CRM Database Management Archives - Best Small and Medium Business CRM Software

How To Manage And Convert Leads Using A Sales Pipeline CRM Software Tool

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company. But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte. Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand. Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace. So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume - American Management Association Click To Tweet

Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace.

So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Now lead management is a technique that focuses on bagging and retaining leads until they become happy and loyal customers with a subscription or purchase or any other business interactions on to the lead’s name.

In other words, lead management with a sales pipeline CRM software helps to guide the leads through a process of qualifying, scoring, and nurturing after which businesses can hand the leads off to their sales reps who are trained to turn them into paying customers.

Now that being said, let us show you some of the most important things that we have learned as one of the most promising vendors of the best small and medium business CRM software about managing sales leads over the last 15 years.

1. Define Qualified Lead

A major disconnect between the staff working in sales and the marketing department in any organization lies in finding a proper definition of a properly qualified lead.
Research suggests that more than even 75 percent of the leads that are passed on to sales departments never get actively worked by the sales reps in most organizations.

This can happen for a plethora of reasons.

We have found one major reason for this disconnect is not being able to define what a truly qualified lead is that can provide business to an organization
Hence for better sales effectiveness, the marketing and sales in an organization need to find a very precise meaning (or rules laid down for measuring engagement) when a suspected contact becomes a definite lead that can be thereafter sent to the sales department, partners, or other channels for nurturing them so that they can convert to a customer.

Now the parameters of this definition of an ideal sales-ready lead vary from company to company, but they generally include the following factors that include:

The horizon for purchase
Title of the lead
The budget of the lead
Geography of the lead
Size of company (in B2B businesses)
Size of the prospected opportunity, and more…

2. Nurture The Leads

Leads that have not fully passed the screen test of a “qualified lead” requires proactive nurturing by the marketers in an organization by using a sales pipeline CRM software.
We have found that most “leads” generated by marketing are doubtlessly not ready to buy based on their first interaction with a company.
Therefore it is best to nurture both suspects and prospects and you will be astonished at how much revenue can be made from nurturing lead in the CRM databases, even with the leads that have been already summarily written off by sales teams.

For this, campaigns need to be run allowing you to touch your prospective leads multiple times throughout the sales process using different sales cadences until they are ready to buy.

Special offers, new product announcements, and promotions are tools that should be set into action to reactive old and long-forgotten leads and even arouse interest in the new ones stored in the sales pipeline CRM software.

Hence nurturing leads is a distinctive sales and marketing skillset that needs to be greatly enhanced, measured, and rewarded appropriately for its successes by the company.

3. Distribute The Leads

According to studies, it is clear that the sales close rate increases phenomenally if you answer back within 12 to 24 hours after a lead initiates contact with your company.

This is because, by responding fast, you truly distinguish your organization and even yourself from other sales reps and your competitors.

For this, the “contact” should not just be an automated email responder, but also a personal phone call from a sales professional.

Obviously, the magnitude of the opportunity and the buying cycle command the persistence and intensity of the follow-up cycle with a lead.

Nevertheless, cloud based CRM systems that are integrated with AI and other cutting-edge business growth technology solutions are great technology in distributing leads quickly and efficiently using round-robin algorithms and more advanced techniques among the right members in the sales team.

4. Track Lead Source

In any business, you need to determine what works and what does not and the only way to know this type of information is to capture the source of the lead.

In an ideal world, this is done using a sales CRM system tool that gets automatically populated when a new contact or lead arrives into the system.

This is because if you are incapable of capturing the genesis or the source of the lead, you have no other way of figuring out what is working to make the lead find out your brand.

Most full-featured sales pipeline CRM software systems have inbuilt reporting systems that aids in understanding the Return on Investment (ROI) on the lead management activities.

Moreover, as CRM systems give you a multitude of ways for capturing and storing leads into the system, your marketing and sales team spends even less time entering and inputting data and more time acting on the stored information in its CRM database.

Additionally, with complete visibility to all leads, there is less chance of multiple people calling the same prospect, which can reduce the efficiency of your sales processes in the long run.

5. Remember Quality Beats Quantity

When it comes to generating new sales, quality definitely supersedes quantity, since significant time can be wasted by organizations and businesses that invest momentous time and energy churning through poor quality leads.

Moreover, the more information you can capture about a prospective lead, the more energized your sales team will be about the lead.

Now this information can be captured in many different ways including things like the search string someone used to get to your website.

This information increases the “quality” of the lead and should be passed to the sales via a simple CRM system.

6. Measure Everything

Lastly, you need to determine what is exactly that you want to measure and the reasons why.

Measurements generally include cost per lead, lead source, cost of acquisition, size of the opportunity, geography, buying cycle, size of the company, and more.

Hence once you determine what you want to measure, you can put the necessary tools like a sales pipeline CRM software in place to capture the information since when you have the right information, you can determine the return on investment of your marketing and sales efforts and focus on the lead generation campaigns that will increase your sales pipeline.

Conclusion

Do not leave money on the table. Invest in CRM database management and take your business to the next level.

There are plenty of easy to use CRM tools to choose from, so take your time when making a decision, ask plenty of questions, and keep your overarching goal in mind, which is – building up a strong customer base.

Things To Know: How Business CRM And Email Marketing Can Increase Your Revenue

When you are doing business online, you will find several things that require your attention. This is 2020, fully digital, everything is available online and if we talk about email marketing and business CRM solutions, according to research it shows that more than 82% of businesses in B2B and B2C are using email marketing automation nowadays. Now, this question might hit your mind: How email marketing can boost my businesses? What is Email Marketing? Generally speaking, email marketing is a part of internet marketing, which encircles online marketing via social networking, websites, blogs, and more. In fact, it is the same as direct mail but instead of sending the mails through postal services, over here messages are sent electronically through emails. Now once we are speaking about marketing, emails always stand out in the crowd and are still considered the best way for communicating with consumers in the marketplace.

