CRM for SMB Archives - Page 7 of 7 - Best Small and Medium Business CRM Software

6 Key Steps for Account Based Marketing- That Really Works

ABM stands for Account Based Marketing. Although over the past year since 2016, there has been more than 21% increase in the number of business establishments that have a full account based marketing in place, still it is a fairly new concept for many people in the marketing world. According to a research, it has been found that while the numbers of companies who have adopted this marketing tactic have almost doubled their growth as to what it was last year, but still lagging alignment between marketing and sales have restricted use of this marketing strategy in many ways. This is exactly why we are here to help you to understand ABM and learn how you can use it optimally in your market place.

There is something new happen in the world of marketing- for there is always something innovative going on here.It not surprising that you may have also recently heard people talk about or paying a lot of attention to a new marketing acronym ABM.
ABM stands for Account Based Marketing. Although over the past year since 2016, there has been more than 21% increase in the number of business establishments that have a full account based marketing in place, still it is a fairly new concept for many people in the marketing world.

According to a research, it has been found that while the numbers of companies who have adopted this marketing tactic have almost doubled their growth as to what it was last year, but still lagging alignment between marketing and sales have restricted use of this marketing strategy in many ways.

This is because the success of ABM is somewhat rooted in the very alignment of marketing and sales.

Therefore, you see if you just know where to begin, you can find Account Based Marketing highly usable, and that is exactly why we are here to help you to understand ABM and learn how you can use it optimally in your market place.

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account Based Marketing is a form of strategic business marketing, wherein a company takes a specific customer account or an individual prospect and treat it like its very own market or rather to say as a market of one.

So ABM in that context sounds more like marketing that is based on a given account, be it existing or prospective.

Enterprise level sales establishments, those who are more into B2B marketing, typically perform Account Based Marketing.

Are you wondering now, why it is so? Well, ABM is specifically useful for companies with multiple buyers and stakeholder, as Account Based Marketing’s primary goal is to address the requirements of companies by connecting with all the stakeholders within the company, where you can have even more than half a dozen stakeholders in a given sale.

Although this can seem a bit tricky in the beginning from an execution level, but in reality ABM filters down to just 6 essential steps, which we can flesh out and tie back to inbound marketing- that apparently looks like two different concepts, but can absolutely complement each other in building superior relationships and interactions with the target accounts.

Find your Target

Identifying your target audience is the core strength of successful marketing. However, since we are dealing with companies while discussing ABM and not people, so do not get yourself confused with developing personas.

In Account Based Marketing, you need both the collaborative efforts between marketing and sales for identifying your target account. It is so because for ABM you need data from a wider ‘firmographic’ perspective whereby things like industry, location, company size and annual revenue are taken into account. Additionally, strategic factors like the likelihood of repeat purchase, market influence, and expected profit margin are also considered while working with ABM.

While conducting market research is a very valuable tool for determining this list, but still then at the end, some of these data can be qualitative. Which means some of this information also depends a lot of on your ability to contribute using your intuitions and experiences.

Research your Accounts

Now once you have successfully determined your prospects, the next goal is to treat your selected companies like large organization-level personas.

Remember, taking about organization-level personas, we are not referring to individual people here but just implying that considering companies as personas helps in acquiring detailed information about the establishments, whom you have identified as your ideal business customers.

Being aware and familiar with elements like the company structure and the most critical players in an establishment can certainly help you to understand and dictate as to how you should convey your product and services to those targets. Especially if you have successfully researched and have found out who are the decision-makers and influencers in the company.

Sometimes, you can find all these information that might already exist in-house. For an example, where someone on your team had already researched this target, but due to lack of understanding did not complete the ABM process right away.

However, if you do not have the information on hand, consider performing a manual research, whereby you can use LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to uncover the data assisted by a fairly- simple advanced search.

Create Your Content

Now that you have found the names of all the major player within each account, start creating new contents for them. Write contents that should not only speak about the pain points of those employees but more to those specific organization’s businesses.

Remember as ABM strategy focuses less on an individual persona, so these contents should be focused differently on the deals that you are wishing to make with each specific organizations and should not sound like a broken record.

So can you see now where you might be able to find how Account Based Marketing strategies and Inbound Marketing strategies are able to work together when compelling contents plays a vital role in reaching your account based targets?

Choose the Appropriate Channels

If you do not use a right channel to promote your contents, even the best content will not be very effective in finding the right audience. It important that you should always choose the right channels as a medium for delivering your contents, based on what is most effective for the given establishment or role.

