How To Regain Business And Sales Productivity In These Wretched COVID-19 Pandemic Times

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin 1809 In the post, let us at the very onset pray for the health and safety of the sick and those at risk in this time in human history- Team ConvergeHub. Nevertheless, for the sake of running our businesses, we will also discuss over here in this post that NOW is the time in this Coronavirus (COVID-19) affected world to make sure that your growth efforts in sales productivity are stronger than ever to help boost revenue in 2021 and beyond.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin 1809
In the post, let us at the very onset pray for the health and safety of the sick and those at risk in this time in human history- Team ConvergeHub.
Nevertheless, for the sake of running our businesses, we will also discuss over here in this post that NOW is the time in this Coronavirus (COVID-19) affected world to make sure that your growth efforts in sales productivity are stronger than ever to help boost revenue in 2021 and beyond.

Per sales person, a CRM can increase revenue by 41% - Trackvia Click To Tweet

Since even during this pandemic there is the business of trying to keep your businesses alive as well as the businesses of your customers.

Now if you lookup for the keyword “Natural Selection” in Vocabulary.com this is exactly what you will read:

Natural selection is the theory that only the strong survive. For example, the animals that can outrun their predators live to pass on their speedy genes; the slow are eaten.

Therefore when the market goes down, the competitors in your marketplace get aggressive to defend their market share, and naturally, brands are faced with making budgets and fight to stop the onslaught of decreasing revenue.

Hence NOW is the time to make sure that your businesses’ efforts for sales productivity and growth are stronger than ever, and so if you do not put money, time, and resources into sales then (we are sorry to remind) you will have a difficult time to survive or you might live to tell the tale but the climb back will be a painful and a long journey in this crunch times.

Therefore, we as one of the most popular vendors of the best CRM for small and medium businesses in the Salesforce Alternative CRM space even though accept the fact that crunch time means tightening the purse strings and doing away with “non-essential” expenses, that list in general includes but is not limited to:

  • Technology
  • Marketing
  • Employee benefits
  • Travel and entertainment
  • Training

Nevertheless, as you go about crunching those numbers, we also recommend you to consider the following:

Be strategic

In these trying times try to think outside the box and be creative with using resources and money to drive revenue. Remember, it necessarily does not always take a lot of creativity to cut expenses.

Discontinue thinking “non-essential”

If any resources and expenses are non-essential, then do not currently be spending money on those items.

Think about wise investing

Consider where you can invest money, time, and resources that might act as an additive to your emergency business objectives and keep your company in the hunt for new businesses and revenue.

In other words, find a new way when you are considering how you must be handling your sales teams and you can help them achieve better during this global COVID-19 pandemic and difficult times.

Now as you go about crunching, one thing that we can recommend to our readers is to strategically pair down your sales team to boost your businesses’ profitability and ROI.

For example, a couple of years ago we assessed an alternative lending group of 90 participants as one of the most popular Merchant Cash Advance CRM software vendors in the USA. And of the 60, this is how the numbers worked out:

The top 1/3 members of this group (20 lenders) represented over 80 percent of the revenue from existing business, which should not be surprising as it is consistent with the Pareto Principle.

Therefore what we mean over here is that you should never consider an early retirement strategy to manage expenses but rather be more strategic in who you let go.

Moreover, you should also now consider how you go about with your new hires since this is the time you should be hiring since many companies will downsize the wrong people for wrong reasons, and so now is the time to pick up great sales talents from your marketplace.

Now, if you want to be selective, you can use pre-hire assessments which can help you to accomplish a critical objective like use the ‘Ideal Fit’ strategy so that you can exactly identify what it takes to be successful in generating sales productivity in your company.

Finally, you should take up the resolution that developing and training this present team that has not undergone these competitive and dire conditions before is absolutely critical and so to accomplish that you can take the advantage of distance conferencing and other similar technologies to improve the skills of your sales team and change their behaviors accordingly.

This is because nowadays with stellar growth in technology you no longer have to pull people out of the field into a conference room for a full day to find an impact on their sales productivity skills. For this use a micro-focused strategy to just address specific “chock-points” in the execution of your businesses’ sales processes and conduct just a few hours session that involves role-plays, drill for skill, to boost strategic development of your team.

Conclusion

Yes, you will have to take actions over the next several days, weeks, and possibly months to outrun your competition and not be eaten in these trying times, but to do that your organization must be stronger and faster than ever before.

Read More –  9 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business Faster

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How CRM Software For Financial Services Industry Can Improve Customer Experience Effectively

For most of us, the financial service industry is a deeply personal zone. This is especially all because, customers entrust their financial advisors, banks, private lenders, and investment firms to safeguard or grow their hard-earned money. Irrespective of whether the money is slated for a child’s education, or on a home, or for a dream retirement, the stakes remain high. Hence, a customer’s choice of a financial institution or advisor may always have a lasting impact on their ability to attain their financial goals. Additionally, many of us still struggle with basic and fundamental financial knowledge, which is exactly the reason why millions of people across the globe may make critical decisions about who should manage their funds without fully understanding their options to choose wisely in the financial marketplace.

For most of us, the financial service industry is a deeply personal zone. This is especially all because, customers entrust their financial advisors, banks, private lenders, and investment firms to safeguard or grow their hard-earned money.
Irrespective of whether the money is slated for a child’s education, or on a home, or for a dream retirement, the stakes remain high.
Hence, a customer’s choice of a financial institution or advisor may always have a lasting impact on their ability to attain their financial goals.
Additionally, many of us still struggle with basic and fundamental financial knowledge, which is exactly the reason why millions of people across the globe may make critical decisions about who should manage their funds without fully understanding their options to choose wisely in the financial marketplace.
Hence for people working in sales in financial services, this situation presents a dilemma, whereby they fail to understand how they can persuade their prospective customers to buy their services when in reality their customers have very little knowledge of their offerings.
Now, part of the answer to this question may be solved by using a CRM software for financial services industry, which can help the sales reps to log in customer data and interactions consistently into the software, which can help them to better identify their prospect’s and customer’s needs and thereafter provide relevant information that is not only persuasive but all better-suited for their customers.

