Tag: Easy to use CRM

How To Use Automation In Top CRM Software For Improving Sales And Business Growth

If your question is: Why should I automate my workflow or use a top CRM software? The briefest answer to this is: To get the most out of your work with the minimum efforts. Now, you may be wondering if there is any scope for such effectual automation within your sales team. Yes, there is! Hence, in this article let us outline a few tested and tried ideas for automation that are certain to deliver better results while reducing the workload of your sales teams.

If your question is: Why should I automate my workflow or use a top CRM software?
The briefest answer to this is: To get the most out of your work with the minimum efforts.

Now, you may be wondering if there is any scope for such effectual automation within your sales team.

Yes, there is!

Hence, in this article let us outline a few tested and tried ideas for automation that are certain to deliver better results while reducing the workload of your sales teams.

If sales reps make contact within 5 minutes after generation of the lead, the lead is 22 times more like to get converted into a hot prospect. Click To Tweet

Idea #1

Make sure that your web-based leads are contacted in minutes

Web-generated leads are precious for all businesses. Nevertheless, your sales reps must ensure that web leads are contacted within minutes after they are generated online.

This is because, according to a study published by MIT, it states that if sales reps make contact within 5 minutes after generation of the lead, the lead is 22 times more like to get converted into a hot prospect ready for buying your offering.

However, how can you be assured that your sales team will be capable of following up with every web lead so promptly?

This is where automation in a robust CRM like Salesforce or any other reputed Salesforce Alternative CRM for small business comes into play.

  • As soon as the web-to-form is filled up, the information gets collected in the CRM database.
  • Next, your easy to use CRM taps into your integrated telephony software solutions and prompts your sales reps active on the system and mobile devices.
  • If the sales rep is busy, the CRM system automatically forwards the call to the next able rep and continues to do so, until a free sales rep is capable of making the call to the given number.
  • The sales rep finds all the relevant information about the lead on their CRM system, and therefore armed with that data just need to click to make the call. This makes sure that all calls are contacted when they are hot and that too before the stipulated 5 minutes time.

Idea #2

Automate follow-up calls on email campaigns

Irrespective of whether your email campaign is about a demo, your new product launch, or a meetup, in all cases, it is really tough for leads to open your emails.

Easy to use CRM software with integrated email campaigning functionalities, help the users of the software to view who opened their emails.

Therefore, to ensure that your sales teams make follow up calls to every lead that opens their emails here is how you can automate your CRM to do it.

  • See the email campaigns report in the top CRM software solutions’ easy to use dashboard.
  • Select all the contacts that opened the email.
  • Push all the contacts into the dialing software integrated with the CRM.
  • For hereon let the dialer do its job of persistently and automatically dial every lead in the contact list and connect them to a representative.

Idea #3

Ensure that missed and abandoned calls do not become missed leads

All sales CRM software solutions capture incoming lead 24/7.

Now it is natural that you can miss calls during holidays, after your work hours, or when your lines are busy.

However, when you are using a CRM missed calls should not mean missing a valuable lead.

Hence, here is a workflow that you can set up easily to make sure that you never miss doing a follow up on any of your missed calls.

  • Your integrated telephony system can find any phone number that goes unanswered with the numbers in your CRM database.
  • Now if the call is from a fresh lead, you can set up your top CRM software system that a new follow up the ticket is automatically generated by the system.
  • An alert on the missed call can be sent by the system to your inbox, and in case there is a voice message that can also get attached to your email.

Idea #4

Send greetings, voice messages, and notifications to all in the contact lists in one go

Do your sales team members need to remind qualified leads, prospects, and customers about their subscription renewal dates, approaching last payment due dates and others?

You can easily set a configurable IVR (Interactive Voice Response) message, and create a workflow using automation in your business CRM that lets you broadcast the message to any or all in the contact list within your CRM database with a single click.

Conclusion

Essentially all of these stated ideas depend on a smooth integration between your top CRM software tool and telephone software applications like RingCentral, NexInteractive Dialer or Twilio Call that are most essential software solutions which can be integrated with Salesforce and all other major Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions like ConvergeHub that are meant for small businesses.

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Why Do You Need A Scalable Business CRM Software Tool In SMBs For Finding Rapid Growth

The number of startups and SMBs in the US since 1982 (according to the U.S. Small Business Administration) has increased by more than 48.7%. New businesses are starting every other day by ambitious businesspersons who want to lead a company and run it on their own. But then again a startup is a completely different game than an expanding medium-scale or large business since with growth come obstacles. Therefore how do we take our team, and meet these growing demands in small businesses? How do we successfully expand to cherish rapid business growth? Many SMB owners make business growth tougher than it is. This is because, they complicate their products and services, over-think their strategies, and fear too much about the stability of their employees.

The number of startups and SMBs in the US since 1982 (according to the U.S. Small Business Administration) has increased by more than 48.7%.
New businesses are starting every other day by ambitious businesspersons who want to lead a company and run it on their own.
But then again a startup is a completely different game than an expanding medium-scale or large business since with growth come obstacles.
Therefore how do we take our team, and meet these growing demands in small businesses? How do we successfully expand to cherish rapid business growth?
Many SMB owners make business growth tougher than it is. This is because, they complicate their products and services, over-think their strategies, and fear too much about the stability of their employees.
It is beyond any doubt that these are indeed important issues, but these problems pail out when compared to the one area that contributes most to the success of any business: Sales.
Now sales teams in SMBs that follow a rigorous and methodical sales process or a business CRM software tool on average according to CSO Insights, make more than 33 percent growth in their production and revenue than the sales teams that do not.

CRM applications can increase revenue by up to 41% per sales representative – Finances Online Click To Tweet

Therefore to find rapid growth, small business owners have to invest enough time every day in ‘Sales’ and so businesses that have adopted easy to use sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform experience seamless and better growth.

The Importance of Best Small Business CRM Software for SMB

The importance of small business CRM software is the need to address the ever-growing size of the business.

This is because today’s small business is tomorrow’s enterprise, and therefore successful startup owners that have adopted a CRM solution that grows with their business are the ones that realize stellar business growth.

The proof is in the pudding:

According to an infographic published by Bizhumm, sales CRM solutions have been known to boost revenue by 41 percent per salesperson, increase lead conversion rate by more than 300 percent while decreasing the cost of sales and marketing by 23 percent.

Therefore to empower sales and grow revenue small businesses need to implement the right resources and business management tools to do it.

Now if you are shopping around for your best CRM for small business, to help in your business growth, you need to accept the fact that a business CRM software goes well beyond just record-keeping.
This is the reason top-performing establishments use their CRM to its fullest potentials for automating tasks, such as marketing and customer support while ensuring that as their number of employees grows so does the capability of their CRM platform to manage its load.

