Tag: MCA CRM

Real Customer Retention Strategies That Works With MCA CRM Software Platform

Is your alternative funding business focused on acquiring new customers or is it that you are more interested in retaining your existing ones? Although it is always appealing to acquire new customers, nevertheless customer retention (that many companies ignore) is, in reality, the key revenue driver of any small business organization. Here are a few customer retention strategies that will aid you to maintain a competitive edge over other MCA businesses in your alternative funding market.

Is your alternative funding business focused on acquiring new customers or is it that you are more interested in retaining your existing ones?
Although it is always appealing to acquire new customers, nevertheless customer retention (that many companies ignore) is, in reality, the key revenue driver of any small business organization.
Now, if you are a user of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, which is also popularly known as MCA CRM, for your Cash Advance business, here are a few statistics that you simply cannot ignore, to drive home the importance of customer retention strategy for your MCA business.

Americans borrowed an additional $17.5 billion outside of business loans to pay for business-related expenses in 2017- Finder.com Click To Tweet
  • You will spend 5 times more to get hold of a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
  • Existing customers spend 67% more on your offerings than new customers.
  • Increasing CRR by just 5% will amplify your company’s profits by anywhere from 25% – 95%.

Therefore, with so much importance on customer retention, it is most essential that you need to incorporate customer retention best practices in your alternative funding business strategy to increase your MCA businesses’ customer retention rate.

Here are a few customer retention strategies that will aid you to maintain a competitive edge over other MCA businesses in your alternative funding market.

  1. Deliver a robust onboarding program

It is a big mistake, if after sealing a deal with a new customer; you immediately turn your attention back to acquire another, elated by the win.

This is because, it is extremely important that you must engage your new customer right from the start, and never leave them to fend for themselves once they have signed your MCA contact, and the best way for doing it is to deliver a robust onboarding program.

Train your Cash Advance business customers how to use your alternative funding services successfully, and to its full potential, so that you can generate the maximum returns on your investments.

  1. Implement customer surveys

If you are using an MCA CRM software, use automation to conduct online customer surveys of your existing customers to find out where they are struggling and how you can improve their customer experience with your Cash Advance business.

According to a nearly proverbial quote and a sage advice by Bill Gates, it says:

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Therefore, conduct customer surveys using your Merchant Cash Advance software, to let your customers voice their concerns.

You can also send one-off emails to the participating customers of your survey sharing the results and laying out the plans you made based on their feedbacks that will show your customers that you really care about their pain-points and you are taking proactive measure to address them, which increases customer retention by building enhanced customer loyalty.

  1. Form a CAB (Customer Advisory Board)

Select a group of customers from your most important customer’s list and form a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) to discuss with them about your MCA services and their experience using it.

Let CAB in your alternative funding firm, be an open forum, where your most important customers can voice out their concerns and satisfaction, which can provide valuable insights into the minds of your existing customer base.

Make it point that you share the key takeaways you receive from the CAB meetings and draft an email to all your MCA customers informing them about the changes in your business plans, which will get your entire customer base involved that will help build trust and boost customer retention for your Cash Advance services.

  1. Provide world-class customer service

Do you know more than seven out of ten customers are willing to pay better rates of interest if they receive a world-class customer experience from employees of your MCA firm?

Therefore, never make your customers wait when they require support. Since according to market survey more than 77% of consumers said that they value their time as one of the single most important things that any company can do to deliver excellent customer service.

Provide your customers to submit their help desk tickets through multiple channels (social media, phone, email, and live chat) and try to increase the FCR (First Contact Rate), by resolving customer support issues on the first attempt without escalating the support ticket and making the customer wait till you get back later on.

Hence, using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM platform like ConvergeHub that is capable of handling multi-channel customer support, and also aid in increasing the FCR by using its knowledge base for resolving frequently asked customer issue is the need of the hours for all small and medium-sized MCA firms looking for growth in their business and revenue.

  1. Incorporate personal touch using MCA CRM software

With so much information stored in your CRM Database, using an MCA CRM software, it is extremely simple to tailor every interaction that you have with your existing alternative funding customers.

Hence, suggest your sales, and support team members open the contact records in your best small business CRM software and view all the interactions your customers had with your MCA firm in the past, before trying to solve their pain-points and issues.

MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is capable of providing a 360-degree view of your customers, makes personalization of customer-facing interactions, even more, easier, allowing MCA businesses to form warmer and closer relationship that does wonders for increasing CRR (Customer Retention Rates) in your Cash Advance business.

  1. Develop educational resources continuously to ensure customers’ success

Last but not least, remember educating your MCA customers does not end with the onboarding program, being discussed at the beginning of this article.

Once the customer onboarding is accomplished in a proper manner, publish blogs articles on a regular basis (once every fortnight), which helps to continually educate the customer on emerging trends, and tips on how your customers can grow their revenue using your Cash Advance services.

If you are using the best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, you can easily use your MCA CRM software to develop a knowledge base for your customers to house these educational resources and update the existing ones, which will not only increase the satisfaction level of your Cash Advance customers, but also boost customer retention rate, help treat your important customers like business partners and assure them that you are taking their opinions and suggestions seriously.

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Do you have a strategy that works well for increasing the CRR for your MCA business? Share it with us in the comments section below!

Ways A MCA CRM Can Help You Reach Your Business Goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

  1. MCA CRM Improves Customer Retention

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

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

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

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

  1. Create Better Marketing Campaigns

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Increase Lead Quality

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

  1. Make your Business more Efficient

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

  1. Improve Sales Pipeline

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Strategic Lead Management Tips To Keep Sales Moving Through Your MCA CRM Pipeline

Keeping track of what is going on in your MCA CRM pipeline is important for your Merchant Cash Advance business. Your Merchant Cash Advance CRM sales pipeline provides you an insight into how your sales strategies are performing, and if any improvement is required to increase your sales. Unfortunately, leads and fence-sitting prospects can get lost in the shuffle or suddenly becoming inactive. Hence, what do you do when you find that the leads in the CRM database are getting stuck or dropping out for a myriad of reasons. Here are some of the most effective tips on lead management strategies that can help you to make your MCA CRM sales pipeline going forward once again.

