Every business wants to observe growth in its sales system. As they see the numbers increase, the happiness increases. But this is not a piece of cake and doesn’t happen so easily. It takes strategies, proper management, hard work, and a bit of good fortune to achieve good results. 
To smoothly keep the sales engine running, it is very important to have a better sales process that will give you great results in less time. In 2022, managing your leads without intent data is not enough. Let us understand more about intent data.

#### **What is intent data?**
Intent data is a piece of information gathered about a user’s behaviour on the web. It provides insights into their interest. You can evaluate users’ intent by closely examining their behaviour such as downloads, form submissions, requests, event participation, media consumption, webpage visits, etc. Intent data can be divided into two parts:


#### 1. Active intent data
When users are currently looking for a product or service, they can be categorised as active intent data.Following are the data sources:

**Transactional intent:** It involves all the transactional activity of the user like adding the product to the cart, checking the price at checkout, etc. It shows that the user is very likely to purchase a product. For example: whenever you add any product to your cart on any shopping website, you get notifications like your product is waiting in the cart.

**Navigational intent:** This source involves searching for a specific web page or a specific product. It shows that the user wants a specific product or a page, and you can make it easy for them by giving them a helping hand. For example, when you search for a particular product, you will find that product on every web page you open next.

**Informational intent:** Here, the user is more likely to gather information about your website or product. They will be interested in reading your guides, tutorials or blogs at this source.


 #### 2. Passive intent data
Sometimes users don’t realize that there is a solution to their problem. There is something in the market that is likely to solve their problems. This unrealized need for a product can be categorized as passive intent data. 

It is important to properly nurture the passive intent and turn it into an active intent. Figuring out this passive intent, the sales and marketing team can find valuable leads. It will grow your sales pipeline because the user is not yet actively looking for the product where you have already reached them. Various datasheets help us to understand whether a user has passive intent or not, and these are: 

**Technographic Data:**  This datasheet gives you information about tools and software used or has been used by your users previously. Based on this, you can figure out what they currently want and what they are interested in.

**Demographic Data:**  This datasheet helps you segregate people into different groups, such as age, income, occupation, gender, and other information.

**Firmographic Data:** This datasheet includes attributes like industries served, company size, funding information, market share, total revenue, and other information that will help you segregate companies.


**Passive and active intent data is further sub-divided into three:**
**First-party data:** Data collected from the interface you control such as your CRMs, chatbots, websites etc., is your first-party data. 

**Second-party data:** Data collected with the permission of the visiting user. For instance: reviews on websites and cookie data. 

**Third-party:** Data collected beyond your websites and other technology that you don’t own or control.

Now that we know what intent data is, let us dig more and find out why it is an important pillar to an efficient sales pipeline.

#### **How to use intent data for lead management and pipeline acceleration?**
When your sales representative uses intent data, they can focus on and prioritize a specific target that is more likely to purchase your product. Based on the intent data, they will know whether the company has the purchasing power, they are only interested in the product, did it sign-up for a free trial, or has recently raised funds. By knowing all these factors, your representatives have a better understanding of your leads and, will turn more effective in closing the deal.

**Enhance your first-party lead management platform** Data collected from the interfaces you control, like CRMs, chatbots, websites etc., is your first party lead management platform. Your sales representative will not have to search for information about your leads that have registered a day before. Intent data platform allows your sales team to integrate intent data directly into the marketing platforms.

**Segregate your leads** Intent data helps you to segregate your prospects into different segments. It will make it easy for your sales representative to work on leads according to their needs. If they see more potential in some leads, they can prioritize it and turn it into a qualified lead.
For example: If a prospect has registered for your free trial and has been recently funded or has good purchasing history, he is the prospect you need to immediately pay attention to.

**Avoid rejections** With the help of intent data, you are less likely to face rejections or objections, as you will be already aware of the details of your prospects. Intent data will also help you to overcome any irrelevant objections or threats. You can counter the objections with factual data and personalized pitches.

**Personalized outreach strategy** Intent data will help you give a personalized touch to your outreach campaigns with correct information. Before pitching the lead, you will already know their current status and history. Rather than doing cold calling, you can know your prospect now. It will help you hit the right target and not waste time on the wrong ones.

If your lead is already using your competitor’s product, with all the insights, you can try to manipulate and make them believe in how good your product is than theirs. 


#### **Intent data as sales acceleration tool**
All the information you will gather from intent data is your content. Content is very important for sales and marketing. It is very necessary to know what your buyer needs or wants. Knowing their requirements is the key to a successful business. When you know what is most required in the market, you can alter your tool accordingly.

So now you know why intent data is an important pillar for your sales pipeline. Create content according to your intent insights to attract more customers. Intent data helps with better leads and sales pipeline management

By now, you must have understood how important intent data is to grow your sales. It helps you to get better leads and manage the sales pipeline. It saves your representative’s time and efforts by finding leads that are intended to buy.

Content plays a vital role in sales and marketing. Intent data is just a new way to help you with your content. With the right content, you will know the market more closely and work accordingly on your product, tool, software etc.

If you wish to create great content for your webpage, intent data will do your job. There are various intent data tools in the market you can research and get one for yourself. 

Every business wants to observe growth in its sales system. As they see the numbers increase, the happiness increases. If you wish to create great content for your webpage, intent data will do your job. 

medium_sales pipeline.jpg

small_sales pipeline.jpg

thumbnail_sales pipeline.jpg

sales pipeline.jpg

Using Intent Data to Expedite Your Sales Pipeline

Sales can be a very complicated job as there are a lot of stages involved. To understand these stages and to make it easy, you must follow a process. Even though not everyone is fond of a monotonous routine, following the same will help you in the process. It is like finding an oasis in the desert. Before getting to the step-wise process, let us understand a sales process.

### **What is a sales process?**

The sales process is a set of defined steps that will help you turn your lead into a customer. It will help your sales team to improve their performance, get accuracy and close a deal faster.

Let us get to the step-wise process now.

### **Step 1. Hunting and generating leads**

Here is where it all begins. In this step, your salesperson will look for prospects and generate leads. You can start with creating a list of potential leads, as it helps your sales team target them more effectively. Try getting their contact information through various sources like LinkedIn, cold call, inbound marketing, trade show, or any other platform. Evaluate whether the customer needs your product and can afford it and research about them. It will help you to approach them confidently. 

### **Step 2. Connecting and approaching**

You have all the necessary information about your lead to proceed further. As the old saying goes, "First impression is the last impression", you need to make a good first impression on your lead. Introduce yourself and your company, but keep it short and simple. Try making it a call that is more of a help and advice rather than a sales call. The goal is to make them aware of the existence of your product.

You need to make sure you are asking the right person. You can ask the following qualifying questions to get surety:

**Can they afford your product?**
**Are you speaking with the decision-maker?**
**Why do they need your products?**
**Is your product fulfilling their needs?**
**Do you need your product now or in the future?**

If they pass these qualifying questions, you can approach your leads in 3 ways:

Premium approach: Who does not like to receive a gift? Presenting will make your lead feel homely.

Question approach: You can ask leading questions to make them interested in listening to you.

The product approach: You can provide free trials or samples to your leads and ask them to review.

In this step, you make first contact with your lead, make sure everything goes well. It can be face-to-face face or over a phone call. 

### **Step 3. Presentation**

In this step, you explain to your potential customer how your product will be beneficial for them. You have to be very convincing and confident. Here is where you try to prove your product is the appropriate solution for their problems or needs. Try to keep it short but include all the necessary information. You can also ask questions in between to make it more interesting. Doing so will help you get their attention, and they will hear more attentively. You need to explain your product according to your prospects' needs.

### **Step 4. Handling objections and closing the deal**

Commonly, your prospect will have some queries, and it is your responsibility to solve them with correct reasoning and that he is satisfied. You need to listen to their concerns and address them. Leaving them unheard will drop your chances of converting your lead to a customer. Handling objections successfully will make you a good salesperson and surely convert your lead to your customer.

After addressing their concerns, you can close the deal. Here's how:

Hit the right spot: Make sure the decision-makers are convinced and ready to buy your product.

Give them choices where both the options close the deal: You can ask them questions with choices where both the choices will lead to closing the deal. For example: Will you make a part payment or complete payment? Will you pay in cash or cheque?
Temptations work best: If they delay deciding, you can simply give them a limited period offer.  
Creating an urgency: You can generate urgency by mentioning you have only a few spots left or prices will increase next month. 

### **Step 5. Regular follow up**

Keep a regular check on how your product is working and if your customer is satisfied. Make sure they are happy with their purchase and if not, help them in the best possible way. It will help you retain your current customer. You can always upsell and also ask for referrals. Maintaining a good relationship with your customer is your key to success. It will help you with long term business.

An organized sales process will help you to close deals faster and more efficiently. It will help you remove all the hurdles between your sales representative and the final signature.


A sales process is a set of defined steps that will help you turn your lead into a customer. In this article we cover some important step for boosting your sale growth.

medium_Sale Process.jpg

small_Sale Process.jpg

thumbnail_Sale Process.jpg

Sale Process.jpg

How to Boost Your Growth With the 5-Step Sale Process

Today, every field wants to boost its sales. Technology has transformed companies' and customers' behavior; the old sales game doesn't work anymore. Now the mantra to achieving great success is to put the customer first.

### **What is customer-centric selling?**

Customer-centric selling simply means empathizing with customers' needs in every stage of the sales process. You become their problem-solving ally by nurturing a two-way dialogue rather than a sales monologue.

### **Why is customer-centric selling necessary for your business?**

You need to have a different approach to stand out amongst others. By approaching the sales process, you can build a sustainable relationship with the customers. You will be able to benefit your customers with the right option as you have studied their needs.  By helping people every day, you will be able to maintain a revenue stream.

