Tag: Easy To Use CRM Software

5 Ways to Tell If Your Alternative Lending Business Needs a Merchant Cash Advance CRM

Any good easy to use CRM software can alleviate many of the persistent headaches that come with managing alternative funding business that is poised for fast growth. However, how do you know if your MCA business needs a Merchant Cash Advance CRM software solution? If you know what is a CRM solution, well then CRM or Customer Relationship Management has been around for quite some time and more to say has in the recent times made a booming comeback, with social CRM technology, with applications focusing more on interactions than on just transactional feedbacks. Here in this article let us look into the 5 keys areas that suggest any alternative financing MCA business, just like other industries, need a Merchant Cash Advance CRM.
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Any good easy to use CRM software can alleviate many of the persistent headaches that come with managing alternative funding business that is poised for fast growth.
However, how do you know if your MCA business needs a Merchant Cash Advance CRM software solution?

If you know what is a CRM solution, well then CRM or Customer Relationship Management has been around for quite some time and more to say has in the recent times made a booming comeback, with social CRM technology, with applications focusing more on interactions than on just transactional feedbacks.

Without an easy to use CRM, 79% of leads fail to convert- Pardot Click To Tweet

With Cloud-based and SaaS CRM solutions integrating even more features, CRM in all industries and businesses is gaining popularity, that too with easy installation and low initial costs, which can also be accessed through handheld mobile device.

Here in this article let us look into the 5 keys areas that suggest any alternative financing MCA business, just like other industries, need a Merchant Cash Advance CRM .

  1. DO YOU- Wish You Had More Time?

Does it seem to you that you had more time to concentrate on selling your financial products and services to prospective new customers? Or just simply wish that you could have spent less time dealing with admin tasks, such as managing your sales rep’s progress, or locating information and past communications with your customers. An efficient MCA CRM software solution will allow you to store and access all your customer data in CRM, as well as provide you with in-depth analysis on your sales team’s progress- thereby allowing you to focus on other important tasks and manage your office hours more efficiently.

  1. DO YOU- Want More Revenue?

To increase their revenue, all businesses typically invest in improving their sales, and support teams. With the help of a thorough easy to use MCA CRM like ConvergeHub, alternative funding companies can easily afford an insight into their customer information stored in the CRM database.

MCA organizations can view where their best leads and sales are coming from, or which marketing campaign proved successful that in turn enables companies to invest more money and time, in the right areas to maximize growth.

  1. DO YOU- Want To Grow Your Customer Base?

It is natural that in the present times your customers will communicate with you company in a multitude of ways. Now, if they have to deal with different representatives of your organization, every time they contact your MCA firm, having an accurate record of each and every dialogue, in the CRM database, ensures that your debtors do not have to provide details of their contact information, loan history, complaints and other documents needed for establishing their credibility.

All customers want to deal with organizations that understand and is capable of responding to their needs, preferable even anticipate them in advance.

Using a Merchant Cash Advance software helps in treating your customers as individuals, provide them with personal attention, acknowledge their requirements individually, and therefore give the respect they need for doing business with your MCA firm.

Invariably, earning the trust of your customers will also lead to growth in your alternative lending businesses’ revenue.

Using an MCA CRM software solution you can make your customers feel special by targeting personalized messages to your present and would be consumers, helping to better connect with them across multiple communication platforms.

  1. DO YOU- Want To Increase Your Customer Retention Rates?

Over the last few years, customers and prospects have become much more tech-dependent and tech-savvy than they were ever before.

As a result, consumers expect a seamless user experience across every channels and device, whilst at the same instance, they also expect the best possible standards of customer support.

With countless customer choices, building up loyalty among your highest value customers for your organizing is crucial for your alternative lending business.

A Merchant Cash Advance software platform can help in communicating with the existing clients at the right moment, through the right channels, and with the most appropriate message to ensure that your customers come back and better yet become a ‘brand advocate’ of your MCA firm.

  1. DO YOU- Want Better Insight into Your Cash Advance Business?

Not be able to precisely forecast your incoming revenue can cause a lot of stress. Can you predict which of your sales reps is going to close your biggest deals? Alternatively, which of your marketing email campaigns delivered the best returns on your investments?

An MCA CRM software platform should not only allow your business to gather and track that data from its CRM database whenever you choose, but also provide substantial information to help you in making decisions and correct your course of actions and strategies as and when it is needed.

Takeaway

If one or more of this five enlisted areas resonates with you, then for sure you need a Merchant Cash Advance CRM software like ConvergeHub to manage your growing Merchant Cash Alternative Lending business.

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To test the effectiveness of any proposed CRM initiative, primarily use a small-scale working model of the software.
So why wait!
Try ConvergeHub’s 14-Day Free Trial– The most awarded Merchant Cash Advance CRM for alternative funding businesses.

Reasons Sales Do Not Use Their Easy to Use CRM (And Solutions)

No matter what industry they work in, sales people, do not use their easy to use CRM for the same reason everywhere. Therefore understanding this “why” is just one-step forward to choosing the right best small business CRM for your SMB. There are several examples of successful and unsuccessful CRM adoption in this world. The cold reality is that even the best small business CRM fails because adoptions of online lead management software like CRM technology can often be an uphill battle. Now the question remains, why would sales representatives want to go back to using pen and paper, sticky notes, and spreadsheets to build their customer relationships? According to Cloudswave’s research, by using an easy to use CRM lead to sales conversion rate improves more than 300 percent.

No matter what industry they work in, sales people, do not use their easy to use CRM for the same reason everywhere. Therefore understanding this “why” is just one-step forward to choosing the right best small business CRM for your SMB.

To Love or Hate an easy to use CRM software?

There are several examples of successful and unsuccessful CRM adoption in this world. The cold reality is that even the best small business CRM fails because adoptions of online lead management software like CRM technology can often be an uphill battle.

Using a CRM can lead to sales conversation rate improvements of over 300%- Cloudswave Click To Tweet

Now the question remains, why would sales representatives want to go back to using pen and paper, sticky notes, and spreadsheets to build their customer relationships?

According to Cloudswave’s research, by using an easy to use CRM lead to sales conversion rate improves more than 300 percent.
Even we did hear from one of our customers using our Merchant Cash Advance CRM software that by using our ConvergeHub MCA CRM the company increased its revenue by 152 percent. While it is not 300 percent, however, we think that is really impressive, as we known and the customer also agreed that after using our CRM software they are well on their way to increased success.

Here is a look at some of the most frequently found reasons we have heard from sales teams in different organizations regarding difficulties and problems in implementing CRM application and why they seek a new solution. `

#1. Salespeople do not want changes

One of the most common and familiar sales tools to the sales reps to track customer relationships is the spreadsheet. Now the question is if the sales teams have been so good at their work so far with spreadsheets, they might not just want to use some other customer relationship management software and fix their existing spreadsheet-based process unless they feel it is broken.

Solution

You must convince your sales teams that easy to use CRM data benefits not only them but also the entire organization, right from marketing to accounts and also support.

Illustrate to your sales reps that when they close a deal without understanding or showing the steps taken to reach the conversion it is a loss. Reiterate the fact that best CRM for small business brings value to that ‘win moment’ because the entire organization can perceive the value of the deal for future reference, which can help in gaining would-be sales.

#2. Salespeople do not perceive the value

 

Speaking about value, another pertinent reason sale does not use their CRM platform is because they think that the customer information database software or CRM was forced on them. This situation typically occurs when the owner or the manager tell their sales teams that they need to use a CRM without discussing or explaining them about the benefits of the software.

“What a waste of money!”, “What a waste of time!”, or “I can’t learn this!” are some of the first thoughts that sales reps have once they are not explained about the utility of the CRM software, which consequentially makes them perceive even an easy to use CRM as a threat rather than a useful tool.

