Make every seller your best seller

Sales acceleration is about making the most out of every point of contact and conversation.  It's about knowing the right information about the contact to carry on a valuable conversation for both parties.  This information would and should be found in your well-used CRM system.  Sales acceleration with CRM means unleashing the capabilities of CRM for your sales, marketing and operations to smartly grow revenue for the business.

Selling is deeply personal. Companies will leverage our "Success with CRM experience" to design a personalized experience for their team as they learn, sell and grow. - getting the best results from their CRM. A well-used CRM system helps small to medium sales teams grow their revenue by creating a human-friendly experience for sales reps and the people they are selling to. We can help create a truly unique experience - designed for your sellers.  Sales acceleration becomes the expressway to sales excellence.

 “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” – Albert Einstein

When it comes to choosing the right customer relationship management (CRM) solution and developing an effective CRM strategy, it is important to choose a CRM-business growth partner that knows the power of listening and asking the right questions. So, this should be someone that first takes the time to listen.

How do you tell if they’re listening?

When they ask the kinds of questions to help you reach your business goals. And when they can help you determine if their CRM solution can accommodate your business relationship strategy and make satisfying your customers the focus for your business. Ultimately there should be a collaborative CRM experience that helps you grow a more profitable business

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

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.

Knowing people and company associations will improve your productivity in the use of CRM and accelerate business relationship development.   An overall goal our clients will mention is the need to identify relationships among the people and company accounts they do business with.  They need to manage the entire relationship with customers and strategic partners. They need to track this relationship information and have it handy for conversation planning. 

Previously in this series of 12 Tips to be more Effective using Infor CRM we have delved into:

1. Setting up your default options to work the way you want to work. Do this once to make life easier.

2. Using Groups - segmenting all types of information into intelligent bit-sized, digestible pieces of information.

3. Using Filters - to more effectively use information from Groups in finding patterns or drilling into the details

4. The effective use of Activities - something you have scheduled but is not yet completed.

5. Living in Outlook and using Xbar - manage CRM from Microsoft Outlook

hOk - so you are a small business owner of a $350,000 to $15,000,000 annual revenue business. There never seems to be enough time each day to get what you want to accomplish moved to DONE.

A December 2015 survey of business owners working with TAB - The Alternative Board indicate that 63% of then are working 50+ hours per week but they really only "want" to work 42 hours.  

Only 34% feel that they are working in that all important quadrant of Important and urgent.  73% would prefer to spend their time working ON the business as "owner' instead of working Inside the business like an employee. 

Provide a Flexible Alternative to Purchasing ACT Software

Choosing a Contact Management solution is about more than just software.  It’s about finding a product and a partner that fit your needs, and your business.  Finding that right fit can be a project in itself.  

Issue #1: I started my own firm and have used ACT for many years. My assistant needs to be able to access the database and I might possibly want other employees / partner to access in the future. What is the best solution for me now and to grow with?

Issue #2: We are currently running ACT 2011 and have upgraded our Outlook to 2014, thus losing our integration.  Soon we will be upgrading our PC's to Windows 2010.  I'm not in a position to buy the ACT upgrade software licenses as a 'Capital Purchase',  I guess we'll just have to keep doing what we have been doing? Isn't there a better solution for my business?

Issue #3: We need various methosds to work. I want to access my calendar and ACT database information from my PC, iPhone or from anyone else's PC at anytime.

Meet Vanessa as we follow her through her busy day, managing sales and follow up activities. She is struggling to reach out to prospective customers and what she really needs is an effective way to build and manage the business in order to increase sales.  

Manage your day and easily share conversations in real time

Learn how to grow the business, organize meetings and monitor performance. Watch how Vanessa can access a customer group or company records to discover useful information including contact details and social updates.  Using the calendar she can plan for upcoming meetings where presentations activities are completed. She can then use her mobile phone or tablet to get direct access to her contacts and create notes so that her team can keep track of all conversations in real time.

Outgrown Act and need an effective data migration to a more complete CRM?

So you have come to a conclusion that your trusted and true ACT contact management system has done all it can do to help your business to continue to grow.  You have taken this easy to modify system very far with customizations and performed work arounds to make it work the way your business operates.  But the limitations are now forcing an upgrade to a fully capable CRM system that is a very adaptable system, such as Infor CRM (formally Saleslogix).

A major concern is how to safely and conveniently migrate your core ACT and customized ACT tables of contacts, companies, opportunities, activities, history, notes, emails, attachments and products to Infor CRM. You realized that there will be the need for additional matching and data manipulations beyond a standard mapping from ACT tables to Infor CRM tables.  Also during this process some data garbage needs to be removed and data transformation must occur. Additionally you'll want to adjust the ACT source data to better uses in Infor CRM, taking advantage of what the new system offers.