Centrium CRM

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Essential Email Marketing Tips for Successful Sales Teams

Lots of small and medium businesses leave the responsibility for email marketing (or parts of it) to their sales teams. So, we’ve gone ahead and compiled this list of crucial email marketing tips that are going to be relevant to the average sales team.

If you’ve spent most of your training being educated in the intricacies of doing sales, email marketing is not an automatic fit for you. Sure, there is an overlap in some areas, but there are also differences.

This is why you want to get a specific education on how to do email marketing. There are certain things you want to focus on and achieve.

Understand newsletters vs offer emails

You need to understand the difference between the two major types of emails. Sales people are “naturally” drawn more towards the second type. These are the types of emails where the entire focus is on what you're offering, why you’re selling it, and why people should buy it.

But, take note that email marketing is different than sales in this way. If you have someone’s permission to send them emails, you cannot only send them promotional emails. You will be marked as a spammer very soon.

Email marketing primarily works on a “value giving” principle. You send many emails where the focus is on giving tips, advice, information or industry news. Of course, the content will depend on your industry and business. In most of your emails, the mention of what you're offering or selling should be a closing line, not the main focus of the email.

Of course, the content will depend on your industry and business. In most of your emails, the mention of what you're offering or selling should be a closing line, not the main focus of the email.

Naturally, you can occasionally send sales-focused emails too. But you need to understand what's a good amount. You generally need to have several "value giving" content emails before sending a single "strictly promotional email". Which brings us to the next point.

You need to plan your emails

Every sales organization should have an email plan. This is your overall strategy on where email marketing does what for which segments of current and potential customers.

The plan can include the number of emails you send on a daily/weekly basis. It can include guidelines on how to segment which kinds of leads (contacts). Decide how you would treat them differently and how much you would automate.

Depending on your sales process, some contacts might require more hands-on personalized attention. This would include hand-written emails and sales calls.

Other types of leads might be more suitable to a highly automated email sequence. Not all of your leads deserve the same amount of manual attention and selling.

With a well-developed strategy, each member of your sales team will know when they need to start selling manually. If you integrate your CRM well with your email service provider, you’ll be able to do this flawlessly.

Get personal in your email

Modern marketing is almost entirely about relationship building. Your customers want to feel like you’re talking to them directly, even when you’re not. Every contact should feel as if they’re getting a highly personal experience.

This should be just as true for the lower priority contacts that get little manual attention. Fortunately, our preferred email provider, MailChimp, makes this possible. With good email marketing automation, you can make every contact feel like they’re getting a custom tailored experience.

But it's not just about using the latest in cutting-edge personalization technology. You want your tone and your writing to feel personal, too. This is where you want your sales team to study copywriting.

It’s a skill they will find highly beneficial when writing emails. This is both for unique one-off emails sent to special clients, as well as for emails that are mass-mailed to many people.

Utilize one-off promotions and special deals

You’d be surprised to learn how much of the sales revenue comes from special time-limited offers. There’s just something about human psychology that makes people go crazy for scarcity and exclusivity. You can use this knowledge to your benefit by offering limited-time discounts on your products.

You can highlight some of your products and offer a discount that is good only for a day or two. A bonus tip is to remind subscribers that there are new discounts being made regularly. Thus, you’re ensuring a lower unsubscribe rate as people will stay active, in fear of losing out on future deals.

Write descriptive subject lines

First off, make sure your sales team always spends time in crafting a quality subject line. You’ll be surprised how many people fail to abide by this rule and just write something like “hey” or “follow-up”. If you do not have a descriptive subject line, your emails are more likely to end up labeled as spam or not opened.

Do your homework on what kind of subject lines have the highest open rates in general. But also experiment and learn what works best for your specific target groups. Then, act accordingly.

The key is to be personal and entice the reader to open the email. Make sure it’s worth the click, though. A fantastic subject line won’t save you if you have lousy content inside of the email body itself.

Stay consistent and predictable

If you send out weekly or monthly emails, make sure they arrive in the subscriber's inbox around the same time. People should know when to expect to hear from you. If you tell them that Monday is the day when you’ll be doing the sending, don’t break that rule afterward.

A good ESP will also let you time deliveries by the recipient's time zone. Mailchimp lets you do this, so that for example all of your subscribers get your email in the afternoon, even though they live in different time zones.

Also, people may inquire or write to you after they read your emails. Make sure you have a system in place that will ensure a quick and thoughtful response by your sales teams. As a general rule, answers to emails from customers should be provided within 24 hours.

Treat inactive recipients differently than raving fans

Good email automation used to be reserved for multi-million dollar corporations. But that was a decade ago. Today, even free plans include a great level of automation. This comes with the ability to segment your recipients by engagement.

The first rule of marketing is “treat different people differently.” And, if you think about it, this is also true for sales. You don’t do the exact same pitch to every contact, do you? The same logic applies to email marketing as well.

You want to see which contacts engage more with your emails and move them to a “raving fans” segment.

Alternatively, you can discover which contacts are no longer engaging and consider adding them to a “re-engagement campaign.” You might even consider having a special deal or offer just for this group. Consider it an "ethical bribe" to get them interested in your stuff again.

Segmenting people by engagement is a huge topic that can fill an entire book, so we're just scratching the surface here. Just understand that you need to pay attention to all of this. Fortunately, Centrium CRM has seamless integration with MailChimp.

Centrium will effortlessly send all your contacts to MailChimp. And then, MailChimp offers your all the features that you need to segment and group readers by engagement. They have some good documentation on this here. You can also find some decent tutorials on YouTube.

Reward your loyal customers

If you apply targeted campaigns for your inactive subscribers, extend the same courtesy to the most loyal ones. In most cases, 80% of your profits are generated from purchases made by 20% of customers. Have this in mind when doing tailored deals for your long-term and loyal customers.

Even more, add a touch of generosity when doing this. Create email campaigns that offer larger discounts to the most loyal customers.

Some companies (such as Howard’s Storage World) reported an increase of $250.000 in profit due to their strategy of categorizing customer engagement.

Do regular A/B testing

Ideally, you should be A/B testing every email you send. Fortunately, MailChimp offers great testing features. You can, and should test everything. For example, you can try different ways of welcoming people on the list. You might experiment with different subject lines.

Don't forget to experiment with different offers and deals, too. See which ones work best for a specific target group or segment. Gathering such data gives you invaluable feedback for future deals. It’s the most effective way to strategically optimize your email marketing.

Integrate your email marketing and sales process

This is easy if you’re using a quality CRM like Centrium. We’ve worked hard to establish seamless integration with MailChimp. The contacts sync between the two, and you get the experience of an intuitive CRM, with the great email marketing provided by Mailchimp.

Mailchimp currently provides a free plan that even includes marketing automation. We also have a free plan (the first user in the CRM is free forever). You can sign up for both today, for free, and test out this combo.

Your goal should be establishing an effortless workflow where you use Centrium to boost your sales process, and merging that with your email marketing.

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Simple Ways to Boost Your Sales Skills Right Away

Unless you work for a monopoly business, doing sales isn't supposed to be super easy. It’s definitely a complex set of skills, and one that takes time to master. To improve your sales skills, you need two things.

First, you need to understand what these skills are, and then learn efficient ways to boost them. We’ll go over some really cool tips to achieve this feat, so read on.

Get out of your comfort zone

It might sound like some self-helpey “fluff”. However, this is more important than you can ever imagine. In fact, this might just be the single most important thing you will ever learn to become better at sales.

Unlike purely technical skills where you’re only dealing with yourself, selling involves influencing other people. Hence, there are a ton of scenarios where you are the limiting factor in your progress. Or more specifically, your comfort zone prevents you from taking the right action at the right time.

You want to ask yourself on a daily basis, "what did I do today that was a stretch?" Did you persist longer than usual with a pitch? Perhaps you “forced yourself” to try an unusual new sales technique?

Perhaps you’re used to sorting leads in one way, but you’ve just learned of a new system to do it more efficiently? Is your comfort zone keeping you stuck to the old way of sorting leads? Or maybe you’re thinking, “It’s the way I’ve always done it, I don’t feel like changing.”

This is just to give you a couple of random examples, but there are literally hundreds of scenarios where discomfort keeps you back. You have to learn to push through the discomfort if you want to grow as a sales rep.

Focus on understanding the customer

People will buy a product or service you're selling for one of two reasons. They may buy it because your product solves a problem they have. Or they might go for it because it makes them happy, i.e. it fulfills an emotional need.

When you do sales, you need to understand this dynamic. Is the product or service you're selling primarily about solving the first or the second need? Perhaps it satisfies different needs for different people. Some of your customers are getting it as a problem-solving tool, while others get it to satisfy an emotional need.

You need to clarify what their reason is: why they would need or want what you’re offering, and how to make them buy it. You can start by talking with your potential customers - asking about their needs and desires. When you’re talking to a customer or a potential customer, you should always be empathetic.

When you understand how your product meets people's needs, you start "getting" the customers. That is essentially the way to get into your customer’s mind. It's a major key to improving your sales skills.

Focus on developing your empathy and if it doesn’t come naturally to you, go and practice it in your everyday life. Once you clarify the reasons why someone would need your product, you will find that you develop and utilize much better pitches and selling tactics.

Work on your confidence

This is how human psychology works - If you pitch something to another person, but do so with less confidence, they will assume that what you’re pitching must suck.

Ironically, the reverse works, too. Some sales reps can sell terrible products just because they do it in a confident manner. Many people assume that if the person pitching the product is confident, then the product must be good.

We’d like to believe that most people make decisions based on logic. It would be great if everyone logically weighed the pros and cons of your product, and made the decisions that way. That’s not how it works, though. How you present these pros and cons affect people's perception in a big way.

If you’re not confident in yourself and in what you’re saying, your potential customers might get the idea that they shouldn’t trust you. You need to know what you’re selling and be confident in your product or service. Also, if you have other people selling your product, you need to teach them that as well.

To improve your general confidence, you can work on things like your posture, eye contact, vocal projection, and body-language. Bookstores have plenty of good titles on the subject. Consider getting “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane for a great science-based overview. The books by Richard Wiseman are also good.

However, you need specific confidence and passion about your product or service. That’s why you should know and think about every little detail that makes it better than the competition. You can even write these things down on paper to remind yourself every day.

Practice keeping calm while doing sales

Another thing you should be careful about is your calmness. No matter how long you prepare, sometimes you might get the nerves. And this anxious demeanor might ruin an otherwise perfect sale opportunity.

If your adrenaline is high, you might talk too much or talk too fast, while forgetting to even mention some of the key points. What should you do about all of this? You need to relax your brain and your facial expressions.

While you’re talking, your body language should be confident, but not too tight. Your tone should be in the right place – it needs to show respect, but you shouldn’t look like you’re begging for someone to buy your product or service.

But how do you accomplish all this without too much effort? While there are many tricks and techniques to practice in the long run, you can apply one easy tip immediately. Just slow down.

Focus on talking more slowly, gesturing more slowly. Even slow down your thoughts if you can. Consciously slow down your breathing and the speed of your reactions to what the prospect says and does.

Think about motivating, not selling

One of the main skills you should have is the ability to motivate others. You should motivate your potential customers to take action and buy from you. Change your focus. It’s not about “selling them a product.” It’s about “motivating them to take action on this amazing deal.”

