Tag: Sales CRM

Business Growth Ideas: How To Close Deals With Prospective Leads (You Do Not Like)

There are times when the personalities of some people do not mesh. Just like any other areas in our lives, this is even true in sales, in spite of the fact that people often stereotype sales reps of having a personality like social champions, nevertheless, if you work in sales and is seeking business growth it is important and critical that you must be able to deal with prospects and customers who have certain obtrusive personalities that might even clash with your own. Now as a salesperson you need not always have to be the best friend with a prospective customer to work together and find them a solution with your brand’s offerings.

There are times when the personalities of some people do not mesh.
Just like any other areas in our lives, this is even true in sales, in spite of the fact that people often stereotype sales reps of having a personality like social champions, nevertheless, if you work in sales and is seeking business growth it is important and critical that you must be able to deal with prospects and customers who have certain obtrusive personalities that might even clash with your own.

80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the meeting. 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up. Click To Tweet

Now as a salesperson you need not always have to be the best friend with a prospective customer to work together and find them a solution with your brand’s offerings.

Therefore here are certain vital tips as to how you can close a deal with even an unfriendly prospect inside your CRM software platform’s database that you may not like:

Never Ever Try To Rush It

It is very natural that as a sales rep you can be obviously tempted to try to rush a deal in your sales pipeline so that you do not have to invest more time with a challenging prospect in your CRM database.

However, when you and your prospective lead are not quite comfortably remaining on the same page, it is important that you must lie low and take time to help build a sense of trust and understanding with the prospective buyer of your offerings.

This is because, in the end, it is no wonder that you both are in fact on the same side and so working together will help both to cherish the best outcome.

Swallow Your Pride

There are several times we have observed as a vendor of CRM software for small and medium businesses, that dislike for a prospective customer often stems from that person disregarding your opinion and advice.

This is because as a sales representative of an offering, it is most likely that you do understand a lot more about what you are suggesting, but then again, an individual who has never met you has no reason to consider you as an expert.
Therefore, there is bound to remain a bit of uncertainty until you establish your credibility and credentials to the person on the other side of the line and in B2B selling show them ways for business growth.

Hence, try to remain humble and acknowledge your prospect’s doubts since brushing their concerns and pain-points aside will only drive you both further away from the imminent sale.

Find Common Ground

No matter how poles apart you and your prospective customer may be, there are going to be for certain a few aspects that you have in common.

Therefore, take your time to tease out these common likings and disliking between you and your prospect, and your experience will be significantly more pleasant.

Make some small talks with your prospect, asking them about their interests and hobbies, and thereafter whatever you do never lie about being interested in what they are (even if it is illogical, or not true).
Since they are going to figure it out that you are not interested in their favorite Hip-Hop or R&B band pretty quickly if you fake it.

Focus On The Big Picture

Even if working in tandem with this customer is torture and you are deep inside the ‘5th circle of Hell’ try to focus on the big picture to calm down your fury.
Just remember once you hopefully close the deal you will never have to see the prospect you do not like anymore.

Hence, stay strong, remain composed, and think about the commission check that you will be receiving once you win the deal.

Pass It Off If Needed

Well, this is the last resort, so think twice before you take this step and even if you do it, never makes this a habit.

Now, if you and your prospective customer will really never see eye to eye, it is time that you might as well pass the deal (especially if the deal is not exceptionally large) to another member of your sales team.

In other words, pass the baton if working with this prospect is truly making you feel miserable, however, before that always remain sure that you have used all your other options first before deciding on this ultimate step and thereafter select another prospect that you might nurture from your easy to use CRM software solution’s database of prospective leads.

Conclusion

As a sales rep, you need to be able to get your work done for business growth even when you do not like some of your prospects.

Therefore in a gist, although making deals with prospects that you do not like may seem to be a frustrating act, however, by using a proactive customer relationship platform like sales CRM software whereby you can find a 360-degree view of your prospects and customers can decrease your sales cycle and make you close these hated deals successfully in lesser time.

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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.

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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.

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Why Do You Need A Scalable Business CRM Software Tool In SMBs For Finding Rapid Growth

The number of startups and SMBs in the US since 1982 (according to the U.S. Small Business Administration) has increased by more than 48.7%. New businesses are starting every other day by ambitious businesspersons who want to lead a company and run it on their own. But then again a startup is a completely different game than an expanding medium-scale or large business since with growth come obstacles. Therefore how do we take our team, and meet these growing demands in small businesses? How do we successfully expand to cherish rapid business growth? Many SMB owners make business growth tougher than it is. This is because, they complicate their products and services, over-think their strategies, and fear too much about the stability of their employees.

The number of startups and SMBs in the US since 1982 (according to the U.S. Small Business Administration) has increased by more than 48.7%.
New businesses are starting every other day by ambitious businesspersons who want to lead a company and run it on their own.
But then again a startup is a completely different game than an expanding medium-scale or large business since with growth come obstacles.
Therefore how do we take our team, and meet these growing demands in small businesses? How do we successfully expand to cherish rapid business growth?
Many SMB owners make business growth tougher than it is. This is because, they complicate their products and services, over-think their strategies, and fear too much about the stability of their employees.
It is beyond any doubt that these are indeed important issues, but these problems pail out when compared to the one area that contributes most to the success of any business: Sales.
Now sales teams in SMBs that follow a rigorous and methodical sales process or a business CRM software tool on average according to CSO Insights, make more than 33 percent growth in their production and revenue than the sales teams that do not.