You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise – Patricia Fripp Click To Tweet

The Value Of Customer-Facing Knowledge

As stated above being one of the leading vendors of Merchant Cash Advance CRM we know how the financial service industry differs from others.
Consumers in the retail industry can try on clothing and access them for style, they can even determine by themselves whether they can enjoy the services of an expandable cable package, but they cannot understand the benefits of buying a financial service.

Hence much like an attorney or a physician professionals working in financial services are considered trusted experts in their fields, upon whom a customer may rely on their perceived expertise and trustworthiness to evaluate the value of a financial representative.

Thus in this landscape customer-facing knowledge has as a result become vital, not just for communicating but even for understanding when it is the right time to communicate with their customers.

Now the risk of manual management of customer and prospect data can easily overwhelm the sales staff in the financial industry and so to streamline this process a financial services CRM is what is needed to manage inputs and thereafter also retrieve information from the customer-facing data, without the requirement of tedious up keeping.

Hence the adoption of CRM software for financial services industry aids the staff in the financial sector to tailor their customer-representative interactions that can build trust for closing a deal in a meaningful way.

How A CRM Organizes Customer-Related Data

In modern times CRM software solutions are a cutting-edge outgrowth of early customer contact lists found in paper-files, and Rolodex machines of the pre-digital era.

In fact, the CRMs that are available for modern-day businesses have made a vast stride over its predecessors.

So what kind of information can an easy to use CRM house inside its database?

The answer to this is- Customer information.

Now customer information is more than a phone number with a name since it can also include a plethora of contact point data (like an office, residence, and cellular phone), as well as demographic data such as age or gender and transactional data like last purchase made or service-related data and more.

Detailed financial services CRM tools can even include notes from customer interactions with any employee within the company and also perform lead scoring that can help to rank customers and prospects for the sales teams to prioritize their efforts.

For managers working in a financial organization this data stored in the CRM database, can provide crucial insights into performance- such as their progress towards individual sales targets, or identify factors that are most important for retention of their existing customers.

Connecting CRM Data And Sales

According to research done by a major CRM vendor of global repute, it shows that CRM can boost sales by up to 29 percent.

Now an increase in sales is not the only improvement that CRM software can offer to its users. As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM tools, we know there are also several studies done on this business growth technology that shows using a CRM sales forecasting accuracy of the sales teams can grow by some 42 percent.

This is because while using CRM sales reps can spend more time on accomplishing high-value tasks and less time entering or searching customer information, which ultimately translates to happier sales staff in an organization that can help improve the bottom line.

Take Away

Hence the four most important ways that a financial institution can find more value from a CRM software for financial services industry is by harvesting more opportunities through immediate connection to the past conversation and requests that are done by a prospect or a customer, identifying key interactions that help build trust with the customers, find the right type of prospects that is in line with the services offered by the organization, and finally, by providing improved customer service through enhanced customer knowledge, since modern easy to use CRM is a tool that is capable of disseminating up-to-date knowledge in real-time to everyone involved that can boost marketing and sales efforts and more importantly help retain the customers years after their first agreement with any finance-related businesses.

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Things To Know: How Business CRM And Email Marketing Can Increase Your Revenue

When you are doing business online, you will find several things that require your attention. This is 2020, fully digital, everything is available online and if we talk about email marketing and business CRM solutions, according to research it shows that more than 82% of businesses in B2B and B2C are using email marketing automation nowadays. Now, this question might hit your mind: How email marketing can boost my businesses? What is Email Marketing? Generally speaking, email marketing is a part of internet marketing, which encircles online marketing via social networking, websites, blogs, and more. In fact, it is the same as direct mail but instead of sending the mails through postal services, over here messages are sent electronically through emails. Now once we are speaking about marketing, emails always stand out in the crowd and are still considered the best way for communicating with consumers in the marketplace.

When you are doing business online, you will find several things that require your attention. This is 2020, fully digital, everything is available online and if we talk about email marketing and business CRM solutions, according to research it shows that more than 82% of businesses in B2B and B2C are using email marketing automation nowadays.

Average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing. Click To Tweet

Now, this question might hit your mind: How email marketing can boost my businesses?

What is Email Marketing?

Generally speaking, email marketing is a part of internet marketing, which encircles online marketing via social networking, websites, blogs, and more.
In fact, it is the same as direct mail but instead of sending the mails through postal services, over here messages are sent electronically through emails.

Now once we are speaking about marketing, emails always stand out in the crowd and are still considered the best way for communicating with consumers in the marketplace.

Hence, email marketing is considered as a highly effective digital marketing strategy as it helps to communicate with all the prospects and customers through electronic channels, whereby using marketing automation found in easy to use CRM software tools email marketing empowers businesses to create campaigns that speaks to their audience on a much more personal level.

Therefore, in this era of digital communication, when marketers are required to do more with less, your marketing staffs need to connect with hyper-targeted buyers lurking within the crowd of prospects, which brings email marketing at the forefront of other strategies in the digital marketing field.

Why your company needs Email Marketing?

  • Better reach to your prospects and customers
  • Hyper-targeted segmentations
  • Beats social media platforms for selling online
  • Create dynamic personalized emails
  • Find easy email exchange at an affordable rate
  • Drive more revenue

According to marketing ninjas, emails are the best ways to hold your customers in-touch if you occasionally say – “Hi, we have got a special offer for you.

It has been observed that using this technique gradually increases the customer’s interest in your brand, as it provides a favorable impression that you have been thinking about them.