Solution

This trepidation stems back to not involving the sales teams and understanding their needs during the buying process. In an ideal scenario, organizations should see an easy to use CRM that is capable of solving specific sales-related problems and highlight those features to their sales teams.

Explain to your sales managers how their sales reps can close more deals if they are using the right small business CRM.

Always make sure, that the final decision about buying your easy to use CRM software is a shared decision by your sales teams.

#3. CRM software is too complicated

Good sales reps want to spend their hours selling rather than learning how to use the software.

Therefore, adopting complex CRM software sets sales teams up for failure. Moreover, unwanted bells and whistles set by the CRM software worsen the problems.

Solution

Choose an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub that is known for its ease of use. Purchase a CRM that does not have a long learning curve, which can take weeks to learn.

#4. The CRM is not aligned with our sales process

Another reason why sales teams do not use their CRM platform is that it is not aligned with their current sales process.

To overcome this issue, you should go back to make the sales reps understand the features of their easy to use CRM and how important those features are for the growth of your organization.

Many CRM platforms include features like depicting deal stages, sales pipeline management, workflows, and others, which are absolutely necessary for winning more prospective deals.

Nevertheless, as all businesses do not track sales, in the same way, therefore, when a CRM field does not fit a sales process that your sales reps are familiar with, they will stop inputting data, unless you further customize the software to fit their needs.

Solution

Purchase a CRM that can be easily customized. Every organization has a different sales process, therefore your best small business CRM’s pipeline stages should be customized to suit how your salesperson sells.

#5. No training or support

Regardless of which industry you work in, software takes time to learn. Moreover, some people are less tech-savvy than others.

In the CRM space, those sales reps that do not know how to use your CRM will simply not use it or end up inputting inaccurate data into the CRM database .

Solution

Proper training is most essential even if you are using an easy to use CRM platform. This training can include basic instructions about the software.

Choose a CRM company that offers free customer support when it is needed.

Remember, there are several CRM companies that only offer support as a paid add-on, which can really prove frustrating for your sales teams.

#6. CRM keeps them stuck at their desks

Sales reps naturally spend a lot of time out of their offices, meeting prospects and building relationships in the field. Therefore, mobile phones are a necessary tool for their meetings on the go.

Hence, if salespeople have to remain at their desk for inputting data inside the CRM database, they will for certain stop using the system.

Solution

Choose a CRM software that is mobile. If your sales reps can pull up conversation history, contact data, deal histories and more when they are out in the field (providing them with a big advantage over other salespeople who cannot) they will obviously like using your CRM.

Moreover, mobile easy to use CRM software empowers the sales teams to update their data right away rather than losing vital information after scribbling on their notebooks.

#7. No time is saved

In the sales world, it is natural that none likes to do data entry. Therefore, this is also yet another reason why salespeople do not use their CRM since they feel it is taking up too much of their precious time to learn and use the software.

Solution

Your chosen CRM should automate as many sales tasks as possible. Since a CRM that is incapable of doing that is not worth considering. 

#8. CRM has bad data

According to a survey done by Experian Data Quality, it was found that most companies lost 12 percent of their total revenue due to bad data.

Now if your new CRM consists of bad data like out-of-date information and duplicates records in the CRM database that none can trust to use, then your salespeople will end up doing the sales analysis on their own, which culminates in a waste of time.

Solution

To avoid the ever-true curse of bad data residing inside the CRM database, you should roll out your easy to use CRM implementation after cleaning the existing data and continue executing the data-cleaning procedure at regular intervals.

Conclusion

Therefore, the key to making your sales reps use your CRM software is in choosing the right easy to use CRM software that your sales teams will actually use.

Do you use a CRM?

If it is affirmative, let us know the incentive for using your CRM software, and if you are still not using an easy to use CRM use ConvergeHub free trail and find how convenient, your sales reps feel after using our best CRM for small business by clicking on the image below.

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A Comprehensive Checklist for Auditing Customer Database in CRM

In this modern world of big data and ever-increasing data availability with respect to its volume and variety the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your organization’s growth is the key for starting a revenue generating marketing solution. When we talk about customer database in CRM, the most often cited response is that “all data in the CRM database is important”. Although this may be true, but to help you in deciding which data elements are most important in the initial phases of building your customer relationship management software solution, can be illustrated as a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your businesses.

In this modern world of big data and ever-increasing data availability with respect to its volume and variety the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your organization’s growth is the key for starting a revenue generating marketing solution.

When we talk about customer database in CRM, the most often cited response is that “all data in the CRM database is important”. Although this may be true, but to help you in deciding which data elements are most important in the initial phases of building your customer relationship management software solution, can be illustrated as a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your businesses.

Bad data sources result in 30% of all leads failing- Cyber Sphere Click To Tweet

After several implementations of online lead management software solutions, we have seen many types of data including “favorite color”; “pet names” and even “number of car doors” all have potential value to different markets for buyers of best small and medium business CRM software.

While “pet names” can be an important data for pet supply retailers using easy to use CRM, “favorite color” can be an essential data field for retails in the clothing industry and “number of car doors” for users of best small business CRM in the motor insurance industry.

Therefore, when you first consider the importance of each data element of the customer database in CRM, the ability to classify the data can help in determining how valuable the data is or in which phase of a solution it should be delivered, if at all.

This following list provides examples of the data elements that can quickly identify the critical pieces of information, which are needed to accomplish your business goals from an array of different data sources.

The priority order of this data is as follows:

#01. Identity Data in CRM Database

In the heart of customer database in CRM lies the individual, so knowing the customer or the individual and to view and maintain that information in a single customer view provides the primary data type which is known as identity data.

Identity data can be any information about an individual that enables the individual to be uniquely identified, which include:

Name Information: Title, First Name (Forename), Last Name (Surname), Designation, and others.

Postal Address Information: Building Name, Building Number, Town, County, Zip/Postal Code, Country, and others.

Person Information: Date of Birth, Gender, and others.

Telephone Information: Home Telephone, Work Telephone, Mobile, and others.

Emailing Information: Personal Email, Work Email, and others.

Social Network Information: Twitter Address, Facebook Identifier, LinkedIn Identifier, and others.

Account Information: Details of your customer’s account ID or User ID.

Professional Information: Company Name, Department Name, Job Title, and others.

Permission and Suppression Data: Although this not essentially an identity element of data, but it is important for finding information concerning permission to communicate and the reason for not communicating (suppression).

#02. Quantitative Data in CRM Database

Now once you recognize who these individuals are in your customer database in CRM, the next element is to find focus on the measurable operational data that enables you to find how the customer behaved,  reacted or has transacted with your business. This data includes any info, which describes the activities completed between the customer and your business.

Transactional Information (Offline and Online): Quantity of products purchased, Subscription/Order Value, Renewal/Order dates, Abandonment rate (abandoned shopping), Product Returns, and others.

Online Activity: Product views, Website visits, Online registrations, and others.

Social Networking Activity: Twitter interactions, Facebook likes, and others.

Customer Support Information: Customer complaint details, Customer query details, and others.

#03. Descriptive Data in CRM Database

Knowing your customers and the type of activities they have completed with your brand provides a good starting point for any marketing activity for up-selling and cross-selling your products. Therefore, to find a fuller perspective of your customer’s additional information, beyond the identity and quantitative details, you must include any info, which may include:

Family Details: Marital status, number of children, age of children, and others.

Lifestyle Details: Car type, Property type, Pet ownership, and others.

Career Details: School name, College/University name, Education level, and others.

#04. Qualitative Data in CRM Database

The concluding type of data, (which you will come across apart from the one, already mentioned) will provide additional description of your customers and their potential behaviors. It is the data acquired by questionnaire type of information captured, where your customers provide data on motivation, attitude, and options that include:

Attitudinal information: How do you value our product, How do you rate our customer service, How likely you are to purchase our products and services again, and others.

