Tag: Salesforce Alternative CRM

From Startup to Scale-up: Leverage Growth with Marketing Automation!

Starting your entrepreneurial journey isn’t a walk in the park. Especially for startups, managing everything on a shoestring budget is quite difficult. But even more difficult is managing the marketing. Running campaigns and reaching out to your targeted audience are not as easy as they sound. Often the limited budget creates a roadblock. Picture this: You’re tightroping between having just enough resources and the desperate need for marketing that actually works, all in the digital age where marketing can either make or break you. Thankfully, marketing automation swoops in like your trusty sidekick. It’s like having a buddy in your entrepreneurial journey, helping you make a big impact without emptying your pockets.

This piece explores marketing automation for startups. Get to know about the tools and techniques that will automate your marketing efforts and help you scale up to the next level. 

Marketing Automation for Startups: What are the Benefits

Marketing automation revolutionizes the way startups operate by automating repetitive tasks and enabling personalized communication with the right audience across multiple channels. Here are the key advantages of incorporating marketing automation into your startup.

Efficient Use of Time and Resources: Startups are inherently lean organizations. Marketing automation tools handle tasks like lead nurturing, email campaigns, and social media posting, freeing up valuable time and human resources. This automation allows your team to concentrate on the strategic and creative aspects of your marketing strategy.

Targeted and Personalized Communication: Top-notch marketing automation tools let startups segment their audience based on demographics, behavior, or engagement level. This segmentation facilitates highly personalized communication, ensuring your marketing efforts are engaging and impactful. It guarantees that your message reaches the right people with the right content at precisely the right time.

Data-Driven Decision Making:  In the startup realm, every decision is critical. Marketing automation tools offer valuable insights through customer data analytics.

Source

Scalability: Marketing automation promotes scalability. As your startup expands, these tools can effortlessly grow with you. There’s no need for constant overhauls of your marketing processes or hiring large teams to sustain momentum. Marketing automation adapts to the scale of your business, ensuring efficiency even as you grow.

Navigating Marketing Automation for Startups    A Step-by-Step Approach

 Step #1    Define Clear Objectives 

Begin by outlining your marketing objectives. Clearly defined goals ensure that automation is in harmony with your startup’s mission. Whether you aim to boost lead generation, enhance conversion rates, or drive traffic to your blog, having specific, measurable goals aligns automation with your business strategy.

 Step #2    Choose the Right Tools 

Selecting a suitable marketing automation platform is paramount. Options like EngageBay, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign offer diverse features catering to different budgets and needs. Evaluate factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities with existing tools, and the quality of customer support. Seamless synchronization between your systems maximizes the potential of automation.

 Step #3    Segment Your Audience 

Effective marketing automation hinges on audience segmentation. Categorize your audience based on demographics, behavior, or engagement level. This division enables personalized messaging, enhancing the impact of your campaigns.

 Step #4    Craft Quality Content 

Compelling content forms the cornerstone of successful automation. Develop material addressing your audience’s concerns and interests, and distribute it across various channels like blogs, emails, e-books, and social media. Align your content with different stages of the buyer’s journey for maximum resonance.

 Step #5    Set Up Automated Workflows 

Create tailored automated workflows to guide leads and customers through interactions with your startup. These could include welcome email series, lead nurturing sequences, onboarding processes, and post-purchase follow-ups. Design each workflow for a seamless, personalized user experience.

Common startup workflows include   

  • Lead Generation and Capture    Automatically gather leads from your website and forms, initiating follow-up sequences.
  • Lead Scoring    Prioritize leads based on engagement, identifying high-potential prospects.
  • Email Marketing Automation   Tailor automated email campaigns for different segments and stages, covering welcome emails, product recommendations, and post-purchase communication. 
  • Social Media Automation    Schedule and publish social media posts, monitor mentions, and engage with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 Step #6    Continual Optimization 

Vigilantly monitor your automation’s performance. Identify glitches and make necessary adjustments to optimize results continually.

Marketing Components You Can Automate with ConvergeHub

Marketing automation relies on a cohesive interplay of essential components to operate efficiently. These elements synergize to streamline marketing processes, enhance efficiency, and elevate the overall customer experience.

  1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

The CRM system acts as the central nerve center of marketing automation. It serves as a comprehensive database housing all customer-related data, including contact details, interactions, and preferences. This organized repository provides a holistic view of customer profiles, aiding in audience segmentation and laying the groundwork for exceptional customer experiences.

  2. Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing remains a robust channel for customer engagement. Email marketing automation within the marketing automation platform empowers businesses to craft, schedule, and dispatch personalized email campaigns to distinct audience segments. This component incorporates features for drip campaigns, lead nurturing, and precise email tracking.

  3. Segmentation and Personalization     

Marketing automation tools facilitate audience segmentation based on diverse filters like demographics, behavior, preferences, and purchase history. This segmentation refines marketing campaigns, enabling the delivery of highly personalized content and messages to specific segments, thereby enhancing conversion rates.

  4. Tracking and Reporting     

Analytics tools are indispensable for monitoring campaign performance. They offer insights into email open rates, click-through rates, website traffic, and conversion rates. Armed with this data, businesses can make informed, data-driven decisions and fine-tune their marketing strategies.

  5. Workflow Automation     

Workflow automation is pivotal in streamlining internal processes. It involves automating repetitive tasks, ranging from lead assignment to triggering follow-up emails based on user actions. Automating these processes boosts business efficiency significantly.

  6. Content Marketing Automation     

Content marketing automation enables the seamless distribution of content across platforms like blogs, social media, and email newsletters. This ensures that the audience receives valuable content timely, nurturing them through the conversion funnel.

  7. Social Media Marketing     

Social media is a cornerstone for audience engagement. Marketing automation platforms integrate with social media platforms, facilitating scheduled posts, conversation monitoring, and engagement metric tracking. This automation ensures a consistent social media presence and aids in community building.

  8. Landing Pages and Web Forms     

Dedicated landing pages and web forms capture visitor information crucial for building the contact database. These forms collect data such as names and email addresses, initiating marketing automation workflows for personalized follow-ups.

