Tag: CRM System

Why Your SME Needs Small Business CRM Software or a Lead Management Platform

Lead management is a procedure of working with leads starting from the marketing funnel to the sales pipeline. It is a process to track, manage, and thereafter qualify the leads, with the ultimate goal of turning them into a sale. It all seems so very simple- right? But what happens if you have hundreds of leads pouring in every day? How can you nurture each of them individually? You cannot just do it manually, and so that is the exact reason you need a lead management platform like a small business CRM software to help your sales team stay organized and prioritize on hot leads by nurturing them towards a sale. However, before we discuss how this small business CRM platform works and can benefit your small business, let us talk over the basics of the lead management workflow.

Lead management is a procedure of working with leads starting from the marketing funnel to the sales pipeline. It is a process to track, manage, and thereafter qualifying the leads, with the ultimate goal of turning them into a sale.
It all seems so very simple- right?
But what happens if you have hundreds of leads pouring in every day?
How can you nurture each of them individually?
You cannot just do it manually, and so that is the exact reason why you need a lead management platform like a small business CRM software to help your sales team stay organized and prioritize on hot leads by nurturing them towards a sale.

Why Your SME Needs Small Business CRM Software or a Lead Management Platform Click To Tweet

However, before we discuss how this small business CRM platform works and can benefit your company, let us talk over the basics of the lead management workflow.

What is Lead Management?

Lead management consists of four key elements, which include:

  • Lead Generation
  • Lead Capturing
  • Lead Organization
  • Lead Nurturing

Each of these four components aids the procedure of converting a lead to a sale.

To understand more of this framework, let us dig deeper into each before we talk about small business CRM software.

Lead Generation

From a higher perspective, the lead generation process primarily gets started in the marketing department of any organization. The purpose of lead generation is to attract prospects who match your ideal customer persona or profile for your business.

Lead generation is further classified into inbound and outbound marketing campaigns. Campaigns can include anything from blog posting, social media advertisements, e-book and whitepaper distribution, email campaigns, cold calling, referrals, and others.

Lead Capturing

When any prospect responds to the advertisements or a marketing campaign sent from your best small and medium business CRM software, the next step is to learn more about them.
This process is known a ‘lead capture”, and generally occurs on the internet using a web form.

Some of the most common lead capture strategies are to offer a free trial, e-books, or a registration to a webinar in exchange of personal information like a contact information, name, company information and others. As this information gets captured these individuals’ moves through the funnel from being a prospect to a lead.

Lead Organization

Once the lead’s information and data have been captured, the distribution process initiates. The lead distribution process sorts and categorizes the leads based on their potential to become a sale. Marketing and sales team members mostly use “lead scoring” technique to ascertain which leads should be passed on to sales, and which among them demands future nurturing.

Lead Nurturing

With the end goal of turning them into a sale, the process of lead nurturing depends on how the initial contact goes with the leads to determine whether it needs to be followed up before transferring the leads from the marketing department to sales.

Therefore, while lead management makes marketing and sales team more efficient, it is extremely hard to control or complete the process without the aid of a secondary organizational platform.

This is where lead management platform like best small and medium business CRM software comes into play.

What is Customer Relationship Management software?

A small business CRM or Customer Relationship Management software for small businesses helps SMEs to manage and streamline their lead management process.  This lead management software helps organizations to organize their prospects, leads and, sales and keep track of them as they move down through the funnel.

While different small business CRM software vendors have their own unique features built into the software, they all come with the same blueprint, which consists of certain basic functionalities that include:

Tracking Leads

The best small business CRM software is a platform that will allow you to tag where the leads are coming from when they are initially captured into the CRM database. Ideally, any good small business CRM software should allow you to demarcate the origin of the leads on a geographical level as well as how the leads found your brand or how they filtered on your website. For example, did the leads come from a trade show, or from e-book download web form etc.

By performing this documentation of registering the point of origin of the leads, companies can better assess how to use their marketing channels for getting more leads into their pipeline.

Assign and distribute leads

Another essential feature of all best small business CRM is the ability to assign leads to the members of the sales team. With the help of CRM software, you can easily monitor each sales rep’s track record as well as their current lead to sale conversion rates providing a better picture as to how you can improve the performance of your sales team.

Status tracking

Once the marketing team passes on the matured and qualified leads to the sales team, CRM software helps to track the leads as they move through the sales pipeline. Most best small business CRM software allows the sales reps and the management to view the status of where the different leads are in the sales process, as well as when and how long they are taking to turn into a sale.
Most small business CRM software provides the user with the ability to view and track the complete lifeline of any lead- from the start to the end.

