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.

Ways CRM Database in Online Lead Management Platform Can Improve Your Sales Pipeline

One of the main advantages of using an easy to use CRM system like ConvergeHub is to find access to a centrally located customer database.

As a matter of fact, 74% of easy to use CRM users says that online lead management systems offer improved access to customer information in the CRM database.

Primarily, salespeople can be resistant to CRM implementation in your organization, because maintaining data in the CRM may seem to be a lot of work, which can disrupt your businesses’ current workflow. Nevertheless, finding an access to past sales data like previous orders, contact details, and buying patterns, means that crucial and important intelligence from your sales pipeline will always be accessible for your team. 

This invaluable intelligence is important because apart from improving customer experience, this key information in the CRM database also allows your sales teams to follow up on prospective leads quickly and that too with all pertinent and relevant information.

Here are a few ways in which you can use your CRM database to improve your sales pipeline:

1. Lead Nurturing

If you are an owner of small and medium business or a startup organization your CRM for small and medium business like ConvergeHub help to manage records of communications that will inform interactions with present and potential customers. Businesses that excel in lead nurturing generate 50% additional sales-ready leads at greater than even 33% lower outlay, for which the opportunity to follow up is crucial to success.

Apart from this, lead scoring methods are also usually required to permit salespeople the chance to prioritize leads depending upon how hot they are, and so likely to close. As without an easy to use CRM often a lot of time gets wasted chasing unqualified leads.

Therefore, look for an easy to use CRM software that will help you to simplify your sales process by prioritizing leads, especially through sales and marketing automation, to gain control of your sales funnel.

2.Perfect sales forecasting

Not all easy to use CRM system offers the same functionality, so mediating with vendors about your detailed needs before purchasing your CRM software is always a crucial part of the CRM selection process. 

Therefore, when selecting your easy to use CRM software, choose a platform that comes with good reporting and analytics options, which can help you to predict sales, view conversion rates, and get a strong idea on your prospective lead’s journey through the sales pipeline. 

Information from your CRM database is more likely to make your sales forecasting more reliable and accurate. This is important if you want to motivate your sales teams to reach their optimal but achievable target-line. 

Hence, easy to use CRM does not only escalate a sales rep’s productivity, but it also makes the sales process more effective and efficient, which in turn contributes to the continuing growth of your organization. 

3.Work smarter with integration

CRM integrations can go a long way in assisting your ever-busy sales teams to focus on the right thing at the right time. 

For example, marketing integrations like Calendar, Emails, e-Signing, Telephony and others can automate tasks that previously may be seemed complicated, by eradicating the need for manual entry of data across several silo software platforms. 

Easy to use CRM systems that can operate well even on mobile devices like ConvergeHub is also an added advantage for your sales teams. 

According to a survey done by Innoppl Technologies:

65% of sales reps who have adopted mobile CRM have achieved their sales quotas. While only 22% of reps using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets.

Since for sales reps having information from the CRM database at the fingertips, when they are working out of the office implies that, they can easily follow up on time-sensitive leads and thereby avoid situations that call for missed opportunities. 

Conclusion

Therefore, in a gist, having access to the information in the CRM database is not only extremely valuable for your organization, but it also paves the way for your businesses’ growth and increases your company’s bottom line and ROI. 

Why ConvergeHub Is Ranked As a Better Agile CRM Alternative

Agile CRM is presently being used by many businesses throughout the organization as a resourceful and inclusive program, which permits several business tools to be organized inside the same interface with integrations to connect them seamlessly. Agile CRM allows you to easily synchronize, organize, manage, and quickly be in touch with contacts in an intelligent way that saves precious time by eliminating a number of administrative tasks.

However, Agile CRM in spite of all its popularity has its inherent disadvantages that make many look for Agile CRM alternatives in the market, some of which includes:

• Lack of effective reporting.
• Lack of testing options.
• Ticketing functionality is poor compared to many other CRM systems.
• If any lead in the CRM is denoted as "hard-bounce", which meaning that the sent email has bounced, the system will not fire any more emails to that lead. The only way to get this undone is to remove the lead and add it again, which results in deleting all history from the lead.
• It takes quite a bit of contextual study and understanding to make the marketing automation work.
• The help files, tutorials were of low quality and not always kept up to date with changes in the layout of the software etc.
• It is expensive for smaller companies.
• The learning process is more challenging and takes longer to get used to the way things are handled in Agile CRM.        