Opinion based information: What is your favorite holiday destination, What is your favorite color, and others.

Motivational information: Why was the product purchased (personal use, a gift for someone), What was the key reason for purchasing our product (quality, price, locality), and others.

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Takeaway

Using this simple CRM data classification process and relating them with your business goals, will not only enable you a quick identification of which data is vital for the success of your business, but it can also help you to understand the value achieved from each of this data element.
Therefore, combining the most advanced customer modeling, micro-segmentation, and analytics technologies with an easy to use CRM platform you can really grow your revenue by  using data classification process and associating them with your business goals.

Many Benefits of the Importance of Sales Force Automation in Businesses

Increasing competition, longer sales cycles, fragmented lead data, and expanding sales reps together can be a woeful situation. The more effort you put to generate sales, the more likely you are to feel perturbed by reduced productivity. The Solution: Hence, instead of trudging and slogging for more hours, you must consider how you can get the same job done in lesser time. The solution is simple, find ways to work smarter instead of harder. For when it comes to sales, there is no superior way to accelerate your job than implement a sales force automation software and find the importance of sales force automation in businesses.

Increasing competition, longer sales cycles, fragmented lead data, and expanding sales reps together can be a woeful situation. The more effort you put to generate sales, the more likely you are to feel perturbed by reduced productivity.

The Solution: Hence, instead of trudging and slogging for more hours, you must consider how you can get the same job done in lesser time. The solution is simple, find ways to work smarter instead of harder. For when it comes to sales, there is no superior way to accelerate your job than implement a sales force automation software and find the importance of sales force automation in businesses.

Sales force automation software eliminates the time consuming but necessary tasks associated with selling, freeing sales reps from the mind-numbing, repetitive behind-the-scene chores, enabling them to what they do best- Sales.

Sales force automation in CRM helps in 30% increase in sales closures- IDC Survey(2017) Click To Tweet

Unlike other business solutions which cater to specific zones, sales force automation is applicable for all size of businesses. Therefore, irrespective of whether you a one-man establishment working out of your garage or an employee of an organization that offers hundreds of products, SFA software helps in abbreviating sales cycles to assist in increasing sales and so boost productivity.

What is sales force automation?

SFA is more of an automated process that mechanizes and incorporates distinguishing parts of business processes right from client contact administration, representative execution assessment to handling of sales estimates.

In other words, SFA connects every simple component of any business and allows a consistent flow of information through various branches that would otherwise require serious conceptualization over different levels and so the importance of sales force automation in businesses is considered as one of the most indispensable parts of all effective organizations.

Features of sales force automation

Sales force automation is perfectly designed to deal with most business responsibilities if not all. The features of SFA are subdivided into the following zones:

  • Managing sales territories
  • Managing opportunities and tracking competitors
  • Sales forecasting
  • Managing orders
  • Up-selling and cross-selling

Managing Sales Territories

Lead routing and tracking sales territories are the bulwarks that create efficiency in a sales process. Therefore, instead of using the traditional spreadsheet and obsolete software, it makes more sense to use a good easy to use CRM or an free lead generation software that allow you to better manage prospects and leads from the time of their initial capture till the sales are closed.

This is what best small and medium business CRM software along with SFA can do for greater integrity and higher efficiency of the sales process:

  • Automation of lead processing along with better management of sales territories that helps in winnowing out drilling for individual records and aids in saving time, money, and energy
  • Assign leads based on already set proper business rules, which eliminates conflicts over ownership of leads and sales territories
  • Send email notifications to the sales reps to follow up on leads and prospects instantly and thereby improve superior service quality, ensuring a higher number of closed deals

Managing Opportunities and Tracking Competitors

For any company to achieve growth and success it is necessary that it must manage and take advantage of every sales opportunity that comes on its way. Another importance of sales force automation in businesses is that when it is a part of an easy to use CRM software it can provide the organization with the following benefits that include:

  • Find the advantage of maximizing the greater number of sales opportunities and not having to rely only on aggregate lists
  • Find which deals have been lost and which were won, an intelligence that can help to educate your sales team
  • Respond to sales inquiries in a better way creating improved chances of driving return sales and building loyal customers
  • Keep track of the customer transactions individually from the time of their first contact till closing of the sale

Forecasting

Best CRM for small business along with SFA can also provide your sales teams with more teeth, tools that can aid them in making accurate sales forecasts, which include:

  • Calculation based sales forecasting using quotes/orders/opportunities
  • Recurrent revenue as well as booking revenue forecasting
  • Make sales much more predictable by fine-tuning the forecasting methods and making it more accurate with the help of CRM software

Managing Orders

Managing orders with the help of an SFA enabled easy to use CRM software can aid in streamlining the entire order fulfillment procedure and even cut down unnecessary paper works that in turn provide the sales team more time to sell. It also helps the customers to receive their orders in a timely manner, which boosts customer satisfaction and makes them more loyal in the long term to the company.

A good CRM solution must be built around customers and their orders taking into account:

  • Dashboards
  • Reports
  • Customer intelligence

Best small business CRM solution will also allow your sales reps to work their deals via a sales pipeline right up to the time that the sale is effective. With sales force automation you will also be in a better position to convert an estimate into an order with a single click of the mouse without the hassle of involving any great amount of paperwork.

Importance of sales force automation in businesses also represents good order management which will provide your business a means to access latest order information so that seeing the status of the order, your sales reps can understand when it is the ideal time for doing a follow-up.

Customers, on the other hand, can check their order status in a real-time environment via your customer care center or website with the implementation of SFA in a CRM software.

Up-selling and Cross-Selling

The tougher and harder is the competition, the more likely it is that it may erode your customers’ loyalty and thereby affect your company’s bottom line. This is why you need sales force automation in your CRM software, which can show you the history of your past customer orders and then create automated and customized email campaigns to up-sell and cross-sell your products.

SFA helps managers to analyze past sales information, understand order history and the customers’ demography that can help in creating email campaigns that are customer segment specific to improve revenue.

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Conclusion

According to the recent IDC survey, the importance of sales force automation in businesses has produced:

  • 30% increase in sales closures
  • 18% decrease in sales cycle timing
  • 14% drop in sales administration time

Which are substantial reasons for utilizing SFA in your easy to use CRM software for your business in the modern scenario if you look forward to staying in the top of your league.

5 Things You Need To Do To Increase Your 2018 Revenue Using ConvergeHub The Easy To Use CRM For Small Businesses

Right now, the smartest leaders and many users of easy to use CRM we know of are thinking ahead. Since for them, 2017 is in the history books and their sights are set on 2018. We are sure, you must be having many objectives for next year, and one of them for sure is- “Growth”. So, how are you going to grow your revenue in 2018? Here is a plan to increase sales for small businesses, which we believe you will find suitable for your business.

Right now, the smartest leaders and many users of easy to use CRM we know of are thinking ahead. Since for them, 2017 is in the history books and their sights are set on 2018.

We are sure, you must be having many objectives for next year, and one of them for sure is- “Growth”.

So, how are you going to grow your revenue in 2018?

Here is a plan to increase sales for small businesses, which we believe you will find suitable for your business.

55% of CRM users accept that the most important CRM feature is its ease of use, and that is intuitive and has a user-friendly interface- Gartner Click To Tweet
  1. Clean up data

If your CRM database is in a mess, as in the end, even the best small and medium business CRM software is only as good as the data residing in it, plan to fix your customer data in your CRM database .

For this, ask every member on your sales teams to review all their contacts and clean up the basic information in the easy to use CRM database. Request them to email their prospects and customers to verify the information in the customer database in CRM . Double check the recipients of the emails who have opted in for the communication and then reach out to those that have not. Also, check for empty fields and out of data information.

Takeaway: Any easy to use CRM for small business is the central core for all good and successful marketing workflow, but without clean data, it is a useless tool.

