You cannot run a business without the customers, and the customers do not just fall from the trees. Being in a startup business means that you have to establish the team relations as well as customer relations; therefore, to achieve that how can one not use a sales stack? You can never leave sales stack in a startup as an option for later. Various startup founders have deduced that the most important asset that one can have while starting a business is the contacts. No matter what business you are in, what you are starting, success and losses will come and go, but the relation that you have with your contacts that can last for eternity. Whether your business is the kind that is focused on customers or the kind that is focused on products, both require a sales stack.

Every startup has the opportunity to benefit from a sales stack. This is not only for the purpose of making sales or for the support teams, but a sale stack can help in impacting everyone working on a team through the customer relationships. As to why sales stack is important and should never be left as optional, the reasons are given below.

1. To Restructure the Sales Process

A sales process is very important and can impact business in various manners. A system that is accessible for leading the contacts and following up with them, and to bring in the new clients, such a system or process is what makes or breaks a startup. When you streamline your sales process, you get the benefit of coming off as professionals and also help in reducing the instances where lead is dropped.

This is where sales stacks can play an important role. The question is how? The answer: by spending time on meeting new prospect and connections, a sales stack can help you in keeping up with the people you are in contact with each day. With a sales stack, you can keep track of the progress of the prospective leads and follow up on them regularly. A sales stack surely helps in smoothing out the path towards bringing the client onboard.

With a sales stack, a flawless sales process is developed and deployed.

Related: Better Robots, Better Sales: Revolutionizing CRM Software with the Power of AI

2. Luminous Customer Service

Your sales reps require a sales stack almost on a regular basis. With the CRM, the sales reps can access the previous interaction with the client that enables them to help the client efficiently without having to ask too many questions.

With a CRM, the sales reps can:

  • Get the related information about the contact and their account details;
  • The details about the purchases that a customer made in the past;
  • The details about different sales rep dealing with the client in the past;
  • The progress and status of the project being worked on for the client

With an amazing customer service, you can go miles. Being a startup business, it is easy to create good and efficient customer service with CRM as there aren’t too many clients. The impact you can make at this stage is important and will make you prosper in your business.

3. Automation of the Marketing Efforts

Usually, people are unaware of the association that a sale stack has with the marketing; as they believe it is only for sales. However, a good CRM will incorporate both these factors. With the sales stack, you can determine where you are getting the leads from and where you are headed to. Sales and marketing are the two prospects that should be closely linked to a startup business, and sales stack is the best way to achieve both.

Related: Networking and Capturing of New Leads with CRM 

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4. Customer Oriented

As a startup, the teams working should be involved with both sales and marketing. The teams should always be on the move for collaboration, and with CRM that is mobile enabled, can play a crucial role. The philosophy of the transparency and collaboration is what works best for a startup. With teams knowing where the prospect is coming from, what he is after, the knowledge about certain to all the members will lead to next to no information gap.

5. Saves Customer Data for the Future

With a sales stack or a CRM, you can think of the leads as a company’s property and not an individual’s property. Following this, it means that if a client goes towards a different opportunity, you will still have the contacts of that prospective client for future sales or referencing. In a startup, contacts are crucial, no matter if they are no longer with us they can prove to be beneficial in the long run.

More importantly, as a growing company, you might get new recruits, with a sales stack or CRM, the information of the clients or customers is immediately available to those new hires. Since everyone has to be up to date with the customers, CRM helps in achieving that.

To conclude, sales stack really is a non-optional thing for the startups. As a startup, you really can’t get too far without a sales stack or a CRM at your disposal. It is most important for a startup to acquire a sales stack as soon as possible and build up the business as you go.

A Customer Relation Management (CRM) and the Social Media Management (SMM) tools are a very important parts of the Business to Business (B2B) companies marketing tool. Nowadays, the B2B companies have started to discover that though CRM and SMM are important individually, they are extraterrestrial when integrated with one another.

The social-CRM integration provides with an extensive overview of the relationships between the customers and the organization through the social media. With this, you are able to provide the social content that leads towards the unwavering loyalty of a client. Moreover, with this integration, the sales teams are able to understand the customer from a touch point.

Not only that but by integrating the SMM with CRM, the two key databases will provide much better insights into the creation of the marketing strategies. With this knowledge, the complete ROI can be transformed exponentially. Why is that? Because, the larger the amount of data that you can acquire about your prospect, the more you will be able to raise it efficiently, and this leads in an increment in sales and revenues.

