Are You Meeting These Key Customer Support Expectations For Your Brand?

In today’s world consumers are increasingly becoming demanding. Now, consumers not only require high-quality products, but they also anticipate star-rated services. 

Nevertheless, current researches have revealed that under-investment in customer care infrastructure is harming customer service from a global perspective.

Recently NewVoiceMedia partnered with OpinionMatters a market research firm, to analyze the survey response from more than 1000 support professionals working in different industry verticals and its results have found five significant gaps between the expectations of the customers and the service they receive that can eventually hurt your business.

Customer Expectation #1

An Unfailing Experience across Channels

For most consumers, elaborating the same problem(s) to multiple support agents is one of the most talked-about frustrating aspects of customer support.

Regrettably, 40 percent of those that were surveyed admitted that their customers in most cases need to repeat themselves to more than one support agents for resolving their issues.

In addition, unfortunately, over a fifth of the surveyed support agents also admitted that they cannot match their consumers to their previous agents after the customers have switched channels for resolving their still persisting issue(s).

Now, failing to provide the customer with the necessary information they need promptly is one of the quickest ways to make your customers think of aborting your brand.

Therefore, using an easy to use CRM that can provide intelligent call-routing and a centralized platform that is capable of tracking customer issues across every channel is a time-tested way to make certain that your brand is meeting the expectations of the customers those that switch channels frequently.

Customer Expectation #2

On-Hold Time Should Be Kept To a Minimum

Research reveals that when it comes to holding times most customers are only willing to wait for 10 minutes on-hold in an average.

Moreover, every minute over this above-stated benchmarked timeline significantly steps-up the chances of your customers hanging up and taking their problems elsewhere.

Nevertheless, in spite of this above-stated fact only 36 percent of the support agents those that were surveyed told that their contact center offers self-service options by using an IVR.

Support executives often field a very high volume of calls for relatively few scenarios. Therefore, by authorizing customers to help themselves by using a self-service IVR that can lessen the effort and time needed to answer their simple issues, which can be integrated with an easy to use CRM, you can reduce hold times and call volumes effectively.

This is because using IVR will not only make your support facility efficient but it will also provide support agents to manage more channels or focus on resolving more complex issues easily.

Customer Expectation #3

The Ability to Interact With a Real Person

Customers have an expectation to be able to contact businesses through an ever-increasing number of channels and also self-service options that provide them with a solution to attend to their problems on their own terms.

Nevertheless, what customers demand even more is to find that their issues are solved quickly, which is the exact reason as to why when things get complicated, most consumers across several brands, still consider that speaking to a real person is the fastest and most effective way to solve their problems.

Nearly 30 percent of the surveyed respondents expressed that their support facility cannot route calls to the right agent without an IVR, and sometimes even not at all.

On the other hand, many businesses that have adopted IVR, use complicated menus in those systems that are too difficult to navigate.

Easy to use CRM, and cloud technology can break these barriers by offering dynamic menus that can aid the customers to speak to the most appropriate person faster, which in turn will help increase the support staffs ability to deliver the most appropriate service required by the customers.

Customer Expectation #4

A More Personalized Experience

According to the survey, it was found that 70 percent of support professionals manually update their records in the CRM database after each call. It was also noted that on an average, respondents waste approximately 142 minutes every week for logging their call data, whilst 28 percent said that they spend more than 3 hours a week updating their records.

If this is sounding like this is exactly what is happening in your business, upgrade your support related technology by adopting easy to use CRM software for your company that will aid support agents to perform their work more efficiently.

Recording of calls and automatic call logging found in most easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub and others not only reduces administration time but it also increases productivity.
Additionally, the customer information that is stored in the CRM database also helps to arm the support reps with data that is needed to provide personalized service that customers demand from brands in modern times.

Customer Expectation #5

Understanding the Customer's Pain Points and Needs

Right from sales to customer service, your customer’s pain points and needs impact business success at every stage of the customer journey.

Therefore, it is best to learn from innovative companies those that have invested in finding ways for listening to their customers and adapted their techniques and strategies base on what they have.

According to the survey although a “Customer Obsessed” organization is the hottest topic of the day, in reality, only 50 percent of the support staffs “Always” ask for feedback, with only 42 percent asking for comments “Only sometimes” and 8 percent those who “Never” performs this important exercise at all.