The previous tips are a good foundation for this one. If you know why the customer needs your product or service, and if you’re confident and relaxed, then you are ready to motivate your lead into buying.

The main trick to motivating someone is being passionate. When others talk passionately about something, it makes us motivated. So, be passionate about your product or service and explain why your prospects must not wait to act on the deal.

Develop your sales process

Is your sales process clear? If not, it is time to develop it more clearly.

Developing your sales process will help you gain confidence about your product and improve your sales skills.

You should clarify each phase of the sales process. Some of the most important phases are making the initial contact, reaching the decision maker, developing a relationship and solving their problem.

You need to experiment with the development of your sales process and see what works best for you. You can try some things that have worked for others, but change them if they don’t work for you. The only thing that’s important is that you constantly work to improve your selling game.

Practice and plan, do simulations

Mastering your sales skills is not something you can do on your own. It’s something that needs to be practiced. You can try it on some of your trusted workers and see what works, while what doesn’t.

You need to understand the flow of the conversation and how it should go. Get advice from some better-experienced people and try a few runs with them. You should also practice on someone who doesn’t know anything about the business you’re in. Perhaps try it with some of your relatives and see how that goes.

They will ask you questions you might not have seen coming. You need this because you will surely miss some important information on your first try.

A quality CRM can help

Improving your sales skills is ultimately about one thing - finalizing more sales with less effort. Does that sound like a familiar goal? If you think about it, that's what Centrium helps you do; Make the sales process easier by organizing all your sales-related tasks in an effortless way.

We can help you and your team manage contacts, keep track of tasks and communication, and close deals. The first user is on us. This means you can get started today, for free. Experience the power of an intuitive and easy-to-use CRM.

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Five Ways to Increase Profits in Your Small Business

Profitability equals survival. If your business isn't growing, it's dying. This holds true for all companies, and especially smaller ones, mainly because they lack the financial reserves to fall back on if things turn bad. So, what can you do to increase profits in your small business?

High sales volume is the first thing that comes to mind. But it’s not necessarily the only thing or the most important thing. There are other, less obvious ways to drive your profits up. This includes things like supplier discounts, cloud solutions, higher profit margins, theft prevention, customer referrals and cost cutting. These are all important profitability drivers.

Let us look into 5 effective ways to boost profits and productivity in your small business.

1. Go paperless

There are many reasons to reduce paper use in the office. First of all, it's good for the planet. The paper industry is a major enemy of the environment. The impact of deforestation, air and water pollution and harmful gas emissions is detrimental.

It also saves money. And in today's economy, every cent matters. Think of what you'll save on paper, toner and printer maintenance. Those preprinted forms you're using can be easily converted to an e-format.

The same goes for e-invoices. Electronic payments will save you a fortune in invoices, postage fees, and envelopes.

Going paperless boosts your overall efficiency. It’s easier to retrieve files without having to sift through countless binders. It also eliminates the need to shred confidential documents. That's quite the time savings if you add up all the time spent shredding documents over a working year.

Consider switching to computerized filing systems for accounting, HR or inventory purposes. It will reduce the time spent on mundane, clerical tasks so that employees can focus on more important things.

Security breaches and data loss can cost you. Copies of important documents left on your desk can be easily stolen. Meanwhile, digital files are protected against unauthorized access by firewalls and passwords.

Use cloud solutions to store and manage your data. It will prevent data loss in case of physical danger, such as flood or fire. It will also speed up your recovery.

2. Use social proof to increase conversions

When it comes to conversion rates, there’s always room for improvement. And the higher the conversion rates, the higher the profits. Conversion rates describe the number of people that take a specific, desired action.

For instance, what percentage of visitors fill out a form, sign up for a newsletter, opt to download an eBook, or buy a product.

Social proof, also known as the wisdom of the crowd, is a great conversion booster. In a word, people often choose to follow the flock, so to speak. Humans have an inbuilt instinct to assume that whatever the flock is doing, that's the right thing to do. Internet communities and social networks have enormous influence on people’s decisions.  

But beware. Social proof is a powerful two-edged sword. Negative social proof can cause considerable business harm.

Testimonials from satisfied clients (preferably with photos) are an effective form of social proof. Try to feature prominent figures, such as executives or other influencers in your domain. Their positive experience with your product will reassure people of its value. This will make your offer more attractive and bring more visitors.

Offer free educational resources. Use case studies to describe how your product helps people solve a problem or accomplish a goal.  

Video case studies work even better, especially when designed as a step-by-step guide. It's much easier to demonstrate to visitors why your product is superior, rather than having to explain it.

Even seemingly small things, such as a blog or Facebook comments, are valuable social proof. They show that your content generates interest.

Find ways to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. Getting mentioned in relation to a certain subject often enough will create an impression of credibility.

3. Show that you’re trustworthy

When it comes to business credibility, there are several key aspects to consider.

Poorly designed sites don’t instill confidence. Your website should be attractive, but tasteful. Choose your content wisely and always check your grammar. Display full contact details and include live chat options.

Offer a free trial period. It shows people that you believe in your product and it’s completely risk-free to give it a try, there are no strings attached. Free trials are an amazing marketing tool. They can bring you more customers and generate positive reviews. Critical comments are also welcome, so you’ll know which product aspects need tweaking.

With the rising number of internet threats, many people are reluctant to buy online. Ease these concerns by displaying credibility indicators.

Trust seals are logos or icons vouching for your business credibility and safety. They are associated with SSL security certificates, guaranteeing secure transmission of sensitive data.

Display awards, recognitions, and certificates to back up the value of your offer.  They'll help portray your business as an authority in the industry, increasing your influence.

Include the names and logos of your existing clients on your website. They'll speak of your business accomplishments in a clear, confidence-instilling way.

4. Reduce costs

There are several things you can do to reduce costs and increase profits.

Take all expenses into consideration

Don't overlook anything, no matter how insignificant the amount. Look to find any expense that can be lowered or cut out entirely.

Of course, make sure not to go to the other extreme. Don't compromise on quality just to cut a few bucks. That actually lowers your ROI.

So you want to think "higher benefit per dollar spent" rather than "lower amount of dollars spent in total".

Move your IT to the cloud

Compared to a traditional data center, cloud-based resources are much cheaper. Also, they are scalable, need no maintenance and your data can be accessed from any location.

Allow your staff to work from home

Telecommuting increases productivity and reduces overhead. This includes rent, utilities, supplies, equipment, furniture and travel expenses, not to mention fewer sick days and absences.

Working from home reduces staff turnover rates. This is because of the higher job satisfaction, reduced stress and the loyalty that comes with it.

Don’t hire new staff unless it's absolutely necessary

Also, be prepared to fire someone if they negatively affect the business efficiency or cost optimization.

Reserve regular bonuses for staff members that truly deserve them

Some business owners suffer from a "nice guy syndrome" believing that showering employees with rewards is the way to go. But then it goes unappreciated. You want to reserve the bonuses, rewards, and praise for when they are truly deserved.

5. Use technology to advance your business

As a small business owner, you have to look for ways to make your business simpler and more efficient. Advanced software solutions can do a lot for your business. They can strengthen your brand, expand your customer base and streamline your operations.

A quality CRM can help you increase profits in a number of ways.

You can use a CRM to segment your prospects and speed up conversion. By defining categories such as age, gender or income, you can devise a custom sales approach for each group.

CRMs help you organize your tasks and projects better. They also increase customer loyalty by helping address the unique needs of each client.

We designed Centrium with all of this in mind. It's a versatile and user-friendly tool that your sales team will adopt almost instantly.

You can use Centrium to store all your contacts and share them within your organization. Keep comprehensive communication history. Plan your work assignments in the most effective way.

And what's best, you can take it for a 30-day test drive. All features, no costs. So, go ahead and give Centrium a try today.

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Crucial Sales Tips That Actually Work

Sales are the backbone of any business. It’s also one of the most challenging aspects for most companies. Whether you sell products, services or ideas, good sales skills are essential. So, knowing a few crucial sales tips can help you maximize your sales potential.

Sales practices may change over time, but the basics remain the same. Sales success is about building lasting relationships with your customers and keeping them happy. It’s about making it easy for people to decide to buy your product.

All businesses have their own specifics. Obviously, there is no single foolproof sales approach that fits all. But knowing what influences your sales outcomes can help you develop an effective strategy.

Here are some useful sales tips to help you get the most out of your sales encounters

Define your sales strategy

The sales process involves a series of repeatable steps, from initial interaction to conversion. Basically, your starting point is sales preparation. Your endpoint is revenue generation.

Make sure these steps are well-defined and measurable. This way, you'll be able to gauge the effectiveness of your sales process and optimize it further.

Start with thorough market research of your target audience. Learn as much as you can about their web behavior, purchase patterns and triggers. This will help you find the right focus for your lead generation efforts.

Be knowledgeable about your business sphere, competitors, and main customer concerns. Make sure your product has a competitive advantage, such as benefits or outcomes that your competition doesn't offer. Do your best to promote your product as effectively as possible on all channels.

Familiarize your sales teams with the steps of the sales process; They shouldn't ever have to guess what to do or improvise.

To maximize sales outcomes, sales and marketing teams should work together. This includes the aspects of prospect definition, qualifying questions and engagement materials. And while it's true that sales teams close business deals, it's marketing that introduces and advertises your product to prospects.

Showcase your expertise

To extend your marketing reach, use social platforms to demonstrate your expertise.

Professional networks like LinkedIn are a good choice. Join groups frequented by your target audience and post informative content on a regular basis. Provide tips and answer as many questions as possible. This will help you stand out and get noticed. With a bit of hard work and luck, clients will start seeing you as an expert in the field.

Videos work great as well. Create educational clips about your offer to help people choose your product. And don't forget that YouTube is the world's second largest search engine.

Booklets, eBooks and blog posts are also an effective way to influence your prospects. Design the content carefully so people can find it without a problem. Keep it useful, educational and relevant to their needs.

Polish your sales skills

Closing a sale requires careful negotiation and the ability to handle different clients and situations. You won’t get far if you’re strictly product-oriented. Instead, focus on the person you're talking to. Acknowledge your prospect’s wishes and views. Compromise if necessary to keep all sides happy.

Avoid talking at length about your product, experience or company. Instead, ask your prospects what they’d like to know. Encourage them to share their concerns.  This way, you won’t sound pushy and aggressive. You’ll simply be answering questions.

Also, learn to read the verbal and nonverbal signs your prospects give out. It will help you determine their interest. Their tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language can tell you everything you need to know. Are they intrigued, bored, or politely waiting for you to finish?

Interested prospects ask precise questions and want to know more details. Prolonged silence or poor verbal feedback usually indicates a lack of interest.

It goes without saying that a pleasant demeanor is a must for a sales person. People respond positively to sales reps with a congenial personality and helpful attitude.

Don’t forget to follow up

One of the main culprits for low closing and retention rates is the lack of regular follow ups. Clients value dedication and attentiveness. But don’t overdo it. You don't want others to perceive you as annoying or aggressive.

Follow-up emails are a great way to maintain contact with your prospects. Keep them short, useful and relevant. Focus on getting people to agree on the next step, like a meeting or a call.

When contacting your prospects, make sure you have a reason for it. Don’t ever call just to say hi. Following their business, competitors and industry trends can always provide you with a fresh new angle to use in starting a conversation.