The insights that you get with the integration of Social Media Management with CRM are as following:

1. Feel about the Customers

The knowledge you can get about your customer, about the products they prefer, the marketing approaches you can use on them, and the way you can develop your relation with them is important. With the integration of SMM and CRM, you will be able to get the feel about the customer you are targeting. By attaining that knowledge, your sales and marketing teams will generate stronger and better responses from the customer when they know what the customer really wants.

The first thing that becomes prominent with this integration is the image of what the customer wants. Your marketing strategies can be adapted with a little brainstorming regarding the thoughts, opinions, and feeling of the customer.

2. Knowledge about the Customer Buying Habits

  • It is essential for a B2B business to understand what is it that makes the customer motivated to buy something. Each customer has his way of thinking and his personal quirks. The most important things that you will need to know about the customer are:
  • Purchasing speed of the customer
  • The complexity of the customer’s buying decisions
  • Are more than one people contacting about the product
  • With the knowledge of the customer behavior, the current customer relationships can be informed, and the buyer façades can be augmented to engage with the future leads. With the integration of SMM and CRM, you get to see the though process of the client in a prominent manner.

3. Customer Activism

If you monitor the social media, you will get to see how the customers are talking about your brand on a regular basis, on places like Facebook, Twitter, etc. If your product is satisfactory to the customers, they will probably link your blogs to their posts, and that is when you can approach them for case studies or testimonials. With the integration of SMM and CRM, keeping track of these interactions becomes transparent and easy to establish.

4. Sales Intelligence

The buying motivations of the customers are also important factors in order to understand the customers’ needs. The SMM integration with CRM can help in the interactions of the customers regarding the product since its creation till the end. With this, the thoughts and behavior of the client are revealed effectively. With the integrated system, a company will be able to easily identify members of the teams to whom specific projects should be assigned. 

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5. Lead Generation

The most important point in marketing is the Lead Generation. When the SMM and CRM are integrated with one another, an abundance of data lies at your feet. With this integration, you will get everything that is needed for generating leads effectively with the proper marketing channels. You will know how the customers interact with the social media, and you can also get the content and marketing collateral that is required to pursue certain leads.

Related: Networking and Capturing of New Leads with CRM

We can deduce from the discussion above that integrating Social Media Management with CRM will provide with richer data, better and extensive marketing and many more sales. It is pretty much basic, the knowledge you can get about the customers and the leads is what helps you in serving them and making conversions and generating a better ROI and revenues. To achieve this SMM and CRM integration is the best solution.

As Teamgate CRM is integrated with MailChimp, all the functionalities mentioned above lead to a better understanding of the insights you receive. We look for ease everywhere we go, and the integration with MailChimp leads to a better CRM environment. Getting to see how the customer reacts to the newsletters and campaigns, the integration of MailChimp with Teamgate CRM, helps you figuring out where you need to make the improvements in order to get the leads and sales. Through the personalization of the messages, and knowing which campaigns to target, you can come to an understanding of the customer’s sentiments and their liking to your services or products. Therefore, integration with any of the social media will help you in retaining your customers and getting new ones as well.

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If you are not familiar with Teamgate CRM and MailChimp integration yet, try it for free to discover all the functionality!

This is How the 360° Customer View is Easily Attainable

Last time we were creating an email marketing campaign, we had the same forms we always begin with, same autoresponders, and a similar outreach plan. The information collecting tactics, however, were just a little more intensive, and the monumental results were well worth the extra steps. By using free online data sources, paired with Teamgate’s simplistic platform, customers became much more than just email addresses and purchase histories. In turn, our outreach strategy underwent a metamorphosis from traditional advertising techniques to a targeted and high-converting conversation with our market.

The 360 degree customer view provided us with insights and trends, specific to our campaign, that we couldn’t have predicted otherwise. All of this was possible by following just a few extra steps when creating our customer profiles.

Is There any Difference Between Leads, Prospects, and Customers?

The very first thing to do with your customer profiles is to break them into three groups – leads, prospects, and customers. Customers are those in your target market who have solidified their position by purchasing something from you at some point. Prospects are those interested in making a purchase. Leads are potential customers (A lead may have signed up for your mailing list, but has yet to complete  or a transaction.). In order to compare traits later, it is important to know where on the spectrum an individual stands.

As prospects make purchases, you can move them into the customer category. As leads take interest, you can move them into the prospects category. A good Sales Stack platform will be set up for just this. With customer relationship management technology, there is no need to create tedious spreadsheets or clutter your life tons of separate files for each group; you can store information for each group in one place for easy comparison.

Where Did This Guy Come From?

