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How To Create The Right Strategy Once You Buy CRM For Business Growth

Maintaining a proper relationship with the customers is indeed an important aspect for the growth of any business. Therefore, to achieve certain benchmark for the things you require for your business growth, you need to follow a comprehensive easy to use CRM software strategy, since without it you just cannot maintain the right kind of relationship with your customers and leads, and achieve the goals you desire for your company. There has been a drastic change over the past few decades in the customer relationship, which we are about to discuss in this article below.

Maintaining a proper relationship with the customers is indeed an important aspect for the growth of any business. Therefore, to achieve certain benchmark for the things you require for your business growth , you need to follow a comprehensive easy to use CRM software strategy, since without it you just cannot maintain the right kind of relationship with your customers and leads, and achieve the goals you desire for your company.

23% of B2B CMOs see improving customer experience as a top three objective - Forrester(2019) Click To Tweet

There has been a drastic change over the past few decades in the customer relationship, which we are about to discuss in this article below.

The Makeover in the Nature of Customer Relationship

In the present world ruled by social media, customer relationship has seen a major change in its nature over the last decade or so.
Businesses nowadays over the course of time have realized that there is an ever-increasing opportunity for engagement with the customers through social media platforms that can be utilized effortlessly.

On the other hand, if any customer goes through any bad experience with any product or service, they can also very easily get the facts vocal in the social media to tarnish the image of the brand, which has led businesses to take customer relationship matters seriously.

In fact, the stellar growth of the social media platforms has lead to a massive increase in the interactions between the companies and the customers, as it is the easiest medium in the present times to raise awareness or to share both good and bad experiences online.

Therefore, in order to minimize the damage to customer relationship, businesses are nowadays resolving their customer issues as soon as possible to help redeem their lost reputations and thereafter grow a solid relationship with the consumers of the offerings.

Best CRM Strategy That We Must Follow

Set A Definite Goal

When you want to achieve something for your business, the primary thing you need to do is to set up your goals for yourself and your company. Try to visualize where you want to see yourself in the next 2 to 5 years.

Online lead management software or any best small and medium business CRM software is a platform that can easily help you to achieve both your personal and your company’s business goals. However, for the CRM strategy to be effective, you have to identify the goals first and understand what needs to be accomplished, or when you should decide how you must progress with the plan to arrive at your desired objectives.

By far, it is always a better idea to split up your goals into lesser but achievable objectives and at the same time maintain an easily reversible and flexible plan.

Always Keep Communicating With Co-Workers

Keeping an effective and constant communication with your co-workers, help in many occasions to resolve several critical issues.

Therefore, use a cloud based CRM software , be it an enterprise-level tool like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM used by SMBs, which is designed to handle a large amount of information and can facilitate communication between various workgroups.

Buy CRM , which ensures that all data is being shared between accounts, sales, marketing, and support departments to help them have a clear idea about the objectives of your company.

Hence, to get your job done, integrate policies and use business growth technology and tools that would benefit your organization in several ways.

Target Customers Wisely

If you cannot target your customers better, you may never be able to improve your business revenue. Therefore, in order to become a successful business establishment, you need to target your consumers wisely enough to help generate profits for your company.

Always remember returning customers are more valuable than new customers since they tend to spend more for your company.

Hence, you can use a cloud based CRM system, to identify your valuable customers and target them intelligently, by proper segmentation of such targeted customers, which is also a great strategy for building the right sales cadence for your sales team that can predict revenue growth.

Track The Interest Of Your Consumers

Keeping a comprehensive trail of your consumer’s interest is a valuable way for closing sales and wining deals for your company. Therefore, it is most important to analyze the kind of things that your leads, customers, and prospects shares or like across the social media channels for up-selling and cross-selling of your products and services.

The CRM database is the storehouse of customer interests in every stage of the customer journey with your brand.

Hence, synchronize everything in the CRM and revaluating your approaches by identifying weaknesses in your system, since properly evaluating the customer database in the CRM, help to identify the scope of improvement for your organization.

Conclusion

Therefore, now that you know what is CRM software, and how it can help in the implementation of your best CRM strategy and build up stronger relationships with your customers, buy CRM to quick pace your business growth.