Average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. Click To Tweet

Now, this question might hit your mind: How email marketing can boost my businesses?

What is Email Marketing?

Generally speaking, email marketing is a part of internet marketing, which encircles online marketing via social networking, websites, blogs, and more.
In fact, it is the same as direct mail but instead of sending the mails through postal services, over here messages are sent electronically through emails.

Now once we are speaking about marketing, emails always stand out in the crowd and are still considered the best way for communicating with consumers in the marketplace.

Hence, email marketing is considered as a highly effective digital marketing strategy as it helps to communicate with all the prospects and customers through electronic channels, whereby using marketing automation found in easy to use CRM software tools email marketing empowers businesses to create campaigns that speaks to their audience on a much more personal level.

Therefore, in this era of digital communication, when marketers are required to do more with less, your marketing staffs need to connect with hyper-targeted buyers lurking within the crowd of prospects, which brings email marketing at the forefront of other strategies in the digital marketing field.

Why your company needs Email Marketing?

Better reach to your prospects and customers
Hyper-targeted segmentations
Beats social media platforms for selling online
Create dynamic personalized emails
Find easy email exchange at an affordable rate
Drive more revenue

According to marketing ninjas, emails are the best ways to hold your customers in-touch if you occasionally say – “Hi, we have got a special offer for you.”

It has been observed that using this technique gradually increases the customer’s interest in your brand, as it provides a favorable impression that you have been thinking about them.

Hence email listing based on demography, behavior, or social features of the prospects and customers provide highly relevant and contextual emails that really work for ushering business growth.

Do you know, according to a poll done by a major Salesforce Alternative CRM solution, it states that 91% of your target audience in the marketplace uses emails?

Additionally, as per polls done by Campaign Monitor, it states that 320% more revenue can be generated by automated emails using business CRM solutions, as against the non-automated ones.

This is because, the beauty of triggered emails is that, once they are programmed to run, they continue to mechanically drive earnings from the intended and targeted audience without you or your employees having to do anything more.

Hence email marketing is the weapon of choice for SaaS-based offerings and online stores as there are several CRM solutions that can help businesses to create startling email marketing campaigns, track the behaviors of their targeted audience and even optimize earnings through repeat purchases.

EMAIL MARKETING IDEAS FOR BOOSTING YOUR REVENUE

Now, in email marketing, it is not sufficient to simply send your prospects and customers plain vanilla emails, rather you need to have a good plan in place to make your emails work effectively.

Hence here are a few concepts for email marketing, which can help you to increase the impact of your efforts:

Get Personal

The most successful emails are those that make the audience feel that they are customized just for themselves.
Now, it is natural that you just cannot manually customize all the emails that you send to your targeted audience in the marketplace.

Hence automation is essential if you would like to treat each of your targeted audiences in a private way that can elicit a reply from the recipients of your emails.

Therefore, firstly if you want to find more traffic through emails, then you should collect sufficient data about your prospects and customers, which you can easily do if you are using a business CRM solution that can provide you the information you can use like the name, date of customer sign up, contact numbers, birthdays, a conversion event, and much more.

Hence, by segmenting the customers and prospects into different groups that are stored in the CRM database, based on their interests, behaviors, buying patterns, and more you can create personalized emails that can fetch replies and actions from the recipients of those emails.

For example, if you are aware of your customer’s preferences, it is possible to notify them over emails when your brand has new items that can pique the interest of your customers and are on sale.

Remember, emails are less about making sales and more about building a trusting relationship with your customer base, so concentrate on the entire customer journey for finding a better response to your emails.

This is because by offering useful incentives and information to your prospects and customers, you can create a loyal customer base that can eventually bring in repeat sales and more revenue.

Moreover, since emails are a part of a set of interactions with your brand, do not create emails that will simply send users to your brand’s generic homepage. Rather invest time to create customized landing pages and take your email recipients to those pages for finding deals that they might consider worth once they click on the CTA (Call To Action) buttons in your emails.

Now, even a simple welcome email can be quite effective as a part of your email marketing strategy, when potential customers are first showing their interest in your brand.

Finally, in the realm of email personalization if your customers are young, make them laugh since inspiring them and teaching them will make them come back to your brand for more.
For this send assignment quotes, short clickable videos, and pictures embedded in your emails that can make your target audience get identified with your brand, which can make them much more likely to turn into loyal customers.

Reward Loyal Customers

Placing a loyalty program with the help of email marketing is a fantastic way to cultivate a relationship with your customers. As a company cannot ensure growth without loyal customers hence consider providing existing customers points for their future purchases which is just one means for creating a loyalty program for your customers.

For this, you can segment your customers stored in your easy to use CRM who have spent above a specific amount while purchasing from your brand and send them email campaigns with exclusive offers like early access to sale, special product bundles or discounts. You can also offer incentives to your existing customers on their special occasions along with their birthday emails or for their first anniversary of shopping at your store.

Moreover, you can also give special discounts to your customers who refer other customers, bring in new visitors, or incentivizes referrals for your brand.

Target Dormant Customers

Sending targeted emails for customers that have not purchased for a while, with incentives to re-purchase could act as a gold mine. For this use emails to remind your dormant customers that you are still around. Send then gift cards in their emails that can encourage them to come back for more.

Utilize Social Proof

The power of providing appropriate social evidence is huge in the digital marketing field. This is because there is no way around the fact that people always trust other people and so think about providing some user-generated reviews and testimonials of your loyal customers in your emails. You can always boost sales significantly by revealing how many customers have used and are happy with your brand’s offerings.

