Socializing CRM Adds Credibility to the Business Solutions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the solution helping modern businesses to enhance profitability by maintaining the perfect relation with customers. Social CRM is another term that modern marketers have introduced. This methodology includes understanding conversation and relationships. As the social media indulgence in modern business strategies is increasing, analyzing customer’s social profile, their interactions, behavior and shifting requirement helps businesses to adjust their strategies with customers’ behavior.

There are several benefits of blending the impeccable social CRM initiative with company’s strategies like knowing customers and offering them exactly what they require. Who would not like to be treated with care as these companies try to do? This strategy might also help marketer to know their customers from close quarters.

This is the latest strategy that gives more impetus to social media conversations rather than just dealing with the factual statistics. Be it the interaction between customers or customers and company.

How to Socialize your CRM – Explained Thoroughly!

If your company has an official website, having an active identity on social media adds to its credibility. Build a fan page on social media and attract customers towards it. Be it crucial business aspects like marketing, sales or even support and maintenance, social CRM influences every sector. You must have:

• Effective support and maintenance team of professionals to get the best out of your social media profile through CRM software.
• Accurately trained team that can manage even the worst case scenario.
• Social media data analyses that will help you know your customers response to any new service or products you introduce.
• Influenced buyers through powerful social media campaigns conducted by top companies.
• Built marketing strategies that involve the study of big data that extracts satisfactory results.
• Improved customer services for better business reputation.
• Customers adapting modernization expect better support services rather that annoying marketing messages.
• Majority of the users sharing their customer experience on social networking websites that is analyzed by big data marketers.

What Imprints has it Left over Modern Businesses?

Social media along with CRM solution impacts modern businesses by taking it on the path of success. Transforming the business data from statistical study to the social media behavior of customers, organizations have started building impeccable strategies that can bring unbeatable profitability.

Change in the branding and marketing processes is simply due to social CRM impacts on enterprises. Social media data is collected and analyzed to make powerful business forecasts.

Mindsets of both modern business owners and customers are changing that can be concluded from their social media behavior.

Target area is fixed and flexible. It is fixed as marketers would have definite market territory for branding. And flexible as the definite markets can be either stretched or can shrink given the marketing process requirements.

Reward your customers with excellent support and maintenance service offered using social CRM and enhance business performance by making the sales & marketing process highly compelling. Add credibility to your business with decisive social media and reliable CRM solution.

Top Tips to Getting Repeat Customers

To nurture your business, it’s enticing to focus on generating new sales or retaining bigger accounts. The most important of all is to emphasize on your old customers, irrespective of how small they are, to keep your business flourishing. There are some basic guidelines and secrets to receive repeat business from your existing clients. It is all about right approach to follow up them implying proper CRM strategy that has a right impact on the customer without irritating them.

The most promising follow-up starts just after the sale. The moment you contact your customer to say “thank you” you must cross check if they are happy with the product/services. In addition, there are many effective and time tested CRM methodologies to follow up to ensure your brand is there in your customer’s mind.

1.Make Aware your Customers What You Have for Them

You can do this by shooting newsletter, or something more casual, like a quick phone call. You can opt for the right method to say connected with your customers. The core is to make them aware of the excellent service you’re offering them. Mention everything you are planning and doing for them. Let them understand how your services can further simplify their work.

2.Send Loyal Customers Personalized, Handwritten Letters Frequently

You can say – “I was relaxing, and I recalled you! Hope your business is going great and you are enjoying great time dealing with your customers. Let me know in case you require another product that can align with your business exploring it further. I can send out with our latest product anytime.” This will keep them engaged and delighted.

3.Make it Personal

You must use the prowess of email and voice mail, which is the most effective CRM tool. You can leave a voice-mail message stating you wish to speak with the person personally or wish to stop by their workplace at a specific time. Face to face communication is the best when it comes to maintaining long term relations.

4.Don’t Forget Special Occasions

You must send your existing customer Birthday cards, New Year cards, Christmas cards, etc. Gifts could be the best follow-up options, too. For this, you don’t have to spend a fortune. You can be creative and deliver an innovative gift ideas associated with your business, customer’s business or their recent purchase. You can hand out a free product of your brand that can keep your name fresh in their minds.