Depending on how you may slice it, you want a more robust sales solution or a marketing functionality that better fits your organization, if you want to adopt a Converged CRM platform that has more flexible in onboarding or more affordable pricing, happily, ConvergeHub CRM is out here as one of the top Agile CRM alternatives that can better suit your marketing and sales goals.

For many ConvergeHub CRM is the best Agile alternative for marketing automation.

In the same price band of $9, ConvergeHub offers complete automation from the creation of multistep/multichannel campaigns to automated lead scoring and from customer lifecycle management to drip marketing. With numerous campaign creation templates, ConvergeHub offers automatic campaign triggering and auto-responders to make your marketing endeavors a breeze.

ConvergeHub also helps users to custom sales processes along with automated reminders so that users can create a checklist of actions necessary for conversion so that your leads do not fall through the crack. This feature is not available with Agile CRM and is so a noteworthy feature the benefits of which have been noted and appreciated by most of the FREE TRIAL users of ConvergeHub looking for Agile CRM alternatives in the market.

The Importance of CLM CRM and Lifetime Value in Marketing

What is Customer Lifetime Value?

If you are using a CLM CRM like ConvergeHub, you must be knowing that CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) which is also often referred to as LTV (Lifetime Value) is the predicted sum total of all future profits (or revenue) that an individual customer will generate for any particular business. 

Therefore, using an accurate estimate of LTV/CLV as the basis for strategic marketing decisions will in return maximize the company’s revenue.    

The key to success in CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management) lies in optimizing CLV and not metrics like Conversion Rate (CR) or Revenue per Visit (RPV).  

So, you can easily understand now that CLV trumps all other metrics for long-term profitability of any business that can be further optimized by using a CLM CRM solution, which provides a 360-degree view of the customers like ConvergeHub.

The Advantages of Utilizing CLV

We all know it is always easy to focus on the present, which is not often the best way to tap the full potential of each customer.

For an example, looking at the metrics such as Conversion Rates and the primary purchase values while ignoring the sustaining value of the consumers may mislead the marketers to invest money and time in finding “cheap and fleeting” customers (with smaller total revenue value). Without focusing on acquiring customers those who will deliver a perennial stream of income for years to come, while conserving the necessary resources that would be a complete waste on low-value customers.

Hence, when a company has a dependablemeans of predicting CLV, it can better manage its customer relationship using CLM CRM software, optimize necessary resources invested in holding back each customer, make the best use of marketing and customer retention strategies, and find accurate customer metrics for the growth of his organization.

In a gist, the goal and objective of using CLV while working with a CLM CRM platform are to concentrate on finding, nurturing and thereafter retaining those predicted long-term customers, which creates the most value for any business over a considerable stretch of time.

According to the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle, 20% of your customers represent 80% of your sales.

Therefore, a CLM CRM like ConvergeHub is the need of the hour for all businesses, looking for nurturing and retaining these 20% high yielding customers those that create the most value for businesses over a considerable period of time.

What are the other CLM CRM metrics needed for evaluating CLV?

• Size of the purchase value or transaction
• Cost of the customer service
• Response to marketing initiatives (e.g. email campaigns and others)
• Cost of customer acquisition/retention·  

Takeaway

Hence, to easily accelerate your marketing actions contact us or request for a free trial of 14-day to understand how you can use ConvergeHub CLM CRM solution to in order to convert more customers, increase the spending of the existing customers and therefore reduce customer churn.  

3 Main Salesforce Alternatives in 2018

In the present times, many organizations that have once used Salesforce CRM, for numerous reasons are looking for Salesforce alternative CRMs, as they find Salesforce as a too powerful tool for small companies and startups. 

In such a case, although it can be a true fact that developing organizations are incapacitated by the potential and value of Salesforce CRM, nevertheless, the outcome of this has resulted in some businesses starting to move to a simple and more affordable CRM solution like award-winning small business CRM software ConvergeHub and others. 

With so many comparison factors to consider, let us in this article outline the primary features of other small business CRM solutions, as well as identify the main Salesforce alternatives in 2018. 

ConvergeHub CRM

ConvergeHub, which is the recipient of 2108, Finance Online Great User Experience and Rising Star Award is a powerful Cloud based CRM software that is capable of providing users with a complete Customer Engagement Management solution as a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for small businesses. 