Hence in this article let us explore a few key areas that best small business CRM software solutions help startups and small businesses to grow:

Improves decision making

Easy to use CRM technology delivers visibility into vital customer data. Since the more comprehensive and detailed are your reports, the better you will be able to measure sales activities, forecast sales, and track your business performances.
It has been found in certain research that most sales-oriented organizations are 38 percent more likely to use CRM for collecting sales analytics and customer information for getting informed on their ongoing customer interactions and touch-points.

Without the information gathered from analytics found in your best CRM for small business, you will not be able to focus on the big picture solutions for your company or empower your sales, marketing, and support teams to focus on opportunities.

Enhance productivity

With business CRM software solutions, your marketing, sales and support reps can seamlessly and safely automate their tasks apart from gaining quick access to customer information as CRM ensures all critical information remains stored in a single place within the CRM database.

Therefore as your business grows, you can significantly boost your brand’s productivity by having a scalable CRM platform that grows along with your prospering business, and also keep all records of your customer’s data which includes all customer history and buyer journey information stored in its database for boosting cross-selling and up-selling activities.

Promotes teamwork        

Growing small businesses and startups requires a scalable business CRM software platform in order to make marketing, sales, customer support work in a more aligned manner since it has been found in research by Aberdeen Group, that companies that have strong marketing and sales alignment achieve more than 20 percent increase in their annual growth rates.

Now if you are using a QuickBooks CRM solution, which even integrates accounting with your best small business CRM software when it is combined with sales and customer service modules in the CRM, it not only boosts productivity but also increases customer experience and promotes seamless teamwork that is needed for rapid business growth.

Therefore an all-in-one CRM makes it possible to open up lines of communication between your teams.

Improve calling services

Easy to use CRM, helps businesses to make outbound calls, receive incoming calls, record calls, create personalized calling scripts, automate voice mails and create many other telephony-based activates, which helps employees using CRM to quickly manage, assign and resolve incidents when these processes are automated.

Therefore, scalability in a CRM becomes a necessity when small businesses have ever-growing data of customer information in their CRM database.

Provide mobile access to data

In the present times, key data no longer can remain confined to the office. Therefore mobile CRM technology provides your team instant access to data which helps them to view sales and customer support activities in real-time.

This is because, with a complete view of customer history, pricing history, and several other types of lead intelligence data which can be seen from any mobile device, the best small business CRM software makes it possible to gain access to information that is needed for any growing business.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist business CRM software is a scalable business tool that not only provides small businesses with the commitment to sell better than their competitors, but it also enables collaborations across departments that results in providing world-class customer experience which helps to create grounds for new business and aids in finding rapid revenue growth.

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How To Boost Lead Conversion Using Sales Management CRM Tools

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their sales management CRM software? Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers? Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2021.

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

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

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

Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization.

Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2021.

Integrate Your Sales Management CRM With A Marketing Automation Platform

A majority of sales reps today use easy to use CRM software solutions to move leads and prospective opportunities through the sales pipeline and close deals.

If you know what is CRM software, you must be aware that CRM is a robust application that stores a plethora of information about all your leads, and customers in the CRM database, which includes details like demographic and behavioral data.

Therefore, when you use automation in CRM, which is also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA) in tandem with your sales management CRM, you can without any hassles leverage that contact details to customize and target the messages that you need to send to your prospects.

Nowadays even most Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, let you personalize your lead nurturing process and send messages based on your prospects’ past buying behaviors, interests, and more.

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

Publish Awesome And Informative Blogs

We all acknowledge that the stage for converting leads comes at the very end of the sales cycle. However, to persuade the leads to get to that point, whereby they become interested enough to procure your offerings- you primarily need to build up trust.

Leads and prospective customers cherish to see you as a subject matter expert and an authority in your arena and feel that you can be trusted to support them and ensure their growth and satisfaction using your offering(s).

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

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

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

Set Up Killer Landing Pages With Optimized CTA Buttons

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

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

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

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

Run Lead Nurturing And Lead Generation Campaigns

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

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

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

Set Up Lead Scoring To Qualify Leads

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

While scoring leads, you can use a point system that indicates the value a lead represents, by awarding points to leads for actions they take, like clicking or opening emails, visiting your website, downloading eBooks, participating in post-sales surveys, etc.

You can also award points to your leads for demographic data such as the place they reside, their job titles, the industry they work, etc.

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

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

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

Simply put lead scoring boosts the lead quality in your business CRM, which helps in achieving a better conversion rate for your organization.

Enable Sales To Quickly Follow Up On Qualified Leads

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

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

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

Using a sales management CRM for creating reminders and automating tasks it is easy to send alerts to sales reps the moment a new lead becomes qualified, to ensure that your sales teams do not let MQLs fall through the crack.

Share On Social Media And Use Social Monitoring To Find Brand Advocates

It is easy to engage your know leads with multichannel campaigns and email marketing.

However, what can you do about those leads whose contact data you do not have in your CRM database?

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

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

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

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

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

Here are two statistics that illustrate the role that brand advocates can play for growing your business.

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

Key Takeaway

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

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

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

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

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Key Features Of Sales And Marketing CRM Tools – That Can Save Your Startup Today

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, is circumventing nine to five jobs, and throwing them into the bin. Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money. Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real problems and issues that can stall your super ideas and how adopting the best sales and marketing CRM tools can change that for you and make your company find business growth.

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, is circumventing nine to five jobs, and throwing them into the bin.

Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money.

Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real problems and issues that can stall your super ideas and how adopting the best sales and marketing CRM tools can change that for you and make your company find business growth.

Paying attention to your customers is important since 14% of startups fail due to not regarding customers’ needs. - Fundera Click To Tweet

What is CRM?

CRM is both a technology and an awesome strategy that integrates into itself several dimensions of customer relations, which helps to convey real value to the customers and retain the same for businesses. With CRM related IT solutions, world-class customer relations can be easily attained and utilized to create brands in the marketplace.

In other words, best business CRM is a tool that helps one understand their target customers, their needs, and how brands can sustain that customer relationship to propel your startup on the basis of that relationship.

Now there are three types of easy to use CRM software that is available in the marketplace:

1. Strategic CRM

This is a CRM software that is based on delivering value to the customers, better than the rest of the competitions, and integrates the same in product development and structure of the business.

2. Operational CRM

This CRM software focuses on the automation of sales, production, and service as per the requirement of the consumers.