**Here are 6 salient points of the customer-centric sales approach that will help you grow:**

As more time is invested in conversation better leads are brought in.

The sales process is made more efficient by adapting and changing according to customers' needs.

By appreciating the customers, they feel valued.

Customer-centric selling helps your team to stand out in such a vast market by delivering higher-quality interaction with your prospects.

A stronger and long-lasting relationship is built as you become your customer's ally and not just a tool.

The company's revenue is increased as there are shorter sales cycles, longer customer lifetimes, and thus, higher quality leads.

Are you willing to use the customer-centric model in your sales process? Let us go through the 7 stages to understand how it works.

#### **Stage 1: Decision-makers are targeted**

Customer-centric believes indirectly targeting the decision-makers rather than investing time in interactions with end-users. Giving real solutions to the right prospects is the main moto.

Finding decision-makers and stakeholders is the very first step of this process. By using a customer-centric sales process the sales team focuses on building a relationship with the decision-makers.

#### **Stage 2: Deeper questions instead of giving opinions**

Customer-centric sellers invest a lot of time in qualifying stages to understand the needs of their prospects and then ask the right question. Instead of giving opinions, they target open-ended questions. This helps the seller to have a good relationship with the prospect.

**For instance:**

- What’s your current process for dealing with the challenges?
- What solution are you currently using to do that?
- What were the deciding factors that made you choose that particular solution?
- What’s working/not working with that solution?
- Why is this a priority for you?
- How is this issue affecting the rest of your team?
- What would success look like to you with a new solution?
- Which aspects of a solution are the most important factors in deciding which product is right for you?
- Who will be responsible for implementing or overseeing this service or product?

The sellers should stop where they feel it is not a good fit while asking these questions. As this process is based on a real solution to the right prospect and not just getting the work done, the seller must stop when he sees there will be no positive response. It is better to make it plain at this stage rather than investing more time.

Being honest and letting them know that the product is not better for your company which was examined during the sales questions. The buyer will be surprised to see such behavior which in long run will be beneficial and will help to gain trust and trusted referrals.

#### **Stage 3: Two-way dialogue than sales monologue**

Here in customer-centric selling, there are fewer presentations and more interaction between the seller and the buyer. Utilizing the information collected during the qualifying stage the seller discusses with the buyer in detail about their needs. It is a two-way conversation where customers' needs are at top priority rather than a presentation where only a salesperson is speaking about the product. This model will help in working with the buyer to find the right solution for their needs.

#### **Stage 4: Hands-on product demo**

By levelling up your demos and making them more customer-centric the buyers will understand what resources they need to be successful customers in the future.

#### **Stage 5: Furnish them with the right resources**

This is the time when you need to concentrate on others who are also to be convinced. Customer-centric sellers provide necessary resources to their internal champions to close the deal.

For instance, if the legal team needs to check the legal policy and other documents, keep them ready.

By anticipating their needs, you will be reducing the sales cycle and moving the deal much faster.

#### **Stage 6: Negotiation and flexibility**

Do not pressurize a buyer to finish the deal in a hurry because it will create a negative impact on the buyer. When it comes to closing a deal customer-centric sellers are flexible, willing to bend to what works for the buyers. Negotiations are focused on bringing what is the best solution, right price, and at the right time.

You need to create sales urgency where a buyer is not able to make a decision or is simply holding back. Creating sales urgency works best to make their decision faster.

If you feel a buyer is not buying it because it is not the right time for them, you need to let it go.

#### **Stage 7: Check-in regularly after the purchase**

Once the prospects are converted to customers do not leave them high and dry. Keep a regular update on how well your product is functioning.
Help them grow after the purchase and check in regularly with their progress.

Now that you know what customer-centric selling is and how it works. You might want to know its advantage. Cutting it short, the star benefit of customer-centric selling is that, the more successful your buyers are within the initial stage, the longer they will stick around your product.

Get started with the customer-centric approach and win leads!

Customer-centric selling means empathizing with customers' needs in every stage of the sales process. In this article we describe 7 easy steps to build customer centric selling.

small_business-partners-handshaking-group-meeting-making-project-investment-closeup_1163-5108.jpg

thumbnail_business-partners-handshaking-group-meeting-making-project-investment-closeup_1163-5108.jpg

business-partners-handshaking-group-meeting-making-project-investment-closeup_1163-5108.jpg

7 Easy Steps to Build Customer Centric Selling

To keep your business growing it is, very important to attract and maintain your webpage. Best content management system provides collaboration, administration and website authoring tools that help users create and manage website content. We will be learning about some best CMS tools for 2022 that will make you easy to choose from. Let us first understand a little more about the content management system.
 
### **What is Web Content Management Software?**

You can create a web page using CSS, HTML or JavaScript. But, with web content management software, a person with little or no knowledge of these programming languages can create a web page. Your business will be good as long as the number of visitors on your web page keeps increasing. To keep people engaged with great content you need the best Content Management System. CMS also makes sure your site remains secure, is user-friendly, device-friendly and gets positive search results.
 
### **Why use web Content Management Software?**

A WMS manages a dynamic collection of web materials. It facilitates auditing, timeline management, editing and document control. Let us look at some features to know why one should use web content management software.

**- Content is easily editable**

CMS includes tools that allow a non-technical user to edit and create content. It becomes easier to edit and manipulate the content once it is separated from the visual presentation of the site. 

**- Regular updates**

Active CMS receives regular updates with new features that help to keep the system up-to-date.

**- Workflow management**

CMS provides the ability to create, maintain and design personalized content for a site. A user can review and approve content before publishing. 

**- Collaboration**

CMS helps people work on a common task to achieve their goals. The collaboration platform allows multiple users to work on a single file simultaneously. 

**- Document management**

CMS helps to manage the lifecycle of the document from creation to destruction.

**- Multilingual**

Many CMSs can display content in multiple languages, which make them very user friendly.

**- Automated templates**

A user can change the appearance of all content from one central place. It creates standard templates that users can apply to existing or new content. 

Now that you know how great a web content management system is. Let us look at who can use a content management system. 

### **Who can use CMS tools?**

Web developers, marketing sites and anyone who wants to take advantage of the above features can use top content management systems to make their job easy. 

Let us find out which is the most suited web content management system for you by looking at the features of some best content management systems for websites.
 
#### **1. Progress Sitefinity**

Sitefinity authorizes marketing teams to independently create and manage content that delivers engaging digital experiences. 

**Features:**

- Simple but powerful
- Easy to use
- Highly customizable
- User-friendly

Price: Starts from $0.01/one-time.
Free version: No
Free trial: Yes

#### **2. WordPress**

WordPress believes that great software should work with the minimum setup. It allows you to share your story, product, or services freely. 

**Features:**

- Simplicity and flexibility
- Extend with plugins
- Publishing tools
- User and media management
- Full standard compliance

Price: Starts from $2.12/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **3. Wix**

Wix is a website building platform and works differently than other CMSs because it is design-driven itself and not a pure CMS. 

**Features:**

- Total design freedom
- Stunning templates
- Advanced SEO tools
- Mobile optimized
- Unlimited fonts

Price: Starts from $39/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **4. Squarespace**

Squarespace is the all-in-one solution for anyone looking to create a beautiful website. It has an award-winning template. 

**Features:**

- Premium integration and blocks
- Professional emails from Google
- SEO features for site visibility
- Unlimited bandwidth and storage
- Free custom domain

Price: Starts from $12/month
Free version: No
Free trial: Yes

#### **5. Hubspot**

Hubspot CMS is the first and only CMS that combines website creation with the power of a CRM. It helps customize the buying journey, sales alignment streamline marketing and deliver true closed-loop reporting.
 
**Features:**

- Premium hosting
- Content delivering network
- Standard SSL certification
- Web application firewall
- Custom domain security setting

Price: Starts from $23/month
Free version: No
Free trial: Yes

#### **6. Drupal**

Drupal is a free, open-source CMS with a large, supportive community. Drupal is the hub of your digital presence with robust CMS tools, sophisticated APIs, and continuous innovations. 

**Features:**

- Audio File Management
- Electronic Forms
- Full-Text Search
- Text Editing
- Video Support
- Website Management

Price: Drupal is free.

#### **7. Joomla**

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system for publishing web content on websites. It contains many verified third-party extensions under the Joomla extensions directory. 

**Features:**

- Multilingual
- Easy updates
- Integrated help system
- Frontend editing
- Powerful extensibility

Price: Starts from $199/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: No

#### **8. Monday**

Monday helps you build, scale and run your workflow on a single work OS platform. 

**Features:**

- Manage everything in one workspace
- Setup in minutes
- Save time with automation
- Visualize work with views

Price: starts from $24/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **9. Magnolia**

Magnolia is a headless content and modular digital experience platform. It helps the users create and launch an engaging digital experience in the fastest possible way. 

**Features:**

- Image recognition 
- Personalization
- Search engine optimization
- Digital asset management
- Single-page application

Price:
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **10. Acquia**

Acquia CMS is an opinionated distribution of Drupal 9 for running low-code websites on the Acquia hosting platform. 

**Features:**

- Pre-selected modules
- Advanced security
- Component-based content assembly model
- Flexible architecture

Price: Starts from $141/ month
Free version: No
Free trial: Yes

#### **11. Concrete**

Concrete CMS is a website builder with built-in tools that makes content editing easy. It is an open-source content management system for teams.
 
**Features:**

- WYSIWYG content editor
- Easy theme controls
- Media manager
- Drag and drop content 
- Layouts retain responsive grid points

Price: Free
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **12. Weebly**

Weebly’s free website builder makes it easy to create a website, online store or blog. It lets you create attractive sites. 

