Tag: online lead management software

How To Increase Lead Conversion Rate in Small Businesses Using The Best Lead Management Software

Do you know how your sales teams are winning your prospects and making them your customers? Does your company have a defined process in place to help your teams qualify their leads so that your salespersons can concentrate their resources and time on the most sales-ready leads in the database of your best lead management software? Are you converting enough MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sent by your marketing teams? We all know lead conversion is the key to revenue and business growth in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that you can follow for increasing the lead conversion rate of your best lead management software and expand your business more sustainably.

Do you know how your sales teams are winning your prospects and making them your customers?

Does your company have a defined process in place to help your teams qualify their leads so that your salespersons can concentrate their resources and time on the most sales-ready leads in the database of your best lead management software?

Are you converting enough MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sent by your marketing teams?

If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you. - Zig Ziglar Click To Tweet

We all know lead conversion is the key to revenue and business growth in any organization.

Therefore, here are a few best practices that you can follow for increasing the lead conversion rate of your best lead management software and expand your business more sustainably.

Publish A Blog

Blogging is an excellent means to build trust as according to an article published in Forbes:

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

This is because we are all aware that converting leads lies at the end of the sales cycle. However, to get to that point whereby the leads will find enough interest to buy your offerings, you first need to acquire the trust of your leads. Your leads need to see your business as an authority in your space and find enough trust that you can support them and ensure their success after using your offerings.

Therefore, with the help of blogging, you can easily make your leads and prospect get engaged with your business once you can solidify your reputation as a subject matter expert or an authority in their mind, which will eventually lead to a higher lead conversion rate.

Integrate Your CRM Software With A Marketing Automation Platform

Most of the sales teams today use easy to use CRM software platforms to move opportunities through the sales pipeline and win deals.
A CRM database stores a gigantic amount of information about every leads in your best small business CRM software system, which includes behavioral and demographic data of your leads, prospects, and customers.

Therefore, when you use an MA (Marketing Automation) solution in conjunction with your business CRM platform, you can easily pull all that contact data stored in the CRM database to personalize your messages that you send to your prospective leads.

This is because, once you send highly relevant messages to your prospects rather than sending one-size-fits-all general messages to everyone in the database of your best lead management software it helps you to better engage with your prospects and increases the likelihood of conversion, as you make your personalization based on the interests, past buying behaviors, and social media activities of your leads.

However, to do this you must integrate your marketing CRM with an MA system, and let them share data in real-time, or use an all in one CRM which comes with inbuilt sales, marketing, and customer support automation, on a single platform.

Set Up A Lead Scoring System In Your CRM

Lead scoring is a process that helps you to identify the most prospective and sales-ready leads in your CRM software’s database. Using a ‘point system’ that aids in indicating the value every leads and prospect represents to your small business organization, you can very easily hone in on the sales-readiness of your leads.

Using the lead scoring process, in your best small business CRM software you can award (and also deduct) points to leads for the actions they take like visiting your website, clicking and opening your emails, downloading your contents, and others.
Additionally, you can even award points to your leads for demographic data (like job titles).

Now as the scores accumulate over time, you need to set up a scoring threshold at which a lead should be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). When any lead cross that predefined threshold, those leads are then passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Doing this activity aids the sales teams to prioritize their outreach to the most sales-ready leads, and not waste their efforts and time on dead-end leads that are not yet ready to make a purchase.

In other words, lead scoring is a process that improves the quality of your leads.

In a study done by TrackVia in 2018, it was found that 42% of businesses experienced a higher lead conversion rate with lead scoring in their small businesses.

However, it must be remembered that your marketing teams must get buy-in from your sales teams to fine-tune your scoring system and consolidate the alignment between the two teams for developing an effective and successful lead scoring process.

Moreover, you are also advised to reevaluate your lead scoring mechanism once every month since if you find that your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to the sales, of which only a few are getting converted, it can be that you are qualifying your leads to soon. In this case, you must increase the MQL threshold score in your scoring mechanism and fine-tune your lead conversion mapping processes.