Here it might be helpful to know where these specific people who are selected in the target organizations ‘live” online. According to an internet based research, it has been found that you can do an excellent job of profiling the users in five major media platform LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter respectively.

So look for the channels that your target audiences are mostly using, and how they are consuming the contents you are custom-creating for each of them on a one to one basis.

Run the Campaign

Now that you have selected your targets, researched on their respective compositions, created customized contents and have selected the channels you will use for your promotion- it is time to execute.

However, running your campaign over here requires some care. Since you are coordinating your messages across various channels, remain cautious that you do not send different signals to the same person within a target group.

So select and influence the right channels properly- to make sure that your messages are not recurring or contradictory in their ideas and statements.

Using a CRM for sending automated messages at different intervals often helps in running this campaign, whereby you do not run a chance of forgetting to send an email to a specific target at the right time.

Measure Your Results

As Account-Based Marketing is a relatively new methodology, you may find it initially difficult to measure the results and have trouble proving the ROI of your marketing efforts.

So try asking the right questions when you are measuring the results of your ABM campaigns.

According to certain experts in ABM, the questions that you may ask might include:

Are the lists of known individuals growing within the target account?
Have there been any changes in the ways these accounts are engaging with our brands and the contents?
How much revenue have we been able to generate from these target accounts?

Takeaway

Therefore, you see Account Based Marketing is not so different from Inbound marketing as it gels quite well with some of the inbound marketing principals that we hold so near and dear.

Now that you have read our blog, do not get overwhelmed, find your targets, and with the help of Inbound marketing, let your targets find you through Account Based Marketing.

Let us know if this article has helped you to understand ABM and generate revenue in the comment box below.

How Small Business Can Manage Their CRM Database

Customer related CRM database provides an insight on the customer behaviors not only to enterprise users of the system but also is a vital piece of information for users of CRM for small business. Rather to say, the database is the foundation on which the CRM software strategies work. As for all businesses, the customer-related information base is one of the most important characteristics that impart the customer-based tactics and strategies needed for optimal use of this system.

Hence, the database is one central prerequisite that supports all types of best CRM solution that are available, such as CRMs used for Strategic, Analytical, Operational or Collaborative purposes.

What is the meaning of Customer-Related Database?

Be it a Server based or Web CRM, for all kinds of infrastructures, the customer-related database is the collection of customer-related information, which focuses on current and future opportunities along with historic sales data of an organization.

The maintenance and updating of this database are done by a number of functional departments in an organization, such as sales, channel management, product management, customer support, accounts, and others.

Information those that are stored within the CRM database are customer information containing fields like:

Name
Address
Contact details
Contact preferences
Age
Marital status
Birthday
Anniversary
Professional and social status
Purchase history
Customer support information and others

For example, a sales manager who is using sales CRM can ideally record past transactions, opportunities, product preferences, customer support issues, accounts data and others vital information using a Customer Management System platform. Similarly, channel managers can record online retail information, details of business-owned retail outlets and product managers may document product preference, and product category explored, products within a specific price band sold and others.

Types of CRM Database

Irrespective of whether you are using a Server based or a Cloud CRM, based on respective purposes CRM database is classified into two types:

Operational Database
Analytical Database

This means operational data of a CRM resides in OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database, while analytical data of the system resides in OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) database.

How Can You Develop and Maintain Customer-Related Database?

The database in a CRM is a storehouse of a collection of files (or tables), which contains a series of records (which are rows of the table) that in turn incorporates a number of fields (which are columns of the table). In each of these files information such as of customer, products, sales, and others are stored within the CRM system.

Here is a visual illustration of the steps that are followed for creating and maintaining a customer-related database:

All best CRM vendors suggest that this database always needs to remain up-to-date for maintaining the accuracy of the data.

Types of Customer Data

Be it a Sales CRM or a Customer Support CRM meant for an enterprise solution or a CRM for small business, there are principally 2 types of CRM data:

Primary
Secondary

This ‘primary’ data in a CRM is the data, which is collected initially for the first time, while the ‘secondary’ data is the information that has been collected previously.

The users of the CRM generally collect the primary data by conducting surveys, inviting customers to subscribe to newsletters, holding a skill competition or while registering their customer’s purchases and others.

All modern CRM software works on Relational Database architecture that is composed of tables that incorporate rows and columns. In this, the tables are connected to other tables with the help of a unique identification number, which is named as the ‘primary key’ and is stored in the ID field.

Database Management for CRM

Several database management systems are available in the market today. Some of the most popular DBMS are:

– Oracle

– Microsoft’s SQL Server

– DB2 from IBM and others.

These systems help to administer and update the CRM’s database.

