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

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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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How to Define and Measure the 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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Faye Business Systems Group – The Customers They Are A-Changin’

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.

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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Getting the Best Results From Your 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.

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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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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How to Use SMS Messaging to Improve the Customer Experience

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.

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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Sugar Sell Named Leader on G2 Crowd for CRM Software

Sugar Sell, the world’s first no-touch, time-aware CRM has been named a leader in CRM software for the 4th consecutive year by G2.

It may seem like a small feat, but G2 is actually the world’s largest technology marketplace where researchers can figure out which platform could be an ideal fit for their business.

How does this work?

G2 scores products and vendors based on reviews gathered from their user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. They apply their unique algorithm to this data to calculate customer Satisfaction and Market Presence scores in real-time.

G2’s Market Presence score is a combination of 15 metrics from G2’s user reviews, publicly available information, and third-party sources.

Both the software vendor and the individual product are measured on various criteria. The criteria are listed below in order of importance. Product metrics receive greater weight than vendor metrics.

Each input is normalized by category and segment. This means that scores are relative to other products in the category/segment and may change from segment to segment. The scores are then scaled from 0–100.

For the 18th consecutive quarter, Sugar has been named a leader for the mid-market. Sugar received high customer satisfaction scores for ease of doing business, ease of administration and meeting overall requirements. With a shorter time to value than other leaders, highly ranked features for Sugar Sell include customization, contact management and contract management.

About Sugar Sell

Sugar Sell enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative sales automation solution on the market. Sugar Sell consolidates customer data into one place and builds on top of that underlying data a comprehensive system for sales automation, including management of contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, forecasts, quotes, contracts, communications, and reporting. With Sugar Sell, customers are able to drive revenue, increase efficiency, reduce sales costs and deliver unmatched customer buying experiences.

DOWNLOAD THE G2 REPORT HERE

 

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5 Tips for Reducing Email Bounce Rate

The most effective and reliable marketing tool your business has is its email list. In terms of return on investment (ROI), nothing else — social media, AdWords, SEO — even comes close. Unfortunately, email marketing also has a major drawback. To maintain the effectiveness of this channel, your email lists need to be actively cultivated, managed, and updated. When your email marketing resources aren’t handled properly, your campaign results quickly begin to atrophy.

One of the first signs that there’s a problem is an increase in the email bounce rate. This key performance indicator (KPI) allows marketers to see how many of their emails “bounce” back from the addresses on their list. If the bounce rate is steadily rising, it’s a clear indication that there’s trouble brewing in the company’s email marketing methodology.

Email Bounce Rate as a KPI

To understand why the bounce rate is such an important KPI, it’s important to explain what the bounce rate actually measures. It’s a surprisingly simple calculation. Take the number of bounced emails in a given campaign, and then divide them by the total number of emails sent out in that campaign. Take that number and multiply it by 100. The resulting product is the bounce rate.

For example, if 1,500 emails bounced back from a campaign with 125,000 recipients, the bounce rate would be 1.2%. As bounce rates go, that’s not bad.

Most marketers would expect to see a 2% bounce rate on a typical campaign. Bounce rates can vary significantly over time — anything up to 5% is widely viewed as acceptable — and a sudden spike in the bounce rate in a single email or campaign isn’t necessarily cause for alarm. One example of this would be an increase in “soft” bounces caused by temporary technical or network issues. The real concern is a steady increase in the email bounce rate over time.

What we’re really concerned with here are “hard” bounces. These can be caused by a wide variety of issues, such an email address that no longer exists or an email that belongs to an expired domain name. The worst-case scenario, however, is that campaign emails are being bounced because they were blocked from being delivered at all. When this happens, it’s usually because the sending address — your marketing email address, or even your entire domain name — was placed on a spam blacklist. That’s a problem you want to avoid at all costs.

To keep your bounce rate as a reasonable level, it pays to follow some basic guidelines.

Here are five of the most important things to get right:

1. Don’t Act Like A Spammer:

   If you don’t want to find your email address or domain name blacklisted, don’t send emails that look like spam messages. Avoid spammer-like language (“act now!”), pay attention to your formatting, and always include your company’s contact information. Also, don’t do sketchy things like buying email lists from questionable sources, as using these lists can increase the odds of your emails getting flagged as spam.