3. Analytical CRM

This CRM software focuses on gathering, storing, distributing, and thereafter integrating and analyzing consumer-facing data to cater value to both customers and businesses.

There are several models of sales and marketing CRM tools available in the marketplace. Nevertheless, in this article, we shall discuss the IDIC model which aids businesses to ascertain the customers who are of high value and loyalty towards the brands.

Identification: Find out who is the customers and understand them well.

Differentiation: Identity which customer has the greatest potentiality and thereby have more future prospects.

Interaction: Makes sure that businesses can perceive the customer’s desires, and understand the customer’s possible relationship with other brands.

Customization: Personalize offers and means of communication to make sure that the customer’s desires can be fulfilled.

So now that you are aware of what is CRM let us move on to the five most important reasons as to why you must buy your best sales and marketing CRM tools for your startup organization and stick to this cutting-edge business growth technology and tool.

5 KEY PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS (FOR STARTUPS)

1. CASH CRUNCH

According to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that more than 29 percent of startups fail because of cash crunch and more than 18 percent for cost and pricing issues.

Therefore it is important for any startup business to keep their pricing compatible and yet generate enough profits to keep the krypton of cash crunch at a bay.

This is over here small business CRM software comes into play as it can help customers to understand the customer’s choices and buying patterns to integrate the same in product development and provide pricing that predicts good business growth.

2. POOR RELATIONS WITH THE CUSTOMERS

Relations with its customers is the spine of any business, especially startups as they are more consumer-based models of business and this is why more startups are in need of incorporating CRM strategies for their growing businesses.

According to reports among all startups that fail more than 17 percent are those that failed to develop and deliver a user-friendly product or service and another 17 percent failed because of inappropriate business models that underlined their offerings.

Therefore, this data even illustrates the growing importance to adopt the best all in one CRM in developing a consumer-based model for business that can help in building user-friendly offerings.

3. NEED FOR THE RIGHT TEAM

The idea of delivering a customer-friendly offering, for any startup is a challenging task, which needs the right team to pull that off.
As per statistics and data that we referred to before about 23 percent of startups fail due to their team’s inefficiency in catering a customer-friendly offering to the consumers in the marketplace.

Therefore as a startup entrepreneur, you need extensive staffing and training programs that can aid you in employing the right team to focus on providing value to the needs of your customers.

This is over here CRM for small business once again comes into play as it can help you to identify the right persons for your job and even train the same marketing, sales, and support strategies to reach customers and sustain them over a long period of time.

4. NEED FOR RESEARCH

Just as there is no way that we can write an article without any proper research, similarly the same applies to any startup, as comprehensive market research is most important and a must for the growth of any startup business across the globe.

According to research, it has been found that 42 percent of failed startup ventures were not successful since they did start their business after performing any market research about their proposed offerings.
Additionally, 13 percent of startup businesses failed and are so ill-fated because they launched their business at a bad time, statistics which show the extent to which startup organizations ignore real-time market trends while starting their businesses.

Therefore, as one of the most recognized vendors of software solutions in the Salesforce Alternative CRM marketplace, we can assure that it is the business growth technology that is capable of storing, integrating, and analyzing consumer data which aid startups to find and focus on the right market at the right time to launch the right product or service in the marketplace.

5. MARKETING WOES

As per statistics and data that we referred even before 14 percent of startups fail due to poor or ineffectual marketing and another 14 percent for ignoring their customers.

But why do startups fail at marketing or while conducting their after-sales service?

Even though there can be multiple factors that can make it happen but one of the most important of all these factors is not knowing well your customers.

CRM for SMB and startups helps growing businesses to understand their customers thoroughly so that they can cater to their customer’s needs.

This is exactly where Analytical CRM comes into play which aids in gathering consumer-related data and with Operational CRM that can ensure faster services to their customers and Strategic CRM that can help in marketing their offerings strategically to target relevant consumers based on their behavioral and purchase patterns which can be easily collected, stored and thereafter analyzed once it is hived inside the CRM database.

Conclusion

Therefore now that you know why your startup needs to adopt the best sales and marketing CRM tools and implement CRM strategies for your business growth, and the right type of CRM to go for to overcome each of these hurdles at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, it remains without any doubt that small business CRM software is that much-needed firepower which your startup needs as the next big weapon for victories ahead in this competitive global marketplace.

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Tips On Black-Belt Customer Retention Program Ideas – That Works

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task. Therefore, if retaining the customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy. This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with your customer retention program ideas it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn. Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program ideas that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task.
Therefore, if retaining customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy.
This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with your customer retention program ideas it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn.

Customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95%. Click To Tweet

Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program ideas that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

What are customer retention programs?

In simple words, customer retention program ideas are your best means to keep your customers happy. Since, when you keep holding on to more customers, you can easily decrease your businesses’ churn rate, boost company revenue and thereby increase profitability.

According to a popular statistical report, customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95%.

However, to make your businesses’ customer retention program really work, you need to make it a part of your businesses’ daily routine.

Therefore, to let us get started here we have put together a few key customer retention programs that you can implement immediately for decreasing churn and find rapid business growth.

1. Create an onboarding program

The very first program for customer retention that you must have on your checklist is implementing a customer onboarding strategy into your daily routine.

Customer onboarding is the process you require to make customers use your products and services in the easiest possible way in order to make them achieve their goals.

To conduct a proper onboarding of your new customers, primarily thank the customer for coming on-board and choosing your brand.

Apart from it during your onboarding calls, you can also cover the following points mentioned below:

  • Discuss with your customer as to how they want to get started and line up your efforts to match their expectations.
  • Offer your customer additional services to start-up.
  • Make your customers familiar with all your community websites, videos, and webinars that you can offer and also help them to overcome the common obstacles faced by others.
  • Send a welcome mail to your new customer after the primary onboarding conversation, with a small picture of yourself, so that the customer has a face to go with your brand.

2. Create customer follow up programs

According to a survey done by Econsultancy, more than 82% of business organizations acknowledge that customer retention is less labor-intensive and cheaper than closing a new deal, which makes it the main driver of any company’s revenue.

Now, do not be worried thinking that you have to use up all day calling each and every customer in your CRM database.

According to the Pareto principle, which most of us are aware of, only 20% of your customers generate 80% of your organization’s revenue.

Now, if you are using business CRM software it can create clear indicators that can aid you in identifying the customers that must receive most of your attention, and help you to spend your time on the right customers efficiently.

To do this set up your CRM software solution to segment your customers into three basic groups.

