary changes that are required to boost your email marketing results.

According to Neil Patel, “A/B testing can enable you to make careful, focused changes to improve your conversion rates.”

So, keep on tweaking your emails, in accordance with the results in A/B testing, until the time you find the optimal conversion ratio that you are looking for.

Endnote

We are sure, once you concentrate on all these strategies for your email marketing campaign, and buy CRM for using Sales Force Automation and you will for sure find a boost in your sales by building stronger engagements with your target audiences that will result in stellar business growth.

sign up

Buy CRM And Create Your Business Plan For Stellar Revenue Growth

Planning is the golden key to any business. Hence, it is imperative that you must review your current business performance on a regular basis to identify the most likely areas for your business growth. This is because, once your progress in the key growth areas of your business is identified, you can revisit your business growth plan, make it a road map to the next successive stages, and grow your business to the next level. Therefore, this concise guide explains how you can change your business from a ‘one-off’ printed document into a lively enterprise that will help your business to carry on and thrive in this competitive world.

Planning is the golden key to any business. Hence, it is imperative that you must review your current business performance on a regular basis to identify the most likely areas for your business growth.

Nearly 60% of organizations expect to increase IT spending in 2019. And it remains the same in 2020 - Super Office Click To Tweet

This is because, once your progress in the key growth areas of your business is identified, you can revisit your business growth plan, make it a road map to the next successive stages, and grow your business to the next level.
Therefore, this concise guide explains how you can change your business from a ‘one-off’ printed document into a lively enterprise that will help your business to carry on and thrive in this competitive world.

The Need for Ongoing Business Planning

Ongoing business planning for your brand’s growth means that you need to monitor whether you are successfully achieving your company’s objectives on a day-to-day, monthly, or quarterly basis.

Business growth plan can be used as a tool for identifying where you stand now and in which direction you want to grow your business in the days to come.

Planning also ensures that you meet up with certain predefined key targets and is able to manage business priorities for your company’s growth.
Adopting, a continuous and regular business planning cycle maximizes your chances for success. However, you must at all times keep your business plan up to date. It is worthwhile stating over here that your plan should also include conducting regular business planning meetings involving key people in your company.

It is only by regularly assessing your SMB businesses’ performance against the targets you have set for yourself in your business growth plan; you are more likely to meet your desired objectives. Furthermore, doing this exercise can also act as a sign-post as to where and why you and your employees are going astray.

This assessment of your progress every three to six months will even help you in conducting discussions with investors, banks, and potential buyers of your products or services.

Moreover, regular review of business objectives is indeed a good vehicle for defining your businesses’ purpose and illustrating your commitment to employees, customers, and suppliers.

Next, once by following your business growth plan if you are capable of growing your business to encompass a series of departments and divisions within your organization, draw up a more sophisticated business plan, whereby you should render each division and departments with its own target and objectives.

Although it is a complex exercise, nevertheless it is vital that although each business units in your organization must tread different growth path, and their individual business plans should integrate into a single strategy which you have documented for your entire organization.

Hence, it is important for each department in your organization to feel that they are stakeholders in your overall business plan and they should remain clear on how their individual departmental plans fit in with that of the wider organizational growth.

Lastly, it is also important to be clear on how you will allocate your resources to make your strategy work, especially if you are an SMB or a start-up.

For this, you can buy an easy to use CRM which is one of the best business growth technology and tools that can help you in planning your business by measuring the different KPIs that are needed for evaluating marketing, sales and support metrics for the growth of your brand.

Takeaway

To conclude, here is a list of some of the key questions that your business growth plan should answer, which includes:

1. What is unique about your business and is it protected?
2. What are the buyer personas who will buy your product and services and why?
3. What will it cost to deliver and how much you will take to sell your products or services?
4. Which are your competitors, and how you are going to tackle them?
5. When will your business start generating income and when it will break even?

Always remember that a business plan is one of the most vital planning tools as it provides a solid foundation for building a successful company.

