Tag: CRM Workflow

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A cumbersome and outdated CRM system typically offers you with just a simple storage of customer data and along with it, a few relevant fields for keeping track of tasks for your sales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 Most of the times with these fields in the outdated CRMs are overwhelmingly confusing and unstructured in their appearance.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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Tip and Tricks for Users of Merchant Cash Advance CRM

If you are using MCA (Merchant Cash Advance) CRM to help you run your business lending company, you should definitely be aware of the best practices of using MCA CRM for getting the most out of your customer relationship management platform. Knowing the best practices that you should follow while using MCA CRM is most necessary, as, at the end of the day, you must have invested a lot on the CRM system and also have spent a considerable amount of time in it. The primary benefit of using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM is- Workflow, which is the foundation stone of any CRM platform regardless of its use in any kind of businesses.

If you are using Merchant Cash Advance CRM to help you run your business lending company, you should definitely be aware of the best practices of using MCA CRM for getting the most out of your customer relationship management platform. Knowing the best practices that you should follow while using MCA CRM is most necessary, as, at the end of the day, you must have invested a lot on the CRM system and also have spent a considerable amount of time in it. However, if you are still sitting on the fence and not using a CRM for the day-to-day operations of your lending business firm, then we can easily cite an example to let you understand your lacuna, whereby not using a CRM in Merchant Cash Advance institution is like a professional racing car driver not using a sports car.

There is currently $80 to $120 billion dollars worth of unmet funding needs among SMB, and MCA companies are in the best position to meet this demand.- Oguz Konar Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, if you are one who still does not use a dedicated MCA CRM, here are a couple of key points you must know if you want to get right from the beginning.
The primary benefit of using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM is- Workflow, which is the foundation stone of any CRM platform regardless of its use in any kind of businesses.

We are aware that with most of us, the very first thing that comes to our minds when we hear about workflow is that it sounds like a lot of work. For creating, a workflow involves going through the entire business process, documenting all activities that everyone does, registering how the files pass from one department to another and many more. We know to run a business we absolutely need to do these tasks, but for MCA CRM workflow, these are not what we ask for, rather you should ask yourself the following questions:

  • What statuses or stages do your customer’s applications fall into throughout their life cycle to get a customer-funded?
  • There are several common mistakes, which most customers make, can you avoid them by using your MCA CRM and generate more productivity?
  • Can Merchant Cash Advance CRM help to create a higher retention rate for your employees, as it can help create higher conversion rates when it comes to their marketing efforts?

Stages and Statuses are not Tasks

We have often seen many business lending organizations creates tasks instead of creating stages and statuses in their CRM workflow. However, it is extremely important to understand that stages and statuses are not the same things. For example, tasks can be created in most of the CRM systems to remind sales reps to perform their day-to-day duties. However, instead of writing “Application Out” or “Contact Sent” with MCA business if your status reflects “Merchant Reviewing Application” or for a file sent to the funder for review and underwriting falls under the status “Funder Reviewing File” it will be more productive for MCA CRM business.

Therefore, instead of just implementing workflow process that expresses tasks create a workflow that shows stages and statuses, for which your team will thank you down the road.

Keep it Simple

We have seen several customers who have created such complex workflows that it would require probably a Ph.D. in Statistics to understand. For this, we want you to remember that more complex is the workflow, the more difficult you are making it for your team and yourself to accomplish or supervise the job. An ideal workflow should always be created in such a manner, that even a new recruit in your company could look at it and understand what it means or what its purpose is.

Hence, it is best to consolidate status and stages to fill the gaps with the task. For example, MCR CRM users often create statuses like “Collect Tax Returns”, “Collect Bank Statement”, “Collect Driving License” and others, all of which can be consolidated into a single status “In Document Collection”, which is not only simple but also very easy to understand.

We must always remember Einstein’s great quote in this respect:
“Anyone can make something complicated.  It takes a genius to make it simple.”

Automated Triggers and Drip Email Marketing

We know your primary thought on this matter would be “what do drip email marketing and automated triggering have to do with workflow?” Well, to be blunt and truthful, it has everything to do with it. For any CRM platform workflow is the cornerstone to almost that goes out to your staffs or to the customers in an automated way. For example, once a status changes for a customer, with  Merchant Cash Advance CRM platform, like ConvergeHub, you can easily create an automation whereby an email can go to the customers from their assigned reps so that it looks like it is a personal email. Moreover, if a customer remains constant in a certain status for a specific period of time an automated email can to go the sales rep based on the time to make him or her attentive and look into the cause of that sudden delay.

The best part about using an automated system with nicely created workflow is that the CRM platform will perform on behalf of the sales reps and the company. Remember, using workflow management notifying both your customers and staffs can only help in your efforts to grow your business in the longer run.