Chances are that you’ve got hundreds, even thousands of customers. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could remember how each person is connected to your organization and what other customers and companies they’re connected to? You can. If you’re using a modern Sales Stack platform, you can easily categorize customers into detailed segments and organize by company. This means that if you’re selling to Company X, and Jane, John, and Suzan all work for company X, you can find them just by clicking on their company in your dashboard. In this way you can send targeted and personalized messages to subgroups that know more than just where you’re at in one sale.

This kind of list segmentation comes in especially handy when you’re delivering personal sales calls and sending out individual emails. You can mention to Suzan that Jane made her order last week, and let her know that, not only are you paying attention, but also instill a “team” mindset into the process. We all want to buy from those that treat us like real people. The more you know about a lead or prospect, the more successful you will be in closing any sale. 

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Does List Segmentation Only Benefit Sales?

If you’re wondering if you can use a Sales Stack platform for your advertising and marketing efforts as well as sales, the answer is yes. You can give everyone in your company access to as much of your information as you want. A marketing professional may have a different kind of insight to add to customer notes that will aide the sales process and vise-versa. Through modern Sales Stack, you can see your customer from all angles. This describes the information that you have access to, and the perspective of the staff member looking at it.

Think of modern Sales Stack as more than just a gym floor; it’s a basketball… a basketball game. Even if you had every bit of your customers’ information before, you were still coming at the idea of customer relationship management as if the Earth were flat, so to speak. Now, you’re able to look at it as the three dimensional object it is, and see the way that it orbits in space. Feel free to get excited.

planet-teamgate (1) (1)

How Can You Start Taking Advantage of This Data Mine?

You knew there had been a breakthrough in business and data mining, and you were sure there was a way to start harvesting from your customers. What you didn’t know was how to do it without gambling a fortune on research that may or may not have anything to do with your target audience. Now is the perfect time to start exploring the vast universe inside your customer list. Sign up for a free trial with teamgate, upload your subscriber and customer lists, and start taking advantage of the advanced insights with everyone on your team, today.

It is not a secret that the modern day logistics is dealing with very complicated business management processes. Logistics companies need to analyze the information about thousands of clients around the world and effectively manage the routes that extends through several continents. How to find the best solution to run these complex procedures? Every larger logistics company has the same brain teaser.

Looking for an easy solution

Just a few years ago, an international freight forwarding company “Baltic transline” got stuck on the same business management question. The company offers a wide range of services which includes cargo collection, transportation between the terminals and delivery. The company operates in the Baltic States region as well as the Scandinavian countries, CIS, also in the Central and West Europe’s markets. “After the successful phase of development into the foreign markets, we gained more clients but their expectations have increased as well. Also, the need has arisen not only to monitor the effectiveness but also to follow the market trends. We have all kind of clients – from the leaders of the market to freshly made start-ups, so we needed a tool which adapts to the needs of every client”, – tells Mr. Marius Dūdėnas, the spokesman of “Baltic transline”. The interviewer highlights that they were looking for an easily managed tool which could help to fix all the complex issues. “From a technical point of view, the new tool had to help, rather to cause problems”, – he says. After considering the simplicity and provided opportunities, “Baltic transline” decided to try sales management system (CRM) created by Teamgate, which was installed in Spring, 2013.

Related: Ways a New Sales Leader Can Rapidly Add Value and How Do Sales Work at Innovative Companies?

The speed and quality of data analysis

Adolis Jančiauskas, a sales manager at Teamgate, observes that Logistics business sector is indeed very dynamic, having frequent changes in the market and huge competition. The clients are usually from different countries so their business habits are different as well, which makes the whole process even more complex and interesting.

“In order not to get involved into the so-called “price wars”, you need to see the full picture of the client. It helps to understand the needs better and to give the right solution on time. Also it is very important to give each client enough attention to ensure his loyalty. It is really hard or nearly impossible to do all of it without having the right tools”, – says A. Jančiauskas.

Exactly for this reason the “Excel” tables are no longer enough to store all the relevant data about the clients. “When working with loads of data, sooner or later the main disadvantage of the “Excel” tables becomes quite clear – it takes ages to find the information you need. These tables are designed to help you calculate, not to store other clients’ data. Anyway, the habit of working with the “Excel” tables could be explained that simply there were no decent client management tools some time ago”, – says A. Jančiauskas.

How does the most suitable CRM look like?

Marius Dūdėnas highlights that they are using the “Teamgate” system for three years now and their business development and customer service divisions especially values it for its simple control and the opportunities to easily plan and track all the actions. “One of the great features is that the system lets you not only to maintain a close connection between the company and its clients but also to react to the market changes, as well as to measure the effectiveness and results of the employees even more objectively”, – says M. Dūdėnas. 

