Easy To Use CRM Software Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Best Small and Medium Business CRM Software

A Comprehensive Guide for Increasing Lead Conversion Rates

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their CRM software? Do have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers? Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2019. Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a Salesforce Alternative CRM software platform that can help you do that? If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their CRM software?

Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers?

Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization.
Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2019.

Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a software platform that can help you do that?
If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

SCHEDULE 30-MINUTE ROCKET LAUNCH SESSION TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS TO NEXT LEVEL

ConvergeHub's ROCKET LAUNCH 2019 can help you acquire leads, automate your sales process, improve your conversion and get more referrals from satisfied customers. Click To Tweet

Publish awesome and informative blogs

We all acknowledge that the stage for converting leads comes at the very end of the sales cycle. However, to persuade the leads to get to that point, whereby they become interested enough to procure your offerings- you primarily need to build up trust.
Leads and prospective customers cherish to see you as a subject matter expert and an authority in your arena and feel that you can be trusted to support them and ensure their growth and satisfaction using your offering(s).

According to Forbes, blogging is a great way to building that trust:

The fact is that in the world of today you cannot become an authority simply by declaring yourself as one. Customers are more suspicious, and they want to see you prove it. By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure that you can become that authority.

Prospects and leads are more likely to engage with brands and organizations once you can establish yourself as an indisputable authority in their minds, leading to more lead conversion rates.

Integrate your CRM with a marketing automation platform

A majority of sales reps today use easy to use CRM software solutions to move leads and prospective opportunities through the sales pipeline and close deals.
If you know what is CRM software, you must be aware that CRM is a robust application that stores a plethora of information about all your leads, and customers in the CRM database, which includes details like demographic and behavioral data.

Therefore, when you use marketing automation, which is also known as sales force automation in tandem with your easy to use CRM , you can without any hassles leverage that contact details to customize and target the messages that you need to send to your prospects.

Using Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub and others, you can personalize your lead nurturing process and send messages based on your prospects’ past buying behaviors, interests, and more.

Since, doing this allows you to send more personalized outreach. Which in turn helps in better engaging prospects that enhances the likelihood of conversion.

Set up lead scoring to qualify leads

Lead scoring techniques help your marketing teams to identify the most sales-ready leads in your CRM database.

While scoring leads, you can use a point system that indicates the value a lead represents, by awarding points to leads for actions they take, like clicking or opening emails, visiting your website, downloading eBooks, participating in post-sales surveys, etc.
You can also award points to your leads for demographic data such as the place they reside, their job titles, the industry they work, etc.

As these scores accumulate over time, you set a score threshold, at which a lead may be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), which once they cross can be passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Remember, while you are setting up your lead scoring system, always include your sales teams in the process, since they can better decide along with your marketing teams, which action warrants which score, and at which a new lead can be considered as an MQL.

Moreover, it is also highly advisable that you must check your lead scoring practice at least once every quarter, for finding whether the leads are being qualified too soon or too late in the process. Since, if your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to your sales teams, but very few of them are getting converted, odds are that your marketing executives are qualifying the leads too soon, and hence you must increase your MQL threshold to fine tune your lead scoring process.

Simply put lead scoring improves the quality of your leads in your easy to use CRM, which helps in achieving a better conversion rate for your organization.

Run lead nurturing and lead generation campaigns

It is a common fact, that to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. There are several ways you can generate new leads, from email drip campaigning to social media programs.

Now, once you have generated new leads, you need to nurture them through the sales pipeline that must consist of a series of ‘touch points’ to move them towards a sale.

Lead nurturing aids in identifying sale ready leads using lead scoring, since each action your leads take can be scored to move the leads closer to conversion.

As an add-on, here is a link to the CONVERGEHUB LEAD GENERATOR, which is a free tool that lets you visit anyone’s social media page (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp etc.) and capture all information instantly without any manual typing.

Using this free tool you can save qualified leads from social media, other sites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse. It even lets you create notes and follow up tasks to get a head start with that lead.

You can save the captured leads in the Lead Generator itself or save them in the ConvergeHub CRM for even more sales power.

Set up killer landing pages with optimized CTA buttons

As the leads move through your sales pipeline, you need ways to capture more of their information by increasing their engagement with your brand.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to create simple, yet attractive landing pages that will encourage your leads to take a desired action, like request a demo, register for a webinar, etc.

Make it painfully clear to your leads, and visitors viewing your landing page, which action you want them to take, how they can take it, and most importantly what will they receive in exchange.

If you are not sure how to create awesome landing pages, it is best to check out some examples from your competitor’s websites.

Share on social media and use social monitoring to find brand advocates

It is easy to engage your known leads with multichannel campaigns and email marketing.
However, what can you do about those leads whose contact data you do not have in your CRM database?

Therefore, when you create blogs and other types of contents around your brand, share them on social media, so that people may share it, which in turn will extend the reach of your brand and drive in more new leads to click through to your blog or website.

Since, once people do that, you will understand that the engagement has begun, as these will be leads that are genuinely interested in your offerings, and are so easier to qualify and convert into customers.

Remember to always include some type of offer in association with your contents that you are sharing to capture the contacts of these new leads.

While sharing your contents in social media platforms, if you find people speaking positively about your brand, reach out, start a dialogue, and show your appreciation. You may even ask them if they want to feature in an interview or a case study of your brand.

In other words, treat these people with care and respect in any possible ways, because they are potential brand advocates for your business, who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and also help to increase conversion rates.

Here are two statistics that illustrates the role that brand advocate can play for the growing your business.

92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)
Only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)

Enable sales to quickly follow up on qualified leads

According to a survey done by InsideSales, it states that:

Your odds of reaching a new sales lead drop over 10 times if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of [sales] qualifying that lead decrease six times after the first 60 minutes.

Therefore, you need to enable your sales teams for immediate follow up, once a lead is qualified, since the longer you wait to reach out to a qualified lead, the lesser the chances of conversion will be along with the passage of time.

Using a Best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is capable of creating reminders and automating tasks it is easy to send alerts to sales reps the moment a new lead becomes qualified, to ensure that your sales teams do not let MQLs fall through the crack.

Key Takeaway

Lead conversion is the bread and butter of your business since it is a process that allows your business to grow, by bringing dollars into the coffers in your organization.

Nevertheless, as you can see, lead conversion does not happen on its own, as it requires serious planning and execution of various tactics to increase the lead conversion rate.

Therefore, always measure your lead conversion ratio, by keeping a scorecard that can help you track this metric so that you can easily identify what is working and what is not, and let you fix the nonperforming issues and focus more energy on conversion tactics that are producing results.

The math is simple. When you increase engagement levels, you boost conversion rates, and revenue climbs.

Do you have any tips for increasing your lead conversion rate? Let us know in the comments section below!

Time-Tested Steps For Finding Accurate And Quality Data In Your CRM Database

Your easy to use CRM database is home to some of your businesses’ most important and valuable information, like selective information about your leads, customers, prospects. The information stored in a CRM database is invaluable for your company’s marketing, sales, and customer support teams- but only and if only it is of high quality and is up to date. According to a research done by Gartner in 2018, it was found that: More than 25% of information and data within a given organization is likely flawed. Therefore, what are these vital things you can do to help clean and improve the performance of your CRM database?

Your easy to use CRM database is home to some of your businesses’ most important and valuable information, like selective information about your leads, customers, prospects.

The information stored in a CRM database is invaluable for your company’s marketing, sales,and customer support teams- but only and if only it is of high quality and is up to date.

According to a research done by Gartner in 2018, it was found that:
More than 25% of information and data within a given organization is likely flawed.

It is a known fact that most employees in any organization across the globe probably do not particularly cherish entering data and even reflects on it as a total waste of time, but inputting data (and the entire data) into your CRM database upfront will definitely help to save resources and time in the future days to come.

64.2% of companies rate CRM tools as impactful or very impactful- LinkedIn (2018) Click To Tweet

Therefore, what are these vital things you can do to help clean and improve the performance of your CRM database?

