You cannot run a business without the customers, and the customers do not just fall from the trees. Being in a startup business means that you have to establish the team relations as well as customer relations; therefore, to achieve that how can one not use a sales stack? You can never leave sales stack in a startup as an option for later. Various startup founders have deduced that the most important asset that one can have while starting a business is the contacts. No matter what business you are in, what you are starting, success and losses will come and go, but the relation that you have with your contacts that can last for eternity. Whether your business is the kind that is focused on customers or the kind that is focused on products, both require a sales stack.

Every startup has the opportunity to benefit from a sales stack. This is not only for the purpose of making sales or for the support teams, but a sale stack can help in impacting everyone working on a team through the customer relationships. As to why sales stack is important and should never be left as optional, the reasons are given below.

1. To Restructure the Sales Process

A sales process is very important and can impact business in various manners. A system that is accessible for leading the contacts and following up with them, and to bring in the new clients, such a system or process is what makes or breaks a startup. When you streamline your sales process, you get the benefit of coming off as professionals and also help in reducing the instances where lead is dropped.

This is where sales stacks can play an important role. The question is how? The answer: by spending time on meeting new prospect and connections, a sales stack can help you in keeping up with the people you are in contact with each day. With a sales stack, you can keep track of the progress of the prospective leads and follow up on them regularly. A sales stack surely helps in smoothing out the path towards bringing the client onboard.

With a sales stack, a flawless sales process is developed and deployed.

Related: Better Robots, Better Sales: Revolutionizing CRM Software with the Power of AI

2. Luminous Customer Service

Your sales reps require a sales stack almost on a regular basis. With the CRM, the sales reps can access the previous interaction with the client that enables them to help the client efficiently without having to ask too many questions.

With a CRM, the sales reps can:

  • Get the related information about the contact and their account details;
  • The details about the purchases that a customer made in the past;
  • The details about different sales rep dealing with the client in the past;
  • The progress and status of the project being worked on for the client

With an amazing customer service, you can go miles. Being a startup business, it is easy to create good and efficient customer service with CRM as there aren’t too many clients. The impact you can make at this stage is important and will make you prosper in your business.

3. Automation of the Marketing Efforts

Usually, people are unaware of the association that a sale stack has with the marketing; as they believe it is only for sales. However, a good CRM will incorporate both these factors. With the sales stack, you can determine where you are getting the leads from and where you are headed to. Sales and marketing are the two prospects that should be closely linked to a startup business, and sales stack is the best way to achieve both.

Related: Networking and Capturing of New Leads with CRM 

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4. Customer Oriented

As a startup, the teams working should be involved with both sales and marketing. The teams should always be on the move for collaboration, and with CRM that is mobile enabled, can play a crucial role. The philosophy of the transparency and collaboration is what works best for a startup. With teams knowing where the prospect is coming from, what he is after, the knowledge about certain to all the members will lead to next to no information gap.

5. Saves Customer Data for the Future

With a sales stack or a CRM, you can think of the leads as a company’s property and not an individual’s property. Following this, it means that if a client goes towards a different opportunity, you will still have the contacts of that prospective client for future sales or referencing. In a startup, contacts are crucial, no matter if they are no longer with us they can prove to be beneficial in the long run.

More importantly, as a growing company, you might get new recruits, with a sales stack or CRM, the information of the clients or customers is immediately available to those new hires. Since everyone has to be up to date with the customers, CRM helps in achieving that.

To conclude, sales stack really is a non-optional thing for the startups. As a startup, you really can’t get too far without a sales stack or a CRM at your disposal. It is most important for a startup to acquire a sales stack as soon as possible and build up the business as you go.

A Customer Relation Management (CRM) and the Social Media Management (SMM) tools are a very important parts of the Business to Business (B2B) companies marketing tool. Nowadays, the B2B companies have started to discover that though CRM and SMM are important individually, they are extraterrestrial when integrated with one another.

The social-CRM integration provides with an extensive overview of the relationships between the customers and the organization through the social media. With this, you are able to provide the social content that leads towards the unwavering loyalty of a client. Moreover, with this integration, the sales teams are able to understand the customer from a touch point.

Not only that but by integrating the SMM with CRM, the two key databases will provide much better insights into the creation of the marketing strategies. With this knowledge, the complete ROI can be transformed exponentially. Why is that? Because, the larger the amount of data that you can acquire about your prospect, the more you will be able to raise it efficiently, and this leads in an increment in sales and revenues.

The insights that you get with the integration of Social Media Management with CRM are as following:

1. Feel about the Customers

The knowledge you can get about your customer, about the products they prefer, the marketing approaches you can use on them, and the way you can develop your relation with them is important. With the integration of SMM and CRM, you will be able to get the feel about the customer you are targeting. By attaining that knowledge, your sales and marketing teams will generate stronger and better responses from the customer when they know what the customer really wants.

The first thing that becomes prominent with this integration is the image of what the customer wants. Your marketing strategies can be adapted with a little brainstorming regarding the thoughts, opinions, and feeling of the customer.