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Adolis Jančiauskas admits that the “Teamgate” tool is a perfect fit for the specifics of logistics industry because of wide functionality and simplicity. “It is really hard to find both functional and handy tools in the market. Functionality and simplicity also means a straightforward CRM installation process, team engagement and successful automation of the processes”, – says A. Jančiauskas.  An important role is held by analysis tools which helps to track how the goals are implemented and to identify where there is a need to improve. “Companies usually pay little attention to this but you must keep in mind that the business can only grow when it can clearly see this kind of data”, – points out the sales manager of “Teamgate”. He also pays attention that the “Teamgate” tool can also offer even more functions which are vital to the transportation industry – flexible additional information field management that allows to collect other specific data about the destinations of export and import, types of cargo and clients’ list filters under various criteria. This level of customization and automation is often achieved through Freight Logistics Software Development Services, which empower companies to build solutions tailored to their unique workflows.

The interest grows quickly

While talking about more general hot CRM trends, the sales manager of “Teamgate” notes that the interest in CRM solutions is increasing among the logistics companies in Lithuania. And there is a probability that this kind of interest will only grow in the future.

“The procedure of switching to CRM occurs gradually – when the organization grows, the number of employees and clients increases, therefore there is a desire to track the information from different angles. At this exact point it could be really hard to find the relevant information fast enough. When the same problem occurs for a couple of times, you start looking for a way to make this process easier. This happens frequently enough in our business and we see it as one of the cases when companies start to show interest in CRM solutions”, – tells Adolis Jančiauskas.

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When working with sales, it is important that you not only provide customers with products that are needed by the client but to also promote your business as well. Promoting your business will allow customers to know who you are and what your company offers, but when you are promoting, you can provide your customers with a snapshot of the products you offer. One of the most important things that a company can do, besides provide customers with new and useful products, is to promote the business in any way possible. There are many ways to develop a business and the promotion will payoff in the long run.

Connecting the Dots

Sellers that are successful know how to connect the dots between the company and the needs of the customers. This means that the company will use data to ensure that the products that are offered by the business are products that are in high demand at that time.  Like many things that change throughout the year, the products that the enterprise is selling should also begin to change. This does not mean that the business to rid the stores of all old products and only sell new, but to ensure that customers have the option of slightly old products that work and newer, trending products that have been released for customer gain. The responsibility of the company is to collect data and analyze which products are most sought out by the customers. This will ensure that the customer is receiving what they want through the company, and it will allow the company to remain more competitive with the companies that fall within the same product distribution section.

Related: 5 Ways to Boost Your Leads and Sales and Sourcing Data from All Angles for Valuable Market Insight

Being the number One

Companies are encouraged to provide buyers with products that will have worthwhile results. To do this, companies must display the products and provide information to the customer to show them how the product will make their lives easier with successful results that are worth the price and the buy.  Marketing your business and your products will let customers know that you are the number one company to get all their products that they may need in one place. It is important to show the customer that the products that they are purchasing offer particular results and the marketing must demonstrate to the client that the product you are providing to them is a product that the customer cannot go without in their daily lives.

Being Responsible

When you are marketing your products, you must be able to demonstrate that when buying a product, there is little risk to the consumer. Customers are becoming more cautious and look for any risks that could potentially present themselves when they are purchasing a product. Risk reduction has increased over the past years, and this is an important step that companies must take when promoting the products they are selling. Marketing needs to be responsible for the brand of product, in turn; the company must be responsible for the marketing. If the company advertises that an individual product will provide the customer with certain results, and the product fails, the company’s reputation will decrease dramatically. It is important to know what the company is advertising relating to the products that are being sold by the business to ensure the reliability of the product itself.

Once you can build the credibility of your business, it is easier to encourage customers to return. You must allow your business to stand alone and prove that your business is the best company for whatever products you are offering. You must be able to demonstrate to customers that your company is superior to any other company around and ensure that existing customers return while promoting new clients to the company. Becoming competitive with your company can be time-consuming and will require great effort. Even with these stipulations, your company will thrive, and the results will begin to show dramatically depending on how much work was put into the company. You must be able to convince your customers that you are the best around and that they will benefit greatly from staying with your company.

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Evaluating Feedback

Another great way to improve sales through your company is to initiate conversation with your customers. It is important to ask the consumer what they would like to see in the store or between products features and what products they would recommend you offer to customers. This is one of the best ways to refine your company and ensure that the client is receiving exactly what they are in need of at that particular time. Whether you create a website allowing customers to offer feedback, set up a suggestion drop box within your company, or encouraging customers to speak with managers of your product, you must find an innovative method in which you can acquire the information. There are many options in which you can receive information from the customer; it is up to you to provide the customer with various options in which their voice can be heard. Customers appreciate it when they know that their favorite company is listening to their advice. This will encourage customers to continue submitting advice to you in which will aid the company to become more competitive than others.