Final Thoughts

As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software solutions, which is mostly used by alternative lending businesses, we trust these email marketing ideas shall surely help you to get the most out of your customer relationships.

Hence never forget to personalize your emails keeping the customer journey of your consumers in your mind and offer rewards to loyal customers which can provide stellar business growth.

4 Awesome Tips For Turning Feedback From Customers Into A Marketing Strategy

Have you ever thought, when you receive feedback from your customers, how you can use customer feedback to boost your marketing strategy for business growth? There are several business owners and marketers those that view feedback as a natural part of their branding process and thereby abstain from paying attention to all the ways it can benefit their business. Now irrespective of whether it is praise or complain, feedbacks from customers are most necessary to understand your consumers, cater to their requirements, achieve your marketing goals, and more. Therefore in this article let us look into the four ways that can help your brand to turn feedbacks from customers into a marketing strategy that will help you to increase your businesses’ bottom-line.

Have you ever thought, when you receive feedback from your customers, how you can use customer feedback to boost your marketing strategy for business growth?

There are several business owners and marketers those that view feedback as a natural part of their branding process and thereby abstain from paying attention to all the ways it can benefit their business.

92% of small business owners in the U.S think that having a website is the most effective digital marketing strategy. Click To Tweet

Now irrespective of whether it is praise or complain, feedbacks from customers are most necessary to understand your consumers, cater to their requirements, achieve your marketing goals, and more.

Therefore in this article let us look into the four ways that can help your brand to turn feedbacks from customers into a marketing strategy that will help you to increase your businesses’ bottom-line:

Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Do you know it is 5 to 25 times more costly to acquire new customers than to retain your existing ones?

This is because moving leads through the sales funnel takes money, time and resources. But for your existing customers, they are already familiar with your brand and its offerings.

Your present customers already know what they require from your brand and it shows that they like your brand since they keep coming back for more.

Hence, if you continue providing deals and opportunities to your existing customers for their loyalty, it is natural that your present customers will continue buying from your company.

This is the reason as to why customer loyalty programs for any brand are so effective as they cater specifically to the existing customers who have already spent on your business, and are so likely to spend even more since they are familiar with your company and its offerings which adds value to your brand by catering to those high-spending customers.

Therefore, if you want to generate more sales and also keep your recurring buyers happy, create a loyalty program that caters to your high-spending customer since a little appreciation goes a long way in keeping both you and your customers smiling and satisfied in the long haul.

Improve Customer Support

You must have observed that all your consumers have a unique and preferred method for getting in touch with your brand like live chat, phone, social media, emails and more. Hence, it most necessary that the support teams for your brand must pay equal attention to all these channels of communication so that they are capable of providing solutions to all.

Now, the steps that you need to take for improving your customer support activities to a lot extent depend on the feedback that you receive from your customers, which varies across businesses.

Therefore, buy CRM and gather all your customer’s opinions about your brand in a centralized repository like a CRM database to find a bigger picture, which will help you to clearly see what is working and what needs to be modified with respect to the feedbacks that you receive from your customers.

Thank the customer for taking the time to reach you out

Hence it is important as-well-as necessary that you must respond to customer feedback when it comes in so that customers can understand that you are hearing to them and your company is working for providing them a solution.

Using a customer feedback forms is the proper way to ask the right questions to the consumers of your offerings and receive the answers you are looking for.

Now, while replying to a customer’s comments and inquiries you must:

Have a well-thought-of strategy in place
Do not wait more than 24 hours and respond quickly
Offer the right solutions
Thank the customers for reaching you out with their comments and issues

Refine Buyer Personas

When customers tell you what they require or what exactly they are looking for, remember that your customers are providing your brand with their valuable insights into how you can improve your business to fulfill their needs.

Hence, leverage this valuable information to refine your buyer personas in your easy to use CRM and thereafter create customer profiles that better reflect the ideal customers for your business.

This is because; if you cannot offer your consumers anything of value (contents, products or services) since you do not know your customers then you will never be able to move your leads and prospects through the sales conversion funnel, generate new leads, or produce an adequate sale for rapid business growth.

Now, buyer personas are most crucial for all modern marketers to gain insights into what their customers want since the more information they have about the customers the more streamlined their marketing strategies will be for boosting sales and revenue.

Additionally, if your brand is incapable of meeting the customer’s needs, and there is a gap in your buyer’s personas that is blocking from delivering to them what they want, your sale will decline steadily resulting in loss of revenue and business growth.

For this, you need to take into account every piece of data from your business growth technology solutions and tools and compile them together to look into the bigger picture in order to find out where your business needs improvements.

For example, if a customer complains that the check out process is complicated in your website and you also notice a progressive lull in your sale, then this feedback is a direct route for solving the problem.

Hence, take into account anything that your customers tell you that are not working with your brand and apply a new marketing strategy (especially if it a recurring issue) and address it right away.

Upgrade Blog Content

Finally, if your website’s Google analytics indicates a lesser volume of traffic to your blog posts or your blog contents are receiving negative comments, revamp your content marketing strategies so that your blogs might serve your consumers in a better way.

Now, as we discussed even before, if you already have your buyer personas outlined, then selecting the ideal contents that will suit your audience’s needs is not at all as difficult as it seems to be.

Knowing your customer’s pain points, interests and inquiries in advance will make it easier for you to create content that can provide genuine solutions and therefore keep your readers engaged.

Using feedback from your consumers you can also create new content for your business website or include whitepapers, checklists and case studies or for that matter anything that brings your audience value to improve lead generation, sales and grow the email list once you buy CRM for your business.

