#Expert Pipedrive CRM Implementation
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itssolved10 · 1 year ago
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Why Choose Zoho Australia?
Discover the power of Zoho Australia with IT Solutions Solved. Explore the possibilities with comprehensive Zoho applications, including Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho CRM Enterprise, Zoho Creator, Zoho One, and more.
As Zoho Partners, we provide expert consulting and implementation services tailored to your business needs. Whether you want to resell Zoho products or integrate your own, we've got you covered.
Join forces with IT Solutions Solved to access dedicated support, valuable training, and a suite of tools to optimize your business functions and drive growth. Elevate your business with Zoho today!
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erpsoftwaredubaiuae · 5 days ago
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Comparing the Best CRM Platforms: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho & More
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In today’s competitive business environment, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is no longer a luxury — it's a necessity. With so many CRM platforms available, choosing the right one for your business can be overwhelming. In this blog, we’ll compare some of the best CRM solutions on the market — Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, and a few other notable contenders — to help you make an informed decision.
1. Salesforce CRM: The Enterprise Leader
Overview: Salesforce is one of the most powerful and widely used CRMs in the world. Known for its scalability and robust customization, it caters primarily to medium and large enterprises.
Key Features:
Advanced automation and workflow management
AI-powered insights with Salesforce Einstein
Extensive third-party app marketplace (AppExchange)
Highly customizable dashboards and reports
Pros:
Industry-leading innovation and integrations
Ideal for complex sales processes and large teams
Strong partner ecosystem and support
Cons:
Steep learning curve
Can be expensive for small businesses
Best For: Enterprises needing full-featured, customizable CRM systems.
2. HubSpot CRM: The User-Friendly All-Rounder
Overview: HubSpot CRM is known for its simplicity, clean interface, and free plan. It’s especially popular among startups, SMBs, and marketing-focused teams.
Key Features:
Free core CRM with optional paid marketing, sales, and service tools
Email tracking and marketing automation
Easy pipeline and deal tracking
Integrated live chat and chatbot tools
Pros:
Intuitive interface and ease of use
Free tier available with generous features
Seamless integration with HubSpot’s marketing suite
Cons:
Limited customization on free/entry-level plans
Costs can add up quickly as you scale
Best For: Startups, small businesses, and marketing-driven organizations.
3. Zoho CRM: The Cost-Effective Powerhouse
Overview: Zoho CRM is a flexible, affordable solution with a rich set of features for businesses of all sizes. It offers strong automation and integration capabilities.
Key Features:
Sales automation and AI-powered predictions
Omnichannel communication (email, social, phone, chat)
Custom modules and layout options
Integration with Zoho’s broader suite (Books, Projects, Campaigns, etc.)
Pros:
Excellent value for money
High level of customization
Strong mobile app and multilingual support
Cons:
UI can feel cluttered for new users
Some advanced features locked behind higher tiers
Best For: SMBs and growing businesses looking for flexibility on a budget.
4. Other Notable CRM Platforms
a. Pipedrive
Sales-focused CRM with a visual pipeline
Great for smaller sales teams and solo entrepreneurs
Affordable with strong email integration and reporting tools
b. Freshsales (by Freshworks)
AI-based lead scoring and email tracking
Integrated phone, email, and chat
Good for startups and SaaS businesses
c. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM
Enterprise-grade CRM with deep Microsoft Office and Teams integration
Ideal for businesses already using Microsoft products
Conclusion: Which CRM Is Right for You?
There’s no one-size-fits-all CRM. The best platform depends on your business size, goals, and budget.
CRM Platform
Best For
Price Range
Salesforce
Large enterprises with complex needs
$$$$
HubSpot
Startups and marketing teams
Free to $$$
Zoho CRM
SMBs needing customization & value
$$
Pipedrive
Sales-driven small businesses
$$
Freshsales
Startups wanting AI & omnichannel support
$$
Microsoft Dynamics
Enterprises using Microsoft ecosystem
$$$$
Before making your decision, consider doing a free trial of two or three CRMs to evaluate their user experience and capabilities.
Need help choosing or implementing the Best CRM Solutions for your business? Reach out to our experts today for a personalized consultation.
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congruentx · 2 months ago
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How CRM Advisory Helps in Choosing the Right CRM Apps
In today’s competitive business landscape, small businesses must efficiently manage customer relationships, sales pipelines, and marketing efforts. CRM apps for small businesses provide essential tools to streamline operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive revenue growth. However, selecting the right CRM solution requires expert guidance, making CRM advisory services invaluable.
By leveraging CRM advisory, small businesses can implement the best CRM apps tailored to their needs, ensuring efficiency and scalability. This article explores how CRM apps benefit small businesses and how advisory services ensure the best CRM selection.
Why Small Businesses Need CRM Apps
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) apps help businesses centralize customer data, track sales, and automate marketing. Here’s why they are essential:
1. Improved Customer Management
CRM apps store customer information, track interactions, and provide personalized insights, ensuring better customer service.
2. Efficient Sales Tracking
These apps help track leads, monitor deals, and improve sales performance by providing real-time analytics.
3. Automated Marketing & Communication
Email automation, social media integration, and reminders help businesses engage customers efficiently.
4. Data-Driven Decision-Making
CRM analytics help businesses identify trends, optimize sales strategies, and maximize revenue opportunities.
5. Scalability for Growth
As businesses expand, CRM apps provide scalable solutions to handle increased customer data and sales activities.
Top CRM Apps for Small Businesses
The market offers numerous CRM apps, but the following stand out for small business needs:
1. HubSpot CRM
Free, user-friendly, and includes sales tracking, email automation, and reporting.
2. Zoho CRM
Affordable, AI-powered analytics, workflow automation, and lead scoring.
3. Salesforce Essentials
Scaled-down Salesforce version with sales forecasting and automation.
4. Pipedrive
Focuses on sales pipeline management with intuitive automation.
5. Freshsales (by Freshworks)
AI-driven lead scoring, email tracking, and built-in communication tools.
The Role of CRM Advisory Services
Choosing the right CRM can be overwhelming. CRM advisory services help businesses make informed decisions by providing expert guidance on selection, implementation, and optimization.
1. Assessing Business Needs
Advisors analyze operations and recommend CRM solutions based on specific goals.
2. CRM Selection and Implementation
They assist in choosing the right CRM, ensuring seamless integration with existing systems.
3. Customization and Scalability
Advisors help tailor CRM solutions for unique business needs and future scalability.
4. Training and User Adoption
Effective CRM use depends on proper training, which advisors provide to teams.
5. Performance Monitoring and Optimization
CRM consultants track performance, optimize workflows, and improve sales processes.
How CRM Advisory Maximizes CRM App Benefits
CRM advisory services ensure small businesses get the most out of their CRM investments:
1. Cost Savings
Advisors help businesses avoid unnecessary CRM expenses by recommending cost-effective solutions.
2. Increased Efficiency
By streamlining CRM implementation, advisory services reduce downtime and improve usability.
3. Enhanced Customer Experience
CRM experts optimize customer engagement strategies, leading to higher satisfaction rates.
4. Data Security and Compliance
Advisors ensure businesses follow industry regulations like GDPR, protecting customer data.
5. Competitive Advantage
Well-implemented CRM solutions help businesses outperform competitors by improving operations and sales forecasting.
Real-World CRM Success with Advisory Services
1. A Retail Startup Increases Sales by 30%
A small retailer adopted Zoho CRM with advisory support, automating customer follow-ups and boosting sales by 30%.
2. A Consulting Firm Enhances Client Management
With HubSpot CRM and CRM advisory, a business consulting firm optimized lead nurturing and increased client conversion by 25%.
3. A SaaS Company Improves Customer Support
A tech startup integrated Salesforce Essentials with support tools through CRM advisory, reducing response times by 40%.
Steps to Choosing the Right CRM App with CRM Advisory
If you're a small business considering CRM implementation, follow these steps with CRM advisory guidance:
Define Goals – Identify CRM objectives (e.g., lead tracking, sales automation).
Consult an Advisor – Seek expert insights on CRM options suited to your business needs.
Test CRM Apps – Use free trials to evaluate different platforms before committing.
Customize & Integrate – Work with advisors to tailor CRM functions and link them with other tools.
Train Teams – Ensure employees understand CRM functionalities to maximize usage.
Monitor & Optimize – Continuously track CRM performance and refine processes with advisory support.
Conclusion
Investing in the right CRM apps is critical for small businesses aiming to enhance customer relationships and sales management. However, choosing and implementing the best solution requires expert guidance from CRM advisory services.
With CRM advisory, small businesses can confidently select, customize, and optimize their CRM systems, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and long-term success. Whether you’re adopting a CRM for the first time or looking to improve an existing system, the right combination of CRM technology and advisory services can drive measurable business growth.
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firstlinkcrm · 3 years ago
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Various Sales Management Software
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Sales management is the process of coordinating the salespeople in the organization to work towards a common goal. Sales management includes creating and implementing strategies that will help the sales team hit and exceed revenue targets.
What is sales management software?
Best sales management software helps the sales team reach its goals. Sales managers can use this platform to track data, reduce admin tasks, and assign leads. Customer information can be stored on the platform, which helps streamline sales and marketing collaboration.
9 Best sales management platforms              
1.     NUTSHELL:-
Nutshell is an easy-to-use and sneaky powerful CRM that optimizes the efforts of teams and encourages collaboration. Nutshell is a fully customizable platforms with sales automation and email sequencing capabilities, which integrates very well Gmail, outlook, constant contact, intercom, unbounded, and many other business applications.
2.     HUBSPOT:-
Hub spot is a full-stack marketing experience that offers a free CRM. Hub spot’s offerings include a Marketing Hub to grow traffic and convert visitors, a Sales Hub that automates tasks, and a Service Hub to connect with customers.
3.     PIPEDRIVE:-
Pipe drive is a CRM that emphasizes its simplicity and ease of use. This is an affordable option and is ideal for small teams. It features a company-wide view of the pipeline, so sales managers can easily track performance.
4.     FRESHSALES:-
Fresh sales is an in-depth sales management software platform that might offer more than you actually need. This platform features a 360 degree customer view so you can track all conversations like emails, phone calls, deals and etc. right form the fresh sales platform. It also offers advance data tracking and in depth sales reports. This can be overly complicated at time, but overall it provides all of the information you need to meet the sales goals.
 5.   ZOHO CRM:-
It is a design focused CRM that aims to help sales teams convert more leads into customers. Zoho has an accessible customer support team and teams and tends to be highly rated in customer reviews. Zoho includes many useful features, like sales forecasting, an integrated calendar, and sales automation.
 6.   TEAMGATE:-
It is a highly rated easy to use CRM. This is a great option for sales team with minimal experience using a CRM. Team gate offers three versions, beginner, intermediate, and expert, making it user friendly regardless of the experience level.
 7.   NIMBLE:-
Nimble is a sales management suite that integrates many different tools. This intuitive system keeps the applications on one place and makes it easy to manage the customer and sales. It can integrate the emails and calendars from both google and outlook with this platform.
 8.   insightly:-
It is a CRM that is specially designed to help manage all of the business relationships. This tool keeps all the sales data in one place. It can easily keep track of all communications with the customers, monitor the employees, performance and assign tasks.
 9.   KEAP:-
Keap is a fully functionally CRM designed for business looking for an advance sales management system. This platform works well for tracking daily tasks, like appointment and next steps. It also helps streamline customer communications and can be used to attract more leads. Its features a sophisticated campaign builder that can assign tasks and send emails based on specific client actions.
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digitalthinktech · 3 years ago
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Why Hubspot Over Pipedrive 2022
Why HubSpot Over Pipedrive
Picking the right CRM stage is basic to your business. HubSpot and Pipedrive are the world's driving CRM stages. The two stages are deals situated and accompanied by strong arrangements that assist you with accomplishing your business objectives. HubSpot has been in the market longer than Pipedrive. Pipedrive is planned all the more explicitly for outreach groups, while HubSpot is an all-rounder stage for your whole association. The significant focuses to consider picking between these two CRM stages are:
Simpler Integrations
HubSpot can incorporate simpler applications and outsider devices than Pipedrive. For eCommerce applications alone, HubSpot incorporates huge names like Shopify, WooCommerce, Square, and BigCommerce. Then again, eCommerce combinations on Pipedrive are just conceivable through Zapier.
Convenience: The two stages were worked to be easy to understand. The significant distinction is that HubSpot offers more space for customization and personalization to fit the framework to your organization's requirements. The more perplexing your organization's requirements are, the more HubSpot is a preferable fit over Pipedrive.
Pipedrive is for Smaller Teams: Pipedrive's evaluating plan is better-taken care of more modest groups as they charge a for every client premise. While HubSpot has set the least clients for each arrangement. HubSpot likewise offers a greater number of elements than Pipedrive on an expert-level arrangement. HubSpot is a superior fit for associations that are quickly scaling.
