Customers are the mainstay of businesses in all industries. Therefore, having a dedicated tool for delivering superior customer service is essential to ensure cordial bond with them for consistent growth. But many organizations lack the proper system to integrate data associated with customer interaction and their experience. Such insufficiency in the business system leads to a critical situation and you might have to lose your customer as they prefer to have a hassle-free source of resolutions. We have shared this blog post to let you easily find what is the purpose of customer support CRM and how does it work?
Let’s understand importance of customer support CRM
Customer support CRM is part of cutting-edge technology and serves as the platform to track the customer’s data with complete security. It creates the cornerstone to make your business successful. Customer support CRM is the most secure platform to manage interactions with customers and store information about them. Business owners must access the purpose of customer support CRM to ensure the increase in business efficiency.
The most advantageous aspect of the customer support CRM is that it allows your sales and marketing team to easily recognize their customers and their concerns. In this way, they talk to them quite accurately without wasting their time. Further, appropriate information about the customer’s data enables them to take the actions meticulously for resolution. You can make your business thrive only by delivering a positive customer experience. Therefore, it is imperative to have a piece of the automated system to encourage customer retention and customer loyalty for you and your brands.
Apart from creating opportunities to maintain the relationship with your existing customers, customer support CRM also allows you to access the former customer who had ended using your products and services. With the help of the customer support CRM, you can easily keep your business system organized.
How does customer support CRM improve Customer Experience?
The core motive of every business is to improve customer experience. Since customers are live assets of the business and hence it is vital to serve them better as much as possible. You can find the following benefits that majorly contribute to the growth of the business:
Allow you to keep in touch with your customers
Businesses need to maintain uninterrupted contact with their customers. Adoption of the customer support CRM helps businesses to send the emails on a regular basis to their both current and potential clients. Since the mailing system is the most authentic way to share information about the newly launched products and services with the customers. With the help of the customer support CRM, you can easily keep a check on your customer’s conversation and their initiatives for the purchase of your products and services.
Enable you to create personalized communication
The creation of the mail with personalized subject lines is highly influential. Most customers click on their mail to take a look because of their name reflecting in the mail subject line. Thus, use of the CRM helps you to include such practice to develop a stronger bond with your customers and improve their experience with your products and services.
Create consistency in your customer experience
Having an idea about the mindset of your customers can help you to achieve business goals without any hassle. Your interactive approach through the regular messages and quick support for your side makes your customer experience excellent. But this kind of factor cannot be achieved through manual work practices. Thus, Customer support CRM is the best option for your business success.
Help to manage customer requests on social media platforms
Social media platforms are the first choice of every customer. They like to connect to you through Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to share issues if they face any problems with your products and services. Additionally, they collect information about your products and services using the same. But for the appropriate management of the customer’s data such as their inquiry and issues on the social media platform, you can use the customer support CRM.
Let you find more about your customers
The presence of the customer support CRM helps you find out which product your customer has purchased when he or she browsed on your website and put the inquiry on social media channels. The complete storage of data associated with their browsing habits can let you easily know their interest in your other products and services. So overall, the use of the customer support CRM is the best way to manage your customer insights efficiently for improved business productivity.
Conclusion
Customer experience is the most important criterion to measure your products and services quality. So, you need to focus on improving your support function to build a resilient relationship with your customer. Thus, Customer support CRM is the most authentic software to let you create a congenial scenario between you and your customers.
Are you Customer-Centric?
Basically, Customer centricity means putting your customer at the center of what you do. As an organization, you need to understand the “how” and “what” of customer experience and you need to promote a customer-centric culture because it is one of the most key differentiators now among the competition. You need to have the right strategies and measures in place to delight your customers and one of the most important ways of doing it is by having a robust Helpdesk ticketing system in place. Let’s understand the meaning of having such a system and its key benefits?
Meaning of Help desk Software or Ticket Management Software
We can call it helpdesk or service desk or customer support desk or ticket management system but it implies a system that can automate complaint resolution process by assigning tickets to customer issues resulting inefficient management of customer issues.
Why Help desk Management System or ticket management system is important for your business?