**Features:**

- Custom fonts
- Parallax and reveal
- Image editor
- Video backgrounds
- Drag and drop builder

Price: Starts from $5/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **13. Sitecore**

CMS is a digital experience platform and content hub that apply the power of data science and marketing technology to shape your business around new possibilities. 

**Features:**

- Accelerate personalization with Al
- Gain deep customer insights
- Automate your cross-channel campaigns
- Personalize to engage your audience
- Rapid development options

Price: Starts from $40,000/month
Free version: No
Free trial: Yes

#### **14. Box**

Box understands that becoming a digital business is the only way to compete in today’s world. Successful organizations use innovative technology to streamline every business process. Hence, Box enables you to rethink your business processes in the digital age. 

**Features:**

- Unlimited external collaborators
- Data loss protection
- Advanced search filters
- Document watermarking

Price: $1.09/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **15. Brightcove**

Brightcove is a video cloud that provides everything you need to organize and manage your videos. It has convenient features like a drag and drop playlist and batch editing. 

**Features:**

- Rich CMS functionality for video assets
- Centralised workflow
- Cross content search
- Granular permission

Price: Starts from $199/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **16. Pantheon**

Pantheon’s WebOps platform empowers marketers and developers to create, iterate and scale websites on the open web to reach millions of people globally.

**Features:**

- Fastest WordPress hosting platform
- Serverless WordPress architecture
- Centrally manages all your sites
- Handles traffic spikes

Price: Starts from $29/feature/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **17. Contentful**

Contentful offers a modern content platform that lets you launch faster. It is the fastest and easiest way to manage your content.

**Features:**

- A toolbox for editors
- Restful API
- Microservices architecture
- Optimized for speed
- Language and framework agnostic

Price: Starts from $489/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **18. Kentico**

Kentico is helping companies and brands to work with content since 2004. It is a headless CMS for modern content management at scale, governance to flexible omnichannel delivery and from seamless workflows

**Features:**

- Version control
- Approval access control
- Document management
- Rich text editor
- Rule-based publishing

Price: Starting from $1249/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

#### **19. Maglr**

Maglr is a content management software designed to help marketers and designers to embed code of published content across websites and share individual pages from digital publications with the target audience.

**Features:**

- Drag and drop block editor
- Activity dashboard
- Assessment management
- Audio file management 
- Campaign management

Price: Starts from $200/month
Free version: No
Free trial: Yes

#### **20. dotCMS**

dotCMS provides the most flexible API-first infrastructure, with the highest level of no code so you can build, manage and deliver a trusted customer experience.

**Features:**

- WYSIWYG editing
- Versioning 
- SEO tools
- Custom workflow
- Image processing

Price: Starts from $1400/month
Free version: Yes
Free trial: Yes

Now that we have learned about the top 20 best content management software, you can rightly choose one for yourself. The above listed are the most popular content management system that is working very well in the market. It is very important to choose the correct tool that will help you function properly and meet your needs. With the correct CMS tools, your business will grow, site visitors will increase and, your site will always stay updated. 


Here we provide best Content Management Systems. Content Management Systems (CMS) reviews, comparisons, alternatives and pricing. The best CMS solutions for small business to enterprises.

medium_5.png

small_5.png

thumbnail_5.png

5.png

Best content management software for 2022

Are you still struggling with Excel to achieve your sales goal? 

Winning in sales is not an easy task. So, what we can do least is make the process easy. A systematic process with steps can help your salesperson to put special efforts in the whole process. Sales automation tools can prove more beneficial to make the whole process a piece of cake. 

Best sales automation software will help to ease the workload and give your employee some extra time to find more leads. The most time-taking task in the sales process is to find new leads, an automated tool gets your job done. A salesperson has to manage a lot of things which includes phone-calls, meetings, emails, free demo, text and so on. Sales automation tools can organize all these repetitive processes, giving more time to your sales team to sell. 

### **What is sales automation system?**

Sales automation system are software-based solution that help in various sales process. It focuses on the monotonous tasks from hunting for new leads to signing a contract. By taking little help of technology, we can make big difference. Sales automation tools help your salesperson to do other tasks that require their hand and all the repetitive work is done by the it. These tools can increase your business and also productivity. 

By using right automation tools, sales team can spend less time on manual task and more time on closing the deal. 

#### **Why do you need sales automation?**

In today’s competitive atmosphere in sales, a sales person has a lot of responsibilities. They spend more time on doing other things which do not contribute to revenue than the actuals sales. To eliminate the non-revenue tasks from the sales person responsibility, you need a sales automation tool. A sales automation tools can help you with generating leads, updating CRM records, writing emails, scheduling meetings and entering data. 

Your salesperson can now invest their time in critical sales strategy and leave the daily task to the automation tool. 
Every rose has a thorn. 

Anything that is good has some negative in it. So, with all the good features of the automation tools there are also some bad features. 
Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of the automation software,

**Pros:** helps to focus on critical sales strategy. 

Sales automation removes daily task from the salesperson’s responsibility, giving them more time for critical sales strategy and achieve their goal. 
Due to the smooth-running process the sales person is more organized and use most relevant strategy for sales. 

It helps managers to establish a flawless team objective due to better understanding of the client needs and strategies. 

Automation tools simplifies the processes of prospecting leads and looking after the users, through sales pipeline. 

**Cons:** somethings are better manually

Customers should be at top priority in any type of sales. Your business will grow only if your customers are satisfied. Sometimes customer expect humans on the other side of selling and not an automated reply. 

They might loose interest if there are considered as just statistics by a computer software. 

For winning this game of sales sometimes emotional aspect is necessary which is missing in automation tool. 

B2B buyers still call for skilled human consultant for maintaining a healthy relationship, chatbots cannot help with this. 

By now you must be aware about automation tool. Now we will look after some best sales automation tools, so you can choose one for yourself.
 
#### **1. Salessimplify**

Salessimplify is the intelligent all-in-one solution for businesses. A sales process involves multiple steps from getting a lead to converting it. Salessimplify makes it easy for you to deal with it. 

With salessimplify your customer management, sales process, activities and tasks are done without any error. It saves your time and gives your salesperson more time to do another critical task. 

**Features:**

- Identify bottlenecks and quickly adjust processes
- Improve productivity by saving time
- Keep an eye on your team’s success

Price: starts from $8/month

#### **2. Hubspot**

Hubspot is an automation software that is powerful and easy to use. It helps you to create a delightful customer experience. This workflow automation tool is beyond email, so you can scale your growth and spend minimum time on repetitive tasks. 

**Features:**

- Automates dozens of tasks beyond just emails. 
- Closing deals
- Deeper insights

Price:  starts from $45/month

#### **3. Pipedrive**

Pipedrive users close an average of 28% more deals after their 1st year. It has various features that will help you prioritise deals, predict revenue and track performance. 

**Features:**

- Focus on sales actions
- Eliminates repetitive administration task
- Track communication

Price: starts from $24.46/month

#### **4. Zapier**

Zapier’s easy automation tools give you the power to get stuff done without lifting a finger. You can customise zap without writing a code. There are several templates that will help you to build your own zap. 

**Features:**

- Web app integration
- Seamless workflow
- Passes information between apps and workflow

Price: from $19.99/month

#### **5. Zoho corporation**

Zoho corporation provides you a workflow automation tool for every need. It helps you to streamline communication, create custom workflow and automate routine task efficiently to manage your business.

**Features:**

- Boost productivity
- Reduce manual errors
- Enhance customer satisfaction

Price: from $10.76/month

#### **6. Keap**

Keap provides a sales and marketing automation to help you grow without chaos. Keap combines CRM, sales automation, payment and marketing in one platform. Which in turn provides you more sales and less late nights. 

**Features:**

- Capture and convert leads more efficiently
- Follow up and get paid
- Consolidate your tools into one place

Price: from $40/month

#### **7. Yesware**

You must try yesware when your sales team needs to drive more revenue through email outreach, but complex enterprise sales software is overkill. Yesware provides you a set of tools for your sales team to outreach activity, track email our rapidly test what does and does not work, and share it all with your team to drive better results, faster. 

**Features:**

- Unlimited email tracking
- Limited attachment tracking
- Meeting scheduler

Price: $15/month

#### **8. Salesloft**

Salesloft provides you an automation tool that will help you to take the guesswork out of pipeline generation, customer renewals and lead nurture. It helps you to build a friendly relation throughout the journey from first lead response to post-sale experience. 

**Features:**

- Sales email 
- Calendaring
- Mobile app access

Price: Request a quote

#### **9. Zendesk**

Zendesk provides you an automation tool that increases productivity, builds customer loyalty and gross profits. It helps you to automate and streamline your operations when your business is growing. 

**Features:**

- Instant in-product chat for admins
- 24/7/365 global support
- Priority response in the queue

Price: from $19/month

#### **10. Autoklose**

Autoklose is built for entrepreneurs, sales and marketing. It helps you and your teams to target, engage and grow. 

**Features:**

- AB testing
- Audience targeting
- Event triggered actions

Price: from $49/month

#### **11. Active campaign**

Active campaign provides you email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools you need to create incredible customer experience. Autoklose provides 2-year price lock, free migration, free online training, you own your data and so on. 

**Features:**

- Marketing automation
- Drag and drop email builder
- 125+ email templates

Price: from $21.75/month

#### **12. Marketo**

Marketo solves your problem of higher revenue and faster growth at lower cost, which is every company’s desire. It enables companies to streamline, measure marketing task and automate workflows so they can increase their efficiency and grow faster. 

**Features:**

- 10,000 records
- Customer engagement engine
- Social boost

Price: from  $895/month

#### **13. Act-on**

Act-on automation tool lets you to create awareness, drive demands nurture leads and extend the customer lifecycle. Act-on automated tool helps you launch, plan, adapt, optimize holistic marketing programs and adapt, this gives one marketer power of 10.

