Marketing automation best practices to drive growth with best sales CRM software

Small and startup businesses need to squeeze every drop of value out of the technology they use. Most small businesses have limited resources and so they need to maximize their efficiency and productivity. Hence, adhering to marketing automation best practices using best sales CRM software like ConvergeHub is the key to many growing businesses.

According to a survey done by Liana Technologies (a software house specialized in digital marketing and communication tools), the most common reason that participants of the survey gave for not using marketing automation was the dearth of expertise and lack of human resource to manage the system.

However with a right marketing automation software, like an easy to use CRM ConvergeHub, these concerns are not a problem, since ConvergeHub provides in-depth on-boarding and training so that you can be sure your team will have all the necessary expertise to use their best sales CRM software efficiently.

Therefore, if you are not sure how to leverage your marketing automation system, to drive growth, this article is for you to make sure that you do not see your marketing automation system as an insurmountable obstacle for generating more sales and revenue.

Here we have covered a few marketing automation best practices using your best sales CRM software for growing your business.

Map out your lead stages

The most fundamental thing that marketing automation in an easy to use CRM software helps your business to grow is by generating and nurturing leads so that they ultimately become your customers. However, to do this you primarily need to map out the different stages a lead passes through on its way for conversion.

Therefore, create a custom field in your best sales CRM software to track where your leads are in the sales funnel, according to which stages they are in.
Since, it is only by viewing how fast leads are moving from one stage to the next, allow you to find out bottlenecks in the sales pipeline and address the cause so that leads can continue to move smoothly through the pipeline.

Here is an example of a few lead stages that most of our customers use, once they use our easy to use CRM software and marketing automation solution ConvergeHub.

• Anonymous Lead
• Known Lead
• Engaged Lead
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
• Won Lead
• Lost Lead
• Recycled Lead
• Disqualified Lead 

Lead scoring

Next, you need a lead scoring process in place to find when any lead becomes marketing qualified and all set to be passed on to sales. You can easily score your leads based on its demographic attributes (like industry, job title, age, location, etc.) and also on the behavioral aspects of the leads (like downloading content, clicking on an email, visiting high-value web pages, etc.)

Lead scoring is a process, which provides valuable insights of which attributes and actions deserve which score. 

Use triggers to simplify lead progression

Use your best sales CRM software like ConvergeHub; you can activate system triggers, which will launch a series of automated actions when specific events take place.

For example, when any one of your leads becomes marketing qualified, you can make use of system triggers to automatically create a task for the sales to follow up on the lead, update the lead stage to MQL, and at the same time pull them out of any ongoing lead nurturing campaign.

You can also make use of triggers to initiate actions like sending emails.

For example, you can use your easy to use CRM to send welcome emails to anyone who has signed up for your free trial.

In fact, using an award-winning smallbusiness CRM software like ConvergeHub the possibility of what you can automatically trigger using its sales force automation functionalities are virtually endless.  

Leverage lead generation tools

Lead generation is one of the most important parts of growing any small and medium-sized business. If you are a user of ConvergeHub CRM software you can streamline your lead generation efforts by using ConvergeHub Free Lead Generation Tool.

Moreover, most easy to use CRM systems also provide the ability to create landing pages with lead forms so that your marketing team can capture personal information of new leads in the pipeline.

Always, be sure that the landing pages of your lead generation forms are effective and engaging at converting leads that help grow your business.

Use popup to manage exit intent

Web pop-ups are message boxes that come up on the screen when you are browsing a website.  These pop-ups often convey information, offer contents, provide free trails and discounts, and others.

Therefore create intelligently and provoking exit intents on your business website to entice your visitors to stick around, since you can easily configure exit intent that will appear when someone is about to leave your website.

Routinely clean your contact database

You best sales CRM software platform’s ability to reach out to leads diminishes as your CRM database starts accumulating fake contacts and duplicate data in the CRM.

Therefore routinely (once every fortnight) clean your CRM database by merging duplicates, and put verification measures that can identify fake emails and phone numbers, so that your easy to use CRM data remains clean and do not affect the performance of your system.

Measure improvements

One of the most cherished thing about marketing automation in any easy to use best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub is its ability to track every touch points that you have with your leads and customers in your CRM software platform’s database.