Remember the importance of prospect nurturing. Most of them won't be ready to buy immediately. Every prospect needs a different amount of time to convert, be it days, months or even a year. This doesn’t mean you should drop them. It just means it will take some time and engagement on your part before they are ready to buy.

Practice good customer relationship management

Finding a way to organize your interactions with your staff and clients is essential. The easiest way to do this is using a quality customer relationship management software (CRM).

A good CRM solution can do wonders for your acquisition and retention rates, but only if your teams use it. To stimulate adoption, you want to consider a couple of things.

First, look for CRM solutions that are right for your size of business. If you run a small or medium business you want a CRM that's easy to implement and start using right away. Then, try to include your sales and marketing people in its deployment. Better yet, consult them when contemplating which one to purchase.

CRM platforms can be used to gain insight into valuable market and customer data. What are your prospects' main concerns?  How many returning customers do you have? How can you shorten your sales cycle?

CentriumCRM can help you do all of this and more.  It’s a user-friendly and simple CRM tool designed for small and medium businesses. And since it’s cloud-based, you can access it from any location or device. Also, you won’t need to allocate in-house resources to software maintenance and support.

You can use our CRM to store files, images, notes, dates, tasks and arrangements. Share this data with your teams. Track your leads throughout the sales cycle.

Centrium’s task lists are great for staying on top of assignments and projects. The shared calendar feature will make sure you never miss a task or a meeting.

Every bit of client data is important.  Centrium CRM helps you keep all your valuable data in one easily accessible place. Your teams will easily access all the data they need to ensure the best sales outcomes.

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Five secrets for creating urgency in sales

Creating urgency in sales without being aggressive is one of the most crucial skills you need to master if you want a loyal base of customers. Mastering this process is a skill you can learn like any other.

There are various techniques and tricks that are readily available to you. Use these and it can help you develop compelling reasons for customers to keep buying your products or services.

Sales don’t materialize on their own. To help make sales happen, you should consider creating a sense of urgency. You can do this using the methods we will discuss now, so read on.

Use deadlines

Setting deadlines for buying your products is a very effective way to create a sense of urgency in people. Most people wait until the last moment to pay their bills and taxes. They postpone starting on a task right until it's too late to even start. At the same time, they make most of their purchases out of emotional reasons.

That’s why you should create a link between the quality of your product and how it resonates emotionally with customers. Then, set a strict deadline after which it will no longer be available. This way, sales are guaranteed to get a boost. Make sure to highlight the benefits customers will miss out on if they choose not to buy. Use a countdown timer to make this technique even more effective.

In a sense, you are motivating people to take action, and taking action always feels good. Don’t give customers too much time to buy. Otherwise, you’re literally handing them the opportunity to procrastinate, and to “buy tomorrow” instead of today. To stop this from happening, use deadlines.

Discount pricing

Discounting your products is another way in which you can attract a larger customer base. After all, everyone loves seeing their favorite products and services on discount. Use this in conjunction with deadlines, and you will create magic in your sales numbers. We already talked about how people make purchases out of emotional reasons, not rational decisions. Discounts can provoke such impulsivity.

However, don’t go overboard and prolong the discounts to no end. That way, the adjusted prices lose their novelty and customers will again procrastinate and not buy your products. They may get the feeling that your products or services are not that popular. This is how they will explain why you have such long and prolonged discount periods.

Create visual cues

People are visual creatures. This is true in both personal and business relationships. Using visual cues that will inspire customers to take action. This is a bulletproof way to increase sales. Invest time and money in developing an attractive website that will appeal to customers and their sense of urgency.

You can do this by inserting graphical elements in different shapes and sizes (e.g. CTA boxes, Opt-in Forms) that will influence the customer to act. The coloring is important, too. Bright colors, such as red and orange, immediately occupy people’s visual field, thus getting their complete attention.

Offer freebies

What’s better than a discount? You guessed it, getting something for free! Yes, it might seem that giving stuff for free is counter-intuitive to the whole triple your sales idea. However, offering some of your services or products for free can lure potential customers to buy from you in the future.

The logic behind this is simple. By offering customers things for free, you’re demonstrating that they are entering a relationship based on value, not just profit.

Individuals like Tim Ferriss and Noah Kagan constantly offer freebies that are boosting their authority. As a result, when customers buy something from them, they know it’s worth buying.

The key secret to creating urgency in sales - a motivated sales force

Keeping a motivated sales force is an essential part of increasing sales in general. It doesn’t matter how many new sales tricks you learn if your salespeople don’t apply them.

The same holds true for tactics that create urgency. How well your team applies these tactics will depend on the working environment that you have created for them. So let’s look at a couple of ways to motivate your sales people.

Talk to your sales people

Ask your team for feedback when implementing things you believe might increase sales.

Your sales team will foster communication with customers so it’s best to keep them in the loop. They can give you feedback and improve your plans, and suggest improvements for the future. This will also make them feel included in the decision-making process. In turn, this will create a sense of having a stake in the company - a sense of ownership.

Give them surveys

Asking your team about what works best and what needs to be improved can easily be done through surveys. You can ask them what complicates their work on a daily basis and which processes can be streamlined. This will let you continuously fine-tune your working environment for maximum efficiency.

Creating urgency in sales is your best friend when it comes to motivating your customers to take action. Offer discounts, use visual stimulation and use the power of limited offers to provoke interest from potential buyers. Last but not least, a quality CRM system can greatly assist you in staying competitive in an oversaturated sales market.

The power of a CRM in motivating your sales force

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is a powerful sales tool. It can provide you with an accurate assessment of multiple aspects of your work. A Quality CRM can automate and manage specific goals, including tracking new customer acquisition and sales. This helps in mapping the profitability of your current customers and potential customers.

With a CRM, you can also analyze the behavior patterns of your customers and what they most respond to. This, in turn, helps you devise more powerful urgency creation tactics.

Centrium offers powerful, but simple to use CRM tools that can help you and your team stay organized. Our software lets you share valuable information with other team members on customer prospects, as well as plan your sales team's calendars and projects.

[centriumcrm]

Six essential free tools to help you with lead generation

Lead generation is the foundation of creating a quality customer base. This is especially true with online marketing. However, generating leads can be difficult if you try to do everything manually. Fortunately, nowadays there are a ton of tools to help facilitate the process. Many of these tools are completely free, so this is what we will be discussing here.

Quora

There’s a reason that online marketers love quora. There are many benefits to using it. It’s not just that you can generate leads by using it. You can also use it to help establish yourself as an authority and build up a reputation. However, this will be more applicable to some than others. It depends on your industry and product.

Quora is a trusted source for many people. Nowadays it’s the place they go to in order to get answers to burning questions. The way it works is rather simple. You find questions that relate to your industry and provide high-quality answers.

How does this generate leads? Well, it’s actually a two-step process. You can’t capture leads right on quora itself. You will want to give a good answer first and then link to a blog post on your site that answers things further. Your blog post would then have a way of converting the visitors to leads.

A good tactic is to give out most of your valuable information on quora, but not everything. You want to leave at least a ⅓ or ¼ of the answer on your blog post. That way you give enough value to get voted “best answer”. But people still have to click through and go to your website for the final ¼ of the answer.

SlideShare

SlideShare is a slideshow hosting service. It allows you to display your presentations to a wider audience. The presentations can also be embedded in other types of content, such as blog posts.

This tool is connected to LinkedIn and it is one of the best tools for lead generation and reaching a B2B audience. It's especially easy for anyone with a LinkedIn account to upload any piece of content they want.

However, to fully utilize the power of this tool, you need to put in some effort. You want to create presentations with well-designed and polished slides.

If you do this, you have a higher chance of being featured on their homepage for a few days. That can drive thousands of views your way. Also, once you do this, your slides will rank higher when people search for your topics.

If you ever want to upgrade to the premium option, you get some additional features. For example, it offers alerts that you get once a user in interested in buying anything connected to your service and product.

Hunter

If you run a sales team that specializes in one-on-one email conversations, you will like this one. It makes it incredibly easy to find the email addresses of companies or people you want to get in touch with.

All you need to do is install their Chrome extension. Then go to the website you're interested in. If you click the button in the extension bar, it will list some associated email addresses.

It also works with LinkedIn.  You can visit a LinkedIn profile of your choice, click that button, and get that person's address. The free version allows for up to 150 requests per month.

Emercury

Nothing helps you generate sales leads like email marketing does. If you haven’t jumped on this ship yet, now might be time. With that said, let’s clarify something about the definition of a “lead”.

When you say “lead” this refers to having identified a person who might be potentially interested in your products and services. A potential future customer if you will. Then there’s also the traditional “sales lead”. A “sales lead” is a person who has entered your sales process. An “email lead” however is just someone that has given you their email. Usually through an opt-in process.

You can use opt-in forms to collect email leads. And then you would use an email marketing solution to convert these email leads into sales leads. The process might be one and the same. As they enter into your email marketing funnel, they’re also becoming part of the sales process.

Your email marketing doesn’t necessarily have to be the same as your sales process, though. Let’s say that you sell a high-priced consulting service. You might have an email marketing campaign that doesn't do any direct selling.

You might just publish a valuable newsletter where you share your expertise and knowledge. And you would just occasionally remind people that you also offer paid consulting, linking them to your "get a quote" page.

In such a scenario the email marketing is separate from the sales process. Only after people ask for a quote do they enter the "sales process" and become a "sales lead".

Now, there are plenty of email marketing solutions out there. The one we’ve found to offer the most features with their free plan is Emercury.net. Other famous email marketing solutions with a free plan include MailRelay, SendInBlue, MailerLite, MailChimp and (For up to 500 Leads) Campaign.

Sumo (formerly SumoMe)

Every email marketing solution nowadays includes an ability to create opt-in forms. However, you might prefer to use a dedicated solution just for building opt-in forms, landing pages and other ways to capture email leads.

Therе are many tools out there for capturing email leads. Very few have a free option, though. Of the few that do, Sumo Free is probably the most popular.

If you like it enough you might upgrade to the Sumo Pro option. However, be warned that there are plenty of other options in the paid realm. Their free option reigns supreme among the free options. Their "pro option" however, is kind of pricey as compared to other premium competitors.

HootSuite

If you spend a lot of time managing your social media channels, you're probably already using HootSuite or one of its competitors. It is currently the most popular social media management tool. It owes this status primarily to the generosity of its free plan.

However, if you're just about to dive into social media marketing, consider using a tool to help you manage this work. HootSuite's free option is a great starting option. It offers enough features to get you started with mastering social media. After you've outgrown its free plan, you may decide to move to its paid plans or a different option altogether.

Lead generation means nothing without a good CRM

Generating the leads is only the first half of a quality sales process. How you manage what happens next is even more important. This is where a quality CRM comes into play.

We've created Centrium just for you. It is a CRM that you can fully utilize almost instantly. We've worked really hard to make sure that it is as intuitive and straightforward as possible.

If you get your free trial today, you'll find that your sales team starts using it almost immediately. They'll be tracking the entire sales pipeline in no time.

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Techniques for Automating Your Sales Pipeline

In today's modern business world, the sales process is growing in complexity. Rather than focusing solely on selling their products, companies are increasingly implementing a systematic approach to sales. This is often referred to as a sales pipeline.

