CRM Blog Posts – Page 36 – user's Blog!

May 25, 2016

Project Management: Are You Doing it Wrong?

According to PMI’s Pulse of the Profession survey, 46 percent of organizations admit to not fully understanding the value of project management, even though they recognize project management boosts the success rate of strategic initiatives by 16 percent. Even more discouraging is that only 64 percent of projects meet their goals. Organizations want to quickly complete projects using fewer resources and with better results. But in order to do this, organizations need to have the most efficient processes in place, and more often than not project management processes fall short.

It’s impossible to predict exactly how a project will run or the obstacles that you may run into, but there’s plenty of planning that can be done to make sure that your team is equipped to roll with the punches and come out on top. These are our top recommendations for ensuring your projects run as smoothly as possible.

Pre-plan

How well you plan will dictate the success of the entire project. Failure to identify tasks and establish a strategy for completing each step will undoubtedly affect the final product, be it a new software feature, a marketing campaign, or a client project. Before doing anything, take a step back and think about each thing that needs to be done in order to make for a quality end product. Then, break that down even further to identify each task that needs to be completed to support it. This will make for a more realistic view of what needs to get done and what the timetable will be for completing each task/component/phase.

Identify risks

Even though you’ve done quite a bit of planning for deadlines, staying on a concrete schedule is unlikely. You need to be flexible and expect changes to happen. In your planning process, think of all the possible things that could go wrong and take those into consideration. Building in time buffers will help to soften the blow of changing circumstances.

Define project expectations and milestones

Identifying key milestones is another way to help you and your team stick to a schedule. This will help the team stay motivated and avoid unexpected hold ups. Being clear about expectations and deliverables up front will ensure that everyone is on the same page as far as what needs to get done and when.

Stay informed

Keep the lines of communication open. This is one of the most important elements of good project management. Regularly meeting with your team to discuss progress will help you identify potential issues down the road. Use a project management tool to stay on the pulse of what your team is up to at any point during a project. This way you and your team can instantly see what tasks have been completed, what’s up next and overall project progress.

Every project is different and every project manager works in different ways. These best practices will help you set the tone with your team, but understand that you may need to tweak the process to find that works best for your team. The bottom line and ultimate goal is to get things done the right way the first time around, regardless of how you get there.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

May 24, 2016

Insightly Speaks for Small Businesses at CRM Evolution

Running a business in an increasingly digital world has both its challenges and advantages. From setting up a website and social profiles to sending email newsletters, there’s plenty of opportunities to be had. However, it can be an uphill battle for small business owners that may not be as tech savvy.

That’s the topic taking center stage at CRM Evolution, now underway in Washington D.C. The annual conference brings together more than 60 speakers and 40 sessions featuring the industry’s most respected influencers, analysts, consultants, and vendors to discuss the latest and greatest in CRM technology and strategies for improving customer relationships.

Our very own CEO and founder, Anthony Smith, will be sitting on a panel led by industry heavy-weight Brent Leary to discuss CRM and small businesses living in the digital world. Fellow CEOs from ConvergeHub, Nimble, and Zoho join Smith, and together they will discuss how the digital world is changing the ways in which small businesses interact and address customers’ needs. They will also discuss the technologies that can help them to meet rising expectations and increase sales.

Attending CRM Evolution? Come join the conversation at 9 a.m. ET. Otherwise, you can follow along on Twitter using the official conference hashtag: #CRMevolution.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

May 24, 2016

Sleep Like a Genius

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Viewing your Insightly Calendar on Mobile

To view your own Insightly events and tasks on your mobile device, you can use the calendar in the Insightly iOS and Android apps. You can also try calendar sync or calendar subscription to display the items in another calendar app that supports these options.

Note: Tasks must have start or due dates to appear on the calendar.

