3 Ways CRM Can Boost Your Inside Sales

This article was originally published on Tenfold’s Blog

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been around a long time, yet its presence in the market continues to expand. According to a Gartner report (as summarized by TechEye), 2014 CRM revenues increased 13% from 2013.

The reason that eCRM Solution has increased in popularity is simple: it works. Companies are making more money by integrating CRM into their phones and computer systems. Here are three reasons why CRM is so effective in boosting inside sales:

1. Data Entry for Call Logging No Longer Drains Staff Time

Effective CRM eliminates the need for data entry — especially the manual entering of call logs. A good CRM will automatically log your calls and link each call log to the correct contact. This can free up time for your employees to type in quick notes in the CRM’s profile for that contact instead of worrying about maintaining call logs. This, of course, will reduce the busy work of employees and allow them to do more product work — like make more calls!

2. Easier, More Personalized Follow-Up

The click-to-dial ease of CRM and the all-in-one-place consolidation of customer profiles can make follow-up easier. Employees can see the streamlined comfort of the CRM structure as a motivational factor to reach out with more initiative and consistency.

Examiner.com provides an example. When you send quotes to large amounts of customers (or even moderate amounts) it can be cumbersome to keep track of who needs follow-up. If even just one quote doesn’t get a follow-up, this can be a missed opportunity, as Examiner.com explains: “Many of those quotes can turn into sales simply by calling the customer or emailing them as a result of the organizational system of the CRM. Opportunities that could have been lost has been addressed and turned into sales.”

And while we’re on the topic of follow-ups, here’s a crucial tip to help you improve in your follow-up effectiveness: always have a reason that you’re calling, and always state that reason in the beginning.

As SalesHacker.com wrote: “I am on a personal crusade to get ‘touching base’ and ‘checking in’ out of the vocabulary of sales professionals. [Those phrases] mean there is no reason for your call so there is no reason for me to speak with you.”

3. Powerful Analytics Help You Refine Your Strategy

In addition, a comprehensive CRM system can benefit your company the way an MRI machine benefits a patient. With its analytics, CRM can give companies a detailed, big picture overview of the health of the company’s sales team. Companies can pinpoint calls that fail and use the detailed information and context of each call to diagnose what went wrong.

The analytics in Tenfold’s CRM take your inbound and outbound call data and summarize it for you in a graph that shows the number of calls that took place to and from each sales lead over a length of time that you set.

Companies can also use CRM to view when their sales people make their calls and appointments and how long each call and appointment lasts. This provides crucial information that will show you where employees need to improve. Tenfold’s analytics graph can also rank your agents in helpful categories such as highest number of inbound calls or outbound calls.

The Importance of an Easy-to-Use CRM Interface

CRM can have many features, but if the interface is burdensome, every time an employee uses their CRM, it will feel like a chore instead of a blessing that makes life easier.

It’s crucial to have a CRM that integrates everything — from activities and notes to call history and analytics — and then organizes it for you in an easy-to-grasp, smoothly flowing interface.

Tenfold’s CRM is feature-rich, but it also has a wonderfully smooth interface. Contact us to learn more about CRM solutions that can help you boost inside sales.

Salesforce Software for CRM: What It Is and How to Best Use It

This article is originally published here

Dave Orrico, Vice President of InsideSales.com’s Enterprise Sales, once said: “The No. 1 key to success in today’s sales environment is speed. The first salesperson who delivers the most valuable information to their customer or prospect wins the game. The best sales professionals rely heavily on tools like salesforce.com to provide that competitive advantage for information acceleration.”

It does sound like Salesforce software is the fix-all for all your sales woes, right? It might be. Salesforce is possibly the most popular cloud-based CRM system in the market today. It is best known for its CRM solutions, which include Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud, and App Cloud, among others.

