CRM Archives - Page 3 of 7 - Best Small and Medium Business CRM Software

How to Find Salesforce Alternatives- As Bigger Is Never Always Better For Your Business

Salesforce CRM is a first-rate cloud-based CRM solution, but several businesses are also there those that are not that happy using Salesforce and hence they look for Salesforce alternatives, as- ‘Salesforce is not for everyone.’ So if you are considering replacing Salesforce or just starting out on your search for buying a Customer Relationship Management platform, but is not sure of which one will be the best for your business, it is a good idea to try our several Salesforce competitors available in the CRM marketplace.

The main reasons why small and medium businesses looking for Salesforce alternative are:

Cheaper prices
More customizability options
Simplistic features for easy adoption and learning
Ease of use to meet their CRM requirements.

So if you are considering replacing Salesforce or just starting out on your search for buying a Customer Relationship Management platform, but is not sure of which one will be the best for your business, it is a good idea to try our several Salesforce competitors available in the CRM marketplace.

Much like Salesforce, there are also several (practically all) Salesforce alternative CRM that provides a free of cost trial of their services. Some of them even offer a free account. Hence, go ahead, use these risk-free and safe alternatives, and attempt to evaluate as many Salesforce competitors as you like, and then after your search, select the winning CRM that fits your sales and marketing team.

Salesforce CRM holds just 21.1% share of the global Customer Relationship Management software market.- IBM developerWorks (2017) Click To Tweet

Here are some of the parameters that can help you to find the right CRM that you need for your business:

Price

Of course, for all businesses understanding your budget is an important element of any purchase. Moreover, do not always consider the upfront cost, but do your research on the long-term costs versus the benefits that your CRM solution is going to deliver over time. Consider the cost of upgrades, training, and ongoing services, which generally comes out of the same fund allocated for the initial payment. Apart from this, you also need to take into account the cost of software customization, system integration, and the price of additional equipment, like PCs, server or notebooks. Avoid buying a cut-rate Customer Relationship Management application that may suddenly inflate your overall price tag while looking for Salesforce alternatives in the marketplace.

Clearly-Outlined Business Objectives

Before purchasing your CRM, involve your sales, marketing, and customer service departments to provide you a compilation of wish lists and their mandatory requirements so that they can champion and support your decision. In addition to the IT department, you should secure buy-in from one of your C-level executives for your selected CRM platform, so that the person can provide the required capability needed for the yet-to-be-acquired software.

Apart from these, create a checklist of weighted, measured, and prioritized requirements for your CRM software selection, which can act as a benchmark for follow-up analysis of the success of the new software and its return on investment before looking for Salesforce competitors in the marketplace.

Scalability

While finding a CRM for your business always measure the scalability of the software, to ensure that your present choice will not become next year’s lament. You need to understand that you are buying the CRM for helping it to make your business grow, and so the CRM also needs to grow unless you are ready to buy a replacement system a few years down the road.

Ease of Use

Consider the expertise level of your office staffs before purchasing your Salesforce alternative CRM platform. Since, if your chosen CRM software is extremely complex and cumbersome to operate, your employees may shy away from using the software that will at once decrease the software’s value and therefore hit hard on your ROI.

Vendor Strength and Reputation

Scrutinize the reputation of your selected vendors on your short-list. Check into social media networks which give user reviews and independent analysis of CRM software. You can also speak directly to existing customers of your short-listed CRM software and know about the brand’s strength and weaknesses; especially how well the CRM support staffs helps their customers by keeping them in the loop on future developments and updates of the CRM platform.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, never be in a haste to clinch a new CRM solution. To find your Salesforce alternatives, always carefully consider your objectives, expectations, and requirements and then meticulously plan your purchase to ensure your purchasing decision delivers both savings and improvement in your business’s workflow, by truly living up to its promises and benefits until the end.

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7 Golden Selling Skills All Sales Professionals Must Develop in 2018

As a sales expert, there are 7 key selling skills that you must develop, which are prospecting, creating rapport, finding out the needs, laying out the solutions, answer objections, finalizing the sale and getting referrals and reselling opportunities. These key selling habits proceed in order. Hence, regularly thinking about each of these 7 elements, which are essential to the sales process, and how they can be enhanced, is the only key to increasing your revenue, sales and profitability.

Hence, regularly thinking about each of these 7 elements, which are essential to the sales process, and how they can be enhanced, is the only key to increasing your revenue, sales and profitability.