This comprehensive approach covers the entire process of company-customer interaction. This goes all the way from lead qualification and initial contact to closing the sale and maintaining a satisfied and loyal customer base.  

The sales process comprises several important stages with the ultimate goal of product purchase. The number of stages depends on the length of the sales cycle and type of business.

For a majority of industries, the sales process involves several stages. This includes the initial contact, lead qualification, contact, making the proposal, and closing the sale. Establishing a sales process is important. As the sales pipeline cannot function without a well-defined sales process in place.

The sales pipeline helps you see where your potential clients are in the sales process at any moment. You can see how they move through its stages, thanks to the efforts of the sales teams.

Benefits of sales pipeline automation

Sales automation facilitates the movement of prospects through the pipeline. It also makes it easier to see where and why your leads drop out and identify weak spots.  

Sales automation tools let you store all contact-related information in a single database. This allows for easy access and reporting.

The automation can involve most of your sales activities, including sales forecasting, pipeline management, customer relations and detailed analysis of your sales cycle.  

Sales pipeline automation can also extend to lead management, customer care, quote/proposal generation, etc; In a word, the entire set of activities needed to convert prospects into loyal clients.    

More specifically, it helps your sales teams track their progress during the lead conversion process and see what they still need to do to ensure a sale.

At the same time, all the notes and comments about the leads are stored in one place for easy access and faster movement of said leads through the pipeline.  

Sales automation tools provide detailed insight into lead-related data to help you detect and manage trouble spots in your sales.

For instance, are you losing most of your leads after the initial contact stage or further along the sales process? Based on the conclusions, you'll be able to take appropriate action and fully optimize your pipeline.  

Another important benefit of pipeline automation is enhancing the relationship between your company and leads. It's a sure way to increase your conversion and retention rates.

To benefit from the automation of your sales pipeline, you’ll need to first evaluate your sales process. This will give you an opportunity to identify and address any weaknesses.

For example, is manual data entry taking too much of your sales reps time? Then, you can easily automate mundane, administrative tasks. Once you've identified your trouble spots, it's easier to define a set of realistic automation goals. These may include higher revenue, shorter sales cycles, higher retention rates, increased cross-sales, and so on.

So, how can you automate your sales pipeline?

First, you have to understand the aspects of your sales pipeline that you should consider automating. Let's cover those right now.

Lead Qualification

It's a waste of company time to focus on poorly qualified leads. Using automation tools and gaining insight into their behavior on the web, you can qualify leads more easily. You can see which people open your emails and what steps they take next.

Active leads that visit your pages and open your emails are the ones to focus on. Don't pay attention to the ones deleting your emails and not paying attention to your content.  

To get this functionality, make sure that your CRM integrates with a good ESP. Centrium is a straightforward CRM that has great integration with MailChimp.

Lead prioritization

Instead of giving your sales reps the responsibility of deciding which leads to call first, your sales automation software can do it for them. These tools arrange leads based on specific criteria applicable to your line of business. For instance, marketing automation tools use lead scoring formulae to decide who to contact first.

Lead scoring involves the ranking of potential clients according to their potential worth for the company. The scores are calculated based on values related to their web behavior and perceived interest in your product.

Lead Cultivation

Due to the increasing length of the sales cycles for many businesses, lead cultivation is growing in significance. In other words, since it may take a while for you to close a sale, you need to maintain a relationship with your leads consistently, as they're moving through the pipeline, to prevent them from dropping out.

In practice, this involves listening to their needs and addressing their concerns as a joint effort of your marketing, sales and customer care departments.

You can use sales automation tools to design custom emails for prospects automatically, based on specific triggers in their behavior, such as site visits, link clicks, email openings, and so on.

Combining Centrium and MailChimp Automation is a great way to do this.

Taking notes and logging calls

It's important to take notes and keep accurate and detailed records. You want your reps to do this on every sale and in every lead interaction. It provides invaluable insight into their likes and dislikes, attitude, and shows ways to convert them. This provides invaluable insight into what they like, dislike and their general attitude. It gives you insight on ways to convert them.

However, this process can consume a great portion of your sales reps time if done outside of a CRM. This is time which can be saved if done inside of a CRM. These tools help sales reps add notes they can store and share with the entire team for future reference.

It’s equally important to log all incoming and outgoing sales. Among other things, it will help you evaluate the performance of your sales teams. CRMs and other automation tools can help you log all these calls, thus eliminating the need for time-consuming manual logging.

Notifications and alerts

Automated notifications are a valuable feature that can help you determine the worthiness of your leads. You’ll be alerted of behaviors that can lead to a sale, such as opening emails or visiting your product page.

Since these notifications are provided in real time, it gives you an excellent opportunity to act right away and contact your leads the moment they are contemplating a purchase, either by calling them or sending an automated email.

In a nutshell, automating your sales pipeline can do wonders for your sales process. It can save precious time which can be put to much better use out in the field where the real action is taking place.

You’ll have a vast and detailed customer base at disposal, so you can make sales volume projections, and estimate closing dates and the likelihood of a purchase. Again, you can achieve this by integrating Mailchimp with the Centrium CRM.

You can automate all these aspects easily using a CRM solution. However, a CRM that includes the ability to automate everything is often too cumbersome and expensive for a small business. It will overwhelm your salespeople with too many options and probably go unused.

This is why we created the Centrium CRM cloud-based solution

This is a tool that is intuitive and easy to use. Your salespeople will pick it up immediately without much need for training. It puts the most important features upfront, allowing you to integrate with your other favorite tools when you want to add additional tricks to your sales pipeline.

This way you can get started in a gradual way, only adding more complex automation when your salespeople are ready.

When you use Centrium, your contacts will be safely stored for easy sharing with the entire sales team. You will have a vast database of leads at your fingertips, including important notes on individual leads, as well as comments, files, photos, and messages, so you can make the most effective sales pitch for each individual lead.

With this intuitive and easy to use CRM, you can easily assign tasks to your sales teams, manage and monitor your leads from initial contact to the final purchasing decision for full transparency of your entire sales process, and easily detect potential trouble spots.

Give our free trial a go today. You might just fall in love with the software at first use.

[centriumcrm]

8 Important Tips for Closing Sales

Converting prospects into customers requires a lot of effort and energy. More importantly, it requires experience, know-how, and strategy. When it comes to closing sales, the goal is to give your best effort, but do it in a well-defined way. You don't want your prospects don’t slip away at the last minute, as is often the case.

How to excel in closing sales

Sales are a complex, time-consuming endeavor. You need to build your prospect base, qualify them, find the best approach to convert, and more importantly, retain them. With so many things to focus on, it’s easy to get sidetracked, miss sales opportunities and lose revenue.

If you want to avoid such mishaps and give your closing rates a real boost, keep reading.

1. Start with a clear objective

You need a clear concept of what you’re going to talk about with your prospect. Otherwise, you may find yourself at a loss for words and come across as insecure and disorganized. Keep in mind that the encounter has to provide some benefit for the prospect, or it will be a waste of time and effort.

Even if you have excellent communication skills, it’s a good idea to present your offer in writing. Most people prefer to obtain information visually, especially when presented in a clear, comprehensible way. Don’t forget to carry a contract with you even if it’s your first meeting with the prospect.

It goes without saying that the goal of every sales meeting is customer acquisition. However, you can consider your encounter with the prospect a success even if it doesn’t result in a purchase.

You can use this opportunity to gather valuable information that propels you forward in the sales process. This includes information about your prospect’s current suppliers, their objectives, and expectations from a product or service. You also want to get a grasp on their budget, structure and the length of their decision-making process.

2. Do your reconnaissance

Thorough research is essential to closing a sale. Learn all you can about your potential customer’s interests, any changes in their corporate structure or the industry, their financial results and new products. Use social networks and the prospect’s website to gather information, check their PR activities and job vacancies.

Equally important, if you’re targeting a larger organization, try to get in contact with the decision-makers. This is because the decision-making process in larger companies usually involves several departments.

3. Document your interviews

Always follow up your interviews with notes. Don't assume that you will remember everything you (or they) said or promised. These notes will also benefit the other sales reps, as well as the marketing and other involved departments. Your notes can provide valuable insight into your prospect’s desires, objectives and attitudes.

It’s a good idea to write an email to the prospect after your meeting. Include a summary of the things you've discussed and agreed upon. It will show the prospect that you’re meticulous, serious and reliable.

4. Use good CRM software

CRMs are great facilitators of lead-to-customer conversion. To begin with, they help automate the process of data entry which would otherwise require a substantial amount of time. The software automatically syncs data entered from multiple devices (cell phone, tablet, laptop). This allows you to have access to the most current customer data from any location.

CRM solutions make it easier and faster to collect information about your clients so that you can make smart, informed decisions. This gives sales teams more time to focus on customer relationships and ultimately acquisition.

Centrium is a smart, cloud-based CRM software that can do wonders for your sales performance. This convenient, user-friendly tool allows you to create a detailed database of invaluable customer info (contact details, purchase behaviors, likes, dislikes).

Centrium helps your sales teams work in a smarter, more efficient manner, and forge strong, lasting customer relationships.

5. Focus on the prospect, not on closing sales

Your prospect has to be the center of attention all the time. Although your primary goal is to close the sale and meet your sales target, try to put your prospect’s interests first. If they feel acknowledged and appreciated, they are more likely to make the purchase.

If you act like a cold salesperson, you may end up putting the prospect off. Use a gradual approach, making bits of progress each time, until the sale becomes a logical consequence of your efforts.

6. Understand your prospect’s needs

To be able to address your prospect’s needs, you need to understand what these needs are. What are your prospect’s challenges and goals; Where are they facing issues; And how can you help solve them?

Ask these questions so you can offer the perfect solution. People make a purchase to satisfy a need, solve a problem or accomplish a goal. Hence, before you start selling, you need to determine people’s motives and desires.

If nothing else, this will help determine whether they are qualified to make a purchase at all, so that you don’t waste your time.

7. Emphasize your product’s business value

Although it may seem that people are likely to buy the most affordable product, this is not always the case. Studies show that people opt for products they perceive as most valuable and satisfactory in terms of service quality. A majority of customers is willing to pay more if assured that the product delivers the best service.

Also, customer churn is rarely price-related. It’s mostly associated with dissatisfaction with the overall customer service quality.

What this means is that as a sales representative, you need to clearly communicate the value of your offer. Accentuate how it can lower operating costs, increase revenue or optimize process efficiency. In a word, make your sales strategy value-driven, rather than price-driven.

8. Be optimistic about the outcome

Being optimistic about your work is the key to success in the field of sales. People are more receptive to sales reps who are enthusiastic and motivated. If you’re monotonous, reluctant to answer questions and don’t believe in what you’re selling, it’ll be hard to close a sale.

People need to be convinced that what you’re offering is the answer to their problems. To that end, explain your product’s benefits in a passionate way. Just don’t overdo it. You don’t want to come across as overly excited or aggressive.

[centriumcrm]

Common Mistakes when Choosing a CRM

Choosing a CRM can be an overwhelming task. You have so many sales platforms to choose from and it is really important to find the one that suits you and your business.

If you implement a system incorrectly or choose the wrong one, you might create some business problems that become an issue later on. There are a couple of things you can try to avoid, to make sure you get the right CRM. What follows are some of the most common mistakes when choosing a CRM.