Therefore, if you see that your leads are starting to drop off, you can set the software to put in certain lead nurturing method to keep the leads alive before they culminate in a sale.

Conclusion

Hence, to conclude, lead management is a powerful tool that helps you to track and guide your prospective leads through the marketing and sales funnel into a sale.

Therefore, investing in lead management platform such as a best CRM for small business is an ideal decision that helps to improve your lead management results and make your marketing and sales team members much more efficient at their job.

You can even start by trying out ConvergeHub’s free 14-day trial since you never know what you are missing unless you give it a try.

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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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6 Golden Strategies to Defeat the Chaos with an Easy to Use CRM

Most businessperson starts an enterprise because they are looking for freedom. However, unfortunately, this dream very soon evolves into a nightmare. If you are not an early adopter of an easy to use CRM system, all things seem to go smoothly until you find your first few customers. That is when the chaos moves in, and even before you know it you find yourself sucked in- as the chaos only seem to mount every time you add another customer, but defer your decision of buying an easy to use CRM for your business. This chaos happens primarily because you cannot possibly follow up with your prospects and customers. Secondly, since without an easy to use CRM your customer database remains disorganized, your valuable leads fall through the crack, since there is not a foolproof process that you can count on.

Most businessperson starts an enterprise because they are looking for freedom. However, unfortunately, this dream very soon evolves into a nightmare.
If you are not an early adopter of an easy to use CRM system, all things seem to go smoothly until you find your first few customers. That is when the chaos moves in, and even before you know it you find yourself sucked in- as the chaos only seem to mount every time you add another customer, but defer your decision of buying an easy to use CRM for your business.

This chaos happens primarily because you cannot possibly follow up with your prospects and customers. Secondly, since without an easy to use CRM your customer database remains disorganized, your valuable leads fall through the crack, since there is not a foolproof process that you can count on.

Estimated CRM software’s global market is now worth $26.3 billion and this figure is projected to reach $36.5 billion by the end of 2018 - Gartner Click To Tweet

Most budding entrepreneurs add a different system to each fire that needs dousing. However, again before you know it, you have the chaos once more in your business that comes (this time) with the use of multiple systems.

As your business is your brainchild, it is true that you are the glue that holds it all together, but still, you cannot ever seem to cross anything off your to-do list, which only gets longer each passing day.

This sound familiar to you?

As an employee of an easy to use CRM company, we at ConvergeHub have talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs, and they have all share the same pain points. It is chaos that makes it impossible to grow a small business quickly and effectively. Moreover, you can never win longstanding customers if you do not fix the failures in your follow-up, which most often cripples small businesses.

Here is a 6-step formula for getting out of this chaos- as this strategy has times and again not only helped people win back their businesses but it has also made then succeed in winning lifelong customers.

#1. Build your emotional capital

You need to find a balance for yourself first. “Emotional-Capital” is the balancing force between family, work, emotions, and physical health.

#2. Practice closely controlled optimism

This starts by envisioning that your small business will achieve the success that you dreamt of, and at the same instance confronting the vile facts of your current reality. You need to attack these brutal facts because you have to, not because you have to do it.

#3. Assert your entrepreneurial independence

You have to carve the path for your own success. If you do not believe something will surely work for you, no one else will.

#4. Centralize and organize your database

As a small business owner with limited resources, you have to centralize your operations. Most small businesses live within multiple-system chaos and house information about their leads, prospects, and customers all over the place. These silo databases of disjointed systems often block you from growing your business and prevent you from impressing your customers, unless you invest in an easy to use CRM platform that help centralize all your customer related database.

#5. Tap into the magical power of follow-up

Failing to follow up with the prospects and customers at the right time is what kills most small businesses. It is because, when you follow up with every new lead, you will automatically close more deals and hot leads that otherwise would have fallen through the crack. For example, some people may not be ready to do business with you today, but if you nurture the relationship and provide value to the prospects through your follow-up, you can remain on the top-of-the-mind of your leads and prospects, when they are eventually ready to buy. An easy to use CRM platform helps you by creating automated drip marketing campaigns that can make you remain in touch with your prospects, leads and would be customers.

#6. Burn the To-Do list and move from manual to automated

Even if you are a follow-up Ninja, you cannot just perform as you thought and complete your jobs as an automated easy to use CRM’s follow system can, since once there are multiple steps in your marketing campaigns, you are bound to make mistakes at some point in time.
How do you understand which contact receives what information, and on which day?