With this software, small and medium businesses are conveniently empowered to improve marketing ROI, drive more sales, and thereby forge and strengthen their customer relationships. 

ConvergeHub is also one of the best QuickBooks CRM in the market that provides seamless integration with the most popular online accounting package in the US, QuickBooks. 

ConvergeHub as an ideal Salesforce alternative CRM solution, lets small businesses take control of their Marketing, Sales, Collaboration, Accounting and Customer Service activities from a single source point, for end-to-end marketing automation and salesforce automation modules. 

The starter pack of ConvergeHub CRM is $11 per user every month billed quarterly or $9 per user every month billed yearly and the premium version of the software is as low as $65 per user every month billed quarterly or $59 per user every month billed yearly.

Pipedrive CRM

Pipedrive is another well-known Salesforce Alternative that is popular in the small business arena for its accurate analysis, detailed tracking, email integration capabilities, easy deal management functionalities, and others. 

Pipedrive is also considered as one of the most efficient CRMs for small and medium businesses for its mobile alerts, better reports and notification functionalities that help analyze how the prospects and customers can be targeted and won. This CRM alternative of Salesforce takes care of every small detail to make sure that your employees are on the right track. 

The Silver edition of Pipedrive CRM is priced $12 per user/month (billed annually) and $15 per user for a monthly billing while the Platinum edition is $49.17 per user/month (billed annually) and $59 per user for a monthly fee.

Nimble CRM

Launched in 2009 as a social CRM, the specialty of this CRM solution is that it not only collects your emails with your customers, leads, and prospects in the CRM’s inbox, but it also gathers your interactions with them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Furthermore, you can also set up activity steam with this Salesforce Alternative CRM platform that allows you to see everything that your customers and prospects has recently posted on their social media platforms. 

The basic Nimble CRM platform that is known as Nimble Contact is priced $12/user per month or $9/user per month (billed annually), while the higher version of this CRM software costs $25/user per month or $19/user per month (billed annually).

Pulling it all together

Therefore, if you are still overwhelmed with the functionalities that do not meet your budget and business requirements as a startup take into consideration any of the above-stated Salesforce alternatives for streamlining your business opportunities and thereby boost your ROI.

The Changing Nature of Customer Relationships and Best Sales CRM Software Strategy

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

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

The Transformation in the Nature of Customer Relationship

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

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

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

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

Best Sales CRM Software Strategy That We Must Follow

• Set A Definite Goal

When you want to achieve something for your business, the primary thing you need to do is to set up your goals for yourself and your company. Try to visualize where you want to see yourself in the next 5 to 10 years.

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

It is always a good idea to break up your goals into smaller but achievable objectives and at the same time maintain an easily reversible and flexible plan.

• Always Keep Communicating With Co-Workers

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

Therefore, use a cloud based CRM software, like ConvergeHub, which is designed to handle a large amount of information and can facilitate communication between various workgroups.

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

Hence, to get your job done, integrate policies and technologies like easy to use CRM software , that would benefit your organization in several ways.

• Target Customers Wisely

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

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

Hence, you can use a cloud based CRM system to identify your valuable customers and target them intelligently, by proper segmentation of such targeted customers, which is a great strategy for growing your business.

• Keep Track Of The Interest Of Your Customers

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

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

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

Conclusion

Therefore, now that you know what is CRM software, and how it can help in the implementation of your best sales CRM software strategy and build up stronger relationships with your customers, try ConvergeHub the award-winning best small business CRM software to escalate your business growth at a quick pace.

Key Elements to Consider For Selecting Salesforce Alternative Small Business CRM Software

Indeed, it is an accepted fact that Salesforce CRM is a wonderful cloud-based CRM platform. But there are several organizations and individuals who are not contended using Salesforce and are therefore on the lookout for Salesforce alternatives.

There is a clichéd quote that: “Salesforce is not for everyone”.
Here are the main reasons why organizations look for Salesforce Alternatives

• Greater customizability options in the CRM
• Lesser prices
• Simple learning curve and easy adoption rate
• Ease of use 

        

Now if you are new to understanding what is CRM , and you assume that all customer relationship management systems are the same, you must reconsider your opinions now.

CRM solutions are not easy software platforms that you can buy and then change frequently, given the high cost factors and efforts needed for adopting CRM applications.