Input your data in real-time (or as close to it as possible)

Never let your employees wait until the end of the day to log information and interactions that they had with their customers and prospects. This is because, it is absolutely normal for many people to overlook and not remember things, and so it is only by entering information in real-time, can stop the potential threat of leaving out valuable information on the table.
Since, with the growth in mobile CRM technology, your employees nowadays can even feed in data into the CRM database on the go.

Remove duplicate records

Finding multiple records for the same contact can not only distort important information, but it can also easily cause inconvenience for salespersons and customers alike. Therefore, to stop this error, try to identify duplicate data and merge them, and thereby create one single record for each customer.
Performing this exercise will help ensure the insights that you have gathered inside your easy to use CRM software platform’s database are accurate and effective.

Missing data? Add it!

Be sure that you always remember to include complete data in your CRM platform. Therefore, fill in all the fields in your easy to use CRM solution without leaving behind any information about your leads, customers, and prospects.
Since, once you are lacking information, the efficiency of your CRM data will instantly become less important and valuable to your employees and your visibility into your leads and customer’s profiles will also become blurred and incomplete.
Therefore, if you are using lead capture forms for sustaining your marketing efforts, be sure to collect all the information that you need to fill into your CRM database.

Keep CRM data up-to-date

Once more we reiterate, this is absolutely critical for optimal performance of any easy to use CRM platform. Since, outdated data in the CRM database can cost sales, marketing, and a support person’s time and at times even a sale.
It is a natural phenomenon that individuals and businesses often relocate or alter their contact information, which can make the data stored in your CRM database inaccurate.

Therefore, it is always a good idea to continuously monitor and update your CRM database with the most up to date information you have for the growth of your businesses’ sales and revenue.

Now if you would like to strategize your business growth in 2019, we have opened up a few 1-on-1 Rocket Launch Sessions where we will:

– Take a deep-dive into your business process

– Pinpoint areas with most growth potential

– Discuss how to implement a system that lets you focus on the most important tasks

See what Rocket Launch Session can do for you!

On this 30-45 minute call, we’ll discuss your business goals, what’s currently NOT working and then help you craft a comprehensive plan to get more customers into your business as quickly as possible.

So why wait, limited slots are still available, sign up now! What have you got to lose?

The Importance Of A Clean CRM Database To A Successful Sales Team

Regardless of what industry you are in, growing your business to new heights can really be a challenging up-hill job. In any business, its sales teams achieve success for a number of reasons, and so it is often tough to exactly pinpoint why one business or a sales team is more successful than another. Nevertheless, there are in general two important factors that most thriving sales teams employ for success and growth of their businesses- the right easy to use CRM software and proper data management of their CRM database.

Regardless of what industry you are in, growing your business to new heights can really be a challenging up-hill job.
In any business, its sales teams achieve success for a number of reasons, and so it is often tough to exactly pinpoint why one business or a sales team is more successful than another.
Nevertheless, there are in general two important factors that most thriving sales teams employ for success and growth of their businesses- the right easy to use CRM software and proper data management of their CRM database.

Why?

This is because to move ahead in this modern competitive marketplace, businesses need to have the right people and essentially the right tools to work hand in hand.

ConvergeHub's ROCKET LAUNCH 2019 can help you acquire leads, automate your sales process, improve your conversion and get more referrals from satisfied customers. Click To Tweet

Therefore, when businesses use the data utilized by their sales teams on a day-to-day basis (which includes actions taken by the sales teams to turn prospective leads into customers) and input that data into the CRM database, it creates a potent business model that provides any business an edge over its competitions.

After all, there is simply no point in adopting a robust and easy to use CRM software , if you cannot use it to its full advantage- manage all your businesses’ data, and streamline the sales process for your marketing and sales teams.

Since, proper and effective CRM data management in combination with an intelligent and intuitive CRM software not only escalates your businesses’ marketing, sales, and customer relationships, but it also keep your sales teams working efficiently, which in turn boosts revenue growth inevitably.

Reasons you require CRM software to manage data and boost sales

Are you still using pen and paper or a spreadsheet to track your customer’s sales history and not using an easy to use CRM software to manage your customers or track your sales data and business processes?

Do not worry! If your customer data management is still stuck in the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, there is no better time than now for an upgrade.

With incredible CRM software platforms now available like ConvergeHub CRM for small business and others, your business can easily organize and integrate not only all your lead and customer data, but even your entire sales process (from managing leads and prospects to closing deals). In addition, CRM also provide comprehensive data analytics, and customer relationship management that are acceptable to your entire sales, marketing, and support teams.

This means, even if one sales rep in your company picks up where another sales person left off, they can find complete customer communication and interaction history, which in turn makes the customer feel important and valued.
With a small business CRM software platform like ConvergeHub, important information, and data is seamlessly updated across all networks, which allows every person in your organization to stay focused and up-to-date on what that matters the most- THE CUSTOMER.

Inputting your business data in the CRM database in an easy to use CRM software can even free up time spent on analyzing customer data for generating leads, sending follow-up emails, or setting up appointments for your sales teams. Since, these tedious tasks can kill time that takes away critical opportunities for harvesting revenue, away from your sales teams.

Easy to use CRM software when used efficiently acts as the heart of your organization and helps your sales teams to streamline data and sales processes. By managing and tracking all sales and customer-facing interactions, easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub, provides everything that you need to close deals and keep your customers happy at your fingertips, which is the true driving force behind any successful business.

By organizing your customer data in the CRM database into helpful categories like Customers, Lost deals, Influencers, Potential partners, and many more, an easy to use CRM platform ensures that your sales reps never fail to meet the requirements of every person that contributes to the growth of your business.

Beyond this, CRM software also offers robust analytical tools that can help your organization to make strategic sales, and budget decisions, by viewing wins-losses, rep performances, and analyzing gaps in your sales processes.

Therefore, what does all this ultimately means?

The answer is- Happier customers, happy sales teams, and therefore, more sales and revenue.

THE TIME TO GET ORGANIZED- IS NOW!

According to a research conducted by a reputed global agency in 2017, it was shocking to find that an astounding 40% of businesses nationwide do not use any data management software and still rely on spreadsheets to mange leads and opportunities, before turning to more often than not cloud based CRM software platforms.

Therefore, by now we guess that must be saying to yourself: “I am in- but how do I get started?”

Well, actually it is all very simple.. So here we go!

STEP #1- SIGN UP

If your small and medium-sized business does not already have an easy to use small business CRM software, it is time to sign up now.

With all the options, that are on-hand these days, you might feel a bit inundated and overwhelmed, but with a little research, you can quickly find which robust small business CRM software, might work best for your business and your sales teams.

STEP# 2- INPUT YOUR DATA INTO YOUR CRM SOFTWARE

Primarily, once you begin, you need to be really careful about how you input your data in the CRM database, so that it matches your sales processes and help you to track your customers exactly as you would like it to do.

Luckily, most easy to use cloud based CRM software like ConvergeHub, comes with systematic, and explicit tutorials that will ensure that all your data is entered in the most appropriate ways, which can efficiently help you to drive your sales teams, and keep them organized.

All best sales CRM software solutions out there offers features to manage all your customer data in the CRM database, through the sales process, including:

Leads
Campaigns
Products
Pricing
Opportunities
Invoicing and Quotes

In all fairness, while even an easy to use CRM software is incredibly useful for businesses, nevertheless, it is not a perfect system.
Hence, inputting data in the CRM database, may initially have some pushback from your sales reps and make them feel that their time could have been more profitably spent making sales (and not inputting data), but in this case, remind your team that ensuring input of quality data in the software is vital for long-term success of any sales team.

STEP#3- OBSERVE YOUR BUSINESS GROW

Once your sales and customer data in the CRM database is organized and is used efficiently, you can expect to see a flourish in the growth of your sales revenue and hence your sales teams will finally find time to focus on their customers- which is the “numero uno” method for improving sales and profitability.

Remember, in today’s competitive marketplace, adopting an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub for growing sales and getting your customer data organized is no longer an option, but an absolute necessity for taking your business to the next level of success.

Is your business stuck with mediocre or no growth?

See how ConvergeHub can skyrocket your revenue growth in 2019 and beyond.

Just click here to schedule a 30-minute ROCKET LAUNCH Session to scale your business to next level.

