Tag: Sales Cadence

5 Lead Tracking Best Practices To Manage Your Sales Pipeline

Even if your business does not have written documentation of the details of how you move your leads through pipeline or funnel, you must be still following a series of steps for lead tracking the prospective customers that guide you from point A to point B in your sales process. Now in order to identify the weakest point of your present sales process, it is as simple as identifying the best and the worst things about your lead’s movement in the sales pipeline. This is because, even if you get tons of apparently profitable leads from a free lead generation tool, or by sharing free resources, but eventually lose half of them, it could be a sign that you need a better lead tracking solution and the best lead tracking practices that will help grow your business.

Even if your business does not have written documentation of the details of how you move your leads through pipeline or funnel, you must be still following a series of steps for lead tracking the prospective customers that guide you from point A to point B in your sales process.

Now in order to identify the weakest point of your present sales process, it is as simple as identifying the best and the worst things about your lead’s movement in the sales pipeline.

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. - DemandGen Report Click To Tweet

This is because, even if you get tons of apparently profitable leads from a free lead generation tool, or by sharing free resources, but eventually lose half of them, it could be a sign that you need a better lead tracking solution and the best lead tracking practices that will help grow your business.

Hence irrespective of whether your businesses goals are to provide better service to your customers, or build better social media engagements, or just find more time on your hand, understanding your organization is the primary step to tracking sales leads which can be as easy as using a CRM software or setting up spreadsheets for finding sales growth.

BEST PRACTICES FOR IMPROVING SALES LEADS TRACKING SKILLS

1. Create an Email Sending Sequence

A big part of managing leads involves nurturing the leads. Therefore even before you send your first email to your prospective customers ensure that you have an entire sales cadence ready that you can send out sequentially over the course of weeks or months.

This is because as one of the leading vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, we have observed that just one email and thereafter one follow-up are never enough to understand the effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns.

Hence businesses must use an email tracking tool like a CRM platform that can allow organizations to track and measure email opening rates, click-through rates, replies, and bounce rates of the emails, which are all important metrics in determining the efforts of your email marketing campaigns.

Therefore it is only with a structured email sequence, you can find a controlled variable to judge upon individual lead responses, which is an info that you can track to find the interested prospects and also those leads that require a bit more convincing.

2. Schedule Follow-Ups

We all know that not all the leads that enter the sales funnel will be at once ready to buy your offerings. Therefore it always requires some extra work to be done before finding successful conversions.

Hence it is important that businesses must invest in lead tracking, lead generation, and lead automation software solutions since by actually neglecting to nurture and talk to your leads, you will be eventually wasting a good deal of money that your business has spent on acquiring them in the first place.

Now you might think that tracking 20 potential customers through your sales pipeline is an easy job, but that changes when that number of leads up to the 100s.

This is because losing track of where your leads are in your sales pipeline (which ones are reading what content or which ones have received your proposals) can be detrimental to your sales process.

Therefore you should schedule your follow-ups to understand exactly where your prospects are in the sales pipeline, and what the next step should be so that you do not start overselling even before enough resources have been shared with the prospective customer, or you might forget them altogether and make them fall through the crack.

3. Follow a Lead Cycle That Makes Sense

While it is always beneficial to nurture and build relationships with long-term leads, instead of exclusively going for the relatively short-term ones. Lead cycles can go on for months and might even take more resources than it is worth.

Hence stick to a lead cycle that essentially makes sense with the model of your business, so that you can increase your profits.

This is important since which B2C leads tend to have a shorter cycle, like if you are an e-commerce site, a fortnight of nurturing campaign is sufficient, whereas for B2B leads the nurturing process can last as long as several months and with some lasting up to a whole year.

Therefore imposing a lead cycle for your business, will help to ensure that your sales reps do not keep engaging with the same prospects over and over again. Moreover shortening your lead cycle will also help to keep your sales pipeline fresh with new leads flowing into the funnel and ensure that your sales reps are pursuing new leads every day and thereby connecting with new opportunities on a regular basis.

4. Track the Sales Pipeline

Now while the sales funnel focuses on the stage-by-stage conversion of the leads, the sales pipeline reflects only what is on your plate at this very minute.

Therefore if you are just keeping track of your sales funnel using a sales CRM tool, consider integrating the sales pipeline also into your process.

This is because when you successfully track the leads through the sales pipeline, it becomes much more easier to remain cognizant of what each lead requires from your company.

Hence think of your sales pipeline stages as steps and formulate what actions are needed to be taken at each stage, since when you can organize leads this way and track them according to their placement in the sales pipeline, you can create a standardized process on how your sales reps should approach the leads.

This also makes your lead nurturing process simpler, whereby you can perform mass actions and create relationships with your leads as a group that can reduce your efforts, but you must do it without forgetting about personalization.

5. Practice Lead Scoring

Finally, you must practice lead scoring, which is a process of segregating leads that belong to the highest priority down to leads that of the least priority in the funnel.

Businesses can score their leads using a business CRM tool based on their urgency, project size, availability of resources, and more.

Therefore instead of treating all leads as the same and one, this practice helps to focus more resources, personalization, and efforts on leads that are more beneficial for your business.

Lead scoring also makes it easier for businesses to understand when it is the right time to weed out unresponsive leads from your sales pipeline when you are sifting through hundreds of leads and thousands of data points that need to be monitored every day.

In other words, lead scoring helps your teams to make decisions at a glance without even worrying about making uninformed decisions in their lead tracking endeavors for finding sales growth.

Conclusion

Now as you must have understood by now, that ultimately all these lead tracking practices can only be performed by a single business growth tool which is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, which is a platform that is dedicated to lead management and lead nurturing and can easily perform any of these tasks simultaneously without fail.

Additionally, an all in one CRM can also help businesses to understand the best performing sales reps in their teams as well as the movement of their leads along the pipeline, generate reports and make you see trends in your sales processes that can amplify your efforts to stay on top of new and ongoing leads for finding rapid revenue growth.

sign up

How To Manage And Convert Leads Using A Sales Pipeline CRM Software Tool

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company. But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte. Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand. Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace. So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company.
But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte.
Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume - American Management Association Click To Tweet

Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace.

So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Now lead management is a technique that focuses on bagging and retaining leads until they become happy and loyal customers with a subscription or purchase or any other business interactions on to the lead’s name.

In other words, lead management with a sales pipeline CRM software helps to guide the leads through a process of qualifying, scoring, and nurturing after which businesses can hand the leads off to their sales reps who are trained to turn them into paying customers.

Now that being said, let us show you some of the most important things that we have learned as one of the most promising vendors of the best small and medium business CRM software about managing sales leads over the last 15 years.

1. Define Qualified Lead

A major disconnect between the staff working in sales and the marketing department in any organization lies in finding a proper definition of a properly qualified lead.
Research suggests that more than even 75 percent of the leads that are passed on to sales departments never get actively worked by the sales reps in most organizations.

This can happen for a plethora of reasons.

We have found one major reason for this disconnect is not being able to define what a truly qualified lead is that can provide business to an organization
Hence for better sales effectiveness, the marketing and sales in an organization need to find a very precise meaning (or rules laid down for measuring engagement) when a suspected contact becomes a definite lead that can be thereafter sent to the sales department, partners, or other channels for nurturing them so that they can convert to a customer.

Now the parameters of this definition of an ideal sales-ready lead vary from company to company, but they generally include the following factors that include:

  • The horizon for purchase
  • Title of the lead
  • The budget of the lead
  • Geography of the lead
  • Size of company (in B2B businesses)
  • Size of the prospected opportunity, and more…

2. Nurture The Leads

Leads that have not fully passed the screen test of a “qualified lead” requires proactive nurturing by the marketers in an organization by using a sales pipeline CRM software.
We have found that most “leads” generated by marketing are doubtlessly not ready to buy based on their first interaction with a company.
Therefore it is best to nurture both suspects and prospects and you will be astonished at how much revenue can be made from nurturing lead in the CRM databases, even with the leads that have been already summarily written off by sales teams.

For this, campaigns need to be run allowing you to touch your prospective leads multiple times throughout the sales process using different sales cadences until they are ready to buy.

Special offers, new product announcements, and promotions are tools that should be set into action to reactive old and long-forgotten leads and even arouse interest in the new ones stored in the sales pipeline CRM software.

Hence nurturing leads is a distinctive sales and marketing skillset that needs to be greatly enhanced, measured, and rewarded appropriately for its successes by the company.