Ignoring email automation

There's one thing that most internet marketers agree on. Email marketing has some of the highest rates of customer engagement. You would be crazy not to utilize it.

When you're picking a platform, make sure to pick a CRM that has good integration with popular email senders. Your contacts database inside your CRM is super valuable. Being able to easily treat your CRM contacts as an email list is even more valuable.

Ignoring the users of the CRM

You should involve the people who are going to use the CRM system in the actual choosing process. If the executives evaluate the new CRM and don’t let the actual people using it contribute to the decision, there can be some problems.

Also, it is really important to let your CRM users know how important the CRM is to your business. They need to understand that this CRM is a tool that can improve the way your business works.

You need to show them that the CRM can help you get better results in things such as time management, process automation, cost reduction and revenue enhancement.

You don't want to end up with a CRM that none of your employees actually use. Involve them both in the process of choosing it, and understanding why it helps them do their work more easily.

Undetermined CRM objectives

Before even considering getting a CRM, you should think about your objectives with the CRM. If you want to get the most out of your CRM, you need to determine what you want to achieve with it.

Also, you need to figure out the short-term and long-term business goals that a CRM should help you with. This might be the most important thing you need to do in order to get success.

Your CRM should be able to monitor the goals you have determined. There are a quite a few, but the most important ones are: enhanced efficiency, increased sales, improved marketing campaigns and numbers of new customers attracted.

If you want to improve the ROI in the long run, clarify your goals and see exactly how the CRM will help you achieve them.

Choosing a CRM that is not mobile friendly

We have already talked about the importance of considering the CRM users. Most CRM systems are optimized and designed for office use. Some of your professionals (or perhaps even yourself) need to use this system on the go.

Choosing a user-friendly mobile CRM can help you get higher engagement. It should be easy to use the system from a tablet whilst you're out there visiting customers or on your coffee break.

This is one area where cloud-based CRMs excel. They are accessible from any device, at any location.

Getting the wrong CRM for your business size

Don't look at what the "big companies" are doing. This is one of the most commonly taught mistakes to students of business. The same applies to any business decision you make. You need to base every decision on the current size of your business.

The ideal CRM for a fortune 500 company is not the same as the ideal CRM for a small business.  Bigger corporations tend to require more fine-grain control. This is why they tend to choose more robust CRM solutions that require an entire team just to configure and manage.

A smaller business will do better with a flexible CRM that prioritizes ease-of-use and minimal maintenance. And if you go with a cloud-based CRM like Centrium, you don't have any maintenance to worry about.

Inconsistent nomenclature

Some overly complex CRMs make up their own fancy nomenclature for things. You want the CRM to use terms that are immediately recognizable. Things like "contacts", "calendar", "appointments", "tasks", "deals" etc...

Any one of your employees should be able to just sit down with this CRM and intuitively know where to go. We designed Centrium to work in just this way. Every label just "makes sense" and is easily understood.

Having a CRM that confuses your users can be a huge problem. Don't be surprised if people on your staff say "oh, whatever" and skip using the CRM, instead choosing to enter their data into Excel spreadsheets. This is quite common when a business owner fails to choose an enjoyable CRM for their staff.  The employees just side-step the CRM.

Overly ambitious implementation of the CRM

Getting a new CRM system might make you tingle with excitement. That excitement may lead to goals that are too ambitious. It may also lead you to force overly advanced features on your employees. These might be features that confuse the users and prolong the adoption process.

The easiest way to avoid this mistake is to go with a CRM designed the right way. Centrium CRM only puts the most intuitive and most crucial features upfront. There are no fancy "bells and whistles" features. There's no fluff, just what your small or medium-sized business needs from a CRM.

The moment your employees sit down to try it out, they will know exactly how to use it. No lengthy training sessions required. If you don't believe me yet, just grab your free trial while it lasts. You'll be able to use the full CRM and get around. You will be amazed at how "it just works".

Undefined measurement of success

It would be silly to implement a CRM without a good goal. Once you set up your goal you need to be sure that you have metrics for all of the business areas you want to succeed in.

Also, you should review the metrics on a weekly basis in order to have a good insight into every little change and the reason why it happened.

Too many fields

Your records shouldn’t have too many fields because you wouldn’t want your sales team to spend time on useless things. Only require the most important details about your contacts and opportunities. If there is additional information available, the salesperson will still be able to fill it out.

Conclusion

You already know that an efficient CRM solution can be the key to your success. However, keep in mind that if you implement the wrong CRM, things can go wrong. Sometimes it can cause more harm than good.

The CRM solution you pick for your business should be the best sales solution for your business. It's not just another random piece of software that may or may not get used by your team. You should make sure your business utilizes it to the fullest.

That often means getting the right kind of CRM. One that will not sidetrack you with too many features. You don't want to end up stuck with implementing bells and whistles. You want to get just the right amount of features to get your sales team working in an optimal way.

[centriumcrm]

Tips for Building a Better Sales Team

The success of your business largely depends on your sales team. This is true whatever the industry or location that you operate in. Salespeople are the ones that communicate your offers directly to the customers. And this makes them an essential link in the chain of revenue growth. They are the front-line troops that need to perform as best as they can, no compromises afforded.

8 tips on building a winning sales team

If you want your business to grow, you have to strengthen your sales-force first. The stronger your salespeople, the more sales you will generate. But how can you be sure you're getting the most out of your sales team?    

Know who to hire and how

Hiring can be an exhausting process. But it is the foundation of creating a winning sales team. Commit to finding the best talent out there. Don’t try to cut on costs too much because you're only robbing from your future success.

You’ll spend much less time and resources on training when you invest in quality hires. You will also avoid the risks of losing precious customers because of weak members inside your sales team.

However, this doesn't mean that you should limit yourself only to the most experienced people. Hire people who are willing to learn, share their knowledge, and whose social goals align with your organizational goals.

In order to find such sales hires you’ll need to search for them through every channel possible. Consider ads, referrals, recruiting events… Interview as many people as you can and look for communication and teamwork skills, adaptability, resilience, and competitiveness.  

Encourage information and knowledge sharing

You know that saying "your team is only as strong as its weakest member". The more information your salespeople share, the stronger your entire team will become. Create a knowledge base that every team member can both give and take information from. Soon you’ll see that it becomes a valuable resource for everyone.

Encourage peer mentoring because a collaborative atmosphere is essential to a growing team. This way, the individual ambitions of all your salespeople will work in symbiosis toward the goals of the organization. Using this approach, you’ll ensure your business will grow as a whole.  

Inspire healthy competition

Teamwork will surely bring results, but salespeople are competitive by nature. If you want to see the best in them, you’ll need to encourage friendly rivalry. Salespeople usually look past the commission – they find satisfaction in the sale itself. Make results transparent, so the ones that are falling behind can realize it and improve.

Create milestones for the team members who are aiming for rewards. But, remember to reward effort and not just the number of sales. Go for more frequent rewards instead of larger rewards.

This is because every acknowledgment of achievements is a great motivator. This combination of healthy competition and a system of rewards will help you improve productivity and sales.    

Show your sales team that you believe in them

As a leader, it's essential to know that you can trust your team. But, it’s even more important to let your team know you believe in them. As you demonstrate confidence in the capabilities of your salesforce, you create a positive and motivating atmosphere that will directly impact productivity and sales.

If you pay attention to the hiring process and choose the best talents, chances are they have some good ideas for improvement. Don’t be rigid about company policies. Let your team share their thoughts on how to make the job better and drive better results. Remember, it’s the human element that can make any business thrive.  

Grow experts

No matter how experienced they are, your sales team can always benefit from additional training. It builds their confidence, expands their expertise, and creates value for your customers.

Help your team become more productive with constant training and watch how they implement new skills into their work. Give them feedback that will help them improve in solving problems for your customers.

As your team improves, their confidence increases and they become more productive. Treat them as experts and help them grow. Even the smallest investments in training will return in the form of improved sales figures.  

Nurture a winning culture

If you want to ensure a strong and lasting sales team, you have to pay attention to the organizational culture you’re promoting. Culture is equally important, if not even more important than your strategy.

A sales process with defined goals and a measurable pipeline is important. But you will only drive performance if you align those goals with the motivations of your team.

Help your team understand the company culture, how they fit in it as part of the big picture, and how they are contributing to the overall success of your business. This way, their targets become real, tangible, practical, and more natural. All of this results in improving their self-motivation.

If you manage to make your team proud for being a part of your corporate culture, they will become internal entrepreneurs eager to drive more and more success.

Lead your team

Companies that have a winning sales force start with excellent leaders. Not mere "managers", but leaders. Managers merely rely on metrics and deadlines to drive performance. On the other hand, leaders motivate, inspire, counsel, coach, or replace salespeople until they have an excellent team by their side. This is why you need to lead, and not just manage your sales team.

Take the time to get to know your team members. Encourage them to show their individual strengths and weaknesses, and work with them to make improvements where needed.

Recognize their unique skills and help them grow. If your team feels free to turn to you in times of need, it gives you the opportunity to get the best out of them. And this is how you build a better sales team.

Treat their time as valuable

Sales teams need to spend time with customers. Your job as their leader is to make sure they have enough time to do that. You need to align goals and let your team do its magic. This means automating all of their tasks.

Centrium CRM has been designed to help both you and your team spend your time communicating with customers, instead of doing other time-consuming tasks.

It lets you safely store and share contacts with your team, together with the entire communication history - from leads to sales. You can manage your projects by keeping track of tasks, integrate with other apps, and go fully mobile. The best part is – you can try Centrium for free now!

[centriumcrm]

Here's Why You Need to Improve Your Transactional Emails

When business owners think about boosting profits through email, most think of newsletters and opt-in forms. What if there was another part of email marketing that's severely underutilized by most? Transactional emails are this secret and often ignored part of your marketing efforts.

What makes transactional emails so important?

The content of a transactional email depends on the actions triggered by the customer. Transactional emails are also known as one-to-one emails, as they are “a reaction” to the action of a prospect.

For example, once a prospect has purchased one or more items online, they may receive an email containing shipment details. Also, a transactional email may be sent to the customer as a verification of the purchase they've just made.  

Since the main point of sending such emails is to confirm a certain action, they have a very high open-rate. This indicates that transactional emails play a crucial role in the communication between business owners and customers. Consequentially, you are missing out if you're not leveraging them to the fullest.

Reasons to improve your transactional emails today

If you're into e-commerce, there are several reasons you need to improve your transactional emails. Each one of these will grow your business.

1| A customized email makes people feel special

And it encourages further engagement. As transactional emails are customized by nature, they can instantly lead to developing better relations with your customers. If properly designed, these emails can promote and provoke social media interaction.

2| Transactional emails help develop trust

It is very important for a customer to feel secure when they're partaking in an online business transaction.

By creating an effective transactional email, you can contribute to a pleasant and safe business atmosphere at each step of the process.

Additional information on the shipment can alleviate eventual concerns a customer may have, which results in building more trust and confidence in your business.

3| Transactional emails promote your brand

They also encourage brand recognition. No matter how large your company, it is always good to promote your brand.

There is a subtle, yet effective way to do this. Just send personalized transactional emails that include your brand logo. You can do this in order confirmation emails, shipping notification emails, etc.

The idea behind this has a psychological basis. When you present your brand logo to customers more than once, they feel more familiar with your brand.