Task Management

Keeping your office staffs on task every single day is truly the name of the game. Since the more tasks, your staffs complete successfully the more revenue everyone makes in your Merchant Cash Advance agency. Much like creating triggers and drip email marketing, task management also helps in creating a good and solid workflow. For example, if the status for a customer in your Merchant Cash Advance CRM changes to “In Doc Collection” a series of tasks can be automatically created like, “Collect Tax Returns”, “Collect Voided Check”, “Collect Bank Statement”, “Collect Driving License” and so on.

Conclusion

Therefore, in gist, if you truly want your MCA business to grow, by remaining on top when it comes to efficiency and productivity, a well thought out workflow will help you to generate more revenue and close more deals by using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM system.

According to one of our notable MCA agency customers of ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM, Rob Abramov of Flowrich Capital quotes on us:

“Whether you are a one-man operation or a 100 person army. ConvergeHub allows you to keep your business organized, maintain customer data efficiently, and automate the entire process from beginning to end.”

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The 5 Most Essential CRM Integrations For Your SMB

In the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry, CRM integrations are the connection points or bridges between two diverse software applications that permit them to work jointly seamlessly. Integrations are gangways for sharing and exchanging information across platforms so that you do not have to bear the trouble of switching between diverse applications or add duplicate information times and again. Largely speaking, integrations is a functionality that makes your CRM system much demanding and heightens the probability of your sales reps using your CRM properly, as there is practically no learning curve involved in working with their existing software.

In the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry, CRM integrations are the connection points or bridges between two diverse software applications that permit them to work jointly seamlessly.

Integrations are gangways for sharing and exchanging information across platforms so that you do not have to bear the trouble of switching between diverse applications or add duplicate information times and again.

6 out of 10 small businesses are using their CRM for email marketing- MarketingCharts Click To Tweet

Largely speaking, integrations is a functionality that makes your CRM system much demanding and heightens the probability of your sales reps using your CRM properly, as there is practically no learning curve involved in working with their existing software. Integrations are pathways that offer clear opportunities to your sales teams whether they are rooted in the CRM’s native application, through an HTTP callback (like WebHook) or over a third party application like Zapier.

Whatever be your choice for using integration, for the sales reps, the benefit of this functionality is instant, which can help you to:

Get Yourself Focused: Perform all your sales activities, with the software of your choice, knowing that all your activities will be centrally tracked.

Get Yourself Organized: Consolidate your calendar activities and your communications.

Save Time: Spend more time in selling and invest less of your day in importing/exporting activities and contacts.

The important applications in any successful sales department include calendar sync, emails, document management, marketing automation, customer support and finally, accounting.

Let us take a closer look at each of these CRM integrations below:

Calendar and Email sync

Calendar and Email sync centralize your calendar and email activities between your personal or business email and your CRM.

Most CRM’s, which include ConvergeHub, has a native integration of Office 365 and Gmail or both. If you are using an unusual email you can still then use SMTP to fetch those communications into your CRM platform, like IMAP. Using this integration when you fire an email from your CRM system or the provider of your email, it routinely synchronizes all the emails with your CRM.

With integrations like Calendar sync, you have the benefit of looking into just one datebook for your activities instead of two.

Hence, remember if you have not done your email and calendar sync, you are just adding another complexity to your day-to-day tasks, which for every sales rep is an enemy that harbors unnecessary busy work.

Document management

Would not it be a great relief if you can create quotes and proposals without leaving your CRM? This is exactly the reason why sales reps most essentially require document management integration. Nevertheless, creating the document is only one aspect. You may also need to have those applications speak to each other such as automatically sending proposal rights after the sales reps move the deal to the next stage of action. Sign a contract and others.

These applications can manage your documentation, create electronic signatures, or automatically add names and addresses from your contacts directly from your CRM’s database. These way integrations meant for document management helps in avoiding manual entry and thereby mistakes.  Pandadoc, WebMerge, DocuSign are some of the most popular document management software among the sales reps.

Marketing Automation

The subsequent integration that we are going to talk about and which matter to all winning sales representatives is marketing automation. It is an integration that provides the capacity to automatically fire ‘bulk’ emails about your new initiatives, products, or programs to existing customers, leads, and prospects, that too with a customized touch.

With the help of integrations in marketing automation, sales reps can monitor each account, keep them informed and help meet their customer’s needs. Most automation software applications offer templates that can be customized so that your sales teams can generate the exact look needed depending on the purpose of what each of them is trying to achieve.

The other demanding aspect of having an email marketing automation is that when you add a contact to your CRM system that is automatically added to the marketing automation software, which reduces the burden of manually entering data across platforms. The same goes true when you want to delete or lose a subscriber or customer. In both the cases, your lists are always in sync.

There are several marketing automation programs which are capable of even tracking the email open rate, to evaluate how well your drip marketing campaigns are performing and can provide this information in a form of a report.