  1. Choose a marketing weapon

Marketing in 2018 is not an easy task, as there several ways to spend your money now. You can Tweet, Email, send letters, advertise in print, make calls, advertise online, advertise on social media platforms…the list goes on. Therefore, even though you can maintain an online and a social media presence, focus on what that will provide you the most bang for the buck while promoting excellence.

For example, if you are in B2B business like us in ConvergeHub, you will find that your prospects and customers respond best to emails, so spend your marketing dollars on sending email campaigns. Test out different campaigns and monitor its results to find which campaign responds the best in your business.

Takeaway: If email is not the best marketing weapon for your business, find out what works the best.

  1. Create a quarterly content plan

This year discontinue doing things seat-of-the-pants and put into practice a quarterly content plan. For example, plan to choose a theme for your online publication every three months that will be of interest to your business community and your customer and then blog, email or post short videos about it. This way you can not only educate your followers but also establish yourself as a subject-matter-expert in your field.

Distribute your content on several social media websites, so that your customers and prospects view your brand as a trusted company to do business with.

Takeaway: Irrespective of how superior are your content, your audience, and followers need to read the information for a few time before they accept it.

  1. Sharpen the pipeline process

Do not let your sales pipeline be a mishmash of email messages and spreadsheets. In 2018, launch a new and detailed pipeline reporting system that you can directly generate from your easy to use CRM software system. If you are using QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub that provides QuickBooks CRM integration free, any prospect or customer who receives a quote from your company will also land on your pipeline report.

Best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams help in tracking customers, responsible salesperson, sales value, product quotes, expected sales closing dates, and probabilities along with most recent actions on any prospect or customer.

This year create a report that will accurately reflect how your open opportunities will affect your cash flow over the next 90 days so that you can plan your ROI.

Takeaway: Be a great sales manager by creating a great pipeline report to keep your eyes on the ball.

  1. Follow the money

Finally, invest majority of your marketing dollars towards your existing brand following community and your customers- that is where the money is. If you are fortunate enough to build up a large list of active consumers of your products and services, maintain this information properly in your CRM database. Next, plan to hold training sessions, events, seminars, and provide other informational materials to your existing customers and fans so that they can use your products better and you can up-sell your products and services consistently.

The money is there in your existing customer database in the CRM- you just need to follow it.

Takeaway: Indeed, acquiring new customers is important. However, know the fact that you will be leaving a lot of money on the table if you do not nurture your existing customers who are already consumers of your brand.

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Conclusion

Regardless of your industry if you follow these plans, we are sure you will increase your revenue in 2018. Since we believe, you will find some of these plans certainly suitable for your products and services.

5 Critical KPIs To Track As A Small Business Owner Using ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM

The fact remains, however, that your profits are one of the several factors, which affects your company’s balance sheet. If you are a user of QuickBooks CRM for small businesses, your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) refer to the values used to assess your business’s success in reaching its goals. Over the course of time, tracking pertinent KPIs can aid you in making critical decisions about your business’s development and growth. Here are 5 most important KPIs to track with the best CRM for QuickBooks online as a small and medium business owner in your industry.

The fact remains, however, that your profits are one of the several factors, which affects your company’s balance sheet. If you are a user of QuickBooks CRM for small businesses, your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) refer to the values used to assess your business’s success in reaching its goals.

Over the course of time, tracking pertinent KPIs can aid you in making critical decisions about your business’s development and growth.

65% of businesses adopt a CRM within their first five years.- Software Advice Click To Tweet

Here are 5 most important KPIs to track with the best CRM for QuickBooks online as a small and medium business owner in your industry:

#1. Cash Flow Forecast

Cash flow forecasting is an important KPI that let businesses assess whether their sales and margins are appropriate. To make this forecast, you need to add the total cash your small business have in savings to the anticipated cash value for the upcoming four weeks, and then subtract the anticipated cash out for the same period of time.

Intelligent small business owners using QuickBooks CRM software perform day-to-day cash flow forecasts, whereby they can identify upcoming financial problems in their nascent stages and then make necessary changes accordingly.

In addition to aiding small businesses foresee expected surpluses or shortages in the revenue, a cash flow forecasting is also most vital for proposing upcoming business loan applications, and for tax planning of your enterprise.

#2. Gross Profit Margin as a Percentage of Sales

No small business can achieve success if it is paying more to the suppliers than its gross monthly sales revenue. Gross profit margin as a percentage of sales is a financial expression that illustrates total profit margin of a business compared to its revenue.

Therefore, primarily to find your businesses’ GPM (Gross Profit Margin) divide your gross profit by your sales. Thereafter multiply the result, by hundred and you will then get your businesses’ GPM as a number in percentage.

Next, to determine the extent your GMP contributes to your overall sales turnover, divide that integer with your sales amount.

Here is the math for your easy reference:

 ( Gross Profit/Sales x 100) / Sales

The usefulness of using this performance indicator consistently is that this KPI helps you to easily quantify how much cash you are keeping against the amount paid out to your suppliers.

The GMP increases as your business retain more cash, and similarly, a decline in gross profit as a percentage of your sales could be a sign that your business is excessively spending on the suppliers.

As a small business owner using QuickBooks CRM accounting platform, you need to reduce overhead expenses or increase the price of your products or services to compensate for the decrease in gross profit as a percentage of sales.

#3. Revenue Growth Rate

It might seem obvious; however, the revenue growth of a business refers to the rate at which a business’s income or sales growth is increasing.

Therefore, to evaluate a revenue growth rate, start by calculating your business’s total revenue for the whole year, which is very easy to find using a QuickBooks CRM platform. Next, divide the current revenue by the total revenue from the previous year to find your present rate of growth.

By calculating RGR (Revenue Growth Rate) as an ongoing process, you can easily assess whether the growth in your business is increasing, decreasing, or is it in a plateau state.

#4. Funnel Drop-Off Rate

The funnel drop-off rate illustrates the number of visitors, who have left your sales funnel, or abandoned a conversion process, prior to its completion.

In a sales funnel (for laymen, envision a sales funnel as a real funnel pointed downward) there are many conversion steps along the way, while the prospects and leads move from the crest of the funnel to its bottom, where the prospects exit or get converted into a sale.

Therefore, the funnel drop rate is the number of prospects that move away from the funnel prior to sale.

To calculate funnel drop rate, begin by calculating the number of visits of a particular sale conversion step and then subtract the number of visits of the first step in the funnel. Next, divide this new value by the visits of the first conversion step.

In the recent times, for users of easy to use CRM software, the funnel drop off rate KPI has become one of the most important performance indicators that businesses must track using a CRM platform for finding growth or decrease in its sales activities.

#5. Accounts Payable Turnover

A business, especially if it is a small business cannot keep its establishment open for long if it runs out of funds to pay its outstanding suppliers. Accounts Payable Turnover is a KPI that measures the rate at which businesses pays for its required goods and services. It reveals the amount of fund spent on the supplying vendors over a given period of time.

Once you are using QuickBooks CRM software, to find this KPI, sum up the cost of your total purchases under supplies, and then divide it by AAP (Average Accounts Payable). Now, once you are aware as a business owner how much you are spending on your suppliers, you can find out if steps are necessary to reduce your spending that can boost long-term profits for your small and medium businesses.

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Takeaway

It is impossible to make any adjustment to your businesses’ strategies and procedures if you do not know how your business is trending.
For it is only by tracking KPIs on a regular interval, entrepreneurs can measure the factors, which are affecting their business growth and thereafter make necessary corrections that in the long run gives businesses the best shot at success.