Here are few key benefits of a ticket management system that you should know:
A centralized system for complaint resolution:
Helpdesk ticket software facilitates centralized complaint management. The software can be accessed from any location and all tickets and their status can be monitored by the stakeholders from any location.
Faster Ticket Resolution:
The customers are only concerned about how fast they get a resolution for their issues and have nothing to do when it comes to your internal processes. Thus, having a ticket-based solution enables the agents to resolve the tickets faster and boosts your customer experience. You may also create a repository of FAQs for your agents so that they can resolve the query faster and efficiently.
Automatic updates to customers:
A Robust helpdesk software has a feature of sending out regular updates on the status of a customer’s requests. This way your customers are well informed throughout the lifecycle of the ticket.
Multi-channel Customer Support:
Customers want to reach you through any of their preferred modes like voice, email, social media, WhatsApp, etc. An Omnichannel CRM enables ticket generation from all channels and streamlines the customer support process.
Better Customer Experience:
The software facilitates regular updates to customer on their ticket status and also have provision for self-service FAQs to enhance the customer experience. The customers can get handy solutions for their issues in a very short span of time.
Reports and Dashboards:
The software provides deep insights on tickets and their resolution. This helps to create and improve CX strategies and drive process improvement to boost customer satisfaction.
Complete information at the customer service representative’s disposal:
It is very frustrating for a customer to repeat his issues every time he reaches a customer service representative. A Robust ticketing software has all the required information at the CSR’s screen and hence the agent can provide accurate information to the customer.
Increase in efficiency:
A ticket management system helps to organize the customer’s requests and complaints. The system facilitates quick response with less effort through the system, promotes fewer mistakes, and enhances the overall efficiency of the organization.
Constant Performance Improvement:
The metrics and dashboards on the team’s performance give valuable insights for example tickets closed, in TAT closures, out of TAT closures, average time for ticket resolution, etc. Such analytics brings transparency to your process and you are able to identify process gaps and take corrective action accordingly.
Promotes Revenue Growth:
It is a proven fact that happy customers bring you more revenue. This happens through word-of-mouth or through repeated orders. When customers are happy with your services, you have the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell also.
Conclusion
After looking at the benefits of a customer service support CRM, we have proven that having an all-inclusive ticket management system is the need of the hour. If you want to delight your customers at every touchpoint, then you need to have a robust ticket management system that offers you omnichannel customer support. There are many help desk ticketing software in the market, but not all are created equal. Dialdesk also offers customizable customer support ticket software, which provides a full suite of customer support features. In case you wish to demo, reach us at 9643303884.
If you have a sales team that works on-field or is working remotely to generate sales for you, then you just can’t do without a Mobile CRM
What is Mobile CRM?
A mobile CRM is a version of your CRM solution which can be accessed from a mobile device (e.g. a smartphone or a tablet). It enables you to access up-to-date information about your customers and potential customers on a real-time basis. It helps your sales force work smarter and faster.
Equipping your sales force with a mobile Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform gives them a greater degree of flexibility and extends numerous strategic benefits to your company.
This is especially true of your sales team, who is frequently away from the office and need access to business applications and operations while they are on the road.
Mobile CRM can also create better intra-departmental communication and integration, where those in the field can more easily communicate with those at the office, sending documents, messages, etc, and shortening the process.
How mobile CRM closes more deals for you?
The mass migration of internet users from desktop to mobile devices clearly indicates that people expect real-time information to be accessible from anywhere. Mobile accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. In the third quarter of 2020, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 50.81 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017.
This is because mobile CRM development services allow its users to access their data no matter where they are, allowing them to run their business on the go.
Top 10 Benefits of Mobile CRM:
Selling on the go:
A mobile CRM allows you to manage sales quickly and stay connected with customers and prospects. According to Ken Krogue, sales reps spend 50% of their working day selling remotely. This statistic highlights the value of mobile CRM.
Having access to real-time data helps your sales team sell smarter and find new opportunities while aiding them to make faster decisions.
Increase sales productivity:
Through Mobile CRM your sales team can make their days much more efficient. The application will give automatic reminders & notifications so that they don’t miss out on any important action/task.
