Tag: CRM for small and medium businesses

6 Reasons Your SMB Needs A Small And Medium Business CRM Software Tool

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth. In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments. Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth.

CRM is considered as one of the most important aspects of business operations as it integrates sales, marketing, customer support, and customer feedback in one system - Super Office (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments.

Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

Still, need further persuasions?

Do not worry, here are some of the other big reason why having a CRM software solution is a must for your small and medium business:

1. It Nurtures Leads and Increases Sales

Do you know that the most basic reason why small and medium businesses adopt a CRM for SMB is that this business growth technology helps to streamline and boost their revenue?

How?

Well, it all begins with lead nurturing and management of the lead after initial lead generation. Modern online CRM permits small businesses to capture more leads from their business websites, social media platforms, emails, etc., and then track those leads throughout the entire sales process.

With your small and medium business CRM stocked up and filled with new contacts, your sales reps can easily start nurturing prospective buyers in the sales pipeline with personalized and targeted campaigns until they are ready to purchase your brand’s offerings.

That means using a CRM your sales teams can not only prioritize the leads but also spend less time trying to persuade unqualified leads who are never going to pull the trigger by taking endless time for closing their deals.

Another big plus of purchasing a small and medium business CRM tool is that the software helps to deliver key insights so that you can make smarter decisions for your company in sales.

This is because a small business CRM software solution can promptly let you know which lead source drives most sales for your brand so that you can allocate more time and money where it is needed. Moreover, it is also a tool that can point out which sales reps in your team are stressed to hit their goals or shed light on what your long-term and short- term forecasts about sales look like so that new business growth ideas and strategies can be tested as per need.

Are you aware that late follow-ups are one of the main reasons for businesses losing customers or failing to convert prospective leads stored in their CRM database?

Now CRM solution helps the sales reps to provide their contacts with appropriate and automated follow-ups to turn present customers into long-term buyers of their brands easily.

2. It Helps You Understand Your Customers

You must be knowing that the best way you can serve your customers is by understanding exactly what they need. Rather say, you must understand your customer’s pain points even though it might seem like a monumental task to gather such information when you have thousands of customers in your database.

Now, this is exactly where CRM comes into play since it is a tool that can gather information about all your customers at a granular level and thereafter even analyze those data to gain valuable insights that might help your business to make more customer-centric and intelligent business decisions for your company.

CRM can track trends, identify opportunities, assess behaviors – all with a few clicks of a button.

Therefore small and medium business CRM tool is particularly useful for SMBs selling complex solutions or for startups with longer sales cycles.

This is because the constant data collection by the Enterprise CRM software allows your business to relentlessly perfect how you interact with each and every customer, since when months of customer-related data is effortlessly recorded and analyzed it allows businesses to understand the different decisions that guided the customers throughout their entire journey.

You can even use this information stored to improve your small businesses’ marketing strategies, tweak your email marketing campaigns, sales approaches, website designs until you can find the optimal way to reach your target audience in the marketplace.

Additionally, another way you can leverage the insight that you have gained through CRM is to create a more personalized experience for your customers.

This is because, when you have accurate oversight into the preferences and behaviors of your clientele, you can easily tailor messages or improve your offerings so that they align more closely with your customer’s expectations and needs, and thereby help develop more meaningful and deeper connections with your customers which can promote loyalty and increase chances of customer referrals for your brand.

3. It Improves Workflow

Irrespective of how small is your business, your marketing and sales processes will always have room for improvements.

Now, the reality here is that most businesses have a plethora of manual processes in their organization and use sticky notes and spreadsheets that kills productivity.

CRM software for small and medium business is a tool that can help to remove the bottlenecks and make it easy to create effective workflows you teams can stick to on a daily basis.

No matter if it is just automating flow-ups on new leads or delivering a reliable onboarding process for new customers, a CRM for SMB can boost your entire team’s efficiency right from lead generation, through sales to customer support – which leads me to my next point.

4. It Escalates Customer Support

Now providing world-class support is one of the strongest pillars for every small business and startup, which not only impacts the retention rate of their customers but also their revenue.

But how can you deliver a consistent world-class customer experience?

Well, you can easily do it by providing your support team’s instant access to detailed information about each and every customer.

Allow your support reps to discover your customer’s online history, their purchase and order information, and their past interactions with your company so that your support reps can truly understand what each customer has gone through.

Now a big advantage of CRM software is that it is a tool that can collect all customer data inside a single repository, which can make it easier to segment your customers based on their specific interests and needs.

5. It Maximizes Resources

We all know that most owners of small and medium businesses are too familiar with the challenge of wearing multiple hats.

In the present business landscape, even mid-sized companies struggle to make the most out of limited resources.

Now as technology does the heavy lifting marketing automation in a robust small business CRM allows a company of any size to do more with fewer resources in their payrolls.

Therefore using a small and medium business CRM tool even companies operating on a skeleton crew can provide high-level service and remain competitive with bigger businesses.

As it has been mentioned even earlier, CRM software can take care of the majority of repetitive admin tasks, keep records and make timely follow-ups with the contacts in the CRM software’s database, while providing you as an entrepreneur to run your business, attend conferences and meetings or provide demos to prospective customers that are ready to buy.

6. It Enables You to Develop Best Practices

Finally, the best CRM software for small and medium businesses can help SMBs to identify and implement best practices to make sure that every employee in their organization remains on the same page and that the business runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine.

Therefore CRM not only helps businesses to find ways to maximize their productivity but also aids in keeping costs down and makes SMBs operate profitably.

It helps in building best practices for making small businesses’ new employee onboarding processes easier, bring them up to speed faster, and provide new entrants with the appropriate information and tools they need to do their job effectively.

Conclusion

Hence with the best small and medium business CRM tool in place your SMB can not only drive more sales, but it can help to delight your customers and make your business more productive.

Therefore with everything, a CRM can do for your business, can you really afford not to have one for finding rapid sales and revenue growth?

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5 Reasons To Choose A Cloud-Based Low-Cost CRM Software For Small Business And Startups

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively. Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business. Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively.

64.2% of companies rate CRM tools as impactful or very impactful - LinkedIn Click To Tweet

Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business.

Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Now gone are those years when the term “CRM” bought to mind a picture of expensive and bulky software that needs an entire IT team and experts working solely on installation and maintenance of the software.

In fact, today’s modern all-in-one CRM systems are more user-friendly and technologically advance, but it even comes with a variety of business growth solutions that are designed to address the needs of all types of businesses, irrespective of whether they are big or small.

Therefore modern CRM solutions not only offer new possibilities, but they are easy to deploy and maintain, comes at a flexible cost.

This is because most CRM solutions nowadays have moved from their earth-bound domains all the way to the Cloud. And so if you are looking for a low-cost CRM software for small business and startups this is exactly in the Cloud where your business should look for a business CRM solution.

Hence if you are still not sure about cloud-based CRM solutions that are price-performance leaders in the CRM space, here are 5 solid reasons why CRM that are cloud-based is something that all businesses should consider seriously if they are looking forward to growing their business and find rapid sales growth:

  1. Hassle-Free Installation

The long innate fear that CRM comes with a complex installation procedure is no more a valid reason for not adopting a CRM for your business.

In fact, present-day cloud-based CRM tools are “IT hassle-free” and you can be up and running in no time, and all you need for that is an Internet connection, after which you can sign in online and use it.

Hence for using a modern easy to use CRM you not only do not have to pay for hardware, software maintenance, and servers you also do not need a permanent IT staff for data migration or even installing upgrades.

With cloud-based CRM all this is done by the CRM vendors remotely.

  1. Seamless Access

One of the greatest benefits of buying a CRM in the cloud is the round-the-clock accessibility of the software.

For example, imagine a situation whereby you need to make some game-changing and urgent sales call while you are on-the-go, or quickly find a contact’s phone no, or send a revised sales proposal, or an email when you are out of your workstation in the office, cloud CRM software can provide you access to the software from anywhere on any device be it a laptop, desktop, tablet or even a smartphone.

Again all you need for accessing the low-cost CRM software for small business is the Internet.

Hence using a cloud-based CRM you can always remain connected to the centralized CRM database as cloud CRM provides businesses the freedom and flexibility to what you need to do when you need to do it from anywhere.

  1. Affordable Product

Another important benefit of using this cloud-based business growth technology solution is that this business-enhancing solution certainly will never break your bank.

This is because if you are using a cloud-based Salesforce Alternative CRM tool you do not have to allocate a big sum of money for making a one-off purchase, but you can pay in regular installment which is usually preferred by SMBs.

