Tag: CRM Database

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Lead Management and Sales

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

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

  1. Flexibility and Integration Capabilities

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

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

  1. Project Management

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

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

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

  1. Mobile Support

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

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

  1. Invoicing and Order Management

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Well, the answer is ‘Yes’.

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

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

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

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Ways A MCA CRM Can Help You Reach Your Business Goals

GOALS- are an essential element that every business be it big or small must have, as aptly quoted by Tony Robbins: “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” This is because, without goals, businesses will never be able to achieve new heights, or rather to say remain comfortably numbed with whatever happens around them. It is nice to sing “Hakuna Matata” in your daily life, but when it comes to business, not worrying about achieving new levels in sales and customer support can burn your entrepreneurial endeavors to the ground. So how can an MCA CRM help you reach your Merchant Cash Advance business goals?

GOALS- are an essential element that every business be it big or small must have, as aptly quoted by Tony Robbins:

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.

This is because, without goals, businesses will never be able to achieve new heights, or rather to say remain comfortably numbed with whatever happens around them.

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.- Tony Robbins Click To Tweet

It is nice to sing “Hakuna Matata” in your daily life, but when it comes to business, not worrying about achieving new levels in sales and customer support can burn your entrepreneurial endeavors to the ground.

So how can an MCA CRM help you reach your Merchant Cash Advance business goals?

 

Ways Merchant Cash Advance CRM Software Can Help You Reach Your MCA Business Goals:

  1. MCA CRM Improves Customer Retention

If you know what is CRM, we have discussed even before in greater details how an easy to use CRM software can enhance your in-house customer support, but at a higher level, a Merchant Cash Advance software can also help you to reach your customer retention goals.

Per say, using your MCA CRM software you can easily track all your customer satisfaction metrics and conjure sales promotional activities that can uncover new, and recurring revenues.

Leveraging features like activity history of the customers, taking notes, and using case management functionalities in an MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub allows your employees to monitor the conversation that your marketing, sales, and support teams have had with your existing customers. That in turn makes it simple for your alternative funding organization to provide apt solutions and promotions to increase the level of satisfaction for your customers.

Always remember, it is at least 50% more easier to sell to existing customers than selling your services to new prospects and that 80% of your future profits in your alternative funding MCA business come from your existing customers. Therefore, leveraging your Merchant Cash Advance CRM to reach your existing customer is a must for the growth of your business.

  1. Create Better Marketing Campaigns

Based on Top Marketing Automation Trends published by Software Advice, businesses that have already understood the impact, which a CRM for small business does for sales and marketing has leveraged lead scoring and lead segmentation features to create groups of customer targets to perk up the quality and reach of their marketing campaigns.

It is a common statement that easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub helps business to reach their goals by providing organizations with deeper insights into their leads, prospect, and customers.

More specifically MCA CRM software in alternative funding businesses provides your MCA firm to look at your opportunity pipelines so that you can very easily correlate each of the opportunities in your sales funnels to a specific marketing campaign.

This marketing automation functions in a CRM lets your employees quickly view which are the campaigns that are likely to result into opportunities and ultimately sales of your alternative funding services.

Therefore, using an MCA CRM like ConvergeHub, fine-tune your marketing campaigns in a manner that provides the opportunities to escalate your company’s goals and its bottom line.

  1. Increase Lead Quality

As you can easily reach your business goals using an MCA CRM software in Merchant Cash Advance businesses, you should instruct your marketing and sales managers to create pragmatic objectives to increase lead quality for higher sales. ConvergeHub CRM helps to score leads and determine which actions and strategies are most pertinent to lead to a sale. Using the CRM database for enhancing customer and lead information you can conveniently fast-track leads through the sales pipeline to help your managers more efficiently reach their predicted sales.

  1. Make your Business more Efficient

Your Merchant Cash Advance software can easily improve your efficiency to hit on goals by developing a better workflow for all your customer-facing processes. ConvergeHub MCA CRM software not only helps you with process workflow, but it even increases process efficiency and time management skills of your employees. Using an easy to use CRM software your team will be able to invest more time on value-added activities and thereby spend less time making communication blunders and loose information while making manual data entries in the software.

  1. Improve Sales Pipeline

Improving your alternative funding businesses’ sales pipeline through your MCA CRM software is a simple way to help you reach your goals.
In other words, plainly speaking, your company needs to reach its revenue goals and your Merchant Cash Advance CRM help you to reach it quickly.

Your sales pipeline gets a considerable boost from an array of areas, although it is a bit way around to include other sections in this list, nevertheless, improving the quality of your leads directly helps to enhance your sales pipeline, improve the quality of your marketing campaigns, and thereby improve your business workflow.
In addition to this, MCA CRM software also lets you segment lists by industries that help your sales teams to focus their outbound efforts on specific niche industries seeking alternative funding resources.

Conclusion

If you know what is CRM, then you must be aware of the fact that a CRM is more than just a piece of software. It is a tool that helps your business to reach its perceived goals, regardless of whether your primary objectives are improving sales, retaining your customers, increase inbound leads, or just reduce wasted time.

Therefore, to conclude, an MCA CRM is your always a silver bullet if you are in the Merchant Cash Advance business, which helps you to manage your entire operation, right from marketing and sales to customer support and project management by placing all of the pieces you need in a single platform to achieve your goals.

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

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

Do you still believe that Blockchain technology starts and ends with Bit-coins? If it is so, then you must not have been paying attention in the way this technological marvel is rapidly gaining importance in the IT world, and it is very likely that this technology will get even bigger in the times to come.

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

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

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

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

Blockchain means improved security of the CRM Database

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

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

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

Put an end to CRM Database tracking

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

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

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

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

Find the benefit of enhanced transparency   

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

Find the advantage of enhanced user privacy control

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

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

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

Escape the hassle of lead generation

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

Do you want to know how?

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

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

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

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

Get rid of outdated information with data cleansing

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

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

Harness the full potential of loyalty programs

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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Myths About Using A QuickBooks CRM For Sales Teams Exposed

Customer Relationship Management solution or CRM software has been around for decades. However, over the past few years the usage of CRM has skyrocketed and today both small and enterprise level businesses use CRM for sales, preferably a QuickBooks CRM that is capable of offering QuickBooks CRM integration free. Here are some of the some of the primary myths debunked about sales CRM software like QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

Customer Relationship Management solution or CRM software has been around for decades. However, over the past few years the usage of CRM has skyrocketed and today both small and enterprise level businesses use CRM for sales, preferably a QuickBooks CRM for sales teams that is capable of offering QuickBooks CRM integration free.

CRM technology has evolved considerably over the years, but still, there are several misconceptions what a CRM solution actually is, or what it does, remains in the minds of the prospective buyers of CRM. Especially, customer relationship platforms that integrate with software solutions like QuickBooks, which helps integration with financial and accounting software platforms, and therefore, aid the sales teams to do their work more efficiently.

We will call them CRM myths.