Run Lead Generation And Nurturing Campaigns

In order to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. You can generate leads in many ways, right from using social media to making use of email drip campaigns or even use free lead generation software which you can find in certain lead management software tools.

Now, once you generate new leads, and store them in your CRM platform’s database, you need to nurture the leads through the sales pipeline with a series of touchpoints that will move the leads closer to conversion.

Set Up Killer Landing Pages

As your leads move through the sales pipeline, you need to find a means to capture more information about the leads which will help to increase their engagement with your business over time.

Irrespective of whether you are using an enterprise-level, highly expensive and robust CRM like Salesforce or mostly used by small businesses and startups a Salesforce Alternative CRM software, one of the most effective ways to do this is by creating simple landing pages, with only one objective, to encourage your leads to take an action like register for a webinar, download specific content, request a demo, and others.

Use examples from peers in your industry; check their format, images, contents, and CTA (Call to Action) buttons for creating killer landing pages.

However, always remember to make it amply clear to the visitors in your landing pages, which action you want them to take, how they should take it, and what they will receive in exchange for sharing their personal information with your brand.

When done rightly, using an effective CTA can significantly increase your lead conversion rate.

Incorporate Data Verification

Typically, all landing pages will have forms to collect information about the prospects to store them in the CRM database.

Now, it is also most often found that many people will provide you with false information, like fake email id, or phony mobile numbers to receive your offers.

To avoid this include data verification measures in your lead generation forms, like using reCAPTCHA, and other data verification processes to reduce the accumulation of fake leads in your database, and increase the ability of your sales teams to qualify high-quality leads in the CRM system.

Use Social Monitoring To Find Brand Advocates

Using social CRM which is also known as SCRM software you can practice social listening and social monitoring which will help you to find instant alerts when someone mentions your brand or offerings on the social media platforms.

Therefore, if you find someone speaking positively about your organization or brand and are happy about your products or services, reach out to them to demonstrate your appreciation.

Treating these people with respect and catering to their needs can help you to find brand advocates, those who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and increase conversion rates.

According to a survey done by Nielsen and Forrester Research, it has been found that:

“92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates while only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers.”

Routinely Measure Your Lead Conversion Ratio

Routinely measuring your lead conversion ratio aids in keeping track of your efforts. The lead conversion ratio is most essentially the ratio of the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) that your sales teams have converted to customers over a specific period of time.

Therefore, create and keep a monthly scorecard that can help in tracking these metrics from your easy to use CRM. This is because; maintain insights on how well your lead scoring process is working will aid you to make data-driven decisions, and also find which processes are working and what is broken in the lead conversion workflow.

Takeaway

Lead conversion is what allows you to grow your business. However, you need to carefully plan and execute various tactics to increase your conversion rates.

Therefore, if you are running a small business following the above-stated points and using the best lead management software (which integrates MA and an easy to use CRM), will not only help you automate your lead conversion processes but also aid in streamlining your efforts for rapid business growth.

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Buy CRM To Decrease The Cost Involved For Running Your Business

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil? Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders? Well, if it is so, then buy CRM as it is a business growth technology platform that can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both time and money. According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% of office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses has no structure for archiving their client communications. So how can we create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers?

Are you still in the era of printing out documents and adding your comments by pencil?
Are you still printing documents and adding them to your file folders?
Well, if it is so, then buy CRM as it is a business growth technology platform that can help you to become more digitally organized and therefore reduce costs in your office. Many among us use social media to advertise our businesses online yet we still incur a high paper wastage that costs us both time and money.

Cloud CRM usage has grown from 15% in 2010 to 97% in 2019- SuperOffice(2020) Click To Tweet

According to a recent survey done in 2017, it has been found that 58% of office in Europe store paper records on their office premises rather than adopting a digital system, and out of them 2% of businesses has no structure for archiving their client communications.

