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5 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM Solution

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | CRM Software| 5 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM SolutionBuying software and changing your business processes is a major decision. The same is true if you are considering changing software tools such as adopting CRM software. After all, it affects your sales, your marketing and your service workflows. It probably costs money to implement as well. However, you may be losing money if you don’t change when your business is in dire need of Customer Relationship Management software. Here are five signs your business needs a CRM solution.

The Productivity of Your Staff is Falling

Manual processes like filling out forms and filing them or maintaining spreadsheets take a lot of time. What worked when you had a few dozen clients becomes unworkable when you have hundreds or thousands of people, and the productivity of your staff falls as they struggle to scale up inefficient systems. CRM systems replace these manual processes, automating a lot of data entry and repetitive work. The faster access to accurate data increases revenue per salesperson by forty percent. This allows the organization to grow, and CRM systems will scale much better than your paper filing system.

It can improve the productivity of the rest of the team by giving everyone a single, shared interface containing all of the relevant data. One study found that three fifths of employees say they have to search through four or more systems to find information. That’s wasted time in every case, and it can lead to mistakes. Whether your customer is placing an order, calling customer service or talking to the warranty department, all notes about the customer interactions and all of their history is available to whomever is working with them at that moment. Anyone in the organization can see where clients are in the lifecycle and know exactly what they need.

Sometimes the issue is the basic CRM system you have. Hubspot is one of the most widely used CRM tools, but it is easy to end up with it being just another database to maintain. You may need help integrating it with your website or existing databases. This is where consultants like Chief Martech Officer come in. These HubSpot experts can optimize HubSpot, making it easier to administer or create the custom reports you need. Or you may need help training staff in the proper use of Hubspot’s features, so that their productivity will hit the levels you hoped for.

You Don’t Know What Your Sales Team is Doing

If you don’t know what your sales team is doing, you probably need a CRM system. CRM systems give you visibility into the sales process. They create a centralized place where all information about their schedules and clients are, typically in easy to read dashboards. You can see how many appointments each person has and the number of prospects they’re working with. This allows you to ensure that sales leads don’t fall through the cracks, and you can hold salespeople accountable when they didn’t follow up. You’ll reduce the number of missed sales, and that will improve the bottom line.

You Don’t Know How Your Sales Team Is Performing

CRM systems eliminate tedious, manual reporting. The Customer Relationship management system will generate the reports with a few clicks, freeing up your time for the more important task of analyzing it.

CRM systems allow you to compare the performance of sales people relative to their targets. It allows you to see how your team is doing relative to department goals, and you can pull up this information at any time. It gives you the up-to-date information you need to take corrective action instead of being surprised you fell short of your goals this month.

You won’t have to worry about creating reports and trying to figure out what they mean, either. CRM systems have built-in reporting and data analysis to give you an insight into customer demographics, seasonal trends, and preferences for individual customers or entire groups. You can study the buying habits of existing customers and start to work on nurturing existing business relationships.

Customer Service is Inconsistent or Constantly Bad

If customer service is inconsistent, your organization doesn’t have a shared set of information and business processes. This means that one department may have great service but another doesn’t. And a third department may fall short of good customer service because they simply don’t have the information that they need to do the right thing. All of this contributes to low customer satisfaction. A customer relationship management system allows you to give all customer-facing employees access to all prospect and customer information, and it can be used to standardized business processes.

A side benefit of adopting a CRM system is that it ensures accountability. Customers don’t fall through the cracks because no one took responsibility for a prospect or didn’t follow up on a customer’s problems. You must implement a good CRM system to be able to work on customer experience management.

You Don’t Know What You Do and Don’t Know

How many clients do you have? Who are your clients? If you don’t know this, you may let a lead walk out the door because you didn’t take a hot lead seriously. If you are relying on a key person to know everything, you run the risk of losing information because their laptop was infected with a virus or they left the company. With a CRM system, all of the information is stored in a centralized location.

Furthermore, that data can be backed up to a safe, alternate location. You can pull reports to find out anything you need to know, and you don’t have to worry about mistakes made because people lacked the information they needed to make the right decision. You’ll also know that your departing sales team won’t leave with a list of all their customers.

CRM tools allow you to improve the customer experience and improve the bottom line. Once your business reaches a certain point, you can’t afford not to have a CRM system.

How To Win Over More Customers

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Entrepreneurship | Marketing and Sales | How To Win Over More CustomersIf you want to run a profitable company and keep your business around for years to come, then you’ll need to work on winning over more customers. Without clients, you risk sales dipping and your business having to shut its doors.