2. Clean Your Lists:
   

   One of the most effective ways to reduce your bounce rate is to regularly review the addresses that bounced, and then remove those which are no longer active. If you’re a B2B company, for instance, you may be sending hundreds of emails to contacts who have since moved to other companies, or even to companies that no longer exist.

3. Confirm Your Opt-Ins:
   

   The best email marketing results come from lists with highly engaged recipients. People who opt-in to your newsletters and email updates tend to have very high conversion rates, and this is even more true for those who follow through on a “Confirm your account” link sent after their initial sign up. Your company may see slower email list growth using this method, but your bounce rates will also be extremely low. More importantly, your marketing ROI with these engaged subscribers will tend to be very high.

4. Segment Your Lists:
   

   Your company may have emails from a wide variety of sources — signups from promotions and trade shows, emails from lead generation on your website, customer lists — making it a challenge to craft an effective marketing message that fits all of these groups. So don’t try to. Instead, segment your marketing lists by bounce rate. This allows your marketing team to focus on your most engaged subscribers first. It also justifies investing less resources in reaching those less-engaged, lower ROI segments.

5. A/B Test Your Content:

   It’s always a good idea to A/B test your marketing. There’s even more value to doing this if your bounce rate is increasing. For example, by tweaking the language and formatting of your emails, you may discover that something in your content is triggering a spam filter.

By consistently applying these tips to your email marketing campaigns, you can gain a new level control over your bounce rate. This allows you to keep this all-important KPI steady, while also giving you new methods for maximizing your campaign ROI.

These tips only scratch the surface of what’s possible for optimizing your company’s email marketing results. To take your results to the next level, you need more than a quick blog post. You need expert insights. Let FayeBSG show you what’s possible. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

 

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Two Ways to Build Authenticity and Better Serve Customers with AI

One of the biggest misconceptions about artificial intelligence (AI) is that it is swapping out human interaction with machines for different business functions. That’s simply not true. Great AI is not trying to replace members of your team, but instead it uses technology and machine learning to make your team better by being more in tuned with your customers.

How? With today’s AI, your customer-facing teams, such as customer support, sales and marketing to better understand your customer, and quickly, to provide the best customer experience possible.

There are many different AI capabilities in the market today, so it may feel a little overwhelming when determining where to start. You want to build a better, more authentic experience for your customers and prospects, but you don’t want to just toss a bunch of technologies at them without guidance.

In order to determine which AI applications make the most sense for your business, first consider your business goals.

AI capabilities enhance your team capabilities. In fact, some recent reports state that AI improves agent efficiency. By automating agent functions, companies are improving efficiency by 31.1%, or about 12 hours per week.

While there are many routes to travel with AI, there are two major ways your customer-facing teams can help build authenticity is through sentiment analysis and creating specific brand assets. Here’s how:

Sentiment Analysis

AI can do more than just make processes more efficient, it can also help you remove the barriers in understanding your customer. Not just in an overarching way like helping to shape your buyer personas or ideal customer profiles, but in how your customer is feeling in real-time. For many customer service and marketing teams, gathering this type of information and customer feedback takes extensive work and can help in the long run, but not always the short term.

With AI-powered sentiment analysis, you can let the AI do the leg work of sorting through data, providing insights in how customers are seeing your company, and how your current customer is feeling if they reach out to you.

This analysis extends past just a positive or negative rating, but some newer AI capabilities are even able to weed out sarcasm and other descriptive wording that shows the truth behind your customer’s sentiment.

With AI-powered sentiment analysis, you can equip your customer support team with data, so they are never caught off guard when speaking with clients. They can also prioritize their queue with this information in mind.

Are you curious how sentiment analysis can work with your other technology to build authenticity and better serve your customers? Check out the video below to learn about Flare Sentiment Analysis for Zendesk.

Brand Assets

It’s not just your customer support team that can utilize AI capabilities to build authenticity. Your marketing team can use AI to help drive initiatives with design and content. For instance, there are some text-to-image generation and generated text capabilities developing that are really interesting and can play an important role in making a prospect’s experience with a brand more authentic.

AI does not mean that machines are taking over the branding or customer support, instead it is a way to have more information to leverage to better these experiences.

