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ACT! Software

If you are a new, small business owner, you are probably ready for the day when you have more time to really focus on your business while working countless hours every day.

You are happy with the direction the business is going so far, but you know you can always make improvements. You know you have some of the tools and resources you need, but you will always feel like you can have a greater level of success.

One of the tools you should strongly consider using is Act! software. This software will give you the ability to make the most of your time because you will not have to do everything on your own.

Make A List

Every second counts, and you need the right resources to help you use the time in the best way possible. If you know there are things that need to be accomplished by a certain period of time, you should make a list of those things. Once you accomplish those things on your list, you can mark them off so you will know what has already been completed.

Get Organized

Act! software allows you to be more organized because everything will be placed where it needs to be. Your customer information, financial information, marketing processes, will all be organized when you use this software.

As a small business owner, you want to do things the right way because there are many small businesses that do not last as long as they hoped they would. If you want to improve your business and give it a chance to succeed, contact us today for more information on Act! software.

CRM software has revolutionized the way sales teams and marketing teams communicate with each other as well as clients. The software makes the sales process more objective and data-based, so future investment is based off of statistics and rather than intuition. And according to a recent Gartner report, the software is growing in popularity.

The report, titled “Market Trends: CRM Digital Initiatives Focus on Sales, Marketing, Support, and E-Commerce” explores into the latest trend of CRM software. According to the report, CRM software revenues will grow to $80 billion by 2025.

This forecast indicates that CRM software has been successful in improving sales and client relations for companies. The software was designed to make the entire process more efficient, and according to the recent forecast, it's apparently effective.

In addition, the report notes that most companies are now transitioning to mobile CRM software. Mobile software makes companies more flexible in the way they deal and communicate with clients. A recent ZDNet article quotes Vice President Ed Thompson, who explains the importance that large corporations are placing on mobility:

“The key area at the moment is mobile. Large organisations especially have their hands full with trying to understand how to make the most out if mobile technology.”

While CRM software can't entirely drive sales on its own for a company, it can certainly have a considerably positive impact on a company's sales. CRM software provides sales teams and marketing teams with the data and information they need to make informed decisions pertaining to the company's future sales. Such software is becoming more popular because companies are realizing the importance of tracking and analyzing client trends in terms of what they buy and when they but it.

If you would like more information about CRM software, contact us.

CRM Software

CRM software is most effective when used in conjunction with email marketing. It helps businesses stay away from their bad habits and send effective timely emails. Here's everything you need to know:

Don't send emails arbitrarily

Email marketing just isn't effective without a strategy. And even if you have one, it won't work unless you stick with it. Unfortunately, most businesses have proven incapable of doing so. There are consequences which sometimes outweigh the benefits of email marketing.

Use CRM software to send timely emails

With CRM software, businesses can send emails when they're most effective, i.e., right before a returning customer places an order. This helps you get more out of your email marketing campaign, and thus increase its ROI.

This Marketing Land article explains why basing your emails off of CRM software rather than an arbitrary schedule is preferred:

"It’s not uncommon for marketers to set all-encompassing limits on the number of emails customers receive per week. This is a mistake. Assuming every subscriber doesn’t want to receive more than two or three messages per week neglects your highly engaged subscribers who may be waiting impatiently to receive the next offer. Avoid making blanket statements about your subscriber base and focus on drilling down on the subscriber level."

How could you possibly know how often a particular customer wants to receive emails without analyzing data? CRM software answers this question for you.

Evaluate your campaign

Although CRM software is a good complement to an email marketing campaign, it's not a solution for all your problems. Running a proper campaign requires testing, and lots of it.

This applies to your CRM software as well. You might find that it's better to change exactly when you send a customer an email. Still, this process of trial-and-error is much simpler and more effective than the alternative.

To talk more about CRM software, or anything else, contact us today.

 Sales Software

If you're struggling to convert leads, then you should consider implementing sales software. With CRM software, you can track and organize your leads so sales representatives are better prepared to deal with them.

Every lead comes from somewhere

Not all leads are the same, in terms of their relevance and background. Some leads won't come from your target audience, some will find your company on social media, and some will have real interest in your products. It's important to organize your leads early on. This way, you can segment them by their interests, original platform, and demographics.

CRM software helps you track and classify leads

CRM software makes it easy to understand your leads. The software automatically organizes them by the way they were generated. This Huffington Post article explains how this can benefit your business:

"Leads come in many forms. With the right CRM in place, these leads consist of: organic online leads, newsletter signups, new customers, social leads, B2B leads and more. Knowing when your leads have entered the pool, how often you have engaged and nurtured them, and what steps you can take to vet them is crucial to your success as an online business."

