Thursday, April 29, 2021

8 Tips for Converting Sales Faster

Converting Sales Faster

Even the best salespeople still have a limited number of hours in the day. That’s a problem for any company that’s trying to ramp up their sales without massively increasing the size of their sales teams. Success for these companies means converting more sales faster. It’s an efficiency and productivity problem, and it’s easier to solve than you may realize.

Here are eight proven methods for improving your sales productivity.

Prioritize Your Prospecting:

It’s impossible to run an efficient sales organization without a steady stream of potential clients. If you want to drive more sales, the best place to start is by increasing the number of leads that enter the sales funnel. One of the most effective ways to do this is by spending the first hour of your workday on prospecting. It’s the toughest part of job — no one likes making cold calls, writing outbound sales emails, or trying to connect with people on LinkedIn — so why not get it out of the way as early as possible? They say whatever on your to-do list you want to do the least is the first thing you should do in your day. So, go and get after it. Do this every day, and you’ll quickly gain a better understanding of how your prospecting relates to your closed sales.

Carefully Qualify Your Prospects:

If you want to improve your sales results, it’s essential that you find ways to reliably identify the most likely customers from a pool of leads. The larger your pool of leads, the harder this becomes. To make things easier, adopt an automated lead scoring system to weed out low-quality leads. This allows you to invest your time on the prospects that are most likely to complete a purchase.

Improve Your Research Process:

There’s no better way to make a strong, positive impression on a B2B prospect than showing them that you understand their business. The more you know about their company, their customers, and their challenges, the more receptive they will be to hearing about the value of your products and services. This means doing the research — looking at their website, reading up on trends in their industry, and scanning through their social media mentions — before every sales call.

Automate Your Workflows:

How much time does your sales team waste every day on repetitive and tedious tasks? How many forms do they have to fill out exactly the same way, and how many standard documents do they have to hunt down for every sale? How many identical sales emails do they have to rewrite and send? These are all things that can be — and should be — automated, allowing the reps to focus on the important work of building prospect relationships and closing sales.

Focus Your Sales Activities:

Some common tasks are too complex or specific for automation. Writing a follow-up email to a prospect to answer a question about a product they’re interested in buying, for example, will always require an actual person with real knowledge. While you may not be able to automate these tasks, it is possible to optimize them. One of the best methods for this is to batch similar sales activities — responding to emails, updating CRM data, reviewing contracts — into a dedicated portion of the workday. This reduces the inefficiencies and distractions that come with attempting to do multiple tasks at once.

Update Your CRM Data:

Your CRM is a powerful sales tool, and it can dramatically increase the speed of the sales process when used correctly. Unfortunately, it still can’t read minds. The CRM is only as useful as the accuracy of the data that’s put into it. The more up-to-date that data is, the more reliable the CRM’s results will be. If elements of the CRM can be automated, automate them.

Streamline Your Sales Training:

Onboarding new salespeople is one of the most expensive and slow parts of running a sales team. Every moment that a new rep has to spend in training is time that they aren’t spending turning prospects into customers. This slows down the sales process for the entire company. Thankfully, there are obvious solutions to these problems: invest in a more streamlined onboarding and training process; make difficult-to-learn tools and workflows easier to use; and build incentives into the training process (such as gamification) that encourage new hires to master the system as soon as possible.

Track Your Results:

If you want to convert sales faster, you need to know where the speed bumps and roadblocks are. Without the right data, it’s impossible to track the improvement of your sales results. This means identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs), and measuring the changes to those KPIs as you try out new strategies, update your sales technology, and improve your workflows.

Conclusion

These eight tips are just a few of the expert-level insights available to companies that are looking to improve their sales conversion speeds. With the right advisors and partners — and the right technology — companies just like yours have been able to experience exceptional sales growth without needing to increase their overhead. To learn how FayeBSG can help your company with converting sales faster, contact us for a no-risk consultation.

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Wednesday, April 28, 2021

5 Proactive Conversations to Have Between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support

proactive conversations

The biggest goals of any marketing, sales, and customer support team are simple. Gain customers. Make customers happy. Keep customers.

To achieve these goals, each customer-facing department plays a role. Marketing plays an innovative role—producing campaigns to keep current customers and generating new leads. Sales teams work hard to close new deals. Customer support teams work to keep current customers satisfied.

While each department is one piece of the puzzle, we see companies keeping each team in its own silo too often. Yet, there is actually a lot of crossover between departments. All have touch points with customers. And if those conversations are not being carried throughout the teams, you are missing out on an opportunity.

