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.

What We Learned About Shifting Success In B2C Industry To B2B Industry?

Businesses consider the B2B and B2C to be completely non-related and isolated marketplaces. Business people who had success in making the switch are the misnomers of our generation.

This will lead to a few pressing questions!

Can we consider the B2B and B2C to be entirely two different markets? Are they both governed by entirely different marketing tactics? Does B2B and B2C customers have entirely different mindsets? Will the success in B2B necessarily equip you to succeed in the B2C and vice versa?

Arguably, having the right answers to these questions would finally determine whether you succeed or jeopardize your business’s future. The businesses that have been successful have zeroed-in on the right answer. On the other side, some businesses end-up with inevitable negative balance sheets due to their mistakes in evaluating.

Ok, now please indulge as we go through some humblebrag.

We believe ourselves to be in a unique position to bring some perspective into answering this question.

But, how does this exactly work?

We have tasted success in both B2B and B2C marketplaces.

Our SaaS product ’Kapture CRM’ has opened the gates to the B2B landscape. The platform enables businesses to smartly manage their sales and lead management. Our 200+ strong client list includes Big Basket, Quikr, Manipal Hospitals etc.

Our Sister company, Adjetter Media Network excels in managing social accounts and websites to achieve their search and social visibility goals. We have found success in diverse industry verticals through our SEO, SMO efforts. This helps you improve the client’s bottom line in different industry verticals.

In answering these questions, we will not try to deliver a single knock-out answer. But, we will try to enable you to figure that answer by yourself in your individual circumstances. This will help you nourish or organize your business in achieving its highest growth rates.

Differences in Crafting B2B and B2C Marketing Strategy

The B2B and B2C industries are governed by entirely separate dynamics of client communication and closures. This requires you to craft messages that are engaging to those particular customer sections.

B2B market place has a much smaller prospect pool that needs you to close much bigger deals.

At present, both the B2B and B2C Industry requires you to stimulate 1-to-1 customer interactions.

This requires you to concisely plan for customer targeting.

Let us enumerate the most important point of differences.

1. In the B2B marketplace, you have a largely fixed pool of customers whom you are looking to engage and convert. The B2C landscape involves you to continuously appeal to a constantly moving stream of customers.

2. The B2C marketing is focussed on creating recognition for the particular business. It can include creative advertising. The B2B marketing revolves around crafting positive logical arguments.

3. Usually B2B leads are much harder to generate than B2C leads. The B2B online lead generation has a much higher CPL or cost per Lead acquisition.

4. B2B deals are more lucrative and carry a higher profit margin. The B2C deals are comparatively less competitive and come with a lesser profit margin.

With this in mind, B2B marketers require a sales funnel to channel the acquired prospects towards long-term engagement and final conversion. This enables the acquired prospects to be streamlined to a single channel of conversion.

The B2C industry is focussed on converting the immediate inquiries.

With this in mind, you can repeat a successful campaign for the same audience demographics. This allows you to replicate a successful campaign multiple times.

Manage Different Marketing tactics to attract different Audience

It’s very important to understand that you have different audience demographics on different platforms. Even the same audience demographics act differently in separate social searches.

For example, the users will be looking at entirely different messages on search and social streams. This allows you to streamline and manage attention in the different streams.

This allows the businesses to streamline attention in different streams.

Conclusion:-

It’s true that B2B and B2C marketplaces require entirely two different approaches. But both of them work on the same marketing and sales principles.

How to increase your Team productivity with CRM software?

Often, any effort to increase the team productivity is met with dubious consent.

Having to monitor and increase productivity is much dreaded activity on both sides of the table. Both the employees and management have grown to think that it may undermine their working relationship.

The management’s take is that a stringent monitoring process could cause a potential leak of employee trust. From the employee perspective, it’s trying to force ‘management policing’ into their daily life.

Even as both these sides may carry their own justification and arguments, the facts and figures inarguably point towards the need for an integrated monitoring system. This helps you cover the productivity loopholes and enable your employees to win-over their impulses.

In this situation, both parties require a minimally intrusive system that can understand and evaluate all the ongoing activities. It also helps you understand the ingrained customer issues.

The CRM-based work monitoring system lets you evaluate and monitor all the ingrained work processes. As an embed information management platform, it also empowers your team to share data concerning your multiple ongoing processes.

This blog helps you understand the associated challenges with regards to improving the overall team work output. We will also discuss potential ways to streamline your efforts in a highly productive way.

Enable Remote Monitoring with Enterprise Mobility

In the recent years, remote work has become a much admired buzzword. Even the global corporations such as Philips and Amazon are now allowing their employees to workremotely.

This presents a number of actual problems such as duration of actual work hours, availability during the work hours, maintenance of quality assurance etc.

In this situation, you can connect your entire team using integrated enterprise mobility. This allows you to send, receive and track tasks on a single dashboard.

It also provides a ticket management dashboard that requires the employees to continuously monitor and record their presence.

Establish and monitor the right Productivity Metrics

All successful managers know that the secret of improving productivity is to monitor the right metrics. Unfortunately, most organizations are measuring the wrong metrics.

Like say, hours spent in office, number of entries created or follow-up to wrong leads etc. This will potentially lead to an increased confusionin all future activities.

These metrics may not necessarily reflect the actual organizational or individual performances. It’s also possible that an employee may try to hack activities to present an inflatedmetrics. But this will not improve their actual productivity.

The CRM platform can be an effective form to evaluate your total employee productivity. It also helps you comprehensively evaluate and monitor every employee action.