3. Distribute The Leads

According to studies, it is clear that the sales close rate increases phenomenally if you answer back within 12 to 24 hours after a lead initiates contact with your company.

This is because, by responding fast, you truly distinguish your organization and even yourself from other sales reps and your competitors.

For this, the “contact” should not just be an automated email responder, but also a personal phone call from a sales professional.

Obviously, the magnitude of the opportunity and the buying cycle command the persistence and intensity of the follow-up cycle with a lead.

Nevertheless, cloud based CRM systems that are integrated with AI and other cutting-edge business growth technology solutions are great technology in distributing leads quickly and efficiently using round-robin algorithms and more advanced techniques among the right members in the sales team.

4. Track Lead Source

In any business, you need to determine what works and what does not and the only way to know this type of information is to capture the source of the lead.

In an ideal world, this is done using a sales CRM system tool that gets automatically populated when a new contact or lead arrives into the system.

This is because if you are incapable of capturing the genesis or the source of the lead, you have no other way of figuring out what is working to make the lead find out your brand.

Most full-featured sales pipeline CRM software systems have inbuilt reporting systems that aids in understanding the Return on Investment (ROI) on the lead management activities.

Moreover, as CRM systems give you a multitude of ways for capturing and storing leads into the system, your marketing and sales team spends even less time entering and inputting data and more time acting on the stored information in its CRM database.

Additionally, with complete visibility to all leads, there is less chance of multiple people calling the same prospect, which can reduce the efficiency of your sales processes in the long run.

5. Remember Quality Beats Quantity

When it comes to generating new sales, quality definitely supersedes quantity, since significant time can be wasted by organizations and businesses that invest momentous time and energy churning through poor quality leads.

Moreover, the more information you can capture about a prospective lead, the more energized your sales team will be about the lead.

Now this information can be captured in many different ways including things like the search string someone used to get to your website.

This information increases the “quality” of the lead and should be passed to the sales via a simple CRM system.

6. Measure Everything

Lastly, you need to determine what is exactly that you want to measure and the reasons why.

Measurements generally include cost per lead, lead source, cost of acquisition, size of the opportunity, geography, buying cycle, size of the company, and more.

Hence once you determine what you want to measure, you can put the necessary tools like a sales pipeline CRM software in place to capture the information since when you have the right information, you can determine the return on investment of your marketing and sales efforts and focus on the lead generation campaigns that will increase your sales pipeline.

Conclusion

Do not leave money on the table. Invest in CRM database management and take your business to the next level.

There are plenty of easy to use CRM tools to choose from, so take your time when making a decision, ask plenty of questions, and keep your overarching goal in mind, which is – building up a strong customer base.

sign up

How To Boost Lead Conversion Using Sales Management CRM Tools

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their sales management CRM software? Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers? Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2021.

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their sales management CRM software?

Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers?

92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. - Nielsen Click To Tweet

Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization.

Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2021.

Integrate Your Sales Management CRM With A Marketing Automation Platform

A majority of sales reps today use easy to use CRM software solutions to move leads and prospective opportunities through the sales pipeline and close deals.

If you know what is CRM software, you must be aware that CRM is a robust application that stores a plethora of information about all your leads, and customers in the CRM database, which includes details like demographic and behavioral data.

Therefore, when you use automation in CRM, which is also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA) in tandem with your sales management CRM, you can without any hassles leverage that contact details to customize and target the messages that you need to send to your prospects.

Nowadays even most Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, let you personalize your lead nurturing process and send messages based on your prospects’ past buying behaviors, interests, and more.

Since doing this allows you to send more personalized outreach. Which in turn helps in better engaging prospects that enhance the likelihood of conversion.

Publish Awesome And Informative Blogs

We all acknowledge that the stage for converting leads comes at the very end of the sales cycle. However, to persuade the leads to get to that point, whereby they become interested enough to procure your offerings- you primarily need to build up trust.

Leads and prospective customers cherish to see you as a subject matter expert and an authority in your arena and feel that you can be trusted to support them and ensure their growth and satisfaction using your offering(s).

According to Forbes, blogging is a great way of building that trust:

“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.”

Prospects and leads are more likely to engage with brands and organizations once you can establish yourself as an indisputable authority in their minds, leading to more lead conversion rates.

Set Up Killer Landing Pages With Optimized CTA Buttons

As the leads move through your sales pipeline, you need ways to capture more of their information by increasing their engagement with your brand.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to create simple, yet attractive landing pages that will encourage your leads to take the desired action, like request a demo, register for a webinar, etc.

Make it painfully clear to your leads, and visitors viewing your landing page, which action you want them to take, how they can take it, and most importantly what will they receive in exchange.

If you are not sure how to create awesome landing pages, it is best to check out some examples from your competitor’s websites.

Run Lead Nurturing And Lead Generation Campaigns

It is a common fact, that to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. There are several ways you can generate new leads, from email drip campaigning to social media programs.

Now, once you have generated new leads, you need to nurture them through the sales pipeline that must consist of a series of ‘touch-points’ to move them towards a sale.

Lead nurturing aids in identifying sales-ready leads using lead scoring, since each action your leads take can be scored to move the leads closer to conversion.

Set Up Lead Scoring To Qualify Leads

Lead scoring techniques help your marketing teams to identify the most sales-ready leads in your CRM database.

While scoring leads, you can use a point system that indicates the value a lead represents, by awarding points to leads for actions they take, like clicking or opening emails, visiting your website, downloading eBooks, participating in post-sales surveys, etc.

You can also award points to your leads for demographic data such as the place they reside, their job titles, the industry they work, etc.

As these scores accumulate over time, you set a score threshold, at which a lead may be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), which once they cross can be passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Remember, while you are setting up your lead scoring system, always include your sales teams in the process, since they can better decide along with your marketing teams, which action warrants which score, and at which a new lead can be considered as an MQL.

Moreover, it is also highly advisable that you must check your lead scoring practice at least once every quarter, for finding whether the leads are being qualified too soon or too late in the process. Since, if your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to your sales teams, but very few of them are getting converted, odds are that your marketing executives are qualifying the leads too soon, and hence you must increase your MQL threshold to fine-tune your lead scoring process.

Simply put lead scoring boosts the lead quality in your business CRM, which helps in achieving a better conversion rate for your organization.

Enable Sales To Quickly Follow Up On Qualified Leads

According to a survey done by InsideSales, it states that:

“Your odds of reaching a new sales lead drop over 10 times if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of [sales] qualifying that lead decrease six times after the first 60 minutes.”

Therefore you need to enable your sales teams for immediate to follow up, using a sales cadence once a lead is qualified, since the longer you wait to reach out to a qualified lead, the lesser the chances of conversion will be along with the passage of time.

Using a sales management CRM for creating reminders and automating tasks it is easy to send alerts to sales reps the moment a new lead becomes qualified, to ensure that your sales teams do not let MQLs fall through the crack.

Share On Social Media And Use Social Monitoring To Find Brand Advocates

It is easy to engage your know leads with multichannel campaigns and email marketing.

However, what can you do about those leads whose contact data you do not have in your CRM database?

Therefore, when you create blogs and other types of content around your brand, share them on social media, so that people may share it, which in turn will extend the reach of your brand and drive in more new leads to click through to your blog or website.

Since, once people do that, you will understand that the engagement has begun, as these will be leads that are genuinely interested in your offerings, and are so easier to qualify and convert into customers.

Remember to always include some type of offer in association with your content that you are sharing to capture the contacts of these new leads.

While sharing your content on social media platforms, if you find people speaking positively about your brand, reach out, start a dialogue, and show your appreciation. You may even ask them if they want to feature in an interview or a case study of your brand.

In other words, treat these people with care and respect in any possible ways, because they are potential brand advocates for your business, who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and also help to increase conversion rates.

Here are two statistics that illustrate the role that brand advocates can play for growing your business.

  • 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)
  • Only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)

Key Takeaway

Lead conversion is the bread and butter of your business since it is a process that allows your business to grow, by bringing dollars into the coffers in your organization.

Nevertheless, as you can see, lead conversion does not happen on its own, as it requires serious planning and execution of various tactics to increase the lead conversion rate.

Therefore, always measure your lead conversion ratio, by keeping a scorecard that can help you track this metric so that you can easily identify what is working and what is not, and let you fix the nonperforming issues and focus more energy on conversion tactics that are producing results.