Keeping track of what is going on in your MCA CRM pipeline is important for your Merchant Cash Advance business.

Your Merchant Cash Advance CRM sales pipeline provides you an insight into how your sales strategies are performing, and if any improvement is required to increase your sales.

The CRM market has seen a steady growth in the recent past. For this reason, its value is estimated to stand at $19 billion. - GoalCast (2017) Click To Tweet

Unfortunately, leads and fence-sitting prospects can get lost in the shuffle or suddenly becoming inactive. Hence, what do you do when you find that the leads in the CRM database are getting stuck or dropping out for a myriad of reasons.

Here are some of the most effective tips on lead management strategies that can help you to make your MCA CRM sales pipeline going forward once again.

However, primarily do you understand what are the reasons that are causing your leads to get stuck in your sales pipeline?

Therefore, before you take any actions, the foremost thing that you need to do is to comprehend why leads are getting caught in the first place. Since, when you do a bit of pondering, you will most likely be able to link all your inactive leads to a few unambiguous causes for which they got halted in their progress.

Not find the proper person

If you are unaware of the right contact information and you do not know the proper decision-maker(s) in the company, you will hardly be able to make any sales.
In addition, a prospective customer may enter an email that the person may not use often when they fill out a web-form in your website.

Both these issues ultimately may lead to not letting your messages reach the right people who need to see them.

Therefore, measure the bounce rate for your emails using MCA CRM software, and if they are considered high, find a solution to your problem. As this can be an indicator that you are not selling to the right person, or rather to say, not selling at all.

There is a problem with your alternative lending service

Another pertinent reason why a lead might get jammed is that your prospects are having issues using your solution, or they assume that your services are too expensive when compared to other MCA businesses in town. Nevertheless, whatever the case may be, it is vital that you find and fix the problems that are within your control.

Although it is true that you just cannot please every prospect, however, making the right change can have a rocking impact on your bottom line.

For example, if you find that a majority of visitors are abandoning the account creation process on your website, do take up necessary steps to decrease friction at the steps.

Your buyer is not ready yet

It can always be that your prospects are not sure that they want to make a change and accept your solution. It is a known fact that most of the visitors on your website will not be ready to buy your service the minute they enter your sales pipeline, and therefore, not doing so can leave some of your prospects fence-sit without the confidence to make a purchase.

If you find this to be an issue, increase the chances of making the leads move through your Merchant Cash Advance CRM pipeline by being helpful towards your prospects.

 

Lead management tips to get prospects moving

Now, once you are aware of what is getting your prospects stuck; you are faced with another new challenge.

So, how do you remove these bottlenecks and advance your leads through your MCA CRM’s pipeline?

The good news is that when you adopt the proper lead management strategies into action, you can easily get all your inactive leads moving ahead again.

Here are a few time-tested tips that we recommend:

Revamp your communication strategies

Are you aware of your communication strategies with your prospects in the different stages of your sales pipeline?

Now, just sending an email blast to every prospect in your CRM database once or twice every month is not going to cut the knot, if you want to steadily encourage every leads to move towards a prospect.

Primarily, understand your sales process and think what is required for qualifying and pushing your leads at every stage of your sales pipeline.
Next, segment your leads using lead scoring tactics into different lists.

Find a lead scoring strategy that addresses to your lead’s concerns, curiosities, and pain points.

According to an article published by MailChimp, lead segmentation plays a major role in the success of any email marketing campaign.

According to MailChimp, it has been found that email campaigns with segmented leads using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, in alternative lending businesses gets cent percent more clicks when compared to non-segmented ones.

Know your leads better

Do you know if your prospective leads are casually considering your service or they are in urgent need of your solution?

Once leads are stuck in the sales pipeline, it can always imply that your leads do not need your services yet.

Maybe, they are doubtful if your answer to their pain points is a good solution for their needs. Knowing this allows you to nurture your leads properly.

Understanding where your leads are in the buyer’s journey aids in marketing to them more efficiently.

You can always find out what your prospective leads are thinking by asking them to reply to your emails or by sending them out a survey using an easy to use MCA CRM platform.

If needed, you can even consider setting up a feedback form for all your new leads so that you can without any problems, collect all the information about your leads and their businesses and store the data in your CRM database.

Lookout for stalled stages

Find out if most of the inactive leads are getting stuck in one specific stage of your sales pipeline. If it is so, reevaluate the stages of your sales process. However, to understand how to fix this stages, you need to find an answer to these two most pertinent questions:

-What is happening?

-What should be happening?

For this, find an answer to what are the specific goals for every stage in your sales process. Next, evaluate how close you or your prospects are coming close to meet these goals. Finally, find out what can you do to make it easier for your leads to move to the next step or fetch a decision to complete the deal.

Offer help

If you are determined that a prospective lead is facing trouble in making a decision or getting buy-in from other alternative funding companies, what can be done offer them help?
What can you do to make your leads generate more trust in your business?

Well, to redress this issue you can offer free trials, eBooks, consultation, coupon codes, and other similar ‘at no cost’ resources. However, you should always make these offers available to the right buyers and at the right time.

Again, the key to finding this proper moment is making sure that your contact list is properly segmented. Per say, you just would not want to email a guidebook of how Merchant Cash Advance business works and its benefits over conventional bank loans to a lead who is already in a decision making stage of the buyer’s journey.

Create urgency

In case your prospective leads are not feeling an urgency to go for your service, set an expiration date or offer a discount.

According to a study done by Experian, adding urgency to your email marketing campaign efforts can increase open rates of your emails by 14%, the click-through rates by 59%, and double the number of completed deals.