**Features:**

- Execute true multi-channel marketing programs
- Engage with customer across their life cycle
- Integrates into virtually any MarTech system

Price: from $900/month

#### **14. Get response**

Get response is a powerful, simplified tool to send emails, create pages and automate your marketing. It helps you to get your business online, grow your audience, engage with customer, boost online sales  and so on. 

**Features:**

- Autoresponders
- Unlimited landing pages
- Basic segmentation

Price: from $12.30/month

#### **15. PandaDoc**

PandaDoc is a workflow automation software that helps you to complete 87% more documents in half the time. If you wish to build more efficient processes and manage important documents instantly and securely, you need PandaDoc automation tool. 

**Features:**

- Rich media drop and drag document editor
- Pricing tables
- 24/7 email and chat support

Price: from $19/month

#### **16. Pega system**

If you are ready to crush business complexity, pega system is what you’re searching for. Pega system automation tool helps you maximize value, simplify service and boost efficiency. Pega system simplifies your technology from the centre out, one customer journey at a time. 

**Features:**

- Bots and humans can work side by side
- Low-code app factory
- Al-powered decision-making

Price: from $140/month

#### **17. Docusign**

DocuSign CLM workflow allows you to build and automate new contract workflows with predefined standardized templates. It helps you to sync all data, configure flexible workflows connect deeply into apps with code or clicks. 

**Features:**

- Prepares and signs documents digitally
- Manage documents and templates
- Collaborate in team 

Price: From $10/month

#### **18. SugarCRM**

With sugar you attract more visitors to your website and gain visibility into how they interact with digital assets. It leverages the marketing automation platform to drive alignment with sales by reducing repetitive tasks and handing off qualified leads automatically. 

**Features:**

- 4support-authorised contacts
- Unlimited emails and landing pages
- Doc merge

Price: From $1000/month

#### **19. Vainu**

Good marketing needs a solid relationship between you and your prospects. Vainu helps you to manage large contact database become feasible. It also helps to grow sales. 

**Features:**

- Monitor customer behaviour in real-time
- Segment and nurture leads
- Scale communication and processes

Price:  Request a quote

#### **20. Netsuite**

A well known business needs to be always error free. To make your task and activities easy netsuite provide you with an automation. This automation relies on accessing, monitoring and analyzing a variety of metrics, and consistently training and updating managers.  

**Features:**

- Project management
- Project accounting 
- Resource management

Price: from $99/month

The above comparison will help you to decide what is best for you. You can choose a tool by looking at the features that are required for your business. Automation tool eases that burden on your employees giving them more time to focus on the critical sales strategy. It also manages your system and makes it more accurate.

If you want to automate your system in 2022 book a free trial with [salessimplify](https://salessimplify.com/) today. 



Best sales automation software will help to ease the workload and give your employee some extra time to find more leads. Comparison of 20 best sales automation for 2022.

medium_automation.png

small_automation.png

thumbnail_automation.png

automation.png

Best Sales Automation Tools for 2022

Who does not like to work in a well-managed system?

Imagine having a technology that manages your company’s relationships and interactions with your customers. If you wish to have management that helps you build a good relationship with your customers, you are at the right place. Keep reading to find some best sales CRM tools.
Now let us understand briefly what exactly CRM software is.


### **What is the best sales CRM software?**


Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is nothing but a technology that manages your contacts, sales, productivity, and so on. It helps you to maintain a relationship with your users, colleagues and also helps find new users. Sales Simplify is one such great CRM software that gives you all these benefits.

You might not need a CRM when your business is new and fresh. But, as it grows, it might be difficult to manage everything. Here is where the CRM tool comes to your rescue. You may need to plan a strategy for the future, and a CRM tool will help you do so. It will give you an overview of all the customer activities.

Earlier, people used CRM as a sales and marketing tool, but many companies have experienced many more benefits with time. It gives a single view of the progress of your customer. Running a business without CRM software can be exorbitant. You will have to invest in more administration which, means very little time for other things. A sales team generates a flood of data, but quite often this data just gets stored in laptops or the minds of your salesperson. But CRM will help you with this problem. It segregates everything that makes your work easy. From a closed deal, ongoing deal, to customer progress, and customer profile, a CRM will do it all.


### **Benefits of using a sales CRM software**

Let us find out with the numerous benefits

- #### **Improves customer service initially**

Where earlier people used sales CRM to improvise customer-business relationships, today, it comes with a plethora of benefits. Improving customer service is the topmost. It makes it extremely easy for any employee to access customer information like purchases, ongoing status, messages, records, etc. It helps to understand a customer better as the employee has all the information they need; this leads to a better customer experience.


Sales Simplify has various fields at one single glance where you can check the progress of your leads or users.

- #### **Self-operating sales report**

A CRM tool makes the process of managing the pipeline and processes extremely easy as it is self-operating. Your employees can use the CRM software to accumulate and arrange data about leads and existing users. It helps the employees to assess their goals, performance and track the progress on the individual project at a glance.

- #### **Better customer retention**

It is very important to retain your customers once the lead has turned into a user. If you are looking for a long-term business, you need to retain your customers for repeated revenue. A CRM tool helps you determine users’ problems and address them speedily by raising an automated ticket, automated customer support and tracks their behavior.

- #### **Growth in sales**

A sales CRM tool brings all the sales data under one roof, which makes it easy for the employees to track the progress of a lead or a user, which helps to grow the sales. It helps to develop a systematic sales process that has steps to follow. Your employee can depend on these steps to run the whole process smoothly.

- #### **Lowers cost**

A cloud-based CRM software system that does not require any hardware or special installation can help you to minimize your IT cost. It also removes the need for timely updates and version checks.
So, if you want to take advantage of these benefits, you need a sales CRM software system.

Now that you know the benefits of having a sales CRM tool let us look at the features of top sales CRM tools.

### **Top Sales CRM Software Features**


#### **a. Efficient management**

A CRM tool helps you to manage your contacts, sales team and also score a lead. It helps your user to organize contacts into different segments that make it easy to check the progress. It helps your sales team to look for new leads. As it optimizes the sales process more, more leads get converted into customers. It helps the salesperson to understand the best customer and concentrate on the idea lead at the right time.

#### **b. Automated sales process**

One of the essential features of a CRM is that it allows the user to automate the sales process to a certain extent, like follow-up drives, ongoing calls, and organizing data for the future. So employees do not waste any time and focus on a more complex task, a CRM automates repetitive tasks.

#### **c. Email templates**

A traditional inbox gets confusing and time-consuming. A CRM software has an email feature that helps to keep your employees organized. There are email templates that the employees can pull in and spend less time drafting a mail. You can create various email templates like basic information about the company, follow-up after an email, phone call or an offer.

#### **d. Interactive visualization**

Interactive visualization gets used in the form of dashboards that gives insights into the changing data. Interactive visualization concentrates on the graphical representation that helps the user input, click a button, move a slider. It shows a relationship between the visual input and data input. It allows the user to explore, interact and manage the data by making different changes.

#### **e. Lifecycle management**

A sales CRM tool helps the user to manage the lifecycle of the user. As long as the user is with the company, a CRM tool manages all the processes like customers’ needs and wants, past purchases, choices, history, etc. It is a continuous process, and hence proper management is required. Right from a potential customer to a user and maintaining the loyalty of the customer, a CRM tool manages everything.

#### **f. Internal contextual collaboration**

A collaborative CRM helps to maintain communication between various organizations associated with customer service. It includes various company divisions such as sales, technical support, vendors, suppliers, customer care, etc. A CRM tool connects all these departments on a single software.

**Now that you know how important sales CRM software is to manage your business.**

Let’s look at the features so some best sales CRM tool. 

#### **1. Salessimplify**

Salessimplify is the intelligent all-in-one solution for businesses. Salessimplify has made it extremely simple to convert a lead into junk or customer in just one click. 

**Features:**
- Keep an eye on your team’s success
- Extremely simple.
- Manage remote teams.
- Security and privacy.
- Integration and support

Price: From $8/month

#### **2. Zendesk**

Zendesk CRM software is built to increase sales and build a good relationship with your customers. Your workspace is unified as it integrates existing platforms. 

**Features:**

- Flexible platform.
- Live chat.
- CRM function.
- Analytical and

Price:  From  $18/month

#### **3. Salesforce**

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM software that helps businesses to maintain a healthy relationship with their customers and get more sales. It gets more information about your customers which helps you stay connected. 

**Features:**

- Effective for insights
- productivity tools omnichannel

Price: From $25/month

#### **4. Hubspot**

Hubspot CRM software is more than just contact management. It has free tools for everyone on your team. Free version offers features like reporting dashboard, company insights, deal tracking and pipeline management. To explore more you can also try the free version. 

**Features:**

- Many tools
- Omnichannel communication

Price: From $35/month

#### **5. Zoho corporation**

Zoho corporation CRM has a global network of over 250,000 businesses in 180countries to grow their revenue, engage more customers and convert more leads into customers. 

**Features:**

- Case management .
- Cloud computing
- Flexible month to month contracts
- Straightforward user interface

Price: from $9.69/month

#### **6. Insightly**

Insightly offers you a CRM software that your team will love. It helps you grow your business faster step by step. It builds a long lasting relationship with your customers. 

**Features:**

- Leading routing.
- Workflow automation and send.
- Track and save emails

Price: $29/month


#### **7. Bitrix24**

Bitrix 24 CRM system has a free version that enables you to explore Its great features. It increases your performance in business which in turn boosts the revenue.
 