#1. Find the ideal customers

To achieve greater success in sales, you should spend more time nurturing people who are better prospects. For this, you must look around for new prospects and remain busy looking for new businesses 80% of your time. Never relax in your prospecting efforts. Keep on prospecting morning, noon, and night; unless you develop so many customers that you do not have enough time left in the day, to satisfy and sell all the people who want to buy your products or services.

#2. Focus persistently on building relationships

The second most important habit for finding success in sales is to develop a keen habit of focusing on the relationship building before anything else. Right from the first contact, you must focus on establishing trust, rapport, and credibility with each of your prospects, since most successful sales reps devote as much time as necessary for establishing trust with their customers. Winning sales reps are those who ask an intelligent question to their prospects and listen attentively to the answers. Some even use a CRM platform as they seek to understand their customer’s situation and needs even before they go ahead and attempt to discuss their products or services.

#3. Clearly identify the needs

The third greatest habit of excellent salespeople is that they develop a habit of asking questions and then identify the real needs of their prospects related to what they are selling in the market. It has been found, that most of the prospects are seldom aware that they can improve their work situation or their life when the primarily meet you. This is the exact reason why prospects often say things such as, “I cannot afford it,” or “I am not interested,” or “We are very happy with our present situation or suppliers.” However, if you probe and ask more questions, ask about the customer’s situation and then when you start linking your products or services to those needs, the more customers start learning about what you can offer and eventually buys your products or services.

#4. Be persuasive

The fourth key habit, which every successful salesperson must develop, is the habit of presenting logical, creative, and well-thought-out presentations of all the features and benefits of their products and services. Once you have identified the prospects that can benefit from what you are selling, after establishing a level of rapport and trust and identifying their requirements, your presentation is where you can show your prospects why it makes sense for the prospects to act on your recommendations.

#5. Handle objections effectively

The fifth golden key to effective selling lies in creating the habit of resolving concerns and answering objections in a competent and confident manner. You can only excel in doing this, once you are capable of thinking through all the conflicts, the objection that a qualified prospect can make, and thereafter ideate a logical and complete answer to handle each of these objections and so keep yourself ready as, and when such situations arise. The crème de la crème, sales professionals always develop a completely clear and logically sustainable “bulletproof answers”, so that when it is needed they can easily put their prospects concerns to a rest.

#6. Ask for the decision

The sixty most vital part of selling is developing the habit of asking the prospective customer to make a buying decision. Since, no matter how strong your presentation is or how high is the level of credibility and trust that is there between you and your prospects, all prospects face their moments of tension or stress before making a buying decision. Therefore, as a good salesperson, your job is to move professionally and quickly through this stressful moments and request the prospects for their orders in a confident manner to wrap up the sale.
In fact, the best of the sales professionals plan their winning closes well in advance. What they do is that they watch for the buying signals from the prospects, make certain that there are no lingering objections and then promptly as the prospect to take action right away in a straightforward manner.

#7. Ask for referrals and cultivate re-sales

To conclude, top sales professionals never forget their customers even after the sale, but develop the habit of proactively asking for referrals from their happy customers. This habit of thinking in terms of referrals and re-sales is the key to high profitability and soaring income both for the salesperson and their organization. Repeat businesses are what makes companies grow.
According to a survey by BIAKelsey: “Sixty-one percent of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers.”

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This Is How We Show Our Love This Valentine’s Day

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers. With this tool, which presently according to SmallBizTech ranks as one of the top 20 Google Chrome extension will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms.

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. Hence, every year on February 14, brands use this day as a catalyst for email campaigns aimed to woo their customers. Nevertheless, whether your brand’s strategy in 2018 is as simple as resending previous year’s e-card or sending wine and rose, this time of the year is a good time to remind your customers that you love their unflinching support and presence and care for their engagement with your brand throughout the year.

Below are a few unique ways to cultivate meaningful customer relationship, and show your prospects and customers some gratitude on this year’s Valentine’s Day:

Listen

It may sound extremely simple- that actually it is. Your CRM platform can track your customer’s social media presence, and therefore by tuning into your customer’s daily activities, you can easily recognize which channels they prioritize, which customers are acquainted with another, or which are planning to attend certain business-related events. This intelligent flow of information through your CRM can aid your sales, marketing, and support teams to tailor their customer outreach strategy, send messages that reach the users on their preferred channels or set up in-person meetings for fostering a more better than before relationships.

Diagnose and find the trends in your customer service

When a marketing initiative or a sales process is not paying off, either you can scrap it as a tough luck or use the available data in your CRM system to better understand the behaviors of your customers. By using keywords to sort out through your customer support requests, you can find recognizable patterns, identify common customer complaints, and deal with them proactively, rather than holding back and wait for the customers to bring the problems to your attention.