2. Knowledge about the Customer Buying Habits

  • It is essential for a B2B business to understand what is it that makes the customer motivated to buy something. Each customer has his way of thinking and his personal quirks. The most important things that you will need to know about the customer are:
  • Purchasing speed of the customer
  • The complexity of the customer’s buying decisions
  • Are more than one people contacting about the product
  • With the knowledge of the customer behavior, the current customer relationships can be informed, and the buyer façades can be augmented to engage with the future leads. With the integration of SMM and CRM, you get to see the though process of the client in a prominent manner.

3. Customer Activism

If you monitor the social media, you will get to see how the customers are talking about your brand on a regular basis, on places like Facebook, Twitter, etc. If your product is satisfactory to the customers, they will probably link your blogs to their posts, and that is when you can approach them for case studies or testimonials. With the integration of SMM and CRM, keeping track of these interactions becomes transparent and easy to establish.

4. Sales Intelligence

The buying motivations of the customers are also important factors in order to understand the customers’ needs. The SMM integration with CRM can help in the interactions of the customers regarding the product since its creation till the end. With this, the thoughts and behavior of the client are revealed effectively. With the integrated system, a company will be able to easily identify members of the teams to whom specific projects should be assigned. 

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5. Lead Generation

The most important point in marketing is the Lead Generation. When the SMM and CRM are integrated with one another, an abundance of data lies at your feet. With this integration, you will get everything that is needed for generating leads effectively with the proper marketing channels. You will know how the customers interact with the social media, and you can also get the content and marketing collateral that is required to pursue certain leads.

Related: Networking and Capturing of New Leads with CRM

We can deduce from the discussion above that integrating Social Media Management with CRM will provide with richer data, better and extensive marketing and many more sales. It is pretty much basic, the knowledge you can get about the customers and the leads is what helps you in serving them and making conversions and generating a better ROI and revenues. To achieve this SMM and CRM integration is the best solution.

As Teamgate CRM is integrated with MailChimp, all the functionalities mentioned above lead to a better understanding of the insights you receive. We look for ease everywhere we go, and the integration with MailChimp leads to a better CRM environment. Getting to see how the customer reacts to the newsletters and campaigns, the integration of MailChimp with Teamgate CRM, helps you figuring out where you need to make the improvements in order to get the leads and sales. Through the personalization of the messages, and knowing which campaigns to target, you can come to an understanding of the customer’s sentiments and their liking to your services or products. Therefore, integration with any of the social media will help you in retaining your customers and getting new ones as well.

***

If you are not familiar with Teamgate CRM and MailChimp integration yet, try it for free to discover all the functionality!

CRM Technology Isn’t Just for Major Corporations. Customer relationships used to be handled with post-it notes and cork boards. Now, as with most things, there is a piece of technology that has improved the process. Customer Relationship Management software is a solution that small business can take advantage of.

Modern CRM tools combine basic sales tracking tools with task management systems that automate the process of following up on leads and closed sales. Advanced functions for your customers include facilitating satisfaction surveys, recommending future purchases, and delivering push order status information to customers’ online profiles. These functions are valuable and diverse.

Organizations with multiple sales and service channels can use these tools to unify the flow of data, even enabling self-service options for tracking and ordering. It sounds like a lot, and you may think that this type of technology is reserved for corporations with a lot of overhead and huge marketing budgets, but that’s not true. CRM technology provides many benefits for small business, and here are just a few of the ways your employees can use it to build relationships and increase sales.

Related: How Do Sales Work at Innovative Companies?

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CRM Software Frees Up Time for Internal Communication and Marketing

When you crunch the numbers, you’re sure to see that your employees are crunching out a certain number of tasks in a 40 hour work week. How much of that goes into tracking customers and establishing satisfaction levels and sales trends? If the number is higher than you would like, it’s time to see what relationship software can do for you and your team.

Most CRMs will contain modules that track customer feedback and establish trends in sales, opinions, and overall consumer satisfaction. By implementing the use of this software into your business structure, you can eliminate hours of manual data entry and research that your staff would otherwise have to spend. This creates more time for improving your marketing message and promotes better-informed communication among team members. Employees will make more of their time with the use of CRM.

CRM Productivity Tools and Add-Ons Help the Creative Process

How many different productivity tools are your employees using? Wouldn’t it be better if they could login to one system for all of their creative needs? Depending on the systems, CRM may solve this issue.

A well-constructed CRM platform supplies the kinds of tools your sales staff needs to be more productive – things like email templates, customized reports, and asset libraries that make selling easier. Your staff can take advantage of any and all productivity tools supplied by the platform or integrate the ones they currently use. With CRM, an all-in-one system can be used for nearly any set of sales technology needs.

Creative-process-teamgate

Related: Hack Your Business Conference Experience With These 16 Must-Have Apps

Using CRM to Forecast Employee Trends

Sales meetings are often a time for touching on the strengths and weaknesses of your team. You can actually eliminate that all together and spend your time brainstorming new strategies and sharing motivational information. Technology makes that possible.

A good CRM platform has a way of instantly supplying metrics you’ll use to measure employee performance and identify weakness that can be discussed in future sales meetings. This is the ability to forecast sales trends within your small business structure so that changes can be made to strategies before difficulties become hurdles.