**Features:**

- Leads and demand generation
- Sales funnel and pipeline
- Sales data analytics

Prices: Free


#### **8. Nutshell**

Nutshell is the all-in-one platform that turns your leads into wins. It integrates with a lot of popular business software applications and offers an advanced pipeline on the market.

**Features:**

- Activity reminder. 
- Email and calendar sync.
- Sales reporting and forecasting

Price: From $19/month

#### **9. Keap**

Keap CRM software helps you to streamline your business by combining payments, CRM, and marketing and sales automation in one platform. 

**Features:**

- Automate follow-up.
- Capture and convert leads more efficiently.
- B2B capabilities

Price: From $79/month

#### **10. Salesmate**

Salesmate CRM software helps you to retain more customers with productivity, pipeline visibility and selling time. It is one of the best CRM software for startups and small business. 

**Features:**

- Email sync-tracking-template.
- Multiple pipeline management.
- Built-in calling and text

Price: From $12/month

#### **11. Capsule**

Capsule CRM software helps you to stay organized, know more about the customers, to make the best of the sales opportunities and build a strong relationship with your customers, all this with very less user input. 

**Features:**

- 50000 contacts.
- 10gb storage per user.
-  Activity reporting

Price: From $18/month

#### **12. Engage Bay**

Engage Bay offers a sales CRM software for small business. It helps you to manage online sales and marketing, with advanced automation. 

**Features:**

- Contact management
- Deal management
- Sales automation

Price: From $10.79/month

#### **13. Freshsales**

With freshsales CRM software you can manage a lot of activities in package. It helps you to maintain details of your leads, create marketing email journey, make calls with-in the CRM software and so on.  

**Features:**

- Visual sales pipeline
- Lead scoring
- 2-way email sync

Price: From $12/month

#### **15. Freshwork**

Freshwork CRM tool offers a 360° view of your customer. It streamlines your sales process which improves seller effectiveness. 

**Features:**

- Offline events
- Custom fields

Price: From $25/month

A good CRM helps you to understand your customers better. For B2B marketers, it is very important to keep a record of the activities of their customers. With the help of the right CRM tool, you can have detailed information about your leads, users, employees, suppliers and service providers. If you want to grow your B2B company in 2022, book a free trial with [SalesSimplify](https://salessimplify.com/)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is nothing but a technology that manages your contacts, sales, productivity, and so on. Let us have a look at the quick comparison of the 15 best sales CRM software of 2022.

medium_sales crm.png

small_sales crm.png

thumbnail_sales crm.png

sales crm.png

Best Sales CRM Software for 2022

Do you wish to generate high-quality leads for your SaaS business without burning a whole in your pocket?
All you need to do is create a referral program that works best for you.

Referral programs work for all types of businesses but, they work best for SaaS. You need a referral
program if you want to connect with your customers directly. It is the most fruitful way for different types
of SaaS businesses.

Now, if you’re keen on building your own SaaS referral program, this guide is a perfect match for you.

## What is a SaaS referral program?

SaaS referral program is exactly what its name suggests, a referral program for existing users. The users
will get a unique referral code. They can share their referral codes through direct messages or social media
and earn rewards. Every time a new customer signs up using that referral code, the referrer (existing user)
gets rewarded. Thus, the existing users are engaged, which increases their loyalty towards you.

It is specifically built for a software-as-a-service business. This program can save your marketing cost for
new customers, which are high in B2B SaaS. The reward can be in various forms such as a gift card, sample
products, free content or money.

All you need to do is choose the right referral tool and relax.

## How does a referral program work?

The first thing you need to do is create a unique referral link or code for your customers. They will share
this link or code with their friends and family. Later, when their family or friends sign up using the link or
code referrer will get the reward.

## Benefits of a SaaS referral program

By now, you’ve got a good idea of what a SaaS referral business model is. You should definitely know its
benefits to understand it better. It will not only increase your user base but also has other exciting
benefits.

Let’s begin,

### • Lower customer acquisition cost

Why is a SaaS referral program easy on your pocket?

Referral programs only pay when a referral successfully becomes a new user. Referral marketing is one of
the best and cost-effective ways of acquiring new customers. It is one of the best advantages of a referral
program. You can also lower your CAC further by giving free subscriptions or trials.

### • Authentic and much quicker conversation

Your referrer will recommend your product to someone who is likely to purchase your product, as he is
familiar with your product. It will be more effective than you presenting your product. We often tend to
trust people we know, so a lead will be more interested in buying the product. Plus, you don’t have to go
through the long sales process, which will save your time. Thus, the SaaS referral program proves to be
an authentic conversation.

### • Increased customer retention and loyalty

As many SaaS companies work on subscriptions or timely purchases, referral programs prove more
beneficial as referred customers have a higher retention rate than non-referred customers.

A SaaS company needs to maintain a good relationship with its users. As the income is not lump sum but
in installments or repeated, it is very essential to retain the users. To keep existing users engaged and
loyal to your product, you need to reward them in the best possible way. Giving them free subscriptions
as a reward will surely make them stay.

The referral program works best because you get a new user and make your existing user happy by
rewarding them.

### • Increases brand recognition

How likely are you to use a product recommended to you by your friend or family?

Do you tend to use a product recommended by your favorite celebrity?

We all love and fall for it. Online referral programs works best. Knowing about a product by your close
ones gives you the confidence to purchase it.

Similarly, when your user recommends the product to someone appropriate to purchase it, he is most
likely to buy it. An existing user can explain your product in the best way and give a genuine review to its
friends and family. When a referrer gets rewarded, he will develop more interest in recommending your
products to more people. Further, the referred user can also refer more people. It will increase brand
recognition and, you will gain their trust.

Now that you know what a SaaS referral program is and its benefits, are you ready to build your own
referral program?

### How do I create a SaaS referral program?

Here are the steps to create the best customer referral program

How to set up a referral program? You need to create a great yet simple referral program. To create a
successful referral program, you need to motivate your user. Following are the steps that will help you to
build a great referral program.

### Step 1: Begin with customer referral program template

You have to start by creating a customer referral template. Make it as simple as possible if you want more
and more customers to share your referral. It can be an email, a code or a link.

### Step 2: Determine the rewards

Firstly, you need to fix what rewards your referrers will get. It can be one-way or two-way. One-way
rewards benefit your user, and two-way ones benefit your user and the new customer. You can decide
what the reward will be, whether a free subscription, cashback or a discount. Though the choice is yours,
it should be attractive to the users. Your existing user should be interested in gaining those rewards. They
should seek extra efforts to earn those rewards. Any reward that you determine should also benefit you.

### Step 3: No hidden terms or conditions

While setting up the new referral program, you need to focus on making it crystal clear. Your user should
not get fooled by fancy offers and later get disappointed. Make your offers as simple as possible. It should
contain no hidden terms or conditions. What rewards the referrer will get, what rewards the new user
will get and what benefits you will get; you need to make it clear right from the start. Hidden terms or
conditions will upset your users or new customers. A clear referral program attracts the user and, they
refer to it happily.

### Step 4: SaaS referral fee

You can fix a referral program fee for your referrers. For every new referred user, you can give some
percentage of the total sale to the referrer. It will be unique as it is not a fixed value and depends on the
sale. The more the sale, the more will be the referrer commission.

### Step 5: Make it effortless

An easy SaaS referral program encourages your user, and thus they promote it. It should not be a tedious
task. A simple referral link or code works best. Whenever a new user applies the referral code or logs in
using the referral link, he should access the program. Effortless referral programs are great referral
programs.

The user benefits by referring to your SaaS, so make sure, they don’t have to go through multiple steps. A
single click should do the job. Make sure there is a referral landing page during the signing in process.

### Step 6: Keep a regular check on the working of your referral program

How many new customers have joined using the referral code? Through which platform they have joined
the inviting link?

You need to monitor every single action as it will help you to understand whether your program is working
or not. By analyzing, you can also change your referral strategy ideas. Based on the result, you will
understand which strategy is working for you and which one is not and modify it accordingly.

## SaaS referral marketing examples 

5 SaaS referral marketing examples that will motivate you to build your own.

Here are SaaS referral examples that are doing wonders in the market. You can get ideas from a few
referral card examples given below. Many SaaS companies have referral programs. You can choose any
one or a combination or create your own ideas to make the best customer referral program.

### • Canva

Canva is a free graphic design platform that’s great for making invitations, business cards, templates,
Instagram posts and more.

Referral program: When a new customer joins using your referral code, you get a free upgrade to Canva
Pro.

### • GPay

Google Pay is a digital wallet platform and online payment system developed by Google in 2018 to power
in-app, online, and in-person contactless purchases on mobile devices, enabling users to make payments
with Android phones, tablets, or watches.

Referral program: When a referred user makes their first payment, both users will receive the reward.
Behind every transaction, you get scratch cards, which may have discount coupons for various brands,
cash back, or free subscription for apps.

### • Swiggy

Swiggy is India’s largest online food ordering and delivery platform, founded in July 2014. Based in
Bangalore, it is operating in 500 Indian cities as of September 2021.

Referral program: When your friend signs up using your referral code on Swiggy, it gives you a discount
coupon. There are exciting offers on your first order.

### • Myntra

Myntra is an online shopping site for fashion and lifestyle. It is a major Indian fashion e-commerce
industry. Founded in the year 2007, its headquarters lies in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.

Referral program: Every time a new user signs up using your referral code, the new and exciting user get
Myntra cash or a discount coupon. Myntra also has exciting offers for your first order.

### • Todoist

Todoist is an application that manages your task. It is similar to OneNote. It lets you manage your personal
and professional tasks across multiple devices.

Referral program: You get a two-month Pro subscription when your referred user upgrades to the Pro
version.

