Tag: Lead Management

How Can You Make Easy to Use CRM Implementation A Success For Your Business

Selecting an efficient CRM platform has become more difficult over the last few years, as several lead management vendors have upped their game, and has thereby made the playing field more level than ever before. Now, if you are still at a loss in understanding what is CRM software, here is your answer is a gist: What is CRM software? Customer Relationship Management or CRM means a mishmash of business strategies, software and business processes that aids in building long-standing relationships between organizations and their consumers. While healthy competition ultimately benefits the consumers, nevertheless those tasked with selecting the right and easy to use CRM solution for their organization, the selection process by signing up for free trials and by rounding up leading CRM vendors for demonstration, can take a lot longer than you really want it to be.

Selecting an efficient and easy to use CRM platform has become more difficult over the last few years, as several lead management vendors have upped their game, and has thereby made the playing field more level than ever before.
Now, if you are still at a loss in understanding what is CRM software, here is your answer is a gist:

What is CRM software?

Customer Relationship Management or CRM means a mishmash of business strategies, software and business processes that aids in building long-standing relationships between organizations and their consumers.

While healthy competition ultimately benefits the consumers, nevertheless those tasked with selecting the right and easy to use CRM solution for their organization, the selection process by signing up for free trials and by rounding up leading CRM vendors for demonstration, can take a lot longer than you really want it to be.

CRM is considered one of the most important aspects of sales right next to lead generation and lead engagement - Bowery Capital (2017) Click To Tweet

Now, as there is always a hidden cost involved to an extended selection timeline, and choosing the wrong CRM can result in substantial multi-year expenditure with little returns, here are five steps to accelerate your CRM selection process which is one of the most popular business growth technology and tools of the modern times.

  1. Interview End Users and Stakeholders

Now that you know what is CRM software, the primary thing you need for a successful CRM selection is to address the requirements of both the management and the end-users of your desired easy to use CRM platform.

Especially inputs from the would-be end users of the software solution is highly valuable while you buy CRM since when the right type of questions are asked, areas of customer dissatisfaction and operational inefficiencies will often emerge, which the management may not have even been aware of.

Moreover, when the ends users feel that they have are a part of the CRM purchasing process, they will naturally be even more willing to participate in using the software, once the solution is rolled out in your company.

  1. Assemble and Analyze Input

Once the information from the end-users and the management staff has been gathered, you need to organize and analyze the user inputs in reasonable detail.

Additionally, relevant details about the existing systems in your organization, ranging from shared spreadsheets to ERP systems (if any) and how these solutions are currently working or not, should also be a part of the analysis.

Since, the output of this step, once you are aware of what is CRM, will become an integral part of the next step.

  1. Develop a Vendor Ranking System

After prioritizing the list of all the requirements, this information should be organized in a manner that the participant of the CRM selection process can rank the CRM vendors on their abilities to meet the documented needs.

Moreover documenting the requirements of your organization also helps the CRM vendors to address the highest priority requirements first and the rest in a logical sequence of the data.

  1. Select the Easy to Use CRM Solution

After the demonstrations by the CRM vendors, now that you know what is CRM software all about, there will inevitably be follow up questions for the CRM vendors regarding specific functionalities and deliverables of their CRM software platforms.

Remember to consolidate all the participating CRM vendors’ rankings in a single document, so that they can be further scrutinized easily in case of a close call.

Additionally as a part of this step, ask for the implementation timeline from the selected CRM vendors at this stage, before you buy CRM, which will help the management of your organization to find a solid basis for their initial estimates of implementing the solution in your company.

  1. Negotiate and Procure

Once you have finalized on the chosen CRM vendor, there are additional works now, which needs to be done. For example, the chosen lead management software may have multiple editions, so the CRM vendor may allow you to mix, and match functionality licenses within your CRM edition, to tailor the solution as per your company’s needs.

It is best and it also makes financial sense to purchase a limited number of user licenses for all departments in your organization, during the roll-out and then purchase additional licenses of this business growth technology in the near future once all the departments in your organization get well adapted in using the software.

Also, check the contact duration before rolling out your easy to use CRM , which should be determined at this stage.

Takeaway

Now that you know what is CRM, as a parting note can assure you that a formal process for choosing the right CRM solution provides a lot more benefits than just buying the CRM software. Since the perspective that you will gain about your business by gathering this valuable information while you buy CRM and implement this lead management tool can be used also as inputs for planning and strategic thinking for the further growth of your business.