For example, the number of calls attended could be a very misleading metric to a service team. Instead you can focus on measuring and following better metrics that will reflect your actual organizational performances.

Keep Sales Team accountable through Multiple Metrics

If you keep aside few new-age digital companies, the sales teams are still the focus of attention in most organizations. Most sales teams are overworked and are kept under constant stress.

While the deal closures may be the ultimate success metric, you cannot directly understand and improve your sales outcome with the CRM software. You actually need more effective pre-sales metric that will enable you to form more deliberate insights.

You can record and evaluate ingrained performance metrics such as time of each visit, number of visits, requisite wait time or idle time for each employee etc.

Achieve Organizational workflow improvements

Almost all business reaches a point where theirproductivity has got plateaued for months. In this situation, having to push your employees may simply lead to employee burnout and attrition.

In this situation, you may need to go beyond employee output and look at organizational changes that can actually cascade your productivitymultiple times.

Let me deliberate this phenomenon.

A simplified workflow improvement process is given below.

It involves viewing the ongoing process, gaining insights, planning and carrying-out the execution and evaluating the output.

An integrated CRM system lets you create and follow a completed workflow. This allows you to create iterations and modifications that will consequently improve your workflow.

Create Team-wide Performance Metrics

An automated CRM platform lets you create an unbiased performance evaluation for your entire team. This will enable managers to overcome their personal biases and prejudices. It will also act to removeinsignificant metrics from the performance evaluation reports.

Needless to say, this will lead to overall performance improvements across your multiple teams.

Conclusion:-

Every organization will eventually face a situation where their productivity takes nose-dive or revenue growth gets plateaued even under renewed efforts.

Unless handled with care, this would develop into a toxic misunderstanding between employees and management.

This requires you to have a system that could empower and improve your total employee productivity.

Four Aspects Of Mobile CRM That Will Positively Impact Your Business Productivity

If you are still in two minds about turning your business into mobile-centric model, let us present you the facts that will stare you right in the eyes.

Approximately, 2.8 billion people reached out and connected through their mobile devices in the last year alone. With the expectation of incremental growth in near future, mobile customer relationships is going to take a more pivotal place for businesses.

From the perspective of business, this dynamics could act as a double edged sword – you can either leverage your existing process to improve your business or fall prey to the comparatively better adapted competitors.

A business-integrated technology such as mobile CRM allows you to play a more central role in establishing a successful business ecosystem. This will help you create much closer relationships with your customers.

In this blog, we will examine the different aspects of Mobile CRM that could help you incrementally improve your business solutions. We will also discuss about specific ways that mobile CRM could modify your current business dynamics.

1. Creating a Mobile-centric Supply Chain and Value Distribution

Even in a traditional business model, the value of a supply chain is determined by the availability of accurate and up-to-date information. The mobile-centric supply chain can establish smooth sharing of information across team hierarchies.

A mobile-enabled supply chain will be more intelligent at handling the stock status and demand of goods across different communication touch points. It will also allow an easy overview of stock availability across each touch point.

In turn, this will help get the stocks easily distributed and managed across your entire stock distribution chain. Further, you can gain a higher value for your distribution network that provides greater penetration and visibility across your market.

2. Creating an inbuilt information feedback-Loop

Most of the business delays are caused due to delays in availing and acquiring information. This usually in-turn depends on the availability of both parties.

Secondly, the conformation of the availed information is also a source of further confusion and delays.

The mobile CRM forms a dedicated communication link between businesses and clients. As all information is available on a single platform, it’s also easy to correct errors and point out inconsistencies in the recorded data.

For example, if the manager considers a high value client, he can take it up for immediate review and processing.

This could potentially be an effective way to manually choose and prioritize between different clients.

It can make mobile CRM into a quick enabler to even slow moving business activities that may limit your organizational speed.

3. Achieving Greater productivity with better Team Control

The term productivity is usually associated with getting more work done in lesser time. Still better, it can also mean more revenue generating activity within a given time limit.

Wait, let us explain.

Usually, most of the productivity boosting protocols involve segmenting and giving independent control to each team manager. In-turn, these teams will be responsible for a higher amount of work output. Even if this model could easily improve work output per employee, the effect of collective organizational productivity is much dubious.

It will also mean that your productivity is no-longer constricted to pipeline effect in your work flow.

The mobile CRM platform will be a much more useful form of productivity boost that enables your entire organization.

The enterprise mobility system will enable each employee to communicate with the consented departments or teams. This will minimize the protocol to obtain tighter integration between different teams and individuals.

This will give constant feedback of your employee performance in your integrated dashboard.

In this way, you can control the trade-off between segmentation and team work towards deriving greater team work or productivity.

4. Establish a Definite Process flow and checklist in your core activities

In the present business ecosystem, forcing employees to work additional hours is an easy way to lose their core efficiency. Otherwise, this may end-up with pondering the core-activities on each turn. A mobile CRM helps you establish a definite process flow to manage your business activities.

A mobile CRM will help you establish a definite checklist to improve your business flow. This will also help you establish strategically streamlined decision making process.

Conclusion:-

The current market dynamics dictate a closely connected seller-buyer ecosystem. This means that mobile CRM app could be your trump card to achieve greater business productivity.

The mobile CRM enables you to stay-connected with your team and customers. This will also help you accelerate your flow of business decisions.

In-turn, this will help you understand and leverage your normal daily decision making processes. This will also give an on-the-pulse understanding of business mechanisms and possible hurdles.