Therefore, if you have been putting off or have not updated your business plan for the last couple of months, buy CRM for your business and carve out a few hours this month, we can promise as one of the leading vendors of small business CRM software solutions that you will definitely finish the exercise with more confidence and clarity about the future of your business.

sign up

How CRM Software Can Boost Sales And Relationships In Alternative Lending Industry

Every business starts and ends with their customers. That implies how the customers are treated from beginning to end and throughout their customer journey needs to be a high priority issue for all organizations, which can also be easily handled using an Alternative Lending CRM software in the Lending businesses, like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending, Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) and more.

Every business starts and ends with their customers. That implies how the customers are treated from beginning to end and throughout their customer journey needs to be a high priority issue for all organizations, which can also be easily handled using an Alternative Lending CRM software in the Lending businesses, like Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending, Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) and more.

Total transaction value in the Alternative Lending segment amounts to US$291,474.5m in 2020 - Statista Click To Tweet

According to a recent Tweet by Qualtrics (a privately held experience management company based in the United States.), it was found that:
“78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of poor service experience.”

Definitely, that is not a piece of hot news; however, it does illuminate the manifold use of adopting an easy to use CRM software platform to improve upon customer support, relationships and more.

Hence, here are some of the ways business growth technology solutions like CRM for Alternative Lending companies can help the lending industry to generate more sales and revenue and provide enhanced customer experience to the consumers of their services:

Build Better Relationships

Have you ever run into that fast-talking salesman who starts talking like your long lost friend just after he meets you?

In the modern information-driven world, this is not an uncommon or far-fetched scenario as being portrayed above.

This is because if you are in any industry the right CRM can do the job of learning and storing years’ worth of relationship-building data with a few short interactions with your customers.

For example, in the lending sector, an efficient CRM for Alternative Lending industry can empower relationship building skills by storing updated and rich contact details, documents, emails, notes, transaction histories, activities, social media updates, and more in the CRM database, which is an ‘easy to find’ repository and the ‘only source of truth’ for all your employees.

This kind of information will not only foster a warm connection throughout the life of your customers, but it will also encourage more deal closures with up-selling and cross-selling activities.

Therefore, using CRM for Alternative Lending companies in lending businesses to nurture the customers throughout their buyer’s journey can guarantee a stellar increase in sales and consequentially rapid business growth.

Stay Connected And Close More Deals

Secondly, using an Alternative Lending CRM to stay plugged in with your customers more often, longer, and from different locations (once you are using a mobile CRM software) will result in not missing the golden opportunities for closing your deals.

Once you use a mobile CRM, you can be sure, that this kind of 24/7 availability and connection rarely goes unnoticed even by your customers that is crucial in the lending businesses which helps to further establish the confidence and trust of your customers for your Alternative Lending brand.

In a study done by Nucleus Research, recently it was found that:
“Mobile access to CRM increases sales force productivity by an average of 14.6%.”

Since, if your easy to use CRM goes wherever you and your sales reps go, it will enable your sales teams to be more productive, from anywhere they work, be it your office, home or the road.

Therefore, using a CRM for Alternative Lending companies for your financing business means that your sales teams working on that big leads (which might even be a game-changer for your company) will not ever be at risk of missing that one vital email, message, text, or phone call.

Find More Efficiency

Even waiting for a salesperson to pull-up your files, find a credit score, maximum loan availability status and so on can become really irritating and can get aggravated quickly, which can put a dent on your relationship with your customers.

However connecting your easy to use Alternative Lending CRM with popular business apps like QuickBooks Online, DocuSign, Zapier, PieSync, and other integrations can help to solve this issue.

Per se, as one of the most acclaimed QuickBooks CRM software ConvergeHub is a CRM tool that provides QuickBooks CRM integration free and is considered the best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

Therefore, integrating the third-party apps with your CRM will make your reps look more efficient and smart and hence leave your customers impressed with your services.

This is because; there is more you need to provide to your customers in modern times than just being polite and friendly. You need to be helpful, fast, and available to make your services count, as your sales numbers and relationship with your customers are all built on delivering effective and efficient service to your customers that can make or break your business in this competitive lender’s marketplace.

CRM for Alternative Lending Industry and Better Business

Delivering excellent customer support is the fastest way to make your business grow and it should be what your business is already doing- right?

Hence, using an Alternative Lending CRM software only extends that very service into better customer relationships but it will even improve your already great customer support operations while increasing sales.