5.Share Information

Suppose you come across an article, see a new edition of book or learn about a company that’s related to your customer, don’t hesitate to send a note or call to let them know.

6.Make Follow-up Calls a Business Development Opportunity

When you interact or visit your existing customers, you’ll mostly realize they have referrals for you that can be a new lead for your enterprise.  With so many ways that your customers can become the most resourceful channel, there is just no reason not to stay in constant touch with them.

7.Customer Service

There are many other things you can do to offer an excellent customer service. Here are some tips that can ensure that your clients get best service every time.

•     Write your customer service policy and make each of your employee aware of it. They must know the rules and be prepared to live up to them.
•     Erect right support systems delivering employees clear instructions for retaining excellent customer service quality.
•     Create a metric of superb customer service and reward employees who practice it consistently.
•     Make sure the passion for excellent customer service runs throughout your company. Make your employees aware how good CRM solutions and service impacts the business as well as your profits and to their future career with the company.
•     Be committed to deliver the best customer service than anyone else in your industry. Each of your old customer must sense it by the rigorousness you pursue it.

Excellent customer service is not only limited to what you say or do for your customer; it is also about giving customers an opportunity to make their feelings known. For this follow these tips:

1.Foster Human Bond

Take time out to take your customers and associates out to lunch, dinner or some ballgame. This will help you learn the secrets that will help you understand and go above and beyond your competition.

2.Attend Trade Shows and Industry Events

Attending such events help you find out how the competition’s working and what types of products and services customers are opting.

3.Keep Alert for Publications and Respond to Them

Have an insight of industry trade publications, be engaged in trade organizations, and pay heed to your customers are doing.

4.Seek Feedback

Keep surveying your customers frequently to understand how you’re doing. Send out paid questionnaire cards or email, call them, and set up survey groups. Seek opinions and fix the trouble areas surfaced.

Did you see, there are umpteen numbers of opportunities and tips that are available to get repeat sale through your old customers! Make use of it and watch your business grow!

Flawless CRM Data can Accelerate Sales, Remarkably!

Any business, whether big or small, needs a Customer Resource Management (CRM) system, which has to be clean i.e. free from duplicate and unwanted data. Data quality is the aspect that should neither be compromised nor should be ignored. There are myriads of benefits attached with the clean databases. It can boost the sales level of your business remarkably, making the business strategies simple and efficient.

Clean and accurate CRM database helps organizations achieve high sales. To sustain in the competition and getting desired ROI, CRM solutions implemented by a company needs to be up to the mark, fulfilling all the challenging business requirements.

Effects of Inaccurate Data on Sales and Marketing Process

It is true that such data kills marketing impacts. No matter how strong and impressive your marketing strategies were, error-full CRM system will reduce its effectiveness. With such CRM database, completing business processes will be a huge challenge. Only clean CRM solution will help complete the business activities efficiently and generate revenue. Identify and resolve CRM issues to accelerate the sales ratio of your business.

Let us learn how to clean your CRM database. In this article, we have listed some of effective methods that would help you to keep your CRM database organized and error-free.

3 Simple Steps to get Clean CRM Data

1.Check

Prior to start cleaning your data analyze it and track the loopholes to prevent the infected or low quality data. Post analyzing it completely, set the limitations of the data quality, which is to be achieved by the data present in your CRM database, else it should be discarded. Check for the duplicate, incomplete data or infected data to resolve the issues generated by such data. Establish a dashboard for data quality, which will give you a clear idea of the duplicates your database contains, where it has arrived from, when were it created and other related information.

2.Clean

Once you have collected all the issues affecting the functional part of the business, build strategies to resolve them. Cleaning the data includes processes like data standardization, removing duplicates, completing the incomplete data and validating the invalid data. Well, this phase includes following several strategies as it involves accomplishment of important processes stated above.