Using marketing automation functions in your easy to use CRM solution you can not only keep track of the landing pages and website visits, number of MLQs converted to customers, content downloads, campaign outcomes, but also measure email open rates, bounce and click-through rates, unsubscribes, and a lot more that helps to keep your finger on the pulse of your results.

Using the powerful analytical capabilities in the CRM software you can easily identify which strategies are working for your business and which ones need improvements to make data-driven decisions for growing your business.

Conclusion

When used correctly marketing automation is the engine that helps you generate more leads, close more deals, and predominantly maintain higher customer satisfaction rates for driving growth and expansions for small and emerging businesses.

This is the reason most small businesses use all-in-one Salesforce alternative CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub, which includes marketing automation on the same platform, and more importantly at no extra cost.

So just be sure to evaluate your options before selecting the right all-in-one CRM software solution to meet your business needs.

Do you want 2019 to be the year where you achieve massive revenue growth?

Then start planning NOW.

Create your revenue growth strategy for 2019.

If you would like to get some ideas or brainstorm on how ConvergeHub can provide the right technology to achieve your company’s sales goals, you can reserve a confidential consultation with one of our experts.

On this 30-45 minute call we will:

• Take a deep-dive into your business process
• Pinpoint areas with most growth potential
• Discuss how to implement an effective marketing automation system that lets you focus on most important tasks

Clickhere to check out how you can achieve your sales growth plans in 2019!

4 Must-Have Integrations for your CRM System for this New Year

When people ask us what CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) they should buy, we always recommend (impartially), that whatever be their preferred choice, the CRM application must be cloud based.

Why?

This is because, cloud based CRM applications integrate better with other third-party business applications, which help the users of the CRM to make changes in one place, rather than modifying data in several other separate silo apps.

Moreover, updates are quicker in cloud based CRM software, not to mention that business tools are more consistent with cloud based CRM apps.

Even programmers can easily access the CRM database in cloud based software applications and hence provide support much faster than on-premise CRM software platforms.

Best small business CRM software systems like ConvergeHub CRM, offer tools and applications so that third-party software vendors can build custom solutions and connect their business applications easily in order to provide a more robust experience for their users.

Therefore, most of our small business CRM customers use two or three third-party integrations, as ConvergeHub provides more than 30 choices of third-partyadd-ons.

Here are the top four and most popular types of integrations used by users of ConvergeHub- The award-winning CRM for small businesses.

Accounting

When a customer calls your sales and support teams, do your reps want to make sure that they have every information they need about their customers at their fingertips? Any easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub will always be able to track emails, customer activities, and notes.

But what about their order histories, products bought, and open invoices?

Let us be clear that a CRM software is not a bookkeeping software or an accounting system. Even the best CRM for small business lacks the audit controls necessary for building a robust financial database.

That is why most users of ConvergeHub CRM prefer to integrate QuickBooks with their online customer relationship management system.

A QuickBooks CRM like ConvergeHub that seamlessly provides QuickBooks CRM integration free allow the users to synchronize contact information and history of transactions done with their brands.

What more, you can also create orders and invoices on the go in the CRM platform and then pass it over to the QuickBooks’ accounting database.

Doing this not only eliminates double-entry of data, which is a ban for all businesses, you can also view all the transaction histories and invoices of your customers in real time.

This is the reason ConvergeHub QuickBooks CRM software is considered as the best QuickBooks CRM for sales teams.

As the best CRM for QuickBooks online, ConvergeHub CRM does store a wealth of customer data that could be used to build long-term relationships, increase customer satisfaction and generate more business.

According to an article published by Intuit the creators of QuickBooks, it states that:

"QuickBooks was created to provide you with a robust understanding of your small business financial. It was not built to manage every area of your business. So, just like you don’t expect a server to also be the chef and dishwasher it’s also unrealistic to expect your accounting software to manage all areas of your business."

Hence, here is the answer to your question: How can you make QuickBooks and CRM work together to increase sales for your organization?

Phone

Would not it be a nice thing to see your customer’s and prospect’s personal records with all relevant information popping-up on your screen along with all the history of their prior communications with anyone in your organization, when you receive a call?

