Tag: CRM Automation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How online lead management software works to improve sales

  1. Improve contact information

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

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

  1. Better interactions with the customers

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

  1. Automate mundane tasks

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

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

  1. Improve reporting and analytical data

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

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

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

  1. Increase time to make sales

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

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

  1. Create happier customers to encourage returning sales

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

What should you do?

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

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

Sales (do not) hate an easy to use CRM- Yet why they do not want to use it?

If you are deciding on implementing easy to use CRM software for your small or medium business, chances are you had come across several blogs, articles, and statistical reports discussing the various reasons why even the best small and medium business CRM software implementation fails. Nevertheless, easy to use CRM solution is one of the most crowded markets and even a competitive one, with more than 100 vendors in the race. Moreover, Gartner’s prediction on this market being a $36 Billion market in 2017, only prove that Customer Relationship Management solutions are going to continue growing even in the long run, as relationships with the customers will always remain critical to the future of any business.

If you are deciding on implementing easy to use CRM software for your small or medium business, chances are you had come across several blogs, articles, and statistical reports discussing the various reasons why even the best small and medium business CRM software implementation fails.

Some of these myriad reasons are so common, that you can find them in almost all discussions, like:

“We do not want to learn another business tool.”

“CRM is just too complex.”

“Our sales teams just do not want to use it.”

Now, let us be pragmatic. Nobody likes using software applications that are complex, which slows us down, or are difficult to get started with. None has patience in this modern world anymore. Especially salespersons, those who are always pressed for time and therefore perceive the idea of using another tool to manage their work, as an unhappy means to monitor their performance and change their work routine.

91% of SME with over 11 employees now use SaaS CRM platform- BuyerZone Click To Tweet

This is exactly the reason there are so many writing on the Internet that talks about salespeople hating to use even an easy to use CRM.

But do they?

Easy to use CRM solution is one of the most crowded markets and even a competitive one, with more than 100 vendors in the race. Moreover, Gartner’s prediction on this market being a $36 Billion market in 2017, only prove that Customer Relationship Management solutions are going to continue growing even in the long run, as relationships with the customers will always remain critical to the future of any business.

Additionally statistics like the increase in CRM usage from 56% to 74% (an 18% jump) in small and medium businesses, only proves that CRM adoption in SME companies has not slowed down between 2016 and 2017, and shall grow even higher in the years to come.

Dividing these stats even further in terms of the number of staffs in a company it has been noted that 91% of SME with over 11 employees use small and medium business CRM software, while 50% of companies with less than 10 employees even use an easy to use CRM.

These stats are enough to make us think positively that salespeople probably do not actually have an apathy in using CRM software – not anymore.

Not if they use the best small and medium business CRM software, like ConvergeHub that helps sales reps to prospect better, follow their potential opportunities and track sales conversations, never let them miss a task or appointment, and at the end, boost their overall growth and productivity.

Per say using an easy to use CRM software is faster than searching through a pile of old business cards, hunting though fading sticky notes, updating spreadsheets or trying to turning your memory into a high-speed computing system.

Even another statistics on an interesting study done by Gartner shows that a well-implemented small and medium business CRM application can increase a business’s revenue by 41% per salesperson. – that indeed sounds promising.

Why sales reps will not use CRM

The decision to adopt CRM or change an existing customer relationship software usually comes from the top brasses in the company, because there are process and budget involved while implementing it. Most of the time the management of any small or medium business ends up choosing a SaaS CRM that is either well-known in the market, or one that provides insights on the sales trends or helps monitor sales performance to aid the management structure a better sales strategy- an application that is not apparently helpful for any sales rep.

This chosen CRM can involve a lot of customization to get up and running and there can be an even longer learning curve to coach the entire team and get them onboard.

Salespersons do not really have a say in this CRM adoption’s decision-making process, while at the end, all they are forced to do is to update the CRM platform so that the management can generate insightful and complex reports.

The hard fact is that traditional CRMs are dead, in these modern times. For on its own, legacy CRM software neither automate all that much nor does it provides the required context needed for effective selling.

Therefore, ever burdened with targets, sales reps sooner or later start looking for sales productivity tools that can help them make sales. Mostly, these sales tools come with an expensive price tag, and so businesses eventually start spending on multiple sales applications, and at the same time jeopardize sales productivity- by making the sales reps waste their time juggling between these tools.

Just think of, nobody forces salespersons to use phone and emails. Since, sales reps are naturally aware that it aids them to get in contact with their prospects, build connections with their leads, and eventually make sales.