Luckily, there are steps you can take to help you grab the attention of potential prospects and customers. You can’t sit around waiting for people to flock to you and figure out what you’re all about. Instead, you need to be proactive and figure out a game plan for attracting individuals who are likely to purchase your products or services.

Define Your Target Market

Trying to get in touch with everyone out there and not having a strategic plan of action for who you want to connect with will likely backfire. While it’s easier to send out mass messages, it’s not going to help you win over the right type of client. Instead, take time to define your target market and figure out what your ideal customer looks like. For example:

  • What are their interests or hobbies?
  • Where do they spend their time?
  • What are their demographics?

These are just a few key questions you should be asking yourself as you outline the specifics about your target audience. It will help you to narrow down who exactly you should be getting in front of both online and offline and the best times and places to do so.

Perfect Your Presentation Skills

You can also win over more customers by perfecting your presentation and sales skills. It’s a wise idea to attend workshops dedicated to helping you feel more comfortable and confident speaking in front of other people. A lot of times you’ll be called upon to give sales presentations and attend meetings where you’re going to have to try and get the customer to buy what you’re selling. The more you practice and improve your skills in this area, the easier it’s going to be for you to present the information without getting flustered.

Increase Your Marketing Efforts

A tried and true way to win over more customers is to increase and expand your marketing efforts. It could be that you’re simply not investing enough time and money in this area to have it make a difference in your sales numbers. Create a strategic plan that incorporates both online and offline marketing campaigns and helps to share your value proposition and reasons as to why someone would want to do business with you. The more creative you are, the more likely it is that your target audience will notice what you’re doing and will want to take further action.

Get Involved in Your Community

Another way to win over more customers is to get involved in your community. You can do this either by sponsoring local events or signing up to help out with charity causes. There’s likely a lot going on right in your own neighborhood, but you have to be willing to reach out and get involved. It is an excellent way to meet new people and introduce them to who you are and what your business does. People tend to gravitate toward companies and business owners who are willing to give back and show their local communities some love. Donating to specific causes and volunteering your time are also excellent ways to show your area some support and get individuals to notice what you’re doing.

Launch A Blog

An easy and effective way to bring in more customers is to post relevant and timely information through a blog. Many people find reading articles a great use of time and will want to know more about your business if you’re continually sharing interesting blog posts through your website. You may also be able to win over more customers by writing intriguing articles and then having other people share them with their networks online. If you want your blog to be successful be sure you post consistently, review it for errors and respond to comments and questions in a timely manner.

Get Current Customers Talking & Sharing

Win over more customers by getting people talking and sharing about your business. Maybe it’s that you run a special promotion or discount or a lead referral program to help you achieve this goal. On the other hand, perhaps you use humor or an element of surprise to attract customers and get people discussing your business with others. Also, the better customer service you offer, the more likely it is that satisfied clients will share their experience with their friends and family and help you draw in more paying customers.

Use Online Reviews

You can also win over more customers by collecting, posting and promoting online reviews and testimonials. The best way to get customers interested in what you’re doing and your business is to get other people to talk about you. Consumers trust reviews and feedback from other consumers versus hearing about how great a company it is from the company itself. Be sure to respond to any negative reviews so that the public sees that you’re aware of any issues and are working hard to resolve them. Include testimonials on your website from real clients and let your service speak for itself. Having a lot of positive reviews and testimonials will certainly help you attract more customers to your business and make people feel compelled to learn more about what it is you do.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, just because you launch a company doesn’t mean you’re going to attract new business automatically. You have to be willing to implement these ideas outlined above if you wish to win over more customers and increase your sales. It’s going to take an extra effort on your part but know that your hard work and dedication will pay off in the long run and you’ll have a thriving business to manage. Give these ideas a try and see what works best for you and continue to do more of that going forward.

Key Steps to Improving Your Business Customer Service

If you want to improve the success of your business, then first and foremost, you need to think of your customers. They are the ones that are going to make the difference between the business being a success or not. Because without any customers, there is no business. So what are the things that you can be doing to improve the relationships that you have with your customers? The answer is an obvious one, but it is often overlooked: improve customer service. No matter how great your team are, how good your business idea is and what you do or sell is, one of the things that customers are likely to remember is what the interaction with your business is like; both negative or positive, it will be remembered.

A strong company will want to have, and hopefully, already strive to have, great customer relationships. But a smart company will be looking for ways to improve and really getting down to the bottom of what good customer service is. It is all about listening carefully to your customers’ needs and wants. You need to make sure that you’re able to keep up, otherwise, they are likely to take their business elsewhere. So here are some ideas to help.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | Key Steps to Improving Your Business Customer Service
 
Strengthen Your Customer Service Skills

First, it is a good idea to make sure that your customer service team, if you have one, has the right skills for your managing the needs of your customers. They are what customers will have first contact with, so it needs to be a good experience, even if the outcome isn’t necessarily positive. customers’ needs. No amount of software or things like CRM can compensate for any shortcomings with your team’s customer service.