Upcoming Marketing Tactics For Achieving Massive Revenue Growth In 2019

Marketing is evolving rapidly, and so are the tactics and strategies that marketers must engage to lure prospects and customers for their business. This is because; you must always remain ahead of emerging marketing trends to remain utterly competitive in your respective industries. Here in this blog, we will cover a few selected marketing trends that we anticipate seeing in 2019 to make you remain proactive and stay ahead in the game.

Marketing is evolving rapidly, and so are the tactics and strategies using easy to use CRM, that marketers must engage to lure prospects and customers for their business.
This is because; you must always remain ahead of emerging marketing trends to remain utterly competitive in your respective industries.

Here in this blog, we will cover a few selected marketing trends that we anticipate seeing in 2019 to make you remain proactive and stay ahead in the game.

Account-based marketing will stay

ABM or Account Based Marketing has grown quickly in its popularity in startup organizations and small businesses.
ABM involves identifying real prospects who are the best fit for your offerings and thereafter performing extensive research on those prospective customers before you reach out to them.

This research most often includes the pain-points of the prospects along with their challenges, needs, interests and more.

If you are a user of an easy to use CRM software solution, you can use information in your CRM database to create buyer personas for your brand which is particularly helpful in leveraging the tactics used for account-based marketing.

ABM assists your marketing teams to focus and target on fewer but higher-value prospects, which proves far more effective than firing marketing campaigns in the dark to leads from a purchased email list and then keeping your fingers crossed, hoping for the best.

87% of marketers across the US, who measures marketing ROI, say that Account Based Marketing will outperform all other types of marketing investments. Click To Tweet

In fact, according to Information Technology Services Marketing Association, ABM is the future of B2B marketing across the globe.

Since 87% of marketers across the US, who measures marketing ROI, using an easy to use CRM software say that Account Based Marketing will outperform all other types of marketing investments, which easily indicates the reason for its growing popularity.

Chatbots will pave the way

You may know by now what is CRM , but do you know what is a chatbot?

Well, to put it simply, chatbots is a program feature, which is most often found in easy to use CRM software platforms that use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to interact with prospective leads and customers. These interactions take place in the form of a conversation, and so typically chatbots are implemented on the businesses’ websites.

Chatbots ‘learn’ over time, using data stored in the CRM database and so are able to provide required answers to the visitor’s questions, without any human interference, to coordinate the conversation.

Mostly chatbots appear as pop-ups on the company’s websites and it seem to the visitors that they are conversing with a real person, whereas in reality, any chatbot is a robot.

In a recent survey done by a major market research firm that provides advice on existing and potential impact of technology, to its customers and the public revealed that even more than 60% of the respondents in the survey have interacted with a chatbot in the last 12 months, which is a clear indication that the use of chatbots will further increase in 2019.

Native advertisement in social media will be on the rise

Native advertisement in social media is the act of putting an ad in a format that lines up with the normal experiences that the users get when they browse their preferred networking websites.

Unlike uploading a banner ad on related web pages that resonates with your offerings, native social media advertisements resemble a normal social media posting and appears on the social media feeds of your followers and their friends (like the rest of your posts), which makes it less intrusive.

So in 2019 do not ignore this big social media marketing trend, which is not only more engaging than traditional advertisement tactics but is also way cheaper and produce better results than legacy ads.

Mobile responsiveness will increase

Let us face the reality of the digital age looming upon us. Therefore, it is no brainer that nearly every one of us uses a mobile device today to check or send and receive emails, check social media platforms, view websites and others.

Therefore, if your marketing teams do email marketing or your company does have a website, it is a critical need of the hour that your email contents and your website must be mobile responsive.

Since you will lose your email reader’s and website visitor’s interest and attention in a flash if they have to do excessive scrolling or zooming to read your emails or view your website, rather to say, even any other contents that your audience cannot read on their mobile device.

Adoption of all-in-one CRM will rise

CRM software is widely used in all businesses today, since most businesses that know what is CRM, also accepts the truth that no business can remain competitive without the use of an easy to use Customer Relationship Management software.

Although traditionally CRM software platforms, just managed contacts and automated basic sales and marketing processes, like moving deals through the sales pipeline, however with the rise of all-in-one CRM software solutions like ConvergeHub the popularity of CRM platforms are steadily climbing high.

Modern-day best small business CRM software solutions like ConvergeHub not only includes the above-mentioned components of traditional CRM software platforms, but it also comes with inbuilt sales enablement, marketing automation, customer support, accounting, help desk,and collaboration modules- all in the same platform.

