Vital Lead Management Tips for Effortlessly Growing Your MCA Business

Keeping a track of what is happening inside the sales pipeline of your MCA CRM software is extremely necessary for the growth of your Merchant Cash Advance business.

This is because the sales pipeline of your Merchant Cash Advance CRM furnishes an insight into how and where your sales strategies are performing, and if any improvement is required to increase your sales.

Unfortunately, fence-sitting prospects and leads can get misplaced in the shuffle or unconditionally becoming inactive.

Hence, what can you do if you find the leads in your CRM database are dropping out or getting stuck for a myriad of reasons?

Here are some of the most tried tips on lead management strategies which can help you to make your MCA CRM sales pipeline going forward once again.

However, firstly for this, you need to comprehend what are the reasons that are causing your leads to get stuck in your sales pipeline?

Therefore, before you take any actions, the foremost thing that you need to do is to comprehend why leads are getting caught in the first place. Since, when you do a bit of pondering, you will most likely be able to link all your inactive leads to a few unambiguous causes for which they got halted in their progress, which include:

1. Not find the proper person

If you are not aware of the right or proper contact information and you are unaware of the right decision-maker(s) in the company, you will hardly be able to make any sales.
In addition, a prospective customer may enter an email that the person may not use often when they filled out a web-form on your website.

Both these issues ultimately may lead to not letting your messages reach the right people who need to see them.

Hence, measure your email’s bounce rate with the help of an MCA CRM software , and if they are considered high, find a solution to your problem, as this can be an indicator that you are not selling to the right person- or rather to say, not selling at all.

2. There is a problem with your alternative lending service

Another pertinent reason why a lead might get jammed is that your prospects are having issues using your services, or they assume that your services are too expensive when compared to other MCA businesses in town. Nevertheless, whatever the case may be, it is vital that you must find and fix the problems that are within your control.

Although it is true that you just cannot please every prospect, however, making the right change can have a rocking impact on your bottom line.

For example, if it appears to you that a greater number of your visitors are abandoning the account creation process on your website, do take up necessary steps to decrease friction in those steps in your account creation workflow.

3. Your buyer is not ready yet

It can always be that your prospects are not sure that they want to make a change and accept your service. It is a known fact that most of the visitors on your website will not be ready to buy your service the minute they enter your sales pipeline, and therefore, not doing so can leave some of your prospects fence-sit without the confidence to make a purchase.

If you find this to be an issue, increase the chances of making the leads move through your Merchant Cash Advance CRM pipeline by being proactively helpful towards your prospects.

Lead Management Tips To Get Prospects Moving

Now, once you are aware of what is getting your prospects stuck; you are faced with another new challenge.

So, how do you overcome these seemingly impossible bottlenecks and make your leads advance through your MCA CRM’s pipeline?

A piece of good news is that once you adopt the right lead management strategies and thereafter jump into action, you can easily get all your inactive leads gradually moving ahead once more.

Here are a few time-tested tips that we recommend for moving your leads through the pipeline:

1. Revamp your communication strategies

Are you aware of your communication strategies with your prospects in the different stages of your sales pipeline?

Now, just sending an email blast to every prospect in your CRM database once or twice every month is not going to cut the knot, if you want to steadily encourage every leads to move towards a prospect.

Primarily, recognize your sales process and imagine what is needed for qualifying and pushing your leads at every stage of your sales pipeline.
Next, use lead scoring tactics to segment your leads into different lists.

Hence, for this find a lead scoring strategy that addresses your lead’s concerns, curiosities, and pain points. 
According to an article published by MailChimp, lead segmentation plays a major role in the success of any email marketing campaign, since according to MailChimp, it has been found that email campaigns with segmented leads using a Merchant Cash Advance software , in alternative lending businesses gets 100 percent more clicks when compared to the non-segmented ones.

2. Know your leads better

Do you know if your prospective leads are casually considering your service or they are in urgent need of your solution?

Once leads get jammed in the sales pipeline, it can always mean that your leads do not require your services yet.

Maybe, they are doubtful if your answer to their pain points is a good solution for their needs. Hence, knowing the reservations inside the minds of your leads will allow you to nurture your leads properly.

Understanding the position of your leads are in their buyer's journey helps in marketing to them more efficiently.