Improve Customer Service Strategy

You and your team may have the skills to provide some good customer service, and have no problems with customers interactions. But what strategies can you start to implement to please your customers even more? You don’t want customers to come to you with problems, if they can be dealt with ahead of time.

Getting personal with customers can be a good idea, as it can allow you to have another level of interaction, through sites like Twitter or Facebook. You can also look to improve how you do certain things, such as your logistics or supply chain. If you are noticing that there are things going wrong, then look to do something about them, such as looking into semi truck leasing or other ways to improve deliveries, before big issues come up and people then demand more from you. If you deal with things before they’re an issue, then it really does provide a good customer service experience.

All Customers to Provide Feedback

No matter how proactive you are in the things that you do, there will always be one issue or another that you never manage to get on top of. So to make sure that you learn about all sides of the experience that your customers have with your business, then it can help you to create a simple way for them to provide you with feedback.

Meeting the Needs of the Modern Consumer

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Articles |Customer Service| Meeting the Needs of the Modern ConsumerIt’s 2019, and the power consumers have in today’s marketplace continues to be unparalleled.

In particular, today’s savvy consumers have access to and can communicate with companies around the world at virtually any time of day, allowing them to not only compare the value of products and services, but also determine whether they share the same core brand values.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter if you represent a big corporation or are a solopreneur — your customers are calling the shots. In many ways, your customers expect to be able to engage with you on their terms and on their preferred channels.

Here’s a look at ways many of today’s successful companies are meeting the needs of the modern consumer.

Multi-channel Service

These days, communicating with companies of all sizes is easier than ever. But with a multitude of options with which consumers can communicate with your brand — from phone and email to SMS and social media — you’ll need to employ a strategy that covers these bases and more to be successful.

According to Shopify, more than 85 percent of today’s consumers use at least two communication channels when interacting with companies, albeit to shop or raise a customer service issue. This is true whether they research online and buy in-store or vice versa.

With this in mind, ideally, you will need to ensure your company has — and maintains — a presence on the digital channels most popular with your customers and prospects. The exact combination could be very different depending on your industry.

Ultimately, your best bet is to ask your customers, typically via email or an online survey, the contact methods they prefer and see which channels your competitors use as well.

Social Media Monitoring

When it comes to social media, meeting the needs of the modern consumer becomes more complicated. Your customers expect you to be listening at virtually all hours of the day and respond in kind in a timely manner. That means you can’t create social media pages, monitor the inboxes for those channels and call it a day.

While some of your customers will use those channels to contact you directly, many more are posting about your company, its products and its people on various social media sites. Some of these will include the ones on which you may already have a presence, like Facebook, but there will be others that you might not use, like WhatsApp or Yelp.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to have a program in place to help monitor mentions of your company and its offerings so you can respond as quickly as possible, to both positive and negative comments.

Calls are Not Going Away

While it’s important to offer a variety of online communications channels for customers and prospects to reach you, you should also realize traditional phone-based customer service isn’t going away anytime soon.
That’s because multi-channel communications typically do not replace the need to speak to a live person. Instead, they enable previously dormant or silent followers to ask questions and otherwise engage with your company.
Phone support is one of the top ways that companies representing all industries provide support. It is efficient, empathetic and responsive.

Personalization

Not all phone support is created equal, though. According to Entrepreneur, roughly 80 percent of consumers say the customer service agents with whom they interact are unaware of any past communication with the brand. The other 20 percent are doing something right.

Some companies have contact center agents standing by who look up information as the caller speaks. Other services, such a cloud call center, take it a step further by integrating a slew of self-service options to direct the call to the right department. The idea is to provide context to the current conversation — and, perhaps more importantly, any future ones — wherever possible.

When these efforts are integrated into a robust customer relationship management solution, it becomes easier for agents to determine whether specific customers have had previous interactions with your brand.

More to the point, keeping a record of what transpired on the previous customer service interaction means customers don’t have to repeat the same information — and become frustrated — over and over again. Customer service then improves, which can bolster consumer loyalty, creating a win-win for both parties.

Letting Customers’ Voices be Heard, Loud and Clear

Today’s modern, savvy consumers expect to have multiple channels to communicate and do business with their favorite brands. They also want their voices heard — and to be amplified when necessary — on social media if their brand experience is anything less than stellar. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t turn to and rely on phone-based customer service.

