Practical Guide For Upselling And Cross-Selling With An Effective QuickBooks CRM Software

We all have been sometimes or the other on the receiving end of pushy sale pitches, and hence knows why up-selling and cross-selling often gets a bad rap. However, if it is done effectively, with a robust QuickBooks CRM software both these marketing strategies are actually great weapons to grow your business by leveraging on your brands existing customer base. Therefore, primarily, let us clarify the difference between up-selling and cross-selling before we talk about the great strategies that can make it happen in reality.

We all have been sometimes or the other on the receiving end of pushy sale pitches, and hence know why up-selling and cross-selling often gets a bad rap.
However, if it is done effectively, with a robust QuickBooks CRM software both these marketing strategies are actually great weapons to grow your business by leveraging on your brand’s existing customer base.

Therefore, primarily, let us clarify the difference between up-selling and cross-selling before we talk about the great strategies that can make it happen in reality.

First thing first, Up-selling happens when you encourage and convince an existing customer to buy a more expensive item, version, or an upgrade of their intended purchase. A classic example of up-selling is when someone asks you in a restaurant “Would you prefer potato-chips with that?”
Here up-selling happens as the customer has already purchased one food item and adding fries to the menu just makes it a more delicious and expensive combo.

A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%- Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy Click To Tweet

On the other hand, cross-selling happens when you try to persuade your customer to buy add-on products or services that complement the customer’s initial purchase. For an example, when you purchase a two-wheeler, the seller will encourage you (hopefully) to add a fog-light and a helmet in the interest of the buyer’s safety.

Hence, regardless of whatever that your company sells, the act of selling becomes more effective at up selling, whereas cross-selling aids in generating repeat business and increase your revenue.

Are you now ready to get started?

Then, keep reading or download this PDF to learn how best CRM for QuickBooks online like ConvergeHub makes it easier to achieve these goals.

Always remain transparent about the pricing

While up-selling and cross-selling your products or services, your customers must never feel like they have been tricked into spending more. Therefore, advice your employees using your QuickBooks CRM for sales teams, to be upfront about what the add-on offering(s) will cost before telling the benefits of buying the products or services. Remember customers always appreciate honesty, and so they are more likely to consider the value of your proposed offerings if they are not distracted by unknown numbers.

It is always helpful to present your customers with an estimate that provides a line-by-line pricing break-up of your offerings.

Using QuickBooks CRM software allows your sales executives to create estimates easily directly within the easy to use CRM software, without requiring to wait for someone else to access the QuickBooks.

Bundle related offerings together

Here is the reason why “Would you prefer potato-chips with that?” is so very effective. Prospective customers always love a good deal, and it is typically cheaper to purchase a combo offer, than to buy, their burger first and go back again for potato chips later.

Now, if you find that your customer is debating whether to include an additional item to their purchase, try offering a time-bound discount on the combo offer, which certainly provides an incentive to buy now rather than waiting.

Therefore, if you want to refer to the regular prices of items in your selling list before making the big promises, QuickBooks CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub, allows your representatives to easily view your list of offerings and their usual pricing without leaving the CRM.

Know your customers’ preferences

According to Marketing Metrics, one of the leading market research firms focusing solely on advisor-sold investments and insurance across the world, states, “the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%”.
This happens largely because if you are using an easy to use CRM software, your employees already know who your existing customers are and what they prefer to buy at large.

Therefore, using a best CRM software for QuickBooks like ConvergeHub that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free your employees can track your customer’s past purchases and preferences, which can be thereafter used for identifying up-selling and cross-selling opportunities that are most relevant to their likings.

Using a QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub not only provides a 360-degree picture of a customer’s history with your businesses, but it also provides every single personal detail and past communications with the customers which include notes, phone conversations, their response to your customized email campaigns in a centralized location, before formulating a new sales pitch.

Understand your customers’ journeys

Pay attention to the storyline that led to your customer’s first purchase, Even if you find them busy and focused on eliminating one problem or achieve a goal, they may have also mentioned other pain points that are related to that cause. Therefore, taking note of these long-term plans of your customers opens up opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling, when the customers are ready to take their next big step.

Hence, always encourage your employees to record every single communication with their customer interactions as a mandatory activity and ensure that everyone on your sales, marketing, and customer support teams has an access to the customer information to assist the customers on their journey with your brand.

Conclusion

Hence, up-selling and cross-selling need not always have to be a shady affair, since the key to both these strategic approaches focuses on delivering vales to your customer.

Luckily, a QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub, makes up-selling and cross-selling strategic approaches focused on delivering values to your customers, which consequently increase your revenue.

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What Is CRM And How It Can Unlock Massive Sales Enablement Benefits For Your Business

You may know by now what is CRM software, but are you aware of the term ‘Sales Enablement’ and what it means to your business? Well, in general, sales enablement refers to a process of providing your sales teams with the most effective tools they need to sell your offerings successfully. Therefore, sales enablement provides your sales teams with the right technology and content to better engage their prospects in the buying cycle. It is a tool that can unlock significant benefits that in turn will increase your sales and drive more revenue.