Well, you may be thinking, where you should begin.

The answer to this most important question for individuals and businesses looking for Salesforce Alternative CRM is here in this article, which will help you to learn a few essential elements to winning CRM implementation, as you look for CRM vendors that are Salesforce competitors in the CRM arena.

Your CRM should grow with you, not ahead of you

Once this factor is not met, businesses tend to lose their faith in the CRM software application as it has also happened with many looking for Zoho CRM alternative or Insightly CRMalternative in the CRM marketplace.

As every business is dissimilar in its own ways, and also the size of every business varies greatly, hence the one-size-fit-all, technique does not work with CRM platforms.

Hence before identifying any brand of CRM alternative solutions, like Hubspot CRM alternative or per say Agile CRM alternative , it is prudent that you must decide on how many employees will use the CRM application in your organization. As according to your business needs and the strength of the workforce in your company, you need to use an easy to use CRM software that is capable of answering to all your business needs and like many other online lead management software, can be customized for that purpose easily.

There are several CRM applications, which you need to purchase based on what they have, and there are also CRM software platforms like ConvergeHub small business CRM and others that lets you choose the features that your organization needs right away.

Hence, the later groups of CRM vendors are more cost effective and better than the others.

However, you should also keep in mind that your present small and medium-sized business set up would not remain small for long. Therefore, when you are looking for an alternative CRM solution like Infusionsoft CRM alternative or others in the similar rank as mentioned before, look for CRM applications that can expand beyond their basic capacities. Most scalable CRM systems use plug-ins, themes, templates, and extensions to expand their capabilities.

A point to remember for all businesses looking for Salesforce alternative CRM is, that you never opt for a CRM software that has functionalities in the software, which cannot be presently utilized by your organization. Since having functionalities in the CRM application, before they can be properly used most of the time hinders the progress in your business instead of helping it to grow spontaneously.

Simplicity is the key

You need to reconsider your CRM purchasing guidelines and strategies with CRM software solutions that are capable of offering every function, which has been developed to perform on a CRM software app.

The logic behind this thought is simple.

Much like the reason why organizations look for Hubspot CRM alternative, an over-complicated CRM system will also end up churning too many perplexing results, which is an unfavorable instance while selecting a CRM for small and medium businesses.

As it was found by us from many individuals looking for Zoho CRM alternative, purchasing a system with an excess of unproductive functionalities mostly results in spending more time in getting familiar with the software or to train your employees for the proper adoption of the CRM software.

Moreover, as it often happened with companies looking for Infusionsoft CRM alternative, because of the exceeding complexity that users face while using Infusionsoft, executives may escape using the CRM, as they find it too sophisticated, which eats up much of their service time.

Hence, the only solution while you select your Salesforce alternative or competitors of any other CRM software platforms, you should solitarily focus only on the functionalities your business needs, since to be truthful, the less functionality a CRM has, the better will be the adoption rate of that CRM for startups, small businesses, and growing organizations.

Nevertheless, it does not imply that you need to compromise on the reputation and fame of this online lead management software. As there are several CRM vendors like award-winning ConvergeHub CRM for SMB and many others that offer uncomplicated cloud based CRM systems without compromising or scaling down on the functionality or quality of their SaaS-based customer relationship management applications.

Review several CRM before deciding “the best one”

We understand that deciding on a Salesforce alternative CRM or be it a Hubspot alternative CRM can be really difficult, since there are more than hundreds of CRM software available in the market, and most of them claim to have the same features that you require for your organization.

Hence, the only solution to this dilemma is to check on several CRM systems and thereafter decide on which software is the easiest to use when pitted against each other.

You can also study the reputation of any easy to use CRM system like ConvergeHub the winner of Finance Online 2018 Rising Star and Great User Experience awards by checking out its review in the social networking platforms and other reputed CRM related websites and magazines published online.

Takeaway

Although all businesses in the modern times are in need of a CRM for enhancing customer experience with their brands or to generate more leads for sales, be careful not to rush into buying a CRM just because you are in a hurry of purchasing it.

Purchasing and adopting a CRM is always a costly venture, so primarily devote time to find the best Salesforce Alternative CRM and purchase one like ConvergeHub that will give you the best return on your investments.

You can even go for a 14-day free trial of ConvergeHub, which will help you to understand this unparallel Salesforce Alternative CRM before you decide upon buying it.