What Is The Nuanced Difference Between Influencer Marketing Vs Brand Advocacy

We all have probably heard the terms “Brand Advocacy” and “Influencer Marketing”. Apparently, they can sound like the same thing. Nevertheless, that is not the truth, as in reality each one of these terms can occupy two different specific niches in your digital marketing strategy. Each of these two digital marketing endeavors is important for different reasons, whereby each of them fulfills a unique need and so can be utilized for two distinct purposes. However, the question remains, in spite of their differences can they be utilized together for moving your marketing efforts? So, here we are to dig into this topic to shed some light on the nuanced differences between brand advocacy and influencer marketing.

We all have probably heard the terms Brand Advocacy and Influencer Marketing. Apparently, they can sound like the same thing. Nevertheless, that is not the truth, as in reality each one of these terms can occupy two different specific niches in your digital marketing strategy.

Each of these two digital marketing endeavors is important for different reasons, whereby each of them fulfills a unique need and so can be utilized for two distinct purposes.

92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates- Nielsen Holdings PLC Click To Tweet

However, the question remains, in spite of their differences can they be utilized together for moving your marketing efforts?

So, here we are to dig into this topic to shed some light on the nuanced differences between brand advocacy and influencer marketing.

What is brand advocacy?

Brand advocacy refers to the promotion of the company by general people who are in love with your brand. Brand advocates can include not only your satisfied customers, but they can also be your employees, or per say, anyone else who has an affinity for your products or services.

Anyone who loves your brand can be your brand advocate and may talk about your product or service in conversation with their family, friends, peers, and relatives.

In other words, any person who is willing to recommend your brand to another individual can be an advocate of your brand.

Although influencer marketing is a hot topic nowadays, nevertheless, brand advocacy indeed has a bigger potential to drive a larger ROI and have a greater impact on the success of your brand’s marketing campaigns than influencer marketing.

Here are two statistics to prove the veracity of our statement:

  • 18% of consumers trust good word and testimonials from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)
  • 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)

What is influencer marketing?

An influence, on the other hand, is an individual who is considered as a thought leader and an authority in their industry. For example, Paul Greenberg (author of the book “CRM at the Speed of Light“) is certainly an influence in the CRM industry. People look to him for expertise and advice to help guide them along the road to success. Paul Greenberg, Warren Buffet, Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuk are some of the examples of big league influencers- persons you are not likely to get a response from easily if you want to engage your brand and is new in influencer marketing.

How do you identify an influencer?

You can find plenty of influencers in your specific industry, individuals whom people look to for suggestions, guidance, and advice.

Find those individuals who run a widely read and highly successful blog in your industry. Else, keep an eye out for people who have enormous social media followers pertaining to your industry. These individuals are easy to spot if you know what to look for. Influencers are mostly semi-famous in their niche industries and many even charge fees for their collaborations.

Influencer marketing, when performed in a proper manner, can generate a significant return on ROI. According to an exclusive survey done on influencers by Tomoson :

“Most businesses today are making $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.”

However, as a word of caution from our end, if you are a newbie in this game, you should be careful with influencers. As most influencers decide to be influences, so they can earn money. Therefore, watch out and remain beware of those influences who may not be interested in your industry and topic as they might appear to be, but are rather in the game just to make an easy buck.

How to generate and utilize brand advocates?

There are many ways to generate brand advocates. Here are a few basic methods for generating and leveraging brand advocates for any industry:

  1. Focus on customer satisfaction

One of the most successful ways to generate brand advocates is to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction among your consumers by delivering an excellent customer experience. You as an owner of a brand must make all the efforts that are needed to keep your buyers happy since if you do so, they are more likely to become advocates of your brand.

Maintaining customers over a long period of time using an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub, who are satisfied using your products or services also results in building brand loyalty. An activity that other than generating additional revenues also helps to generate brand advocates in your established markets.

  1. Maintain happy employees

Remember, all the employees in your organization have the potential to be awesome advocates of your brand. Therefore, treat your employees well, and you can be sure that they are most likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family. Running employee engagement programs are an excellent means to make your employees feel like they are a part of a family. You can also run a workplace satisfaction survey among your employees and implement changes in your organization based on its results to make your employees feel heard. Praise your employees and reward them for a job well done to create a positive work environment around your business.

All these gestures will definitely make your employees feel more motivated to work harder, provide them morale boosts, and so they will naturally speak to their friends about your brand.

  1. Find them on social media

Once you use social listening and monitoring tools, you can easily get an alert in real time, when someone mentions your brand’s name on the social media platforms. Now, if you can engage them immediately and praise them for their kind words, they will for certain appreciate your gesture and so when they return to social media and continue to talk about how awesome your brand is, you will be successful in creating your social media advocates.

How do you leverage industry influencers?

Primarily if you want to identify the right influencer for your audience and your brand, then think about how you can reach them out to propose a mutually beneficial collaboration.

Here are two key strategies for leveraging influencer in your marketing efforts.

  1. Mutually beneficial collaboration

Once you have established a relationship with an influence, you can propose things like interviewing them for podcasts, exchanging guest blogs, co-authoring blogs with them, and more. Blast the results everywhere you can, once you have produced any type of deliverable or content in collaboration with your influencer. This blasting outreach can span across social media, press releases (if the resulting product is newsworthy), email newsletter campaigns etc.

  1. Tapping into your influencer’s network

However, the real value of influencer marketing comes in when your influencer shares the result of your works on their social media platforms. Doing so, your influencer provides you an exposure to their entire network, which considerably increases the reach of your content and gets your brand recognized to a mostly new audience. When your influencer’s followers see that, the influencer is working with you; they will most often navigate to your website or landing pages to learn more about what you do or about your products or services.

Conclusion

Therefore, as you can see both brand advocates and marketing influencers have their parts to play in growing your business. However, while influencers are more difficult to obtain, brand advocates fill a different need, word of mouth advertising, an advice that comes from someone they know and trust personally.

Hence, in a gist, although your brand can only have a handful of influencers, you can have thousands of brand advocates, those who can do the work of promoting your brand on their own.

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Do you have any lessons or tips learned from any marketing influencer or brand advocate? Share them with us in the comments section below!

4 Must-Have Add-ons for your Easy to Use Small Business CRM System

When people ask me what easy to use small business CRM system to buy, I always suggests that, whatever be their preferred choice, the CRM application should be Cloud-based. Why? It is because Cloud-based or SaaS applications join much better and updates quicker than On-Premise CRM systems. Additionally, changes made in one platform is seamlessly altered in the other integrated applications, rather than making amendments in multiple separate apps. Moreover, tools are more consistent, and support is faster for cloud based CRM software. The best small and medium business CRM systems like ConvergeHub offers tools and applications so that third-party vendors can build custom solutions and connect their software systems with ConvergeHub, in order to provide a more robust experience for the users.

When people ask me what easy to use small business CRM system to buy, I always suggests that, whatever be their preferred choice, the CRM application should be Cloud-based.

Why?

It is because Cloud-based or SaaS applications join much better and updates quicker than On-Premise CRM systems. Additionally, changes made in one platform is seamlessly altered in the other integrated applications, rather than making amendments in multiple separate apps. Moreover, tools are more consistent, and support is faster for cloud based CRM software.

In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM – This figure has now increased to 87% in 2017 (SuperOffice'2018) Click To Tweet

The best small and medium business CRM systems like ConvergeHub offers tools and applications so that third-party vendors can build custom solutions and connect their software systems with ConvergeHub, in order to provide a more robust experience for the users.

Because of this, most of our customers use one or two third-party applications, since ConvergeHub easy to use CRM provides several choices to choose from.

Here are the top four and the most trending types of add-ons which most of our customers use for escalating their business processes every day:

Accounting

When any customer calls, it is natural that you would always want to make sure that you have every detail about them right at your fingertips. An easy to use CRM will always be tracking emails, activities, notes from the CRM database . However, what about the rest? What about order histories, open invoices, and products bought by the customer?

Let us be clear that a CRM system is not an accounting and bookkeeping software. Hence, it lacks the audit controls required for creating a powerful financial database.