Employees stay integrated with updated information and analytics, distributing responsibilities (reducing the dependency on one or two employees, which could cause problems in case of staff turnover). Staff will appreciate the ability to easily see into their own performance metrics and reach out for ideas in advance, rather than hear about issues from someone else once individual shortcomings have already caused problems.

Analytics Tools Provide Valuable Insight for Current Campaigns

Sales campaigns generally have time written in for structured analytics and re-strategizing. Real time data sharing and reports eliminate the need for scheduled analysis, opening up the time for strategy.  

Today’s CRM delivers the enhanced ability to forecast trends, measure performance, and work smarter to small business employees. Data available in the analytics board represent the most important benefits for productivity and revenue growth in companies of all sizes. Changes and updates are communicated in close to real time, meaning that decisions can be made in real time.

Related: Insights You Gain by Integrating Social Media Management with Your CRM

In Conclusion

Using CRM software reduces time spent writing email templates, answering common questions, analyzing data. Add-ons and productivity tools enhance the creative process, while employee trends and sales data can be analyzed. CRM isn’t just for big business. Sign up for a free trial today, and find out what you’ve been missing.

The engagement of a prospect is very important if a software business is set to earn considerable revenue. One of the compelling ways to attract a customer towards your services is to write a proposal that is convincing as well as straight forward. A sales proposal for a software business might be your way of redefining how much value your service holds and what it brings for the clients.

With a large number of competitors in the business software arena, it has become important than ever before to come up with a proposal that will necessarily intrigue the prospects. The notion of making a proposal compelling has been considered by all those running a software business.

There are some factors that makes a sales proposal stand out from all the others. Let’s discuss a few things to know more about the particularities related to such proposals;

Focus On the Prospects

If the client has spared some time to read your proposal, it suggests he/she already knows you have something worth a consideration. What you need to do now is to keep them on the same page by emphasizing more on the ways SaaS will reduce work related complications for them and how it will be fulfilling their business needs.

The prospects are not as much interested in a business’s achievements the way they are interested in getting their problems resolved. Focusing on the prospects doesn’t mean to ignore the main features of the software that a company sells. Add the features too, but keep the focus maintained upon the requirements of the prospect. Tell them how your software will cope with the obstacles and how it will support their existing setup?

Give Them Different Options

The consumer psychology suggests that the prospects show more interest in availing products/services when they know they have a set of options to choose from, and this is what a person should take care of while designing a sales proposal for a software business.

Be as much flexible as you can when it comes to options. These options can be created by offering different plans, packages and offers in your proposal. Such choices provide a convenience to prospects to choose an option that suits their needs the most. In short, prospects are more likely to turn into customers if they are given options. One way of doing this is to offer them a free use of your software for a limited time or maybe some freemium package.

Make Your Point with Comparisons

As discussed earlier, there are many competitors in the case of a software business.  To stand out, a company must portray value in a distinguishing way to look different and better than its competitors. These comparisons are a better approach to convince prospects instead of boasting about how good your company is.

The comparisons can be made by introducing such add-ons and features along with the software services that haven’t been introduced before by anyone else. The proposals are one of the suitable platforms to inform prospects what makes the software better than the competitors. For instance, you can tell them how your software works better than the hardware fulfilling same purposes?

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Customize the Perks

It is an understood fact that the use of software service will differ from person to person, since everyone doesn’t come in for the same reason. See what your software service provides to different kinds of clients, categorize your services accordingly and then make a proposal in a customized manner.

It is indeed a better approach to present the proposal to potential customers in a personalized way. It becomes easy to persuade the prospects for using your services this way. The selection of words should also be made carefully to achieve all your personalization goals.

In a nutshell, the quality of proposals that a business design greatly influences its win-rate as far as a sales process is concerned. If a proposal doesn’t have any spark, the prospect would more likely abstain from attaining SaaS. So being super circumspect is the key to designing best sales proposals for a software business.

Article Summary

A comprehensive and persuasive sales proposal can increase the sales and revenue of a software business in an amazing way. One must take care of different factors while designing a sales proposal to get maximum benefits out of it.

With the technological tools and advancements revolutionizing every field; the sales domain is no different. The management of sales pipelines and the performance management of sales are just a few examples, not to mention many other spots where the technological advancements are proving to be helpful for the sales management.

The developers keep coming up with the new versions of these technological gadgets as the years pass by, which makes it imperative for the sales people to foresee the future of sales management and plan their strategies accordingly. It is more important than ever before to keep track of these up-gradations and know how they can be fruitful to your sales plans.

The sales automation tools, CRM, and SaaS, have already transformed the sales trends, but the coming years bring a few more robust features to take this convenience to a new level. Let’s see how the digital tools are going to influence the sales process;

Artificial Intelligence

The IT professionals keep bringing the refined and more efficient versions of sales tools and these sales tools have grown so responsive now that you no longer have to indulge yourself in the monotonous process of contacting and emailing the prospects. These tools when used in combination with the databases provide the accurate likelihood of a prospect to buy a product/service or not.