So how can we create an exceptional customer service, bring in loyal customers, and at the same time lessen the use of administering papers? Digital record management gives you:

  • Improved business process through speedier retrieval and access of information
  • Make better-informed decisions through faster access to all right information
  • Better service delivery as the right information can be located quickly
  • Reduced staff time looking for information
  • Lesser compliance cost and increased ability to provide timely, accurate and transparent responses
  • Cost savings from less storage, creation, handling, and retrieval of paper records

Every business initiative starts with a singular person and so here are 8 workable tips on how you can organize your day and be on the way to digitally manage your growing organization.

  1. Plan your tasks and activities ahead

When you have several ideas and a multitude of agendas on your mind, it is impossible to do ‘everything’ at once. Therefore, sit in front of your diary and plan the different tasks over a period of time. However, make sure that your hard priorities do not get disturbed and so keep some open room for unexpected and important tasks that may come up in-between.

  1. Log everything

As with your database, your dairy is only good if you keep it updated every day. Write down in your dairy everything right from your colleague’s birthday to ordering flowers and management meetings. Not only does this help you but it also provides your colleagues and not to forget the front desk, an overview of your day or week. However, remember to make all your private bookings only visible to you.

  1. Avoid the Print button

Although it may depend on the job that you have as to what is really necessary to print. Nevertheless, in truth, most of us do not need much paper in today’s digital world. Hence, if you use an easy to use CRM you can conveniently save all your documents, emails, and activities as Projects in your CRM platform.

  1. Share electronically

Once you buy CRM it can help you to share your documents and emails, since using business growth technology you can have all your information stored in one place where they are traceable. Additionally, you also save time by not having to send an email to for example your sales group, and the possibility that your “crucial” messages do not get lost inside hundreds of other emails. You can also use applications like WeTransfer or FTP for sharing bigger files.

  1. Use electronic templates

There are several organizations that waste a lot of their time building templates for advertising, sales offers, invitation, and others. However, if you digital library available for your organization in your lead management software you will not only save money but also a lot of time by not inventing new templates and instead focus on your original work. Moreover, doing this will ensure a uniform profile and verbiage in all your outbound communications, which will be in accordance with the policy upheld by your company.

  1. Reporting

Are you getting tired of endless hours putting together an Excel spreadsheet with the latest sales figures in your sales pipeline? Today we all have to put in our optimal performances and show results to the management, and to do that we need to take out data from several sources, for example, sales by week, months or quarters or by the open rates on the e-marketing mailers. However, if we buy CRM, we can easily find all the sales data in one system and therefore take out standard reports or even if needed add an Analytics module to get the data reproduced in chart formations on the CRM’s dashboard.

  1. Contact information

Have you ever used Google or Yahoo to find company information or looked into a corporate website to find out information about a contact person? It is true that when a company does not have a contact database or a business directory, it becomes time-consuming for the employees of that organization to quickly find the relevant information. Therefore, having all the personal and company data in one place benefits the organization in several ways. Hence if your organization has an easy to use CRM system you can search for everything, for example, if you just have an email address you can search for all the related information tagged with the email which is there in your CRM database .

  1. Mailing lists

Are you buying your prospect lists from external agencies, if you do, we recommend to not to do it anymore? Start building your own prospect list, since this proves to be better leads and cheaper in the long run. Adding a call to action buttons to your website, getting subscribers through your social media channels and blogs or you can do it even by collecting emails at business conferences and do not forget to add these contacts to your lead management software so that you can send them direct mailers using your information stored in your CRM database.

Takeaway

Hence once you buy CRM the tool helps in automating your sales process by with the help of Sales Force Automation (SFA), track prospects, schedule appointments and follow-ups, warm up new leads, manages orders and quotes and thereby helps in closing sales deals in less time, which in turn saves money as the additional time your sales teams get can be utilized in starting and closing new deals.

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How AI and Easy to Use CRM Solution Can Change the Future of Sales

In the present times, several companies are proactively using both easy to use CRM solutions and AI in forms of groundbreaking ways to escalate their businesses. For an example, if you are watching Netflix, an AI (a recommendation algorithm) will undoubtedly be used for you to help you decide what to watch. Similarly, while shopping in Amazon your decision about what you might wish to buy is also influenced by an AI (through an association algorithm). Even if you ever wish to call an Uber, an AI (a location algorithm) is used to find and quickly book a car in your vicinity. Now, this same type of AI algorithms can also be used to empower any company’s business strategy or decision-making process, to help businesses to make better business decisions. Here are a few specific areas where AI algorithm can be ideally leveraged to help companies grow by helping your sales teams to increase their sales and revenue.