  9. Multi-Channel Marketing     

Effective marketing automation extends across multiple channels including email, social media, SMS, and website retargeting. Consistency across these channels reinforces brand messaging, enhancing brand recall.

  10. Lead Generation and Management     

Marketing automation captures leads from various sources like website forms and social media. These leads are automatically integrated into the CRM, enabling prompt follow-ups. Each lead is assigned a score based on their engagement, facilitating prioritized attention from the sales team.

Common Mistakes Startups Make with Marketing Automation

Startups often stumble in their marketing automation endeavors due to several common pitfalls. Here’s what to avoid:

Over-automation         

Strive for a balance between automation and personalization. Excessive automated messages can alienate your audience. Maintain a human touch and focus on delivering meaningful value.

 Ignoring Strategy and Planning         

 Rushing into automation without a clear strategy leads to disjointed efforts. Define goals, target audience, and KPIs. Develop a comprehensive plan outlining the customer journey. Without this roadmap, automation efforts can become ineffective.

Zero Idea of ROI         

 Tracking ROI is vital for understanding automation effectiveness. Monitor metrics like conversion rates and revenue attributed to automation. Use this data to assess campaign efficacy and justify resource allocation.

Sales and Marketing on Different Tracks           

Siloed sales and marketing hinder automation results. Foster collaboration between teams. Shared insights enhance understanding of customer behavior, improving lead nurturing and conversions.

Startups are increasingly relying on Marketing  Automation 

According to recent studies, 90% of marketers agree that automation is crucial to their success. In the startup realm, this translates to an increased reliance on marketing automation platforms to optimize their campaigns, enhance customer experiences, and drive revenue. At ConvergeHub, you can get a plethora of automation tools such as email marketing, social media scheduling, lead nurturing, and customer segmentation, all tailored to meet the unique demands of startups.

For startups, time is of the essence. Recent statistics reveal that 77% of CMOs at top-performing companies indicate that their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation is to increase efficiency. By automating repetitive tasks, such as email responses and social media posts, startups can allocate their resources more effectively, enabling their teams to focus on strategic initiatives and innovation. This streamlined approach not only saves time but also reduces human error, ensuring consistent and error-free marketing campaigns.

Customer Acquisition Or Retention – Which One Should Be Your Main Concern Today

Have you ever thought about which one is more important for your business: new customer acquisition or retention of the one that you already have? We all are aware of the fact, that acquiring new customers is one of the most important criteria for any business. However, this must also be remembered that retaining your present and old customers is also critically important if you are running a subscription-based business (like cloud based CRM software) or have repeat customers. Hence, we can see both acquiring fresh customers and retaining the existing ones are equally important for the growth of any company.

Have you ever thought about which one is more important for your business: new customer acquisition or retention of the one that you already have?

We all are aware of the fact, that acquiring new customers is one of the most important criteria for any business.

Acquiring new customers costs 5 times more than retaining their existing ones. Click To Tweet

However, this must also be remembered that retaining your present and old customers is also critically important if you are running a subscription-based business (like cloud based CRM software) or have repeat customers.

Hence, we can see both acquiring fresh customers and retaining the existing ones are equally important for the growth of any company.

Nevertheless, it is really a big question for many as to how do they know which one to focus more on customer acquisition or retention when forming the strategies needed to boost their business growth.

Now, the answer to this question is subjective, and highly complicated, as it involves several variables like your long-term business goals, customer acquisition cost, your business model, and so on.

Hence to answer this complex topic, whereby we need to consider several things, let us dig into the topic and shed some light, as to which is the right strategy for your company based on the business model you work on.

Basic of Customer Acquisition

So let us start with the obvious. It is no brainer that you just cannot run a successful business without winning fresh customers, which is particularly true for small businesses and startups.

Now, acquiring the first few customers does always seem to be a monumental up-hill task when you start your business. Since building your brand reputation can be most difficult without any customers.

Mostly the first customers for any business come from the existing contracts of the company and its stakeholders in the business. However, as your business evolves acquiring new customers becomes exponentially easier, since an increase in brand awareness helps in growing your customer base.

Nevertheless, how you approach your sales strategy for customer growth largely depends on your business goals.

Therefore, let us now look into how you can develop the right sales strategy for your business to find customer growth.

Potential Pitfalls of Customer Acquisition

Although it has been agreed that your business needs new customers and hence the sales pipeline in your best CRM software should never remain empty, nevertheless, several organizations make the blunder of devoting too many resources for customer acquisition and not enough staffs for retaining them, since they remain confused about understanding whether customer acquisition or retention which should supersede the other as their goal.

Therefore, customer churn is an obvious phenomenon that happens when you acquire a new customer but do not take the appropriate measures to ensure that your customer is happy using your offerings, which results in losing them quickly.

Therefore, the key to keeping your customers happy is to provide a world-class customer experience (CX) right from the very beginning after your sale that in turn boosts customer satisfaction and renewal rates.

According to a survey done by Invesp, acquiring fresh customers in most businesses costs 5 times more than retaining their existing ones.

Therefore, when you win over a fresh customer, there is your chance to solidify their trust in your businesses’ ability to support them successfully.

Never sign in a new customer and then leave them to fend for themselves on their own, for if you do this you will surely dissatisfy the customers, who will most likely leave your brand for competition.

Hence while you onboard a new customer, ensure that you also provide high-quality training to the customer to increase their customer satisfaction which will eventually make the customer stay for long with your brand.

The Basics Of Customer Retention

Retaining your existing customers is not always as difficult as it seems.
This often-overlooked factor in business which determines the success and failure of your brand can be easily done by delivering a world-class customer experience that you can do simply by delighting your customers.

Here are some basic tips as to how you can retain your customers for long:

  • Start out on the right foot by ensuring that your customers have everything they need, which must begin from their first day.
  • Distribute contents that can solve some of the common problems faced by your customer base, which will help in building trust and also aid in positioning you as an authority in your marketplace.
  • Reach out to your customers on a regular basis, to check out how things are going.
  • Keep your customers informed about your brand’s new developments (like info on new products, bug fixes, forward-looking plans, and more).
  • Create a customer advisory board to let your customers suggest you in the evolution process of your company.
  • Focus on resolving customer issues on the first attempt by creating a dedicated helpdesk group.