Here are five proactive conversations to have between the marketing, sales, and customer support departments:

  1. Ideal Customers

Every prospect is not a good fit for your company. Successfully finding your ideal customer takes input from all three departments.

The marketing team drafts buyer personas, which they use to target the ideal customers with marketing campaigns. The sales team speaks to prospects every day and has a finger on the pulse of who’s buying what you’re selling. The customer support team speaks to your customers, understanding who is a good fit in the long term.

Each team has its own insight into the customer. Each input has value and it’s up to you to leverage information to create the most accurate ideal customer profiles. This will help shape who will be the best clients.

  1. Expectations

When creating efficiency between departments, setting expectations is hugely important. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle of everyday tasks and forget how much everyone has on their plates.

If a sales rep needs a piece of marketing collateral, setting a deadline and an expectation is important. What happens if a customer support rep speaks with a customer who casually mentions needing an additional service, what is the expectation of that rep to tell sales? If you are not proactively having conversations about roles and expectations, things can easily go by the wayside.

  1. Processes

Maybe a sales rep wants a piece of vendor-facing sales information, or a customer service agent wants an FAQ fact sheet. Either way, what is your company’s process? How do sales and customer support teams present proposed campaigns to marketing?  Sometimes a well-intentioned sales rep may be really excited for a new prospecting campaign and frustrated that marketing hasn’t produced the collateral in the time frame he or she was hoping. Yet, if there was no deadline or pertinent information given, it’s hard for marketing to know how and where to put that initiative into its queue. Having a clear process (as well as setting expectations) will create greater efficiencies.

  1. Technology Usage

How often do all your teams log into their respective technologies? Have you connected your software? Who is responsible for updating what? These are important discussions because, for instance, a CRM is not just a Rolodex and a marketing automation platform is not just a place to send emails from. There is great value and detailed data in these systems. Yet, if your teams are not using and sharing that information, it won’t get you very far.

  1. The Hand Off

Yes, the hard-hitting discussion that needs to be discussed at every company. Your marketing team can create all the successful campaigns in the world, but if there is no follow-up to these lead generation efforts, then leads never become customers. Having honest and realistic conversations surrounding the hand off between marketing to sales to customer support will keep everyone on the same page and working together, instead of in opposition.

Conclusion

When it comes to supporting your customers, it’s imperative to have proactive conversations and keep the lines of communication open between all the departments that speak with them.

Do you need to better connect your software and communications efforts? Looking to have more proactive conversations? Faye can help. Contact us today.

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Wednesday, April 21, 2021

How to Define and Measure the ROI of Content Marketing

ROI of content marketing

Today’s marketers are practically drowning in customer data. Every modern marketing solution provides tools for gathering snippets of information about every social media interaction, website visit, email open, and online purchase. You can also track changes in that data over time. As a result, marketers have the ability to precisely measure the full financial impact — the return on investment (ROI) — for every email campaign, Facebook ad, and other marketing activity. There’s no more ambiguity about whether a given marketing strategy was effective or not, because the campaign ROI can be calculated down to a fraction of a penny.

Except for content marketing, that is. A shocking number of B2B companies — 44%, according to industry analysts — don’t even bother to track their ROI from content marketing. This is genuinely surprising, as content marketing is widely seen as one of the most effective forms of marketing for companies with multi-stage sales cycles. It’s also one of the most time-consuming elements of marketing, especially if you are doing it incorrectly.

Why is this? Is the effectiveness of content marketing particularly difficult to measure? Or is there something else going on? The short answer is: Yes, it isn’t always easy to measure your content marketing ROI.

The role of content marketing

Most content marketing is designed to be both persuasive and indirect. You can use it to showcase your expertise on a topic. It’s rare for a potential customer to decide to make a purchase simply because of something they read in a company’s free white papers, blog posts, or email newsletters. Those things may have contributed greatly to the completed sale as they add touchpoints to the prospect. Yet, it’s difficult to say exactly what percentage of the sale should be assigned to an individual piece of content. The math is always a little fuzzy, and that makes it hard to fully establish a clear ROI.

This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to assign an ROI to your content marketing. It can be done, and should be. On a technical level, it’s also probably easier than you realize. To start, you need to first understand what you’re actually measuring.