A customer referral program is a best way to retain your customers and find new customers without
spending much on the customer acquisition cost. It is a word-of-mouth marketing. By creating a referral
program, you are creating a salesperson without actually hiring them. Now that you know what a SaaS
Referral program can add value to your business. It would be the right move to add the same to your
marketing strategy to boost your sales.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the what SaaS referral program, benefits of SaaS referral programs, and steps to create the best customer referral program. Read on to find out more!

medium_saas.png

small_saas.png

thumbnail_saas.png

saas.png

A Perfect Guide to Start Your SAAS Referral Program

The whole process of sales can get a little hectic and can hamper the productivity of your team. It will eventually lead to issues in your business, and thus, stop growth. A sales CRM is essential for day to day sales tasks as it simplifies the whole process and makes life easier.

#### **What is CRM?**

It stands for Customer Relationship Management. The name does sound a little scary but it means just the opposite. Customer Relationship Management is all about serving customers, while sales is the activity.  A CRM is a business tool for sales designed to handle sales activities. In simple words, sales is the activity that involves converting the potential buyer to a customer or a paying customer. Customer Relationship Management or CRM plays a major role in selling and growing a business. Now that we understand the basic definition of CRM let us move ahead and dive a little deeper into the features that make CRM so important for any salesperson. 

#### **Why is a CRM important for your business?**

Sales is a team job, and sales CRM helps you track sales processes, salespeople, and customer tasks and progress. It can also record your conversations and activities and gives you the ability to automate tasks, for example, sending a welcome email to new customers. Also see: CRM Cloud For many small businesses, Sales CRM solutions are cumbersome and expensive. The best way to get started is to download our free small business CRM guide. Getting Started Where do I start? You need a Sales CRM that is effective and will suit your business. It can be daunting to look at all the options available, but check out the reviews and then get one for you.

#### **How to choose the best CRM for you?**

Choosing the right Sales CRM is essential because it is a helping hand in the journey of business. To choose the perfect Sales CRM, you need to consider three factors – Research, Requirement and Result. You might feel overwhelmed by the wide choice out there. That’s no surprise, as there are so many CRM options to choose from, that to be sure that you pick the right one for you, you need to do a lot of research.

Before that, understand your requirements and learn about the result you are expecting. Compare the same with the CRM available and if it matches perfectly, go for it.

Customer Relationship Management is not a niche field that people specialize in. To take the best advantage of the CRM system, it is necessary to select the one that suits your workflows, tools and approach. It is why the best CRM solution – Sales Simplify, can be very helpful to you. You can integrate it into your business processes and track sales, nurture relationships, improve customer satisfaction and much more. That is why your business will benefit by choosing the CRM that will be best for your needs.

The whole process of sales can get a little hectic and can hamper the productivity of your team. It will eventually lead to issues in your business, and thus, stop growth. A sales CRM is essential for day to day

medium_6.png

small_6.png

thumbnail_6.png

6.png

How to choose the best CRM for your business?

#### **What is relationship selling?**

Relationship Selling is a sale technique that concentrates on the interaction between the buyer and the salesperson. It does not focus on the price and details of the product and is 6 to 7 times more expensive to gain new customers. Based on the belief in building a long-lasting and ongoing relationship with clients to encourage repeat purchases, it inspires your existing customer and further marketing through the mouth of word and referrals.

Loyal customers have a greater chance of spending more money on each visit, and they will shop more frequently as compared to new or other customers. Thus, they will continue to buy from you regardless of the price. Building relationships with your customers and taking interest in their world notably improves sales and retaining customers. Start your conversation with a potential customer with something that is not your sales pitch. Send a blog post that you think your prospect will find interesting for a longer period.

#### **Relationship selling vs transactional selling: the difference in mindsets**

The opposite of relationship selling is called transactional selling, in short, transactional selling means exchanging money for goods.

Transactional Marketing is a marketing strategy used by firms to target customers to make one-off sale transactions which are short term in nature, and the customer contact is very low as they stress more on gaining new customers as a result, customer retention or loyalty is extremely low.

Whereas in Relationship Marketing, the primary aim is to retain and satisfy customers by providing values to them, which are long term in nature and with high customer contact. 

As we have discussed, both techniques of marketing are important for the business entities and must exist side by side, so as to increase the customer base. However, relationship marketing is capable of capitulating better results in comparison to transactional marketing.

#### **How to use Relationship Selling to connect and convert leads?**

Relationship selling has a direct impact on the success of your marketing and sales strategy, you should understand the principles and qualities to build a long-term relationship.

**Integrity and reliability**

Having integrity and reliability at work is one of the most important qualities for building long term relationships with your clients. Communicate with your customer honestly and openly. It simply shows how trustworthy you are. Admit the mistakes, if any because, it is ok to accept and resolve them. Integrity is not just important on a personal level, it is also vitally important at a workplace level. Organisations known for their integrity perform better.

On the other hand, reliability helps to keep your customers and increase efficiency. Customers like to know what they will get if you are selling them any faulty or ineffective products. They keep an eye on your behaviour as it symbolises the reliability of your brand. If they find it helpful and useful, it opens doors to creating a long-lasting relationship.

They might not waste their time and money on your product in future, but they will repeat the purchase if you are reliable. 

**Increase Trust**

Trust is the natural result of thousands of tiny actions, words, thoughts, and intentions. Trust does not happen all at once; gaining it takes work and time. It might take years of calling on a certain client to break through and fully gain their comfort and trust. For any relationship to last longer, it is important to increase the trust between you and your customer. The best way to do this is by delivering your customer what you committed, taking care of the deadlines and so on.  

**Sound human in your business communication**

Instead of directly talking about your product or starting with the sales pitches, focus on building trust. Try to sound natural to them, write fun and personalized subject lines for your cold emails, simplify your email signature and mention something you and your prospect have in common.

What is relationship selling? Relationship Selling is a sale technique that concentrates on the interaction between the buyer and the salesperson. It does not focus on the price and details of the product and is 6 to 7 times more

medium_1-1.png

small_1-1.png

thumbnail_1-1.png

1-1.png

Relationship selling – the way to customer’s heart

How did these entrepreneurs get featured in Fast Company? Did they reach out to the magazine, or did the magazine reach out to them? And how can I do the same? – these questions often cross our mind. 

While [Instagram influencer marketing](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/guides/instagram-influencers/) is a well-known strategy, many other networks are growing for influencers. According to [Adweek](https://www.adweek.com/digital/giordano-contestabile-activate-by-bloglovin-guest-post-influencer-marketing-in-2018/), the industry is all set to reach $10 billion in worth by 2020. Other networks like Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok have their own set of influencers with different demographics.

#### **What is influencer marketing?**

A decade ago, the influencer marketing arena was limited only to celebrities and a few dedicated bloggers. Now, it seems like we have seen social media influencers rise, saturate the market.

Influencer marketing involves cultivating relationships with influencers to spread the word about your company or product to the rest of the market.

At a fundamental level, influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers – individuals who have a dedicated social following and are considered experts within their niche. Influencer marketing works because of the high amount of trust that social influencers have built up with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a form of [social proof ](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-proof/)to your brand’s potential customers.

That means that if you can work with consumers, you can work with influencers. It also means that you can use your sales CRM to manage your influencer outreach efforts.

#### **Here’s how:**

 **Step No. 1:Identify your influencers.**

Much like any strategy, [research is the first step](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/market-research/). Choose the platform you want to focus on first. You can always expand to other platforms later but if you are just starting, stick with one. Ideally, your brand should already have a presence on this network or be looking to expand into it.

Once you have developed a list of 10 to 20 people, add them as [contacts to your CRM](https://salessimplify.com/manage-contacts/). Make sure to include all the relevant information you have, including their E-mail, social media accounts etc.

 **Step No. 2: Get to know them.**

You should develop an understanding of who each influencer is and the types of conversations they are having. Follow them on Twitter and add them to a list so you can easily monitor what they are doing, subscribe to their blogs via an RSS feed and set up a [Google alert](https://www.google.co.in/alerts) to track their online activity. To keep track of these efforts, create an “engagement” stage in your pipeline.

**Step No. 3: Reach out**

Move an influencer to the next stage of your pipeline when they start reciprocating (that is, likes or favorites your tweets, shares your content, etc.) or when a predetermined amount of time has already gone by

In this stage, you will reach out to the influencer and attempt to engage.

For micro-influencers, you could reach out directly in a private message on the same platform. For more traditional ones, click around their profile, and they may list contact information for business inquiries in their bio. They may also link a website that denotes brand partnerships.

**Step No. 4: Track your results.**

There are a few ways of measuring the success of your campaign. You can create a specific hashtag, like #SalesSimplify to track what your influencers are doing.

It makes it easy to see what is being talked about with specific hashtags or to watch for mentions of [specific Twitter keywords.](https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-listening/)

If you are aiming for more sales, giving out affiliate codes or tracking links is an easy way of seeing how much is being generated from influencers.

#### **Conclusion**

Influencers are here to stay, but how the world of influencer marketing looks and operates has changed a great deal in a short time, and in five years, maybe drastically different from today. This guide will help you get started with building your strategy, but like any social strategy, it is important to be ready for change.

Still, while there are some unique considerations to working with influencers, setting up a campaign is the same as most marketing campaigns: research, set a budget, determine goals, find your influencers and review and revise.

How did these entrepreneurs get featured in Fast Company? Did they reach out to the magazine, or did the magazine reach out to them? And how can I do the same? – these questions often cross our mind.  While Instagram

medium_2.png

small_2.png

thumbnail_2.png

2.png

A guide to managing your influencer relations with a Sales CRM

On average, sales and marketing costs average from 15%-35% of total corporate costs. So the effort to automate for more sales efficiency is essential. In cases reviewed, sales increase due to advanced CRM technology has ranged from 10% to more than 30%.