Typically cloud CRM solutions operate on the pay-as-you-go subscription model that needs minimal upfront investments and so reduces the risk of going bust while using the software.

  1. High-Security Levels

Since the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) on May 25th, 2018, as information security levels at Cloud services are times higher than those provided by local IT firms, vendors that offer cloud-based CRM tools take security issues seriously.

Additionally, providers of cloud CRM solutions even offer advanced automatized back-up policies and have robust data-recovery plans if any breach happens while working with their software.

Moreover, most low-cost CRM software for small business also offers data safety to their customers by using two-step authentication and robust passwords.

  1. Enhanced Compatibility

Finally, as stand-alone business growth solutions have little chance of success in today’s IT world, so modern business environment requires information exchange between already available technology solutions which is paramount for all businesses.

Therefore, no one would invest in a software solution that cannot save your contacts, open your documents, or be able to integrate the email or accounting software that you are using for your business.

Hence compatibility with other products and services is the key to ensuring CRM’s effectiveness and longevity.

Now, CRM that uses cloud-based technology can be easily integrated with other software or applications, such as Gmail, QuickBooks CRM, Excel, Words, PowerPoint, Zapier, and many other tools.

In fact, it is this compatibility that makes cloud-based CRM an even more appropriate choice for your small business.

Conclusion

Now that you know what you need to look for in your low-cost CRM software for small business, the only thing that is left is to choose the CRM for small and medium business solutions’ vendor wisely.

Remember it has never been more important to improve workflow between your teams and provide full visibility of client communications between your employees than ever before.

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Play With Numbers: How To Turn Data Into Actionable Insights For Business Growth

Irrespective of the role that you play in your organization, having the right aptitude to convert raw business information or turn data into actionable insights is slowly becoming a must-have skill needed for the growth of carriers in all industries across the globe. In fact, according to an HBR (Harvard Business Review), it has been found that more than even 60% of business enterprises wants their senior leaders to have proper data-analysis skills that can help to contribute to providing strategic business decision-making skills that can turn them into an indispensable member of any team. Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools with hundreds of active users across the globe, to help you build the right mindset and skills here are some of the key strategies and skills that can help you to turn data into actionable insights which can predict rapid business growth.

Irrespective of the role that you play in your organization, having the right aptitude to convert raw business information or turn data into actionable insights is slowly becoming a must-have skill needed for the growth of carriers in all industries across the globe.

74% of CRM software users said that their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data. - Capterra (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, according to an HBR (Harvard Business Review), it has been found that more than even 60% of business enterprises wants their senior leaders to have proper data-analysis skills that can help to contribute to providing strategic business decision-making skills that can turn them into an indispensable member of any team.

Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools with hundreds of active users across the globe, to help you build the right mindset and skills here are some of the key strategies and skills that can help you to turn data into actionable insights which can predict rapid business growth.

1. Do Not Make Things Too Complicated

Primarily once you start learning how you can turn data into actionable insights for your business, it is imperative that you must understand that every business or company has problems that need to be solved or even things that can be improved for finding more revenue growth.

Hence look for an opportunity to reduce cost, meet evolving customer needs, dive efficiency and thereafter prepare a set of questions that will help to generate insights and decisions through analysis.

Now, for finding insights from raw and unstructured data, you do not always need to use Python or R programming to perform basic analysis tasks.

Therefore start by using Excel or other simple tools to uncover insights, trends, and patterns and thereafter convert a few rows of data into a chart which can help to reveal unexpected and hidden things about your business.
Do not worry to get things right the very first time, but rather accept your mistakes and thereafter try to improve.

In fact, if you just have the basic technical expertise of how you can work with a business CRM solution or an Excel chart, have knowledge about your business domain, and proper communication skills, you practically have everything that you need to get started with data analysis for your company.

2. Work With What You Have Got

Remember while you are building your skills to turn data into actionable insights for your business, data is messy and there are bound to be gaps, holes, and imperfections in your datasets.

Now this is true since most useful raw data required for solving business issues is often collected from social media platforms and webpages where symbols like hashtags, ampersands, dollar-signs, etc., will remain in the data, and so you have to be able to work with what you have got.

As one of the award-winning vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses, we can assure you of the good news that the underlying information for turning data into actionable insights does not have to be perfect to provide useful insights, as long as you keep a few things in mind.

For example, before analyzing the data you need to understand where the data comes from and thereafter determine which sources will be most useful to solve your problems.

Additionally, never make assumptions about the completeness poor quality of the data.

Rather go through each dataset and verify that everything is (relatively) clean and useful. Hence always perform a visual inspection of your raw data since missing data or large gaps in data needs to be taken into consideration when making observations or drawing conclusions from the finding generated from those data.

Finally, remain vigilant and extra-careful when handling missing values or filling in the blanks in machine-learning datasets, since such things might produce biased conclusions.

Therefore, to remain on the safe side, apply common sense to the insights that you have discovered from the data before recommending actions.

3. Sell Your Ideas Effectively

Remember even great business growth ideas, cannot survive bad presentations. And sadly many new and even veteran analysts fall short when they reach this part of the data analysis process since they lack the ability to sell their ideas to stakeholders in a concise, confident, and effective manner.

Hence even before you learn how to turn data into actionable insights for your business, enrich your skills of telling a story without graphs, charts, or PowerPoint slides.

Learn to condense a story into a single line “sound-bite” that will resonate appropriately with your audience.

Never use data as a crutch.

Therefore ask these simple questions to yourself before selling your ideas, which includes (but is not limited to):

  • What does this information ultimately mean?
  • What point are you trying to make?
  • How do your results and conclusions tie back to the original problem in your business?

Once you have all the proper answers to these questions craft a narrative that should resonate instantly with your target audience, since a good data analyst has to be able to present their ideas in a way that everyone can understand and you really do not need a crystal ball to predict the future or act wisely to make a lot of sense in real life.

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How To Regain Business And Sales Productivity In These Wretched COVID-19 Pandemic Times

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin 1809 In the post, let us at the very onset pray for the health and safety of the sick and those at risk in this time in human history- Team ConvergeHub. Nevertheless, for the sake of running our businesses, we will also discuss over here in this post that NOW is the time in this Coronavirus (COVID-19) affected world to make sure that your growth efforts in sales productivity are stronger than ever to help boost revenue in 2021 and beyond.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin 1809
In the post, let us at the very onset pray for the health and safety of the sick and those at risk in this time in human history- Team ConvergeHub.
Nevertheless, for the sake of running our businesses, we will also discuss over here in this post that NOW is the time in this Coronavirus (COVID-19) affected world to make sure that your growth efforts in sales productivity are stronger than ever to help boost revenue in 2021 and beyond.

Per sales person, a CRM can increase revenue by 41% - Trackvia Click To Tweet

Since even during this pandemic there is the business of trying to keep your businesses alive as well as the businesses of your customers.

Now if you lookup for the keyword “Natural Selection” in Vocabulary.com this is exactly what you will read:

“Natural selection is the theory that only the strong survive. For example, the animals that can outrun their predators live to pass on their speedy genes; the slow are eaten.”

Therefore when the market goes down, the competitors in your marketplace get aggressive to defend their market share, and naturally, brands are faced with making budgets and fight to stop the onslaught of decreasing revenue.

Hence NOW is the time to make sure that your businesses’ efforts for sales productivity and growth are stronger than ever, and so if you do not put money, time, and resources into sales then (we are sorry to remind) you will have a difficult time to survive or you might live to tell the tale but the climb back will be a painful and a long journey in this crunch times.

Therefore, we as one of the most popular vendors of the best CRM for small and medium businesses in the Salesforce Alternative CRM space even though accept the fact that crunch time means tightening the purse strings and doing away with “non-essential” expenses, that list in general includes but is not limited to:

  • Technology
  • Marketing
  • Employee benefits
  • Travel and entertainment
  • Training

Nevertheless, as you go about crunching those numbers, we also recommend you to consider the following:

Be strategic

In these trying times try to think outside the box and be creative with using resources and money to drive revenue. Remember, it necessarily does not always take a lot of creativity to cut expenses.

Discontinue thinking “non-essential”

If any resources and expenses are non-essential, then do not currently be spending money on those items.

Think about wise investing

Consider where you can invest money, time, and resources that might act as an additive to your emergency business objectives and keep your company in the hunt for new businesses and revenue.

In other words, find a new way when you are considering how you must be handling your sales teams and you can help them achieve better during this global COVID-19 pandemic and difficult times.