Conclusion

In modern times, technology has created better informed and more connected customers. Therefore, in this competitive market, it is most essential that to ensure happiness for your customers and make them come back and continue using your brand, automated post support call surveys using an easyto use CRM software is most needed nowadays, which can help evaluate whether your business is living up to your customer expectations for rapid business growth.

The New Driver Of Buying Decisions- Customer Experience

Businesses’ approach to tempting new customers for buying their products has evolved a lot over the last few years. In the past, it was easy to sell anything that was affordable and of high-quality. Well, in modern times, that has changed and we all know it will also continue to change in the days to come. 

Today, customer experience has become an element that is more important than product or price, when it comes to the consumer’s buying decisions for satisfying their needs. 

In Walker Info report it has been noted that within the next one year (by 2020) customer experience will replace product and price as a key driver behind consumers’ decisions on whether or not to purchase a product or service. 

Therefore with so much competition in the marketplace, it is much more easy for customers to leave you for a competitor that prioritizes on customer experience for the buyers of their offerings. 

Below we will dive and dig into the importance of providing a world-class customer experience and how it can benefit you for your business growth. 

Why is customer experience so important?

As in 2019, millennial(s) are becoming the biggest consumer demography in the US; all businesses will see a drastic change in their customer-vendor relationship. For now, if consumers are unhappy, they can easily ruin your brand’s reputation by spreading venomous comments across a plethora of social media channels on the internet. 

Therefore, with customers having so much of choices when making a purchase, creating a reputation as a customer-centric brand is most crucial, as if you do not, consumers will buy from your competitors that do. 

Consider these statistics, to drive home the importance of providing your customers with world-class customer experience:

• With stellar customer-experience, an increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent.

• It costs five times more to get hold of a new customer than it takes to keep holding on to an existing one, and it is only a great customer experience that can generate loyal customers and reduce customer churn. 

• Because of bad customer experience, 95 percent of customers say they have left or have taken action towards a brand.

• 86 percent of customers will be ready to pay 25 percent more for an offering from a brand that delivers excellent customer service to its consumers. 

Hence, you see if you want to remain competitive in your industry and make the wish for your business growth come true, delivering stellar customer experience is now the baseline standard for all successful businesses. 

Here are a few best practices and tricks for delivering excellent customer experience for business growth.

1. Stay in constant touch

Reach out to each of your customers individually to check how things are going on a routine basis, which you can easily do using your best small business CRM software and ask them what you could do to improve upon your services. 

Make use of campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM software to create a survey and ask your customers if they need any help from you that they presently do not have. 

This outreach can be done with the help of phone calls to make the interaction more personal. 

Performing this type of regular outreach makes the customers feel them as your valuable partners, that you truly consider their opinions, and you are ready to do anything you can to improve their experience with your brand. 

Always remember that once you have planned changes based on their feedback, communicate to your customers that you are making the changes they asked for, since this will win big points for your organization’s reputation and also ensure that your customers are satisfied with the experience that you provide to them for their loyalty towards your brand. 

2. Deliver stellar customer support

Customers form their opinions of your ability to deliver stellar customer experience based on several variables. 

This includes how accessible you are to them, the contents your marketing teams provide, interactions with your sales and support reps that shows empathy, and the list goes on. 

However, the most important among all these factors is the quality of customer support, which is the one that provides the greatest impact on the customer’s perception of your brand.

Hence here are some of the most helpful tips for maintaining a powerful customer support presence of your brand in the marketplace.

Provide multi-channel support

If customers are made to wait, when they need assistance it is natural that they grow increasingly impatient and frustrated. 

Therefore use Chatbots for providing your customers 24 hours support and Live-agents for providing support during the working hours to field more complex questions. 

Apart from this, you can also use the telephone and email for those customers who prefer these modes of communication.

Finally, if you are using your best small business CRM software for increasing customer experience with your brand, you should also integrate social listening and social media monitoring tools to receive alerts when someone mentions about your brand on social media websites. 

It has been observed that people are increasingly asking support questions on social media. Therefore, it is important that you must respond to these questions quickly with the help of these tools, which results in delivering stellar customer experience to your consumers in the marketplace. 

3. Increase the rate of FCR

FCR or Fast Contact Resolution rate refers to the incoming help desk support tickets that your support reps can resolve on their first try. 

The easiest way to boost your FCR rate is by hiring or training top talents in your organization to manage your support efforts or create dedicated help desk groups (support groups that are specialized in a specific product, services or any other areas of your business) to ensure that your customers receive superior customer experience every time.