The math is simple. When you increase engagement levels, you boost conversion rates, and revenue climbs for stellar business growth.

sign up

6 Things You Can Do To Increase Revenue With Prospecting CRM For Enterprise-Ready Small Businesses

At the very onset primarily let us accept the fact, that Customer Relationship Management abbreviated CRM is a business workflow management software, which makes it convenient for large enterprises like SMBs to handle their entire sales process, right from prospecting to the final delivery of the solution to the customer and even beyond. This is a reality, which is true for any organization or business, irrespective of whether they have a sales team of just one or more than 100.

Below are 6 ways SMB and enterprise-ready businesses can boost sales using modern Prospecting CRM solution, and easily turn their leads into prospects and then customers.

More than 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process, followed by closing (36%) and qualifying (22%). Click To Tweet

1. Share information across your team

Easy to use CRM system, which is known for its power of bringing together disparate and disjointed information from its database, helps in coordinating activities within the sales team when sales reps want to make pitches or contact leads for prospecting towards a sale.

2. Keep track of your sales process

Whether you have a five-step sales cadence or any other sales process designed to keep your sales team consistent when closing sales or following up with leads, CRM for SMB organizations helps you to make sure that your team is following the sales path to the letters, which will certainly help your establishment to increase sales.

Therefore, using a business CRM you can easily double-check what your sales reps say while monitoring their activities remotely.

In other words, sales CRM software helps you to understand what deals are in the pipeline, more importantly, keep track of what stage each deal is in and so keep a finger on the pulse of your entire sales process.

3. Better allocate your sales resources

Prospecting CRM software helps businesses to let them see, how their sales resources are allocated at a glance. These not only aid the sales managers to make intelligent decisions about how they can deploy their team, but also assign more leads to performers and shame the laggards which ultimately increase sales and brings additional revenue for the company.

4. Enable collaboration

Instead of wasting valuable work hours tracking important sales documents, CRM helps to build a single library of all your sales materials that can be accessed by everyone in your sales team. You can choose documents, brochures, sales collaterals from the CRM database to include in your emails right from a drop-down menu in your email’s inbox.

5. Create “Web to Lead” systems

Say goodbye to hot leads getting lost in an overcrowded inbox. Prospecting CRM software helps you to create forms on your website’s landing page to capture leads. Next, the system automatically routes the leads directly to the salesperson in the sales department who is free or is capable of reaching out and make a connection between the sales rep and the lead in just a few minutes.

6. Keep up with reminders and notifications

Just as it is necessary to keep track of your important sales contacts and prospects, you also need to reminders about when your sales reps should call up the leads and customers, since broken follow-ups could mean losing important businesses.

Most all in one CRM systems provide reminders about contacting important contacts and hot leads; you may not have spoken to lately and so helps you not to miss your next big sale.

Aren’t the benefits of using a CRM for complementing your sales process amazing?

Hence, to conclude, if you are a small or midsized business owner, or even just about to get your business enterprise-ready using CRM for SMB can definitely help you to increase sales and reach your goals easily.

sign up

Innovative Ways To Convert Obstinate Leads Lurking Inside Your CRM Software

CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software is a tool that permits your business to manage contacts in an effective way, which can have a positive impact on your businesses’ bottle line as you nurture leads and prospects through their sales cycle. However, the problem lies when some of these leads in your easy to use CRM just would not convert. These fence-sitting leads mostly click through your landing pages and even open your emails, but nevertheless, they do not click the buy button and become a customer. Now even though it can be really tempting at times to simply disregard these obstinate leads as duds, however from a business standpoint doing so implies losing out on potential revenue, in this ever-growing competitive marketplace.

CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software is a tool that permits your business to manage contacts in an effective way, which can have a positive impact on your businesses’ bottle line as you nurture leads and prospects through their sales cycle.
However, the problem lies when some of these leads in your easy to use CRM just would not convert. These fence-sitting leads mostly click through your landing pages and even open your emails, but nevertheless, they do not click the buy button and become a customer.

28% of millennials think CRM applications are “extremely critical” to their success, compared to 18% of Generation X and 9% of Baby Boomers - LinkedIn (2018) Click To Tweet

Now even though it can be really tempting at times to simply disregard these obstinate leads as duds, however from a business standpoint doing so implies losing out on potential revenue, in this ever-growing competitive marketplace.

Hence in this article let us explore some of the creative ways you can convert fence-sitting stubborn leads in your easy to use CRM and how you can make them your brand’s loyal customers for consistent business growth.

 

Use a live chat on your website

As one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM for startups and small businesses, we have often observed that there are some leads that take longer to get converted as they are still in the research phase, and so require additional information to help with their decision.

For these leads, businesses can make it easier for prospects to reach out by using live chat. Needless, to say, live chat is a chat box that any business can integrate on their website, which can allow visitors to type in a question and thereafter receive a prompt reply from a customer support executive.

According to studies it has been found live chat is extremely effective for converting leads as it is an awesome tool that 79% of consumers prefer as a method of communication.

This is because live chat allows consumers to receive an immediate response without having to pick up the phone for clarifying their queries or send an email.

Moreover, you can even send leads in your CRM database to contents on your website using email campaigns where they can get in touch with your support executives using the chat feature integrated into your software.

Get them on your email list

For any business, an email list is a powerful marketing tool. In fact, according to surveys, it has been noticed that email is one of the top-performing digital marketing channels even today.

Hence once you have an email list in your CRM you can easily build relationships with prospective customers and move leads down through the sales funnel using an email sequence as a part of your businesses’ sales cadence.

Now there are several ways that you can use to collect email addresses.
You can collect email addresses of your prospective customers through traditional networking activities like holding meetings or meeting contacts at conferences, or capture fresh leads visiting your business website with the help of sign-up forms that can automatically transfer the contacts to your CRM’s database and offer incentives to get prospects to enter their email addresses.

Now no matter how you collect your emails, it is the need of the hour that you must get them on your email list.

There are several easy to use CRM software platforms in the marketplace that can help you to track your email campaigns in real-time and see how well individual messages are performing right from the dashboard.

Therefore, using these business growth technologies and tools once you see that leads are opening your emails which implies that they are interested in your offer, you can instantly follow up to continue nurturing that prospect and try to get them closer to a sale.

Use a pop-up quiz

As we have said even before, there are certain leads in your CRM those who want to buy something, but they cannot make up their mind, which can be really frustrating for the sales reps as their goal here is to increase conversions.

Now another innovative way to approach this issue is to use a pop-up quiz on your website.

Now, these are not typical quizzes that you find in general websites that tell you what character you are from The Game of Thrones or The Office, rather these quizzes are created to make leads find out what they are looking for based on their selections.

It has been noticed that pop-up quizzes can be a silver-bullet to convert leads, especially if you have a plethora of products to sell on your website.

Deploy retargeting campaigns

In a perfect world, we can assume that each visitor will convert into your customer. Nevertheless, it does not happen in the real world.

This is because visitors and leads may get easily distracted just when they are ready to purchase or they may simply not be ready yet to buy.

Therefore, another effective way you can convert these leads in your easy to use CRM is by retargeting these prospective leads awaiting conversion in your CRM database.

Here how it works:

A visitor lands on your business website and clicks through your product page, but unfortunately, they leave without making a purchase. Retargeting is a technological wonder which allows you to reach the same visitors time and again by showing them ads of your product or brand on the advertising networks like Google or Facebook.

Recent studies have shown that retargeting is an excellent means to create a more profitable sales funnel, which is especially true for e-commerce websites.

For example, you can easily retarget your buyers who have abandoned their shopping cart with ads that display enticing offers.

Now if you are using an easy to use CRM you can even segment your list and thereafter make your retargeting campaigns more effective by targeting specific buyers with their preferred wish list and offerings.

Have a clear and well-defined call to action

Finally, if your leads are not converting, the problem could be that your CTA (Call to Action) is lacking what is needed to move the leads to a sale.

Now a Call to Action or a CTA is prompt, which is a button or a text that is designed to encourage visitors to take an action.

CTA specifies exactly what you want your visitor to do, which can be either a move to buy your product and services or even sign-up for a free trial.

Therefore, make the CTA button on your homepage or your campaign’s landing pages clear and well-defined so that visitors cannot miss it as it uses a prominent color.

You can even optimize the CTA buttons with a copy to say “Try for Free” or “70% Discount” instead of generic copy like “Click Here”.

Hence experiment with different types of CTAs on your pages and run A/B tests to measure which works the best for your company.

Takeaway- Follow up with your leads

As bonus advice, if you want to close more leads in your easy to use CRM platform, you need to reach out.

Now while this may seem obvious, but this is even true that research shows even less than 48% of sales reps never attempt a single follow up.