Viewing the calendar in our iOS and Android apps

To view the calendar in the apps:

Tap the Calendar icon from the menu drawer.
Your Insightly mobile calendar displays all your own tasks and events. Days with scheduled events will display one dot for a single event and two dots for multiple events.
From the calendar view, you can:
- Swipe down from the top to switch between monthly and weekly views.
- Swipe the calendar left or right to move to the previous or next week or month.
- Tap the + symbol to add a new event. The app will use your phone’s current time zone, not the time zone in your Insightly settings.
- Tap the search icon to search through your events.
- Tap a date to view the tasks and events for that day.
- Swipe down on a daily agenda to refresh it.

This week’s tip was provided by Tony Roma. Tony is an Insightly product expert who has been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Manage Leads and Sales Opportunities

When you’ve got tons of leads zooming by your head, it’s important to stay organized so you can maximize your conversion rate. These super simple tips will help you be efficient in following leads down the pipeline and boost sales as well.

Define Activities & Campaigns at Each Stage

Your lead’s needs change as she moves into your pipeline from opportunity to prospect, to customer, and hopefully, repeat customer. Make sure you’re delivering content and marketing campaigns at every stage of the pipeline to match her ever-changing requirements.

When she first enters the pipeline, you can ply her with informative emails to help her make the decision to purchase from you. Once she’s become a customer, move her to a different email list based on her purchase and behavior details. She’ll need more sophisticated communication at this stage to build on the relationship you’ve established.

Earnings

Track Prospect Value

When you know how much a given opportunity is worth, you can allot the appropriate resources to nurturing the lead or existing customer. For example, if you have a customer who made a small one-time purchase, you might not need to spend as much time nurturing that relationship as one who signed up for $60,000 worth of services for the year.

Tracking sales opportunity value allows you to prioritize your efforts and decide where your time spent will have the most impact.

The Bed That Helps You Sleep Smarter

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society say you should get seven or more hours of sleep a night.

The it bed by Sleep Number— which will retail at US$1,000 when it launches in summer 2016—uses embedded sensors to track heart rate, respiration, and movement overnight. Then it communicates that data to a phone app where daily activities are recorded, incorporating analytics to reveal how your routines affect sleep and making suggestions for sleeping more soundly. The it bed will be able to automatically communicate directly with wearables, such as fitness trackers, to include data from those devices.

“People did a double take to see a bed at the Consumer Electronics Show,” says Peter Bils, vice president of Sleep Science and Research at Sleep Number, referring to the popular annual show held each January in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the bed won innovation honors. “They were intrigued that data from wearables and their bed could reveal the impact on their sleep from drinking coffee or sleeping with their pet.” Find out more at itbed.com.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

May 23, 2016

A Marketing Consultant’s Guide for CRM Success (Part 2)

As discussed in my last post, a well-structured CRM can pay dividends for your marketing consulting business. This can only be true, however, if you actually use it on a daily basis.

In this post, I’ll share suggestions for leveraging the “day-to-day” aspects of your CRM: contacts, tags, and organizations.

Contacts (& Tags)

The well-known axiom asserts that it’s not what you know – but rather who you know. Pause to consider the many people with whom you interact. While only a few are decision makers, there are dozens of others who support and influence your work.

Your consulting business offers a unique opportunity to make a lot of beneficial connections. Sure, some may be more valuable today than others. As any consultant knows, however, high turnover rates can change your paradigm in an instant.

A platform such as Insightly CRM helps you stay nimble as the conditions around you change. In fact, by systematically structuring your contact records, you can capitalize on the changes (instead of feeling sorry for yourself). This is precisely why I always capture my contacts’ social media profiles. This way, if a colleague decides to join another company, I can reach out at a later date. It’s possible that a departure from your current client could turn into a new lead in the future.

In addition to tracking social media accounts, using tags can provide excellent segmentation. As I’ve alluded to, the people within your clients’ organizations fill different roles. These roles define how you engage with the company and how much of an impact you can make. By leveraging tags, contact records can be grouped logically for your business.

For example, in my own business, most contacts fall into one (or more) of the following tags:

Decision Maker – ultimately decides if I’m worth the money being paid
Subject Matter Expert – knowledgeable resource who can help me
Stakeholder – invested in / benefits from the work I do
Influencer – has sway in the decisions being made
Roadblock – tends to obstruct the process or work being done

To develop these tags, I asked myself the following question, “If I sold my company today, what groupings would be beneficial to the new owner?” These tags make sense for me, but I would encourage you to pause and ask yourself similar questions.

