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What is a Sales Pitch? How Can You Make a Winning One That Sells?

Generating new leads and turning them into closed deals is challenging. And letting those hard-earned leads fall through cracks is the last thing you can afford – you need to curate a winning sales pitch and get it nailed down to create a buzz around your business. 

A customer-centric sales presentation can enable you to engage prospects with your company and persuade them to buy from you. 

But what is a sales pitch, and how can you maximize its potential to win big deals and close them faster? Let’s dive deeper and unpack everything essential you need to know to make a successful sales pitch that sells.

What Is a Sales Pitch?

A sales pitch is a consolidated sales presentation that sales professionals deliver to their potential clients. The target is to pique their interest, convey a clear business value, convert prospects into high-value leads and drive them through the sales pipeline to speed up the sales cycle. It should be no longer than one to two minutes and can occur via different channels – direct call, cold calling, email outreach, offsite meetings, or social selling. 

You cannot deliver an hour-long pitch to today’s customers – their attention span is ever-shrinking, and you need to be outstanding in your introductory spiel to outperform your competitors. 

Importance of Sales Pitch

Let’s go through some sales challenges even the reps of high-growth companies are up against:

48% of sales professionals find closing sales deals challenging as they have to compete against low-cost rivals.  

A survey conducted on 472 sellers of businesses having 10 to 5,000+ salespeople found that the average win rate for sales is only 47%

The percentage of sales reps successfully hitting their target quotas has plunged from 63% to 53% in the last 6-years

How about if you get a ready-to-go sales recipe to reach your target customers most efficiently?

You would love it, right?

Surprisingly, 20% of skilled salespeople can win 80% of all deals.

But how do they manage to be so efficient in clinching so many sales deals? 

It’s no secret they implement the failproof formula of elevating sales presentations. 

A perfectly-curated pitch is gold dust to a company that lets you directly communicate with your would-be clients and build an in-person value exchange. It enables you to drum up your startup, bring value to both parties, and devise more rigorous strategies to keep sales rolling in your system.

Storytelling- the Base of Your Pitch

Facts tell, but stories sell – they say. So you should create a stellar storyline and make the pitch revolve around it to keep your prospects engaged with your offers while swaying them to make a deal.

The narrative can be on anything – the story behind your brand, how your customers found you, etc.

How to Make a Killer Sales Pitch 

Let’s dig deeper into how you can curate a perfect sales pitch to start stronger and close well:

Research -a Must-have Element of a High-converting Sales Pitch

Let’s accept the reality – your company will not sell itself. To create real value for your presentation, improving the probability that the would-be clients will positively respond, you must understand who you pitch to, what your target organization deals with, their goals, the competitors, etc. 

Plus, you should prioritize the sales deals you would be chasing by counting on data analytics rather than mere intuitions. 

To get better insights into your potential customers, channelize your sales efforts accurately, and pitch the right leads, cash in on your CRM database. For example, Veloxity’s high-fidelity intelligence centralized databases augment customer data, consolidate interactions and contact details in holistic profiles unique for each client, and enable reps to categorize customer base using segmentation filtering and tagging. 

Revolve the Pitch Around Your Customers’ Needs, Not Yours

Speaking about your company only is the snappiest means to get customers to tune out. You have to frame your sales presentation around your clients, not you. Elaborating on the value your company can build for the consumers will always pay off. Are you lowering prices, boosting efficacy, or reducing manual tasks? Your potential clients would be more likely to react to advantages than product attributes.

Use the Right Channel to Reach Your Target Audience

Reach out to your B2B clients via the communication channels they usually prefer. For example, while high-growth companies reply more to conventional types of outreach, like direct calls, an SMB or contemporary business favors private messages/DM (direct messages). With that said, don’t overstress this step; if you cannot nail it on the first shot, trying to reach them via another channel is absolutely fine. 

Personalize Your Pitch

Personalizing your sales pitch can go a long way in helping top-professional sales teams win big deals with ease. Thanks to different market-leading automation tools that enable reps to work off customizable templates and map their presentations with each prospect’s preference, pain points, and requirements. 

And CRMs make pitch personalization as painless as possible. For instance, Veloxity’s state-of-the-art CRM offers a 360-degree view of all leads and enables reps to get customer data at their fingertips – anytime, anywhere! Further, its robust Email Template Builder lets your sales reps use the built-in email templates or build their own, and the system auto-fills in the appropriate fields in the body and subject before sending out. Delivering consistent, hyper-targeted sales presentations tailored to customers across all touchpoints has never been this effortless.

Keep Following up

Following up with to-be consumers periodically after the initial pitch is a sure-fire way of acquiring more new leads and pumping up your sales. A study reveals that 70% of email interactions end if the first email is unanswered. However, the possibility of getting a reply to your second email is 21%. 

Thanks to Veloxity CRM – it notifies sales reps to follow up with both low-value and high-value prospects timely and enables mail-out scheduling and automating to ensure a rep can reach out to the right lead with the right message at the right time. 

End with a Steller CTA

A winning sales pitch followed by a compelling CTA empowers you to make incredible strides and keep leads flowing into your company. 

Besides offering your buyers a follow-up email/number, convince them by rewinding what you have to deliver and then push them to take a clear action (purchase, newsletter subscription or mailing list, opt for a free trial, etc.). Further, you can make the CTA more enticing by spicing up the pitch with sensory phrases and words.

Tips to Create a Knockout Sales Pitch

Take your pitch to the next level by using an appealing headline.  

Keep it short and succinct while incorporating a value proposition.

Shake off the traditional pitch strategies – the foolproof technique to convince your clients is to spend less time on pitching and more on interactions.

Keep your pitch packed with stats and facts to back up your claims – a study run by Dimension Research revealed that 90% of prospects said online feedback impacts their purchase decisions. 

You have a whole host of sales pitch types to use – switch up your pitch based on how you want to frame it, your target business type (B2B/B2C), etc.

Give Veloxity CRM a free shot and rock your sales world. 

The post What is a Sales Pitch? How Can You Make a Winning One That Sells? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/what-is-a-sales-pitch/

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What Is a Sales Pipeline and How Can You Build a Winning One?

Clinching sales deals is the climax of your sales and marketing efforts that begins with building a lasting relationship with leads flowing into your business. 

But why do sales teams fail to hit their goals if businesses run following a robust and thought-out sales process? The answer is that lack of clarity into the sales pipeline causes setbacks in the sales process, and the team cannot turn outbound leads into repeat buyers with ease – you need a strong sales pipeline that always packs piping hot deals!

But what is a sales pipeline, and how can you build and grow one? We have unpacked everything you need to know about a high-converting sales pipeline in this precise guideline.

What is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales opportunities, defining their positions in the sales process as they advance through the sales stages. So your sales representatives can better track your prospective clients as they are pushed from opps to warm leads. 

These stages are unique for each company and are designed by keeping the sales process that the business follows to fit in the consumer decision process into consideration.

Importance of a Sales Pipeline

Building and following a pipeline will help you:

Effortlessly track all your opps that flow into your system daily

Sell even more and systematically.

Augment revenue forecast.

Run business based on an integrated and thought-out marketing strategy.

In short, you can drive more profit and bolster productivity.

Difference Between Sales Pipeline and Sales Funnel

Though these terms are often used interchangeably, they are not identical. The primary difference between them lies in the data analyzed in each case and how it is represented. 

Let’s look into the difference:

As we have already stated, a sales pipeline deals with various stages throughout the consumer lifecycle – from acquiring leads to closing sales. 

On the flip side, a sales funnel indicates the conversion rates and the acquired lead quantity between pipeline stages.

While a pipeline analysis describes the sales value and number and leads activity in real-time to enable the sales team to effortlessly channelize their efforts for higher conversions, a funnel report shows the win rate and is created depending on a cohort. For instance, if you acquired 200 leads in the last quarter, you can, with a funnel report, comprehend what portion of the acquired leads has really advanced through the pipeline stages.

Sales Pipeline Stages

The sales stages of a B2B sales process:

Lead Generation: Though handled by marketing reps usually, it is still an element of a B2B sales process. It is the technique of drawing opps and prospective clients to your company and making them feel curious about your products through nurturing – with the ultimate target of turning them into loyal clients. Salespeople can:

Curate ICPs/ideal customer profiles by incorporating real-time marketing, investigating the closed sales, and figuring out the identical characteristics of the two companies doing a business. 

Collaborate with the marketing representatives to devise killer plans to brainstorm content ideas for effective content marketing and offer value-based input to drive more high-value prospects to your business. 

Lead Qualification: It is a vital stage that entails independent analysis or communicating with the captured leads and scoring them to pinpoint the prospects that are more likely to close and worth pursuing further. 

Contacting: A sales representative, for the first time, interacts with the qualified leads via the communication channels that each customer prefers – social media, direct calls, SMS, email, etc. Thus your sales team can, more efficiently, map your business specifications with your consumers’ demands/requirements. Scheduling a demo on how your business can better meet your client’s unique needs or convincing the lead for a meeting can help progress faster towards deal negotiation.

Proposal: Once you’re done with lead qualification, it’s time to make up and send an official sales proposal clearly defining the price and terms and conditions. A highly-effective customer-centric proposal is always customized based on buyer demands. 

Negotiating and Closing: Now, it’s time to negotiate a bit with your to-be consumers on the terms and conditions, costs, etc., and let them decide. If your products/service can impress your prospective clients, they will agree to buy from you, and you can log your win. 

Retention: You are not yet done with closing each deal. You have to follow up with your buyers periodically to build a lasting relationship and grow your business with the existing customer base. 

How to Build an Effective Sales Pipeline

Devising a sustainable sales pipeline helps your sales team boost your top and bottom line revenue with fewer efforts and time. 

Let dive deeper into how you can build a sales pipeline from scratch:

Create a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona gives you a fictional manifestation of your target buyers or ideal client. With clarity into the audience you should reach and market to, it becomes effortless for your sales team to devise compelling, hyper-targeted content that speaks to your client’s issues and demands.

Define the Stages in Your Sales Cycle

It’s time to frame the sales stages around your sales cycle – the phases your sales team follows to win a deal. 

As we have already stated, these stages may be unique for each business model and need tweakings to fit in your distinct sales scenarios and make the pipeline operate more efficiently. 

Estimate the Number of Opps Needed to Hit the Target

The set of stages in your sales process must indicate the number of sales opps and leads your teams must acquire to hit their set target. For example, say, from your pipeline analysis, you got to understand that your conversion rate is 5% from the leads your representatives interact with and 75% from the high-value prospects they sent a targeted proposal to. However, your sales team devotes only 10% of their operating hours to follow up with prospects and 30% on leads. 

Such insights help your salespeople route their efforts in the right direction for higher conversion rates and add more value to your organization. 

Build a New Sales Pipeline or Modify the Existing One

Your business evolves with time, so does your sales pipeline – it’s morphing over time, and you can hardly nail it on the first shot. Even if you already have implemented one, you have to tune it up based on the tasks your team executes throughout the sales cycle as your company scales. 

