How Data In Small Business CRM Can Improve Your Sales Pipeline

One of the greatest advantages of using a small business CRM system is access to a centrally located CRM database related to your leads, prospects, and customers. In fact, more than 75% of CRM users say that CRM system indeed offers enhanced access to customer data. In the beginning, sales reps can be resistant to small business CRM implantation, because using a CRM may seem like a lot of work, which can disrupt their current processes. Nevertheless, having an access to historical CRM data pertaining to sales, such as, contact details, buying patterns of the customers, past orders, implies that the key intelligence from your sales pipeline will always be available to your sales team.

One of the greatest advantages of using a small business CRM system is access to a centrally located CRM database related to your leads, prospects, and customers.

In fact, more than 75% of CRM users say that CRM system indeed offers enhanced access to customer data.

In the beginning, sales reps can be resistant to small business CRM system implementation, because using a CRM may seem like a lot of work, which can disrupt their current processes. Nevertheless, having an access to historical CRM data pertaining to sales, such as, contact details, buying patterns of the customers, past orders, implies that the key intelligence from your sales pipeline will always be available to your sales team.

How Data In Small Business CRM Can Improve Your Sales Pipeline Click To Tweet

This key intelligence found from the CRM database is also important because it improves customer experience and therefore allows your sales team members to follow up on leads and prospects, quickly armed with all relevant information.

Here are 3 ways in which you can use your small business CRM data to improve your sales pipeline:

  1. Lead Nurturing

Your small business CRM keep a record of all transactions that will make your sales reps remain informed about the communications with current and potential prospects. It has been found that business establishments that excel at nurturing of the leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lesser cost and therefore the opportunity to follow up on leads and prospects is crucial for the growth of any business.

However, for success in lead nurturing, some type of lead scoring criterion is by and large needed that allows the sales reps to prioritize leads relying on how hot or likely they are to close, for without lead scoring often a lot of time is wasted by the salespeople as they chase unqualified opportunities.

Therefore, look for the best small business CRM to fit your organization that will help in simplifying the lead prioritization process, particularly by using automation, to gain control of your sales pipeline.

  1. Accurate Sales Forecasting

Not all CRM platforms provide the same functionalities, so discussing with your CRM vendor about your specific requirements is a critical part of the CRM selection process.

When selecting your best small business CRM, choose a system that comes with reliable reporting options along with good analytics that can aid you to predict sales growth, illustrate conversion rates, and help you to get an idea on the prospect’s journey through the sales pipeline.

Customer data from your small and medium business CRM database is more likely to make your sales forecast reliable and accurate.

This is absolutely necessary if you want to motivate your salespersons to reach their optimal yet achievable targets consistently. Your small business CRM system can not only escalate a sales rep’s productivity, but it can also make your sales process more efficient and therefore contribute to the continued growth of your company.

  1. Smarter Working with CRM Integrations

Proper CRM integrations with other third-party software can go a long way in assisting a busy sales team by aiding them to focus on the right thing at the right time. For instance, calendar, mail, and marketing integrations can automate previously complex tasks, eliminating the requirements for manual CRM data entry across multiple software platforms.

It must be remembered, that small business CRM system like ConvergeHub and others, which can operate nicely on mobile devices is also an added advantage for your sales team.

Research indicates that salespersons those who have mobile access to their CRM are 24 % more likely to achieve their annual targets, where remote access to CRM data is the key to their performance.

As for sales reps, having data from the CRM at their fingertips even when they out of the office and on the go, means that they can follow up on time-sensitive leads and thereby stay away from missed opportunities.

The long and short of it?

The access to sales data in real time by using a mobile enabled small business CRM is really valuable for closing leads at the right time, which is why mobile CRM technology and integration capabilities of any Customer Relationship Management software are the most sought after functionality of all best small and medium business CRM systems nowadays.

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3 Quick Tips To Get Your Salespeople Using Your QuickBooks CRM System

Our company ConvergeHub has implemented hundreds of powerful CRM systems over the years, and although customer relationship management is more to do with sales, marketing, and support related activities, we still as a CRM vendor tend to believe that financial integrity is the most critical element in the world of small and medium businesses. Since without receiving and paying customers and vendors, there is no business. This is the exact reason why we at ConvergeHub integrated our easy to use CRM platform with the best and the most popular accounting platform QuickBooks to develop a small business CRM system that will cater and bring unthinkable results for both sales and accounting teams in any organization, and branded ConvergeHub, our customer relationship management platform as QuickBooks CRM.

Our company ConvergeHub has implemented hundreds of powerful CRM systems over the years, and although customer relationship management is more to do with sales, marketing, and support related activities, we still as a CRM vendor tend to believe that financial integrity is the most critical element in the world of small and medium businesses. Since without receiving and paying customers and vendors, there is no business.
This is the exact reason why we at ConvergeHub integrated our easy to use CRM platform with the best and the most popular accounting platform QuickBooks to develop a small business CRM system that will cater and bring unthinkable results for both sales and accounting teams in any organization, and named ConvergeHub, our customer relationship management platform as QuickBooks CRM.