This is the reason why most of our clients prefer to integrate ConvergeHub with QuickBooks, which is one of the most popular online accounting software in the USA.

ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM that offer QuickBooks CRM integration free is one of the best CRM for QuickBooks online that allows the customers to synchronize contact information and also view the transaction history of the customers on the go.

Additionally, ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM software even allows the users of the CRM to create invoices in the CRM system and the port it over to the accounting database.

This way ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM eliminates double entry and helps the sales and support reps to find all the information they need about their customers in real time.

E-Mail Marketing 

If you need to send a few hundred emails at a time, they any efficient easy to use CRM should be able to handle it. However, if your business needs to fire thousands of emails every day to several opt-in lists, then the best small and medium business CRM software needs to be integrated to a dedicated email marketing service like MailChimp and others.
Why?
For, to begin with, your local internet service provider may shut you down if you do not. Nevertheless, that will never happen with an efficient and popular email marketing service, because their only job is to assure their customers the delivery of the mails. Any good email service like MailChimp will put your emails through certain diligent protocols to make sure that your messages are not inappropriate and they do not find their way to the spam box. For once, your emails have passed the email provider’s thorough tests, the email service provider should be able to handle thousands of emails at a go and bring the results of those email campaigns back into your easy to use CRM, so that you can use analytics to measure the results and if needed modify your future campaigns.

Phone 

Would not it be nice if when you receive a call, the caller’s records automatically pop up on your window with all their history of prior interactions with anyone in your company? Moreover, would not it be productive if you can have the ability to start an outgoing call with just a click of the button right from your contact’s database or, be able to seamlessly record any phone calls and attach the audio-file with the called contact’s record for listening in the later times?

You can get all these if you integrate your best small and medium business CRM software with a cloud-based phone system like NextInteractive Dialer or RingCentral, which can access contextual information during calls and provide a personalized experience for building better relationships.

If you are a user of ConvergeHub, you can set up these integrations in a few minutes with a couple of simple steps for making your calls faster and keep better track of your prospect’s and customer’s call activities.

Data Integration 

Sometimes a specific add-in that you need for your niche business may not exist. In the past, that would have been a problem. However, today there are several cutting-edge powerful tools, which are automatically configured to read the tables of your easy to use CRM system. With the help of these robust tools, you can easily read and write data in and out of the CRM and the required software needed for your business. Moreover, even if some of these tools cannot cut, then a good CRM system’s API can help you to accomplish your objectives, although you may require an experienced software programmer to accomplish the feat.

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Takeaway

Always remember that your best small business CRM is just a database. However, it an extremely important database that is storing information about everyone that comes in touch with your business.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you must integrate your CRM with these few illustrated software mentioned above so that you can leverage your CRM data.

Reasons to Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List and adopt an Easy to Use CRM

Even after using an easy to use CRM software, whether we admit it or not, using our email’s inbox can be addictive. After all, checking an email is as uncomplicated as refreshing a web browser or tapping on an app. Checking emails gives us the hope that our aspirations will be realized soon. Be it for an exciting business opportunity waiting for a reply, or an update on your shopping cart list etc. Nevertheless, keeping the addiction aside, email inbox, in reality, makes an awful to-do list. Unfortunately, there are still several business organizations those that use email to structure their day-to-day works. In spite of, the prevalence of affordable project management apps, there are many among us those that just cannot break free from the age-old shackles of email.

Even after using an easy to use CRM software, whether we admit it or not, using our email’s inbox can be addictive.

After all, checking an email is as uncomplicated as refreshing a web browser or tapping on an app. Checking emails gives us the hope that our aspirations will be realized soon. Be it for an exciting business opportunity waiting for a reply, or an update on your shopping cart list, etc.

CRM almost makes everyone in your organisation a sales person, since they are selling your business in one way or another. Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, keeping the addiction aside, email inbox, in reality, makes an awful to-do list. Unfortunately, there are still several business organizations those that use email to structure their day-to-day works.
In spite of, the prevalence of affordable project management apps, there are many among us those that just cannot break free from the age-old shackles of email.

In this article, we shall discuss a few reasons as to why you should discontinue using your email inbox and instead use the best small and medium business CRM software to manage your new to-do list:

Your Inbox Does Not Worry About Importance

As a small or medium business owner in a typical day’s work, you need to pitch new clients, deal with employee issues, develop game-changing marketing and support strategies, and others. With so much on your plate, you surely cannot afford to lose time and waste your work hours on non-value-adding tasks.
However, all these being said, why do you then spend so much time hunting between emails? Granted that it is truly impossible to make out when a vital email will arrive, keeping a close watch on your email’s inbox indeed makes sense from this standpoint. Nevertheless, we can wager that more than 90% of the emails that you receive every day are far less than important.  Mostly your inbox gets a lot of stuff like these:

  • Promotional emails from your vendors
  • Industry newsletters
  • Emails from sales reps, who want to sell you things
  • Low-priority requests from employees, vendors, or clients
  • Social media alerts and others

Additionally, your email’s inbox does not put the most important task related emails at the top, and therefore, important request sinks down into obscurity as additional emails arrive every day.

Surely, you can keep the pace by archiving or deleting unimportant emails. However, is this the best use of your precious time? Probably not.

You Cannot Mark an Email as “Done”

Let us take for granted that you have somehow even managed to devise a process by which only “important” emails make it to the inbox. For this, you have unsubscribed all non-essential emails, have set filters to auto-forward any business emails to your assistant, and have convinced your customers and team members to reach you out sparingly.

However is your email inbox the perfect to-do list now- we still assume it is not so much.

To illustrate this point, let us guess you have the following emails anticipating your attention:

Email Subject: Finish Slide Deck for next week’s presentation

Email Subject: Select a venue for your company’s vendor meeting

Email Subject: Please Sign Up for ConvergeHub 14 Day’s free trial

Being an efficient businessperson, you may be able to complete all these tasks within an hour. However, sadly your all these three tasks are still in your inbox. What should you do with them now? Delete them? Move them to another folder? Do you need to answer to each person, indicating that your job has been done?

Would not it be nice if you can just mark your tasks as ‘done’ and move on with your work? Sadly, emails do not work that way.

Delegation is Messy

 

To include another layer of complication, not every chore fits precisely into a single email exchange tread.

For an example, let us take up this subjected email “Select a venue for your company’s vendor meeting”. Now, what seems like a relatively straightforward decision can very fast evolve into several separate email threads. Shortly after sending your email for approval, you can receive dozens of added emails from coordinating staffs at the venue. Even their accounts department may need you to make an advance payment by the close of your day’s businesses. You can receive a 20-page PDF document, containing all kinds of menu options, information on sitting arrangements, and other important details.

Will it not be more productive for you if you can allocate all these different tasks to some other members in your company? Nevertheless, here lies the lacunae of using an email inbox, since delegating tasks from your inbox can be really messy.

In the modern times, you virtual assistant may not take much time to forward messages to your marketing and accounting department, however, the problem is there is no guarantee that your staffs will remember to follow up on the issue, as their inbox is also overflowing with tasks. Therefore, using the inbox of your email, you have no way to check whether your delegated job has been accomplished within the deadlines.

There Is a Software Designed Specifically For Organizing Your To-Dos

By now, you must be agreeing with us that your inbox is indeed letting you down.

However, there is good news, as we alluded on the beginning of this post; there are several online SaaS platforms that can structure your company’s works. ConvergeHub CRM, which is best known for its sales management tasks, also provides a suite of integrated business productivity tools.

Let us find how this best small business CRM software can solve many of your headaches right away.

Sequencing important tasks: Unlike your email inbox, ConvergeHub brings clarity to your most important tasks. Using this easy to use CRM software, you can assign due date, the priority of the job, completion report, and status update of your important tasks with just a few clicks.