Hardware Needed For CRM Database

The parameters of the hardware platform on which the CRM database will reside is chosen based on the following criteria:

The existing technology used in the business
The size of the database
The location of the users of the CRM

Data Attributes

The CRM data stored in the CRM’s database must comply with the following attributes:

It must be shareable (as several people may need to access it from different geographical locations)
It must pertain to a given purpose and so must be relevant
It should be accurate (For this data should be reviewed in a timely manner while acquiring and entering data into the system)

Data-Warehousing (DW)

All CRM database consists of Data-Warehouses, which are a huge collection of customer-related data, which are received from several sources. The Data-Warehouse repository can be as big as a few Terabytes.

There are a plethora of global businesses operating from several continents and countries that generate a gigantic volume of data. However, this data needs to be converted into useful information for subsequent operations and analysis.

A Data-Warehouse does this work by:

Transforming the data into a required format before loading it into the database
Organize the data chronologically and according to the subjects of the business
Standardizing the data into a single format which are coming from various sources
Conduct periodic updates of the data (This is not performed in real time)
Provide updated data for the purpose of data mining, analytics, and reporting

Data Access and Interrogation

CRM is a system that allows users to interact with the database.

This data access and interrogation are performed in the following 3 ways:

Data mining

In the context related to CRM database, data mining is the application of predictive analytics that supports sales, marketing, and services. It finds an association among different datasets and classifies the customers according to their business value to answer the following questions:

Which customer your business should target?
What is the cost of your customer acquisition?
Which customers are buying and not buying your products?
Why some of your customers are becoming defaulters regularly?
Who are your low, medium, and high margin customers?
How can you segment your business market?

For organizations that use CRM for small business and even for large enterprises data mining is an excellent tool that can provide relevant data to the marketing and sales team of a company for marketers’ analysis, which is required for generating sales volume, and subsequently increase ROI.

Database Queries

The queries are tools that help you to access and modify your CRM’s database. SQL (Structural Query Language) is used as a standard language for relational database management system. These SQL queries come in the form of statements such as:

SELECT
ADD
DELETE
UPDATE
DROP, etc.

Reports

All Customer Relationship Management applications generate reports on a regular periodic manner for analyzing the quality and traits of performance, sales, and many other related activities. The management of an organization, for performance assessment, mostly accesses these CRM generated reports.

OLAP (Online Transaction Processing) technology used by CRM is capable of depicting data at the lowest levels that of a sales rep or of a complete region, which aids in assessing the performance of the champions and question the underperformers in a company.

What is the position of the CRM system in respect to its Database?

While analytical CRM does work most strongly with the customer’s database, the strategic CRM do work furthermost from the system’s database.

Here is a visual illustration to elaborate the statement:

If you have found this article useful in understanding the CRM database structure, which works for your CRM for small business as well as for large enterprises, we would be happy to know of your comments below.

Does Investing In CRM Lead To Betterment In Permission-Based Marketing In 2017

It has been recently observed that although ad growth in slowing down, investments in CRM are growing. This makes total sense as it points to further growth in permission-based marketing channels such as email marketing.

In a report published by eMarketer after conducting several outside studies indicates that companies of all kinds, particularly SMBs are nowadays spending more on CRM technology- because CRM improves sales and customer service.

Also in a study done by Duke University, located in Durham, North Carolina, it has been noted that spending on CRM systems is outpacing brand spending over the last two years, since 2014.

More to say, eMarketer matching Duke’s findings did a research from Gartner, which showed that among SBM professions in the creative industries (Advertising and marketing, IT, Software and computer services, Publishing, Film, TV, Video, Radio, Photography etc.), sale of CRM has increased between 10 to 49 percent.

This is why it has happened:

Adv Spend Uncertainty

Let us put in the context of the ongoing worries advertisers are having about fraudulent ad viewability. In a recent conversation with Omnicom’s CEO John Wren with Gartner’s representatives, he stated that in a most recent investor conference, he has noted a slowdown in the growth of client’s digital spending, as he feels that clients are tapping their brakes because of the lack of clarity about these issues.

Media Life echoed this same concern after they observed in an independent survey that 96% of the surveyed professionals at digital publishers said that viewability is the most pressing problem, while an equal number was worried about advertisement campaign’s attributions and measurements.

CRM As an Antidote To Adv Waste

In our view, the solution to this industry woe is to double-down on permission-based marketing. According to Terence Kawaja, the founder, and CEO of Luma Partners, connecting CRM data management platforms let marketing professionals merge first, second and third party data to reach customers on a closer one-to-one basis.

