The Key to Increasing Your Sales: It’s All about Following-up

Following up with the clients and customers is one of the most vital business strategies a sales or marketing person can follow. It is now an established fact in sales and marketing sector. The follow-ups add value to the product or service and helps to build a long term relationship with the customer.

If you meet a really good prospect today, how long would you wait to follow-up with the client?

If you have no standardized plan to make follow-up calls or emails, let us show you some facts first. It will help clarify the entire scenario.

Facts to Motivate You to Make Follow-up Calls

• Generally, it takes around 8 call attempts to reach a prospect. Whereas, most of the salespersons only make 2 attempts to reach a prospect.
• 44% of the salespersons give up after one follow-up.
• Around 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after meeting.
• Following up with web leads within 5 minutes ensures 9 times more likelihood of conversion.

Get a Clear Perspective by Following-up

Sometimes it sounds like people keep calling their customers only to make a good impression over them. But it’s not true. The primary concern of a follow-up call is to know where the client stands in the current deal. That is how you can get a clear perspective and a better understanding about the sales development factors.

Besides, follow-up calls can address possible problems earlier. Make sure to encourage your client or customer to ask questions to make everything clear. Answer all queries before ending the call. This way you’re also letting the client know that your business provides outstanding customer support, no matter what the situation is.

Add Value to Your Product or Service

While engaging in an initial selling process, reasonable frequent calls can add value to your service or product. Even if the deal appears to be closed, a follow-up call can help to express the you are interested in building long-term relationships.

When you have nothing to gain after you’ve made the sale, the client gradually trusts that you were telling the truth.

This kind of trust ensures not only customer satisfaction, but also the recommendations or referrals. Even the trust in a single product may turn into loyalty towards the entire brand. This can influence the future purchase decisions as well.

Follow-up Call: A deciding Factor behind Sale

You can easily imagine from your own purchasing experience. What are the most influencing factors behind a purchase? When you feel appreciated by the shop assistant, you are more likely to purchase more than one product from that shop.

Besides, follow-up call works as a reminder as well. It also helps to reach busy buyers and increase sales.

Managing All Contacts with One Tool: A Perfect Utility of CRM

Now, how to manage customer contact details easily? This is obviously a huge question. Besides, it is not just the question of managing contact details, a salesperson needs to remember a plenty of things- status of the deal, enquiry details, when to call the customer, the last conversation details, the background of the client, and many others.

One of the basic advantages of CRM is to leverage the access and management of entire customer support system, along with other necessary information. Below are the advantages you can get from a mobile Customer Relationship Management application:

• With a mobile CRM you can receive call reminder and meeting reminder.
• It helps to keep track of the sales progression.
• Before calling the customer you can see the call history and last conversation details.
• You can put new details and change the status of the prospect.
• You can create a ticket number for each customer enquiry.
• The ticket number will help you find the details and status of the customer enquiry.

Moreover, since all the customer-related information is stored in your mobile CRM, it helps you analyze the requirements of the customers and even anticipate their problems. All these increase customer satisfaction and secure sales, in addition to the higher profit margins.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, a salesperson should aim for a long term relationship with the customers, in spite of looking for the short-time profits. Hence, if you want to retain your customers for a long duration, you have to recognize the importance of following-up with the prospect. The CRM software enhances the sales possibilities with its call management facilities that boosts the entire selling process.

5 Impressive Benefits of having a Three Stage Sales Pipeline

All organizations that successfully achieve a regular monthly and recurring revenue growth have established one significant thing.

A healthy three stage sales pipeline.

In-order to improve your sales outcome, you need to seriously consider improving the three important parts of your sales pipeline – pre sales process, sales activity and post-sales process. By maintaining a three step progress procedure, you can consistently guide and improve your sales outcome.

Along with creating and retaining a customer base, it also makes it easier to leverage and nourish your existing user-base to attract new customers. In-short, it’s a systematic process to create a series of sales processes that will function like a well-oiled machine.

In this article, we will discuss about how a three stage sales pipeline can amazingly improve your sales process. We will also go into the details of improving each of these parts to achieve these incremental results. In short, our sales processes will be able to improve your transactions and pave way for better sales outcomes.

1. Achieve the most optimal way of deal closure

All sales professionals are essentially looking to find the most optimal ways of finalize deal closures. In a simple sense, you are looking to travel between the two sales transaction points through its shortest path – from initial lead inquiry to final sales transaction and follow-up of post sales services. By establishing a sales pipeline, you can ensure that this process remains well streamlined and organized.

Within a CRM-based sales pipeline, you can setup definite responsibilities and conversion milestones. This will give you the direction to close the sales meetings and client responsibilities.

You can also specifically address and manage conversion for each lead. In short, all of these combine to deliver a positive sales outcome.

For example, your final deal closure will be the combined outcome of a number of meetings. A sales CRM lets you set specific milestones for each of the ongoing meetings.

Consequently, you can either reach a deal closure or move onto the next prospect.