Therefore,all in one CRM software like ConvergeHub allow startups and companies to manage nearly every business activities from one easy to use system and even store all the resulting data in the same CRM database.

Moreover, cloud based CRM software solutions are also way cheaper than traditional on-premise CRM systems and provides a plethora of additional functionalities.

Hence it is no wonder that in 2019 small and growing business organizations will increasingly opt for adopting all-in-one CRM software systems.

Millennial(s) are taking over this year

In 2019 and beyond it is predicted that Millennial(s) are going to overtake the Baby-Boomers as the largest consumer demography in Canada and the USA.

This means companies will need to adapt their marketing efforts to cater to the growing needs of the Millennial(s) and change their marketing approaches in the following ways:

Millennial(s) prefer to buy from brands those that bear a strong sense of corporate social responsibility
Millennial(s) expects more from brands when it comes to responsiveness and engagements
Millennial(s) prefer communicating with chatbots, and messages over telephone calls
Millennial(s) use social media insanely, so brands need to strengthen their social media presence
Millennial(s) prefer viewing ‘how-to’ video over written contents

Conclusion

Therefore, to stay ahead of the curve, modern-day marketers must pay immediate attention to these marketing trends in 2019 and incorporate them in their marketing strategies for the growth of their businesses.

Do you want 2019 to be the year where you achieve massive revenue growth?

Then start planning NOW.

Create your revenue growth strategy for 2019.

If you would like to get some ideas or brainstorm on how ConvergeHub can provide the right technology to achieve your company’s marketing and sales goals, you can reserve a confidential consultation with one of our experts.

On this 30-45 minute call we will:

Take a deep-dive into your business process
Pinpoint areas with most growth potential
Discuss how to implement an effective marketing automation system that lets you focus on the most important tasks

Click here to check out how you can achieve your sales growth plans in 2019!

2018: The Year in Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRMs Have Split Out By Vertical

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

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

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

Personalized Workflow Automation Through AI Technology Platforms

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

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

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

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

Businesses Are Supporting Digital Customer Journeys Evermore

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

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

Tighter Integration With External Tools

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

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

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

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

Social And Mobile CRM Are Flying High

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

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

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

Big Data Is Getting Into The Legal Weeds

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

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

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

Finally- CRM Adoption Will Rise

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

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

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

CRM Database and Blockchain: A Perfect Combination for You and Your Customers

Do you still believe that Blockchain technology starts and ends with Bit-coins? If it is so, then you must not have been paying attention in the way this technological marvel is rapidly gaining importance in the IT world, and it is very likely that this technology will get even bigger in the times to come. This is because Blockchain has opened up a completely new range of possibilities and has revolutionized how the present business processes and technologies work. As a matter of fact, Blockchain technology has the possibility to develop as one of the most technologically superior constructive tools for uniting and securing the CRM database in the coming years.

This is because Blockchain has opened up a completely new range of possibilities and has revolutionized how the present business processes and technologies work.

As a matter of fact, Blockchain technology has the possibility to develop as one of the most technologically superior constructive tools for uniting and securing the CRM database in the coming years.

Therefore, in this article let us find out how Blockchain and easy to use CRM software may be just what you require to bring up your business to the next level.

To ensure a successful Blockchain project, focus on the business problem, not the technology solution- Gartner Click To Tweet

Blockchain means improved security of the CRM Database

As the name “Blockchain” suggests, this technological wonder is nothing but a chain of blocks. Each of the blocks holds transactional records and stays connected to the blocks, which both precedes and follows the chain. In general, these blocks in a Blockchain remains cryptographically secured in a manner that the users of this technology are able to gain access to the chain if they have the access to the network keys that stands as a guard, for eliminating the possibilities of unauthorized entries.

In addition, thinking about how most of the CRM Database is hosted on the Cloud servers, security of the data in the Cloud remains a prevalent concern for many.
Of course, in the present times the Cloud protection protocols have been enhanced considerably, but all Cloud based CRM software platforms have an inherent solitary point of failure by virtue of being essentially centralized, and therefore, it could be wrong for a company to take unnecessary risk of sharing their critical data with CRM vendors of lesser market reputes.
This is exactly where coupling Blockchain technology and CRM Database of an online lead management system is the solution that comes into play.

