A CRM Solution That Provides More Efficiency

Customers are more empowered today than they’ve ever been. However, exactly how empowered are your sales reps, the ones who have the most interaction with your target audience?

The landscape has changed for everyone and consumers are doing their research online. Nearly 60 percent of the buying process is completed by the time the consumer reaches out to the company, which means your sales team needs to alter their thinking when it comes to how they perform their daily tasks.

With customers becoming more efficient researchers, sales teams must become more customer-centric. You have to go to them if you want to be of any influence in making a sale. You have to learn more about them if you’re going to achieve this, and you should offer any information you gain to your company so people in other departments can better serve the target market. This requires something most sales teams aren’t equipped with – a mobile CRM solution that makes sales reporting easy.

Consumers are actually making it easy for us to learn about their habits today. Hundreds of millions of people are constantly on their social media channels, which provides valuable insights to people who know what to watch for. You can dig deep into website analytics and retrieve information about purchase histories. Your sales team needs to be paying attention to this data, but they also need to be able to send data back to the company and automatically populate the relevant areas of the CRM solution.

Your sales reps need the mobile tools that allow them to more easily be part of the CRM solution. Tablets and smartphones are in the pocket or the briefcase of just about every sales rep in the field today. They need a CRM app that allows them to take advantage of their mobile technology.

When paired with the right software, your sales team can bring all the data necessary to the table, populate the company CRM system, and give the entire company information from which they can make fact-based decisions regarding future strategies. Furthermore, the right solution will bring a level of accountability to your sales department.

The key to the success of a CRM implementation is making sure your sales department is equipped with the mobile reporting tools they need to provide consistent information back to the company, but it won’t work unless the tools are easy to use.

Front Row Solutions has built a sales app that gives reps the ability to send back full reports in less than a minute. After every sales call, reps go through a list of questions in an easy-to-use interface that they will be able to easily fill out. Contact us today or take a look at our CRM solution descriptions on our website to get more information about how we can help your company.

There is a lot of talk about “big data” for a reason: it leads to profits. The relationship between customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and big data is growing stronger as companies realize the power of big data.

A CRM solution has traditionally been used to manage your company’s relationship with your current customers and improve the relationship with prospective customers. Synchronizing sales, marketing, and customer service, the CRM solution has automated features that make doing business easier. Unfortunately, companies, including some of the largest in the world, are failing to utilize their CRM to get the most out of big data. In fact, Gartner has predicted that through 2015, up to 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies won’t use big data to improve their standing. Executives say the failure is due to sheer size and variety of the accumulated data.

In some cases, the problem is incorrect, duplicated or dark data. It is simply too difficult to wade through all of it and effectively organize it. This has an obvious effect on how a company does business, but it has a greater impact on how the customer is served.

Companies that get it right are using their CRM as a repository for storing records in a way that makes sense, which means it can be queried later and used to make fact-based decisions. A CRM solution can also be used to help track orders and schedule follow-ups. This leads to better customer service, customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Apparently, there are more companies getting it wrong than getting it right.

According to a survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, satisfaction levels across all major industries has fallen in the third quarter of this year by more than any time in the two decades the index has been around. This is not due to CRM failing users; it’s more about companies not utilizing their CRM for anything more than a digital rolodex.

Other companies are failing because they aren’t gathering data from the right people. For instance, sales reps interact with customers on a daily basis. But we know from experience that sales reps are among the worst at filing reports. All the information they have on their clients is kept between the two of them instead of coming into the CRM system where everyone in the company can see it.

One way to get your sales reps sending you sales reports is to equip them with a mobile app that makes the reporting process quick and easy. That’s the only real hurdle – time and effort. Most CRM solutions aren’t sales-friendly because the reporting tools are too complex. When the sales reps report their interactions, sales managers will have insight into how they work, what they do right and what they could use some improvement on.

Front Row Solutions has created an app that gets sales reps in the reporting game. When a report only takes a minute to send, all of your reps will start a regular reporting cycle that will make your big data mining a success story. Contact us today for more information.

A CRM Solution That Shows a Return on Investment.

In 2004, an estimated 50 percent of the work forces equipped with customer relationship management solutions (CRM) were actually using it. Times have changed; more than 80 percent of CRM-equipped workers are now using the tools in their CRM.

The Rise of Mobility
Part of the drive to more usable CRM products is the rise of mobile devices in the workplace. The salesforce was among the first to use mobile phones to increase their productivity. Unfortunately, CRM vendors weren’t quick to offer a mobile CRM solution for the most mobile portion of the enterprise.

Today, organizations are looking at CRM to help them improve the productivity in nearly every aspect of the business. They want to see a more efficient workflow that helps them penetrate deeper into their target market. For too many years, the salesforce has been neglected when it comes to offering them effective CRM tools that can help achieve the goals above. Fortunately, more vendors are starting to see that their CRM solution development should include tools for the salesforce.

Knowing What You Need
Before you can establish that you’ll see a good return on your investment in mobile applications, you need to be able to answer questions regarding who your target audience is, how you reach out to them and what tools you use to make connections. Furthermore, how many resources are you using to make these connections? In the case of most sales reps, they’re not using reporting tools in the company’s CRM system because it’s not mobile, it’s complex and too time consuming.