Automate your ‘To-Do’ list

In every business verticals and in all departments and positions there are always certain tasks which are more repetitive than others. Regrettably, these monotonous tasks many times lead to errors, which in turn send unfortunate messages to your prospects and customers that you do not seem to appreciate their businesses. Nevertheless, there is help at hand. Automating a workflow in your CRM platform can trigger of a set of actions whenever you add a new customer to your CRM system, like a welcome email, or special offers for new users, or dictate automated reminders to aid your team to customize the user experience for weeks and months to come.

Present a gift

Think out of the box on this Valentine’s Day. No more stale chocolates, offer your customers a time-sensitive deal, a gift card, or bonus points that enhance your customer loyalty program.

Valentine’s Day- Takeaway

On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers.

With this tool, which according to SmallBizTrends ranks as one of the 20 Best Chrome extensions for Small Businesses, will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Yelp, and others. You can even use this tool to grab email addresses from Gmail and store them straight into your ConvergeHub CRM platform seamlessly.

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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.

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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4 Tips on Optimizing the Lifetime Value of your Consumers in 2018

In these times of dramatic change, it is more crucial than ever before to establish a strategic focus for your business. The way we see it, businesses need to set an unwavering focus on CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), which help provide the solid foundation that is needed to enjoy lasting growth and success in businesses. Looking through the lens of analytical and quantitative science, Customer Lifetime Value embodies the critical virtuous cycle that will build relationships and fosters customer acquisition in 2018.

Looking through the lens of analytical and quantitative science, Customer Lifetime Value embodies the critical virtuous cycle that builds relationships and fosters customer acquisition. CLV is, in fact, a guiding strategy that helped Amazon to grow into a powerhouse of market innovation.

Brands that provide the best experience throughout the customer journey accomplish higher levels of sales, retention, and customer satisfaction than businesses, which only focus on transactional touch-points- McKinsey & Company Click To Tweet

Here are 4 ways by which you can maximize Customer Lifetime Value in 2018 and for years to come:

#1. Get ready for customer journeys; do not count on just transactions

According to McKinsey & Company, brands that provide the best experience throughout the customer journey accomplish higher levels of sales, retention, and customer satisfaction than businesses, which only focus on transactional touch-points. Hence, companies need to examine the entire customer journey, find out the root cause and work across functional areas using advanced customer journey analytics to better understand their customer behavior across multiple touch-points over time. Better insight and visibility from marketing to sales and service, across the entire customer lifecycle, provides businesses to break down the walls between internal silos and solve the biggest pain points that influence a buyer’s next step to achieve business goals such as new-offer acceptance or increased renewal rates.

#2. Engage customers through chat-bots and messaging apps

According to a survey done by eMarketer, it has been found that more than 1.4 Billion consumers use messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and others and the number will scale up to 2 Billion in 2018. Hence, because of the ever-rising popularity of messaging applications, in 2018, chat-bots will play a pivotal role in improving customer experience and developing deeper relationships. More to say, now that chat application providers are allowing brands to use their apps to interact with the customers, brands are also using these apps for new consumer-interaction channels. Presently in 2018, it is assumed that because of advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence), NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies, machine learning, brands must engage in a more meaningful and personalized way for providing even more helpful interactions with their consumers. Therefore, with this latest type of “conversation-commerce” customers can now establish ‘chat’ with the brand representatives for obtaining customer support, get tailored recommendations, ask questions, read on the reviews and even make a purchase without having to leave the messaging application of their choice that they prefer to use.

More to say, unlike email interactions, AI-driven conversations are not disjointed as messaging provides a continuous thread between the consumer and the brand, which makes the flow of the interaction more akin to a dialogue that, facilitate tracking and management from either side. Therefore, with this more natural flow of interactions and conversations between support and sales, there are chances for greater opportunities to cross-sell and seek or share feedback on social media platforms.

#3. Gain tangible results from machine learning and AI

Although the words “machine” and “artificial” may imply and sound impersonal in their approaches and hence robotic, nevertheless with the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence technology, this advancement is actually helping several brands to deliver greater customer experience, and to a larger audience, something that we just could not have been able to do before. For example, by pairing NLU (Natural Language Understanding) with deep-learning algorithms, retail brands can now help customers to express their requirements naturally through Facebook Messenger-based chat-bots. Retailers can now also create a size profile for any customer by presenting a browsable inventory of curated collections, which according to several market survey reports have shown nearly three times more engagement rates, compared to that what was found while using traditional inventory browsing.