Authentic brands can take the beginning of data presented by AI, and fine tune then into the strategic initiatives. AI-generated assets can sift that focus toward the customer experience, so marketers can then focus their time on taking assets that will resonate with their audience.

Conclusion

While AI is not necessarily a new concept, it is continually evolving and its capabilities continue to grow. Whether you are looking to better your customer service teams, your overall branding or somewhere in between, AI can help you acquire the data points you need to do this the best way you can.

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7 Tips for Not Getting Stagnant with Employee Satisfaction a Year into the Pandemic

It may be years until we fully understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but even now it’s becoming obvious that big changes are on the horizon for business. These new trends are most visible when it comes to how companies adapt to the post-pandemic needs, priorities, and expectations of their employees.

While many companies are desperate to get back to the business-as-usual status quo of 2019, the reality is that it’s not going to happen. Workers have seen the benefits of going remote, and now most of them have no intention of coming back into the office five days a week.

It’s a brave new world out there. If you want your company to thrive in this new era, it’s time to rethink some things. There’s no better place to start than how to improve employee satisfaction in a remote-work reality.

The Basics

Many companies now have a year of experience managing remote teams, making it almost impossible to argue against the viability of a work-from-home model. While some workers will eventually want to return to a physical office, a recent PwC report claims that as of January 2021, an astonishing 83 percent of employers say the shift to remote work has been successful for their company. Additionally, over half of employees would prefer to be remote at least three days a week moving forward. Hundreds of major companies are now offering work-from-home options as a kind of job perk, and even reducing the size of their office space in anticipation of a smaller in-person workforce.

It’s clear that the new “hybrid work model” isn’t going anywhere. But how do you actually make it work for your business? How do you keep your employees productive and satisfied without those daily face-to-face interactions? Do you want to prevent stagnation? How do you improve motivation, and keep productivity levels high?

Here are seven tips to keep things dynamic and fresh during this post-pandemic remote-work restart.

1. Provide Clear and Consistent Communication:

   One of the drawbacks of a remote-work system is that there is less opportunity to casually check in with team members throughout the day. This means that it’s essential that the communication workflows — particularly when it comes to things like assignments, deadlines, and status updates — are as clear as possible. This also means investing in the right communication technology, including cloud-based solutions for video conferencing, project management, and virtual workspaces.

2. Focus on Giving Timely Feedback:
   

   Constructive feedback is one of the keys to strong employee satisfaction. This is relatively easy to do in a traditional office setting, but it’s surprisingly easy to overlook opportunities for this feedback in a remote-work context. Something as simple as an end-of-week email or instant message recognizing employees’ efforts can have huge results in overall employee satisfaction.

3. Invest in Productivity-Tracking Tools:

   It’s not exactly a secret that some workers struggle to maintain their normal levels of productivity in a work-from-home context. They may get distracted without in-person oversight, or even become a little lazy. Productivity-tracking tools help to keep everyone honest. These tools can also help to identify potential problems with tricky assignments or heavy workloads before they start to impact employee job satisfaction.

4. Motivation is More Important Than Ever:

   Many of the most-effective and time-tested methods for improving employee motivation just aren’t as effective for remote workers. What good is taking everyone out for lunch, for example, if half your team doesn’t even live in the same city? One option is to have a virtual lunch. You can buy  delivery service gift cards for employees and then they can pick what meal they’d like to purchase for the virtual meeting. While thing can boost team morale, it might not be enough to truly motivate your team. It’s worth considering some remote-ready motivation strategies instead. One great example? Use a gamification platform, such as Splash for SugarCRM or Flare Gamification for Zendesk, to motivate your employees to do exactly what you need them to do in your software.

5. Find Opportunities to Build Trust:
   

   It can be difficult to build a sense of trust and comradery between team members when they work in a distributed workspace. This can have a negative impact on morale. This is particularly true during crunch periods or when team projects get bogged down by delays. By creating a space for casual interactions, team members can steadily build up those all-important trust levels. Try chatting for a few minutes immediately before a video conference or hosting an after-hours game or trivia contest.

6. Rethink Your Onboarding Strategy:

   Your company has changed during the pandemic. Why would you force new employees to learn the old way of doing things? Now is the perfect time to update onboarding processes for new employees. The truth is, many of them may never set foot in the company’s physical offices anyway. Hiring priorities may also need an update. Think about what the skill sets your employees may now need to have. These could include more of a focus on computer literacy, technical skills, and an improved understanding of distributed workflows.