Organizations

As your consulting business grows, the number of clients served will naturally increase. With each new client comes additional stakeholders, influencers, and other contacts. Without proper record keeping, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

An organization record in Insightly CRM creates links between the people you serve and their employers. By linking contacts and organizations, your own business becomes much more scalable. Perhaps you have aspirations of growing beyond a one-person shop. As you add new staff, the information exclusively in your head becomes less useful.

As an example, let’s imagine that you expand by hiring an account manager. This person’s job will be to coordinate the day-to-day projects for a specific client, freeing up your time to prospect for new business. Onboarding and training is a lot easier when using Insightly CRM. In addition to seeing all linked contact records, your new employee will be a click away from:

Phone, address, web, and other company details
Email history
Activity history and relevant notes
Files (such as invoices or quotes)

Compare this model to life without a CRM. You would likely spend hours (or days) forwarding countless emails, spreadsheets, and handwritten notes. Instead, your new hire can hit the ground running on day one, thus reducing friction and increasing productivity.

Next Stop, Opportunities

Contact and organization records set the groundwork for CRM success. In my next post, we’ll explore an additional record type that ties everything together: opportunities. Stay tuned for more tips!

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.

May 19, 2016

How to Connect Your Apps and Save Time

Take a minute to think of all of the employees at your company and each employee’s unique talents. Your sales lead is best at big-picture thinking and goal-setting, while your marketing head might be more detail-oriented and good at asking thoughtful questions. Each member of your team has a certain skillset, and your company is all the stronger for it.

Now think of the many web apps and platforms that your company uses—tools for email marketing, lead generation, time management, accounting, social media, project management, and the list goes on. These apps aren’t unlike your team: each app is best for getting certain things done, much like each of your teammates has a special skill. No one team member holds up your company, and there is no one app that does it all either. You probably use many other apps in addition to Insightly throughout your work day in order to run your business.

Using a variety of apps means that you might find yourself transferring data between them multiple times a day—whether that means copying and pasting, importing and exporting, or even manually typing data from one app into another. All that manual work takes a lot of time. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if your apps connected to each other so you didn’t have to manually transfer data between them?

Thanks to power of integrations, your apps connect and automatically talk to each other. You can take advantage of Insightly’s native integrations, API, or partner integrations like Zapier. Zapier is a tool that allows you to connect your apps without any coding knowledge. In just a few minutes, you can set up custom integrations, or “Zaps,” that connect Insightly to 500+ other apps. There are so many ways connect Insightly to the other apps you use, but here are just a few connections that will save you time.

Automatically Move Your Contacts from Other Tools into Insightly

Instead of exporting a list of contacts from another tool and then importing the list into Insightly, you can rely on a Zap to automatically send contacts to Insightly. For example, you can use a Zap that automatically creates an Insightly contact whenever a new contact is created in Google Contacts. Set up the Zap once, turn it on, and your new contacts are automatically added to Insightly.

You can even automatically add contacts to Insightly from a rather outdated contact management system: paper business cards. Use an app such as FullContact Card Reader that scans business

cards then set up a Zap to automatically send those contacts to Insightly.

Automatically Capture Leads with Insightly and Online Forms

If you use online forms to collect information from visitors to your website, you can connect your form software to Insightly, too. Whenever someone fills out a form on your website, they will automatically be added to Insightly as leads, contacts, or opportunities, thanks to Zapier. As you set up your Zap, you can customize the integration so that it works best for your workflow.

Connect Insightly with Email Marketing Tools

While you manage your contacts and leads in Insightly, you might also use an email marketing tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact to manage your email subscribers. You can set up Zaps that will automatically add your new Insightly contacts to MailChimp and other email marketing tools, where you can send marketing emails to them. Say goodbye to the repetitive, boring process of exporting your Insightly contacts and then importing them into your email marketing app: these Zaps do the work for you.