The best thing about a mobile CRM app is that your sales rep does not have to remember what happened at each meeting and wait to get to his desktop to add updates. After each appointment, he can directly add meeting notes into his mob app. This way his meeting notes are much more accurate and are available in real-time for his manager to view if needed. The application allows uploading documents instantly, hence fastening the process application & making your customers happier.
A recent study by Innoppl Technologies found that 65% of salespeople who work at companies that have adopted a mobile CRM platform have achieved their sales quotas as opposed to only 22% of reps from companies that have not yet adopted a mobile CRM platform. That’s nearly three times more sales success!
Improves closer percentages and shortens your sales cycle
A sales app not only makes tasks easier for your sales team. It also allows them to approach the prospect with much more information and clarity, which has a direct effect on their closure rates.
Keep a check on sales performance
In an ideal world, a need for this feature would not arise. But, in some cases, a mismatch between the number of meetings a sales rep says he’s done and the number he’s actually done may occur. To avoid conflict, mobile CRM can help you monitor and track each meeting that the agent has done over the day. Increased transparency equals reduced discrepancy! The mobile app has features like Geo-tagging and Geo-fencing which facilitates genuine reporting of your sales team.
Easy access to crucial information
With a mobile app, the salesperson has access to information, even on the field. He can look up his lead’s activity history, his website visits, the conversations he has had with them before, to be better prepared. He can also lookup new leads or tasks assigned to him, overdue appointments, lead stage changes, etc. from his mobile device only.
Having all the information to close a deal readily available will ensure salespeople don’t waste valuable time looking for contacts or trying to find notes from their last conversation.
Respond to customers faster and better
Mobile CRM software offers the ability to efficiently track, manage, and respond to certain customer service cases.
Being able to access real-time data on-the-fly lets sales team members get out of the office and into the field, increasing response times and nurturing relationships with customers and prospects.
In a recent study conducted by sales performance improvement organization Huthwaite, the majority of respondents indicated that smartphones gave sales reps a competitive edge due to the speed at which they were able to respond to their customer needs.
Geo-location Logging
While analytics may be a weak area, but mobile CRM’s Geo-location capabilities have improved greatly. This adds real value to sales interactions and saves time in going from site to site and planning out routes.
Geo-location uses GPS functionality to track and analyze customer locations. This is particularly useful for salespeople that want to optimize navigation while in the field. It can also help them visualize their sales territory and see whether they have a lot of customers in a particular area. This can be used to tailor content and offers based on location-specific customer behavior.
You can even use GPS and tagging to find out where your clients are and plug in their address for an in-person visit.
Improve Insights
A prospect is no longer just a name and a phone number on a card in your database. They are a collection of online tracking data, their social profiles, company information, account history, number of employees, turnover, and much more. All this data provides sales reps with an exciting opportunity to provide a more personalized sales process than ever before. However, all this is of no use if you are not able to access the meaningful information that you need the most.
Streamline Operations
A mobile CRM platform provides the right tools to accomplish all of a salespersons’ tasks in one place and make their lives just a little bit easier. Don’t forget, a happy employee is always more productive than usual!
A complete contact list allows you to call up records at the swipe of a finger.
Lead tracking helps you monitor a prospect through the sales cycle, so fewer leads are lost and conversions are increased.
Call logging becomes automatic, recording data in case you need to go back later for review and training purposes.
Comprehensive performance analytics, dashboards, and reporting tools will keep you up to date so you can make informed decisions going forward.
Easy paperwork
Often times, the most tedious part of any sale is the most important: the documentation
Getting an order finalized and submitted often requires time-consuming back and forth coordination with a client, and requires the sales rep to take valuable time out of their day to push the paperwork through. For salespeople who are on the road or attend multiple meetings, this can delay processing until they are back in the office.
A mobile sales team is able to keep all their information organized and even submit deals on the go, as soon as they are agreed to by a customer.
The days of endless faxing back and forth are disappearing quickly and faster processing of orders translate to shorter delivery or boarding times and happier and satisfied customers.