In a gist, running a profitable business venture in the Alternative Lending industry must encompass a business strategy that involves adopting an easy to use CRM which foretells better revenue growth.

Now, if you want to learn more about how you can improve your sales or re-evaluate your customer relationship strategy in the lending industry, you can contact us after reading our page on Alternative Lending CRM which promises to GROW YOUR REVENUE BY 40% IN 12 MONTHS.

For the past few years, we have worked with thousands of small and mid-size businesses to help them with their business growth strategies, since the main purpose of customer engagement for a business or brand is to form a long-term relationship with the customer.

CRM is a cutting-edge software solution that not only help increase conversions of prospects but also ensures long-term customer loyalty that increases chances of customers becoming repeat consumers and eventually advocates of your brand.

Always remember, using Alternative Lending CRM means running a better lending business that is good for you and your customer.
So, why wait!

Buy CRM from ConvergeHub- the award-winning CRM for Alternative Lending industry for small and medium businesses right today!

sign up

Buy CRM And Double Your Sales Productivity For Rapid Business Growth

Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth. In certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff. Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.

Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth.

With 379 CRM systems listed on G2, only 18 % have a 4 or 5-star rating, which includes ConvergeHub - G2 Learning Hub (2019). Click To Tweet

In certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff.
Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.

In other words, adopting easy to use CRM software for the organization most often means a decrease in productivity of the sales reps, and this happens so often that according to DMNews (operated by AC Business Media, Inc) 63% of all new CRM rollouts fail.

Nevertheless, the paradox lies in the fact that there are also several studies that show that sales teams using easy to use CRM software platforms most often outperform teams without online lead management software across several growth metrics in an organization.

Therefore, the good news is that it is possible for easy to use CRM software platforms to give you the best of both worlds, assist you to drive in strategic growth, and so in reality increase productivity consistently.

In this article, we are going to illustrate to you why so many CRM initiatives waste money, sabotage productivity, and suffocate the sales rep’s performance into a slowly diminishing, gasping tickle.

We shall also see how the right CRM can actually help your sales employees to track data from the CRM database  , drive strategies, and actually increase productivity in the process.

First things first: Why a modern sale is really this complicated

Doing Sales (going by the books), should be really simple.

A sales rep makes a contact, qualifies the lead, and then tries to close the deal.

Hence, a traditional sale is all about:

  • Contact
  • Qualify
  • Close
  • Wash, Rinse, and Repeat

So what is it that is getting things complicated?

Well, in modern times the complicacy arises, as there are other handfuls of big problems that tend to scale up with the growth in any businesses, such as:

  • Leads come from several channels with varying levels of interests, warmth, and qualifications
  • Lead follow-ups need to be tracked and thereafter recorded across myriads of interactions
  • Lead data needs to be analyzed and subsequently utilized for amending sales strategies accordingly

In the modern digital world, there are numerous channels than ever for harvesting leads for businesses, and each of these channels brings in different types of leads among which some even bring in multiple unique business segments for your businesses.

Now, each of these segments must be sold to after nurturing them independently, and all these actions must be recorded, tracked, and thereafter analyzed.

Well, over here we are not refereeing to hundreds but a few thousands of data events and the larger the business grows, the more activity it needs to coordinate and track its interactions and workflows.

Therefore, to do this, it is impossible to perform such a monstrous work, without the aid of software.

Hence, when it comes to sales, the core piece of business growth technology and solution required to perform these actions is an easy to use CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software.

In reality, your easy to use CRM is supposed to be the central cog for your organization’s business machine, which bridges marketing, sales, support, customer retention, finance, and business analysis into one automated, cohesive system on which you build your business.

As mentioned earlier, the CRM’s goal is usually to help in strategic decision-making, which often comes at the cost of the sales team’s success, and productivity.

Nevertheless, instead of making day-to-day activities more efficient and easier, CRM platforms often at times end up doing the exact opposite.

Let us take a look at why?

Why is it that 63% of CRM rollouts fail?

Just as it requires two people to begin an argument, CRM failures can also be the result of both the CRM software solution and the business organization itself.

