Tag: CRM Platform

Easy To Use CRM Software Training (A Dozen Best Practices)

Most easy to use CRM software training consists of daylong, instructor-led courses that cover application capabilities. Research on software training courses show; normally the attendees of these courses recollect less than 17 percent of their course contents beyond 72 hours. However, luckily as a vendor of CRM for small and medium businesses, we have found that there are certain proven best practices, which when adhered to, can considerably improve CRM software training results instantaneously.

Most easy to use CRM software training consists of daylong, instructor-led courses that cover application capabilities.

More often than not, participants of these training sessions even on the best small business CRM training get bored, become diverted, find ways to check their emails, and then check anything that comes to their mind on the mobile devices that they find more exciting than the curriculum of their online lead management software training course.

Research on software training courses show; normally the attendees of these courses recollect less than 17 percent of their course contents beyond 72 hours.

91% of businesses with over 11 employees now use CRM, compared to 50% of those with 10 employees or less. - SuperOffice (2018) Click To Tweet

Luckily as a vendor of CRM for small and medium businesses, we have found that there are certain proven best practices, which when adhered to, can considerably improve CRM software training results instantaneously.

Here are some of the golden ways by which you can improve your CRM training, which we mostly implement while training our customers after their purchase of ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM or our Quickbooks CRM software, which comes with several unique functionalities that are beyond just CRM platforms developed for customer information database software applications.

# 1. The primary pre-requisite to a successful easy to use CRM software training is keeping aside a pragmatic budget. In a study done by CIO magazine, it was found that an ideal training program’s monetary allocation should comprise of 10-13 percent of the project’s budget. However, from our experience, we have found very few training project allocations reaches anywhere near to this figure.
The curriculums for a successful training which is needed for customer information database software like CRM are for software adoption, the utilization of the software and the technology payback. Therefore, plan accordingly.

#2. A CRM software system built on usability is the next and another most necessary pre-requisite to successful user training. Easy to use CRM software that is designed for simplistic intuitive navigation and purpose-built user experiences can be adopted without long training. It has been noted that best small business CRM systems that leverage on consumer technology, have a lower learning curve, better user adoption, greater software utilization and faster to find value out of the CRM platform. The main point over here is that designing usability of a CRM platform during the implementation process pays greater dividends during the training.

#3. When it comes to training, one size does not fit all. While training people in various organizations once they have adopted our Merchant Cash Advance CRM or ConvergeHub Quickbooks CRM software, we have seen that while there are many that responds to classroom training, there are others who find themselves more comfortable with computer-based training, by using self-paced manuals or mobile-enabled videos. Hence, using both these training options will certainly help your organization to better connect with more staffs working in your company.

#4. While imparting training for the easy to use CRM software, training instructors must advise the company employees, why the company is adopting the new customer information database software system. Trainers of the software must make the employees understand that the goal of adopting easy to use CRM software is just not to provide the users a different place to enter their customer data, but instead, CRM is a software that has been engineered for better business outcomes by the use of cutting-edge new technologies.
These business outcomes may include:

  • Lesser manual processes
  • More process automation
  • Enhanced customer experiences
  • Faster time to market the product
  • Better information reporting
  • Greater support for more agile business strategies that leads to continuous process improvements

It has been seen that employees are likely to remain more committed to the CRM training programs when they understand the strategic importance of their new online lead management software system.

#5. It is an accepted fact that short, bite-sized training work better than the long ones. To put it in other words, less is always more when it comes to any type of training for retention of the contents taught in the training. Research done on training processes suggests that an average adult can concentrate no more than 15-20 minutes before getting distracted. However, this figure can marginally increase with an engaging instructor, personalized stories and by creating role-based contents. Nevertheless, any training sessions beyond 60 minutes of classroom instructions produce diminishing returns.

You can still schedule training for your easy to use CRM software for a whole day, but always remember to break up the training classes so that the sessions are short and are progressively built upon each other. It can also be helpful if you allocate half-day for the courses and assign the rest of the training period for conducting homework-like assignments in hands-on exercises, whereby the retention factor climbs sharply as the attendees apply to what they have learned.

#6. Another way for imparting training for customer information database software is not to provide training for functionalities that the attendees may use 3-6 months down the road. Instead, it is more useful to adopt a JIT (Just-In-Time) training with ad-hoc training programs that can be learned and adopted when they are required. Even better, you can also deliver these training on the staff’s mobile devices for their individual consumption of the training materials as when and where they are needed.

#7. It is always a good idea to invest in support collaterals, presentations based on role-plays, and handout materials to support the training curriculum. It is a general mistake to always use the software company’s standard training resources. Instead, for easy to use CRM software training, you can use tailored curriculums that focus on use cases, expected outcomes, and inject real users and company stories as course pre-requisites that attendees can personally relate.

#8. Training for best small business CRM software should flow according to the role-based business processes and not as per the instructor’s software screen. Users understand the best when their training is presented as a part of their daily job’s contexts. This makes the staffs learn how they can perform their jobs easier and better. Therefore, do not follow the step by step sequences as easy to use CRM platforms are quite flexible, which normally permits multiple navigation options that help the users to find their own preferences.

#9. Always keep the training simple. Concentrate primarily on the core responsibilities and never try to make your employees technology experts- it just will not work. Empower your staffs not to become technology gurus, but to understand the necessity of CRM automation, and other basic information regarding the functionalities of the CRM.