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Utility Of CRM Database In Your Lead Management Software Tool For Business Growth

It is not only large companies that can benefit out of easy to use CRM software, lead management solutions can also be especially important for small and mid-sized organizations. This is because maintaining a CRM database in the right way is an excellent means for keeping track of your entire customer related information and processes and so it forms the basis of any customer relationship management system.

It is not only large companies that can benefit out of easy to use CRM software, lead management solutions can also be especially important for small and mid-sized organizations.
This is because maintaining a CRM database in the right way is an excellent means for keeping track of your entire customer related information and processes and so it forms the basis of any customer relationship management system.

64.2% of businesses view CRM tools as impactful on their bottom line - LinkedIn(2018) Click To Tweet

What is a CRM database?

To tell the truth, a CRM database in a lead management system does not vary much from the common database that we have in our smart phones and desktops.
Nevertheless, the main idea of buying database management software is to store data, which can be accumulated from different sources, so that all employees and departments in your organization can access the same information from a centralized repository that reduces the time spent in digging out information and diminishes errors in their workflow.

To maintain a proper customer database after you buy CRM , the database needs to have several characteristics to make it useful and functional.

Firstly, all the information in the database should be saved correctly without any spelling mistakes.
Secondly, there should not be any duplication of data since each customer data needs to be clearly identifiable with an ID as a unique identifier created by the CRM tool.

Why is CRM database in lead management software important for businesses?

Small and midsized organizations often struggle with the large amount of data, which are generated from all types of sources. For organizations, those who do not maintain customer database using easy to use CRM software, in worse cases have to save their data on individual computing systems and hard drives.
Hence, it is not surprising, under this circumstance, communication between the sales, marketing, billing and customer support departments can be a problem when data is not consistently saved for use of all departments. Therefore having a universal storage for customer-related information and other relevant business data can solve numerous problems in your company.

Here are some of the advantages of maintaining a well-maintained customer database in a CRM system:

Data cleansing made easy: Although in an ideal scenario data cleansing is not at all necessary, but the cleansing of data becomes much more complex when every department within an organization has their own set of data.

Hence using a centralized CRM database, helps in cleansing customer data, when it may be required, that can be universally supported by all working in the organization.

Useful system integration: Communication with the leads, prospects, and customers in day-to-day business is often done using a variety of software. However, when an easy to use CRM system is integrated with other business application tools like Outlook and Gmail for emails, QuickBooks for accounts, Evernote for note taking and others, all important information of your conversations with the leads or customers can be directly saved in the centralized database of the CRM system. Hence, when any employee in your organization wants to contact the same customers, they can access the readily existing data in the CRM system, which is the most cutting-edge business growth technology that significantly reduces the possibility of data redundancy in the organization’s customer database.

Data security: Concerning security CRM database, helps in centrally storing data, which remains safe and it is easier to manage the integrity of the stored data. Moreover, the privacy of the data is also enhanced in the CRM database, as companies have to comply with privacy regulations (like GDPR) when they deal with customer data that is stored in their servers.

Conclusion

Therefore maintaining a proper CRM database in your easy to use lead management software, not only aids in boosting customer relationships, but it also improves the ability to cross sell, improve your businesses’ efficiency in providing world-class customer support, increases team collaboration, boosts staff satisfaction that in return increases profitability and revenue by saving cost leading to business growth.

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What To Do And Avoid With Lead Management Using Best Small Business CRM Software

Lead management is vital for any sales company using the best small business CRM software. Since, without lead management software that offers necessary features, your business will be left with a chaotic and bewildering mess of data that will not be useful to anyone in your company. Therefore, it is imperative that you must use your easy to use CRM software platform’s lead management system appropriately and effectively, and ensure that each member of your sales team is also using it proactively to generate more sales and revenue.

Lead management is vital for any sales company using the best small business CRM software. Since, without lead management software that offers necessary features, your business will be left with a chaotic and bewildering mess of data that will not be useful to anyone in your company.

Therefore, it is imperative that you must use your easy to use CRM software platform’s lead management system appropriately and effectively, and ensure that each member of your sales team is also using it proactively to generate more sales and revenue.

85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal. Click To Tweet

In this article, we shall explore how you can best manage the leads in your sales pipeline in order to increase your profits and ROI.

What is Lead Management?