In the present times, several companies are proactively using both easy to use CRM solutions and AI in forms of groundbreaking ways to escalate their businesses.
For an example, if you are watching Netflix, an AI (a recommendation algorithm) will undoubtedly be used for you to help you decide what to watch. Similarly, while shopping in Amazon your decision about what you might wish to buy is also influenced by an AI (through an association algorithm). Even if you ever wish to call an Uber, an AI (a location algorithm) is used to find and quickly book a car in your vicinity.
If you ever had a thought about a product or a vacation, and like telepathy, it seems to suddenly appear on your email inbox or on your search page, we can assure you it was also based on an AI (a classification algorithm) that is monitoring your 24 hours online activities.

Now, this same type of AI algorithms can also be used to empower any company’s business strategy or decision-making process, to help organizations make better business decisions.

Companies that have pioneered the use of AI in sales rave about the impact, which includes an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50%- Harvard Business Review Click To Tweet

Here are a few specific areas where AI algorithm can be ideally leveraged to help companies grow by helping your sales teams to increase their sales and revenue:

  1. Providing Sales Teams with Pertinent Insights

Marketing automation in spite of all its technological advancements has its limits, as only a sales rep can finally have a 1:1 conversation with the customers and close a deal.  However, an AI algorithm can help marketing and sales teams by permitting them to make available valuable insights to their colleagues about prospects, throughout the sales cycle. Information about the customers like their preferences, buying patterns, price selections, brand preferences, preferred time of interactions with sales reps and marketing teams provides a positive outlook, since sales professionals can deal with this information and discover relevant and actionable insights.

AI-driven prescriptive sales tools work like a regular easy to use CRM platform with the exception that it is capable of tracking and analyzing billions of touch points and events, thereby identifying areas for constant improvement.

Manash Chaudhuri the CSO of ConvergeHub CRM and a thought leader in AI-driven Prescriptive Sales technology says:

“AI programs can fetch through billions of customer touch points and events to find correlations and patterns that we just would not be able to notice as human beings on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, it might notice a correlation between sending a specific sales campaign to a prospective customer before calling them, which results in a better conversation. It can also notice that sending a weekly follow up email can yield results up to 6 weeks after an initial contact, which are just example of small practices that sales reps might miss, but that can increase their performance over time.”

  1. Price Optimization

Knowing the amount of discount (if any) to be provided to a customer is always a tricky area for any sales representative. But then again no sales rep wants to leave money on the table. In the present AI based business scenario, an AI algorithm can easily tell the sales teams using a best small business CRM like ConvergeHub what this ideal discount rate should be. Ensuring that you are most likely to win the deal by analyzing specific features of past deals that were won or lost on that very product or service to the customers. These features can include:

  • New or existing client
  • Size of the deal in dollars
  • Product specification compliance
  • Number of competitors
  • Territory/region
  • Customer’s annual income
  • Level of decision-makers (influencers) involved
  • Timings of the past sale (e.g., Q1 vs Q3), and several others
  1. Quality and Quantity Leads

Improving lead generation has been the focal point of the buzz around AI. In a study conducted by HBR (Harvard Business Review), it was found that businesses using Artificial Intelligence along with online lead management software platforms for sales were able to increase their lead generation by 50%. Moreover, the lead quality, as well as the lead quantity of AI-driven leads, are superior as Artificial Intelligence has a keen potential of spotting the best targets for inbound and outbound marketing initiatives. Therefore, a large chunk of the longstanding friction between marketing and sales in a company can be eliminated with the growth of AI in sales.

In other words, AI-driven solutions can act as a blessing throughout the entire sales-marketing cycle, turning a magnanimous amount of information in the CRM database into actionable insights.