To do these include the offer and time limit in the subject line of your emails.

However, always make sure that your urgency is based on something real, and is not a trial offer which is supposed to remain for a week but remains beyond that time, which is one of the quickest ways for losing credibility.

Ask questions

Start listening, if you cannot get a lead to close the deal. Ask your leads questions so that you can apprehend their hesitations. Since, if you ask your prospective lead any question that can get them engaged, you always have a fair chance that they will certainly reply, and you can easily find out from their answers what is holding them back.

If you are using a survey or sending a short email with questions to do this work, always send something that your prospects can answer within a few minutes.

Bottom line

Therefore, you see, solving issues and pain points of your prospective leads are not as complicated as it apparently seems.

The key to keeping you leads moving forward seamlessly through your MCA CRM sales pipeline lies in simply understanding and apprehending what is holding them back. Hence, make sure that the sales process in your Merchant Cash Advance software is set up to support your leads, and prospects and not just you as the owner of the software.

Are you ready to take control of your Merchant Cash Advance CRM sales pipeline now!

Learn more about how ConvergeHub’s robust marketing automation and sales pipeline management features can aid you and your team to get the right message to your prospects and leads in the right time.

To get going, start a 14-days free trial of ConvergeHub- the award-winning MCA CRM software by clicking on the link below.

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How Lead Scoring Benefits Businesses Using Merchant Cash Advance Software

If you are using MCA business and is using Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative funding business, what should you do next after attracting a high volume of leads? Remember, not all leads are the same, and therefore, separating the good leads from those that are not can be really challenging. This is exactly where if you are using an easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM solution like ConvergeHub, solid lead scoring comes into play. According to a report published by APSIS, only 44 percent of companies are presently using lead scoring systems to grow their business.

If you are using MCA business and is using Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative funding business, what should you do next after attracting a high volume of leads? Remember, not all leads are the same, and therefore, separating the good leads from those that are not can be really challenging.

This is exactly where if you are using an easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM solution like ConvergeHub, solid lead scoring comes into play.

According to a report published by APSIS, only 44 percent of companies are presently using lead scoring systems to grow their business.

Just 56% of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before they are passed to Sales- MarketingSherpa Click To Tweet

Therefore, before it gets too late you as a user of MCA CRM software should maximize this methodology and leverage your alternative lending business from your competitors by unveiling meaningful insights to improve your sales processes and your funnel.

In fact, lead scoring is a time-honored process, which most often exceeds expected benefits such as sales productivity and effectiveness, increased conversion ratio, and measurable ROI.

However, even before we delve into how we can build an awesome lead scoring model for your MCA business, let us talk primarily about whether you should have it and if so why.

Candidly, lead scoring is truly a tedious process, therefore, it is most essential to determine if lead scoring is suitable for your MCA business, to ensure that you do not waste time, money, and effort dedicated towards it.

Why Implement Lead Scoring in MCA business?

The most intriguing factor about lead scoring techniques is it does not come as a “one-size-fits-all” methodology. In fact, not every business needs an advance lead scoring model for their business. Nevertheless, lead scoring provides your business with a scientific and automated means to rank your leads, in a quantifiable manner, to calculate their perceived value in your organization.

Let us look at an example:

Suppose Jack, an owner of a large departmental store, visits your website. Since you do not know about him yet, he starts from the score of 0. However, as he interacts with your website more his scores increases subsequently. Per say, information about his title (+10 Points), he requests a cash advance demo (+10 points), he is from a large retail outlet (+5 Points). Now, once your lead reaches a certain point (based completely on your individually created criteria), where Jack is deemed sales-ready, it is time to send your sales team to reach out and convince Jack to convert him into your customer, by closing the deal.

The lead scoring technique is most often used with Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for improving the sales process, align marketing and sales, prioritize leads and lastly for creating higher quality conversions.

Now, to determine if lead scoring is required for your cash advance business, here are some questions you should consider as a user of MCA CRM platform, which aids in implementing the lead scoring methodology.

–Do you have a very high volume of leads flowing in from several channels, than your sales team can follow up within a specific time?

– Do you have enough information in your MCA CRM database for lead scoring?

–Do you have a particular content from a lead nurturing strategy, which needs to be delivered to a lead at a specific time in their buying journey?

–Do you feel that your sales processes can be more effective and efficient than what it is now?

If your answer is affirmative for all or most of these above-mentioned questions, then we would readily recommend that your alternative funding business organization is ready to start with a lead scoring system.

Otherwise, we would suggest you to primarily focus on generating more leads, establish an SLA (Service Level Agreement) between your marketing and sales teams, and collect and track the right information from your forms and website.

If you do not have enough leads to start lead scoring for your business, do you know ConvergeHub offers FREE LEAD GENERATOR Tool, which is a free lead generation software that you can easily download from ConvergeHub website?

Implementing a lead scoring methodology is extremely difficult to do manually (using spreadsheets) as a lead’s activity can change every day. Therefore, you need Merchant Cash Advance software or online lead management software, like ConvergeHub, which has an excellent lead management system to implement the modeling we will discuss below.

Basic Framework of Lead Scoring Setup

According to SiriusDecisions, 90 percent of B2B (Business-to-Business) companies are applying lead scoring. However, on the other hand, only 40 percent of sales reps have said to have found value from it. Although various factors can contribute to the failure of this remaining 28 percent, we are sure if you start on the right foot when implementing this system, the lead scoring methodology is always beneficial, especially as your business grows in years and becomes more complex over time.

Demographic Lead Scoring

Primarily, you need to outline what your MCA business needs by identifying your ideal lead. To begin, you need to select the demography based on your lead’s characteristics. Like, who are more likely to purchase your offerings compared to others? Is it small or large enterprises? In what industry/business and in what level?