Conclusion

If you want to expand your business, then listen to your customers. Every little piece of customer feedbacks does count because it helps to improve your present business strategies so that your brand can continue getting better and receive more positive results.

Therefore, if you want to expand your business, then it is most important that you must listen to your customers, since every feedback matters as it can help you to improve your current business strategies, recreate your sales cadence , generate sales ready leads, to find better positive results, for boosting business growth.

Utility Of CRM Database In Your Lead Management Software Tool For Business Growth

It is not only large companies that can benefit out of easy to use CRM software, lead management solutions can also be especially important for small and mid-sized organizations. This is because maintaining a CRM database in the right way is an excellent means for keeping track of your entire customer related information and processes and so it forms the basis of any customer relationship management system.

It is not only large companies that can benefit out of easy to use CRM software, lead management solutions can also be especially important for small and mid-sized organizations.
This is because maintaining a CRM database in the right way is an excellent means for keeping track of your entire customer related information and processes and so it forms the basis of any customer relationship management system.

64.2% of businesses view CRM tools as impactful on their bottom line - LinkedIn(2018) Click To Tweet

What is a CRM database?

To tell the truth, a CRM database in a lead management system does not vary much from the common database that we have in our smart phones and desktops.
Nevertheless, the main idea of buying database management software is to store data, which can be accumulated from different sources, so that all employees and departments in your organization can access the same information from a centralized repository that reduces the time spent in digging out information and diminishes errors in their workflow.

To maintain a proper customer database after you buy CRM , the database needs to have several characteristics to make it useful and functional.

Firstly, all the information in the database should be saved correctly without any spelling mistakes.
Secondly, there should not be any duplication of data since each customer data needs to be clearly identifiable with an ID as a unique identifier created by the CRM tool.

Why is CRM database in lead management software important for businesses?

Small and midsized organizations often struggle with the large amount of data, which are generated from all types of sources. For organizations, those who do not maintain customer database using easy to use CRM software, in worse cases have to save their data on individual computing systems and hard drives.
Hence, it is not surprising, under this circumstance, communication between the sales, marketing, billing and customer support departments can be a problem when data is not consistently saved for use of all departments. Therefore having a universal storage for customer-related information and other relevant business data can solve numerous problems in your company.

Here are some of the advantages of maintaining a well-maintained customer database in a CRM system:

Data cleansing made easy: Although in an ideal scenario data cleansing is not at all necessary, but the cleansing of data becomes much more complex when every department within an organization has their own set of data.

Hence using a centralized CRM database, helps in cleansing customer data, when it may be required, that can be universally supported by all working in the organization.

Useful system integration: Communication with the leads, prospects, and customers in day-to-day business is often done using a variety of software. However, when an easy to use CRM system is integrated with other business application tools like Outlook and Gmail for emails, QuickBooks for accounts, Evernote for note taking and others, all important information of your conversations with the leads or customers can be directly saved in the centralized database of the CRM system. Hence, when any employee in your organization wants to contact the same customers, they can access the readily existing data in the CRM system, which is the most cutting-edge business growth technology that significantly reduces the possibility of data redundancy in the organization’s customer database.

Data security: Concerning security CRM database, helps in centrally storing data, which remains safe and it is easier to manage the integrity of the stored data. Moreover, the privacy of the data is also enhanced in the CRM database, as companies have to comply with privacy regulations (like GDPR) when they deal with customer data that is stored in their servers.

Conclusion

Therefore maintaining a proper CRM database in your easy to use lead management software, not only aids in boosting customer relationships, but it also improves the ability to cross sell, improve your businesses’ efficiency in providing world-class customer support, increases team collaboration, boosts staff satisfaction that in return increases profitability and revenue by saving cost leading to business growth.

How to Transform from Good to Great Customer Support Progressively

In the modern scenario, customer experience and customer satisfaction have become the most important factor for any organization, brand or an enterprise. Companies today strive hard to make their Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as possible using easy to use CRM software to help them in the process, a recognition that is the product of globalization and consumer awareness. Hence, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is more vocal now than ever as they are dictating the policies of most companies be it big or small across the globe.

In the modern scenario, customer experience and customer satisfaction have become the most important factor for any organization, brand or an enterprise.
Companies today strive hard to make their Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as possible using easy to use CRM software to help them in the process, a recognition that is the product of globalization and consumer awareness.

Hence, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is more vocal now than ever as they are dictating the policies of most companies be it big or small across the globe.
Many companies nowadays even take up social stances to support overwhelming public opinions on several issues.

80% of businesses use customer satisfaction scores to analyze customer experience and improve it. - Harvard Business Review Click To Tweet

Therefore, in such a consumer conscious marketplace, it is important and most necessary to understand the process and strategies you need to handle your customers while providing solutions to their issues.

Here are some of the ways you can provide world-class customer support to your customers:

Chat Integration

Chat integration with your easy to use CRM software platform helps to store previous customer interactions in the CRM database so that the information lets your support team instantly access relevant customer data while resolving customer-facing issues.
Moreover integrating chat application with CRM software helps support agents to recognize the customers and thereby be more productive while providing solutions to their problems.
Additionally, as the chat application automatically greets the customer while a support agent is assigned to provide human-touch, it keeps the customer engaged until they are attended.

Self-Service

CSS or Customer Self Service is an important feature that exists in most easy to use CRM software platforms be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM.

CSS is a functionality that allows your customers to perform standard actions like creating an account or a payment method without the presence of a customer support executive.

Hence, CSS is a feature that not only saves a lot of time for the support agents but the data that is entered also gets updated in the CRM database instantaneously.

Interactive Voice Response

IVR or Interactive Voice Response is an extremely effective and convenient means for routing the call to specific departments in your organization.