However, Salesforce and your success with it really depends on how you use its features. A CRM system will inherently benefit your business, regardless of size. According to studies, a dollar spent on a CRM system gets you $5.60 back. Sales practitioners know this; and thus, the CRM market is projected to be worth $37 billion this year.

This demand is not about people getting on the bandwagon. It is a testament to the importance of a reliable CRM system, such as the Salesforce software, to your sales and overall business operations.

Introduction to Salesforce

Salesforce, the company, is best known for revolutionizing the CRM industry through its innovative use of cloud computing. Because of its efforts, it has made CRM affordable for most businesses.

There are no set-up fees nor hardware/ software requirements needed. You won’t have to maintain nor upgrade your CRM system. You can add users, features, and capacities when needed. It is accessible from multiple devices, anywhere you are.

Salesforce has made CRM within reach; there’s practically no reason to miss out on making the most of it.

What Is The Salesforce Software

Salesforce software actually refers to the company’s comprehensive CRM solution. This integrated product allows you to organize and manage all prospect and customer interactions. It provides you with sales automation tools and analytics tools, among others.

The Salesforce software is made up of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Analytics Cloud, IoT Cloud, App Cloud, Health Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Force.com, and Chatter. Let’s look at some of these.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

This Salesforce software application tracks and manages contact information and interactions. It is where you manage and nurture leads, and set up select marketing automation features. Likewise, you also get assessments and reports regarding your marketing campaign.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

This is where you manage your marketing channels, from setting up and personalizing email marketing to managing your mobile messaging and setting up and personalizing web content. You can also manage social engagements and set-up cross-channel customer journeys.

Salesforce Service Cloud 

This is the customer support aspect of the Salesforce software. Through it, your team can keep abreast with your customers’ history, conversations and issues. It helps your customer support team personalize interactions and solve problems faster.

Salesforce Analytics Cloud

You turn to Salesforce Analytics Cloud when you want to see how you’re doing. Get accurate performance insights, and use this information in making crucial operational decisions. Let data drive your sales and marketing.

As Dave Elkington, CEO and Founder of InsideSales.com, said: “You have to generate revenue as efficiently as possible. And to do that, you must create a data-driven sales culture. Data trumps intuition.”

How To Best Use Your Salesforce Software

The Salesforce software is designed for the prospect and client management process that pushes you towards increased returns and business growth.

Improve pipeline marketing.
The Salesforce software can help you at all stages of the pipeline—from gathering and qualifying leads as well as turning them into opportunities. Because it lets you effectively manage prospects and customers, you can minimize lead leakage, automate follow-ups, and track where your leads are in the sales funnel.

You can potentially make the most of the opportunities that come your way through efficient contact management and data-driven user engagements.

Develop effective and repeatable sales cycle.

The use of the Salesforce CRM can provide you with useful insight on your client’s journey. You gain information on their commonalities, pain points, and motivations. This can then guide you in developing content and follow-up strategies that are responsive to their needs. This helps you move people through the sales funnel faster. Use the analytics apps to see leading sales drivers and areas for improvement. Tweak where necessary, then repeat.

Build effective teams.

The Salesforce software improves communication across different teams in your organization, wherever these teams are. From marketing to sales and support, members get access to the same comprehensive pool of data. They are empowered with information that personalizes conversations and helps address issues more efficiently.

Compete at the same level as other businesses.

Regardless of how big or small your business is, it has become requisite to implement a reliable CRM system if you want to compete at the same level as the rest. Don’t be left behind. Make sure you stay on top of your customers and prospects and get the most from the opportunities that come your way.

Author:- 

Dan Sincavage

Dan is a Co-Founder of Tenfold and currently serves as the Chief Strategy Officer. Dan oversees the Tenfold sales organization, manages strategic partner relationships and works with key enterprise accounts to ensure their success with the Tenfold platform.

CRM Software Solutions This Holiday Season!

Customer experiences rule every change and that is the bottom line. All through the years we explore, understand & comprehend how our customer relationship management system keeps the users engaged, seamlessly across the channels during the festivities unceasing 24*7 and beyond!