Build a Strong Customer Database

A powerful customer database is gold dust to any business that helps boost sales. You have a whole array of organic ways to reach your target audience and grow your customer database – for instance, web forms, emails, cold calling, CTA, sending out mailshots, networking via social media, etc. 

It’s crucial to enable your sales representatives to have a unified view of your customers and get it at their fingertips – recording your client database in a CRM’s centralized repository is always a plus.

Plan Your Calls and Fine-tune Your Pitch

Onboarding expert communicators is always a plus. However, there are ample opportunities to upskill staff members and fine-tune pitching so you can efficiently figure out the possibilities to create more value for your clients, demonstrate it effectively and incite them to buy. 

Key Sales Pipeline Metrics to Look Into

Track the following metrics to evaluate the health of your sales pipeline:

Qualified lead number in the pipeline.

Average deal size

The close-ratio

Customer acquisition cost/CAC

Sales cycle velocity – the time a sales representative requires to close a sale.

How Can Veloxity CRM Help Better Manage Your Sales Pipeline?

Gone are the days of stagnant pipelines and unlimited drill down to optimize your sales process. Thanks to Veloxity’s state-of-the-art CRM that can bring a static sales pipeline to life. Let’s see how:

Use Veloxity CRM’s pre-set pipeline options to create a winning pipeline. Plus, Veloxity lets you configure your own pipeline stages so that they can make the most sense for your business model. 

Create numerous pipelines for multiple sales processes with a few clicks only

Get a close view of your opps and predicted revenue with out-of-the-box charts and Kanban view.

Drag and drop opps between stages in the kanban view.

Track essential customer interactions right from the pipeline timeline

Schedule and record web meetings and direct calls 

Visualize your pipeline at various levels in the territory structure or direct sales pipeline reporting 

The post What Is a Sales Pipeline and How Can You Build a Winning One? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/what-is-a-sales-pipeline-and-how-can-you-build-a-winning-one/

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What Are Inside Sales?

Running a business and making it thrive in the market is no picnic. But despite all the hurdles, you still need to drive revenue, boost customer loyalty, and uncover all sales opportunities to streamline and create a buzz around your business – you need to leverage every aspect of the ever-evolving technology.

With the morphing sales pipelines and technology, businesses selling high-ticket products are taking up a new sales model – inside sales.

But what are inside sales, and how can it help your sales reps sell more with ease? Let’s dive deeper.

What Are Inside Sales?

Inside sales is a remote selling approach more popular among B2B companies, tech services, and SaaS businesses where sales reps reach their target audience via phone and other mediated and digital communication channels like email, social media platforms, etc., without getting involved in offsite meetings or any in-person interaction.

Key responsibilities of an inside sales rep are:

Replying to customer inquiries

Maintaining long-term relationships with potential clients to build credibility and rapport

Nurturing and following up with leads to improve conversion rates and trying to get high-quality sales referrals from customers

Hitting their daily/monthly quota targets (for instance, web meetings arranged, number of phone calls made, number of leads followed up with daily, proposals sent, etc.)

Negotiating and cracking more sales or passing them to field sales executives for additional nurturing and closure

Reporting on sales data

Inside sales representatives work following a more predictive schedule and leverage a set of tools like CRM, phone, social selling tools, email management software, etc., to meet their daily set targets.

Inside Sales Vs. Outside Sales

With more businesses running remotely amid pandemic, we have seen a surge in the use of the inside sales model. But what are the differences between inside and outside sales? Let’s go through:

Outside sales is a selling model where sales reps organize offsite meetings to meet their present or to-be customers. Inside sales, as we have already stated, involves no face-to-face interactions between reps and customers.

While inside sales representatives nurture and follow up with a large group of prospects and leads daily, outside sales reps target to reach and meet only high-value prospects.

The inside sales model involves a one-time investment in technological infrastructure and a fixed cost as reps’ salary. On the flip side, outside sales is a comparatively expensive selling approach.

The sales velocity in the inside sales model is shorter than the other one as inside sales reps can follow up with multiple leads simultaneously and push them through the sales stages to close deals faster.

Benefits of Inside Sales

37% of high-growth businesses use inside sales as their fundamental sales technique (vs. 27% for outside sales, 23% for internet sales, 8% for channel sales). But why is it becoming more popular? 

Let’s dive deeper:

Faster Response Time to Leads

Now more than ever, companies revolve around clients, making the customer experience (CX) a critical brand differentiator. On the flip side, customers today move fast, make fickle buying decisions and expect top-notch service in a short attention span. It means that quick responses before prospects turn into customers are another crucial catalyst to brand success – replying first to your potential buyers influences how many sales opps your reps can convert. 

An inside sales team only focuses on acquiring new leads and retaining customers through remote interaction. So they can be more prompt in responding to customer inquiries than outside reps. 

Customers Prefer the Inside Sales Model

What a study conducted by the Sales Benchmark Index would send a chill down your spine. It says 70% of its evaluated buyers are not interested in an in-person meeting; instead, they prefer doing business remotely. A census run by DiscoverOrg says that 78% of decision-makers polled have attended an event or finalized an appointment coming from a cold call or an email. 

In short, the more remotely you can reach people, the better are your chances to win deals. 

Spend More Time Selling

While outside sales reps spend only 22% of their weekly working hours in activities related to revenue generation, the percentage is 35% for inside sales reps – they don’t need to travel and thus can devote that time to nurturing leads and driving them to deal closure. 

Spending more time in activity selling helps your sales reps hit their quota goals and keeps revenue rolling in your business. 

Improved Collaboration

Inside sales promotes cross-functional collaboration and team cohesion. Plus, sales managers can track sales activities, give constructive feedback and guide reps to channelize their sales efforts accurately – thanks to the physical contiguity between sales managers and representatives in the inside selling model. 

As this sales model runs leveraging advanced software and tools, departments can break team silos and collaborate on deals to move them faster through the sales funnel.

How to Succeed in Inside Sales?

Keep the following things in mind to succeed and thrive as an inside sales rep:

Prospect Strategically 

Meaningful time devoted to interacting with your would-be customers will always win out over the number of dials you make. 

As an inside sales rep, you should put in a bit of legwork and make tactful approaches while talking to your prospects. 

Though cold calls can work fine, today’s high-growth businesses now prefer warmer calls as a more effective and efficient way of reaching sales leads interested in your business. Whether it is a nourished sales lead, referrals from the current client base, or even a convivial banter on social media, warm calls are always a goldmine for a business.

Investing time in stalking your prospects’ social media accounts using avant-garde features, for instance, LinkedIn’s advanced searches, can help you gather a bit of their personal information and tailor your interactions. 

Plus, spend ample time studying your competitors and your own USPs to stay on top of your competition while reaching the prospects. 

Pitch Perfectly

Today’s busy customers don’t have the whole day to talk to you over the phone. So for the person on the other side of the phone to really listen to you, your initial spiel has to supplant everything worth their time – you need to be perfect while pitching to pique their curiosity.

Let’s look into some pro tips to nail your sales pitch and turn strangers into customers:

Handle prospects with utter care and love and ensure your pitch never sounds like a scripted sales call. 

Talking continuously without letting prospects answer is a big fat no. 

Don’t try to sell on the first call.

Ask them for a secondary appointment while appreciating their busyness.

Keep it short, sweet, and concise. If possible, try to build rapport by figuring out a common topic, and don’t forget to pick up on it the next time you interact.

Capitalize on Your Past and Current Customers

Your previous customer database can be a critical buying signal that can speed up your sales cycle. So, besides following up with your present and to-be buyers, you should also track your past clients who had been hired for another post or switched to a new job if you don’t want any lead to slip through the cracks. 

While the possibility of a new prospect to convert is only 5-20%, following up with past and present clients boosts sales opportunities by 60-70%. 

Use CRM to Better Manage Your Prospects

Clinching sales deals needs you to reach opps at the right time with right product information. A CRM like Veloxity can be your partner in managing prospects efficiently so your inside sales professionals can be on what they are best at – selling. 

Let’s see how:

By consolidating all contact data in a centralized repository, a CRM ensures your sales team can get what they need at their fingertips. And with Veloxity’s native mobile application, they can access a full-fledged CRM system even on the fly. Plus, a CRM enables them to categorize client data based on tagging and segmentation filtering.

No more endless navigation between tabs and drill down to optimize sales processes. With Veloxity CRM Quoting and Product Bundle Management, reps can create high-quality quotes and build out product catalogs with a few clicks only.

Most top-class CRMs integrate with third-party systems your teams use daily. For instance, Veloxity syncs with Google Calendar, Outlook, IMAP, and Gmail to enable reps to track interactions and schedule web meetings and webinars right from the CRM timeline.

CRMs enable real-time sales pipeline visualization and let you configure the sales stages. With Veloxity’s Kanban view and out-of-the-box charts, you can locate your sales opps’ positions in the sales process, see potential revenue at each stage, and drag and drop opps between stages. 

CRMs streamline and automate your sales reps’ day-to-day repetitious tasks. With few clicks and no/less coding, they can carry out tasks like lead scoring, phone or email logging, and more – thanks to Veloxity’s robust sentence-based Rules Engine.

Having a quality CRM in place makes lead management as painless as possible. For instance, with Veloxity’s powerful lead assignment rule builder, you can set your own rules and direct leads to the right reps. 

How Can Inside and Outside Reps Collaborate?

The steps you can take to make your inside and outside reps collaborate include:

Make your inside reps acquire a large number of low-value prospects. This way, the outside reps have a greater chance to pursue larger agreements. 

Make both teams share contact details to move deals faster in either way – via offsite meetings or remote communication

Both teams should track leads timely acquired by either reps. 

The post What Are Inside Sales? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/what-are-inside-sales/

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What is a Cold Call?

Sales reps of both small and high-growth companies searching for opportunities to drum up their businesses use cold calling as a ready-to-use tactic of reaching fresh sales leads. 

Though for any outbound sales professional, cold calling is usually the first and perhaps the sure-fire way of acquiring sales opportunities, this old-school sales strategy is on the downswing today. 

Why?

Simply because people don’t enjoy being ambushed and receiving sales calls out of the blue. 

Cold calling is not the most suitable method to reach prospects, but it still works and is a salient tactic of most sales teams’ arsenal.

What is a cold call? Unpack everything essential in this precise guide.

What is a Cold Call?

Cold calling is a type of telemarketing where a sales rep directly calls potential clients who are not yet connected to your company or have expressed interest in your service. The ultimate target is to interact with a business or person fitting into your devised buyer persona for the first time, deliver a powerful spiel demonstrating your services concisely, and figure out how likely they are to move forward through the sales stages. 

Don’t confuse cold calls with warm calls. Warm calling is when your sales reps initiate communication with to-be buyers who are already interested in doing business with you in any way – subscribing to your newsletters, submitting information, filling in web forms, downloading content, etc. 

Is Cold Calling Effective?

The first thing to clear is that people don’t like unsolicited connections, cold emails outreach, or cold calls.  

A person may seem to be a right fit to negotiate a deal with, but most times, he will not be repetitive – hence the efficiency rate of cold calling is frequently put into doubt.