Here are four key software platform based factors, which makes even the best CRM fail:

  • Too expensive and unnecessary complicated setup
  • Shady pricing models
  • Limited numbers of integrations
  • Software not built with the requirements of the sales teams in mind

HOW CRM SOFTWARE CAN DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESSES’ BOTTOM-LINE

The best sales and lead management CRM software do not just drive strategies, but it also makes jobs simpler for your sales teams.
Easy to use CRM solutions solve all the issues we were just talking about as it allows salespersons to make contact, qualify, and close the deals.

Hence, here is how CRM software can actually DOUBLE your businesses’ productivity scores, instead of suffocating it.

  1. Low cost, simple setup, and maintenance

While in one hand, an easy to use simple setup, which is low-cost, beats a complicated and expensive CRM setup anytime.

Nevertheless, most businesses are willing to take up an upfront hassle even if a little bit of complication is involved for a long-term boost in productivity.

This is exactly the reason as to why maintenance cost and ownership of a CRM is so important. Always remember, the more often your system is out of service or being worked on, the less productive your teams will be with that software.

Therefore, if you use an essentially maintenance-free system, that is simple and easy to use, you will never have to worry about losing your team’s productivity, while you implement or perform regular updates and checkups on your CRM.

  1. Simple lead assignment rules

Thanks to the growth of social media and digital marketing techniques, nowadays leads can reach the sales teams with increasing diverse histories. This includes:

  • PPC ads
  • Direct calls
  • Content marketing
  • Contact forms
  • Offline events
  • Social marketing
  • Prior purchases
  • Mobile opt-ins
  • Partner referrals and others

Sorting through these leads, matching them to relevant sales reps, tracking their activities through the sales pipeline, and briefing sales staff on all their past activities are functions that can take an entire team of managers if it were not for lead management software platforms to do it.

Best CRM software solutions, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms most often used by startups and small business are designed to integrate seamlessly with marketing software on the front end, which helps in allowing sales managers to easily import, sort, and thereafter assign leads to staffs with an automatic briefing on each leads history of their past likings and transactions.
For when these stated actions are done in the right way, it allows the sales reps to sit down and start contacting the leads, as easily as they would have done working their way through an email inbox.

  1. Better sales conversations through sales pipeline management

The most convenient ways to contact a lead in modern times are over email or phone calls, neither of which requires advanced online lead management software.

You can always pull out a Smartphone and can do both these without even needing to download an app.

However, although sending emails and calling is the easy part, nevertheless, the more challenging part comes with tracking and recording the conversations for the purpose of future training, and reviews required for strategic adjustments.

As we have expressed earlier that many CRM rollouts become unsuccessful because they are not built with sales staff in mind, therefore the best CRM platforms are built with salespeople in mind.

Hence once you buy CRM it not only eliminates all these issues by allowing emails and phone calls directly through the CRM platform with the help of different third-party integrations, but it also helps in tracking and recording every single activity, without the need for the sales reps to do a thing manually.

  1. Integrating marketing, sales, customer support and accounts data

While your primary priority is to help your sales teams to send more emails and make calls, you would also certainly want to train your staff, refine your sales rep’s sales approaches, and thereafter evaluate and redefine your company’s sales strategies over time.

It is a data analysis of your CRM database that allows you to achieve this. However, in order to collect usable data, you have to track everything from the beginning until the end, from marketing to sales, customer support and if you are using a QuickBooks CRM that integrates with financial software packages, then even accounts.

Hence, the ability to accommodate third-party integrations is a fundamental part of any sales CRM software that is worth its salt.