  1. Manage Performance

Sales managers in all businesses, have to evaluate the revenue pipeline of each of their sales representatives every month, with a vision towards nurturing deals that might have got stalled, or worse, fallen through the crack. Using an AI-powered best small and medium business CRM software platform, managers can now use the dashboard to visually perceive which sales reps are likely to accomplish their sales targets along with the number of outstanding deals that stands a good chance of getting closed.
An AI-powered easy to use CRM solution allows sales managers to concentrate their attention on key sales reps and their associated deals that can help the company to reach its forecasted sales objectives.

According to Shampa Bagchi, CEO of ConvergeHub CRM for small businesses, ‘using AI to uncover trends and correlate data is great, but customer data in CRM is only made valuable when you can take action on it.”

  1. Simplify Tasks

According to McKinsey Global Institute, as AI magically reduces tasks, therefore, 40% of time spent by sales reps on day-to-day mundane and menial tasks such as cold calling, replying to emails and others can be automated by adopting all the present technologies that AI has to offer for the sales teams.
As AI is capable of aiding professionals to commit to their jobs better, especially with the use of analytics and data science.

Embedding AI into CRM database, sales force automation software platforms, and other applications can eliminate a lot of crippling tasks and liberate the sales reps from monotonous tasks, which can uplift their efforts in sales to unprecedented new heights.

Conclusion

Therefore to conclude although AI is never going to be a replacement for sales and marketing in any business, nevertheless it is ‘The’ technology for now, and for the future, which is going to impel sales professionals to a ‘level-up’ in their game.

Al will allow sales and marketing professionals to base their decisions and opinions more accurately based on data (and since data never lies) focusing and unveiling the information trapped in the CRM database, making their choices more precise than ever.

How Doing Business without Online Lead Management Software Can Kill Your Sales

Do you find your CRM or online lead management software as just another software tool for you and your team to log our sales in, but do not really understand the reason for doing it? If it is so, have you also experienced long stretches of low sales, squandered sales opportunities, and unsolicited small errors getting on the way of your sales performances? This is the very reason as to why the benefits of using online lead management software or a CRM solution should never be underestimated by the sales team. There are multiple ways even skilled sales reps miss potential sales prospects when their business does not adopt easy to use CRM software. Here are some of the most common reasons for underperformance in sales.

Do you find your CRM or online lead management software as just another software tool for you and your team to log your sales in, but do not really understand the reason for doing it?

If it is so, have you also experienced long stretches of low sales, squandered sales opportunities, and unsolicited small errors getting on the way of your sales performances?

This is the very reason as to why the benefits of using online lead management software or a CRM solution should never be underestimated by the sales team.

An Easy to Use CRM solution decreases sales and marketing costs by 23% -SmallBizCRM Click To Tweet

There are multiple ways even skilled sales reps miss potential sales prospects when their business does not adopt easy to use CRM software .

Here are some of the most common reasons for underperformance in sales:

  • Incapability to understand the customer’s needs
  • Ineffectual sales performance tracking
  • Too much of time being spent on focusing on back-end support activities and not making sales

How online lead management software works to improve sales

  1. Improve contact information

An easy to use CRM solution provides you and your entire team a complete 360-degree view of your leads and customers, giving everyone in your business access to the same information, and thereby helping them to remain on the same page.

When everyone in your organization access a single customer list, it becomes much more convenient to sort and analyze your lead and customer information. Additionally, an online lead management software solution also aids you to track where your leads are in the sales cycle with opportunity tracking abilities, which helps your sales teams to predict the likelihood of closing a prospective deal.

  1. Better interactions with the customers

A key feature of a cloud based CRM systems is tracking interactions with your leads, prospects, and customers. Being able to keep a log of outgoing and incoming emails, phone calls, visits, and more; allow your sales teams to remain updated with what is going on with their customer relationships. An online lead management software solution helps to keep your sales teams organized, speeds up their follow-up activities, and most essentially improve the quality of their communication with leads and customers. A CRM solution also ensures that no two sales professionals in your organization are approaching the same lead, which makes your sales team more efficient in closing their deals.