Digging Deep Into Data
The salesforce is a valuable source of information because they have the best access to clients. Much of the information they learn in their interactions is not conveyed to other departments that could use the information to make better connections in future offerings. However, if the sales rep has a CRM solution that allows them to make quick and easy reports back to the office, there will be plenty of data for marketing and other departments to use in creating better campaigns that expand the target market and better connect with them.

Improving Salesforce Production
The other side effect of bringing in an effective mobile CRM solution to the sales rep is that sales managers will have information they can use for their coaching sessions. Without this information, managers have no idea how to get their reps to work toward more efficient work processes.

Front Row Solution’s Advantage
We know what sales reps need because Front Row Solution was built by former sales reps. As a leader in the mobile CRM solution space, we are providing the app that sales professionals need to not only improve their production, but also the bottom line of entire organizations.

CRM Integration: Four Ways to Make Your CRM Work for You

If you’re part of an organization that cares about its viability going forward, you’re likely to have had conversations about how to develop better relationships with your customer base and establish new relationships with future customers.

There is also a good chance that you’ve discussed how technology can help you meet your goals, which is what customer relationship management (CRM) vendors are offering in their solutions. CRM integration can work for you, but only if you use it effectively.

What is CRM integration? Essentially, CRM integration involves building up your website to work seamlessly with your CRM solution. Integration often includes a good amount of automation that keeps your customer lead data flowing effortlessly so you can make better connections. Let’s review some aspects of CRM integration.

·         Why Do I Need to Integrate?
Data has value. It’s the data that gives you insights that can positively influence your decisions made for your business. When the data is kept in a silo that never gets any sort of evaluation, it’s essentially useless. CRM helps you unlock the power behind your data by presenting it in a usable form. You can customize the interface to make the data speak directly to you.

·         How Can I Get Started with Integration?
Many organizations already have an expensive and robust CRM solution at their disposal, they just haven’t figured out how to make it part of their workflow or help manage their workflow. If you haven’t yet implemented a CRM solution, you’ll need to map out what you expect your system to do for you and then start shopping based on those needs. CRM integration can be a technical process and involves an IT team that has a thorough understanding in seamless integration techniques. You can also get assistance from your vendor.

·         What Benefits Will I Notice?
A seamlessly integrated CRM solution will produce an improved customer satisfaction rating, which leads to increased profitability. When you have unlocked the secrets hidden in the data, you’re better able to please your customers, which always equates to better profit margins. You’re also going to see better productivity on the part of your employees, especially marketing staffers and sales reps. For instance, sales reps who have integrated use of the CRM are better able to keep track of follow-ups and access notes about clients before they meet for a sales call.

·         Can I Include a Mobile CRM Solution?
You can include a mobile solution for your salesforce and others in your organization. This is something that was neglected in CRM designs previously, but has emerged recently as sales teams were missing out on the power of the CRM solution. With a mobile app, sales reps can send sales reports back to the office where it will populate the database with excellent, insightful and useful information that will move the company forward.

Front Row Solutions is committed to CRM integration that assists the sales team in meeting their goals. Contact us today and see how our enhanced CRM tools can boost your sales quotas.

Five Ways to Create a Culture of Sales Accountability

When establishing sales accountability in the workplace, it’s often the sales manager that is tasked with leading the charge. Sales managers need reliable data, which can be obtained through CRM solutions that give them insights into the performance of their sales staff. Without the data, there can be no accountability. Below is a list of six tips offered up by sales managers who have established a culture of sales accountability.

1. Be the Boss
If you’ve got sales managers who want to be buddies with their salesforce, you’ve got the wrong people for the job. Creating a culture of sales accountability is nearly impossible with sales managers who want to be one of the guys and/or gals. In order to stay in the ranks as one of the gang, sales managers will turn a blind eye to poor performance. They need to be the boss and jump on coaching opportunities as they present themselves.

2. Set the Bar High
Don’t settle for mediocrity. Raise the expectations up to a level that will have your salesforce striving to be at the top of their game. Sales managers should not defend their team’s every action; they should look for reasons why a sales rep isn’t performing and solve the issue with coaching.

3.  Be the Interrogator
One thing a sales manager should never be short on is questions. Eventually, the sales rep will begin to discover the answers for themselves. It’s all part of a well-oiled communications machine that relies on a positive give and take. Again, with the right CRM solution at the disposal of the sales reps and the sales manager, there will be more opportunities to come up with answers to any question.

4.  Be Responsible
How can the sales staff buy in to the culture of accountability if the sales managers aren’t owning up to their responsibilities? If your sales manager is raising expectations yet doesn’t take a position of accountability, the battle is lost. If your sales department isn’t hitting its goals, your sales manager shouldn’t be looking for a place to assign blame – they should take full responsibility and ask what they can do better next time around.

5. Manage the Sales Cycle
How closely do your sales managers follow the sales cycle? What do they know about the work habits of each of their sales reps? How often do they review sales reports? For most companies using CRM, the sales reporting process offers all the information a sales manager needs to determine where the strengths and weaknesses of each rep lie.

There are many steps to creating a culture of accountability, but one way to get the ball rolling is to arm your salesforce with a mobile application that allows them to send back detailed sales reports in less than one minute. Front Row Solutions knows the needs of the salesforce and has created a mobile app that assures sales managers will always have plenty of information to bolster a workplace that thrives on sales accountability.