Conclusion: Sales software does not have to suffocate productivity

As we have discussed, in spite of most conflicting debates lead management platforms, like easy to use CRM solutions in reality, does not drain your sales team’s level of productivity, but instead, CRM software platforms drive a significant boost to your team’s success in the following ways:

  • Easy setup and maintenance
  • Better sales conversions through effective sales pipeline management
  • Straightforward lead assignment
  • Integrated data transfer across departments

So, get started and buy CRM to boost your businesses’ productivity there is nothing better than a lead management software that can help your company to find business growth.

sign up

Ways To Jointly Improve Customer Experience And Service In 2020

Customer Experience aka CX and Customer Service have enough of sobering stats to consider for business growth. Here are two of our favorites: In 2017, more than 54 percent of the consumers in the USA had greater expectations for customer service compared to prior years; the expectation of the consumers jumped to 66 percent for consumers aged from 18 to 34 years old – Microsoft It takes a minimum of 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience – Ruby Newell-Legner

Customer Experience aka CX and Customer Service have enough of sobering stats to consider for business growth . Here are two of our favorites:

  • In 2017, more than 54 percent of the consumers in the USA had greater expectations for customer service compared to prior years; the expectation of the consumers jumped to 66 percent for consumers aged from 18 to 34 years old – Microsoft

  • It takes a minimum of 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience – Ruby Newell-Legner

On a more optimistic note:

  • It was observed in a study done across 20 industries a modest boost in CX would help increase the revenue of a typical $1 dollar business, on average to $775 million over the next forthcoming three years – ROI of Customer Experience

  • Just a 5 percent boost in the retention of the customers can lead to a 25-100 percent increase in profits for your brand (whether it be through referrals, up-sells or repurchases) – The Loyalty Effect

Hence reading through these stats it is amply clear that customer expectations are high, and so the requirement for delivering quality customer service and product experiences leads to larger business growth.

It takes a minimum of 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative experience - Ruby Newell-Legner Click To Tweet

Now as problems will always occur and it is hard to avoid the inevitable, whereby consumers will reach out to customer service, nevertheless, while many business leaders believe that just quality service to the customers will suffice but in reality, it is not good enough to simply just answer phone calls or respond to emails and chats quickly.

Therefore in this article let us consider how your business can focus on making an impact in 2020, by resolving to deliver great CX and customer service by diving deeper and collaborating with teams outside the customer service department to address the underlying reasons for the problems that customers face with brands.

Working across departments

It has been observed times and again that it is common for departments to operate in their own silos, without connecting with others.
Now, while this is indeed truly unfortunate, the isolation of especially ‘customer service’  is detrimental for businesses.

This is because, beyond serving as a voice of the company and a friendly face, customer service in any organization brings additional value to the company. By acting as the ear and eyes into the customer base, customer service can offer extremely valuable insights and eye-openers into the problems that customers are experiencing.
For example, products arriving with unclear instruction manuals, broken or missing parts, billing issues and more- all in a day’s work.

The issue is that these problems all originate (an can also be resolved) outside of customer service. Therefore, to address them properly it requires help from another team, and this is the very reason why customer service must create and maintain strong connections with other departments within the organization where those real solutions can be resolved easily.

With solid working relationship along with a shared purpose to raise the bar on Customer Service and Customer Experience, customer service can work in tandem with other teams to do more than just simply provide a workaround, and can address the core problem to resolve their customer-facing issues.

Discovering the root cause

Even though it is necessary to satisfy the consumers of your offering(s) with a sensible resolution in a timely manner, however when brands limit their responses to just repeating one-time answers they most often miss the opportunity to deliver permanent solutions to their customers since the fundamental cause underlying the problem continues to exist.

For example, the issues faced by customer service which have been cited earlier mostly comes as a broken process that originates somewhere outside of customer service in the company.

Like issues with products are results of problems of the quality control team in engineering or manufacturing departments of an organization. Similarly, billing issues happens when finance makes a mistake.

Well, it is true that customer service can provide the necessary details as to how the problem impacts the customers or how widespread is the issue, however, they just cannot provide the change required to stop the issue from recurring for the affected customer as well all the future customers, since the real solution to the problem lies elsewhere, and customer service must, therefore, work with other teams to identify the root cause.

Hence, once the root cause has been located, customer service can continue to work with the appropriate team to develop a solution to the issue.

Now, problems can arrive in diverse orders of magnitude, and so customer service and the team in question in your organization must work collaboratively on the best solution and thereafter if the issue affects all the customers a business process change might be necessary since if cent percent of the customers are affected by a specific problem, it neither portray a quality image of the brand nor can service teams carry on servicing all customers with the same issue over a prolonged period of time.