Apart from this, top-performing AI-powered chat-bots can also recognize when it is the ideal moment to transfer the interaction to a live customer support representative. The main objective over here is to make this transfer as seamless and natural as possible. This way, brands can bring in human expertise for support related issues, when it makes the most difference.

While Bots and AI technologies are still in their early phases, in 2018, as bots learn more from user behaviors, they will evolve to create a more richer experience and therefore deliver better results for both brands and their consumers.

#4. Merge customer service and sales mindsets to drive revenue

To a customer, there is practically no distinction between sales and service departments of a brand, and so in this hypercompetitive market, the company cannot let their sales and customer support teams operate in silos in 2018.

Therefore, companies this year and going ahead on time, need to adopt strategies that help blend service and sales, by adjusting their evaluation metrics and incentive plans, and the key to achieving this is ongoing training.

Takeaway

Hence, to conclude we can say that new data and better coordination between sales and service teams are the empowering factors that can only create more sales value in 2018. For companies that shall use AI, bots, advanced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, and messenger apps will be rewarded with higher customer lifetime values, greater customer retention rates, and profitability, rather than fall back in the race by just cutting on service delivery costs.

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Top 6 Growth Hacking Strategies to make Small Businesses succeed in 2018

All marketers of small and medium businesses and their business owners are in a constant search for growing their company. Growth hacking tactics come into play over here, as it is the key to success for any SMB or startups. For all of them who wants to know what is growth hacking, this business growth strategy helps enterprises to find the most effective channels for marketing and take advantage of them to get connected with the relevant audience and therefore scale up the business.

Before understanding what is growth hacking, and growth hacking strategies, let us get to the First things First!

As the world is becoming increasingly mobile and connected most businesses are exploring newer avenues, revenue streams, and business models with the Internet to meet their growing consumer demands. Starting a new business is becoming easier in these modern times than ever before. Thanks to the Internet, many entrepreneurs are starting their journey every year, with escalated dreams and aspirations, and investors are even funding some of them, as prospective business ventures for this digital world. Nevertheless, most of the business owners fail to comprehend into account the survivorship basis, whereby some researches show that more than 90% of technology startups eventually fail within the following few years or months. While the inconsistency to find a sustainable margin or cash flow is a major concern for all startups, the primary reason for failure cited by startups those who fail is the paucity of the market need for their products and services.

Good growth teams care about driving acquisition. Great growth teams care about acquiring users who will stick around. - Pinterest Click To Tweet

All marketers of small and medium businesses and their business owners are in a constant search for growing their company. Growth hacking strategies come into play over here, as it is the key to success for any SMB or startups.

For all of them who wants to know what is growth hacking, this business growth strategy helps enterprises to find the most effective channels for marketing and take advantage of them to get connected with the relevant audience and therefore scale up the business. Growth hacking tools are capable of measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns across several platforms. Using growth hacking skills, you can gather information that you can use to find the best ways to engage your audiences.

Why focus on Growth Hacking Strategies?

When it is critical for any small business or startup to grow quickly without investing a lot of money, growth hacking can help you exactly to achieve it. With growth hacking tactics, you may not only gain insights about your audience, but you can also measure their purchasing patterns and measure the efficiency of your digital marketing strategies. In other words, growth hacking strategies improve your traffic and online visibility.

Here are a few tips, which you must work on so that your growth hacking tactics resonate with your audience:

Get user feedback and make necessary changes to your growth hacking plans accordingly.
Use testimonials and make use of other conversion rate optimization techniques.
Create shareable and relevant contents.
Use your email database as a funnel to nurture your email marketing campaigns.
Retarget each page and post, individually.
Repurpose old contents.

Be cautioned that you do not invest too much in getting custom-made software for your business. Nowadays most of the business applications involved in sales, marketing, finance, and operations are readily available as SaaS (Software as a Service) on Cloud.

You can avail these services like ConvergeHub CRM on a pay-as-you-go basis. Doing this will not only save a lot of time while you are implementing and practicing your growth hacking skills, but it will even reduce your costs involved in development and maintenance needed for bespoke software.

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5 Secrets of Marketing and Business Automation with ConvergeHub CRM

The more your business can cultivate leads and succeed in creating long-term relationships even before your prospects are ready to purchase your products or services, the more likely you are to win your lead’s approval and thereby increase your sales pipeline’s conversion rate.
To help cultivate and nurture leads to move through the marketing funnel you need marketing and business automation software which helps you to take the tedious work out of connecting with leads as they move through the customer journey. Nevertheless, marketing and business automation should not be dealt with a “set-it-and-forget-it” manner. Since for correct utilization of marketing and business automation you are required to properly setup and maintain the objective of your marketing campaigns to achieve specific objectives and goals.