Now, this is only a partial list of many other things that you can do to keep your customers loyal and satisfied with your brand so that they stick around and provide recurring revenue for your business.

 Benefits Of Customer Retention: Not Pitfalls

To be truthful there is really no drawbacks focusing on customer retention, as there are a plethora of statistics that back this up which even hints at your business growth:

  • Long-term loyal and satisfied customers spend more than the new ones. – Business.com
  • 80% of key business revenue comes from 20% of existing customers those who are satisfied and happy. – Forbes
  • Just a 2% growth in customer retention decrease up to 10% overall cost of the company – Amazon

Food for thoughts:

Would you rather have 50 new customers each year that leaves after that year or just 15 customers that stick with you for a decade?

Well, the answer seems to be pretty obvious.

Talking about customer acquisition or retention, new customers eat up more resources and administration costs, and they also do not produce enough revenue for your company.

On the other hand, a loyal and happy existing customer who remains with your business over the long haul not only allows you to predict your businesses’ future revenue more accurately but also provides you the peace of your mind.

Conclusion

Therefore, the future of all successful businesses remains with maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction using the best small business CRM software if they are a growing startup. Since doing so naturally results in a higher level of customer retention and helps in creating brand advocates that ultimately can do wonders for your brand reputation management efforts.

According to a report published by Corporate Visions, more than 80% of businesses spend more than 70% on their marketing budgets for acquiring new customers and unfortunately even lesser than 30% on customer retention initiatives.

Therefore, to conclude on this topic it is recommended that as a modern business organization using Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub for managing the relationship with your customers you should at least spend 50% of your marketing budgets on strategies and processes for retaining your customers since it is one of the best tactics for ensuring long-term business growth.

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Business Development Ideas For Better Serving Customers During A Crisis

The recent economic downfall due to COVID-19 Pandemic has involuntarily forced SMBs to transform the way they work from the office and live rapidly. In fact, many elements in several companies like customer service, sales, and supply chain management have been challenged in recent times. Nevertheless, small and medium businesses are doing their best to manage through this global Pandemic by drafting an effective crisis response strategy using new business development ideas that can manage supply-chain interruptions and retain communication with the employees and customers to ensure their wellbeing.

The recent economic downfall due to COVID-19 Pandemic has involuntarily forced SMBs to transform the way they work from the office and live rapidly. In fact, many elements in several companies like customer service, sales, and supply chain management have been challenged in recent times.
Nevertheless, small and medium businesses are doing their best to manage through this global Pandemic by drafting an effective crisis response strategy using new business development ideas that can manage supply-chain interruptions and retain communication with the employees and customers to ensure their wellbeing.

Salespeople saw productivity increase by 30% once they had mobile access to CRM. Click To Tweet

Now with these new models of business, it is no doubt that customer experience or CX will take on a new meaning in the light of Coronavirus malady.
For example, the requirements of the customers have in recent times changed dramatically from convenient, seamless, and engaging communication to the most empathizing one.

In a report published in the Gallup Business Journal, consumers nowadays are 9X more likely to get them engaged with any brand or business if they receive empathetic customer support- which illustrates how vital ‘empathy’ is nowadays.

Hence leading organizations across the globe that have recently realized the current needs of today’s consumers are reorienting their CX efforts and business development ideas to meet those needs, which dwells in these three words- security, safety, and empathy.

Therefore by emotionally interfacing with the customers during this crisis, SMBs can build a solid foundation of generosity that can result in forming an enduring relationship with the customers.

So here are six such crisis management strategies that have been adopted by certain business communities and brands at this time:

1. Plan Well and Stay Calm

This Pandemic like many others that happened before is all about distress. Nevertheless, exhibiting the emotion to your consumers will not help your SMBs in any way. Rather, plan and show your customers your readiness to face this Pandemic or any other crisis that may emerge even in the future days to come.
In other words, when you reach out to your customers, ensure that you have sound knowledge and confidence since your customers will always want to know if your business is all set to handle the situation, and whether your business is available to help them during this trying times.

In fact, it is only by planning, you can save your brand now from making insensitive and hasty decisions that can put a pause on your business growth, even though as a small business organization you must always prioritize supporting your customers with a limited budget while planning your crisis management strategies.

Additionally, remember as customer practices are undeniably changing nowadays like never before, ensure customers can connect with your small business amidst this crisis 24/7 and your business is willing to help them round the clock as they are at home and therefore their buying behaviors have switching online for which SMB organizations need to adapt to this change.

2. Support Your Customers Emotionally

Nowadays customers are forced to work from their homes due to this COVID-19 Pandemic, and so SMBs too must have to ensure that they can make their customer’s life more enjoyable at their homes with their products and services.

For example, Comcast has recently offered free access to its Xfinity WiFi hot spots for all people (which includes even non-subscribers) for 60 days so that their families can entertain themselves by viewing videos and online courses at home or New York’s Metropolitan Opera released digital shows to engage the virtual crowds for free.

Your business can also offer mindfulness and contemplation by offering applications like Headspace which is currently opening free membership to healthcare experts and providing free content for its customers.

Hence as an SMB owner, you can utilize these business development ideas or brainstorm for more new concepts to help relieve the stress of your consumers amidst this global crisis.

3. Assist Community in Financial Distress

In this hour of crisis, organizations all across the globe are compelled to lessen the work of their employees for a questionable period of time which uncovers SMB owners to an enormous risk of liquidity issues.
Hence in such scenarios offering high-quality solutions while dealing with financial distress can be a big challenge for small firms.

Nevertheless, instead of penalizing the customers for not meeting their payment obligations, businesses need to be flexible with them nowadays.

In fact, there are several automakers, telecommunication companies, and utility firms that are waiving their fees and easing shutoffs to aid communities struggling during this Pandemic.