However, if the issue is of a lower priority or only a small group of customers is affected with a lower CX impact, other opinions can be accommodated whereby it might be more lucrative to provide a workaround touching a not so large subset of your consumers rather than totally recall a product or service for its issues.

For example, if the involved customer segment is small, and you buy CRM as a business growth technology for streamlining your business process and workflow, alternatives like using a knowledge base for automated self-service can be utilized to deliver adequate solutions to problems that are smaller in magnitude.

Maintaining visibility and accountability

When the customer service team and any other team in your company agrees to a process change or a workaround, the team owing the solution to the issue goes to work, even though the customer service’s job does not end here, as with the other team working on the solution, customer service still is required to know when the solution will be ready and deliverable to the customers of your brand.

It is only immaculate workflow that can make this possible, and so part of any customer service platform like an all-in-one easy to use CRM solution not only provides full visibility but also total accountability and also a timeline from issue identification till solution delivery. So that once the required repair is ready the customer service team can notify presently affected customers. Hence being spared from taking supplementary calls, chat, and emails on the same issue.

Improving customer service and CX jointly

When customer service in any organization operates in a silo, the status quo is maintained and nothing improves at the end.

This implies that in such an environment, even though the service might be satisfactory, but more importantly the CX does not get any better.

World-class Customer Service and Customer Experience can only be catered as a team when the customer service connected to the length and breadth of the entire organization. Since by doing this customer service can triage the issues, work cooperatively with other teams in the company to raise the complains, identify the real cause, discuss and agree on a solution and thereafter use workflow to monitor the resolution through to its conclusion.

This is because by dealing with the root cause, not only the existing customers of any brand benefits from receiving a permanent fix but it also ensures that future customers are never bothered by the same problem which ultimately improves CX and even helps the customer service be nullifying the need to address the same issue once more in row.

sign up

Buy CRM To Decrease The Cost Involved For Running Your Business

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil? Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders? Well, if it is so, then buy CRM as it is a business growth technology platform that can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both time and money. According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% of office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses has no structure for archiving their client communications. So how can we create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers?

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil?
Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders?
Well, if it is so, then buy CRM as it is a business growth technology platform that can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both time and money.

Cloud CRM usage has grown from 15% in 2010 to 97% in 2019- SuperOffice(2020) Click To Tweet

According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% of office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses has no structure for archiving their client communications.

So how can we create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers? Digital record management gives you:

  • Improved business process through speedier retrieval and access of information
  • Make better-informed decisions through faster access to all right information
  • Better service delivery as the right information can be located quickly
  • Reduced staff time looking for information
  • Lesser compliance cost and increased ability to provide timely, accurate and transparent responses
  • Cost savings from less storage, creation, handling, and retrieval of paper records

Every business initiative starts with a singular person and so here are 8 workable tips on how you can organize your day and be on the way to digitally manage your growing organization.

  1. Plan your tasks and activities ahead

When you have several ideas and a multitude of agendas on your mind, it is impossible to do ‘everything’ at once. Therefore, sit in front of your diary and plan the different tasks over a period of time. However, make sure that your hard priorities do not get disturbed and so keep some open room for unexpected and important tasks that may come up in-between.

  1. Log everything

As with your database, your dairy is only good if you keep it updated every day. Write down in your dairy everything right from your colleague’s birthday to ordering flowers and management meetings. Not only does this help you but it also provides your colleagues and not to forget the front desk, an overview of your day or week. However, remember to make all your private bookings only visible to you.

  1. Avoid the Print button

Although it may depend on the job that you have as to what is really necessary to print. Nevertheless, in truth, most of us do not need much paper in today’s digital world. Hence, if you use an easy to use CRM you can conveniently save all your documents, emails, and activities as Projects in your CRM platform.

  1. Share electronically

Once you buy CRM it can help you to share your documents and emails, since using business growth technology you can have all your information stored in one place where they are traceable. Additionally, you also save time by not having to send an email to for example your sales group, and the possibility that your “crucial” messages do not get lost inside hundreds of other emails. You can also use applications like WeTransfer or FTP for sharing bigger files.