Here is what ConvergeHub can do for your businesses:

- Acquire leads through structured marketing campaigns
- Build your own sales process to follow up and nurture leads
- Drive sales with efficient sales automation
- Turn your customers into raving fans through efficient customer support
- Grow revenue through single click Quotes and Invoices
- Get 360-degree customer view to provide highest customer satisfaction
- Multichannel touch points in real time with all prospects and customers
- Automate your workflow to increase team productivity

Why You Just Cannot Make Up For Churn With Upsells

Optimizing the customers’ experience around your brand is a great way to find new customers, and the best way to foster customer loyalty. Nevertheless, still now, neglecting the customers before and after the sale is the biggest barrier in addressing this issue, which usually happens due to a lack of deep understanding of the customers. Therefore, it is important that you have the right systems in place, an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub, for a comprehensive understanding of your customers, which is required to achieve your business goals, be it trying to create more engaging contents, optimize your customers’ experience, or increase sales. CRM is a software that helps in leveraging both qualitative and quantitative data by collecting and storing customer-facing information in the CRM database, which helps you to better understand your customer’s mindsets that are needed in order to get you started.

Today we are going to unveil one of the greatest (and yet least spoken about) misconceptions around parameters like customer success- which illustrates why you cannot successfully offset customer churn with upsells.

ConvergeHub's ROCKET LAUNCH 2019 can help you acquire leads, automate your sales process, improve your conversion and get more referrals from satisfied customers. Click To Tweet

Here is the basic math:

Now, let us consider if your business loses $ X when one of the customers cancels their service that you offer, (or decides to remain but pays you less because of downsells or discounts), you need to replace that $ X before your business can start to grow.
There are two main ways you can offset churn revenue:
1. By acquiring new customers for your services
2. Making your existing customers pay more by expanding their relationship with your brand

However, as many businesses have found that the first suggested method (acquiring new customers) is often a losing or a difficult proposition for it creates a longer payback period for CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), it is the second suggested method (making your existing customer buy more) solves your problem.

Right? No, it is not!

Since Customer Success thought leaders like Lincoln Murphy and other similar professionals that we have in Team- ConvergeHub Rocket Launch 2019, believes that using existing customer to offset churn does not work either, so here is their well-reasoned argument:

The expansion is part of the customer’s success

Upselling and cross-selling only happens because a customer is satisfied with your products and services. Therefore, account expansion is a part of a customer’s growth towards success. However, if churn is what that happens when a customer is resentful towards your services and offerings, then expansion is not achievable when the growth of the customer is unsuccessful.

As Lincoln Murphy clearly states:

You can’t use upsells to offset churn because churn is caused by the very thing that prevents upsells from happening.

Hence, if you anticipate your Customer Success to be just more than making customers happy- which implies you expect your Customer Success as a Growth Engine element through up-sell and cross-sell, you must at any cost have a baseline focus on your customer’s success plans.

Offsetting is NOT growth

According to our Team- ConvergeHub Rocket Launch 2019, a critical metric to track in your Customer Success strategy is your NNR (Net Revenue Retention), which is the revenue that stays at the end of a timeline, net of any up-sell and churn.
Therefore, if your NNR is lesser than 100%, it clearly states that your business is shrinking.
Nevertheless, the paradox is, an NNR of 100% also does not necessarily mean that your business is growing, as it only implies your business is stagnant and to quote Murphy:

If that status quo is due to expansion ‘offsetting’ revenue churn just to break even, that’s likely a really bad sign.

Hence, it is advisable that your business should always have an NNR that is greater than 100 percent, which only indicates that you are making more from revenue expansion than any churn.

Then again, although this might seem like an appreciable thing for your business, even then it is not, the reason is what is being explained below.

Math and reality are different

As we said earlier that you just cannot use up-sell to offset churn since churn is caused by everything that hinders up-sells from happening, which Murphy explains:

If you are acquiring customers without Success Potential and/or not doing what is necessary to ensure your customers that have Success Potential are unlocking such potential, then you are not creating the conditions necessary for expansion. You’ve created – by choice or by accident – an environment and experience that are not congruent with the customer’s success; so how can you realistically expect enough customers to buy more or invite you into other parts of their company to offset the damage that’s being done by the customers you’ve failed?

While we can find exceptions with invariable edge-cases of businesses that have managed to offset their customer churn with up-sells, but in most cases, the reality is, this is not going to work, as according to Lincoln Murphy:

You simply cannot achieve the revenue expansion necessary to offset revenue churn – in a scalable, repeatable way – when you’re not working to ensure your customers are successful since expansion is PART of the customer’s success.

Therefore, the action that you need to take is what follows below.

Focus on avoiding churn

While it may seem to be a reasonable argument that churn need not be present, several businesses have even accepted the fact that customer churn is a reality, which is how they have developed plans (like up-selling) to offset that churn.
Nevertheless, Murphy advises getting back to the core of the problem and working out ways to reduce and eliminate it, as he states:

When you don’t have churn, you don’t have to offset the lost revenue; all of your expansion revenue just adds to the top line and improves your margins. It’s true that it costs less to get revenue from existing customers than from net new customers, but this only works if you create the conditions for Customer Success. And ultimately, this focus on the customer’s success directly increases the value of your company.

Customer Success Tips Around The Web

Skills to help you truly know your customers

Optimizing the customers’ experience around your brand is a great way to find new customers, and the best way to foster customer loyalty.
Nevertheless, still now, neglecting the customers before and after the sale is the biggest barrier in addressing this issue, which usually happens due to a lack of deep understanding of the customers.
Therefore, it is important that you have the right systems in place, an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub, for a comprehensive understanding of your customers, which is required to achieve your business goals, be it trying to create more engaging contents, optimize your customers’ experience, or increase sales.
CRM is a software that helps in leveraging both qualitative and quantitative data by collecting and storing customer-facing information in the CRM database , which helps you to better understand your customer’s mindsets that are needed in order to get you started.

Avoid Customer Success being stuck in a vacuum

Your customer success team can never succeed if it is stuck in a vacuum. Therefore, to add a strong relationship with key stakeholders, and customers, and to dish-out your immediate wins here are certain elements you must ponder for the success of your organization:

Ideas for quick wins:

Do you have a company-wide meeting?
-Let your Customer Success Manager present great customer conversations, both positive and negative, that they have had and the learning that resulted from such discussions.
Do you have a company-wide newsletter?
-Let your Customer Success Manager write up a customer spotlight piece or a summary of the feedback they have received.
Do you have sales meetings?
-Let your Customer Success Manager be an active participant in the meetings with your Sales Teams.
(Our CSM at ConvergeHub attends once a week and we have found it to be very beneficial).

Word to the Wise

Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level and reduce churn, and looking for a software platform that can help you do that?

If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

Hence, sign up for a FREE 30-minute Rocket Launch session with us, and take the first step towards creating massive growth for your company in 2019.

During the Rocket Launch session, Team- ConvergeHub Rocket Launch 2019 will do a deep dive into your business along with you, and brainstorm how ConvergeHub can help you acquire leads, automate your sales process, improve your conversion, reduce churn, and get more referrals from satisfied customers.

So why wait- Sign up now! Limited slots are still available. What do you have to lose?

Key Features That You Need In Your Best Small Businesses CRM Software

When it comes to the best small business CRM software, every organization requires different features. However, in general, there are a set of key features that all small and medium-sized businesses, should make sure to include in their CRM that will work for now and also in the future days to come. Since the very last thing you want to have to deal with as an owner of a small business is a messy integration into a different system. Now, that being said what are the core features that all small businesses need to have in their CRM platforms? The core features, which all small business need in their easy to use CRM platforms are as follows.

In 2018, 87% of the businesses are estimated to use cloud-based CRM, while a mere 13% are pegged to use on-premise CRM. Click To Tweet

Now, that being said, what are the core features that all small businesses need to have in their CRM platforms?