A sales pipeline of an organization is a diagrammatic representation of its sales prospects, and to find the exact place where these leads and prospects are in the purchasing process. Visualizing a sales pipeline also provide an overview of any sales person’s account forecast and how he is to accomplish his sales quota, as well as, how a sales team as a whole is capable of reaching its target.

Sales lead management enables sales managers and reps to forecast the numbers and revenue generation of deals that are predicted to close in a given span of time.

In other words, a sales pipeline aggregates individual prospect and customer’s sales funnel into a composite visual representation that weighs the health of all the sales prospects of an organization. The sales pipeline also helps in illustrating the lifecycle of various customers and prospects from their initial interaction with your business to the closing of the deals.

These steps in lead management include:

  • Help to collect incoming leads.
  • Qualify a sales inquiry into a marketing-qualified lead by using methods such as lead scoring and thereafter into a sales-qualified lead.
  • Help to validate a qualified lead into a sales opportunity.
  • Register the deal as ‘closed’, ‘on hold’, or as a ‘lost opportunity’.

Therefore, having sales lead management embedded in your best CRM for small business helps to manage the task more efficiently.

The health of a sales pipeline is most often measured by the following metrics that include:

  • The total number of deals in a pipeline.
  • The average size of the deals in a pipeline.
  • The average percentage of deals that have been won or the close ratio.
  • The average time that is taken to close the deals or the sales velocity.

Common mistakes- what to avoid while managing the leads

Sales managers using lead management embedded in the CRM for small business most often tend to think only about numbers and statistics. Therefore, they fail to focus on what is happening with each opportunity. Sales managers do not look at people they are positioned with, the customer’s goal or buying process, the relationship strength with the customers, the competitive position of the offering, or what is in for the customer for purchasing the product or service provided by the organization.

That means sales managers who use lead management software often miss coaching opportunities and therefore produce poor results.

Here are certain things that you should not do with lead management:

  • Avoid keeping focusing only on the numbers. Instead, look into a more in-depth study of the status of the opportunities and how they can be moved forward through the pipeline.
  • Do not confuse lead management with sales forecasting.
  • Remember, sales lead management is just a coaching tool.
  • Do not believe in the idea that a bigger pipeline is a better pipeline, as smaller pipelines can be more productive, since it can be devoid of the junk deals that will never amount to any revenue, allowing sales reps and managers to focus on selling to lead that are more qualified for faster closure of the deals.
  • Do not focus on only late-stage

Best practices for Lead Management using small business CRM

Overcomplicating what you are trying to measure drives low adoption of lead management software. Therefore keep your sales pipeline management simple and to the point.

Believe in creating holistic skill development of your employees in the sales and marketing teams. Let your sales managers help the reps to execute necessities required for managing the sales pipeline across all stages of the process, and so create targeted training for each step for every individual in the team.

Create account plans that illustrate the sales rep’s position within the organization, what are their opportunities. The strategies that you need to employ, the resources needed to be successful, and recognize the key players to help move the opportunities through the pipeline.

Train the sales team how to prospect the leads, which should include things like asking questions, writing emails and motivating potential prospects to act.

Takeaway

Once you buy CRM, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM used by small businesses and startups, allows users to manage multiple sales pipelines.
For example, suppose you run an automobile dealership and make money by selling cars, automobile parts and also provide repairs. Many customer relationship management software, will allow you to configure only one pipeline, which means you will not be able to accurately analyze or track multiple lines of business and profit centers using such CRM platforms.
Therefore, keep this in mind while choosing your lead management software embedded in the CRM for better use of business growth technology and tools that will help in the generation of more business and predict better ROI.

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Ways To Warm Up Leads Using Your Best Small Business CRM Software Platform

Every lead is singular, therefore understanding what messaging they will reply to, and what actions they are taking on your website makes lead nurturing easier. Although it might seem like a massive undertaking, it is a lot simpler when you are using your best small business CRM tool. Now if your organization has an impeccable sales enablement strategy, it is likely that you will most probably be already using a CRM tool, which can be used to warm up leads and therefore improve your company’s sales performance.

Every lead is singular, therefore understanding what messaging they will reply to, and what actions they are taking on your website makes lead nurturing easier. Although it might seem like a massive undertaking, it is a lot simpler when you are using your best small business CRM tool.

Now if your organization has an impeccable sales enablement strategy, it is likely that you will most probably be already using a CRM tool, which can be used to warm up leads and therefore improve your company’s sales performance.

38% of businesses surveyed experienced higher lead to opportunity conversion rates thanks to lead scoring.- Kentico Click To Tweet

HOW YOU CAN USE YOUR CRM TO WARM UP LEADS?