Determine Your Content Marketing ROI

One of the biggest challenges of establishing your content marketing ROI is knowing what, exactly, counts as content marketing in the first place. Content marketing is a catch-all term that includes everything from company news and product-related infographics to promotional videos and thought leadership-building podcasts. While most people would agree that these are marketing tools in the broadest sense, they aren’t always created by (or even for) the marketing team.

The other important thing to remember is that any measurement of content marketing ROI will depend entirely on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are included in the calculations. It’s absolutely essential to determine what specific KPIs relate to each type of content marketing, what outcomes will be measured, and what percentage of the overall revenue will be attributed to any sale that interacted with the marketing content. These numbers may need to be revised and refined over time, and there will always be a certain amount of estimation involved.

Let’s start with the three core elements that determine the initial ROI for your content marketing.

Establish the baseline

Content marketing drives visitors to your website and social media by providing something that furthers their movement down the sales pipeline. In a sense, everything any potential or current customer interacts with online should count as part of that process. Every unique website visit, every clickthrough, every second spent reading a page, every scrap of content downloaded, and every shared post counts. If your CRM, analytics solution, and marketing automation tools aren’t tracking these interactions, they should be. Once this baseline of interactions is being tracked, it becomes possible to measure changes in these metrics against your content marketing activities and campaigns.

Set the percentage

Even if your CRM and other sales and marketing software isn’t directly tracking content marketing KPIs, it’s possible to get a rough idea of the impact of that marketing on final sales. Every time a website visitor clicks a “Schedule a Demo” button, or replies to a marketing email asking for a consultation, that’s a lead generated by content. Every one of those leads that results in a closed sale should be included in the ROI calculation.

Know your costs

You can’t know what the return on an investment is until you clearly define what those investments are. Is content being generated in house, or is it being created by a contractor or freelancer? How much staff time does it take to edit, proof, and post this content? Are you paying to boost the visibility of this content on social media? All of these things need to be measured to determine ROI.

Track interactions

Most modern CRMs can track lead activity on a website, and many even include comprehensive tools for lead scoring. Every interaction with website content — from lead generation when a visitor trades their email for an ebook or white paper to per-session clickthroughs on guides and blogs — should be counted as a major step forward in the sales process. When one of these sales closes, a percentage of that sale should be attributed to the content they consumed. The more accurately this is tracked, the more precise the content marketing ROI estimate will be.

Post-sale follow up

Not sure how big of a role content marketing plays in your sales process? Why not go right to the source and ask the customer after the sale? This shouldn’t come across as invasive, as customers might find it a little disturbing to be presented with a list of everything they’ve ever read or downloaded from your company website, after all. Instead, simply send them a quick email asking if there was anything on the site that they found helpful when they were making their buying decision.

Expect a certain amount of negotiating — and even pushback — from sales managers and C-suite execs from any calculation of content marketing ROI. Many sales professionals tend to see every closed sale as the result of a one-on-one interaction between buyer and seller, and they may not be used to thinking of content marketing as an essential part of the process. It may take some convincing before they can even admit that the content itself was the deciding factor in moving forward with a sale.

Once you’ve established the basic methodology for measuring the ROI of your content marketing, it’s time to put that knowledge to use.

Here are three things to keep in mind:

Give it time

Unless you’ve been tracking these KPIs from the start, it will take months to determine what’s “normal” for your content marketing metrics. These numbers will ebb and flow throughout the year, and they may not respond quickly to changes in your content marketing strategy. Don’t try to rush it.

Build the case

Your goal isn’t to show that your marketing content is responsible for closing every sale, or for driving every lead. You’re simply trying to clearly demonstrate that your content marketing strategy has real value, and should receive an appropriate budget for the value it provides. If the company wants to generate more sales, increasing the spending on content marketing should be part of the conversation. Collect your data, and show these connections.

Show them the money

With the right KPIs and attribution models in place, the ROI for every dollar spent on content marketing should become clear. Marketing discussions tend to be filled with somewhat ambiguous concepts like “engagement” and “reach,” which isn’t always compelling to the people who make the budgets. Content marketing ROIs allow you to speak their language. It’s hard to argue with “Every dollar we spend on content marketing brings in $4.35,” particularly when you have a CRM report to back that assertion up.

It’s absolutely essential to get the details right when making this kind of ROI calculation. Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious how to put all the pieces together. It helps to work with a team that understands the vital role that content marketing attribution plays in the sales process. If you need a little help establishing your marketing ROI using your CRM and other tools, we can help. Contact FayeBSG today for a no-risk consultation.