Hence, used skillfully, CRM systems and email communication can create a virtuous cycle.

Finding the consumer’s email address is generally the very first step in permission-based marketing, while the email itself becomes the foundation of that CRM profile.

Now, once the relationship with the consumer has begun, email becomes an outstanding channel for availing more relevant information about the person. These emails can include multiple-choice questions, surveys, and other brand marketing strategies that can be used for further promotions, via email and other channels. CRM can also provide purchase history of the customers, which also helps in establishing a stronger relationship with the buyers at large.

From the other end, once all the information of the customer is appended into the CRM system and the system is filled with people-based prospective profiles, powerful emails can be designed that comprises of dynamic content, which is personalized to the likes of the recipient. The greater the CRM system is made knowledgeable about an individual with information like location, product and information preference, ideal time of the day to receive offers, the more the email can deliver the best mix of offer and information to the customer.

However, marketers can avail these benefits only if they have a robust technology for both CRM and email, which is found in converged CRMs like ConvergeHub.

This is why the increase in investment in CRM platform is healthy, which will make email marketing better and help provide a single view of customers across channels, which remained unexplored hither before.

References:

Bush A., , Bush V., , & Harris S. (1998). Advertiser perceptions of the internet as a marketing communications tool. Journal of Advertising Research
Karson E. J., , McCloy S. D., , & Bonner P. G. (2006). An examination of consumers’ attitudes and beliefs towards web site advertising. Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising,
MacPherson K. (2001). Permission-based E-mail marketing that works.

Best Small Business CRM ConvergeHub- The #1 CRM for SMB

Though CRM solutions plies on their bells and whistles for attracting customers, in reality, there are a few core functionalities that all best CRM features, which have the most impact on your business. Therefore, while you examine your possible options for adopting a CRM, focusing on these features can prevent you from getting distracted by functionalities, which in spite of appearing interesting or even promising, will not be able to do the CRM assisted heavy-lifting tasks that your business needs now

Though easy to use CRM solutions plies on their bells and whistles for attracting customers, in reality, there are a few core functionalities that all best CRM features, which have the most impact on your business.

Therefore, while you examine your possible options for adopting the best Small Business CRM, focusing on these features can prevent you from getting distracted by functionalities, which in spite of appearing interesting or even promising, will not be able to do the CRM assisted heavy-lifting tasks that your business needs now.

What is CRM?

ConvergeHub defines CRM as “Another way of illustrating the various functions of CRM software and what it can do for an organization is based on the following parameters, which includes features related to Sales, Marketing, Service Management applications, and Collaborations with Partners”.

It provides organizations with necessary customer data, so that businesses can provide products and services that the customers want, provide effective cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, retain present customers, close deals, and ultimately better understand who their customers are.

Why we need easy to use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software?

A easy to use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is the heart of every business. Best Small Business CRM software adoption allows organizations to gain business and customer intelligence with the aim of improving overall productivity and customer satisfaction.
This customer relationship building system also helps businesses to automate day-to-day mundane tasks and time-consuming processes, while improving communication and visibility across an organization.

Therefore, if your company does not have a CRM system yet in place, it might be a good time for you to start looking for one, which has all the best CRM for small business features in it.

How best small business CRM helps business?

The wealth of main benefits that most easy to use CRM system offers are:

CRM Sales Automation
CRM Marketing Automation
Ticketing and Support CRM Features
Social CRM Integration
Mobility and Field Service

What can a easy to use CRM do for an organization?

Another way of illustrating the various functions of CRM software and what it can do for an organization is based on the following parameters, which includes features related to Sales, Marketing, Service Management applications, and Collaborations with Partners.

According to CRM expert and principal consultant at Third Idea Consulting Marshall Lager:

“Taken as a whole, these features are the core of what CRM is about,” he said. “Without them working together, an organization will wind up with siloed customer information, which is precisely what CRM is meant to prevent. They’re what you need to have a complete view of your customers”.

So, here we detail the features to consider when you are selecting a easy to use CRM application, one after another.

How best small business CRM works?

Briefly the bottom line of Customer Relationship Marketing workflow is:

1. Start marketing activities

Run Campaigns
Generate Leads
Create a database

2. Develop sales

Assign Leads
Qualify Leads
Convert Leads
Track New Opportunities

3. Schedule dispatch of orders

Deliver Products
Create Billing and Invoices

4. Extend support

Provide Service
Manage Cases
Conduct Training
Build up the Knowledge Base

Best CRM features related to Sales

Empower your sales team with Salesforce Automation software. SFA automates the repetitive tasks, which are associated with selling that in turn enables your sales personals to concentrate more on the act of closing their deals. Converged CRM like ConvergeHub also provides a 360-degree view of your valuable leads and customers, which provides your sales reps with precise selling and customer insights. Features like customized Dashboard along with Account, Contact and Deal Management enables the sales team to visualize all information from one application platform.