Using IVR the customer calls the company and thereafter chooses from a series of options from the prerecorded voice prompts in the system.

IVR provides customers with the options which are categorized into sections so that they can find the appropriate department or agent with the necessary knowledge to solve their issues.

Therefore, IVR as support functionality accelerates the process of customers getting solutions for their questions and issues.

Service Level Agreements

SLA or Service Level Agreement allows support and service reps to track their time spent to solve an issue.

The SLA factor is set up in such way that any unattended or unresolved support ticket gets automatically escalated, and are passed on to higher level support representatives who are well-equipped to handle the situation and solve the issues.

This is because; in SLA the support tickets keeps repeating unless the ticket gets resolved effectually.

Therefore, using SLA for resolving customer complains promotes a sense of responsibility and accountability within the support teams.

This way by assuring the customers that every question or support tickets are attended to, improves customer satisfaction for your brand drastically.

Social Media Integration

With leads being tracked from all social media websites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others, easy to use CRM platforms allows the users of the software to segregate leads generated from these websites and thereafter organize them based on priority so that support agents are capable of providing solutions at the earliest.

Conclusion

Nowadays, customers recognize the ease of doing business with a company and if they are satisfied with their services remain grateful for it.

Therefore embedding these features in your easy to use CRM software will not only improve customer relations speedily but also your enable sales and support teams to work seamlessly with each other to provide world-class customer experience and thereby find business growth rapidly.

Best Practices Of Contact Management With Easy To Use CRM Software

It is often said that it takes a decade to build a reputation but just one minute to ruin it. Any good business strategy not only signifies more closure but it also means repeat business and happy customers. Now, how can you beget happy customers? The answer is easy- by understanding their requirements and delivering their needs. However, to do this you elementarily require more information about your customers and secondly an easy to use CRM or Contact Management software that helps you to build a stronger informational customer profile.

It is often said that it takes a decade to build a reputation but just one minute to ruin it.
Any good business strategy not only signifies more closure but it also means repeat business and happy customers.
Now, how can you beget happy customers?
The answer is easy- by understanding their requirements and delivering their needs.
However, to do this you elementarily require more information about your customers and secondly an easy to use CRM or Contact Management software that helps you to build a stronger informational customer profile.

Easy to use CRM is critical for your sales teams.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume - American Management Association (2018) Click To Tweet

This is because Contact Management software aids them to dig out customer information gathered in the CRM database to find out your customer’s needs, wants and preferences.

Even though for startup organizations and small businesses purchasing a best small business CRM software could stretch their budgets a little, nevertheless, an easy to use CRM software offers certain most essential benefits that can empower your sales, marketing, and support teams.

As a part of your best small business CRM software, a Contact Management solution also features:

Centralized storage for contact information
Sales tracking
Easy to search through your CRM database
Email integration
Scheduling
Lead nurturing
Conversion management
Document management

Although the requirement for customer data is acknowledged by all in businesses, most organizations especially startups and SMBs fail to create a contact management plan that is integrated with the required touch points needed for converting prospects and nurturing existing customers.

Here are a few contact management best practices for your business using best small business CRM software:

1. Tracking interactions

When an easy to use CRM platform has an integrated Contact Management software it helps in creating a single page for viewing all the interactions between your prospects and your company, which aids sales, marketing and customer support teams in your organization to find quick access to the required information when and where they need it from the centralized CRM database.

Using the best small business CRM software all interactions of phone calls, meetings, emails, and social integrations are logged and stored with the contact information.

Therefore, once you have a CRM in place, a single click can provide you all the information of your leads, prospects, and customers and prepare your teams to make the calls with all relevant information at their fingertips.

Moreover, if you are using a QuickBooks CRM like ConvergeHub, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, you can keep on using QuickBooks for accounting, and at the same time see invoice and payment information, customer details, products, directly in your best small business CRM, which you can then use for business process automation, reminders, customer service, and follow-ups.

Hence, by bringing your different teams together Contact Management software when integrated with a CRM helps you to cross-sell and forecast which products or services of your brand can be of interest to your customers.

2. Better understanding of your customer

It is a known fact that customer service is far less expensive than acquiring new customers. According to a recent survey, it has been found that 9 out of 10 consumers in the U.S said that they are ready to pay more for enjoying a superior customer experience.

Hence, it does not really matter how awesome is your offerings, since the only thing that is of interest to the customer is how well they are being treated.

Now, equipped with an easy to use CRM software you can access everything that is needed to understand your prospects and customers, right from the history of their purchases, to their interactions in your website, their social media presences and more.

Therefore, with such homogeneous information at their fingertips, your sales and support reps can pitch their calls with more efficiency for each of your customers.

3. Up-selling and cross-selling opportunities

It is easy to access and share data when you have all the required information stored centrally in the CRM database .

Therefore, accessing customer history after implementing CRM software for your organization, according to a report published by NelsonHall, most businesses takes a great stride in up-selling and cross-selling activities.

For example, if one of your customer’s purchase histories shows that the customer has purchased several ankle-length jeans, by using automated email campaigning feature of the CRM, you can easily email the customer on sneakers or best-suited belts to match those jeans.

4. Increased profits

Can you imagine collecting a colossal number of business cards and storing them without an easy to use CRM?
We guess not.

Now even if you are capable of storing your customer and prospect’s data in silo software solutions it makes no sense of that data that is only visible to you, since it can reduce your sales and profits, as in this case your sales teams will be spending more time for finding information than leveraging it.

Additionally, manual data entry is a time-consuming and tedious process. Content management software is a platform that helps to organize data as specified and aid employees to devote their work hours to more important tasks than the administrative ones.