As with all businesses, the enormous task of recording telephonic conversations, in-person interactions, emails, service recalls, follow-ups and keeping up with myriad other information can be a daunting task, if it is not managed with the help of a robust system.

68% of small business owners regret looking back on the first year is that they didn’t spend more time learning about financial management- Intuit Click To Tweet

However, going back to our initial statement, since accounting is the terra firma or the foundation stone of all small business, it is typical that the customer’s historical purchases are most often sourced from the existing accounting software used by the organization, which companies in more than 80% of cases, will be already using QuickBooks. Therefore integrating QuickBooks with a robust CRM system like ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM virtually eliminates all of the double data entry, which is the basic requirement for efficient implementation of small business CRM software.

Using our QuickBooks CRM, your sales and support team can concentrate on recording quality information about their customers and their interactions, involving multiple touch points that can only be done with the help of a CRM.

Moreover, if you manage each lead or prospects to whom you have sent your estimates in QuickBooks, it is sure to create a lot of clutter and junk data in the accounting software. Therefore handling your leads in a QuickBooks CRM, whereby you handle your leads in the CRM, helps to keep the QuickBooks data clean and therefore make accounting related tasks more accurate.

Additionally, if your business establishment is like most other companies having a majority of estimates and quotations that your sales team sends do not convert to paying customers, QuickBooks CRM can help by following up these leads and keeping them warm through marketing automation until they get off the fence and are ready to decide on their purchases.

Nevertheless, the initial problems that business establishments face while implementing CRM system is getting their staffs, especially their sales team members to use this incredibly powerful system, as salespeople do not always consider CRM to be “mission critical” for their day-to-day activities.

These are the companies those that generally fail with CRM implementation in their organization, while the ones that succeed in adopting CRM as a culture and know that having a CRM database for sales, marketing, accounting, inventory, payroll, and customer support, improves their company’s value and profitability.

Here are three simple and quick tips that we learned from our smart customers of ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM, to get your sales and services staffs use the system, especially during the first few months, before your software implementation process gets derailed:

#1. The Voicemail Trick

Not being technical does not make good salespeople bad. If you are a small business owner, the last thing you would want to happen is to find your CRM system getting in the way of making your sales reps sell. Many sales reps still hail from the old school and are hence tech-averse, in spite of the management’s requirements for knowing their activities.

The solution to this problem lies in an amicable compromise.

Set up a company voice mail and tell your tech-adverse sales reps who abhor data entry to “call-in” their daily activities and just leave a message. You can thereafter hire a high school kid to listen to the messages every evening and update the required database. That way salespeople can focus more on selling and you can get all the information they needed to feed in the CRM system.

#2. The Lead Trick

Ask any sales rep what is the most important element to sustain their livelihood, and they will tell you it is “leads”.  Although it sounds a little over-optimistic, most salespersons will say, “Give me a lead and I will close the deal”.

While in a perfect sales workflow, a good marketing team will generate leads and a good sales rep will take those leads to sell. A good manager’s job is to make sure that the leads get distributed efficiently only through the company’s CRM system.

This way, even tech-averse and old-school sales reps can be forced to work with the CRM system to fetch those leads and provide required data to get necessary credits for the sale.

Any efficient salesperson’s stomach is through his or her wallet. Therefore, start putting the leads into the CRM system and watch your old-school sales reps work on the system to get their meals.

#3. The Alert Trick

All good lead management software systems like ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM enable the users to set up reminders and alerts so that tasks and appointments are not forgotten and nothing falls through the crack.

System alerts can ensure that your sales reps are using your CRM system optimally.

Therefore, you and your sales managers can tune the CRM platform to send you alerts every hour because one or more of your tech-averse sales reps are not following up on their leads or if they are not returning phone calls or completing their sales activities in time or not updating crucial status fields on a timely basis.  Once system alerts are activated you can always make your sales reps to do their tasks by asking them to do it. Since not willing to use a CRM system in the present day, is not only annoying but also kind of career limiting for any salesperson in any organization, if you get my drift.

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Conclusion

Do you think will any of these three tricks solve the problem of getting your salespeople use your QuickBooks CRM system, which has already naturally solved several accounting problems for your organization?

If you find the answers affirmative, as an owner in charge of your business and the CRM system, you got to be the one to put your foot down and stand behind it determinedly.

You have to be the person to make your sales team understand that your small business QuickBooks CRM is every bit as important as your accounting and inventory system and make your sales reps know that “if it is not in the system it does not exist”.

In the end, funding for the QuickBooks CRM is your investment and as it says, “Your CRM is as good as what you put in it.”