Here are some of the some of the primary myths debunked about sales CRM software like QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

A CRM software can greatly help in cutting costs, and using one can lead to reduced marketing costs by 23% - Cloudswave Click To Tweet
  1. Sales CRM is too complicated

During the early days, sales CRM software was non-intuitive, clunky, and complicated, which came with an extremely steep learning curve. The market took notice of this issue and hence CRM software gained a reputation that it is a complicated piece of technological marvel that requires advanced computing skills to manage its functionalities.

However, those days are gone, and CRM technology has evolved by leaps and bounds. Today easy to use CRM software platforms have intuitive drag and drop interfaces like ConvergeHub that allows even the most non-technical users to quickly learn and use the platform.

This is the exact reason CRM systems like ConvergeHub, which are built to be accessed by small and growing businesses, have an extremely short learning curve.

  1. CRM is too expensive

Another prevailing myth about CRM systems that were born during the early days of the technology is that CRM solutions are prohibitively expensive. Since, at that time, businesses would have to normally spend more than $1000 per month or even a larger sum for CRM implementation in a company.

Unfortunately, this perception still exists and is as-of-date believed by many.

However, the truth is that prices of CRM software solutions have dramatically dropped in the recent years, which has happened primarily because of the growth in cloud based CRM software and the exceeding numbers of many new vendors that have entered the CRM marketplace.

For example, ConvergeHub CRM not only offers a 14-day free trial of the software but also allows you to use ConvergeHub on a pay-as-you-go subscription-based service (quarterly or annual), with its Starter Pack billed as low as $9 per user/month if it is billed annually.

  1. If I buy a CRM, I must still purchase a marketing automation system

In the present times, an innovative and new type CRM technology has entered the market. It is known as the Converged all-in-one CRM software, which includes full customer relationship management for sales, marketing, customer support, and even accounting on the same platform. Therefore, once you buy a QuickBooks CRM for sales teams like ConvergeHub, you no longer need to buy different automation systems for customer support, sales, marketing, or accounts, as they are built within the CRM.

This means all data centrally stored in the CRM database, be it from sales, marketing, support, or accounts is for all to see, which help align your various teams and makes everyone in your organization work more efficiently.

  1. CRM is only used to store contact information

Easy to use QuickBooks CRM software that supports marketing, sales, accounts, and customer support is used for a plethora of activities. Therefore, when you bring a Converged CRM like ConvergeHub into the picture, the list of processes that can be automated with best CRM for QuickBooks online grows exponentially, which include:

  • Billing and Invoicing
  • Email marketing
  • Drag and drop landing page and web form creation
  • Multichannel campaigning
  • Lead generation and lead scoring
  • Online appointment scheduling
  • Creating advanced metrics and analysis to drive data-driven decisions
  • Creating eDocs and electronic signatures
  • Advanced telephony for streamlined sales calling
  • Helpdesk and customer support automation
  • Social CRM and social listening capabilities
  • Creating project management workflows
  • And much more

  1. CRM for sales will not integrate with my other systems

This is absolutely a myth in the present times, since on the contrary most CRM solutions like ConvergeHub are sold as SaaS (software-as-a-Service) systems.
This means, most cloud based CRM have open APIs, which lets you integrate almost any third-party applications like QuickBooks and others that you want with your easy to use CRM.

These integrations opens the door for the users to complete most complicated tasks using the right plugin and API, like accounting, invoicing, billing, and creating eSignatures, and others, without having to leave the CRM. Modern CRM solutions, not only allows you to integrate billing and invoicing apps like QuickBooks, but also combine emailing, telephony, social media apps, and others with the CRM platform.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the legacy CRM software of the late 90’s and the early 2000s are gone and obsolete in 2018.
As most customer relationship management software solutions like ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM live in the cloud, they are extremely cost-effective, and highly intuitive that empowers your business to be more competitive in your field, which in turn increases productivity while decreasing costs, and enables your sales teams to spend more time closing deals.

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The Ultimate Benefits Of Keeping A Centralized and Clean CRM Database

Still, in the present times, there are many businesses that maintain different databases for their customers and thereby often find it becoming a nuisance to keep everything well managed and synchronized. Exporting data from one software platform to another and trying hard to resolve dependencies and conflicts can become really cumbersome, especially when you are dealing with a very large amount of data. Therefore, it is recommended that you should practice keeping one centralized database, a repository to maintain all your useful data, as we find in a CRM database. Here is how a central database can help you in making your business operations more efficient in the long haul.

Still, in the present times, there are many businesses that maintain different databases for their customers and thereby often find it becoming a nuisance to keep everything well managed and synchronized. Exporting data from one software platform to another and trying hard to resolve dependencies and conflicts can become really cumbersome, especially when you are dealing with a very large amount of data. Therefore, it is recommended that you should practice keeping one centralized database, a repository to maintain all your useful data, as we find in a CRM database.

Here is how a central database can help you in making your business operations more efficient in the long haul.

Bad data sources result in 30% of all leads failing- Cyber Sphere(2017) Click To Tweet

Inbound marketing strategies have altered the fate of hundreds of business establishments (for the better) all across the globe. However, this is also true, that not all the leads generated are useful. Moreover, in addition to your prospective leads and customers, you will also find many competitors filling out your forms, just to find the feel of your services and eventually try to bulwark a way into your customer database in your online lead management software system.

Additionally, vendors those who have the singular objective of promoting your company something may also break into your CRM database and remain there without ever thinking of being your customer.

Therefore, over a span of time, if you do not periodically clean your customer database, it will eventually accumulate unsought for data that can become a problem in the long haul.

Here are a few steps that you can take in the attempt to make your CRM database cleaner and therefore more optimized.

  1. Delete Inactive Contacts

Implementing an easy to use CRM solution is indeed a step in the right direction, however, in order to maximize upon customer relationships, and productivity, you should always keep a tab on your customer database in CRM. Contacts, that have remained inactive and silent for an extended period of time should be essentially pruned, if and when it is viable to delete their records. Since, hopelessly following leads that are clearly not interested in your offerings can be very damaging for your company’s reputation over time.

  1. Identify Duplicates

Your marketing database software is the golden key to your company’s success, and that is why it needs to be kept clean and efficient at all times. Therefore, it is most needed that you must ensure that every single duplicate identification is removed from your CRM database. It is a common fact that as soon as your business grows and gains a reputation, it is inevitable that duplicate information will start piling up in your customer database in CRM.

Therefore, it is advisable that you must run a periodic check on your CRM database to find and remove duplicate entries or scrutinize both the lead and customer records and after finding out which entry has better information, merge both the records for optimal performance of your customer relationship software system.

  1. Set Up Alerts

Any good easy to use CRM database software allows its user to set up alerts that trigger when certain actions take place so that you keep everything under check. For example, with ConvergeHub CRM you can use time-saving tools like “Manage Duplicates” and “Merge Duplicates” that can prove to be essential in a scenario where two customers or leads have the same name, last name but different phone numbers or emails.

  1. Uniformity Is Key

A CRM database cannot remain clean if uniformity is not maintained- and by no means is it a child’s play. For an example, let us assume that you allow your leads to type their country where they reside instead of allowing them to choose from a drop-down list. In this case you will eventually find a lot of inconsistency in your database, as people hailing from the United States of America, will provide you entries like “USA”, “US”, “U.S.A”, “U.S” and others which will be a sucker blow to your CRM database’s uniformity that can only be rectified by manual correction of data.