CRM, Customer Relationship Management is a system that aims to improve the relationship with existing customers, find new prospective customers, and win back former customers. Sales Simplify CRM software facilitates collecting, organizing and managing customer information – all in one place so that you save your precious time and can focus on more productive work.

There were times when CRMs were just for large-scale organizations with huge databases of customers, but now things have changed, and CRMs are advantageous to even small and medium-sized organizations.

These softwares are designed in a way that they can easily keep track and streamline your processes. A CRM system like Sales Simplify can be one of the most powerful management tools in your arsenal. The outcomes of this CRM include improved customer service, deepened customer relationships, retention of new customers, and much more.

#### **A business with CRM & without CRM**
Suppose you get an out of the blue phone call or email wanting to reconnect after several years. The person might not remember you as you are not in touch with your old clients, and it may happen because we all tend to forget things. But, with Sales Simplify CRM software, you can easily build long-lasting relationships.

With a well-organized CRM system, you get to track regular communication, schedule touch calls and probably several nurturing emails of helpful information that keep your business top of mind with your clients.

Missed communication, missed follow up and unable to find the right information to connect with a customer, is what it is like being without an easy-to-use CRM system.  Time and now, we have seen prospective salespeople not having the right process or tools to work effectively. They keep calling the main office and do not have detailed contact information. They do not have accurate prior sales history on what the customer had previously purchased. 

They have to do rather rudimentary Google searches to build up intelligence about the person and business they are trying to contact.

Sales Simplify allows you to keep an easy connection with your contacts or clients so that you can have a lasting relationship with them.

#### **Here is how Sales Simplify helps you grow:**

**Sales Simplify helps you improve customer relationships with its centralized customer data:** 

Customer data is critical for your business. So, maintaining your customer records accurately is one of the most important things to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

**It helps you build more lively and sustainable relationships:**

To know your clients and develop a deep and clear understanding of your client’s business, their goals and choices are highly necessary for business growth and maintaining good relationships. Understanding customers is the key to providing them with the best service which in turn, results in stronger customer relationships.

**Reduction in your sales cost:**

Making a thoughtful and strategic approach and implementing marketing campaigns to capture or generate new leads requires more human effort and budget. Selling to your potential customers and gaining deep insights to upsell, cross-sell, and renewal options can boost repeat customer sales.

**Provides better, efficient & reliable customer service:**

With the help of the [Sales Simplify system](https://salessimplify.com/), you can respond to the customer’s behaviour and the evolving marketing trends appropriately. It helps you in accessing real-time sales, customer reviews, and challenges before customers and constantly changing marketing trends and technologies.

On average, sales and marketing costs average from 15%-35% of total corporate costs. So the effort to automate for more sales efficiency is essential. In cases reviewed, sales increase due to advanced CRM technology has ranged from 10% to more

medium_3.png

small_3.png

thumbnail_3.png

3.png

CRM – the saviour of your organizations

The increasing popularity of social media has changed the way organizations interact with leads and customers. Now, there are [4.2 billion social media users worldwide](https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-global-overview-report) spending an average of 145 minutes each day on the platforms. To get a complete picture of our leads and prospects, we need to consider the part social media management plays in our customer relationships. 

Social media lead generation is part of every marketer’s strategy—whether they know it or not.

For marketers ready to move beyond brand awareness and engagement, social media lead generation is a good next step. Collecting leads on social media will help you find people interested in your company. More importantly, these leads will help you keep in touch with potential customers—whether it is to make a special offer or share news.

#### **What is a social media lead?**
A lead is any information someone shares that you can use to follow up with them. That includes names, email addresses, occupations, employers, or any other information that a social media user shares with you.

Before moving forward, let’s do a breakdown of some of the lingo marketers use for social media leads.

**Social media lead generation:** In simple words, social media lead generation is any activity undertaken on social platforms to collect new leads.

**Social media lead nurturing:** Once a social media lead gets generated, good marketers will nurture their leads. It includes taking them through the customer journey, or as marketers would say: [through the sales funnel.](https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-build-social-media-sales-funnel/) 

#### **Picking the right social CRM solution**
There are a growing number of SaaS products and other solutions describing themselves as social CRM platforms. However, as most sales organizations already have a familiar CRM, the idea of trading in their existing solution and pricing up a dedicated social CRM software isn’t so appealing. 

When looking for social media CRM tools, whether in a standalone platform or through integrations to your existing setup, there are different levels to consider depending on your requirements:

- **Collection**. A social CRM platform allows you to collect relevant data from social media about potential and existing customers. You can monitor mentions or hashtags related to you (or your competitors) in customer profiles and posts. 
- **Interaction**. More advanced tools allow you to directly engage with your prospects, enabling two-way communication across multiple channels while managing it all in one platform.
- **Enrichment**. With some tools, you can link the social data to the CRM entries for your leads and prospects, giving you a greater understanding of your contacts and enabling more personalized outreach.
- **Analysis**. To get the full benefits of social CRM, you need to analyze the incoming data and make sense of it. Recent advances in machine learning have made it possible to analyze social media activity at scale.

#### **Why is Social CRM important?**
Social CRM benefits the whole company, not just the sales team. Along with lead generation, building a complete picture of your customer engagement also helps marketers create more relevant campaigns and help desk staff respond to issues faster. When the sales, marketing and customer support teams all use a social CRM, it leads to greater alignment across the company and a more seamless customer experience.

#### **Benefits of Social CRM for Salespeople**
There are several ways that salespeople can benefit from the data collected by a social CRM.

**1. Win More Business**
With Social CRM, you can get detailed insights about your customers regarding their demographics, tastes, preferences, buying behavior, etc. It will help accelerate the sales process by allowing you to identify the leads that have the highest probability of being converted into deals.

It can also aid the marketing team in exploring new market segments and design personalized highly targeted marketing campaigns and promotional offers on different social media platforms. 

It results in enhanced productivity, optimal allocation of the company’s resources, and brings the desired ROI. If you are currently using any other [CRM for your business](https://salessimplify.com/importance-of-crm-for-organization), you can also do social media integration like integrating Twitter and Facebook with the help of plugins. It will consequently enhance your CRM functionality.

**2. Better Coordination Among the Departments**
Due to the inter-dependency among various departments, the key to success in any organization is effective communication to ensure that work gets done on time.

With a Social CRM implementation, every single team, be it marketing, sales or customer support can now stay up to date with customers’ activities through access to real-time data related to each customer’s profile. Every department will know what the status of each customer is and will, therefore, be able to act accordingly.

**3. Bridge the Gap Between the Present & the Future**
Track what customers have to say about your company’s product and if they have changes or feedback. Today, customers with their access to vast amounts of data know what kind of product they would like to buy in the future, and that gets reflected in their online activity. 

Social CRM tools help you look into the future and develop products that customers wouldn’t expect to be in the market anytime soon.

**4.Proactively Serve Your Customers**
A positive word of mouth can do wonders for your business, whereas a single negative comment can do more damage than one can imagine. Social CRM software will give your customer support team data about customers’ feelings and sentiments in real-time, which will also help you serve and provide customer service in a more personalized manner. 

Later, it is up to you to use that feedback to make strategic adjustments and take the necessary action that enriches the customer experience.

#### **Conclusion**
As with any tool, social CRM works best when used with a clear goal in mind. When used in tandem with your overall sales strategy, your team will make better decisions based on holistic customer data.

By helping you better understand your leads and customers, organize your contact’s details and manage your communication from one location, social CRM can help you generate more qualified leads and increase your sales.

 

The increasing popularity of social media has changed the way organizations interact with leads and customers. Now, there are 4.2 billion social media users worldwide spending an average of 145 minutes each day on the platforms. To get a complete

medium_4.png

small_4.png

thumbnail_4.png

4.png

Social CRM – the new-age way of generating qualified leads.

Today, the customer journey has changed. Customers buy experiences, not products. A few years ago, everyone was generating leads through billboards, radio commercials, and designing print marketing materials.

74% of users say that customer experience is an important factor, but if you see the actual numbers, only 45% of customers get a good customer experience. It will not let you build a long-lasting relationship with your clients. [Sales Simplify](https://salessimplify.com/) helps you automate your lead generation process effectively.

So, when a potential customer opts in to receive your emails, you can send them a sequence of messages designed to increase their interest in your product or service, then adjust your emails automatically based on their behaviour.

#### **What is lead generation, and why should you automate it?**
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated an interest in your company products or services. Tell them about it and try to build a lasting relationship. Some examples of lead generators are job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.

Automating the lead generation means you will be able to secure more leads with fewer efforts. You can prioritize which leads to a chase, you can nurture prospects and keep track of your progress.

#### **Chatbots**
These little robots are amazing at removing friction from a customer to business interaction. They indicate that not only businesses are passionate about chatbots as marketing, customer service, and lead generation solutions, the customers themselves find it appealing too. And there’s no secret behind it.

Customer engagement is the critical requirement to boost your sales and chatbots are an excellent tool to keep your customers engaged. Research suggests that businesses that successfully engage with their customers can increase customer spend by almost 20% to 40%.

#### **Nurture Leads with Smart Email Automation**
Email continues to be the main driver of customer retention and acquisition for small and midsize businesses. According to the data, 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention.

Email marketing is going to be a critical factor in determining whether someone chooses your business or a competitor, and you need to use it very smartly. Use email to send prospects relevant information that helps them with their decision. 

It could be a blog post, a personal email from a sales representative asking a question about their pain points, or an invite to your next webinar. The more you will connect with your customer, the more you can grow your business.

#### **Provide hot leads to your sales team**
The hottest leads are identified and segmented automatically. All that your sales team needs to do is, follow up with the subscribers and download your extra content. You can even notify your sales staff of new leads, letting you follow up quickly and easily.