  • A – customers or large accounts
  • B – customers or medium-sized accounts
  • C – customers or small accounts

Now, while for large accounts you can schedule a face-to-face meeting with the customers or follow up with the customer once every month with medium-sized and small accounts, you can provide them a half-yearly follow-up, send newsletters and keep them updated on seasonal price offers or any other campaigns your company is having for the consumers of your offerings.

3. Identify risk customers

In most cases, customers will stop doing business with you because they are not satisfied either with your products or your support services.

Therefore, to retain customers and prevent churn it is crucial that you must identify risky customers as a part of your daily customer retention program.

According to Forrester, it cost 5 times more to acquire new customers than retain your existing ones.

Here are some of the ways you can identify the risky customers in your business:

  • Be proactive and create an overview of customers with too many open tickets, which is a red flag and should be managed with proper follow up.
  • Create an overview of customers that shows disruptive buying patterns. If a customer has bought every month over a year and then all of a sudden do not order any product for the next six months, pick up the phone to check out what is going on.
  • Create an overview of customers who are calling up regularly with questions and complaints. These demanding customers most often need training or another service to get them up and running.

Cloud-based CRM software be it Salesforce for enterprises or Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by startups and small businesses, CRM is a tool that can be used with customer retention program ideas, to easily create this overview so that you can provide better support after identifying your risky customers to reduce churn and grow your business.

4. Win back lost customers

Why spend your resources on winning new customers when you can use those efforts to win back lost customers in your CRM software’s database.

According to Jill Griffin’s book “Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers-And Keep Them Loyal” most businesses have a 20-40 percent chance of selling to their lost customers, whilst the chance for selling to new customers are only 5-20 percent in this competitive marketplace.

Here are some of the key reasons why you should focus on winning back lost customers:

  • Lost customers have once shown that they are interested in your offerings, and so they are superior prospects to arbitrary leads on your cold calling list.
  • Lost customers already know your brand, and so you require lesser time to educate them.
  • You can use technology to keep track of customers that you already know, follow their past buying patterns, and create tailor-made offers to win them back.

Winning back lost customers can have a snowball effect, whereby when you succeed in winning lost customers, and they become satisfied with your brand, it might generate word of mouth advertisement, which will help you to boost your chance of winning new prospects, as 91% of B2B customers are influenced by word-of-mouth and referrals when they make their buying decisions for new products and services.

Wrapping Up

Therefore, stop managing your customers in an ad-hoc manner, since retaining customers not only requires hard work, but it also requires the right customer retention program ideas that you must implement in your daily routine to see an increase in customer satisfaction score, revenue growth, and productivity.

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CRM And Customer Service Skill Enhancement Tips For Small Business Growth

Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business? Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings. This is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands. Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”

Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business?

Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings.

Globally, 54% of all consumers say that they have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago. - Microsoft(2021) Click To Tweet

This is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands.

Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”

Well, even though it is one way of showing that cars with bumper stickers stuck on them like these shows that they are ready to continuously evaluate their own performances, nevertheless asking “How are we doing” is a good step in showing that your business does care about how potential customers think about your brand and your company.
This is because it takes more than just asking the public to figure out if the customer service that your company is providing is meeting the real expectations of your customers.

Companies (especially small businesses) have pretty comprehensible indications when their customer service is bad.

Therefore, it is only when it becomes just about impossible to keep up with a volley of negative remarks and criticisms on social media and when sales start to dwindle or they are increasingly having to offer ‘make good’ that managers and leaders are quick to see how they can improve the way questions and complains are handled by the service teams in the organization.

However, by the time they reach that aforesaid point, it might already be too late to keep up with a valuable relationship or prevent permanent damage happening to the brand.

Hence, most successful small businesses have learned to stop and make changes wherever it is necessary based on the variety and volume of customer complaints coming through.

In fact, successful businesses armed with CRM and customer service team take a hard look in the rear-viewing mirror before continuing on their customer support journey, to ensure that they have not missed any important markers on their way.

Therefore for ascertaining if the service provided to your customers is good enough can involve a mixture of subjective indicators and formal methods, out of which below are five to consider for your business growth:

1. Find Out What Is Good Enough

There are several anecdotal indicators of customer service metrics to choose from, and there are also a lot more of it than what is common across your industry.

Irrespective of whether you are using Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software these data can be readily captured as they directly impact your business growth.

Some of the most popular metrics found in easy to use CRM software include CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score).

Although it is really hard to reach 100% in any of them, nevertheless based on Revenue per Customer, and Customer Retention and Churn rate, determine what looks good and what appears to be great for your startup or small business.

2. Use Multiple Effective Feedback Loops

Most businesses big or small do some kind of survey to measure the quality of their customer service at one point in time or another.
This can work if your business has some sort of solid email database in the business CRM, or you know of a convenient point in the customer journey where purchasers are most willing to complete your survey questionnaire.

In other cases, several small businesses and startup organizations even offer simple online forms on their websites to collect feedback on their support services, or in modern times a ‘hashtag’ that can be used on social media for viewing their feedbacks.

Always remember that presently we dwell in an omnichannel world and so according to certain research conducted it states that more than 40 percent of customers prefer not to do business with brands if they are incapable of using their preferred channel(s) for conveying their issues and feedback.

3. Remain Aware Of Organic Feedback

Even if you have set up channels to get the opinions of your customers and find the right metrics for measuring your customer satisfaction scores, there will always be certain customers of your brand who share their experiences (good as well as bad) on their own accord.

This can be a comment made by the customer to a sales rep (once they approached for selling a new product), something said in a public forum, or on stage at an industry-specific event.

Therefore remember to check and pay special attention to these customers who take time to send snail mails even in this era of digitalization and social media as to whether they have been pleased or displeased about the customer service they received from your brand.

4. Test The Effectiveness Of Self-Service Tools

Finally, your small business might create a solid product/service manual, or create a knowledge base and an open library of necessary documentation and other content online to aid your customers help themselves.

However, if most of these generated contents go unused, it becomes pretty obvious how good these resources have been marketed or developed for helping your customer’s needs.

Self-service is just another customer service channel. Irrespective of whether it is a sophisticated Chatbot, or simply a community of online users where your customers can come up with answers aided by their peers, the use of self-service in customer support once you use CRM and customer service team to create the knowledge base shows how well they trust your brand to empower them with DIY (Do It Yourself) capabilities.

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Small Business Growth Ideas: Sales Hack For SMBs (That You Cannot Ignore)

Before you start learning some more small business growth ideas, are you aware that only 35 percent of a sales rep’s time is actually spent in selling? Well, we know these stats can be absolutely frustrating for sale reps and managers alike. Therefore, to stay successful, sales teams have to not only become an expert at organizing their time but also needs to maximize it. Hence, here are some of the most simple tried and common hacking tips that you and your sales reps can utilize in your small business to maximize their selling time.