And what is more, keeping the businesses on their toes intelligently to be geared up for the holiday sales & rush is an important part of the CRM too!

Read more at: http://ecrmsolutions.co/blog/crm-software-solutions-holiday-season-cracking-code-customers-enterprises/

 

What Makes CRM Software Solutions Fail to Achieve their Goals?

This post was originally published on Renaissance eCRM’s Blog

Years of research have consistently shown that CRM software solutionsfail between 30% and 60% of the time. And failure rates have not been improving. Once upon a time, Customer Relationship Management system was assumed to be the window to the future and the best way to retain your customer loyalty and garner best of profits for your organization. After all, it was considered to be the key mantra behind keeping your customer yours forever. But, isn’t it surprising the way it is failing to do so? You take the best of software, the best of environment and the best of service provider – still, it is not able to fulfill the objectives set. Why and what should be done?

Enterprises have been trying hard to follow CRM best practices to help them leverage the optimumout of it. But still, there are numerous reasons that are just a fingertip away to prove why the CRM systems fail. But, to each its own. These reasons are specific to each business, apart from some of them, which in any case – be it any business, segment and category, remain effective and contribute to the success or failure of the CRM software solution. Even though statistics prove the existence of CRM over two decades, the failure ratio hasn’t changed much over these years. What is needed is a perfect and indepth evaluation of the why’s and when’s of the failures along with a thorough risk assessment and mitigation schedule to overcome the same.

Read More at: 7 Unblemished Reasons Why CRM Software Solutions Fail to Succeed

Would Mobile CRM Software Succeed without the Customer Loyalty Quotient?

This post was originally published on RENAISSANCE ECRM Solution’s Blog

Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless” – Jeffrey Gitomer. So says most enterprises today who value customer loyalty far more than any other parameter for the success of any enterprise solution that is being implemented. And as statistics prove, when it comes to success story of Enterprise CRMSoftware Solution, the key ingredient in it is the customer loyalty factor, if in subdued numbers, may not provide a sellable success story of CRM. The goal of good Mobile CRM software, if you generally see, is to keep your customer yours forever, but does that get achieved? That is the real crux of the implementation of the solution, which, in certain scenarios, depicts that enterprises tend to lose customers after implementation of the CRM solution, whereas it needs to be actually just the opposite.

The real reason why certain CRM solutions tend to fail is because they are not able to keep up the customer loyalty quotient and lose out on capable and trustworthy customers because of certain reasons that turn out to be of a negative effect. Assuming CRM is the key to all problems, enterprises start implementing it blind eyed, not knowing the recompenses it would cause further on. With a single handed objective of reaching out to customers anywhere and everywhere, Enterprise CRM Software Solution is implemented in enterprises and what the end result is – the business loses out on valued customers even more than earlier. The primary reason behind this is the lack of knowledge and expertise in how best to utilize the CRM software to not only build new customers but garner the trust and loyalty of existing ones and retain them to the best level possible.

Why is Customer Loyalty Such an Important Entity in the Success of Mobile CRM Software?

As seen all through these years, a small increase in the customer loyalty quotient multi-fold the profits of any enterprise by almost 5 times and that proves how important it is to maintain and manage this loyalty factor. It is very easy to find new customers but equally challenging to retain them and make them loyal to you. Even if the Mobile CRM Software is highly competitive and robust, till you don’t have your set of loyal customers to support you, it is very tough to showcase your profits and success story through implementation of the solution. With the advent of technology, the vulnerability of client retention has increased since they have many more options to look for and hence to keep them yours, you need the support of the solution that you are implementing, both in terms of a thorough knowledge base on how to use it at its optimum and how to attract the clients into your own aura, in the right manner at the right time with the right opportunities.