CRM applications can increase revenue by up to 41% per sales representative – Finances Online Click To Tweet

Therefore to find rapid growth, small business owners have to invest enough time every day in ‘Sales’ and so businesses that have adopted easy to use sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform experience seamless and better growth.

The Importance of Best Small Business CRM Software for SMB

The importance of small business CRM software is the need to address the ever-growing size of the business.

This is because today’s small business is tomorrow’s enterprise, and therefore successful startup owners that have adopted a CRM solution that grows with their business are the ones that realize stellar business growth.

The proof is in the pudding:

According to an infographic published by Bizhumm, sales CRM solutions have been known to boost revenue by 41 percent per salesperson, increase lead conversion rate by more than 300 percent while decreasing the cost of sales and marketing by 23 percent.

Therefore to empower sales and grow revenue small businesses need to implement the right resources and business management tools to do it.

Now if you are shopping around for your best CRM for small business, to help in your business growth, you need to accept the fact that a business CRM software goes well beyond just record-keeping.
This is the reason top-performing establishments use their CRM to its fullest potentials for automating tasks, such as marketing and customer support while ensuring that as their number of employees grows so does the capability of their CRM platform to manage its load.

Hence in this article let us explore a few key areas that best small business CRM software solutions help startups and small businesses to grow:

Improves decision making

Easy to use CRM technology delivers visibility into vital customer data. Since the more comprehensive and detailed are your reports, the better you will be able to measure sales activities, forecast sales, and track your business performances.
It has been found in certain research that most sales-oriented organizations are 38 percent more likely to use CRM for collecting sales analytics and customer information for getting informed on their ongoing customer interactions and touch-points.

Without the information gathered from analytics found in your best CRM for small business, you will not be able to focus on the big picture solutions for your company or empower your sales, marketing, and support teams to focus on opportunities.

Enhance productivity

With business CRM software solutions, your marketing, sales and support reps can seamlessly and safely automate their tasks apart from gaining quick access to customer information as CRM ensures all critical information remains stored in a single place within the CRM database.

Therefore as your business grows, you can significantly boost your brand’s productivity by having a scalable CRM platform that grows along with your prospering business, and also keep all records of your customer’s data which includes all customer history and buyer journey information stored in its database for boosting cross-selling and up-selling activities.

Promotes teamwork        

Growing small businesses and startups requires a scalable business CRM software platform in order to make marketing, sales, customer support work in a more aligned manner since it has been found in research by Aberdeen Group, that companies that have strong marketing and sales alignment achieve more than 20 percent increase in their annual growth rates.

Now if you are using a QuickBooks CRM solution, which even integrates accounting with your best small business CRM software when it is combined with sales and customer service modules in the CRM, it not only boosts productivity but also increases customer experience and promotes seamless teamwork that is needed for rapid business growth.

Therefore an all-in-one CRM makes it possible to open up lines of communication between your teams.

Improve calling services

Easy to use CRM, helps businesses to make outbound calls, receive incoming calls, record calls, create personalized calling scripts, automate voice mails and create many other telephony-based activates, which helps employees using CRM to quickly manage, assign and resolve incidents when these processes are automated.

Therefore, scalability in a CRM becomes a necessity when small businesses have ever-growing data of customer information in their CRM database.

Provide mobile access to data

In the present times, key data no longer can remain confined to the office. Therefore mobile CRM technology provides your team instant access to data which helps them to view sales and customer support activities in real-time.

This is because, with a complete view of customer history, pricing history, and several other types of lead intelligence data which can be seen from any mobile device, the best small business CRM software makes it possible to gain access to information that is needed for any growing business.

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist business CRM software is a scalable business tool that not only provides small businesses with the commitment to sell better than their competitors, but it also enables collaborations across departments that results in providing world-class customer experience which helps to create grounds for new business and aids in finding rapid revenue growth.

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How To Use The Best Sales CRM Software To Segment Customers And Promote Your Brand

In a gist customer segmentation is a powerful strategy whereby you divide your customer base into individual groups that share similar characteristics which can be easily done once you are using any of the best sales CRM software for finding revenue growth. Segmentation of the customers is important because when you try to use the one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing strategies, even the best strategy will come up with mixed results. This happens because while some customers may like one campaign, others may not. Therefore by executing a customer segmentation strategy once you buy the best sales CRM software, you can easily use the tool to divide your customer base into subgroups with similar attributes, after which you can tailor your marketing plans and create contents around those subgroups and personalize your marketing messages to better communicate with different groups of customers for rapid sales and business growth.

What Is Customer Segmentation?

In a gist customer segmentation is a powerful strategy whereby you divide your customer base into individual groups that share similar characteristics which can be easily done once you are using any of the best sales CRM software for finding revenue growth.

The global mobile CRM market will grow 11% to $15 billion worldwide this year. - MarketingDive Click To Tweet

Segmentation of the customers is important because when you try to use the one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing strategies, even the best strategy will come up with mixed results.

This happens because while some customers may like one campaign, others may not.

Therefore by executing a customer segmentation strategy once you buy the best sales CRM software, you can easily use the tool to divide your customer base into subgroups with similar attributes, after which you can tailor your marketing plans and create contents around those subgroups and personalize your marketing messages to better communicate with different groups of customers for rapid sales and business growth.