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Thursday, April 15, 2021

Faye Business Systems Group – The Customers They Are A-Changin’

Faye Business

In 2020, companies experienced unexpected and unprecedented changes in customer behavior. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people are choosing to limit physical encounters and prefer digital interactions. To meet consumer demand, businesses had an increased need to digitize transactions across industries.

To stay ahead, companies are trying to improve their customer experience — in fact, 65% of executives list customer experience in their top-five priorities. Various CRM platforms exist to aid organizations in tracking their relationships with customers. HubSpot, Salesforce, and SugarCRM, among others, make customer management easier.

Chances are, your competitors are working hard to refine their customer experience, and that starts with their CRM. We wouldn’t want you to be left behind.

We at Faye Business Systems Group help companies grow by successfully deploying, customizing, and managing industry-leading customer experience, CRM, and ERP software platforms. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, our team provides high-value software development and consulting services to meet your evolving business needs.

Recently, our company received our first review at Clutch, a B2B reviews and ratings website. It is about our CRM work with a valuation services company.

We are managing their company’s SugarCRM system, which they’ve been using for several years already. Their use of SugarCRM is unique such that they also use it for sales, marketing, and business operations, not just customer management. We are maintaining their system that handles 2,000 appraisals per year; we also build additional functionalities whenever the client requires.

Our ongoing partnership has been successful, and we are given a 5-star rating for our work.

The Review

Their COO noted the quality of our service. They liked our approach that involves understanding the business first, before applying the necessary technology. They also noted our communication skills as well as our own project management system, which facilitates a good workflow. Their team has a close relationship with ours, and that only improves our partnership.

Here’s what they have to say about our resources:

“Faye Business has a really strong bench of resources for project management, technical tasks, and business development.” – COO, Valuation Services Company

Aside from that, we received additional recognition from Clutch’s sister company, The Manifest, a website that highlights top companies and agencies. We were ranked as the 3rd best CRM consultant in Los Angeles. This only proves the work we do not just in Los Angeles, but all over the world.

We appreciate such glowing feedback, and it only motivates our team to work harder. We know how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people conduct business. To remain competitive, companies need to adapt to the changing field — and we are here to help!

Does your organization need assistance on your CRM platform? Contact us today to learn more about our services.

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Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Getting the Best Results From Your CRM Reports

CRM reports

Growing a company isn’t just a matter of making a great product or hiring the right people to market and sell it. You also need to know how the business itself is performing, where the challenges are, and what can be improved. That’s why customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have become essential tools, as they allow businesses to use modern technology to collect, store, and use essential data.

CRMs do this in many ways, but one of the important of these is the generation of reports. These reports can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the sales process, but they can also do much, much more. Anything the CRM tracks — every scrap of customer, sales, marketing, and other data — can be used to generate a useful report.

Your CRM collects a huge amount of information every day. This massive storehouse of data can be used to reveal a wide range of trends, from the performance of your sales teams to the engagement of your customers. Generating these reports is a key feature of modern CRM solutions, with most systems having a robust set of reporting options built-in by default.

The Basics

Unfortunately, many companies only use their CRMs for very basic reporting. They don’t realize that this wealth of information can provide powerful insights into the efficiency of their operation, enhance their ability to recognize new opportunities, and even act as a compass toward greater revenues. One of the reasons for this hesitancy to use CRM reporting to its full potential is that many people — even managers and executives — often see reports as the result of some arcane database process that only a true sorcerer of technology can understand.

That’s not the case. The vast majority of reports involve little more than simple arithmetic applied to a handful of data sets within the CRM. The quantity of numbers may be vast — the revenue from every purchase made by every customer over the last year — but the mathematical operations themselves could be done by an average middle schooler. The CRM simply does these calculations very quickly and precisely, and it may also include some tools to make the results easier to understand, like charts and graphs.

Before we delve into the reports your company should be running, it’s important to understand a key distinction between the two major types of reports your CRM can generate: Stock reports and custom reports.

Stock Reports

This is the suite of default reporting options that are included as part of the CRM software. These tend to be simple and straightforward, such as “All Open Opportunities” or “Total Sales By Quarter By User,” making them perfectly suitable for tracking basic KPIs and broad trends. It’s common for companies to use the stock versions of sales reports, customer reports, and campaign reports that come with their CRM. They often select options from a built-in menu.