Read More at: Important Guidelines to Engage in Complete Customer Loyalty in Mobile CRM Software

Achieve an Effective Sales Pipeline with Enterprise Mobile CRM

This post was originally published on Renaissance eCRM’s Blog

 

“Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.” – Brian Tracy. Don’t we know how important is sales pipeline to the success of any business? Termed as a tactic to selling based completely on the basic fundamentals of sales process, it focusses hard on each step that the sales force takes starting from the initial contact to prospect to lead to an actual sales opportunity. It has been proving itself as one of the most important features in any solution that aims to streamline the sales and marketing activities with an aim to enhance customer satisfaction and retention. This powerful sales management methodology has been increasing its usage all over the globe, enterprises understanding strongly the importance and need of the same. Till now, organizations have either been neglecting the implementation of the sales pipeline or haven’t understood the deep significance of it. Now, with scalable and effective Enterprise Mobile CRM solutions in place,to acquire exhaustive insight into sales activities, it has gained its momentum and is successful in proving its worth as a revenue generator.

What has happened in the past is while implementing CRM solutions little have enterprises realized the true worth of sales pipelining and its importance in generating business revenue. What is the procedure to extract the best of information from a sales pipeline, how does it form, what is the method of converting from one phase to another are some of the many questions that have always raised eyebrows and hence the reluctance. Managing pipelines talks about people management in the restricted time available as per the perceptions that have been conceived by the clients, not as it should be always. After all, the major aim of any Enterprise CRM solution is to keep your customer yours forever. Isn’t it?

 

Read more at: How Best Can Enterprise Mobile CRM be leveraged to optimize the Sales Pipeline Results?


 

CRM & Marketing Automation Together Can Weave Magic in Business

This post was originally published on Renaissance eCRM’s Blog

 

With today’s complex, fast moving and challenging world, departments working together, in sync with each other, has become indispensable and profitable both. Most enterprises witness their sales and marketing teams to work in coherence with each other, aiming towards the benefit of the organization and maximized RoI. Though both have their own set of objectives to achieve, they need to work as a combined unit, which may seem tough, but is manageable and needful too. The marketing team needs to come up with a greater amount of leads whereas the sales people have to work towards converting them into actual opportunities. These two powerhouses are now growing together and that is what is being reflected in Marketing CRM software. Owing to synchronized processes, there could be enhanced lead management and high end customer data integration. You could acquire exhaustive insight into sales activities via Mobile CRM Solutions.

Though it may sound a tad different, CRM and Marketing Automation are two dissimilar but harmonizing sections that are capable of weaving magic once they amalgamate. Even though they have different goal sets and methodologies, looking at today’s demanding wave, if they work together, there are bound to be dynamic and fruitful results, on the way. CRM with inbound marketing makes a terrific twosome, garnering quality clientele. This wonderful integration will offer enterprises an influential comprehensive solution that will encompass the entire client journey and garner maximum profitability and productivity.

Read more at: How has the Confluence of CRM and Marketing Automation Evolved over These Years?

The GST Bottomline for India. A Change is in the Offing & We Are Ready Too!

This post was originally published on Renaissance eCRM’s Blog

It was a little different to be an Indian company catering to clients across the world for niche software solutions until a few years ago. There were some awkward moments because of policies and constricted visions of the governments back home. Keeping pace with a fast-moving world became issues at times.

When a brand-new government made its way to Delhi a few years ago with an unexpected ease, the mandate was marred by discussions. Puritans throwing tantrums about saffron, the color the new chosen ones preferred and ruckus in the until then the strongest ruling dynasty followed. The mandate however had a bottomline. India was ready for a change, a transformation to keep pace with the world and move on. India was on the threshold, ready to cross-over.

And this is not a judgmental note because the new government observes that a lot of things need to be undone to realize big steps. These could be excuses. We need to wait & watch. We need to give changes a chance. And things have certainly begun to move, be it the changes in technology with realization of approaches to empower citizens digitally like Digital India, movements like Make in India for supporting industries at home or inviting foreign manufacturers or the other unexpected radical moves for the economy.