Past Sales: HubSpot is extraordinary across-the-board deals and showcasing instruments. It permits consistent correspondence among advertising and deal drives so quality possibilities enter the pipeline and no lead is missed. While Pipedrive centers all the more vigorously around deals exercises, it is detached from showcasing exercises.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is an inbound deal and advertising stage that helps associations draw in guests, change over leads, and shut down bargains. It unites awards deals and advertising divisions to deal with every one of their exercises in a single application. It likewise further develops work processes and income given various trade channels. HubSpot has serious areas of strength for in-seller imaginative showcasing innovation arrangements. Its excellent regions incorporate promoting mechanization, web-based entertainment crusades the board, and presently it has a fortress in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space.
ThinkTech is an ensured HubSpot Solutions Partner situated in Calgary and Edmonton and has been serving its clients worldwide across significant urban communities like Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Denver, and others. ThinkTech has a group of qualified and ensured HubSpot experts in Calgary and Edmonton who can Implement, Optimize, Integrate and Migrate to HubSpot involving best practices for B2B and B2C Industries. ThinkTech has previously helped 200+ clients all around the world.
Move From Pipedrive To HubSpot
Each period of your relocation process accompanies an arrangement. The movement will be taken care of by ThinkTech's relocation specialists, who will work intimately with your group or accomplices in the interim. The total relocation process comprises the accompanying classes and sub-steps:
Records:  
To start with, separate which information (leads, accounts, contacts, and so on) ought to be relocated to HubSpot.
Make new properties in HubSpot 
Utilize HubSpot's local Pipedrive reconciliation to computerize the movement.
Incorporations:
Rethink your current cycles and formulate upgraded systems in HubSpot. HubSpot has 500+ pre-characterized connectors, which assist the business with interfacing its logical business applications. It offers a huge API library if the business doesn't have the coordination it needs.
Computerization: 
Archive robotization and deal with the subsequent meet-ups.   Enhance similar cycles in the new HubSpot climate. Rebuild computerization in HubSpot's work process apparatus.
Announcing:
Look at all reports in the ongoing apparatus.
Decide future announcing needs.
Select and adjust custom reports that meet your business needs, or you can fabricate these reports if necessary.
What You Can Expect From Our Migration Services
Partnership Any relocation project that we work on requires an organization between our group and yours. For information burden and security reasons, openness is vital for proficient outcomes
No Data-Loss Guarantee We at ThinkTech guarantee that not so much as a byte of information is lost. We regard the secrecy of your business' information with uprightness.
Followed through On-Time Our relocation specialists complete the movement project instantly. We are excited to see your business develop!
POST-MIGRATION
You've changed effectively from Pipedrive to HubSpot, yet your process isn't finished at this point. ThinkTech will assist you with succeeding in your business. ThinkTech's Standard arrangement offers extra elements like all-day, everyday Product Support, HubSpot Training, Customized Roadmap and Growth Plan, Annual Health Checkup and Strategy, and Customer Success Manager. Notwithstanding these elements, the exceptional arrangement has extra highlights like Ongoing Campaign Strategy and Optimization, Ongoing Technical Strategy, Architecture, and Integration Support.
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michaelandy101-blog · 5 years ago
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79 Marketing Tools and Software for Every Business & Budget
New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/79-marketing-tools-and-software-for-every-business-budget/
79 Marketing Tools and Software for Every Business & Budget
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In the world of marketing, it seems like there are always new tools, tips, tricks, and trends to discover and incorporate into your marketing strategy. How is it possible to keep up with them all?
As a marketer myself, I often wish I had a better sense of all of the tools available to me — and what sets each of them apart — so I can make more informed decisions on how to create and optimize content.
Luckily, I have the privilege of working on a team of 150+ other marketers who specialize in different functions than I do. And because of that, I was able to curate this list of the top tools every marketer should know about and use.
The list of recommended tools below is sorted into different sections so you can get a better sense of what tools are available for different functions of the job. 
Above lists the different types of tools for every part of your job. Below is our roundup of the best marketing tools in each category. 
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
You and your sales team want to sell your product or service — not fight with messy spreadsheets, cluttered inboxes, or clunky tools that slow you down. That’s why using a Customer Relationship Management System — also known as a CRM — is essential. Not only will it help your sales team manage relationships, but a CRM will also give you a place to deliver those leads you generated to your sales team.
CRMs are such an essential part of any good marketing and sales team that we think everyone should have one. That’s why the HubSpot CRM is completely free.
Featured CRM Tool:
1. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM automates the tasks salespeople hate and takes minutes to learn — not months. That means doing more deals and less data entry.
Other CRM Tools:
2. Zoho CRM
3. Zendesk
4. Pipedrive
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Online Advertising Tools
If your team is making investments into PPC ad campaigns on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, it’s probably a bit of a hassle to manage all the different ad campaigns you’re running across each different network. Besides just managing them, you then have to try and report on the results of all of them. What a struggle. Luckily, there’s tools for that.
Featured Online Advertising Tool: 
5. AdStage
AdStage takes the hassle out reporting on all of the PPC campaigns you’re running and puts it all in one place. AdStage helps you automate, create, and manage your campaigns across all of the major PPC platforms, then allows you to report on your results. With visual features and powerful automation tools, AdStage is a must for PPC experts and newbies alike.
Other Online Advertising Tools:
6. HubSpot Ads Tracking Software
7. Perfect Audience
8. Google Keyword Planner
9. AdRoll
10. WordStream
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Social Media Tools
Social media managers know the pain of posting that perfect social media post only to have a follower find a typo a minute later and call you out. For marketers, using a social media tool to schedule all of your posts (so you catch those typos beforehand) is a must. But it also helps to get the right analytics from your social posts, especially on channels where it can be hard to get that information.
Featured Social Media Tool: 
11. Iconosquare
Iconosquare is the perfect tool for marketers to grow their brand on Instagram with easy-to-use analytics. It’s not always easy to know what’s working and what’s not on Instagram. But, as the second most popular social channel and one that’s quickly approaching first most popular among some age groups, it’s a channel that marketers can’t afford to miss out on. Try Iconosquare now to maximize your Instagram analytics and optimize your brand Instagram channel for success.
Other Social Media Tools:
12. Buffer
13. Hootsuite
14. BuzzSumo
15. HubSpot Social Inbox
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
Whether its keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page rankings, every marketer needs a go-to tool for planning what content to create and how to optimize it for SEO. 
Featured SEO Tool:
16. Ryte
Marketers need tools to plan which keywords to rank for and making sure the content they create actually meets their goal once created. Ryte is the ideal tool marketers can use to make sure their SEO efforts are having a real impact on their marketing strategy.
Other SEO Tools:
17. Ahrefs
18. SEMrush
19. Moz
20. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension
21. HubSpot Content Strategy Tool
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Content Creation and Design Tools
In the world of content creation, there are admittedly tons of different tools you could use to create various types of content. Whether it’s social images, logos, blog posts, or ebooks — the options and tools are endless.
That said, a newcomer among the Adobe Suite of tools is winning the hearts of many marketers, including this one, for its ease of use to create stunning webpages, awesome videos, and eye-catching graphics. The best part? It’s completely free and impossibly easy.
Featured Content Creation Resource:
22. Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a suite of three web or mobile apps — Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video — that allows marketers to easily create graphics, webpages, and videos in a variety of themes in minutes.
You can completely avoid the hassle of page layout, video editing knowledge, or a CMS and start creating content that looks remarkable immediately. For example, we use Spark Page at HubSpot to create some of our online guides and promote them with Spark Videos and Posts. You can too!
Other Content Creation and Design Tools:
23. Venngage
24. Piktochart
25. Canva
26. Recordit
27. Kap
28. Adobe Color CC
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Video Marketing Tools
Haven’t you heard? Video is the thing everyone is talking about. But how do you actually implement it into your marketing?
Maybe your strategy is just to put a YouTube video embed on one of your blog posts or landing pages. But then what happens? Someone else’s ad plays on your landing page before your video even begins. That’s bad for your conversion rates, brand, and your user. Luckily, there’s a solution.
Featured Video Marketing Resource:
29. Wistia
Wistia is a powerful video hosting platform that allows you to host your videos on your website — ad free — with a guaranteed smooth playback and responsive player. Wistia also helps you prove the ROI of your video efforts by offering you video analytics and key metrics to fine-tune your video marketing efforts over time. Ready to take your video marketing to the next level?
Other Video Marketing Tools:
30. Vidyard
31. Vimeo
32. Loom
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Event Marketing Tools
Whether your team holds monthly customer and prospect events, yearly conferences, or just occasional community outreach parties and events, it’s important to have the best event marketing tool up your sleeve when the time comes to use it. After all, in-person events are some of the best ways to interact with potential customers and create a brand experience that prospects, customers, and your community will remember.
Featured Event Marketing Resource:
33. Eventbrite
Eventbrite is an efficient, easy-to-use tool tons of marketers rely on not only to manage the logistics (like ticketing) of events but also to promote their events. Eventbrite lets you create an event landing page and allows you to set up your ticketing and payment for the event all within the same platform. The best part? Eventbrite is always free if you’re hosting a free event!
Other Event Marketing Tools:
34. Facebook Events
35. AddEvent
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Lead Capture and Conversion Tools
When it comes to your bottom-line goals, you probably want a few tools for not only attracting prospects to dedicated marketing campaigns, but just as importantly, converting those visitors into leads and customers.
Featured Lead Capture and Conversion Resource:
36. HubSpot’s Free Marketing Tools
HubSpot’s free marketing tools can help do just that. The moment a lead shares their email, you’ll know who they are, where they work, and what pages they visited — all in real time. When they view an offer or check your pricing, you’ll be ready to follow up right away.
And with simple but powerful analytics, you’ll learn more about what’s working and what’s not — like which traffic sources or pieces of content are driving the most conversions. It’s a risk-free way to find out what inbound marketing can do for you. No budget necessary.
Other Lead Capture and Conversion Tools:
37. HubSpot’s Free Pop-up Forms Tool
38. Typeform
39. OptinMonster
40. Sumo
41. Convertflow
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Lead Generation Tools
If you’re in the mood for demand generation, you probably have your eyes on the prize: converting anonymous website visitors into contacts with email addresses that you can successfully nurture. Landing pages are a must for capturing lead information on important offers and opt-ins.
Featured Lead Generation Resource: 
42. Unbounce
Thanks to a drag and drop interface, Unbounce lets you quickly build mobile responsive landing pages without developer assistance. The tool also integrates with a number of different CMS platforms and software.
With Unbounce Convertables, you can also launch targeted overlays on top of any web page, each with a dedicated call to action. Customizable triggers and targeting rules give you control over who sees your offers and when so you can serve the most relevant offers to the right audience.
Other Lead Generation Tools:
43. Leadpages
44. Instapage
45. HubSpot’s Landing Page Builder
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Website Optimization and CRO Tools
As marketers, sometimes it feels like we’re constantly making educated guesses about how our site visitors are going to interact with our content. While we might design a page to draw our user’s eye to a spot on a page, how do we ever really know where their focus is so that we can improve that experience?
Featured CRO Resource:
46. Hotjar
Hotjar is a new and easy way to truly understand what your web and mobile site visitors are looking at when they interact with your site. With its visual heatmap tools, you can understand what users want, care about, and interact with on your site. Hotjar visually represents visitors’ clicks, taps and scrolling behavior, giving you the ability to find hot areas for growth and conversion rate optimization.
Other CRO Tools:
47. Optimizely
48. Lucky Orange
49. Google Optimize
50. Clicky
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Lead Nurturing and Email Marketing Tools
It’s not enough to drive traffic to your website and then convert them. Many of your website visitors may not be ready to buy, and that’s where lead nurturing comes in. Email marketing is a great way to nurture contacts toward a purchasing decision. 
Featured Lead Nurturing Resource: 
51. HubSpot’s Email Marketing Software
HubSpot offers robust email marketing software from free to enterprise. You’ll be able to create emails in a simple drag-and-drop interface, personalize emails for better experience and performance, and see email activity in your free CRM. HubSpot also offers automation solutions in their paid plans. 
Other Lead Nurturing and Email Marketing Tools:
52. Constant Contact
53. Campaign Monitor
54. MailChimp
55. AWeber
56. ActiveCampaign
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Marketing Automation Tools
Automation is nothing new to marketers. Whether you want to save time doing marketing tasks or simply cut time wasted doing those daily tasks like saving emails and files to spreadsheets, having a tool that makes your life easier and saves you time is ideal.
Featured Marketing Automation Resource: 
57. HubSpot Marketing Automation
As previously mentioned, HubSpot has a powerful automation tool included in its paid marketing tiers. It doesn’t just send drip sequences. You can also use it to trigger specific actions such as updating a contact record or adding a contact to a list when certain criteria is met. 
Other Marketing Automation Tools: 
58. Drip
59. Marketo
60. Omnisend
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Data Reporting and Analytics Tools
Most tools that automate some of your marketing strategy will also provide reports that allow you to see and present your campaigns’ performance to other employees in your company. What if you want a more holistic look at the health of your marketing?
Featured Data Reporting and Analytics Resource: 
61. Digital Marketing Tuner
From the efficiency of your content calendar to the effectiveness of your lead-generation methods, Digital Marketing Tuner offers a helpful overview of all of your latest marketing activities.