Oh, but the times are a-changin’ — and it’s up to forward-thinking brands to continually come up with new ways to allow customers to be comfortable and in the driver’s seat when making important buying decisions so these customers become repeat customers.

What To Think About When Giving Corporate Gifts

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management ArticleAs Christmas draws closer, business owners around the world will be starting to think about organizing, purchasing, and giving corporate gifts to their clients, customers, and suppliers. Whether these gifts seem like an expensive and unnecessary thing to do, or they feel like a Christmas tradition that can’t be broken, the point is that, if you want to make a good impression going into the new year, you’re going to need to give at least something to someone.

If you don’t quite know what to offer up as a holiday gift yet, and you’re not sure what to think about when choosing the gift, here are some key pointers that will help you out and ensure that everyone is happy with what they are given.

What Is Your Work Culture?

If you can distill your company’s culture down into one gift, this will certainly help you to be remembered, and it will ensure that whatever you choose to give will be completely unique. To do this, you need to think about the work that you do and the people who work for you. You might be famed for your dress down Friday, or perhaps your office parties are something that everyone talks about. Maybe it’s the fact that you give everyone their birthday off, or you include your employees’ families in everything you do. Whatever it might be, search around for a gift that speak of it, and give this to those important business connections that you want to impress.

Be Inclusive

It is important to find something that you can give to everyone because buying individual gifts will be expensive and time-consuming to find and purchase. If you want to offer up branded t-shirts, for example, think of the cut and the material – will everyone like it? Is it going to work for both men and women? This is an important point but one that will help to set you apart and show how caring you are and how you think of others when it comes to all aspects of your work.

Think Of Presentation

No matter what you are giving and to whom you are giving it, presentation is all-important. Wrapping a gift well in nice paper, perhaps with additional bows and ribbons will always be appreciated, especially when the alternative is a poorly wrapped gift that no time, thought, or effort was put into – assuming the gift is wrapped at all. Although this is a corporate gift, it should be treated no differently to any other that you would give to someone important to you. Make sure it looks good, because first impressions regarding anything county for a huge amount.

Ask Employees

As a business owner, you have final say in what corporate gifts you want to give, but it could be worthwhile to speak to your employees and get their opinions too. If you are completely drawing a blank, then ask your employees to come up with some ideas that you can work with. They might have more insight into what your clients and customers would like because they work with them more closely.

If you do come up with some ideas but can’t decide between them, again, you can ask your employees. They might be able to help you to determine which of the two, three, or more ideas is the most viable, saving you from buying and giving something that just wouldn’t really work.

Ask Questions

Being considerate and asking questions is another important step. You may feel you have discovered the ideal gift, but if there is any doubt then getting in touch with the recipient to determine whether this really is the case will help you – it will show that you are thinking of your clients and customers rather than simply buying the first thing that comes into your head (even if, in reality, you are). For example, if you are thinking of offering a food-related gift, it is a good idea to speak to the recipients and check to see if they have any allergies, or if they prefer beer to wine or red or white wine. You don’t have to tell them what you are buying in detail, either, so the surprise element will still be there.

Make It Local

Something that is always widely appreciated is a gift with some local flavor. This is a great gift whether the recipient lives nearby or far away – it’s always fun to be given something made in a specific place, perhaps in a specific way. You could choose a calendar showcasing your local area, or some food products that a local maker has created. If your area is famous for anything, this is a great gift to give as it will help the recipient get a better idea of where you are based and what the place is like.

This is also a great way to support local small businesses who might be able to help you in return. By doing this, you are enabling the economy to thrive, which is certainly another bonus.

Make It Personal

Whatever you choose to give, you need to ensure that it reflects your company in some way, and the easiest way to do that is to brand it with your logo or company name. Many companies such as Perfect Imprints make this an easy thing to do, and your branding can be added to mugs, coasters, Christmas decorations, t-shirts, pens, and much more.

You should remember not to overbrand, however. You can make yourself remembered with just a small logo, for example, rather than printing your name all over the front of everything that you give away. This can look much more attractive, and will even do a better job of reminding those who receive the gifts about you, as they will be more likely to use items with only small amounts of branding on them.

Give Quality

Whatever it is you choose to give, it needs to be of good quality. If you buy cheap and give items that are poorly made and that break apart quickly, or that can’t be used, worn, or even eaten, this will reflect badly on your company. You don’t need to spend a fortune to find good quality products, but you should take the time to read reviews and even sample the products for yourself if possible, to ensure that you are happy to give them to important clients and suppliers.