Now as CRM is a business growth technology that helps in streamlining this workflow and process so that you can reach the leads and customers who are most receptive to your offering(s), here is why combining easy to use CRM software with customer segmentation strategy benefits your brand:

1. Analyze Patterns and Trends

Business CRM software is a tool that collects customer data and stores them in one place for easy reference. Now, since CRM is an important tool for your customer service teams, this lead management software harvests customer data, such as a prospects purchasing behaviors, location, interest and hobbies, age group and more for your marketing staffs, after which the tool can also analyze patterns and trends in this data for providing accurate results needed for proper nurturing of the leads without any guesswork.

2. Determine the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

Once you buy the best sales CRM software and implement it effectively, the application helps the users to create predictive models that aids in determining profitable customer-base based on the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of the customers.

Using a sales CRM, the users of this business growth technology can help the users to ascertain which segment of their market has the highest CLV and thereafter send marketing materials that resonate with those customers.

Now, since CRM also helps in discovering customers with a low CLV you can use this tool and use the information found in the CRM database of those customers to find methods that can increase their lifetime value with your brand and company.

For example, Facebook allows its users to filter their posts based on age, gender, interest, relationship status, location and more.

Hence using CRM and integrating it with social media tools you can create posts that target the bulk of your low CLV customer-base and reach a cross-section of your demography instantly and even address a specific audience on LinkedIn and other social media websites.

3. Increase Sales

According to certain research conducted by leading global market research organizations, all in one CRM is a software that boosts sales by 30 percent.
Hence, combining easy to use CRM software platforms with customer segmentation strategy can generate even more successful results.

This is because, using this approach you can easily get to the right customer with the right message at the right time, a thing that you just cannot do with generic “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategies.

For example, once you buy the best sales CRM software you can easily target your customers with suggestions on products and services based on their previous purchase histories.

In fact, one of the biggest brands across the globe relies on marketing CRM software solutions to sift through a plethora of customer data, something that marketers are unable to do manually, or by using spreadsheets, for up-selling and cross-selling their offerings.

4. Increase Engagement

For the most part, engaged customers are always more profitable customers for any business. According to research more than 86 percent of buyers will pay for a better CX (Customer Experience), while customers who are totally engaged represent on an average 23 percent of all premium customers for any brand when it comes to profitability, revenue and growth of relationship when compared to average buyers in the marketplace.

Therefore using easy to use CRM as a business growth technology solution for segmenting customers will not only help you to separate your buyer’s based on demography but also find out other common characteristics as per their sales cadence and collective characteristics so that you can engage your customers on a deeper personal level.

Conclusion

Enterprise CRM is a tool that not only provides you with useful insights into your customer’s attitude and behaviors by tracking interactions and collecting sales data, but it can also send powerful marketing material to smaller groups in the CRM database who share similar traits and comparable sales cadence, resulting in increased customer lifetime value and higher rates of engagements.

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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.

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7 Metrics That You Must Cover In Your Monthly Sales Report To Impress Your Employee

As a manager in sales it is ultimately your responsibility to keep your sales team accountable to their or organizational and personal goals- but how? Well, we do agree with you when you say that tracking sales metrics for creating monthly sales report is extremely time-consuming. Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions with thousands of easy to use CRM implementations across the global marketplace here are some of the key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you must focus on to create your team’s monthly sales report despite the overwhelming amount of data being thrown on your way. And which can be your secret weapon in developing high-performing sales teams predicting rapid business growth.

As a manager in sales it is ultimately your responsibility to keep your sales team accountable to their or organizational and personal goals- but how?
Well, we do agree with you when you say that tracking sales metrics for creating monthly sales report is extremely time-consuming.

Sales teams that are productive and have effective workflows are 81% more likely to use a CRM system consistently. Click To Tweet

Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions with thousands of easy to use CRM implementations across the global marketplace here are some of the key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you must focus on to create your team’s monthly sales report despite the overwhelming amount of data being thrown on your way. And which can be your secret weapon in developing high-performing sales teams predicting rapid business growth.

# 1

Opportunity-to-Win Ratio

The opportunity-to-win ratio which is also known as the win rate is used for measuring the success of your sales team per opportunity over a predefined time window.

Now to calcite this KPI you need to compare the number of closed and won opportunities against all closed opportunities within the same time frame (both “closed won” and “closed lost”), which can provide you as a manager a high-level view of the overall success score of your sales team.

Managers in sales can even track this KPI in the monthly sales reports to identify strengths and weaknesses among individual reps and thereafter take corrective actions accordingly.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your sales CRM software:

Win Rate = the number of “closed won” opportunities divided by the number of “closed” opportunities (“closed won” + “closed lost”) in the same frame of time.

# 2

Conversion Rate

This KPI which is also known as the Close Rate is measured to calculate the effectiveness of your sales funnel.

Now we all know irrespective of whether we buy leads from the marketplace or use a free lead generation tool, the process of lead generation starts at the top of the funnel, and thereafter every lead works its way down the funnel which requires the deft expertise of the members of the sales team.

In other words, conversion rate provides both marketing and sales insights to the quality of leads arriving into the sales funnel through the marketing campaigns created by your marketing team.

Hence to measure your teams’ lead conversion rate, primarily you as a manager need to determine what is considered “being converted” in the eyes of your employees.

Now typically any lead is deemed to be converted once the lead becomes a paying customer.

Now the average conversion rate generally varies from one industry to another. Nevertheless, it is critical to track the conversion rate from either side which includes SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) or MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your business CRM software:

Lead Conversion Rate = (The total number of New Customers divided by the total number of Leads) multiplied by 100.

# 3

Average Deal Size

This KPI is going to provide you with the initiation point to enlarge the size of your deals.