Developed by OverGo Studio, an inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Agency Partner, Digital Marketing Tuner guides you through a brief survey where you can submit basic information about your company’s content volume, email open rates, website traffic, and more. The tool then sends you a detailed report in which you can better visualize your team’s strengths and weaknesses so you can make even better decisions for your company moving forward.
Other Data Reporting and Analytics Tools: 
62. Google Analytics
63. Google Search Console
64. Databox
65. RavenTools
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Digital Asset Management Tools
In any marketing team, the inevitable happens: there’s a million files and pieces of content between everyone on your team without one place to keep it all. Organization on any team — let alone a marketing team — is essential. That’s why it’s important to have a collaborative organization tool to keep you sane.
Featured Digital Asset Management Tool:
66. Dropbox
Dropbox is the perfect tool to keep your team organized and your files under control. With cloud-based software to keep your files accessible anywhere at anytime, Dropbox helps your team store all of its files in a central location. Dropbox makes it easy to collaborate, too. With tools like Dropbox Paper, which allows you to write and collaborate in real time on the same doc — and sharing tools for shared folders and files, you’ll be organized and ready for any project that comes your way.
Other Digital Asset Management Tools:
67. Google Drive
68. Box
69. Shift
70. Brandfolder
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Team Communication and Collaboration Tools
Where would your work day be without accessibility and communication between you and your colleagues? Probably pretty frustrating. Marketers can’t shy away from communication when it comes to aligning with team members and across the company, so having the right team communication tools is necessary every single day.
Featured Communication and Collaboration Resource:
71. Slack
I wouldn’t be given any slack if I didn’t make the world aware of this tool.
Slack is a powerful messaging app that allows you and your teammates to quickly message back and forth without the hassle of email. But it’s not just AOL instant messenger 2.0. Slack has powerful features and integrations that make it possible for you to integrate all of your other daily tools — like Trello, Gmail, Giphy, and so many more — right where you’re already communicating. You can start channels between different teams or just chat with specific colleagues. Slack makes remote and in-person work possible and easier than ever.
Other Communication and Collaboration Tools:
72. Join.Me
73. Zoom
74. Skype
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Project Management Tools
File management and organization is one thing, but how do you manage all of the moving pieces of a marketing campaign or project? There are many different tools you can use for project management, but only one sticks out when it comes to the number of integrations and features at the price of — oh yeah — free!
Featured Project Management Resource: 
75. Trello
Trello is a great project management tool for small teams and individuals. With it’s Kanban-style setup and fun user interface, Trello lets you set up to-do lists and tag individual cards with due dates, members, labels, and more. You can attach files, links, images, and more to your cards and easily get a full-view of any project that you’re working on. At HubSpot, we use Trello daily to manage our team campaigns and individual to-do lists. Want an example of how we do this? Check out our guide to managing marketing campaigns in Trello.
Other Project Management Tools:
76. HubSpot Projects
77. Asana
78. Airtable
79. Wrike
You’ve got all the tools you need, but are you looking for a place to start putting them all together? Check out our free marketing plan. It’ll walk you through creating your own marketing plan and teach you how to use all of these tools together.
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Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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itssolved10 · 1 year ago
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Why Choose Zoho Australia?
Discover the power of Zoho Australia with IT Solutions Solved. Explore the possibilities with comprehensive Zoho applications, including Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho CRM Enterprise, Zoho Creator, Zoho One, and more.
As Zoho Partners, we provide expert consulting and implementation services tailored to your business needs. Whether you want to resell Zoho products or integrate your own, we've got you covered.
Join forces with IT Solutions Solved to access dedicated support, valuable training, and a suite of tools to optimize your business functions and drive growth. Elevate your business with Zoho today!
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erpsoftwaredubaiuae · 2 months ago
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Best CRM Software for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the UAE
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Best CRM Software for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the UAE
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become an essential tool for businesses looking to improve customer interactions, streamline sales processes, and boost profitability. For small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the UAE, selecting the right CRM solution can be a game-changer in driving growth and enhancing operational efficiency.
Why SMEs in the UAE Need CRM Software
The UAE’s dynamic business environment presents opportunities and challenges for SMEs. With increasing competition, businesses must focus on customer satisfaction, lead generation, and data-driven decision-making. CRM software helps SMEs by:
Enhancing Customer Relationships: Centralizing customer information ensures personalized engagement and better service.
Streamlining Sales and Marketing: Automating workflows, tracking leads, and improving sales conversions.
Improving Productivity: Reducing manual tasks and improving team collaboration.
Data-Driven Insights: Generating reports and analytics to support business growth.
Top CRM Software for SMEs in the UAE
1. Zoho CRM
Why Choose It?
User-friendly interface with powerful automation tools.
Affordable pricing for SMEs with scalability options.
AI-driven sales insights for better decision-making.
Seamless integration with third-party applications like WhatsApp and Google Workspace.
2. HubSpot CRM
Why Choose It?
Free version available with essential features.
Marketing, sales, and service modules in one platform.
Easy-to-use dashboard with detailed analytics.
Integrates with email marketing tools and social media platforms.
3. Salesforce Essentials
Why Choose It?
Industry-leading CRM with advanced customization options.
AI-powered features for smarter sales tracking.
Cloud-based and mobile-friendly for remote work capabilities.
Scalable for SMEs planning long-term expansion.
4. Freshsales by Freshworks
Why Choose It?
AI-powered lead scoring to prioritize high-value customers.
Built-in phone, email, and chat integration for easy communication.
Customizable workflows and automation features.
Cost-effective pricing for small businesses.
5. Pipedrive
Why Choose It?
Focuses on sales pipeline management with a visual interface.
Simple drag-and-drop functionality for ease of use.
Automation tools to eliminate repetitive tasks.
Mobile app for managing sales on the go.
How to Choose the Best CRM for Your SME in the UAE
When selecting a CRM software, SMEs should consider:
Budget and Pricing Plans – Choose a CRM that offers the best value for money with scalability options.
Ease of Use – Look for an intuitive platform that requires minimal training.
Integration Capabilities – Ensure it can seamlessly connect with your existing software tools.
Customization Options – Select a CRM that allows workflow customization to match your business needs.
Customer Support – Opt for a provider with reliable customer service and local UAE support if needed.
Conclusion
Investing in the right CRM software UAE stay competitive, enhance customer relationships, and drive business growth. Whether you need a free solution like HubSpot CRM or a powerful AI-driven tool like Salesforce Essentials, choosing the right CRM depends on your specific business requirements. Evaluate the options, test free trials, and select the best fit for your SME's success.
Looking for expert guidance on CRM implementation in the UAE? Get in touch with us to find the perfect CRM solution for your business!
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congruentx · 2 months ago
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How CRM Advisory Helps in Choosing the Right CRM Apps
In today’s competitive business landscape, small businesses must efficiently manage customer relationships, sales pipelines, and marketing efforts. CRM apps for small businesses provide essential tools to streamline operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive revenue growth. However, selecting the right CRM solution requires expert guidance, making CRM advisory services invaluable.
By leveraging CRM advisory, small businesses can implement the best CRM apps tailored to their needs, ensuring efficiency and scalability. This article explores how CRM apps benefit small businesses and how advisory services ensure the best CRM selection.
Why Small Businesses Need CRM Apps
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) apps help businesses centralize customer data, track sales, and automate marketing. Here’s why they are essential:
1. Improved Customer Management
CRM apps store customer information, track interactions, and provide personalized insights, ensuring better customer service.
2. Efficient Sales Tracking
These apps help track leads, monitor deals, and improve sales performance by providing real-time analytics.
3. Automated Marketing & Communication
Email automation, social media integration, and reminders help businesses engage customers efficiently.
4. Data-Driven Decision-Making
CRM analytics help businesses identify trends, optimize sales strategies, and maximize revenue opportunities.
5. Scalability for Growth
As businesses expand, CRM apps provide scalable solutions to handle increased customer data and sales activities.
Top CRM Apps for Small Businesses
The market offers numerous CRM apps, but the following stand out for small business needs:
1. HubSpot CRM
Free, user-friendly, and includes sales tracking, email automation, and reporting.
2. Zoho CRM
Affordable, AI-powered analytics, workflow automation, and lead scoring.
3. Salesforce Essentials
Scaled-down Salesforce version with sales forecasting and automation.
4. Pipedrive
Focuses on sales pipeline management with intuitive automation.
5. Freshsales (by Freshworks)
AI-driven lead scoring, email tracking, and built-in communication tools.
The Role of CRM Advisory Services
Choosing the right CRM can be overwhelming. CRM advisory services help businesses make informed decisions by providing expert guidance on selection, implementation, and optimization.
1. Assessing Business Needs
Advisors analyze operations and recommend CRM solutions based on specific goals.
2. CRM Selection and Implementation
They assist in choosing the right CRM, ensuring seamless integration with existing systems.
3. Customization and Scalability
Advisors help tailor CRM solutions for unique business needs and future scalability.
4. Training and User Adoption
Effective CRM use depends on proper training, which advisors provide to teams.
5. Performance Monitoring and Optimization
CRM consultants track performance, optimize workflows, and improve sales processes.
How CRM Advisory Maximizes CRM App Benefits
CRM advisory services ensure small businesses get the most out of their CRM investments:
1. Cost Savings
Advisors help businesses avoid unnecessary CRM expenses by recommending cost-effective solutions.
2. Increased Efficiency
By streamlining CRM implementation, advisory services reduce downtime and improve usability.
3. Enhanced Customer Experience
CRM experts optimize customer engagement strategies, leading to higher satisfaction rates.
4. Data Security and Compliance
Advisors ensure businesses follow industry regulations like GDPR, protecting customer data.
5. Competitive Advantage
Well-implemented CRM solutions help businesses outperform competitors by improving operations and sales forecasting.
Real-World CRM Success with Advisory Services
1. A Retail Startup Increases Sales by 30%
A small retailer adopted Zoho CRM with advisory support, automating customer follow-ups and boosting sales by 30%.
2. A Consulting Firm Enhances Client Management
With HubSpot CRM and CRM advisory, a business consulting firm optimized lead nurturing and increased client conversion by 25%.
3. A SaaS Company Improves Customer Support
A tech startup integrated Salesforce Essentials with support tools through CRM advisory, reducing response times by 40%.
Steps to Choosing the Right CRM App with CRM Advisory
If you're a small business considering CRM implementation, follow these steps with CRM advisory guidance:
Define Goals – Identify CRM objectives (e.g., lead tracking, sales automation).
Consult an Advisor – Seek expert insights on CRM options suited to your business needs.
Test CRM Apps – Use free trials to evaluate different platforms before committing.
Customize & Integrate – Work with advisors to tailor CRM functions and link them with other tools.
Train Teams – Ensure employees understand CRM functionalities to maximize usage.
Monitor & Optimize – Continuously track CRM performance and refine processes with advisory support.
Conclusion
Investing in the right CRM apps is critical for small businesses aiming to enhance customer relationships and sales management. However, choosing and implementing the best solution requires expert guidance from CRM advisory services.
With CRM advisory, small businesses can confidently select, customize, and optimize their CRM systems, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and long-term success. Whether you’re adopting a CRM for the first time or looking to improve an existing system, the right combination of CRM technology and advisory services can drive measurable business growth.
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unixcommerce · 5 years ago
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Pipedrive Unveils New Leadership, Redesign and New Solutions to Coincide with 10th Anniversary
Pipedrive, the CRM platform provider, just celebrated a major milestone. It turned 10 years old this year and just unveiled a brand-new user experience along with a number of new features. Raj Sabhhlok also became the new CEO.
Sabholk joins Pipedrive following a successful stint as president of SaaS business application provider at Zoho for 10 years. Small Business Trends caught up with Sabholk to discuss his vision for Pipedrive, Pipedrive offering for SBMS, the state of CRM, the impact of COVID-19 and more.
The interview follows the lineup of new offerings.
Pipedrive CRM Updates User Experience
Pipedrive, has announced a redesign of its user experience (UX) feature to coincide with the company’s 10th anniversary this year. The redesign of the Customer relationship management’s (CRM) platform offers tweaked and revamped features for its customers.
The main menu of the dashboard has changed its orientation towards a sidebar freeing up room for additional options. It also includes a search bar, quick add button, sales assistant and account settings. The enhanced search functionality now allows for quick access, update and follow up. The add button helps to speed up the creation of new deals, activities or contacts without having to leave the current screen.
The menu features a Leads Inbox and Deal Pipeline on top. These are accompanied by frequently used features like email, contacts, calendar, and Insights offering seamless navigation and ease of use. This all comes with a new intuitive UX providing customers faster access to all of Pipedrive’s features along with scalability. According to Pipedrive, this will help users to implement the products that will make the biggest impact on their Return On Investment (ROI).
“Sales is a team sport involving different departments in a business and we connect the team together. Our goal has always been to provide our customers with powerful, yet easy to use tools that help them do their job faster and more effectively,” said Krishna Panicker, VP of Product, Pipedrive.
More Control, Predictability and Flexibility in Engagement
The redesigned features also come with two new launches, Insights and Sales Docs. Insights offer customers the ability to track sales data and trends to inform sales and outreach. It comes with an interactive dashboard for enhanced tracking, metrics to filter results and customize data visualization. Sales Docs, a beta tool, for its part streamlines and automates sales-related documents for better impact.