4. Make employee satisfaction a priority

Employees who are happy working in your organization cares more about your customers, and go that extra mile to support them to resolve their pain-points, which eventually help deliver excellent customer support. 

Therefore, create employ survey programs to measure the satisfaction of your employees in their job, and identify areas where you can improve and increase their satisfaction in their workplace. 

Since when employees are stressed, tired, or overloaded they are more likely to be curt or rude with your customers which can easily damage the reputation of your brand. 

Conclusion

As customer experience is becoming increasing important and will be the most crucial determining factor in the consumer’s purchasing decision making process, following these tips and positioning your company as a customer-centric business along with the use of  best small business CRM software to aid the process will help your company to deliver world-class customer experience that will increase your revenue and solidify your future business growth. 

Why ConvergeHub is the cheapest Salesforce Alternative for your Sales Force

The main concern for any business leaders looking for adopting a CRM for their organization, particularly for the business growth of a startup or a small business, is whether or not their employees are going to use the CRM software platform, as intended.

In a recent study done by Forrester in 2017, it was found that 43% of the respondents in the survey did not understand the challenges that come with gaining acceptance of a new CRM software solution in their company.

Kate Leggett and John Bruno wrote in a Forrester report:

“CRM initiatives can spiral out of control into multimillion-dollar investments that negatively affect your customers and the employees who serve them. The cost of poor adoption is twofold:  Underutilized investment and unmet business objectives.”

This is what happens especially with the adoption of complex CRM software platforms like Salesforce that offers numerous functionalities and whistles that are mostly never used by small businesses.

Therefore, if you are looking for the best small business CRM solution and a Salesforce Alternative CRM platform for your SMB, ConvergeHub prioritizes usability and user adoption for their small business CRM platform.

Manash Chaudhuri, founder, and CSO of ConvergeHub in a recent talk on Salesforce Alternative CRM software platforms said:

"Gone are the days of one-size-fit-all CRM applications. We hear this loud and clear every day from our prospects, fans, and customers, and this new functionality in easy to use CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub CRM has provided the customers of online lead management software the ultimate flexibility they required to implement their CRM for small and medium businesses the way they want to.
Since allowing small businesses to customize and tailor their Salesforce Alternative CRM in a way they choose, not only lessens the alleged risks of CRM implementation but also encourages the inclinations of the CRM users to use their easy to use CRM regularly, with this new functionality in their small business CRM platforms."

In the end of the day, small businesses and startups looking for Salesforce Alternative CRM software just want an affordable and an easy CRM solution to use.

In other words, they want a CRM for small business, a software solution that is capable of tracking their sales, that saves them time, and make their business growth happen more productively.

Therefore the moment you will Sign up for ConvergeHub , the award-winning CRM for small business , you will surely notice the difference.

ConvergeHub is a scalable enterprise-ready CRM for small businesses that is packed with advanced features which are also found in Salesforce that will help your small business grow rapidly.

It is an easy to use CRM software , that incorporates customizable and configurable features, which helps companies to adapt the CRM to their way of doing business.

Therefore, if you are looking for Salesforce Alternative CRM software that has robust enterprise-grade features and is priced for startups and small business, ConvergeHub is for you.

ConvergeHub is a feature-packed powerful CRM, which is found at an affordable and transparent pricing of $9/user per month (Billed Annually) or $11/user per month (Billed Quarterly) and is committed to provide the highest price-performance value for startups and small and medium businesses that believe in rapid business growth. 

Here are some of the key benefits of using ConvergeHub (Starter Edition) for managing your SMB’s Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Deals:

• 500 Leads
• 500 Accounts
• 500 Contacts
• 500 Deals
• 500 Cases
• 500 Events
• 500 Tasks
• 500 Notes
• 250 MB Storage
• 500 emails per user/month
• App Store· 

Moreover, it practically requires zero training for using this easy to use Salesforce Alternative CRM software, since it will take just a couple of hours to see the value in using a focused and simple lead management software, which helps in adding clarity to your customer relationship management and sales tracking efforts.

ConvergeHub believes in focusing on building a great product that people like and recommends vs. hiring thousands of employees like Salesforce that will try to hard sell their CR, since our motto is to help our small business customers in their business growth strategies and thrive, and we certainly do that by providing a fantastic Salesforce Alternative.

So go ahead, give ConvergeHub a shot. We are sure you will never regret it as you will be really surprised to find how great this Salesforce Alternative is today, in the 2019 Cloud-based CRM software marketplace. 