Now as you go about crunching, one thing that we can recommend to our readers is to strategically pair down your sales team to boost your businesses’ profitability and ROI.

For example, a couple of years ago we assessed an alternative lending group of 90 participants as one of the most popular Merchant Cash Advance CRM software vendors in the USA. And of the 60, this is how the numbers worked out:

The top 1/3 members of this group (20 lenders) represented over 80 percent of the revenue from existing business, which should not be surprising as it is consistent with the Pareto Principle.

Therefore what we mean over here is that you should never consider an early retirement strategy to manage expenses but rather be more strategic in who you let go.

Moreover, you should also now consider how you go about with your new hires since this is the time you should be hiring since many companies will downsize the wrong people for wrong reasons, and so now is the time to pick up great sales talents from your marketplace.

Now, if you want to be selective, you can use pre-hire assessments which can help you to accomplish a critical objective like use the ‘Ideal Fit’ strategy so that you can exactly identify what it takes to be successful in generating sales productivity in your company.

Finally, you should take up the resolution that developing and training this present team that has not undergone these competitive and dire conditions before is absolutely critical and so to accomplish that you can take the advantage of distance conferencing and other similar technologies to improve the skills of your sales team and change their behaviors accordingly.

This is because nowadays with stellar growth in technology you no longer have to pull people out of the field into a conference room for a full day to find an impact on their sales productivity skills. For this use a micro-focused strategy to just address specific “chock-points” in the execution of your businesses’ sales processes and conduct just a few hours session that involves role-plays, drill for skill, to boost strategic development of your team.

Conclusion

Yes, you will have to take actions over the next several days, weeks, and possibly months to outrun your competition and not be eaten in these trying times, but to do that your organization must be stronger and faster than ever before.

Read More –  9 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business Faster

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Why B2B Sales Prospecting Methods Are So Tough To Realize – And How to Make It Easier For SMBs

To begin with, let us admit that B2B sales prospecting methods are not easy to accomplish. Rather B2B sales prospecting can be really tough to find the attention of the B2B (Business to Business) buyers in a marketing model that has altered a lot in the recent years, whereby increasing competition in the marketplace makes is more and more stand out from the crowd. Now prospecting for hot new products and services on the market is not a difficult thing. This is because direct and targeted approaches can create enough demand and thereby keep the sales funnel from getting depleted when a new offering fills a gap in the market. But what happens when the low-hanging fruit has been picked up by the knowledgeable buyers? What happens when the competition has caught on and caught up?

To begin with, let us admit that B2B sales prospecting methods are not easy to accomplish. Rather B2B sales prospecting can be really tough to find the attention of the B2B (Business to Business) buyers in a marketing model that has altered a lot in the recent years, whereby increasing competition in the marketplace makes is more and more stand out from the crowd.

80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the meeting. Click To Tweet

Now prospecting for hot new products and services on the market is not a difficult thing. This is because direct and targeted approaches can create enough demand and thereby keep the sales funnel from getting depleted when a new offering fills a gap in the market.

But what happens when the low-hanging fruit has been picked up by the knowledgeable buyers?
What happens when the competition has caught on and caught up?

In this case when the executive suite will be still calling for action and revenue that is when fresh B2B prospecting methods and skills are needed as we as one of the popular vendors of easy to use CRM will discuss below.

Actually at the heart of the dilemma faced by the B2 prospectors lies the inability to create selling opportunities when their buyers (inconveniently) are not actually looking to buy. Therefore traditional prospecting methods and sales pitches may no longer be effective with B2B prospecting nowadays, and this is clearly a big problem with so many sales, marketing, and business development professionals having being bought up with old school business growth ideas on a diet of little else that hardly works in B2B marketplace today.

Who Are These New Breed of B2B Buyer

In present times the rules have changed for the B2B marketers since the typical new breed of B2B buyers has evolved in several ways.

Multiple Buyers

In modern times the individual buyers have largely given way to a “team approach” whereby multiple players are most often involved in purchasing decisions made by organizations, sometimes which spreads across different business functions, where people entrusted for buying often have very little experience of the procurement process.

An interesting report published by HBR (Harvard Business Review) in 2015, illustrated that the average number of buyers involved in a considered buying process is 5.4, however, what is more, alarming was the drop off in conversion rate as more people are added to that buying process.

Hence sellers that are keen on developing their B2B prospecting methods need to primarily ascertain who has the authority to make the buying decision in an organization, and thereafter if it is found that the person cannot make a unilateral decision, the next goal should be to help the decision-maker to get others on board and thereafter provide additional tailored information covering each buyer’s specific area of responsibility.

For example, an end-user of any B2B product or service will definitely have different information requirements and concerns vs. a financial authority working in the same company.

Informed Buyers

Nowadays with the rise in the internet which has led to a sporadic abundance of research information available online has given birth to the rise of “self-educated” buyers and so potential prospects are no longer sitting back waiting for a solution to be presented to them, as the buyers are proactively seeking information themselves nowadays and as a consequence are likely to be less receptive to traditional unsolicited approaches.

Buyers seek value not price

In a research done by SiriusDecisions, it suggests that the cost factor involved in a sale is no longer a main deciding-factor for the B2B buyers in making their purchase decisions, whereby in the present times the “unique business value” of a solution or that an organization can provide to its buyer has become the factor of primary importance.

Nevertheless, even in this era of progressively more complex solutions, it appears that old habits are hard to die, and so too many teams in sales are now still considering price and also features when in reality the focus needs to be on conversions about the distinct value that the seller can offer to set them apart from the completion in the marketplace.

SOLUTION– Going Beyond B2B Cold Calling

While this might require some time and long term training along with a cultural shift but what about here and now.  So what can organizations involved in selling can do to go beyond the realms of cold calling to reach out to their prospects and get things moving in the short-term?

So as one of the most acclaimed vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses and startups here we have provided a few suggestions for growing enterprises to get them started.

  • Deploy Effective Business Growth Tools

Every structure needs a firm foundation to stand on its own, this is the reason people who know what is CRM is greatly in favor of this business growth tool.

CRM helps to record and organize every interaction with the leads, prospects, and customers and make it available for analysis to every department in an organization –which results in ushering more effective communication, better organizational culture, and less waste of resources.

Using easy to use CRM solutions while the number of leads generated will be less than if it was done in a haphazard and unstructured manner, but the quality of the leads generated will be much higher which will better the conversion rate in the sales pipeline.

  • Have A Focus

The time and effort dedicated to prospecting in the B2B segment should be just on where it is going to be effective and not spread too thin.
This can be done by concentration on the best market segment (based on profitability) and personas as identified by the business CRM tool whereby the approach can be refined to appeal to a specific buying audience in the marketplace.

  • Go Social

Social media can be another robust digital tool in finding outreach and build relationships online. According to research, LinkedIn is the best haunting place for the B2B community, followed by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and all other good platforms like Quora which are good places to connect and demonstrate expertise.

  • Shoot Email campaigns

Email still remains one of the most preferred modes of communication despite all that plethora of social platforms that we use. And that includes B2B buyers who are also considered as prime targets for a well-targeted email campaign that addresses their pain-points and provides solutions to those issues.

Creating separate email campaigns for the sales and marketing teams can help in prospecting B2B buyers where the sales campaigns are targeted towards the decision-makers and the marketing campaigns are covering all titles in the company involved in the buying decision of the purchasing process.

  • Do Networking

Joining networking groups online can be a source of new B2B contacts in real life as well as online, which can help to create relationships that can culminate in fresh businesses. Businesses can also consider putting their own networking events to raise their industry profiles.

Takeaway- Achieving The B2B Prospecting Challenge Today

B2B sales prospecting methods can be challenging and often discouraging in the face of the consumer’s demands. However, by undertaking long-term and short-term actions sales and marketing teams in the B2B industries can breathe new life into their prospecting methodology, and so we hope these thoughts will put coal and fire into your prospecting engine if it has stopped.

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4 B2B Sales Business Plans To Find More Customers and Revenue

Sales can be hard to find if you do not have the right B2B sales business plan and the appropriate strategy for finding business growth. This is because B2B sales is a transaction that requires intricate sales strategies to get more qualified leads to keep your sales pipeline healthy or convince all parties involved in the business-to-business deals. Hence in this article as one of the leading vendors of easy to use CRM software tools, let us share with you four tied strategies that have helped many of our customers overcome their challenges and stay on the top of the game using B2B sales business plans which can bring more customers and revenue.

Sales can be hard to find if you do not have the right B2B sales business plan and the appropriate strategy for finding business growth.