With Insights, users get customizable sales reports and interactive dashboards. It helps track various sales metrics, including sales performance, conversion, duration, progress, and sales activities. Insights also allow users to filter results and choose preferred data visualization. For example, the Deal performance report helps to improve the sales process and efficiency by providing valuable insights. This includes metrics on the number of opportunities won or lost and why, deal progress, and sales cycle duration.
Furthermore, with insights, the report data can be converted by the visual dashboard for easy interpretation of the trends and processes. You can share this data across teams and stakeholders.
Sales Docs is a toolbox to streamline and automate how sales teams create, send, and manage sales-related documents. Touted to be particularly useful for remote sales it comes with trackable quotes, proposals, and contracts available directly within the CRM. It comes with real-time notifications on actions taken, auto-fill sales templates and documents with Pipedrive data and Google Drive integration. It can also backup data on Google sheets.
Support and Availability
Pipedrive’s integration options include sending Slack notifications in Pipedrive, create QuickBooks invoices and create new deals in Pipedrive for new Facebook Leads Ads. Pipedrive says it can integrate its solutions with over 150 applications. And the support also includes Sales Assistant, Pipedrive’s Artificial Intelligence.
Sales Assistant automates repetitive administrative tasks to help eliminate redundant tasks. This comes with performance tips, automation recommendations, notifications and analytics on performance trends.
Pipedrive’s pricing comes in four tiers: essential, advanced, professional and enterprise. The essential package comes with a $12.50 monthly subscription. The robust enterprise package comes with a $99 monthly subscription and includes a customized onboarding and support for your in-house CRM. All plans except the enterprise package have a 14-day free trial option for businesses to check out all of the features.
All plans come with 24/7 support and they are general data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant to protect privacy. Pipedrive can be also be accessed via mobile devices compatible with both Android and iOS devices.
CRM: Keeping Up with Your Customers
Your business is literally built on the relations you have with your customers. And the success of your business hinges on the relationship you have with your customers. Your relationship with your customers is defined by the level of sales, marketing and operations efforts you conduct to meet the needs of your clientele.
Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps you take the pulse of these relationships. With an efficient CRM you can gain a better understanding of your engagement with customers and prospects. It gives insights on your sales process, how customers engage with you, identifies which marketing efforts are working and other aspects.
In a nutshell, CRM helps manage the information that will help inform your business decisions. It affects key segments that keep your business running such as your customer service, marketing, human resources, sales and operations. In contrast, lack of clarity in your relationships with customers means you rely on your gut to make important business decisions.
A good CRM on the other hand offers real insights that can delve into specifics and help isolate issues. This in return will help you focus on issues that need tweaking. At the end of the day, customer satisfaction comes from understanding the needs of your customers. And CRM is designed to do just that.
Interview with Raj Sabhlok
Small Business Trends: What’s the greatest lesson you learned working in the corporate world that’s helped you to succeed?
Raj Sabhlok: You can only be successful if you are doing what you love.
Small Business Trends: What exciting things can we expect from Pipedrive in the next 12 months?
Raj Sabhlok: There are lots of exciting things happening over the next year. We have just launched our revamped UX and came out with new navigation that better reflects how salespeople think and work, allowing them to work faster and more efficiently in their job. Over the coming months, we will keep developing our recently launched Insights, a very sophisticated and customizable sales reports platform with interactive dashboards for tracking various sales metrics, and high-level data visualization and sharing features.
This fall will be very busy with Pipedrive. At the beginning of the fall, we will come out with various product updates that are particularly useful for remote sales. We will launch native integrations with Zoom and MS Team. Also, a full version of Sales Docs (currently in beta) will come out which automates everything related to sales documents – allowing users to create, send, manage, and digitally sign quotes, proposals, and contracts.
In September we will have our biggest product launch, which is related to leads and lead management. Our recent State of Sales study showed that 54% of salespeople struggle with prospecting. Pipedrive’s new Lead Suite will have a number of useful tools that are specifically developed to help our customers with finding high-quality leads. Probably the most interesting feature is Prospector, which will include 400 million constantly updated leads that our customers can filter by country, industry, size, or estimated revenue of the company.
Then in 2021, we will come out with a more robust marketing automation tool. A few months ago, Pipedrive acquired a marketing automation company, Mailigen, which added a lot of know-how in the area. Using their years of experience, we’re developing a tool that facilitates smooth cooperation between marketing and sales teams.
Other key areas in 2021 are a Sales Coach that helps customers to identify their success patterns, and data quality control and forecasting tools. In addition, we will come out with a new goals’ management feature and an AI-based leads assessment tool.
Small Business Trends:  What is the greatest lesson you learned at Zoho that you would like to continue as CEO in Pipedrive?
Raj Sabhlok: Being the head of the company does not mean that you have to be an expert in every field. The key to success is to gather around you people who know their area and actually love what they do. As a manager, I have always aimed to be an enabler, seeking to give people the freedom to achieve their goals, thereby getting the best out of them. This is one of the pillars of Pipedrive’s exceptional work environment and strong organizational culture. Employees have a lot of flexibility to choose what they work on and at the same time take responsibility for their deliverables. This is a very strong motivator for doing your job as well. I look forward to fostering this work environment at Pipedrive.
Small Business Trends:  Has the pandemic led to particular shifts in the market place?
Raj Sabhlok: Although the SMBs were hit the hardest by COVID-19, surprisingly for Pipedrive the drop was not as sharp as we might have expected. Fortunately, we just experienced a momentary downturn and now our business is returning to pre-crisis levels. Pipedrive reacted with agility and quickly implemented a number of measures to help our customers to survive the shock to their businesses and get through the worst months. We also started to notice a trend of new sign-ups by companies that had used ‘larger’ CRMs. Companies were reviewing and reassessing their tools and realized that Pipedrive is a powerful yet very easy to use platform with a number of features that support salespeople working remotely. All this was available for them at a lower price than they were paying before, which was a clear bonus during uncertain times.
Small Business Trends: What is Pipedrive’s current vision? How are your offerings and innovations enabling businesses to grapple with the paradigm shift?
Raj Sabhlok: Ten years ago, Pipedrive set out to raise the industry standard for CRM usability and productivity by building a tool that actually reflects how the mind of a salesperson works. Our goal has always been to make sales professionals’ lives easier and help them to sell better. We will continue expanding our product portfolio wider and include tools for other revenue-creating functions in the business. We’re also looking to go deeper into areas we’re already in, providing more sophisticated and automated sales tools to ensure our customers achieve better results even faster.
Small Business Trends: How do you feel about your current offerings and future offerings for small businesses?
Raj Sabhlok: Small and medium-sized businesses have been at the core of Pipedrive’s customer base. And, while today we can address the needs of larger sales teams, we continue to make sure that SMBs can benefit from our innovations. We’ve also tried to target our pricing as fairly as possible, building it around tiers to not lockout our smaller customers with higher prices or with features they don’t need.
Small Business Trends: The CRM sector is currently booming and cloud solutions are in demand due to the COVID pandemic. What differentiates Pipedrive from other CRM platforms?
Raj Sabhlok: We have several features that we developed especially for helping our customers adjust to remote work. However, I believe our strength lies in solving the pain points that sales professionals face, no matter what is going on in the world. Finding high-quality leads, reducing time spent on repetitive administrative tasks, closing deals faster, and improving their sales results and deal conversion rates. These are the struggles that Pipedrive aims to solve.
Small Business Trends: What areas do you see Pipedrive moving towards in order to address customers’ needs in the post-COVID-19 era?
Raj Sabhlok: As businesses go through many changes, one of the key challenges that sales professionals will definitely face during the times ahead is prospecting and finding up-to-date leads. Pipedrive’s new Lead Suite with sophisticated lead-generation features such as LeadBooster chatbot, live chat, and web forms will tackle exactly this problem and help Pipedrive users to get up-to-date and relevant leads easier and faster.
Small Business Trends: Will Pipedrive be offering CRM solutions catering to the needs of small businesses? If so how would you tell them how Pipedrive stacks against others in the market? 
Raj Sabhlok: Pipedrive has a number of characteristics that make it especially suitable for smaller companies. Being easy to set up and use is massively important as small businesses do not have the resources for multiple-day training or hiring an expert to get their CRM up and running. We also have the Pipedrive Academy, which is a great free resource with sales tips and product tutorials that also has a number of useful articles that are written for small businesses. It’s possible for everyone to contribute to the community, with thousands of sales and marketing professionals giving great advice and sharing useful experiences every day.
For small businesses, it is also extremely important to have a CRM that is easily customizable. Every sales team’s way of doing sales is different and this should also be reflected in their CRM. Pipedrive is highly customizable, allowing each small business to create sales pipeline stages, filters, automation, and dashboards that are relevant to them. Additionally, Pipedrive’s integrations mean it can work with more than 200 other popular tools, allowing small businesses to use the tools they need and prefer.
Small Business Trends: What do you see the Pipedrive’s experience looking like in five years?
Raj Sabhlok: In short, Pipedrive will be a broad offering that does many ‘jobs’ for small businesses, from sales to marketing and beyond. All of our solutions will continue to have the ‘Pipedrive magic’ which means that our offerings will deliver instant value to customers. Finally, while pretty UIs will continue to be important, automation will be paramount and be at the core of our offering in the future.
Image: pipedrive.com
This article, “Pipedrive Unveils New Leadership, Redesign and New Solutions to Coincide with 10th Anniversary” was first published on Small Business Trends
https://smallbiztrends.com/
The post Pipedrive Unveils New Leadership, Redesign and New Solutions to Coincide with 10th Anniversary appeared first on Unix Commerce.
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businessreviewguidenow · 5 years ago
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Pipedrive Unveils New Leadership, Redesign and New Solutions to Coincide with 10th Anniversary
Pipedrive, the CRM platform provider, just celebrated a major milestone. It turned 10 years old this year and just unveiled a brand-new user experience along with a number of new features. Raj Sabhhlok also became the new CEO.
Sabholk joins Pipedrive following a successful stint as president of SaaS business application provider at Zoho for 10 years. Small Business Trends caught up with Sabholk to discuss his vision for Pipedrive, Pipedrive offering for SBMS, the state of CRM, the impact of COVID-19 and more.
The interview follows the lineup of new offerings.
Pipedrive CRM Updates User Experience
Pipedrive, has announced a redesign of its user experience (UX) feature to coincide with the company’s 10th anniversary this year. The redesign of the Customer relationship management’s (CRM) platform offers tweaked and revamped features for its customers.
The main menu of the dashboard has changed its orientation towards a sidebar freeing up room for additional options. It also includes a search bar, quick add button, sales assistant and account settings. The enhanced search functionality now allows for quick access, update and follow up. The add button helps to speed up the creation of new deals, activities or contacts without having to leave the current screen.
The menu features a Leads Inbox and Deal Pipeline on top. These are accompanied by frequently used features like email, contacts, calendar, and Insights offering seamless navigation and ease of use. This all comes with a new intuitive UX providing customers faster access to all of Pipedrive’s features along with scalability. According to Pipedrive, this will help users to implement the products that will make the biggest impact on their Return On Investment (ROI).
“Sales is a team sport involving different departments in a business and we connect the team together. Our goal has always been to provide our customers with powerful, yet easy to use tools that help them do their job faster and more effectively,” said Krishna Panicker, VP of Product, Pipedrive.
More Control, Predictability and Flexibility in Engagement
The redesigned features also come with two new launches, Insights and Sales Docs. Insights offer customers the ability to track sales data and trends to inform sales and outreach. It comes with an interactive dashboard for enhanced tracking, metrics to filter results and customize data visualization. Sales Docs, a beta tool, for its part streamlines and automates sales-related documents for better impact.
With Insights, users get customizable sales reports and interactive dashboards. It helps track various sales metrics, including sales performance, conversion, duration, progress, and sales activities. Insights also allow users to filter results and choose preferred data visualization. For example, the Deal performance report helps to improve the sales process and efficiency by providing valuable insights. This includes metrics on the number of opportunities won or lost and why, deal progress, and sales cycle duration.
Furthermore, with insights, the report data can be converted by the visual dashboard for easy interpretation of the trends and processes. You can share this data across teams and stakeholders.
Sales Docs is a toolbox to streamline and automate how sales teams create, send, and manage sales-related documents. Touted to be particularly useful for remote sales it comes with trackable quotes, proposals, and contracts available directly within the CRM. It comes with real-time notifications on actions taken, auto-fill sales templates and documents with Pipedrive data and Google Drive integration. It can also backup data on Google sheets.
Support and Availability
Pipedrive’s integration options include sending Slack notifications in Pipedrive, create QuickBooks invoices and create new deals in Pipedrive for new Facebook Leads Ads. Pipedrive says it can integrate its solutions with over 150 applications. And the support also includes Sales Assistant, Pipedrive’s Artificial Intelligence.
Sales Assistant automates repetitive administrative tasks to help eliminate redundant tasks. This comes with performance tips, automation recommendations, notifications and analytics on performance trends.