Hence, follow up on your stubborn and face-sitting leads with a phone call and thereafter even send follow up emails which can be extremely effective as a part of your sales cadence when done correctly.

The bottom line is, once you are using a CRM sending follow-up emails is one of the best ways to convert more leads in your CRM as many of our customers who use our CRM for small and medium business have seen as much as 18% boost in their response rates on the first follow up email and a 27% jump on the sixth email which is an effective tool for converting obstinate leads to customers.

sign up

How To Create The Right Strategy Once You Buy CRM For Business Growth

Maintaining a proper relationship with the customers is indeed an important aspect for the growth of any business. Therefore, to achieve certain benchmark for the things you require for your business growth, you need to follow a comprehensive easy to use CRM software strategy, since without it you just cannot maintain the right kind of relationship with your customers and leads, and achieve the goals you desire for your company. There has been a drastic change over the past few decades in the customer relationship, which we are about to discuss in this article below.

Maintaining a proper relationship with the customers is indeed an important aspect for the growth of any business. Therefore, to achieve certain benchmark for the things you require for your business growth , you need to follow a comprehensive easy to use CRM software strategy, since without it you just cannot maintain the right kind of relationship with your customers and leads, and achieve the goals you desire for your company.

23% of B2B CMOs see improving customer experience as a top three objective - Forrester(2019) Click To Tweet

There has been a drastic change over the past few decades in the customer relationship, which we are about to discuss in this article below.

The Makeover in the Nature of Customer Relationship

In the present world ruled by social media, customer relationship has seen a major change in its nature over the last decade or so.
Businesses nowadays over the course of time have realized that there is an ever-increasing opportunity for engagement with the customers through social media platforms that can be utilized effortlessly.

On the other hand, if any customer goes through any bad experience with any product or service, they can also very easily get the facts vocal in the social media to tarnish the image of the brand, which has led businesses to take customer relationship matters seriously.

In fact, the stellar growth of the social media platforms has lead to a massive increase in the interactions between the companies and the customers, as it is the easiest medium in the present times to raise awareness or to share both good and bad experiences online.

Therefore, in order to minimize the damage to customer relationship, businesses are nowadays resolving their customer issues as soon as possible to help redeem their lost reputations and thereafter grow a solid relationship with the consumers of the offerings.

Best CRM Strategy That We Must Follow

  • Set A Definite Goal

When you want to achieve something for your business, the primary thing you need to do is to set up your goals for yourself and your company. Try to visualize where you want to see yourself in the next 2 to 5 years.

Online lead management software or any best small and medium business CRM software is a platform that can easily help you to achieve both your personal and your company’s business goals. However, for the CRM strategy to be effective, you have to identify the goals first and understand what needs to be accomplished, or when you should decide how you must progress with the plan to arrive at your desired objectives.

By far, it is always a better idea to split up your goals into lesser but achievable objectives and at the same time maintain an easily reversible and flexible plan.

  • Always Keep Communicating With Co-Workers

Keeping an effective and constant communication with your co-workers, help in many occasions to resolve several critical issues.

Therefore, use a cloud based CRM software , be it an enterprise-level tool like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM used by SMBs, which is designed to handle a large amount of information and can facilitate communication between various workgroups.

Buy CRM , which ensures that all data is being shared between accounts, sales, marketing, and support departments to help them have a clear idea about the objectives of your company.

Hence, to get your job done, integrate policies and use business growth technology and tools that would benefit your organization in several ways.

  • Target Customers Wisely

If you cannot target your customers better, you may never be able to improve your business revenue. Therefore, in order to become a successful business establishment, you need to target your consumers wisely enough to help generate profits for your company.

Always remember returning customers are more valuable than new customers since they tend to spend more for your company.

Hence, you can use a cloud based CRM system, to identify your valuable customers and target them intelligently, by proper segmentation of such targeted customers, which is also a great strategy for building the right sales cadence for your sales team that can predict revenue growth.

  • Track The Interest Of Your Consumers

Keeping a comprehensive trail of your consumer’s interest is a valuable way for closing sales and wining deals for your company. Therefore, it is most important to analyze the kind of things that your leads, customers, and prospects shares or like across the social media channels for up-selling and cross-selling of your products and services.

The CRM database is the storehouse of customer interests in every stage of the customer journey with your brand.

Hence, synchronize everything in the CRM and revaluating your approaches by identifying weaknesses in your system, since properly evaluating the customer database in the CRM, help to identify the scope of improvement for your organization.

Conclusion

Therefore, now that you know what is CRM software, and how it can help in the implementation of your best CRM strategy and build up stronger relationships with your customers, buy CRM to quick pace your business growth.

sign up

Why Many Sales Closing Techniques in Your Sales Cadence Fails with B2B Deals

There is a general misconception among certain sales reps that by following the right sales cadence and the right sales closing techniques they will even be able to get a reluctant buyer to say “Yes”. Now for this let us take two examples of sales closing techniques with colorful monikers the “Thomas Jefferson” and the “Something for Nothing” close. In the Thomas Jefferson close, you draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper and label either of the columns in the paper as “Pro” and “Con”. This is what exactly the American statesman did when making important decisions while he served as the third president of the United States.

There is a general misconception among certain sales reps that by following the right sales cadence and the right sales closing techniques they will even be able to get a reluctant buyer to say “Yes”.

Now for this let us take two examples of sales closing techniques with colorful monikers the “Thomas Jefferson” and the “Something for Nothing” close.

By 2020, customers will handle 85% of all business contact without ever interacting with a human - Gartner Customer 360 Click To Tweet

In the Thomas Jefferson close, you draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper and label either of the columns in the paper as “Pro” and “Con”.
This is what exactly the American statesman did when making important decisions while he served as the third president of the United States.

The idea behind this exercise is to aid the fence-sitting or analytical and indecisive buyers to make a purchase decision by listing the pros and cons as to why they should buy your offering.

Warning: Do not use this one unless you find a lot of good reasons in the “Pro” column.

In the Something for Nothing closing technique, you just nudge a fence-sitting buyer into buying your offerings by throwing the last-hour freebie (like: “If you sign-up right now, we will include a free…)

Now the issue with these techniques is that they place a greater emphasis on the psychological tactics and tricks designed to “coerce” the buyer into making a purchase, but at the same instance ignore what happens immediately before or after you force you buyer for making a commitment.

Now while such tactics might work out with individual buyers, these selling tricks are less effective with B2B (Business to Business) purchasers, since in B2B deals not only the asking are two high but the risk of making a mistake is greater than the B2C (Business to Consumer) sales, with multiple decision-makers who just cannot be collectively pressurized or tricked into saying “Yes” and buy your offerings.

Hence when the time is right to gain commitment from a B2B buyer, it is best to keep things simple and close the sale using the right sales cadence that works for your business, applying the ASK process as illustrated below:

  • Align priorities
  • Secure the commitment
  • Keep the commitment alive

Align Priorities

To do this begin by summarizing your knowledge and understanding of your customer’s business, their needs, and their priorities.
Make the summary of your observations short and to the point using verbiages like “ Based on what you said it is important to….” Or “You have said that efficiency and streamlining processes are your key priorities…”

Now if the purchaser has any other requirements, then ask additional questions about them and ensure the buyers that your proposed solution is addressing these needs.
After this ask for your buyer’s feedback by saying “Is there anything that I am missing?” Or “Did I understand that correctly?”

Now once you summarize their key priorities and receive their feedback, proceed and ask for the sale.

Secure Commitment

Summarize in a paper the key ways your purchasers will benefit by moving forward with the sale, and thereafter link the major features and benefits of your products or services to their needs.
While doing this exercise, if you find a few benefits are of vital importance just focus on them before you ask for your buyer’s commitments.

Here are the most common three non-manipulative ways of asking for an assurance from your B2B purchasers of your offerings:

  1. Direct

“Do you think you would like to move ahead with this?”

There are many sales reps who are afraid to use this approach of selling as it can place the purchaser(s) on the spot that can lead the buyer to say “No” right away.
Nevertheless, asking for a commitment in a straightforward way is one of the most effective methods to get buyers of their fence and say “Yes” and make you win the deal.

  1. Assumptive

“Can we start on the 10th?”

This technique leverages the power of suggestions by assuming that the purchaser(s) has already decided to buy.
Using this technique in your sales cadence makes the buyer then focuses on secondary issues such as quantity or delivery date for receiving the offering.