It is a tool that is going to aid you as a manager to keep track of inflowing revenues and act as a pivotal guideline for how many deals you require to close to reach (or even surpass) your quotas.

This KPI also helps the managers in sales to identify at-risk opportunities.

This is because, if you keep track of this KPI month-over-month as you create your monthly sales report, this metric can help you understand how or when you need to change your sales pipeline.

For example, if you increase the average deal size of your orders you might attract leads with a wider range of needs than what you required in the previous months.

# 4

Average Days to Close

This KPI is based on how long your sales reps take to close a deal right from the lead’s first point of contact to the conversion of the lead into a loyal customer.

In other words, this is a metric that can provide you insights as a manager as to how fast your sales reps are capable of moving prospects through their sales pipelines and turn them into revenue for your company.

Now different sales cycles are needed to close different deals. For example, a bigger opportunity might take a significantly longer time to close than one which will generate lesser revenue.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your all in one CRM software:

Average Days to Close = Add all days it took to close deals for the month and after that divide, the number by the number of deals closed that month.

# 5

Time Spent In Each Stage Of The Pipeline

Knowing about the number of deals that are there in each stage of your business growth tool’s sales pipeline will help to reveal how your prospects are moving through your pipeline and also where there are facing bottlenecks.

In other words, this metric provides deep insights into developing different sales techniques to push prospects from one stage to the next.

However, as a sales manager, you must ensure that the stages in your sales pipeline are based on what is actually happening in the sales arena, and not on how your sales reps feel, since you can always feel confident about a deal, but it never means that the prospect will obviously close.

# 6

Customer Churn Rate

This KPI in the easy to use CRM answers the question: How good are you at keeping your customers?

Therefore, if there is just one sales metric that you want to show to your employees in your monthly sales report and focus on every month – CCR would likely be the only one.

This is because knowing your brand’s churn rate means knowing why or how often your customer is leaving you for another in your marketplace.

Remember once your brand’s churn rate becomes too high, it means you surely need to make improvements in your sales tactics and find new business growth ideas, for the future success of your company.

# 7

Average Lead Response Time

According to research, it states that more than 50 percent of buyers choose the vendor or seller that responds first.

Therefore, learning this metric helps to understand the average time your sales reps take to reach out to a lead after they have been identified as a prospective contact for your company.

Now even though each company will have their own description of what a lead means to their business, but typically in general a lead refers to an individual or organization downloading a piece of content or fill out a request for a demo.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your marketing CRM software:

Average Lead Response Time = Sum of the number of minutes/hours/day to respond for all contacts divided by the number of contacts in your CRM database.

Conclusion

Now even though there are in reality endless sales metrics that you can use for filling up your monthly sales report.

These metrics and KPIs illustrated above will not only scale productivity but it will help to easily boost the performance of your sales team and so make you find respect among your employees as an ideal “Boss” – showing them the path for rapid and sure business growth.

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The Key Benefits Of Using A Sales Tracker CRM Software For Rapid Business Growth

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers. This is where comes the role of sales tracker CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time. Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business. The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like sales tracking CRM software include, as follows…

Customers are very important when we think of any business; nevertheless, most businesses do not have a proper plan and clear strategy to capitalize on existing and prospective customers.

This is where comes the role of sales tracking CRM software which ensures you provide the best possible service, keeps automated business practices in place, ensure customers never face billing-related problem keeping both reminders and bills on time.

Hence a complete five-star service is what Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM brings for your business.

With 44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2021, up from 38% in 2020. This is not just to keep up with their competitors, but also as a result of improving sales. Click To Tweet

The major benefits that your business can get from business growth technology like sales tracking CRM software include:

1. Understand customers better with enhanced and increased knowledge

When you have more and better information about your customer you are better placed to take a decision on what service you can deliver delivered irrespective of whether it is selling an offering or communicating something to your customers.

2. Improve process to find a better return on investment

Once you buy a sales CRM and set up your business processes aided by an easy to use CRM the main improvement that you can see is more conversion of the leads, better interaction with customers leading to a more satisfied and happy customer base.

3. Better coordination between sales and marketing teams

The functions of the marketing team lead to better sales output. The major gap between sales and marketing teams has always been a lack of a dedicated channel of communication. Easy to use CRM is a business growth technology that bridges the gap and creates connections that result in a more cohesive operation between the employees in your company.

4. Create a world-class customer experience

As a vendor of award-winning small business CRM software, working with several businesses we have learned how to bring better customer experience and how it can change the ways most people do business in their company. In fact, a sales tracking CRM software builds standard processes that help not only the in-house employees in business but also networking partners and external agencies associated with the company.

5. Empower customer service team

It has been a worry of most customer service desk of not able to provide support because of the lack of a unified and answerable system operating for all departments within the company. CRM is a business growth technology that makes every department within the organization liable to deliver its job on time and builds a better and coordinated system to help customer service teams to provide world-class services to the consumers of their brand’s offerings.

6. Plan the ways marketing budget is spent and improving on the existing ways

Want to check how your email marketing working or how the sales team converting the prospective leads? Want to know whether leads are being followed up in time and with correct details? Buy CRM to end all your worries and get them solved overnight. Additionally when SFA (Sales Force Automation) is integrated with easy to use CRM it helps in creating a better-planned marketing campaign and thereby aid in improved business functionalities.

7. Help in accurate decision making

Easy to use CRM empowers you to take correct decisions based on many facts and data stored in the CRM database. With the power of data, this business growth technology helps you to know the working styles of the employees and whether their service gets delivered in time, which helps the management to take on time, better and accurate decisions for consistent revenue growth.