Complete the incomplete data is the phase which allows you to complete the data, which was left incomplete, while entering it. Complete the data that was left as it is, to make your CRM database consistent and reliable.
Standardizing the data includes following the standards and policies set by business. The data entered in the CRM software solution of an organization should completely fulfill the company standards. This process is also called as normalization, which makes the CRM database organized and consistent.
Removal of duplicated data is the most important phase which helps discarding duplicate data, to avail unique and unmatched data combinations.
Validating the data phase includes your CRM database with correct and accurate data, fulfilling the constraints, validation rules etc. making your CRM data seamless and error-free.

3.Protect

The important business data requires high security. Thus, it is crucial for organization to protect their authentic information. The data entering your CRM has to be clean, accurate and validated to avoid data drawbacks like inconsistency and inaccuracy.

All these steps will make your CRM solution perfect and reliable. Organizations should follow these steps as it will help in accelerating sales ratio, remarkably.

Is Your Business Ready to Adapt to Changing Consumer Behavior?

Changing consumer behavior is the biggest challenge for any business to keep pace with.  How the behavior of consumers changing?

Such changes are not focused to merely academic interest. Consumers are more focused on eco friendly and safe products and seeking exclusive experiences.

The market size has grown more than double with an expected compound annual growth rate of 20 percent. This shows three and a half times faster than the projected growth in upcoming and developing economies, and more than 10 times the projected rate for already established economies in recent years.

Are enterprises completely prepared to capture that growth? Several growth pioneers have been entertaining new customers in developing markets, in both B2C and B2B landscapes. But nearly a third of the leaders have attained their increased growth by addressing the diversified needs emerging from changing consumer behavior. There are some common elements behind their success. Let’s have an insight into the components that an enterprise need to focus on to address the growing and changing behavior of consumers.

Analytical Toolkit

Consumer-driven growth pioneers use advanced analytics to ascertain and bridge gaps between their businesses and consumers.

These toolkits help many companies to get better insight into the customers’ needs, more importantly, by using data-derived data to craft and offer better customer experience. These capabilities are vital in verticals like entertainment, where experience is king.

The key to the success of many players has been their compliance to the quality of the experience it offered to its consumers. Instead of flooding the market with mediocre products, the enterprises focused on earning a reputation for delivering high-quality products.

After spending a significant amount of time with focus groups and testing concepts on key audiences to understand the consumer behavior, the business intelligence group of the enterprise could understand the likes and dislikes of the audience. This requires the potential to identify, hire, retain and train in-house analytics brain.

An Adaptive Mindset

Developing a corporate mindset that is open to flexible business-model and technological change is quite tough. The enterprises need to develop an early warning. An adaptive brain can be especially helpful at identifying threats.

Thinking laterally can offer great opportunities outside your core business and innovative response to disruption. Offering your consumers the related products and services can be a great opportunity outside the business.

Agility in Business

Agility is the core to the adaptive organization. Such organizations respond to change quickly, through investments and acquisitions.

Agile business also learns rapidly, and passes on the lessons to others. To address the changing needs of seemingly conscientious consumers, you need to equal—and often exceed—industry practices for environmental responsibility.

The concept of change in consumers’ behavior is not new. The only difference is the way they are changing and the undefined directions it can take. Businesses must meet the expectations of consumers of buying products online at competitive rates and deliver quickly.

Engage Prospects

Initiate conversations with consumers, and explore what is valuable for them about the relationships they have with your competitors. This will help you develop ideal customer-vendor bonding and how you can best exhibit your value proposition to address their needs.

Evaluate Processes and Metrics

You need to identify the metric and process changes that are necessary for you to proficiently track and respond to changes in consumer behavior. A recent survey states that the amount of face time sales reps spend before customers today is 40% less compared to what it was three years ago. It’s time to re-evaluate the changed scenario and methodologies that you have been using to interact with your consumers. Deploying an automated CRM system can help you identify several options and metrics that are the most suitable given the changing behavior of the consumers.