Before you start learning some more small business growth ideas, are you aware that only 35 percent of a sales rep’s time is actually spent in selling?

Well, we know these stats can be absolutely frustrating for sales reps and managers alike. Therefore, to stay successful, sales teams have to not only become an expert at organizing their time but also needs to maximize it.

A properly implemented CRM solution can yield an ROI of 45% per dollar invested. Click To Tweet

Hence, here are some of the most simple tried and common hacking tips that you and your sales reps can utilize in your small business to maximize their selling time.

Simplify Your Easy To Use CRM Data       

As a manager looking after your sales teams, look for ways to streamline the quantum of information that you need your sales reps to collect and enter into the CRM database.

Well, we know it must seem tempting to track and evaluate every single piece of information about your salesperson’s deals. Nevertheless, in reality, doing this will not only steal invaluable time from your sales reps, but excessive data even in your best small business CRM software can bog down your team, and seldom provide any extra info that may revolutionize your sales process.

Automate As Many Activities As You Can

Irrespective of whether you are using enterprise-level CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM for startups and small businesses in either case sales automation is becoming more and more sophisticated every day.

However when we talk about data fidelity it can still feel like a gamble, and so your sales teams must identify activities in sales that are not heavily tied to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and so can be automated easily.

For example, as another small business growth ideas if you are using a separate software tool like accounting software to create proposals for your prospective customers, make sure that you are leveraging integration like QuickBooks CRM (software that integrates CRM with QuickBooks) to automatically pull data from your accounting software into your CRM database.

This is because automating tasks using Sales Force Automation (SFA) in a CRM means reducing errors that at the end save your sales teams countless hours of overtime.

Make Contents Easier To Find

It is hard to believe, but it is true that 60-70 percent of the content created by B2B marketing teams, especially in small businesses is never used by sales.

Here is a solution:

Instead of your sales reps wasting their precious time searching for contents, use a smart folder in your easy to use CRM that provides discoverability or use dedicated content distribution applications like DropBox™ or OneDrive™ that helps in sharing assets by integrating it with your CRM database.

Avoid The Back-And-Forth Scheduling            

There are several business application tools available in the marketplace these days that permit your sales reps to schedule meetings by sharing a link to your calendar instead of firing several messages and emails to verify each other’s availability and thereafter suggesting a time for the meeting.

Integrating online appointment schedules with your easy to use CRM aids in easily avoiding this time suck and therefore provides more time for doing sales for your sales teams.

Use Data To Your Advantage

As another small business growth ideas leverage applications like PandaDoc™ and others for document management and automation to provide extremely useful information like document viewing reports, document forwarding reports, and eSignature notifications that leverages the sales rep’s power to understand when to follow up.

Moreover, integrating document management software with best small business CRM software provides instant access to this type of data that helps in completely eliminating the questions of whether or not contact or a proposal has been reviewed or received by the customers that boost the likelihood of winning the deals quickly.

Conclusion

Therefore after reading through these small business growth ideas irrespective of whether you are a team of 10 or 50, remember it is always beneficial and smart to dedicate some energy and time to leverage your sales operations and use sales enablement tools that help in dramatically reducing the time spend by your sales teams on mundane admin works, so that your sales reps may find more time to sell, which directly translates to rapid business growth.

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How To Use The Best Sales CRM Software To Segment Customers And Promote Your Brand

In a gist customer segmentation is a powerful strategy whereby you divide your customer base into individual groups that share similar characteristics which can be easily done once you are using any of the best sales CRM software for finding revenue growth. Segmentation of the customers is important because when you try to use the one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing strategies, even the best strategy will come up with mixed results. This happens because while some customers may like one campaign, others may not. Therefore by executing a customer segmentation strategy once you buy the best sales CRM software, you can easily use the tool to divide your customer base into subgroups with similar attributes, after which you can tailor your marketing plans and create contents around those subgroups and personalize your marketing messages to better communicate with different groups of customers for rapid sales and business growth.

What Is Customer Segmentation?

In a gist customer segmentation is a powerful strategy whereby you divide your customer base into individual groups that share similar characteristics which can be easily done once you are using any of the best sales CRM software for finding revenue growth.

The global mobile CRM market will grow 11% to $15 billion worldwide this year. - MarketingDive Click To Tweet

Segmentation of the customers is important because when you try to use the one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing strategies, even the best strategy will come up with mixed results.

This happens because while some customers may like one campaign, others may not.

Therefore by executing a customer segmentation strategy once you buy the best sales CRM software, you can easily use the tool to divide your customer base into subgroups with similar attributes, after which you can tailor your marketing plans and create contents around those subgroups and personalize your marketing messages to better communicate with different groups of customers for rapid sales and business growth.

Now as CRM is a business growth technology that helps in streamlining this workflow and process so that you can reach the leads and customers who are most receptive to your offering(s), here is why combining easy to use CRM software with customer segmentation strategy benefits your brand:

1. Analyze Patterns and Trends

Business CRM software is a tool that collects customer data and stores them in one place for easy reference. Now, since CRM is an important tool for your customer service teams, this lead management software harvests customer data, such as a prospects purchasing behaviors, location, interest and hobbies, age group and more for your marketing staffs, after which the tool can also analyze patterns and trends in this data for providing accurate results needed for proper nurturing of the leads without any guesswork.

2. Determine the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

Once you buy the best sales CRM software and implement it effectively, the application helps the users to create predictive models that aids in determining profitable customer-base based on the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of the customers.

Using a sales CRM, the users of this business growth technology can help the users to ascertain which segment of their market has the highest CLV and thereafter send marketing materials that resonate with those customers.

Now, since CRM also helps in discovering customers with a low CLV you can use this tool and use the information found in the CRM database of those customers to find methods that can increase their lifetime value with your brand and company.

For example, Facebook allows its users to filter their posts based on age, gender, interest, relationship status, location and more.

Hence using CRM and integrating it with social media tools you can create posts that target the bulk of your low CLV customer-base and reach a cross-section of your demography instantly and even address a specific audience on LinkedIn and other social media websites.

3. Increase Sales

According to certain research conducted by leading global market research organizations, all in one CRM is a software that boosts sales by 30 percent.
Hence, combining easy to use CRM software platforms with customer segmentation strategy can generate even more successful results.

This is because, using this approach you can easily get to the right customer with the right message at the right time, a thing that you just cannot do with generic “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategies.

For example, once you buy the best sales CRM software you can easily target your customers with suggestions on products and services based on their previous purchase histories.