Dashboard

The dashboard helps you to get real-time snapshots of all your key metrics. It helps your sales managers to understand the latest developments in their sales operations from four different panels:

Deals By Expected Close Date
Leads By Source
Lead Acquisition
Deal Acquisition

Customizing the required setting of each panel helps the sales team to get a dynamic view as per their individual needs. For example, clicking on the Summary side panel on the ConvergeHub CRM window also helps in visualizing the sales pipeline at its various stages, like the updated data of the leads, contact, account, and deals.

Many also like ConvergeHub, as users of this CRM can experience easy navigation, which aids in visiting all the important sections in the CRM, through the links, which are present on the dashboard itself.

Account Management Module

Using ConvergeHub CRM’s account management software module, you can enable your sales reps to collectively manage, share, and collaborate with accounts. Being a cloud based CRM system sales reps can also authorize others to access a complete history of each individual accounts from one common database repository.

You can also add comments, attach files, schedule events, create tasks, and pin notes to the accounts.

ConvergeHub allows you to reach out to your accounts through phone, FAX, email, and SMS.

Refer to all your past deals of the accounts to understand their historical buying patterns, which increase the up-selling and cross-selling opportunities apart from setting up loyalty programs for your present customers.

Contact Management Module

ConvergeHub allows you to add contacts from third party sources using Developer API and Import tool to experience an easy and powerful means to store all your business contacts in a shared and centralized cloud database.

You can also use Microsoft Outlook plug-in to import contact into ConvergeHub or export it to Excel and PDF format.

Allowing your sales team to get a summary of all the communications happened between the customers and your company helps to improve customer service of your brand and organization.

You can also customize the contact management module in ConvergeHub easy to use CRM as per your organization-specific sales processes, which is just another best CRM feature of ConvergeHub.

Deals Management Module

The deals management module in this #1 CRM for SMB, helps to manage and store comprehensive information about deals and leads that are converted or to be converted, providing a detailed outlook about every single deal through fields like:

-Account name

-Assigned to

-Lead source

-Sales process

-Sales stage

-Deal value

-Deal type

-Expected closing date

-Conversion probability etc.

You can also associate the deals module with contact, accounts, activities, and other modules that will help your sales reps to close more deals and gain further insights into improving future ones.

Best CRM features related to Marketing

While easy to use CRM systems transform sales, marketing-automation completes the storyline by generating leads and managing lead engagements.

According to Matt Heinz, “World-class sales and marketing organizations need both teams to succeed and scale.”

Automated Campaigns

ConvergeHub CRM helps marketers to accomplish smarter decisions with exact information about their customers and prospects, at their fingertips. Increase your marketing ROI by building and running automated campaigns across several channels like email, mobile, Web, and social media to increase footfall and harvest more leads.

As one of the best CRM for SMB organizations measure your campaign results, mark the fruitful ones and rectify the areas that need improvements. ConvergeHub also features real-time visibility of all marketing performances with customizable and packaged reports.

ConvergeHub helps you to track campaign results through different fields like:

-Total Sent / Attempted

-Opened / Viewed

-Link clicked

-Unsubscribed

-Bounce / Invalid

You can also find extremely visual and content rich reports of your marketing campaigns on established user roles in Line, Pie, and Bar charts, for quick analysis of your marketing skills.

Create Email Templates

Content specific email marketing templates play a vital role in improving the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. ConvergeHub offers you predefined email templates in 6 different categories like:

-My Templates

-Business Templates

-Seasonal Holiday Templates

-Newsletter Templates

-Press Release Templates

-Showcase Templates

You can also create new or customize your pre-created templates with ConvergeHub Rich-Text HTML Editor.

Create Lists

ConvergeHub the best CRM for small business features the ability to create separate lists from accounts, target leads, and contacts to increase the impact of your marketing campaigns. Creating lists helps in targeting different priority markets through individualized campaigns, by adding segments and criteria in the lists for launching more specific and focused campaigns.

To create a list use the CRM’s advanced search functions to zero in on the recipients of previous marketing campaigns, export the list to PDF or Excel format and send a new campaign targeted to the previous recipients of the former campaigns. If needed, you can also adjust and modify the number of subscribers displayed on the list.