You can always find out what your prospective leads are thinking by asking them to reply to your emails or by sending them out a survey using an easy to use MCA CRM platform.

If needed, you can even consider setting up a ‘Feedback Form’ for all your new leads so that you can without any qualms, collect all the information about your leads and their respective businesses and accumulate the data in your CRM database.

3. Lookout for stalled stages

Find out if most of your leads that are inactive or non-responding are getting stuck in one particular stage of your sales pipeline. If it is so, reevaluate the stages of your sales process. However, to understand how to fix these stages, you need to find an answer to these two most pertinent questions:

-What is happening?
-What should be happening?

Hence, find an answer to what are the specific goals for every stage in your sales process and next, try to evaluate how close your prospects and you are coming close to meet up these goals. Finally, try finding out what actions you can take to make it easier for your immobile leads to move seamlessly to the next step or fetch a decision to accomplish the deal.

4. Offer help

Now, if you are sure that a specific prospective lead is encountering issues in deciding or they are getting better signals from other alternative funding companies, ponder what can you do to offer them help?
Or rather to say, what can you really do to make your prospective leads generate enhanced trust in your business?

Well, to redress this issue you can offer free trials, eBooks, consultation, coupon codes, and other similar ‘at no cost’ resources. However, you should always make these offers are available to the right prospects and at the right time.

Again, the solution for finding this opportune moment is ensuring that your contact list is properly segmented. Per say, you just would not want to email a guidebook of ‘How Merchant Cash Advance Business Works And Its Benefits Over Conventional Bank Loans’ to a lead who is already in a decision making stage of the buyer’s journey.

5. Create urgency

In case your prospective leads are not finding a necessary urgency to avail your service, put an expiration date or offer a time-bound discount.

According to a study done by Experian, adding urgency to your email marketing campaign efforts can increase open rates of your emails by 14%, the CTR a.k.a click-through-rate by 59%, and double the number of completed deals.

To do these provide at the very onset the time limit and the offer in the subject line of your emails.

However, always make sure that your claims for urgency is based on things that are truthful and real, and is not a trial offer which is supposed to remain for a week but remains beyond that time, which is one of the quickest ways for losing credibility.

6. Ask questions

Start listening, if you cannot get a lead to close the deal. Ask your leads questions so that you can apprehend their hesitations. Since, if you ask your prospective lead any question that can get them engaged, you always have a fair chance that they will certainly reply, and you also can easily evaluate from their answers and replies what are the reasons that are holding them back.

If you are using a survey or sending a short email with questions to do this work, always send something that your prospects can answer effortlessly within a few minutes.

Bottom line

Therefore, you see, solving issues and pain points of your prospective leads are not as complicated as it apparently seems. 

This is because the key to finding you leads gliding ahead effortlessly through your MCA CRM sales pipeline lies in simply understanding and apprehending what is holding them back. Hence, make sure that the sales process in your Merchant Cash Advance software is set up to support your leads, and prospects and not just you as the owner of the software.

So are you prepared now to take the driving seat and control your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software’s sales pipeline now!

Learn more about how ConvergeHub’s enterprise-ready sales pipeline management and marketing automation features that can aid you and your team to get the right message to your prospects and leads at the right time.

Therefore to begin and kick-off, why not start a 14-days free trial of ConvergeHub- the award-winning MCA CRM software since you can never know the full capability of any CRM unless you use it. 

How In MCA Business You Can Fill Your Sales Pipeline Much Like A Pro

Sales prospecting is the number one challenge faced by business development teams, vetting on their ability to keep the sales funnel filled up on a consistent basis in Alternative Financing businesses. 

Small and medium Merchant Cash Advance businesses cannot be a victim to slow times, owing to seasonal occurrences or lack of events to capture leads.

Although theoretically, it is necessary to keep the sales pipeline filled with prospects, there is also truth in the statement that this is something that cannot be attained overnight. 

It takes immeasurable patience, dedication, practice, and hard work- but beyond all it requires consistent lead harvesting for keeping your sales funnel full. 

Therefore, it is needed that you must establish a set of processes that can be automated within a Merchant Cash Advance CRM , to lay down a foundation on how you should manage the sales cycle for unswerving growth of your company.