For example, AT&T has halted the termination of home telephone, and broadband assistance when customers cannot take care of their payments as a result of this Pandemic or Burger King is providing two free meals to Americans purchasing through their Burger King app. and thereby helping the families who formerly relied on school lunches to feed their kids.

4. Treat Customers with Utmost Care

Treating your customers with care has become the need of the hour. With physical channels like retail brick and mortar stores being closed, SMBs must adopt online strategies to resolve customer issues and other requests that otherwise would have needed personal attention.

There are several service-oriented companies that have already established a customer-resource center focused to assist customers with claims related to this Pandemic.

Now be as it may, such firms, once they are small in size are presently encountering increased volumes of calls in their contact centers whereby dealing with these call rates has resulted in complexity for small businesses, especially while most customer-service operations have shifted to remote-working arrangements.

Nevertheless, with a specific well-though crisis management plan, and by using advanced business tools like easy to use CRM software platforms, there are many SMBs that are rightly utilizing these issues to increase their conversion and revenue.

For example, Cisco’s Webex is presently helping colleges and schools by remotely offering free apparatuses for students, educators, and guardians, and in this way aiding the internet learning platform or LinkedIn through its workers’ referral is providing free access to its top-notch highlights for a limited period of time.

5. Reduce Physical Interaction as Much as Possible

Now while supporting the community with their services, it is also the responsibility of SMBs to eliminate the spread of the virus.

Therefore for small businesses here are certain business development ideas that can minimize contagion risk by following specific precautionary measures, especially if their sales process involves physical interactions.

For example, there are many organizations that are providing free home delivery for customers over 65 years old or limiting the number of people to enter the store at once.
There are also several food-conveyance firms that are offering new contactless delivery choices to wipe-out physical contact among customers and their conveyance operators, guaranteeing the well-being and security for both the customers and their representatives.

6. Contribute to Safer Innovations

As an owner of a small and medium business it is the right time to ask yourself these two basic questions:

Do you have an offering that is safer for the consumers to use right now?

Is it possible to innovate your offering(s) new tools that are required for the community?

Now with a sufficient budget, SMBs can pursue this approach for a limited period of time and use their strength to contribute to society by supplying goods that are outside their current product portfolio.

For example, there are several distilleries across the globe that are partnering with refineries to provide hand sanitizers or appeal manufacturers are shifting to stitching thousands of face masks that are crucially needed at this moment.
Similarly, automotive industries are also manufacturing respiratory care products and ventilators or rideshare firms are transporting essential goods and medicines rather than passengers.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

Organizations, these days are investing in the CRM Software to manage their customers in a more streamlined and seamless manner. Many are outsourcing the CRM Software development to design their own product , but instead of bearing software development outsourcing costs, you can opt for one of the best CRM product in the market, which is also a great Salesforce Alternative too.

Stay Connect with us & Use Our Enterprise CRM Software.

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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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5 Reasons To Choose A Cloud-Based Low-Cost CRM Software For Small Business And Startups

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively. Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business. Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Although Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is really a buzzword in the present business space, and most look for low-cost CRM software for small business and startups since almost all know that they can significantly benefit from adopting a CRM for SMB tool – yet only a very few know which solution fits their business model effectively.

64.2% of companies rate CRM tools as impactful or very impactful - LinkedIn Click To Tweet

Now it does not really matter if your company employs just 10 staff or has more than 100 employees- business CRM is a tool that can help you build closer connections with your prospective leads and customers, sell more, and provide professional customer service and thereby grow your business.

Therefore, when it comes to buying an easy to use CRM, it must be affordable, it should not be complicated, should be accessible day and night, and should target your unique business needs.

Now gone are those years when the term “CRM” bought to mind a picture of expensive and bulky software that needs an entire IT team and experts working solely on installation and maintenance of the software.

In fact, today’s modern all-in-one CRM systems are more user-friendly and technologically advance, but it even comes with a variety of business growth solutions that are designed to address the needs of all types of businesses, irrespective of whether they are big or small.

Therefore modern CRM solutions not only offer new possibilities, but they are easy to deploy and maintain, comes at a flexible cost.

This is because most CRM solutions nowadays have moved from their earth-bound domains all the way to the Cloud. And so if you are looking for a low-cost CRM software for small business and startups this is exactly in the Cloud where your business should look for a business CRM solution.

Hence if you are still not sure about cloud-based CRM solutions that are price-performance leaders in the CRM space, here are 5 solid reasons why CRM that are cloud-based is something that all businesses should consider seriously if they are looking forward to growing their business and find rapid sales growth:

  1. Hassle-Free Installation

The long innate fear that CRM comes with a complex installation procedure is no more a valid reason for not adopting a CRM for your business.

In fact, present-day cloud-based CRM tools are “IT hassle-free” and you can be up and running in no time, and all you need for that is an Internet connection, after which you can sign in online and use it.

Hence for using a modern easy to use CRM you not only do not have to pay for hardware, software maintenance, and servers you also do not need a permanent IT staff for data migration or even installing upgrades.

With cloud-based CRM all this is done by the CRM vendors remotely.

  1. Seamless Access

One of the greatest benefits of buying a CRM in the cloud is the round-the-clock accessibility of the software.

For example, imagine a situation whereby you need to make some game-changing and urgent sales call while you are on-the-go, or quickly find a contact’s phone no, or send a revised sales proposal, or an email when you are out of your workstation in the office, cloud CRM software can provide you access to the software from anywhere on any device be it a laptop, desktop, tablet or even a smartphone.

Again all you need for accessing the low-cost CRM software for small business is the Internet.

Hence using a cloud-based CRM you can always remain connected to the centralized CRM database as cloud CRM provides businesses the freedom and flexibility to what you need to do when you need to do it from anywhere.

  1. Affordable Product

Another important benefit of using this cloud-based business growth technology solution is that this business-enhancing solution certainly will never break your bank.

This is because if you are using a cloud-based Salesforce Alternative CRM tool you do not have to allocate a big sum of money for making a one-off purchase, but you can pay in regular installment which is usually preferred by SMBs.

Typically cloud CRM solutions operate on the pay-as-you-go subscription model that needs minimal upfront investments and so reduces the risk of going bust while using the software.