Hence email listing based on demography, behavior, or social features of the prospects and customers provide highly relevant and contextual emails that really work for ushering business growth.

Do you know, according to a poll done by a major Salesforce Alternative CRM solution, it states that 91% of your target audience in the marketplace uses emails?

Additionally, as per polls done by Campaign Monitor, it states that 320% more revenue can be generated by automated emails using business CRM solutions, as against the non-automated ones.

This is because, the beauty of triggered emails is that, once they are programmed to run, they continue to mechanically drive earnings from the intended and targeted audience without you or your employees having to do anything more.

Hence email marketing is the weapon of choice for SaaS-based offerings and online stores as there are several CRM solutions that can help businesses to create startling email marketing campaigns, track the behaviors of their targeted audience and even optimize earnings through repeat purchases.

EMAIL MARKETING IDEAS FOR BOOSTING YOUR REVENUE

Now, in email marketing, it is not sufficient to simply send your prospects and customers plain vanilla emails, rather you need to have a good plan in place to make your emails work effectively.

Hence here are a few concepts for email marketing, which can help you to increase the impact of your efforts:

Get Personal

The most successful emails are those that make the audience feel that they are customized just for themselves.
Now, it is natural that you just cannot manually customize all the emails that you send to your targeted audience in the marketplace.

Hence automation is essential if you would like to treat each of your targeted audiences in a private way that can elicit a reply from the recipients of your emails.

Therefore, firstly if you want to find more traffic through emails, then you should collect sufficient data about your prospects and customers, which you can easily do if you are using a business CRM solution that can provide you the information you can use like the name, date of customer sign up, contact numbers, birthdays, a conversion event, and much more.

Hence, by segmenting the customers and prospects into different groups that are stored in the CRM database, based on their interests, behaviors, buying patterns, and more you can create personalized emails that can fetch replies and actions from the recipients of those emails.

For example, if you are aware of your customer’s preferences, it is possible to notify them over emails when your brand has new items that can pique the interest of your customers and are on sale.

Remember, emails are less about making sales and more about building a trusting relationship with your customer base, so concentrate on the entire customer journey for finding a better response to your emails.

This is because by offering useful incentives and information to your prospects and customers, you can create a loyal customer base that can eventually bring in repeat sales and more revenue.

Moreover, since emails are a part of a set of interactions with your brand, do not create emails that will simply send users to your brand’s generic homepage. Rather invest time to create customized landing pages and take your email recipients to those pages for finding deals that they might consider worth once they click on the CTA (Call To Action) buttons in your emails.

Now, even a simple welcome email can be quite effective as a part of your email marketing strategy, when potential customers are first showing their interest in your brand.

Finally, in the realm of email personalization if your customers are young, make them laugh since inspiring them and teaching them will make them come back to your brand for more.
For this send assignment quotes, short clickable videos, and pictures embedded in your emails that can make your target audience get identified with your brand, which can make them much more likely to turn into loyal customers.

Reward Loyal Customers

Placing a loyalty program with the help of email marketing is a fantastic way to cultivate a relationship with your customers. As a company cannot ensure growth without loyal customers hence consider providing existing customers points for their future purchases which is just one means for creating a loyalty program for your customers.

For this, you can segment your customers stored in your easy to use CRM who have spent above a specific amount while purchasing from your brand and send them email campaigns with exclusive offers like early access to sale, special product bundles or discounts. You can also offer incentives to your existing customers on their special occasions along with their birthday emails or for their first anniversary of shopping at your store.

Moreover, you can also give special discounts to your customers who refer other customers, bring in new visitors, or incentivizes referrals for your brand.

Target Dormant Customers

Sending targeted emails for customers that have not purchased for a while, with incentives to re-purchase could act as a gold mine. For this use emails to remind your dormant customers that you are still around. Send then gift cards in their emails that can encourage them to come back for more.

Utilize Social Proof

The power of providing appropriate social evidence is huge in the digital marketing field. This is because there is no way around the fact that people always trust other people and so think about providing some user-generated reviews and testimonials of your loyal customers in your emails. You can always boost sales significantly by revealing how many customers have used and are happy with your brand’s offerings.

Final Thoughts

As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software solutions, which is mostly used by alternative lending businesses, we trust these email marketing ideas shall surely help you to get the most out of your customer relationships.

Hence never forget to personalize your emails keeping the customer journey of your consumers in your mind and offer rewards to loyal customers which can provide stellar business growth.

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Features You MUST Look For In Your MCA CRM Software (Especially During This Pandemic)

Technology solutions for business practices do not usually involve reinventing the wheel, but so to speak add enhanced and efficiency and functionalities to existing business processes to boost accuracy, speed, and user experiences. And it is even more true- when we are looking for a solution to manage our businesses during this COVID-19 Pandemic times. MCA CRM is an important tool that allows Merchant Cash Advance businesses to communicate with and serve the requirements of their customers. The purpose of easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM is to engage customers and create a meaningful relationship with the customers, create lasting dialogues that enhance understanding of the customer base, and increase their loyalty for your business growth.

Technology solutions for business practices do not usually involve reinventing the wheel, but so to speak add enhanced and efficiency and functionalities to existing business processes to boost accuracy, speed, and user experiences.
And it is even more true- when we are looking for a solution to manage our businesses during this COVID-19 Pandemic times.
MCA CRM is an important tool that allows Merchant Cash Advance businesses to communicate with and serve the requirements of their customers.

The share of applicants approved for at least some financing is highest for merchant cash advances and auto/equipment loans. - SMALL BUSINESS CREDIT SURVEY (2020) Click To Tweet

The purpose of easy to use Merchant Cash Advance CRM is to engage customers and create a meaningful relationship with the customers, create lasting dialogues that enhance understanding of the customer base, and increase their loyalty for your business growth.