Plus, various mediated and digital communication channels like social media platforms, email, etc., enable brands to reach potential clients and nurture them simultaneously. The efficacy of such sales strategies in boosting sales and building brand credibility can, no doubt, overshadow cold calling.

Simultaneously, buyers are more empowered now more than ever – the prompt access to client feedback and service information, coupled with the intensifying business competition, makes it more challenging for sales teams to sway prospects even with a stunningly created cold call.

Further, most people consider cold calls a breach of their privacy. Even sales professionals sometimes consider it a scattergun pitching approach and hesitate to dial people all of a sudden.

While still in practice, cold calling doesn’t have that high and expected win rate. Even a meticulous cold call can secure a success rate of around 2% (vs. 30% for warm calling).

But the doors are still open. Let’s look into some data that can rock your sales world:

According to a survey conducted in summer 2018 by Selling Power, 46% of the evaluated 160 B2B sales reps still use phone calls to reach prospects.

Another study run by the Rain Group said that 57% of C-level and VP customers prefer receiving sales calls – perhaps a perfect way to fine-tune your value proposition.

To sum up, though meager, cold calling still has an efficiency rate, and while executed following a well-devised strategy, it can help reps generate more new leads and win more sales quicker. 

Rules to Follow While Making Cold Calls

Though challenging to pull off, cold calling is absolutely allowed. 

However, sales reps have to follow some stringent regulations:

While B2B cold calls are legal in the EU, the GDPR rules enforced in 2018 have outlawed B2C cold calling to European Union citizens. After Brexit, businesses operating in the UK must adhere to UK GDPR (identical to GDPR 2018). The companies registered in the USA must stick to the fundamental cold-calling legislation regulated by the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission).

No sales reps can cold call numbers registered to the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) or Telephone Preference Service (TPS) in the EU and UK. The Do Not Call database is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the USA – an independent government agency that aims to protect consumer rights. 

No sales call is allowed out of the time frame – between 8 am-9 pm daily.

In the first 2-minutes of interaction, cold callers must inform potential about their personal details and company information to ensure the process is legitimate.

Cold Calling Tips to Win Big

Crush your cold calls with the following killer tips and strategies and improve your closing rate:

Know Your Targets

The effectiveness of reaching people who fit in your sales process will always win out over the number of dials you make. So before calling people, make sure you create a buyer persona and put in a bit of legwork in researching your products and market trends to identify your target customers. 

Plan Call Times Wisely

As we have already stated, dialing prospects out of the allowed time frame is a big fat no, and a part of government-enforced regulation as well – the people you want to reach are the busy bees of a company who may feel like rolling their eyes and hang up the call if you cold call them during the 9-5 working hours. 

If you want your cold calls to boost your sales success, try to avoid calling prospects on Friday – most times, they will be winding down after a hectic schedule, and Monday – they will be settling into a busy week. 

The most suitable time of the week to cold call B2B clients are Wednesday and Thursday. Schedule the call and reach them when they are more open to making deals. 

Prepare a Cold Call Script and Follow It Like a Pro

Being outstanding in your introductory spiel helps you hit your target of winning deals most efficiently. 

A strategic cold calling script enables sales reps to keep the call on the right trail while adding a human touch. However, don’t forget to keep the script short, natural, and succinct.

Keeping Following Up

While following up on high-value prospects is a must, you cannot ignore those who are still unsure about purchasing your service. 

Sending a hyper-targeted follow-up email or voice mail, including fleshed-out and tailored information on how your business can better resolve the issues discussed over the phone, will help you fix a secondary meeting.

Use the Right Tools

Having the right tools in your business’s arsenal will help the salespeople be more productive and speed up the sales cycle with ease. 

Different top-class sales tools, multichannel outreach tools, phone systems, pure cold calling software, and CRM can transform the way your sales reps work. 

How Can a CRM Like Veloxity Help

As your CRM is always packed with targeted leads and contact data, your sales reps can, with a few clicks, ‘break the communication ice’ and initiate a strategic cold call. And with Veloxity’s state-of-the-art CRM, you can create custom workflows and call prospects from within the CRM interface using its powerful integrated dialing system.

Plus, a CRM’s lead management system enables sales teams to better track lead activities, pinpoint their pain points and preferences, and note them. So the next time you plan a cold call, you can frame it around the lead insights and ensure no potential sales leads fall through the cracks. 

No more spending time on repetitive daily tasks – with a CRM’s tasks management system, you can optimize your sales performance. And with Veloxity CRM’s powerful sentence-based Rules Engine, you can automate tasks like lead scoring, routing, assigning works, and more just by filling in the blanks. 

Moreover, you can visualize your sales pipeline, build a new one and even configure the sales stages. Keeping track of your sales activities and moving prospects through the pipeline has become effortless with Veloxity. 

You can use a CRM as a call center that logs each call you have missed into the lead cards and notify you to reach the caller – no more keeping prospects you have reached earlier via cold calling waiting if they get back to you. 

Further, CRM’s call record and playback feature can be a gold mine for businesses – they can gain valuable customer insights, tune up cold call scripts, and upskill reps using the recorded calls. 

The post What is a Cold Call? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/what-is-a-cold-call/

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How to Develop a Winning Hospitality Marketing Strategy to Boost Your Bookings

The hospitality business is well-known for its stiff competition and low profit margins, and never was it so true as it is today. With so many small-scale hotels going under in the initial years of launch, SMBs must hunt to gain a competitive edge and stand out from the pack by efficiently channelizing their marketing efforts. Again, even if you are an expert player in managing luxury hotels having more wiggle room, you must strive to make every dollar spent on marketing count – devising a winning full-funnel hospitality marketing strategy is a must.

To help you set up the right strategy, we’ve put together the basics of a hospitality marketing plan and its most essential components.

What is Hospitality Marketing?

Hospitality marketing is the process of getting a hospitality business out to the target customers pinpointing their requirements. The purpose is to build a positive brand experience and promote services and commodities to sell more and drive better revenue. 

What is Hospitality Marketing Strategy

A hospitality marketing strategy defines the marketing goals of a company to reach more prospects, turn them into repeat guests and win more deals by concentrating its fixed resources on the greatest opportunities. It is a set of thought-out business tactics that revolves around a business’s value proposition and helps it gain sustainable competitive advantage.

However, the issues that most hoteliers frequently vocalize as leading causes of hospitality marketing plan failure are:

Unfavorable hotel location

Poor accounting

Poor guest assistance service

Poor administration

Non-existent/poor advertising/marketing

Benefits of Hospitality Marketing Strategies

Adapt to the Changing Landscape: Hospitality businesses must keep up with the constantly evolving marketing trends to stay ahead of the curve and thrive. Having a well-devised marketing strategy in effect means that hoteliers can efficiently audit and tune up their current promotional techniques based on competitor/market analysis and customer demands to bolster business efficacy. And the more optimized your marketing strategy is, the more sustainable your campaigns would be. 

Outshine the Competitors: To keep revenue rolling in your hotel business, driving more direct engagement with guests, you need to outshine your competitors. Devising a hit strategy will help you throw light on your USP/unique selling points and let people know about your special services. Plus, you can publicize customers’ happy feedback and case studies by capitalizing on online and offline marketing channels.

Tips for Powerful Hospitality Marketing Strategies

Here’s your all-access-pass guide to developing a foolproof hotel marketing strategy to get your bookings up:

Target the Right Type of audience/Travelers

The prerequisite to devising a finely-tuned marketing strategy for your hospitality business (or any business, really) that sells is to identify the target audience and better understand their requirements and pain points. But how would you identify and build the right type of customer base or guest persona?

First off, you must understand whom you cater to – corporate warriors or couples, their expectations, factors influencing their buying decision, the channels they use to reach hoteliers, etc. So you can better analyze the guest persona, decide on whom you should target to market your service, and tweak your marketing strategies to create a pipeline of high-value prospects.

Invest in a Website

It is highly unlikely that you still don’t have a digital side to your hotel/ marketing campaign. But, if you don’t, you’re missing out on an extensive selection of prospective clients that could push your occupancy through the roof! 

The foremost step in ‘going digital’ is designing a spectacular website. 

But don’t emphasize making it look stunning only – it should load faster and be easy to navigate to ensure visitors enjoy a cohesive viewing experience. 

Let’s look at some foolproof tips for making your website fully functioning: 

Make it mobile-friendly so visitors can have a unified view across all devices

Optimize it for SEO to boost your chances to rank higher in the search engines and improve conversion rates

Make brief content and use coherent, easily readable fonts

Ensure visitors don’t have to zoom in/out, scroll down endlessly or pinch to see essential website details

Limit pop-ups and Flash

Integrate Google Maps to make your hotel easily locatable

Add web forms that get auto-filled to collect guest information

Enable ‘click-to-call’

Enable ‘Book Now’ and ‘Review Us’ CTA buttons

Make the Most of Technology

Travelers won’t just stop at your hotel and make their reservations with you; instead, they will look into several services online and decide. 

So leverage the power of technology to showcase your property – give them a 360-degree view of the space, show them the spacious rooms, stunning infinity pools, and the facilities they can avail. After all, the visitors should be able to picture that savory dinner they can enjoy at your cafe or the incredible evenings they’re about to relish in your space.

Try to add as much branded imagery as possible to your site. And if possible, add a video tour of the mesmerizing nearby sceneries, ancient monuments, and architecture. 

With the undeniable rise of the ‘contactless technology’ today, empower your mobile app to boost guest services and handle almost everything – from room reservations to check-ins and ordering food to leaving reviews. 

Also, you can use geo-based targeted advertising and proximity marketing to send location-based hyper-targeted messages to your potential guests straight on their phones.

Get Social Media Savvy

With almost everyone going online and using social media today, no marketing tactic can overshadow the importance of promoting your hotel business on social media platforms. 

So beef up your hotel’s social media accounts and rebound successfully in the upcoming travel season:

Keep your Instagram and Facebook page active by posting breathtaking photos of your hotel space and updates about your upcoming offers and discounts.

Link your website to your social media accounts – each component of your marketing plan will ultimately come back to your website. 

Add links to your social media profiles in your emails and on your official site.

Keep the feed fresh with top-notch content, following the 80/20 rule – 80% about the incredible surroundings, 20% about your business and hotel.

Load the pages with relevant, suitable keywords and easily-searchable content 

Collaborate with Travel Agencies to Maximize Exposure

Collaborating with travel agencies, influencers, and travel brokers is always a plus to keep visitors flowing into your website and maintain the optimal stream of guests in your hotel.

Before opting for cross-functional collaboration, ensure your listing is just perfect, and your brand message is pertinent and uniform across all marketing channels. 

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is the most infallible yet underrated marketing strategy that savvy hoteliers use to augment their direct bookings and guest list, gain more exposure, personalize the guest experience, and follow up on visitors after their stay. 

Before launching email marketing campaigns, don’t forget to optimize your contact list, target loyal customers, offer special discounts during the peak seasons, and incite them with hyper-personalized emails.