  1. Use automated communicate to keep them warm consistently

While it is true that you do not want to spam any of your potential leads, you should also keep communicating with them times and again so that they do not lose interest in your offering and look somewhere else. Using small business CRM software allows you to automate your email marketing campaigns and set up sales sequences to grab every lead that comes into the system.

It is natural, following up on every lead, which needs warming up and nurturing would be practically impossible if your system is fetching more than 1000 leads a month. Nevertheless, using a CRM means you can enroll fresh leads into automated work, which takes the pain out of the lead nurturing process.

You must also use your small business CRM to make certain that your attempts at re-engaging are not becoming annoying to your prospective leads. For example, if you are blasting a dozen emails in a day without any response, you will easily be able to see that information in your CRM software and then can adopt a different strategy to warm those non-responsive leads.

  1. Know what stage your leads are in the buyers funnel and send them appropriate contents

If you are using a small business CRM such as ConvergeHub, it is a trouble-free process to define leads by where they are in your sales funnel, assign them as marketing qualified or sales qualified, and identify the buyer persona.

Now, once you have demarcated your leads into different stages of your sales and marketing funnel, and you are aware that your lead is qualified, it is much easier to send them the required content useful to them at the stage they are in the pipeline.

  1. Look at their past actions and behaviors

Modern small business CRM software platforms are capable of tracking clicks on landing pages, website visits, email opening rates, and content downloads, which provides a great insight into what actions your leads have taken previously and what contents can pique their interest. Therefore, once you are using a CRM, and you have this information on your fingertips, you can send relevant contents to your leads that they are more likely to respond.

  1. Keep a lead in contact with the same person

People feel more confident with people rather than with companies. Therefore, prospective leads are more likely to respond to information coming from an individual they have previously interacted, than to a generic email, such as ‘info@company.com’.

Nobody wants to speak or respond to “info”, rather they want to speak to ‘Mike’ or ‘Gracie’, with whom they have interacted previously or have seen or read on the company’s website.

Now you may think what does this have to do with best small business CRM.

Well, when you are using a CRM platform, you can easily assign leads to sales reps of your choice, those who are thereafter termed owners of the leads, and so any communication going out from a lead-owner to the prospect is considered as a reliable information that is recognizable by the receiver of the communiqué.

Since it is not advisable to warm up any leads if they are not opening their emails, using a CRM platform ensures that all leads are properly distributed, and all communications come from persons that your leads trust and recognize personally.

  1. Re-engage old customers

Like a microwave meal, old customers those who are needed to be warmed up again are also as valuable as your new leads. Hence, if you are using your small business CRM efficiently, you can always have a list of previous customers you can retarget. All best small business CRM such as ConvergeHub are capable of taking note of any actions taken and communications done with old customers, and so your sales and marketing departments should be able to gauge the prospects past responses, and thereafter re-engage them with the appropriate messages.

Takeaway

Follow these five steps and take the hassle out of lead nurturing by using your CRM for small business to its full potential.

At ConvergeHub, we have a team of professionals skilled in lead nurturing and marketing automation to help you synergize your marketing and sales efforts.

Try ConvergeHub For Free

So why wait, go for a 14-Day free trial of ConvergeHub and let us help develop a lead nurturing strategy to supercharge your revenue.

 

5 Key Factors Of Successful Lead Scoring

The inbound marketing bug has already bitten most of the modern day marketers. Therefore, once your inbound marketing is running successfully and you are generating a high volume of fresh leads, you need to score those leads for further actions. Successful lead scoring aligns marketing and sales automatically. When it comes to lead scoring, we have some good and some bad news for the readers of this blog. Disclosing the bad news first it is, that only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads. However, the good news is that this does not have to be the case. Lead scoring that provides sales-ready leads is easier than you can think, as long as you comprehend your buyers and build a lead scoring process around their behaviors and interests.

The inbound marketing bug has already bitten most of the modern day marketers. Therefore, once your inbound marketing is running successfully and you are generating a high volume of fresh leads, you need to score those leads for further actions. Successful lead scoring aligns marketing and sales automatically.

Only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads- Data2CRM Click To Tweet

When it comes to lead scoring, we have some good and some bad news for the readers of this blog. Disclosing the bad news first it is, that only 23% of salespeople say that the marketing department delivers sales-ready leads. However, the good news is that this does not have to be the case.