Some of the favorite marketing automation software that is popular among sales reps are MailChimp, Constant Contact and others.

Customer Support

Customer support is an ongoing activity that does not start or stop at the help-desk. In fact, more and more sales teams are presently keeping track of their customer support with the help of customer support tickers within their CRM.

It is an accepted fact that the value customer support integrations provides extends well beyond the sales teams. Often customer support teams have to address all problems that even include not being able to make a webinar that the customers registered for, engineering issues and billing assistance. Being able to add “@” mentioning a team member’s name helps in including others in the discussion and so resolve the issue much faster, than ever before.

The last thing that any organization asks for is to find one of your top ten customers, challenge you by telling that you know nothing about an issue, where you could have jumped in to help get an issue resolved quickly.

As to our knowledge, we found most of our customers are extremely contended using Zendesk and LiveChat for facilitating their customer support.

Accounting

In small and medium businesses, generating invoices, sales and purchase orders, are also an important activity, typically done by the sales reps themselves. For this most often, the person has either to create an entire document from its scratch, using a template or call someone who knows finance or another related department to get them generated.

Either way, would not it have been better or more efficient if these sales or purchase orders could have been automatically generated when the status of the deals was changed or got triggered by any other events.  This way thing could have been better timed and there would have been less of a chance of deals slipping through the crack.

Having the right accounting integrations makes these tasks easier. From our experience, we have registered that Xero and Quickbooks are the most favorite accounting integration of the sales reps using ConvergeHub.

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Takeaway- Be ready for the impact

All CRM for SMB markets have similar features and functionalities- vendors may disagree upon many things, which offer the most value for a sales rep using a CRM platform, but all agree that not having software integration functionality in CRM- is a deal breaker, in its truest form.

Hence, always adopt a CRM, which maximizes your sales rep’s day-to-day needs by offering the aptitude to automate as many processes (as possible) and for that has seamless integrations with the software that your sales team members use the most.

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Find More Value From Your Software With CRM Workflows

Workflow is the core building block of any CRM, which is an infrastructure, built on procedures and processes. Hence, for sound business management, here are three key recommendations to get started with workflows using CRM for enhancing your company’s growth and ROI.

It has been widely found that CRM system is mostly used for following up with contacts, doing bits and pieces of marketing, managing opportunities and relying on a few good reports. That is all. Nevertheless, Customer Relationship Management is a platform, which is capable of performing greater things once people who want to maximize the value of their investment, use workflows.

By getting proficient at setting up CRM workflows, you can tune your CRM system to run at its most productive level and use the software to automate tasks, which will ensure that you always get your work done, regardless of whether you remember to do them.

Workflow is the core building block of any CRM, which is an infrastructure, built on procedures and processes.

Hence, for sound business management, here are three key recommendations to get started with workflows using CRM for enhancing your company’s growth and ROI.

Workflow # 1: Website Visitors

When someone visits your website or business landing-page, you can configure your CRM to receive the visitor’s data and let the CRM send you an email, notifying you of the visit. Now, when the information is received, you can generate a workflow process to look at the information and assign a task to the sales reps who are in charge of that visitor’s region to follow-up the visitor on your website. You can also design an automated email that can be sent along with your product and service information and then if the visitor opens the email, a sales manager is notified to pursue every visitor visiting your site.

Find More Value From Your Software With CRM Workflows Click To Tweet

Workflow # 2:  Trade Shows

Most businesses spend an inordinate amount of their revenue on trade shows and then do not do enough follow-ups. Workflows are capable of fixing this problem. Hence, when you return from your next trade show, be sure that you have all the contact information of every visitor who visited your booth, which most trade shows provide on a spreadsheet. Once you import the spreadsheet into your CRM, you can then launch a workflow to assign those leads to the right salespeople in your organization based on demographical preferences, specialty, or product line. Using workflow automation, you can even send a thank you email to the prospects who visited your booth and if no action is taken, ensure that a manager in your company is notified under such circumstances.

Workflow # 3:  Lost Customers

Every month create a workflow in your CRM system, which scans your database and looks for contacts who are in your existing customer lists and check their purchase history to run a drip email campaign educating your customers of your new products or services. In the same way, you can also create workflows in your CRM software, informing you of customers those who have not purchased your products for the last six months, so that you can nurture those customers who may have inadvertently fallen through the crack.

Setting up a workflow in a CRM system like ConvergeHub is not at all difficult. However, if you find that you are not an expert, do not let this stop you. Find and hire CRM consultants who are experienced with CRM applications and let them create and support the workflow that you need for your business.

Although, it may cost you a few hundred bucks, creating a proper workflow, it will surely provide you with greater business gains, and bigger returns on your investments.

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If you have liked reading this article, or want us to contact you for further knowledge on setting up workflows, write to us in the comment box below.