In fact, one of the biggest brands across the globe relies on marketing CRM software solutions to sift through a plethora of customer data, something that marketers are unable to do manually, or by using spreadsheets, for up-selling and cross-selling their offerings.

4. Increase Engagement

For the most part, engaged customers are always more profitable customers for any business. According to research more than 86 percent of buyers will pay for a better CX (Customer Experience), while customers who are totally engaged represent on an average 23 percent of all premium customers for any brand when it comes to profitability, revenue and growth of relationship when compared to average buyers in the marketplace.

Therefore using easy to use CRM as a business growth technology solution for segmenting customers will not only help you to separate your buyer’s based on demography but also find out other common characteristics as per their sales cadence and collective characteristics so that you can engage your customers on a deeper personal level.

Conclusion

Enterprise CRM is a tool that not only provides you with useful insights into your customer’s attitude and behaviors by tracking interactions and collecting sales data, but it can also send powerful marketing material to smaller groups in the CRM database who share similar traits and comparable sales cadence, resulting in increased customer lifetime value and higher rates of engagements.

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Boxes You Must Check Before Adopting A Sales CRM Software For Small Business

The incredible impact that technology has on business growth is fairly recognized now, especially in marketing, support, and sales. However, for this, you have to choose the right business growth technology and tools for your company or you will surely run the risk of it not being used at all. Now, the most popularly used tool for marketing, support, and sales teams is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system because if you buy a sales CRM software for small business it helps SMB organizations to be more productive by working more efficiently and understanding the customer’s experience with your brand that boosts sales and revenue. However, to reap the full benefit of a business CRM solution, your teams must use the software application, even though it is often stated that the employee adoption of CRM is neither easy nor assured be it an enterprise-level CRM solution like Salesforce or other Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by small businesses and startups in the CRM space.

The incredible impact that technology has on business growth is fairly recognized now, especially in marketing, support, and sales.
However, for this, you have to choose the right business growth technology and tools for your company or you will surely run the risk of it not being used at all.
Now, the most popularly used tool for marketing, support, and sales teams is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system because if you buy a sales CRM software for small business it helps SMB organizations to be more productive by working more efficiently and understanding the customer’s experience with your brand that boosts sales and revenue.

43% of CRM customers use fewer than half the features they have on their CRM. - CSO Insights Click To Tweet

However, to reap the full benefit of a business CRM solution, your teams must use the software application, even though it is often stated that the employee adoption of CRM is neither easy nor assured be it an enterprise-level CRM solution like Salesforce or other Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by small businesses and startups in the CRM space.

Therefore, it is always a smoother process if you can understand what your teams (especially sales) need once you purchase a sales CRM software for small business and so here are the four most important qualities your team members will absolutely want to see in a new easy to use CRM tool, since purchasing bad technology is even worse than none, as adopting a wrong technology for your startup or small business can rapidly scale down your business growth.

1. Buy CRM That Automates Your Processes

The best sales CRM software for small business should be both easy to use and automate processes for your sales, marketing, and support teams.
This is because; fancy features that are not essential for your business processes can be not only pretty distracting but it can also make the whole CRM adoption more complicated than it should be for your startup.

Hence, before you buy CRM for your company, think of the bells and whistles (which might seem attractive) if they are absolutely necessary for your business.

Rather, look for features in your best CRM for small business that will save you time and not take it away by complicating your business workflows.

Now, the ability to automate tasks and processes by using functions like Sales Force Automation is the most time-saving qualities of a CRM.

Therefore, buy CRM that is capable of automating your staff’s daily mundane and repetitive tasks.

Moreover, CRM also saves time by automatically pulling all customer data into one place which not only saves efforts but also provides the great benefit of establishing one source of truth about your leads, prospects, and customers.

2. Buy CRM that is user-friendly

We all are aware of the feeling of frustration that happens when you are unable to make out how a piece of software or an application works.
This is because, when something is difficult to use or confusing, we normally tend to quickly work it out or stop working with it if it takes too long to understand.

This same thing even applies to CRM software systems. Since the very moment, a CRM solution starts becoming a source of friction that very moment people also stop using it.

Hence look for a CRM solution that is intuitive, and has a clean design so that it can be easily used by your employees.

According to research, it has been found that salespeople spend more than 60% of their time using various business growth technology and tools and so they just cannot afford to use a CRM that they do not understand.

As an early warning sign check out if your preferred CRM comes with a long training guide, since the less training a CRM system requires, the more likely it is that the software will be easy to use and can be conveniently adopted by your teams.

3. Buy CRM that can be quickly implemented

Some businesses (mostly large enterprises) require a full-time staff member to implement, train, and manage the CRM software platform.
However, for startups and small organizations, this is neither realistic nor necessary with limited capabilities.

Therefore your organization’s best small business CRM software should not be complicated to set up and maintain.

Buy CRM that has an easy implementation process.

Moreover, it is never a great beginning to your team’s CRM experience, if it starts with a lengthy and drawn-out onboarding process.

Hence always buy a CRM with which your teams can get started right away.

4. Buy CRM that integrates with your existing software(s)

Think about all the business growth technology and tools that your teams already use along with the ones that you may also need in the days to come even before you buy your CRM.

It is most essential that you must check your best small business CRM software’s integrity with the tools that you use every day since if it does not, adopting a CRM for your business will only add to your team’s existing workload and that will naturally lead to further frustrations.

Moreover, when you use an all-in-one CRM that does bring in all the data from all your disparate silo software applications, the system helps your employee’s to find a bird’s eye 360-degree view of the information they need about their leads, prospects, and customers in a quick and easy manner.

Takeaway

Therefore to conclude for startups and small businesses, simplicity must be the key driving element behind your CRM software section process, since the less complicated the software is the more likely is it that your employees will understand the system and use it immediately.

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7 Metrics That You Must Cover In Your Monthly Sales Report To Impress Your Employee

As a manager in sales it is ultimately your responsibility to keep your sales team accountable to their or organizational and personal goals- but how? Well, we do agree with you when you say that tracking sales metrics for creating monthly sales report is extremely time-consuming. Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions with thousands of easy to use CRM implementations across the global marketplace here are some of the key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you must focus on to create your team’s monthly sales report despite the overwhelming amount of data being thrown on your way. And which can be your secret weapon in developing high-performing sales teams predicting rapid business growth.

As a manager in sales it is ultimately your responsibility to keep your sales team accountable to their or organizational and personal goals- but how?
Well, we do agree with you when you say that tracking sales metrics for creating monthly sales report is extremely time-consuming.