Now if this sales closing technique is difficult to use and you have confidence issues, then in such a case as yourself these two questions:

  1. What about your offering is unique?
  2. How will your buyer benefit by using your offering?

To sell it is most necessary that you must believe that your purchase will benefit from buying your products or services and so if you do not make a list of the ways your buyer will benefit by buying your offerings.

  1. Choice

“Would you like to set a follow-up meeting for Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon?”

Offering a choice to the buyer makes your purchaser’s decision easier by providing them a choice between “which” rather than between saying “Yes” or “No”.

This is because we all know that decision making for some people can be a difficult thing because it forces them to assume responsibilities and which they consider as a risk.

Now in B2B purchases, the least risky path is to say “No”, using choice as your weapon makes it easier for your buyer to say “Yes” because in fact, they will eventually benefit by saying “Yes” and buy your product or service for their businesses.

Keep Commitment Alive

Well, as a seller you must always remember that even after the buyer says “Yes” you have a lot of works to do.
Therefore once your prospective buyer agrees to purchase, you must immediately clarify the very next step and logistics required to fulfill the sale.

Find out if your buyer understands the contracting process?
Do you need to schedule a delivery or finalize on an implementation meeting with another department or person from your buyer’s end?

This is because if there are some formal and extra implementation processes that involve other persons or departments from your establishment, you as a salesperson should personally make the hand-off, and thereafter follow-up even after the implementation is done to confirm that everything, as discussed without any ambiguity, went smoothly.

Moreover once you win the deal also confirm to your buyer past your sales cadence processes that the buyer has made a good decision by deciding on purchasing from your company, since after any buyer decides, it is human nature that they will start having doubts and qualms (i.e., buyer’s remorse) and so it is most important to strengthen your buyers (especially in B2B deals) of their decisions right after they make it.

Finally, there is one more thing that all B2B seller must remember, which sometimes sales reps forgets. Send your buyers a follow-up thank-you email or a note few days after they have signed the agreement to make them come back and ask for more.

sign up

The Necessity Of CRM Data To Build The Right Sales Cadence For Business Growth

In this present world of ever-increasing data and information with respect to its variety and volume the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your business growth is the cardinal point for starting revenue-generating sales and marketing solutions for your company. Now, whenever we discuss customer data residing inside your lead management software, the most often cited response is that…“all data in the CRM database is important”. Although this may be true, to help you in deciding which data elements are most necessary during the initial phases of building your customer relationships, can be illustrated by a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your business.

In this present world of ever-increasing data and information with respect to its variety and volume the challenge to understand, which customer database in CRM is valuable for your business growth is the cardinal point for starting revenue-generating sales and marketing solutions for your company.

With revenues expected to reach over $80 billion by 2025, it’s no surprise that CRM is the fastest growing software market - SuperOffice Click To Tweet

Now, whenever we discuss customer data residing inside your lead management software, the most often cited response is that…“all data in the CRM database is important”.
Although this may be true, to help you in deciding which data elements are most necessary during the initial phases of building your customer relationships, can be illustrated by a method to evaluate and identify the value of each type of data for your business.

With several implementations of online lead management software solutions, we have seen many types of data including “favorite color”; “pet names” and even “number of car seats and doors” all have prospective value to different buyer’s markets of best small and medium business CRM software .

While “pet names” can be an important data for pet supplies retailers using easy to use CRM , “favorite color” can be an essential data field for retails in the clothing industry and “the total number of car seats and doors” for users of business growth technology solutions like CRM in the motor insurance industry.

Therefore, when you primarily consider the necessity of each data element of the customer-related database in CRM, the ability to classify the data can help in determining how valuable the data is or in which phase of a sales cadence it should be delivered, if at all.

This following list provides examples of the data elements that can quickly identify the critical pieces of information, which are needed for creating customized sales cadence workflows and thereby accomplish your business goals from an array of different data sources.

The priority order of this data is as follows:

  1. Identity Data in CRM Database

In the heart of the customer database inside the easy to use CRM lays the individual, so knowing the customer or the individual and to view and maintain that information in a single customer view supplies the initial data type which is known as identity data.

Identity data can include any information about an individual that enables the individual to be uniquely identified, which include:

Name Information

Title, First Name (Forename), Last Name (Surname), Designation, etc.

Postal Address Information

Building Name, Building Number, Town, County, Zip/Postal Code, Country, etc.

Person Information

Date of Birth, Gender, etc.

Telephone Information

Home Telephone, Work Telephone, Mobile, etc.

Emailing Information

Personal Email, Work Email, etc.

Social Network Information

LinkedIn Identifier, Facebook Identifier, Twitter Address, etc.

Account Information

Details of your customer’s account ID or User ID.

Professional Information

Company Name, Department Name, Job Title, etc.

Permission and Suppression Data

Although this not essentially an identity element of data, it is important for finding information concerning permission to communicate and the reason for not communicating (suppressions).

  1. Quantitative Data in CRM Database

Now once you identify who these individual persons are in your CRM database , the next element is to find focus on the measurable operational data that enables you to find how the customer behaved, reacted or has transacted with your brand. This data includes any info, which describes the activities completed between the customer and your business.

Transactional Information (Offline and Online)

Quantity of products purchased, Subscription/Order Value, Renewal/Order dates, Abandonment rate (abandoned shopping), Product returns, etc.

Online Activity

Product views, Website visits, online registrations, etc.

Social Networking Activity

Twitter interactions, Facebook likes, etc.

Customer Support Information

Customer complaint details, Customer query details, etc.

  1. Descriptive Data in CRM Database

Knowing your customers and the type of activities they have completed with your brand provides a good starting point for any marketing activity, building your sales cadence for up-selling and cross-selling your offerings. Therefore, to find a more entire and broader perspective of your customer’s supplementary information, beyond the indemnity and quantitative details, you must include any info, which may include.

Family Details

Marital status, Name of Spouse, Number of children, Children’s age, etc.

Lifestyle Details

Property type, Car type, Pet ownership, etc.

Career Details

School name, College/University name, Education level, etc.

  1. Qualitative Data in CRM Database

The concluding type of data, which you will come across apart from the one, mentioned will provide additional description of your customers and their potential behaviors is the data acquired by information captured by questioners where your customers present data on motivation, attitude, and options that include.

Attitudinal information

How do you value our product, How do you rate our customer service, How likely you are to purchase our products and services again, etc.

Opinion based information

What is your favorite holiday destination, What is your favorite color, etc.

Motivational information

Why was the product purchased (personal use, a gift for someone), What was the key reason for purchasing our product (quality, price, locality), etc.

Takeaway

Using this easy data classification strategy and connecting them with your business goals, will not only enable you a quick identification of which data is vital for the success of your business, but it can also help you to understand the value achieved from each of this data element that helps in most advanced customer modeling, micro-segmentation of your customer base, and use an automated engine like Sales Force Automation (SFA) for building your sales cadence in your easy to use CRM platform.

sign up

Tactics To Close More Sales This Holiday Season For Business Growth

The winter has set in and so like every year this holiday season also brings with it an added excitement and rush to go shopping. This is because people look forward eagerly during this time of the year for special discounts and the items on sale that are always up for grabs. Hence retail and online business owners surely can expect a surge in customer walk-ins and their website traffic during such a period and therefore find the best ways to make the most out of this holiday shopping frenzy by doing something out of the ordinary in order to boost the flow of their prospects and customers. Therefore here are some of the most effective and all-time popular sales closing techniques that you can try out this holiday season for your brand’s prosperity and business growth.

The winter has set in and so like every year this holiday season also brings with it an added excitement and rush to go shopping.
This is because people look forward eagerly during this time of the year for special discounts and the items on sale that are always up for grabs.
Hence retail and online business owners surely can expect a surge in customer walk-ins and their website traffic during such a period and therefore find the best ways to make the most out of this holiday shopping frenzy by doing something out of the ordinary in order to boost the flow of their prospects and customers.
Therefore here are some of the most effective and all-time popular sales closing techniques that you can try out this holiday season for your brand’s prosperity and business growth:

Announce Giveaways

To produce a buzz around your offering(s) it is a good idea to create a giveaway. Offering free accessories to the customers who shop for a certain specified amount is sure to draw more people and make them interested in buying your products and services.
We say this because attractive offers and combos will always remain a hit with customers who go out to shop during this part of the year.
According to surveys it has been found that clothing, electronic gadgets, footwear, chocolate, and cookies are some of the most purchased items in this season.
Therefore, offering giveaways to high-spending customers will definitely boost spending among loyal consumers of your brand.