  1. Say No-No to Junk Contacts

Your CRM database will inevitably have anonymous leads that will enter fake email addresses like asdfglkjh@gmail.com or blahblah1234@hotmail.com. These junk lead data often pollutes the CRM database, which a good CRM software can run a search and identify and thereafter remove or suspend the information from the online lead management system.

  1. Monitor Email Campaign Results/Feedback

Lastly, it is also recommended that you should keep a close watch on your email campaign’s results and look for opt-outs and, bounced emails. Because based on your findings and observations, you can clean your CRM database after every email campaign is fired for optimal utilization of the resources in your CRM database.

Now that we have learned how to keep a CRM database clean, let us talk about some of the tangible benefits of why you must do so, and what payback a clean CRM database can offer for the growth of your business.

  • Cut Costs

One of the most pertinent benefits of having a clean CRM database is that it saves your business a lot of money. No one wants to send emails to addresses that do not even exist. Therefore, when you run a periodic check on your CRM database to maintain a clean repository, your email list delivers positive results.

  • Precise campaign stats

If your contact database in CRM contains erroneous email addresses, several emails that you send will never be opened, or engaged, which as a result will never be able to paint an accurate result of email campaign’s statistics or your marketing efforts. Whereby, a clean database in CRM, which is devoid of any unwanted lead and customer records, will go a long way in ensuring that your campaign stats are authentic and thereby help you to create your business strategies accordingly.

  • Sender reputation protection

Spam complains, and bounce rates determine how good your reputation is as a sender of your emails, which plays an important factor in email deliverability. Therefore, keeping a clean CRM database ensures that your sender reputation remains protected and trusted by email marketing services.

  • Elevate Revenue And Conversion Rates

Finally, a clean CRM database helps in avoiding a bad sender reputation whereby the chances of emails being placed in the spam folder (instead of the inbox) more frequently is reduced to a lot extent. Therefore a clean database, which engages people, is bound to increases conversion rates and thereby revenue which is the bottom-line for the growth of any business today.

Conclusion

Therefore, implementing an easy to use CRM system, which ensures that the customer database in CRM remains devoid and clean of any unwanted errors can be a real asset to the organization. A Converged CRM like ConvergeHub can easily bring an end to all data management worries as ConvergeHub is the one-stop-solution for online lead management that can save your resources by targeting the most deserving leads.

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How AI and Easy to Use CRM Solution Can Change the Future of Sales

In the present times, several companies are proactively using both easy to use CRM solutions and AI in forms of groundbreaking ways to escalate their businesses. For an example, if you are watching Netflix, an AI (a recommendation algorithm) will undoubtedly be used for you to help you decide what to watch. Similarly, while shopping in Amazon your decision about what you might wish to buy is also influenced by an AI (through an association algorithm). Even if you ever wish to call an Uber, an AI (a location algorithm) is used to find and quickly book a car in your vicinity. Now, this same type of AI algorithms can also be used to empower any company’s business strategy or decision-making process, to help businesses to make better business decisions. Here are a few specific areas where AI algorithm can be ideally leveraged to help companies grow by helping your sales teams to increase their sales and revenue.

In the present times, several companies are proactively using both easy to use CRM solutions and AI in forms of groundbreaking ways to escalate their businesses.
For an example, if you are watching Netflix, an AI (a recommendation algorithm) will undoubtedly be used for you to help you decide what to watch. Similarly, while shopping in Amazon your decision about what you might wish to buy is also influenced by an AI (through an association algorithm). Even if you ever wish to call an Uber, an AI (a location algorithm) is used to find and quickly book a car in your vicinity.
If you ever had a thought about a product or a vacation, and like telepathy, it seems to suddenly appear on your email inbox or on your search page, we can assure you it was also based on an AI (a classification algorithm) that is monitoring your 24 hours online activities.

Now, this same type of AI algorithms can also be used to empower any company’s business strategy or decision-making process, to help organizations make better business decisions.

Companies that have pioneered the use of AI in sales rave about the impact, which includes an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50%- Harvard Business Review Click To Tweet

Here are a few specific areas where AI algorithm can be ideally leveraged to help companies grow by helping your sales teams to increase their sales and revenue:

  1. Providing Sales Teams with Pertinent Insights

Marketing automation in spite of all its technological advancements has its limits, as only a sales rep can finally have a 1:1 conversation with the customers and close a deal.  However, an AI algorithm can help marketing and sales teams by permitting them to make available valuable insights to their colleagues about prospects, throughout the sales cycle. Information about the customers like their preferences, buying patterns, price selections, brand preferences, preferred time of interactions with sales reps and marketing teams provides a positive outlook, since sales professionals can deal with this information and discover relevant and actionable insights.

AI-driven prescriptive sales tools work like a regular easy to use CRM platform with the exception that it is capable of tracking and analyzing billions of touch points and events, thereby identifying areas for constant improvement.

Manash Chaudhuri the CSO of ConvergeHub CRM and a thought leader in AI-driven Prescriptive Sales technology says:

“AI programs can fetch through billions of customer touch points and events to find correlations and patterns that we just would not be able to notice as human beings on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, it might notice a correlation between sending a specific sales campaign to a prospective customer before calling them, which results in a better conversation. It can also notice that sending a weekly follow up email can yield results up to 6 weeks after an initial contact, which are just example of small practices that sales reps might miss, but that can increase their performance over time.”

  1. Price Optimization

Knowing the amount of discount (if any) to be provided to a customer is always a tricky area for any sales representative. But then again no sales rep wants to leave money on the table. In the present AI based business scenario, an AI algorithm can easily tell the sales teams using a best small business CRM like ConvergeHub what this ideal discount rate should be. Ensuring that you are most likely to win the deal by analyzing specific features of past deals that were won or lost on that very product or service to the customers. These features can include:

  • New or existing client
  • Size of the deal in dollars
  • Product specification compliance
  • Number of competitors
  • Territory/region
  • Customer’s annual income
  • Level of decision-makers (influencers) involved
  • Timings of the past sale (e.g., Q1 vs Q3), and several others
  1. Quality and Quantity Leads

Improving lead generation has been the focal point of the buzz around AI. In a study conducted by HBR (Harvard Business Review), it was found that businesses using Artificial Intelligence along with online lead management software platforms for sales were able to increase their lead generation by 50%. Moreover, the lead quality, as well as the lead quantity of AI-driven leads, are superior as Artificial Intelligence has a keen potential of spotting the best targets for inbound and outbound marketing initiatives. Therefore, a large chunk of the longstanding friction between marketing and sales in a company can be eliminated with the growth of AI in sales.

In other words, AI-driven solutions can act as a blessing throughout the entire sales-marketing cycle, turning a magnanimous amount of information in the CRM database into actionable insights.