Such sophisticated knowledge will enable the salesmen to provide high-quality services for the prospects who are more likely to buy their product/service. The artificial intelligence will facilitate the application of process like predictive analysis in which the information like demographic and behavioral data will be used to predict the probability of a potential customer to purchase a product or not in the future.

Related: Better Robots, Better Sales: Revolutionizing CRM Software with the Power of AI

Visual Thinking

The term “visual thinking for business” have been discussed by the entrepreneurs and revolutionists for a few years now because of the value and the innovation it depicts. Visual thinking is a way of learning merely by looking at the visuals. Visual thinking has been seriously considered by sales people while devising the sales management plans because the consumers are more attracted towards the visual interpretations than they are towards the plain text.

The leading lights of the sales world predict the incorporation of visual thinking strategies into the development of sales management plans. Creating an influential story by using visuals is not that easy for everyone, but once accomplished, it will prove to be an effective tool to attract more and more customers. In short, you’ll be able to impact your sales positively by using visualizations.teamgate-digital-sales-management-crm (1)

Related: Stuck in a Rut: Why Enterprise-to-Enterprise Business isn’t what it used to be

Smart Contracts

The smart contract facilitates two people to enter into an agreement by signing it cryptographically without the intervention of any third party. It uses bitcoin technology to commence and complete such agreements. The vendor and client can conveniently and independently interact with each other via a smart contract which is fully automated.

The hotshots in the world of business are anticipating an increase in the trend of smart contracts in the future. The smart contracts can help the companies track down all their interactions without dealing with any complicated systems. Although smart contracts are in their developing stages currently, soon they will be developed enough to transform the way organizations make contracts with its clients.

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In a nutshell, these are a few technologies that will be accompanying the sales trends in the future and reduce the dependency on people by introducing more automated systems. What the sales people need to do is to keep an eye on the progress of these technological tools and bring changes in their set-ups, accordingly. Adopting change is the best way to keep pace, after all.

Related: Insights You Gain by Integrating Social Media Management with Your CRM

Summary

The leading lights in the sales domain are foreseeing the increase in the use of tools utilizing like artificial intelligence, visual thinking strategies and smart contracts to bring positive changes in the way they deal with prospects.

We recognize that most of your contacts lay outside Teamgate CRM.

Yes, ideally you would like to think that your CRM would be the one place to exclusively store contacts, but in most cases, they remain somewhere else – and understandably so. In fact, besides sales automation, one of the primary reasons why customers acquire CRM solutions is to have a centralized platform for clients’ contacts. But what do you do when your leads and clients are scattered throughout social media, LinkedIn, Google, and Apple contact books?

Related: Introducing an easiest Mailchimp and Teamgate Integration

The answer is Integration

You can now import your Google Contacts into Teamgate CRM. Let’s find out how you can do it in a few simple steps:
First, decide the type of contacts you want to populate. You can apply the same procedures for Leads, Companies, People, etc.
In this example, we’ll be importing as Leads.

If you’ve imported contacts before, then you’re probably familiar with this page.
XLSX file extension is an Excel Microsoft Office Open XML Format Spreadsheet file.
CSV files can be used with any spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc, or Google Spreadsheets.
Let’s go ahead and pick Google Contacts.

import-Google-crm

Now when we get to this page, we will choose My Contacts. Of course, this page will vary depending on the user and how they organize their contacts. Google usually tends to automatically apply their own sorting, but “savvier” users are likely to have included their own tags.

Step4Animation

Our last step is to select the Teamgate field that will match the imported CSV (Google Contacts columns).

Since we’re uploading leads, we’ll choose “Name”. If we were importing companies, we would have chosen “Company”, but it is not the case in this example.

 

step5

Congrats!

laststep

Assuming you approved giving permission to Google to connect with Teamgate, the two apps should be fully integrated by now. You should be able to access all of your Google Contacts throughout Teamgate’s CRM.

Teamgate is also working on seamless Outlook, LinkedIn and other integrations. You can subscribe to our blog to stay in the know!
Don’t have a Teamgate account yet? Try it for free today!

In an interview with the NY Times, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin was asked the following question: What is unusual about your workplace?
His answer was very interesting:

“We got rid of phones in the office. Just on a whim, I thought that at every company we start, and this is the third one, we’re going to eliminate one piece of unnecessary technology. So this time it was phoned. We thought, why do you really need a phone? If you have a phone at your desk, it’s just sitting there and you’re kind of encouraging people to talk on it. Everyone’s got a cellphone”

Are traditional landline phones “unnecessary technology” as Phil Libin puts it? Possibly, and Phone Integration is the likely contender to replace them.

Let’s find out how it can trump office phone landlines:

Unified Communication

Untitled design

Consider the following exchange:

Q: Did you call Customer Smith to follow-up on them?

A: I don’t think so; I thought you were supposed to call them?

Q: It’s ok; I’ll give them another call.

 

It is a time-consuming situation that is equally frustrating for customers as it is for co-workers. To avoid this scenario, we resort to manual data entry which can be even more time-consuming.

More hindering is the fact that traditional office phone conversations are impossible to integrate with any of the modern solutions businesses use. Ideally, you want to build a customized ecosystem of apps that communicate with each other. But what you end up with, using office phones, is an important component (communication) that is completely disconnected from your app ecosystem.