This is because B2B sales is a transaction that requires intricate sales strategies to get more qualified leads to keep your sales pipeline healthy or convince all parties involved in the business-to-business deals.

Effective sales organizations are 81% more likely to be practicing consistent usage of a CRM or other system of record. - Aberdeen Group Click To Tweet

Hence in this article as one of the leading vendors of easy to use CRM software tools, let us share with you four tied strategies that have helped many of our customers overcome their challenges and stay on the top of the game using B2B sales business plans which can bring more customers and revenue.

Business Plan #1

Strategic selling

Strategic selling is a tactic that can help businesses to win complex deals with an insight-driven and scalable approach which was first introduced by the Miller Heiman Group.

The fundamental approach to this type of selling lies in being able to identify different points of contact for the company that you are prospecting, which can be based on the influence on your B2B sales process, where after you need to determine the level of support these contacts can offer during the decision making at the prospect company.

For example, imagine a situation whereby you want to sell a business growth technology software for project management and automation tool to a firm.

In this case, your first point of contact could be the marketing manager or the operations manager, who has been looking for a productivity tool to increase the team’s efficiency while at work.

Now having connected them, you might find that that the marketing manager of the company is the right fit to promote the introduction of your software in the firm a.k.a. “coach” while the manager for operations is the one who will decide and make the final decision, a.k.a. “economic buyer” and so place your value proposition accordingly to the marketing department’s need during your outreach and so this way can begin a conversation on a meaningful ground.

After this you can provide the manager for marketing with the type of information and data required to convince the manager of operations or make sure that you get a meeting with both these two managers together, perhaps also accompanied by the IT manager in the company, who will be the “technical buyer” and thereafter with the aid of the marketing manager, ensure that the IT manager provides his/her approval and finally the operations manager signs off the deal.  That is strategic selling.

Business Plan #2

Solution selling

This second type of B2B sales business plan as the name suggests focuses more on the requirement of the prospective B2B customer than it does on the actual product sales process during the sale.

To explain it more precisely, in solution selling the salesperson focuses more on helping to identify and dragonize the needs of the prospect along with their challenges and goals.

After this, the salesperson recommends the product or service that can help them to overcome these challenges.

Now, this type of selling tactic is most useful when your company offers customized solutions to its target B2B market.

For example, if your company sells a cloud-based easy to use CRM primarily you need to research the prospect’s pain points and the solution they have been looking for, thereafter ask the prospect open-ended questions and find whether the prospect fits your businesses’ ideal customer personas, the educate the prospect so that they qualify for the solution that you offer and provide them with a tailored solution based on their needs ( along with case-studies) and finally negotiate the terms and close the deal.

Business Plan #3

Account-Based Selling

According to predictions stated by Gartner, this sale tactic among all other B2B sales business plans would be adopted by more than 75% of B2B companies by 2021.

Now, account-based selling is all about treating every account in your B2B sales pipeline as a market of one and so includes a multi-channel and multi-touch strategy, executed across the company, to establish contact with several stakeholders at the prospect’s firm.

Looking for an example?

Let us imagine you are selling a solution for service management to a logistics company.

Firstly for this type of selling you need to list down all the logistic companies that your business offers its solutions and thereafter based on the selection criteria you need to recognize your present prospective customer. Next, you need to delve into the data and perform research on the common challenges the previously mentioned companies face across various processes on multiple levels, recognize the key influences and decision-makers of your prospect’s company, tailor your value propositions with different variations to address the challenges and goals of the different stakeholders in the prospect’s firm and finally reach out to all the stakeholders you have identified to begin a conversation for finalizing the deal.

Typically, account-based selling is best suited for businesses that have lengthier sales cycles, complex sales interactions that require the approval of several decision-makers and have a higher chance of up-selling and cross-selling in their targeted marketplace.

Business Plan #4

Social Selling

According to Forrester Research, more than 68% of the B2B consumers conduct research for the solution they require on search engines and multiple social media platforms.

Now, social selling focuses on the latter whereby you primarily need to establish your business in the defined target markets and then focus on building relationships with your prospect’s company leveraging social media networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others to share appropriate and relevant contents in order to engage the potential customer or nurture the existing ones.

Now the vital dissimilarity between social selling and the other B2B sales business plans which we have discussed before is that while the former selling tactics focus on building a one-onto-one relationship with the prospects across these social channels the latter kind of marketing is all about broadcasting messages from one to many.

For example, let us take a look at how one of the co-founders of our partnering companies uses LinkedIn.

With a profile optimized to discuss clearly what our company is building, which is CRM for small and medium businesses, our above-mentioned partnering company networks with social influencers on a pre-understood footing a thereafter add “Making easy to use CRM human” to his profile tagline which creates a conversation-starter.
Next, he shares sales-related content actively with his network to generate discussion around this topic, whereby the goal is not to directly sell, but more focused on building contextual relationships.

In other words, the goal over here in this B2B sales business plan is to be able to establish ourselves as experts in the industry who wants to have a conversation with businesses, and not just sell to them, since the better the conversations, the higher the number of conversions.

Therefore in social selling by promoting content that is relevant to the prospective buyers across the channels that they remain most active on the salespersons are more likely to have profound conversations with prospects about things that they really take care of.

Moreover, this type of selling even helps to keep a watch on the competitors in the marketplace and find how they are approaching the target markets or how many people interact with them and what their customers are saying about your competitor’s company.

Conclusion

Now if you are eager to know which of these B2B sales business plans and strategies you should use, the answer is: to each his own.

This is because not every B2B sales tactic is suitable for every business.

Hence even before you choose a strategy to implement for your company, look into your current sales process, define your target markets, find which mode of engagement they prefer, how long you can afford a sales-cycle to be, how many decision-makers are typically involved, and lastly the resources available to you before selecting your sales business plan.

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Golden Tips For Cultivating Customer Loyalty In Small Businesses And Startups

Pursing any new business is a pretty exciting activity. Especially when it comes to capturing new leads and then guiding them through immersive and compelling brand experience and customer journey using a business growth tool like an easy to use CRM that leads to a lucrative sale. Additionally, it is even a rewarding experience to know that you as an owner of an SMB is playing a major role in generating serious revenue for your company and keep it in motion to motivate you and your employees to keep landing new clients and customers. Nevertheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective leads is even a little exaggerated activity- at least in the grand scheme of things.

Pursing any new business is a pretty exciting activity.
Especially when it comes to capturing new leads and then guiding them through immersive and compelling brand experience and customer journey using a business growth tool like an easy to use CRM that leads to a lucrative sale.

Because CRM software greatly improves data accessibility, sales reps at companies using a CRM can shorten their sales cycles by 8-14%. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Additionally, it is even a rewarding experience to know that you as an owner of an SMB is playing a major role in generating serious revenue for your company and keep it in motion to motivate you and your employees to keep landing new clients and customers.

Nevertheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective leads is even a little exaggerated activity- at least in the grand scheme of things.
This is because there is a lot more to marketing that just focusing on acquiring new leads and customers, as most successful businesses are focused on the larger picture, which implies that they are focused on the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.

Do not get us wrong. Even though lead generation and top-of-the-funnel marketing are extremely crucial for business growth in all companies, nonetheless your existing customers are always your most dependable source of revenue.

Therefore, retaining your existing customer base should be your businesses’ number one priority since you cannot grow your business if you constantly lose customers because your brand fails is providing poor experiences to the consumers of your offerings.

Hence as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools let us move past prospect marketing strategies and explore how you can encourage customer loyalty using three golden customer marketing tactics for decreasing churn and thereby boosting revenue growth.

1. NURTURING IS NOT JUST FOR PROSPECTS

In most small businesses and startups many associate nurturing with driving prospects through their sales funnels.

Now while that is certainly one example, nevertheless nurturing is not just associated with prospective leads.

In fact, since customers are already spending in your brand and offerings they are more primed for nurturing than even the hottest lead inside your easy to use CRM tool.

Hence here are just a few examples and means you can nurture existing customers to inspire their loyalty for your brand and boost business growth.

• Thank You, Welcoming and Onboarding Emails

Whenever you sign a new customer or make a new sale, ensure to follow-up immediately over email or SMS thanking the customer for their purchase(s). You might even also launch an automated drip email campaign that provides simple direction on how to get started with your offerings, and after that, as the campaign progresses you can add more details and conditional logic to that program to make sure your customers are getting the very most out of your sold offerings.

In the end, also be sure to include recommended content or additional products and services in your communications to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities and thereby further galvanize your seller-customer relationship.