  1. Manage Performance

Sales managers in all businesses, have to evaluate the revenue pipeline of each of their sales representatives every month, with a vision towards nurturing deals that might have got stalled, or worse, fallen through the crack. Using an AI-powered best small and medium business CRM software platform, managers can now use the dashboard to visually perceive which sales reps are likely to accomplish their sales targets along with the number of outstanding deals that stands a good chance of getting closed.
An AI-powered easy to use CRM solution allows sales managers to concentrate their attention on key sales reps and their associated deals that can help the company to reach its forecasted sales objectives.

According to Shampa Bagchi, CEO of ConvergeHub CRM for small businesses, ‘using AI to uncover trends and correlate data is great, but customer data in CRM is only made valuable when you can take action on it.”

  1. Simplify Tasks

According to McKinsey Global Institute, as AI magically reduces tasks, therefore, 40% of time spent by sales reps on day-to-day mundane and menial tasks such as cold calling, replying to emails and others can be automated by adopting all the present technologies that AI has to offer for the sales teams.
As AI is capable of aiding professionals to commit to their jobs better, especially with the use of analytics and data science.

Embedding AI into CRM database, sales force automation software platforms, and other applications can eliminate a lot of crippling tasks and liberate the sales reps from monotonous tasks, which can uplift their efforts in sales to unprecedented new heights.

Conclusion

Therefore to conclude although AI is never going to be a replacement for sales and marketing in any business, nevertheless it is ‘The’ technology for now, and for the future, which is going to impel sales professionals to a ‘level-up’ in their game.

Al will allow sales and marketing professionals to base their decisions and opinions more accurately based on data (and since data never lies) focusing and unveiling the information trapped in the CRM database, making their choices more precise than ever.

CRM Database: Tips For Unlocking Secrets Of Your Customers For Business Growth

According to Search Business Analytics, 41% of businesses are currently struggling to tie customer data to business actions. Since there is little use of the information in CRM database if you do not make it work for you. If you are aware of what is CRM, you must be knowing that Customer Relationship Management is all about making the best use of CRM database to discover valuable customer insights about your leads, prospects, and customers and then turn those insights into successful business decisions. This is why CRM software is important for all businesses. In this article, we will look into some of the ways you can use CRM database to unveil your customer secrets.

According to Search Business Analytics, 41% of businesses are currently struggling to tie customer data to business actions. Since there is little use of the information in CRM database if you do not make it work for you.
If you are aware of what is CRM, you must be knowing that Customer Relationship Management is all about making the best use of CRM database to discover valuable customer insights about your leads, prospects, and customers and then turn those insights into successful business decisions.

This is why CRM software is important for all businesses.

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

According to Software Advice, more than 74% of business organizations state that an easy to use CRM software solution allows them to have greater access to customer data. While Accenture confirms that high-yielding businesses (those that greatly outperform over long-term) are 5 times more likely to use the information stored in their CRM’s customer database pitted against low performing businesses.

However, the big question is, what you need to look at to know who your customers are, or what they want, and lastly how do your business benefits from that information?

In this article, we will look into some of the ways you can use CRM database to unveil your customer secrets.

Use CRM Database for Personalization

As every customer is a different individual, hence they all have different preferences when it relates to their communication and their buying habits.
According to Digital Trends, more than 73% of consumers choose to do business with organizations that use their personal information to enhance their shopping experiences.

Additionally, according to a report published by Infosys, it has been established that 86% of consumers support the role that personalization plays in their purchasing decisions.

This is exactly where you can use the information stored in your easy to use CRM software, since this platform does not only stores names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers of your customers, but all your other interactions with the customers are also stored in the CRM database.

Therefore, take the advantage of using the customer information in your CRM database, which helps to address your customer by their names and incorporate the information that you know about them to show them that you are interested in treating them individually.

Personalize and shape your communications with your customers in such a manner that it suits the need of each customer individually and see how your customer’s perception of your brand starts to improve over time.

Discover Your Top Customers

As your customers are far from being equal, therefore, some of your customers earn you more profits than others, while there are also many that even waste your time.
According to the Pareto Principle – “80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers”

Hence, if you need to focus on this 20 % of your customers that brings you most of your revenue, your easy to use CRM software provides the analytical tools that can help you to spot your top purchasers by analyzing your CRM database.
Similarly, the CRM software can also identify the customers who are taking up most of your time and are top time wasters- customers that are not vital for your company.

Once you find this information, you can focus and treat your top hassle-free customers, provide them with more attention and uncover more business opportunities with this ever-growing selected few.

Become Trained To Win and Close More Deals

Have you ever thought- actually how you sell?

What are the steps that you unconsciously follow all the way to closing a deal?

More importantly, what are the things that you do to win a sale, and if they are really working?

Now if you start digging deeper, you will certainly start to understand which sales strategies are really helping you to advance the deals and which are those that do not.

However, to do this you need to look into the CRM database.
When every action that you take and every document that you send to the prospect is logged into the easy to use CRM system, you can view the major steps that you have taken in the sales process and the touch points that you have registered with the prospective customer. Data in the CRM platform also lets you understand how long the entire procedure takes, and how much time elapsed between each step in the buying process.

If you find some of the tactics that you have used generated higher closing ratio, or have made the sales cycles shorter, you can make that as a part of your every sales process, and stop doing things that did not.

So CRM database helps in making your sales reps follow successful sales processes ever time they are trying to close a deal.

Discover Upselling Opportunities

We all want to increase our revenue, and the best way to do it is to persuade your customers with products and services that they like instead of just bombarding them with random offerings.

CRM data helps us to anticipate the customer’s interests and needs and offer them opportunities to enhance their buying experiences. This is where an easy to use CRM earns its keep.

Converged CRM software like ConvergeHub (the best small business CRM software) provides a 360-degree view of the customers, whereby it helps you to analyze all customer information in the CRM database and pinpoint what the customer is likely to purchase as per their existing requirements.

For service-oriented businesses, information stored about your customers in the CRM database can also help you to send reminders to your customers before their contract is up for renewal so that you can upsell your customer at the right time.

Reduce Churn

Although there is always a lot of focus on increasing sales, however keeping the customer that you already have from leaving, is less talked about in the business world.

Nevertheless, the loss of customers, or customer churn, can crush your business goals.

According to a study done by Kini Group, it has been found that by just reducing customer churn by 5% businesses can increase their profits by 25-95 percent.

Now, if you evaluate the data in the CRM database between steadfast and broken relations with your customers, you can find valuable insights which can help you to evaluate what is working and what you should avoid in your customer relationship management to keep away from higher churn rates in the future days to come.

Moreover, access to these insights can also help you to resolve customer-facing issues faster and make your customers have a great experience with your brand, just by feeling that their pain-points have been understood.

Conclusion

Therefore, use your CRM database to develop an all-around customer experience strategy.

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Always remember, that the main benefit of having an easy to use CRM in place is to manage the relationship with your customers using information hidden in the CRM database, for now, and forever, in order to increase your sales and grow your business’s revenue.