How productive do you think your day will be if you can start an outgoing call with just a click of a button on the contact records in your CRM database ?

Or be able to record outgoing and incoming calls from your leads, prospects, and customers and have the functionality to connect the recordings with your contacts in the CRM for future listening.

Well, if your still excited listening to this, you can have all these functionalities integrated into your easy to use CRM software, once you integrate ConvergeHub with Twilio Call, Nexinteractive Dialer, RingCentral or SkypeCall.

As most of the phone systems today are cloud based applications, hence integrations like these can be set up and done in minutes nowadays.

Using simple and uncomplicated setup, using these add-ins you can make calls faster and thereby keep track of all your customer-facing employee’s phone calling activities.

Email Marketing

If your small business or startup organization is in the habit of sending only a few hundreds of emails at a time, then your best CRM for small business should be able to handle that. However, once your company grows in size and revenue, and you need to send thousands of emails on a daily or weekly basis to numerous opt-in lists, then you surely need to connect your easy to use CRM software platform to an email marketing service.

Why?

This is because, your local service provider may shut you down if you send a massive number of emails, which do not happen with good and dedicated email marketing services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Drip, and others.

Good email marketing service providers like MailChimp and others put you through some due diligence to ascertain your organization is not sending spam or inappropriate contents in your messages. For once you have passed this test, effective and popular email marketing services are capable of handling tens of thousands of emails at one go and bring back the results of your campaigns into your easy to use CRM software system.

Remember your CRM database is the central repository of all your marketing communications that you had with your leads, prospects, and customers and a good email marketing application is just a mere tool that must use the information stored in your CRM database to help you send the right messages to the masses, and then track the results of those messages using efficient analytics to reveal your KPIs.

G Suite

Are your employees fond of using Google Apps? Well, most of our customers do. Integrating your small business CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contact, helps you get the best of either world - a robust customer management system working in tandem with Google’s varied storage, collaboration, communication products, and services.

Using these integrations you teams can seamlessly sync your calendar with the CRM, import contacts, and many more, so that you can stay up to date with your tasks and meetings or create a lead directly out of an email, using a single platform.

Takeaway

Using a cloud based CRM software integrating these third-party applications with your best CRM for small business software platform is as easy as setting up basic applications on your mobile phone.

In the end, always remember that your CRM is as good as its database.
However, CRM database stores information about everyone that comes in touch with your business, and so you must use powerful integrations (ones that we have described above) to leverage this data as a must-do strategy for this New Year.

9 Ways Marketing and Sales Teams Can Unite To Close More Deals

In spite of using the best easy to use CRM software , do you feel that your sales team is endlessly spinning its wheels?

Clearly, something is definitely wrong, since a low conversion rate and exhausted sales reps is not a great combination for the growth of any business. 

A part of this problem can lie in the fact, that your team may have too many leads. 

Although you may assume that having a pile of leads is a good sign, nevertheless, sales can be counter-intuitive, since quality is far less important than quality when it comes to sales.

It is a common fact faced by many organizations, whereby a clogged sales pipeline in an easy to use CRM can be really demoralizing for your sales and marketing teams and can render a grim blow to any sales rep’s confidence working in your company’s payroll. 

How Marketing Can Help You Focus on the Highest Quality Leads?

Although both sales and marketing teams have the same goal (to increase revenue), at times both teams are often at odds, which can cause tensions between the two. 

The problem lies in the fact that while marketing may not provide your sales reps with adequate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), sales also many times may neglect the MQLs that marketing sends through to them.

Therefore, as an entrepreneur, you need to find a shared purpose for sales and marketing that will allow you to refine the sales pipeline in your easy to use CRM software, and focus more on best quality leads. 

Per say, your marketing team’s content marketing program should provide a lot of heavy lifting for your sales, by answering frequently asked questions, reeling in leads, and identifying prospective leads who are ready to converse with your sales reps by observing the way those leads are interacting with your brand’s contents.  

Below is a guideline for working with your marketing team to engender better quality leads and hit your sales targets over time:

1. Inform marketing what your prospects are asking at every stage of the sales pipeline

Marketing is always desperate for insights into the prospects requirements and your sales reps talk to those people every day, and know what prospects want.