Merchant Cash Advance CRM platforms can aid in tracking and thereafter measuring campaigns and perform in-depth customer analysis, which can help in expanding knowledge beyond the core marketing and sales areas to incorporate customer support and even financial data, which can provide a 360-degree view of every individual customer and even measure experiences of the wider customer base in the Alternative Lending marketplace.

Apart from developing and maintaining customer relationship, most MCA CRM has three robust functionalities which include:

• Sales Force Automation (SFA)
• Data warehousing
• Opportunity management

SFA can automate tracking of customer account histories, implement sales analysis, and coordinate sales, marketing, and retail outlets borrowing from alternate lending businesses.

Data warehousing of MCA CRM software allows users to follow trends, aggregate transaction information, and determine value and KPIs by uncovering data from the CRM database.

Opportunity management aids cash advance businesses to manage unpredictable demand and growth through a forecasting model that integrates sales projections with sales histories.

Therefore, a robust MCA CRM software increases customer satisfaction while at the same time reduces the number of actions needed for managing the customers.

As mentioned even before, integration is the key to proper implementation and adoption of any CRM software.

This means, your easy to use CRM must be able to work seamlessly with your present and existing business software platforms.

For example, most MCA CRM software integrates with accounting packages like QuickBooks for leveraging the power and functionalities of QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free.

An effective CRM solution should inevitably increase sales without increasing overhead. If you find your CRM solution adds complexity without any benefits, you may be using a system that is not right for your business.

But do not give up. The best CRM solution is there for every business – it may take some customization and tweaking, but the benefits it can provide far outweigh the time it takes to calibrate a CRM system to fit your needs.

Now choosing the right MCA CRM for your alternative lending business depends mostly on the size of your organization.

For example startups and small businesses usually does best with customized CRM solutions that are scalable and meets the requirements of their organizations without adding an extraneous feature that bog the system and also most essentially your workflow as it happens when SMBs opt for CRM solutions like Salesforce and prefer not to use Salesforce Alternative CRM software platforms that are specially developed for small businesses.

Takeaway

Therefore to conclude, the key benefits of implementing the right MCA CRM for your Cash Advance business include customer loyalty that enhances the security of your future revenues.

That means, implementing the right MCA CRM solution like ConvergeHub for your alternative financing business during these troubled times, when every single customer counts, lets you simultaneously save resources and time while it helps to increase your customer base and ROI.

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How To Build A Custom Facebook Audience Using Your MCA CRM Software

In modern times, most owners of businesses in the Alternative Lending industry using MCA CRM software would effortlessly agree that social media marketing is an extremely important and effective advertisement tool nowadays. However, in spite of the growing rise in social media many small business owners might not be conscious of all the existing resources and tools that are freely available for building a custom and preset audience for their relevant ads. To elaborate, for example. Facebook is one of the most popular and trending social media platforms when anyone among us thinks about putting up an adv on social media, more so because Facebook freely provides such wide-ranging customer targeting tools.

In modern times, most owners of businesses in the Alternative Lending industry using MCA CRM software would effortlessly agree that social media marketing is an extremely important and effective advertisement tool nowadays.
However, in spite of the growing rise in social media many small business owners might not be conscious of all the existing resources and tools that are freely available for building a custom and preset audience for their relevant ads.

To elaborate, for example. Facebook is one of the most popular and trending social media platforms when anyone among us thinks about putting up an adv on social media, more so because Facebook freely provides such wide-ranging customer targeting tools.

Seven out of ten (69%) adults in the U.S. claim that they use Facebook - Pew Research Center(2019) Click To Tweet

One of these targeting tools found in Facebook is its ability to upload your self-created customized audience list right from your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software.

Hence if you have a list of customers that have not been visiting your MCA website for a while and you are in a desperation to your lost customers a targeted ad as a simple reminder to visit the new offers that you have placed on your website, creating a list of the custom audience is a perfect way of doing so.
Now, there are several ways that you can approach to build your custom audience on social media platforms like Facebook.

Nevertheless, irrespective of how you choose to create the custom audience, the primary and the foremost thing that you need to ensure is that you have a saved list of your MCA customers which contains their phone numbers and their email addresses in your MCA CRM software platform’s database.

Thereafter, ensure that this list is saved as a CSV or a TXT file.

How to Build a Custom Audience Through Facebook Business Manager:

1. Log into your Facebook Business Manager.

2. Next, beneath the Business Manager Button (which is located in the upper left-hand corner), click on the Audiences.

MCA CRM

3. After this click on the Create Audience tab and select Custom Audience which you will find in the drop-down menu.

MCA CRM

4. Select Customer File in the list that appears on the screen.

5. Next click on “Add Customers From Your Own File or Copy and Paste Data”.

MCA CRM

6. Upload the previously created CSV or TXT and saved in the pop-up of the window.

MCA CRM

7. For the uploading process to complete permit Facebook at least 20-30 minutes and ensure that you name the list in the best way to describe its use.

8. You create now create a Facebook ad that is perfectly in accordance to the audience, once your data upload is completed.

How to build a Custom Audience Using Ads Manager:

1. To begin with, create a Facebook ad by logging into your Ads Manager on Facebook.

MCA CRM

2. Underneath the Custom Audiences (as you explore the audience section) click on Create New Tab and after that click on Custom Audience.

MCA CRM

3. Next, opt for Custom File in the box that appears on the screen.

4. Next just click on “Add Customers From Your Own File or Copy and Paste Data”.

MCA CRM

5. Now just like we did it even before, upload the previously created CSV or TXT and saved in the pop-up of the window.

MCA CRM

6. After initiating the upload to complete the entire process permit Facebook at least 20-30 minutes and ensure that you name the list in the best way to describe its use.