Using lead capture forms helps you to collect this data. You can easily capture four basic demographics:

  • Job title or role
  • Number of employees or size of the business
  • Industry or business type
  • Department

Assign points based on your ideal lead. For example, for company type, you may assign higher points for B2B and lesser for B2C leads. This also works for the lead’s industry (like retail, small shop, large departmental store, among others) and seniority (like the owner, the floor in charge, sales rep and others).

Behavioral Lead Scoring

The second type of data that you need is how your lead interacts with your website. This process of lead scoring is based on the actions that the lead performs to indicate their interest. While in this behaviors such as opening an email, attending a webinar, or request a demo gets a higher score, similarly unsubscribing from your email list or webinar or canceling a demo request gets negative points and consequentially that lead goes further down the sales pipeline.

Here are some examples of the type of interests you can observe from your leads:

  • Web pages they viewed
  • Emails they opened
  • Content they downloaded
  • Webinars they signed up for

Apart from this, it is also important to consider your leads activity levels before you consider and mark your leads with the help of lead scoring as sales-ready.

Here are some examples:

  • Number of web pages viewed
  • Number of forms completed
  • The typical sales cycle for your company

How to Build a Killer Lead Scoring Model

Now once you have completed your basic framework, you can combine the information found in both these data, to paint a complete picture of your lead.

Note: It is always best to keep a separate and a combine sore of the two data. Because although the demographic data normally remains stable, the behavioral data can always change over a certain period of time. 

As we mentioned earlier that lead scoring is a tedious process, therefore getting your demographic and behavioral data is just the start of the lead scoring process, after which you need to proceed with the following:

  1. Identify your criteria

Now, that using your lead scoring framework you have created a foundation of your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), whereby your MQL are more likely to convert into a customer, compared to other leads based on their demographic and behavioral data. To set up a lead scoring process, you will have to assign points or scores as a basis for your lead scoring methodology.

For this, it crucial that your MCA organization to extract insights, use lead intelligence and analytics of your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, to find the unique attributes including customer base, sales cycles and key differentiators that focuses on your efforts on finding high-quality leads, which results in more conversions.

  1. Assign values

It has often been said by many that figuring what the score should be may be one of the hardest parts of the lead scoring process.

In most of the cases, the threshold for the lead scoring scale ranges in-between 0 to 100 (but you can also set any value as you like).

In ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, you can easily segregate the leads into three main categories: Hot, Warm, and Cold.

Leads that have a score of over 80 can be considered ‘Hot’, while leads that get a score between 30-80 can be denoted as ‘Warm’, while ‘Cold’ leads should have a score below 30. Although, you can always customize the range based on your company’s individual preferences and needs.

  1. Determine sales-ready score

The main point of implementing a lead scoring process is to identify the leads that are ready to accept your alternative funding services. Therefore, by identifying leads, which are sales ready (with a score in-between 80-100) your sales reps can prioritize whom to follow up with to maximize their time.

According to MarketingSherpa:

When 73% of leads are not yet sales-ready, this is where this process becomes more crucial, as you have to make sure your sales team will only reach out to the lead once the opportunity is right. Since the lead score can change every day, a tool such as an easy to use CRM solution featuring lead scoring updates the score instantaneously based on your criteria.

  1. Test your model

These three steps mentioned above are the most crucial factor to cover while implementing a lead scoring methodology in any business. However as lead scoring models are never sacrosanct or set in stone, it is only by testing in real-world scenarios; you can get a hands-on and more reliable results. So monitor your MCA lead scoring model for a few months and then if needed revise the scoring criteria and the lead scores against each of these criteria by analyzing past leads before finalizing your lead scoring process.

  1. Aim for continuous growth and improvement

A lead scoring model that is based on data collected with the help of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for the growth of your alternative lending business is a real game-killer.

Always be open for improving, testing, and tweaking your lead scoring model, since although developing a lead scoring system takes time, but its effects can always be improved.

Therefore, involve your sales department and check in monthly or every fortnight to make sure everything is working fine, since behavioral lead scoring needs to be reset over time, to identify scores that need to be redefined according to the behavioral data of the leads, which can change over a certain period of time.

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

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

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

To Love or Hate an easy to use CRM software?

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

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

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

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

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

#1. Salespeople do not want changes

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

Solution

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

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

#2. Salespeople do not perceive the value

 

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

#3. CRM software is too complicated

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution

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

#5. No training or support

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

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

Solution

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

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

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

#6. CRM keeps them stuck at their desks

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

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

Solution

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

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

#7. No time is saved

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

Solution

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

#8. CRM has bad data

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

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

Solution

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

Conclusion

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

Do you use a CRM?

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

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9 Killer Outbound Marketing Tips To Drive Growth In Merchant Cash Advance Business In 2018

A merchant cash advance or MCA allows small business owners those who allow credit card payments to acquire an advance of the funds regularly flowing through the businesses’ merchant account. Hence, MCA is not a loan, but rather it is an advance based upon the future credit card sales of a business. An MCA provider weight credit criteria and evaluates risks differently than traditional bankers, as merchant cash advance providers examine the volume of daily credit card receipts to evaluate if the business can pay the MCA lender in a timely manner. However, whatever may be your business, even for Merchant Cash Advance organizations, outbound marketing is still a doable option for moving leads through their sales funnel.

What is Merchant Cash Advance?

A merchant cash advance or MCA allows small business owners those who accept credit card payments to acquire an advance of the funds regularly flowing through the businesses’ merchant account. Hence, MCA is not a loan, but rather it is an advance based upon the future credit card sales of a business.

An MCA provider weigh credit criteria and evaluates risks differently than traditional bankers, as merchant cash advance providers examine the volume of daily credit card receipts to evaluate if the business can pay the MCA lender in a timely manner.

Merchant cash advance companies are less concerned with FICO scores and more concerned with signing businesses up that have a steady supply of paying customers.- GSFunding Click To Tweet

Since in MCA the small business is selling a portion of its future credit card sales to acquire a capital, businesses opting for MCA get the required advance deposited into their accounts quickly.