Proactive Approach

You need to identify business goals for the future and skills required to achieve those goals. Be prepared to track trends, and be on the forefront to understand the results rather than constantly watching from behind. It’s time to take a proactive approach that helps interacting with clients to not only be in touch but also speculate future changes.

Closed Loop Marketing

Closed Loop Marketing is all about making sure that marketing strategy is working hand in hand with the rapidly changing behaviors and channel utilization of today’s consumer and is integrated with service, sales, and operations in a professional way that triggers effectiveness of demand generation.

For several enterprises, trying to address these shifting consumer demands may appear to be attempting to square the circle, and enterprises might feel threatened by the challenge. The answer to these changes is in reacting to change with analytical approach, an adaptive set of mind and an agile organization—successfully aligning the advantages of the large with the customized approach of the small, the conventional benefits of the old and the leading edge of the new.

By obtaining the perfect balance between expectation of consumers and enterprise offerings can be the most effective strategy to combat the changing behavior of the customers and transform this change to their advantage.

Is CRM Your Cup of Tea? How to Know?

Venturing into the world of customer relationship management (CRM) can be touch. The most vital aspect before selecting, implementing, and using a CRM system is to know certain things that are crucial to survive in the dynamic ecosystem of CRM. Below are some of the most vital facts you must realize before navigating CRM technology.

1. Understand Your Needs:

Prior to considering what CRM solution to opt for, you must ascertain exactly what you expect from a CRM system. Who you are and what you do decides what you want and how CRM system can fulfill your need. You may just want your sales representatives open an account quickly, or you may require household information for your marketing team to track sales and products activities. You must be familiar with exactly what’s your need before you zero in to a vendor for purchasing a system that is not suitable to your business.

2. Select Right Vendor:

When you go online to search for the right CRM technology, you will be astonished to find that the market is inundated with options, making it tough to come to a conclusion. Take time to have a look from close quarters at each vendor to ensure you are making the right choice. Often the best CRM system for your enterprise may not be the top ranked or the most expensive CRM. Surprisingly the simplest CRM solution could be the most effective for you!

3. Know Customization Cost:

It’s somewhat difficult to find CRM solution that addresses all of your needs in a simple package. In many cases, the right amalgamation of features may not be available with the vendor and you may need to opt for customization options. Avoid falling into the trap of endless customization. Just ensure that your CRM is efficiently performed by your in house staff to avoid paying any outside staff to manage it when you need any report. Review customization options. Contact existing customers for better insight on overall price including customization.

4. Don’t Get Influenced Easily:

Stay grounded when selecting the right CRM. Every feature and variant may appear vital, but actually it’s not. After defining your needs, stick to your needs and don’t get carried away by the sea of features you are presented with. Same with implementation; you can bifurcate your implementation plans and never push everything out all at once. Implement the CRM solution slowly in a phase wise manner so that your business can get time to harmonize with the system change.

5. Stay within Budget:

Yes, being within budget is essential. There are CRM solutions that can easily meet any budgetary limits you may have. Usually the costs you will run into would be initial cost of the software including maintenance and integration charge. In many case you may end up finding options of per month subscription fee. Just ensure what works best for you in terms of expenses and payment options.

6. Homework before Implementation of CRM:

It may take a long time to get the new CRM application up and running. Migrating existing data into a new CRM system may be a tiring and time consuming task. It’s a great idea to clean up your existing data by deleting duplicate data and cleaning details of those people & companies who have left your enterprises. This will ward off any confusion and extra time to implement the new CRM system and sift through irrelevant data.

7. Employee Workflow:

After implementing your new CRM system, the earlier employee workflow would no longer work. The new system would require a transition to a new workflow for your employees. Better you know what the new workflows will be; this may include how to follow up with potential leads, etc. You need to hand out the training manuals and ensure that you are keeping track with the workflow for every employee. This is to ensure that your staff are aware of the all the necessary information they need to succeed.

8. Invest in Training:

As said earlier, training is necessary to implement a new CRM application in your company. Training to the end user is vital to ensure consistency of use. Just ensure you are also focusing for ongoing training as you develop your training modules. Continuous training is necessary to help all employees stay on the same page and keeping abreast with the functionality and feature updates of the CRM system.