Now, because of the above stated reason as your business grows more efficiently by minimizing unnecessary middle work, your sales and support reps can retain more customers by offering them superior customer service, make up-sells and cross-sells by understanding the customer’s needs and find new customers through word of mouth advertising and networking and hence accomplish more in the same workday.

5. Targeted marketing

With the best small business CRM and Contact Management software in place, you can access several marketing templates and create timed and automated drip marketing campaigns.

Using easy to use CRM solutions you can not only group your potential customers by priority and interests but also create groups that fit best with your marketing plans.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, every aspect of easy to use CRM software is cut-out to perform a particular task efficiently so that it can help your organization manage marketing, sales, and support better for your company and also your customers.

Most Common Rookie Marketing Automation Pitfalls To Avoid Immediately

In modern times, marketing automation has become a vital tool for both enterprises and small businesses. Marketing automation (MA) is a tool that can aid you in gaining and sustaining competitive advantage by speeding up sales in the marketplace. Moreover, when MA is integrated into an easy to use CRM, it enables the user to personalize messages, engage more contacts and thereby builds a world-class relationship with prospects and customers. However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.

Marketing automation on average drives upto 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead- Google (2019) Click To Tweet

However, all marketing automation systems are not the same. There are many silo MA software apps and CRM platforms that need integration with third-party applications, which can not only cost time and money but also bring along with it the fear of things going wrong down the road.

This is the exact reason businesses prefer to use all-in-one CRM software like ConvergeHub which includes Sales Force Automation (SFA) that is also popularly known as Marketing Automation in a CRM.

The four main benefits of using MA in an easy to use CRM are:

You can customize the MA for the unique requirement of your business
You can send multiple email campaigns 24/7 all at the same time
Automate your business processes specific to the contacts along their journey
Create alerts and reminders for enhancing your workflows

Nevertheless, there are also MA mistakes you can make along the way, which you must avoid as mentioned below:

MA Mistake #1

Send Emails to Contacts That Did Not Opt-In

One of the most important Marketing Automation best practices is that MA involves permission-based emails. This implies, you only send emails to people in your contact list that provides permissions to send them information about your brand.
You can get this permission when each of the contacts opt-in to your email, by providing their emails through authentic channels like web-to-lead forms, the free trial offers, buyer’s information forms and many more.

Therefore, going by the books, adding contacts manually or importing a list to your MA system is a violation of the Spam rules, since if you do it there are changes that doing so may compromise the delivery of emails and thereby reduce the success rate of your email campaigning strategies.

MA Mistake #2

Not Maintaining an Active Contact’s Database

Now, even after you get any contact to opt-in for your emails, you must also keep them active. This implies that you must continuously send emails with appropriate contents to keep your list engaged at least once every week. This is because, if you do not, your contacts may forget you and thereafter do not open your emails.

You can use re-engagement campaigns as an effective and time-tested method to get inactive contacts to get engaged with your emails.

Therefore, always maintain an active and clean contact list in your CRM database .

MA Mistake #3

Focusing on Wrong Metrics

Marketing Automation is an extremely robust marketing tool when integrated into easy to use CRM that allows the user to measure the results of their campaigns.

Some of the most important email campaigning metrics are:

Opt-ins
Sales conversion rate
Email opening rate
Link clicked rate
Landing page visits, and more

However, attending to wrong metrics can make you misinterpret the real results.

Therefore it is most important that you must know the metrics you are seeking to find with each campaign individually to determine your email campaign’s success using MA software.

MA Mistake #4

Not Split Testing Campaigns

All email campaigns done with the help of Marketing Automation differs by the number of contacts, type, content and more.
Hence, spit test your campaigns to find what works right for your business.
The key to spit testing your campaigns is to just focus one variable at a time like, offer, headline, price, design, target audience and others.

Take the campaign that wins as your new control and then tests other subsequent campaigns against it.

MA Mistake #5

Not Having a Certified Consultant on Your Team

We are finally talking about this mistake as MA is both an art and science. Marketing Automation in practice requires a mix of technological knowhow along with expertise in direct response marketing.

This is the reason why it is best to rely on an independent marketing automation software consultant to build your custom Marketing Automation system, train your employees and develop MA strategies for your business growth.

How To Switch Your CRM Software Easily?

There are several organizations who are discouraged from changing their CRM provider because it is perceived that switching CRM will be too painful, hard, and too expensive. However, is this true? You will always find a stack of blogs and articles in Google search with the keyword “CRM Failure”. Has your CRM also failed to deliver the results that you wanted? For example, are you considering a move to switch your software from Salesforce to any other best Salesforce Alternative CRM software because your employees found the former one too complicated to handle and too expensive for your small business, but you are just too scared to start all over again?

There are several organizations who are discouraged from changing their CRM provider because it is perceived that switching CRM will be too painful, hard, and too expensive.
However, is this true?

You will always find a stack of blogs and articles in Google search with the keyword “CRM Failure”.

Has your CRM also failed to deliver the results that you wanted?

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM – This figure has now increased to 87%. Click To Tweet

For example, are you considering a move to switch your software from Salesforce to any other best Salesforce Alternative CRM software because your employees found the former one too complicated to handle and too expensive for your small business, but you are just too scared to start all over again?

Well, it is true that most organizations hesitate from moving to a new CRM since they perceive the process to be hard, painful, and a costly affair. However, then again not doing anything may also be an absolutely wrong answer, since sticking with anything that you have and something that is not delivering the right outcome, in reality, is a step backward.

Now, before switching your CRM, think in the first place, why your company invested in a CRM.
Was it because of the believer that at the outset your CRM platform would benefit your business and make a marked difference by driving in more sales, increase your businesses’ productivity, escalate customer loyalty and many other things that a CRM can do more than just sales.