Well, if you are thinking about just handling a handful of prospects, maybe then you can handle it yourself, but once you have hundreds or thousands of contacts to manage, no mere mortals can do it all by themselves.

Hence, with the help of automation found in easy to use CRM, you can find the benefits of following up with your leads, customers, prospects without the pain of making mistakes. Additionally, easy to use CRM software helps you and your team to build relationships that cannot be achieved in any other way.

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Conclusion

Therefore the bottom-line is, it is automation that makes your business more scalable. This is because, with the help of automation found in an easy to use CRM, things are set to run as needed and it really does not matter how many prospects or customers you add to its CRM database.  The system is capable of following up with each of them automatically, that too in a customized and a highly targeted way.

4 Key Regions Your CRM System Needs to Excel In 2018

Modern CRM solutions like ConvergeHub delivers workflow management, sales and marketing automation, customer support, and other essentials that help provide an end-to-end business platform for managing all aspects of the customer journey. It supports a variety of third-party tools and technology to refine your broader customer engagement ecosystem. However, as these varieties of extensions in the system can be overwhelming when adopting a CRM system for your business, it is best to consider your needs to these 4 critical areas while buying a CRM.

A cumbersome and outdated CRM system typically offers you with just a simple storage of customer data and along with it, a few relevant fields for keeping track of tasks for your sales team to follow up. Most of the times with these fields in the outdated CRMs are overwhelmingly confusing and unstructured in their appearance. In other words, legacy CRM platforms are not at all up to our modern day business standards as they simply put, do not fit the requirements of most people in the modern day organization’s workforce.

The user interface has become mission-critical, even though you might not think of it as an ordinary part of CRM selection. - Paul Greenberg Click To Tweet

Fortunately, not to worry about CRM has come a long way since its inception. Modern CRM platforms deliver consumer-grade system interfaces to render best-in-the class user experiences, which are specifically tailored to the different departments in an organization.

According to many of our customers, they do not even think ConvergeHub as CRM but look at it as a comprehensive business platform to enhance productivity, ROI and customer experience.

Modern CRM is a platform that will do more than just assist businesses to organize their customer data. Per say, today’s Customer Relationship Management technology has grown to become a proactive and integral piece of your customer engagement strategy. A system that apart from just being a central location for storing customer data is also a platform that helps automate data collection, data analysis and more importantly helps find customer insights.

Modern CRM solutions like ConvergeHub delivers workflow management, sales and marketing automation, customer support, and other essentials that help provide an end-to-end business platform for managing all aspects of the customer journey. It supports a variety of third-party tools and technology to refine your broader customer engagement ecosystem.

However, as these varieties of extensions in the system can be overwhelming when adopting a CRM system for your business, it is best to consider your needs to these 4 critical areas while buying a CRM:

#1. Intuitive user experience

The largest challenge with most CRM deployment is user adoption. According to Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research:

It’s important to simplify the focus, to put just the information in front of the user that they need to make the most effective decision or to make the next best action.

Hence simply speaking, if a CRM is not easy to use, it will never help your employees to perform their jobs better, but instead make the tasks more complex and harder to complete and consequentially people will not use it.

Therefore, to streamline your employee’s processes and optimize customer interactions, CRM solutions need to provide different ways to interact with the system. Whereby, you need to purchase a CRM system that helps create different user types and roles, which will allow the users only to view information that is relevant to them for their respective activities. Moreover, insights should be delivered visually whenever it is possible to help the users act decisively. The CRM platform must also have an intuitive interface (for both desktop and mobile) so that your field staffs can find the same experience of using a CRM platform regardless of location or device.

According to Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light:

The user interface has become mission-critical, even though you might not think of it as an ordinary part of CRM selection.

#2. Workflow automation

Any modern day CRM platform must excel at automating processes (whenever possible) for outshining in workflow management. Advanced automation in CRM systems help enforce best practices in an organization, improve performance and productivity indices, and hence reduce cost. Intelligent workflow can deliver unparallel value across the organization in several key areas like:

  • Intelligent call routing facility
  • Predictable cash flow
  • SLA (Service Level Agreement) compliance in the entire service resolution lifecycle of the prospects and customers

#3. Process alignment

Businesses that use CRM as a platform in their organizations are capable of aligning their business processes across their entire organization to manage the following areas of work, which includes:

  • Contact management
  • Order management
  • Service delivery of goods
  • Claim process management
  • Purchase request management

Enabling workflow in the post-sales processes ensures timely alerts and to enforce other critical parameters around sales, returns, billing and payment and many more purchasing activities.