Here are 4 golden tips on how you can fill and manage your MCA CRM software’s sales pipeline like a Pro:

1. Use All Possible Modes Of Communication

Develop a timeline of touches that include phone, email, and also in-person contacts. Next, roll out that timeline as a set of tasks in your MCA CRM system with requisite time in-between each touch. This way you will be able to create a calendar of events for each of your prospects without forgetting the quite leads. Reminding your prospects who you are often can keep a cold lead warm, which may have been on a greater priority earlier in the year.

Apart from this, you should also remember that everyone learns through different means. There are leads and prospects those who like to hear (on phone), while there are others who prefer to see (on emails), and there is a growing population those who demand a more interactive learning experience (on video tutorials or demo). Therefore, adapt to your prospect's needs while using your Merchant Cash Advance software, and do not only stick to your preferred channels for communication.

2. Proactively Ask For Referrals

Let us now discuss referrals which can be used as a highly effective means that can boost your Cash Advance businesses’ sales pipeline. Alternative financing businesses must not wait for the referrals to come to them. Rather they should be proactive and ask happy customers for referrals to increase the sales.  

Now, once any of your customers send you a referral never forget to thank your connection for lending their help, and remember to keep them in the loop on the engagements so that your connection is capable of comprehending the significance of their actions. 

Therefore, send business cards to your customers reminding them after every few months about your MCA brand’s referral programs, and then if any conversion happens to ensure that you send them a token of appreciation (like a gift card) to keep the connections send more referrals to your alternative financing company. 

However, the most important thing is to remain sure that you must track all your lead sources in your Merchant Cash Advance CRM software so that you can find your reference back to the original referrer, whose efforts you mostly need to appreciate for vouching on your financing services.

3. People Do Not Like To Say No

As we spoke before, converting a prospect into a new customer takes efforts, time and patience, and so, most of the outcomes of your attempts for conversions are not usually seen on your first communication with a sales prospect. 

It has been found in several types of research on sales processes that lead, prospects and customers do not prefer to say no. So keep contacting the prospects in your MCA CRM pipeline until they negate your offering. This is because; you may never know your prospect’s present need for finding finance, budget, and timeline that change along with time.  

Too often sales reps deem leads as dead, just because they did not hear back on a proposal. 

However, what happens if a lead did not remember you and therefore contacted your competition? 

Hence, setting up a business growth technology once your buy CRM helps to remind you to contact all your fence-sitting prospects every month, just to make sure that you remain in their mind until the prospects tell you to go away. 

4. Do Not Try To Avoid The Gatekeeper

Decision-makers in any organization are always inundated with sales calls, therefore, the office managers and receptionists are most often tasked with keeping such solicitors at a bay. Mostly, these gatekeepers screen the sales reps so that their manager’s times are not disrupted by unsolicited sales calls. 

Hence, rather than trying to bypass or treating these gatekeepers as a barrier, befriend and educate them why their organization needs your alternative financing solutions. Performing this simple exercise might help you in reaching your prospects faster and closing your deals.

Takeaway

Filling your sales pipeline like a Pro does not have to be difficult or expensive; however, it needs consistency and a cutting-edge business growth technology and tools as the backbone to ensure nothing falls through the crack. 

There are many MCA CRM software solutions that will easily integrate with your Merchant Cash Advance software platforms and enable your sales team to do more.

If you found this article helpful, contact ConvergeHub for a live demo today. 

General Myths and Benefits of Leveraging QuickBooks CRM Software for SMB

Almost every time we implement a Customer Relationship Management system, our customers frequently ask: “Hey, is it possible to integrate our CRM platform with our Accounting system?” The answer is mostly “Yes”. But at what price?

Today’s cloud based CRM software, like ConvergeHub and others, enables integration with bookkeeping and accounting applications like QuickBooks.
There is no question about the truth in the fact that integrating your easy to use CRM application with an accounting platform by purchasing a CRM that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free is much convenient than it ever was.

However, QuickBooks CRM integration is not always a piece of cake. In fact, there are certain myths about integrating these systems to develop the best CRM software for QuickBooks, which you should know that include:

1. QuickBooks CRM integration is costly

This is not true, as long as it is already built. ConvergeHub QuickBooks integration (both for Desktop and Online versions) allows customers with paid subscriptions to see their records from QuickBooks and transfer data between the two systems. Even other good CRM systems already have their integrations already built with bookkeeping and accounting systems. Therefore, when this is the scenario, configuring these QuickBooks CRM integrations is reasonably simple and inexpensive. However, if the pre-built integration is unavailable then the integration options do become costly. 