7. Once the upload is over, you can create a Facebook ad that is precisely in accordance with the audience.

Conclusion

Using a Custom Audience from a customer list that you have created in your Merchant Cash Advance software for your alternative lending business not only helps you to invite past customers to return to your MCA website, but it also aids in sending special offers to repeat customers or want to let people know of a special offer that you provide for a specific set of customers in your CRM database.

Hence once you are using an MCA CRM to reach your customers on two perspectives (Email marketing and also in Facebook Custom Audiences) you can be double sure of reaching an audience that is highly qualified and so is more likely to be your customers which results in consistent business growth.

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How To Make The Best Use Of Inbound Marketing Skills For MCA Businesses In These Trying Times

The usefulness and popularity of the methodologies on inbound marketing in all sectors in the business including Alternative Lending businesses have been rising steadily since inbound marketing practices found its acceptance in the 2000s and thereafter evolved considerably, supported by the meteoric rise of the internet and introduction of fresh channels for marketing to deliver tailored and personalized contents to new prospects and existing customers, using MCA CRM software solutions which is more needed in this Pandemic times. However, do you know what is inbound marketing and what are the means by which you can excel in it? Well, in this article let us, therefore, dig into the nuances of this popular marketing strategy and discuss certain tactics that can be used in inbound marketing as we face this menacing COVID-19 tragedy along with some of the best practices that will help you to master it. Even not in the distant past, marketing was a totally different ballgame even in the MCA industry, than it is today.

The usefulness and popularity of the methodologies on inbound marketing in all sectors in the business including Alternative Lending businesses have been rising steadily since inbound marketing practices found its acceptance in the 2000s and thereafter evolved considerably, supported by the meteoric rise of the internet and introduction of fresh channels for marketing to deliver tailored and personalized contents to new prospects and existing customers, using MCA CRM software solutions which is more needed in this Pandemic times.

The global mobile CRM market will grow 11% to $15 billion worldwide this year as businesses seek to connect with their customers through their mobile devices. Click To Tweet

However, do you know what is inbound marketing and what are the means by which you can excel in it?

Well, in this article let us, therefore, dig into the nuances of this popular marketing strategy and discuss certain tactics that can be used in inbound marketing as we face this menacing COVID-19 tragedy along with some of the best practices that will help you to master it.

Even not in the distant past, marketing was a totally different ballgame even in the MCA industry, than it is today.

As before the rise of MCA CRM software and the internet, marketing for Merchant Cash Advance business mainly consisted of overtly trying to convince leads and prospective customers to buy their services, which in fact was not much different than traditional age-old advertising.

However, this marketing strategy changed as the internet and social media began to provide marketers with novel ways to deliver content to leads, prospects, and customers, shifting the focus from touting the advantages of their services to providing educational information that helped MCA prospects and customers to solve common problems.

Effective MCA inbound marketing tactics and best practices using Merchant Cash Advance software during this COVID-19 outbreak:

Although there are several common inbound marketing tactics that you have surely seen, nevertheless here are also a few of the most effective inbound marketing tactics that you can use for your Cash Advance business, especially when you are also using Merchant Cash Advance CRM software.

Content marketing

Content marketing is considered the bedrock of an inbound marketing strategy. Some of the most used content marketing tactics that can be used in Alternative Lending business are:
• Blogging
• EBooks
• Social media contents
• Videos
• Infographics
• Whitepapers
• Case Studies
• Email newsletters and others

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Next, once you have created your valuable content, you need to make it easy for your potential MCA customers to find and benefit from it.
This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play.
As most consumers use Google to search for content, SEO is a practice that helps in optimizing your Cash Advance website so that your web-pages appear higher-up in the search engine results.
However, although SEO remains a critical piece in every inbound marketer’s playbook, as Google constantly alters its search engine’s algorithms, nailing down SEO tactics for your Alternative Lending business is like aiming at a constantly moving target.
So learn more about updated SEO strategies that you can easily assimilate into your inbound marketing plans. Remember creating content without doing SEO is of no value, as content marketing is useless if you do not find a way to drive traffic into it.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has utterly altered the way present-day marketers approach their works. With the escalation of people using social media on a daily basis, social media platforms have become the primary channel through which MCA businesses can also reach their potential customers.
According to a report published by Social Media Examiner in 2018, it has been stated that social media marketing increase brand exposure by 87%, website traffic by 78%, and helps in generating more leads by 64% in the US markets.
Therefore, as an inbound marketing tactic, use social media to increase customer engagements and post your content on your social media platforms since if your content is outstanding, people will definitely share it and your Cash Advance businesses’ followers will grow.

Create buyer personas

Despite what many marketers may think, it is difficult to make a broad generalization about what your customers need or want without any research. Creating hypothetical profiles of your businesses’ ideal buyers or buyer personas helps to zero in on their requirements and deliver inbound content that addresses those needs.
For developing buyer personas, it is useful to launch a customer survey email campaign that allows you to focus on the most common pain-points that are felt across your customer base.
Using an MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub for collecting these data in the CRM database and for conducting these surveys helps in effectively address your customer’s needs.

Score Leads

Lead scoring is the practice of providing leads points for actions that they have taken and the demographic data they provide using MCA CRM software.
For example, when someone views or downloads your inbound contents, like eBooks, white papers, or visit your pricing page and others you can award them points for their interest to buy your services.
Lead scoring helps to view most sales-ready leads easily.

Develop engaging landing pages that convert leads

When someone clicks a link to view or download your content, ‘landing page’ is the place where they land on that offers the content for free but request personal information in exchange.
A landing page is a lead generation tactic, so make your Alternative Lending businesses’ landing pages engaging, which makes it amply clear what they are offering.

Takeaway
Unlike COVID-19, inbound marketing is here to stay. Since inbound marketing using Merchant Cash Advance CRM bridges the gap and enables modern, digital marketers to show that they care about the customer experience than anything else for creating a customer-centric business.