Why use Outbound Marketing?

However, whatever may be your business, even for Merchant Cash Advance organizations, outbound marketing is still a doable option for moving leads through their sales funnel.

Although there has been a lot of clamor about inbound marketing in the recent times, however, it also has its drawbacks. For example, inbound marketing may generate demand for your content rather than your services. Hence, it is best used in combination with outbound marketing, in order to convert more leads into customers.

Here are nine highly useful outbound marketing tips to help users of merchant cash advance CRM to close more deals.

#01. Social media advertising

Every MCA business using merchant cash advance software is also much familiar with social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Therefore, with so many people on social media platforms these days, it is hard to go wrong leveraging social media advertising, when it is anticipated that the social media reach is expected to grow to 3.02 billion by 2021.

Advertising on different social media channels comes at varying costs. Nevertheless, Facebook is usually the cheapest, and Twitter is likely to be the most expensive.

Hence, do your research before deciding upon which channel is best or your MCA audience, before pushing your ads out into the digital world.

#02. Boost successful social media posts

Boosting a social media post is a little different from just posting your ad.

You can boost your existing posts by paying a little extra to extend its reach and put your post in front of more people.

The best time to boost your post is when you find any particular post doing well (having lots of shares and likes), as boosting popular posts is likely to skyrocket its engagement and thereby increase your social returns on your investments.

#03. Pay-per-click advertising

PPC or Pay-per-click advertising is creating an ad for your MCA firm with an image that is linked to a particular landing page on your website.

It is fairly easy to setup and runs PPC ad campaigns. You only pay Google once someone clicks on your ad, and so if your ad is not successful, you do not end up paying for the flop.

#04. Cold calling

Cold calling is still a necessary and viable part of any outbound marketing strategy. Especially if you are using a merchant cash advance CRM that can be integrated with call management software like Ring Central and others.

Even though many people will certainly hang up or say that they are not interested in your MCA business, a certain percentage of those you call will actually be interested in opting for a cash advance for their small businesses and become your leads.

Moreover, integrating advanced call management software with your MCA CRM lets you make more calls in much lesser time than it was possible before. Therefore, advanced telephony software used in combination with merchant cash advance CRM can turn your sales and marketing team into a lean, mean, calling machine.

#05. Email newsletters

If you are using a cash advance CRM, email newsletters are an excellent way to get the word out about your new and existing products and service offerings to new leads. You can leverage marketing automation solutions found in ConvergeHub merchant cash advance CRM to create professional-looking email newsletter in a matter of minutes.

Always select or design email templates that fit your brand’s personality, after which with your CRM software’s email marketing capabilities, you can send it to your entire list of leads in no time.

#06. Print and radio ads

You may think that these marketing strategies are dead, now that we have ventured into the age of digital marketing. Nevertheless, radio ads and print advertisements can be even very successful for cash advance business, especially for smaller firms with a local presence.

Therefore, when you are developing your outbound marketing strategies, do not forget to consider these types of ads and target small brick and mortar business establishments in your community.

#07. Video Ads

Video ads are no exception, as they are also one of the most engaging forms of marketing contents. Channels like YouTube and Vimeo lets you easily upload your video clippings and even determine your targeted audience. Moreover, like PPC advertising, you can also run Pay-per-click video ads of your cash advance business, and when someone shows interest in your ads that makes it another cost-effective solution for outbound marketing.

#08. Tradeshows and other industry events

The oldie but still a goodie, tradeshows are still there, so why not sponsor one and show up with your best sales reps, highest-quality marketing materials, and most experienced product experts. Tradeshows are one of the best ways to land and shine in front of your leads. It also helps to how superior or at par, your business establishment is compared to other cash advance companies.

If you are using a mobile cash advance CRM software, you can easily enter the information of your new leads instantly to your CRM database, without even bringing the lead-sheet back to your office.

#09. Email blasts with one-time discounts or offers

Good old email blasts still work. Despite the onslaught of social media email use is still on a rise. Therefore, if you are using a merchant cash advance CRM for managing your cash advance business with the right email marketing capabilities like ConvergeHub, which aids in creating emails quickly. Use your CRM’s marketing automation capabilities and send email blasts to new leads with one-time discounts or offers.
People love free stuff.

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Conclusion

Although inbound marketing has been seriously on the surge in the last few years, when it is used in unison with outbound marketing tactics, they can form the perfect marketing storm to help you generate more leads.

Additionally, as inbound marketing cannot convert leads on its own, therefore, when it is complemented by outbound marketing strategies using merchant cash advance software it will certainly aid you in closing more deals.

7 Factors To Evaluate Merchant Cash Advance CRM For Financial Services

If you are in financial business, before making a decision as to which Merchant Cash Advance CRM software to go with, you need to consider a few factors that include: 360-degree view of the customer, Intelligent cross-selling/marketing campaigns, Tracking buying behavior, Auto alerts and reminders, Collaboration capabilities, Size and scope of your business, Integration with other systems.

If you are in financial business, before making a decision as to which Merchant Cash Advance CRM software to go with, you need to consider a few factors that include:

  1. 360-degree view of the customer
  2. Intelligent cross-selling/marketing campaigns
  3. Tracking buying behavior
  4. Auto alerts and reminders
  5. Collaboration capabilities
  6. Size and scope of your business
  7. Integration with other systems
There is currently $80 to $120 billion dollars worth of unmet funding needs among SMB, and MCA companies are in the best position to meet this demand.- Oguz Konar Click To Tweet

360 Degree View of the Customer

One of the primary factors to look at while adopting a customer relationship management software for cash advance business is what type of information the Merchant Cash Advance software can collect and display for each of your customers and if it is easily available around the clock. Moreover, you also need to find if the CRM solution can display a holistic view of the customer to all the stakeholders in your company, which can assure quick response in crucial circumstances.
When working for a cash advance industry in the financial sector, businesses need to collect a large amount of information of their customers for compliance and for serving the customers better in the longer run. So apart from tracking basic information such as name, address, and phone numbers, in alternative funding industry, you need to track other vital information and analytics, if you want to provide better service to your customers. For example, in cash advance business, you have to keep track of conversations you had with your customers about specific investments, their risk appetite, and goals. Storing this information in your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software allows alternative funding businesses to readily refer to these data before offering any advice and therefore helps in cross selling its products to its customer base.