Plug Insightly into Project Management Tools

Adding tasks in Insightly helps keep your team on track. You can also set up integrations to send Insightly tasks to other project management tools other teammates may be using. For example, if your engineering team tracks tasks in Asana, while you manage tasks in Insightly, you might run into confusion and miscommunication. Instead of manually adding tasks to both Insightly and Asana, you can set up a Zap to do it for you.

These integrations are just a few of the many Insightly Zaps you can create to save yourself time. You can set up your own Zaps between Insightly and 500+ other apps by signing up for a Zapier account.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

Carlin Sack is a member of the Zapier marketing team and a Northwestern University journalism alum.

May 18, 2016

CRM for All: Manufacturing

The success of your supply chain hinges on the relationships you’ve established with suppliers, distributors and customers. If communication between these parties and your team is challenged, your supply chain becomes jeopardized.

[pullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”14″]Insightly helps keep all of our sales files up to date and organized. Without Insightly CRM, well before it, everything was kept on an Excel spreadsheet which became very messy. –Anna Myers, Business Development Manager, Myers Motor Accessories[/pullquote]

How can you make sure every point within your supply chain is working just as it should? For starters, customer and supplier information must be up-to-date and easily accessible. This is one of the most important factors in keeping relationships and your supply chain in optimal shape. The supply chain is critical to your business, and information is critical to the supply chain. Manufacturers can’t reach their full potential without an integrated, easy-to-use customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Here are the top three reasons why CRM is important for manufacturers:

Improves response times: Staff consistently field inquiries from customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. When they have access to the most up-to-date account information and data, they’re able to address questions and problems quickly and completely, keeping the business moving.

Keeps data in a central database: An integrated CRM pulls in information from all the tools that manufacturers use to keep tabs on everyday activities such as order fulfillment, payment processing, and customer service ticketing. Say goodbye to digging through emails and chasing people for payment updates.

Strengthens relationships: A strong relationship between manufacturers and their partners, customers, and other supply chain stakeholders is a top priority. When staff delivers an above-average service experience, customers are happier and more likely to refer additional business.

TRB Lightweight Structures used CRM to help them get a clear view of their pipeline and uncover potential facility improvements to help better meet customer requirements.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

May 17, 2016

The Name of The Sales Game

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Changing a Responsible User for Multiple Leads, Opportunities, or Projects

If you need to re-assign a lead, opportunity, or project to another Insightly user, you can do this with the Change Responsible User selection in the bulk editing options.

From the Leads, Opportunities, or Projects page, select your group of records using the Filter list, which includes a custom filter option. Once you’ve filtered the proper group of records:

Click the checkbox in the header row above the records. This will select all visible records.
Click the More button and select Change Responsible User to perform the maintenance on all the selected records.
A dropdown will then appear with a list of your Insightly users to select from. Choose the new responsible user and all selected items will be transferred.

This week’s tip was provided by Tony Roma. Tony is an Insightly product expert who has been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Know Your Prospects

Building rapport and creating connections with customers are still a key focus in today’s selling environment. It can happen in an instant. You can also blow it right at “Hi, my name is…,” and once it’s gone, you probably won’t get another chance to forge a bond. So, how do you build and instant rapport with customers? We’ve broken it down into a few, key steps:

Use Your Resources: Invest a bit of time researching who you’re going to be meeting with. Look at their Twitter account or public Facebook page for clues as to their hobbies and interests. Connect with them on LinkedIn. From their LinkedIn page, note where they worked previously, their alma mater, any articles they’ve posted, or any other relevant info you might be able to refer to during your meeting. Is there a common denominator, such as a company you both worked for at some point?

Customer-rapport

Keep an Open Mind: If your schedule doesn’t allow you to look up the prospect beforehand, just keep an open mind when meeting with that individual. Listen to what they say, what they omit, how they say what they say, her or his tone of voice, delivery, and personal style. Shoot the breeze for a bit if you get a friendly, outgoing vibe from them. If they’re reserved and “all business,” skip the weather channel chitchat—even if hail the size of soccer balls is coming down, they’re not going to want to talk about anything other than what they need and what you can do for them.