On average 51% of companies are currently using Marketing automation. With more than half of B2B companies (58%) plan to adopt the technology.-Emailmonday Click To Tweet

Let us take a look at 5 secrets of successful marketing and business automation below:

#1. Prepare and Organize Your CRM

Make sure that you clean your CRM database since it will synchronize with your marketing and business automation software. Hence, if your database has a lot of outdated or duplicate information, you are sure to land up with a bad problem on your hand. Always go through your CRM database, clean up the names of your contacts, delete duplicate entries, and associate contacts with the right accounts.

#2. Validate Email Addresses

Another vital step in making business and marketing automation software work for you is to verify all the email addresses in your CRM’s database. For this, you can run all your email addresses through an email verification service and fix the emails those are not approved. In several instances, these are small errors that can be easily fixed (i.e., gmil and gamil to gmail). In other circumstances, you may find many emails those that may no longer be active. So be careful about deleting them before importing your emails into your marketing and business automation platform.

#3. Get Everyone on Board

Before doing your marketing campaigns using business and marketing automation software, address how the software will affect your marketing and sales processes. Will it change the way your leads are presently assigned? Will it take the place of your sales outreach strategies? For this, you need to check out with the other resources in your business, including your IT department, webmaster, marketing and creative team leads, SEO team, and your CRM administrator. Since, to make your business and marketing automation software work most efficiently, you need the help of these teams with tasks such as creating contents, make email authentication, track codes, and integrate the software, if it is a third-party application with your CRM database.

Take to your automation provider if you are not sure with the answers, but answer questions early on, so that you can you can fetch the maximum from your business and marketing automation system.

#4. Test, Analyze and Update

When your business and marketing automation system is up and running, it is necessary that you continue to test and analyze the output of the software. Every aspect of your lead nurturing and marketing campaigns to your lead scoring can be a lot improved when you are aware what results you are expecting to see out of the software. Therefore, by testing, analyzing and updating the results, you can make the necessary corrections and create better strategies for your business growth.

#5. Continue Education

We are sure like most of us; you will not learn everything about business and marketing automation and its best practices in your first few months. Therefore, in order to continue getting the most from your business and marketing automation experience, you must continue to educate you staffs and yourself on the latest updates and best practices and more. There are several places wherefrom you can find this information, which includes forums, webinars, and user groups of the software.

Conclusion

Business and Marketing automation is a wonderful tool that can easily bring success to your business. We are sure that by following the above tips, you will be well on your way to accomplish a successful business and marketing automation experience.

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Reasons for a Small Business Need of CRM to Survive

Small Business’s Need of CRM or Customer Relationship Management platform enables small and medium business owners to manage operational challenges, such as client attrition, sales decline, misalignment between corporate revenue targets and their salespeople’s commission policy and others. Therefore, if you are a small business owner, there are various ways that a client-tracking tool, can affect your company’s bottom-line. Check out our top 7 tips on why small business needs CRM.

Recent studies show that companies with a fully utilized CRM system can increase sales by 29%.- Forbes Click To Tweet

Therefore, if you are a small business owner, there are various ways that a client-tracking tool, can affect your company’s bottom-line.

Check out our top 7 tips on why small business needs CRM:

Be Organized

As a small business owner, you can claim that you are managing your company’s task management systems, business emails, calendar system, but in reality, unless you organize all your information in one system, you are missing the big picture of your business. CRM integrates all these activities and much more in one easily maintainable and managed place, which can help you learn things about your business you never knew before. Hence, understanding the small business’s need of CRM, and being organized will never ever be a detriment to the success of your business.

Client Management

Another most vital reason why small businesses are in need a CRM is that CRM is a tool that provides more visibility into your client base. It helps small business owners to ponder on different strategies and tactics that are needed for formulating better plans and thereby break new grounds for long-term profitability.

Track Profitability

CRM is a tool that can help ease-up the work of your accountants. Once you adopt a CRM like ConvergeHub, you need not worry about tracking your billing processes and instead concentrate on activities like strategizing on product discounts, client returns and shipping costs. Converged CRM platforms provide small businesses with a speedy bookkeeping system and can produce accurate financial reporting, which is a crucial process in the corporate value chain.

Sales Strategy

As an owner of small business, the last thing you must be wanting is to lose income by targeting the wrong customer. Client administration programs, which are the core utility of a CRM, can provide small business owners with extremely valuable intelligence about future sales trends that can aid them to adjust their present corporate sales strategies and drive higher revenues.