What Is CRM ROI? How To Get Paid For Your Investments Using Cloud Based CRM Systems

According to a study done by Nucleus Research, it was found that for every single dollar spent on a cloud based CRM platform, the return is between $5.60 and $8.71. According to another research done by HubSpot, it was established that 40% of sales reps do not even use this online lead management tool to manage leads and prospects but instead relies on Rolodex cards and Excel spreadsheets to manage their sales funnel and cultivate customer relationship. Now, how can this be possible when statistically 47% of the sales teams that use a cloud based CRM say that they registered a positive impact on customer retention by using CRM for their businesses? Part of the problem in this long-standing self-contradicting confusing statement lays in the horror stories we hear about companies that did unsuccessfully spend thousands of dollars on the promise of improving productivity with the help of a CRM for their sales teams.

According to a study done by Nucleus Research, it was found that for every single dollar spent on a cloud based CRM system , the return is between $5.60 and $8.71.

Nevertheless, there is also a bad news.

According to another research done by HubSpot, it was established that 40% of sales reps do not even use this online lead management software to manage leads and prospects but instead relies on Rolodex cards and Excel spreadsheets to manage their sales funnel and cultivate customer relationship.

Every single dollar spent on a cloud based CRM system, the return is between $5.60 and $8.71. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Now, how can this be possible when statistically 47% of the sales teams that use a cloud based CRM say that they registered a positive impact on customer retention by using CRM for their businesses?

Part of the problem in this long-standing self-contradicting confusing statement lays in the horror stories we hear about companies that did unsuccessfully spend thousands of dollars on the promise of improving productivity with the help of a CRM for their sales teams.

We all know any CRM is more than just a sales tool.

This means a CRM database serves as a data warehouse that centers on client interactions, so that marketing, customer support, billing, and other departments should be able to use its centralized repository for collecting and retrieving information.

Cloud based CRM software should also offer automation that effectively improves workflow and permits a seamless connection to all the front and back-end systems in an organization.

However, the golden key for this cutting-edge tool is that you have to use it right to garner your ROI.

In this article, we will look into CRM ROI and provide the readers with certain pointers on why investing in cloud based CRM software like ConvergeHub can make all the difference for your team.

Top Considerations for CRM ROI

Creating a business case for your cloud based CRM software got you this far. However, after go-live of the CRM users must find the impact this new online lead management software has on all the departments that use this platform.

Forrester (the global research firm) is one organization that has provided us a framework of how we can do this. Their methodology, which is known as ‘Total Economic Impact’ views on the sales outcomes as weighted against money and time spent on the CRM.

Forrester’s TEI methodology typically looks at whether sales increased or closed faster via improved lead generation strategies.

Forrester also evaluates the user-friendliness of the cloud based CRM software and how scalable is the CRM as the company changes and registers growth in employment over time.

Here are some of the questions Forrester use to measure their CRM ROI, which includes:

  • Did the CRM platform increase wallet share by capturing more customer income and consumers on your offerings?
  • Did the cloud based CRM software help sales reps match the services that your client needs?
  • Are the customer relationships lasting longer than before?
  • Did the cloud based CRM software provide marketing, sales, support, and the management teams with automated functions that improve business efficiency?
  • Have the management team in your organization been able to capture data that shows reduced direct selling costs?
  • Is the CRM platform, easy to use and intuitive enough to eliminate the time required for IT to pull reports from the CRM database?

CRM implementations are never identical. Therefore, as you can only see an ROI from your CRM if your employees use the platform, this human variable has a direct impact on CRM ROI. Hence, if you take two organizations with competing offerings from the same industry and provide them with identical CRM platforms, it is highly likely that the experiences of these two companies will never be similar. Consequentially, so shall be the differences in their ROI.

With that being said, let us quantify some of the steps that are necessary to set up a new cloud based CRM system for success in any organization, that include:

  • Making certain that the information silo housed in the different departments in the organization are abolished. It has been found that there will always be certain departments that will be more unwilling than others to comply with the CRM software, where all data is collected and stored in one place. However, it is important that each department in your organization agree to enter information in one place to reap the benefits of CRM ROI.
  • Create a means to measure the different metrics by departments and develop a reporting structure that can follow these benchmarks effectively. Therefore, select an online lead management software that is able to handle the deviating goals of marketing, sales, operations, billing, customer support, and others.
  • Accept workflow changes that will completely leverage the software. This may be a conflicting situation for most employees that are set in their ways. Setting the expectation upfront that CRM ROI is based on each team member’s acceptance of the software, is an important part of finding employee buy-in. Each of the employees must be aware that they will receive proper training to utilize the cloud based CRM software, which will make them grow individually and as a department.
  • Customize the CRM software to reduce the busy works, which is holding your organization back for generating CRM ROI, as you are likely to find a host of redundant tasks baked into many of the departments in your business.

Recovering what you pay for your cloud based CRM software means choosing the right CRM software and optimizing the platform to fit your business.

Recently we hired a research agency to conduct an analysis of CRM ROI for ConvergeHub CRM. Let us look at what they discovered about ConvergeHub online lead management software, which is a FinanceOnline award-winning CRM for small businesses:

According to the research study, the potential ROI of ConvergeHub cloud based CRM saw a number of business benefits, like reduced CRM maintenance and infrastructure costs, and quicker time-to-market.

The report further elaborated that:

  • The time-to-implement and deploy was much faster with ConvergeHub cloud based CRM solution than an on-site CRM implementation.
  • Organizational efficiency in the processes was improved as sales and customer support departments were able to automate several basic and redundant works.
  • The online model of ConvergeHub CRM software allowed customers to avail a fixed monthly subscription, which nullified overhead costs.
  • ConvergeHub helped businesses save money in the long term.
  • Businesses began to see an ROI within 3 months after installation of the small business CRM software.

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Ultimately, the research stated that ConvergeHub has an overall 63% CRM ROI rate, a figure that places ConvergeHub as a highly rated SaaS-based online lead management software , which is worth considering, as it helps you to get the most for your investments.

Reasons Sales Do Not Use Their Easy to Use CRM (And Solutions)

No matter what industry they work in, sales people, do not use their easy to use CRM for the same reason everywhere. Therefore understanding this “why” is just one-step forward to choosing the right best small business CRM for your SMB. There are several examples of successful and unsuccessful CRM adoption in this world. The cold reality is that even the best small business CRM fails because adoptions of online lead management software like CRM technology can often be an uphill battle. Now the question remains, why would sales representatives want to go back to using pen and paper, sticky notes, and spreadsheets to build their customer relationships? According to Cloudswave’s research, by using an easy to use CRM lead to sales conversion rate improves more than 300 percent.

No matter what industry they work in, sales people, do not use their easy to use CRM for the same reason everywhere. Therefore understanding this “why” is just one-step forward to choosing the right best small business CRM for your SMB.

To Love or Hate an easy to use CRM software?

There are several examples of successful and unsuccessful CRM adoption in this world. The cold reality is that even the best small business CRM fails because adoptions of online lead management software like CRM technology can often be an uphill battle.

Using a CRM can lead to sales conversation rate improvements of over 300%- Cloudswave Click To Tweet

Now the question remains, why would sales representatives want to go back to using pen and paper, sticky notes, and spreadsheets to build their customer relationships?

According to Cloudswave’s research, by using an easy to use CRM lead to sales conversion rate improves more than 300 percent.
Even we did hear from one of our customers using our Merchant Cash Advance CRM software that by using our ConvergeHub MCA CRM the company increased its revenue by 152 percent. While it is not 300 percent, however, we think that is really impressive, as we known and the customer also agreed that after using our CRM software they are well on their way to increased success.