2. Integration with an accounting system is easy

Like the example, we provided above, if something is pre-built, then yes integrating small business CRM software with an accounting system is easy. However, if you are using a bookkeeping and accounting software that is less popular in the market or it does not already have pre-built integration, then it is not easy at all. 

In such a case, you need a programmer or use an import/export tool to get the integration work seamlessly. Moreover, even once the integration is done, going forward, you need to be supported since the software; database and the environment will change. Therefore, purchasing the best CRM for QuickBooks online like ConvergeHub and others is a better option, than trying to integrate an unknown and rarely used accounting platform with your CRM for small and medium business.

3. You cannot integrate if you are not a programmer

This is also false. For example, if you want to integrate ConvergeHub with your non-QuickBooks online accounting system, there are even intelligent tools to help you do this. Like Zapier and PieSync, these ConvergeHub partners will help you to move data to/from ConvergeHub to other bookkeeping applications like FreshBooks, Xero, and QuickBooks. Apart from this Zapier and PieSync also aids you to create workflows to schedule reminders or send emails. 

This must be noted over here that good and easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is also known to be the best CRM software for QuickBooks has data-integration tools that even non-programmers can work with. 

4. Having the API solves your integration challenges

It is good, but having an API will not clear all your roadblocks. Application Programming Interfaces or APIs are wonderful tools for programmers, but you must know that is not a source code. Rather it is just another tool. Therefore, you may face challenges with what you can integrate once your requirements are complex. Therefore, always make sure that you do it with due diligence. Apart from it, if you are going to need an API that implies you will require a programmer to work with it. You need a developer familiar with API, having good communication skills, and needless to say, affordable to work on your project.  

Judging from our experience of working with developers, this is also not an easy task to do. However, a first-rated programmer and an excellent API can really perform wonders.

Now here are a few benefits of using QuickBooks CRM software like ConvergeHub, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free and is considered the best CRM software for QuickBooks:

1. Better Lead Management

Most businesses send a lot of estimates and other information to a significant number of leads and prospects, who do not purchase right away. Therefore, they need multiple follow-ups through emails, phone calls, demos, office visits, and others, until they are ready for the purchase. 

This type of lead management involving multiple touch-points is ideally performed through a QuickBooks CRM, which can help in creating better customer relationships apart from handling bookkeeping works in the organization. 

2. Cleaner QuickBooks

If you try to manage, every lead or prospect whom you have sent estimates in QuickBooks, it creates a lot of clutter and junk data in the accounting software. Therefore, handling your leads with a QuickBooks CRM helps to keep your leads in the lead management CRM tool and thereby keeps your accounting system clean, which makes your bookkeeping more accurate.

3. No Double Data Entry

Finally, as a prospect moves along its journey from being a lead to a paying customer, a multitude of information gets overlaps between sales, order fulfillment, accounting, and customer service teams. If all these different teams use diverse systems to manage their work, they have to enter the same data in different systems multiple times, which results in double data entry. 

As double data entry is a waste of time and effort, which even causes the system to have incorrect data for human errors. Hence using a business growth technology like ConvergeHub, which offers QuickBooks CRM integration free is essential so that your data does not get uncoordinated and your different teams do not end up working on different sets of data.  

Apart from this QuickBooks CRM for sales teams helps in automating sales process, which increases your sales efficiency, empower customer support and marketing automation once you buy CRM with high-level data security, so that you do not have to give access to employees who are not familiar with accounting software, but can still view invoices, estimates and purchase history of the customers.

The 101 Easy Lead Prospecting Guidelines for Beginners

Building your business can often be the toughest encounter you might face while running your own firm. Since, while doing business not only you need to handle your present customer base, but on top of that, you also need time to contact new customers and get them on board.

Now if you know what is CRM and it has been a while since you started a lead prospecting campaign but did not get the results that you would have otherwise expected, then it is high time that you must think of reassessing the way you go about finding prospects. Buy CRM that offers all the tools that you need to manage all your prospective efforts.

Hence in this article find out how some of the best companies acquire new leads using easy to use CRM platforms, which is mostly in the modern times an intuitive cloud-based business growth technology and tool, and also a lead management platform that can use automation to build your company’s sales cadence and thereby help to manage prospecting effortlessly.