Create Broadcasts

ConvergeHub allows you to create, target and run broadcast campaigns from one interface across 4 mediums like:

-Email

-Direct Mail

-Social Media

-SMS

You can also perform cross-channel campaign tracking, identify the most profitable channels, modify your marketing efforts, and so find a noticeable improvement in your ROI.

Best CRM features related to Service Management applications

Use ConvergeHub to streamline organization-wide Customer Support processes. Instead of handling Sales and Post-sales support from two different platforms, integrate both under ConvergeHub. This facilitates you to provide quick resolutions to increase customer satisfaction and boost cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Some of the features in ConvergeHub that make this happen are:

Case Management Module

Manage all your customer cases from a centralized database, for effective and on-time resolution of your customer issues. You can route and assign your support services to your help-desk agents across multiple communication channels like phone, email and the Web.

While resolving an issue support agents can attach relevant files from their computer or from the ConvergeHub Library.

You can also analyze the performance of your customer support agents through impeccable analytical reports.

For frequently complains about known support issues you can use the Knowledge Base of ConvergeHub for providing faster resolutions by submitting or editing through canned messages stored in the system.

View Case History

Click on the Issue History section in ConvergeHub to find a quick snapshot of your customer’s case history. You can get a detailed insight into your cases from important details like:

-Total number of previous cases

-Assigned customer support agents

-Case resolution status

-Case closure date

You can also comment on the issue history, if needed, as per your specific requirements.

Web to Case

ConvergeHub, in order to accelerate the resolution process, allows the system to capture customer support request from the website to include them in the system’s Cases module.

As one of its best CRM features, the case is automatically validated and assigned to the appropriate customer support agent.

ConvergeHub users do not need the help of software professional to build the web-to-case form. You can just drag and drop the required fields and select your customer support agent. Once you have set the form header, form description, button label, form completion message and redirected URL, all that you need to do is place the embedded code into your website.

API Integration

The ConvergeHub Application Programming Interface (API) allows your developers to integrate our CRM into any other application or system that you use. This signifies you can transfer and share data between your systems, which helps in building more effective business processes. Using ConvergeHub API you can connect to any other web-based applications, such as your in-house systems, website, and a myriad other cloud computing products. ConvergeHub’s API is a Representational State Transfer (REST) API that can accept your requests in either XML or JSON formats.

Best CRM features related to Collaborations

ConvergeHub helps you to collaborate with your employees, customers, and partners on sales opportunities, lead generation, service case, and marketing campaigns. Simplify your workflow by sharing winning practices, capturing new ideas with ConvergeHub online collaboration tools.

Library

Use ConvergeHub document management module to store and manage all your important files. Provide viewing and editing permissions of all your documents like presentations, brochures, case studies, and collaterals to employees based on their organizational hierarchy.

Use tags to make all your documents more searchable in the Knowledge Base and be notified when a new version of any file is uploaded, to keep all your information updated.

Calendar

Use ConvergeHub calendar to get reminded about upcoming events. You can synchronize your Google Calendar with ConvergeHub Calendar by downloading Google Calendar from the ConvergeHub Apps Store. You can also export your ConvergeHub Calendar to a third party source as per your requirements.

Partner

To improve partner relationship and increase channel partner sales, use ConvergeHub to directly communicate and share important documents with your channel partners for better collaboration on deals.

Notifications

As another best CRM features, get an instant view of all important notifications on your ConvergeHub dashboard.

As a round-the-clock communication channel, use your easy to use CRM also to send notifications to your business associates on client updates, reminders on upcoming sales and marketing events or meeting rescheduled dates.

Best CRM features related to Platforms used by a CRM

Office based CRM systems are undoubtedly powerful tools, but as competition increases, it is important for your sales team to be on the top of the game. Using mobile CRM helps your sales reps to show up in a meeting with all the information needed for closing the sale.

Mobile

Whether you are traveling within the city or on a business tour, ConvergeHub mobile CRM platform helps you to manage your business from your phone 24×7.

ConvergeHub is available both on Android and iPhone devices. Hence, update your sales opportunities, monitor the latest lead developments, act on customer complaints, get social insights, share files, and track your team’s activities anytime and anywhere using ConvergeHub the #1 Mobile CRM for SMB.

Takeaway

Now that you are aware of the best CRM for small business features, use ConvergeHub, join our team and we can help you to make your business smarter- for we believe that an integrated business is always a smarter business.

What Is CRM Marketing and How It Can Boost Your Marketing Plans

The answer to the question what is CRM marketing lies in the process by which marketing managers can track customer’s interests, record their behavior, watch the customer’s interaction to the campaigns to ensure campaigns and marketing messages are meeting their needs in the best possible ways.