9. Focus on the Client:

When you implement a new CRM, don’t forget focusing on your clients. You may get released by performing some iterative tasks but you cannot divert focus from your customers. After all the new system also is there to focus on your customers, so don’t get overwhelmed with it and don’t stop focusing on your clients and ensure you do not lose them.

10. Don’t Rely Blindly on Technology:

Unfortunately it is human effort that has to be put to use to make things work once CRM technology is implemented. Just having a CRM product with a collaboration forum or some other social CRM product cannot make things work automatically. You will have to initiate to put efforts into involving customers, building interactive portals, and offering feedback when required. Or else the data collected in your CRM will lose its essence.

11. Incorporate Social Media Leads:

Social media is becoming the most vital landscape in the business sector. Just do not forget to use your CRM system to ensure that it allows you to track leads from social media sites like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The same message must be conveyed to your team and all end users of the system.

12. Get Rid of Unwanted Features:

There might be certain features that do not fit into your business needs. Just identify these features and disable it all or you can also hide them from your screen. This will keep your CRM clean and clutter free. Take the time to ensure they are off your screen and it’ll be easier to navigate through the available modules. It’ll improve the functioning of your CRM application.

13. Evaluate Your ROI:

It’s necessary to track your ROI once you have implemented a CRM solution. Understand the procedure and strategy by building your goals to analyze the implementation of the CRM as software and also as strategy. You would be able to quantify the benefit of CRM application and you would also be able to understand how successful your business is post CRM implementation.

Just ensure you do not miss out to understand and implement all these aspects to get the optimum benefits of your new CRM system.

Siloed Software System Vs Automated ERP Solutions

Implementing the right and efficient business systems has been the most crucial decision that every high-growth business grapples with to handle its expanding operations. Embracing an automated and integrated ERP system often takes a back seat to short-term revenue acceleration objectives. As a result, several disparate tools are installed at different points in time in multiple functional operations, leading to business process incompetencies and software integration challenges. Let’s have an insight how did these problems arise, and how can they be avoided?

Business Challenges Caused by Outdated Software System

When the growing enterprises have multiple siloed applications, there are many business challenges that arise. These challenges often become severe enough to cripple growth. A brief summary of the most prominent issues that can obstruct your growth in case you run a business having disparate software systems is mentioned:

Wasted Productivity of Employees: Every employee of your company must be performing to its best when your company is in growth mode. Inefficient and disharmonized processes may hinder your employees’ performance, and it may increase errors and may leave them with less time to perform more important core duties. Necessary processes like order processing, expense approvals, invoicing, etc. to name a few, may get delayed and can often be erroneous. There are several labor-intensive and manual tasks that can cut down the agility that your business need to grow.

Wasted Resources & Time in Multiple Integrations: Having so many disparate tools, business wastes an enormous quantity of time, effort and money on integrating, acquiring and maintaining new versions of these applications. Many a times, when new versions are purchased, more integration and maintenance has to be performed for all these versions to work together seamlessly. As a result, valuable IT time that could be spent in the productivity of the company is wasted, with skyrocket maintenance costs.

No Real-time Visibility: When your software tools are not properly integrated, you may witness various overlapping databases, which obscure the real business performance and cannot give a view of the real-time business performance. Reports manifesting performance across your marketing, finance, services, sales, and fulfillment sections are vital that gives an integrated 360 degree view of your company’s operations. Majority of companies just do not opt for accessing this information regularly as it may take lot of time to source, extract and analyze the data. As a result, businesses either make slow critical decisions, driven by inaccurate information, or make hasty and risky decisions, based on their gut instinct.

Increased Customer Churn: Revenue growth and customer acquisition are cornerstones of your company’s consistent success. Due to fierce competition, it is imperative that your business offers an excellent customer experience or bear the brunt of having customers take their business to the competitors. If you’re not able to quickly provide customers the information on their order status, resolve issues on time, or deal with products being out of stock often, they will not be satisfied and may not continue purchasing from you.