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The Utility Of Facebook For Lead Generation In MCA Businesses

Finding MCA (Merchant Cash Advance) leads for Merchant Cash Advance software has become a challenging task nowadays with the rise in demand and competition especially by owners of small businesses. This is over here the requirement for Merchant Cash Advance lead providers for MCA CRM software comes to play with high-quality leads that have the highest conversion rates. These MCA leads providers make use of various marketing techniques for harvesting a pool of reliable leads under one roof. Among these lead providing platforms for Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, Facebook is a wonderland for connecting and bonding with prospects to create a sense of trustworthiness that is capable of converting them into customers at some point of time.

Finding MCA (Merchant Cash Advance) leads for Merchant Cash Advance software has become a challenging task nowadays with the rise in demand and competition especially by owners of small businesses.
This is over here the requirement for Merchant Cash Advance lead providers for MCA CRM software comes to play with high-quality leads that have the highest conversion rates.

According to the Federal Reserve, 59% of business owners applied for financing to grow and expand their company - 2018 Click To Tweet

These MCA leads providers make use of various marketing techniques for harvesting a pool of reliable leads under one roof.

Among these lead providing platforms for Merchant Cash Advance CRM software, Facebook is a wonderland for connecting and bonding with prospects to create a sense of trustworthiness that is capable of converting them into customers at some point of time.

Are you aware of how many users log in to Facebook across the globe every day?

Well, according to recent statistics published by Hootsuite 1.47 Billion people log in daily on this social media platform, with over just half of them those that check-in even multiple times every day.

Therefore, with such a great number of daily users on this social media website application, Facebook since the last couple of years has grown to become the ‘numero uno’ choice and destination for marketers worldwide nowadays.

This is because using Facebook; you can generate high quality and authentic leads, increase web traffic to your alternative financing business website and thereby become the MCA market leader in your business space.

Now while there are several businesses that are still unaware of the true potential of Facebook for generating leads, there are also, on the other hand, many businesses that have tried their luck with this platform but hopelessly failed to find the returns the desired, with their Facebook lead generation strategies.

Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Merchant Cash Advance CRM software for small businesses here are the basics that will certainly help you to execute marketing campaigns of your alternative funding business on Facebook to generate the best quality leads that can aid you in achieving rapid business growth.

Sharing Posts On Merchant Cash Program

The fastest and the easiest way to spread the word about your Merchant Cash Advance service is sharing it on the social media platforms.

This is because, the moment people comment, like, or share your posts; their activity automatically and instantaneously appears of their friends’ news feeds.

Therefore, social media is one of the most effective ways of promoting your alternative financing services and generate leads for your MCA CRM as it will be automatically referred to your social networks on the website.

Hence Facebook helps to easily promote your business and get referred to potential customers in your friends’ circle, which provides the prospect to generate more solid and reliable MCA leads, as well as secure new customers.

This is because, you can use ‘Page Insights’ to track your posts and shares on Facebook and thereafter learn more about your prospects.

Website Traffic Equates To Customers

Several companies use Facebook to increase their web traffic. Hence by posting engaging and appealing contents you can generate highly targeted web traffic and drive visitors who are genuinely interested in learning about your alternative financing services.

To generate high-quality leads for your MCA CRM software, create posts that provide information related to your Merchant Cash Advance business and share useful offers and advice on your services.

Additionally, as pictures catch more attention of the social media users which can help in finding a boost in share, comments and likes; it is advised to post contents with high-quality images.

Now, all website traffic that you get can be tracked and view in Google Analytics.
Hence always remember to keep an eye on the stats that are shown by this analytics tool to boost your posts for increased engagement and generating a way higher conversion rate.

Lead Generation Through Insights

It is equally important to add an appealing CTA (Call to Action) with all your Facebook posts. Since, with the help of this modern marketing strategy, potential customers can click on the provided link that will redirect them to your MCA businesses’ landing page which may provide complete information on your MCA offerings.

Moreover, you can even benefit from an increase in the number of article subscriptions by asking your visitors to fill in a short contact form for their respective names, email addresses and other information needed for providing financial services whom you can later on email at least once or twice every week to remind them of your offerings.

Easy Data Processing

One major benefit of using Facebook for generating MCA leads is the endless treasure of data available online.

Being a free social media platform Facebook is a place where you can find information from thousands of active users without much hassles, data that you marketers can use for trimming the niche of your target customers and thereby bring more business for your MCA firm.

This is because using Facebook Insight tools you can gather useful data about your audience, such as their age, language, gender, location, and others that can help in creating targeted email marketing campaigns on the right audience for improving your business growth .

Paid Ad Campaigns

Finally, paid Facebook ads are an extremely powerful marketing tool that can generate a very high number of qualified leads.

One major advantage of paid Facebook ads is that they are highly cost-effective and are priced much lesser than Google Ads, or any other traditional marketing campaigns on paper, media or TV.

As one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software for small business, there are several MCA businesses that we know who have earned millions in return after investing on Facebook ads as social media is the best place for finding an awesome return on investments.

Conclusion

Therefore to establish your brand image as one of the best MCA firms in your marketplace, you must opt for social media, since with so many available business owners surfing Facebook on a regular basis, it will not take long for your brand to create its awareness in the marketplace and thereby stand apart from the rest.

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How to Create a Comprehensive Buyer Persona with Your MCA CRM Software

In any business be it in Merchant Cash Advance or any other creating buyer personas are one of the main keys to business growth. Buyer personas which you can easily create using Merchant Cash Advance Software help understand who your ideal buyers are for your cash advance business, what they require, and how you can best sell your services to your customers. In fact, an elaborate buyer persona aids businesses to zero in on the challenges, pain-points, and needs of your customers. Buyer personas also help you to understand how you should appeal to your prospective buyers and make them generate interest in your offerings.