You may know by now what is CRM software, but are you aware of the term ‘Sales Enablement’ and what it means to your business?

Well, in general, sales enablement refers to a process of providing your sales teams with the most effective tools they need to sell your offerings successfully. Therefore, sales enablement provides your sales teams with the right technology and content to better engage their prospects in the buying cycle. It is a tool that can unlock significant benefits that in turn will increase your sales and drive more revenue.

Leads that are nurtured in the CRM system convert 47% of the time- Annuitas Group Click To Tweet

For example, ConvergeHub small business CRM software is a sales enablement tool that can empower your sales teams to convert more leads and prospects into customers in a much lesser time.

Therefore, with a small business sales enablement tool like a CRM in place, your business has the potential to provide more ROI rapidly.

However, what are these benefits that you can unlock with a best small business CRM like ConvergeHub?

Now that we know what is CRM software, let us dive in see!

Automating manual tasks

A sales enablement CRM for small and medium business drastically increases the efficiency of your sales teams by automating their day-to-day tasks. Therefore, when you use a Converged CRM that includes sales, marketing, customer support, and also accounts (if you are using a QuickBooks CRM), your efficiency increases dramatically.

Here are a few examples:

  1. Data Entry

Lead data is captured successfully when you leverage lead-generation forms. That means, your sales reps do not need to enter data manually, and they can use that time to focus on more important issues.

  1. Appointment scheduling

CRM helps to automate the process of scheduling the appointment process. This allows prospects and customers to schedule meeting with reps with their convenience, freeing them from having to conduct the actions manually.

  1. Lead Scoring

This process helps sales reps to take actions by viewing the propensity of the buyers. Lead scoring methods help in improving the quality of the leads. Hence, small business CRM software that includes lead scoring capabilities helps reps to focus on other things and at the same time have an insight into, leads, which are sales-ready, and those leads that need more nurturing.

  1. Telephony

If you easy to use CRM provides telephony integrations, like Ring Central and others, it helps your sales reps make more calls in less time. Using telephony integration you can select a group of leads to call and let the software call them in sequence without your sales reps having to call up each of the dialed numbers manually, resulting in increased productivity.

  1. Voicemail Drop

Another great benefit of using telephony integrations with your small business CRM software is the ability to leave pre-recorded voice mail drops. Hence, when your sales reps call someone and get sent to the prospect’s voicemail, they click the voicemail drop they want to leave, which thereafter gets delivered automatically.

  1. More Insight Into Customers And Prospects

A CRM software that provides sales enablement stores extensive data on customer and prospects, which includes demographic and personal data of the prospects and the customers. For users who know what is CRM software and its capabilities, can easily track such data for finding behaviors such as clicking on an email, attending a webinar, or viewing a content, which can help sales reps to leverage sales enablement software to maintain more insights into who the customers are and what they need.

  1. Understanding past buying behavior

Sales enablement software like ConvergeHub software helps to track all deals that have been created by your reps.
Once you are using a QuickBooks CRM for sales teams, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, your reps can easily open a contact’s records in the CRM database to see which product has been bought by the customer in the past. It can also show which products the prospects and customers have been interested but did not purchase, which allows reps to understand which types of offerings the customers are interested in that in turn drastically increases up-selling opportunities.

  1. Knowing customer’s pain points

When you use a Converged CRM like ConvergeHub, you can track all the customer support tickets, and easily see which problems a customer has faced with your offerings by reviewing their ticket history in the CRM database. Therefore, before up-selling to any customer, using a CRM you can see if the customer is having an issue, and up-sell until the customer is satisfied again.

  1. Arming representatives with the right resources

Sales enablement is also about sending the right resources and content to the leads, prospects, and customers at the right time. Therefore using easy to use CRM software platform, your reps can check where each lead are in the sales funnel, and provide them contents that correctly aligns with the sales process, which can be leveraged by using marketing automation functionalities of the CRM software.

  1. Automated tasks and alerts

You can use small business CRM software to send alerts to sales reps instantaneously when leads become sales qualified that help to remind reps that they need to reach out immediately and start a conversation with the prospect. It is like striking when the iron is hot.

Moreover, using CRM software when speaking to a lead that would benefit from a particular resource, sales reps can simply open the saved email and hit send, which lets them quickly provide the resources and content that leads need at each stage of the sales funnel.

  1. Understanding results

Sales and marketing teams need constant insight into their efforts to improve their results. With a robust sales enablement software like ConvergeHub CRM , you can use its powerful reporting functionalities to view how they are performing against their goals. Sales CRM software helps in checking the health of your sales pipeline, see growth reports, check your rep’s call rates and much more, to identify areas that need improvement or fix broken processes and make data-driven decisions they need to improve to close more deals.

 Conclusion

Now that you know what is CRM software and how it can help you as one of the most efficient sales enablement tools, use ConvergeHub the award winning CRM platform for small businesses, to unlock the benefits described above to make your reps work faster, smarter, and convert more leads into customers in less time.