Cloud Hosted Phone Integration is the solution to this problem. Unified communication refers to centralizing and integrating features like Emails, calls, CRMs, and other business tools.

For example:

  • Set a Teamgate CRM reminder to call a customer.
  • Receive the reminder by SMS or Email.
  • Make the call through Teamgate.
  • Logit and archive it.
  • Notify teammates of the call.
  • Access your history to track the number of calls.
  • Monitor their success.
  • Why not forward your voicemail recordings to your email?

These tasks – all of which rely on cloud-hosted apps—are not restricted by the presence of a physical office phone and a nearby notepad. This perk is especially attractive to field workers like traveling salespeople looking for ways to avoid workflow disruptions. Moreover, the availability of call data can foster transparency and open communication within any team.

Related: 4 Crucial Sales Trends You Cannot Afford to Ignore in 2016

Cost and Scalability

The costs of maintaining multiple landlines, in addition to the initial installation fees, can add up quickly. This is why small businesses that switch to cloud-hosted Phone integrations “reduce the cost of their local costs by up to 40%, and save up to 90% on international call”, according to tech.co.
Seamless scalability also favors Telephony Integration apps since many cloud-hosted plans offer per-minute pricing. This guarantees that resources will be allocated according to your everyday business needs. Under-used landlines and phone plans are a significant resource sink. With Telephony Integration, the bearer setup requires nothing more than a headset.

Analytics

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The popular quote “What can be measured can be improved” holds especially true for phone integration.
When combined with CRM, phone data is an invaluable tool for data lovers. Not only can you extract key information like duration of calls, a number of calls-per-customer, response rates, and conversion rates but you can also monitor how your sales team or customer service department, for example, is progressing towards meeting their pre-set goals.

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Not to forget that this acquired data provides a rich stream of inputs that can make your CRM forecasts and visualizations more accurate, thus making future decisions more informed.

Teamgate and Phone Integration

True Story
Yes, I just logged a call with Mark Zuckerburg.

 

Teamgate CRM supports integration with Nexmo, an API for phone services. We are also launching soon our very own Teamgate SmartDial, relying on the Twilio API.

Besides offering the features you can currently use with Nexmo integration like Browser Calls and SMS notifications, Teamgate SmartDial will include the following additions:

– Calls directly through Teamgate’s CRM.
– Missed calls will be listed and recorded on each customer’s profile.
– Unlimited storage for call records and history.
– Record call-specific notes on the customer’s profile.
– Share call notes with teammates.
– Track the number and effectiveness of calls made.

Stay tuned for Teamgate SmartDial Launch. In the meantime, why not take Teamgate for a test drive?

Try Teamgate today for free!

GIFT (1)

Being the customer of a business using CRM is a rewarding experience. Leads are well nurtured, the business knows its customers well, targeted marketing campaigns are customer-centric and each deal is closely followed to fruition through each step of the sales pipeline.

But CRM can also make an excellent gift for a business as well. If you’re in the market for a special gift, a CRM app might be the perfect choice.

Related: Black Friday: Choose Value Over Discounts

It Shows That You Care Deeply

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CRM emphasizes knowing customers well. Likewise, a great gift is about truly knowing your friends.

Running a business is an exciting but also exhausting endeavor. We all have a business-owning friend or relative who’s constantly buried in repetitive paperwork and boxes of old receipts. Gifting someone a CRM shows that you are keenly aware of the challenges that business-owners undertake.

By giving someone the ability to automate sales and marketing, you are effectively freeing up some of the time they usually spend on repetitive tasks to now spend with the people they care about.

It Reflects Entrepreneurship

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What makes personal gift personal is having a bit of both the giver and the gifted. Many friendships and relationships are based on shared interests—business and entrepreneurship in this case. If you gift a CRM, you are very likely to be the first contact they add which will cement your place as the first lead/customer/deal. Heartwarming isn’t it?

Surprise! (But professional)

pro teamgate (1)

The professional gift is a tricky business—no puns intended. Fountain pens, paperweights and stationery are old and very underwhelming ideas. On the other hand, A CRM gift is a very fresh and original take on the modern dilemma of the professional gift that marries utility, professionalism and care.

It’s Good PR

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When Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson was suspended after a “food catering” disagreement, Snickers sent him a box of free chocolate bars. The move garnered Snickers significant media attention and was widely praised by marketers and customers alike.

A similar move by your business will prove your commitment to true customer support: Your customers and those of your customers.

Become A Team Happiness Champion

reasons teamgate (1)

You can always gift a CRM to your own team and they will appreciate you for it, for all the previous reasons.

It shows that you have the initiative and innovation required to see a challenge and prescribe the right solution. Repetitive tasks can take a toll on coworkers, and a CRM is the right gift to dissipate the stress of repetition.

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Also, a CRM can be just the perfect gift to reflect your appreciation for your team’s professional ethics. What can be a better gift for a professional than an app that makes efficient workflows smoother and available for the rest of the office to appreciate?

At Teamgate, we care deeply about customers, relationships and productivity. Teamgate is intuitive and efficient enough to be the perfect CRM gift either for your team or your business-owning friends.