84% of buyers now kick off their buying process with a referral. Click To Tweet

Email Blasts

Changing or moving your existing sales process online might not be possible within a short span of time. Nevertheless, marketing your offerings online can always reap benefits beyond measures if it is done in the right way using easy to use CRM by automating your email blast and targeting your existing customers and new prospects and leads in the CRM database with enticing offers to increase their interest.

Additionally, as a part of your sales cadence , you can even send out festive greetings to all your new and regular customers which is also a good way to remind them and keep your brand on the top of their minds.

It is a known fact that customers love brands that add a personal touch and are more likely to shop from your brand once you buy CRM and send tailored and customized emails to the consumers of your offerings.

Suggesting gifting ideas for Christmas 2019 and New Year 2020 is a surefire way to get people to look for things to buy for their family and loved ones from your brand and company.

Issue Promo Codes

Customers irrespective of age, sex or demography love a discount and so why not give them that especially during this time of the year when they are all up on their shopping spree.

Therefore, circulating special promo codes for the holiday season via social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others will help your consumers know about your special holiday season sale that you have on your offerings.
This is because curious responders will all be delighted to use discount codes on their purchases which will in return help in your business growth.

Cross-selling

Driving and closing sales is surely a challenging task for all salespersons throughout the year and it is more so during the holiday seasons.

Hence why not implement a smarter approach to sell more?

Even though cross-selling is still an underrated selling strategy and most businesses fail to focus on this concept, nevertheless, just by doing some homework and learning by using your business growth technology and tools what your existing customers had bought, it can be really worthwhile to suggest them items of relevance this holiday season that might be of their interest.

For example, consumers of your brand who have bought an iron can be suggested to buy ironing board or an iron cleaning product or clothes and accessories can go hand in hand, so that it increases your holiday sale revenue from your existing customers listed in your easy to use CRM software’s database.

Free Shipping and Fast Delivery

While shopping online it is a known fact that most consumers loathe paying money for shipping. Therefore just offering free shipping to your online customers is likely to boost your holiday season’s sale.

Moreover, if your business adds to that the premium of super-fast delivery you can be sure that there is going to be a deluge of customers flooding your website.

This is because there can be nothing more attractive to the consumers than to be assured that their orders will arrive in double quick time and will also carry no surcharge for this alacritous service.

Conclusion

Finally, to sell more this holiday season we once again reiterate to buy CRM and use analytics-driven data to get sufficient insights as to how this holiday season 2019 will play out for your business.
Employ SFA ( Sales Force Automation ) in your CRM to boost sales during these busy periods of the year, since in this digital era where everyone is moving fast, the onus is on you to keep up with the pace to secure high sales volume during this holiday season and start 2020 with a sense of assured prosperity and new hopes for your company.

sign up

Understanding Sentiment Analysis: The Ultimate Next Generation CX Measuring Tool

We all know that consumers are irrational beings when it comes to shopping. Hence as a brand owner if you can trigger the right emotion among your consumers there is a much higher chance of boosting your businesses’ revenue. Therefore the ultimate key to business growth in modern times is to buy CRM and thereafter scan customers’ reactions towards your offerings and adjust them accordingly for consistent sales and revenue growth. Now when you send a well-experienced sales rep to close a deal, they, in general, know what to do based on their experience.

We all know that consumers are irrational beings when it comes to shopping. Hence as a brand owner if you can trigger the right emotion among your consumers there is a much higher chance of boosting your businesses’ revenue.
Therefore the ultimate key to business growth in modern times is to buy CRM and thereafter scan customers’ reactions towards your offerings and adjust them accordingly for consistent sales and revenue growth.

Companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience - Temkin Group Click To Tweet

Now when you send a well-experienced sales rep to close a deal, they, in general, know what to do based on their experience.

However, the question that remains to be answered is how you can replicate the same in online sales? Or how can you boost your brand’s customer service just by automatically scanning reviews and emails or by judging the time your web-audiences and leads spent on your web-pages or by their mouse movements?

Initiate Sentiment Analysis

To a layman, sentimental analysis can be illustrated as an umbrella term that is used for a set of algorithms that tries hard to make sense of the user’s brand perception based on the words, phrases, and punctuations they use, and also many other parameters such as the use of emojis.

At its basic form, sentimental analysis classifies a reaction of a person as positive, neutral or negative. However, recent advancements in this technology specify and categorizes reactions in a more specific way, like identifying complex emotions like curiosity, anger, happiness, depression, stress and so on.

This is possible by mining and scanning through billions of social media posts and product reviews that aids in building a dictionary based on the context used by individual words. Therefore for sentiment analysis of the customers, it is most essential to use data sets that are very much alike to the customer’s expected inputs in terms of both the language and medium or channel used for those verbiages.

 It Is More Than Just Sentiments

Now although it is easy to understand now why sentiment analysis is an awesome tool for marketers, nevertheless it is not enough powerful on its own. Since, to be really efficient, sentiment analysis technology needs to be integrated with NLP (Natural Language Processing) to find recurrent themes in the customers’ feedbacks.

For example, if you are running a hotel and you get negative reviews, it is most critical to understand the exact reason that caused them like poor Wi-Fi, messy rooms, lack of parking space, unhygienic food and more.

This is because since people use several types of languages to convey the same idea, the original challenge is to classify all these variations correctly.
For example, the use of sarcasm can easily pose to be a linguistic issue for machine-based analysis. This is because even positive words can be at times misleading when it has one or more negative connotations in the same phrase, like the typical British phrase “bloody excellent” and many more.

Moreover, polite words can also be challenging to interpret using NLP as they can hide a negative impression masked inside a neutral word.
For example, the phrase “not bad” must be treated in the context of somewhat positive, even though both these words convey negative feelings.

Sentiment Analysis: Use Cases

Actually, sentiment analysis is all about reading your customer’s minds and finding out those actions that can change their moods for actions that include product launches, promotions, price variations, social projects and more.

Therefore here are a few practical and pragmatic ways that you can use this cutting-edge tool to work for your business:

  1. Customer Segmentation

If you are aware of what lead management is in easy to use CRM software you must have heard of this term as the fastest way to fail in any business is to remain oblivious to market segmentation.

This is because you must not address everyone in order to succeed but focus all your marketing efforts on individuals, companies or groups who are capable of naturally embracing and advocating your offerings.

Hence using sentiment analysis you can easily determine who these peoples are and what these things are which makes them remain happy about your business.

  1. Product Launch or Redesign

When gearing up for marketing a redesign or start an innovative product launch or, you can use sentiment analysis to read through the social media pages of your competitors to see what draws people to their offerings. And when you go through a redesign, you can even use this tool to make sure how your audience comprehends the new identity and adjust your communication to meet expectations.

Now once you get the results you can use your lead management software like easy to use CRM to filter these results by demography and thereafter define user categories.

Additionally, you can even borrow a concept from user experience with your brand and define user personas based on the results of your findings.

This is because by correlating the attitudes and words used by your customers with the spending habits you can set up your marketing efforts, lead nurturing techniques, or filter your sales cadence endeavors accordingly.

  1. Finding Brand Ambassadors and Brand Detractors

The meteoric rise of social media brought into our attention even new jobs like influencers and brand ambassadors nowadays.

Now, while there are several brands that choose prominent global celebrities and stars for these roles, you must not neglect the micro-influencers in the social media platforms that have small but extremely loyal communities around them and can be found by using sentiment analysis techniques.

Sentiment analysis can also be of use for finding perpetual detractors who are relentlessly talking negatively about your company.
Since once you can identify these detractors you can either block them, take legal measures or contact them directly to offer an explanation if necessary to protect your brand.

Finally-Evaluate Trends

You can even use sentiment analysis as your brand evolves to find real-time feedback(s) from your customers as well as to measure and evaluate long-term relationships.

Sentiment analysis can be also a helpful method to gauge the success of your brand awareness campaigns, to track subtle shifts of the position of your brand in the marketplace or measure the effectiveness of your crisis management practices.

This is because until now machines and cutting-edge software technologies have been mostly filtering reactions based on written texts, however the stellar growth and advancements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will bring in more ways to do this based on images, emojis and voice recordings of the consumers, which will result in producing a far more accurate result, since meta-verbal and non-verbal languages can eliminate some of the uncertainties regarding sarcasm and double-meaning words used by customers while posting on social media or while publishing reviews.

sign up

4 Awesome Tips For Turning Feedback From Customers Into A Marketing Strategy

Have you ever thought, when you receive feedback from your customers, how you can use customer feedback to boost your marketing strategy for business growth? There are several business owners and marketers those that view feedback as a natural part of their branding process and thereby abstain from paying attention to all the ways it can benefit their business. Now irrespective of whether it is praise or complain, feedbacks from customers are most necessary to understand your consumers, cater to their requirements, achieve your marketing goals, and more. Therefore in this article let us look into the four ways that can help your brand to turn feedbacks from customers into a marketing strategy that will help you to increase your businesses’ bottom-line.