• Celebrate Milestones With Big Promotions

It is extremely important to understand a few key bits of information about all your customers- such as their work anniversaries, birthdays, purchase history, and more. This is because armed with this knowledge you can easily send emails celebrating those milestones and thereby offer special perks and discounts on your offerings.

For example, if you are into a restaurant business or run a ghost kitchen you can provide BOGO promotions on your customer’s anniversaries and birthdays, or an auto insurance firm might offer discounted rates to ensure lower renewal rates after three or five years of safe driving.

These are not only great ways to stay on top of your customer’s mind, but it even shows that you care about your clients and customers and are ready to invest in their success and for continuing business with your brand.

• New Product and Service Announcements

Ambitious startups and small businesses area always diversify and add new products and services to their existing pipeline, since these sort of innovations proves that these companies are serious about improving their business and are ready to provide their customers the best possible goods and services.

Therefore whenever your company rolls out any new lunch, ensure that your existing customers are the first in the list to know about your successes.

Hence consider offering them discounts or free trials for early adopters of your new offerings even before you sell them in the marketplace.
For this, you can ask your customers if they are willing to sign-up in advance for a waitlist, which is great tactics that help in building anticipation for your new launch and even help your brand to gauge the demand of the offering yet to be launch in the marketplace for business growth.

According to surveys we as one of the most popular CRM for small and medium business have seen this sort of preferential treatment, which is often appreciated by customers. Hence ensure to show your customers that they are valued whenever it is possible which will help increase their loyalty for your brand.

2. PRODUCT EDUCATION AND ADOPTION IS CRUCIAL FOR LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS

There are several instances businesses are so used to their own products and services that they take the ease of use of their offerings for granted.

Now, this is just another most common mistake to assume that your clients and customers are using your products and services to their full potential.
However, to avoid this you can create different customer marketing campaigns to make sure sound practical knowledge and optimal usage of your offerings.

• Automated Trigger Campaigns

Well, if you might remember we talked about generating onboarding campaigns previously that can help you customers to get a basic understanding of your offerings.

But still, despite our best efforts as marketers, many customers do not open those text messages and emails, much less click on any informative or helpful links therein.

Therefore, persistence is the key to ensure proper adoption of your products and services.

Now if you are using marketing automation integrated into your CRM for SMB organizations, you can easily track the user’s behavior in your CRM app or on your website, after which you can segment these individuals based on their usage and/or purchase history and then launch an automated campaign to familiarize them with your offerings which can encourage adoption.

Remember to include concise and direct instructions in the verbiage of your campaigns and also add links and prominent CTA (Call to Action) buttons to helpful resources (if they are available online).

You can also encourage A/B testing of your emails to learn what is working and what is not to optimize your customer onboarding campaigns which will ensure that your CTAs, subject lines, and content are all resonating with the audience of your emails for rapid business growth.

• Pro-Tips and Training

Depending on your services and product line, your customers might need some advanced and on-going training.
Hence use progressive profiling and adaptive forms to make it easy for your customers to sign up for training sessions conducted digitally across your marketing channels (e.g. on your login page, website and apps), your monthly customer newsletters and even on your social media websites.

Remember not to overcomplicate the training materials, but ensure your customers find the fundamentals they need to get real usage out of your offerings and thereby remain loyal when the renewal date comes around or they are ready to make another purchase from your brand.

• Customer Webinars

Now if you want to raise the bar and go above and beyond, customer webinars are a great tool that can be extremely helpful in improving product education and the adoption of any offering.

This is because upholding digital events provides exclusive opportunities to dig deeper regarding some of the more complex features of your offerings and help to guide customers through several functionalities or use cases that they might not have implemented or tied even before.

We say this since a greater portion of your customers would rather acquire knowledge through viewing than reading, therefore webinars mostly attracts a lot of viewers, which might provide you a chance to promote additional offerings in real-time.

3. LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING

Finally, the feedbacks of your customers are always considered as the proverbial ear to the ground, which allows businesses to identify their greatest fans and thereafter leverage them as advocates.

Customer feedback also allows brands to understand the pulse of dissatisfied customers so that they can reach them out directly and correct problems showing the customers that they care.

Therefore on a larger scale, the customer feedback loop is the most effective way to gather information about your brand’s reputation and the value and usability of your offerings.

In fact, it is also a good way to determine if any updates or changes in your business model are having a positive or negative effect.

Hence once you have a clear perception of the public’s view about your company, you can easily leverage this knowledge to boost that perception and your offerings.

For this, it is best to gather customer opinions via social media listening, surveys, NPS (Net Promotor Scores) and third-party review sites such as G2 and Yelp.

After this, you can analyze the information by identifying patterns in the responses of your customers and then start mapping solutions to the main issues- as well as capitalize on what you are doing right.

It is extremely necessary that your businesses’ customer feedback loop is both a model and an ongoing process so that you can apply this method repeatedly to promote a culture of excellence and thereby build a more positive perception in the minds of your customers for your brand for business.

Now as what works for one organization might not work for another, so be sure to research multiple feedback channels and thereafter use the one you feel works most accurately for your company for finding consistent business growth.

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How To Get Started With Outbound Sales Strategies In B2B Small And Medium Businesses

Are you running an SMB and trying to get started with outbound sales? We guess for this you need a solid outbound strategy in place for your business growth. We say this because honestly when it comes to making outbound sales if you have not diligently done your footwork and have avoided creating the required infrastructure that is needed for business growth, it can really get messy.

Are you running an SMB and trying to get started with outbound sales?
We guess for this you need a solid outbound strategy in place for your business growth.

We say this because honestly when it comes to making outbound sales if you have not diligently done your footwork and have avoided creating the required infrastructure that is needed for business growth, it can really get messy.

91% of businesses with 10 or more employees now use CRM software. Click To Tweet

However, on the other hand, if you lay the required groundworks and thereafter create a smart strategy, we are certain as one of the most popular vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses, that you will start seeing the desired results in a very short time.

Therefore, with that in mind, let now take a quick peek at what it requires to develop the outbound sales strategy for your startup or small business.

Hence in this article, we are going to provide you with four key requirements for getting started:

• Identifying your ICP

• Creating contents that support sales

• Creating a strong value proposition

• Knowing your engagement tools (like an easy to use CRM software)

THE 4 ELEMENTS OF A WINNING OUTBOUND SALES STRATEGY

1. Identifying your ICP

Now we have heard times and again the cliché “We cater to every industry, and our offerings can appeal to several job titles and departments in any company”.
However, unfortunately, it never works that way.

This is because if you are unable to target your messages specifically to an ICP or Ideal Customer Profile, your outbound sales outreaches will result in a disaster since an ICP is a qualifiable and quantifiable description of the perfect company in need for your solution.

Hence to build and ICP, begin by analyzing your existing customers in your CRM database, or try for the customers of your competition in the marketplace who are in need of your offerings, which in detail means:

• Specifically identifying the company location, size, technology and service requirements of your buyers, along with tracking their pain-points, the number of employees, the age of the company, and their typical customers.

• Look into the data in your CRM be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM, since Ideal Customer Profile is different from Buyer Personas (which are semi-fictional and are more related to B2C marketplace).

• Look at your ten best customers and find out the characteristics that work and what you would like to improve. However, as a startup organization if you even do not have any customers, do not worry, you can easily create ICP by making sure your products and services appeal to a very specific business audience in the marketplace.

2. Creating contents that support sales

When your team may be introducing your company to a new lead for the first time for prospects that are unfamiliar with your offerings, your team has to assume that they will be doing their own research on your offerings.

Therefore if you do not have the goods, you will not be able to seal the sale.

What kind of content do you need for this?

Well, truthfully this can vary based on what your ICP is most willing to buy.

Nevertheless, your content can include sales decks, case studies, blog posts, pricing sheets, and even a strong social media presence.

Remember, your brand needs more than just a Feature page. Therefore, when you are connecting with B2B leads through outbound sales, your business must be savvy.

Hence, implementing other unique techniques through your digital and social media channels, like videos can help to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

3. Creating a strong value proposition

It will not do much good, if you are just filling up your website and target, but not spending enough time to research and test and thereafter perfect your current offerings.

Your product and service must be solving a problem for your customers, and the only way you can do it is your brand is fitting your market with a strong value proposition.

Now if you do not know what is a value proposition, it is just a simple statement designed to convince a potential customer and make them believe that your product or service will add value to their business.

For this, your business has to prove its worth over similar offerings in the marketplace.

Now it must be remembered that creating a value proposition is more than an exercise. Rather it is free of jargon, to-the-point, compelling statement that proves the worth of your offering.