8. Find better and new prospects with the use of modern technology

These days easy to use CRM can be integrated with social media which helps you to stay connected with your prospects and customers. Social media listening enables CRM platforms not only to ushers a more cohesive work culture in the organization but it also increases point to point delivery of the work faster bringing more liability on each head. This is how better and improved prospect finding starts and continues for sales growth.

9. Build long term relationships

CRM brings many important things on Sales Force Automation which your customers need like an immediate and timely response of their queries, easy availability of information, and automation of business process helping them stay with you for more by keeping them happy and satisfied over time.

Takeaway

Therefore with the clear intent to keep customers happy and to keep all other related processes well placed and automated buy a sales tracking CRM to keep your entire organizations focus on not only keeping customers satisfied but also reduce churn leading to increased business growth.

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How To Build Successful Customer Journey Milestones Along The Digital Transformation Pathway

As the old saying says: “you do not find a second chance to make a first impression”, hence each touchpoint in the customer journey milestones matter throughout the journey of the customer through your brand. In fact, the primary ninety days of a customer relationship with any business can easily determine the outcome whether it has been good or bad. Therefore, businesses must focus and double the efforts to satisfy their customers during these first ninety days which mostly includes processes like implementation, product or service training, and initial relationship cadences, even though it is important to note that the journey to customer success is a constant endeavor and so it never really ends. This is because, post-implementation, you will find most of your customers in your easy to use CRM software’s database will need to feel that they have your company’s support at every level.

As the old saying says: “you do not find a second chance to make a first impression”, hence each touchpoint in the customer journey milestones matter throughout the journey of the customer through your brand.

54 percent of B2B marketers say they feel empowered to collaborate with their sales teams. Click To Tweet

In fact, the primary ninety days of a customer relationship with any business can easily determine the outcome whether it has been good or bad.

Therefore, businesses must focus and double the efforts to satisfy their customers during these first ninety days which mostly includes processes like implementation, product or service training, and initial relationship cadences, even though it is important to note that the journey to customer success is a constant endeavor and so it never really ends.

This is because, post-implementation, you will find most of your customers in your easy to use CRM software’s database will need to feel that they have your company’s support at every level.

As one of the prominent vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms, we have often seen that companies too many times finish their implementation in a proactive manner and then gradually recedes into a reactive state.

Hence, we suggest that the best practice in this digital transformation path is to develop successful customer journey milestones with definite tasks and align them throughout the whole lifecycle of the customer.

Focus on the Entire Journey (Not Just a Single Aspect)

Remember you must never look into one single aspect in your customer journey milestones, but rather one of the main ways to uphold customer successes to focus on the entire journey of the customers through your brand.

This is because once you delve deep into the process, you will realize that your customers undergo and experience several changes through their journey on their pathway.

Hence creating a seamless customer experience or CX throughout their lifecycle aids them to know what they need from your company and in turn, this makes them feel valued, irrespective of where they are in the journey with your brand.

Therefore just after you develop a strong journey, your next goal will be to put metrics or measurements which you can find once you use an all in one CRM software for your business, which will allow you to quickly measure success and optimize pitfalls for further improvements.

For this you must take an outside-in approach and measure metrics that include:

The Customer Journey for Companies of All Sizes

Even though creating a customer journey milestone map is important for any organization that wishes to provide a world-class experience to its customers, it might look different for companies at various stages. For example:

For startup organizations, the journey can be siloed, limited, and even fragmented. This is because at this point, very few processes are in place and so their teams must shepherd the customers across onboarding, renewal, and other critical milestones. Hence customers involved with startup organizations the customer journey might often feel scrappy.

Now for emerging companies, the focus is often on onboarding and implementation touch-points on the customer journey milestones since those are the primary experiences that customers will face with mid-sized businesses. Therefore these organizations work hard to define these processes first and foremost while guiding their customers.

Finally, for scaling and enterprise-level companies, or scaling businesses, the customer journey is defined and executed across the entire Customer Lifecycle and is most strongly proactive in nature.

Someone Always Owns the Moment

If you have heard Walt Disney “someone always owns the moment” is a phrase that he often used in his approach to just about everything.

This is because Disney always understood the consistency of great moments which creates great experiences, and these experiences provide happy memories, and creating awesome memories is how Disney measured success in his wonderland.

Now the same principle also applies to customer experience or CX.

So who owes these moments and when- let us deep dive and find out more:

Best Practices to Create the Customer Success Journey Map Easily

As you develop your customer success journey map, you need to involve your whole team in the process, and it will take a lot of collaborations and alignments to do that.

This is because your goal (the outcome) should be that everyone in your business understands their specific roles and timings in help your customers succeed, and so here are few principles that you can undertake which can help you during the process:

  1. Always use an outside-in approach

Ensure that you view the journey primarily from the customer’s perspective, rather than from your company’s end. This is so since the customer journey map begins at brand impression and thereafter guides the customer towards success (renewals).

  1. Define the handoffs

Identify the handoffs between departments as you build your journey. For this, it should be clear who does what and when?

Additionally, you also need to provide new game plans on how your information will circulate and travel and be consumed between handoff processes within your teams.

  1. Focus on key moments of truth

Always remain vigilant to define success milestones along the journey. For this make it clear to everyone in your teams that these customer journey milestones are actually moments that manifest a customer in moving and progressing and so it implies that they are having success with your offerings, which in other words are known as “moments of truth” in businesses.