Without the software, it's difficult to keep track of the hundreds of leads you generate. When this happens, lead nurturing becomes impossible.

Knowing the background of the lead is important for conversion

When you know how a particular lead was generated, it makes lead nurturing easier. Your sales representatives have something to go off of rather than just treating each lead the same.

Your social media leads probably correspond to a different audience than your paid advertisement leads. This will affect the way your sales representatives try to convert them. It's important to organize your leads so you can have different lead nurturing strategies for different demographics. CRM software takes care of the organization aspect for you. To talk more about sales software, or anything else, contact us today.

Marketing Software

Marketing software is often exactly what businesses need to add a quantitative edge to their campaign. If you're struggling to generate leads or track the results of your marketing campaign, then using CRM software is probably just what you're looking for.

Email automation

Email marketing is still the most effective online marketing practice, with just one caveat -- you have to approach it correctly. If you just send arbitrary emails out whenever you remember you have a newsletter, you'll never make any meaningful progress.

With CRM software, you can automate your email marketing campaign. You can set triggers so you send general emails out to subscribers in a timely manner.

Track metrics

Not tracking the results of your campaign will always end up in failure. You'll never learn from your mistakes, see what's effective, or understand if you're making any progress.

Business 2 Community explains how integrating CRM can resolve these problems:

"Having a CRM integrated with your marketing allows you to see which of your contacts are opening emails, what websites they are visiting, webinars attended and so forth. You can’t improve your marketing without these metrics. As marketers, we must understand the sales cycle and how our work fits into it."

You'll have greater access to data than ever before. This is worth its weight in gold regarding your marketing campaign, since you'll be able to retain customers and attract prospects better.

Align marketing and sales

And finally, using CRM software is an easy way to align your marketing and sales teams. By instructing both departments to use and refer to the software, you'll improve their communication and awareness of their counterpart. This alone is extremely effective for your marketing campaign, since sales representatives will have a better understanding of your company's brand when talking to prospective customers.

If your marketing campaign is in a slump, consider integrating CRM software. To talk more about marketing software, or anything else, contact us today.

CRM Software

CRM software is all about data. The longer you use it, the more data you'll compile for your marketing and sales teams. In that light, we'd like to share three important statistics regarding CRM software.

ROI (Return on Investment)

At the end of the day, all businesses really care about is the ROI. In the short-run, you might improve internal and external communication, convert leads, and increase engagement, but in the long-run, you want to increase your profit.

According to Nucleus Research, CRM will help you on your journey. Their study states that for every dollar you spend on CRM software, it will return $8.71.

"Companies continue to make new investments in CRM to take advantage of new analytics, social collaboration, mobile, and other capabilities – and with good reason. In analyzing Nucleus ROI case studies on CRM, we found the average returns from CRM have increased since 2011, from $5.60 to $8.71 for every dollar spent."

That's an incredible ROI for an investment, especially since this is sustainable long-term.

Email marketing

The most common application of CRM software is email marketing. You can use marketing automation to send targeted emails to subscribers who are ready to place another order.

According to research by Marketing Charts, 6 out of 10 businesses use CRM software for email marketing. If the majority of your competitors are enhancing their marketing campaign, then you'll have to follow suit to keep up.

Sales representatives

Sales representatives benefit the most from CRM software. They can refer to the data to prepare for meetings and study up on specific clients.

CRM software helps sales representatives hit their quotas. According to Innoppl Technologies, 65% of sales reps who use mobile CRM achieve their quotas, which is almost double the amount that sales reps accomplish without the software.

The statistics back CRM software as much as it backs your sales representatives and marketing advisors. To talk more about CRM software, or anything else, contact us today.

Marketing Process

An inefficient marketing process is more trouble than its worth. Although it might generate leads, it'll take a lot of resources to run. Some campaigns don't even generate relevant leads, which leaves businesses right where they started. For a more efficient campaign, try out these tips:

Document your strategy

Documenting a marketing strategy is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the related campaign. The process of documenting helps you organize your thoughts and plans, and afterwards you have a guide to refer back to.

Many businesses today forgo this step and continue intuitively. This is a recipe for inefficiency, since you'll revisit the same territory and stall your progress.

Find the right tone

If you sound too promotional, then consumers won't take your content seriously, but if you don't mention your business, then they won't know you offer a related product. Tons of businesses struggle to find the right tone.

According to a recent Forbes article, it's important to test your results to find an appropriate tone by trial-and-error:

"Figuring out how to strike the right balanced tone can take time, and you’re unlikely to hit the mark on your first try. Testing and comparing results is thus essential; try different methods of introducing the action, as well as different copy, designs and locations. Track the appropriate engagement metrics to determine the success of your testing and iterate further on the methods that prove to convert better."