Pipedrive’s pricing comes in four tiers: essential, advanced, professional and enterprise. The essential package comes with a $12.50 monthly subscription. The robust enterprise package comes with a $99 monthly subscription and includes a customized onboarding and support for your in-house CRM. All plans except the enterprise package have a 14-day free trial option for businesses to check out all of the features.
All plans come with 24/7 support and they are general data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant to protect privacy. Pipedrive can be also be accessed via mobile devices compatible with both Android and iOS devices.
CRM: Keeping Up with Your Customers
Your business is literally built on the relations you have with your customers. And the success of your business hinges on the relationship you have with your customers. Your relationship with your customers is defined by the level of sales, marketing and operations efforts you conduct to meet the needs of your clientele.
Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps you take the pulse of these relationships. With an efficient CRM you can gain a better understanding of your engagement with customers and prospects. It gives insights on your sales process, how customers engage with you, identifies which marketing efforts are working and other aspects.
In a nutshell, CRM helps manage the information that will help inform your business decisions. It affects key segments that keep your business running such as your customer service, marketing, human resources, sales and operations. In contrast, lack of clarity in your relationships with customers means you rely on your gut to make important business decisions.
A good CRM on the other hand offers real insights that can delve into specifics and help isolate issues. This in return will help you focus on issues that need tweaking. At the end of the day, customer satisfaction comes from understanding the needs of your customers. And CRM is designed to do just that.
Interview with Raj Sabhlok
Small Business Trends: What’s the greatest lesson you learned working in the corporate world that’s helped you to succeed?
Raj Sabhlok: You can only be successful if you are doing what you love.
Small Business Trends: What exciting things can we expect from Pipedrive in the next 12 months?
Raj Sabhlok: There are lots of exciting things happening over the next year. We have just launched our revamped UX and came out with new navigation that better reflects how salespeople think and work, allowing them to work faster and more efficiently in their job. Over the coming months, we will keep developing our recently launched Insights, a very sophisticated and customizable sales reports platform with interactive dashboards for tracking various sales metrics, and high-level data visualization and sharing features.
This fall will be very busy with Pipedrive. At the beginning of the fall, we will come out with various product updates that are particularly useful for remote sales. We will launch native integrations with Zoom and MS Team. Also, a full version of Sales Docs (currently in beta) will come out which automates everything related to sales documents – allowing users to create, send, manage, and digitally sign quotes, proposals, and contracts.
In September we will have our biggest product launch, which is related to leads and lead management. Our recent State of Sales study showed that 54% of salespeople struggle with prospecting. Pipedrive’s new Lead Suite will have a number of useful tools that are specifically developed to help our customers with finding high-quality leads. Probably the most interesting feature is Prospector, which will include 400 million constantly updated leads that our customers can filter by country, industry, size, or estimated revenue of the company.
Then in 2021, we will come out with a more robust marketing automation tool. A few months ago, Pipedrive acquired a marketing automation company, Mailigen, which added a lot of know-how in the area. Using their years of experience, we’re developing a tool that facilitates smooth cooperation between marketing and sales teams.
Other key areas in 2021 are a Sales Coach that helps customers to identify their success patterns, and data quality control and forecasting tools. In addition, we will come out with a new goals’ management feature and an AI-based leads assessment tool.
Small Business Trends:  What is the greatest lesson you learned at Zoho that you would like to continue as CEO in Pipedrive?
Raj Sabhlok: Being the head of the company does not mean that you have to be an expert in every field. The key to success is to gather around you people who know their area and actually love what they do. As a manager, I have always aimed to be an enabler, seeking to give people the freedom to achieve their goals, thereby getting the best out of them. This is one of the pillars of Pipedrive’s exceptional work environment and strong organizational culture. Employees have a lot of flexibility to choose what they work on and at the same time take responsibility for their deliverables. This is a very strong motivator for doing your job as well. I look forward to fostering this work environment at Pipedrive.
Small Business Trends:  Has the pandemic led to particular shifts in the market place?
Raj Sabhlok: Although the SMBs were hit the hardest by COVID-19, surprisingly for Pipedrive the drop was not as sharp as we might have expected. Fortunately, we just experienced a momentary downturn and now our business is returning to pre-crisis levels. Pipedrive reacted with agility and quickly implemented a number of measures to help our customers to survive the shock to their businesses and get through the worst months. We also started to notice a trend of new sign-ups by companies that had used ‘larger’ CRMs. Companies were reviewing and reassessing their tools and realized that Pipedrive is a powerful yet very easy to use platform with a number of features that support salespeople working remotely. All this was available for them at a lower price than they were paying before, which was a clear bonus during uncertain times.
Small Business Trends: What is Pipedrive’s current vision? How are your offerings and innovations enabling businesses to grapple with the paradigm shift?
Raj Sabhlok: Ten years ago, Pipedrive set out to raise the industry standard for CRM usability and productivity by building a tool that actually reflects how the mind of a salesperson works. Our goal has always been to make sales professionals’ lives easier and help them to sell better. We will continue expanding our product portfolio wider and include tools for other revenue-creating functions in the business. We’re also looking to go deeper into areas we’re already in, providing more sophisticated and automated sales tools to ensure our customers achieve better results even faster.
Small Business Trends: How do you feel about your current offerings and future offerings for small businesses?
Raj Sabhlok: Small and medium-sized businesses have been at the core of Pipedrive’s customer base. And, while today we can address the needs of larger sales teams, we continue to make sure that SMBs can benefit from our innovations. We’ve also tried to target our pricing as fairly as possible, building it around tiers to not lockout our smaller customers with higher prices or with features they don’t need.
Small Business Trends: The CRM sector is currently booming and cloud solutions are in demand due to the COVID pandemic. What differentiates Pipedrive from other CRM platforms?
Raj Sabhlok: We have several features that we developed especially for helping our customers adjust to remote work. However, I believe our strength lies in solving the pain points that sales professionals face, no matter what is going on in the world. Finding high-quality leads, reducing time spent on repetitive administrative tasks, closing deals faster, and improving their sales results and deal conversion rates. These are the struggles that Pipedrive aims to solve.
Small Business Trends: What areas do you see Pipedrive moving towards in order to address customers’ needs in the post-COVID-19 era?
Raj Sabhlok: As businesses go through many changes, one of the key challenges that sales professionals will definitely face during the times ahead is prospecting and finding up-to-date leads. Pipedrive’s new Lead Suite with sophisticated lead-generation features such as LeadBooster chatbot, live chat, and web forms will tackle exactly this problem and help Pipedrive users to get up-to-date and relevant leads easier and faster.
Small Business Trends: Will Pipedrive be offering CRM solutions catering to the needs of small businesses? If so how would you tell them how Pipedrive stacks against others in the market? 
Raj Sabhlok: Pipedrive has a number of characteristics that make it especially suitable for smaller companies. Being easy to set up and use is massively important as small businesses do not have the resources for multiple-day training or hiring an expert to get their CRM up and running. We also have the Pipedrive Academy, which is a great free resource with sales tips and product tutorials that also has a number of useful articles that are written for small businesses. It’s possible for everyone to contribute to the community, with thousands of sales and marketing professionals giving great advice and sharing useful experiences every day.
For small businesses, it is also extremely important to have a CRM that is easily customizable. Every sales team’s way of doing sales is different and this should also be reflected in their CRM. Pipedrive is highly customizable, allowing each small business to create sales pipeline stages, filters, automation, and dashboards that are relevant to them. Additionally, Pipedrive’s integrations mean it can work with more than 200 other popular tools, allowing small businesses to use the tools they need and prefer.
Small Business Trends: What do you see the Pipedrive’s experience looking like in five years?
Raj Sabhlok: In short, Pipedrive will be a broad offering that does many ‘jobs’ for small businesses, from sales to marketing and beyond. All of our solutions will continue to have the ‘Pipedrive magic’ which means that our offerings will deliver instant value to customers. Finally, while pretty UIs will continue to be important, automation will be paramount and be at the core of our offering in the future.
Image: pipedrive.com
This article, “Pipedrive Unveils New Leadership, Redesign and New Solutions to Coincide with 10th Anniversary” was first published on Small Business Trends
source https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/08/pipedrive-unveils-new-user-experience-ceo.html
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farotechinboundmarketing · 7 years ago
Text
Top 3 Benefits of CRM Implementation for Sales Lead Nurturing
Sales Solutions for the Digital Age
In order to understand how to build successful relationships with your customers or potential customers, we must first understand how to manage a customer relationship effectively through sales lead nurturing.
Thanks to a few brilliant minds and digitally-savvy tech folks, the birth of the “Customer Relationship Management” software, also know as CRM, busted out into mainstream business and attracted a plethora of sales people looking for an organized, analytical based solution.
Thanks to founding CRM father, Tom Siebel, small to large businesses can maximize their customer relationships, and ultimately increase sales, with tools that allow its users to track the movements of potential customers, identify key stages in the sales funnels, and send customized marketing materials to each and every prospect.
If your business relies heavily on generating web-based leads and sales, you may benefit immensely from the structure and organization that a CRM tool can offer. Whether you are looking into the possibility of implementing a new system or you already use a CRM solution, we’d like to offer you a few tips on how to really get the most out of your software so that it will benefit your lead nurturing efforts.
After all, the entire goal of a CRM program is to build your business and increase your profits through the proper management of your client relationships, right?
Effectively Using Your CRM Software
1. First, Let’s Get Organized! Regardless of the size or type of your organization, we know that it can be a daunting task to try to track all incoming leads and systematize a plan to properly follow-up. But as tough as it may be to stay organized, the success of your business depends on your sales team’s ability track leads and follow-up with unique marketing collateral.
A quality CRM solution can solve the issue of organization once and for all. If used properly, CRM software will vastly improve the efficiency and productivity of your sales team by tracking incoming leads, following your prospects engagement with your website and/or emails, and reminding your sales team of when to follow-up.
So how do you rate a CRM on its’ ability to keep your sales team organized? Look for the following features:
The ability to set tasks or reminders on when to follow-up with a prospect.
The CRM effectively integrates with your website and/or email marketing to track your prospects movements.
The capability to email or call your prospects directly from the software.
A function that allows you to manually enter notes about each prospect and any interactions you or your sales team has had.
2. Now, Build A Customer-Centric Sales Process You know that running a good business really comes down to having good people skills and taking the time to build meaningful relationships.
Your products and services may be the best in the world, but if your clients and potential clients do not feel valued and respected by your company, chances are you’ll lose their business. A good CRM system will allow you to organize particular data about each customer and in doing so, develop a custom plan for communicating with them in a meaningful way. When your team becomes experts at offering clients a truly personalized experience, your sales will go through the roof. But relationship building takes time. A CRM can help make that effort a little easier for you. And the time spent will be well worth it!
The communication you initiate will:
Work your potentials through the sales process using tailored marketing techniques
Build trust and rapport with your brand by ensuring each experience is unique and valuable
Generate increased referrals because the sales process was painless (and isn’t that every customers dream)
Facilitate constant customer interaction with your company and interactions that are worth your prospect’s time
3. Finally, Evaluate the CRM As mentioned earlier, the primary goal of any CRM software is ultimately to help you increase sales and build your business. A CRM that is properly used will help you pinpoint exact areas of increased ROI potential because it allows you to determine (with the simple click of a mouse) which specific products or campaigns are most successful.
What better way to boost your overall efficiency and truly concentrate your sales lead nurturing efforts?
Because this systematic process should undoubtedly lead to growth in your business, we recommend looking for CRM software that is built with scalability and flexibility in mind so that the system can accommodate your growing business!
CRM Recommendations from the Pro’s
Below you will find a list of valuable CRM features and CRM’s we recommend:
Tracking Leads – This should include everything from list management to measuring your prospects’ engagement. We prefer HubSpot’s interface when it comes to contact management and tracking your prospects every interaction. Their features include lead scoring, task creation, email marketing, landing page/form creation and more.
Sales Automation – This should include everything from sales reminders to automated emails. Your sales team should invest their time where it matters, so having automated emails set-up to easily send to a potential customers, allows your sales people to get on the phone or even grab some much needed face time. HubSpot’s CRM has a fantastic integration called Sidekick that allows users to send automated, canned emails to their prospects and see if the prospect even opened them.
Deal Forecasting – This should allow your sales people to set up deal stages, track campaigns, forecast deal amounts and monitor where each prospect is in your pipeline. Pipedrive has some great functionality when it comes to tracking your sales pipeline.
Every CRM has different features and functionality and in order to find the one that fits your organization’s needs, you have to do some research. Thankfully, Capterra has done this work for you and also has a list of reviews for you to sort through.
Action Items & Takeaways:
Do Your Research! There are a ton of CRMs in the marketplace, but finding one that fits ALL of your organization’s needs is just as important as hiring a new sales rep.
Invest in Training! We see this all the time and it is so frustrating. A business buys CRM software, invests thousands of dollars, and only uses 10% of its capabilities. Most software companies offer some training (for an additional cost or even for free), and the expense is worth the results. At Farotech, we are well-versed in HubSpot’s CRM and have helped several of our clients set up and effectively use their CRM to track and nurture leads. We don’t advertise this, but if you need help in setting up or using your CRM, give us a call!