7. Schedule One-On-One Meetings:
   

   Even if face-to-face meetings become a thing of the past, it’s still important for managers to have strong personal connections with their workers. One-on-one video conferences are a great way to do this. They provide an opportunity to talk about issues outside of a conference call or group chat. This is essential for things like performance reviews, constructive criticism, and other personalized guidance. One of the most important things for any employee is to understand his or her place within the company. How does their role matter in the big picture? It’s something employers sometimes forget to show in a physical office, let alone a distributed one. Having these one-on-one meetings allow you to regularly check.

Conclusion

As the world adjusts to the “new normal,” it’s tempting to obsess over the things we’ve lost. Forcing employees to fit into the old workplace model is a recipe for resentment, frustration, and plummeting job satisfaction. Instead, let’s focus on rebuilding a better, more efficient, and more satisfying workplace. Acceptance can go a long way.

Is your company struggling to come up with a post-pandemic strategy for its workforce? FayeBSG can help. Let us show you how to use today’s smartest technology — CRM, ERP, CX, and more — to improve your business, streamline your workflows, and increase your profits. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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5 Benefits of CX for Transportation and Logistics Companies

For many transportation companies, gaining and retaining customers is a huge deal. Once a customer signs up for a shipment or two, you can easily still be vying with your competitors for loads three, four, and five. So how can you better serve your customers? How can you best engage with them, while still being able to balance everything else on your plate?

Utilizing CX for transportation and logistics software, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system, can go a long way in establishing a relationship with customers and keeping them around. When you have CX software that focuses on logistics, you can customize the process to meet your specific needs. Whether you need to integrate your CRM data with your TMS data or have a clearer understanding of every step of the transport process, having proper software can extend your capabilities far beyond any Excel program a company may rely on.

Here are 5 benefits of CX for transportation and logistics companies:

1. True Team Collaboration

In any business, silos can be real challenges. But for transportation companies, they can be even bigger headaches. If a customer calls wanting to know where an order is, they will quickly get frustrated when their simple question doesn’t receive a simple answer.

A CRM system includes all the data about leads, prospects, and customers. So everyone who needs to see it can.

Once you add in integrations into other software, you have broken down significant boundaries. Now anyone who gets a call can look up the caller’s data and handle quick information. And if it needs to be passed off, you can send it to the right person. Your team can now better monitor the workflow and communication with your customers.

Even better, onboarding new employees moves faster when they can have all of a customer’s information at their fingertips—instead of having to engage with multiple team members, just to get a glimpse.

2. Automated Request Processing

Not only does CX-centric software help your team gain information more quickly, it also streamlines their work processes by automating routine tasks. From the beginning of a customer’s journey to the end, you can automate processes, such as receiving requests, assigning them to managers, managing orders, and invoicing.

Your customers want fast, accurate support. And with proper CRM software, you can provide it to them.

3. Better Data Management and Reporting

Both logistics and transportation have a lot of moving parts, on and off the road. Understanding your customer’s needs is important. Having the ability to forecast their needs? Even better. When all your data is connected and accessible, you have a better data management system and way better reporting capabilities.

For instance, with integrated, CX-focused software, a manager can look through a client’s previous orders to see if there are any spikes or valleys in their loads. Maybe a client ships live plants. If so, you always reach out to them right before spring time—every year, like clockwork.

Yet once you have your CRM data in place, you uncover that winter loads spike up, too. Previously, you never considered the Christmas tree market for this client.

Ultimately, you can analyze all your previous interactions with customers, prospects, and vendors.

4. Better Sales and Marketing Performance

When you have better insight into your customers, your marketing team can build better, more accurate buyer personas. They can also create better sales enablement collateral for your sales team, which means they can close more deals.

By adopting a CX system to manage your customers, your sales and marketing teams can:

• Offer support through multiple channels of communication.
• Identify the best channels to attract customers.
• Better manage requests that can lead a prospect to the first sale.
• Analyze each stage of the sales pipeline and better understand each piece of the customer’s journey.
• Set up calls, Zooms, and emails—right from inside the system.
• Create drip campaigns to current and past customers that support reengagement efforts.