Here is the list:

1. Find your ideal client by using 360-degree prospecting

When you start looking for customers, the primary thing that we all do is to create a more rigorous system to locate our ideal client.

Ideal customers are those who are interested in your products and services that you offer, are easy to work with and can be repeat customers. Apart from this, ideal customers in your CRM database can even be people who have a strong desire to provide you with referrals for your business.

The question here is where can you find these ‘ideal’ customers?

For this, the best thing that you can perform is to research every one of your currents customers thoroughly and design your ideal customer who has all the combination of each trait that all of your best customers share.

To create a 360-degree view, easy to use CRM pulls information from your own notes, web activities, and social media of each of your contacts in the CRM database.
This allows you to prospect more effectively and utilize your time more prudently, targeting just the audience that you know, will turn into real prospective leads.

2. Take Notes and Export Your Prospecting Knowledge to the Cloud

A big part of how you should use your easy to use CRM lies in taking notes on the leads that you generate for your business.

As a business person since you are dealing with a plethora of customers on a daily basis, you need to take notes seamlessly, which will allow you to efficiently track each prospect more closely, and provide you the knowledge that you require to make each contact with them meaningful and useful for your business.

Be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms that are mostly used by small businesses and startups, and are mostly popular lead management software solutions, effortlessly organizes these notes and other collateral documentations, so that you can find them at your fingertips, when you need to speak to your prospects, vendors, clients or anyone else who you can relate to your business.

3. Follow Up On Time, Every Time

Missing meeting or contacts are a threat for lead prospecting professionals. It depletes your money and time. Moreover, if you are not fixing your follow-up problems using sales cadence strategies, all your prospecting will dry up in the long run. Easy to use CRM solutions make this following up with your customers and prospects easier. Integrating the CRM system with your calendar software, to keep you informed of the meeting that you have, helps in tracking your point of contact with prospects more closely so that you can secure more deals.

Once you buy CRM, you can also set up an automation that sends notifications and flags contacts as per your businesses’ sales cadence for necessary actions.

4. Spend You Hours On The Right Prospects

Lead prospecting does not mean that you need to reach out to every would-be customer that could possibly want to create a relationship with your company. Not all deals are equal. So while some deals may fetch higher revenue, there are others which will easily close and some will develop as great leads in a couple of years, but are not so right now.

One easy way to work with this issue is by allowing the CRM to score each lead that you have generated, segment your lead pool, which will track only those leads you should be spending your time on.

Doing this exercise, will not only shorten your sales cycle, but it will also help in working with the right leads, and not just the ones that are right in front of you.

5. Track Your Prospect Using Numbers, Not Hunches

Peter Druker the famous educator, management consultant, and author once said, “What gets measured gets managed”. However, not many organizations adhere to these famous words. There are many salespersons who approach their lead prospecting from the goal of doing more each time they meet, but unfortunately, they do not have the numbers to track the metrics of these visits.

This is where again CRM comes into play as this business growth technology provides you with meaningful reporting and analytics that allow its users to create more structure around your goal settings, which if you are running a business with a sales team helps you to manage underperformance and reward the performers in your organization.

Endnote

To conclude, prospecting is not what is difficult in running a business, but for many of us, it can be hard if we are not using the right lead management tools.

Hence to conclude we would advise you to buy CRM that can help you to track your lead generation activities easily and with functions like lead segmentation and advanced reporting tools, CRM technology can make it easier for you to have all the necessary information in front of you when you want to reach out for the leads that you have not connected for a while.

Tip on Quick Adoption of Easy To Use CRM Software for Startups and Small Businesses

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM increases sales by 29%, according to Nucleus Research the average ROI (Return on Investment) of any CRM is $8.71, for every $1.00 spent on this software platform.  

Therefore, as cost-cutting measures are the need of the day, for to survive nowadays businesses and brands have no other options but to do better than their competitors without amplifying their budgets, which has made easy to use CRM more important than ever nowadays.

To improve productivity and fine-tune business processes several small businesses and enterprises have accepted the gaining widespread popularity of business growth technology and tools like CRM for retaining and finding new customers, as cloud-based CRM software applications are pretty simple to use. 

Now, having said that, there is one important fact that we cannot choose to overlook- that not all implementations of CRM solutions, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions are successful.