Sales teams that are productive and have effective workflows are 81% more likely to use a CRM system consistently. Click To Tweet

Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions with thousands of easy to use CRM implementations across the global marketplace here are some of the key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you must focus on to create your team’s monthly sales report despite the overwhelming amount of data being thrown on your way. And which can be your secret weapon in developing high-performing sales teams predicting rapid business growth.

# 1

Opportunity-to-Win Ratio

The opportunity-to-win ratio which is also known as the win rate is used for measuring the success of your sales team per opportunity over a predefined time window.

Now to calcite this KPI you need to compare the number of closed and won opportunities against all closed opportunities within the same time frame (both “closed won” and “closed lost”), which can provide you as a manager a high-level view of the overall success score of your sales team.

Managers in sales can even track this KPI in the monthly sales reports to identify strengths and weaknesses among individual reps and thereafter take corrective actions accordingly.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your sales CRM software:

Win Rate = the number of “closed won” opportunities divided by the number of “closed” opportunities (“closed won” + “closed lost”) in the same frame of time.

# 2

Conversion Rate

This KPI which is also known as the Close Rate is measured to calculate the effectiveness of your sales funnel.

Now we all know irrespective of whether we buy leads from the marketplace or use a free lead generation tool, the process of lead generation starts at the top of the funnel, and thereafter every lead works its way down the funnel which requires the deft expertise of the members of the sales team.

In other words, conversion rate provides both marketing and sales insights to the quality of leads arriving into the sales funnel through the marketing campaigns created by your marketing team.

Hence to measure your teams’ lead conversion rate, primarily you as a manager need to determine what is considered “being converted” in the eyes of your employees.

Now typically any lead is deemed to be converted once the lead becomes a paying customer.

Now the average conversion rate generally varies from one industry to another. Nevertheless, it is critical to track the conversion rate from either side which includes SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) or MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your business CRM software:

Lead Conversion Rate = (The total number of New Customers divided by the total number of Leads) multiplied by 100.

# 3

Average Deal Size

This KPI is going to provide you with the initiation point to enlarge the size of your deals.

It is a tool that is going to aid you as a manager to keep track of inflowing revenues and act as a pivotal guideline for how many deals you require to close to reach (or even surpass) your quotas.

This KPI also helps the managers in sales to identify at-risk opportunities.

This is because, if you keep track of this KPI month-over-month as you create your monthly sales report, this metric can help you understand how or when you need to change your sales pipeline.

For example, if you increase the average deal size of your orders you might attract leads with a wider range of needs than what you required in the previous months.

# 4

Average Days to Close

This KPI is based on how long your sales reps take to close a deal right from the lead’s first point of contact to the conversion of the lead into a loyal customer.

In other words, this is a metric that can provide you insights as a manager as to how fast your sales reps are capable of moving prospects through their sales pipelines and turn them into revenue for your company.

Now different sales cycles are needed to close different deals. For example, a bigger opportunity might take a significantly longer time to close than one which will generate lesser revenue.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your all in one CRM software:

Average Days to Close = Add all days it took to close deals for the month and after that divide, the number by the number of deals closed that month.

# 5

Time Spent In Each Stage Of The Pipeline

Knowing about the number of deals that are there in each stage of your business growth tool’s sales pipeline will help to reveal how your prospects are moving through your pipeline and also where there are facing bottlenecks.

In other words, this metric provides deep insights into developing different sales techniques to push prospects from one stage to the next.

However, as a sales manager, you must ensure that the stages in your sales pipeline are based on what is actually happening in the sales arena, and not on how your sales reps feel, since you can always feel confident about a deal, but it never means that the prospect will obviously close.

# 6

Customer Churn Rate

This KPI in the easy to use CRM answers the question: How good are you at keeping your customers?

Therefore, if there is just one sales metric that you want to show to your employees in your monthly sales report and focus on every month – CCR would likely be the only one.

This is because knowing your brand’s churn rate means knowing why or how often your customer is leaving you for another in your marketplace.

Remember once your brand’s churn rate becomes too high, it means you surely need to make improvements in your sales tactics and find new business growth ideas, for the future success of your company.

# 7

Average Lead Response Time

According to research, it states that more than 50 percent of buyers choose the vendor or seller that responds first.

Therefore, learning this metric helps to understand the average time your sales reps take to reach out to a lead after they have been identified as a prospective contact for your company.

Now even though each company will have their own description of what a lead means to their business, but typically in general a lead refers to an individual or organization downloading a piece of content or fill out a request for a demo.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your marketing CRM software:

Average Lead Response Time = Sum of the number of minutes/hours/day to respond for all contacts divided by the number of contacts in your CRM database.

Conclusion

Now even though there are in reality endless sales metrics that you can use for filling up your monthly sales report.

These metrics and KPIs illustrated above will not only scale productivity but it will help to easily boost the performance of your sales team and so make you find respect among your employees as an ideal “Boss” – showing them the path for rapid and sure business growth.

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The Key Benefits Of Using A Sales Tracker CRM Software For Rapid Business Growth

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers. This is where comes the role of sales tracker CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time. Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business. The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like sales tracking CRM software include, as follows…

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers.

This is where comes the role of sales tracking CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time.

Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business.

With 44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2021, up from 38% in 2020. This is not just to keep up with their competitors, but also as a result of improving sales. Click To Tweet

The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like sales tracking CRM software include:

1. Understand customers better with enhanced and increased knowledge

When you have more and better information about your customer you are better placed to take a decision on what service you can deliver delivered irrespective of whether it is selling an offering or communicating something to your customers.

2. Improve process to find a better return on investment

Once you buy a sales CRM and set up your business processes aided by an easy to use CRM the main improvement that you can see is more conversion of the leads, better interaction with customers leading to a more satisfied and happy customer base.

3. Better coordination between sales and marketing teams

The functions of the marketing team lead to better sales output. The major gap between sales and marketing teams has always been a lack of a dedicated channel of communication. Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that bridges the gap and creates connections that result in a more cohesive operation between the employees in your company.

4. Create a world-class customer experience

As a vendor of award-winning small business CRM software, working with several businesses we have learned how to bring better customer experience and how it can change the ways most people do business in their company. In fact, a sales tracking CRM software builds standard processes that help not only the in-house employees in business but also networking partners and external agencies associated with the company.

5. Empower customer service team

It has been a worry of most customer service desk of not able to provide support because of the lack of a unified and answerable system operating for all departments within the company. CRM is a business growth technology that makes every department within the organization liable to deliver its job on time and builds a better and coordinated system to help customer service teams to provide world-class services to the consumers of their brand’s offerings.