The core features, which all small business need in their easy to use CRM platforms:

Lead Management and Sales

The purpose of purchasing CRM software, not just for small and medium-sized businesses, but even for larger organizations, is to manage their sales processes and build efficiencies in their customer-facing areas.
You will be hard pressed to buy a small business CRM software that does not include some sort of contact management and sales functionalities since CRM is a software that is specifically designed to do so.
We as an award-winning vendor of small business CRM platform would recommend you to look for an easy to use CRM solution like ConvergeHub that has a robust lead and sales management functionalities that permit your teams to track leads and contacts by creating automated and customized campaigns, which will allow you to more easily scale-up your business.
We also as the creator of ConvergeHub know that the last thing any small business owner wants to implement is a CRM that meets the features they need now but does not have the required capabilities to grow with their business.

Therefore, primarily, sales pipeline management is an absolute “must have” feature for all best small businesses CRM software platforms.

Flexibility and Integration Capabilities

Saying that one of the core features that all CRM needs is flexibility may sound a little vague in the first place; however, it is an absolute must for the growth of any small business.
This is true, as when your business grows, you may not have any idea what are the new software platforms that you need to include for the convenience of your business.
Per say, one day you may choose to use a CRM based on its integration capabilities with your present tele-calling software RingCentral and then maybe you make a switch to NexInteractive predictive dialing software later on. Now if you do not choose a CRM system for your growing organization that features the ability to integrate with different software applications, and is easily customizable to support your teams, your business will suffer and so would your growth.

Therefore, purchasing best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, which seamlessly integrates with more than 30 business applications, including most popular integrations like Zapier and QuickBooks, is absolutely critical for supporting your sales, marketing, customer support, and accounting teams.

Project Management

Gone are those days when every different business needed a different point of solution to solve their different pain points. Times have changed and so has technology.
Therefore, now the world of CRM has grown so much that you can find a plethora of features out there- which is again just another critical factor what makes it so difficult to choose a CRM system.

As a cloud based CRM vendor recognized and recommended by many, project management is one of these new features that we shall recommend for all small and medium-sized businesses.
Why?

This is because, in a growing business landscape, most small businesses establishments have different facets of businesses and project management functionality. Small business CRM software, helps the employees to keep track of their active projects and tasks, and provides a detailed workflow of their projects for their customers, which includes taking care of multiple resources, costs, and milestones.

Mobile Support

When it comes to startups, and small and medium-sized businesses, we all know that the job does never stop just because you stepped out of your office. Practically, SMB employees and owners in most cases works round the clock, doing anything and everything to make their business grow.
This is the reason for having a cloud based mobile CRM for small business like ConvergeHub (now more than ever) is crucial for any growth-oriented small organization.

Being able to log projects, access prospect data from the CRM database, send messages, and track all customer data, anytime from anywhere, is, therefore, a must for all best small business CRM software, which can be only be done with seamless mobile support.

Invoicing and Order Management

This may seem like a new recommendation for many, but as a small business entrepreneur, you are always going to have to sell your products or services- right?

Well, how much do you assume that your life will be easier if your sales teams can quickly create invoices and quotes and track client billing from a single system?

Having this functionality as a part of your best small business CRM software means that when your sales and customer support executives can look up your customer’s account details, they can easily see an entire history of the customer’s billing and also track the customer lifetime value. Doing this can make your teams aware of how much value each of your customers may bring in a lifetime, which in turn increase their potentiality to up-sell or cross-sell based on the history of the offerings that your customers have purchased in the past.

Order management and invoicing are not common features you will find in most of the outdated CRMs, but it is a feature that modern-day CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub include in its software, and so it is also known as QuickBooks CRM.
ConvergeHub the best small business CRM software allows QuickBooks CRM integration free and is therefore considered as the best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

Conclusion

So do you need all these 5 Features in your CRM for SMB?

Well, the answer is ‘Yes’.

This is because, in today’s working environment, all these 5 features are an absolute must if you want to run your business as efficiently as possible to cut the cost associated with running multiple software systems for the growth of your business.

This cost factor we mentioned above, not only includes paying for multiple products, but also the time-cost that is associated with the time wasted in entering and tracking data in multiple platforms, which even forebodes the fear of creating duplicate and erroneous data entries.

Using a CRM like ConvergeHub that provides a low cost entry point and also a free trial for 14 days not only allows you to see how we would fit within your business processes, but we the best CRM for small business, fits with your existing workflow and enhance them as your business grows in the days to come.

Avoid CRM Disasters With This Ultimate Easy To Use CRM Checklist

Did you just invest a few thousand dollars in purchasing a brand new easy to use CRM software system, only to find that it does not solve the pain points and aches that are holding your business back? Well if it is so, we can assure that you are not alone. This has happened several times to many businesses big and small- nevertheless, it does not have to be so all the time. Read to know why does even easy to use CRM implementations Fail?

Did you just invest a few thousand dollars in purchasing a brand new easy to use CRM software system, only to find that it does not solve the pain points and aches that are holding your business back?
Well if it is so, we can assure that you are not alone.
This has happened several times to many businesses big and small- nevertheless, it does not have to be so all the time.

Less than 40% of businesses have a CRM adoption rate over 90%- CSO Insights Click To Tweet

Why Does Even Easy To Use CRM Implementations Fail?

So many features, but not the right ones

It may be a flashy interface, new gamification features, and a lot more functionalities that you never knew you wanted, but does not actually offer the features you need on a regular basis to run your business.
Therefore, while choosing your easy to use CRM software , you need to work with a plan.
Find out what are the business problems you are planning to solve, know your goals, and always make sure that they are measurable, before choosing your easy to use CRM system that can address to those unique pain points and needs.

The pricing of the software is eating into your profits

You have chosen an easy to use CRM software, that exceeds what your organization can afford. Therefore, while the benefits of using a CRM solution for your business can always increase your sales. However, it takes a longer time to build up those crucial customer relationships. Therefore, an easy to use but at the same instance, expensive CRM software can bring your business to a halt even before your sales start rolling in and eat away your profits.

Promising the world

If you know what is CRM , always remember that this is a CRM system, which is just a tool and can never be a magic pill. Successful easy to use CRM implementations depends a lot on your employee’s eagerness to learn how to use the CRM software, keep all the records up to data in the CRM database, and your every employee’s commitment towards this customer-centric approach to the business.
Hence, set reasonable goals, and thereafter work with determination to exceed them. This will not only keep your team’s morale high but also help your business to grow at a steady pace.

Too quickly too much change

After investing money and time on an easy to use CRM implementation, some entrepreneurs may get tempted to discard that their employees were using beforehand and push the employees to use the new CRM system. Nevertheless, whatever that you do, always understand that too much change in a small span of time can leave your team confused, and thereby make your customer service suffer the dire consequences.

Therefore, start rolling out the new features in your just purchased CRM system that makes it easier and more satisfying for your employees to do their jobs. Replace gruesome, routine tasks and manual workarounds with system automation and you can be sure your employees will start using the new software more quickly. Many easy to use CRM systems like ConvergeHub also includes a series of integrations , so that your old business software solutions like Gmail, DocuSign, MailChimp, DropBox, Ring Central, and others can seamlessly connect to the new system, which makes it easier to work for your staffs, making the CRM implementation more successful for your company.

Not everyone is present on board

Finally, CRM is not just a tool but also a business strategy, and so like any other business strategy to work, everyone in your organization has to follow a singular goal. Per se, executives in your company and the users of the easy to use CRM software must willingly remain on board to learn and use the new customer relationship management software.
This factor in successful CRM implementation is absolutely necessary as it helps in creating a lot of less friction if everyone in an organization agrees to use the new CRM software in the first place.

Conclusion

Now that you are aware of what not to do, let us make your easy to use CRM implementation a success, as here at ConvergeHub, we have mined and worked with myriads of inquiries, customer data, and surveys to offer you with the most comprehensive Converged CRM system, and the CRM requirement checklist.
This is because of the fact- we are aware that the devil lurks in the details of implementation of the easy to use CRM software platform.

Ways A MCA CRM Can Help You Reach Your Business Goals

GOALS- are an essential element that every business be it big or small must have, as aptly quoted by Tony Robbins: “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” This is because, without goals, businesses will never be able to achieve new heights, or rather to say remain comfortably numbed with whatever happens around them. It is nice to sing “Hakuna Matata” in your daily life, but when it comes to business, not worrying about achieving new levels in sales and customer support can burn your entrepreneurial endeavors to the ground. So how can an MCA CRM help you reach your Merchant Cash Advance business goals?