The main reason behind lagging implementation of even easy to use CRM solutions is poor user adoption rate. 

Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM platforms for businesses. 

Moreover, as many CRM vendors have done a good job of touting the simplicity of their applications, many customers have taken the user-friendliness of CRM implementation of their Customer Relationship Management platform for granted.  

But, just because something looks apparently simple and easy you must not take it for granted. Since, if you do not learn to implement and neglect the best practices, it will almost inevitably lead to a failure in reaping the maximum benefits not only from your CRM but even from any other business growth technology and tools.

For example, although brushing your teeth is relatively simple, but if you neglect to brush or do it altogether in the wrong way, this can lead to several maladies and even tooth loss.

Similarly, once you buy CRM using the software inefficiently or not using it consistently can cause detrimental consequences for your business.

Ineffective use of any CRM may not only lead to failure in follow-up on scheduled tasks and appointments, but it can also mismanage customer relationships, fail to capture important customer data and insights and in severe cases end up with the loss of potential customers in your business.  

Here are some of the crucial low adoption rate statistics on easy to use CRM software platforms:

• According to CSO Insights, 43% of CRM customers use even lesser than half the features they have in their CRM.

• According to Really Simple Systems, 4 out of 5 senior executives say that their biggest challenge was getting their staffs to use the CRM consistently. 

Hence, before you buy CRM, remember employees of your business organization may always have different preconceived notions and perspectives about the CRM system. Whereby, while some may love it, others may hate using it too. 

Therefore, before most of your employees get reluctant towards CRM as one of the most popular business growth technology, it is best to make them understand the benefits of this software and show them how it will make their work a lot easier every day.

Here are 7 awesome golden tips to make your CRM implementation a success story once you buy CRM for your business growth .

1. Give Value To Business Needs And Requirements

To make your easy to use CRM implementation worthwhile for your business, you must not only possess a good understanding of your businesses’ workflows but also understand how your brand interacts to satisfy your potential customer’s needs. 

CRM is more than a mere software solution. Rather Customer Relationship Management is a process of dealing with your customers through intelligent communications that call for a holistic approach. 

In other words, CRM technology consists of people, processes, and technology that combine to manage business relationships with your customers. 

2. Involve Employees From The Beginning

Your employees are the ones who are going to use your CRM, and so they play the most significant role in the successful implementation of your CRM platform. Hence, it is always wise to involve your employees from the very first stage of your CRM implementation process. 

Exhibit to them how the new system is going to diminish their workload and make them understand how easy to use CRM is going to take their work on the upbeat. 

As an additional gesture for early adoption of your easy to use CRM, encourage your employees to provide their opinion and feedback on the system. This will not only help in trimming down uncertainties of the software but also help you to acquire necessary support for proper utilization of your CRM system.

3. Hire a CRM Project Manager 

It is always a good idea to get a CRM project manager on board in your company, who will act as a technical ambassador and a problem-solver of your employees with respect to your easy to use CRM system. As your CRM project manager is the one who will be responsible for overall implementation and management of your easy to use CRM platform, the person must possess good communication and IT skills. 

It is the project manager whose steps your employees must follow, as he/she will drive the project and even help measure the achievement levels of your best small business CRM solution related goals. 

4. Remain Patient And Move One Step At A Time

Once you buy the software, do not attempt to achieve too many tasks with your CRM at once or implement the customer relationship solution in a haphazard manner. As it is very natural, like many other buyers of CRM you may always find yourself being carried away and find it absolutely exciting to implement the new system which is capable of streamlining all your business processes but don’t forget all complex projects needs to be broken down into manageable and measurable phases with achievable goals. Hence, for successful implementation of your CRM, go slow with the platform and implement this business growth technology without hurrying, one-step at a time. 

5. Train Your Employees

As every employee in any organization has a different capacity to understand and accept changes, it is always advisable that you must arrange training sessions for all your employees. Also, make sure during the course of the training you must train each department, like marketing, sales, accounts and customer support reps, on their specialized needs. Appropriate training on the CRM’s functionalities often brings forth positive momentum of enthusiasm among the employees, for implementation of the easy to use CRM platform. 