Additional a strong value proposition must be accompanied by a powerful headline, followed by sub-headings that can help explain the value of the offering or what your product or service is best at.

Never make the content of your value offerings more than three sentences long and include bullet points in the verbiage.

In fact, any great value proposition can also be used as a foundation of a call script or a great email message that you will write heading into the outbound sales process for your SMB.

If you are still not sure where to start, create an outbound campaign suing your easy to use CRM tool and then ask for feedback from your prospects and listen to their constructive criticisms, and thereafter if you find that your message is not reaching them, alter it as per their needs.

4. Knowing your engagement tools

No to find the right engagement tool for your sales team in B2B organizations you need not search and buy every SaaS product available in the marketplace.

This is because to track and analyze the reactions of your prospects, once you implement the best small and medium business CRM software it can help you to find sales and business growth.

Using an easy to use CRM you will not only be able to create an automated timeline for engagements, but you can also create a series of touch-points, and track customer insights, all in one place once you are using this cutting-edge business growth technology and tool.

Your best CRM for SMB can also help your sales teams to get organized and get your messages hyper-personalized, which is the need of the hour nowadays.

Conclusion

So, have you checked all the boxes?
Now, while this list is not the end-all and be-all of outbound sales preparedness, however, these are some of the basics B2B small and medium businesses require to get started with their outbound sales.

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Ways Your Marketers Can Carry On Generating Their Pipeline Even In These Pandemic Times

In the midst of ever shocking events that the world is going through right now- Pandemic, social-distancing, an economic meltdown- marketers across the globe are facing a never seen before challenging times leading their teams or for finding business growth. Presently, while balancing precariously the priorities of work, family, and every other activity in between, marketers are still expected to carry on generating expectable revenue- but just not in the old ways as it was before.

In the midst of ever shocking events that the world is going through right now- Pandemic, social-distancing, an economic meltdown- marketers across the globe are facing a never seen before challenging times leading their teams or for finding business growth.

44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2020, up from 38% in 2019 -SuperOffice (2019) Click To Tweet

Presently, while balancing precariously the priorities of work, family, and every other activity in between, marketers are still expected to carry on generating expectable revenue- but just not in the old ways as it was before.

Sustain Business Relationships With Prospective Buyers

Now while we would have liked finding all the possible answers. Yet honestly speaking, this global unrest has got all of us stumped as we are currently looking for answers as to where we should point out teams? Should we tell them to keep going? Use their best judgment and empathize with customers? And more.

Of course, these are useful tips to relay to our teams. But personally, when plotting our team’s success, we rely on insight and data.
This is because, even though our tactics have changed a lot in the wake of this Pandemic, nevertheless, our targeting strategies which were already embedded in the behavioral insights into what our purchasers really care about and which of them are currently in-market still remains the same.

It is obvious now that insights are mission-critical to drive revenue in the present times. In fact, this strategy gas been a saving grace, especially when in this current situation sending tone-deaf emails is just a step away from being blacklisted by most subscribers in your mailing list.

Needless to mention, that there are a total zero promotional events for business growth or conferences going on right now (and so we can kiss leads that are generated by such activities goodbye), but still to sustain the businesses we have to fulfill our pipeline goals, which again leads us with a plethora of questions, such as:

Should we be spending our event marketing budgets somewhere else now?

Should be channelized that money into paid social, advertising, or some other functions of digital marketing?

How can we still continue generating pipeline when in the present time everything has changed?

Use the Three “I” Formula

Now that we have accepted that insight are the impetus behind revenue and business growth in the present times, so let us talk more specifically now.
In a review that we did earlier during the beginning of this year as one of the most popular vendors of easy to use CRM for small and medium businesses, we asked several CMOs as to where they are focusing their marketing budgets now.

According to the review, we found that there are three primary areas of focus (in order):

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

• Thought leadership

• Sales enablement

But the question that still remains to be answered is where are we targeting our ABM, though leadership and sales efforts right now?

Now that we have already talked about the importance of insights, there are specifically three types that are critical to your operations.

So here is our Three “I” Formula:

Number 1: In-Market

Now if this COVID-19 Pandemic has not brought your industry to a complete halt, then definitely you will still have accounts that need your solution. Well, in the present moment there may be a decrease in the inbound volume of business, but active buyers are still out there in the marketplace.

Hence encourage your teams to find them out and start building relationships with them.

To help your teams build these connections, it is best to use predictive analytics to seek out patterns in a buyer’s behavior. This is because, it is predictive analytics that can help you now to uncover specific keywords prospective leads are researching now, or if they have visited your business website without raising a hand.

Consider an account to be in-market when they are ready to engage with a solution. Therefore, by using insights that we can fetch from predictive analytics you can easily time your outreach and also pull the lever when the account goes in-market and let yourself be the first vendor they talk to.

Since using predictive analytics which can be integrated into an easy to use CRM can not only help businesses connect with their buyers but at that point even permits you to construct a solid relationship before other competitors can even find their foot inside the door, for your brand’s business growth.

Number 2: Intent

Even though intent data primarily helps you to find if an account is in-market, but more importantly it helps marketers to focus on what the account intends to do or rather to say answer the critical question “What the account actually cares about?” by compiling first-party data (like who has interacted with your campaigns or visited your website) and third-party data (like the generic or branded keywords) they have used to conduct research.

This is because the “promised land” is where you know exactly which keyword an account is researching, which locations are most active, which of your website’s pages they have visited or which buyer personas are most engaged with your offerings.

Therefore, with intent data sellers can find insights into what is most pertinent to their prospective buyers, that too at an account level or which personas are most relevant for targeting that can help them to initiate meaningful conversations.

On the other hand intent data also helps marketers to better understand the most typical topics that are needed by their audience in real-time- which matters al lot when that changes daily during these stressful present times.

Number 3: Industry

Your team has to find a clear understanding of an account’s industry if you anticipate centralizing your targeting and messages. In other words, it is essential to address how a given situation can impact an account’s overall business and industry model and find out whether it has a negative or a positive effect.

Now in a situation where we stand today, this Pandemic has affected every one of us differently. In fact, the impact level of the situation and how well industries adapt to it shapes your targeting.

Therefore, look at accounts outside your easy to use CRM, and their after based on how much everything has changed uncover patterns outside your own data, to fill your pipeline, since there might be many accounts that might not seem relevant anymore.

Unlocking Mission-Critical Insights with the Three I Formula

Apart from times like we are facing now, even during the best times, this Three I Formula can be mission-critical for businesses.

This is because collectively in-market, intent and industry insights can provide you everything that your business needs to effectively market and sell your solutions in any situation since you must always know what your prospective customers want and thereafter target your outreaches based on what is important to them so that you can avoid sending potentially tone-deaf messages in your outreach that can seriously hamper your business growth.

In a nutshell, with clear insights, the Three I Formula helps your marketers to fill their pipelines by creating personalized and targeted outreach to accounts that need your responsiveness right now, and let your marketers find the assurance to move forward through these troubled waters and continue generating enough revenue for consistent business growth.

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Skills For Adapting Your Customer Support When Crisis Strikes

The key purpose of this article is to make sure that your customer service does not have to suffer even while your brand is registering a fall in business growth and passing through difficult times, as, in a report published by Small Biz Trends, it has been observed that more than 78% of consumers would not think twice before stopping doing business with a brand because of poor customer service rendered to its consumers. Therefore now is the right opportunity to show your buyers how you can keep them updated, informed, and respected through this COVID-19 Pandemic that is raging globally across the world. Now, while like several other companies your business may also be facing a switch to remote work and consequently a drawdown in services, nonetheless, you can easily maintain top-quality customer support by adapting some of the support practices to the need of this hour, for which here are a few tips to get you started right away.

The key purpose of this article is to make sure that your customer service does not have to suffer even while your brand is registering a fall in business growth and passing through difficult times, as, in a report published by Small Biz Trends, it has been observed that more than 78% of consumers would not think twice before stopping doing business with a brand because of poor customer service rendered to its consumers.

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

Therefore now is the right opportunity to show your buyers how you can keep them updated, informed, and respected through this COVID-19 Pandemic that is raging globally across the world.

Now, while like several other companies your business may also be facing a switch to remote work and consequently a drawdown in services, nonetheless, you can easily maintain top-quality customer support by adapting some of the support practices to the need of this hour, for which here are a few tips to get you started right away:

Keep Your Team Up-to-Date

In a rapidly evolving situation like the COVID-19 Pandemic and the meltdown of the global economy at large, surely you just might not find enough time to send out a new missive to your teams nearly every day.
However, for providing world-class customer support, your employees need to be updated and remain on board with any developments within your company.