  1. Share with customers and provide them insights

Sharing the customer journey map with your loyal customers and having them help you with the process by validating whether things are true or not can help businesses a lot in forming a realistic customer journey mapping program for their company.

Therefore do not feel shy or vulnerable to get their feedback, we can assure you that it will pay its dividends in the long run.

  1. Measure and optimize the journey map

As your organization and customers evolve, remember this map will change accordingly. Therefore do not indulge in mapping the customer journey milestones as you did a year ago.

Hence ensure that you are measuring the results and optimizing your customer’s journey on a regular basis that can foretell business growth.

Conclusion

No matter the stage your company is in right now, as one of the award-winning vendors of sales CRM tools, we can assure you that it is never too early to start thinking about your customer’s journey through your brand, which you can ask by asking questions like:

  • What does your current business process look like?
  • Where do you need improvements?
  • Where and how could you improve your customer journey process?
  • What does a successful customer look; like for your company?

This is because it is only after you have a clear picture of success, you can then work backward to define your customer’s journey, its milestones and delineate hands off that can help you to take customer success from being just a departmental process and move it to the forefront of your company’s culture, vision, and more.

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Sales Lead Definition With Examples – For Generating New Leads On The Go

Generating sales leads is one of the most critical aspects of every company’s marketing and sales process. This is because finding promising leads and thereafter converting them into loyal customers is an important part of any company’s workflows, ensuring that their business continues successfully, Therefore if you are interested in knowing the sales lead definition with example and how they factor into the sales process, primarily you need to know what they are and how businesses find them from the marketplace.

Generating sales leads is one of the most critical aspects of every company’s marketing and sales process. This is because finding promising leads and thereafter converting them into loyal customers is an important part of any company’s workflows, ensuring that their business continues successfully.
Therefore if you are interested in knowing the sales lead definition with examples and how they factor into the sales process, primarily you need to know what they are and how businesses find them from the marketplace.

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

So let us look over here at different types of sales leads and after that discuss some of the effective lead generation methods which can bring more sales revenue to your business and, consequently, profits within a very short time.

What are sales leads?

A sales lead is an individual or company that has the potential to become a paying customer.

Therefore leads are prospects at the earliest stages of becoming a loyal customer.

In fact, leads are people or organizations that have expressed interest in the offerings of a brand by undertaking some sort of action, which can be clicking on a link or filling out a form.

Hence to turn a lead into a customer, businesses must first contact the lead and then provide information and data about their products or services to close the sale.

There are in general three types of leads which most of us have learned in our business growth training that includes:

  • Cold leads

A cold lead is an organization or an individual who practically knows nothing about your brand or your offerings.

It can always be that a cold lead may not have shown any specific curiosity or interest in your offerings yet- but still, they could be a perfect fit as your consumer.

Hence in order to appeal to the cold leads, the members of your sales team must remain extra careful not to overwhelm them with information, but rather present a concise introduction of your brand and your business and provide them a low-risk opportunity to interact with your offerings.

There are several businesses that purchase cold leads using professional lead generation services from the marketplace that meet geographical and demographical criteria and thereafter exert considerable efforts to persuade the lead to become their customers.

  • Warm leads

These leads are the entities that have demonstrated some interest in a company’s offerings but have not yet expressed any desire to make a purchase.

Now warm leads that you have in your easy to use CRM software’s database, might respond to a brand’s social media post or have filled out a form to receive more information about a certain offering that your company sells in the marketplace.

Warm leads can also be those who are interested in a company’s brand or mission but have not made any commitment to support the company monetarily or people who have contacted the company in the past or have responded to the company’s general marketing efforts and so have the potential to become customers with a relatively small amount of effort.

  • Hot leads

Finally, the hot leads (the most sought-after leads for any business) are individuals or companies who have expressed a positive desire to purchase a certain offering that you sell in the marketplace.

Now hot leads, in general, are well-informed on the product and services sold by your company, they are also agreeable to the price.

Hot leads are mostly consumers who have received a recommendation for your brand, conducted in-depth independent research, and have decided to purchase on their own.

There might be also hot leads in your sales CRM software’s database that might have originally been cold or warm leads that were effectively converted by the sales and marketing teams.

For the hot leads mostly the only effort required by the company is closing the sale and completing the transaction.

Where can you find new leads?

Now that you know the sales lead definition with examples here are several effective and time-tested methods that businesses use to find and generate leads.

Therefore as one of the best vendors of CRM for small and medium business and startups, here are some of the best lead generation practices for SMBs.

1. Website

The most basic tool that any business need for lead generation is a website that effectively features your company’s mission, vision, pricing, and offerings.

Actually, websites are landing pages to which all other lead generation tools and methods are redirected.

Now the website of your company should present your brand’s offerings in a way that must appeal to a wide range of customers.

Most importantly the website should also request the visitors to input their contact information as soon as they arrive at the home page.

There are several methods you can attract visitors to your website which includes email marketing or ensure that your website appears in the search engine results by using effective SEO techniques that can make your brand show up on the first page.

The technique used for website lead generation, in general, takes the form of a pop-up that greets the visitor and asks them to type their email address into a field after which once the company receives the visitor’s email address they send the visitor a series of follow-up emails that contains more detailed information about their offerings and also invite the lead to contact customer support if they have any other questions on their mind.

2. Social Media

Another most effective tool that is used nowadays for the generation of leads is social media platforms.

This is because, creating a company profile for services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram provide opportunities to businesses for promoting their brand and offerings to millions of users on the internet.