  1. High-Security Levels

Since the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) on May 25th, 2018, as information security levels at Cloud services are times higher than those provided by local IT firms, vendors that offer cloud-based CRM tools take security issues seriously.

Additionally, providers of cloud CRM solutions even offer advanced automatized back-up policies and have robust data-recovery plans if any breach happens while working with their software.

Moreover, most low-cost CRM software for small business also offers data safety to their customers by using two-step authentication and robust passwords.

  1. Enhanced Compatibility

Finally, as stand-alone business growth solutions have little chance of success in today’s IT world, so modern business environment requires information exchange between already available technology solutions which is paramount for all businesses.

Therefore, no one would invest in a software solution that cannot save your contacts, open your documents, or be able to integrate the email or accounting software that you are using for your business.

Hence compatibility with other products and services is the key to ensuring CRM’s effectiveness and longevity.

Now, CRM that uses cloud-based technology can be easily integrated with other software or applications, such as Gmail, QuickBooks CRM, Excel, Words, PowerPoint, Zapier, and many other tools.

In fact, it is this compatibility that makes cloud-based CRM an even more appropriate choice for your small business.

Conclusion

Now that you know what you need to look for in your low-cost CRM software for small business, the only thing that is left is to choose the CRM for small and medium business solutions’ vendor wisely.

Remember it has never been more important to improve workflow between your teams and provide full visibility of client communications between your employees than ever before.

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How To Use Automation In Top CRM Software For Improving Sales And Business Growth

If your question is: Why should I automate my workflow or use a top CRM software? The briefest answer to this is: To get the most out of your work with the minimum efforts. Now, you may be wondering if there is any scope for such effectual automation within your sales team. Yes, there is! Hence, in this article let us outline a few tested and tried ideas for automation that are certain to deliver better results while reducing the workload of your sales teams.

If your question is: Why should I automate my workflow or use a top CRM software?
The briefest answer to this is: To get the most out of your work with the minimum efforts.

Now, you may be wondering if there is any scope for such effectual automation within your sales team.

Yes, there is!

Hence, in this article let us outline a few tested and tried ideas for automation that are certain to deliver better results while reducing the workload of your sales teams.

If sales reps make contact within 5 minutes after generation of the lead, the lead is 22 times more like to get converted into a hot prospect. Click To Tweet

Idea #1

Make sure that your web-based leads are contacted in minutes

Web-generated leads are precious for all businesses. Nevertheless, your sales reps must ensure that web leads are contacted within minutes after they are generated online.

This is because, according to a study published by MIT, it states that if sales reps make contact within 5 minutes after generation of the lead, the lead is 22 times more like to get converted into a hot prospect ready for buying your offering.

However, how can you be assured that your sales team will be capable of following up with every web lead so promptly?

This is where automation in a robust CRM like Salesforce or any other reputed Salesforce Alternative CRM for small business comes into play.

  • As soon as the web-to-form is filled up, the information gets collected in the CRM database.
  • Next, your easy to use CRM taps into your integrated telephony software solutions and prompts your sales reps active on the system and mobile devices.
  • If the sales rep is busy, the CRM system automatically forwards the call to the next able rep and continues to do so, until a free sales rep is capable of making the call to the given number.
  • The sales rep finds all the relevant information about the lead on their CRM system, and therefore armed with that data just need to click to make the call. This makes sure that all calls are contacted when they are hot and that too before the stipulated 5 minutes time.

Idea #2

Automate follow-up calls on email campaigns

Irrespective of whether your email campaign is about a demo, your new product launch, or a meetup, in all cases, it is really tough for leads to open your emails.

Easy to use CRM software with integrated email campaigning functionalities, help the users of the software to view who opened their emails.

Therefore, to ensure that your sales teams make follow up calls to every lead that opens their emails here is how you can automate your CRM to do it.

  • See the email campaigns report in the top CRM software solutions’ easy to use dashboard.
  • Select all the contacts that opened the email.
  • Push all the contacts into the dialing software integrated with the CRM.
  • For hereon let the dialer do its job of persistently and automatically dial every lead in the contact list and connect them to a representative.

Idea #3

Ensure that missed and abandoned calls do not become missed leads

All sales CRM software solutions capture incoming lead 24/7.

Now it is natural that you can miss calls during holidays, after your work hours, or when your lines are busy.

However, when you are using a CRM missed calls should not mean missing a valuable lead.

Hence, here is a workflow that you can set up easily to make sure that you never miss doing a follow up on any of your missed calls.

  • Your integrated telephony system can find any phone number that goes unanswered with the numbers in your CRM database.
  • Now if the call is from a fresh lead, you can set up your top CRM software system that a new follow up the ticket is automatically generated by the system.
  • An alert on the missed call can be sent by the system to your inbox, and in case there is a voice message that can also get attached to your email.

Idea #4

Send greetings, voice messages, and notifications to all in the contact lists in one go

Do your sales team members need to remind qualified leads, prospects, and customers about their subscription renewal dates, approaching last payment due dates and others?

You can easily set a configurable IVR (Interactive Voice Response) message, and create a workflow using automation in your business CRM that lets you broadcast the message to any or all in the contact list within your CRM database with a single click.

Conclusion

Essentially all of these stated ideas depend on a smooth integration between your top CRM software tool and telephone software applications like RingCentral, NexInteractive Dialer or Twilio Call that are most essential software solutions which can be integrated with Salesforce and all other major Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions like ConvergeHub that are meant for small businesses.

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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.

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Key Features Of Sales And Marketing CRM Tools – That Can Save Your Startup Today

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, is circumventing nine to five jobs, and throwing them into the bin. Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money. Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real problems and issues that can stall your super ideas and how adopting the best sales and marketing CRM tools can change that for you and make your company find business growth.

Startups all across the globe are glorified as the ultramodern way of taking control of your life, is circumventing nine to five jobs, and throwing them into the bin.

Nevertheless, according to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that approximately 40 percent of startups are profitable, while 30 percent of them are at break-even points and the rest 30 percent losing money.