5. Increased Cost Efficiency

The better the workflow, the better the cost efficiency. The more you can automate mundane tasks, the more your team can focus on speaking to clients one-on-one and handling more difficult tasks.

When applicable, let the software do the work. For instance, if a client sends in a new billing address, one team member may have to upload that information into the accounting system. If your accounting is integrated with your CRM software, then that information can get sent directly. There is no need for another team member to have to go into another system to update that information.

Or worse, the information never gets updated in all the places it needs to, and no one knows the best address—because it’s inconsistent throughout your systems.

CX for transportation and logistics software allows you to eliminate such mistakes.

Conclusion: A Better CX Strategy Leads to More Business

If you are already using CRM and/or TMS software, then you have already begun to see the value of putting an emphasis on the customer experience.

It’s the same with the structure of the supply chain. When all the pieces of your technology come together and work together, it’s a better experience. And a better customer experience can lead to more business.

Want to learn more about CX for transportation and logistics? Great! Contact us today.

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Where are Customer Service and Support Leaders Spending In 2021?

There’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound — and largely disastrous — impact on almost every sector of the global economy. For most companies, 2020 was a year defined by catastrophic breakdowns in supply chains, chaos in distribution, crashing product demand, painfully halted production, and a frenzied transition to an untested work-from-home workflow. Even companies that did do well in the tough business environment had to adapt to new safety regulations and finding the most efficient way to serve customers. But it wasn’t all bad. In some ways, the COVID-19 crisis helped to make a great case for a new, modernized approach to business technology. These changes are apparent in the field of customer service and support.

In October of 2020, more than six months into the pandemic, business research firm Gartner conducted a poll of 106 customer service and support leaders to gain some much-needed insight into coming industry trends. What did this survey reveal? COVID-19 changed the game. Well, that’s not surprising. However, the survey specifically showed significant acceleration in several already-growing trends relating to customer support technology. Later reporting by Gartner, and other firms, has only confirmed the durability of these trends.

So, what are these trends, and what can they tell us about spending and investment in customer support in 2021/2022? Let’s take a look at some essential findings.

The Big Three

Gartner’s survey uncovered three top priorities for customer support and service leaders heading into 2021. The first is increased investment in upgrading outdated “legacy” support technology in favor of modern support tools. Those old systems were designed for the needs of a different era, and they just can’t keep up with the needs of today’s customers.

Automation of customer service processes — including AI-based solutions — was another major priority. Modern customers already understand how to interact with computers, and are increasingly comfortable with chatbots, menu-driven support resources, and other related systems to find solutions to their problems. Not surprisingly, spending on these solutions is also on the rise.

The third priority was an increased focus on migrating contact volume toward self-service channels. Human support workers are expensive, and it’s not easy or fast to scale traditional support services in response to increasing demand. That’s not the case with self-service support solutions. All three of these concepts are likely to see substantial investment in 2021.

Ramping Up Digital Channels

Roughly 70% of customer service and support leaders plan to increase spending on digital channels in 2021.

Customer Support and Service Volumes Are Skyrocketing

One of the major reasons that self-service initiatives are on the rise has to do with an unprecedented increase in customer contact volume. Around 85% of those surveyed by Gartner reported big increases in support and service tickets in 2020, with the bulk of those increases happening at B2C companies.

Self-Service Isn’t Optional

Most of those surveyed reported rapid growth in customer support and service volumes. 39% of companies said their live support staff handled the bulk of those increases. This not only placed an additional burden on the customer experience (including longer wait times), but it also resulted in an uptick in reports of burnout among employees. To continue to meet customer expectations, companies are increasingly investing in modern, self-service ready support technology. This also helps remove additional pressures from workers.

Customers Don’t Mind Self-Service

One of the more surprising trends to emerge from recent reporting is that customers appear to be content to use self-service options for many common support and service tasks. This suggests that moving to a self-service support model could result in a substantial cost reduction for many companies.

Multi-Channel Support Is Essential for Self-Service

Behind-the-scenes investment in support technology for CRMs and support desk systems is increasing. Yet, the customer-facing elements of these solutions are also becoming more visible. Many companies report plans to update their websites, mobile pages, and even their apps to allow for improved access to self-service customer support options. This also includes an expansion into other channels, such as social media.