2. Create and maintain Cohesion between Sales Teams

As you may have noted, managing each customer is an organization wide responsibility. If you are just having a good pre-sales process without the actual deal closure skills, your sales process is liable to lose steam during the final stages. Similarly, if you start to push the pre-sales activities before actual nourishment, it can apparently come across as pushy.

By aligning pre-sales and post sales processes through a CRM platform, you can achieve a higher conversion performance. This will help you achieve better cohesion and management between teams to create a better sales cycle.

A strictly cohesive and streamlined sales pipeline also minimizes the risks of prospects dropping-out along the sales pipeline.

3. Dissect to Understand and improve every sales Process

As you may know, a sales Process could be considered to have different moving parts. This includes receiving inquiries, providing quotes, managing customer visits, negotiation etc.

A three staged sales pipeline helps you dissect and analyze each process. By having dissected each process into its concerned parts, you can start making well-informed selling decisions.

For instance, you can set a goal that each prospect has to be closed within a certain number of visits. In this way, you can maximize the sales outcome by handling each of these processes individually and in a streamlined manner. Having aligned different processes helps you elevate your final conversions.

4. Improve Customer and Prospect Engagement

Having increased customer or prospect engagement forms the highway to better sales and product interest. A well-organized sales pipeline lets you organize and manage your entire prospect list.

This makes it duly important to manage a timely lead response time for a high quality lead database.

Within a CRM-based sales pipeline, you can create a ticket escalation or beat plan that ensures on-time attendance for your entire prospect list. You can also guarantee proportionally higher volume of leads to pass-onto the next sales stages.

5. Increase Customer Referrals and Retention

Today, social and business recommendations carry the highest validity in making the right sales decisions. This allows you to get maximum leverage from existing customer groups.

Sales process pipeline gives you a maximum utility to engage and convince each and every customer.

In the initial stage, you can start engaging with prospects. During the sales activity, you can discuss about further value addition strategies. In the last stage, you can add value to customer exchanges and take convincing steps to attract potential referral sales.

Conclusion

In-order to be successful, every business should try to establish a customer journey that starts from being an initial prospect to finally being a recurring customer. A three-staged sales pipeline lets you simulate and manage each prospect along the diverse sales procedures. A CRM platform enables you to channel and augment the sales pipeline to its fulfillment.

How a complaint management system can turn sour customer opinion into business asset?

Even the most conscientious businesses will occasionally find themselves on the wrong side of the customer opinion. Some businesses will decide to clamp-up on these situations. In some cases, they may try to over-compensate the complaining customers or decide to completely overlook them.

We don’t want to appear preachy; but both of these are high cost methods to manage your customer complaints.

A customer complaint management system enables you turn the heel and convert your customer complaints into insightful assets. It will transform your customer complaints into an opportunity to reinforce your business. This also allows you to stay clear of the usual customer complaints.

Here we will discuss about interpreting a customer complaint to extract a positive impact. We will discuss about managing complaints to measure customer engagement, customer satisfaction, customer feedback, customer intelligence etc.

Ok, now let’s just jump into the wrong side of customer opinions.

1. Turn Customer Complaints into a engagement metric

If you are having a lower number of customer complaints, these are the two most natural causes.

Reason 1 – Your users are so much in love with your products that they don’t have anything to complain.

Reason 2 – Your customers are least interested in your product and they don’t use your product. Naturally, in this case there wouldn’t be any complaint. Later, you would find it harder to maintain future customer retention or referrals.

The second reason is much more likely and interesting. The lack of customer complaint usually signifies a lack of customer adoption or engagement.

You can see that the same feelings are being resonated by recent studies.

By understanding and resolving the existing complaints, you can learn to increase your customer retention and total turnovers.

2. Means of Early adoption to customer Problems

Whether you are a service provider or a technology provider, the general adoption rate follows the graph given below.

In the initial phase, your product will be tried-out by a group of experimenters. Later, you can gain the necessary leverage by trying to impress these early adopters.

You can immediately raise your product demand by tailoring your product to suit the audience demands.

If you are facing certain complaints, resolving them can immediately increase the number of purchases and user adoptions.

It will also help you avoid the situation of having to face a larger volume of future complaints that come from a much larger audience.

Kindly Indulge; take time to examine the graph given below.

The law of adoption tells you that user adoption usually follows a bell curve.

The rate of adoption starts slow, then picks-up and then slows down in the later stages due to saturation of the user-base.

You can make the right changes by listening to the early adopters. This will also enable you to present an improved version of your product to a relatively larger consumer base.

3. Evaluate your customer satisfaction levels

Often customer satisfaction is a reliable metric to evaluate the future sales and retention. This requires you to keep a pulse on the overall level of customer satisfaction.

The rate of customer complaints is also an indispensible metric to evaluate your customer satisfaction levels. A low level of complaint rate means a bigger pool of satisfied user base.

In short, you should start doing everything within your power to improve the customer satisfaction levels.

You can calculate the rate of customer complaints as given below.