Here is a look at some of the most frequently found reasons we have heard from sales teams in different organizations regarding difficulties and problems in implementing CRM application and why they seek a new solution. `

#1. Salespeople do not want changes

One of the most common and familiar sales tools to the sales reps to track customer relationships is the spreadsheet. Now the question is if the sales teams have been so good at their work so far with spreadsheets, they might not just want to use some other customer relationship management software and fix their existing spreadsheet-based process unless they feel it is broken.

Solution

You must convince your sales teams that easy to use CRM data benefits not only them but also the entire organization, right from marketing to accounts and also support.

Illustrate to your sales reps that when they close a deal without understanding or showing the steps taken to reach the conversion it is a loss. Reiterate the fact that best CRM for small business brings value to that ‘win moment’ because the entire organization can perceive the value of the deal for future reference, which can help in gaining would-be sales.

#2. Salespeople do not perceive the value

 

Speaking about value, another pertinent reason sale does not use their CRM platform is because they think that the customer information database software or CRM was forced on them. This situation typically occurs when the owner or the manager tell their sales teams that they need to use a CRM without discussing or explaining them about the benefits of the software.

“What a waste of money!”, “What a waste of time!”, or “I can’t learn this!” are some of the first thoughts that sales reps have once they are not explained about the utility of the CRM software, which consequentially makes them perceive even an easy to use CRM as a threat rather than a useful tool.

Solution

This trepidation stems back to not involving the sales teams and understanding their needs during the buying process. In an ideal scenario, organizations should see an easy to use CRM that is capable of solving specific sales-related problems and highlight those features to their sales teams.

Explain to your sales managers how their sales reps can close more deals if they are using the right small business CRM.

Always make sure, that the final decision about buying your easy to use CRM software is a shared decision by your sales teams.

#3. CRM software is too complicated

Good sales reps want to spend their hours selling rather than learning how to use the software.

Therefore, adopting complex CRM software sets sales teams up for failure. Moreover, unwanted bells and whistles set by the CRM software worsen the problems.

Solution

Choose an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub that is known for its ease of use. Purchase a CRM that does not have a long learning curve, which can take weeks to learn.

#4. The CRM is not aligned with our sales process

Another reason why sales teams do not use their CRM platform is that it is not aligned with their current sales process.

To overcome this issue, you should go back to make the sales reps understand the features of their easy to use CRM and how important those features are for the growth of your organization.

Many CRM platforms include features like depicting deal stages, sales pipeline management, workflows, and others, which are absolutely necessary for winning more prospective deals.

Nevertheless, as all businesses do not track sales, in the same way, therefore, when a CRM field does not fit a sales process that your sales reps are familiar with, they will stop inputting data, unless you further customize the software to fit their needs.

Solution

Purchase a CRM that can be easily customized. Every organization has a different sales process, therefore your best small business CRM’s pipeline stages should be customized to suit how your salesperson sells.

#5. No training or support

Regardless of which industry you work in, software takes time to learn. Moreover, some people are less tech-savvy than others.

In the CRM space, those sales reps that do not know how to use your CRM will simply not use it or end up inputting inaccurate data into the CRM database .

Solution

Proper training is most essential even if you are using an easy to use CRM platform. This training can include basic instructions about the software.

Choose a CRM company that offers free customer support when it is needed.

Remember, there are several CRM companies that only offer support as a paid add-on, which can really prove frustrating for your sales teams.

#6. CRM keeps them stuck at their desks

Sales reps naturally spend a lot of time out of their offices, meeting prospects and building relationships in the field. Therefore, mobile phones are a necessary tool for their meetings on the go.

Hence, if salespeople have to remain at their desk for inputting data inside the CRM database, they will for certain stop using the system.

Solution

Choose a CRM software that is mobile. If your sales reps can pull up conversation history, contact data, deal histories and more when they are out in the field (providing them with a big advantage over other salespeople who cannot) they will obviously like using your CRM.

Moreover, mobile easy to use CRM software empowers the sales teams to update their data right away rather than losing vital information after scribbling on their notebooks.

#7. No time is saved

In the sales world, it is natural that none likes to do data entry. Therefore, this is also yet another reason why salespeople do not use their CRM since they feel it is taking up too much of their precious time to learn and use the software.

Solution

Your chosen CRM should automate as many sales tasks as possible. Since a CRM that is incapable of doing that is not worth considering. 

#8. CRM has bad data

According to a survey done by Experian Data Quality, it was found that most companies lost 12 percent of their total revenue due to bad data.

Now if your new CRM consists of bad data like out-of-date information and duplicates records in the CRM database that none can trust to use, then your salespeople will end up doing the sales analysis on their own, which culminates in a waste of time.

Solution

To avoid the ever-true curse of bad data residing inside the CRM database, you should roll out your easy to use CRM implementation after cleaning the existing data and continue executing the data-cleaning procedure at regular intervals.

Conclusion

Therefore, the key to making your sales reps use your CRM software is in choosing the right easy to use CRM software that your sales teams will actually use.

Do you use a CRM?

If it is affirmative, let us know the incentive for using your CRM software, and if you are still not using an easy to use CRM use ConvergeHub free trail and find how convenient, your sales reps feel after using our best CRM for small business by clicking on the image below.

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A Comprehensive Checklist for Auditing Customer Database in CRM

In this modern world of big data and ever-increasing data availability with respect to its volume and variety the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your organization’s growth is the key for starting a revenue generating marketing solution. When we talk about customer database in CRM, the most often cited response is that “all data in the CRM database is important”. Although this may be true, but to help you in deciding which data elements are most important in the initial phases of building your customer relationship management software solution, can be illustrated as a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your businesses.

In this modern world of big data and ever-increasing data availability with respect to its volume and variety the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your organization’s growth is the key for starting a revenue generating marketing solution.

When we talk about customer database in CRM, the most often cited response is that “all data in the CRM database is important”. Although this may be true, but to help you in deciding which data elements are most important in the initial phases of building your customer relationship management software solution, can be illustrated as a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your businesses.

Bad data sources result in 30% of all leads failing- Cyber Sphere Click To Tweet

After several implementations of online lead management software solutions, we have seen many types of data including “favorite color”; “pet names” and even “number of car doors” all have potential value to different markets for buyers of best small and medium business CRM software.

While “pet names” can be an important data for pet supply retailers using easy to use CRM, “favorite color” can be an essential data field for retails in the clothing industry and “number of car doors” for users of best small business CRM in the motor insurance industry.

Therefore, when you first consider the importance of each data element of the customer database in CRM, the ability to classify the data can help in determining how valuable the data is or in which phase of a solution it should be delivered, if at all.

This following list provides examples of the data elements that can quickly identify the critical pieces of information, which are needed to accomplish your business goals from an array of different data sources.

The priority order of this data is as follows:

#01. Identity Data in CRM Database

In the heart of customer database in CRM lies the individual, so knowing the customer or the individual and to view and maintain that information in a single customer view provides the primary data type which is known as identity data.