Data Collection Is More Important Than Ever

Companies consistently report that customer data collection plays a crucial role in their development of cost-effective support solutions. Moving into 2021/2022, this customer data will provide fundamental insights into the development of self-service and automated support models.

More importantly, the reporting created from this data will also allow companies to make targeted, informed decisions as they form new strategies for the post-COVID-19 economy. Not surprisingly, spending on customer data collection and analysis is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.

Conclusion

The world is changing, and your customers are changing with it. The good news is there are ways to meet and surpass expectations. Your company can access to the best support and service solutions modern technology can offer.

As a Master Zendesk Partner, FayeBSG implements, customizes, integrates, manages, and supports all Zendesk platforms. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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Using Technology to Overcome Support Hurdles in CPG and Retail

Even before the massive disruptions that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, big things were changing in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries. The old status quo was being shaken up, with everything from Brexit to climate change policy having real and surprising impacts on how everyday goods make their way into consumers’ shopping carts. For a customer-centric organization, these uncertainties can create a chaotic situation where agents and other support staff are blindsided by issues that they couldn’t anticipate. It has become even more of a challenge to overcome support hurdles.

Effectively responding to these challenges requires a new, technology-driven approach to CPG and retail strategy. It also requires a shift in perspective, where current business tools can be upgraded to become full-fledged assistants to your support teams. By letting the technology manage the messy details of monitoring customer behavior, your support teams can focus on delivering the best possible service.

Utilizing the Framework

Building these customer experience (CX)-oriented solutions is easier than you may realize. The essential framework of this technology is customer relationship management (CRM) software, which almost every CPG and retail company already has in place in some form. These systems generate a wealth of customer data, but it’s not always accessible because of how that information is stored, accessed, and used within the company.

With today’s CX technology, CPG and retail companies can empower their teams to best serve their customers. How? By having information about product discounts, availability, and recalls right at their fingertips. By using data that is already collected in new and innovative ways, CPG and retail companies can avoid many of the expensive support headaches that result from today’s erratic consumer markets. The result is a better customer experience.

Solutions

Consider a system like Flare CPG, a solution FayeBSG built for our clients that use the Zendesk Sunshine CRM platform. Sunshine already does an excellent job at connecting data for improved customer experiences. Yet,  the out-of-the-box experience isn’t optimized to measure and track CPG-specific data. By adding on another layer of resources, companies now have access to highly specific customer insights.

These tools allow a Flare CPG user to do things like:

• Anticipate potential product recalls
• Consolidate, normalize and respond ‘in-line’ to client inquiries via ‘any’ social media, messaging app, chatbots and email/phone
• Improve in-store product search
• Generate physical mailings for coupons or refunds
• Leverage product feedback and surveys to inform product development decisions

These are more than just quality-of-life improvements for support staff and agents. It’s a new way to exploit the valuable data that’s already being collected within the CRM. More importantly, tools like Flare CPG just scratch the surface of possibilities for CPG and retail applications. Existing CRM data can be reshaped in countless ways to fit new needs and solve new problems.

The result is this new approach to CRM data is a flexible, adaptable CX framework for providing a truly exceptional level of customer support. In the CPG and retail industries, shaken by years of instability, this new technology couldn’t come at a better time.

Is your CPG or retail company looking for a smart way to improve CX and overcome support hurdles? FayeBSG can help. Contact us today for a no-risk consultation.

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CRM and Sales Impact Report

The $35 billion CRM market provides the foundational technology for customer engagement. However, it has been reported that CRMs are failing sales teams, customers, and prospects, with more than half (52%) of sales leaders reporting that their CRM platform is costing potential revenue opportunities.

Nearly one-third say their customer data is incomplete, out of date, or inaccurate.

And a massive collection of companies have reported that they cannot access customer data across marketing, sales and service systems.

This data is being provided by the latest CRM and Sales Impact Report. 

The CRM and Sales Impact Report surveyed 1,000 sales leaders to consider:

• How technology is transforming the expectations of both sales leaders and their customers
• Which roadblocks and blind spots are causing sales friction and contributing to churn
• What customer data and insights business leaders need to compete and win market share

Are companies on the cusp of a customer relationship crisis? Find out today.