We are asking this because if it is the fact that your current CRM is not delivering desirable results, it does not mean that your required needs have disappeared. Therefore, why live with a business solution that is not bringing your desired benefits to your business?

Here are some of the key advantages of switching over to an easy to use and productive CRM software in the long run:

Cost savings

Tweaking and modifying the existing CRM system is one way to try and improve the present situation in your organization.
However, if this process is going to be complex, cumbersome and expensive and demands on-going modifications and endless changes, then this might not be the most cost-effective solution for your business.

Now, while a total change of CMR will require a higher initial up-front cost, nevertheless switching the CRM will over the course of time be financially beneficial for the growth of your business.
This is because, having an easy to use CRM software solution that performs properly and effectively will lower the overall cost of your CRM implementation and adoption, which will consequentially increase your company’s revenue and profits.

Enhance user adoption

User-adoption is always another major consideration when you are thinking about remaining put with your current CRM software platform.

While there are several organizations that may be investing more money, efforts, and resources trying to fix the issues in the problematic areas while using their CRM software, but it has been often seen that once your users have considered the system difficult to use and of no-good, or do not feel comfortable the way their CRM operates and performs then it is unlikely that your employees will like to get engaged with it even after the modifications have been made on the existing CRM system.

As one of the best Salesforce Alternative CRM vendor for startups and small businesses in the CRM space, we have often seen that any user’s attitude is an extremely difficult challenge to fix while adopting a CRM.
Hence a clean break is most often the best route in such situations as the benefits of changing the unproductive CRM software outweighs the challenges and costs involved in moving to a new easy to use CRM software system.

Choose the right vendor/implementation partner

When you are seeking at alternative vendors to replace your existing CRM system, be sure to check out if your new CRM vendor has moved at least one organization from your present CRM platform.

Ask them how did they do it?

Inquire how easy it was for them to perform the migration and what testimonials or proof-points do they have to back-up their claims.

In fact, it is a great thing if your new vendor can provide references whereby you can cross-check with other organization the level of expertise that you new CRM vendor provided while migrating CRM platforms (the one that you presently have) to their easy to use CRM software.

This is because moving any CRM is far more easier when your new CRM vendor has previous expertise and experience in moving organizations from your present CRM platform to their easy to use CRM platform.

Data migration

One of the biggest concern while switching CRM software is about data migration. That means extraction of all data from your existing CRM database to your new system.

Our suggestion is simple: Do not think of boiling the ocean.

You do not necessarily have to move all your data into your new CRM system. Rather, consider your data migration from the old system to your new CRM platform’s database as a data-cleansing exercise.

This is because the relevance of data about prospects and leads which are age-old being useful today is often too low (and that is without even taking about GDPR).

Therefore, try to filter out how much of your existing data in the CRM database is of use and real. That means live data and information vs. data that are just dirt and noise.

You can also consider storing your old data elsewhere and only bring forward the data you think is needed in your new easy to use CRM. Since once the new CRM system gets operational and you find that you require data from some other particular year, you can still import it. But do not try to do everything at once if it is not required.

Conclusion

Hence, you see moving to a new CRM is not as difficult as first perceived.

Nevertheless, if you know what is CRM, you must understand that selecting a new and more efficient CRM solution for your business will always take time and need attentive research and detailed technical discussions with a number of vendors in the CRM marketplace.

However, once you purchase the right CRM solution for your business, it will deliver the benefits that you originally envisaged for your business, along with happier staffs and customers.

Therefore, do not live with sub-optimal benefits from your CRM. Rather step up and switch your CRM software- since CRM migration, in reality, is not that hard.

Recent Trends and Developments in Chatbot Customer Support Strategies in 2019

The developments in Chatbot services have traveled a long way and have also achieved huge success and milestones since its beginning that started back in the 1950s. During the initial years after the launch of this technology Chatbots were only used as an interface for web development services to enhance business interactions, however times have now changed and technology has also evolved greatly over the last few decades just like it has happened with easy to use CRM software in the CRM marketplace.

The developments in Chatbot services have traveled a long way and have also achieved huge success and milestones since its beginning that started back in the 1950s.
During the initial years after the launch of this technology Chatbots were only used as an interface for web development services to enhance business interactions, however times have now changed and technology has also evolved greatly over the last few decades just like it has happened with easy to use CRM software in the CRM marketplace.

80% of businesses want Chatbots by 2020- BusinessInsider Click To Tweet

Now, if we look at the Chatbot technology we will certainly accept the fact, that although Chatbots were their all along, however, this technology has gained unseen momentum and popularity over the last few years. Especially in 2018-19 the trends in Chatbot technology has shown some amazing runs that portrays several tweaks to its traditional technology as it is becoming more and more useful for rendering support to the customers and prospects in small and medium-sized organizations that are using best small business CRM software platforms to enhance the customer experience associated with their offerings and find rapid business growth.

This is happening because, the recent development in the field of Big Data and AI (Artificial Intelligence) has significantly improved the level of technology usage in Chatbot development, helping Chatbots to evolve from simple answering applications to the advanced Chatbots that are smart and intelligent enough to effectively interact with prospects and customers in the CRM database .

Hence there are many organizations that are looking to hire app developers for implementing Chatbots in their business websites and integrate its functionality with an easy to use CRM for leveraging its power in providing world-class support to their prospects and customers.

Advancements in Chatbots nowadays are allowing the implementation of AI tools which is the main reason for Chatbots to gain this large consumer base, like small organizations with limited resources those that are most essentially in need of remaining online 24/7 using Chatbots.