Don’t take our word for it! Try Teamgate for free before you buy the giftwrap.

If you are not a salesperson, it can be easy to look at Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and shrug it off as something exclusive to salespeople. Granted, CRM find its popularity in sales since it mimics business workflows and sales pipelines. More importantly, the current “Age of The Customer” requires any business and product to be customer-centric. In the salesperson’s world of leads and clients, CRM usage allows businesses to keep customers at the core of their processes.

But can non-salespeople use CRM as well?
In this article we will talk about:

  • Why CRM Works For Other Professionals
  • Who Else Should Use CRM
  • How to Customize Your CRM

Why CRM Works For Other Professionals

Truth is, almost every professional working in a field requiring frequent contact with customers can benefit from CRM. Take a look at the following graph of the most requested CRM features:

crm-buyerview-report-2013-5

(Graph and study by Softwareadvice)

Access to a centralized platform for contacts (emails, phone calls, meetings etc.), metrics and task management are features that make CRM a powerful toolkit for salespeople and other professionals alike.
Without a CRM, professionals have to resort to building their own ecosystem of apps. Although the choice of great app substitutes is limitless, having a dedicated platform where all the features are easily accessible can be a great boost to productivity –and revenue.

Who Else Should Use CRM

To misquote the bard:

“All the world’s a market, and all the men and women merely salespeople”.

Professionals have services to offer –or sell, they have contacts that require various degrees of engagement and they need data to make informed decisions. If we follow this reasoning, every professional is a salesperson as well.
Let’s explore how other professionals can use CRM:

Online Freelancers:

freelance

Freelancers have to manage their clients, do customer support, manage projects, and prevent old leads from turning cold while doing their own marketing. Without planning and organization, these tasks can be very challenging to manage even for the more seasoned freelancers.

A CRM is the ideal toolkit to manage the complex web that is the freelancer’s contacts. On one platform, you can schedule follow-up emails, visualize your pipeline and receive smart insights on the likelihood that a lead will convert based on previously gathered data.
A pipeline can help you see the steps through which your deals progress. For freelance writers for example, a deal will start with a pitch, then an initial contact, a quote, a negotiation then closure.
The more you populate your CRM with data, the more information you can gather about:

  • Which deals are easier to close?
  • Which clients are more profitable?
  • The pipeline step where deals are most likely to fall through.

Besides freelance writers, any independent contractor who regularly deals with a variety of customers can use a CRM. This includes:

Non-Profits & Fundraising

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For a non-profit to stay afloat financially, it has to manage a delicate network of established donors while trying to acquire new ones. Even with the advent of online crowdfunding efforts, fundraising is a field where high-touch engagement with donors is conventional if not required.
With contact management and segmentation strategies, non-profits can afford to easily give their owners the attention they deserve. In addition, the data gathered thanks to frequent CRM use can highlight the particular donor/prospect personas most likely to be generous.
Lastly, task and relationship management through scheduled and well-recorded contacts allow for better-targeted marketing campaigns and as a result, happy email-reading customers.

Related: Customer Success Strategies for Non-SaaS Businesses

Musicians and Promoters

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For musicians who do not feature on the Billboard Top40, a great deal of management is needed to land a show. Musicians and promoters have to constantly look for venues (leads), manage their relationships with old customers (agents, music venues, labels, etc.), and send Demos.
Although creatives are typically portrayed as scattered individuals with a distaste for organization, their success will still depend on meticulous planning.

A CRM can help:

  • Manage client contacts for venues, promoters, agents, labels, etc.
  • Track previous and ongoing Deals (a deal can be a show, a gig, or a record contract)
  • Compare Deals based on profitability, geographic location, and other customized variables.

How to customize your CRM

The most important trick to making CRM a versatile tool for any profession is customization. Although the sales jargon can be applicable to many other professions, it’s best to replace it with something you’re more familiar with. Let’s find out how!

Pipeline

freelancepipeline
The sales pipeline consists of all the steps each deal goes through prior to closure. The default Sales Pipeline provided by Teamgate has the following stages:

  • Incoming
  • Contacted
  • Quote
  • Evaluating
  • Closure

You aren’t bound to keep the pipeline as it is. This is my attempt at creating a Freelance Writer Pipeline:

  • You can create your own pipeline by navigating through:
  • Click on your Profile then Settings
  • Pick Deals and Deals settings on the left tab.
  • Then Add New Process
  • Add a new stage for every stage of your ideal pipeline.

If you can’t think of a clearly defined and recognizable stage, it is perfectly fine to keep the original Sales Pipeline and keep tweaking it as you go.

Tags

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Our segmentation article talks extensively about how clear and purposeful tagging enriches Customer Relationship Management systems. Make sure to check it out for more information about good segmentation habits.
The above example is my attempt at segmentation as a Freelance writer.

Integration

Allowing your CRM to communicate with your apps of the trade is one of the best ways to customize it to your own liking. Although this can often require some API knowledge or CRM support, we thankfully now have options like Zapier which makes integration a breeze for non-developers.