#### **Dynamic landing pages**
These types of landing pages are an excellent way of generating leads at a much greater rate. Furthermore, this process can also be automated.

If you use it correctly, your dynamic landing pages will show different messages, website designs, and even calls-to-action to various users, based on a set of factors, like their location, age, occupation, and so forth.

One of the main reasons to consider using dynamic landing pages is their potential to increase conversion rates. The idea is that instead of arriving on a blanket landing page based on a single campaign, or set of keywords, the pages will be customized. Doing so will help you provide more relevant data to the user.

Today, the customer journey has changed. Customers buy experiences, not products. A few years ago, everyone was generating leads through billboards, radio commercials, and designing print marketing materials. 74% of users say that customer experience is an important factor, but

medium_7.png

small_7.png

thumbnail_7.png

7.png

Automate your lead generation process with Sales Simplify

The benefits of adopting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system are not easily seen by everybody, except for the Sales Manager. They like and even appreciate the fact and feature that the data file is stored safe and private and is even presented in an easy-to-follow format, allowing them to monitor every sales process, which eventually helps in increasing sales. 

In the former days, the Sales Manager did not appreciate the CRM applications much. They underestimated the benefits it had for them and misunderstood it as just another tool or an application that helped their seniors in keeping track of their work.

It was later that they realized CRM improves the lives of salespeople. They understood that helping them keep track of their generated leads by setting the follow-up reminders and prioritizing them helps boost their sales.

Later in 2014, a survey was conducted, and they saw an increase of about 87% in the use of Mobile CRM. A study showed that about 65% of sales representatives who have used Mobile CRM have already achieved their sales quota.

CRM is a tool that solves the key problem of how to qualify and follow up on leads and prioritize their sales activities.

Here are three main reasons why CRM is necessary for sales representatives.

#### **1. Safe and private data storage**
CRM helps salespeople to store their data files safe and private. It gives easy access to data anytime and anywhere. To assure that your data won’t get lost. Segmentation of the data and identifying valuable opportunities is another thing that CRM helps salespeople with. It saves them from hours of cutting and pasting from various documents or surfing in the disorganized list.

#### **2. Automated activity reports**
CRM helps salespeople to automate their weekly or monthly reports for management. The process is automated and transparent and takes just a few minutes to inform clients about their sales leads and current progress. CRM helps salespeople to manage their schedules and prioritize their tasks lest to ignore them. It allows them to spend more time with their customers, which leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base.

#### **3. Time for the new sale**
CRM software shortens sales cycles by discarding manual tasks that bog down a sales manager’s time. This software solution captures and centralizes all communications to achieve sales targets seamlessly and consistently. Sales CRMs can track every customer communication irrespective of the source – emails, phone calls, chats etc. In this way, it saves time by tracking all communication with the customers. CRM helps salespeople to know exactly when you need to contact the customers.

#### **Conclusion**
Therefore, one can say that salespeople and CRM when together, and used correctly will not only boost the performance and attract an audience. But also get stronger, and have a better reach and sorted qualified leads.

All the sales representatives need to accept that fulfilling their goals by recording all activities and following the schedule will help them achieve their sales target. Doing so will save their time, and they can attract more leads. 

CRM also revolutionizes sales operation with a mobile CRM solution that easily integrates with mobile apps to offer excellent scalability and flexibility benefits. Using it, you can plan, schedule and reschedule on the go and prioritize your tasks. It helps you stay focused on the deals to deliver and offers a personalized experience to customers.

So, are you ready to try out this software and go on a high roll along with your team? Share your experiences with CRM software? To take the demo of this software, visit us at salesimplify.com

The benefits of adopting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system are not easily seen by everybody, except for the Sales Manager. They like and even appreciate the fact and feature that the data file is stored safe and private and

medium_9.png

small_9.png

thumbnail_9.png

9.png

A proper guide to building Sales through CRM

In the first moments of a company, most founders only have one worry: to start selling and obtaining benefits in any way. When you have only a handful of customers, keeping your sales process under control is relatively simple. But as the company grows, managing a growing mass of leads in different stages of the buying process becomes increasingly complex. If you want to sell more and more effectively, you need to optimize the process. And for that, you need a CRM.

Here are nine ways in which Sales Simplify will improve your sales process.


#### **1. The CRM lets you document your sales process**
In the beginning, your sales process can be as simple as an idea written down on a napkin, but if you have to coordinate with a team, you will need a more effective method. With Sales Simplify, you can document all stages from initial contact to sale, and your team will always know what to do at all times.


#### **2. You can create repeatable processes**
If each sales representative goes about their business, you end up having as many sales processes as sellers. Thanks to our CRM tool, you can standardize interactions between vendors and customers, which will not only give consistency to customer relations but will also help you save time.


#### **3. You will automate and reduce data entry**
Before CRM came into the picture, most sales teams used Excel. Although the formulas and macros can do wonders, entering the data one by one is a long and frustrating process. If you simplify the process with us, your team can devote that time to getting new leads.


#### **4. Your prediction will be more accurate**
According to a MarketWatch study, 88% of spreadsheets contain errors. If you use them as a basis for your decisions, do not be surprised if your calculations fail. Instead, with a CRM, you will see all your sales and leads much more accurately. 


#### **5. You can keep a better track of objectives**
If your sales representatives are achieving your goals, you can reward them for it, and if they are falling short, you’ll be able to see and solve the problem in time.


#### **6. You will centralize all of your sales information**
Having different sources of information can drive you crazy when looking for the information you need. But with all the customer information stored in a single program, your life will be much easier.


#### **7. You control the whole process without disturbing your employees**
If you need to know the sales results for the quarter, you do not need to ask all your sales representatives, just consult the CRM.


#### **8. You will create a sustainable salesforce**
Imagine you have a person in the sales department who has been creating the sales Excel and knows exactly how it works. While that person is working in your company, finding out how things are going is as easy as asking. But the day they leave is the day chaos begins to reign. To prevent this from happening, you need to have an infrastructure set in place that everyone understands and does not depend on one person.


#### **9. You will make the information about your customers more visible**
CRM is mainly used in sales, but the other company areas may also be interested in having information about customers. And with this system, they can have a look with just a few clicks.

With the above-mentioned features, we are sure you might want to get a FREE trial of this software. For the same, you can visit [www.salessimplify.com](www.salessimplify.com)

In the first moments of a company, most founders only have one worry: to start selling and obtaining benefits in any way. When you have only a handful of customers, keeping your sales process under control is relatively simple. But

9 reasons to choose Sales Simplify over any other CRM

Moving forward as the industry revives from its slump, to accelerate the recovery process, new and emerging models need to be deliberate. The industry is still hampered by the loss in demand therefore proactive steps need to be taken by the government to revive consumer confidence as well.

The government has always been proactive for the retail sector and has taken several measures to help create a robust environment that has allowed retail to thrive.

- The government may change Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) rules in food processing in a bid to permit E-commerce companies and foreign retailers to sell Made in India consumer products.
- The government of India has allowed 100% FDI in the online retail of goods and services through the automatic route, thereby providing clarity on the existing businesses of e-commerce companies operating in India.
- The government’s focus to improve digital infrastructure in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets would be favourable to the sector.
39% of company CEOs say a good customer experience is the most effective way of establishing an advantage over competitors.

Customer relationship management in retail can increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and improve your company’s performance in the marketplace. CRM software manages your relationships with individual customers to create advantages for both parties. To select the appropriate software which includes necessary features, you need to know the working of a CRM and its effects on your retail operations.

### **How will a CRM be helpful for the retail sector?**

### **Segmentation**

CRM helps you gather information about each of your customers, including preferences and demographic data. You can use such information to segment your market and customize your approach to each group of customers. For example, if you have a large number of young families in a segment, you can create a family-friendly retail environment. If your data shows you have many seniors, you can install ramps for wheelchairs and make your store more easily accessible. The effect of segmentation based on CRM data is to adjust your retail strategies according to the customers you have.

### **Promotion**

The data gathered within a CRM system lets you target a market segment with promotions that appeal to its members and individual customers. For example, when you know that a customer is reaching retirement age, you can promote appropriate hobby products. If you see that a customer has visited your website and looked at particular products, you can include promotions of those products in his mails. In this way, CRM reduces promotions that are of no interest to the recipient and increases the relevance of material you send out.

### **Purchases**

A CRM system keeps records of customer purchases and customer service calls. You can keep track of the products each customer has purchased and check for warranty or dissatisfaction issues. This information allows you to send out special offers to customers when the products they have purchased reach the end of their lives. Such a strategy keeps your products in front of the customer when he might need them and gives him the benefit of lower pricing if he buys from you again. On your side, the costs of such a targeted promotion are lower than marketing to a large group and receiving only a few responses.

### **Retention**

The overall effect of CRM is to increase the retention of customers by serving them in a more focused and convenient way. You can further increase this effect by using CRM software to implement customer loyalty programs. Since the applications already track purchases, you can issue reward points and bonuses to keep valuable customers. Such programs help you reduce costs because sales to long term customers are less expensive than sales to new customers.

### **Bottom Line**

The benefits of a CRM in retail are varied and significant. Positive customer experiences have long been a crucial factor in the success of SMBs, and now, more than ever, businesses have to deliver.

Streamlining customer service and utilizing data through a CRM provides the best opportunity to retain and gain customers, and savvy organizations will recognize that those who are leaders in customer service are more frequently finding success.

As customer attitudes continue to change and expectations climb, it will be incumbent or decision-makers to ensure that they have the right technologies in place that effectively offer a great customer experience.

Moving forward as the industry revives from its slump, to accelerate the recovery process, new and emerging models need to be deliberate. The industry is still hampered by the loss in demand therefore proactive steps need to be taken by