User The Customer’s Name: During the conversation, use the customer’s name often. People like to hear their own name spoken back to them. It creates instant rapport, a sense of security, and a feeling of individuality.

Bag the Smartphone

Sometimes traveling light is the way to go. If you aren’t enamored with what your preferred airline has on offer in their repertoire of entertainment, but you still need to get some work done and relax and watch a favorite show, here’s a life hack that’s sure to make your business or pleasure travel. All you need is a sandwich-size plastic bag, your tray top table in the upright position… and you’re good to go!

Life-Hack-Travel

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

May 16, 2016

Customer Retention is the New Acquisition

Customer retention is the cheapest way to positively affect your bottom line. Depending on which report you read, and which industry you work in customer acquisition is 5 – 25 times more expensive than customer retention. It goes without saying that you should nurture your high-value customers, after all they are not only likely to buy from you again, they are potentially your biggest brand advocates. But one, overlooked, segment of customers is the inactive customer. Those customers who bought something from you, subscribed to your email list, but you never hear from them again. If you successfully activate their engagement, they are actually worth more to you than newly acquired customers. The average repeat customer will spend twice as much as a new customer, with a report from McKinsey finding that a new customer will spend on average $24.50, compared to $52.50 for repeat customers. Read on for some tips on retaining your high-value customers, and how to re-activate your inactive customers.

Appreciate your high-value customers AKA “You’re awesome” “No, no, you’re awesome!”

Loyalty programs are still a popular way to give high-value customers the VIP treatment, with emails being the prefered way to communicate with loyalty program customers. Research from Zendesk has found that 46% of customers have increased the amount of business they do with a company to collect loyalty rewards. You can easily find your most high-value customers by using MailChimp to create segments according to purchasing activity. For example you can segment based on the total amount a customer has spent:

There are various offers you can send to your high-value customers such as a percentage based discounts, a dollar value discounts, free shipping, or a free gift.

But loyalty programs don’t have to be limited to email campaigns. Starbucks has gamified their customer loyalty program using a customer loyalty app with great success. When customers buy a Starbucks coffee they collect stars on their app, which they can later exchange for rewards, like a free coffee. At first sight this sounds like a fancy version of the old customer loyalty card. However the app also has nifty widgets, like a navigator to find the closest Starbucks and you can pay with Passbooks. Customers appreciate that type of convenience and will repay you with their loyalty.

We Miss you Come Back

One of the best sources for “new” customers, are old customers that are won back. Customer retention expert, Peter Lavers from WCL Customer Management, says “A very effective marketing approach, I’ve seen many times over, is an email sent to the customer that says ‘We miss you will you reconsider?’ It’s incredibly simple and it works because the relationship you have with them is already warm. You don’t have to educate these customers like you do a new one.”

In order to send reactivation emails, you must first segment the customers who haven’t made a purchase, or interacted with you, within the last six months (or whatever timeframe is reasonable for your industry). MailChimp has written a handy article on how you can segment your customers based on purchase history. You can then use an integration such as MailChimp (and sync MailChimp with Insightly using PieSync!), to send out triggered emails to try to re-engage these customers. Not sure what to send them? Check out this top-notch collection of customer retention emails at Really Good Emails. My personal favorite is this one from duolingo:

Who can resist the sad owl and a free 5 minute lesson?

If you prefer something a bit fancier than a text email, you can send a poll Airbnb’s campaign “We Woke Up Like This” was specifically targeted to their less engaged users. They sent emails with Instagram photos posted by the Airbnb community to this segment, to show them compelling content and get them to re-engage by clicking on one of the photos.

You can also run a competition, like this one World Nomads is currently running. This is a terrific example of encouraging subscriber engagement:

They’re asking their subscribers to cook their favorite dish, take a photo and share the photo with the community. The culinary trip to Spain is also an amazing incentive to get active again.

For this segment you can also send discounts, gifts, or free shipping. Keep in mind that research has found that emails with a percentage offer in the subject line, had four times higher revenue per email than other reactivation mailings ($0.21 compared to $0.05).