ERP Solutions

For the growth of your business, it is important that you have your business software tools appropriately integrated within a single codebase and database. This is where ERP system comes into picture! It yields tremendous cost savings and improves business productivity, including:

Improves Efficiency Across Business: There are many core business processes that you have to deal with in your daily operations, like fulfillment, invoicing, order management, cash collection, expense approvals, to name a few. Automating these processes allows you to avoid deputing new resource to manage these processes, and staff to higher-value processes for the growth and innovativeness of your business. By using integrated suite, businesses can stimulate their financial close times, increase sales productivity, and also increase inventory turns, amongst other efficiencies.

Valuable IT Time and Cost Savings: With business no longer having to install, procure, and maintain multiple integrated systems, a major reduction in operational costs can be witnessed while more IT time can be invested in improving the business productivity and other operations.

Improved Visibility: It is necessary to have real-time visibility to make timely and informed business decisions. When data and other information can be made available instantly from almost anywhere, without wasting time and efforts on data extraction and assembling data from different sources together, employees are more informed and are able to make faster and accurate decisions.

Speed Up Growth: When you have an integrated software system, expansion to various locations and additional sales channels can be done a lot faster due to unified order and accounting processes and related data. You can upsell and cross-sell more proficiently to your existing customer base with the improved visibility you obtain.

User-based Innovation: As process changes can be deployed faster, everyday business users can be able to use their functional expertise to customize processes and tools to improve performance. Meanwhile, you will be able to focus on strategic goals that can strengthen the bottom line of your business by erecting innovative value-added solutions.

These days, businesses in every industry are leveraging sophisticated business software like ERP to fuel their growth but several are still struggling to keep up with their growth and manage costs effectively due to the unintegrated functional systems leading to process bottlenecks and employee productivity complexity.

Integrated ERP suites are transforming how businesses run, and allowing them to overcome growing pains that earlier were holding them back from pushing their business to the next level of profitable growth.

SugarCRM is the Most Popular CRM. Find Out, Why?

Startup enterprises, which have just entered the market, have to face a strong competition and tend to make a concrete position among other enterprises. Quality and cost effective IT solution would be their first priority due to limited budget and resources. Mid-sized enterprises as well as corporate entities use CRM tools to reduce the complexities in managing business activities. Such enterprises spend huge money and resources to get the most suitable CRM solution for availing notable success.

A CRM system is considered to be the cornerstone of any startup. No matter whichever country you reside in, customer relationship management system helps enterprise of all categories to organize business processes effectively. SugarCRM is one of the best CRM tools used by enterprises nowadays.

SugarCRM development companies focus on the intense requirements stated by businesses prior to start developing the CRM solution to meet their business requirements. Professional developers, with years of experience, build efficient CRM solution to simplify and automate their business processes.

Why is SugarCRM so Popular?

It makes Customization Easy!

There is no CRM solution that supports one-size-fits-all model. Majority of the enterprises seeking a tailored CRM solution to match with their challenging requirements, select SugarCRM software for managing their business as it offers simple and easy customization, suiting business processes. With the inherent features like studio and module builder offered by SugarCRM software, you can customize your CRM system as per your choice by just dragging and dropping the features.

It makes Managing Operations, Simple!

There are several enterprises using their SugarCRM solutions as mini ERP systems as this software is capable to offer additional facilities along with its basic features. SugarCRM software is beneficial for companies that are seeking a solution that offer multiple features. Managing customers’ data and invoices can be done using single software, isn’t it good news for enterprises?

It makes Business Budget, Flexible!

The best reason, why enterprises select SugarCRM software as a CRM tool is, it is a cost effective CRM solution. You can get the best out of your money invested on CRM system. It costs less and offers more features. Well, only cost is not the biggest factor of SugarCRM software, you also get advanced features that are compatible with latest technologies easily. Due to this reason, enterprises rely on this solution for their crucial business management requirement.

Do you own an enterprise? Are you seeking a strong and powerful CRM solution for easy management of your business activities? If, yes, SugarCRM software is the CRM solution, your enterprise would require for better performance.