Since Chatbot technology aids in providing instant response to the requirements and questions of prospects and customers living in completely different time zones across the globe.

According to the Harvard Business Review and InsideSales:

“A five-minute delay can result in your chances to attract lead decimation. In ten minutes the delayed answer will reduce your chances to get the effective contact up to 400%.”

Therefore, it can be easily said that with the extensive area for development, Chatbot technology just like easy to use CRM software, has a boundless unrestrained space and future to thrive and grow, but what seems to be the trend for this year provides us the picture as depicted below, as according to BusinessInsider:

“80% of businesses want Chatbots by 2020.”

Replacement of Legacy App Interfaces

There are several web and app development services in 2019 that have already adopted the trends with legacy app interfaces replaced and interchanged by unique interfaces, which results into using Chatbots for making interactive conversations with a customer instead of simply navigating through the UI of the app.

This way it has been found that businesses using Chatbots gets high-level of engagement with their customers, as irrespective of whether your customer is a Baby Boomers (age 55+) or a Millennial (age 18-34), people are looking to Chatbots for providing them on-demand answers to their questions in real time, since 55% of people in the USA believe the top benefit of interacting with a Chatbot is getting instant responses to their inquiries.

Follow-line of Google Duplex

Built on an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) using ‘TensorFlow Extended’, a general purpose Google machine learning platform, Google Duplex is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chat agent that can perform definite verbal tasks.

It has been recently observed that small and medium businesses that use best small business CRM software is using this innovative tool to book appointments and orders on the command of the users, which in the years to come can also be followed by other similar ideas, because technology never waits to evolve, which is more so pertinent in the present times.

Human-like Chatbot Experience

The entire race in the Chatbot technology is for rendering human-like experiences to the users of the application. Therefore, business establishments that are working on Chatbots are also slowly becoming smarter to deliver human-like experience through Chatbots, using technological advancements in AI, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.

Additionally, in an HBR survey, it showed that decision makers and business leaders are turning towards the broader umbrella of business automation technologies that also most importantly includes CRM integration with Chatbots, for things like marketing, sales, and customer support services.
According to the HBR study:

“Forty-two percent of participants believe automation technologies in these areas will mostly improve the customer experience. And 48% said that they already use automation technology for these business functions, with 40% planning to implement some form of automated technology by 2020.”

Chatbot powered UI

It has been found that UI or User Interfaces that are Chatbot enabled helps the UI to deliver information quickly, as interacting through Chatbots is a lot more simpler than using app-based UI tour.

Automatic Customer Support Center

The most advanced artificial based voice and other devices are the server-less technology that is currently deployed Over-the-Automated-Call-Center.

In the present times smart Chatbot development companies can help you to set up the automatic call center and infuse them with the deep domain knowledge base to serve the customers 24/7, and that too without any reduction in efficiency.

In-depth Customer Data Analysis

In the present times as AI is helping data mining and analysis activities that are most necessary for finding customer insights for businesses, hence Chatbots in 2019 are getting integrated with Machine Learning which is aiding Chatbots to solve even technical tasks.

Moreover, this effective analysis of Chatbots about customer insights and pattern recognition using Big Data and Machine Learning technologies integrated with the app along with data collected inside the CRM database is helping Chatbots to gain an advantage in real-time scenarios over the human mind.

Conclusion

As the ultimate goal of almost all businesses is to engage the customer, show them their plans, sell the customers their offerings, and provide world-class support services an innovative and futuristic Chatbot technology will definitely help businesses to achieve these goals.
Since looking at the trends in Chatbot technology although friendliness and approachability” are not areas where consumers believe Chatbots are particularly strong, according to a Drift report 15% of consumers in the US have used Chatbots to communicate with businesses in the past 12 months and this number is on the rise steadily.

To know more on how you can use technology to find massive business growth read our “Business Growth Manifesto”, to identifying areas that can be optimized or automated in your organization and then implement technology that will optimize, automate and improve your business processes.

Selling to Millennials: How to prepare for the future with Easy to Use CRM software

It is pertinent that we should state in the onset that the title of this blog is a bit misleading since we are not yet truly prepared for the market as easy to use CRM software users, where Millennial(s) are going to be the key consumer demography for many businesses. Therefore, marketing and selling to the Millennial(s) is a completely new ball game, and it is really necessary to understand how to succeed at it. In 2019, Millennial(s) are gradually moving into decision-making positions in several organizations, and therefore as markets using the best small business CRM software, we must adapt to their unique requirements, buying behaviors, and tendencies.

Therefore, marketing and selling to the Millennial(s) is a completely new ball game, and it is really necessary to understand how to succeed at it.

In 2019, Millennial(s) are gradually moving into decision-making positions in several organizations, and therefore as markets using the best small business CRM software, we must adapt to their unique requirements, buying behaviors, and tendencies.

At the end of 2018, CRM software revenues overtook database management systems to become the largest of all software markets- Super Office Click To Tweet

Most of the difference between these Millennial(s) and their predecessors revolve around the pervasiveness of technology and the Millennials’ familiarity and comfort level with it.

Hence, to adapt alongside the evolving business landscape driven by these Millennial(s), it is utmost important to understand how they are changing the playing arena and what you can do as a user of small business CRM to accommodate those changes.

Here are 5 tips covering the key areas, in which Millennial(s) are altering their buying approaches, and tips on adapting your strategy and find success when marketing and selling to these Millennial(s).

Millennial(s) will become America’s largest consumers in 2019

Baby-Boomers have all along been the largest consumer demography in the US. However, it will no longer remain so, as Millennial(s) are set to overtake them in 2019.

Millennial(s) have different buying behaviors and expectations that marketers need to take into consideration.