In any business be it in Merchant Cash Advance or any other creating buyer personas are one of the main keys to business growth.
Buyer personas which you can easily create using MCA CRM Software help understand who your ideal buyers are for your cash advance business, what they require, and how you can best sell your services to your customers.

In fact, an elaborate buyer persona aids businesses to zero in on the challenges, pain-points, and needs of your customers.
Buyer personas also help you to understand how you should appeal to your prospective buyers and make them generate interest in your offerings.

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

Therefore, in this article let us find how we can effectively use buyer personas and evaluate how you can leverage them to increase your sales and revenue.
So, let us dig into this topic and start with the basics:

  • Their position in the company
  • Department which they represent
  • Their biggest challenges and pain-points
  • Their future goals and aspirations
  • Their gender, age, and personality types
  • How you should communicate with them
  • And finally, how your offerings can solve their challenges

What are the reasons for creating a buyer persona?

Mapping a detailed portrait of your most common and ideal type of buyers you can market to those prospective customers in a more personal and relevant way.
You can speak with your ideal buyers directly about their challenges and pain points and then present to them how your offering will help solve those issues.

You can use buyer personas in your MCA marketing efforts for:

  • Explaining to the prospective customers that they already have a problem and are not yet aware of
  • Reach out to your prospects in a manner that resonates and can engage them effectively
  • Kindle their interest in your offering
  • Provide knowledge about how your offerings will be able to solve their issues
  • Present real-life examples, how your offerings have helped their peers in MCA business
  • Convince the customers so that they use your offerings to solve their issues

Why buyer personas are so important?

Buyer personas are important since they allow you to deliver the right message to the right person, and not make the mistake of using assumptions about knowing your customer to drive outreach.

It also bars your sales and marketing teams from sending irrelevant messages to the wrong people, and therefore by delivering the right information to the right decision maker help to increase engagement and interest in your offerings, leading to more wins and growth in revenue.

To create a great buyer persona in any business, firstly you need to do a lot of research. Now, as mentioned before if you just run on assumptions you will mostly end up meeting leads that are inaccurate and do not capture the right details about the person involved in the buying process.

How to create buyer personas?

One of the most common ways for creating buyer personas is to send surveys using Merchant Cash Advance software to all in your present customer base to find out what they specifically need, where their challenges are, and how your MCA firm can solve those problems to make your prospective customers more successful.

After that, in the next step, you need to apply that knowledge to your buyer personas and use that learning to converse with your prospects in a more pertinent and engaging way.

You can also provide incentives to the participants of your survey for completing their task so that it can help you to find more data. Since the more data you have the better and accurate will be your buyer personas.

Nevertheless, what questions should you need to ask for creating your buyer persona survey?
The question may vary according to your unique business and its specific customer base. However here are a few general MCA related questions to get started, which are mostly used by our Merchant Cash Advance CRM users in the alternative funding business:

  • What is your gender, age, marital status, nationality, and other demographic info?
  • What is your sale per day in your business?
  • What is your role and job title in your organization?
  • How long you have been employed with your company?
  • Where is your retail outlet/company located?
  • What are the biggest challenges that you face while applying for a bank loan?
  • How many employees are there in your organization?
  • Which technology and tools you use every day?
  • Do you use CRM software for enhancing your customer relationship?
  • Have you applied for any bank loans/ if so when?
  • Why you prefer alternative funding over bank loans?

Well, these are just samples of the kind of questions that you could ask for a survey of your MCA customers when you want to create an ideal buyer persona for Merchant Cash Advance business by storing vital information of your present customers in you MCA CRM database.

However, always remember to keep your survey to 15 questions or less, since otherwise, your response rate will plummet down.

Moreover, do not ask for your participant’s names and other general personal information (as you already have them in your MCA CRM software) in the survey, as those data will be irrelevant to the task at hand.

Now, once you get all the information that you need, you can start looking for commonality in your participant’s responses and then start building your buyer personas based on the common traits that you will find in your customer base.

Remain cautious, when you send your survey to capture information for building your ideal buyer personas. Do not tell the customers your original purpose for sending the survey. Instead, tell your survey participants that you would like to understand better who your customers are so that you can serve them more efficiently, as per their requirements in the days to come.

Conclusion

Therefore, instead of shooting in the dark any more create buyer personas for your business as it is something that differentiates average companies from the exceptional ones.

Moreover, do not hesitate to create multiple buyer personas and save them in MCA CRM software platform. We as one of the most popular vendors of MCA CRM software have seen some companies that have 10 or more buyer personas in their system.

In a gist, armed with an accurate and solid buyer persona representative of your MCA firm will not only be able to reach out to your prospective customers and engage them more easily, but it will also aid in building trust with your prospect and therefore close deals more quickly, while maintaining a competitive edge in your MCA market.

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2018: The Year in Review

When the year-end arrives, all of us find the incessant urge to recall the various things that happened, going down the memory lane and refresh the timeline to view the goals that were fulfilled with the passing year. We live in the age of the customer, where consumers (not business executives) decide on how customer-centric companies are. Since in 2018, among many other things, we understood that good customer experience can help to control cost, and so business executives in both small and large B2B organizations are presently more interested in their potential to fuel sustainable top-line growth

When the year-end arrives, all of us find the incessant urge to recall the various things that happened, going down the memory lane and refresh the timeline to view the goals that were fulfilled with the passing year.

We live in the age of the customer, where consumers (not business executives) decide on how customer-centric companies are.
Since in 2018, among many other things, we understood that good customer experience can help to control cost, and so business executives in both small and large B2B organizations are presently more interested in their potential to fuel sustainable top-line growth.

Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.- The Annuitas Group Click To Tweet

Easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub is the foundation building block of an organization’s customer experience strategy to win, serve, and retain their customers, enabling organizations to integrate many new technologies and business strategies, which are constantly being rejuvenated by new trends.

Nowadays, consumers across all industries want to connect easily with companies to interact, make a purchase, or get services from organizations.

In a recent survey done by Forrester, it was found that:

More than 72% of consumers say that they value their time and consider it to be the most important thing that an organization can do to provide them with good service.

Therefore 2018 showed organizations that they must offer customers means to easily engage with them to foster an ongoing relationship based on omnichannel dialogue that can enhance loyalty and strengthen retention.

Here are a few notable trends that we saw in the B2B industry using CRM software in 2018:

CRMs Have Split Out By Vertical

In the past CRM has been largely kept as its own category of software, more like a separate companion to whatever other business systems, you are already using for your industry.
Implying, when you purchase an easy to use CRM platform, it does not necessarily mean that the software will have all the compatibility and functionalities for what you do every day.

However, over the last few years and more so in 2018, CRM companies have realized that there is a critical need for highly specialized CRM software platforms. Therefore, 2018 has been a year which showed the mushrooming growth of vertically specialized CRM solutions, which are specific to such B2B industries like Real Estate, Merchant Cash Advance business, E-commerce, Field Services, Legal and others.

It has been predicted by renowned CRM vendors and stalwarts that it is extremely likely that within the next 5-10 years CRM platforms will no longer come as a standalone solution, but will be a part of industry-specific requirements.

Personalized Workflow Automation Through AI Technology Platforms

Another most important and prominent advances that this year has shown, is that Artificial Intelligence will power up our CRM platforms to learn from our sales, marketing, and support rep’s interactions by analyzing data, helping AI to find answers to our questions, predict our requirements, or take care of forgotten and tedious tasks so that we can focus on more important issues.

2018 has been the take-offyear which illustrated how AI-powered CRM systems can access untapped and unseen activity patterns to uncover insights on leads or an existing customer, predict trends, and make critical decisions which will significantly reduce cold calls and save hours of work.

For example, in 2018 we have seen how B2B organizations will continue using AI-powered analytics to prescribe the right action for customer-facing employees and use prescriptive advice to identify high-quality leads, send relevant sales collaterals to the buyers, or use optimal discounting to maximize revenue per contract to enhance business growth.

This year has shown us how AI-powered rules can help pinpoint the right prospect, recommend issue resolutions, use machine learning and predictive analysis to uproot guesswork out of critical marketing decisions, help create appealing and innovative campaigns, and route leads to appropriate resources in the organization.

Businesses Are Supporting Digital Customer Journeys Evermore

The present year has seen a sporadic growth in personalized product recommendations, automated product configuration, price negotiations, and order taking. Even for post-purchase support, we have seen more B2B companies offering customer facilities for online issue submission, tracking and scheduling for service technicians, apart from exploring the value of offering automated conversational interactions with chat-bots and virtual agents.

Hence, small business CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub has taken a step ahead in 2018 for providing the right customer experience for the right customer at the right time in his or her customer journey.

Tighter Integration With External Tools

Another noteworthy trend that we have visualized this year is the improvement of tighter integrations of CRM software with external tools and services to improve the usage of small business CRM software systems.

CRM developers in 2018 are keen on understanding the need for industry-standard interfaces to connect multiple B2B solutions and services, integrating new technologies across sales, marketing, business accounts, and customer support.

For example, successful collaborations with accounting application like QuickBooks CRM that allow intelligent synchronization across platforms using REST-based APIs are the key to winning collaborations by permitting systems to effortlessly communicate with one another privately and securely for enhanced user productivity of the CRM software.

In the days to come, the future of CRM technology will definitely see the need for the growth of integrating mobile and web-based solutions with a CRM for using information from different but tightly related sources to generate meaningful relationship intelligence.

Social And Mobile CRM Are Flying High

This year has witnessed a surge in social CRM technology as CRM vendors have realized that the key to keeping your customers engaged lies in harnessing the power of social media channels for marketing and customer support.

This surge in the growth in social CRM technology and increasing emphasis on customer sentiment analysis and social influence in B2B organizations are factors that not going to determine where your business is today, but where you want to be a year from now, once the pace of sales and customer acquisition has gained its speed.

Moreover, in this time of change, CRM companies in 2018 have also recognized the need for enhanced mobile CRM technology as they have recognized most of their B2B customers want to be able to take their CRM system with them everywhere, as this year we can see creation of CRM brands that are solely available via app, focusing on mobile-first.

Big Data Is Getting Into The Legal Weeds

In the present times, B2B companies are now having an insane amount of information about their customers, data that could (in theory) be used to really invade someone’s personal life.

Therefore, governments across the world have started paying attention and growing interest in protecting their citizens from businesses’ interests in their personal lives.

The European Union, in particular, is interested in setting up laws surrounding adoption of Big Data in CRM technology, and so this year CRM users and vendors have started learning how they should be storing and collecting personal data of their customers, now that General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect to support the collection and management of personal data in a secure way.

Finally- CRM Adoption Will Rise

Looking for technology to help the CRM industry to overcome the adoption challenge (that has long been one of its greatest obstacles), 2018 has seen the rise of ‘Gamification’, by which several CRM vendors are making it more enjoyable for the B2B users to easily adopt this excellent and unparallel business tool.

By stimulating competition and participation while using the CRM software among employees, this year B2B organizations are driving engagement across the board, by applying easy to use gaming procedures to non-gaming business applications, which is the latest elements to motivate and inspire employees, praise their accomplishments, improve their performance and eventually maximize returns for business growth.

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Do you have any other ideas of new trends that we saw in the B2B industry using CRM software in 2018? 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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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. DO YOU- Wish You Had More Time?

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

  1. DO YOU- Want More Revenue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaway

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

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