Tracking completed tasks: Tasks tracking best CRM for small business like ConvergeHub, will also fulfill your desire to check tasks off your to-do list. Using this customer information database software marking any task as “Done” is as easy as clicking a button on your computer or mobile screen.

Delegating tasks to others: Getting all the members of your organization working in sales, marketing, support and even finance departments into ConvergeHub, can be really beneficial for your company. Rather than delegating works from your email inbox, this convergence CRM provides a more structured workflow. Using this easy to use CRM software you can create tasks to occur on a repeated or single-time basis, which makes the very act of delegating your works more efficient.
To start assigning jobs to your other employees, just select the correct team member’s name from an intuitive drop-down in the CRM and connect the task to a larger project.

You can also add detailed notes as you allocate your jobs, to ensure that your teams find no more excuses.

Connecting Sales and To-Dos: For added context on sales and marketing related tasks, you can seamlessly link items to opportunities in your sales funnel. With just a click or two using an easy to CRM software, your team can have access to information that would have otherwise resided only in your mind.

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Takeaway:

Leadership comes from the top, so by continuing to rely on email inbox dependent processes, you are just telling your employees to do likewise.

Therefore, take a bold step now and find a better approach to streamline your tasks for enhanced productivity.

Doing this you can be sure that your team will thank you- and so will your bottom-line.

Reasons Why Easy To Use CRM Software Help To Amplify Small and Medium Businesses

When evaluating any software for business, we always want to accomplish the most out of the application, so that we do not end up with the necessity of implementing and accessing multiple software. Our elementary goal of using any software for business is to consolidate processes, business intelligence, and data into a single application, which can either by itself or through integrations, create efficiencies previously unknown. An easy to use CRM software is commonly this solution, which once adopted successfully becomes the nucleus of an organization. So, exactly how does easy to use CRM platform amplify your business? Well, there are hundreds of real-world examples to pull from but here are our top 5 to consider.

When evaluating any software for business, we always want to accomplish the most out of the application, so that we do not end up with the necessity of implementing and accessing multiple software. Our elementary goal of using any software for business is to consolidate processes, business intelligence, and data into a single application, which can either by itself or through integrations, create efficiencies previously unknown.
An easy to use CRM software is commonly this solution, which once adopted successfully becomes the nucleus of an organization.

So, exactly how does easy to use CRM platform amplify your business?

80% of all sales, occur after approximately 5 followups- Gartner Click To Tweet

Well, there are hundreds of real-world examples to pull from but here are our top 5 to consider:

 #1. Understanding the Client Relationship

If you are an owner of an SME (Small and Medium Enterprise), you will always consider the best small and medium business CRM for your business that integrates well with the emailing, documentation, and financial software of your organization. Per say, since QuickBooks is the most popular accounting software for businesses in the U.S. customer relationship management software that allow QuickBooks CRM integration free help to find an instant snapshot of client relationship lifecycles. Using a QuickBooks CRM , you can easily see in one centralized location, what your customers have purchased, when they purchased, how often they purchase, or if they faced any problem while purchasing your products or services. Easy to use CRM software records every touch in the client management processes.

#2. Easy Collaboration

 

When we have an online lead management software solution like an easy to use CRM it becomes simple for anyone in your company to have an access to specific information at a moment’s notice. Since most best CRM for small business is located in the Cloud, anyone in your organization (at any time, and from anywhere) can find access to their desired information, provide feedback, make additions to the CRM database and more. Cloud based CRM systems ensure real-time data and allow seamless collaboration among employees.

#3. Easily Manage and Maintain Tasks

When running a business organization it is most essential to have a clear visibility of what tasks has been completed and jobs that remained outstanding. Using the best small and medium business CRM software like ConvergeHub, you can easily view your progress reports as well as notes contained within the customer database in CRM.
This CRM database is updated instantaneously; hence, there is no need for making second guesses if you are wasting time, resources, or money on tasks that have already been completed. Easy to use CRM software even provides visibility into bottlenecks that needs immediate attention for resolving the issues.

#4. Track KPIs

Key Performance Indicators or KPI can be tracked within the best CRM for small business as the data is pulled from the CRM database. With the help of this data, you can easily evaluate the health of your business by viewing the key performance indicators, which include:

  • Monthly number of unconverted leads
  • Sales conversions to leads
  • Email click-through rate
  • Email response rate
  • Number of lost opportunities
  • Funnel drop off rates
  • Average collection period
  • Number of complaints per month
  • Installation problems per unit sales
  • Time to first call response
  • Time to complete problem resolution
  • On-time delivery
  • Average time to problem resolution
  • Cost per call
  • Call length
  • The volume of calls handled
  • Number of customer complaints
  • The volume of calls handled
  • Customer ratings of service
  • Number of escalations and others

You can also view extended KPIs using easy to use CRM software like:

  • Average customer retention period
  • Average time to last follow-up (sales)
  • Customer attrition rate
  • Average customer lifetime value (by using a CLM CRM)
  • Post sales per unit sold
  • Average profit per customer
  • Survey ratings
  • Upsell revenues etc.

Therefore, while CRM software helps to keep track of all your touch points with the customers, KPIs are measurement benchmarks you can use to assure your product and service delivery remains consistent.

#5. Improve Sales Conversions

Finally, if you are looking to amplify your business, increasing revenue should always remain at the top of your list. When working with an easy to use CRM software, you can increase sales as more data on the client gets tracked and tasks that your employees would have to perform manually gets automated, providing sales reps more time to focus on what they do best- Sales.

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According to a report by Gartner 80% of all sales, occur after approximately 5 follow-ups. A QuickBooks CRM for sales teams , not only helps the sales reps by showing previous purchase and transaction histories of the prospects and customers, but it also makes sure to remind your sales team of all the necessary touches and therefore an easy to use CRM does not let any appointment fall through the crack.

5 Time-Saving Ways To Use Your Easy To Use CRM For So Much More Than Just Sales

Your easy to use CRM can do tasks greater than just monitoring and managing sales. For most, typically you would use your easy to use CRM tool to manage your sales activities. Nevertheless, you should not just think of your small and medium business CRM as a tool designed for daily monitoring of your prospects and leads. There are so many ways you can use your best small and medium business CRM software! Therefore, whether you are looking for competition tracking, accounting and bookkeeping, HR support, or even any task as uncomplicated as making a content calendar- a proper CRM system can carry out all these jobs for you and more.

Your easy to use CRM can do tasks greater than just monitoring and managing sales.

For most, typically you would use your easy to use CRM tool to manage your sales activities. Nevertheless, you should not just think of your small and medium business CRM as a tool designed for daily monitoring of your prospects and leads.

CRM applications can help increase sales by up to 29%, sales productivity by up to 34% and sales forecast accuracy by 42%.- Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

There are so many ways you can use your best small and medium business CRM software!

Therefore, whether you are looking for competition tracking, accounting and bookkeeping, HR support, or even any task as uncomplicated as making a content calendar- a proper CRM system can carry out all these jobs for you and more.

Here are 5 other ways to use your CRM system to help you automate time-taking manual works.

#1. Integrate Email Marketing Processes

Any monotonous email marketing task can be automated and enhanced with the help of CRM platform. You can use an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub to gauge the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Here is a snapshot of what you can do:

  • Fully sync your inbox to any major email provider
  • Send emails to your contacts directly from ConvergeHub, which will then be synced back to your inbox
  • Use customizable templates to save work time preparing recurring communications
  • Look at a specific deal or contact and see all emails associated with that deal or person at-a-glance

#2. Account Management

 

There are many who think that they can only track their primary preliminary sales in the CRM, but you can also use your small and medium business CRM software to up-sell or create stronger relationships with your customers over time.

Remember your job is not done once you make a sale or sign a deal. Churn is the enemy of sustainable growth in any organization. Therefore, you must use your CRM software to handle the customer’s complete buyer journey, to aid you in growing higher revenue per customer and keep up that ever-necessary average-lifetime-value of your purchasers over time.