Leverage the Power of CRM

Building customer loyalty is essential in the hospitality business, more than anything. But unless you stop juggling between spreadsheets and isolated systems to manage your guests, you are doomed to failure. Thanks to CRMs like Veloxity that can help hoteliers retain guests and maintain lasting customer relationships delivering proactive customer service.

With Veloxity, organizing and synchronizing scattered client data from multiple channels and consolidating it into a central repository becomes effortless. Thus hotel reps can better track customer interactions, follow up with them through turnover and turn one-time guests into loyal, repeat clients with ease.

Moreover, rolling out laser-targeted marketing campaigns, scheduling mail-outs, and visualizing how efficiently your marketing efforts translate into business values have become easier than ever before – thanks to Veloxity’s best-in-class marketing automation. 

Plus, you can use Veloxity’s ML-based analytics to get actionable insights into the massive volume of guest data your hospitality business churns out daily. Making data-driven decisions on redesigning or tweaking your hotel marketing strategy has never been this effortless.

The post How to Develop a Winning Hospitality Marketing Strategy to Boost Your Bookings appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/hospitality-marketing-strategy/

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Best Free CRM: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Free CRM Software

Are you still relying on Google Sheet, Excel, or notebooks to keep track of your leads, sales, or even projects? If yes, then such endless juggling between tabs and spreadsheets will only hold back your business productivity – opportunities will be missed, leads will drop at a high rate, and the market will suffer greatly. Unless you arm your teams with a time-saving dedicated program like a CRM, managing your valuable clients at scale will become challenging for them.

The great news is – now you can leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with the best free CRM system to effectively follow up with your clients and maintain lasting customer relationships. To learn more about free CRM systems, read on.

What is a CRM Software?

A CRM is a dedicated business application that combines a set of techniques and tools to enable enterprises to get actionable insights into a massive volume of customer data employing data analytics. Thus businesses can better track all customer touchpoints throughout the sales funnel stages, and deliver proactive customer service. Having quality CRM software is crucial to generating, acquiring, and retaining clients and bolstering business efficacy.

A CRM can:

Offer a 360-degree view of stakeholders and clients

Help administer deals and tasks

Automate repetitive jobs

Enable cross-departmental collaboration, and the list goes on.

What is a Free CRM: Difference between Open Source and Free Open Source CRM

Though the terms ‘Free CRM’ and ‘Open Source CRM’ are often used interchangeably, they are not identical. 

A free CRM is a particular CRM program that you can implement and utilize at zero payment.

An open-source CRM is a business tool that you can install and use for free; plus, the source code is also available for further modification/use/compilation, incurring no charge. 

CRM Benefits

The global CRM market size was valued at $52.64 billion in 2020 and is forecast to reach  $128.97 billion dollars in 2028 from $58.04 billion in 2021, growing at a CAGR of a staggering 12.1% during 2021-2028. 

But why are businesses switching to CRM systems at a fast pace? Let’s dive deep into the benefits:

Enhanced Customer Service

No matter how strategically you devise your services or offers, unless you can ensure top-notch customer service, the bitter truth is, your business is doomed to failure. Thanks to industry-leading CRMs that can help your teammates efficiently interact and follow up with the clients, offering a 360-degree view – accurate data about customer demographics, purchase history, preferences, etc., are now at your reps’ fingertips. 

Plus, having a quality CRM in effect, your service team can have aggregated conversations with stakeholders from multiple channels your business exists. Having more detailed and accurate client information on a single screen means tailoring hyper-personalized offers to meet customer preferences becomes effortless. 

Drive Better Profitability with Upsells and Cross-sells

A quality CRM like Veloxity can help you identify the products your customers usually purchase together by throwing up precise sales analytics. For instance, a client purchasing your email campaign services may also opt for one of your email analytics packages. 

Thanks to CRMs that let you program the system to filter and analyze data, and customer feedback, and pitch related upgrades or features so you can identify the upsell/cross-sell opportunities with ease. Consequently, you can sell more, boost customer retention rates, drive better revenues and improve client satisfaction – all that a business requires to thrive.

Enable Cross-departmental Collaboration

The leading cause most lead capture efforts fail is miscommunication between different business departments. Departments operating in silos are unable to communicate in real-time, resulting in massive customer defection. 

CRM tools allow all teams across a company to access the centralized multi-faceted customer database and share and edit files in real-time by enabling cross-departmental collaboration – the latest version of customer interaction copies are always at their fingertips. 

What Makes the Best Free CRM Software

The top-notch free CRMs never reinvent the wheel; instead, they try to make it roll a little smoother, so teams of startups and small businesses with tight budgets and resources can win more deals and remove frictions from their sales process with less time and effort at zero cost.

The functionalities that make a quality free CRM software package include:

Contact, Account, and Opportunity Management: A free CRM must document and retrieve client information, including contact details, names, addresses, social media interactions, etc., efficiently. 

Sales Management: Even a free CRM should support out-of-the-box configurable charts and Kanban to allow sales reps to visualize the sales pipeline and better track sales and opps across the sales stages.

Dashboard-based Reporting: Enables users to visualize key business matrices using fully-customizable reports, analytics, and charts and present the aggregated data in its intuitive, configurable dashboard.  

Workflow Automation: A free yet quality CRM provides a horde of automation functionalities to streamline workflows. It enables users to define rules and automate most of their daily repetitive tasks – automated messaging, sending thank you emails, assigning duties to reps, etc.

How to Choose the Best Free CRM Software

CRM solutions are an absolute necessity to keep up with today’s intensifying business competition, especially when the budget of a B2B company cannot accommodate a whole host of premium software simultaneously – leveraging the power of a quality free CRM is the ultimate solution. 

Keep the following things into consideration while evaluating a free CRM:

Allowed Users, Contacts, and Accounts: The number of accounts, opps contacts, and maximum storage supported by your free account usually determine how much value it can bring to your stakeholders and company. While having unlimited storage and users/opps with a free account are always the golden standard, you cannot expect all of these three parameters unrestricted on a free program. Compare multiple free plans and pick the most suitable one that allows a maximum number of accounts and opps with a free account.

Easy to Use: Go with a CRM that features an intuitive interface, a minimal learning curve, and is effortless to navigate and input data. So your teammates can get with the new system effortlessly. 

Breakdown of Pricing Tiers: Understanding the pricing tiers of the free program you implement is always a plus. So when your company booms, you can, without breaking your bank, upgrade your productivity with one of its paid editions. And the best part is, you won’t require to switch to an entirely new platform.

How Does Veloxity CRM Win the Race?

If you are searching for a world-class CRM with a feature-packed free-forever version, Veloxity can be your ultimate pick. That’s correct – powerful functionalities for marketing, support service and sales teams, highly-encrypted cloud storage, and robust integrations – all at zero cost. 

Let’s look into some of Veloxity best-in-class features:

With Veloxity’s free edition, you can add up to 300 accounts, 500 contacts, and 300 opps – it’s no doubt a great deal.

Users can design and configure sales stages with guided sales besides customizing the homepage – customize the system to make it all yours.

Supports scheduling, rescheduling, and activity tracking with easy drag and drop Calendar View

With Veloxity’s first-in-class comprehensive and intelligent searching capabilities, locating data across the system becomes effortless.

Account, contact, opportunity tracking, easy user and quote management, integrated chat, live news feed, seamless integration with Outlook and Gmail, and powerful email template builder – all make a fully functional free CRM edition with no hidden charges

Access your free CRM account and work with ease even on the fly with Veloxity’s native mobile app – the power of a fully-fledged CRM is now in your pocket.

The post Best Free CRM: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Free CRM Software appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/best-free-crm/

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Process of CRM Migration: Steps to Getting Started

Gone are the days of juggling between spreadsheets and notebooks endlessly to maintain lasting customer relationships. Thanks to CRM software that has enabled businesses to follow up with leads, roll out hyper-targeted marketing campaigns, channelize sales efforts, and deliver proactive customer service with ease. 

But for ongoing CRM success, you may sometimes need to migrate to a new CRM system from a legacy system without losing data integrity – only high-quality clean business data can bring value to your stakeholders and end customers.

No matter how well built or designed a CRM system you choose, unless the process of CRM migration is smooth and strategic, all your efforts may be doomed to failure, and the drawbacks may outweigh the benefits.

To know more about successful CRM (Customer Relationship management) migration, read on.

What is CRM Migration?

CRM migration is a step-by-step method of transporting data of real value to a quality CRM software from a legacy CRM program. So the already-using program stays as is and the essential data gets copied over to a new platform.

Data that you cannot afford to lose while executing the process of CRM migration include:

Customer data – contact details, client preferences, communication, and purchase history, and more

Marketing Process Data – social media outreach, CLV information, campaign success reports, brand awareness information, and more

Sales Cycle Data – Upsell/cross-sell rates, invoicing records, lead generation expenses, sales pipeline, etc.

Customer Service Data – Case management information, SLAs/Service Level Agreement, client testimonials, etc

While migrating, companies must factor in the many elements of data gravity and work around them – having a realistic and specialized CRM migration strategy put into effect is a must that can ensure the data is: 

relevant and accurate

complete

easily accessible

authentic and dependable

unique and contains no duplication

valid and in the correct format supported by your new system

Why Migrate to a New CRM?

CRM migration is often put on a business’s agenda when it transitions to a new development stage. The leading causes companies shift to a new system are:

Lack of flexibility and scalability with the previous application

Need of more CRM customizability and configurability

High CRM maintenance costs

Lack of cloud-based data storage

tough-to-navigate and intimidating user interface

Limited range of third-party software integration supported.

CRM Migration Best Practices

If the data transformation takes place between two identical platforms – which is a rare case – a third-party data migration tool can work just fine

Another way to transfer data from an already-installed program into a new CRM is to archive the essential data and upload it via the legacy software’s UI. This approach may seem straightforward but is functional only if the data structure is identical for both applications and the newly-deployed program can parse the exported files.

The most viable and effective option is to develop a custom tool or script. The best thing is, you can even shift the third-party applications integrated with the legacy tool, besides data, into the new CRM via API calls. 

The Process of CRM Migration

The steps that can make the process of CRM migration effortless are:

Consult with the Users

Before starting off the migration process, get all the stakeholders, decision-makers, sales, marketing, and customer support teams, and users on-board with the shift to new software for maximizing its use. 

Collaborating with the staff members will enable you to evaluate the efficacy of the migration process based on various business perspectives, including:

The must-have features the target CRM tool should contain

Analyzing the company benefits in terms of cost-savings

Plus, as the most prominent users of CRM, they can be the most stringent testers of the newly-deployed system and figure out glitches, data duplication or missing, and more, most efficiently.  

Search and Compare

Have you decided to level up your business implementing a top-notch CRM solution? Congratulations! 

Now, it’s time to pick a platform that can better suit your business specifications and requirements. 

With the market booming with hundreds of products, choosing the right solution may seem overwhelming. 

Combining the simplicity of a small business CRM with the best-in-class out-of-the-box functionalities of an enterprise-grade platform, Veloxity has become a state-of-the-art CRM software that comes at half the cost of other solutions. Bringing all top-of-funnel sales and marketing on a single pane of glass, this low-/no-code custom CRM is best known for its realm of training resources that make the adoption, migration, and deployment process as painless as possible. 