Salespeople are already mobile in their daily lives and it is only a matter of time before all sales reps begin using mobile technology to gain a competitive advantage in their business. Companies that see this shift coming and get out ahead of the curve by enabling their team to fully embrace mobile in their sales process will reap massive rewards and recognition. With increased efficiency, streamlined and automated workflows, and staggering productivity efficiencies, mobile sales teams will dramatically outperform their desktop counterparts. The future of sales team is mobile.
Organizations worldwide often wonder what the difference is between a customer relationship management (CRM) system and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The two systems are similar in many ways but they have different core functionalities. Both are valuable business solutions that help to improve, both revenue and productivity. So, are you ready to learn more about the differences? Let’s compare and contrast.
What is CRM?
CRM means Customer Relationship Management. CRM at its simplest is systems and processes for managing a company’s interactions with its current and potential customers. When we talk about CRM, we usually are talking about CRM Software. A CRM software is used to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, and customer service.
CRM now has been developed to include all areas of the customer experience, keeping the customer happy and in turn keeping them loyal and more valuable to your business. It is the process of identifying potential leads/prospects, nurturing them, and guiding them through the sales process to close the business deal. Once they become a customer it ensures that you maintain that relationship and encourage repeat business – either more frequent orders or higher value.
CRM focuses on three key areas: sales, marketing, and customers. It can help your teams within these departments achieve the following:
Nurture new leads/prospects and opportunities
Provide timely, reliable, and consistent service to transform your prospects into customers
Drive faster lead response time
Create, measure, automate, and iterate marketing campaigns
Streamline and optimize your sales processes
Analyze customer behavior/ purchasing patterns including touchpoints
Creates a high-quality and dependable customer service/support system
Automate repetitive and mundane tasks
Identifies cross-selling and upselling opportunities with your existing customers
Transforms your repeat buyers into loyal customers
What is ERP?
ERP software is designed to streamline business operations. While a CRM focuses on the sales and customer service side of the organization, an ERP system is integrated and implemented across multiple departments within the organization.
At its core, an ERP system offers interconnected management of specific business processes. So, you can access standardized information throughout every department in real-time. Any issues can be sent as alerts to designated recipients.
The business can hence focus more on data and less on operations. There are fewer errors, and organizations can make better decisions.
The right ERP system will help your business and your team achieve the following:
Track real-time critical business data within and across departments
Measure your freight, transportation, and shipping needs
Process orders, update accounts, and automate alerts for billing and order fulfillment
Manage supply and manufacturing chains
Create alerts and reports for every step of the supply and manufacturing chain
Track employee productivity
Track recruitment and hiring processes
Send notifications about company issues and how it affects the different departments
Manage benefits, payroll, and other information of employees and consultants
Customize project workflows for the department and enterprise-level operations
How are CRM and ERP similar?
ERP and CRM are both business applications that store and analyze data in a relational database. Both are delivered either through a traditional on-premises model or through software as a service (SaaS), where the vendor manages the software in its own data center and customers access it through the cloud.
While NetSuite and Salesforce.com, the two pioneers in SaaS ERP and CRM respectively, got their start around the same time, CRM systems were quicker to move to the cloud because the systems proved simpler to build and businesses were initially wary of putting financial data in the cloud.
ERP Vs CRM – What’s the difference?
CRM caters to your customers, while ERP caters to your teams and operations.
ERP and CRM systems use different approaches to increase profitability. ERP focuses on reducing overheads and cutting costs. By making business processes more efficient, ERP reduces the amount of capital spent on those processes. CRM works to increase profits by producing greater sales volume.
ERP consolidates the information provided by various functional groups of the organization through systems like CRM, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Resource Management (HRM), etc.
Some ERP systems include a CRM component, while others do not, but CRM software systems do not include ERP components. For example, Salesforce.com is not an ERP system because it does not handle transactional data. It may access order history or invoices, but that data is brought in through an integration with the ERP system.
Success metrics for CRM are about customer acquisition and retention. ERP tracks goals for accounting, order procurement, vendor management, distribution timelines, etc
Generally, you may have to choose between CRM and ERP. Your choice will depend on three critical factors:
The size of your business
The scale of your business
The complexity of your business processes
For instance, smaller businesses may choose CRM systems to grow their customer base. In contrast, complex organizations choose ERP systems to cut operational costs and maximize ROI. Thus, your IT capacity, current, and future needs may also influence your choices. You might choose an ERP system to streamline processes. Or perhaps replace existing non-integrated applications. Other businesses with a focus on their customers and want to sync sales and marketing functions may choose CRM systems.