A good compromise is to write informative content and add a call-to-action in at the end.

Emphasize data and analytics

And finally, businesses today have greater access to data than ever before, and it's up to you to take advantage of that. As in the case of experimenting with tones, you can always improve your marketing campaign by throwing new things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

To talk more about your marketing process, or anything else, contact us today.

CRM Software

CRM software has many practical applications in regard to business operations, the marketing process, and the sales process. When implemented correctly, just about every employee can use it as a reliable resource.

In addition to serving a practical purpose, CRM software also answers more big-picture questions that businesses must answer. According to a recent Business 2 Community article, just by having the software, you can know the answers to these questions:

"What do you know about the prospective customers who have filled out forms on your website or who are on your email list? How often does your sales or marketing team interact with them? Is your customer information compiled in a database that is up-to-date, as well as easy to access and navigate? If a possible investor wanted to see your sales growth throughout the past few years, how easy would it be for you to provide that information?"

It's important to know how you're doing with lead conversion and if your marketing and sales teams are aligned. Moreover, it's critical to stay organized so it's easy to communicate and work with investors.

In addition to just answering those questions, CRM software helps you hear the answers you want. With it, you're more likely to find out that you're converting a high percentage of your leads and keeping your customer information nice and organized.

Not knowing the answers to these questions leaves your business in the dark. In all likelihood, it also means that you wouldn't want to know where you stand anyway, since you're more likely to hear bad news. If that's your current situation, then it's crucial to focus on these areas as soon as possible. They're essential for the long-term health of your business operations.

If you implement CRM software today, then you can start using it tonight. That's how practical and applicable it is. But there's another benefit of using CRM software, which is that it helps you manage some very serious aspects of your business.

To talk more about CRM software, your marketing campaign, or anything else, contact us today.

Identifying your target audience occurs during the marketing process, but it has important implications for the sales process as well. If the leads you generate aren't relevant, that is, they don't correspond to customers in your target audience, then your sales representatives won't be very effective.

A common mistake businesses make in this respect is assuming their entire target audience shares the same needs. They try to streamline their entire sales process to match one specific type of customer.

A recent Business 2 Community article explains why this doesn't work. According to the article, it's common for customers in the same target audience to have different needs and preferences:

"Elite sales teams have a sales process that’s focused on one thing — the buyer. If your process isn’t aligned with how your buyers buy, it will never be effective. A common mistake is to assume that one process fits all. Your market likely has different segments of buyers that have different needs. Some have regimented buying processes, while others may be less refined. All have their own key decision criteria."

In addition to identifying your target audience, you should also create buyer personas. These will represent different people and have a certain set of characteristics.

This tactic is especially important for your sales representatives. If they understand the different personas in your target audience, then they'll be prepared to speak to prospective customers. Rather than just having one plan for everyone, they'll have multiple strategies based on the persona a customer matches.

Some businesses inform their sales representatives of their target audience and expect them to take care of the rest. This creates an incredibly hard challenge for the representatives. Rather than describing a vague group, consider creating concrete buyer personas that the sales representatives will recognize. This will help them close more sales.

To talk more about your sales process, or anything else, contact us today.

CRM Software

Data plays a critical role in regard to CRM software. It's the key to nurturing leads, sending personalized emails, and getting in touch with customers right when they're about to place an order.

Of course, to enjoy all these benefits, you need to know how to use the data correctly. This applies not just to your analytics and applications, but to the way you input it as well.

Business 2 Community explains why so many businesses don't know how to input CRM data correctly. According to the article, because many employees have access to the software, it only takes one person to mix up information:

"If you don’t know how to use your CRM as best as you can, it could result in staff aimlessly plugging in data. One of these common CRM mistakes involves putting in data incorrectly. Wrong or misplaced data inevitably becomes useless data (especially if you can’t find it). Don’t let that happen to you, or your employees could seriously confuse customer information, ultimately risking losses."

CRM data is specific to each individual customer. It's essentially worthless if it all gets scrambled. To avoid this, you need to teach each employee how to input the data correctly. It's a simple process, but there's no room for error. In addition to the initial round of employee training, you should also host regular sessions so they remember the exact steps.

The analytics and applications are a different story. It's up to management to decide what to do with CRM data and how to incorporate it in their marketing strategy. If you're not sure what to do, then you can always reach out for help in this area.

Data is everything when it comes to CRM software. If it's inaccurate, misplaced, or not used correctly, then you won't enjoy the benefits you should. To talk more about CRM software, or anything else, contact us today.