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5 Trending Customer Support Ideas For The Easy To Use CRM Software Users In 2018

Consumers today in this era of digital transformation are evolving in their preferences and expectations around how a brand or a company is interacting with them. With the present time’s rapid rate of technological advancements and innovations, customer support personals, users of easy to use CRM software are also adopting unique solutions to streamlines their operations and hence better serve their customers. Here are five chosen customer support ideas that are critically important to increase your abilities to remain competitive in a persistently shifting business landscape and help you to stay ahead of the curve in 2018.

Consumers today in this era of digital transformation are evolving in their preferences and expectations around how a brand or a company is interacting with them. With the present time’s rapid rate of technological advancements and innovations, customer support personals, users of easy to use CRM software are also adopting unique solutions to streamlines their operations and hence better serve their customers.

More than 75% of customers believe that providing value to their time is one of the most significant things all businesses can do to deliver their customers with better customer support-Forrester Research Click To Tweet

Here are five chosen customer support ideas that are critically important to increase your abilities to remain competitive in a persistently shifting business landscape and help you to stay ahead of the curve in 2018:

  1. Chatbots Will Become Increasingly Prevalent

The use of live chat functionalities in business websites has been increasing rapidly.  According to Inc.com, this is because more than 45% of the prospects and customers favor this functionality as chatbots do not keep them on hold.

Moreover, with the rise in the usage of AI (Artificial Intelligence), it is expected that chatbots (which are still manned in certain instances by humans, who interacts directly with the customers), will become more independent in the days to come.

Hence, in spite of the growing popularity of this functionality, it is becoming unfeasible for support staffs to respond to every type of incoming questions.

Therefore, presently live chat can be made use of primarily for providing basic information, like hours of operations, company contact addresses etc.

However, this little help from chatbots frees up the live agent’s time and so aids them to focus their energy on resolving more intricate customer issues.

Many best small and medium business CRM software users, are of the opinion that as chatbots, “Learn” more of the common customer issues, you will probably see them solving more critical problems, in the later days. As there are several easy to use CRM software users and AI enthusiasts those who believe that this is only the beginning of a long journey.

  1. Easy To Use CRM Software Integration Will Become Necessary

There are several small enterprises and call centers across the global frontiers those who have already integrated their support ticketing systems with many best small business CRM software. It has been noted that with so much information stored in the CRM database, at their fingertips, support agents can deliver significantly enhanced support by using an easy to use CRM software.

Moreover, now that the modern day tech-savvy customers increasingly expect call center’s support agents to have a 360-degree comprehensive view of their history with the establishment, which is only possible by adopting best small and medium business CRM software, like ConvergeHub.

It has been found that more than 85% of the customers often get frustrated when a support agent does not have the exact information with them on the customer-buying journey.

Therefore, as consumer expectations and preferences continue to evolve over time, it will become increasingly challenging to satisfy the customer’s needs without an easy to use CRM software with its CRM database in place.

  1. Intelligent Call Routing Will Be On The Rise

If your business is offering several products, you just cannot expect every support executive to be an expert in them all. Therefore, you require specialized support staffs and a mechanism for routing support related tickets around specific products to the representatives who are specialized in them.

By using system tags, it is possible to segment customers into groups those who have common attributes, such as the language they speak or the products they use, which can be learned by knowing how to maintain customer database in an easy to use CRM.

This will help your help desk system to automatically route new tickets when they come to the support reps specialized in supporting that segment.

Segmenting support tickets using CRM database will help in accomplishing the following:

  • Save time, which was previously used to route tickets manually
  • Faster ticket closures because of specialized expert support
  • Increase in customer satisfaction

According to Forrester Research, more than 75% of customers believe that providing value to their time is one of the most significant things all businesses can do to deliver their customers with better customer support.

  1. Big Data Analytic and Increase in Personalization

The colossal amount of customer information in the CRM database in all best small and medium business CRM software systems have opened the gates for enhancement of the need for personalization in customer support.

Using an easy to use CRM, now it is possible for support reps to glimpse at a customer profile and very quickly comprehend the customer’s behavior, geographical location, past support related issues, the preferred method of communication, and more.

Armed with this type of insight, support reps can now deliver better customer experience and thereby more easily develop a deeper rapport with the customers.

Moreover, when support reps better understand their customers they can easily predict the kind of information that the customers need by looking into the history of their support related issues, that helps in faster resolution of the tickets.

  1. Data Protection Regulations Will Force Change

In May 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will go into effect. For those who are not aware of GDPR, it can be explained in brief that GDPR is there to protect the personal information of all EU residents. Which implies your support teams will now need explicit permissions to record support calls. If you serve any customer in the EU, this is going to apply to your support related policies, since non-compliance could result in very steep fines.

 

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Bottom Line

It may feel challenging to keep up with the forces that are shaping customer support strategies and practices in 2018; however taking time to do your homework and adopting an easy to use CRM, will certainly keep you fully prepared to evolve with the times.

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