GOALS- are an essential element that every business be it big or small must have, as aptly quoted by Tony Robbins:

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.

This is because, without goals, businesses will never be able to achieve new heights, or rather to say remain comfortably numbed with whatever happens around them.

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.- Tony Robbins Click To Tweet

It is nice to sing “Hakuna Matata” in your daily life, but when it comes to business, not worrying about achieving new levels in sales and customer support can burn your entrepreneurial endeavors to the ground.

So how can an MCA CRM help you reach your Merchant Cash Advance business goals?

Ways Merchant Cash Advance CRM Software Can Help You Reach Your MCA Business Goals:

MCA CRM Improves Customer Retention

If you know what is CRM, we have discussed even before in greater details how an easy to use CRM software can enhance your in-house customer support, but at a higher level, a Merchant Cash Advance software can also help you to reach your customer retention goals.

Per say, using your MCA CRM software you can easily track all your customer satisfaction metrics and conjure sales promotional activities that can uncover new, and recurring revenues.

Leveraging features like activity history of the customers, taking notes, and using case management functionalities in an MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub allows your employees to monitor the conversation that your marketing, sales, and support teams have had with your existing customers. That in turn makes it simple for your alternative funding organization to provide apt solutions and promotions to increase the level of satisfaction for your customers.

Always remember, it is at least 50% more easier to sell to existing customers than selling your services to new prospects and that 80% of your future profits in your alternative funding MCA business come from your existing customers. Therefore, leveraging your Merchant Cash Advance CRM to reach your existing customer is a must for the growth of your business.

Create Better Marketing Campaigns

Based on Top Marketing Automation Trends published by Software Advice, businesses that have already understood the impact, which a CRM for small business does for sales and marketing has leveraged lead scoring and lead segmentation features to create groups of customer targets to perk up the quality and reach of their marketing campaigns.

It is a common statement that easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub helps business to reach their goals by providing organizations with deeper insights into their leads, prospect, and customers.

More specifically MCA CRM software in alternative funding businesses provides your MCA firm to look at your opportunity pipelines so that you can very easily correlate each of the opportunities in your sales funnels to a specific marketing campaign.

This marketing automation functions in a CRM lets your employees quickly view which are the campaigns that are likely to result into opportunities and ultimately sales of your alternative funding services.

Therefore, using an MCA CRM like ConvergeHub, fine-tune your marketing campaigns in a manner that provides the opportunities to escalate your company’s goals and its bottom line.

Increase Lead Quality

As you can easily reach your business goals using an MCA CRM software in Merchant Cash Advance businesses, you should instruct your marketing and sales managers to create pragmatic objectives to increase lead quality for higher sales. ConvergeHub CRM helps to score leads and determine which actions and strategies are most pertinent to lead to a sale. Using the CRM database for enhancing customer and lead information you can conveniently fast-track leads through the sales pipeline to help your managers more efficiently reach their predicted sales.

Make your Business more Efficient

Your Merchant Cash Advance software can easily improve your efficiency to hit on goals by developing a better workflow for all your customer-facing processes. ConvergeHub MCA CRM software not only helps you with process workflow, but it even increases process efficiency and time management skills of your employees. Using an easy to use CRM software your team will be able to invest more time on value-added activities and thereby spend less time making communication blunders and loose information while making manual data entries in the software.

Improve Sales Pipeline

Improving your alternative funding businesses’ sales pipeline through your MCA CRM software is a simple way to help you reach your goals.
In other words, plainly speaking, your company needs to reach its revenue goals and your Merchant Cash Advance CRM help you to reach it quickly.

Your sales pipeline gets a considerable boost from an array of areas, although it is a bit way around to include other sections in this list, nevertheless, improving the quality of your leads directly helps to enhance your sales pipeline, improve the quality of your marketing campaigns, and thereby improve your business workflow.
In addition to this, MCA CRM software also lets you segment lists by industries that help your sales teams to focus their outbound efforts on specific niche industries seeking alternative funding resources.

Conclusion

If you know what is CRM, then you must be aware of the fact that a CRM is more than just a piece of software. It is a tool that helps your business to reach its perceived goals, regardless of whether your primary objectives are improving sales, retaining your customers, increase inbound leads, or just reduce wasted time.

Therefore, to conclude, an MCA CRM is your always a silver bullet if you are in the Merchant Cash Advance business, which helps you to manage your entire operation, right from marketing and sales to customer support and project management by placing all of the pieces you need in a single platform to achieve your goals.

Why SMBs Have Embraced Cloud Based Easy to Use CRM Platforms

For all business organizations, especially small and medium-sized businesses and startups growth is indispensable to meet up competition in the market. SMBs also have another factor; they mostly have a tight budget and a quick time frame for making their brand make a mark in the business world. As growth with a limited budget can be a hard task for any small organization, however, small and medium businesses are discovering Cloud based easy to use CRM platforms nowadays, which is making it easier for them to achieve this feat. Also popularly known as Software as a Service (SaaS), On Demand, or Cloud based CRM, it simply means that your information and data is stored in the Cloud, instead of, in your own server as in On-Premise CRM systems.

For all business organizations, especially small and medium-sized businesses and startups growth is indispensable to meet up competition in the market.
SMBs also have another factor; they mostly have a tight budget and a quick time frame for making their brand make a mark in the business world.
Growth with a limited budget can be a hard task for any small organization, however, small and medium businesses are discovering Cloud based easy to use CRM platforms nowadays, which is making it easier for them to achieve this feat.

In 2018, 87% of the businesses are estimated to use cloud-based CRM, while a mere 13% are pegged to use on-premise CRM. Click To Tweet

Also popularly known as Software as a Service (SaaS), On Demand, or Cloud based CRM, it simply means that your information and data is stored in the Cloud, instead of, in your own server as in On-Premise CRM systems.

While it may sound very obvious that you would always like to store your data in your own server, but the truth remains that Cloud is actually more secure, requires less maintenance, and you are less likely to lose access to your data once it is uploaded on the Cloud.

According to a recent survey by CBR (Computer Business Review), it is reported that 86% of small and medium businesses found improvement in their business processes since adopting an easy to use CRM software platform that is cloud based. CBR also reported in the same research study that the SMB cloud services markets would escalate by approximately 17% by 2021.

Now if you are curious to know “why”, here are 3 compelling reasons to go for easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub that are built on the Cloud.

It Is Cost Effective

Unlike traditional On-Premise CRM systems, with easy to use CRM solutions that are Cloud based Customer Relationship Management software platforms, you do not need to buy and maintain a private server. Rather in a Cloud based CRM, you can easily access a website that is created for the customers through a hosting service. Additionally, Cloud based CRM systems save time and money during CRM implementation process, as easy to use CRM software platforms, which are Cloud based CRM gets you up and running in few hours, without impeding your daily workflow.

Your Data Is Always Available and Protected

As it was a decade before, when your CRM software lives on your personal server, it becomes solely your responsibility to make sure that your CRM database is consistently backed up, just in case your server may fail one day. Cloud based CRM software like ConvergeHub takes backups of your software’s data, and manages them using Cloud infrastructure that is used for building the easy to use CRM platform.

This way, you never have to worry and fret about how long it has been since you last backed up the data in your easy to use CRM database.

With Cloud based CRM systems even, a power outage also does not mean it is lights out for your business. Word class data centers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) used by ConvergeHub have redundant storage, power, and overflow of seamless internet connectivity all available to maintain your CRM system during the most challenging situations, all the time.

However, if your CRM’s server is On-Premise, it signifies that even a small power outage invariably signifies a loss of all access to your CRM database until power is restored.
Nevertheless, with a Cloud based CRM, since your information is stored in the Cloud, you and your employees can still access the data even during a power outage, from any location that caters to power and internet.

Superior Security

Many small business owners may have an uneasy feeling about keeping their precious and sensitive customer data in the Cloud, remembering frequent headlines we often hear about hacking and data breaches. However, with Cloud based CRM software platforms, your data always remains in the hands of professionals. Cloud providers like AWS, MS Azure, and others provide their employs with state-of-the-art security measures so that they can obtain and keep their customers happy.