Lead scoring that provides sales-ready leads is easier than you can think, as long as you comprehend your buyers and build a lead scoring process around their behaviors and interests.

Comprehending your leads

A well-performing lead scoring machine can align marketing and sales efforts and do wonders for your pipeline. The most efficient lead scoring sees two main aspects of a lead’s journey with your brand: Behavioral aspects and Demographic aspects

Behavioral aspects

The behavioral aspect of your prospective customer’s interaction with your product or service includes the way they purchase, where they like to interact (web, phone, social media, email) and what they find most interesting about your brand. Web analytics are a powerful way to understand the lead’s interests in tracking how many web pages a lead visits on your brand’s website, which pages they like to view more and for how long. Are they opening the emails in one of your particular campaigns or responding particularly well to an SMS message about a new product or service?
All these are behavioral aspects of a lead.

Demographic aspects

The demographic aspects of any lead identify common characteristics of your prospective customers. Especially main characteristics such as company size, location, the range of the revenue. On an individual level, the demographic aspects include categories such as job titles, age group, gender, income level and others.
However, the most vital demographic aspect of the lead scoring process depends on the particular business on an organizational and individual level.

The critical harmonious balance for the lead scoring technique is where the behavior and demography intersect. Once you identify that intersection, it is time to build the lead scoring system for your brand.

5 Key Factors Of Successful Lead Scoring

Which are the factors that you apply for setting up your lead scoring process completely depends on your business model, but these building blocks of the lead scoring system are the same for all small and medium businesses.

Here are the five key factors for setting up an effective and robust lead scoring process that can automatically align both your marketing and sales efforts. 


  1. Define your criteria

Even before you start your lead scoring rules, brainstorm with your sales team for identifying your brand’s ideal customer. This is the basic criteria for building your lead scoring system. There may be different types of customer personas for your ideal customer, if it is so, find out where do those buyers overlap.


  1. Recognize your Target Audience (TA)

Once your ideal customer conditions are finalized, the next step is to identify your TA (Target Audience). The questions that you should ask your marketing team to find out your TA may include:

  • Are you TA based in Europe, North America, Middle East, or are they spread across the globe?
  • Which income group is the TA inclined towards?
  • Is your TA composed of mid-level management or top-level managerial staffs?

Although your sales team may help you to find information about your target audience, your marketing team is best equipped to answer these queries on your TA.


  1. Define your brand’s unique customer journey

Find out what the steps in your customer journey are, and how these steps should be scored? Once you have the characteristics of your leads well defined, focus on your lead’s behavior with your brand. List out all the possible touch points through which your prospective customers engage with your brand before they become your loyal customers. Over here, some behaviors may be more important than others. Make a list and assign score points to empathize each step’s importance. These mentioned steps may include:

  • A lead opening an email
  • A lead visits and signs up on your website’s signup page
  • A lead registers for a webinar etc.

The points allocated for each of these actions taken by the leads may vary from business to business.


  1. Structure a system and assign scores

After the behavior and characteristic aspects have been identified, define your lead scoring structure. For example, if you focus on the North American market, then you give leads from North America a positive score versus a lead from China or India (or this might also be the other way around). Another instance is when you allot a negative score to any lead coming to your brand’s job page because those leads are concerned for working in your organization and are not anxious about buying your product.

Once your lead generation process is ready for operation, you need to deal out a particular number or score to every touch points of your leads, which should be based on the priority that you have set for each aspect.

Do you want to provide higher scores to leads visiting your brand’s pricing page than leads visiting your career page?

Do you want to give a higher score to leads coming from private companies than those are from government institutions?

All these decisions should be incorporated into your lead scoring system.


  1. Track and Tweak

The last key factor to this lead scoring building blocks to make a good lead scoring system is to continuously track and tweak the lead scoring process.

Do not be surprised if you discover new aspects of your lead’s behavior that are crucial to defining a buy-ready lead.

For example, if you find that leads that are visiting your blog page are converting more than who are visiting your webinars, you should revise your lead scoring points for webinar visits and increase the ranking for the blog visits of your prospective leads.

Conclusion

Most silo marketing automation systems and easy to use CRM that have inbuilt marketing automation platforms, provide some sort of lead scoring functionality. However, it is essential to choose the one that exactly syncs with the model of your business.

Moreover, lead scoring for small and medium business is different from what it is for large enterprises. Therefore, always discuss with your sales and marketing team to improve your implemented lead scoring process.