  1. Use electronic templates

There are several organizations that waste a lot of their time building templates for advertising, sales offers, invitation, and others. However, if you digital library available for your organization in your lead management software you will not only save money but also a lot of time by not inventing new templates and instead focus on your original work. Moreover, doing this will ensure a uniform profile and verbiage in all your outbound communications, which will be in accordance with the policy upheld by your company.

  1. Reporting

Are you getting tired of endless hours putting together an Excel spreadsheet with the latest sales figures in your sales pipeline? Today we all have to put in our optimal performances and show results to the management, and to do that we need to take out data from several sources, for example, sales by week, months or quarters or by the open rates on the e-marketing mailers. However, if we buy CRM, we can easily find all the sales data in one system and therefore take out standard reports or even if needed add an Analytics module to get the data reproduced in chart formations on the CRM’s dashboard.

  1. Contact information

Have you ever used Google or Yahoo to find company information or looked into a corporate website to find out information about a contact person? It is true that when a company does not have a contact database or a business directory, it becomes time-consuming for the employees of that organization to quickly find the relevant information. Therefore, having all the personal and company data in one place benefits the organization in several ways. Hence if your organization has an easy to use CRM system you can search for everything, for example, if you just have an email address you can search for all the related information tagged with the email which is there in your CRM database .

  1. Mailing lists

Are you buying your prospect lists from external agencies, if you do, we recommend to not to do it anymore? Start building your own prospect list, since this proves to be better leads and cheaper in the long run. Adding a call to action buttons to your website, getting subscribers through your social media channels and blogs or you can do it even by collecting emails at business conferences and do not forget to add these contacts to your lead management software so that you can send them direct mailers using your information stored in your CRM database.

Takeaway

Hence once you buy CRM the tool helps in automating your sales process by with the help of Sales Force Automation (SFA), track prospects, schedule appointments and follow-ups, warm up new leads, manages orders and quotes and thereby helps in closing sales deals in less time, which in turn saves money as the additional time your sales teams get can be utilized in starting and closing new deals.

sign up

5 Way to Refine Your CRM Implementation Process In 2020

As customers are an invaluable asset to any company, therefore every business must work harder this year to gain new customers and sustain a good relationship with their existing ones. Nevertheless, the work of managing customers and the skills required for guiding them through the sales funnel is an overwhelming task. This is exactly where easy to use CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform (mostly used by SMB organizations) could be a powerful tool in your arsenal that can streamline business processes by gathering, coordinating and organizing customer information stored in the CRM database.

According to a Beagle Research, it has been predicted that even though 36 percent of sales professionals are still to adopt easy to use CRM for business growth, nevertheless it is predicted that this will change as we head into 2020, as it has been aptly quoted by  Denis Pombriant:

“There is a great deal of white space in CRM to be claimed and this will be where humans will add the greatest value as we continue to bring CRM to businesses that were once completely manual.”

We highlighted this fact as according to another recent study conducted by  Grandview Research, it states that:

“The CRM market would be worth $81.9 billion by 2025 and Gartner and others publish annual reports indicating the market’s vibrancy.”

Hence as customers are an invaluable asset to any company, therefore every business must work harder this year to gain new customers and sustain a good relationship with their existing ones.

CRM as a whole is expected to reach over $81.9 billion revenue by 2025 - Gartner Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, the work of managing customers and the skills required for guiding them through the sales funnel is an overwhelming task.

This is exactly where easy to use CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform (mostly used by SMB organizations) could be a powerful tool in your arsenal that can streamline business processes by gathering, coordinating and organizing customer information stored in the CRM database.

Easy to use CRM is a software that can work for any business, irrespective of whether you implementing it for a large enterprise or you are just a small startup.

Now even though CRM is a powerful business growth technology , it is a known fact that many businesses do not utilize it fully.

A Customer Relationship Management system has several benefits, like boosting retention and optimizing your sales, marketing, and support efforts and so in this article let us find out how you can improve the implementation of your easy to use CRM or your best small business CRM software solution if you are an SMB to ensure success and steady business growth.

  1. Involve Your Team In CRM Selection Process

Most often than not, the people who will be implementing your easy to use CRM tool are your sales teams.
Hence it is most important that you need to involve them when you choose your CRM software and buy CRM for business growth.