Identity data can be any information about an individual that enables the individual to be uniquely identified, which include:

Name Information: Title, First Name (Forename), Last Name (Surname), Designation, and others.

Postal Address Information: Building Name, Building Number, Town, County, Zip/Postal Code, Country, and others.

Person Information: Date of Birth, Gender, and others.

Telephone Information: Home Telephone, Work Telephone, Mobile, and others.

Emailing Information: Personal Email, Work Email, and others.

Social Network Information: Twitter Address, Facebook Identifier, LinkedIn Identifier, and others.

Account Information: Details of your customer’s account ID or User ID.

Professional Information: Company Name, Department Name, Job Title, and others.

Permission and Suppression Data: Although this not essentially an identity element of data, but it is important for finding information concerning permission to communicate and the reason for not communicating (suppression).

#02. Quantitative Data in CRM Database

Now once you recognize who these individuals are in your customer database in CRM, the next element is to find focus on the measurable operational data that enables you to find how the customer behaved,  reacted or has transacted with your business. This data includes any info, which describes the activities completed between the customer and your business.

Transactional Information (Offline and Online): Quantity of products purchased, Subscription/Order Value, Renewal/Order dates, Abandonment rate (abandoned shopping), Product Returns, and others.

Online Activity: Product views, Website visits, Online registrations, and others.

Social Networking Activity: Twitter interactions, Facebook likes, and others.

Customer Support Information: Customer complaint details, Customer query details, and others.

#03. Descriptive Data in CRM Database

Knowing your customers and the type of activities they have completed with your brand provides a good starting point for any marketing activity for up-selling and cross-selling your products. Therefore, to find a fuller perspective of your customer’s additional information, beyond the identity and quantitative details, you must include any info, which may include:

Family Details: Marital status, number of children, age of children, and others.

Lifestyle Details: Car type, Property type, Pet ownership, and others.

Career Details: School name, College/University name, Education level, and others.

#04. Qualitative Data in CRM Database

The concluding type of data, (which you will come across apart from the one, already mentioned) will provide additional description of your customers and their potential behaviors. It is the data acquired by questionnaire type of information captured, where your customers provide data on motivation, attitude, and options that include:

Attitudinal information: How do you value our product, How do you rate our customer service, How likely you are to purchase our products and services again, and others.

Opinion based information: What is your favorite holiday destination, What is your favorite color, and others.

Motivational information: Why was the product purchased (personal use, a gift for someone), What was the key reason for purchasing our product (quality, price, locality), and others.

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Takeaway

Using this simple CRM data classification process and relating them with your business goals, will not only enable you a quick identification of which data is vital for the success of your business, but it can also help you to understand the value achieved from each of this data element.
Therefore, combining the most advanced customer modeling, micro-segmentation, and analytics technologies with an easy to use CRM platform you can really grow your revenue by  using data classification process and associating them with your business goals.

Reasons Why Easy To Use CRM Software Help To Amplify Small and Medium Businesses

When evaluating any software for business, we always want to accomplish the most out of the application, so that we do not end up with the necessity of implementing and accessing multiple software. Our elementary goal of using any software for business is to consolidate processes, business intelligence, and data into a single application, which can either by itself or through integrations, create efficiencies previously unknown. An easy to use CRM software is commonly this solution, which once adopted successfully becomes the nucleus of an organization. So, exactly how does easy to use CRM platform amplify your business? Well, there are hundreds of real-world examples to pull from but here are our top 5 to consider.

When evaluating any software for business, we always want to accomplish the most out of the application, so that we do not end up with the necessity of implementing and accessing multiple software. Our elementary goal of using any software for business is to consolidate processes, business intelligence, and data into a single application, which can either by itself or through integrations, create efficiencies previously unknown.
An easy to use CRM software is commonly this solution, which once adopted successfully becomes the nucleus of an organization.

So, exactly how does easy to use CRM platform amplify your business?

80% of all sales, occur after approximately 5 followups- Gartner Click To Tweet

Well, there are hundreds of real-world examples to pull from but here are our top 5 to consider:

 #1. Understanding the Client Relationship

If you are an owner of an SME (Small and Medium Enterprise), you will always consider the best small and medium business CRM for your business that integrates well with the emailing, documentation, and financial software of your organization. Per say, since QuickBooks is the most popular accounting software for businesses in the U.S. customer relationship management software that allow QuickBooks CRM integration free help to find an instant snapshot of client relationship lifecycles. Using a QuickBooks CRM , you can easily see in one centralized location, what your customers have purchased, when they purchased, how often they purchase, or if they faced any problem while purchasing your products or services. Easy to use CRM software records every touch in the client management processes.

#2. Easy Collaboration

 

When we have an online lead management software solution like an easy to use CRM it becomes simple for anyone in your company to have an access to specific information at a moment’s notice. Since most best CRM for small business is located in the Cloud, anyone in your organization (at any time, and from anywhere) can find access to their desired information, provide feedback, make additions to the CRM database and more. Cloud based CRM systems ensure real-time data and allow seamless collaboration among employees.

#3. Easily Manage and Maintain Tasks

When running a business organization it is most essential to have a clear visibility of what tasks has been completed and jobs that remained outstanding. Using the best small and medium business CRM software like ConvergeHub, you can easily view your progress reports as well as notes contained within the customer database in CRM.
This CRM database is updated instantaneously; hence, there is no need for making second guesses if you are wasting time, resources, or money on tasks that have already been completed. Easy to use CRM software even provides visibility into bottlenecks that needs immediate attention for resolving the issues.

#4. Track KPIs

Key Performance Indicators or KPI can be tracked within the best CRM for small business as the data is pulled from the CRM database. With the help of this data, you can easily evaluate the health of your business by viewing the key performance indicators, which include:

  • Monthly number of unconverted leads
  • Sales conversions to leads
  • Email click-through rate
  • Email response rate
  • Number of lost opportunities
  • Funnel drop off rates
  • Average collection period
  • Number of complaints per month
  • Installation problems per unit sales
  • Time to first call response
  • Time to complete problem resolution
  • On-time delivery
  • Average time to problem resolution
  • Cost per call
  • Call length
  • The volume of calls handled
  • Number of customer complaints
  • The volume of calls handled
  • Customer ratings of service
  • Number of escalations and others

You can also view extended KPIs using easy to use CRM software like:

  • Average customer retention period
  • Average time to last follow-up (sales)
  • Customer attrition rate
  • Average customer lifetime value (by using a CLM CRM)
  • Post sales per unit sold
  • Average profit per customer
  • Survey ratings
  • Upsell revenues etc.

Therefore, while CRM software helps to keep track of all your touch points with the customers, KPIs are measurement benchmarks you can use to assure your product and service delivery remains consistent.

#5. Improve Sales Conversions

Finally, if you are looking to amplify your business, increasing revenue should always remain at the top of your list. When working with an easy to use CRM software, you can increase sales as more data on the client gets tracked and tasks that your employees would have to perform manually gets automated, providing sales reps more time to focus on what they do best- Sales.