Intelligent Cross Selling/Marketing Campaigns

Most of the easy to use CRM software allows the users to send customized marketing messages to their customers on the information collected and analyzed by the CRM platform. For example, if you are promoting cash advance, you can also scan through customers who are interested in mutual funds and bonds or looking for other investment opportunities, based on the discussion you had with them in the past.
At this point, Merchant Cash Advance CRM software can send out customized emails to each of your customers in the CRM database with pertinent verbiage using customized templates prebuilt in the software.
You can also send monthly newsletter related to various investment scenario and other key financial trends to any specific mailing list, using a mail-blaster from within the CRM.

Tracking Buying Behavior

Another functionality that you may want to look for in your MCA CRM solution for finance businesses, is the ability of the Merchant Cash Advance CRM software to track customer decisions and activities. For example, like most cash advance firms if your company is also selling small business loans and investment products to your customers, you need to keep track of what products or which loan each customer prefers and purchases from your financing organization. By tracking this data, you can create a profile for each customer and ascertain what type of investment or loan he or she likes. This way, when you have a new product available in your portfolio, you can easily select the list of customers that may be interested to purchase your new offerings. Tracking the customer’s past purchase decisions will provide you with an idea of how much they might be willing to invest in the future and the most appropriate product that you can offer to them, which might pique their interest.

Auto Alerts and Reminders

When choosing a Merchant Cash Advance CRM for your alternative funding industry business, you also need to find an easy to use CRM software that generates reminders on the basis of configurable settings. Like any other business, one of the most vital factors of being successful in the financial service industry is to develop relationships with your customers. Most Merchant Cash Advance CRM software like ConvergeHub and others nowadays incorporates exiting social networking features to help view comments, profile information, and mutual friends. It reminds you of important dates in your customer’s lives such as his or her birthday, anniversaries, and other, which can go a long way in helping you to grow your relationships. By using automation functionalities in the CRM, you can even program the software to automate mailing services to send birthday cards and other greetings to your customers.

Apart from this, you may approach a customer about a particular product that you want to sell and the customer tells you to check back after a fortnight. If you are using CRM software, you can easily input this data into the CRM program and set a reminder for the appropriate data and time, whereby you can get an alert a few hours before the scheduled task. Therefore equipped with all up-to-date information you can now call on the prospect, which increases your chances of winning the sale.

Collaboration between All Stakeholders

Depending on the size of your cash advance business, you may need to be able to collaborate with multiple partners, departments, and customers. If your MCA CRM solution offers the ability to allow multiple users to input and access information, this will not only boost synergy in your business but even help to serve your customers in an effective and efficient manner.

Ideal Business Size

Your business size also plays an impact on the type of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software you should implement. While in large alternative funding company, where scalability, integration, and processes are more demanding and complex than small and medium-sized businesses you may require on-premise CRM.
However, for small and medium cash advance firms, cloud-based CRM like ConvergeHub is more popular and effective as it considerably reduces cost and implementation time of the software.

Integration with Other Systems

Last but not the least, before choosing a Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, you must find out whether it integrates with other programs that you are currently using to store important customer and product related information.

For example, if your MCA CRM allows you to integrate with Google Calendar, Gmail, MS Outlook, DocuSign, QuickBooks, Box, Zapier, and other third-party software seamlessly it will help you to integrate your billing, call management, e-signature solution, and others, for a complete customer data and smarter selling.

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Takeaway

Therefore, in a gist CRM software, not only has the potential to improve user experience by making the marketing and sales processes easier and effective, but CLM CRM also helps in Customer Lifecycle Management to keep your customers coming back for more.

Why Use Merchant Cash Advance CRM For Your MCA Business?

What sets Merchant Cash Advance CRM apart are those functionalities that cater to MCA industry for meeting with their unique purposes. MCA CRM is designed to help Cash Advance businesses run their front-end operations and at the same time improve their customer lifecycle management for retention of the clients by providing unsurpassable services. Apart from this Merchant Cash Advance CRM also enables the lenders to keep detailed client data and maintain timely customer follow up with loan pipeline management to stay in control of the business.
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Merchant Cash Advance CRM like all other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has the same basic functions, which includes:

  • Automation
  • Client Data Collection
  • Analytics
  • Marketing

However, what set Merchant Cash Advance CRM apart are those functionalities that cater to MCA industry for meeting with their unique purposes.  MCA CRM is designed to help Cash Advance businesses run their front-end operations and at the same time improve their customer lifecycle management for retention of the clients by providing unsurpassable services.

CRM gives businesses a 65% boost in sales quotas- Innopple Technologies Click To Tweet

Apart from this Merchant Cash Advance CRM also enables the lenders to keep detailed client data and maintain timely customer follow up with loan pipeline management to stay in control of the business.

Comparing Merchant Cash Advances to Traditional Business Lending

MCA or Merchant Cash Advance are gradually becoming more mainstream as several small and medium businesses that are not being able to secure a bank loan are turning to alternative funding sources. This is because; a merchant cash advance can be availed by a business quickly and that too with minimal paperworks. Hence, as banks continue to be very tight with their loans; merchant cash advance is becoming extremely appealing to small business owners over time.

How MCA works?