Deciding between a CRM or an ERP system
For companies who want to maximize their growth, they often wonder which system to implement first. It can be a difficult decision because they each have unique advantages. To scale, companies must increase sales and profit–so, that requires a CRM system.
On the other hand, an ERP system drives the business with precise and accurate inter-departmental data. Before organizations can cut costs, they must have profits. Moreover, a company can be extremely organized yet not make enough in sales to continue operating. Business processes are only possible with consistent sales revenue.
So, what’s the answer? Well, you need both. A CRM system drives sales, and an ERP system helps to streamline operations and reduce overall costs. Working together, a CRM and an ERP can maximize business growth.
To enquire about a demo that is the best fit for your business, email at sales@teammas.in
New technology comes fast and goes, even faster. These days, there’s a new app or widget every week promising to make businesses and their sales reps more productive, efficient, and effective. Although some technology has proven to be more useful than others, one piece of sales technology that’s definitely here to stay is customer relationship management (CRM) software.
A properly deployed CRM system is an extremely useful tool. It tracks and manages all interactions and communication your representatives have with prospects and customers. It also helps to flag opportunities that might require additional nurturing or follow up (among many other things).
CRM literally helps to boost sales!!
Back in 2012, *Tech News World published research, which revealed that more than half of all businesses (54%) expected to improve their sales with CRM.
But, has this happened by now?
Well, #statistics point out to “Yes”, as 2014 saw an amazing 87% increase in the use of Mobile CRM, which is particularly appealing to salespeople who are always on the move.
Talking about the needs, what could be more important for sales representatives than achieving the targets?
According to **The Tas Group, on an average, 2/3 of all salesforce (67%) miss their sales quota.
Meanwhile, the study by Innoppl Technologies claims that that 65% of sales reps who have used Mobile CRM were able to achieve their sales quotas, and a staggering 78% of those who didn’t use CRM did not achieve their targets.
Despite all the “pros”, not all salespeople seem to be excited by the idea of introducing CRM in their daily routine. The number of salespeople who misinterpret the value of CRM is 87%, as they think it is adopted by their manager to police their activities. This fear results in them “just checking boxes” in the system, without seeing the true value of this tool.
Even though the benefits that CRM brings to the sales teams may not be immediately recognizable, they are still game-changing if implemented in the right manner.
And since those are the salespeople that need CRM the most, in this blog post I will bring out the key reasons why CRM can help them achieve their sales goals faster and improve results.
So, why do salespeople need CRM?
To Maintain a centralized database
: CRM helps salespeople to safely and centrally store their contacts/ database, sales opportunities, activities, and scheduled plans in one place, and will have uninterrupted access to the database from multiple locations. Rest assured that your data won’t just get lost.
Reduces human labor
: Automation is now everywhere. The most common example would be the autoresponders you get confirming your order when you place an online order. With this increasing adoption of automation, businesses are looking to reduce the manual load on their sales team as well. A good CRM and sales management system generally come equipped with a sales automation feature. This will keep track of every single lead interaction. Using this information, it would send automated sales notifications to your sales reps/ agents. This reduces both the response time and improves your customer experience. Not only notifications, but you can also automate any aspect of your sales process. You can distribute leads to your agents’ basis geography or demography. You can qualify your leads based on prior criteria. More importantly, you can even prioritize your leads. Doing this all manually not only costs more time and effort, but it can also be prone to a lot of errors in your process that will impact your customer experience also.
Manage all communication and interactions with your prospects
: All communications, both internal (rep to rep) and external (rep to prospect), can be managed through a Sales CRM. This allows your sales rep to track all parts of the buyer’s journey, including every interaction, email, phone call, and more. For example, your CRM will help your sales rep determine if and when they need to reach back out to a specific prospect. It will also help your sales reps remember whether or not they already sent a prospect the resources they requested.