Evaluate Your Sales Process! Your CRM is only effective when you fully understand your sales process. What questions are you asking to better understand your customers and the information they need in each stage? For example, what information should an email have versus a downloadable eBook? Fully understanding each stage in the sales process is key to defining what collateral you need and where to support your sales team. We have plenty experience evaluating the sales process. Why? Because it is crucial to developing robust marketing campaigns.
If you have more questions about how to effectively use your CRM or want to learn more, contact us today!
The post Top 3 Benefits of CRM Implementation for Sales Lead Nurturing appeared first on Farotech.
from Inbound Marketing – Farotech https://farotech.com/blog/top-3-benefits-crm-implementation-for-sales-lead-nurturing/
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daniel1244martinez · 7 years ago
Text
CRM Software market Size and Prediction by Leading Manufacturers according to its Application and Types till 2022
This report is a Detailed analysis, which Provide thorough knowledge along with complete details of Global CRM Software Market. The research experts have examine the general sales of Global CRM Software Market and its revenue generation. Furthermore, it gives complete study of root market trends and many governing elements along with improvements in the market in every segment.
CRM Software Market Scenario:
Global CRM Software Market outlook provides information to the user to analyze the future based demand and predicts the accurate implementations. The Global CRM Software Market Report contains data that is collected from various primary and secondary resources. The data collected was validated from the industry analyst which makes the document a useful resource for managers, analysts, industry experts and other to get access and self-analyzed the study which helps to understand market trends, applications, specifications and market challenges.
Go For Sample Copy of Global CRM Software Market Report @ https://www.reportsmonitor.com/request-sample/?post=324823 
CRM Software Market by Companies: Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, Zoho, Hubspot, Act, Maximizer, Sage, Infusionsoft, Pipedrive, Apptivo, Salesboom, Base and Many More.
Product Type Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Major Company of Product Type etc.): Strategic CRM, Operational CRM, Analytical CRM.
Application Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Different Demand Market by Region, Main Consumer Profile etc.): Small Business, Enterprise Business (for Large Enterprises).
Key Highlights of the CRM Software Market:
– Key methods of major players
– Assessment of niche business developments
– Emerging segments and regional markets
– Full in-depth analysis of the parent market
– Important changes in market dynamics
– Segmentation details of the market
– Market share analysis
– Former, on-going, and projected marketing research in terms of volume and price
– Testimonials to companies therefore on fortify their foothold among the market.
By Regions, CRM Software Market report covers:
-United States
-EU
-Japan
-China
-India
-Southeast Asia.
Have any special requirement on above CRM Software market report? Ask to our Industry Expert @ https://www.reportsmonitor.com/make-enquiry/?post=324823 
The next part also sheds light on the gap between supply and consumption. Apart from the mentioned information, growth rate of CRM Software market in 2022 is also explained. Additionally, type wise and application wise consumption tables and figures of CRM Software market are also given.
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sualkmedeiors · 7 years ago
Text
How to Generate Leads with Webinars
Any marketing and sales professional knows that most buyers don’t make a purchase decision right away. As WebAttract co-founder Mike Agron puts it: “77% or more of today’s B2B buyers will research you before they even want to speak with you. In B2B, most people are on a journey to get more educated.” There is no better way to educate leads on your value proposition than webinars. They provide huge amounts of value to your audience, all while positioning you as an authority. You can demonstrate that you’re the right person to help them.
The problem is: Many marketers create webinars that deliver little value. Worse, they don’t know how to create webinars that turn leads into ready-to-buy opportunities.
In this blog, I will outline the formula that successful brands use to turn leads into sales with webinars.
How to Choose a Topic that Draws an Audience
Webinars have become so common that there’s a lot of noise around the format. To cut through this noise, you must choose a killer topic.
This means discovering the challenges people in your audience are trying to overcome. Picking topics can no longer come from an internal brainstorm alone. The main objective of webinars is usually to convert leads into sales. Therefore, when brainstorming a topic, you should get your sales team involved from the beginning.
To find topic ideas, ask yourselves:
What are the most common questions that prospects ask?
What would we enjoy teaching?
What are we most knowledgeable in?
Which area could we deliver the most value in 60 minutes?
The topic you pick can be broad, diving into several subtopics. Or you can go deep and talk about a specific topic in a granular fashion. Your approach will depend on the nature of your offering.
To find specific topics for your webinar, start with a broad topic and brainstorm subtopics. For example, if Pipedrive were going to talk about sales challenges, here’s what a brainstorming session might look like:
You should also look outside of your organization to get an educated direction of which topic to choose.
Four sources of topic information you can go for:
Current customers
Most engaged leads
Email surveys
Data from your own content
Your best customers already understand the problem you solve. They “get” your proposition and understand your industry. Ask them what challenges your solution helped them to overcome, and why they decided to do business with you in the first place.
Your most engaged leads are those who are consuming your content on a regular basis. They’re engaged, but they need nudging into the sales cycle. Ask them what challenges they’re trying to overcome and what they’d like to learn more about. Find out which topics would get them to attend a webinar.
Setting up a survey campaign can yield quantitative data from your entire list of leads and subscribers. Ask them multiple-choice questions, as well as one or two open-ended questions where they can add nuance or express their opinions in more detail.
In this great example from Udemy Fast Track, their founder, Scott Britton asks for only necessary information:
Your own data can provide great topic insights. What are your top-performing blog posts and most downloaded ebooks? Your most popular content can be sure-fire hits for webinars.
Choosing the Right Webinar Format
Now that you have a topic, you need to decide your webinar’s format. There are plenty to choose from. Our favorites:
Case studies
Prospects want to know how their peers overcame the same challenges they face. They want to know what was implemented and the results they generated. Therefore, case studies are the best way to convince and persuade before beginning the sales process. Customer stories like these add credibility. Getting a client to share their experiences on a webinar proves that they’re advocates and excited about the results you bring them. Your attendees will empathize with the journey.
One of WebAttract’s clients wanted to show how their target audience, automobile dealerships, could increase their sales. Instead of talking about the topic, they got one of their customers to tell the story instead. By targeting a pain point and introducing a customer case study, they attracted more than 600 decision makers to the webinar. They collected more than 180 leads that wanted more info and closed 30 deals. If you haven’t created case study content, webinars are a great way to get started. You can repurpose the webinar into a blog post, making for great sales enablement content.
Expert panel discussions
With Pipedrive, we collaborated on webinars with companies like PandaDoc and Sales Hacker. This form of marketing brings credibility from outside sources. If all you have is internal experts, your webinar will look like a sales pitch. Collaboration also adds a new perspective to your webinars.
Check out this webinar by Pipedrive and Sales Hacker to see this in action:
The best part, however, is the expanded audience you’ll tap into. It’s a win-win scenario for you and the brand you collaborate with. You both get access to a new source of leads, borrowing and boosting each other’s authority.
Don’t underestimate the power of thought leaders. Influencer marketing can be difficult. But if you can build relationships with one or two industry leaders and conduct a webinar with them, the results can be outstanding.
Education, tutorials and product demos
This format works great if you have a freemium version of your product or a technical solution that requires some explanation.
Pipedrive uses product tutorial webinars to empower users to educate themselves on the CRM software. They help us to retain and onboard new customers in a scalable manner.
BuzzSumo has a similar approach, conducting regular webinars to help users get the most out of their software. They also run them whenever a new feature goes live. This helps boost retention and reduce churn. Your webinar’s format will depend on the topic you choose. You should also be careful to map the topic and format to the right stage of your funnel and sales cycle. As mentioned above, product demos are only useful for those using (or ready to use) your product.
How to Keep Your Audience Engaged
Getting registrations to attend your webinar can be challenging. Encouraging them to stick around to the end is even harder. Not every attendee will turn into a sale. But you can deliver enough value for them to remember you and become raving fans of your content.
1. Hook them with storytelling
All great content has a compelling hook. It’s no different with webinars. Begin your webinar with a story. Create a narrative the leads into the value that you’re about to deliver. Are you skeptical about the power of storytelling? Alex Turnbull of Groove A/B tested two different versions of his blog post. One that began with a story, and one that dove straight into the content.
The post with the story had 300% more people finish the entire post and average time on page was five times higher than the version without the story. Storytelling works with every form of content especially webinars.
2. Get your audience involved
You may have lots of energy and a voice as smooth as butter. But nobody likes being talked at for an hour. To get the audience involved, try breaking the webinar up with short Q&A sessions. Take two or three questions after you’ve covered a specific topic. Seek a moderator’s help to pick these questions to keep things running smoothly.
Better yet, get your audience to interact with each other using a chat box. Multiple-choice polls can add an extra layer of interactivity to keep your audience engaged while learning more about their interests.
3. Make it visual
Even marketers with little design skills can create great-looking content. Tools like Canva make it easy, so there’s no excuse to use boring webinar slides anymore:
According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners. Therefore, your slides should be light on text. Walls of text are intimidating and won’t reinforce what you’re trying to teach. Create slides that contain fewer words and strong visuals. Inject some humor using GIFs where it’s relevant. Use graphs and screenshots to back up your points.
4. Use third-party data
With the right Google search, you can find statistics on virtually any topic. Use this data to back up the information you provide in your webinars. Using data from recognized third-party sources lends credibility and authority to your content. Backing up your content with statistics will inspire trust.
But don’t overdo it. Use one or two key data points that you want your audience to remember throughout the webinar.
Creating the Webinar Content
Now you have a topic and understand the format your webinar must be in—it’s time to create the content. As we’ve already covered, your webinar needs to be visually engaging. Use a tool such as Canva or recruit the help of a designer.
Outline and script
Before writing a script, create an outline of what you will cover. This will dictate the flow of the webinar, so make sure the order makes sense.
An example outline might look like this:
Brief introduction (30 seconds is fine)
Storytime—hook the audience in
Three to five subtopics to deliver value
Call to action
Q&A
Then it’s time to write your script. Get everything you want to talk about on paper. However, don’t write out what you’ll say word-for-word. This will sound scripted and robotic. Instead, write down short bullet points of what you want to cover under each sub-section, which will allow you to sound natural while staying on track.
Offer and call to action
The ultimate goal of your webinar is to sell. So, part of your webinar should be reserved for your pitch:
Depending on your audience, as well as your product or service, your pitch may be as short as a ‘quick plug,’ but should be no longer than five to 10 minutes—and even then, you must offer value. The majority of your webinar should be dedicated to educational content.
Of course, reciprocation is essential to developing strong relationships, so create an offer that’s exclusive to your webinar attendees to thank them for their time and attention.
This can come in several forms:
Discount on your product/service
Extended trial of software
Your offer + webinar exclusive bonuses
Make the offer time sensitive to create a sense of urgency to take action. In some webinars, I’ve seen people offer bonuses for those who act within an hour of the webinar’s end time. Find an offer that’s right for your business and your audience, as well as any collaborators with whom you conduct the webinar.
How to Promote Your Webinar
Like every aspect of content marketing, creating your webinar content is only half the battle. The other half is promoting the webinar itself.
Now I’ll cover how to get people registering and attending your webinar in droves.
Setting up a landing page
You’ll need a landing page to drive traffic and convert registrations. Include a form that asks for a name and email address. From our experience, extra fields result in losing 5% of your prospects per field. Running A/B tests will help you to optimize messaging, and ultimately, to maximize conversions. There may not be sufficient data to get great results the first time around, and you won’t know your typical audience until you have a few webinars under your belt. But you can optimize the messaging for future webinars.
Check out this example from Unbounce for inspiration:
Your webinar should include:
Title: An impactful summary of the value your webinar offers to potential listeners. This is what will hook your audience in, and is considered the most important factor as you promote your webinar.
Bios: Include information on the presenters so your attendees know who they are and why it’s worth listening to.
Topic: Provide a brief explanation of the topic, including what they’ll learn by attending.
Value: Use a “Key takeaways” or “You’ll learn” section to be clear about why they should attend. And if you are targeting a discrete type of listener, be specific—“Executives will learn…”, “Marketers will learn…”, and so on. The point is: What will the webinar empower them to do after they leave?
Time: Make the time and date of the webinar clear and even add an auto-scheduler so attendees can easily add it to their calendars.
Accessibility: Inform your potential listener how they can join the webinar, including any links, with concise instructions.
Tools like Unbounce and Leadpages come with webinar registration pages out of the box. Both solutions have powerful features that integrate with all major email marketing and webinar platforms.
Creating your email sequence
When acquiring signups for your webinar, it’s key to have an intelligent email marketing sequence set up before a single email goes out. The majority of signups will come from your list of leads, as well as those of whomever you partner with. Sharing lists can be one of the biggest benefits of collaborating with other brands, but you need to make sure that you have clear guidelines and opt-in consent from your audience. Best practice typically includes sending two to three registration emails that direct your audience(s) to your landing page. (A quick note about best practices: Always test them!)