One of the problems with stock reports is that many companies rely on their results for making big decisions. Yet, they come without ever closely examining the methodology used to generate them. These stock reports also have some serious limitations, as they aren’t capable of capturing nuances that are specific to the unique elements of the business. This can result in major blind spots in reporting. One of the easiest ways to address these shortcomings is by adapting a stock report to include additional data. This creates a custom report.

Custom Reports

Many custom reports begin as a revision of an existing stock report. They add variables and fields to create a more focused view of a particular topic. Borrowing from our previous example, this might be “Total Sales By Quarter By User By Sales Team.”

It allows for an even more precise picture of sales performance. A carefully-crafted custom report can provide a greater context to trends observed in default reports. It can even create entirely new kinds of reports. They can correlate and connect any number of data sets from within the CRM.

Custom reports are also easy to make, and that comes with its own risks. While custom reports can be powerful tools. Yet, poorly-designed reports are misleading.  It’s entirely possible to create a custom report that’s completely useless, or even nonsensical.

Custom reports should always be:

  • Precisely planned out
  • Carefully checked for errors
  • Heavily tested for reliability before their results are trusted for major decisions

The accuracy of these reports also depends on the quality of the data. That said, the more experience your company has with a wide range of reports, the more options you have for extracting valuable insights from the data your CRM already collects. A surprising number of companies play it far too safe. They only rely on a handful of stock and custom reports to inform their strategies and decisions. Those companies are missing out on countless possibilities to improve their operations, efficiency, and revenue.

So, what are the reports that most companies are missing out on? Here are some common stock and custom report categories — any modern CRM can generate them — that every business should become familiar with.

Goal Progress

Most CRMs include several default reports for tracking progress on sales goals and won deals. It’s possible to create custom reports to monitor progress toward any goal that the CRM itself collects data about.

Sales Conversions

There’s more to sales conversions than simply tracking the number of leads who become customers. What stage in the sales pipeline do most leads convert? Where do those sales most often fail to convert? What common reasons do leads give that are owned by a particular sales rep? At what stage? With the right reports, you can follow this sale rabbit hole all the way down.

Sales Forecasts

The more you understand about your sales pipeline, the easier it becomes to make predictions about future sales trends. These reports allow you to generate highly specific sales forecasts by type. Additionally, you can establish accurate forecasts from things like individual social media channels.

Sales Pipeline

Every C-suite decision maker dreams of having full visibility into their sales funnel. They want the capabilities to readily identify any blockages that keep potential customers stuck. A well-implemented CRM already has all of that data, allowing for the creation of a wide variety of pipeline reports.

Measuring Sales Success

Sales Cycle

One of the most powerful uses of CRM reporting is to track the activity of an individual customer over the course of the entire sales cycle. For companies with multi-year sales cycles and a small set of high-value clients — heavy equipment manufacturers, for example — these reports can offer an unmatched level of insight.

Profitability

Do you know exactly where your money is coming from? Can you easily pull of up a list of customers with the highest lifetime value (CLV)? How do you  compare their projected spending for the year against their actual purchases? Can you determine how profitable your newest customers are, and compare that cohort to your most established customers? The CRM holds the answers, you just need to use them.

In creating these reports for your business, it’s essential to get the details right. Why take on the stress and risk of creating these CRM reports from scratch, when expert help is just an email or phone call away? At FayeBSG, we work with our clients to help them with implementation and guide them through understanding how to best use their CRM. That includes creating highly targeted reports that deliver the real and accurate insights your business needs. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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Thursday, April 8, 2021

SugarCRM Named a Leader in 2021 Nucleus Research CRM Value Matrix

SugarCRM has moved into the leader quadrant in the 2021 Nucleus Research CRM Value Matrix. Sugar was cited for its functionally complete customer experience management platform including modules for sales, service, and marketing, as well as analytics and data integration.

“It is gratifying to receive recognition for Sugar’s focus on innovation for our customers. The new ranking from Nucleus Research reinforces that our team has built a powerful CRM platform which helps companies improve performance and predictability,” said Rich Green, Chief Product Officer for SugarCRM. “By embedding the AI-driven capabilities of SugarPredict into our products, we are making high-definition customer experience a reality for companies of all sizes.”

As noted in the report, Sugar’s recent AI acquisition and module additions proactively augmented its platform to compete with entrenched market leaders. The report also called Sugar’s time-aware approach to processing platform data differentiated, enabling more sophisticated analytics, reporting, and automation than other leading vendors. Further, the inclusion of omnichannel and voice-powered capabilities, as well as a dedicated integration platform and on-platform automation of tedious manual tasks like data entry speak to a noted improvement in usability since last year’s evaluation.