Once you have selected the CRM to migrate to, compare it with your existing system based on the use cases, files types to be transferred, and new functionalities your teams need.

Prepare and Analyze

Now the most intimidating step – data cleansing, begins. Before carrying out CRM migration, data clean-up is vital to ensure you only transfer high-quality, accurate data that can bring value to your business in the long run. Scan your existing CRM data for outdated/duplicate information, include missing data entries, and ensure no information has been shoehorned into the incorrect fields.

Once the data clean-up is complete, count on data mapping to decide where the migrated data would reside in the target CRM. 

Data Backup – A Must

Don’t forget to create a backup of all your data from legacy systems – anything can happen during CRM migration, and losing your mission-critical business information and contact details are the last thing you can afford.

CRM Customization

A quality CRM with out-of-the-box features is just fine for a small business. But as your business expands, CRM customization becomes crucial for helping your business run optimally. Before carrying out the migration, evaluate what customization facilities you need in the target CRM, for instance, dashboard view configuration, user permission, non-standard fields adding, excluding unnecessary fields, etc.

Veloxity is a best-in-its-class custom CRM enabler that comes with unlimited customization options. From adding unlimited new data objects, and fields to that data objects and configuring dashboard and data views to creating unlimited rules with Veloxity’s powerful Rule Engine – everything has become a matter of a few clicks only. Plus, Veloxity supports REST API to enable users to carry out any data operations essential to support their custom CRM application requirements.

Run a Couple of Tests

Don’t risk your data and make the process a real catastrophe trying to migrate everything in a single shot; instead, run a couple of tests by transferring some sample data sets to the new system to evaluate how smoothly and accurately the process goes on. It’s vital to integrate multiple intricate applications into your target CRM especially if you have a hierarchy-based multilevel database connected to numerous objects.

All Set to Migrate!

And finally, it’s time to click the ‘Migrate’ button and wait for the ‘Success’ box to appear! Hiring a team of expert developers is always a plus to make the process an absolute success and resolve any glitches that may occur during the CRM migration. 

Migrating to Veloxity from any other system is as effortless as it can be:

All you have to do is to go to My Profile > App Setup > CRM Setup > Import Other CRM Data from the Main Menu

You can execute the migration using any compatible CRM data migration tools and transport your CRM data to Veloxity in no time – all you require is your login ID and API key.

The post Process of CRM Migration: Steps to Getting Started appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/process-of-crm-migration-steps-to-getting-started/

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LinkedIn Automation Ban: What it Means for Your Recruitment Process

LinkedIn has a new algorithm in place that limits job hunters from seeing your profile if they have a certain number of automated applications. In order to ensure the best possible candidate is brought in for a job, organizations have long turned to LinkedIn to recruit. 

But with the new algorithm, recruiters will have to manually search through their database to find the best candidates for a given job. 

LinkedIn has said that the algorithm will help recruiters find more applicants that are a better fit for a job. It will also help recruiters find more people who aren’t already on LinkedIn. 

In this post, we’ll explain what the LinkedIn algorithm change means for recruiters and help you determine whether or not you should adjust your recruiting strategy to take advantage of the new changes.

How the New LinkedIn Algorithm Affects Job Hunters, Recruiters, and Companies

If you’re a job hunter, the change means you should probably expand your search beyond LinkedIn and make sure your resume is as sharp as possible. You don’t want to send too many applications at once to any one employer.

This will allow you to see any organization’s website and company LinkedIn page, but it can make it more difficult for recruiters to find your profile. 

Companies will have a better chance of finding the best candidates from their database or from other places on the internet.

The new algorithm also allows companies to send personalized messages to job hunters, giving your company a leg up as you build your brand.

The Need For Linkedin Automation Tools

Save time

Manually sending messages to applicants and managing each applicant’s status can be very time-consuming. Instead, use automation tools that allow you to manage your recruitment process more efficiently.

Improve Personalization and Branding of Your Company

Many companies looking for talent want—and expect —to see what a firm is like behind the scenes.

Automation makes it easy for recruiters to send personalized messages to candidates or respond to questions in real-time.

Save Money on Manpower and Cost-Per-Hire

Automation tools are often cheaper than human recruiters, which means you can keep your recruiting budget intact even as you grow your company.

Provide a 360-Degree View of Your Company

Job candidates want to know more than just what it’s like to work at your organization; they also want to see how the role plays into the larger picture.

Most automated tools allow you to send videos, presentations, or other forms of multimedia content along with job postings.

LinkedIn Automation Tools to Avoid

Bots

The majority of companies looking to hire individuals on LinkedIn use bots.

This makes it difficult for recruiters and hiring managers to find new candidates on social media platforms, as they have a hard time finding anyone who other employers aren’t already contacting.

Autopilot Tools

Autopilot tools are designed to automatically apply for jobs without any human intervention. Not only will this likely get you blacklisted by employers looking through their applications, but it is also costly and time-consuming.

LinkedIn Resume Builder

LinkedIn’s resume builder is designed to allow job hunters to create a profile that will show up at the top of search results.

However, using this tool means your information won’t be synced with other databases or data sources relevant for recruiters and hiring managers looking for talent on LinkedIn.

What Is Lead Automation?

Lead automation is the act of identifying, contacting, and scoring prospective customers. This practice is also called lead generation or lead nurturing, which are critical practices in the sales process.

Lead automation is one of the most important things for organizations generating leads for their business.

Lead generation software can extract important data such as company details, contact person name, title, etc. This helps organizations generate accurate and high-quality leads.

LinkedIn Automation Ban Wrap Up

LinkedIn automation bans have started to become the norm, however the risk of being banned isn’t enough for recruiters to stop using lead generation tools.

This ban will help companies find genuine people on this platform and prevent fake profiles. So, it is advised to use automation tools cautiously.

Therefore, it is not uncommon to see HR professionals use social media sites like LinkedIn as a resource for generating quality business leads.

The post LinkedIn Automation Ban: What it Means for Your Recruitment Process appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/linkedin-automation-ban/

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Is It Hard to Learn a New CRM?

Whether your business is transitioning to another CRM product or your team is adopting one for the first time, you might be wondering “how hard is it to learn a new CRM?” If you’re still on the fence about investing in a customer relationship management system, you’re not alone.

In this post, we’ll go over the various barriers that may be in the way of implementing a CRM software and how you and your team can overcome them.

So, if you’re worried that a CRM will be too difficult to adopt, keep reading.

How Long Is a Piece of String?

Is it hard to learn a CRM? The real and unsatisfying answer is, it depends. Just with learning any new skill or program, it takes time, organization, and a willingness to learn. There’s certainly a wrong way to go about CRM implementation, which can make learning it brutal for you and your team. But if adopted correctly, you won’t find it difficult to learn a CRM.  

That being said, we can’t stress enough the importance of training every employee who is expected to use the new system, but more on that later.

What Are the Benefits Of A CRM?

CRM software can improve your sales processes and your relationship with your customers, but just in case you need a little reminder of how it can also improve the flow and consistency of your entire operations, here are some common CRM features:

Visual sales pipeline

Rules automation

Email marketing templates

Analytics and charting

Sales forecasting

Social media management tools

One of the greatest benefits of a customer relationship management software is that you can train it to do the heavy lifting. If set up correctly, a CRM should free up your time by taking care of mundane or repetitive tasks, such as data entry and lead assignment. 

While there is a learning curve when it comes to creating rules, you’re never far from the resources and tools you need to help you. 

For example, creating a new opportunity assignment rule in Veloxity CRM is as easy as heading over to our Support Centre and following these easy steps.

What to Expect from the Implementation Process

You do not need to know how to read code or programming language in order to implement your new CRM system. The more time you spend researching the right CRM, choosing the features that will help your business processes, and preparing your data, the smoother the implementation process will be.

Many businesses choose to invest in a CRM in order to improve their customer service and streamline processes for their sales team. If at this point you don’t already have a consensus on how your sales reps manage incoming leads, for example, a CRM will help.

How to Make Your CRM Easier to Learn

Get Departments Involved

Before you decide on a CRM, be sure to speak to your marketing, sales, and customer service teams about what features they need. You can avoid adoption failure by making a list of the top features that your teams actually need to improve their processes. 

Excluding departments from these early conversations may make it more difficult for your employees to learn if they can’t make any use of your CRM features. 

Schedule Training

We’ve said it many times in previous blog posts, and we’re saying it again: train, train, train your staff.

You’ve invested time and money in your new CRM system, and training your staff is part of that investment. While it’s true that the best CRM products out there are easy to learn, you shouldn’t expect everyone at the office to intuitively know how to use it. 

Training not only ensures that your employees feel comfortable using your system on a daily basis, but it also guarantees your team is using the software to its full potential.

Audit Your Data

As a machine-learning software, your CRM will only be as useful or as accurate as the information it receives. Therefore, you don’t want to feed it tons of outdated, inaccurate, duplicate, or unnecessary data. 

Performing a data audit before transferring it to your CRM (and regularly after that) will provide your team with more accurate sales predictions and reduce the amount of time needed for the data transfer.

A data audit will also ensure consistency, which speeds up the adoption process.

Try Our CRM For Free

In conclusion, there are enough resources and CRM courses out there to learn the ins and outs of whichever software you choose. Veloxity CRM makes learning easy with our free resource centre and out-of-the-box features that are easy to customize.

Schedule a free demo today to see how easy it is to use our software.

The post Is It Hard to Learn a New CRM? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/is-it-hard-to-learn-a-new-crm/

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What Are the Three Main Sales Forecasting Techniques?

If you work in the sales department of your company, you may have heard of sales forecasting. Any business decision must rely on forecasting, and anyone in the company planning ahead will have to consult a sales forecast in order to make the right decision at the right time. That means that accurate forecasting is crucial to the success of your company.

What Is Sales Forecasting?

A sales forecast is how much revenue a company can expect to earn over a given period. Sales forecasting is the process of making this prediction using accurate methods that are based on collected data or experience, or both. 

Every sales forecast sets out to answer two questions: how much will a company earn and over what period of time?

The Importance Of Sales Forecasting

No executive worth their salt is going to spend company dollars on a blind guess. In fact, decision-makers won’t even consider pulling the trigger on marketing campaigns, production runs, or internal changes without looking at some kind of forecast. Companies don’t want to risk spending money, making a product, or marketing a service without a high probability of success.

With that said, let’s take a look at the main sales forecasting techniques:

#1: The Qualitative Sales Forecasting Technique

This technique relies heavily on the expertise and experience of professionals. In your company, that could be a seasoned sales rep, an experienced manager, or anyone who has accumulated a wealth of knowledge to accurately predict your sales figures.

Why Use the Qualitative Sales Forecasting Technique?

While quantitative data can provide immeasurable value, it’s also beneficial to depend on experts to provide sound judgement on marketing decisions, production, trends, etc.

Unlike quantitative sales forecasting in which predictions are based on numerical values and objective historical data, qualitative sales forecasting is based on opinions of people with experience behind them. Using both methods can provide accurate sales forecasts for your future sales.