6. Set Guidelines For Your Employees

It is really important that you must lay down guidelines in consultation with your easy to use CRM project manager, on what kind of data (as per your company’s goals), your employees should input in the CRM. Since, for proper utilization of your customer relationship management software, it is utterly necessary that you must manage all tasks and activities with proper reporting structure as a part of your guidelines.  

7. Make The CRM Available Anywhere

Last but not the least, in case your sales team also includes sales reps working in the field, you must buy CRM, which has a mobile application in addition to the web-based version of the platform. 

The user experience should also be taken into consideration while implementing mobile CRM app. As desktop and mobile environments of any app need to be different, the mobile version of your easy to use CRM platform should be intuitive and fast. It should also be data contextual, minimizing keystrokes and automating information as much as possible, to streamline workflow.

It is only when your sales team, see that the easy to use CRM helps them to sell, and there are little or no difficulties involved in using the platform, it will escalate the adoption rate of your customer relationship software.

Takeaway

Remember, like any other business growth technology and tools easy to use CRM adoption is a journey and not a destination. Hence by remembering the tips and guidelines given above, it will be easy for you to triumph over the initial hurdles to CRM adoption and make certain that your business reaps the best benefits offered by CRM for rapid business growth.

3 Preliminary Reasons to Buy CRM for Boosting Sales and Revenue

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is time-tested software, which is not just the application of technology but is also a strategy to learn more about your customer’s needs and behavior in order the build a stronger relationship. 

However, as it is true that getting an easy to use CRM for your SMB too early is a wrong thing, similarly you can inflict a negative impact on your business if you buy CRM and its implementation gets too long.

Even CRM guru Paul Greenberg the writer of the bestselling book “CRM at the Speed of Light” admits that it can be an accepted fact, like many others, your business may not be ready for CRM, for if that is the case, you will be wasting your money and efforts if you adopt easy to use CRM for your business growth. 

So, is your business ready for this business growth technology and tools?

To find an answer to this critical question, here are 3 indicators that can guide you to understand whether you should buy an easy to use CRM for your business right now or your company needs to grow further till you adopt this business growth technology for earning even better revenue. 

1. Are You Loosing New Sales?

Selling would have been a lot easier if none of the companies would have lost in their selling process. However, if you are losing sales because your lead and customer information got misplaced, or you failed to follow-up because your CRM database is disorganized, or your sales team is spending more time updating and managing their Excel spreadsheets than selling, then it is high time you should move towards implementing an easy to use CRM for your company. 

At the most basic level CRM is a tool where you can store all leads and customer information in the CRM database that allows the user to collect, store and use the data for alerts and future sales and customer service activities. 

CRM also allows rapid access to all collateral materials as and when they are needed, understand where sales may be going wrong and find an immediate solution to the problem. 

So the answer to what is CRM, can be summarized that CRM software is a technology that helps in performing actions that are hard to do with a pure manual, spreadsheet-based approach.

2. Are You Loosing Existing Customers?

Apart from gaining new customers, CRM is even more valuable when it comes to retaining existing customers. Hence, if you are losing existing customers because of failure to follow-up, it is the time that you must introduce ‘Sales Force Automation’ or SFA with the help of easy to use CRM, into sales and customer service operations in your company.

3. Is Your Customer Data Too Large?

The longer you retain your customers, the more you know them. However, it is impossible to carry all the details of your customers, such as their payment terms, buying patterns, things they respond to and even their personal information and others, in your head.

Therefore, when your organization needs to remember the large volume of data about your leads, prospects and existing customers, it is the time that you need a CRM database to keep your entire information safe in one central repository. 

Endnote

Although implementing CRM can be challenging, but if you are losing sales for any of these above scenarios, it is the time you must understand what is CRM , and adopt this most popular business growth technology for optimizing your organization’s sales and customer support efficiently. 

How Will Blockchain Transform Customer Retention And CRM For Business Growth

Blockchain is going to overwhelmingly change the world that we see today.

Well, this might be a profoundly bold claim- but it is one that we feel is justified.

This is because; even though so far Blockchain as a business growth technology has been the domain of Fintech industry but as of date this has started to change. 

It has been observed that some of the greatest opportunities of Blockchain are within ‘Marketing’. Since this latest business growth technology can be used to develop customer-centric relationships and propositions that might motivate and empower consumers while also delivering stellar efficiency and responsiveness for rapid revenue growth. 

