Many sales and marketing professionals find themselves in a rut, sooner or later. Even with a well-developed sales script or enough understanding of the field to skip one, they find customers just aren’t interested in what they have to offer. No matter how had or soft the sell is, things seem to fall through every time. Often, this comes with too much focusing on the bottom line–and the more a sales professional focuses on absolutely ensuring a sale gets made, the less selling actually gets done.
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Referrals — Putting Customer Relationships to Work
The best marketing is often word of mouth. When customers are happy, they generate new business. When they are unhappy, they can actively stymie efforts to create and qualify leads by telling others about their bad experiences. Even before the age of public satisfaction forums on social media, there was lots of evidence suggesting dissatisfied customers reach out more frequently and with more force than satisfied ones. A study by Eugene Anderson in the late 90s demonstrated the lack of consistency among results in measuring the customer satisfaction-word of mouth relationship.
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Permission Marketing and CRM — A Natural Pair
A lot of marketing efforts can feel like wasted time, especially if you look at some of the numbers published by private studies. Some of these reports suggest that more than half of all email users, for instance, admit to not reading most of their emails, and many more just look at the sender and the title before making the decision to delete. For cold calls, success rates vary between 2 and 5 percent, depending on the industry. In a digital world where customers are more savvy and prone to skepticism at being approached by someone unknown to them, it can be hard to have enthusiasm and confidence that a marketing initiative is going to be successful.
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The Right CRM Program Part III — Money & Time
This is the final installment of Selecting the Right CRM for Your Company, a series of articles where we discuss the key points you should be thinking about if you’re looking to implement a new system for your business. Here, we discuss the two overarching constraints of any business or software implementation endeavor: time and money. Knowing what features you want, how you want to implement your new CRM solution, and what your implementation goals are ultimately amounts to nothing if you lack a well-developed timeline and the money to back it all up.
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The Right CRM Program Part II–Features & Functions
In our last post, Selecting the Right CRM Program for Your Company, we discussed how a company’s environment and today’s hosting options affect CRM system choices as they relate to long-term business goals. To continue this discussion, here we focus on how to weigh features and functions of CRM programs against those goals.
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What’s the Right CRM Program for Your Company?
Have you been on the lookout for a CRM program that will help you get the most out of each interaction with your customers? The market for CRM software is big and there’s a lot of choices out there, so navigating a first-time installation can be tricky. Even worse is when a company invests in a CRM system only to have it come up short, whether due to low adoption rates, missing features, or a clunky workflow. All of the money spent on the CRM program itself, switching systems, training employees, and IT resources can end up wasted if you are not careful.
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Webinar – Prospecting the Sandler Way with Prophet CRM
Tired of the same old approaches to sales that leave customers and agents feeling burned out? Do you want to distinguish yourself from the competition and go beyond just selling a product? The real task of today’s sales agents isn’t to just collect a check from a prospect—it’s actually to assist that prospect in making the best decision they can for their own company. How does a sales agent do this without jeopardizing their own chances for success?
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Does Your Business Have a Crisis Plan?
Every business should have a public relations strategy that includes a crisis plan. Time is crucial during any major event that a company faces, and wasting that time with figuring out how you intend to stay in contact with key customers and the public as a crisis unfolds can leave a business in shambles. Part of having a solid crisis plan is knowing how to use every tool at your disposal–this becomes especially important as businesses gain access to more (and more varied) channels of communication. Response speeds that might have been acceptable five or even ten years ago might be considered too long in an age of instant information.
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Changes to Expect In Outlook for Office 2016
In addition to its steady rollout of Windows 10, Microsoft has also rolled out another major change to its core: Office 2016. For those who use Outlook for business emails, Office 2016 offers as variety of new, useful features that make it easier to collaborate, share, and communicate. Some features and integration methods are going away as well — businesses should be aware of what systems are changing before making the switch.
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