Many in marketing and sales industry are familiar with the word CRM; however, few understand what is CRM marketing, as customer relationship management is often illustrated as a sales tool.

CRM as we know generally helps to track the outreach of your sales team, provide in-depth information about each prospective and current customer, and help your sales representative plan out strategies to close the deals.

However, CRM marketing is a newer breed of technology, which is developed to facilitate relationship-building activities for the marketing team, and often at a much larger scale, permitting both B2B and B2C organizations to plan and track interactions with their customers.

With the ability to track customer interactions across multiple channels and customize marketing plans according to those data, multichannel CRMs marketing (also known as Social CRM or SCRM) are essential for building a real 1:1 customer relationships at scale.

Therefore, the answer to the question what is CRM marketing lies in the process by which marketing managers can track customer’s interests, record their behavior, watch the customer’s interaction to the campaigns to ensure campaigns and marketing messages are meeting their needs in the best possible ways.

However, since every customer’s interest and behaviors are different, using personalization in campaigns leads to increase the conversion rates and encourage happy customers to stick to your brand.

CRM Marketing is most needed today as nowadays consumers are bombarded with all sorts of offers and messages that springs out of every corner of the business world.

Everyone is marketing these days.

Have you ever noticed how many times you receive promotional emails every single day, from a brand that you signed-up for? And more importantly, how frequently do you actually read them?

So consequentially, it has never been as difficult as it is now, for marketers to win customers, as everyone is on social media and everyone, as said before, is marketing their brands.

The rate of content generation is simply incredible these days. According to a report published by Science Daily, it has been suggested that more than 90% of all the data that is found on the internet now has been generating in these last few years.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google has been quoted as saying that more content is created now in 48 hours than it was ever produced between the advent of internet technology up until 2003.

Since everyone now has a blog so, all can comment and share their ideas. According to WordPress, every minute WordPress users alone posts 347 blogs in their platform.

So, this mind-blowing acceleration of information affects the way we go about marketing in this digital world.

Bid Goodbye to One-Size-Fits-All Approach

With the spread of social media channels as a natural outcome of the rapid boom of modern technology, customers have become tech-savvy, discerning, and increasingly fussy. Modern customers are well aware of what they want, have wider choices and so they cannot be fed with just anything. Instead, modern buyers want personalization and demand ways of engaging with their desired products and services.

Hence, the good old method of targeting everyone with one message does not work anymore. According to a survey done by Gartner, it has been found that 78% of online consumers get irritated with the website and promotional email contents, ads and offers when they have nothing to do with their interests.

There have also been many instances when customers got so frustrated with irrelevant contents, that they were also willing to leave the site forever.

So what do all these mean for marketers today?

This means- RELEVANCE.

Now, that we need to discuss what is CRM marketing, we must understand the rise of highly individualized content marketing approach, which is primarily driven by data and technology, and it only a CRM system that can aid marketers to stay on the top of this game.

Hence, let us take a look how customer relationship software can help the marketers to improve their activities and create better marketing campaigns.

Focused Targeting

One of the toughest tasks for marketers is to look through all the customer data. In order to receive a response from potential customers and find out what they are most likely to buy, marketers must send messages that appeal exactly to them.

CRM software helps marketers to sift through thousands of contacts and find out the potential customers who will be interested in buying the products. It aids in targeting potential customers. As CRM contains several information on the customer behavior and buying preferences it allows the marketers to take informed actions, which results in improving prospect awareness and customer satisfaction.

Segmentation

It is a clichéd saying that those who can predict, instead of reacting, win. This is very much true for marketers as to sell online marketers need to observe common buying trends before offering anything to the customers.

Today marketers not only need to segment their customers only by industry, job, or age, but they also need to be aware of such factors like the customer’s recent activities, their purchase history, their personal likes and dislikes, emails opened and replied, social media activities and others.

Hence, the sharper and focused is the potential customer’s profile; greater are the chances and opportunities for personalized marketing messages, which can bring sales for the organization.

So segmenting customer profile and email subscriber’s database with the help of a CRM system, not only aids in growing revenue but also improves the metrics in email marketing.

Personalized Contents

Once you have segmented the CRM database into meaningful groups and know whom to target, it is the time that you must individualize your marketing messages.

Mass marketing is outdated today. Today’s CRM allows markets to address their potential and existing customers by their name. You can even impress your customers by knowing what industry they work for, which will consequentially help you to tailor your email campaign messages according to their likings and needs.