Have you ever thought, when you receive feedback from your customers, how you can use customer feedback to boost your marketing strategy for business growth?

There are several business owners and marketers those that view feedback as a natural part of their branding process and thereby abstain from paying attention to all the ways it can benefit their business.

92% of small business owners in the U.S think that having a website is the most effective digital marketing strategy. Click To Tweet

Now irrespective of whether it is praise or complain, feedbacks from customers are most necessary to understand your consumers, cater to their requirements, achieve your marketing goals, and more.

Therefore in this article let us look into the four ways that can help your brand to turn feedbacks from customers into a marketing strategy that will help you to increase your businesses’ bottom-line:

  1. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Do you know it is 5 to 25 times more costly to acquire new customers than to retain your existing ones?

This is because moving leads through the sales funnel takes money, time and resources. But for your existing customers, they are already familiar with your brand and its offerings.

Your present customers already know what they require from your brand and it shows that they like your brand since they keep coming back for more.

Hence, if you continue providing deals and opportunities to your existing customers for their loyalty, it is natural that your present customers will continue buying from your company.

This is the reason as to why customer loyalty programs for any brand are so effective as they cater specifically to the existing customers who have already spent on your business, and are so likely to spend even more since they are familiar with your company and its offerings which adds value to your brand by catering to those high-spending customers.

Therefore, if you want to generate more sales and also keep your recurring buyers happy, create a loyalty program that caters to your high-spending customer since a little appreciation goes a long way in keeping both you and your customers smiling and satisfied in the long haul.

  1. Improve Customer Support

You must have observed that all your consumers have a unique and preferred method for getting in touch with your brand like live chat, phone, social media, emails and more. Hence, it most necessary that the support teams for your brand must pay equal attention to all these channels of communication so that they are capable of providing solutions to all.

Now, the steps that you need to take for improving your customer support activities to a lot extent depend on the feedback that you receive from your customers, which varies across businesses.

Therefore, buy CRM and gather all your customer’s opinions about your brand in a centralized repository like a CRM database to find a bigger picture, which will help you to clearly see what is working and what needs to be modified with respect to the feedbacks that you receive from your customers.

Thank the customer for taking the time to reach you out

Hence it is important as-well-as necessary that you must respond to customer feedback when it comes in so that customers can understand that you are hearing to them and your company is working for providing them a solution.

Using a customer feedback forms is the proper way to ask the right questions to the consumers of your offerings and receive the answers you are looking for.

Now, while replying to a customer’s comments and inquiries you must:

  • Have a well-thought-of strategy in place
  • Do not wait more than 24 hours and respond quickly
  • Offer the right solutions
  • Thank the customers for reaching you out with their comments and issues
  1. Refine Buyer Personas

When customers tell you what they require or what exactly they are looking for, remember that your customers are providing your brand with their valuable insights into how you can improve your business to fulfill their needs.

Hence, leverage this valuable information to refine your buyer personas in your easy to use CRM and thereafter create customer profiles that better reflect the ideal customers for your business.

This is because; if you cannot offer your consumers anything of value (contents, products or services) since you do not know your customers then you will never be able to move your leads and prospects through the sales conversion funnel, generate new leads, or produce an adequate sale for rapid business growth.

Now, buyer personas are most crucial for all modern marketers to gain insights into what their customers want since the more information they have about the customers the more streamlined their marketing strategies will be for boosting sales and revenue.

Additionally, if your brand is incapable of meeting the customer’s needs, and there is a gap in your buyer’s personas that is blocking from delivering to them what they want, your sale will decline steadily resulting in loss of revenue and business growth.

For this, you need to take into account every piece of data from your business growth technology solutions and tools and compile them together to look into the bigger picture in order to find out where your business needs improvements.

For example, if a customer complains that the check out process is complicated in your website and you also notice a progressive lull in your sale, then this feedback is a direct route for solving the problem.

Hence, take into account anything that your customers tell you that are not working with your brand and apply a new marketing strategy (especially if it a recurring issue) and address it right away.

  1. Upgrade Blog Content

Finally, if your website’s Google analytics indicates a lesser volume of traffic to your blog posts or your blog contents are receiving negative comments, revamp your content marketing strategies so that your blogs might serve your consumers in a better way.

Now, as we discussed even before, if you already have your buyer personas outlined, then selecting the ideal contents that will suit your audience’s needs is not at all as difficult as it seems to be.

Knowing your customer’s pain points, interests and inquiries in advance will make it easier for you to create content that can provide genuine solutions and therefore keep your readers engaged.

Using feedback from your consumers you can also create new content for your business website or include whitepapers, checklists and case studies or for that matter anything that brings your audience value to improve lead generation, sales and grow the email list once you buy CRM for your business.

Conclusion

If you want to expand your business, then listen to your customers. Every little piece of customer feedbacks does count because it helps to improve your present business strategies so that your brand can continue getting better and receive more positive results.

Therefore, if you want to expand your business, then it is most important that you must listen to your customers, since every feedback matters as it can help you to improve your current business strategies, recreate your sales cadence , generate sales ready leads, to find better positive results, for boosting business growth.

sign up

Sales Cadence: Why Your Sales Team Needs A Prospecting Methodology For Business Growth

Thoughtful planning is everything in sales. Hence, irrespective of whether you are writing a sales proposal, creating a sales process, or setting up a follow-up strategy, you are required to have a well-thought-out planning to get the desired result that you want. You need to create a plan that should get leads flowing smoothly through your sales pipeline and even get them engaged with your brand. However, as one of the award-winning vendors of small business CRM software solutions, we have found that most businesses do not have any follow-up plan which in other words going by the books is known as “sales cadence” for a brand or company. This is because, in most businesses the sales reps sometimes follow-up on their leads and prospects for once (probably even twice) and thereafter when they do not find a response, they move to the next prospect in their calling list.

Thoughtful planning is everything in sales.
Hence, irrespective of whether you are writing a sales proposal, creating a sales process, or setting up a follow-up strategy, you are required to have a well-thought-out planning to get the desired result that you want.
You need to create a plan that should get leads flowing smoothly through your sales pipeline and even get them engaged with your brand.
However, as one of the award-winning vendors of small business CRM software solutions, we have found that most businesses do not have any follow-up plan which in other words going by the books is known as “sales cadence” for a brand or company.

20% want to talk during the decision stage, once they're decided which product to buy. Click To Tweet

This is because, in most businesses the sales reps sometimes follow-up on their leads and prospects for once (probably even twice) and thereafter when they do not find a response, they move to the next prospect in their calling list.

Now, this inconsistency in the follow-up strategies of the sales reps not only slows down the sales process but it also makes way for opportunities to slip or fall through the crack.

In reality, prospective customers always need to hear from the sales reps on an average at least seven times before they decide on making a purchase.
Therefore, if your sales reps have given their prospects a call or have sent their prospects an email which the prospects have not responded, it does not actually mean that the prospects are disinterested in buying your offerings.

It is not strange to hear in this era of stellar growth in digitalization that probably every one of us receives hundreds of cold emails every day and so important emails can easily get buried deep inside the mailbox.
It can also be that perhaps your prospects have read your email but did not find adequate time and opportunity to respond to your calls.

Hence, you can never know the real reasons for your prospect’s silence unless you follow-up with them.

Therefore as it is has been found in different studies done on sales cadence that even if the first email sent to a prospect does not get any response, the second email has 21 percent chances to be read, the golden key to finding a response from your prospective customers is to conduct regular follow-ups with the right sales cadence or a prospecting methodology so that it can result in a sale.

WHAT IS SALES CADENCE?

To reiterate what we said even before, a sales cadence in any business is a sequence of follow-up touch-points with a prospect that helps in establishing a connection for ushering an engagement or hastening a sale.

Hence, sales cadence is typically a schedule that needs to be created for the sales reps to follow-up with each of their prospects via telephone, social media channels, or over emails.

Therefore, sales cadence is a process and a workflow that begins at the first contact and thereafter continues to evolve through a sequence of interactions until the prospective customer is either converted into a sales opportunity or they exits the sales cadence workflow and goes back to the nurturing bucket.

WHY DO YOU REQUIRE A SALES CADENCE?