Once they recognize your brand, they are likely to think of your business the next time they want to make a purchase.

4| Transactional emails help you improve

Don't limit your email to information about the shipments, different discounts or return policies.

Transactional emails should also encourage customers to provide you with feedback. Once you implement this trick, your understanding of the customer base will improve significantly.

You can then address any issue and improve your customer service, purchase process or anything that you get feedback about.

Improve your Transactional emails by avoiding these common mistakes

Most entrepreneurs and small online business owners can leverage the power of transactional emails. They open up a fantastic opportunity to present your brand and your goods or services in a positive manner. But there are some things you should consider.

In order to avoid having your transactional emails seen as “pointless junk mail”, let's look at several common mistakes you should avoid.

Mistake #1| Long subject lines

Whether it is a transactional, commercial or a “cold” email, long subject lines are unnecessary. Not only are they less attractive to read, but they often end up in the trash folder as spam.

Mistake #2| Lack of personalization

Transactional emails should inevitably have that personal touch, as they are a reaction to a customer’s action.

A transactional email should contain relevant information about a purchase, but also create a sense of care.

This will encourage customers to continue doing business with you in the future.

Mistake #3| Excessive cross-selling

One of the most common mistakes when creating a transactional email is failing to think about the customer experience.

This refers to putting aside the primary needs of the customer at that moment in time and focusing too much on selling other goods or services.

Instead of excessive cross-selling, think about what you want your customer to do next, and compose your transactional email accordingly.

Mistake #4| Wrong timing

As the old saying goes, timing is everything.  Not paying attention to timing when sending a transactional email to the customer can be counterproductive.

When a person places an order online, they should receive a transactional email immediately, while still thinking about their order; not 30-40 minutes later. If they receive your email immediately after placing their order, they are the most likely to read it and take action.

Mistake #5| Lack of communication

Let’s face it – transactional email is that first step of communication with your customer. Unlike newsletters, a transactional email is always about something your customer cares about.

However, not many businesses care enough to leverage this fact. They fail to provide sufficient information, promote themselves, and develop a positive and fruitful relationship through these transactional emails.

So it's no surprise that customers eventually turn to competitor services.

The key to success is good organization

To sum it up, transactional emails are a great tool to create positive business relations with your customers. They are not just emails containing shipment info - they can also be welcome emails, order confirmations, and call-to-action emails.

Transactional emails are crucial for optimal customer service and positive company reputation. They can both give relevant information to customers, as well as provide small businesses with various opportunities for success.

In order to promote your business and boost sales, it is essential to pay extra attention to good organization.

That is why our experienced team of professionals created for you a simple to use, cloud-based CRM solution. This is why we created Centrium.

Using Centrium, you can organize your team in the most efficient way. You can store information about your customers and share it with all your team members. Give Centrium a try today with your free trial.

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Painless CRM Onboarding Approaches

Understanding the CRM onboarding process is crucial to getting your money's worth from a CRM. While it is true that CRM systems are great at increasing profits, this is only half of the story.

The CRM solution will only help you as much as you let it. If your team isn't fully immersing itself in the CRM, then you're not getting the full benefits.

A great CRM will give you insight into your sales, help you track leads and keep a tab on all contacts. Your team will be able to easily make sales calls, track sales-related tasks and deals.

But first, you have to make sure they understand the CRM and are utilizing it to the fullest. This is where the onboarding process comes in.

Think wisely before settling on a solution

Before you decide which CRM system you’ll use, you must make sure it is right for your business.

It's easy to get swayed by fancy bells and whistles. CRM marketers will put the number of features upfront. It's easy to start fantasizing about how you'll need this feature and that feature.

In truth, a lot of features in those expensive CRMs are only useful to fortune 500 corporations. And even then, only in certain rare scenarios.

To understand the CRM onboarding process you have to understand it’s all about the end user. A “successful onboarding” means that your employees use and love the CRM.

If you get an overly complex and overwhelming CRM, you risk many problems. You could create frustration and procrastination on your staff. They can just put off using the CRM indefinitely.

“It's too complex to learn, too cumbersome to use, I don't have time for it”. This is something you'll often hear if you're overly ambitious in your choice of a CRM.

Don't be surprised if your employees continue tracking things in spreadsheets. All the while your CRM goes unused.

Get your employees excited about the new change

Change is difficult for every human on this planet. Your employees are obviously human and not too fond of change either. This is why you have to know how to “frame” the transition to using a CRM.

Don't think of a CRM implementation as a “fix” to how your team currently does things. You shouldn't offer the CRM as a way of “improving the sales process”.

Avoid saying anything that implies they're currently doing things “wrong”. Even if you want to just say “the current process is sub-optimal and can be better”. They'll still hear “Your sales process sucks people, and so do all of you.”

You have to be careful in how you approach them. If you do it wrong, they might get the message that you think they're currently bad at doing sales. This will cause resistance and resentment in your staff.

You want to approach the change from an entirely different mindset

It's this “cool new tool that will make their lives easier”. You know that with a good CRM they'll achieve so much more with less effort, and you're excited for them.

It helps if you’re enthusiastic about how the CRM can help your sales team. If you truly believe in the solution, it will be much easier to create buy-in for your team as well. When you're in love with a CRM solution, your team is more likely to accept it.

Consider creating a presentation and explaining the new system to the top employees. You want to focus on how it benefits them, and how it makes their jobs easier. If you succeed in getting them excited about the change, onboarding will go much easier.

You might also ask these top employees and managers to walk through the training for the CRM. Then, they can go and help onboarding the rest of the staff. If you do it right, the “onboarding managers” will be happy to do this.

You want to paint a story about how it benefits them if everyone is on board. Help them understand how if everyone uses the CRM, everybody’s job gets easier. That way they’ll be happy to help implement the onboarding process and get others on board.

Take time to understand the CRM

If you choose an intuitive and straightforward CRM, this will be quite easy and enjoyable. For example, if you’re using Centrium, everything will make sense instantly. You almost never have to look up the documentation or wonder where a feature resides.

This is because we built Centrium to help businesses have a quick and easy onboarding process. We focused on putting only the features you need most upfront. And we worked very hard to streamline everything.

However, you might choose some overwhelming CRM with too many features. In that case, try to learn everything you can before implementing it. Don’t ask your team to start using the CRM until you fully understand it yourself.

As I already said above, it is important that you are genuinely enthusiastic about this CRM. Let’s say (for example) that you try the CRM and find the learning curve frustrating. Don’t expect you can reliably convince others to love using it.

You want to understand all the pros and cons of the CRM before you ever pitch it to your team. Your education should begin long before the onboarding process, while you’re still deciding on a solution.

Fortunately, every good CRM offers a free trial. And that includes Centrium. Feel free to give it a try today.

Keep on working on your CRM Onboarding

This is another point that depends on the CRM that you choose. If you go for Centrium, this will just involve telling new employees to check it out. They’ll easily figure it out themselves.

If you choose a more complex CRM however, expect for onboarding to be an ongoing process. The more complex the technology, the more things that can go wrong. Expect that over time there will be additional issues for you to resolve. There will be additional guides for you to write and rules to create.

You will have to schedule extra meetings with your team and make them give suggestions or ask questions about the new system. Also, you will need to review any updated training and documentation on a regular basis. Then, you would have to inform your employees about any of this new information.

If you have a larger group of employees (10 or more) and using an overly complex CRM, consider creating an internal knowledgebase. You can use many free services to create an online working knowledge base. This will prevent employees from constantly coming to you with unnecessary questions.

You can include some tips, shortcuts, and tricks in order to maximize the productivity of the workplace.

Conclusion

Implementing a new CRM system and making it work can be difficult. This is especially true if you choose a CRM that's unnecessarily complex. However, if you have a good understanding of onboarding and the right CRM - all of this can be very easy.

Feel free to give Centrium a try. We are confident that you will love the features, and how they are implemented. This is why we are offering a full free trial. Give it a go today, you might just fall in love at first use.

[centriumcrm]

How Successful Companies use CRMs

Businesses of all sizes increasingly use CRM tools as a way to increase sales, improve retention, strengthen customer relationships, and fine-tune their marketing strategies. CRM solutions achieve this by helping companies compile and process valuable data across different channels, throughout the customer life cycle.

CRM tools are highly beneficial for companies of any size. They provide automation of marketing, sales and customer support tasks and processes, allowing managers to monitor performance and efficiency based on available data.

Among other things, this includes interacting with prospects via social media and email, automated audio messages intended for solving customer issues, and delivery of information and handling customer requests.

If your company is thinking about investing in a CRM solution, it’s good to know how successful businesses use their CRMs so you can benefit the most in terms of sales, revenue, customer satisfaction and overall growth.

How to use your CRM software successfully

Regardless of your company size, customer satisfaction is vital for business growth. This is where a CRM solution can help you.

However, in order to be effective, you should use the CRM tool properly and extensively. Without the appropriate management, CRM tools can drain your resources. Compiled information has to be properly interlinked, processed, arranged and distributed, allowing easy access to data from a common database.

To ensure the successful creation of strong customer relationships, your employees have to undergo in-depth training regarding the use of the CRM, no matter how simplistic and intuitive the tool may be. The training can be supplied externally, by the vendor, or internally, by a skilled employee.

You'll surely face some reluctance among your employees when introducing the new solution. That is normal. People are used to doing things a certain way and often resist adapting to a new tool.  

On that note, let people adjust to the tool and discover its benefits at their own pace. Forcing adoption can only create resistance. Once people see the benefits the CRM tool offers, they will start using it more often.

Take a look at some tips guaranteed to help you turn your CRMs into a powerful business ally:

Create an implementation strategy

To make sure your CRM software does its job, you need to devise a detailed implementation strategy.

Namely, if your company decides to use a CRM tool, it will require the participation of all departments to a greater or a lesser extent. This means you'll have to alter some work patterns and deal with certain negative responses dealt.

Also, the perception of CRMs as solely sales business tools is incorrect. The software can greatly facilitate the operations of all departments, including marketing and customer care. Even your legal and finance departments can benefit from learning how to manage customer relations.

Choose a user-friendly CRM tool suited to your needs

First and foremost, your CRM system must be easy to use. If the system is too cumbersome to master, you’ll be facing objections from your staff and overt refusal to use said system.

Avoid CRM solutions with unclear or redundant features. Instead, choose software that makes it easy to enter and retrieve data.  Keep in mind that your employees are busy, and complicated software will make the adoption quite difficult.

To make sure you’ve chosen wisely, conduct thorough research on what exactly you need from the software. Otherwise, even if you purchase the most popular or most expensive software, it may fail to meet your particular requirements.

Opt for a SaaS solution

Instead of purchasing traditional software, go for a pay-per-use solution. This will stop you from purchasing IT infrastructure, obtaining software licenses and worrying about maintenance and support.

Your sales reps can easily access your cloud solutions from any location, and scale them up more easily than a traditional CRM system.

Use in-house trainers

Rather than hiring external CRM trainers for your sales reps, consider assigning this task to your sales managers. This way, they will master the use of the software and be able to provide assistance to their sales team.

Allow your sales reps to focus on their tasks

Your sales staff should clearly know the importance of feeding your CRM system with valuable data regularly. However, entering data shouldn’t become their primary engagement. The main purpose of the CRM is to make them more productive, not distract them from their focus. If possible, try to assign this part of the job to administrative personnel, or use automated programs.