Most popular sales forecasting methods:

The Delphi method

Expert’s opinion method

Survey of buyer’s expectations 

Sales force composite method

Historical analogy method

#2: The Time Series Analysis Method

In the time series analysis method, sales forecasts are made by studying data points that have been collected over a period of time. Using this method, data analysts can see how variables change in specific time periods, which allows them to accurately forecast future sales. 

Unlike the qualitative method, the time series analysis method is based strictly on data collected over time. 

Why Use the Time Series Analysis Method?

The time series analysis method is important for any company that wants to understand trends. For example, if a company has designed a product and is ready to launch, they can use their analytics to determine their timeline for marketing, production, and distribution.

The time series analysis method is used in various applications. In fact, we’ve been collecting data points and measuring them over time for thousands of years. It’s how our ancestors predicted weather patterns and seasonal changes to help them successfully plant their crops. 

The most common modern applications for the time series method include:

Interest rates

Stock trading

Quarterly sales

Stock prices

#3: The Causal Models Method

As the name suggests, this sales forecasting technique is based on cause and effect. The causal model is considered the most sophisticated type of forecasting technique, as it depends on data to analyse and determine the relationship between independent and dependent variables. 

The causal model takes everything into account when forecasting sales numbers, such as current events, seasonal changes, and market survey information. To make a forecast using this method, analysts will first establish the company’s current position and then evaluate all the variables that could influence future sales.

Why Use the Causal Model?

If you have enough historical data to perform an accurate analysis, the causal model will likely give you the best and most accurate sales forecast. If you don’t have all the data you need, however, you will likely have to rely on assumptions until enough data can be collected.

Automated Sales Forecasting

No matter which sales forecasting technique you use, you’re better guaranteed more accurate predictions when you can use machine intelligence to forecast future sales. Customer relationship management systems like Veloxity use machine learning to make highly accurate projections based on your sales team’s inputs. 

What Is the Best Sales Forecasting Technique?

When you use a CRM, you no longer need to spend hours tediously analysing sales data. The more information your CRM receives, the more accurately it can predict future sales. This frees up your time and gives you the most accurate prediction to help your company save money and increase your marketing ROI. Want to see Veloxity’s sales forecasting at work? Try our demo today!

The post What Are the Three Main Sales Forecasting Techniques? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/what-are-the-three-main-sales-forecasting-techniques/

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Cost-Effective Custom Pharmaceutical Software

The medical and pharmaceutical industries have been through a complete overhaul since the beginning of the pandemic. Now, more than ever, it has become essential to have constant access to digital medical records and patient history using remote applications and software.

If you work for a pharmaceutical company, you may be wondering how your team can improve workplace efficiency and patient satisfaction. 

That’s where custom pharmaceutical software comes in. If you’re thinking of hiring a developer to build a software solution for your company, keep reading to learn more.

What Is Healthcare Software Used For?

Healthcare software spans a wide range of applications and can be used in laboratories, medical clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and pharmaceutical companies. As such, the definition of pharmaceutical software is any application that is used to improve a patient’s experience. The digitization of patient data, drug history, etc. makes it easy for the healthcare network to share and access the same information and provide a consistent level of care.

Do You Need Custom Pharmaceutical Software?

It’s rare, even unlikely, to find a company, agency, or enterprise that doesn’t use some form of software that tracks inventory or patient data. But even if you’re reluctant to invest in a custom application, your team will benefit greatly from using a more complex software system that can save you precious time and money.

There are many benefits of using a pharmaceutical software’s out-of-the-box features. For example, you can start using the application as soon as you pay for your subscription and don’t have to wait around for your development team to design and test each feature.

Typical Features Of Pharmacy Software

The healthcare industry has a wealth of software available to make processes more efficient, compliant, and organized. 

The types of software that the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries use every day are:

Customer relationship management software (CRM)

Enterprise resource planning software (ERP)

Laboratory information management system software (LIMS)

When hiring a web development team to design cost-effective customer pharmaceutical software, consider adding the following features:

Inventory Management

Stay on top of your inventory to save money and track your batches, lots, and serial numbers. You’ll want to keep track of pharmaceutical products every step of the way without needing to spend hours and hours following the trail throughout various departments.

Production Management and Quality Control

Quality control and production management are crucial for maintaining compliance and the public’s trust. This is an important feature in your custom pharmaceutical software.

Multi-Location Support

Whether you operate a local pharmacy or a medical research centre, chances are, you might be running projects or operations from more than one location. If you are, consider adding multi-location support to your custom pharmaceutical software. 

With multi-location support, you can keep tabs on your inventory and gain important insights using analytics and charting all from a single software. 

E-Prescriptions

Some pharmaceutical software features are designed with the patient’s ease of use in mind. If you have a direct relationship with patients and their prescription medications, you’ll likely need an e-prescription feature that takes the guesswork out of illegible scripts and allows doctors to send refills directly to the pharmacy.

Digital Documentation

One of the main benefits of using pharmaceutical software is the efficiency and streamlining of documentation. Before various healthcare and medical software became available, compliant, and useful, essential documentation was widely stored on paper documents. 

Thanks to digital documentation, information is readily available at your fingertips, which speeds up research and patient care.

Examples of Pharmaceutical & Medical Software

Veloxity CRM

Horizon ERP

Medicine ERP

RedBook

Medeil

Benefits Of Custom Software Development

Hiring an experienced team of web developers to create customer pharmaceutical software has plenty of benefits, such as:

Access to features tailored to your needs

Increased security

Improved patient care

Cost-effective expert solutions

Scaleable

Enhanced productivity

Should You Invest in Cost-Effective Custom Pharmaceutical Software?

Hiring web developers to create a customized solution that meets your business needs can be an intelligent business decision that improves operational efficiencies and increases your ROI. However, you may not necessarily need to pay for a web development team to give you the features that you need.

Veloxity CRM is a flexible software solution that can be adopted and expanded to meet your business’s requirements. Getting started is easy and doesn’t require prior knowledge of LIMS or CRM software. Want to see how easy it is to customize our software? Get started with a free trial today!

The post Cost-Effective Custom Pharmaceutical Software appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/cost-effective-custom-pharmaceutical-software/

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How a CRM Can Help You Predict Revenue

There are no guarantees in this world, and this is especially true in business. Market fluctuations, changes in customer demand, and (as we’ve seen with the pandemic) unforeseen global issues can all affect your business revenue, even though your team has done everything in its power to prepare for the future. 

That’s why revenue forecasting is so crucial…and why it’s even more important to create accurate forecasts using reliable prediction models and software.

In this post, we’re going to discuss the different types of revenue forecasting techniques and look at the various CRM features that can help your team make accurate sales forecasts.

Keep reading if you want to learn more about predicting revenue for your business.

What Is Revenue Forecasting?

Revenue forecasting is the process of predicting how much revenue your company is going to make over a certain period of time—usually measured over a quarter to a year. 

Startups will have less accurate revenue predictions, as they have no historical data or experience to support their projections, simply market research.

Not all sales forecasting is based on data, however. The qualitative sales forecasting technique (also called judgment forecasting), for example, relies on experience and anecdotal evidence to predict future sales. When data isn’t available, experts can provide invaluable insight into future sales. 

The more data you have, however, the more accurately you predict revenue to help you make marketing and sales decisions. 

What Are the Three Kinds of Sales Forecasting Techniques?

Opportunity Stages Forecasting

Your current CRM may already be forecasting future revenue based on where your prospects are in the pipeline. It can detect trends and patterns and predict how long it will take for a lead to turn into a customer, or when a prospect will request a free demo. 

The more data your CRM has, the more accurately it can predict future sales over time. For example, Veloxity CRM uses machine learning to assign a probability value to your customized sales stages.

Test Marketing

Have you come up with a new product that you want to test on the general public? If you need solid feedback from your target customer, you can use the tried and true method of test marketing.

Test marketing allows you to test a product on your audience to determine the market’s level of interest, and therefore, sales revenue within a given time period. Test marketing generally works by dividing your customers up into two groups: the test group and the control group. The test group is given the product to try without any marketing or promotion, while the control group is first exposed to the product through advertising and marketing.

The difference in sales between these two groups is analysed to determine the potential for revenue growth.

Historical Forecasting

This method of sales forecasting predicts future sales based on past numbers. Historical forecasting isn’t without its flaws because it automatically assumes that whatever has happened in the past is most likely to happen in the future. 

Historical forecasting is a good starting point, however, it doesn’t take into account seasonality, fluctuating customer demand, or any other variables. 

CRM Tools to Help Predict Revenue

The benefit of using CRM software for your business is that you have access to helpful forecast revenue tools to help you predict sales for the next quarter or the next year. Not only can CRMs help you determine the likelihood of a sale, but it’s also loaded with other helpful features to help you stay on top of your sales and maintain customer satisfaction.

Here are some tools to help with your sales forecasting:

Visual Sales Pipeline

When opportunities are added to the CRM, your sales team can see where they land in your pipeline. The CRM’s powerful AI learns from your data input and will provide more accurate predictions over time.

Forecast Automation

Use your CRM to set quotas by region or by sales representatives, and compare quotas against real sales and forecasts. 

Analytics and Charting

Veloxity’s complex analytics and charting goes well beyond simple pie charts. You can use one of the prebuilt charts or customize your own report using various visual charts that will help you see trends in your sales pipeline and predict future revenue. 

Summary: Use CRM Software for the Most Predictable Revenue Forecasting

Before there was CRM software, business decision-makers used complicated Excel spreadsheets or relied on data scientists to compile complicated predictions using pen, paper, and calculators. These days, we can rely on predictive analytics and complex machine learning applications to predict revenue with much better accuracy.  To learn more about Veloxity’s advanced features, try a free demo!

The post How a CRM Can Help You Predict Revenue appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/how-a-crm-can-help-you-predict-revenue/

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Higher Education CRM Software: The Best Options for Your Business

When it comes to increasing customer retention and business growth through technology, one of the easiest ways to make an impact is by using CRM software.

A CRM or Customer Relationship Management system is designed to help companies better understand their customer base and develop customer relationships.

It is crucial for businesses that depend on customer relationships for their success. It’s also critical for higher education, where customer relationships are often a key profit driver.

What is an Educational CRM?

CRM, a blend of a powerful business strategy and technology, aims to help businesses bolster profitability and revenue, produce proactive customer service and promote customer-centric business activities. 

A higher education CRM is a specially designed CRM that acts as a complete educational platform to help educational systems manage administrative, marketing, and sales tasks, track and follow up interactions with their stakeholders across all communication channels the institutes are present, and more. It updates customer data and streamlines workflow, thus helping staff members to maintain lasting relationships with current and prospective students, donors, alumni, and everyone associated with the institution – the result is higher retention, conversion, and admission rates, happy students, and employees, and the list goes on.  

But who can use education CRM software? Let’s look through:

Schools

Colleges

Universities

Distance learning schools

Online tutor

Professional speakers and more

What Should Higher Education CRM Software Include?