Therefore if you are having any second thoughts on your big idea, read through this article as we unravel the real problems and issues that can stall your super ideas and how adopting the best sales and marketing CRM tools can change that for you and make your company find business growth.

Paying attention to your customers is important since 14% of startups fail due to not regarding customers’ needs. - Fundera Click To Tweet

What is CRM?

CRM is both a technology and an awesome strategy that integrates into itself several dimensions of customer relations, which helps to convey real value to the customers and retain the same for businesses. With CRM related IT solutions, world-class customer relations can be easily attained and utilized to create brands in the marketplace.

In other words, best business CRM is a tool that helps one understand their target customers, their needs, and how brands can sustain that customer relationship to propel your startup on the basis of that relationship.

Now there are three types of easy to use CRM software that is available in the marketplace:

1. Strategic CRM

This is a CRM software that is based on delivering value to the customers, better than the rest of the competitions, and integrates the same in product development and structure of the business.

2. Operational CRM

This CRM software focuses on the automation of sales, production, and service as per the requirement of the consumers.

3. Analytical CRM

This CRM software focuses on gathering, storing, distributing, and thereafter integrating and analyzing consumer-facing data to cater value to both customers and businesses.

There are several models of sales and marketing CRM tools available in the marketplace. Nevertheless, in this article, we shall discuss the IDIC model which aids businesses to ascertain the customers who are of high value and loyalty towards the brands.

Identification: Find out who is the customers and understand them well.

Differentiation: Identity which customer has the greatest potentiality and thereby have more future prospects.

Interaction: Makes sure that businesses can perceive the customer’s desires, and understand the customer’s possible relationship with other brands.

Customization: Personalize offers and means of communication to make sure that the customer’s desires can be fulfilled.

So now that you are aware of what is CRM let us move on to the five most important reasons as to why you must buy your best sales and marketing CRM tools for your startup organization and stick to this cutting-edge business growth technology and tool.

5 KEY PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS (FOR STARTUPS)

1. CASH CRUNCH

According to a report published by Small Business Trends, it states that more than 29 percent of startups fail because of cash crunch and more than 18 percent for cost and pricing issues.

Therefore it is important for any startup business to keep their pricing compatible and yet generate enough profits to keep the krypton of cash crunch at a bay.

This is over here small business CRM software comes into play as it can help customers to understand the customer’s choices and buying patterns to integrate the same in product development and provide pricing that predicts good business growth.

2. POOR RELATIONS WITH THE CUSTOMERS

Relations with its customers is the spine of any business, especially startups as they are more consumer-based models of business and this is why more startups are in need of incorporating CRM strategies for their growing businesses.

According to reports among all startups that fail more than 17 percent are those that failed to develop and deliver a user-friendly product or service and another 17 percent failed because of inappropriate business models that underlined their offerings.

Therefore, this data even illustrates the growing importance to adopt the best all in one CRM in developing a consumer-based model for business that can help in building user-friendly offerings.

3. NEED FOR THE RIGHT TEAM

The idea of delivering a customer-friendly offering, for any startup is a challenging task, which needs the right team to pull that off.
As per statistics and data that we referred to before about 23 percent of startups fail due to their team’s inefficiency in catering a customer-friendly offering to the consumers in the marketplace.

Therefore as a startup entrepreneur, you need extensive staffing and training programs that can aid you in employing the right team to focus on providing value to the needs of your customers.

This is over here CRM for small business once again comes into play as it can help you to identify the right persons for your job and even train the same marketing, sales, and support strategies to reach customers and sustain them over a long period of time.

4. NEED FOR RESEARCH

Just as there is no way that we can write an article without any proper research, similarly the same applies to any startup, as comprehensive market research is most important and a must for the growth of any startup business across the globe.

According to research, it has been found that 42 percent of failed startup ventures were not successful since they did start their business after performing any market research about their proposed offerings.
Additionally, 13 percent of startup businesses failed and are so ill-fated because they launched their business at a bad time, statistics which show the extent to which startup organizations ignore real-time market trends while starting their businesses.

Therefore, as one of the most recognized vendors of software solutions in the Salesforce Alternative CRM marketplace, we can assure that it is the business growth technology that is capable of storing, integrating, and analyzing consumer data which aid startups to find and focus on the right market at the right time to launch the right product or service in the marketplace.

5. MARKETING WOES

As per statistics and data that we referred even before 14 percent of startups fail due to poor or ineffectual marketing and another 14 percent for ignoring their customers.

But why do startups fail at marketing or while conducting their after-sales service?

Even though there can be multiple factors that can make it happen but one of the most important of all these factors is not knowing well your customers.

CRM for SMB and startups helps growing businesses to understand their customers thoroughly so that they can cater to their customer’s needs.

This is exactly where Analytical CRM comes into play which aids in gathering consumer-related data and with Operational CRM that can ensure faster services to their customers and Strategic CRM that can help in marketing their offerings strategically to target relevant consumers based on their behavioral and purchase patterns which can be easily collected, stored and thereafter analyzed once it is hived inside the CRM database.

Conclusion

Therefore now that you know why your startup needs to adopt the best sales and marketing CRM tools and implement CRM strategies for your business growth, and the right type of CRM to go for to overcome each of these hurdles at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, it remains without any doubt that small business CRM software is that much-needed firepower which your startup needs as the next big weapon for victories ahead in this competitive global marketplace.

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Play With Numbers: How To Turn Data Into Actionable Insights For Business Growth

Irrespective of the role that you play in your organization, having the right aptitude to convert raw business information or turn data into actionable insights is slowly becoming a must-have skill needed for the growth of carriers in all industries across the globe. In fact, according to an HBR (Harvard Business Review), it has been found that more than even 60% of business enterprises wants their senior leaders to have proper data-analysis skills that can help to contribute to providing strategic business decision-making skills that can turn them into an indispensable member of any team. Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools with hundreds of active users across the globe, to help you build the right mindset and skills here are some of the key strategies and skills that can help you to turn data into actionable insights which can predict rapid business growth.

Irrespective of the role that you play in your organization, having the right aptitude to convert raw business information or turn data into actionable insights is slowly becoming a must-have skill needed for the growth of carriers in all industries across the globe.