Any small business owner using an On-Premise CRM software can rarely afford such extravagant measures, and so users of Cloud based software platforms get enterprise-level security for their SMB with the Cloud.

In fact, Cloud companies and data centers also invest millions of dollars in professional security services to monitor and guard their servers 24 hours a day.

Moreover, user sessions with Cloud are also fully SSL encrypted, which helps in establishing highly secured end-to-end connections between the server and the points of use.

Conclusion

Therefore, although it completely depends on the needs of your business whether you choose Cloud or On-Premise CRM software for your company, Cloud based easy to use CRM software solutions indisputably have several benefits over On-Premise CRM software, which makes SMBs embrace CRM(s) like ConvergeHub, which is an award-winning Cloud based easy to use CRM platform.

If you are new to ConvergeHub, the best CRM for SMB, click on the link below for a 14-day trial of the software.

CRM Database and Blockchain: A Perfect Combination for You and Your Customers

Do you still believe that Blockchain technology starts and ends with Bit-coins? If it is so, then you must not have been paying attention in the way this technological marvel is rapidly gaining importance in the IT world, and it is very likely that this technology will get even bigger in the times to come. This is because Blockchain has opened up a completely new range of possibilities and has revolutionized how the present business processes and technologies work. As a matter of fact, Blockchain technology has the possibility to develop as one of the most technologically superior constructive tools for uniting and securing the CRM database in the coming years.

This is because Blockchain has opened up a completely new range of possibilities and has revolutionized how the present business processes and technologies work.

As a matter of fact, Blockchain technology has the possibility to develop as one of the most technologically superior constructive tools for uniting and securing the CRM database in the coming years.

Therefore, in this article let us find out how Blockchain and easy to use CRM software may be just what you require to bring up your business to the next level.

To ensure a successful Blockchain project, focus on the business problem, not the technology solution- Gartner Click To Tweet

Blockchain means improved security of the CRM Database

As the name “Blockchain” suggests, this technological wonder is nothing but a chain of blocks. Each of the blocks holds transactional records and stays connected to the blocks, which both precedes and follows the chain. In general, these blocks in a Blockchain remains cryptographically secured in a manner that the users of this technology are able to gain access to the chain if they have the access to the network keys that stands as a guard, for eliminating the possibilities of unauthorized entries.

In addition, thinking about how most of the CRM Database is hosted on the Cloud servers, security of the data in the Cloud remains a prevalent concern for many.
Of course, in the present times the Cloud protection protocols have been enhanced considerably, but all Cloud based CRM software platforms have an inherent solitary point of failure by virtue of being essentially centralized, and therefore, it could be wrong for a company to take unnecessary risk of sharing their critical data with CRM vendors of lesser market reputes.
This is exactly where coupling Blockchain technology and CRM Database of an online lead management system is the solution that comes into play.

Contrary to the Cloud systems, Blockchain(s) remains decentralized and distributed over synchronized P2P networks. Therefore, the chances of tampering the whole Blockchain is virtually impossible, since that would require a gigantic amount of computation power, which consequentially reduces the possibilities of fraud and repudiation to the bare minimum level.

Put an end to CRM Database tracking

Blockchain and easy to use CRM system can perform together to keep your CRM Database useful and clean. Right now, the user of cloud based CRM systems across the globe argue in different levels about the problems faced by users of easy to use CRM in matters of duplication or corruption of their customer information in the CRM Database.

Blockchain technology when coupled with CRM offers a unique solution to this ever-persisting data corruption problem by enabling customers to own a single block. Hence, this process offers a unified and accurate image of a user’s (lead, prospect, or customer) personal details, transaction history, and several other vital data.

Therefore, Blockchain ultimately ends up doing good for both the organization that adopts Cloud based CRM software platforms and the customers.

This inherent structure of Blockchain technology prevents duplication of CRM data or corruption of information from causing problems with the CRM Database. Additionally, once you wipe off all the inaccurate data, you will instantly notice a boost in the speed of your easy to use CRM processes along with greater improvements in customer behavior understanding.

Find the benefit of enhanced transparency

As a decentralized process, Blockchain enables companies to deal with their customer base in a secured and transparent manner, without relying on a financial institution like a bank or third party broker to facilitate the entire process.
Therefore, once you are capable of eliminating these intermediaries, it is imperative that your dealings will speed up and can get your work done more efficiently, while at the same time all your private data will change hands less frequently and you do not have to worry about your information falling into the wrong hands.

Find the advantage of enhanced user privacy control

Security of private data has become one of the most crucial issues in the IT world with more cases of virus, breaches, and malware attacks being recorded each year more than ever before. Therefore, it is not surprising that the modern age CRM systems are expected to address these issues by modifying the way they deal with the private data of their customers.

Thanks to its decentralized and secured nature, Blockchain technology enables the CRM vendors to implement the concept of self-sovereign identity within the organization.

Now, users are able to encrypt and store their personal data and authenticate the same data upon inquisition without having to divulge any details with parties concerned, which is a great boon for easy to use CRM vendors in these trying times of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) data protection norms.

Escape the hassle of lead generation

Users of CRM can harness the power of Blockchain and Machine Learning to figure out, which businesses are most trustworthy in a particular area of interest. In the present times, the existing digital ad-space has its own flaws, and Blockchain is a technology that is capable of changing the way people connect with their brands.

Do you want to know how?

Well, primarily, with the advancement of Blockchain, a single business can no longer control various retail categories, as businesses will have to focus and select their specific search categories.

This implies that targeted marketing will no longer be the central focus and this will impact CRM-based lead generation strategies.

Apart from this, companies will be no longer forced to advertise for leads or purchase new database without the knowledge of where it came from.

Small and medium businesses using easy to use CRM software platforms will also benefit from this system, as they will be able to capture customer attention by earning trust.

Get rid of outdated information with data cleansing

All easy to use CRM users across the world must deal with outdated data at some points of time. Generally, this occurs because of negligence on the part of the users or for using the wrong kind of data importing tools. However, once you implement a Blockchain technology in CRM, you get the privilege of owning your own block that offers the most accurate and unified 360-degree view of your personal information.

Therefore, leveraging Blockchain and CRM technology lets you overcome the problem of storing outdated information, since cleaning out old data, and useless information and keeping an updated CRM Database, improve your customer insights and allows businesses to engage information in the CRM Database in a more effective manner.

Harness the full potential of loyalty programs

The key purpose of loyalty programs is to increase the profits of a business by adding value to the overall customer experience.

However, unfortunately, because of their variable mileage, volatile values, and privacy concerns loyalty programs becomes quite cumbersome for customers and therefore it yields a reducing ROI.

Nevertheless, in a way similar to different crypto-currencies, brands can utilize the Blockchain system to reimage and revitalize the entire loyalty program.

Implementing Blockchain with CRM systems will greatly benefit the customers as it offers a ‘single and decentralized wallet’, which is compatible with various brands. Effectively, the customer takes charge of the experience and companies must contend with one another by providing better deals so they can access their wallets.

The Bottom Line

Hence, in a gist, Blockchain technology will not only change how we approach a CRM system, but this newfound technology also has the potential to fundamentally alter business operation models and keeping in view all that Blockchain is capable of, we believe this claim is a justifiable one.

Practical Guide For Upselling And Cross-Selling With An Effective QuickBooks CRM Software

We all have been sometimes or the other on the receiving end of pushy sale pitches, and hence knows why up-selling and cross-selling often gets a bad rap. However, if it is done effectively, with a robust QuickBooks CRM software both these marketing strategies are actually great weapons to grow your business by leveraging on your brands existing customer base. Therefore, primarily, let us clarify the difference between up-selling and cross-selling before we talk about the great strategies that can make it happen in reality.

We all have been sometimes or the other on the receiving end of pushy sale pitches, and hence know why up-selling and cross-selling often gets a bad rap.
However, if it is done effectively, with a robust QuickBooks CRM software both these marketing strategies are actually great weapons to grow your business by leveraging on your brand’s existing customer base.