Contrary to the Cloud systems, Blockchain(s) remains decentralized and distributed over synchronized P2P networks. Therefore, the chances of tampering the whole Blockchain is virtually impossible, since that would require a gigantic amount of computation power, which consequentially reduces the possibilities of fraud and repudiation to the bare minimum level.

Put an end to CRM Database tracking

Blockchain and easy to use CRM system can perform together to keep your CRM Database useful and clean. Right now, the user of cloud based CRM systems across the globe argue in different levels about the problems faced by users of easy to use CRM in matters of duplication or corruption of their customer information in the CRM Database.

Blockchain technology when coupled with CRM offers a unique solution to this ever-persisting data corruption problem by enabling customers to own a single block. Hence, this process offers a unified and accurate image of a user’s (lead, prospect, or customer) personal details, transaction history, and several other vital data.

Therefore, Blockchain ultimately ends up doing good for both the organization that adopts Cloud based CRM software platforms and the customers.

This inherent structure of Blockchain technology prevents duplication of CRM data or corruption of information from causing problems with the CRM Database. Additionally, once you wipe off all the inaccurate data, you will instantly notice a boost in the speed of your easy to use CRM processes along with greater improvements in customer behavior understanding.

Find the benefit of enhanced transparency

As a decentralized process, Blockchain enables companies to deal with their customer base in a secured and transparent manner, without relying on a financial institution like a bank or third party broker to facilitate the entire process.
Therefore, once you are capable of eliminating these intermediaries, it is imperative that your dealings will speed up and can get your work done more efficiently, while at the same time all your private data will change hands less frequently and you do not have to worry about your information falling into the wrong hands.

Find the advantage of enhanced user privacy control

Security of private data has become one of the most crucial issues in the IT world with more cases of virus, breaches, and malware attacks being recorded each year more than ever before. Therefore, it is not surprising that the modern age CRM systems are expected to address these issues by modifying the way they deal with the private data of their customers.

Thanks to its decentralized and secured nature, Blockchain technology enables the CRM vendors to implement the concept of self-sovereign identity within the organization.

Now, users are able to encrypt and store their personal data and authenticate the same data upon inquisition without having to divulge any details with parties concerned, which is a great boon for easy to use CRM vendors in these trying times of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) data protection norms.

Escape the hassle of lead generation

Users of CRM can harness the power of Blockchain and Machine Learning to figure out, which businesses are most trustworthy in a particular area of interest. In the present times, the existing digital ad-space has its own flaws, and Blockchain is a technology that is capable of changing the way people connect with their brands.

Do you want to know how?

Well, primarily, with the advancement of Blockchain, a single business can no longer control various retail categories, as businesses will have to focus and select their specific search categories.

This implies that targeted marketing will no longer be the central focus and this will impact CRM-based lead generation strategies.

Apart from this, companies will be no longer forced to advertise for leads or purchase new database without the knowledge of where it came from.

Small and medium businesses using easy to use CRM software platforms will also benefit from this system, as they will be able to capture customer attention by earning trust.

Get rid of outdated information with data cleansing

All easy to use CRM users across the world must deal with outdated data at some points of time. Generally, this occurs because of negligence on the part of the users or for using the wrong kind of data importing tools. However, once you implement a Blockchain technology in CRM, you get the privilege of owning your own block that offers the most accurate and unified 360-degree view of your personal information.

Therefore, leveraging Blockchain and CRM technology lets you overcome the problem of storing outdated information, since cleaning out old data, and useless information and keeping an updated CRM Database, improve your customer insights and allows businesses to engage information in the CRM Database in a more effective manner.

Harness the full potential of loyalty programs

The key purpose of loyalty programs is to increase the profits of a business by adding value to the overall customer experience.

However, unfortunately, because of their variable mileage, volatile values, and privacy concerns loyalty programs becomes quite cumbersome for customers and therefore it yields a reducing ROI.

Nevertheless, in a way similar to different crypto-currencies, brands can utilize the Blockchain system to reimage and revitalize the entire loyalty program.

Implementing Blockchain with CRM systems will greatly benefit the customers as it offers a ‘single and decentralized wallet’, which is compatible with various brands. Effectively, the customer takes charge of the experience and companies must contend with one another by providing better deals so they can access their wallets.

The Bottom Line

Hence, in a gist, Blockchain technology will not only change how we approach a CRM system, but this newfound technology also has the potential to fundamentally alter business operation models and keeping in view all that Blockchain is capable of, we believe this claim is a justifiable one.

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