This is exactly how a CRM software should be. Easy to use CRM needs to be smart, provide invaluable insights to the sales reps, which should eventually help the sales team to sell more in less time.

An ideal easy to use CRM should remind the reps of what they should be doing, help them to recall their last conversations with the customers and provide a ‘history’ with the customers, which include:

  • Communication
  • Issues
  • Wins

After all, the secret of success in sales is working with people, and an easy to use CRM software should act as an essential sidekick for the sales team.

So here is what we say to all sales reps out their- if you are using a CRM software that is not helping you to get better at your skills and make more sale, but is just there to measure your tasks, you should never accept it.

Yes, you should never use a CRM, which is not built for you, and hence it is not in a position to help you sell.

Here it leads us to the crucial question, which CRM software should small and medium businesses put their funds on?

Investing your money in the right pot

This is the age of value selling. The customer does not like to be sold, rather they prefer to work with someone who can help them to accomplish their objectives and goals, and, sales is just the result of good help offered to the leads.

Therefore, sales teams always have to remain equipped with the right insights, about their prospect’s expectations and goals, so that they can offer the right help and value to the customers.

Sales need an easy to use CRM system, like ConvergeHub, which is designed with them in mind. A CRM software, which is not only simple but also intuitive. After all, when the sales teams are happy and have the necessary tools to increase their productivity, the management will be happy with profits rolling in.

Here are some factors to look out for when selecting the best small and medium business CRM software:

#1. One with less data entry

Sales reps hate manual data entry. They abhor typing the same email repeatedly, filling up endless forms, updating profiles in multiple systems, saving emails from the inbox folder to CRM and creating reports. According to a Forrester data, sales reps spend just a little over 35.9% of their work hours selling, while the rest is consumed by these menial tasks.

Therefore, your easy to use CRM software should be able to automate most of these time-wasting activities so that the sales reps can focus on what they do best- Sales.

#2. Communication tools within the CRM

Sales and marketing practically live within their system’s inbox. So why not purchase an easy to use CRM software that brings the inbox into the CRM. This way all sales reps will find complete control to access the customer’s data along with all the sales conversations from the CRM, which will aid them in nurturing their prospects more efficiently.

#3. Help add value to conversations

In 2015 in an interesting report published by Forrester, titled “Death of the B2B Salesman” (after Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949), brought to light one useful piece of information- sales reps those who provide value-added information becomes more important to their prospects and customers over time.

Hence, your easy to use CRM should be equipped with advanced features that cater to essential context, which includes:

  • Insights on the customer’s buying process
  • Interaction with your emails
  • Experience with your product or solution

That will make your sales team members better prepared to provide a valuable experience to the prospects and customers on their next sales call.

#4. Easy to get started and use

Save yourself and your sales teams from languishing in utter frustration by choosing a small and medium business CRM that is quick to configure, aids in seamlessly migration of any form of data (without help of a consultant), easily adapts to your existing sales processes, and most essentially one that does not call for endless hours of training.

Always make sure that your easy to use CRM integrates with all your existing tools like project management, customer support, marketing automation and so on.

#5. Scalability

Your business may be very small now, but this not how it is going to stay after a few years. You might triple your sales team, invest substantially more in marketing activities, and generate more leads. Therefore, make sure that you buy a CRM that is scalable in the end and is fit to grow along with your company.

Conclusion

Let us face it. Sales hate changes, which can disrupt their productivity. Hence, for once give the baton to your sales team, by making them a part of your CRM buying decision making process, and let them decide which easy to use CRM would work best for them.

Try ConvergeHub For Free

You can remain sure, once the members of your sales team select a CRM, they would not want to switch to another business management software for a long, long time.

Proven Methods for Using CRM Database Driven Sales with Best Small Business CRM

Whether you engage with your leads through organic search, social media engagements, or your sales team prefer cold calling a list of prospects- there are multiple ways to drive sales through your best small business CRM. However, when we get down to the real fact, it all comes back to data. In fact, making use of data to facilitate sales is on the biggest foolproof methods for collecting leads and closing those deals. To understand how we collect data to boost our CRM database, here is what we do to create a data insight cycle for escalating sales.

Whether you engage with your leads through organic search, social media engagements, or your sales team prefer cold calling a list of prospects- there are multiple ways to drive sales through your best small business CRM.

However, when we get down to the real fact, it all comes back to data. In fact, making use of data to facilitate sales is one of the biggest foolproof methods for collecting leads and closing those deals.