A few say it was a gamble. Demonetization shook every single citizen in India. Media frenzy followed, some unreasonable videos went viral, some social activists & the opposition went berserk in their statements. Things fell into place however. People settled down with a little different way of transacting. Online became the new way of life. Yet another long lingering bombshell followed. GST, Goods & Services Tax seemed to be getting a new lease of life to bind India under a single tax structure. This time though less seem to be complaining, a confident India is waiting to make history with the correct stride. Again, India watches in anticipation.

We make sure we are a part of this change too. SPEC INDIA offerings and especially our own CRM software solution, Renaissance is ready for the change and is GST compliant.

Read More at: The GST Bottomline for India. A Change is in the Offing & We Are Ready Too!

7 CRM Best Practices that can Help Enterprises Leverage the Optimum

This post was originally published on Renaissance eCRM’s Blog

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves – Steve Jobs.”

This is exactly what forms the crux of any good customer relationship management solution. Once you achieve this level, one can say you have the optimum potential to keep your clients happy and satisfied. And the one and only comprehensive, exhaustive and robust solution that keeps your customer yours forever is Enterprise CRM Software. Needless to say, CRM solutions have time and again, showcased their mettle by proving their worth in a diverse set of industry zones, irrespective of the size and nature of business. It has turned out to be the most important link between the enterprise and the customer. Be it sales or marketing, CRM has shown that it is the apt key for getting clients closer to you and ensuring their loyalty. Mobile CRM solutions have been the key to acquire exhaustive insight into sales activities and thereby understand and comprehend the system to its best.

Even with the best of CRM solutions in your foray, there are chances of a poor result or disappointing performance because after all, that is just a solution. What matters most is how best you take care to use it and how well are you prepared to make the most of it. If your preparations and prerequisites are well taken care of, there are no two chances that your solution fails to succeed. And that is where a set of best practices come into picture. Even though there are many, here are some shortlisted ones, which have proven that if taken care of, they act as the power booster in making any CRM solution implementation fruitful and profitable.

Read More at: 7 Key Pointers and Watch your Enterprise Mobile CRM App Succeed

 

 

Good People, Good Food, Good Times with Mobile CRM for Restaurants

This Post was Originally Published on Renaissance eCRM Solution’s Blog

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” – John Russell.

That is what a Customer Relationship Management solution helps you to do. And when it comes to a restaurant business, there are numerous tough pressures entrepreneurs have to face, in this competitive and tough world. Retaining customers, maintaining quality, imbibing variety, managing price variation, retaining inventory, handling home deliveries, building more and more business etc. are just a few significant activities that an restaurant business demands and needs to be managed and controlled in the most thought of manner. This industry, however attractive and lucrative it looks, is a tough deal. Each year, there are so many entrepreneurs, who enthusiastically, open business and try their best to pursue it but meet with hurdles and challenges forcing them to either stop or curtail activities. The single stop solution that can help restaurants sustain business is Mobile CRM solutions – the organizational storehouse of knowledge.

Competition does not spare anyone and that is where building close customer relationships matter the most. Can it be done as is? No, surely not. You need the help of a comprehensive and robust Mobile CRM for Restaurants, to be your lifetime assistant. It is a sure shot key to convert your one time client into a permanent one as well as attract new customers on a regular basis. CRM solutions are known to manage clients effectively in most of the happening industry zones and the restaurant business is one of them, since the roots of this business go a long way in associating business with human relationships. After all, it is the client whose taste buds have to be satisfied and whose expectations have to be met. CRM for restaurants is well designed to cater to the needs of all stake holders in the business – starting from top management, managers, reservation people, stock managers, serving staff, cooking staff and so on. The result that is obtained is fast, scalable and interactive business, high standard service and quality relations with your clients.

Read More at: How can Mobile CRM for Restaurants Help to Attract Clientele and Grow Business?