Here’s an example from Teachable’s registration mail about choosing course topics:
You’ll also need reminder emails should include date and time, agenda, information on the speakers, and a way to get in touch. Having this information will help registrants attend, allow you to jump straight into the story once you go live, and let them know they can still get the value of the webinar should they have to miss the live event. Depending on time, you should send two at least 24 hours and one hour before the webinar goes live. Go one step further by sending value-added emails in the days leading up to the webinar, where the webinar is advertised subtly alongside relevant or appealing content.
Finally, send out follow-up emails thanking attendees and drawing them to your call to action. Include links to any resources mentioned in the webinar and remind them of the deadline you set for your offer. You will likely need a few versions of each follow-up email—for example, you should avoid email copy that says, “Thank you for attending,” to non-attending—and should segment your email list into at least these two segments.
How to Generate Registrations
Beyond your email lists, there are other channels to source webinar signups. First and most obvious, make it visible on all of your owned media channels. This includes pinned social media posts as well as your homepage.
Here’s a good example of this in action from BuzzSumo:
Use your company blog to talk about the topics your webinar covers. Write about the topic in broad strokes. Tease the webinar as the place they can learn more. Make sure to include a call to action at the end of the post, driving traffic to your landing page. (You can include links to relevant blog content in your pre-webinar and post-webinar emails). Consider promoting these blogs using content amplification or use paid advertising, such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook Ads. Target long-tail keywords using AdWords to keep your cost-per-click low. And never underestimate the power of timing. Day of the week and time of day can have a huge impact on not only signups but actual attendees, especially if you’re targeting audiences in one or more time zones.
Conclusion
Webinars have proven to be a successful driver of leads and sales. I expect the number of brands conducting webinars is going to increase in the years to come. Be sure to pick a topic that people will find hard to ignore. This is what will differentiate you from your competition this year and beyond. Not only that, but you must always offer and deliver educational or business value at the same time. Make sure your audience goes away armed and ready with the knowledge and tools they need to act on your advice.
What are your experiences with webinars? What successes and lessons have you learned? Share your story in the comments below.
The post How to Generate Leads with Webinars appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
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zacdhaenkeau · 7 years ago
Text
How to Generate Leads with Webinars
Any marketing and sales professional knows that most buyers don’t make a purchase decision right away. As WebAttract co-founder Mike Agron puts it: “77% or more of today’s B2B buyers will research you before they even want to speak with you. In B2B, most people are on a journey to get more educated.” There is no better way to educate leads on your value proposition than webinars. They provide huge amounts of value to your audience, all while positioning you as an authority. You can demonstrate that you’re the right person to help them.
The problem is: Many marketers create webinars that deliver little value. Worse, they don’t know how to create webinars that turn leads into ready-to-buy opportunities.
In this blog, I will outline the formula that successful brands use to turn leads into sales with webinars.
How to Choose a Topic that Draws an Audience
Webinars have become so common that there’s a lot of noise around the format. To cut through this noise, you must choose a killer topic.
This means discovering the challenges people in your audience are trying to overcome. Picking topics can no longer come from an internal brainstorm alone. The main objective of webinars is usually to convert leads into sales. Therefore, when brainstorming a topic, you should get your sales team involved from the beginning.
To find topic ideas, ask yourselves:
What are the most common questions that prospects ask?
What would we enjoy teaching?
What are we most knowledgeable in?
Which area could we deliver the most value in 60 minutes?
The topic you pick can be broad, diving into several subtopics. Or you can go deep and talk about a specific topic in a granular fashion. Your approach will depend on the nature of your offering.
To find specific topics for your webinar, start with a broad topic and brainstorm subtopics. For example, if Pipedrive were going to talk about sales challenges, here’s what a brainstorming session might look like:
You should also look outside of your organization to get an educated direction of which topic to choose.
Four sources of topic information you can go for:
Current customers
Most engaged leads
Email surveys
Data from your own content
Your best customers already understand the problem you solve. They “get” your proposition and understand your industry. Ask them what challenges your solution helped them to overcome, and why they decided to do business with you in the first place.
Your most engaged leads are those who are consuming your content on a regular basis. They’re engaged, but they need nudging into the sales cycle. Ask them what challenges they’re trying to overcome and what they’d like to learn more about. Find out which topics would get them to attend a webinar.
Setting up a survey campaign can yield quantitative data from your entire list of leads and subscribers. Ask them multiple-choice questions, as well as one or two open-ended questions where they can add nuance or express their opinions in more detail.
In this great example from Udemy Fast Track, their founder, Scott Britton asks for only necessary information:
Your own data can provide great topic insights. What are your top-performing blog posts and most downloaded ebooks? Your most popular content can be sure-fire hits for webinars.
Choosing the Right Webinar Format
Now that you have a topic, you need to decide your webinar’s format. There are plenty to choose from. Our favorites:
Case studies
Prospects want to know how their peers overcame the same challenges they face. They want to know what was implemented and the results they generated. Therefore, case studies are the best way to convince and persuade before beginning the sales process. Customer stories like these add credibility. Getting a client to share their experiences on a webinar proves that they’re advocates and excited about the results you bring them. Your attendees will empathize with the journey.
One of WebAttract’s clients wanted to show how their target audience, automobile dealerships, could increase their sales. Instead of talking about the topic, they got one of their customers to tell the story instead. By targeting a pain point and introducing a customer case study, they attracted more than 600 decision makers to the webinar. They collected more than 180 leads that wanted more info and closed 30 deals. If you haven’t created case study content, webinars are a great way to get started. You can repurpose the webinar into a blog post, making for great sales enablement content.
Expert panel discussions
With Pipedrive, we collaborated on webinars with companies like PandaDoc and Sales Hacker. This form of marketing brings credibility from outside sources. If all you have is internal experts, your webinar will look like a sales pitch. Collaboration also adds a new perspective to your webinars.
Check out this webinar by Pipedrive and Sales Hacker to see this in action:
The best part, however, is the expanded audience you’ll tap into. It’s a win-win scenario for you and the brand you collaborate with. You both get access to a new source of leads, borrowing and boosting each other’s authority.
Don’t underestimate the power of thought leaders. Influencer marketing can be difficult. But if you can build relationships with one or two industry leaders and conduct a webinar with them, the results can be outstanding.
Education, tutorials and product demos
This format works great if you have a freemium version of your product or a technical solution that requires some explanation.
Pipedrive uses product tutorial webinars to empower users to educate themselves on the CRM software. They help us to retain and onboard new customers in a scalable manner.
BuzzSumo has a similar approach, conducting regular webinars to help users get the most out of their software. They also run them whenever a new feature goes live. This helps boost retention and reduce churn. Your webinar’s format will depend on the topic you choose. You should also be careful to map the topic and format to the right stage of your funnel and sales cycle. As mentioned above, product demos are only useful for those using (or ready to use) your product.
How to Keep Your Audience Engaged
Getting registrations to attend your webinar can be challenging. Encouraging them to stick around to the end is even harder. Not every attendee will turn into a sale. But you can deliver enough value for them to remember you and become raving fans of your content.
1. Hook them with storytelling
All great content has a compelling hook. It’s no different with webinars. Begin your webinar with a story. Create a narrative the leads into the value that you’re about to deliver. Are you skeptical about the power of storytelling? Alex Turnbull of Groove A/B tested two different versions of his blog post. One that began with a story, and one that dove straight into the content.
The post with the story had 300% more people finish the entire post and average time on page was five times higher than the version without the story. Storytelling works with every form of content especially webinars.
2. Get your audience involved
You may have lots of energy and a voice as smooth as butter. But nobody likes being talked at for an hour. To get the audience involved, try breaking the webinar up with short Q&A sessions. Take two or three questions after you’ve covered a specific topic. Seek a moderator’s help to pick these questions to keep things running smoothly.
Better yet, get your audience to interact with each other using a chat box. Multiple-choice polls can add an extra layer of interactivity to keep your audience engaged while learning more about their interests.
3. Make it visual
Even marketers with little design skills can create great-looking content. Tools like Canva make it easy, so there’s no excuse to use boring webinar slides anymore:
According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners. Therefore, your slides should be light on text. Walls of text are intimidating and won’t reinforce what you’re trying to teach. Create slides that contain fewer words and strong visuals. Inject some humor using GIFs where it’s relevant. Use graphs and screenshots to back up your points.
4. Use third-party data
With the right Google search, you can find statistics on virtually any topic. Use this data to back up the information you provide in your webinars. Using data from recognized third-party sources lends credibility and authority to your content. Backing up your content with statistics will inspire trust.
But don’t overdo it. Use one or two key data points that you want your audience to remember throughout the webinar.
Creating the Webinar Content
Now you have a topic and understand the format your webinar must be in—it’s time to create the content. As we’ve already covered, your webinar needs to be visually engaging. Use a tool such as Canva or recruit the help of a designer.
Outline and script
Before writing a script, create an outline of what you will cover. This will dictate the flow of the webinar, so make sure the order makes sense.
An example outline might look like this:
Brief introduction (30 seconds is fine)
Storytime—hook the audience in
Three to five subtopics to deliver value
Call to action
Q&A
Then it’s time to write your script. Get everything you want to talk about on paper. However, don’t write out what you’ll say word-for-word. This will sound scripted and robotic. Instead, write down short bullet points of what you want to cover under each sub-section, which will allow you to sound natural while staying on track.
Offer and call to action
The ultimate goal of your webinar is to sell. So, part of your webinar should be reserved for your pitch:
Depending on your audience, as well as your product or service, your pitch may be as short as a ‘quick plug,’ but should be no longer than five to 10 minutes—and even then, you must offer value. The majority of your webinar should be dedicated to educational content.
Of course, reciprocation is essential to developing strong relationships, so create an offer that’s exclusive to your webinar attendees to thank them for their time and attention.
This can come in several forms:
Discount on your product/service
Extended trial of software
Your offer + webinar exclusive bonuses
Make the offer time sensitive to create a sense of urgency to take action. In some webinars, I’ve seen people offer bonuses for those who act within an hour of the webinar’s end time. Find an offer that’s right for your business and your audience, as well as any collaborators with whom you conduct the webinar.
How to Promote Your Webinar
Like every aspect of content marketing, creating your webinar content is only half the battle. The other half is promoting the webinar itself.
Now I’ll cover how to get people registering and attending your webinar in droves.
Setting up a landing page
You’ll need a landing page to drive traffic and convert registrations. Include a form that asks for a name and email address. From our experience, extra fields result in losing 5% of your prospects per field. Running A/B tests will help you to optimize messaging, and ultimately, to maximize conversions. There may not be sufficient data to get great results the first time around, and you won’t know your typical audience until you have a few webinars under your belt. But you can optimize the messaging for future webinars.
Check out this example from Unbounce for inspiration:
Your webinar should include:
Title: An impactful summary of the value your webinar offers to potential listeners. This is what will hook your audience in, and is considered the most important factor as you promote your webinar.
Bios: Include information on the presenters so your attendees know who they are and why it’s worth listening to.
Topic: Provide a brief explanation of the topic, including what they’ll learn by attending.
Value: Use a “Key takeaways” or “You’ll learn” section to be clear about why they should attend. And if you are targeting a discrete type of listener, be specific—“Executives will learn…”, “Marketers will learn…”, and so on. The point is: What will the webinar empower them to do after they leave?
Time: Make the time and date of the webinar clear and even add an auto-scheduler so attendees can easily add it to their calendars.
Accessibility: Inform your potential listener how they can join the webinar, including any links, with concise instructions.
Tools like Unbounce and Leadpages come with webinar registration pages out of the box. Both solutions have powerful features that integrate with all major email marketing and webinar platforms.
Creating your email sequence
When acquiring signups for your webinar, it’s key to have an intelligent email marketing sequence set up before a single email goes out. The majority of signups will come from your list of leads, as well as those of whomever you partner with. Sharing lists can be one of the biggest benefits of collaborating with other brands, but you need to make sure that you have clear guidelines and opt-in consent from your audience. Best practice typically includes sending two to three registration emails that direct your audience(s) to your landing page. (A quick note about best practices: Always test them!)
Here’s an example from Teachable’s registration mail about choosing course topics:
You’ll also need reminder emails should include date and time, agenda, information on the speakers, and a way to get in touch. Having this information will help registrants attend, allow you to jump straight into the story once you go live, and let them know they can still get the value of the webinar should they have to miss the live event. Depending on time, you should send two at least 24 hours and one hour before the webinar goes live. Go one step further by sending value-added emails in the days leading up to the webinar, where the webinar is advertised subtly alongside relevant or appealing content.
Finally, send out follow-up emails thanking attendees and drawing them to your call to action. Include links to any resources mentioned in the webinar and remind them of the deadline you set for your offer. You will likely need a few versions of each follow-up email—for example, you should avoid email copy that says, “Thank you for attending,” to non-attending—and should segment your email list into at least these two segments.
How to Generate Registrations
Beyond your email lists, there are other channels to source webinar signups. First and most obvious, make it visible on all of your owned media channels. This includes pinned social media posts as well as your homepage.