As businesses will continue to increase investments in CRM solutions CRM sector is projected to become a $40 billion industry by the end of 2018- SuperOffice Click To Tweet

To understand how we collect data to boost our CRM database, here is what we do to create a data insight cycle for escalating sales.

Using the data insight cycle, you can not only track your data, but you can also analyze the CRM data in order to gain insight into the buying patterns of your leads. Therefore, this process can be effectively used to inform improvement in marketing, help in product development and even coach your sales team.

Here is a rundown as to how you can gather data to increase the CRM database in your small business CRM and how you can use it for the betterment of your business.

COLLECTING YOUR DATA EFFICIENTLY

Collecting data for your CRM database can be a cumbersome procedure. Fortunately, you can aid to streamline the discovery process by focusing on the metric that you need.

For example, if you want to collect information on what your prospects are willing to pay for. In this case, your sales reps can collect information you need by talking to them that can include:

  • Whether your prospects are willing to pay for quarterly, monthly, or annual payment plans?
  • How much they are willing to pay per seat?
  • If there are any training or implementation services they demand as an addition?
  • What are the values of those services?

However, for everything else you can use an automated system like the one that is found in most small business CRM software, to capture the data, which in turn aids in speeding up the data collection path. This way, sales reps do not have to waste much time on data collection for your CRM database and instead they can focus on their sales processes.

The automated system in your best small business CRM will capture things like:

  • Which industry vertical the prospect or lead is in
  • Their geographical location
  • The source of the lead (email campaign, marketing events, blog, eBook downloads, etc.)
  • Whether the leads came from your affiliates (sales consultant organization, referral partners, etc.)

CRM DATA AS A COACHING MECHANISM

Once you collect your data in your CRM database, you can use it to find trends around your product. You can use it to ponder at what is working, what you can do to improve your sales process, your product, and thereby your business.

For example, the data that you have collected can help you to implement better educational content on your business website. Similarly, the information gathered about your client’s locations can help you to identify trends related to where the leads are coming from, and so assisted with the information collected and analyzed in your CRM database you can better assist your sales team with optimized leads.

You can also use this data to take a look at your sales statics, like how many sales were closed over the month and how you can implement better selling practices. So that, by looking into each sales rep’s performance stats, you can create a better picture of how you can assist your organization and improve as a team.

BOTTOM LINE

To conclude, if you want to remain efficient with the CRM database that you have collected, make sure that it aids in identifying the pain points within your sales process, by recognizing your salespeople’s area of strengths and weaknesses.

CRM database in best small business CRM software solutions is also necessary to identify trends around your clients and make them make better investment decisions, which all lead to a successful closing of a sale.

Therefore, it is needless to say that CRM data is an extremely powerful tool, however, it is also true that you must understand how to use it.

Try ConvergeHub For Free

Now, if you are keen on getting your hands wet and explore more about how data-driven sales work in reality, sign up for a 14 day free trial of our ConvergeHub CRM software, which is one of the best small business CRM platforms in the Customer Relationship Management software industry.

4 Ways Dirty CRM Database Can Hurt Your Marketing Efforts

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all? Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database. And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. Here are how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them.

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all?
Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database.

And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. For when scores are shared between duplicate leads, it implies that neither of the records gets a high enough score to proceed down the sales pipeline.

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

Additionally, pitiable marketing results along with time wasted following up with the wrong lead drastically lower marketing and sales productivity, increase CRM’s and other marketing software costs, and finally damages the reputation of the company.

Here are 4 how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them:

#1. Duplication

Data of the customers are gathered through several sources, which includes tradeshow lists, web forms, webinars or other third party sources.  Hence, duplicates of records end up on most marketing lists.

Cloud-based CRM system and marketing software charges are most often based on the amount of data that is stored in its database. Therefore, retaining too many duplicates in your system inflates the cost of storage. Duplicate records stored in the CRM database also skew performance reports, making it complicated to base critical business decisions on inaccurate results.

The Fix:

  • Boost the performance of your system with CRM database duplication prevention tools.
  • Make sure that the likely places for duplicate entry, like manual data entry and data import, are duly covered.
  • Create a duplicate-free workflow for all teams in your organization, not just for marketing and sales departments in your company.

#2. Lead Scoring

There are several prospects who often use more than one email addresses or interact with your business in different ways (downloads, trail requests, email opens etc.) causing the CRM system or other marketing automation tools to create innumerable duplicates.

Duplicate entries in the CRM database affects lead scoring by:

  • Score sharing between duplicate leads, whereby neither of the leads scores high enough points to qualify either of the leads.
  • By treating each and every email addresses as a unique record in the CRM system, a score actually referring to the same lead can be split between two different emails of the same entity.
  • Shared email addresses, when they are shared between different members of the organization, all the addresses are saved to one unique lead.