Therefore it is most important that you must have a central repository of documents available company-wide, like an easy to use CRM software which will help decrease the amount of time needed on making announcements while keeping every employee updated simultaneously.

It must be a business growth solution that can ensure online accessibility of documents and update regularly with any new changes, which can be at this present times even considered as your company’s manifesto for internal crisis management, much like something that you can point to at all times when concerns or questions arise regarding supporting your customers in these dire times.

This best path to follow right now is not to think of this manifesto as the be-all and end-all for your crisis communication strategy but treat it more like an internal resource you can point to and continuously update.

However, when any major updates occur, make sure that you also send a company-wide email to alert your staffs to the new information and create an avenue for any concerning parties to put forward their thoughts with you or other managers in your teams, especially now that you are shifting to telecommunicating with the employees of your teams.

Double-Down on Customer Relations

Always remember it takes only one single instance of poor service to lose a customer, something that businesses simply cannot afford in a period of crisis like the one we are passing through now.
More so when there are several companies who are ready to carry the customers even through these difficult times.

Right now external communications like email updates can assure the customers that you are trying to do your best to operate as usual, but before sending your emails make sure that you are up to the task when the customers need to get in touch with you for their services.

Now, in times of crisis, there can be an inflow of a very large volume of phone calls and support tickets that can happen due to consumer uncertainly or large-scale changes in the ways the used to lived, worked or shopped during the normal times.

Hence use a customer relationship management software like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions mostly preferred by SMBs which can make you remain prepared to accommodate this increased load of incoming calls.

As in these present circumstances investing in customer support staffs may be counterintuitive, since most companies are trying to scale back operations, hence this might be right opportunity to engage your support reps in advanced customer support training while assessing your brand’s knowledge base assimilated inside your easy to use CRM software’s database and find if any information is lacking that needs to be updated on an urgent basis.

Additionally, apart from updating answers to the issues about new features or services you may have rolled out, keep in mind questions that your consumers may ask in response to this COVID-19 Pandemic, and so creating a few new FAQ’s related to this COVID-19, Social-Distancing and Pandemic may also prove helpful while revamping your tactic for allaying customer concerns.

Reconsider Social Media

Even referring to the pre-Pandemic times it was estimated that more than 90% of businesses nowadays use social media strategies for marketing their brand, apart from conducting recruiting and performing other communications needed for business growth.

However, as one of the most popular vendors of CRM for small and medium business and startups, we have often seen there are several businesses which run social media accounts that are updated infrequently or are entirely mismanaged, grossly promotional or just plainly ineffective.

This is because there are several managers and executives employed in many companies who assume that by simply having a LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter account they are already in front of their potential customers who are interested in buying their offerings.

Nevertheless, the truth remains, without proper social media engagements, no one can stand tall in the social media platforms.

Moreover, another major advantage any business would be foolish to overlook at the moment is that Facebook posts, Tweets, LinkedIn blogs, and even videos on YouTube can be produced quickly, allowing brands to respond to events almost instantaneously.

Hence entrust someone in your organization to take up the responsibility to amplify your brand’s social media strategies.
This is because amping up your social media has a number of noted benefits.
For example, any lead generation program that you run on social media can be done at a little cost, apart from providing your business a chance to expand its reach and engage in conversations with your followers relevant to your industry and thereby establish yourself as a thought leader within your marketplace.

However, while you make your announcements in social media, they must be vetted properly by your internal staffs.

Hence if you do not want to leave your partners, prospects and customers questioning how you are handling this crisis, take a new look at your social media accounts with an eye how you can use these platforms to create your message, solve questions and concerns raised by your customers and thereby use it as a powerful tool for your crisis communication strategy.

Finally- Reach Out To New And Old Acquaintances

Even though thus far, this year has been defined as a layoff, and a slowdown for nearly every business in all markets across the globe, nevertheless, more than any other time in recent history, 2020 is making workers at all levels experience a new availability of free-time that was foreign to all employees who were accustomed to a 9-to-5 grind.

Therefore for even those who are fortunate enough to continue working through this Pandemic, must evaluate which of our tasks and duties are most important and thereby use ideas and insights that were not even under consideration as recently as last year.

In other words, now is the time to reconnect with your business acquaintances that you have lost touch over the past months or years, as there is a great deal of potential in reaching out or just touch base to let someone know you are available to talk, which is enough to keep your business on their radar.

Hence reestablish contact with your old customers and other close contacts by looking inside the data stored in your CRM database and create a wider network to share potential game-changing ideas and information with your old and existing consumers of your offerings.

We all have lost past the days of Rolodex, so log into LinkedIn and start creating a new network of allies. Additionally, if you have someone’s number, remember a quick call can be worth more than a dozen emails, since now is the time to let all your contacts know that you are making an effort to stay connected in a time of social distancing.

Conclusion

Do not panic.

Today all businesses across the globe are searching for answers.

While some are looking at the 2008 recession as guidance, others are going back as far as the 1918 Spanish Flu as a historic example- as the moments we are living now is largely without any precedence.

Therefore, businesses that wish to make a dent in this recessive market must encash this moment in 2020 as an opportunity to grow (particularly if you expect your competitors to recced) by focusing on values and return to your brand’s mission statement by reassessing your 2020 plans, if you do not want your business to get swept away in the currents of change.

Let firm guidance and steady leadership act as a balm to your employee’s nerves.

Remember as a lack of information during a crisis can cause concerns.
Hence it is only with the right plan in mind that is tailored to your industry you can weather this storm and find opportunities to create new partnerships and make your customer service stay the course and thrive in response to your guidance by adapting to the changes in this Pandemic times.

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How Will Customer Self-Service Look In 2025 In the Post COVID-19 Era

As of today, self-service has already become a key part of delivering a superior customer experience that the present consumers expect from their companies. Now irrespective of whether they help the consumers to make changes to their accounts themselves or provide answers to routine inquiries over self-service systems, the benefits are clear. In fact, consumers today can get faster and more convenient services that value their time using self-service options, while brands are able to deflect mundane questions that would otherwise be answered by a human being using this business growth strategy, which at the end frees up their precious business hours and also increase efficiency. Now, even though we have witnessed a rapid growth in self-service for the customers in the last five years, but what will the next five bring is a matter of concern. Hence in this article based on our experience as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM for the SMB organizations, we believe that there are key four areas to focus on as we look ahead in time.

As of today, self-service has already become a key part of delivering a superior customer experience that the present consumers expect from their companies.
Now irrespective of whether they help the consumers to make changes to their accounts themselves or provide answers to routine inquiries over self-service systems, the benefits are clear.
In fact, consumers today can get faster and more convenient services that value their time using self-service options, while brands are able to deflect mundane questions that would otherwise be answered by a human being using this business growth strategy, which at the end frees up their precious business hours and also increase efficiency.

Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80% - Forrester Click To Tweet

Now, even though we have witnessed a rapid growth in self-service for the customers in the last five years, but what will the next five bring is a matter of concern.

Hence in this article based on our experience as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM for the SMB organizations, we believe that there are key four areas to focus on as we look ahead in time:

1. Superior Use Of More Advanced AI

In the present times, we are already witnessing businesses harnessing AI technologies such as NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning in self-service, which either way helps in identifying what questions actually means and thereafter provide the right answers to the customers.

Nowadays this can be delivered either using a Chatbot or a standard web-service question and answer interface.
Nevertheless, what we believe today as one of the best vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses is that AI will develop even further and faster in the days to come.

For example, it will empower self-service to better understand the consumer’s context of an inquiry and use this knowledge to develop a more natural and fuller conversation with the consumers that than engaging in single interactions, like as we find today.

This means Chatbots will be able to provide answers to more difficult, and complex enquires like “Please book me the cheapest flight ticket to Chicago departing today and email me the boarding pass in advance.”

Note: It is presumed that NLP engines in the next few years will become more regional and domain-specific, which implies less training will be required to tune these machines and make them faster to deploy in a pre-packaged way.

2. Self-Service Will Become Easier To Roll-Out And Manage

One of the problems that we face with self-service technologies nowadays is that the system relies heavily on humans to create and manage their interactions.

For example, web self-service and Chatbots presently require a team to write, review, and update relevant and important contents with the knowledge base of the business growth technology that constitutes the building blocks of the software.

Nevertheless, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is gaining its reputation and strength rapidly which will help in human mapping and understanding the processes used by self-service technologies and thereafter identify those areas that can be automated.