Therefore, primarily, let us clarify the difference between up-selling and cross-selling before we talk about the great strategies that can make it happen in reality.

First thing first, Up-selling happens when you encourage and convince an existing customer to buy a more expensive item, version, or an upgrade of their intended purchase. A classic example of up-selling is when someone asks you in a restaurant “Would you prefer potato-chips with that?”
Here up-selling happens as the customer has already purchased one food item and adding fries to the menu just makes it a more delicious and expensive combo.

A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%- Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy Click To Tweet

On the other hand, cross-selling happens when you try to persuade your customer to buy add-on products or services that complement the customer’s initial purchase. For an example, when you purchase a two-wheeler, the seller will encourage you (hopefully) to add a fog-light and a helmet in the interest of the buyer’s safety.

Hence, regardless of whatever that your company sells, the act of selling becomes more effective at up selling, whereas cross-selling aids in generating repeat business and increase your revenue.

Are you now ready to get started?

Then, keep reading or download this PDF to learn how best CRM for QuickBooks online like ConvergeHub makes it easier to achieve these goals.

Always remain transparent about the pricing

While up-selling and cross-selling your products or services, your customers must never feel like they have been tricked into spending more. Therefore, advice your employees using your QuickBooks CRM for sales teams, to be upfront about what the add-on offering(s) will cost before telling the benefits of buying the products or services. Remember customers always appreciate honesty, and so they are more likely to consider the value of your proposed offerings if they are not distracted by unknown numbers.

It is always helpful to present your customers with an estimate that provides a line-by-line pricing break-up of your offerings.

Using QuickBooks CRM software allows your sales executives to create estimates easily directly within the easy to use CRM software, without requiring to wait for someone else to access the QuickBooks.

Bundle related offerings together

Here is the reason why “Would you prefer potato-chips with that?” is so very effective. Prospective customers always love a good deal, and it is typically cheaper to purchase a combo offer, than to buy, their burger first and go back again for potato chips later.

Now, if you find that your customer is debating whether to include an additional item to their purchase, try offering a time-bound discount on the combo offer, which certainly provides an incentive to buy now rather than waiting.

Therefore, if you want to refer to the regular prices of items in your selling list before making the big promises, QuickBooks CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub, allows your representatives to easily view your list of offerings and their usual pricing without leaving the CRM.

Know your customers’ preferences

According to Marketing Metrics, one of the leading market research firms focusing solely on advisor-sold investments and insurance across the world, states, “the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%”.
This happens largely because if you are using an easy to use CRM software, your employees already know who your existing customers are and what they prefer to buy at large.

Therefore, using a best CRM software for QuickBooks like ConvergeHub that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free your employees can track your customer’s past purchases and preferences, which can be thereafter used for identifying up-selling and cross-selling opportunities that are most relevant to their likings.

Using a QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub not only provides a 360-degree picture of a customer’s history with your businesses, but it also provides every single personal detail and past communications with the customers which include notes, phone conversations, their response to your customized email campaigns in a centralized location, before formulating a new sales pitch.

Understand your customers’ journeys

Pay attention to the storyline that led to your customer’s first purchase, Even if you find them busy and focused on eliminating one problem or achieve a goal, they may have also mentioned other pain points that are related to that cause. Therefore, taking note of these long-term plans of your customers opens up opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling, when the customers are ready to take their next big step.

Hence, always encourage your employees to record every single communication with their customer interactions as a mandatory activity and ensure that everyone on your sales, marketing, and customer support teams has an access to the customer information to assist the customers on their journey with your brand.

Conclusion

Hence, up-selling and cross-selling need not always have to be a shady affair, since the key to both these strategic approaches focuses on delivering vales to your customer.

Luckily, a QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub, makes up-selling and cross-selling strategic approaches focused on delivering values to your customers, which consequently increase your revenue.

How Best Sales CRM Software Plays A Vital Role In Building Your Sales Strategy

Best sales CRM software can help your business grow by managing several sales processes, starting with lead scoring to creating long-term customer relationships. In a study done by Aberdeen Group in 2010 revealed that, many of the fastest growing organizations use Customer Relationship Management technology to turn more sales leads into revenue. In the same study, it was also shown that 63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use best sales CRM software technology for their success. Here is how best sales CRM software helps in the growth of your organization.

Best sales CRM software can help your business grow by managing several sales processes, starting with lead scoring to creating long-term customer relationships.
In a study done by Aberdeen Group in 2010 revealed that, many of the fastest growing organizations use Customer Relationship Management technology to turn more sales leads into revenue.

In the same study, it was also shown that 63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use best sales CRM software technology for their success.

63% of organizations, which has very high annual growth rates, from sales leads, use best sales CRM software technology for their success- Aberdeen Group(2010) Click To Tweet

Here is how best sales CRM software helps in the growth of your organization:

Sales Planning

Easy to use CRM software can provide you with an overview of your projected sales targets for a specific period of time. This can help you plan marketing campaigns using the forecasted data and prepare your sales teams for an increase or dip in the volume of sales in your business.

You can also use the information retrieved from your CRM database, to manage sales territories more efficiently. Best sales CRM software allows your sales managers to view the schedules of your sales reps out in the field, along with the potentials of various territories, so that you can decide upon entrusting the right members of your sales team to the locations where they are most needed, which results in optimizing your sales team’s performance.

Improve Lead Conversion

Best sales CRM software like ConvergeHub CRM and others helps to shift the focus of your sales reps (from other mundane tasks) so that they can spend their time more in selling. The data gathered in the CRM database of your best sales CRM software can also help in finding deals that have not yet been closed, monitor sales quotas, and develop strategies to shorten sales cycles resulting in the generation of faster revenue.

Best sales CRM software solutions can also track incoming leads and after assessing them, distribute the leads to the representatives most likely to close the sale. Easy to use CRM applications can also help to foster efficient collaborations with your employees in sales, marketing, support, and accounts by coordinating tasks among your employees.

Build Customer Relationships

Maintaining relationship with existing customers is just as important as acquiring new ones. Easy to use CRM platforms can store detailed information from each interaction with your customers. Customer information stored in the CRM database also helps in anticipating the customers’ needs, which helps in providing personal customer service that aids in creating loyal customers.

In fact, best sales CRM software solutions can manage sales processes as well as monitor and develop your long-term customer contracts, by sending automated reminders for renewal of your services.

Track And Analyze

Best sales CRM software like ConvergeHub also enables you to track lead data, so that you can easily calculate the returns on your investments in lead generation and in marketing campaigns on an ongoing basis. This helps you to see, which among your lead sources are generating the most revenue and adjust your strategies according.

Easy to use CRM even lets you access data for each of your leads individually, which is always a valuable asset for your sales teams.

According to us, the sales analysis aspect of any best sales CRM software helps in monitoring the overall health of your business by proactively monitoring sales pipeline management, creating accurate forecasts, effectively manage the budgets and intelligently allocate resources to meet your company’s revenue goals.

Pricing And Order Fulfillment

Best sales CRM software, especially CRM platforms like ConvergeHub that allows QuickBooks CRM integration free ensure accurate pricing and quotes, by capturing customer order, confirming availability of the products and expediting order fulfillment.

According to SearchCRM, the main purpose of best sales CRM software is to:

“Provide employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers, understand and identify customer needs, and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.”

Conclusion

Therefore, in a brief, most easy to use sales CRM solutions are created to help sales and marketing teams succeed. As when the information that these customer relationship applications collect are applied as an essential part of the sales strategy, it helps to benefit the organization as a whole, in terms of revenue generation and growth, by determining which marketing efforts and sales strategies are most effective for the development of the company.

The Future Of Cloud Based CRM Systems: Intelligent, Integrated And Data-Driven

The time of an intelligent, integrated cloud based CRM systems has come, and it is one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise software solutions today. Right from startups and SMBs to big global enterprises, marketing and sales teams are adopting easy to use cloud based CRM technology to acquire new customers, retain the old, enhance customer experience, and find new customer-centric data driven insights that are paving the path for strategic changes in their companies.