The Fix:

  • Assess the quality of your CRM database and persistently track down all new duplicate records in the database.
  • Be thorough in cleaning your bad data and make sure that no duplicate records are left behind on a recurring basis.

#3. Inaccuracy

It has been found that CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. Hence, remember your CRM database’s quality always changes over time.

Outdated contact information, organizational changes, errors during entry, and also external data sources affects the quality of your existing CRM database.

Bad data unnecessarily stored in the CRM database, escalates storage costs, which results in creating a devastating effect on your marketing plans. This is because; multiple communications with the same prospect or lead and wrong targeting can have a crucial effect on the reputation of your brand.

The Fix:

  • Verify and then enrich all customer data.
  • Verify all third party data sources before adding the contacts or other related information in the CRM database.

#4. Limited Visibility

Most businesses depend on several systems for gathering their customer data, where CRM is just one of these sources marketers use in building the customer profiles that help them in targeting.

To access the customer information across, on-premise, cloud and also third-party systems, marketers need to be capable of finding data easily and quickly, regardless of errors or differences in form (like acronyms, nicknames, or misspellings).

The Fix:

  • Find a 360-degree view of your customers using a Converged CRM (like ConvergeHub) for creating more personalized campaigns resulting in better targeting of your customers.
  • Integrate every customer-based data into a unique workflow.
  • No matter where it resides, make data easy to be located in your sales, marketing, and support teams.

Conclusion

Are your campaign rates dropping?
Evaluate the current state of your CRM database with data quality report of your database from professional CRM data cleaning services in your city.

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Find More Value From Your Software With CRM Workflows

Workflow is the core building block of any CRM, which is an infrastructure, built on procedures and processes. Hence, for sound business management, here are three key recommendations to get started with workflows using CRM for enhancing your company’s growth and ROI.

It has been widely found that CRM system is mostly used for following up with contacts, doing bits and pieces of marketing, managing opportunities and relying on a few good reports. That is all. Nevertheless, Customer Relationship Management is a platform, which is capable of performing greater things once people who want to maximize the value of their investment, use workflows.

By getting proficient at setting up CRM workflows, you can tune your CRM system to run at its most productive level and use the software to automate tasks, which will ensure that you always get your work done, regardless of whether you remember to do them.

Workflow is the core building block of any CRM, which is an infrastructure, built on procedures and processes.

Hence, for sound business management, here are three key recommendations to get started with workflows using CRM for enhancing your company’s growth and ROI.

Workflow # 1: Website Visitors

When someone visits your website or business landing-page, you can configure your CRM to receive the visitor’s data and let the CRM send you an email, notifying you of the visit. Now, when the information is received, you can generate a workflow process to look at the information and assign a task to the sales reps who are in charge of that visitor’s region to follow-up the visitor on your website. You can also design an automated email that can be sent along with your product and service information and then if the visitor opens the email, a sales manager is notified to pursue every visitor visiting your site.

Find More Value From Your Software With CRM Workflows Click To Tweet

Workflow # 2:  Trade Shows

Most businesses spend an inordinate amount of their revenue on trade shows and then do not do enough follow-ups. Workflows are capable of fixing this problem. Hence, when you return from your next trade show, be sure that you have all the contact information of every visitor who visited your booth, which most trade shows provide on a spreadsheet. Once you import the spreadsheet into your CRM, you can then launch a workflow to assign those leads to the right salespeople in your organization based on demographical preferences, specialty, or product line. Using workflow automation, you can even send a thank you email to the prospects who visited your booth and if no action is taken, ensure that a manager in your company is notified under such circumstances.

Workflow # 3:  Lost Customers

Every month create a workflow in your CRM system, which scans your database and looks for contacts who are in your existing customer lists and check their purchase history to run a drip email campaign educating your customers of your new products or services. In the same way, you can also create workflows in your CRM software, informing you of customers those who have not purchased your products for the last six months, so that you can nurture those customers who may have inadvertently fallen through the crack.

Setting up a workflow in a CRM system like ConvergeHub is not at all difficult. However, if you find that you are not an expert, do not let this stop you. Find and hire CRM consultants who are experienced with CRM applications and let them create and support the workflow that you need for your business.

Although, it may cost you a few hundred bucks, creating a proper workflow, it will surely provide you with greater business gains, and bigger returns on your investments.

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If you have liked reading this article, or want us to contact you for further knowledge on setting up workflows, write to us in the comment box below.