Use your CRM software across departments

You can use the CRM software to create opportunities for interdepartmental cooperation, with customer satisfaction as a common goal. For instance, it can include cooperation between sales and customer services to accommodate a client requiring support about an existent product, while also considering making an additional purchase.

CRMs can be a powerful marketing tool. By gathering information about the likes, dislikes, spending patterns, location and age of your clients, you can tweak your marketing approach so you can address customer needs perfectly.

Exploit your CRM tool to the fullest

CRM tools are uniquely designed to serve as a hub, bringing together email communication, tasks and assignments, scheduled events and customer patterns, and insights. This way, your staff won’t waste time searching for information.

Furthermore, storing all your customer-related data into a single database makes it easier to detect sales and lead acquisition possibilities, evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and identify weak spots in your customer approach.

To reap the most of its benefits, your CRM solution should allow you to gather vital information throughout the sales process, including lead generation, sale, customer retention, upselling and cross-selling. This, however, requires features that help you increase revenue streams while keeping your customers happy and loyal.

Centrium is an intuitive, user-friendly CRM tool, designed to facilitate contact management, lead-to-customer conversion, daily tasks and overall company-client interactions.

You can use our tool to store and share contacts, manage projects, prospects and deals, keep track of your communication history, and above all, stay on top of things, thanks to its smart email and in-app alerts.

[centriumcrm]

How to Make Sure You are Fully Utilizing Your CRM

Customer satisfaction is vital for the success of any business. It increases customer loyalty and lifetime value, while reducing churn and negative word of mouth. Customer relationship management solutions can help you get the most out of your interaction with clients, provided you are fully utilizing your CRM tool.  

Smart business management should always include a customer-oriented approach. It doesn’t just mean intense customer engagement in the period leading up to a purchase, but also maintaining constant communication after the sale.

This helps you monitor customer satisfaction and opens the way for additional sales opportunities, such as up-selling and cross-selling.

Although many businesses are theoretically aware of the benefits of using good CRM software, they don’t necessarily exploit its full potential, and fail to grasp its full value. As a result, some of them stop using it altogether. Meanwhile, others simply keep using a mere fraction of what the system has to offer.

Ways of utilizing your CRM

Incorporating a CRM system into your business strategy will facilitate your marketing and sales processes. Ultimately, it will increase your revenue stream.

Although the software implementation process rests in the hands of the IT department, when considering a CRM solution, you should consult all concerned departments, including customer care, sales, marketing, etc.

Here are some ways to help you fully utilize your CRM software and achieve your customer-related goals:

User training

Your CRM platform should be user-friendly. Tech support should be available in case a problem that users can’t handle on their own occurs.

To make your CRM a worthwhile investment, you need to dedicate sufficient time and resources to employee training. They should learn how to use all its features and take advantage of all its possibilities, not just a few.

The trainers should explain the benefits of the application, what it can do for the company, and why the entered data is important. The more in-depth the training, the more familiar and confident users will get. This will also stimulate them to explore the application further and improve user adoption.

Adjust the software to your needs

Avoid burdening your employees with features that aren’t at all applicable to your business. Only use the features that allow you to implement your sales strategy in the best possible way.

In the period following the practical implementation of the CRM tool, employees will encounter issues that haven’t appeared before or didn’t seem significant during the earlier phases. This is expected and can provide a valuable way to deal with issues that might hinder productivity and effectiveness associated with the use of CRM.

Since CRM platforms are designed to address the needs of a wide variety of businesses, you’ll need to customize them to fit your needs. This can include an analysis of client relationships, setting up ways to tag contacts for easier searching, and so on.

Integrate your CRM software with other tools

Regarding the issue of customization, it’s important to integrate your CRM software with other business tools, such as accounting, EMS or time-tracking software.

It’s best to ask a professional to perform the technical aspect of the customization, to avoid errors and ensure the systems are properly interconnected.

Go mobile

The job of marketing and sale reps is fast-paced and usually not restricted to standard work hours, offices or PCs. This makes work mobility one of the main features of your CRM tool.

In fact, going mobile has the potential to transform your business. Make sure the most vital tasks and processes are accessible via mobile devices to provide your salespeople with instant access to contact info (addresses, invoices, alerts), whether they are in the office, at home, or on a meeting with clients.

Choose a Cloud-based solution

Cloud-based CRM platforms eliminate the need for physical installation of software and fixed IT infrastructure for data storage and access. Instead, they offer online file storage so you can access important company data from any location, anytime. This is especially important for companies with multinational or virtual teams.

Thanks to the pay-per-use concept, Cloud solutions eliminate any upfront expenses and reduce costs associated with IT personnel, purchasing and maintaining IT systems.

Keep your contacts organized

Your customer database is one of your key assets, hence you should manage it well at all times. Use your CRM software to organize and categorize leads, filter your contacts and tie them to specific properties so they’ll appear when you search for a specific activity.  

The CRM software will also help you manage and share prospects, contacts and vendors with your team, so everyone has access to the same data. This should be done in a way that gives you a comprehensive overview of your contacts (background, emails, important tasks).  

Focus on customer satisfaction

One of the basic functions of CRM tools is providing an insight into customer needs and opinions by monitoring their behavior and online social activities.

The software also collects information about customer requirements and concerns after each sales rep visit, and keeps it all in one place. This way, your sales teams are constantly informed and updated about anything of importance regarding a client.

Many CRM tools also come with a customer feedback feature. This is a useful way to learn firsthand what your customers want. Afterwards, you can tweak your sales and marketing strategies accordingly.

Benefit from the task alerts

Instead of the standard to-do lists, your CRM software can automatically send alerts and reminders for previously scheduled activities. Using the CRM to schedule daily tasks and events will save time and increase the efficiency of your sales teams. They can also keep track of all pending activities to make sure no task or event is missed.

A well-designed and properly customized CRM solution can do wonders for your daily workflow and company-client relationships.

Centrium is the best CRM software out there. We promise it will meet all your client-related needs. You can use it to facilitate the process of lead generation and strengthen relationships with prospective and existing customers.

Centrium is extremely simple and easy to use. It can be mastered in no time, without the need for lengthy trainings. Thus, it allows your sales and marketing teams to focus solely on doing a great job.

[centriumcrm]

Strategies for Implementing a CRM

You've probably decided that implementing a CRM is a great idea for your company. Now you need to craft a plan on how to make a CRM system part of your business.

Some of the details of the implementation process will vary depending on the CRM system you choose. However, regardless of the system, there are some essential strategies you should pay special attention to.

Decide on a system

If you're running a small business there are really only two things you need to consider in choosing a CRM.

The first is to consider ease of use and ease of implementation. The second thing to consider is the feature set.

There are a lot of CRM options out there that will overwhelm you with the amount of advertised features. If you're running a small business, you do not need nor want all of these features. You want to apply an occam's razor and decide what is crucial, and what isn't.

At Centrium we've worked really hard to discover what the absolute-must features for a CRM are: contacts management, tasks management and sales pipeline management. And then we worked really hard to polish these features into a well-integrated simple to use, yet powerful solution.

Managing implementation

Essentially, mastering a complex CRM system is a time-consuming process that comes with many challenges. For instance, you have to make sure that all system elements run simultaneously, which can be difficult to achieve at first.

Our suggestion is to go for a streamlined small-business CRM that offers no such challenges. But if you choose to go for an overly-complex self-hosted CRM, it's essential to use efficient management skills and a detailed communication strategy.

Inform all your employees about their responsibilities during the implementation process. As their leader, you should know everything about the CRM system beforehand.

Being a project manager, you have to monitor every aspect of the implementation process, including:

The calendar - important to keep track of all the meeting dates regarding the implementation process and project milestone dates.

The work plan – this is how you'll know what will be done during the process, understanding the timeline for achieving the set goals.

The budget – keep a list of all the costs related to the implementation process.

The task list – information on the tasks of all employees included in the implementation process.

Contract and License

This part can be either simple or complex. If you've chosen a cloud-based CRM, you just subscribe, and that's that. "It just works". You don't have to worry about licencing, maintenance or any of that stuff.

If you choose a self-hosted complex CRM system, you've got some hefty work ahead of you. After choosing said system, the first step is contracting and licensing the system to provide support during the process and evaluate the costs involved.

Mainly, having a contract is important because of the CRM setup procedure. Hence, the contract vendor is responsible for setting up the CRM, alongside support and routine maintenance. Therefore, be careful when signing a contract; it's very important for each part of the strategy that you implement.

Licensing sets the rules of the vendor in terms of intellectual property, fair use, and costs of the system. Basically, a license is important when determining what the organization can, and cannot do with the CRM system. Some CRM vendors keep all rights over the system, and protect their code from modifications. Others are working as open source and allow users to modify the code at will.

System Customization

This will only apply to you if you operate in a large corporate environment, and need to customize a self-hosted CRM to meet your unique needs. If you run a small business, feel free to skip over this part and consider using a cloud-based small business CRM.

So you've decided you might need customization of the CRM based on your organization. Some systems require basic setup to be easily implemented in a company. Others have to be substantially customized to be suitable for each employee. Essentially, the development work is of vital importance for the final CRM product.

Talk to the developers and tell them everything they should know before customizing the CRM. You need to focus on the features since they are essential for the progress of your business. Small businesses need to avoid costly overruns and incorrect assumptions about their working process. Also, try to get involved in all aspects of the development. That's how you will avoid making costly mistakes in the future.

Track down the accomplishments of the vendor by asking for documentation of the features in each case. Doing this, you will understand the costs of each step along the way, but also stay up-to-date with the schedule of the vendor and their next actions.

Data Migration

Naturally, almost every organization that is trying to implement a CRM system will need to transfer data from older systems sooner or later. The problem is, said data is oftentimes organized differently than in the new system, so the migration process is not as easy as it may initially seem.

First, you will need to gather all data that is important for the company. It might be scattered among the staff and other systems, so you’ll have to identify it and collect it in one place.

First, transfer only the most important data to the new system. Many companies transfer inaccurate data, which can cause problems for users, so do your best to not follow in their footsteps.

Lastly, don’t start the transfer without performing a test migration process first. The process will ensure that the information will be transferred correctly.

Training and Support

The more complex the CRM, the more training will be necessary to put it to use. If you go for an intuitive and straightforward CRM like Centrium, your employees will pick it up instantly.

If you're in a corporate setting and need a very complex CRM with obscure features, brace yourself for some research. When you're comparing the different CRM solutions don't just look at features. Be sure to also look into how their training works. Do they have free training, do they charge you extra to train your employees to use it?

Look at what the reviewers say about their support and how often they had to ask the developer for help. With a more complex CRM, many users require training to even understand the documentation. Ultimately, your employees should also master the CRM to a level when they won't require help anymore.

We're here to make the process easy

At Centrium, our job is to provide a simple-to-use and implement quality CRM system for small businesses. Our vision was to create the CRM for small businesses that want to grow quickly.

[centriumcrm]

Why Small Businesses Really Need a CRM

There’s a common assumption among small business owners that a CRM is only useful to large companies. They believe a CRM might just complicate their workflow due to its complexity.

But the truth is that it doesn't have to be that way

There are elegant and simple-to-use small business CRM solutions that can empower the performance of your company and drastically change the game.