Never Lose Your Data

Do you store all your business and client relationship information on your laptop? Then the odds are high that your laptop can be damaged or stolen. Small business’s need a CRM system helps you to get rid of notepads, calendars, memo-books, and other outdated systems for tracking your data. A web-based or SaaS-based CRM system such as ConvergeHub lets small businesses to protect their data from being lost. With a Cloud-based CRM, as your data remains on the Cloud Server, it guarantees data safety and so provides you a protective cover against data loss.

Statuses Are Important

Are you aware which of your clients are ready for a quick callback and who is not? Knowing which of your prospects are showing interest in your products and services, and which clients are presently on a hold will surely help businesses to improve or modify their sales strategies. A CRM at its most basic level lets you see the statuses of your customers. Small businesses need CRM for every time you make a call, contact the customer or your prospects and leads by email or SMS you can easily update all your customer related information along with their current status in your CRM. This way by mapping your customer journey, you can avoid following up on cold leads and instead mature the hot ones.

You Need Metrics

Do you remember how many successful conversions of your leads-to-customers you had in the past weeks or months? Can you provide a quick data of your conversion ratio or explain the most fruitful method that helped your sales reps to reach your customers? Metrics are critical for the growth of any business. You can always figure out these statistics to some extent using Excel formulas in a spreadsheet, but then again, the odds are high that you may make mistakes while calculating your result. Most people do. CRM software is capable of providing you instant metrics on several aspects of your business and generates reports which are specific to your needs.

Conclusion

Finally, small business’s need of CRM is highly recommended, as this software is capable of improving an organization’s customer service practices. It helps your support staffs to respond to client’s queries quickly apart from providing insight into customer’s order trends, which ensures that your support staffs never mess up with order related questions from your customers.

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10 Inspiring Quotes To Kick-Start a Prosperous 2018

The start of the New Year is the perfect time to make a new beginning by reflecting on the past years. Be it in your career, relationship or your health, here are 10 ageless inspiring quotes to jump-start a successful new year. We hope you will find yourself motivated by reading these inspiring lines and keep them in your mind throughout 2018 to help encourage you to make this year your best ever.

We hope you will find yourself motivated by reading these inspiring lines and keep them in your mind throughout 2018 to help encourage you to make this year your best ever.

Happy New Year 2018!

“The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.” – Arthur C. Clarke
“Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”– Warren Buffett
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”– Milton Berle
“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”– Norman Vincent Peale
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”– Anne Frank
“Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.” – Napoleon Hill
“A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.” – Jack Dempsey
“When the sun is shining I can do anything; no mountain is too high, no trouble too difficult to overcome.” – Wilma Rudolph
“The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.” – Charles Kettering
“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” – Bertrand Russell

Top Benefits of Marketing Cloud and Business Automation

Marketing cloud and business automation are two processes that help businesses to market their products and services online through integrated digital experience. The aim of cloud marketing is to use methods for advertising via online applications to target customers through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and various other websites that aim to reach out to the consumers by demonstrating different brands, products, and services.

Marketing cloud and business automation are two processes that help businesses to market their products and services online through integrated digital experience.

The aim of cloud marketing is to use methods for advertising via online applications to target customers through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and various other websites that aim to reach out to the consumers by demonstrating different brands, products, and services. Cloud marketing platform, which was established by ShareVue Marketing Technologies a company based in Raleigh, North Caroline is maintained and supported by third-party SaaS firms. Using marketing cloud and business automation markets targeting leads and customers need to ensure that their materials are compatible with devices, which are capable of rendering electronic media.

Global Cloud IT market revenue is predicted to increase from $180B in 2015 to $390B in 2020, attaining a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17%. Click To Tweet

Benefits and Advantages of using Cloud Marketing

Cost-effectiveness

Marketing cloud and business automation help businesses to lessen the cost of marketing distribution materials, which include sending e-books, magazines, catalogs and other similar advertising materials to consumers as digital media. It helps to send promotional contents over digital format, which enables a cheaper and faster approach. The reduction in the cost of printing and the efficient use of online materials, which can be used continuously, makes Cloud marketing so popular among all businesses in the modern times.

Customization

Customization while using marketing cloud allows businesses to creatively use interactive media to produce relevant and effective advertisements when targeting a customer. Customization also includes the use of social media websites such as Facebook to customize pages to send to the public or fans of your brands over the internet. Once markets deploy cloud marketing through a CRM platform, they can even combine information from third-party data sources, including surveys and emails to visualize the customer experience.