Rate of Customer Complaints = Absolute number of complaints / number of Consumers or users * 100

For example, the simple formula given here lets you analyse an overall figure of concurrent customer complaints.

In this sense, you can create a feedback mechanism to control and direct your number of customer complaints.

This also helps you keep track of the important issues that affect your customer experience.

4. Discover low hanging fruits to improve Customer Experience

While improving your customer satisfaction levels is certainly a long shot move, managing your customer complaints could be easy opportunities to capture big wins.

For example, you can drill down your data to find the most frequent reason for customer drop-off. This could become the lowest hanging fruit to improve your customer satisfaction.

This allows you to cut-through and focus on the right customer issues.

For example, consider the graph below.

The graph given below describes the rate of churn and relative reasons for customers to leave your business.

 According to the graph, the rate of usage will be proportionally increasing your sales conversion. This also happens to be the most feasible conversion opportunity.

5. Collect, Manage and Utilize Customer Intelligence

Most businesses depend on different feedback forms to collect customer intelligence. In hindsight, this is a rather lame way to collect customer knowledge.

It’s just common sense that you can’t plainly ask someone to register their opinion of your business. You are least likely to receive a well thought-out answer to your questions.

This is also a rather narrow path to collect all your customer feedback.

In this situation, having to mine your customer complaints is a much more realistic assessment of your customer intelligence. This also enables you to figure out the most effective customer answers.

Conclusion:-

It’s absolutely possible to turn your customer complaints into opportunities and positive reinforcements. This requires you to streamline and manage your customer complaints to its best possible resolutions.

A complaint management system lets you manage and automate your customer complaints through a unified platform. It also lets you collect and manage your customer data to be utilized in business proceedings.

6 New Year business Resolutions that will help you dominate 2017 - Kapture CRM

Yes, finally it’s happening!

Welcome 2017! The year 2016 has finally come to an end. Globally, this year had a mostly sour relationship with its occupants. You could go on and on – Brexit, US Elections, toughening market competition, growth rate slow-down etc.

You could even almost experience the sourness leaving your mouth right now.

Most of these things lie beyond our control. And to tell you the truth, most of us aren’t facing any immediate repercussions due to these changes.

Instead the Year 2017 is the time to take things into our own hands. These meaningful business resolutions will help you accelerate your business growth.

So, let’s jump right into it!

1. Get a Responsive Mobile Website

Globally, businesses are going mobile.

According to Google’s mobile first indexing, your desktop website will have a high scale of ranking difficulty. In this scenario, mobile websites will become a practical prerequisite to garner any online visibility.

If you don’t have a mobile website, you need to stop reading this article and contact a web development firm. If you have an existing mobile website, try to improve the load time and overall usability.

Otherwise, it could cripple your business growth.

Unless you have a mobile system, you would be limiting your reach and usability. You would also be constricting in your own incoming business opportunities.

2. Create AMP Web pages

Last year, one of the most significant announcements of Google was its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). You can start by creating your own AMP website and by validating it for AMP compliance.

An AMP enabled website can deliver a mobile customized version of your website for exclusive mobile users.

You can also start leveraging the popularity among your web audience with an AMP validated business website. Check out this search engine watch article for more detailed information.

3. Shift your Focus on Social media

In the previous year, we were content with motivational and engaging content on social media.

In 2017 the marketer’s attention will shift to user engagement and remarketing. The year 2017 will undoubtedly see advancement in this arena.

Your social marketing plans also need to include newbie activities such as snapchat and facebook live.

4. Bring down the call resolution Times

Various studies have repeatedly established that customer resolution quality and waiting times are important for any business to boom. This requires you to have a comprehensive system to manage customer queries.

A connected ticketing system lets you oversee and manage all the incoming queries. This will also help you systematically bring down the individual query resolution times.

This helps you manage the quality of issue tracking system. It also improves your individual call quality.

5. Focus on Customer experience or CX

If you ask us to name one positive development in 2016, we would definitely point at the shifting focus towards CX or customer experience.

The year has seen CX grow-up from an added customer benefit to become the mainstay of marketing and sales strategy.

The first principle of CX is that your customer should be able to enjoy your product/service. This goes well-beyond satisfaction or improving your customer service.

It also involves understanding your customer demographics and tailoring products to suit the taste of your customers.

6. Build long-lasting customer relationships

Finally, businesses have grown to recognize that customer retention is more important than customer acquisition.

This allows you to shift your focus to building long-lasting customer relationships.

It lets you nourish and manage your relationships to create positive ROI. Further, this will form the foundation to expand your client base.

Take away

We would rather be surprised if anyone gets too disappointed about passing of the year 2016. Many of us take it as the year of political catastrophe. The unpredictable market disruptions are just piling up on the agony.

In truth, most of these matters are outside our control or immediate impact.

In 2017, let’s focus on not allowing the market or politics to dictate our year-end mood. These resolutions will allow you to end the year in a significantly better shape than the one you began.