However, to generate leads using social media platforms, you need to post contents that are relevant to your brand on a regular basis and thereafter invite viewers to interact with your company.

You can share polls, quizzes, contests, and giveaways on your social media platforms that can, not only keep your followers engaged but also set your brand apart from other competitors in the marketplace.

Now the ultimate goal of all social media activities will be to direct your brand’s followers to your business website or any other landing page where they can purchase your offerings.

As a leading vendor of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, we have found that promotions like online discounts, free trials, or free of cost shipping and installation can help to persuade leads found in social media to be a customer.

3. Customer Referral System

Finally one of the other effective types of lead generation is a customer referral system, whereby companies provide incentives to their existing customers to refer their brand to their family, coworkers, friends, and relatives.

Now, this is a highly effective and beneficial lead generation tactic since over here the potential leads are more likely to trust a recommendation from their known ones and so these leads are mostly “hot leads” which are low hanging fruits that are easy to close and so are cherished by most companies.

Takeaway

Even though there are many other ways to find leads for your businesses, nevertheless these three tried and tested methods have bought revenue for most B2B and B2C companies.

However, it must be remembered that any lead generation strategy needs patience and time and also a whole lot of A/B testing to get to a situation where it puts your brand to find more leads.

So be wise with your marketing efforts and do not be lured by shady lead generation techniques that promise to find your business excellent leads from the marketplace.

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6 Christmas Sales Strategy That Can Easily Boost Sales And Increase Engagements

This is the season for businesses across the world to see their bottom line on their income statement (profit and loss). Hence with Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday just around the corner, this is indeed a great time to review your sales goals and develop a Christmas sales strategy to meet them through your holiday sales strategy for business growth. So what will your business do to ensure that your offerings are top of the mind of your customers as they make spending decisions during this holiday season starting from Black Friday through the end of the year? As one of the leading vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools here we have illustrated six ways upon which your business can build its holiday marketing campaigns which can help you boost holiday sales this season for harvesting more than ever before revenue growth.

This is the season for businesses across the world to see their bottom line on their income statement (profit and loss). Hence with Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday just around the corner, this is indeed a great time to review your sales goals and develop a Christmas sales strategy to meet them through your holiday sales strategy for business growth.

So what will your business do to ensure that your offerings are top of the mind of your customers as they make spending decisions during this holiday season starting from Black Friday through the end of the year?

Online holiday sales to increase 25%-35% for the 2020 season and reach $182-$196 billion for ecommerce sales in November, December and January - Deloitte Click To Tweet

As one of the leading vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools here we have illustrated six ways upon which your business can build its holiday marketing campaigns which can help you boost holiday sales this season for harvesting more than ever before revenue growth.

1. Offer special discounts to loyal customers

Why not treat your customers to a holiday gift – from you to them, as a part of your Christmas sales strategy this year?

Hence offer special discounts to your most loyal and best customers on the things they buy the most, offering deals that they just cannot refuse on the things they buy, since as one of the popular vendors of easy to use CRM, we think this is a great way to say Happy Kwanzaa, Merry Christmas, or Happy Hanukkah to your most loyal customers.

Always, remember that it usually costs a lot more for any business to acquire new customers than to retain the existing ones.

Another way to approach holiday sales might even be to offer these loyal customers of your brand an even bigger discount when they refer your business to their family and friends… and those referrals ultimately make a purchase.

2. Personalize Emails

Mostly for online ecommerce stores, but for even for any other business that uses a sales CRM, has their email addresses and any other basic information on their customer’s base sales history, it is great to be able to personalize and send emails by including their names and pertinent details and even suggestion for an item that you might think they would like based on their order history stored in the CRM database.

3. Provide gift certificates

You maybe are a hairdresser, automotive repair shop, maid service, a web developer, or a professional organizer – so how do you gift these things?

With gift certificates, of course.

Who would not love a new hairstyle, a free oil change, and tire rotation, or a house cleaning during this holiday season?

Moreover, gift certificates are even a great opportunity to cross-sell, when you have tons of products and services for the consumers of your offerings.

Hence promote your gift certificates on social media channels or send them to your customers on your email list.

4. Cross-sell

The months that lead up to the holidays are an excellent time to suggest items to go with the products and services that your customers are already purchasing from your brand.

Maybe a customer has bought a beautiful set of earrings last year, so suggest the customer a matching necklace for this holiday season, or if you are a hairdresser you can cross-sell a salon-quality hair conditioner and a shampoo set since cross-selling is a great way to add value to your existing customers and so increase your holiday sale.

5. Send gift ideas

Another Christmas sales strategy that you can use this holiday season is sending an email filled with gift ideas tailored and customized to the people on your list with heading like “great gifts for co-workers”, “gifts for mon” or “gift for neighbors”, etc.

For this find out what are your brand’s most popular items and who buys them, and thereafter share that info with the people on your mailing list.

Remember people will be grateful for it since most people run short of gift ideas during the holiday seasons for several hard-to-buy-for personas in their list.

6. Offer free shipping or special deliveries

Who does not love a surprise?

Hence don’t be afraid to think out-of-the-box to boost your holiday sales.

Now if you are running a small e-commerce store, it is no secret that your business is competing with giant global retailers like Walmart and Amazon that are providing multiple choices for fast, free shipping.

Therefore, offering free shipping to your customers is another great way to craft the customer experience around waiting for and receiving their purchases during the holiday season which can increase your brand’s revenue growth.

Takeaway

Finally, to make your customers know that they are appreciated, send them a “thank you” card this holiday season that has nothing to do with trying to sell them anything- they will love you for it.