#3. Accounting and Bookkeeping

By integrating QuickBooks Online with your best small and medium business CRM software you can use your CRM for allowing your employees to create new transactions (such as sales orders, estimates, invoices, and payments) in your CRM- without requiring direct access to an accounting software like QuickBooks.

QuickBooks CRM like ConvergeHub helps you to find a measurable increase in convenience, efficiency, and productivity, whereby users can view any customer payment status and history within the CRM platform.

Moreover, by creating QuickBooks CRM integration free with your CRM software you can get rid of dual data entry by linking payments, invoices, and estimates to opportunities, customer contacts, or projects.

#4. Deal and Commission Tracking

If you are using Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, which is customized for Alternative Funding industry, you can track deals from leads to underwriting, through collection. Support refinancing of existing funded deals and syndication of deals with individual investors and other funders.

Additionally, you can also administer commission payout to brokers and other funding companies. Easily compare scheduled amounts to settled amounts both within your organization and with external sources.

#5. Create and Store Files

Many CRM systems like ConvergeHub and others can create, organize, and store files for things like applications, contacts, briefs, and more.

Once these documentations are in your easy to use CRM, you can easily categorize and thereafter use them to suit your marketing, sales, and support processes. Storing files in the CRM help find any of the documents quickly without trawling through your computer or depending on your email service provider’s basic filing system.

Conclusion

This entire article is dedicated to helping you learn how you can make your easy to use CRM software your new virtual assistant since there are plenty of practical ideas to inspire you to use your customer relationship management software in more innovative ways.

Per say any business procedure that needs a well-thought-out series of actions, and steps can be managed and automated with ConvergeHub CRM.

Therefore, whatever be your business necessities, CRM is a tool that will be able to help you in making all areas of your business operations more proficient.

Just remember, your best small and medium business CRM software is not only for sales, but almost every department in your company can benefit from it.

However, the question is- are you making the most out of your best small business CRM?

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6 Things to Do Before You Buy Your Easy to Use ConvergeHub CRM for Yours SME

Getting your very first easy to use CRM software is a lot like getting your first automobile. You just cannot hop into it and go speeding around, you have to get a license plate first, buy insurance, buckle up your seat belt, adjust your rear mirror, check the controls and so on. Similarly, there are certain preparations you need to do before diving into a brand new company-wide software platform, which is your gateway for generating better sales volume by nurturing enhanced customer relationships.

Getting your very first easy to use CRM software is a lot like getting your first automobile. You just cannot hop into it and go speeding around, you have to get a license plate first, buy insurance, buckle up your seat belt, adjust your rear mirror, check the controls and so on. Similarly, there are certain preparations you need to do before diving into a brand new company-wide software platform, which is your gateway for generating better sales volume by nurturing enhanced customer relationships.

CRM software returns an average of $5.60 for every dollar spent. Click To Tweet

Small business CRMs are in vogue among SMEs, to put it mildly. In a recent CSO Insights research study, it has been found that 80% of sales organizations in small and medium businesses are now using best small business CRM software, which is nearly double the adoption rate that was a decade before. However, easy to use CRM usage does not just end with sales. Innumerable other verticals and niche markets from customer service to car wash companies are also adopting CRMs to track and manage their customer relationships.

Nevertheless, there yet remains a widely held belief that CRM initiatives are plagued by instability. If you look into the web, you will easily find that analysts quote precipitous fail rates for CRM software, which is as high as 68% in certain instances. Although these statistical findings are somewhat based on thin evidence, even partial accuracy would be a cause for such an alarm.

However, the truth be told, there are more than a few opportunities between purchasing a new easy to use CRM software and achieving successful returns on your investment.

So, how do you protect your investment in your best small business CRM software?

To do this, you need to create an environment that optimizes the value of your new customer relationship management system through impeccable preparation, effective use, and precise performance measurement of your CRM data.

For this do not forget to do these six most essential things before make your CRM go live in your business establishment.

#01. Consider the alternatives

Maybe you have already selected a specific brand for you are confident that it is the best small business CRM in the market. One that is ideal for your needs. Still, as a rain check, never sign a contract until you have considered other easy to use CRM solutions. The CRM market is notoriously competitive, which implies for every “best of breed” options, you are likely to find one or two more online lead management software systems with similar features and pricing.

#02. Create executive buy-in

Getting your leadership team on board with the new customer information database software or your CRM can have a great impact on its long-term success. However, it necessarily does not just mean getting your CFO to sign off on the purchase. What we mean over here is that you must sit down with your future stakeholders (CMO, Director of Sales, CIO/CTO, etc.) and let all of them unanimously agree on the business need for your new CRM and accept your game plan for the project.

According to us, the ideal way to build a business case is by showing your executives the value your best small and medium business CRM software will add to their respective departments.

For an example, best small business CRM is obviously a financial incentive, as it is a known fact that CRM software returns an average of $5.60 for every dollar spent.

#03. Negotiate a safe contract

Whether you are selecting an on-premise or an easy to use cloud-based CRM like ConvergeHub, most vendors will be willing to compromise on certain points. Your contact with the CRM company will serve as a map for your future and ongoing relationship with the vendor. Therefore, it is most important that you must read the fine prints on fees and pricing, CRM data ownership, renewal terms, updates and security measures laid by the vendor of your easy to use CRM. In case you find anything that unfairly favors the vendor, lay down your concerns. You should also ask for a copy of the SLA (Service Level Agreement), as the SLA will define your expectations for support and performance of your purchased system.

#04. Train your employees

End-user adoption is one of the most widespread and most exasperating reasons for the failure to launch a CRM initiative. According to a study done by Forrester, it has been revealed that 22% of the CRM adoption problems arise because of slow user adoption, unsuccessful training, and for challenges which lie in adapting to the new workflow. Therefore, your easy to use CRM software training program should focus on the value gains (e.g. automation, time saving features) of the new system. The length of the application training should be determined and measured by the CRM system’s complexity.

#05. Customize the software

Although a formal training is truly a top-down approach for proper adoption of your best small and medium business CRM software, however, you can balance the scales also by taking a bottom-up approach for the implementation of your online lead management software.

In other words, customize your new CRM software to match the user’s preferences. For example, is there a specific pipeline procedure your sales teams prefer? If it is so, recreate the process in your new easy to use CRM software.

Another important aspect of customization includes creating role-based access controls and integrating any third party programs (like QuickBooks Online for accounting, Dropbox for file sharing etc.) through the CRM provider’s API. All critical integrations should be set up and made alive before your CRM goes online.

#06. Establish a framework for evaluating ROI

The only assured way to find whether your easy to use customer information database software is failing is to carefully track the ROI (net gain as a percent of the overall cost). This is exactly where most businesses feel uncomfortable, as “cost” is much more complicated than the CRM’s price tag, and “net gain” is much more complex than revenue.

Therefore establish a baseline before your CRM implementation and then compare the new data against the previous baseline.

 Here are some metrics that you should consider while doing your calculations:

Total Cost

  • Upfront or subscription licensing
  • Vendor service and support fees (implementation, data migration, consulting, maintenance, etc.)
  • Paid upgrades
  • IT maintenance costs
  • Cost for adding/removing users

Net Gain

  • Overall revenue
  • Average revenue per sale/account
  • Number of new accounts
  • Cost and time savings from increased productivity
  • Cost savings per lead
  • Cost savings from increased customer retention

Takeaway

Setting up your first easy to use CRM software system can seem to be a daunting task, but this process depends more on the scale of your business’s needs than on any inherent complexity of your best small and medium business CRM software.

In fact, if your small business deploys a cloud-based CRM like ConvergeHub, it can be up and run in less than a day.

Just keep it in your mind, that the more planned your strategies are on the front end, the more value you will get out of your customer information database software on the back end.

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