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Myths About Using A QuickBooks CRM For Sales Teams Exposed

Customer Relationship Management solution or CRM software has been around for decades. However, over the past few years the usage of CRM has skyrocketed and today both small and enterprise level businesses use CRM for sales, preferably a QuickBooks CRM that is capable of offering QuickBooks CRM integration free. Here are some of the some of the primary myths debunked about sales CRM software like QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

Customer Relationship Management solution or CRM software has been around for decades. However, over the past few years the usage of CRM has skyrocketed and today both small and enterprise level businesses use CRM for sales, preferably a QuickBooks CRM for sales teams that is capable of offering QuickBooks CRM integration free.

CRM technology has evolved considerably over the years, but still, there are several misconceptions what a CRM solution actually is, or what it does, remains in the minds of the prospective buyers of CRM. Especially, customer relationship platforms that integrate with software solutions like QuickBooks, which helps integration with financial and accounting software platforms, and therefore, aid the sales teams to do their work more efficiently.

We will call them CRM myths.

Here are some of the some of the primary myths debunked about sales CRM software like QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

A CRM software can greatly help in cutting costs, and using one can lead to reduced marketing costs by 23% - Cloudswave Click To Tweet
  1. Sales CRM is too complicated

During the early days, sales CRM software was non-intuitive, clunky, and complicated, which came with an extremely steep learning curve. The market took notice of this issue and hence CRM software gained a reputation that it is a complicated piece of technological marvel that requires advanced computing skills to manage its functionalities.

However, those days are gone, and CRM technology has evolved by leaps and bounds. Today easy to use CRM software platforms have intuitive drag and drop interfaces like ConvergeHub that allows even the most non-technical users to quickly learn and use the platform.

This is the exact reason CRM systems like ConvergeHub, which are built to be accessed by small and growing businesses, have an extremely short learning curve.

  1. CRM is too expensive

Another prevailing myth about CRM systems that were born during the early days of the technology is that CRM solutions are prohibitively expensive. Since, at that time, businesses would have to normally spend more than $1000 per month or even a larger sum for CRM implementation in a company.

Unfortunately, this perception still exists and is as-of-date believed by many.

However, the truth is that prices of CRM software solutions have dramatically dropped in the recent years, which has happened primarily because of the growth in cloud based CRM software and the exceeding numbers of many new vendors that have entered the CRM marketplace.

For example, ConvergeHub CRM not only offers a 14-day free trial of the software but also allows you to use ConvergeHub on a pay-as-you-go subscription-based service (quarterly or annual), with its Starter Pack billed as low as $9 per user/month if it is billed annually.

  1. If I buy a CRM, I must still purchase a marketing automation system

In the present times, an innovative and new type CRM technology has entered the market. It is known as the Converged all-in-one CRM software, which includes full customer relationship management for sales, marketing, customer support, and even accounting on the same platform. Therefore, once you buy a QuickBooks CRM for sales teams like ConvergeHub, you no longer need to buy different automation systems for customer support, sales, marketing, or accounts, as they are built within the CRM.

This means all data centrally stored in the CRM database, be it from sales, marketing, support, or accounts is for all to see, which help align your various teams and makes everyone in your organization work more efficiently.

  1. CRM is only used to store contact information

Easy to use QuickBooks CRM software that supports marketing, sales, accounts, and customer support is used for a plethora of activities. Therefore, when you bring a Converged CRM like ConvergeHub into the picture, the list of processes that can be automated with best CRM for QuickBooks online grows exponentially, which include:

  • Billing and Invoicing
  • Email marketing
  • Drag and drop landing page and web form creation
  • Multichannel campaigning
  • Lead generation and lead scoring
  • Online appointment scheduling
  • Creating advanced metrics and analysis to drive data-driven decisions
  • Creating eDocs and electronic signatures
  • Advanced telephony for streamlined sales calling
  • Helpdesk and customer support automation
  • Social CRM and social listening capabilities
  • Creating project management workflows
  • And much more

  1. CRM for sales will not integrate with my other systems

This is absolutely a myth in the present times, since on the contrary most CRM solutions like ConvergeHub are sold as SaaS (software-as-a-Service) systems.
This means, most cloud based CRM have open APIs, which lets you integrate almost any third-party applications like QuickBooks and others that you want with your easy to use CRM.

These integrations opens the door for the users to complete most complicated tasks using the right plugin and API, like accounting, invoicing, billing, and creating eSignatures, and others, without having to leave the CRM. Modern CRM solutions, not only allows you to integrate billing and invoicing apps like QuickBooks, but also combine emailing, telephony, social media apps, and others with the CRM platform.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the legacy CRM software of the late 90’s and the early 2000s are gone and obsolete in 2018.
As most customer relationship management software solutions like ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM live in the cloud, they are extremely cost-effective, and highly intuitive that empowers your business to be more competitive in your field, which in turn increases productivity while decreasing costs, and enables your sales teams to spend more time closing deals.

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