The time of an intelligent, integrated cloud based CRM systems has come, and it is one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise software solutions today.
Right from startups and SMBs to big global enterprises, marketing and sales teams are adopting easy to use cloud based CRM technology to acquire new customers, retain the old, enhance customer experience, and find new customer-centric data driven insights that are paving the path for strategic changes in their companies.

Now as these new CRM technologies are rapidly evolving to meet the newfound strategic goals of businesses globally, Big Data, Analytics, Business Intelligence (BI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine learning are the new technological foundations of the present days fast growing CRM applications, in the market.

The global CRM market is predicted to achieve a 13.7% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) through 2021- Gartner Click To Tweet

Investing in cloud based CRM systems, startups are presently focusing on how easy to use CRM solutions are capable of providing new insights into improving the customer experiences, increase customer retention strategies, and accelerate new product development based on the needs of their customers.

In a recent analysis done by CrunchBase on CRM startups, it shows that the majority of the CRM vendors are investing in advanced analytics, machine learning, Big Data, and AI technologies.

To substantiate this claim McKinsey notes that the total annual external investments in Artificial Intelligence technology globally were between $8 Billion and $12 Billion back in 2016, with machine learning attracting 60% of that investment, and the same figures are on a rise.

Quick Stats

According to Gartner- 56% of all easy to use CRM adoptions will be cloud based CRM systems, starting from 2017.
According to Gartner- The global CRM market is predicted to achieve a 13.7% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) through 2021.
AI will be the primary catalyst of the cloud based CRM’s growth over the next 4 years, which is going to be supported by BI, analytics, and machine learning technologies, as cloud based CRM buyers will focus more on the addition of emerging technologies that cater to more efficient customer experiences.

Businesses of all sizes are now struggling to remain on the same page with their customers as the customer’s preferences as to how they are learning about their required products and services and when they are buying are changing constantly.

In other words, nowadays the customer’s psychology is fundamentally at a flux, and it exceeds the boundaries of simple demographics, or even customer segments, which ranges across B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Consumer) enterprises.

Therefore as the dynamics of the customers across all segments are changing fast, with customer experiences winning over mere transactions, getting response from any channel a customer chooses to interact with the brands, and for rendering intelligent and responsive support, modern cloud based CRM systems need to change their technology if they are going to meet these customer-centric goals.

Modern cloud based CRM systems need to find greater precision in focusing on the customer needs, predict and quantify their behaviors. In addition to this, today’s CRM platforms should also be capable of recommending or suggesting potential strategies and tactics for sales and marketing teams that should deliver results.

Customer Intelligence is the King

The better the insights, marketing data, and customer-centric knowledge-driven decisions, the more effective every marketing statistics and tactics will be. As we all know by now, that when strategies in sales and marketing are built on the foundations of customer insight and intelligence, customer experiences improves.

Positive customer experiences create loyalties, builds trusts, fuel repurchase, which consequentially lead to higher CLV or Customer Lifetime Values.

Nevertheless, this chain reaction behind customer-centric growth can only begin when the sales and marketing teams in any organization are well aware of what their customers are expecting, why they are expecting, and how their organization can deliver the offerings that will exceed the customer’s expectations.

Therefore as we predicted earlier in this blog, Big Data, AI, machine learning and analytics are the future of cloud based CRM systems, because they are being used nowadays to redefine the path to exceed customer expectations and drive in more revenue.

Hence, the days of the traditional CRM systems and its strategies for treating every customer, in the same way, are over.

In the present times- Customer Intelligence is now the King.

With greater contextual insights, predictive accuracy offered by customer intelligence of when and where to sell delivers measurable results. For marketing managers and their teams, one of the greatest challenges they encounter is in quantifying their contributions to their businesses’ growth. Therefore, with the modern technological developments in CRM technology, machine learning, AI, and analytics all these in conglomeration will provide the marketing managers and their teams an opportunity to measure how their strategies are driving profits and sales, as well as how they are contributing to their organization’s growth.

Most of the CRM solutions in the market today are cloud based CRM systems. Since cloud based systems are capable of maturing rapidly and provide a solid foundation for the next generation of application developments. In fact, APIs or Application Programmer Interfaces that most modern CRM software solutions rely on to create real-time integrations helps in linking and bridging platforms and applications, accelerating the breadth, depth, and stability of modern cloud based CRM systems.

In a recent study done by McKinsey & Company, it has been found that businesses using cloud based CRM systems can capture greater revenue growth with APIs to integrate enterprise systems.
In other words, in CRM systems, APIs are the fasteners that make greater customer intelligence possible. Since APIs helps to integrate systems together and develop a valuable system of records that can easily reflect customer preferences, while at the same time create strategies for a successful sales growth.

API Integrations Are Designing The Most Valuable CRM Apps Of The Future Days

All businesses big or small striving for keeping their existing customers, and at the same time attract new ones, faces the constant challenge of staying on the radar of their customer’s preferences. Since customer preferences change over time, therefore, using outdated CRM applications are no longer pertinent to the sales and marketing teams depending on CRM and its features to catch the attention and win customers.

Hence, the future of CRM today is defined by new and agile application interfaces that can be customized for each sales reps and marketers by adding or changing fields in minutes, according to their varied needs.

The cloud based CRM system of the modern times no longer takes weeks or months to modify a CRM system’s dashboard or its workflow, since they can be easily modified and changed quickly by the system administrators using a cloud-based platform.

Therefore, the flexibility of customization of cloud based CRM systems to match how marketing and sales team works, rather than the other way round is one of the main catalysts that welcomed the adoption of cloud based CRM solutions and is fueling its continuous growth.

In fact, APIs are one of the main technologies that facilitate cloud based CRM platforms to flex its functionalities and respond to the sales and marketing team’s needs.

Moreover, the growth of AWS (Amazon Web Services) has also dramatically shown how APIs contribute to the development of an entirely new business model, fueling a level of analytics-driven insights for businesses, previously unknown to the users of CRM platforms.

According to a recent article published in Forbes, it points out that APIs are most essential for defining and customizing GUIs (Graphic User Interfaces) that improves the contribution and usability to improve customer experience since APIs creates the links that cloud platforms rely on to integrate easy to use CRM and other enterprise software applications.

The CRM’s Future Is a Highly Integrated One- Because the Cloud Has Won

In the present times, APIs are already beginning to become more customer-centric in their designs, which allows for greater versatility and flexibility in designing entirely new GUIs, process steps, workflows, and screen designs, which over time will redefine the nature of cloud platforms in the days to come.

Nearly every cloud based CRM providers today like ConvergeHub and others have integrated enterprise-grade APIs (some more mature and scalable than others) that signals the future of the CRM technology’s road map across all businesses.

We are all extremely apprehensive that these new APIs will become customer-centric in the coming 3-5 years and will have a strong focus on orchestrating a wide variety of data-rich applications, databases, and system of records.

In other words, cloud platforms are helping APIs to become more customer-centric by providing reliable and scalable integration frameworks and technologies.

Looking Ahead

It is presumed that in the near future a more integrated, contextually intelligent and aware cloud based CRM applications will enable sales and marketing teams to define their strategies with superior precision while measuring the results achieved, better than it was ever before.

Therefore, briefly, cloud based CRMs like ConvergeHub will continue to outmatch overall enterprise growth in software, as with a superfluity of technologies at hand, the future of cloud based CRM is the brightest among all other enterprise level cloud-based software solutions in the IT world.

Tag: Easy To Use CRM Software

A Comprehensive Guide for Increasing Lead Conversion Rates

Time-Tested Steps For Finding Accurate And Quality Data In Your CRM Database

Why You Just Cannot Make Up For Churn With Upsells

Customer Success Tips Around The Web

Key Features That You Need In Your Best Small Businesses CRM Software

Avoid CRM Disasters With This Ultimate Easy To Use CRM Checklist

Why Does Even Easy To Use CRM Implementations Fail?

Ways A MCA CRM Can Help You Reach Your Business Goals

Ways Merchant Cash Advance CRM Software Can Help You Reach Your MCA Business Goals:

How Best Sales CRM Software Plays A Vital Role In Building Your Sales Strategy

Company

Resources

Solutions

Product

10X Hub