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Need For Sales Automation CRM Tools – The Forerunners of Your Business

Before we begin discussing future-CRM solutions and Sales Automation CRM tools there is no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the build-block for all industries which is absolutely data-driven to make lives better for entrepreneurs and the consumers of the modern times. Now, every CRM users across this planet shall agree to this fact irrespective of where they use an enterprise-level or a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for their SMBs that nothing much has changed in the CRM space since the 1990s except for the fact that it had moved from on-premise framework to the cloud. Still today in most enterprises, customer data is still isolated, and therefore manually entered in the software.

Before we begin discussing future-CRM solutions and Sales Automation CRM tools there is no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the build-block for all industries which is absolutely data-driven to make lives better for entrepreneurs and the consumers of the modern times.

63% of companies outgrowing their competitors are using automation. Online competition will always be tough, but with automation, study has shown that companies can have the edge. Click To Tweet

Now, every CRM users across this planet shall agree to this fact irrespective of where they use an enterprise-level or a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for their SMBs that nothing much has changed in the CRM space since the 1990s except for the fact that it had moved from on-premise framework to the cloud.

Still today in most enterprises, customer data is still isolated, and therefore manually entered in the software.

Hence given the fact that this new “Experience Economy” is entirely becoming sales-driven where prioritizing the customer is becoming more tough and crucial every day –CRM software is still considered inefficient and there are ongoing researches which are trying to make the future-CRM of tomorrow relying more and more on AI, Big Data, Deep Learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and other bleed-edge technologies.

In other words, it might also imply that CRM has not been evolved or rather its total capabilities have not been yet explored and leveraged as of date.

Now undeniably easy to use CRM is a vital tool in sales and marketing which has already changed the perception of the consumer world.
This is because retailers now can analyze data and apply it in real-time in several areas, which has given rise to seamless and easy processes, which otherwise would have been really difficult to quantify and measure.

For example, finding purchasing behaviors and making market predictions are now within fingertips of the marketing executives using marketing CRM for their enterprise.

Financial organizations using CRM software for financial services industry are also able to pinpoint and stop fraudulent transactions in seconds.
Additionally, health care services are also using CRM to keep an effective track of their patients enabling easy treatment and diagnosis.

Nevertheless, in spite of its dynamic features and instant benefits that an easy to use CRM provide to various industries, the CRM software by large still remains ineffective as major tasks are done manually.

For example sales executives who are relentlessly monitoring their high-volume deals in their sales CRM solutions pipeline have to invest extra hours to enter a large volume of data manually.

Clearly, it is a cry for help, a stark indication to the future of CRM software- more Sales Automation CRM functionalities is the need of the hour now.

How Will Sales Automation Help?

With CRM software, sales management is still a burden, as far as time and energy are concerned. Thus, Sales Automation CRM can generate a process where a salesperson can connect with potential customers and accelerate the journey throughout the sales pipeline.

Prioritizing customers will be the sole purpose to drive growth while the sales automation will take care of the administrative task.

Hence Sales Automation in CRM is all about removing the barriers for human contact and make sales a more integrated process. Thus, the benefit is two-fold.

The future is digital and the future is now – so there is no better time for the need of CRM automation like the present.

The features of the sales automation in CRM perfectly fit the need as it should be more directed towards the broader concept where the data must serve an organization and not the otherwise.

This is because it is important for easy to use CRM to shift to the more focused and human side of selling where more data and algorithms should be working for people.

Enterprise workflow needs to be smart and easy. This would allow the sales reps to use the automated CRM more often and leverage its complete set of features.

Some of the necessary features of the automation include customer-targeted recommendations based on, personalized communications, activity records, and much more. This would even ease the tricky job of lead generation for the sales representatives.

Predictive analytics is another helpful feature that can be used in the process of sales.

We say this as research shows that higher customer retention depends on the right customer information and their habits – which ultimately even drives the sales. Hence predictive analytics can have a big role to play in giving the valuable customer information that the sales reps can use to their benefit.

It can also be said that the future of CRM is also determined by the ability of software to determine, which steps to take.

The future holds great potential for CRM software with the specific knowledge and understanding of each industry and the business process is crucial for functioning and workflow.

As the aim of every company remains the same- to get and keep customers, all-in-one CRM software with such smart features will readily be accepted by the industry, which will be the key to customer retention as it is the returning customers that mostly spend more money than the new customers.

Wondering what is the role of predictive data and artificial intelligence in the future of CRM?

They are helpful when the CRM requires data-driven solutions to influence the productivity of the sales representatives, whereby the salesperson will get more time for the crucial tasks while automating repetitive tasks that can be taken care of by AI and predictive data.

With the right Sales Automation CRM salesperson can now invest more time in other definitive work processes like studying customer behavior and build a relationship with them. This will also help to reveal the more humane side of their business.

Conclusion

Thus, the future of CRM software lies in customer relationship automation, which can take customer experience and support to a new level.

The sales reps can leverage the future CRM’s potential by compiling different data from disparate sources allowing them to have all the information about the customer while approaching them. The approach will also be more personalized than formal.

And the right approach at the right time will help the sales surge potential increase exponentially.

This is the reason, features like artificial intelligence and predictive analytics will give the sales reps a crucial understanding of customer information to work with by creating a business CRM software, which is more proactive and so helps in saving time and increase productivity.

Hence the future of easy to use CRM is the need of the hour, since it will not only simplify the sales process and but it will also make customer relationship management a much more exciting and humane job.

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