Therefore, if your sales teams can provide a list of those frequently asked questions by the prospects to your marketing, they can create contents in form of blogs and FAQs that they and your sales reps can share with the prospects, and thereby do not have to waste time continually covering old grounds. 

According to research conducted by Forrester:

"78 % of buyers were put off by the fact that salespeople do not offer them relevant content to help them research and understand your offering."

2. Ask marketing to share their buyer personas

While your marketing team puts in a lot of efforts into creating buyer personas (the profile of ideal customers for your brand), salespeople often lose deals since they do not know who their ideal customers are, or where to find them.

These ideal buyer personas include details like age, language, position in the company, pain points, their favorite traveling places, even their preferred TV shows, etc.

According to another research done by Forrester, it was found that:

"75 % of prospective leads feel the sales reps who contact them don’t understand their business, role at work, or even the problem they’re trying to solve."

Therefore, sharing buyers personas between marketing and sales or developing it in conjunction with sales and marketing teams, can help in growing your sale. 

3. Explain marketing why leads sales are getting do not work 

Instead of complaining or rushing into a meeting for evaluating why lead your sales reps are getting from marketing do not work, it is best to explain your marketing team, what a solid lead looks like for your salespersons based on the leads that have been converted in the past. 

Marketing can also use this information in conjunction with sales to develop a lead scoring system that will work for both.

4. Know that the definition of MQL is always in a flux

As your sales teams keep working with marketing to refine the formula for Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), your sales teams also need to keep an eye and measure the leads that convert and adjust the MQLs by working on the existing lead scoring points, so that new leads resemble your existing customers. 

5. Refine the fields in your lead generation forms

If your sales team is not finding good leads from marketing it can be because of the fact that the lead generation forms on your business website’s landing pages don’t match your sales reps needs.

Therefore, suggest your marketing to create well-crafted lead generation forms in conjunction with the sales teams, having the right fields that can filter in right leads (isolate the bad ones) and drive them directly into your sales pipeline. 

6. Keep the data in your CRM Database up to date

People change jobs, phone number, emails, and addresses. Things change over time. People leave their jobs. Businesses and companies move and get closed. So do not let the MQLs sit in your CRM Database forever.

Strike your deals while they are hot. Since solid and good MQLs can get decayed and becomes useless within a few months.  

Review your CRM database every week, and evaluate all open deals as well as the lost ones from the previous weeks. 

Understand the reasons for your wins and losing categories (on product features, price, requirements of specific industries, or others) and make this clear to your marketing teams. 

Since, when your sales and marketing teams using the easy to use CRM fine-tune your selling tactics on a regular basis by learning from this knowledge, it ensures better and more sales down the line. 

7. Let marketing team nurture fence-sitting leads

Create a process for your marketing team, whereby they can find prospects that are still not ready to purchase your offerings and can take them back from your sales teams. 

Hence, if a qualified lead is passed on to the sales reps but is found that they are not ready to buy, you need to pass the prospect back to your marketing team and let them nurture it further, until the prospect is ready to buy.

This way, you can cut down on stuck leads in your easy to use CRM software platform’s sales pipeline. 

8. Look past closing your deals

Even after you have made the sale, let your marketing team keep sending premium contents to your customers. 

This will not only help you build the credibility of your contents with your customers but the next time that customer needs something that your organization can provide, you can convert their trust in your offerings into more revenue when the time is right. 

Sell once, and keep the customer for life.

You can also encourage your customers to share your contents on their social media networks, and thereby make them act as unpaid brand ambassadors for your business. 

9. One more bonus step you need to take

Talk to your marketing team on a regular basis.

Though it may seem obvious, in reality conducting regular meetings between marketing and sales teams are easier said than done. 

According to a study published by DemandGenReport (an organization that caters to the Latest B2B marketing news and trends):

"49 % of marketing and sales leaders said that the major challenge for finding alignment between their teams is communication. Sales and marketing just aren’t talking."

Therefore if you want to instantly take one action after reading this article, advice your sales reps to make friends with marketing right now, since if you can make this happen, increasing conversion rates can temporarily wait.

This is because, for the growth of your business, sales and marketing team are going to need to come up with a set of unified goals.