Remember that customers appreciate the small details. Personalize where you can and make sure your campaigns are timely. There you have it, our top tips for customer retention success, good luck!

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

Vanessa Rombaut is the Digital Communications Marketer at PieSync. @PieSync helps you to sync your customer data bi-directionally between your favorite cloud apps and your CRM.

May 14, 2016

Are You a Mobile Superhero?

Mobile CRM is here to stay. Are you paying attention to your customers when you’re out and about generating new sales, attending events, or purchasing supplies? A true superhero doesn’t have to duck into a phone booth to call the office for updates. With smartphone or tablet in hand, you’re never more than a login away from retrieving all the necessary information from your CRM. Embrace your inner superhero and learn more about the many ways small businesses are using (and maximizing) mobile technologies to keep them informed, 24/7.

Super-hero-graph — Click on the infographic to get the scoop on mobile computing in the superhero world of CRM.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

May 12, 2016

6 CRM Features Your Salespeople Will Actually Use

Whether you’re still on the fence about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or you’ve begun to use it with lukewarm results, you may be concerned about what your salespeople will really get out of using CRM. Is it basically a digital rolodex? Does it take too much time? Can they learn how to use all the features? Start by helping everyone on your sales team master the most useful CRM features.

Collaborative Tools

CRM isn’t much more than an address book if your team isn’t using it to collaborate. Marketing and sales teams, especially, can use CRM to stay on the same page and keep projects moving forward. Create a pipeline, assign responsible parties, and attach pertinent information.

Collaborative tools arm your salespeople with all the information they need to follow the sales pipeline. It lets the marketing team see where their efforts are going. Best of all, it allows both teams to work together more effectively to complete a sale.

Calendar with Scheduling

If you have an SMB CRM, it likely has a calendar of some sort, but you need one that really works for your team. It must have reminders, notifications, and recurring tasks as a bare minimum. If it can also include sales pipelines, collaborations with other team members, and the ability to sync with other popular calendars it will work out even better.

Robust calendar features save your team the time of double checking deadlines, tasks, and others’ schedules each day. It also lets them avoid double booking anything by having a completely synched schedule. With reminders and notifications, there is no chance of forgetting about a deadline.

Social Media Integration

Typically, data gathered from customer social signals is most useful to your marketing team. Sales will find this data useful as well, when they know how to leverage it. Using CRM with social media integration allows your salespeople to see all of your company’s social interactions with a contact. They’ll be able to gauge a customer’s sense of satisfaction and tailor their approach based on past interactions, rather than starting fresh each time.

File Sharing

As your team progresses through sales pipelines, they can attach relevant documents. File sharing ensures that everyone in a project can see those documents. Indeed, any contact given access can see shared files, including clients if appropriate.

For your salespeople, file sharing means instant access to such important information as past purchases, personal information, relevant images, and so on. Having files from other team members at their fingertips empowers your sales team and saves them time.

Ongoing Support

Sometimes we assume that a product like CRM automatically comes with lifetime support and training. It’s a feature that can easily be overlooked during the buying process. If you want your team to use CRM effectively and feel supported in doing so, make sure the product you choose has support. Typically, different plans have varying levels of support, such as priority email support or chat support. Your team will want personal help when they need it. Onboarding is equally as important to setting your salespeople up for success with CRM.

Lead Management

When someone is interested in your business, but they’re not quite at the sales point yet, your team needs to stay on top of nurturing those warm leads. That’s where lead management in a CRM comes in very handy. Create leads from web forms, social media, and other places. Your team can reach out to gauge interest in buying, then converting them to a sales opp when the customer is ready. In CRM, sales opportunities can be linked to a contact’s data, history, and interactions, giving your salespeople all the information they need to close the deal.

For small businesses, shopping for CRM can be an overwhelming task. The lists of features all sound wonderful until you and your team are trying to wade through them. Tools that give you more customer data, encourage collaboration, and save time are always the most useful. Help your team master the CRM tools that will empower them to work more effectively.