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Experimenting

To have a CRM tailored for you and your profession, there’s no substitute for practice. Tweaking around your pipeline and implementing different tag subgroups will allow you to learn more about the CRM and your own business practices.

Take Teamgate for a Free Trial today to see if it’s the best fit for your job.
Back to you! Do you use CRM for non-sales-related tasks? How do you use it? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Related: Black Friday: Choose Value Over Discounts

As a corporate or small business utilizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, you understand the importance of organizing, recording, and reviewing customer data. You know that the more sales data you keep track of, the higher your company’s potential for success. The Sales Pipeline is one of the most valuable tools available for your business. Advanced tracking options give you the opportunity to optimize your productivity by conveniently recording your sales process each step of the way.

Track Deals with Individuals and Companies

When noting updates in your CRM platform, you have the option to track deals with both individual buyers and B2B customers. If necessary, you can connect individuals with the companies they work with, keeping all of your data interconnected. By being able to track your progress with both independent persons and businesses, you can keep all of your information in one place, rather than having to maintain multiple platforms. Keep it simple and use one platform that meets all of your company’s needs.

In the same note, tracking will provide you with excellent insights. You can anticipate potential sales by looking at conversions from past deals. The Sales Pipeline showcases and stores information in a way that makes the entire sales process more convenient.  

Know What Stage You’re at In the Sales Pipeline

Whether you’re prospecting, negotiating, or closing the sale, recording everything in your Sales Pipeline lets you know how far along you are in the sales pipeline. Each time you make contact with a prospect, recording your productivity lets your organization avoid contacting a customer with irrelevant communications about your deal . If the sale’s been closed, you don’t want to accidentally reach out to someone with a quote; that’s a surefire way to instantly lose credibility with customers. Knowing what stage you’re at helps build trusting relationships.

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Share the Workspace with Team Members

You’re not isolated to handling the load of your deals and customers alone. Your teammates play an important role in business relationships, and your CRM tools should reflect that. Sharing a single workspace with your entire team lets everyone see the progress of a deal, and everyone’s work is united in one place. You and your teammates can use designated segments and hashtags to easily access split data from various categories. Work together in one place to create a family-like team that spreads love to your customers.

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

The most user-friendly CRM on the market. 14-day free trial.

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Painless setup, no credit card required

Keep Your Sales Notes Simple and Organized

A helpful CRM plan makes things easier. Too much irrelevant and busy information is nothing but an obstacle. By utilizing software designed specifically for managing your customer relationships, you are more likely to keep it simple, letting the technology to all the hard work for you. A Sales Pipeline is one way to ensure convenience and increased productivity.

Anyone using a Sales Pipeline in their sales process can let you know how it’s benefited them in the long run. As with all aspects of sales, you will want to take the time out to evaluate your efforts and make personalized tweaks to those that aren’t working to their full potential. It might be the right time to take some of this information and start your next CRM strategy evaluation.

The CRM market is saturated with a variety of apps and suits promising to satisfy every business’s needs. However, the ensuing fierce competition between apps to offer more expansive solutions has obscured the line between CRMs and ERPS.

Although All-In-One solutions might, at first, seem like they would be the ideal choice, specialized CRMs or custom-built CRM ecosystems can provide an incredible competitive advantage for small and big businesses alike.

Focus on Relationships

It makes sense for a company to inquire on whether a particular CRM also automates processes like accounting, billing and inventory management.  It is important however to remember the feature key to any CRM’s success: the R.

Core to any CRM is the ability to manage relationships with leads of all kind. Consequently, a CRM app dedicated to the sales pipeline is bound to be better at valuing good customer relationships.

This also means that the dedicated CRM is more likely than All-in-One suits to research and develop features unique to the customer relationship aspect. A classic development mistake for apps is spreading out resources across multiple features incompatible with CRM’s principal purpose: Leads conversion and customer relationships.

Flexibility

A good CRM should seamlessly slot in with already existing workflows.  This is why All-in-One CRMs target the same standardized workflows that big enterprises adopt. Small and medium sized businesses, on the other hand, rely on flexible workflows which makes the rigidity of All-In-One CRM solutions an obstacle.

Moreover, the wide variety of apps available for businesses allows you to build your own ecosystem centered on the dedicated CRM app of your choice. You can tailor this ecosystem to mimic your current business workflows and keep adjusting it according to future needs.

Instead of the ready-made features that All-in-One suits offer like billing, accounting and project management, you get to decide which particular app solution matches your resources and fits best with your workflow.

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Apps like Zapier allow a number of CRMs to easily integrate with other apps and services without any technical knowledge of their APIs. Flexibility in terms of integration can be an incredibly cost-effective and efficient feature due to the fact that it creates a CRM ecosystems consisting of apps your employees are already familiar with.

Related: Did Santa Leave a CRM app?

Scalability

When keeping the scalability of your business in mind, it’s important to make sure that business processes will stay centered around the customer.  Since growth is driven by increasing customers and customer demand, it makes perfect sense to have a platform dedicated to ensuring smooth scalability.

With increasing customers comes the need for better leads management, sales forecasting tools and other analytics native to your CRM platform of choice. Although most all-in-one solutions also offer such tools, it can hard to dedicate sufficient attention to them when they’re also cluttered with non-CRM related features.