“The focus on AI-driven CRM has accelerated during the abrupt market changes brought by the pandemic,” says Daniel Elman, Research Manager, Nucleus Research. “Cloud-native vendors stand to gain from this paradigm shift, as customers embrace the value of AI, automation, and connections across all customer-facing systems in sales, marketing, and service.”

The Nucleus Value Matrix segments competitors based on usability, functionality, and the value that customers realized from each product’s capabilities, measured with Nucleus’ rigorous ROI methodologies.

Learn more about the Nucleus Research report here.

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Wednesday, April 7, 2021

How to Use SMS Messaging to Improve the Customer Experience

SMS Messaging

Whenever anyone asks me what the first step of marketing is, I always say, “Know your audience.” You should know who your prospects are and gear your marketing efforts toward them. You can run the most intricate and innovative marketing campaign you can imagine. But if you’re targeting the wrong audience, it won’t get you very far.

Part of knowing your audience is understanding where they are and finding the ways to communicate there. One place where many consumers are is on their cellphones. In fact, recent reports stated that consumers spent an average of 4.2 hours per day on their phones in 2020.

Proven Communication Method

So you can see that consumers are spending a lot of time on their phones. But what does that mean for businesses? Are they open to speaking to companies in this manner, or do they want to keep it on a personal level? You want to reach them where they are, but you also don’t want to appear intrusive. Here’s the good news: 82 percent of consumers open every text message they receive.

SMS messaging is a proven communication method that consumers are literally carrying around in their pockets or purses 24/7. It’s a highly reliable way to reach your customers.

Many businesses are reaching their customers this way. And customers respond well to it. Facebook has reported that more than 175 million people message a WhatsApp Business account every day. Furthermore, Facebook research shows that people prefer to directly engage with businesses through messaging to get the help they need.

Some businesses prefer more traditional methods of communication or find much success in email marketing. Utilizing SMS messaging does not take away from those efforts. Instead, it involves reaching customers and prospects in the way they want to speak to you. If they prefer phone calls, you’re there. Do they like email? You can be there, too. Prefer a text message? Great. The more channels a brand communicates with their customers, the better chances they have of reaching their markets to the fullest potential.

Messaging

Different messages are going to be more effectively catered to different forms of communication. For instance, a long-form piece of content can work well in a white paper or on a website. You won’t want to send lengthy messages via SMS. While text messages can’t have the depth of other forms of communication, you can send links to relevant content, send reminders of needed services or upcoming appointments, and much more.

SMS messaging can also be a space where customers/prospects can reach out to ask questions. When you have a proper omni-channel presence, you’ll have more channels, and you’ll have a better chance to reach customers where they are. When these conversations are all linked together through your CX platform, you can best serve your customers.

By utilizing SMS messaging as part of your CX strategy, you can enable your customer-facing team to have a quick and easy way to reach out to customers—whether they need to schedule an appointment or share an update on an order.

OmniChannel Support

Match the Message to the Customer Journey

When utilizing SMS messaging for CX, the length of communication is not the only messaging factor to consider. You also want to make sure you’re sending the right messages at the right times.

There are many different points to the customer journey. And with proper omni-channel communication, a prospect can seamlessly move from digital to physical and back again.

When you think about texting your prospects, it’s important to think through whether they are in discovery mode or decision mode. It’s the same with a targeted email campaign: You don’t want to blast pricing information or demo requests to someone who is just starting to put together information about a service.

Since each touchpoint you have with a prospect is important, you don’t want to overwhelm them. Instead, you want to guide them.

Are you curious about how this can work?

Many of the CRM and CX platforms on the market today have some form of SMS messaging options for you to use.

For instance, you can do the following with SugarCRM SMS Messaging:

  • Text “on the fly” from any record with a mobile phone number.
  • Send texts to one or more recipients by using user-definable pre-built SMS Text Templates.
  • Send texts from Sugar List Views by selecting records and clicking a “Text” button.
  • To enable automated texting-based communication, integrate texts with workflows on values in Sugar fields.
  • Send texts via Sugar Campaigns.
  • Text reminders for upcoming meetings and appointments.
  • Text updates when the status of a case changes.
  • Send both SMS and MMS communications.
  • Store all texts in a Messages subpanel under contacts, leads, etc.

If you’re looking for more information on how SMS messaging for CX can work for you, contact us today.

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