74% of CRM software users said that their CRM system gave them improved access to customer data. - Capterra (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, according to an HBR (Harvard Business Review), it has been found that more than even 60% of business enterprises wants their senior leaders to have proper data-analysis skills that can help to contribute to providing strategic business decision-making skills that can turn them into an indispensable member of any team.

Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools with hundreds of active users across the globe, to help you build the right mindset and skills here are some of the key strategies and skills that can help you to turn data into actionable insights which can predict rapid business growth.

1. Do Not Make Things Too Complicated

Primarily once you start learning how you can turn data into actionable insights for your business, it is imperative that you must understand that every business or company has problems that need to be solved or even things that can be improved for finding more revenue growth.

Hence look for an opportunity to reduce cost, meet evolving customer needs, dive efficiency and thereafter prepare a set of questions that will help to generate insights and decisions through analysis.

Now, for finding insights from raw and unstructured data, you do not always need to use Python or R programming to perform basic analysis tasks.

Therefore start by using Excel or other simple tools to uncover insights, trends, and patterns and thereafter convert a few rows of data into a chart which can help to reveal unexpected and hidden things about your business.
Do not worry to get things right the very first time, but rather accept your mistakes and thereafter try to improve.

In fact, if you just have the basic technical expertise of how you can work with a business CRM solution or an Excel chart, have knowledge about your business domain, and proper communication skills, you practically have everything that you need to get started with data analysis for your company.

2. Work With What You Have Got

Remember while you are building your skills to turn data into actionable insights for your business, data is messy and there are bound to be gaps, holes, and imperfections in your datasets.

Now this is true since most useful raw data required for solving business issues is often collected from social media platforms and webpages where symbols like hashtags, ampersands, dollar-signs, etc., will remain in the data, and so you have to be able to work with what you have got.

As one of the award-winning vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses, we can assure you of the good news that the underlying information for turning data into actionable insights does not have to be perfect to provide useful insights, as long as you keep a few things in mind.

For example, before analyzing the data you need to understand where the data comes from and thereafter determine which sources will be most useful to solve your problems.

Additionally, never make assumptions about the completeness poor quality of the data.

Rather go through each dataset and verify that everything is (relatively) clean and useful. Hence always perform a visual inspection of your raw data since missing data or large gaps in data needs to be taken into consideration when making observations or drawing conclusions from the finding generated from those data.

Finally, remain vigilant and extra-careful when handling missing values or filling in the blanks in machine-learning datasets, since such things might produce biased conclusions.

Therefore, to remain on the safe side, apply common sense to the insights that you have discovered from the data before recommending actions.

3. Sell Your Ideas Effectively

Remember even great business growth ideas, cannot survive bad presentations. And sadly many new and even veteran analysts fall short when they reach this part of the data analysis process since they lack the ability to sell their ideas to stakeholders in a concise, confident, and effective manner.

Hence even before you learn how to turn data into actionable insights for your business, enrich your skills of telling a story without graphs, charts, or PowerPoint slides.

Learn to condense a story into a single line “sound-bite” that will resonate appropriately with your audience.

Never use data as a crutch.

Therefore ask these simple questions to yourself before selling your ideas, which includes (but is not limited to):

  • What does this information ultimately mean?
  • What point are you trying to make?
  • How do your results and conclusions tie back to the original problem in your business?

Once you have all the proper answers to these questions craft a narrative that should resonate instantly with your target audience, since a good data analyst has to be able to present their ideas in a way that everyone can understand and you really do not need a crystal ball to predict the future or act wisely to make a lot of sense in real life.

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Tips On Black-Belt Customer Retention Program Ideas – That Works

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task. Therefore, if retaining the customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy. This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with your customer retention program ideas it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn. Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program ideas that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task.
Therefore, if retaining customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy.
This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with your customer retention program ideas it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn.

Customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95%. Click To Tweet

Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program ideas that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

What are customer retention programs?

In simple words, customer retention program ideas are your best means to keep your customers happy. Since, when you keep holding on to more customers, you can easily decrease your businesses’ churn rate, boost company revenue and thereby increase profitability.

According to a popular statistical report, customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95%.

However, to make your businesses’ customer retention program really work, you need to make it a part of your businesses’ daily routine.

Therefore, to let us get started here we have put together a few key customer retention programs that you can implement immediately for decreasing churn and find rapid business growth.

1. Create an onboarding program

The very first program for customer retention that you must have on your checklist is implementing a customer onboarding strategy into your daily routine.

Customer onboarding is the process you require to make customers use your products and services in the easiest possible way in order to make them achieve their goals.

To conduct a proper onboarding of your new customers, primarily thank the customer for coming on-board and choosing your brand.

Apart from it during your onboarding calls, you can also cover the following points mentioned below:

  • Discuss with your customer as to how they want to get started and line up your efforts to match their expectations.
  • Offer your customer additional services to start-up.
  • Make your customers familiar with all your community websites, videos, and webinars that you can offer and also help them to overcome the common obstacles faced by others.
  • Send a welcome mail to your new customer after the primary onboarding conversation, with a small picture of yourself, so that the customer has a face to go with your brand.

2. Create customer follow up programs

According to a survey done by Econsultancy, more than 82% of business organizations acknowledge that customer retention is less labor-intensive and cheaper than closing a new deal, which makes it the main driver of any company’s revenue.

Now, do not be worried thinking that you have to use up all day calling each and every customer in your CRM database.

According to the Pareto principle, which most of us are aware of, only 20% of your customers generate 80% of your organization’s revenue.

Now, if you are using business CRM software it can create clear indicators that can aid you in identifying the customers that must receive most of your attention, and help you to spend your time on the right customers efficiently.

To do this set up your CRM software solution to segment your customers into three basic groups.

  • A – customers or large accounts
  • B – customers or medium-sized accounts
  • C – customers or small accounts

Now, while for large accounts you can schedule a face-to-face meeting with the customers or follow up with the customer once every month with medium-sized and small accounts, you can provide them a half-yearly follow-up, send newsletters and keep them updated on seasonal price offers or any other campaigns your company is having for the consumers of your offerings.