SO WHY WAIT?

Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a software platform that can help you do that in 2019?

If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

SCHEDULE 30-MINUTE ROCKET LAUNCH SESSION TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS TO NEXT LEVEL

See how ConvergeHub can skyrocket your revenue growth in 2019 and beyond!

On this 30-45 minute call we'll discuss your business goals, what's currently NOT working and then help you craft a comprehensive plan to get more customers into your business as quickly as possible and mend your bottom-line.

Key Tips for Finding Your Best Salesforce Alternative CRM Software In 2019

Salesforce is an excellent cloud based CRM software for customer relationship management. However, that are several users of Salesforce that are unsatisfied using this most talked about CRM solution and therefore look for Salesforce Alternatives in the CRM marketplace.

This is because:

"Salesforce is not a CRM that is meant for everyone."

The most pertinent reasons as to why small and medium-sized businesses look for Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms are:

-More affordable pricing

-Better customizability options

-Simple learning and easy adoption curves

-Ease of use

Now let us explain if you are new in understanding what is CRM software, and you think that all CRM solutions are the same, you need to relearn and reconsider your decisions once more.

Let us state clearly, that CRM systems are not simple software platforms that you can purchase and change repeatedly, once you are not satisfied using it. Since given the amount of expenditure and efforts that are involved in adopting a new CRM solution it becomes a pain in the neck once you find your CRM not up to the mark for the growth of your business.

Well, after reading this, we know you might be guessing like many: “Where do I begin?”

To answer your question, here are a few vital tips for winning CRM implementation as you look for Salesforce Alternative CRM in the marketplace:

1.Your CRM software should grow with your business

Since every business is different in their own ways, and the size of the businesses also varies considerably, hence, the “one-size-fits-all” concept just does not work with CRM systems.

Therefore, before selecting your Salesforce Alternative CRM software, evaluate how many employees are going to use the CRM in your company. Because, according to the employee strength of your organization you need to identify a CRM solution for your business that answers to your needs and can be easily customized for that purpose, without hampering your day-to-day workflow, and can expand its functionalities once your business grows in the times to come.

The true fact is, that there are several CRM solutions, which you need to purchase, based on just what they have, while there are even other CRM platforms that let you select the features that you require for your organization. Hence, the later one is always more cost-effective.

Considering your small business will not remain in this position for too long, and shall grow, adopt a CRM solution that can expand and extend its functionalities by using plug-ins, themes, templates, extensions, integrations with other third-party software platforms, and more.

Always remember while looking for your Salesforce Alternative CRM software look for functionalities in the selected CRM that can assist in your businesses’ growth.

2.Simplicity and easy to use features is the key

Stop! Change your CRM purchasing strategy if you are still looking for a CRM that can provide every functionality that has ever been created to perform in a CRM platform.

The logic behind stating this is simple.

An over-complicated and perplexing CRM software will also churn out complicated results. Moreover, your employees will have to invest more time in getting them used to the system for better understanding of the CRM software.

Worst of all, your teams may even escape using your newly purchased Salesforce Alternative CRM platform, if they find it too complicated, as it may eat up a considerable amount of their time in understanding the software.

Hence, the only prerogative that you must have while selecting your Salesforce Alternative CRM software, is to focus on the functionalities that your organization needs. To be truthful, the fewer the functions the better is the Salesforce Alternative CRM for growing organizations, small and medium businesses, and startups.

Nevertheless, we do not mean that you should compromise on the eminence of the CRM software platform, since easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub offers you a CRM system, which is not only scalable but is also affordable without compromising on its basic CRM functionalities.

3.Review more than a few, before purchasing

We understand, finalizing your purchase for a Salesforce Alternative CRM software can be difficult. This is because there are a plethora of CRM software solutions available in CRM space, and among them, there are many that claims that they have the same functionalities and features that you need for your business.
Hence, the solutions lies in checking on more than just a few systems and then select on how effective and easy to use your CRM software platform is when it is compared to others.
If needed, you can even inspect the reputation of your selected CRM software in social media networking websites and reputed CRM related online magazines found in the web.