Helps with lead generation and follow-up
: Whenever there is a high volume of leads flowing in, it is important to filter out your junk leads and ensure only relevant leads move on to the next stage so that your reps could work on them. Lead Qualification criteria and Lead prioritization help companies to weed out their spam leads. After this, the leads are then assigned to agents to followup. The sales agents get equipped with all the information they need about the lead, thanks to the CRM and sales management tool. They can then give a customized pitch to your lead. Not just the first contact, but the CRM tool keeps reminding your reps to constantly followup with the lead. This way leakage of leads is reduced to the minimum.
Show up in time for the new sale
: By tracking all customer communications, CRM helps salespeople to know exactly when customers need to be contacted; for example, for product replacement, contract renewal, or for an upsell to a new product or service. This way it increases your chances of closing a sale.
Provides detailed analytics and insights: CRMs allow your sales team to collect and organize data about prospects and deals using reporting features such as sales dashboards and reports. These allow sales reps to better automate and manage their pipelines, deals, and contacts. They can also evaluate their personal performance and keep track of their targets and necessary work to reach their quotas.
Cut down on admin tasks: CRM releases the sales teams from the majority of admin tasks by reducing and even removing some of the repetitive actions that take a lot of time, but yield more productivity and little profitability. CRM stores product and price details trigger reminders for activities and take sales people through the sales pipeline step by step.
Stay focused on your customers: By having access to information on customer’s interests and behavior, your sales reps can pursue the right opportunities at the right time, or collaborate with your marketing team to deliver targeted and useful content to your customers/ prospects. Selling becomes an even more personalized experience that’s focused on the customer. CRM data also helps you anticipate your customer’s needs before they reach out to you, and your team can keep your customers happy by solving their problems as soon as they arise.
Keep customers engaged: CRMs capture a wealth of valuable data that your marketing team can use to nurture your prospects into customers and customers into advocates or brand evangelists. Modern CRMs also integrate with numerous marketing tools so that marketers can create effective email nurturing campaigns, landing pages, forms, and advertisements to keep prospects moving steadily through the funnel and towards the bottom line of the sales funnel.
Accurately predict your sales: Having a more accurate sense of your win rate allows sales managers to dependably forecast how many sales their team will close from a given number of leads and set realistic revenue goals for themselves and the business. Sales managers can use these sales reports and dashboards to see how their team is tracking towards target attainment and review the number of closed deals. VPs and other organization senior leaders can also monitor the amount of revenue that’s been generated.
Now that you know how CRM brings value to your business, and if your business is ready to adopt one, it’s time to start evaluating your options and to book a demo, email at sales@teammas.in
Last month, a miracle happened. Your company’s video went viral. Lead volume shot up by 500%. You were pumped and the office was filled with a spirit of celebration.
Cut to today, and your enthusiasm has been reduced to nothing. Here’s how:-
Week 1 :
80% of your calls have ended with the two fatal words – “not interested”.
Week 2 :
60% of your calls have ended with people telling you they don’t even remember your company’s name and certainly didn’t sign up for a free trial seeing some video.
Week 3 :
40% of your calls have ended with people telling you they’ve already purchased your competitor’s product, thank you very much.
Week 4 :
Your conversion rate has dropped abysmally, and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to reach out to all the 12000 leads yet to be contacted.
Moral of the story? Two words could have prevented all of this heartbreak: lead prioritization.
What is lead prioritization?
Lead prioritization is simply separating quality leads from junk ones so that you can reach out to the ones that are most ‘likely to buy’ first.
Now, how do you identify who is ‘likely to buy’ and who is not? You can use two simple parameters for that:-
Closeness to your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)
Level of buying intent
Let us delve deeper into what these parameters mean, and how you can measure your lead’s ‘likelihood to buy’ from them.
Closeness to your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)
This is a static measure of your lead quality and helps you understand how aligned your product is with the needs of the lead.
Defining your ICP
Your ideal customer is someone who is the best fit for your product. Your Ideal Customer Persona is just a set of features that you use to represent your ideal customer.
Here are a few examples to help you understand this better:-
customer persona
From the above table, it is clear that each business will use different metrics to define its ICP. Besides, one business may cater to more than one ICPs. For example, a travel agency selling budget, as well as luxury packages, will have different ICPs for each of them.