  1. Automate mundane tasks

One of the greatest benefits of using a customizable easy to use CRM (like ConvergeHub), is creating end-to-end workflow. With ConvergeHub, you can make your online lead management software work the way you do, and automate several mundane manual processes, such as sending a follow-up email after conversion of a lead, converting estimates to invoices, or even manage your businesses’ inventory.

By customizing your best small business CRM software solution to fit your business, your sales and support teams become more efficient, as they can free up their time, focus on closing deals, and thereby grow your business.

  1. Improve reporting and analytical data

Finding valuable insights into your customer data in the CRM database provides priceless information on what makes your leads get converted at a higher rate and also gives you an in-depth understanding of your customer lifecycle.

An online lead management software like ConvergeHub CRM also easily tracks the history of all the interactions your sales reps had with their customers, so that you are able to view, for an example, which are the leads that received a specific email marketing campaign converted to customers at a higher rate than those that did not.

Therefore, using a CRM solution you can easily find out and understand now which emails you should send to convert more leads and as a natural consequence grow your business.

  1. Increase time to make sales

By investing less time on tedious administration tasks in the office, using an online lead management software that has marketing automation capabilities like ConvergeHub CRM, your sales teams can focus a considerable amount of time tracking new leads, forging new relationships and thereby increase sales.

Using an easy to use CRM software solution, your sales team members need not request other employees in your organization to get a purchase history of the customers or reach a customer with outdated contact information, which allows your team to generate more sales.

  1. Create happier customers to encourage returning sales

By having a comprehensive 360° view of all your customers, you can easily view their entire history, making interactions between you and your customers easier.
As better perception of your customer’s needs results in more efficient customer service, that inspires your customers to return back for more businesses.

What should you do?

Therefore, if you find that the sales teams in your small business organization are desperate for perceiving a change in their sales strategies for escalating their plummeting sales goals, try ConvergeHub CRM software today.

ConvergeHub is an award-winning CRM solution for small and medium-sized businesses, which provides an online lead management software solution to startups and SMBs that have requirements as large business organizations but do not have the required budget to spend on several standalone software applications and their integrations for increasing their ROI.

What Is CRM ROI? How To Get Paid For Your Investments Using Cloud Based CRM Systems

According to a study done by Nucleus Research, it was found that for every single dollar spent on a cloud based CRM platform, the return is between $5.60 and $8.71. According to another research done by HubSpot, it was established that 40% of sales reps do not even use this online lead management tool to manage leads and prospects but instead relies on Rolodex cards and Excel spreadsheets to manage their sales funnel and cultivate customer relationship. Now, how can this be possible when statistically 47% of the sales teams that use a cloud based CRM say that they registered a positive impact on customer retention by using CRM for their businesses? Part of the problem in this long-standing self-contradicting confusing statement lays in the horror stories we hear about companies that did unsuccessfully spend thousands of dollars on the promise of improving productivity with the help of a CRM for their sales teams.

According to a study done by Nucleus Research, it was found that for every single dollar spent on a cloud based CRM system , the return is between $5.60 and $8.71.

Nevertheless, there is also a bad news.

According to another research done by HubSpot, it was established that 40% of sales reps do not even use this online lead management software to manage leads and prospects but instead relies on Rolodex cards and Excel spreadsheets to manage their sales funnel and cultivate customer relationship.

Every single dollar spent on a cloud based CRM system, the return is between $5.60 and $8.71. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

Now, how can this be possible when statistically 47% of the sales teams that use a cloud based CRM say that they registered a positive impact on customer retention by using CRM for their businesses?

Part of the problem in this long-standing self-contradicting confusing statement lays in the horror stories we hear about companies that did unsuccessfully spend thousands of dollars on the promise of improving productivity with the help of a CRM for their sales teams.

We all know any CRM is more than just a sales tool.

This means a CRM database serves as a data warehouse that centers on client interactions, so that marketing, customer support, billing, and other departments should be able to use its centralized repository for collecting and retrieving information.

Cloud based CRM software should also offer automation that effectively improves workflow and permits a seamless connection to all the front and back-end systems in an organization.