Time

Timing is always a vital prerequisite for targeting customers using marketing cloud and business automation. Traditional brand advertising methods, like posters and surveys, have limited time windows before they become invalid. However, marketing cloud helps a business to produce advertisements as and when it is required for the consumers. Hence, the advertising materials can be effortlessly removed if the marketing campaign or the advertising season is over. The materials used for cloud marketing can be easily erased from the Internet or even can be modified along with different hyperlinks to ensure that the materials are fit for its purpose, and the customized contents are delivered at the right time.

Cloud Marketing Strategy

The strategy followed by cloud marketing can be broken into 4 parts:

Establishing the goal

The primary step for cloud marketing is to find a goal or an objective for the marketing project. The project proposal for marketing cloud should clearly define the objectives of the campaign, which can be maintained based on qualitative or quantitative data. This helps the plan not to be deployed haphazardly.

Development

In the development stage, the marketing team creates the contents, graphics and other media materials required for the online advertisement of the brand, while the web development team researches on a method to post the materials onto an online source.

Maintenance

Maintenance is required for cloud marketing, which updates the material while it is online. Additionally, members of the marketing team are also responsible for acting as a moderator in any discussion boards or keep the communication alive with the receivers of the content and in needed increase the validity of the campaign.

Evaluation

Users of marketing cloud and business automation needs to evaluate the success of the marketing campaigns throughout the duration of the campaign, to find how appropriate it has been to the end users. It is only by analyzing the campaign statistics companies can establish their brand marketing strategies, allowing an increase in the overall effectiveness of marketing cloud and business automation technology.

Now that you are aware of what is marketing cloud and business automation, write to us in the comment below, for more updates on this topic.

Why and How Should You Greet the Customers In 2018?

To gain business and grow your reputations never forget to treat your customers, as you would want to be treated. Use your own experience, think beyond products and services, and closely inspect your customer service experience with other brands, which may help your customers to build a positive connection with your company this year.

In the Internet-age, to greet the customers and create a customer-service strategy has never been more important ever before. News travels fast and news that is bad travels even faster. Companies that relax their customer-service standards, fail to comply and respond, or reply to every customer complains, can spell disaster for their business.

We have seen numerous stories in 2017 of poorly handled customer support situations that have gone viral. Business establishments that allow customers to direct their angst towards a specific brand have proliferated in the recent times.

According to Zendesk 79% of high-income households, avoid vendors for 2+ years after having a bad customer service experience. Click To Tweet

On a local level, as bloggers can help you gain business, they can also create havoc on a company’s reputation, canceling out years of good reputation with a few negative posts about your brand online.

However, this news is not that bad. For, businesses that embrace the customer-experience responsibilities can adopt social media and take the help of technology, to circulate endorsements, positive reviews, and their success stories. There are many organizations those who have succeeded in turning their customers into “wild fans”, by superseding the expectations of their customers and clients, or by identifying unique touch points in their customer engagement process that can create or destroy a sale.

So how do you fight with this double-edged sword of social media and customer experience in 2018?

To start with, let us discuss the fundamental aspects of what signifies a great customer experience for your customers. Delivering great customer experience can create a lifelong relationship with your customers, but it is really hard to start with the earliest levels of engagement.

Hence, as you check on your brand’s customer-service strategies, here are three quick tips that can help you support your end goals to gain business by creating happy customers that spread the good word about your brand, services, products, and technology:

Captivate customers from the first point of engagement

In this very moment, while you are reading this article, hundreds of companies across the world are losing business by mistreating their customers.

For example, if your employees do not know how to greet the customer, a customer may walk into your store, is greeted by nobody, and is compelled to wait for service. This is obviously not a great way to create a first impression of yourself to your customers.

We know of instances, whereby there are business establishments those have lost more than half of their customers this way. Similarly, many businesses do not even know how many clienteles they lose.

Efficient business establishments never make their customers wait, but they roll out the red carpet, by knowing how to greet the customers in a proper way.

Therefore, always make sure that you have an employee ready to greet your clienteles.

There are many technologies that can even do the “greeting” for you, like as in in-store kiosk that help customers “check-in” for service, or mobile application technology that queue customers in a virtual line.

Address negative reviews and customer complaints, openly and compassionately

In case of negative feedback and customer complains, move quickly and be empathetic. Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes to understand what is driving their unhappiness. The most important thing to gain business and recover lost sale is to never become confrontational. Since doing this most often fans the fire rather than dousing it.

In order to “COPE” with negative feedback and complains your employees need 4 elements in their checklist:

Contrition- the ability to feel sorry and apologize

Own up the issue and take responsibility

Prevent the mistake from happening again

Explain to the customer what has happened and what and you are doing to prevent it from happening once more.