Qualifying leads based on ICP
Once you’ve defined your Ideal Customer Persona, you can use filters on Excel to qualify your leads on the basis of it.
Let’s take the case of a Tier II B-school, for which we have already defined the ICP above. This is what their lead data would look like, before prioritization:-
Ideal Customer Persona
Now, let’s see what this list looks like after I apply these ICP filters – Profession: IT, Age : 22-25 and Work Experience : 1-3 Years.
Manual prioritization using Excel
However, this is a very basic way to qualify your leads. Manual prioritization using Excel comes with a couple of limitations:
It does not allow for leads that match the ICP to be ranked further
For example, in the above case, Lakshmi, Digvijay and Kumar will be assumed to have the same lead quality. This kind of manual prioritization will not work for businesses which generate thousands of leads per day, because even the number of leads that meet the basic ICP criterion will be too high.
Instead, you can opt for a marketing automation software which provides lead quality scoring. For example, using LeadSquared, you can set up lead quality rules in two quick steps :-
Choosing your lead quality attributes
These are the features of your leads that are most relevant for you, and hence can be used to ascertain the lead quality. For example, if you’re an institute providing MBA courses, ‘job title’, ‘work experience’, ‘location’, etc. would be the defining lead quality attributes for you, while ‘marital status’ would not.
You can specify distinct weightages for each of those chosen attributes, or select the option to assign equal weightage to each. For example, as an MBA institute, ‘job title’ could be the most important lead attribute for you, so you could assign it more weightage than the others.
Lead quality attributes
Defining quality scoring rules
You can set how the values associated with a particular lead attribute will be scored from 1 to 10. For example, an MBA institute can set the following rules for the attribute of ‘job function’:IT – 10
Marketing – 9
HR – 8
Others – 7
Using the weightages scoring rules defined for the lead attributes, the software will calculate a cumulative quality score out of 10, for each lead in the system. Using this score, you will be able to identify the more conversion-optimized leads even amongst those that match your ICP.
Here’s how the Lead Quality score will appear on the LeadSquared portal :
It does not allow for the lead qualification process to be automated
You will have to run these Excel filters each time the lead list is updated.
Again, using a marketing automation software like LeadSquared can resolve this issue, because once you define the rules for calculation, each lead in your system will be associated with a Lead Quality score. You can then filter these leads based on any criteria (for example, Lead Quality Score 8).
Degree of buying intent
The manual prioritization discussed above is an incomplete test of a lead’s ‘likelihood to buy’, as it is solely static and does not take into account the degree of buying intent that a lead has at a point in time. For example, in the above case, Lakshmi matches the ICP, but she may have already enrolled in a college. There is no simple manual process through which a lead’s buying intent can be ascertained.
Buying intent occurs when a person has the desire as well as the purchasing power to buy your product.
Now, how can you spot whether a lead has buying intent or not? By measuring their level of engagement with your business. The more a person responds to your marketing campaigns, or visits your website, or spends time on your blog – the higher are the chances that they’re interested in buying from you.
A marketing automation tool like LeadSquared can help you see the ‘engagement index’ for each lead. To set that up, all you’d need to do is :-
Define the Activity Period
If you’re an MBA institute, your sales cycle will typically be around 1 year (this is the time it takes for students to prepare for exams, give the exams, and then choose from various college options based on their results). Now if a lead was actively engaging with you 2 years back, and it reflected on its engagement score, that would be a false measure of its likelihood to buy because they might be disengaged currently.
That is why; you can specify for what period you want the lead’s activities to be included in the calculation of the engagement score. Because the engagement score is based on the ‘recentness’ of a lead’s activities on your web presence/campaigns, it is a dynamic measure of their ‘likelihood to buy’, as opposed to the quality score, which is a static measure.
Specify the lead stages to include
If you’re in a business that does not see repeat sales (like an institute), you may not be interested in seeing the ‘engagement score’ of a customer. This is just one of the many cases where it is not useful to have the engagement score calculated for all of your lead stages, so using this option, you can specify which stages you’d need the score for.