To illustrate in layman’s terms, Merchant Cash Advance, or an MCA provides purchases a pre-defined amount of a business’s future credit card receivables in one lump sum in return for the receivables, which is paid back to the lending organization over a certain period of time, which is usually calculated as a daily percentage of the customer’s debit/credit card totals. This is the key benefit that distinguishes MCA from conventional loans.

In other words, Merchant Cash Advance is not loaning a business any money, rather it is a simple process of buying a portion of the customer’s future business revenue.

Advantages of MCA Borrowings Over Bank Loans

The primary advantage of MCA over bank loans is that Merchant Cash Advance, in general, does not require any collateral, and liens (although this is always subjected to certain conditions). Apart from this, the other ranges of benefits that small businesses receive from choosing this kind of funding are:

  • No rigid monthly payments
  • No upfront fees
  • No UCC-1 (Uniform Commercial Code-1) at the time of funding
  • No collaterals (subjected to certain conditions)
  • No limits on how you spend the fund
  • Minimal approval time for disbursement of the fund

Therefore, the greatest advantage of MCA is that the amount, which the business pays, is based on the sum total of the credit card transactions that the borrower receives every day. As there are no set fees that must be paid every month, so small businesses taking merchant cash advance still have an access to a greater portion of their own revenues. This implies, if your sale drops for a specific month, your MCA payment will also become low to reflect that change.

Why use a Merchant Cash Advance CRM?

While all CRM may work for any business, Merchant Cash Advance CRM is specially designed for MCA businesses, as it not only helps in easy collaboration with the funders but it also helps MCA business in the following ways, which include:

  • Find a central repository for merchant contact information, related documents and underwriting information
  • Escalate the power of communication by integrated with DocuSign, Email, and Fax application templates for merchants and funders
  • Track deals from underwriting to funded stages
  • Syndicate and track approval numbers, management fees and commissions
  • Increase agent’s productivity by using quick lead capture form, easy edits, 360-degree merchant profile view and one-click deal conversion
  • Multiple fund submission and tracking

Takeaway

Therefore as a small business owner, if you find that you have the opportunity of expanding your business, but you do not have the time for traditional funding to come through, it is the perfect time to consider Merchant Cash Advance to get the finance you need, especially just when you need them.

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Choosing an MCA CRM? Avoid these mistakes!

Let us face the reality; you do not want to make the mistake of picking up the wrong MCA CRM just like others. MCA CRM software can save a lot of your precious work hours, but then again, it comes at the price of a learning curve. A learning curve that can make you shell out a lot of money, in case you have to change the MCA CRM platform down the line. For the convenience of such buyers of MCA Customer Relationship Management platform, we have put together a few ideas to mull over when choosing a CRM. Let us review them one by one now and we are hopeful that these suggestions will help.

Let us face the reality; you do not want to make the mistake of picking up the wrong MCA CRM just like others.
MCA CRM software can save a lot of your precious work hours, but then again, it comes at the price of a learning curve. A learning curve that can make you shell out a lot of money, in case you have to change the MCA CRM platform down the line.

For the convenience of such buyers of MCA Customer Relationship Management platform, we have put together a few ideas to mull over when choosing a CRM.

There is currently $80 to $120 billion dollars worth of unmet funding needs among SMEs, and MCA companies are in the best position to meet this demand. Click To Tweet

Let us review them one by one now and we are hopeful that these suggestions will help.

Not finding whether or not you are looking for a specific solution

A specific or a niche solution may be perfect for your business if you are wishing to use the CRM solution at its optimal level. Now, if you are just utilizing your CRM platform for basic data input, you will definitely not benefit from such a high-powered customer relationship solution with myriad bells and whistles. However, if you are using the CRM solution to track multiple areas unique to your kind of business, such as retail, MCA, legal and others, you should consider using the appropriate niche CRM solution that fits with your business’s modus operandi.

Not understanding the needs of all the users

Once you purchase a CRM platform, it is most likely that you are not going to be the only one who will use the CRM system. Therefore, before buying a CRM, you will have to take time out to consider the needs of the other users who will use the CRM along with you in your company. Never run into a risk of fully investing in a particular software solution that will only reward you and your executives, but your evaluation of the CRM platform should take into consideration the cross-section of all the users who will collaborate with the software.

Picking the solution that will not address the problem

This statement may seem clichéd and obvious, yet it is one of those critical issues that are mostly overlooked. For example, let us take that the most pressing issue for your urgency in buying a CRM is to facilitate communication with your customers. Therefore, communication should be the make or break feature for purchasing your CRM system. Therefore, do not get caught up with other fancier aspects of the CRM software if you find your desired CRM lacks the ideal communication features while purchasing the CRM.

Always keep in your mind that the software solution that you select for your business must be accurate and effective in addressing your problems. However, we have seen that it is not uncommon for companies to select CRM solutions that do not necessarily address their pressing issues. Hence, the primary problem the software solution is expected to resolve should always be there at the top of your checklist before buying your Merchant Cash Advance CRM.

Opting for a CRM that does not save time

In any sort of businesses, most companies can very quickly identify at least two time-taking business processes when it comes to managing their customer relationships. Therefore, before finalizing carefully map these burdensome processes and match the ideal CRM solution that is capable of streamlining these cumbersome issues. Remember, you selected CRM must always save your business resources and time to justify its ROI to the company.

Not being thoughtful about ongoing IT needs and anticipated resources

There can be several scenarios and you can be a part of any one or more of these issues. Like, you can have access to manage an in-house team of IT professionals or you may have limited access to reliable professionals and resources that can solve your IT problems as they arise, or you may even have access to IT resources but they do not align with the particular needs for a given CRM solution. Therefore, when selecting your CRM system, always take into account the potential support requirements of the skillsets that you require from your technical team before purchasing the CRM software.

Not testing the software

Last but not the least, the most common mistake that businesses make while opting for a CRM system is to make a selection even before scheduling a demo of the software. Ideally, you should consider evaluating several CRM solutions simultaneously before selecting your preferred CRM software. Most CRM brands offer a walkthrough or a free trial to their prospects.