The core CRM capabilities that make student recruitment and stakeholder management process seamless include:

Contact Management: Enables staff members to organize contact data based on segmentation filtering, tagging, etc., in unique holistic customer profiles to help track interaction history.

Team Management: Quality CRM software enables task, message, or meeting scheduling, lead pipeline tracking, features collaborative tools for allowing cross-departmental collaboration from within the system, and more. 

Communications Tools: Many quality CRMs enable real-time communication via messaging and phone, syncs with third-party applications, social media platforms, and other software your institute is built around, etc.

Reporting: Supports AI/ML-based predictive analytics and pre-defined/customizable reports and charts to enable sales pipeline and key business metrics visualization. 

Educational CRM Solution Benefits

Let’s look into the benefits of educational CRMs and why they are replacing the legacy systems in educational institutions at a fast pace:

Data Silos Elimination: Though all departments operate separately in an educational organization, they share the same goal – student welfare. Thanks to CRM systems that enable each team to get essential stakeholder data at their fingertips and ensure prompt and personalized customer support. 

Time saver: One of the main reasons CRM use is skyrocketing and becoming the leading business market today is its robust marketing automation – employees can better focus on following up the hottest leads, tailoring offers, etc., rather than tracking things manually. 

Transparency across departments: Enabling real-time access to historic trends/data and updates in client profiles is crucial for making data-driven decisions during enrollments. Thanks to CRM software that helps gain better visibility into data consolidated by all teams and facilitates administrative tasks. 

Best CRM Options For Higher Education

Veloxity CRM

Are you a super-smart EdTech business trying to make knowledge more accessible and eradicate the limitations of those old-school classrooms? Stop juggling between spreadsheets and legacy systems and give Veloxity, the world’s most trusted SaaS-based CRM, a FREE try to revolutionize your institution. 

This fully-fledged online platform has become the primary source of research for prospective students and made lead and recruitment management, student, etc., collaboration effortless like never before – the admission department can now manage, attract, forecast, and turn even more prospects into clients with zero leakage.

Veloxity CRM Features

Now you can automatically track lead generations and capture, register the latest admissions, and employ automated lead assignment rules for lead routing – thanks to Veloxity’s intelligent CRM platform.

Supports seamless integration with tools like Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, ZOOM, GotoMeeting, GoogleMeet to track emails with contacts and opps from the CRM timeline and schedule webinars and meetings from within the system – you can effortlessly provide a seamless academic experience to students and employees. 

Veloxity helps educational organizations identify the target audience, attract them with hyper-personalized content and emails tailored to their requirements, the field of interest, website activities, and position in the admission cycle, rolling out targeted campaigns – thanks to Veloxity’s powerful email and marketing automation.

Helps institutions evaluate campaign ROI with unprecedented precision that contributes to boosting the number of enrollments via campaigns and give you a complete overview of a prospective student’s lifecycle – thanks to Veloxity’s ML-based predictive analytics

It comes with an intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface to boost customer experience – you can get things done effortlessly without strolling around the system. 

Salesforce Education Cloud

Salesforce Education Cloud is another market-leading educational CRM provider with best-in-class features. From email and your social media integration to collaboration with stakeholders – everything to power organizational success is available right on the CRM timeline. 

Though Salesforce CRM may cost you a bit higher and its UI seems intimidating to some users, the top-class functionalities and the wide range of integration facilities are worth the price. 

Features of Salesforce Education Cloud

Supports a wide range of integrated platforms and customization to support the learner lifecycle – the Education Data Architecture (EDA), Admissions Connect, Student Success Hub, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc., that can be connected to transform student life

Salesforce Wave Analytics enables educational institutes to draw in and analyze data from various channels, applications, and teams and gain actionable insights by creating reports. 

Drive institution and learner success across the complete educational journey using Salesforce AppExchange – a collection of experts and applications. 

TargetX

Are you searching for a CRM specialized in higher education and efficient student lifecycle management? Try out TargetX, a Liaison company with state-of-the-art CRM functionalities to boost student experience. 

Supporting mailout scheduling and event management to record customization and a fully-fledged mobile application (School App), TargetX has become one of the leading purpose-built CRM to make enrollment, alumni, and student lifecycle management effortless. 

Features of TargetX

Seamlessly integrates with SIS and a wide range of payment platforms, including Paypal, Banner, PeopleSoft, etc.

Its Recruitment Suite features intelligent event management, online applications, travel planning, form builder, Uchat, workflow automation, email, text message integration, and more to increase student enrollment.

Now, you can boost completion and student success rates with the TargetX Retention Suit. It supports email and campaign automation, telecounseling, effortless data importing from various sources like applications, test scores, and search tools, and more.

The post Higher Education CRM Software: The Best Options for Your Business appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/higher-education-crm-software-the-best-options-for-your-business/

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How CRM Improves Customer Service

Customer relationship management (CRM) software has been used for decades to manage customer information and interactions. However, recent advances in technology have enabled CRM systems to provide a host of new features and capabilities to help organizations improve customer service.

In this post, we’ll cover five ways that your CRM can improve customer service.

But first, here are some popular customer service-focused CRM features offered by Veloxity and other providers:

Ticketing

Live chat and chatbot support

Call centre solutions

Customer feedback surveys

Analytics and reporting

Email automation

#1: Personalize Your Customer Experience

Your customer relationship management software has powerful email marketing features that help you build intelligent lists that split your contacts into various segments, depending on where they are in the sales cycle, the products they’ve purchased in the past, or any desired demographic or behaviour.

Not only can you customize your emails to your customers, but you’ll also be able to create and deliver valuable content that lets them know you care about their experiences.

It may not seem like a huge deal, but your customers are far more likely to open an email that’s addressed to them than an email that looks like it was sent out to 1000 people.

With Veloxity, you can save time by using our email template builder, which allows you to create and send out emails to multiple customers using fields that auto populate with the customer’s name and personal details.  

#2: Deliver Responsive Support

And speaking of emails, you can utilize your CRM software to build automatic responses to the most common customer inquiries, which shows your customers that their needs are immediately being addressed.

If your company offers technical support, you’ll find CRM software products that offer advanced tools, like live chat, chatbot AI, telephony, and various third-party integrations like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. 

If you can’t offer 24/7 customer support, chatbots are a great way to take care of straightforward issues that don’t require human intervention. This can reduce the number of call-backs and escalations for your team while also increasing your rate of first-call resolution.

Some CRM software products, such as HubSpot, offer customer support solutions that help you raise the standard of service, with features like ticketing, team management, conversation intelligence, and customer feedback surveys.

The more ways you can offer customer support, the faster you can resolve your customer’s issues.

#3: Anticipate Your Customers’ Needs

CRMs like Veloxity store all your customer’s info, order history, and communication history from a single location, so that when they call or email, you’ll have all the information you need to help them without having to chase sales teams or go looking through shared drives.

Veloxity allows you to log calls and track emails from the customer’s profile so that your team is better prepared to help your customers whenever they have an issue.

Is your CRM linked to your social media account? With powerful social media integrations, you can keep your finger on the pulse of the conversation to find out what your customers are talking about, what they care about, and what they’re saying about you. 

#4: Offer Consistency & Professionalism

Nothing sets off red flags for a customer more than inconsistent client support. Companies that can’t provide consistency and professionalism in all their customer interactions are far more likely to lose their customers to the competition. 

When your customers learn to expect the same level of service at every touch point, you’ll foster a high level of trust from your contacts.

How does a CMS offer consistent customer service? By automating your processes.

The easiest example of this is setting up an automatic reply that’s triggered every time a contact requests a demo, a callback, or extra support. 

#5: Learn More About Your Customer

The data collected from your CRM allows you to better understand your customer’s behaviour, likes, and dislikes and to provide a better overall experience. You can use your analytics and charting to determine trends and forecast sales while gaining meaningful insight into what marketing strategies work and which ones are lowering your ROI.

Your analytics allow you to gain insights into not only each customer, but all of your customers. For example, Veloxity’s advanced charting tools allow your team to visualize any specific data you choose to help you determine the success of specific campaigns, products, or customer retention strategies.

It can also help you determine when issues start in the sales pipeline and diagnose these issues before they lead to a loss in potential revenue.  

In Summary: Your CRM Works for You

One of the greatest advantages of using a CRM is the ability to accumulate, track, and analyze large amounts of data. Not only is your customer relationship management software designed to improve your relationships with your customers, but it can significantly boost your ROI and improve sales processes and marketing strategies.

The post How CRM Improves Customer Service appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/how-crm-improves-customer-service/

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How CRM System Can Help an Organization to Grow?

No matter the quality service you offer, unless you can manage your customers efficiently and provide best-in-class customer assistance, the bitter truth is, you are doomed to failure. Plus, the fierce and ever-intensifying business competition makes customer retention and acquisition challenging today more than ever – clients expect prompt service, hyper-personalized interactions, and a seamless customer journey with narrowing attention spans and flimsy loyalty. It is where a CRM can help – a catalyst for thriving in the competitive business world, providing a top-class customer experience. 

But how CRM system can help an organization to grow? If you want your business to grow with ease but find customer management intimidating, read on to know more about CRM software. 

What is a CRM?

A CRM/Customer Management is a software specially developed for helping enterprises manage, track and nurture their relationship with their business clientele. It is a group of methodologies and systems that acts as a centralized repository to bring your marketing, support and sales departments into one single glass pane and help streamline the sales process. 

The core functions of a quality CRM are:

Offering 360° view of clients

Monitoring deals and tasks

Automating and streamlining customer-related operations

Enabling cross-departmental collaboration

Enabling marketing automation

A business must curate a realistic and effective CRM strategy and implement it efficiently before implementing a CRM – you have to synchronize the activities of all departments and involve them in the strategy – you can boost sales, generate more revenue, and improve customer service through combining business operations and technologies.

What Companies Use CRMs?

Any company, be it small, medium, or large, can implement a CRM tool to acquire and retain customers and deliver proactive customer assistance. 

CRM better suits:

a B2B company with a more involved sales cycle that requires consolidating a massive amount of client data to understand its audience better, for instance, pharmaceutical industries and manufacturers, marketing agencies, HR software vendors, and more

a B2C customer-centric company that involves a comparatively complex sales cycle, for instance, financial institutions, hospitality service, airlines, retailers, car dealerships, and more

Different CRM Capabilities

The core CRM capabilities that make a quality CRM package:

Contact Management: Consolidates customers’ contact data, for example, names, social media accounts, mailing addresses, etc., from multiple communication channels into one searchable customer database.

Interaction Tracking: Tracks customer interaction history and adds notes, documenting them in holistic profiles unique for each customer.

Opportunity Management: The capability to quantify sales opportunities – you can track down the prospects who are most likely to turn into winning deals.

Lead Management: Helps sales teams to identify and move high-value prospects through the sales funnel based on Quality Scoring and convert them into paying customers.

Forecasting: Helps augment forecasts for future revenue and sales figures analyzing historic trends past and present data/trends for a certain period.

How CRM System Can Help an Organization to Grow?