3. Identify risk customers

In most cases, customers will stop doing business with you because they are not satisfied either with your products or your support services.

Therefore, to retain customers and prevent churn it is crucial that you must identify risky customers as a part of your daily customer retention program.

According to Forrester, it cost 5 times more to acquire new customers than retain your existing ones.

Here are some of the ways you can identify the risky customers in your business:

  • Be proactive and create an overview of customers with too many open tickets, which is a red flag and should be managed with proper follow up.
  • Create an overview of customers that shows disruptive buying patterns. If a customer has bought every month over a year and then all of a sudden do not order any product for the next six months, pick up the phone to check out what is going on.
  • Create an overview of customers who are calling up regularly with questions and complaints. These demanding customers most often need training or another service to get them up and running.

Cloud-based CRM software be it Salesforce for enterprises or Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by startups and small businesses, CRM is a tool that can be used with customer retention program ideas, to easily create this overview so that you can provide better support after identifying your risky customers to reduce churn and grow your business.

4. Win back lost customers

Why spend your resources on winning new customers when you can use those efforts to win back lost customers in your CRM software’s database.

According to Jill Griffin’s book “Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers-And Keep Them Loyal” most businesses have a 20-40 percent chance of selling to their lost customers, whilst the chance for selling to new customers are only 5-20 percent in this competitive marketplace.

Here are some of the key reasons why you should focus on winning back lost customers:

  • Lost customers have once shown that they are interested in your offerings, and so they are superior prospects to arbitrary leads on your cold calling list.
  • Lost customers already know your brand, and so you require lesser time to educate them.
  • You can use technology to keep track of customers that you already know, follow their past buying patterns, and create tailor-made offers to win them back.

Winning back lost customers can have a snowball effect, whereby when you succeed in winning lost customers, and they become satisfied with your brand, it might generate word of mouth advertisement, which will help you to boost your chance of winning new prospects, as 91% of B2B customers are influenced by word-of-mouth and referrals when they make their buying decisions for new products and services.

Wrapping Up

Therefore, stop managing your customers in an ad-hoc manner, since retaining customers not only requires hard work, but it also requires the right customer retention program ideas that you must implement in your daily routine to see an increase in customer satisfaction score, revenue growth, and productivity.

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CRM And Customer Service Skill Enhancement Tips For Small Business Growth

Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business? Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings. This is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands. Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”

Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business?

Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings.

Globally, 54% of all consumers say that they have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago. - Microsoft(2021) Click To Tweet

This is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands.

Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”

Well, even though it is one way of showing that cars with bumper stickers stuck on them like these shows that they are ready to continuously evaluate their own performances, nevertheless asking “How are we doing” is a good step in showing that your business does care about how potential customers think about your brand and your company.
This is because it takes more than just asking the public to figure out if the customer service that your company is providing is meeting the real expectations of your customers.

Companies (especially small businesses) have pretty comprehensible indications when their customer service is bad.

Therefore, it is only when it becomes just about impossible to keep up with a volley of negative remarks and criticisms on social media and when sales start to dwindle or they are increasingly having to offer ‘make good’ that managers and leaders are quick to see how they can improve the way questions and complains are handled by the service teams in the organization.

However, by the time they reach that aforesaid point, it might already be too late to keep up with a valuable relationship or prevent permanent damage happening to the brand.

Hence, most successful small businesses have learned to stop and make changes wherever it is necessary based on the variety and volume of customer complaints coming through.

In fact, successful businesses armed with CRM and customer service team take a hard look in the rear-viewing mirror before continuing on their customer support journey, to ensure that they have not missed any important markers on their way.

Therefore for ascertaining if the service provided to your customers is good enough can involve a mixture of subjective indicators and formal methods, out of which below are five to consider for your business growth:

1. Find Out What Is Good Enough

There are several anecdotal indicators of customer service metrics to choose from, and there are also a lot more of it than what is common across your industry.

Irrespective of whether you are using Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software these data can be readily captured as they directly impact your business growth.

Some of the most popular metrics found in easy to use CRM software include CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score).

Although it is really hard to reach 100% in any of them, nevertheless based on Revenue per Customer, and Customer Retention and Churn rate, determine what looks good and what appears to be great for your startup or small business.

2. Use Multiple Effective Feedback Loops

Most businesses big or small do some kind of survey to measure the quality of their customer service at one point in time or another.
This can work if your business has some sort of solid email database in the business CRM, or you know of a convenient point in the customer journey where purchasers are most willing to complete your survey questionnaire.

In other cases, several small businesses and startup organizations even offer simple online forms on their websites to collect feedback on their support services, or in modern times a ‘hashtag’ that can be used on social media for viewing their feedbacks.

Always remember that presently we dwell in an omnichannel world and so according to certain research conducted it states that more than 40 percent of customers prefer not to do business with brands if they are incapable of using their preferred channel(s) for conveying their issues and feedback.

3. Remain Aware Of Organic Feedback

Even if you have set up channels to get the opinions of your customers and find the right metrics for measuring your customer satisfaction scores, there will always be certain customers of your brand who share their experiences (good as well as bad) on their own accord.

This can be a comment made by the customer to a sales rep (once they approached for selling a new product), something said in a public forum, or on stage at an industry-specific event.

Therefore remember to check and pay special attention to these customers who take time to send snail mails even in this era of digitalization and social media as to whether they have been pleased or displeased about the customer service they received from your brand.

4. Test The Effectiveness Of Self-Service Tools

Finally, your small business might create a solid product/service manual, or create a knowledge base and an open library of necessary documentation and other content online to aid your customers help themselves.

However, if most of these generated contents go unused, it becomes pretty obvious how good these resources have been marketed or developed for helping your customer’s needs.

Self-service is just another customer service channel. Irrespective of whether it is a sophisticated Chatbot, or simply a community of online users where your customers can come up with answers aided by their peers, the use of self-service in customer support once you use CRM and customer service team to create the knowledge base shows how well they trust your brand to empower them with DIY (Do It Yourself) capabilities.

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