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Conclusion

Remove guesswork before selecting your CRM. We are confident that if you are capable of avoiding these common pitfalls in choosing your CRM, this article will help you to find the right CRM solution for your Merchant Cash Advance businesses.

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Tip and Tricks for Users of Merchant Cash Advance CRM

If you are using MCA (Merchant Cash Advance) CRM to help you run your business lending company, you should definitely be aware of the best practices of using MCA CRM for getting the most out of your customer relationship management platform. Knowing the best practices that you should follow while using MCA CRM is most necessary, as, at the end of the day, you must have invested a lot on the CRM system and also have spent a considerable amount of time in it. The primary benefit of using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM is- Workflow, which is the foundation stone of any CRM platform regardless of its use in any kind of businesses.

If you are using Merchant Cash Advance CRM to help you run your business lending company, you should definitely be aware of the best practices of using MCA CRM for getting the most out of your customer relationship management platform. Knowing the best practices that you should follow while using MCA CRM is most necessary, as, at the end of the day, you must have invested a lot on the CRM system and also have spent a considerable amount of time in it. However, if you are still sitting on the fence and not using a CRM for the day-to-day operations of your lending business firm, then we can easily cite an example to let you understand your lacuna, whereby not using a CRM in Merchant Cash Advance institution is like a professional racing car driver not using a sports car.

There is currently $80 to $120 billion dollars worth of unmet funding needs among SMB, and MCA companies are in the best position to meet this demand.- Oguz Konar Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, if you are one who still does not use a dedicated MCA CRM, here are a couple of key points you must know if you want to get right from the beginning.
The primary benefit of using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM is- Workflow, which is the foundation stone of any CRM platform regardless of its use in any kind of businesses.

We are aware that with most of us, the very first thing that comes to our minds when we hear about workflow is that it sounds like a lot of work. For creating, a workflow involves going through the entire business process, documenting all activities that everyone does, registering how the files pass from one department to another and many more. We know to run a business we absolutely need to do these tasks, but for MCA CRM workflow, these are not what we ask for, rather you should ask yourself the following questions:

  • What statuses or stages do your customer’s applications fall into throughout their life cycle to get a customer-funded?
  • There are several common mistakes, which most customers make, can you avoid them by using your MCA CRM and generate more productivity?
  • Can Merchant Cash Advance CRM help to create a higher retention rate for your employees, as it can help create higher conversion rates when it comes to their marketing efforts?

Stages and Statuses are not Tasks

We have often seen many business lending organizations creates tasks instead of creating stages and statuses in their CRM workflow. However, it is extremely important to understand that stages and statuses are not the same things. For example, tasks can be created in most of the CRM systems to remind sales reps to perform their day-to-day duties. However, instead of writing “Application Out” or “Contact Sent” with MCA business if your status reflects “Merchant Reviewing Application” or for a file sent to the funder for review and underwriting falls under the status “Funder Reviewing File” it will be more productive for MCA CRM business.

Therefore, instead of just implementing workflow process that expresses tasks create a workflow that shows stages and statuses, for which your team will thank you down the road.

Keep it Simple

We have seen several customers who have created such complex workflows that it would require probably a Ph.D. in Statistics to understand. For this, we want you to remember that more complex is the workflow, the more difficult you are making it for your team and yourself to accomplish or supervise the job. An ideal workflow should always be created in such a manner, that even a new recruit in your company could look at it and understand what it means or what its purpose is.

Hence, it is best to consolidate status and stages to fill the gaps with the task. For example, MCR CRM users often create statuses like “Collect Tax Returns”, “Collect Bank Statement”, “Collect Driving License” and others, all of which can be consolidated into a single status “In Document Collection”, which is not only simple but also very easy to understand.

We must always remember Einstein’s great quote in this respect:
“Anyone can make something complicated.  It takes a genius to make it simple.”

Automated Triggers and Drip Email Marketing

We know your primary thought on this matter would be “what do drip email marketing and automated triggering have to do with workflow?” Well, to be blunt and truthful, it has everything to do with it. For any CRM platform workflow is the cornerstone to almost that goes out to your staffs or to the customers in an automated way. For example, once a status changes for a customer, with  Merchant Cash Advance CRM platform, like ConvergeHub, you can easily create an automation whereby an email can go to the customers from their assigned reps so that it looks like it is a personal email. Moreover, if a customer remains constant in a certain status for a specific period of time an automated email can to go the sales rep based on the time to make him or her attentive and look into the cause of that sudden delay.

The best part about using an automated system with nicely created workflow is that the CRM platform will perform on behalf of the sales reps and the company. Remember, using workflow management notifying both your customers and staffs can only help in your efforts to grow your business in the longer run.

Task Management

Keeping your office staffs on task every single day is truly the name of the game. Since the more tasks, your staffs complete successfully the more revenue everyone makes in your Merchant Cash Advance agency. Much like creating triggers and drip email marketing, task management also helps in creating a good and solid workflow. For example, if the status for a customer in your Merchant Cash Advance CRM changes to “In Doc Collection” a series of tasks can be automatically created like, “Collect Tax Returns”, “Collect Voided Check”, “Collect Bank Statement”, “Collect Driving License” and so on.

Conclusion

Therefore, in gist, if you truly want your MCA business to grow, by remaining on top when it comes to efficiency and productivity, a well thought out workflow will help you to generate more revenue and close more deals by using a Merchant Cash Advance CRM system.

According to one of our notable MCA agency customers of ConvergeHub Merchant Cash Advance CRM, Rob Abramov of Flowrich Capital quotes on us:

“Whether you are a one-man operation or a 100 person army. ConvergeHub allows you to keep your business organized, maintain customer data efficiently, and automate the entire process from beginning to end.”

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