Here’s a good example of this in action from BuzzSumo:
Use your company blog to talk about the topics your webinar covers. Write about the topic in broad strokes. Tease the webinar as the place they can learn more. Make sure to include a call to action at the end of the post, driving traffic to your landing page. (You can include links to relevant blog content in your pre-webinar and post-webinar emails). Consider promoting these blogs using content amplification or use paid advertising, such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook Ads. Target long-tail keywords using AdWords to keep your cost-per-click low. And never underestimate the power of timing. Day of the week and time of day can have a huge impact on not only signups but actual attendees, especially if you’re targeting audiences in one or more time zones.
Conclusion
Webinars have proven to be a successful driver of leads and sales. I expect the number of brands conducting webinars is going to increase in the years to come. Be sure to pick a topic that people will find hard to ignore. This is what will differentiate you from your competition this year and beyond. Not only that, but you must always offer and deliver educational or business value at the same time. Make sure your audience goes away armed and ready with the knowledge and tools they need to act on your advice.
What are your experiences with webinars? What successes and lessons have you learned? Share your story in the comments below.
The post How to Generate Leads with Webinars appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 https://blog.marketo.com/2018/01/generate-leads-webinars.html
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archiebwoollard · 7 years ago
Text
How to Generate Leads with Webinars
Any marketing and sales professional knows that most buyers don’t make a purchase decision right away. As WebAttract co-founder Mike Agron puts it: “77% or more of today’s B2B buyers will research you before they even want to speak with you. In B2B, most people are on a journey to get more educated.” There is no better way to educate leads on your value proposition than webinars. They provide huge amounts of value to your audience, all while positioning you as an authority. You can demonstrate that you’re the right person to help them.
The problem is: Many marketers create webinars that deliver little value. Worse, they don’t know how to create webinars that turn leads into ready-to-buy opportunities.
In this blog, I will outline the formula that successful brands use to turn leads into sales with webinars.
How to Choose a Topic that Draws an Audience
Webinars have become so common that there’s a lot of noise around the format. To cut through this noise, you must choose a killer topic.
This means discovering the challenges people in your audience are trying to overcome. Picking topics can no longer come from an internal brainstorm alone. The main objective of webinars is usually to convert leads into sales. Therefore, when brainstorming a topic, you should get your sales team involved from the beginning.
To find topic ideas, ask yourselves:
What are the most common questions that prospects ask?
What would we enjoy teaching?
What are we most knowledgeable in?
Which area could we deliver the most value in 60 minutes?
The topic you pick can be broad, diving into several subtopics. Or you can go deep and talk about a specific topic in a granular fashion. Your approach will depend on the nature of your offering.
To find specific topics for your webinar, start with a broad topic and brainstorm subtopics. For example, if Pipedrive were going to talk about sales challenges, here’s what a brainstorming session might look like:
You should also look outside of your organization to get an educated direction of which topic to choose.
Four sources of topic information you can go for:
Current customers
Most engaged leads
Email surveys
Data from your own content
Your best customers already understand the problem you solve. They “get” your proposition and understand your industry. Ask them what challenges your solution helped them to overcome, and why they decided to do business with you in the first place.
Your most engaged leads are those who are consuming your content on a regular basis. They’re engaged, but they need nudging into the sales cycle. Ask them what challenges they’re trying to overcome and what they’d like to learn more about. Find out which topics would get them to attend a webinar.
Setting up a survey campaign can yield quantitative data from your entire list of leads and subscribers. Ask them multiple-choice questions, as well as one or two open-ended questions where they can add nuance or express their opinions in more detail.
In this great example from Udemy Fast Track, their founder, Scott Britton asks for only necessary information:
Your own data can provide great topic insights. What are your top-performing blog posts and most downloaded ebooks? Your most popular content can be sure-fire hits for webinars.
Choosing the Right Webinar Format
Now that you have a topic, you need to decide your webinar’s format. There are plenty to choose from. Our favorites:
Case studies
Prospects want to know how their peers overcame the same challenges they face. They want to know what was implemented and the results they generated. Therefore, case studies are the best way to convince and persuade before beginning the sales process. Customer stories like these add credibility. Getting a client to share their experiences on a webinar proves that they’re advocates and excited about the results you bring them. Your attendees will empathize with the journey.
One of WebAttract’s clients wanted to show how their target audience, automobile dealerships, could increase their sales. Instead of talking about the topic, they got one of their customers to tell the story instead. By targeting a pain point and introducing a customer case study, they attracted more than 600 decision makers to the webinar. They collected more than 180 leads that wanted more info and closed 30 deals. If you haven’t created case study content, webinars are a great way to get started. You can repurpose the webinar into a blog post, making for great sales enablement content.
Expert panel discussions
With Pipedrive, we collaborated on webinars with companies like PandaDoc and Sales Hacker. This form of marketing brings credibility from outside sources. If all you have is internal experts, your webinar will look like a sales pitch. Collaboration also adds a new perspective to your webinars.
Check out this webinar by Pipedrive and Sales Hacker to see this in action:
The best part, however, is the expanded audience you’ll tap into. It’s a win-win scenario for you and the brand you collaborate with. You both get access to a new source of leads, borrowing and boosting each other’s authority.
Don’t underestimate the power of thought leaders. Influencer marketing can be difficult. But if you can build relationships with one or two industry leaders and conduct a webinar with them, the results can be outstanding.
Education, tutorials and product demos
This format works great if you have a freemium version of your product or a technical solution that requires some explanation.
Pipedrive uses product tutorial webinars to empower users to educate themselves on the CRM software. They help us to retain and onboard new customers in a scalable manner.
BuzzSumo has a similar approach, conducting regular webinars to help users get the most out of their software. They also run them whenever a new feature goes live. This helps boost retention and reduce churn. Your webinar’s format will depend on the topic you choose. You should also be careful to map the topic and format to the right stage of your funnel and sales cycle. As mentioned above, product demos are only useful for those using (or ready to use) your product.
How to Keep Your Audience Engaged
Getting registrations to attend your webinar can be challenging. Encouraging them to stick around to the end is even harder. Not every attendee will turn into a sale. But you can deliver enough value for them to remember you and become raving fans of your content.
1. Hook them with storytelling
All great content has a compelling hook. It’s no different with webinars. Begin your webinar with a story. Create a narrative the leads into the value that you’re about to deliver. Are you skeptical about the power of storytelling? Alex Turnbull of Groove A/B tested two different versions of his blog post. One that began with a story, and one that dove straight into the content.
The post with the story had 300% more people finish the entire post and average time on page was five times higher than the version without the story. Storytelling works with every form of content especially webinars.
2. Get your audience involved
You may have lots of energy and a voice as smooth as butter. But nobody likes being talked at for an hour. To get the audience involved, try breaking the webinar up with short Q&A sessions. Take two or three questions after you’ve covered a specific topic. Seek a moderator’s help to pick these questions to keep things running smoothly.
Better yet, get your audience to interact with each other using a chat box. Multiple-choice polls can add an extra layer of interactivity to keep your audience engaged while learning more about their interests.
3. Make it visual
Even marketers with little design skills can create great-looking content. Tools like Canva make it easy, so there’s no excuse to use boring webinar slides anymore:
According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners. Therefore, your slides should be light on text. Walls of text are intimidating and won’t reinforce what you’re trying to teach. Create slides that contain fewer words and strong visuals. Inject some humor using GIFs where it’s relevant. Use graphs and screenshots to back up your points.
4. Use third-party data
With the right Google search, you can find statistics on virtually any topic. Use this data to back up the information you provide in your webinars. Using data from recognized third-party sources lends credibility and authority to your content. Backing up your content with statistics will inspire trust.
But don’t overdo it. Use one or two key data points that you want your audience to remember throughout the webinar.
Creating the Webinar Content
Now you have a topic and understand the format your webinar must be in—it’s time to create the content. As we’ve already covered, your webinar needs to be visually engaging. Use a tool such as Canva or recruit the help of a designer.
Outline and script
Before writing a script, create an outline of what you will cover. This will dictate the flow of the webinar, so make sure the order makes sense.
An example outline might look like this:
Brief introduction (30 seconds is fine)
Storytime—hook the audience in
Three to five subtopics to deliver value
Call to action
Q&A
Then it’s time to write your script. Get everything you want to talk about on paper. However, don’t write out what you’ll say word-for-word. This will sound scripted and robotic. Instead, write down short bullet points of what you want to cover under each sub-section, which will allow you to sound natural while staying on track.
Offer and call to action
The ultimate goal of your webinar is to sell. So, part of your webinar should be reserved for your pitch:
Depending on your audience, as well as your product or service, your pitch may be as short as a ‘quick plug,’ but should be no longer than five to 10 minutes—and even then, you must offer value. The majority of your webinar should be dedicated to educational content.
Of course, reciprocation is essential to developing strong relationships, so create an offer that’s exclusive to your webinar attendees to thank them for their time and attention.
This can come in several forms:
Discount on your product/service
Extended trial of software
Your offer + webinar exclusive bonuses
Make the offer time sensitive to create a sense of urgency to take action. In some webinars, I’ve seen people offer bonuses for those who act within an hour of the webinar’s end time. Find an offer that’s right for your business and your audience, as well as any collaborators with whom you conduct the webinar.
How to Promote Your Webinar
Like every aspect of content marketing, creating your webinar content is only half the battle. The other half is promoting the webinar itself.
Now I’ll cover how to get people registering and attending your webinar in droves.
Setting up a landing page
You’ll need a landing page to drive traffic and convert registrations. Include a form that asks for a name and email address. From our experience, extra fields result in losing 5% of your prospects per field. Running A/B tests will help you to optimize messaging, and ultimately, to maximize conversions. There may not be sufficient data to get great results the first time around, and you won’t know your typical audience until you have a few webinars under your belt. But you can optimize the messaging for future webinars.
Check out this example from Unbounce for inspiration:
Your webinar should include:
Title: An impactful summary of the value your webinar offers to potential listeners. This is what will hook your audience in, and is considered the most important factor as you promote your webinar.
Bios: Include information on the presenters so your attendees know who they are and why it’s worth listening to.
Topic: Provide a brief explanation of the topic, including what they’ll learn by attending.
Value: Use a “Key takeaways” or “You’ll learn” section to be clear about why they should attend. And if you are targeting a discrete type of listener, be specific—“Executives will learn…”, “Marketers will learn…”, and so on. The point is: What will the webinar empower them to do after they leave?
Time: Make the time and date of the webinar clear and even add an auto-scheduler so attendees can easily add it to their calendars.
Accessibility: Inform your potential listener how they can join the webinar, including any links, with concise instructions.
Tools like Unbounce and Leadpages come with webinar registration pages out of the box. Both solutions have powerful features that integrate with all major email marketing and webinar platforms.
Creating your email sequence
When acquiring signups for your webinar, it’s key to have an intelligent email marketing sequence set up before a single email goes out. The majority of signups will come from your list of leads, as well as those of whomever you partner with. Sharing lists can be one of the biggest benefits of collaborating with other brands, but you need to make sure that you have clear guidelines and opt-in consent from your audience. Best practice typically includes sending two to three registration emails that direct your audience(s) to your landing page. (A quick note about best practices: Always test them!)
Here’s an example from Teachable’s registration mail about choosing course topics:
You’ll also need reminder emails should include date and time, agenda, information on the speakers, and a way to get in touch. Having this information will help registrants attend, allow you to jump straight into the story once you go live, and let them know they can still get the value of the webinar should they have to miss the live event. Depending on time, you should send two at least 24 hours and one hour before the webinar goes live. Go one step further by sending value-added emails in the days leading up to the webinar, where the webinar is advertised subtly alongside relevant or appealing content.
Finally, send out follow-up emails thanking attendees and drawing them to your call to action. Include links to any resources mentioned in the webinar and remind them of the deadline you set for your offer. You will likely need a few versions of each follow-up email—for example, you should avoid email copy that says, “Thank you for attending,” to non-attending—and should segment your email list into at least these two segments.
How to Generate Registrations
Beyond your email lists, there are other channels to source webinar signups. First and most obvious, make it visible on all of your owned media channels. This includes pinned social media posts as well as your homepage.
Here’s a good example of this in action from BuzzSumo:
Use your company blog to talk about the topics your webinar covers. Write about the topic in broad strokes. Tease the webinar as the place they can learn more. Make sure to include a call to action at the end of the post, driving traffic to your landing page. (You can include links to relevant blog content in your pre-webinar and post-webinar emails). Consider promoting these blogs using content amplification or use paid advertising, such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook Ads. Target long-tail keywords using AdWords to keep your cost-per-click low. And never underestimate the power of timing. Day of the week and time of day can have a huge impact on not only signups but actual attendees, especially if you’re targeting audiences in one or more time zones.
Conclusion
Webinars have proven to be a successful driver of leads and sales. I expect the number of brands conducting webinars is going to increase in the years to come. Be sure to pick a topic that people will find hard to ignore. This is what will differentiate you from your competition this year and beyond. Not only that, but you must always offer and deliver educational or business value at the same time. Make sure your audience goes away armed and ready with the knowledge and tools they need to act on your advice.
What are your experiences with webinars? What successes and lessons have you learned? Share your story in the comments below.
The post How to Generate Leads with Webinars appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 https://blog.marketo.com/2018/01/generate-leads-webinars.html
0 notes