Always remember when selecting the software, that it matches your organizational requirements.

However, how do you identify your needs?

Well, your sales team can aid you to pinpoint the challenges they face in their sales cycle and even provide solutions as to how CRM can address the problems for sales growth.

Now once your sales team is recognizing the issues, your marketing team needs to identify the touch-points with the customers, how they manage their communication or the time they need to deal with the leads and prospects to qualify the leads.

We say this because only armed with the knowledge of the underlying issues, you can choose an easy to use CRM tool that will ensure streamlining your processes and provide efficient customer management for your business.

Moreover, even before you buy CRM if you accept the ideas and thoughts of your sales and marketing teams into consideration it is natural that they will embrace the software without resistance, easily.

  1. Show Your Employees The Value Of Utilizing The Software

As one of the most acclaimed and award-winning CRM for SMB organizations, we have frequently found that sales teams most often have a negative opinion about using this business growth technology and tool.

This is because most often than not sales professionals find this tool as an unnecessary burden due to the time they need to update customer-related data into the CRM database.

Hence irrespective of whether you are buying CRM for small business or for a big enterprise, you need to highlight its value in the marketing functionalities and aspects of the software.

This is because as sales reps most of their time spend researching on customer data or doing follow-ups on prospective buyers on their list.
Now, with the marketing industry becoming increasingly data-driven, sales teams once they understand the value of easy to use CRM which aids harvests prospect’s data, such as a prospect’s interests and hobbies, location, purchasing behavior, age group, and more and then analyze patterns and trends in this data, sales teams are more likely to get on board on the use this business growth technology for enhancing their data management skills.

Remember, you should sell your CRM software to your employees as a tool that can make their works simple by reducing tasks and optimizing their efforts in sales and marketing, so that your sales reps acknowledges that the tool will be able to provide them with all the necessary information to influence sale at their fingertips, easily.

  1. Thoroughly Train Your Employees

For your teams to cherish the easy to use CRM tool, they need to grasp the ins and out of the software. Now, while it an easy to use CRM may be straightforward and simple to use, you still need to educate your employees on how they must use the software for harvesting optimal ROI.

The CRM training should cover all the guidelines on the operational aspect of the tool. For example how to enter the company’s data in the CRM database , or use the dashboard more efficiently, or create customer segmentation based on different filters and more.

Remember, as employees are diverse in nature, and so while some might find it easy to figure out how the software works, others without additional and ongoing training might even make mistakes which can lead to ineffective use of the software.

Additionally, encouraging your employees to take a short course on the goals and implementation process of this business growth technology most often increases the adoption rate of the software.

  1. Define your CRM strategy

Now, if you are just trying to use a robust business growth technology solution like a CRM as a plug and play tool, you are surely setting yourself up for failure.

Hence, before the implementation of your CRM, rather even before you buy CRM for your business you need to create an excellent and a doable strategy to ensure you maximize the use of the software.

How do you come up with a strategy?

Well, for example, once you have recognized the goals like generating high-quality leads or goals like customer retention, you can easily come up with a definite strategy to meet up these goals.

For this evaluate your businesses’ workflow at each stage of the CRM implementation process and thereafter analyze its performance on a regular basis.

In other words, irrespective of the plan of action you decide to take, make sure that the easy to use CRM should complement the vision laid down by your company.

  1. Lead By Example

Even though in an HBR (Harvard Business Review) publication it states that in 2017, CIO magazine reported around one-third of all CRM projects fail it has been observed that most CRM implementations fail due to the dearth of support from the top management in the company.

Hence if the senior managers in your company are not a part of the CRM implementation process, your employees will likewise keep on neglecting to embrace the software.

This the reason, once you buy CRM you must get all the leaders on board from the beginning to create a ripple effect. For this make your managers take part in the training, attend meetings, and stay abreast of the latest CRM implementation processes.

Conclusion

Remember, CRM implementation in any industry is an ongoing process, and therefore you need to tweak your CRM strategies from time to time.

Nevertheless, once you buy CRM you should always keep your employees and teams happy working with the system by incorporating their feedback in the implementation process until the time the systems get adopted by your employees completely.

sign up