The complete idea of using a sales cadence is to diversify your sales reps’ outreach by getting in touch with more than one prospect across multiple channels that are used by your business.
This is because, while certain prospective customers might seem more receptive to phone calls, others might prefer communicating through social media or emails.

Hence, in modern times it is extremely important for your sales cadence to incorporate several channels of communication to get connected with the prospects as executing a sales cadence for your sales teams not only helps your organization but also your sales reps.

– How a sales cadence can help the sales reps?

  1. Once you buy CRM for your organization, it is a lead management software that can help in creating a follow-up sequence of emails and calls for every prospect that is stored in the CRM database, which creates a structured framework that completely eliminates guesswork and therefore aids in maintain consistency between every interactions with the prospective customers of your brand.
  2. Hence using sales cadence reps can close more deals in less time by following up with their prospects on a regular basis, ensuring that their leads are moving as anticipated across the different stages in their sales funnels.

– How sales cadence aid businesses?

  1. Prospecting using outbound marketing strategies can definitely bring your business quality leads. However, without the right follow-up strategy, your conversion rates will soon become stagnant. Hence combining a sales cadence along with the right outbound sales tactics can increase conversion rates and help your business to gain its sales momentum in the marketplace.
  2. A sales cadence is created in businesses so that every sales rep abides by the same process. Since adhering to a consistent sales cadence that works for your business is one of the most fundamental keys for predicting accurate numbers that can be generated with the help of your sales process.

HOW TO BUILD A SALES CADENCE?

Building a sales cadence is never a one-time process. This is because, sales cadences differ based on the target market’s demography, personas, offerings that you want to sell, and more.
Rather it can be said that building a sales cadence involves a trial and error approach until the time you find the right cadence that works best for your business.

Nevertheless, the basic terra-firma of any sales cadence remains the same – a timeline of how and when you should contact your prospects.

Sales Cadence

Hence, here are 7 points that all sales reps should follow while designing their sales cadences:

  1. Know your target audience

Do research to understand your prospective customers, what their unique pain points are, which platforms they are most active on, and how your offerings will provide a solution to their problems.

  1. The medium of communication

To reach out to your prospects a good sales cadence must include phone calls, emails, social media channels, text messages and more.
Hence, make a quick list of the channels where your prospective customers are most likely to remain active.

For example, if your prospect is more responsive to Facebook Messenger than emails or phone calls, use that to your advantage by including it into your cadence list.

  1. The number of contact attempts

As we have suggested even before, you in most cases need to contact your prospects at least seven times to get their attention, and so an ideal sales cadence should have anywhere in-between 7-14 touch-points for conversion and sale.

  1. The interval of the touch-points

If you do not want to get on your prospect’s nerves, never touch base with a prospect more than thrice in a day, since less is more in this case, unless you want to lose your deal.

Moreover, make sure that you space your cadence in such a way that you give a day or two before contacting your prospects once again.

  1. The duration of the cadence

The effective length of a sales cadence begins from the first touch-point when your sales rep receives a prospective customer and remains until the sale is concluded, which according to researches done should be about two to four weeks.

Nevertheless, this, of course, depends on the prospect’s nature of engagement with your phone calls, social media messages, and emails.

  1. Target segmentation

One of the best approaches to build your sales cadence is to first categorize your list into tire accounts. These tires can be numbered – one, two, and three.
You can do this segmentation of your prospects by categorizing them by their company size, industry, personas, regions and others.

For example, while enterprise establishments who are your prospective customers can fall in tire one, mid-market, and small and medium businesses can fall in tire two and three respectively.

Identically, you can categorize your prospects based on their professional hierarchy whereby decision-makers can be included in tire one, mid-level managers and lower managers can fall in tire two, and three respectively.

Now, once you have segmented your prospects in your lead management software into tires, you can easily design a cadence for each of these tires based on how you must approach them, the number of touch-points they need, the duration and respective channels needed to perform these cadences.

  1. The content is king

Finally, the chances of your prospects getting back to your reps and your brand primarily depend on the quality and uniqueness of your content.

Hence to catch the attention of your prospects, your content must be informative as well as intriguing, since even if you have an awardable sales cadence but a poor content, your cadence strategy will never take off the ground.

EXAMPLE OF A GOOD SALES CADENCE FOR B2B SALES

As we have stated even earlier that sales cadences can vary according to the personas you are reaching out, the size of the company, the target industry, and many more variables.

Nevertheless, here is an example of an ideal sales cadence which can help you to approach a company’s top-level executives:

Day 1

Send a personalized email

To do this start by finding out more about your prospective customer using social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Thereafter understand your prospect’s business and find out how you can benefit them by selling your offerings.

After this research has been done, send a personalized email using the data gathered about your prospect, accompanied by a connection request on LinkedIn.

  • In this email you can congratulate your prospect on their recent achievements, elaborate a little so that the prospect understands that are well-aware of their industry and end the email as to how your solution can help boost their businesses’ productivity.

Day 3

Send an email pitching your offerings

To do this empathize on your prospective customer’s pain-points, elaborate on specific business use cases and express your thoughts as to how your brand helped them to overcome these dark areas of problems.

  • In this email, explain why you are reaching out to your prospect, their pain points and the solution that you can provide to alleviate their issues. You can also talk about any of your prospect’s competitors and how your business has helped them on similar lines.
    In the end, ask your prospect- what is the best way to get 15 min of their precious time?

Day 6

Send the first follow-up email

This is your first follow-up email; therefore keep it short, simple and crisp. Remember the goal of this email is to find a simple “Yes” or “No” from your prospect.

  • In this email, you can say that you just wanted to follow-up and see if your prospect has received your previous emails. Ask your prospect if they will allow a short phone call or an email exchange and thereafter decide if they would like to take the discussion further for knowing more about your offerings.

Day 8

Make a phone call (leave a voicemail and an email if unanswered)

In this step in your sales cadence make the first call to your prospect (preferably during the evening) and if it goes unanswered leave a voice mail with your name, company’s name and phone number, requesting the prospect to call back at their convenience.

You can also drop an email to your prospect saying you tried to call them and have left a voice mail in their absence.

Day 11

Send the second follow-up email

This email should essentially talk about the features of your offerings that are in relevance to your prospect’s pain points.

Day 13

Send the third follow-up email

In this email, you can send more success stories and case studies of how your offerings have helped others in uprooting problems associated with their businesses.

Day 16

Breakup email

This must essentially be the last email in your communication chain, in which you should for the one last time highlight the challenges faced by your prospect and remind them how your solution can help them to overcome their pain points.

Always remember to end this final breakup email in a positive note, so that you can leave an open door for future potential collaborations and opportunities.

SALES CADENCE- BEST PRACTICES

  • The best time to make cold calls is from 1000 Hrs till 1230 Hrs and thereafter from 1400 Hrs till 1600 Hrs.
  • The worst time to make cold calls is from 0800 Hrs till 1000 Hrs.
  • The worst time to call is the best time to send emails to your prospects.
  • During cold calls talk less about yourself and try to learn more about your prospects.
  • Never make use of more than three touch-points in a day. For example, if your prospect does not pick up the phone, leave a voice message and an email, but make sure that you do not exceed three touch-points on the same day.
  • When you receive “No” from prospects try to understand the reason for the rejection which will help you to identify patterns and improve on your offerings.

HOW TO MEASURE AND TRACK THE RESULTS?

Manually following up with your leads and prospects can be really challenging, especially when you are dealing with a very high volume of leads.

Therefore, buy CRM and use this lead management software that can leverage technology to automate the sales cadence with Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools.

Now once you have a sales cadence to know if it is working and judge the success of your strategy here are four metrics that you need to track with the help of your easy to use CRM software:

  1. Email open and click-through rate
    This shows if your email has caught the prospect’s attention, and makes you aware when there is room to change or tweak your email outreach strategies.
  1. Email open to reply ratio
    A high email reply rate signifies that your email contents resonate with your prospect’s pain points and if it is not it means you need to rework on your email content’s verbiage.
  1. Call to appointments ratio
    Tracking this metric helps you to understand your ideal customer’s profile and lets you decide on the market and industry you should focus on (and also hold off) for selling your offerings.
  1. Bounce rate
    In a gist, this shows how clean your email list is as a high bounce rate calls for pruning the email list in your CRM database.

CONCLUSION

A sales cadence makes sure that your prospective leads do not fall through the crack and are steadily moving across the different successive stages in your sales funnel.

Therefore test the sales cadence that you build and adjust it if needed until you discover what best works for your business.

sign up