Therefore, CRM marketing can shape the entire communication strategy in such a way that it can suit a particular customer or a group of customers who have one or more than one things in common.

Personalization of content helps in improving response rate, creates a stronger brand perception, and increase revenue.

Knowing what is CRM marketing, hence helps online marketers to focus more on the customers rather than on products.

Recycling The Process

Using CRM software marketers can analyze whether their campaigns were successful and they yielded any results. For once, you can find which content performed best; you can recycle the content and that email campaign’s template for converting new contacts and customers.

Hence, instead of starting from the scratch when you remarket your ideas, taking out all opinions and guesswork, you can curb your leads to marketing costs but focus on resending campaigns that performed the best.

Hence, marketing CRMs are more than the just inert database and market automation tools, because marketing CRMs helps in putting everything together for a truly personalized marketing effort. ConvergeHub’s founder and CEO Shampa Bagchi, speaking of CRM technology, sums it all up like this:

It’s been about propelling at the speed of mobile, digesting information and humanizing the data for the marketing team, building up the scale, and developing a product that conforms to the requirements of the marketer in this ever-connected digital world.

If you want to know more about how a CRM system can support your marketing efforts, please write to us in the comments below.

5 Proven Practices for Building Client Relationship with CRM

The success factor of any good B2B (Business-to-Business) company depends largely on strong client relationship, which is especially applicable for small companies and organizations in its early stage. Here are lists of points, what we believe it takes companies to transform them from a vendor consideration set to trusted partners of an organization.

The success factor of any good B2B (Business-to-Business) company depends largely on strong client relationship, which is especially applicable for small companies and organizations in its early stage. Exceptional client service marks the core value of any business, whereby the organization aims to become a trusted partner of the customer, rather than viewing them as a vendor for their buyers.

Client relationship helps to differentiate companies from their competition by building strong relationships, whereby the level of service is one of the primary reasons customers prefer working with these organizations.

Here are lists of points, what we believe it takes companies to transform them from a vendor consideration set to trusted partners of an organization:

1. Be patient while building relationships

Whether you are using a CRM or using other means to develop a relationship with your clients, building relationships take time. Do not indulge in insincere schmoozing, as it can sidestep your objectives. Rather, take the time to understand your client, and in the process share a little bit of yourself. It is always important to remember that what you serve to your client, your work, is paramount in building a relationship. For at the end, no amount of personal connections can substitute for a great work.

2. Get to know your client’s industry and company

Always keep yourself updated with information about your client’s company as well as news and reports of their industry. You do not always have to be an expert, but knowing your client’s business will not only help you to speak the same language as your client but also understand the factors what are keeping them up at night. Knowing your clients better will help you to cater your interactions and offerings accordingly.

3. Go the extra mile

As you are growing your business and your client relationship, many times you will reach crossroads when you will have to make a decision on when to expand or adjust your core offerings to cater to the need of a specific client. The advantages of offering customized solutions to your clients are mainly two-fold:

Clients remember and always appreciate when you came through for helping them
It can open up additional avenues for new product offerings that you have never thought of, leading to increase of your revenue

However, it is best to remember over here, if you are making a noteworthy departure from your primary offerings always see that you are sufficiently compensated for rendering your services.

4. Treat every client as your most significant one

This is no brainer that happy clients are more likely to provide you with referrals. Provide all your clients with your best services regardless whether they are a small business or a Fortune 500 company. You can never identify whom your clients know or whom they can refer you. We have observed it on several occasions, when clients switch jobs, be it within the organization or to a new company if you have nurtured a good relationship with your client they often recommend your products or services to their new teams.

Also, remember that today’s small companies could be the big companies of tomorrow and it feels amazingly fulfilling to be trusted partner fueling your client’s growth.

5. Be more than just an email address

Despite the prevalence of using email communication for maintaining client relationship while using a CRM, email communications can be misconstrued, during taxing and stressful situations, especially when the recipient and the sender do not know each other well. Hence, consider calling up your clients over a phone call, Skype or meet them in person to put a face to your name. Calling up your client for informing a good news, is a great way to build a better relationship.

Summarize your next steps

No matter how unimportant or quick a client meeting seems, always recapitulate the conversations with next steps. You may think that you will remember all the details (maybe you certainly will), but your client may not. Using a CRM platform helps a lot in keeping recorded history of your past conversations with your clients so that you are always aligned with them on the same page. This prevents a lot of confusion down the road while building a great client relationship.

Now that you have learned how you can build a wonderful client relationship with your CRM if you have anything to share from your own experiences, write to us in the box below.

Tag: CRM for SMB