In this day of instant messaging, nurturing leads is all about being swift and relevant.
Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first, according to InsideSales.com. Yet, roughly half of all inbound sales leads – from websites, social media and other marketing activities that bring in visitors – are never followed up. Continue reading
Investing time in your customer information can bring your business a lot of value. You can improve customer satisfaction, increase sales, boost engagement, and help fill your sales pipeline by building your customer relationship management tools. Continue reading
Why use a contact management system in your small business? Because building a customer relationship management system (CRM) can help you:
By using a CRM, your company can increase sales an estimated 29-41%. How does this happen? By preventing lost opportunities and enhancing customer relationships. Continue reading
You’ve undoubtedly heard the term “metadata” bandied about recently in the press, particularly as it applies to telephone logs. But what exactly is metadata, and how can it benefit your small business?
In short, metadata is information that helps to describe some “thing”, such as a phone number or code from a recently sold product. This collection of information is usually stored in a database where there are numerous categories that relate to each other in some way. This structure facilitates finding, sorting and filtering information of interest. Books, for example, have “titles”, “authors”, and “publication date”. Telephone calls have a “calling number”, “called number”, “time”, and “length”. This makes it easy to ask simple questions like, “show me all the calls from 415-555-1234 in the past 30 days” or “how many copies of The Great Gatsby have I sold?” Continue reading
Do you remember your first job with a desk and phone? Did you have to use a company sponsored software program? Most likely the customer relationship management (CRM) program provided was unnecessarily complex.
With bulky, complex customer tracking software, the volume of data that needs to be entered, let alone accurately, can be daunting. Hundreds of fields such as time of call, notes, sales representative name, etc., etc., often require hours of data entry and additional upkeep time in order to have a viable system. If mistakes are made during the data capture period, they can significantly impact the customer. Some mistakes even lead to loss of the sale.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems such as Salesforce.com have become the defacto sales and support tool for large enterprise and government organizations worldwide. The idea is pretty simple: manage your business interactions in a central database so that your sales and support organization can leverage that knowledge for increased sales and more effective customer service.