However, unfortunately even today most marketers are not yet conversant with Blockchain and its opportunities.

Therefore, in this post, we have revealed exactly what this Blockchain technology is all about and how we assume Blockchain will fundamentally change our approach towards customer retention and the use of easy to use CRM platform be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions for boosting customer experience with brands all across the globe. 

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is defined as a database that takes into account a number of records and places them in a block (more like assembling them in a proper sequence on a single sheet of paper). Each block is thereafter “chained” to the next block, by using a cryptographic signature, which enables the chain of blocks to be used as a ledger that can be corroborated and shared by anyone with the appropriate permissions to access it.

Blockchain according to HBR (Harvard Business Review) published in May 2016 states that:

"The technology most likely to change the next decade of business is not the social web, big data, the cloud, robotics, or even artificial intelligence. It’s the Blockchain."

So Blockchain in layman’s terms is a business growth technology that aids in:

•  Distributing digital assets (music, money, loyalty points) across global ledgers

•  Post transactions across billions of computers across the globe

•  Create a block every 10 min. and link it to a time-stamped chain of blocks

•  Self-execute agreements among smart contacts between businesses and individuals that use the Blockchain

Blockchain(s) can be permission-less (open to all) or permissioned (closed access).

Now for every business according to its industry, the implications of using Blockchain are quite profound:

•  Blockchain is a disruptive technology as it gets rid of intermediaries and the costs involved with them (like consumers can transfer money directly without the need of banks)

•  Blockchain will allow consumers to monetize and own their data

•  Blockchain will help to make peer-to-peer (P2P) dealings become the norm

•  Blockchain technology is extremely secured and un-hackable owing to the distributed nature of Blockchain that will aid in protecting privacy

Why should marketers take Blockchain technology seriously?

Blockchain is no longer a theme that is being hyped by the industry neither an emerging idea, it is a reality.

According to research done by Deloitte, it showed that:

•  Venture capitalists have invested billions of dollar in more than 120 Blockchain-related startups.

•  Thirty world’s largest banks have joined a consortium to build Blockchain solutions.

•  Microsoft has already launched a cloud-based Blockchain service.

•  Nasdaq is designing a Blockchain-powered private market exchange

•  Blockchain prototypes, concepts, are emerging in every major industry

Therefore, it is evident that Blockchain, in reality, will create disruptive and viable opportunities for marketers to create and deliver customer relationship due to its peer-to-peer nature which will deliver genuine engagements that are customer-centric for businesses that are ready and interested to invest in long-term customer experience and loyalty.   

How will customer retention and CRM get disrupted by Blockchain?

Here is a wonderful illustration (inspired by Deloitte) of what Blockchain-enabled CX (Customer Experience) could look like:

Therefore we think that the following use cases subsist in customer retention and easy to use CRM space:

• Use of loyalty points as global payment economy

• Exchange of loyalty points among peer-to-peers in the marketplace

• Irrefutable customer database, where service issues and questions from the customers can be rapidly identified without any ambiguity

• Multiple customer programs can be managed from a single wallet

• A coalition of brands will offer the customers a more complete experience

The Implications

Now with such awesome opportunities also come profound implications that will decide which brands will be able to lead and will be able to distinguish their customer propositions by use of Blockchain.

Therefore one you buy CRM built with Blockchain capabilities it is likely to:

• Boost redemption of rewards, incentives, and promotions, which will be seen as a positive endeavor to brands that will recognize this technology for engaging customers. 

• Interactions and experiences will be increasingly controlled by modern customers and not by brands or businesses. 

• There will be little need for intermediaries who might add costs and dictate processes. 

• Brands will be able to get genuinely engaged for building long-term loyalties (not just promise great rewards that are never fulfilled by the companies).

• There will be less obscurity in terms and conditions which imply more transparency and accountability between consumers and businesses.

• For the first time businesses will be able to find a real-time view of the behaviors of their customers by offering traceable customer rewards. 

• Customer experience will be more responsive and much faster with increased demands on automated contact strategies and new business rules. 

Why Blockchain is a big deal for marketers?

Once you buy CRM built with Blockchain technology it will help in creating indisputable records of customer behaviors, relationships, and value exchange, as consumer-driven P2P relationships are becoming possible with this business growth technology in ways marketers can only start to imagine for better understanding their customers to build propositions that supports repeat engagements.