Encourage customers to share their experience with your brand

The era when a bad customer experience was only confined to a few close friends and relatives is over. Today, mobile and online reviews can magnify every customer experience, be it good or bad, in space and time. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are a platform that can make both good and bad reviews spread and swell like a wildfire.

Therefore, not only greet your customers once they enter your brick and mortar or virtual space, but it is also a good practice to encourage them to review your services and provide feedback, which makes it easier for your customers to promote your brand.

This can be as simple as sending a “Review and Like our page on Facebook” reminder on email to your customers, using CRM software to automate your email campaigns or offer a discount to customers those who send a tweet with a referral or recommendation for your brand.

Always remember to keep up the interaction, by thanking your customers who provide a nice shout-out.

Takeaway

Lastly, to gain business and grow your reputations never forget to treat your customers, as you would want to be treated. Use your own experience, think beyond products and services, and closely inspect your customer service experience with other brands, which may help your customers to build a positive connection with your company this year.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!

CRM and the Role of AI for the Future of Businesses

Everywhere that you see today, customer data is blowing up. People (and all their modern devices) are sharing data, which even refers to household products. This is happening, as behind each device, interaction, and products there is a customer, which equates to a first-time opportunity for organizations to delight their clients and customers with unprecedented experiences that are most intuitive, predictive, and relevant than ever, upholding the role of AI for the future of businesses in this modern world.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) embedded in trade and commerce and CRM platforms are creating striking new possibilities for the customer experience and beyond.

Out of more than 1000 global companies analyzed by IDC 28% of companies already use Artificial Intelligence and 41% are planning to use AI in the next two years. Click To Tweet

In December 2016, President Obama released a detailed report on the role of AI for the future of businesses, automation, and the American economy. The report endorsed technology being the primary driver of growth in GDP per capita, overruling labor, or capital in the U.S. However, it also warned that the larger economic gains that can be found by AI could remain to a selected few, as the winner-take-most nature of the IT markets means that only a few may come to dominate the markets that hold the role of AI for the future of businesses.

Recently the pioneering market intelligence company IDC, in collaboration with SFDC, released a report on the economic impact of using AI for Customer Relationship Management activities, ranging from marketing and sales to customer support and retention. Whereby they confirmed, out of more than 1000 global companies analyzed 28% of companies already use Artificial Intelligence and 41% are planning to use AI in the next two years. Hence, 2018 is expected to be a pivotal year for AI adoption for enterprises, paving the road for the role of AI for the future of businesses.

Within CRM specificity, it is a known fact to many that 50% of business activities in the Customer Relationship Management platform are already in the cloud. No wonder vendors of cloud-based SaaS CRM ranging from IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and even Google have doubled down on the war for acquiring lion’s share of the market of the enterprise cloud.

The term Artificial Intelligence or AI is an extremely broad term that defines a wide range of technology that includes machine learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), computer vision, and several other predictive analysis approaches that heralds the role of AI for the future of businesses.

The challenge in this golden age of AI revolution is to determine how we can develop the right expertise and process for collecting data, as well as build AI algorithms and models fast enough to reap the benefits of this technology.
Given the fact that most companies do not even know where and how to begin, building AI based new systems, apps, and capabilities or having AI already ingrained into CRM, will significantly hike any companies’ skill to deliver high-impact and smart customer experience quickly and effectively.

Customer intelligence in a CRM starts with the cluster of rich data that resides in one location and caters to a single comprehensive view of each customer. Without this data, AI algorithm (no matter how advanced it is) will not be able to present a meaningful predictive analysis. Additionally, this approach not only turns CRM platform into an ideal technological choice for managing customer relationship but it can help to build all kind of apps like the one that can predict late payments, accounts receivable, supply chain management that can predict stock level according to expected demands and more.

E-commerce firms can also use the CRM database to elevate buying experience by providing personalized and automated recommendations and special offers that can help draw shoppers to their e-commerce websites. Thinking ahead of times, embedded intelligence can even learn from conversation history and coach sales agents in the next steps they must take to reach out with their best offers to the customers.

To conclude, with all trends that are transforming the ways we do business and interact with customers, the role of AI for the future of businesses will surely show us even more exciting and innovative developments during the upcoming months in 2018.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!

Tag: CRM

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Check out our top 7 tips on why small business needs CRM:

10 Inspiring Quotes To Kick-Start a Prosperous 2018

Happy New Year 2018!

Top Benefits of Marketing Cloud and Business Automation

Benefits and Advantages of using Cloud Marketing

Cost-effectiveness

Customization

Time

Cloud Marketing Strategy

Establishing the goal

Development

Maintenance

Evaluation

Why and How Should You Greet the Customers In 2018?

Company

Resources

Solutions

Product

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