Freedom of Choice Rings True 

For America, July 4th has a very special place in our history and our culture.  It signifies our desire for freedom and the choices brave souls made over 240 years ago.  Having the "Freedom of Choice" pervades our lives and gives us options that many others across the world would love to have.

Daily my firm will have conversations with clients and prospects about choices they have available. We learn about the challenges they need to address and the advantages of valuable improvement opportunities. We'll share insights about what works for similar businesses scenarios and what has not worked. The 18 requirements of Success with CRM is a helpful checklist along with avoiding the three most expensive mistakes ebook.

CRM ROI  - Return on Investment

What is it worth to you? This is the essential question to ask when trying to understand the return on investment of CRM.

How necessary are customer relationships, referrals and communication between employees to the success of your business?

Choosing a CRM system should be held to the same standards as any other business decision.

Did you know there are tools and in fact complete business process management systems for helping a business and its employees work smarter?  I have stated before that 30% of business success with CRM is the "processes" involved. It is smart to know that you can automate workflow and make your life simpler and much easier.  The business can be running smoother behind the scenes with visual workflow tools.

The following is a helpful outline for leading a successful CRM initiative. The importance of communications and education themes are highlighted throughout!

It's important to layer in the proven success principles: 60% is on people, 30% is on processes and 10% on technology. Too many times this order is just the opposite. The following is from our friend at Infor: Erik Tavenner, Solutions Consultant.

Many of our Sales Managers and VPs of Sales tell us that they struggle to figure out what their sales people are focusing on. It is not easy to predict future revenue when you don’t have a complete understanding of the challenges in each of your sales opportunities.

With a well-designed CRM System, you can support your sales staff, while gaining greater visibility into sales activities, current opportunities, and at-risk opportunities. A good CRM system will:

Speed up your sales cycle

        Provide insight into sales efforts

        Results-based sales tools

        Offer shared access 24 x 7 x 365

Too many businesses have separated sales, marketing, and service operations.  Silos of information cause lack of productivity with your staff and frustrated customers who are waiting for the right answers.

Problems Solved

Often times, many people are frustrated by the lack of integration and automation within the CRM market. Below is a list of major problems that ConvergeHub solves.

• Most existing CRMs for SMBs do NOT deliver on the original Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) promise–a single affordable and integrated system for Sales, Marketing, HR and Support…to manage your team, build your business and manage all your customer relationships.

• Many are silo, or desktop apps that don’t help all your team, or require too much expense to integrate.

CRM enables you to:

Grow your revenue share within your existing customer base

• Understand the true cross-sell and up-sell opportunity of every one of your customers in order to
  maximize the profitability of every relationship.

• Dramatically reduce your cost-per-lead by delivering highly targeted marketing communications to specific customers or customer segments.

• Cut the amount of time and cost it takes to resolve service issues without compromising an exceptional service experience that keeps your customers loyal.

• Provide decentralized empowerment to your customer-facing staff in a way that will drive their productivity and effectiveness while still retaining central control over headline resource, performance and budget management.

Business Apps that increase productivity with Act! Premium Cloud Subscription.

Integrated connection between Act! and Zapier popular Apps automate everyday tasks to help you nurture leads, update contacts, communicate with your team, and learn more about your customers. Make your own ZAP with Triggers + Actions.

What is a ZAP?  A ZAP is a connection between two apps made of a trigger and an action.  Whenever the trigger event happens, Zapier will automatically make the action event happen for you!

What are Triggers, Searches, and Actions? Triggers, Searches and Actions are the foundation that power your integration.  

Triggers- watch for events in your apps, then kick off a sequence of Searches and Actions.

Searches- look up existing data.

Actions- create new items. Together these three complete your tasks automatically.

The most common reason that clients come to us is to have a more capable, well-used CRM system that  works purposely for their business. Basically they have outgrown their current system.  If your current CRM system is not an effective “knowledgebase asset” that your people engage regularly, your organization may be losing valuable opportunities and productivity.

On the other hand, when you upgrade to a CRM that is robust enough to handle your organization’s needs, you will: 

     Gain visibility into your entire business

     Put your people first with a fully customizable CRM

     Get accurate and timely information

     Remove limitations to growth 

Customer relationship management software makes it easier to handle your whole selling process and keeping connected with the best contacts. This goes for any business, whether you have a sales team of one or 100. But if you think of CRM systems only as a way to add efficiency or improve customer service, you’re missing a big part of the full value of CRM.

CRM systems also help you increase your selling results dramatically with purpose built CRM that is well-used. Being well-used comes from an engaging and helpful CRM system. Here are 13 ways businesses boost their sales using CRM software and turn prospects into long term profitable customers. Read more here, Value Creation - Determining the Worth of Well-Used CRM