4.Consider professional support

Although it is natural that you might assume you completely understand what your business needs out of your CRM solution, we have seen people finding them confused at times, owing to lack of expertise on the CRM oriented fields. Therefore, never base your purchase of any Salesforce Alternative CRM software based on your raw instincts.

We would always suggest that you should ask for professional help and take into consideration involving experts that can offer proper and effective CRM implementation solutions for your business.

CRM development consultants not only aid you in choosing the right CRM software that is easy to adopt, scalable, and fits your business, but the one that offers support during CRM implementation and provides adequate training to your employees to get a grasp of the functionalities of your purchased new software.

Conclusion

We all know that your business needs an easy to use CRM, however, be careful not to rush. Remember, if your organization is working until now, a few more days will never hurt the performance of your company, as much as a wrong choice while purchasing your Salesforce Alternative CRM software can harm your businesses’ growth and productivity.

Remember, adopting a new CRM software is always a costly job, so invest proper time to conduct your research, find the best Salesforce Alternative CRM software, and purchase the one that will pay off after installing the solution. 

So are you ready to start your hunt for Salesforce Alternative CRM now!

Try ConvergeHub, the award-winning small business CRM by clicking on this link- we are sure you will appreciate it, like many of our customers who have become raving fans of our truly easy to use CRM software.

Here is what you can do with ConvergeHub the best Salesforce Alternative CRM in 2019:

 •Acquire leads through structured marketing campaigns
 •Build your own sales process to follow up and nurture leads
 •Drive sales with efficient sales automation
 •Turn your customers into raving fans through efficient customer support
 •Grow revenue through single click Quotes and Invoices
 •Get 360-degree customer view to provide highest customer satisfaction
 •Multichannel touch points in real time with all prospects and customers
 •Automate your workflow to increase team productivity

These 2 Exasperating Things Are Again Making Businesses Look for Salesforce Alternatives In 2018

Although Salesforce by any measure seems to be on the right path, with its stocks to record-high levels of over $155 per share in Wall Street, nevertheless, every company goes through its growing pains, and so there are still areas, which state that Salesforce is facing two most growing concerns as customers look for Salesforce Alternatives that are:

1.Complains about its pricing models:

In a report published by Forrester, it says that customers using Salesforce CRM see a lot of hidden costs that make them turn away from renewing their contract with the CRM giant and look for other Salesforce Alternatives.

Perse, to create a sandbox environment, which is a common application for testing, Salesforce unreasonably charges an addition of 15% or more in addition to its annual subscription fees. 
Not to mention of the exorbitant extra charges that Salesforce also asks for providing additional integrations and API usage.

In fact, in another report published by Forrester in 2015, quoted:

2.Not doing a good job while integrating its marketing products:

The same report even claimed that Salesforce is also facing serious trouble converting its largest set of customers those who make use of its sales and customer service products, to its new marketing product, which Salesforce bought through its acquisition of ExactTarget in 2013.

The report stated that Salesforce Marketing Cloud could only make up 10% of its sales while more than a quarter of its sales revenue still comes from its core products Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

Part of this disparity lies in the fact that since the company has not fully integrated its sales and marketing products, which has different user interfaces and customer bases, it has lead to high level of dissatisfaction among Salesforce customers, who are looking for Salesforce Alternatives in the CRM market.

As a matter of fact, the level of discontent and unhappiness among the Salesforce users are so high on this issue that more than 20% of its Marketing Cloud users are ready to move to a different Cloud based CRM vendor like ConvergeHub and others, rather than renegotiate their existing Marketing Cloud contracts when it expires.

Hence, Salesforce need to think about continue increasing the number of apps create on top of basic CRM platform (especially on the sales side) and also its new products in data analysis to make way for up-selling and cross-selling opportunities for its customers to attain its over-enthusiastic dreams in 2019 of  reaching its projected $12.6 to $12.65 billion revenue.

Conclusion

As it is often said, that CRM is a solution where one size never fits all, therefore, if you are looking for a Salesforce Alternative that can fit your small and medium business, try ConvergeHub the award-winning Cloud based CRM for SMB.

ConvergeHub is a CRM for small businesses and startups that easily customize and integrate with other useful processes; thereby making your entire workflow automated for better profitability, increased ROI and enhanced customer service.