#10. Avoid using demo data. Use real information and spend most of your time training in live applications. Real user scenarios, which focus on relevance and expected benefits of adopting an easy to use CRM software make the CRM applications seem more familiar, which improves the training experiences. It is okay to start with a standard demonstration of the customer information database software, but that necessarily must be followed with the staffs operating the CRM applications, as there is no substitute for the users typing on their keyboards.

#11. Make the training a part of your change management program. Training is one of the best approaches and the most effective tools to get hesitant and unwilling staffs get off their fences and into the software. When training is combined with other change management stuff such as business impact analysis, employees start to understand the organization’s go forward plans and how they can fit into the bigger picture of the company’s goals.

#12. Finally, it is most vital to understand that easy to use CRM software training is a process and not an event. Therefore, avoid one-time training and go for continued training programs even after the go-live event, which will increase the user adoption and utilization of the CRM software. It is best to design recurring training cadences that are aligned with new software releases of the CRM so that the users of your easy to use CRM software are capable of identifying training shortfalls and find necessary remedies as a part of a defined learning process.

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8 Ways CRM Platform Can Decrease the Costs for Your Business

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil? Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders? Well, if it is so, then CRM platform can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses have no structure for archiving their client communications.

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil?
Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders?
Well, if it is so, then CRM platform can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both money and time.

According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses have no structure for archiving their client communications.

58% office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses have no structure for archiving their client communications. - Superoffice Click To Tweet

So how can create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers? A digital record management gives you:

  • Improved business process through speedier retrieval and access of information
  • Make better-informed decisions through faster access to all right information
  • Better service delivery as the right information can be located quickly
  • Reduced staff time looking for information
  • Lesser compliance cost and increased ability to provide timely, accurate and transparent responses
  • Cost savings from less storage, creation, handling, and retrieval of paper records

Every business initiative starts with a singular person and so here are 8 workable tips on how you can organize your day and be on the way to digitally manage your growing organization.

 

  1. Plan your tasks and activities ahead

When you have several ideas and a multitude of agendas on your mind, it is impossible to do ‘everything’ at once. Therefore, sit in front of your diary and plan the different tasks over a period of time. However, make sure that your hard priorities do not get disturbed and so keep some open room for unexpected and important tasks that may come up in-between.

  1. Log everything

As with your database, your dairy is only good if you keep it updated every day. Write down in your dairy everything right from your colleague’s birthday to ordering flowers and management meetings. Not only does this help you but it also provides your colleagues and not to forget the front desk, an overview of your day or week. However, remember to make all your private bookings only visible to you.

  1. Avoid the Print button

Although it may depend on the job that you have as to what is really necessary to print. Nevertheless, in truth, most of us do not need much paper in this today’s digital world. Hence, if you use a CRM platform you can easily save all your documents, emails, and activities as Projects in your CRM platform.

  1. Share electronically

Use a CRM system to share your documents and emails, since using a CRM platform you can have all your information stored in one place where they are traceable. Additionally, you also save time by not having to send an email to for example your sales group, and the possibility that your “crucial” messages do not get lost inside hundreds of other emails. You can also use applications like WeTransfer or FTP for sharing bigger files.

  1. Use electronic templates

There are several organizations that waste a lot of their time building templates for advertising, sales offers, invitation and others. However, if you digital library available for your organization you will not only save money but also a lot of time by not inventing new templates and instead focus on your original work. Moreover, doing this will ensure a uniform profile and verbiage in all your outbound communications, which will be in accordance with the policy upheld by your company.

  1. Reporting

Are you getting tired of endless hours putting together Excel spreadsheet with the latest sales figures in your sales pipeline? Today we all have to put in our optimal performances and show results to the management, and to do that we need to take out data from several sources, for example, sales by week, months or quarters or by the open rates on the e-marketing mailers. However, if we have a CRM platform, we can easily find all the sales data in one system and therefore take out standard reports or even if needed add an Analytics module to get the data reproduced in chart formations on the CRM’s dashboard.

  1. Contact information

Have you ever used Google or Yahoo to find company information or looked into a corporate website to find out information about a contact person? It is true that when a company does not have a contact database or a business directory, it becomes time-consuming for the employees of that organization to quickly find the relevant information. Therefore, having all the personal and company data in one place benefits the organization in several ways. Hence if your organization have a CRM platform you can search for everything, for example, if you just have an email address you can search for all the related information tagged with the email which is there in your CRM’s database.

  1. Mailing lists

Are you buying your prospect lists from external agencies, if you do, we recommend to not to do it anymore? Start building your own prospect list, since this proves to be better leads and cheaper in the long run. Adding a call to action buttons to your website, getting subscribers through your social media channels and blogs or you can do it even by collecting emails at business conferences and do not forget to add these contacts to your CRM so that you can send them direct mailers using your CRM’s database.

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Takeaway

There is also another way for collecting free leads from social media websites like LinkedIn, Yelp, and Facebook by using CONVERGEHUB FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL that help generate leads of your choice directly from the Chrome browser. This amazing handy add-on has also been highlighted in an article on Small Biz Trend website as the “20 Best Chrome Extensions for Small Businesses”.

You may also visit our landing page and click on the download link to get this absolutely free prospect listing tool.