You must oversee everything that is going on in your business. This is a big responsibility, and there is no way that you can monitor everything that is going on every day. There are options for you, however. You can delegate different staff members to do the marketing, or the promotion of the company, the data collection and the monitoring of the customer feedback and requests. Here, you will all each staff member to complete their work and debrief you on their findings. This way you can monitor the company and ensure that everything is working smoothly.

If you are the only player on the team, the team will fail. If your staff is not completing their daily tasks correctly, your team will fail. If the team fails, your company fails. It is important that you hand-pick your employees and staff members to elevate any uncertainty about the running of the business.

CRM Technology Isn’t Just for Major Corporations. Customer relationships used to be handled with post-it notes and cork boards. Now, as with most things, there is a piece of technology that has improved the process. Customer Relationship Management software is a solution that small business can take advantage of.

Modern CRM tools combine basic sales tracking tools with task management systems that automate the process of following up on leads and closed sales. Advanced functions for your customers include facilitating satisfaction surveys, recommending future purchases, and delivering push order status information to customers’ online profiles. These functions are valuable and diverse.

Organizations with multiple sales and service channels can use these tools to unify the flow of data, even enabling self-service options for tracking and ordering. It sounds like a lot, and you may think that this type of technology is reserved for corporations with a lot of overhead and huge marketing budgets, but that’s not true. CRM technology provides many benefits for small business, and here are just a few of the ways your employees can use it to build relationships and increase sales.

Related: How Do Sales Work at Innovative Companies?

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CRM Software Frees Up Time for Internal Communication and Marketing

When you crunch the numbers, you’re sure to see that your employees are crunching out a certain number of tasks in a 40 hour work week. How much of that goes into tracking customers and establishing satisfaction levels and sales trends? If the number is higher than you would like, it’s time to see what relationship software can do for you and your team.

Most CRMs will contain modules that track customer feedback and establish trends in sales, opinions, and overall consumer satisfaction. By implementing the use of this software into your business structure, you can eliminate hours of manual data entry and research that your staff would otherwise have to spend. This creates more time for improving your marketing message and promotes better-informed communication among team members. Employees will make more of their time with the use of CRM.

CRM Productivity Tools and Add-Ons Help the Creative Process

How many different productivity tools are your employees using? Wouldn’t it be better if they could login to one system for all of their creative needs? Depending on the systems, CRM may solve this issue.

A well-constructed CRM platform supplies the kinds of tools your sales staff needs to be more productive – things like email templates, customized reports, and asset libraries that make selling easier. Your staff can take advantage of any and all productivity tools supplied by the platform or integrate the ones they currently use. With CRM, an all-in-one system can be used for nearly any set of sales technology needs.

Creative-process-teamgate

Related: Hack Your Business Conference Experience With These 16 Must-Have Apps

Using CRM to Forecast Employee Trends

Sales meetings are often a time for touching on the strengths and weaknesses of your team. You can actually eliminate that all together and spend your time brainstorming new strategies and sharing motivational information. Technology makes that possible.

A good CRM platform has a way of instantly supplying metrics you’ll use to measure employee performance and identify weakness that can be discussed in future sales meetings. This is the ability to forecast sales trends within your small business structure so that changes can be made to strategies before difficulties become hurdles.

Employees stay integrated with updated information and analytics, distributing responsibilities (reducing the dependency on one or two employees, which could cause problems in case of staff turnover). Staff will appreciate the ability to easily see into their own performance metrics and reach out for ideas in advance, rather than hear about issues from someone else once individual shortcomings have already caused problems.

Analytics Tools Provide Valuable Insight for Current Campaigns

Sales campaigns generally have time written in for structured analytics and re-strategizing. Real time data sharing and reports eliminate the need for scheduled analysis, opening up the time for strategy.  

Today’s CRM delivers the enhanced ability to forecast trends, measure performance, and work smarter to small business employees. Data available in the analytics board represent the most important benefits for productivity and revenue growth in companies of all sizes. Changes and updates are communicated in close to real time, meaning that decisions can be made in real time.

Related: Insights You Gain by Integrating Social Media Management with Your CRM

In Conclusion

Using CRM software reduces time spent writing email templates, answering common questions, analyzing data. Add-ons and productivity tools enhance the creative process, while employee trends and sales data can be analyzed. CRM isn’t just for big business. Sign up for a free trial today, and find out what you’ve been missing.