Acquire Right Customer for Elevated Business

Hundreds of leads may flow into your company daily but, if your salespeople cannot efficiently identify the opportunities to turn them into sales, all your efforts and time will go in vain. What statistics say is even more awful – only 5-10% of marketing leads convert, whereas 95-90% of them never buy. 

Thanks to quality CRM tools that come with best-in-class email automation, social media integration, lead and contact management, and more that make the lead generation, capture, and nurture effortless for your salespeople – with fewer efforts and time, they can improve conversion rates, sell more, and bolster productivity even faster.

Enhance Customer Experience: The Key to Business Success

The rule of thumb for increasing revenue and making a business grow faster is to improve customer experience – the more satisfied the customers are, the more likely they are to re-subscribe, re-purchase, and recommend your service to others. 

Thanks to CRM software that ensures every essential customer data, like interaction history, demographics, and more, is at your team’s fingertips. As your teams have quick access to client data, they can better understand customer pain points and pull up details to personalize communication, tailor offers, or recommend products/services based on each customer’s preference – all that a business needs to create a more consistent customer experience and increase sales. 

Decrease Sales Costs

New clients are one of the main components of uninterrupted business development, but it is not that easy to acquire leads. The best thing is, now you can offset lead generation expenses through deals to your current client base. 

Get better visibility into the cross-sell, upsell and referral possibilities in your existing client portfolio and see how radically your repeatable sales boost, speeding up your sales cycle – thanks to CRMs that help build brand awareness and credibility among the consumers. 

Take the following functionalities of a CRM into account to reap the benefits:

Optimize Sales Cycles: Prioritize high-value opps and prospects to close more deals faster based on customer interactions.

Clarify Upsell and Cross-sell possibilities: Visualize the opportunities through CRM’s intuitive dashboard to encourage customers to opt for add-on sales or purchase complementary /related products.

Enhance Customer Touchpoints: Identify the engaged and interested clients and follow up with them at the right time for optimal outcomes. 

Increase Referrals from Current Customers: Unveil the potentials in the current customer base and win new business rather than spending time and effort on cold calling and low-value prospects.

How Veloxy CRM Platform Can Help?

Let’s dive deep into how veloxity, the world’s most trusted CRM system, can help you level up your business and flourish like never before:

With Veloxity’s Opportunity Pipeline, visualizing the sales pipeline at different levels and viewing the potential revenue at each sales stage has become effortless – thanks to its interactive Kanban views and out-of-the-box chart options. 

Let your admins, even the non-technical ones, be more productive. Enable them to use Veloxity’s intelligent lead assignment rule builder to define rules and route new leads to the right reps for super-efficient follow-ups and inbound lead qualification. Plus, you can capture new leads from your website using Veloxity’s out-of-the-box web forms and assign them to sales reps based on the rules you have set.

With Veloxity’s super-powerful quoting capabilities, creating quotes from within your opportunities and sending them to the prospects have now become a matter of a few clicks only. 

Use Veloxity’s best-in-class searching facilities and visualize your key business metrics with its pre-defined/customizable charts and reports. Plus, get the most out of your data using veloxity’s powerful ML-based analytics. 

Now your employees can be even more productive as the power of fully functional CRM is in their pockets now – thanks to Veloxity’s native mobile app.

The post How CRM System Can Help an Organization to Grow? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/how-crm-system-can-help-an-organization-to-grow/

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What Are the Stages of Lead Conversion?

Not everyone who engages with your brand is ready to buy your product or service. Your marketing should appeal to leads at all stages of the buying journey.

But what are the stages of lead conversion, and what steps should your sales and marketing teams take to convert leads into customers?

In this post, we’ll go over each lead stage and give you examples of how to nurture leads and drive them to purchase your product.

Locating the Leads

The first and important stage involves finding the right lead. You can achieve this by knowing who can be the right lead for your brand and by exposing your brand with ads and content in virtual places they visit the most. 

Next, you will need to determine why this lead might be interested in your products or services by determining their needs and wants. If you are starting a new business and you have zero clue about who your right leads could be, check out your competitors to get ideas on what kind of clients they are pursuing.

Once you know your leads and what their needs are, you will draw their attention by providing the right content.

Attract Leads Through Effective Content

When it comes to attracting new leads, it’s important to make sure the content you share online is informative and engaging. In this case, you should think like your leads, understand what they’re looking for, and then provide it.

For instance, a web designer may write blog posts about ways to diagnose and troubleshoot simple website problems on one’s own. On the other hand, a photographer can post photos from his recent photo shoot on Facebook or Instagram.

You can create content in various formats like:

Videos

Blogs

Infographics

Whitepapers

Images and photos

Case studies

Make sure the content you create and share suits your business and will interest your leads.

Share Share! Share!

When your content is ready for consumption, use search engine optimization to promote it on Google. Then, promote your content on Facebook, email, Slideshare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms where your potential clients are active.

It’s important to ensure that your content is perfectly delivered by making sure you have offered all the valuable information and data about your services or products across all the channels. 

That explains why 70 percent of marketers are spending valuable time and money on content marketing.

Get Their Contact Details

The moment your content catches the attention of your potential leads, your next step is getting their contact details so that you can guide them through the sales funnel.

When requesting contact details (i.e. for newsletter sign-ups, etc.), bear in mind that contacts are more likely to provide you with their details if you ask them fewer questions. You can convince them to share their contact information by saying, “we will not share or sell your information.”

Nurture Your Lead

The moment you get the lead’s name and email, you can provide more useful, engaging content to persuade them to try your products. One of the effective ways to nurture your leads at this phase is to send marketing emails that speak to them at their particular stage of the buying journey.

For instance, if an individual reads your blog and subscribes to your newsletter, you can send emails such as:

Useful tips related to your brand

Sales vouchers

News of new product release

Each email you send must explain how your brand can answer their pain points. Remember to write a precise call to action that prompts them to sign up for a webinar, request a quote, or download a free ebook. 

Lead Score Based on Actions

Here is where you score your leads depending on where they came from and what actions prompted them to get on your list. For example, allocate the highest score to the lead that is:

Interacting more

Visiting your site

Downloading your content

Opening the emails

Signing up for a free app trial

Lead scoring will help you concentrate on individuals who are likely to become clients. This phase will tell you how likely the lead is ready to buy. 

Most importantly, this information will inform your future marketing strategies and give you more insight into what campaigns work better than others. 

Transforming the Leads Into Clients

Moving your leads down the funnel so that they eventually become paying customers and loyal brand ambassadors is a combined effort of your sales and marketing teams. Before your potential customers convert, you can tip the odds in your favour by offering:

Free trials

Sales calls

In-person demos

On-site visits

However, the sales crew’s role shouldn’t end here. The moment a client has purchased, the team must enrich the client’s experience to maintain their brand loyalty.

Final Word

Lead generation plays a vital role in increasing the company’s client base. Nevertheless, it’s vital to know that as a digital marketplace evolves, the client’s expectations will as well. Hence, you should stay updated on new apps, techniques, and lead generation trends to maintain the steady flow of new clients.

The post What Are the Stages of Lead Conversion? appeared first on Veloxity.

source https://www.veloxity.com/what-are-the-stages-of-lead-conversion/

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How to Calculate ROI in Digital Marketing: An Essential Framework for Success

Are you looking for a system to help you calculate your return on investment (ROI)?

Do you want to understand how to calculate ROI for your digital marketing efforts?

If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll provide a framework for calculating ROI for digital marketing—a tool that you can use to measure the profitability of your efforts.

We’ll also provide an overview of some of the common pitfalls that people experience when calculating ROI.

How to Calculate ROI in Digital Marketing

Calculating ROI (return on investment) can seem relatively simple, that is, of course, before we get into the complex ROI models. 

The fundamental ROI formula is easy enough: take the general value of your investment, deduct the cost, and divide it by the cost of the investment.

ROI = (Gains from Investment – Cost of Marketing) / Cost of Marketing

To put it in simpler terms, ROI compares the profits to the amount of money invested in creating and deploying a digital marketing campaign. A business person would want their ROI as high as possible.

Because of its simplicity, this basic ROI calculation formula comes with some limitations. For instance, you cannot use it to calculate long-term return on investment for your digital marketing campaigns. Additionally, it does not include indirect benefits, such as social return, of your marketing campaigns.

That’s why there are more complex ROI calculations models that give more accurate return on investment values, such as:

Using a CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

Tagging links with UTM parameters

Setting up digital tracking pixels

Let’s look at these tactics in detail:

Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool

A CRM tool helps you track leads from the initial contact to when they conclude their purchasing journey. When calculating ROI, this software can come in handy. It allows you to monitor and tag leads generated by your digital marketing campaign. This way, it is easier to evaluate the number of opportunities your digital marketing investment provides for your business.

Setting up Digital Tracking Pixels

Tracking pixels have become all too common in digital marketing campaigns today. They help track where traffic is coming from and how you can target these customers in your future remarketing campaigns.

Digital tracking pixels are added to business websites. When you need to calculate your ROI, these elements can help you determine where the traffic is coming from as well as any transactions taking place on your website. That provides you with precise data for accurate ROI calculations.

Tagging Links with UTM Parameters

A UTM link is another valuable method to use when calculating ROI. Before we get into how it works, let’s first understand what a UTM link is. A UTM (or Urchin Tracking Module) link is a lengthy URL with a question mark affixed to it. They are different from regular links as they allow you to track your digital marketing efforts through Google Analytics.

When a customer visits your website and clicks a link tagged with a UTM code, Google Analytics will track their location alongside the campaign that created the link. That gives you a precise idea of how many opportunities each digital marketing campaign has brought to your business.

Calculating ROI won’t signify anything if you haven’t set focused objectives, used inaccurate numbers to do the calculations, or aren’t clear on what you are monitoring.

For that reason, it is essential to consider the following few things before calculating ROI on your digital marketing campaigns.

Understand the marketing objectives and goals

Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)

Use clean data collection methods

Draw insights from KPIs to measure ROIs

Common Pitfalls that Many People Experience When Calculating ROI

Basically, your ROI is an estimate of the gains you have generated compared to the cost of the marketing campaign. Unfortunately, getting an accurate ROI value is much more complicated than the formula can insinuate. Here are some common pitfalls that people experience when calculating ROI.

It Is Difficult to Directly Link Some Marketing Campaigns to Revenue

The majority of marketing initiatives revolve around creating awareness for a product or service. Without a defined value, it is challenging for you to tie it to revenues. Some sophisticated digital marketers might achieve this using a wide range of techniques—however, this is an exception rather than a norm.

Labor Costs for Internal Employees Can Be Difficult to Calculate

If you’re paying an external firm to carry out all the work, it can be easier to estimate the costs of your marketing campaign. However, the majority of businesses run advertisement initiatives using their employees. That makes it difficult to calculate the initial costs invested in the campaign.

In Summary

ROI in digital marketing is vital for your business as it helps you monitor the progress of your marketing campaigns. With such conclusive data, you can identify sections that require change as well as funnel your efforts towards the most efficient and effective marketing channels.

The post How to Calculate ROI in Digital Marketing: An Essential Framework for Success appeared first on Veloxity.

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