The Rise Of Inbound Marketing In MCA Business And How To Master It

The effectiveness and popularity of inbound marketing in all industries including the Cash Advance business have been steadily rising since inbound marketing began penetrating marketing practices in the early 2000s, and has also evolved significantly, owing to the stellar growth of the internet and the introduction of new marketing channels to deliver customized contents to prospects and customers.

However, do you know what is inbound marketing and what are the means by which you can excel in it?

Well, in this article let us, therefore, dig into the nuances of this popular marketing strategy and discuss certain tactics used in inbound marketing along with some of the best practices that will help you to master it.

Even not in the distant past, marketing was a totally different ballgame even in the MCA industry, than it is today.

As before the rise of MCA CRM software and the internet, marketing for Merchant Cash Advance business mainly consisted of overtly trying to convince leads and prospective customers to buy their services, which in fact was not much different than traditional age-old advertising.

However, this marketing strategy changed as the internet and social media began to provide marketers with novel ways to deliver contents to leads, prospects, and customers, shifting the focus from touting the advantages of their services to providing educational information that helped MCA prospects and customers to solve common problems. 

Common MCA inbound marketing tactics and best practices using Merchant Cash Advance software:

Although there are several common inbound marketing tactics that you have surely seen, nevertheless here are also a few of the most effective inbound marketing tactics that you can use for your Cash Advance business, especially when you are also using Merchant Cash Advance CRM software.

Content marketing

Content marketing is considered as the bedrock of inbound marketing strategy. Some of the most used content marketing tactics that can be used in Merchant Cash Advance business are:

• Blogging
• EBooks
• Social media contents
• Videos
• Infographics
• Whitepapers
• Case Studies
• Email newsletters and others

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Next, once you have created your valuable contents, you need to make it easy for your potential MCA customers to find and benefit from it.

This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play.

As most consumers use Google to search for contents, SEO is a practice which helps in optimizing your Cash Advance website so that your web-pages appear higher-up in the search engine results.

However, although SEO remains a critical piece in every inbound marketer’s playbook, as Google constantly alters its search engine’s algorithms, nailing down SEO tactics for your MCA business is like aiming at a constantly moving target.

So learn more about updated SEO strategies which you can easily assimilate into your inbound marketing plans. Remember creating contents without doing SEO is of no value, as content marketing is useless if you do not find a way to drive traffic into it.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has utterly altered the way present-day marketers approach their works. With the escalation of people using social media on a daily basis, social media platforms have become the primary channel through which MCA businesses can also reach their potential customers.

According to a report published by Social Media Examiner in 2018, it has been stated that social media marketing increase brand exposure by 87%, website traffic by 78%, and helps in generating more leads by 64% in the US markets.

Therefore, as an inbound marketing tactic, use social media to increase customer engagements and post your contents on your social media platforms since if your content is outstanding, people will definitely share it and your Cash Advance businesses’ followers will grow.

Create buyer personas

Despite what many marketers may think, it is difficult to make a broad generalization about what your customers need or want without any research. Creating hypothetical profiles of your businesses’ ideal buyers or buyer personas help to zero in on their requirements and deliver inbound content which addresses those needs.

For developing buyer personas, it is useful to launch a customer survey email campaign that allows you to focus on most common pain-points those that are felt across your customer base.

Using an MCA CRM software like ConvergeHub for collecting these data in the CRM database and for conducting these surveys helps in effectively address your customer’s needs.

Score Leads

Lead scoring is the practice of providing leads points for actions that they have taken and their demographic data they provide using MCA CRM software.

For an example, when someone views or downloads your inbound contents, like eBooks, white papers, , or visit your pricing page and others you can award them points for their interest to buy your services.

Lead scoring helps to view most sales-ready leads easily.

Therefore to dig further read here how to incorporate lead scoring into your MCA inbound marketing strategy.

Develop engaging landing pages that convert leads

When someone clicks a link to view or download your content, ‘landing page’ is the place where they land on that offers the content for free but request personal information in exchange.

A landing page is a lead generation tactics, so make your MCA landing pages engaging, that makes it amply clear what they are offering.

Therefore to dig further read here how to create and use landing pages into your MCA inbound marketing strategy.    

Conclusion

Inbound marketing is here to stay. Since inbound marketing using Merchant Cash Advance CRM bridges the gap and enables modern, digital marketers to show that they care about the customer experience than anything else for creating a customer-centric business.

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?

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If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

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