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

The most user-friendly CRM on the market. 14-day free trial.

Start Free Trial

Painless setup, no credit card required

Price

The “all” in All-in-One CRM solutions comes with a hefty price. For CRM suits, subscription fees take into account all the features and services made available at the business’s disposal regardless of whether they are needed or not. If you are only in the market for a CRM solution only, investing on features you do not required yet is a waste of resources. As previously mentioned, dedicated CRMs are flexible enough to accommodate more functionalities when the need for them arises.

Focus

Low adoption rates are a constant concern for any business seeking to make a CRM app part of its workflows. In simpler terms, businesses need to make sure that whatever CRM app they choose will become an elemental part of their sales team routines. Often, purchased CRMs app go either under-used or have some of their features ignored.

Low adoption is a much bigger risk with All-in-One solutions when their features fall outside sale’s scope. In addition, these solutions also require more extensive and frequent training for the staff members using them, otherwise, unfamiliarity with the features often results in under-use.

On the other hand, dedicated CRMs make low adoption less of a concern thanks to the ease with which they fit in most businesses workflows intuitively. Moreover, training your staff to use them is easier and cheaper.

The ease of integration, previously discussed, of dedicated CRMs with other solutions that staff members are familiar with guarantees no interruptions in your business workflows to deal with the logistics of adopting a CRM app.

At Teamgate, we remain committed to offering a CRM app dedicated to the sales pipeline and to customer relationships. Features such as Sales Funnel and Sales Forecasting reflect our commitment to our app’s purpose: Customer relationship.

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Related: Old vs. New CRM

The Internet has a plethora of apps promising better productivity and organization. However, this can often result in information overload. It can even be counter-productive now to manage each online platform you’re invested in while trying to dedicate enough time to keep up with recent app releases and new features. So why should you even bother to learn about Zapier?

Well, give us a second.

What is Zapier?

To put it simply, Zapier is an online automation tool that lets you connect apps to each other without any technical knowledge of their API’s. Currently, Zapier boasts of more than 500 applications including the likes of Google Contacts, Slack, Asana, Mailchimp, Evernote, Teamgate and many more.

In some ways, Zapier is very similar to IFTTT (If This Then That), but where Zapier excels is at providing automation Zaps (The action linking two separate app events) well suited to streamlining business workflows.

Here’s the exciting part: You can create your own Zap recipes!

For example, if you happen to have a crowded inbox in which important emails get easily buried, a Gmail to Google Calendar Zap allows you to determine which senders get automatically added to your Google Calendar without having to manually do it yourself.

Why use Zapier?

Zapier’s utility is particularly pronounced in the Zaps that bridge communication between apps which usually do not interact with each other. By doing so, it proves an incredibly efficient and invaluable tool for individuals and businesses trying to make the best out of available tools without investing too much time into handling repetitive tasks.

Do you have a CRM that keeps you organised?

The most user-friendly CRM on the market. 14-day free trial.

Start Free Trial

Painless setup, no credit card required

Furthermore, Zapier allows you to centralize information in one platform. If you rely heavily on Google solutions (Google Contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar etc…), for example, the collection of integration recipes made available on Zapier will redirect all relevant information from other apps to the Google solutions platform.

How to Use Zapier with Teamgate

Have a cool idea to use the Teamgate API for but don’t have the programming skills? No worries, Zapier is here for the rescue! With easy to set up Zaps, programming will no longer be an impediment to using different API’s  in order to streamline your business workflows. Here are few ideas for Teamgate and Zapier integrations you can start with:

zapier ikonos

  • FullContact + Teamgate: Business Cards To Leads
  • FullContact will scan business cards, automatically extract all the information from them then send add them to Teamgate as New Contacts.
  • Gmail + Teamgate: Emails To Teamgate Deals
  • You can label any important emails in additional to ones from potential leads to let Zapier automatically add them to Teamgate either as contact leads or deals in the making.
  • Google Contacts + Teamgate: Add contacts or company information to Teamgate
  • You do not have to manually go through all of your Google Contacts to make sure all important leads (Company and Clients) are monitored through your Teamgate account. This recipe will also save you the hassle of regularly checking newly added Google Contacts and
  • Teamgate + MailChimp: Add Teamgate Contact To Mailchimp’s list.
  • With this recipe, each contact added to your Teamgate account will be automatically added to your list of subscribers on Mailchimp. This Zap is particularly powerful when fused with integrations such as FullContact+Teamgate, which can allow you to easily turn a business card lead into an email subscriber in no time.
  • Wufoo/JotForm + Teamgate:
  • Wuffo and JotForm are common tools used to deploy quick forms and gather information. These Zaps allow every form filled to be directly converted into Teamgate contacts for individual leads and companies.

As is the case for cuisine, the possibilities are truly endless when it comes to Zapier recipe ideas. More importantly, itcontinues to add more apps which unlock complex networks of communication between custom Zaps you create for your business.

Which Zapier apps do you use? Both Teamgate and Zapier offer free trials and so we would love to hear your recipes and any interesting Zap ideas for Teamgate integration.

Get cooking in the comments section below!