Specify the lead activities to include
The engagement score is based on tracking a lead’s activities towards your business, and assigning each of these activities specific values depending upon their importance.
For example, if a lead signed up for a webinar, you can define a rule for increasing it’s engagement score by +5. On the other hand, if a lead only opened an email about a webinar, you can define a rule for increasing it’s engagement score by +1.
Using the scores associated with each of these activities, the software will compute the engagement score for each lead in the system.
lead scoring model
And we’re done! Hope this helps you get your priorities right in order
“Your success in life isn’t based on your ability to simply change. It is based on your ability to change faster than your competition, customers and business”– Mark Sanborn
Organizational change is no choice and in fact is essential for a company to move ahead in the path of progress. Changes could be strategic, structural, technological, or relating to people, culture, policies, processes, products etc. Since companies are moving from being internally driven to being customer-focused, none of the changes would be relevant or fruitful without taking customer relationship management into account. What this means is that companies must ensure that organizational change happens to improve their relationship with customers—both existing and potential—and to serve them better. Revolving change and decisions around customers is a sure-shot way to success and long-term gains for any company.
Customer relationship management is not easy by any standards; companies need to consistently invest resources to ensure that they not only attract, but also retain customers long enough to become loyal fans. Any kind of organizational change is never easy – it is a hard and cumbersome process – and by adding customer relationship management, this task has become even harder. Every company has its values, a unique culture, rules and guidelines, and a set of employees that are expected to live by these aspects. The fact that employees come from different backgrounds, skill-sets, and experience levels makes it tougher to keep the culture intact – imagine the difficulty implementing any change keeping customer relationship management in mind! In order to succeed, a company must find ways to ensure that every employee contributes to the change and is happy to contribute in whatever manner required.
Companies have had to change their business strategies owing to the drastically changing market situations–economic downturn, increasing competition, rise of self-help options for customers, increase in similar products and services. The power equation has shifted to the customers owing to these factors; therefore without a focus on customer relationship management, a company may find it difficult to sustain in a longer term. It is now necessary for companies to invest in technology and software that makes customer relationship management agile and a lot easier. This would help companies align this strategy with their overall business strategy or make organizational changes in order to do so. Without the inclination and alignment to a focus on customers, it would be tough to gain maximum advantage of CRM software, technologies, and principles in the market today.
Before implementing any reorganization, a company must first identify the existing processes and their alignment with customer-focused policies. The decision of reorganization should be made post evaluating whether these changes would have a positive impact on customer relationship management or whether they would jeopardize the company’s efforts in that direction. Customers are not likely to be happy with any changes that affect them adversely; they would rather move their business to a company that seeks to satisfy their needs, and concurring with them before making any relationship altering changes.
We know that the top management of any company is mostly responsible for affecting changes in any organization and therefore they must make informed decisions before edging forward with any changes. When top leaders are convinced of the positive impact of an organizational change on customer relationship management, they would be able to inspire confidence and credibility not only with employees, but with the customer base too. Employees drive the tide in the favor of a company and get customers to believe that the changes proposed would be beneficial for them too. Employees too, remain enthused when they observe their leaders promoting an initiative. While the initiative must come from the top leaders, we also know that realistically, they cannot be directly involved with every project and reorganization initiative.
An organizational change management program requires deft handling, especially because any change is usually met with resistance. By ensuring that it is methodical, provides details of the benefits. Ensuring support to employees to help manage the change, will enhance the chances of success. If employees were to resist the change, there would be a direct impact on their job performance and in the manner in which they serve customers. This would naturally adversely affect the relationship a company has with its customers, leading to dissatisfaction and churn. There is therefore, a direct connection between any organizational change and customer service. An inefficiently managed change would meet with negativity that would then radiate out to the customers, which is never acceptable for a customer-focused company.
Organizational change requires careful planning and implementation. In order for it to be successful, the impact on customer relationship management must definitely be discussed. If the program will lead to a major change, it is advisable to implement it incrementally, to ensure least possible disruption to the employees and in turn, to the customers. Organizational change is a must, however, it should be managed in a way that both employees and customers can perceive the short-term benefits and envision the long term goals.