The first CRM software solutions that came out were designed to do just what the name says. They were just about "customer relationship management". They would provide help with building and maintaining relationships with customers.

Today’s CRMs have evolved to a point where they are used as a powerful way of managing all your business operations. This includes marketing, sales, accounting, and anything that can be managed from within a single robust solution.

The amount of complexity you will go for will depend on your size of business. Unless you're running a fortune 500, you most likely will do better with a more elegant and easy-to-use small-business CRM.

The benefits of using small business CRM solutions

The number of companies using a small business CRM is on the rise. There are a plethora of benefits to streamlining processes that are critical for the survival of a business. Quality CRMs make this streamlining process a breeze. Is it any wonder that so many small businesses are starting to implement CRMs in their workflow?

A good CRM can make your life as a business owner much easier, and that’s a fact. Features that come with today’s CRM solutions make them good tools for centralizing the workflow and stimulating business growth.

Such software saves precious time and energy, while improving your results at the same time. It helps in acquiring better efficiency, happier customers and more profits. But, let’s dig a little deeper and see how a small business CRM solution can help your company specifically.

Better customer support

Since the main point of a CRM is to help you manage customer relationships, it’s no surprise that it will be your biggest asset in delivering the best customer support possible. This is a tool that helps your company understand customers, build effective relations with them and ultimately increase sales.

A good CRM enables you to centralize all the customer information in customer accounts. There, you can store data about past interactions, such as the purchase history and preferences, as well as relevant personal data. This will drastically improve your customer service practices and help your team answer questions and resolve issues more easily.

Centralization of customer information will enable anyone from your support staff to help any given customer at any time. It also enables them to collaborate in solving more difficult situations. Therefore, your team can respond to customer queries and complaints more quickly and easily.

Increased customer acquisition

Keeping your current customers happy is key, but it is also very important to continuously work on the growth of your customer base. With the use of a CRM, you can do this without having to come up with individual promotions.

When you use it as a lead database, a small business CRM will help you distribute targeted content until your leads turn into customers. You can even turn members of your target audience into leads by getting them to sign up for relevant content on your website.

In order to acquire new customers, you need to understand the reasons why your current customers are motivated to make purchases. Thanks to the CRM, you can better understand the customer perceived value of your product or service, their needs, and their experiences with your company. Evaluating this type of information, you’ll be able to anticipate the needs of your potential customers.

More effective sales strategies

No matter if you have a sales team or you're handling the sales yourself, a CRM will provide valuable information regarding sales trends within your company. You can view reports and stats that let you know where your sales strategy is performing at its peak, and where it needs improvement.

The use of a CRM puts you in a better position of control over your business operations and the overall success of the business. Allowing you to target the right customers at the right time, your CRM reduces the risk of losing income by focusing your efforts incorrectly.

A quality CRM helps sales people optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks. They can safely store and centralize their contacts, sales opportunities, activities, and scheduled plans in one place. It can help you make sure that customers will never be ignored, while your key prospects will be contacted in time.

Easier marketing operations

The first rule of marketing communication is – know your audience. Good small business CRM software lets you keep track of your customers through comprehensive profiles that contain a plethora of valuable information about them. Keeping track of their activities and preferences will help you better understand how each individual can fit into your marketing campaigns.

Utilizing a CRM helps you understand who has bought what, why, and how much they've spent. This data is essential when it comes to launching a marketing campaign or promotion, and hitting the right leads. Knowing who you are targeting will give you great pointers about how to target them.

Without a CRM, you’d have to go back over old invoices or purchase records to manually track who bought what, and when. You’ll waste valuable time on segmenting the information about each customer. Then, you’ll have to open a separate database to organize their email addresses.

Reduced costs and maximized productivity

With the right software, your marketing, sales, and customer service teams will have access to the same relevant data. This will make it easier for them to work together and create solutions that will properly serve your clients. When all of your departments function in synergy, they will work towards your goals more effectively.

Moreover, using a CRM system, much of the sales and marketing tasks can be automated in a personalized manner. The software can take care of administrative tasks, keep records, and make follow-up contacts for you. This gives your team more time for activities that have the most impact - meeting with clients that are ready to buy.

One of the most valuable benefits of a CRM is its tendency to reduce costs. As soon as you improve your customer experience, you can make sure that your clients are going to stick around. This means that you’ll need to dedicate less energy and fewer resources to finding new clients. You can then focus on improving other areas of your small business.

How Centrium fits your business needs

Centrium can ease your small business operations in many ways. It lets you store all contacts and data in a single location and share them with your team. At the same time, the software allows you to pick which team members can see the data you enter. You can keep track of communication history by posting notes, messages, files, and photos, and then communicate with your team to solve problems together.

Smart e-mail and in-app notifications will let you know whenever something important happens. This lets you keep an eye on pending and assigned tasks in shared calendars, so that you don't leave any tasks behind. You can also combine multiple tasks into milestones and projects.

Centrium makes it easier to organize leads and sales by being available to you anytime, anywhere. You can also integrate it with other apps and tools that you already love. If you’re still not sure that this is the right solution for you, contact us for more details on how Centrium can help your business shine.

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Sales Strategies for SaaS that Actually Work

Finding or creating sales strategies for SaaS is not that easy. Sometimes it might even seem that finding permanent customers for your Software as a service is even harder than creating the product itself.

Don’t worry though, we have come across a couple of strategies over the years. All of these are proven to be effective, and we will share them with you right here. Read on to find about some effective strategies for selling your SaaS.

Sales Strategies

Better Registration Experience

Make sure that each new user creates a complete profile in your Software. You need their information – complete details about their name and date of birth, email address, profile picture and connections to their friends.

Some of this information, such as their picture and their name is useful for marketing purposes. You can use their friend connections to facilitate "refer-a-friend" schemes.

You can also showcase your existing user-base to other potential customers. That will demonstrate that you already have experience and you offer a good product.

If the profile is too cumbersome for your customers to fill out, you can put up tutorial videos and useful tips to help them out.

Another option is to integrate with social networks so that most of these fields are pre-filled. This is a pre-requisite for getting their friend connections anyway.

You might have seen these "login with Facebook", "register with your google account" buttons everywhere nowadays. There's a reason for this. A lot of people prefer an easier registration process by not having to manually fill-in so much of their data.

The easier the registration process, the more user accounts you will see. This is especially true if you do offer a free-entry-plan.

When you do feature that userbase on your homepage, you don't have to point out that most of these users were a quickly created free account. You just get to display a really nice stream of user profile photos and first names. This offers great social proof.

When others see that you already have a sizeable user-base, they will be more likely to join. That’s why you need to make the registration process easier. The simpler it is – the more users you'll have, and in turn the more customers you’ll have.

Excellent customer relationships

You need to think of a way to get closer to the people and really help them out. There are many creative ideas for achieving better customer relationships. Your users need to know that you’re taking good care of them.

For example, you can come up with nice gestures to show appreciation. You might contact them to congratulate an anniversary, birthday or just let them know you're thinking about them.

This is easy to organize with Centrium contacts and tasks.

Once the word about your excellent customer treatment gets out there, you’ll get many more customers. Who doesn’t like being treated well?

And it isn't just "current paying customers" that you need to consider. The term "customer relationship" is often broader and includes "potential customers" as well. You need to think of these people as "customers in the making".

Webinars

You can offer weekly or monthly webinars to all of your potential customers, and this includes free-plan members (if you do offer a free-level plan).

With the webinar you're basically educating your leads about how to improve aspects of their business. And then you pepper in references about how it can be even easier if they upgrade to using your SaaS. In the case of free-level members, you'd hint at how it is easier with one of the higher level plans.

Remember, all of this needs to be done smoothly. You don't want it to sound like a desperate sales pitch that was miss-advertised as a webinar. If you promise a webinar about learning a skill, deliver on the promise. Don't make it all about why they need to buy your product.

Also, some of these webinars can be about showing your users how to get the most out of your software. You can give them tips, tricks or anything that might be useful for them.

These webinars can shows both the features available for free, and those part of the paid plans. That way you're encouraging the free-plan members to upgrade to a paid plan.

But if you make the webinars public, you're also giving a taste to people who aren't members at all. In fact, you want to specifically call out to those people in the webinar.

Don't hesitate to do a call to action "And if you're not a member yet, just for those watching this webinar I want to say that..."

These webinars won’t cost you much in terms of finances, but they will require a time-investment. The return on investment is well worth it.

Video Library

You can have an entire video library that is available to free members, paid customers, and even the general public. You can put old webinars there and any other user video material that you can offer. This includes tour guides, tutorials, interviews and any material really in the form of video.

Free Guides

All of your users will appreciate free guides. That’s why you need to have many free eBooks available for your users. The books shouldn’t be just simple tips that tell the user what to do.

They should cover many fields that will help them in their business. When your user gets more successful, you get more successful. They will upgrade their plans on your SAAS as their business grows. Remember that and always try to help them.

Optimize your sales process

Generate leads

In order to be successful in generating leads you need to remember that you should always be generating leads – non-stop. This includes internet marketing, offline marketing and advertisements, cold calling, warm-calling, mailing outs, networking events, and anything you can think of.

Most good sales professionals try all of the methods they know about. And then they go and read up on additional methods to try out. You don't know what will work in your field until you try it. Experiment a lot, and find what works best in getting leads for your SaaS.

And of course, the number one best lead generator is previous customers. Making sure all of your customers are satisfied is the best advertisement you can ever cook up. A satisfied customer will always recommend you whenever someone asks them for an SaaS recommendation in your field.

Also, don’t forget that some types of generating leads can be a full-time job. Perhaps you need to hire additional people to do your content marketing and social media well? Perhaps you need to outsource some types of lead generation? Consider all your options.

Conversion

Conversion happens when you get in touch with potential customers. In this conversation we're assuming a phone call. But "getting in touch with potential customers" also includes email marketing, addressing webinar attendees, etc.

When it comes to in-person and phone sales - you should feel perfectly comfortable talking about you software to anyone.

There are a few things that need to be done in order to make a sale:

Need or interest – You must find the need or interest that a potential customer might have. You, as a salesperson need to uncover that and make them see their need even more. If you see that you can’t find the interest or need, try another way.

Decision making – You need to talk to decision makers. If you're talking to an employee who has no ability to decide if they start using your product - you're wasting your time! You should be talking to someone who has the final word on purchases.

Target your audience

You can talk to anyone about your software and get sales. But, that’s not the point. You need to recognize the "true leads", these are the companies and people who will truly be interested in your software. You need to ask questions and focus on the information the people give you.

So, be focused and do your best to sell your product. Don’t waste your valuable time talking about things that are not important. Be straight forward and you will save everybody's time.

Sales is an on-going process

Once you sell your software and make that customer a user, don’t stop the communication. Ask them what they like about the collaboration and if there is anything that you can change to make it better. Let them contact you whenever they want, so you can make their experience even better.

Also, think about each sale you have made and see what could have been better or if there as different approach you can try with the next customer. Reviewing and summarizing sales is a step most salespeople gloss over.

But, if you want to be more successful than the rest of them, never forget to review and summarize your sales.

We can help you in implementing these sales strategies for SaaS

We've designed CentriumCRM with your needs in mind. Utilizing a software solution like ours will make implementing these sales strategies quite straightforward.

Feel free to check out the features, or dive straight into a free trial.