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According to a report by Gartner 80% of all sales, occur after approximately 5 follow-ups. A QuickBooks CRM for sales teams , not only helps the sales reps by showing previous purchase and transaction histories of the prospects and customers, but it also makes sure to remind your sales team of all the necessary touches and therefore an easy to use CRM does not let any appointment fall through the crack.

Missing Important Goals with your QuickBooks CRM for sales teams? Here Are the Sales Objectives You Need to Track

Building the perfect sales team is always the first priority and the highest challenge for any organization. Since, tracking your leads, customers, and prospects using the best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams, and measuring your sales metrics are close to redundant, if you do not have the right salespeople who are capable of using your sales process. The best sales managers in all organizations across the globe always understand the human inside the sales reps and trust in the spectrum of emotions involved in the day-to-day roles acted by their salespeople in the team.

Building the perfect sales team is always the first priority and the highest challenge for any organization. Since, tracking your leads, customers, and prospects using the best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams, and measuring your sales metrics are close to redundant, if you do not have the right salespeople who are capable of using your sales process.

The best sales managers in all organizations across the globe always understand the human inside the sales reps and trust in the spectrum of emotions involved in the day-to-day roles acted by their salespeople in the team.

Integrating QuickBooks and CRM helps your business deliver a better customer experience. Click To Tweet

We all know, each stage of the sales process comes with its own distinct challenges and anxieties that sales managers must factor in while making decisions around the sales metrics, which you want to track.

Therefore, even after using the best QuickBooks CRM making sure that you pick the right people for your business, which is of utmost importance. For, it is the personality, ability, and determinations of your employees, which are the most crucial factors that will directly determine the growth and success of your business.

Once you have the right salespeople in place and you are using the best CRM software for QuickBooks, it is up to the management to create the right environment for the people to thrive with the flexibility, opportunity, and support to perform what they do best.

In other words, the clarity around your employee’s performance, your expectations, and motivation are the main parameters that will deliver the arena your team needs to make the most out of their professional skills.

Simplifying your sales tracking and structure

You can never get the optimal performance out of your salespeople even if you are using the best small business CRM software if you are too bogged down with useless tracking.

According to a user of our Merchant Cash Advance CRM, stripping things down and getting back to the basics will always help you to create a simple sales process that aids your sales team focus on their primary objectives. This simplicity in the sales process should also combine with a powerful corporate ethos that you must communicate constantly. Therefore, keep reminding yours sales team to focus primarily on selling and make them find the assurance in your words that it is your task as an employee or a manager to make sure that the rest is taken care of.

However, it does not mean that you should neglect and ignore the CRM data you receive from your QuickBooks CRM or Merchant Cash Advance CRM software.

What is really implies, is that you need to expend your efforts focusing on what can really make a difference for your sales team and thereafter filter all the most important and actionable insights from your CRM software that integrates with QuickBooks.

Rather you need to refine your tracking and focus on a few (or just one) key metrics from your CRM data, at each stage of your sales process.

This will help your salespeople using your small business CRM from clogging their work with reporting and other administrative tasks.

Focus on the “Indicator” rather than the result

Once you are a user of QuickBooks CRM or a Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, you just cannot escape talking about KPIs, however, we too often ignore the real meaning of KPI- that it should not be viewed simply as a result.

KPIs are indicators of performances. Elements that should be taken into consideration to find a better understanding of how certain results are being achieved and how things can improve in the future to grow your business.

According to some of the veteran sales managers those who use our Merchant Cash Advance CRM, to them, they found that salespersons too often get obsessed with the result, rather than focusing on getting their process right.

Here is one of the most commonly used CRM metric in sales:

Wins

When we talk about wins, we specifically talk about closed deals against a monthly or quarterly quota.

Clearly wins in sales helps you to know how your team is performing in a broader sense, but nevertheless, this metric in your QuickBooks CRM or any other small business CRM software provides very little insights into the “Why”.

Wins are an outcome and not an indicator, for they can never tell what your sales reps can do differently or how you can optimize your sales process to achieve better results.

Therefore, knowing the number of wins is just a CRM data without any insights, since knowing the results does not help you drive more sales.

Sales metrics that you should focus on:

Therefore, these are certain sales metrics that you should be spending your time, which can measure what develops the action at each stage of the sales process, as opposed to simply focusing on the results.

  • The total quantity of deals in your sales funnel
  • The average size of the deal in your pipeline
  • Close ratio (Average percentage of the deals closed)
  • Sales velocity (Average time taken to close a deal)

Sales reporting of any small business CRM software provide a detailed look at every stage of your sales pipeline. As each of this reporting is generated automatically in the QuickBooks CRM, it becomes easy to visualize your sales process and pinpoint the areas, which requires immediate improvement.

Most best small business CRM like ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM and MCA CRM software, allows visual display to view the above metrics that helps in simplifying the sales process, enabling you to proactively measure the performance of your sales team and make necessary changes as and when it is needed according to the nature of your business.

More specifically, you can evaluate the following sales metrics of your sales team:

  • Sales Pipeline Coverage
  • Opportunity Win Rate by individual sales reps
  • Historical Sales Cycle Velocity

What is Opportunity Win Rate?

Opportunity Win Rate details the percentage of the closed deals that were won.

Simply speaking, if you can increase this metric, you will be able to bring in more revenue for your business.

With this metric, you can:

  • Measure the impact of new business development initiatives
  • Look into sales strategies that you have implemented across customer segments
  • Compare the performance of different sales reps in your sales team

Most importantly, if you look at the different stages of your sales funnel and analyze where the opportunities are being lost for your sales reps individually, using a QuickBooks CRM software you can recommend training plans for them to improve their skills in certain areas, which include:

  • Rapport building
  • Improving product knowledge
  • Improving demo skills
  • Improving negotiation and closing skills

By deconstructing the sales funnel and having the CRM data in your hand, you can work with your sales reps on a personal level, to build their confidence and skills in their weakest areas of performance.

Remember to always think in this logical path:

  • Data
  • Analysis
  • Action

Working with your sales team using a QuickBooks CRM in this manner is more pertinent, pragmatic, and useful than merely tracking the number of dials, measuring talk times, or demos scheduled, and then asking your sales team to “do more”.

What is Sales Cycle Velocity?

Sales Cycle Velocity is the average time taken by your sales to win any deal. You can also measure the average time taken by your sales reps for individual stages in the sales process, which is termed as “duration in stage”.

Looking into the average historical sales cycle can help you to build a picture of the likelihood of closing your current deals and understand likely buyers and at-risk opportunities.

This metric can help your sales reps to understand which deals need their time and efforts.

Using this CRM data you can also create a weighted sales pipeline when forecasting (opportunities with higher likelihood are assigned more value), enabling you to forecast your sales results more accurately.

Simplify your metrics to help your team focus on selling

Now using the metrics of a QuickBooks CRM, since you are aware where your team is, you can evaluate each stage of the sales pipeline, forecast more accurately, and coach your sales reps individually in specific areas where they are weak.

Therefore, use your Merchant Cash Advance CRM or QuickBooks CRM to assign just one key metric to measure the performance at every stage of the sales process and start un-complicating your sales metrics so that your team focus on one primary thing that matters for any sales managers and representatives- Selling.

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