6. Plan the ways marketing budget is spent and improving on the existing ways

Want to check how your email marketing working or how the sales team converting the prospective leads? Want to know whether leads are being followed up in time and with correct details? Buy CRM to end all your worries and get them solved overnight. Additionally when SFA (Sales Force Automation) is integrated with easy to use CRM it helps in creating a better-planned marketing campaign and thereby aid in improved business functionalities.

7. Help in accurate decision making

Easy to use CRM empowers you to take correct decisions based on many facts and data stored in the CRM database. With the power of data, this business growth technology helps you to know the working styles of the employees and whether their service gets delivered in time, which helps the management to take on time, better and accurate decisions for consistent revenue growth.

8. Find better and new prospects with the use of modern technology

These days easy to use CRM can be integrated with social media which helps you to stay connected with your prospects and customers. Social media listening enables CRM platforms not only to ushers a more cohesive work culture in the organization but it also increases point to point delivery of the work faster bringing more liability on each head. This is how better and improved prospect finding starts and continues for sales growth.

9. Build long term relationships

CRM brings many important things on Sales Force Automation which your customers need like an immediate and timely response of their queries, easy availability of information, and automation of business process helping them stay with you for more by keeping them happy and satisfied over time.

Takeaway

Therefore with the clear intent to keep customers happy and to keep all other related processes well placed and automated buy a sales tracking CRM to keep your entire organizations focus on not only keeping customers satisfied but also reduce churn leading to increased business growth.

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Killer Strategies On Email Customer Engagement Policies That Can Fuel Business Growth

Email marketing is most probably the most popular customer engagement strategy and the most widely used terminology of today’s digital marketing world. Thanks to the rapid swell in internet usage across the globe, this term has become nowadays a familiar word even for ordinary people living around us. In fact, email marketing is the hottest and the most potent trend in the digital marketing field which can make or break any brand’s presence in the marketplace. This is because email marketing when done with the help of an easy to use CRM software, is not only budget-friendly, but it is an effective digital marketing practice, which has undoubtedly become any digital marketer’s weapon of choice to make their brands stand out in the crowd.

Email marketing is most probably the most popular customer engagement strategy and the most widely used terminology of today’s digital marketing world.
Thanks to the rapid swell in internet usage across the globe, this term has become nowadays a familiar word even for ordinary people living around us.
In fact, email marketing is the hottest and the most potent trend in the digital marketing field which can make or break any brand’s presence in the marketplace.

Nearly 60% of organizations increased IT spending in 2020. And it remains the same in 2021. Click To Tweet

This is because email marketing when done with the help of an easy to use CRM software, is not only budget-friendly, but it is an effective digital marketing practice, which has undoubtedly become any digital marketer’s weapon of choice to make their brands stand out in the crowd.

What about- Assurance of Success

For boosting customer engagement of any brand, email marketing as a strategy holds immense importance in a sender’s or user’s life. Nevertheless, this process is not entirely faultless nor reliable. This is because the senders of these emails may need to face some unpleasant experiences at times since recipients of the emails can tend to unsubscribe to the list or change their registered email id or even the email that you send can inadvertently land into the recipient’s spam-box.

Hence, since these paramount challenges can often remain there, as an email marketer, you are required to come up with a spotless email marketing strategy to overcome these trivial yet of consequence hurdles and find success over time.

Build your Email List

Any weathered email marketer well understands why building a potential database of their customers with the help of a business CRM is a critical urgent cry.

Now, if you as an email marketer have a long list of subscribers who are all enthusiastic to know more about your brand and your offerings, it can be a boon for the marketer, as the mindset of the recipients is the ultimate factor for deciding the success in sending the emails to your customer base.

Hence, in other words, the efforts of an email marketing strategy for boosting customer engagement can go in vain overnight, if the recipients of the email are reluctant to open and view through the emails shared by your company.

In fact, a fall in open rate while doing email marketing can not only affect your CTR (Click through Rate) but it will also increase Bounce Rate whereby your overall customer engagement strategy may come to a standstill.

Now to grow your email list, you can use lead magnets and opt-in forms, which are the two most essential elements that work hand-in-hand to help grow and sustain your subscribers list substantially over time.

Time of using Email Marketing

Even though to most in common, email marketing might sound simple, however in reality only the digital marketer understands how hard it can be if the sense of creating perfect timing is found to be missing from their email marketing plans.

This is because as one of the most popular vendors of small business CRM software, we know that a sender of the email must have a clear understanding of when to start sending emails to increase customer engagement activities.

Therefore, here are a few important practices which any email marketer must adhere to while sending their emails which are mentioned below:

  • As personalized mailer contents tend to find more views and thereby customer engagements, try to personalize the communications that you have with your prospects and customers.
  • Since the main motive behind pursuing an email marketing practice is to let people get aware of what kind of offerings that your brand provides to the consumers in the marketplace, hence try to deliver messages in such a manner that it will help to enhance brand awareness among your consumer base.
  • Take out time to invite your email subscribers to provide their personal information once they are receiving your emails, and so brainstorm and come up with unique ideas that can be beneficial to your subscribers, since you will only get your desired information from the consumers if they find your click-bait plans too tempting to resist.
  • Lead nurturing is another important factor for conducting a successful email marketing strategy that boosts customer engagement. Therefore see that your users remain happy with the type of content that you are sending to them (which must be useful and pertinent) that can solve their pain-points and issues.
    Hence, as email marketing can do wonders in relation to your content management strategy, email marketers can use this tool to share relevant assets, case studies and articles to provide a more realistic approach to his or her email marketing skills.

USEFUL EMAIL MARKETING STATISTICS THAT CAN SURPRISE EVERYONE:

  • More than 86 percent of marketing professionals prefer email as their primary mode of communication.
  • A well-researched email copy can fetch more than 47 percent higher CTR.
  • Emails that include emoji(s) fetch higher than 56 percent open rate than any normal emails.
  • More than 60 percent of marketers believe that email marketing when done with an all in one CRM software can bring in more ROI without investing an excess amount on other business growth technologies.

Conclusion

Do you know according to Google there are more than 3.8 billion active users across the globe who uses email to stay in touch with others?

Therefore, you see, it is too simple to understand why email marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies nowadays that can really boost customer engagement without allocating more budgets.

It has been found in research that email generates 3,800 percent ROI in general, and for that, all that a marketer requires is access to an email marketing tool like a marketing CRM and the list of subscribers to make it a success any day.
Additionally, as this same research also states that emails are capable of fetching 40X more traffic in comparison to social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook, hence building a proper email marketing strategy can not only boost customer engagement but also increase the turnover of your organization rapidly.

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