However, the golden key for this cutting-edge tool is that you have to use it right to garner your ROI.

In this article, we will look into CRM ROI and provide the readers with certain pointers on why investing in cloud based CRM software like ConvergeHub can make all the difference for your team.

Top Considerations for CRM ROI

Creating a business case for your cloud based CRM software got you this far. However, after go-live of the CRM users must find the impact this new online lead management software has on all the departments that use this platform.

Forrester (the global research firm) is one organization that has provided us a framework of how we can do this. Their methodology, which is known as ‘Total Economic Impact’ views on the sales outcomes as weighted against money and time spent on the CRM.

Forrester’s TEI methodology typically looks at whether sales increased or closed faster via improved lead generation strategies.

Forrester also evaluates the user-friendliness of the cloud based CRM software and how scalable is the CRM as the company changes and registers growth in employment over time.

Here are some of the questions Forrester use to measure their CRM ROI, which includes:

  • Did the CRM platform increase wallet share by capturing more customer income and consumers on your offerings?
  • Did the cloud based CRM software help sales reps match the services that your client needs?
  • Are the customer relationships lasting longer than before?
  • Did the cloud based CRM software provide marketing, sales, support, and the management teams with automated functions that improve business efficiency?
  • Have the management team in your organization been able to capture data that shows reduced direct selling costs?
  • Is the CRM platform, easy to use and intuitive enough to eliminate the time required for IT to pull reports from the CRM database?

CRM implementations are never identical. Therefore, as you can only see an ROI from your CRM if your employees use the platform, this human variable has a direct impact on CRM ROI. Hence, if you take two organizations with competing offerings from the same industry and provide them with identical CRM platforms, it is highly likely that the experiences of these two companies will never be similar. Consequentially, so shall be the differences in their ROI.

With that being said, let us quantify some of the steps that are necessary to set up a new cloud based CRM system for success in any organization, that include:

  • Making certain that the information silo housed in the different departments in the organization are abolished. It has been found that there will always be certain departments that will be more unwilling than others to comply with the CRM software, where all data is collected and stored in one place. However, it is important that each department in your organization agree to enter information in one place to reap the benefits of CRM ROI.
  • Create a means to measure the different metrics by departments and develop a reporting structure that can follow these benchmarks effectively. Therefore, select an online lead management software that is able to handle the deviating goals of marketing, sales, operations, billing, customer support, and others.
  • Accept workflow changes that will completely leverage the software. This may be a conflicting situation for most employees that are set in their ways. Setting the expectation upfront that CRM ROI is based on each team member’s acceptance of the software, is an important part of finding employee buy-in. Each of the employees must be aware that they will receive proper training to utilize the cloud based CRM software, which will make them grow individually and as a department.
  • Customize the CRM software to reduce the busy works, which is holding your organization back for generating CRM ROI, as you are likely to find a host of redundant tasks baked into many of the departments in your business.

Recovering what you pay for your cloud based CRM software means choosing the right CRM software and optimizing the platform to fit your business.

Recently we hired a research agency to conduct an analysis of CRM ROI for ConvergeHub CRM. Let us look at what they discovered about ConvergeHub online lead management software, which is a FinanceOnline award-winning CRM for small businesses:

According to the research study, the potential ROI of ConvergeHub cloud based CRM saw a number of business benefits, like reduced CRM maintenance and infrastructure costs, and quicker time-to-market.

The report further elaborated that:

  • The time-to-implement and deploy was much faster with ConvergeHub cloud based CRM solution than an on-site CRM implementation.
  • Organizational efficiency in the processes was improved as sales and customer support departments were able to automate several basic and redundant works.
  • The online model of ConvergeHub CRM software allowed customers to avail a fixed monthly subscription, which nullified overhead costs.
  • ConvergeHub helped businesses save money in the long term.
  • Businesses began to see an ROI within 3 months after installation of the small business CRM software.

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Ultimately, the research stated that ConvergeHub has an overall 63% CRM ROI rate, a figure that places ConvergeHub as a highly rated SaaS-based online lead management software , which is worth considering, as it helps you to get the most for your investments.

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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