#4. Platform and built

Modern-day CRM solutions for SMBs are typically SaaS or in other words, Cloud-based. However, if your organization has a team of IT staffs you can also think about CRM vendors who offer hybrid hosting options and freedom of choice on Cloud storage. Moreover, some of the CRM systems are built on open standards, while others use proprietary codes.

Conclusion

Hence, as you evaluate your current CRM system, or even if you are in lookout for a better one, keeping these four areas in your mind will help you for these are critical factors are which that will ultimately affect the value you will be getting out of your CRM  and on your ability to reap a better ROI.

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Stop the Loss! Know The Top benefits of CRM System for Your Business

The CRM system is valuable because the information that the system provides can help amplify and boost the general business goals of any organization.Here are some of the crucial benefits offered by a CRM to any organizations without any discrimination as to whether it has been implemented in a big multinational organization or for a small business.

According to APICS, CRM system or Customer Relationship Management is illustrated as:

Marketing philosophy based on making the customer the highest priority. It consists of the collection and analysis of information designed for sales and marketing to understand and support existing and potential customer needs. This analysis includes account management, catalog and order entry, payment processing, and customer credits and adjustments.

Therefore, the CRM system can be described as a set of software applications that can help any organization determine the preference and needs of the customers by organizing, tracking, managing and, storing all customer interactions in its database. The CRM system deploys advanced technology to replace manual documentation and handwritten processes of the past, which helps users to document everything, starting from basic contact information of leads, and prospects, to specific conversations with the customers.

The CRM system is valuable because the information that the system provides can help amplify and boost the general business goals of any organization. For example, if sales consultants are aware of the specific needs and preferences of their customers, by adopting CRM technology they can deliver a more personalized service by creating a more client-specific business environment. CRM systems are also capable of providing a digitalized central documentation reparatory, allowing employees across different verticals and departments to access the same information at the same time.

Here are some of the crucial benefits offered by a CRM to any organizations without any discrimination as to whether it has been implemented in a big multinational organization or for a small business:

  • Organize customer interactions in a central location
  • Manage customer contact information
  • Measure success of campaigns
  • Track customer actions, habits, and preferences
  • Provide instant metrics
  • Track industry trends
  • Manage customer service requests
  • Weaken expense and business risk, and therefore
  • Create more personalized customer experiences

There are primarily 2 types of CRM platforms.

  • On-Premise CRM and
  • Cloud-Based CRM systems

An On-Premise CRM system puts the onus of security, administration, control, and maintenance of the CRM’s database and information on the company itself. Users of this CRM systems purchases licenses upfront for implementation of the CRM system, instead of buying monthly, quarterly or annual subscriptions. The On-Premise CRM system’s software and database resides on the company’s server and it requires a prolonged installation process for integration of the software with other existing and traditional software (if any), used by the company. In general, a very large business organization with highly complex Customer Relationship Management needs benefits more from this type of CRM.

Cloud-based CRM which is also as on-demand or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) CRM system, is a platform, where data is stored on a remote, external network that users of the CRM can access anytime, with the help of an Internet connection. In many cases, third-party services are deployed to oversee maintenance and installation of these CRM systems. The Cloud-based CRM system needs relatively easy and quick installation and is so adopted by companies who have limited expertise, technology, or resources. Cloud-based CRM is also more cost-effective as vendors of these CRM systems charge users on a subscription basis with the option of yearly, monthly, or quarterly payments.

There is also another type of CRM programs, which are known as Open Source CRM, where the vendors of these CRM make their source codes available to the public. This allows users of Open Source CRM to alter the program with no cost involved in making the addition and customization of data links to social media channels, which helps users of these CRM improve their Social CRM practices.

The choice of adoption of any of these CRM deployment methods in any organization depends on the company’s business needs, resources, and goals.

Recent Trends in CRM systems

With the proliferation of mobile devices and the advent of social media, CRM system provides have also upgraded their offerings to include additional new features that cater to customers who use these technologies.

Social CRM refers to use of the CRM system for engaging leads, prospects, and customers directly through the social media websites and platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others. Using Social CRM technology companies can also capture sentiments of their brand admirers and customers in order to develop their marketing strategies and service plans.

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Lastly with the growth of mobile technology, we presently also have CRM system applications that are built for tablets and smartphones. Mobile CRM apps use features that are unique to mobile devices, such as Voice-recognition capabilities, GPS, and others in order to better serve the customers and provide access to the employees using this technology on the go.