Therefore in the near future, it is apprehended that RPA will act as a relief for hard-pressed customer service teams, where the deployment of the system becomes a barrier as they feel that they do not have the time or capacity to create a knowledge base or manually pick processes that demand improvements.

This implies that self-service is presently focusing on facilitating information rather than going deeper into just solving issues for the consumers.

Hence as one of the best vendors of CRM for SMB organizations, we believe that over the next 5 years AI will even help to transform the back-end processes within self-service, which will, in turn, remove much of the load on customer service teams.

For example, by analyzing customer service conversations AI in the near future will be able to flag where there are any gaps in the knowledge base, and then suggest relevant answers that can be reviewed (if needed) by a human before deployment.

Similarly, AI will even integrate with such systems like an easy to use CRM and billing software technologies in order to flag friction points in processes that can be automated and also suggest ways for accomplishing these.

3. Democratizing Self-Service

Even the best self-service deployments presently need resources to tune, manage and update them, which implies that they have tended to be the domain of large and medium-sized businesses that have these resources available within their organization.

Now, the good news for modern customers is that by using AI within the back-end of the self-service systems, businesses can reduce their management overheads significantly, increase ROI, which will, in turn, put self-service options within the grasp of many more startups and small businesses.

Customers will, therefore, receive a significantly improved self-service experience from every brand they deal with, irrespective of its size or industry.

Well, given the present downward trend in customer satisfaction with businesses across the globe, as it has been found by the Institute of Customer Service, this big improvement will be a welcoming step for the entire industry.

4. Self-Service Will Become More Proactive

In the present times self-service is reactive, which implies it provides service or responses only after a customer asks them, which in the near future we as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors believe will become more proactive, and will be able to deliver information to the consumers or trigger processes without a question needed to be asked, whereby a human customer may not be required to be involved at all and will be still notified about what is going on automatically.

For example, a vehicle could automatically identify whether it is going to require service, check its owner’s digital diary, and thereafter book a service in the local garage.

Now even though all these might sound like a page from a science fiction novel today, it is an approach that is already being explored by innovators like Tesla.

Therefore, by identifying what consumers are trying to do, self-service will be able to predict the support and the information they need, and thereafter automatically supply it logically.

Conclusion

However, to end this discussion, all these advances rely on one factor- Trust.

Now, customers use self-service today because they trust that self-service options will be capable of delivering the answers that they need and thereby make their lives easier.

Hence, if trust in self-service technologies fails to provide this most necessary payback, consumers will surely abandon the channel, which will reduce efficiency and destruct the customer experience, and so transformations in self-service over the next five years in the ‘post-COVID-19’ era businesses need to ensure that every step they take must revolve around the customer needs if it has to deliver ROI for the companies and improve the satisfaction of the consumers.

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Six Inexpensive Strategies For Lead Generation To Follow For Small Businesses

Generation of leads is basic as well as one of the most important stages of a sales cycle for consistent business growth. In fact, lead generation can be termed as the “sales engine” that helps in the growth of any business. This is because the strategies used for lead generation that followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the generated leads are not of superior quality, which means if they are not appropriate for your brand’s profile of an ‘ideal customer’, your sales funnel and the pipeline could end up to be extremely frail and vulnerable resulting in a dent in your company’s bottom line. Hence lead generation incorporates the technique of accumulating a database of potential leads along with their contact information. Now since, for SMB organizations strategies circles around the principals of spending less and gaining more, hence lead generation strategies for small businesses and startups should never become an uneasy overhead for your company.

Generation of leads is basic as well as one of the most important stages of a sales cycle for consistent business growth.

In fact, lead generation can be termed as the “sales engine” that helps in the growth of any business. This is because the strategies used for lead generation that followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the generated leads are not of superior quality, which means if they are not appropriate for your brand’s profile of an ‘ideal customer’, your sales funnel and the pipeline could end up to be extremely frail and vulnerable resulting in a dent in your company’s bottom line.

Increasing quality leads is the top priority for 68% of B2B professionals, followed by increasing lead volume (at 55%.) - B2B Technology Marketing Community (2019) Click To Tweet

Hence lead generation incorporates the technique of accumulating a database of potential leads along with their contact information.
Now since, for SMB organizations strategies circles around the principals of spending less and gaining more, hence lead generation strategies for small businesses and startups should never become an uneasy overhead for your company.

As a procedure, lead generation helps to move focused prospects into your sales funnel whereby you can target those leads for nurturing and eventually generate a sale for business growth.

Therefore keeping in mind the budgetary constraints faced by small businesses here are a few low budget lead generation ideas for SMB organizations, which we found interesting enough to share for your business growth:

#1. Exit-intent popup

Designing and creating an exit-intent popup for your business website hardly requires no more than 10 to 15 minutes. Exit intent popup helps brands to monitor the movement of the visitors on the website and mobile application users by providing an opt-in form when they are about to leave your website.
Once you find your website visitor is leaving your site, by creating exit intent pop-up, without taking any action on a CTA (Click to Action) button like registering or buying, you can easily butt-in and interrupt your visitor and re-direct them to take a specific action.
Several large organizations have been using this technique for long and have achieved exemplary results by implementing this as a part of their marketing strategy for business growth.
Therefore, following their strategies you can even make use of exit-intent popup when people are leaving your landing page, pricing page or abandoning your shopping cart, because these sections of your website are the places where people take their most important decisions before buying your offerings.

#2. Add call-to-action button

In general, known as CTA, call-to-action buttons are created for luring people to make use of a particular product, application, or service. CTA is meant for provoking instant responses. For example, they provide the consumers with compelling reasons to make an immediate purchase with click-bait verbiage like- “This offer expires in the next 2 hours”.
You can incorporate call-to-action buttons in your catalogs, digital brochures, emails, and other forms of outbound communications. Hence, a CTA needs to be designed in an effective manner that incorporates click-worthy content. For instance, you can include in your CTA content what your products or services can offer and how the consumer can actually sign-up and use your offerings for free.
Always make sure that your “Sign up for Free” button in the CTA should be jazzy enough to stand out as a predominant and highlighted element over everything else on the web-page.

#3. Share best practices or success stories

The majority of your consumers would always be happy to know if your offerings really stand up for what you claim or can it rightly deliver the solution your customers are looking for.
The ideal way to answer this query is to showcase and provide proof of what your brand did even before for your customers, and how their business benefitted by purchasing your products or services.
Therefore, while sharing your success stories, write a small compelling introduction, with a CTA that requires your prospects to fill in their details, once they want to download them.
This way, you will understand that your prospects are trying to find a solution to the challenges you noted in your story and might be interested in purchasing your products or services for solving their issues.

#4. Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a roundabout way for generating leads and storing them in your best small and medium business CRM software platform’s database.
Guest blogging on other people’s even websites boosts your web traffic dramatically and thereby introduces new prospects to your solutions, by using back-links placed within the blog contents to redirect traffic to your website.
Guest blogs are mostly published on high DA (Domain Authority) websites that attract a very large footfall of traffic.
However, even before you begin blogging on different websites here are a few points that you need to remember:
• Deliver contents that are compelling and focused only on your niche
• Publish contents only on those popular websites where the audience exactly fits your niche
• Ensure that the owner or editor of the blog is proactive on social media websites

#5. Add testimonials

Testimonials are similar to success stories but while success stories are written from your end, testimonials are provided directly by your customers, in their own words.
Therefore, you shall often find consumers who reach out on social media to appreciate different products, customer support endeavors, or even an organization.
Now once your business has a social media presence, you can always leverage and take advantage of these testimonials and publish them on your business website for business growth.
Illustrating testimonials are a highly effectual way of showing your success that can help your potential leads and customers to decide on making a purchase.

#6. Add social proof

According to a report published by Nielsen Survey, it states that: “84 percent of US consumers have faith and trust the recommendations made by their friends, colleagues, and relatives.”
Hence, word of mouth marketing done on social media platforms is one of the most successful ways of generating leads. There are many web portals that permit you to get connected to your potential leads and the most popular among them is LinkedIn.
In LinkedIn, once you are connected with the leads and have perceived their level of interest, you can initiate a conversation with the prospective leads or even create LinkedIn Groups, which permits people with likewise interests and tastes to react or comment on your postings on the group.

Conclusion

Therefore if you are using a CRM for small and medium businesses to augment your lead generation skills using these inexpensive strategies for your small business or startup can boost your lead generation process and thereby increase sales which will consequentially lead to rapid business growth.

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