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5 B2B Marketing Trends in 2021

No matter how you shake it out, 2020 was a whirlwind. Everyone dealt with some type of new hurdle that they’ve never seen before. It was felt across the board, personally and professionally. This is true in every business, in every industry, and that includes B2B marketing.

B2B marketing trends in the past would often cater around how to move the technology and digital needle forward in businesses and industries that historically move slowly. 2020 changed the game…and quickly. Buzzwords like “digital disruption” are now nearly obsolete as nearly everyone was faced with taking offline marketing activities online. With no more in-person tradeshows or on-site meetings for sales reps, B2B companies had to move fast. After spending time building a robust 2020 marketing plan, B2B marketers had to pitch everything they thought they were going to do into the trashcan and stay anew.

A year later and many industries are still struggling to get back to full strength, but B2B marketers are faced with the task to market the company anyway. So, where is B2B marketing going now that the big disruption happened?

Here are five B2B marketing trends in 2021:

Voice Search

Hello Siri, can you tell me more about voice search? While this article isn’t Siri, I can tell you more about voice search. Truth be told, no B2B marketing trends for 2021 report is complete without talking about voice search. In fact, studies show that one-third of the U.S. population uses voice search features.

When you work through your SEO and content marketing strategies for the year, don’t overlook making your content voice search optimized. One of the biggest differences between text and voice search is the keyword length. Voice search typically has long-tailed keywords, more so than the shorter keywords your text search strategy may focus on.

Finding Efficiency in Tech Stack

One of most troubling parts of 2020 for businesses was seeing the glaring gaps between their technology solutions. For instance, a manufacturer may have never cared if their CRM and ERP data was integrated before. It was never a huge deal for a customer service rep to talk to a plant manager if he or she had questions about a part. When everyone works together in an office space or plant, you won’t always see the inefficient processes you are relying on. Then comes 2020, where anyone that is not necessary to be in the office is not. It’s not as easy for sales and marketing to come together and align their goals if they aren’t seeing each other every day. How does marketing know the best sales enablement material to create if the sales process is changing because sales reps can’t meet prospects in person?

Additionally, marketers rely on marketing automation for efficiency. It’s never going to be a best practice anymore for a marketer to manually email every person who downloads content from your website. However, what happens when in the chaos of 2020, the marketing department forgot to check on the messaging in those automated drip campaigns? What happens when the follow up emails somehow mention activities (like amusement parks or flying on an airplane) that weren’t really happening in 2020? It’s not just a matter of content getting stale, but becoming irreverent.

Marketers found that automation and technology should be a part of their strategy, but there should also be analysis done. Even if something is running smoothly, you can look to see if anything needs refreshed, especially when there is a shift in the market.

AI at the Forefront

Not only are companies finding the best way to use their current technology solutions, they are discovering more of what they can do. Artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to improve and will be a mainstay in digital marketing efforts. Using AI technology to enhance your B2B campaigns is a huge feat. The biggest trick is to utilize AI and machine learning to complement your efforts, not take them over. Customers and prospects still want to speak to humans and collaborate with your specialists.

Omni-Channel Approach

I did a presentation in 2019 about omni-channel. It touched on just how many different ways people communicated online in their personal lives, thus wanting to do it professionally too. Fast forward through 2020 and into 2021 and those communication styles have grown exponentially. Now people are regularly finding ways to stay connected while living and working apart.

Adapting to an omni-channel strategy will help your reach your audience better. You can boost your leads if you are in the places they are in, and connect those conversations together. If you aren’t sure where your customers and leads are at, attempting to engage in a variety of places will also help you find out where they are.

Budget Conscious

The ongoing pandemic affected (and still is affecting) a variety of industries. Even companies that may be back to full capacity are a little hesitant to dive back into things in the same way. The pandemic showed all of us how quickly things can shut down without notice –and sometimes not knowing when it’s opening back up.

When thinking about your marketing spend for 2021, assess how things will impact your organization in the long-term. This does not mean you necessarily need to cut it completely and then wait and see what happens. A screeching halt on your marketing efforts can be similar to abruptly stopping a train. It takes much more effort to get a train running again then if you just keep it chugging along slowly. Plus, many marketing efforts take time to gain traction, so you don’t want to lose all your momentum.

Conclusion

B2B marketers quickly adapted their strategies and executed them the best they could in 2020. So, what does that mean for 2021? B2B marketing trends in 2021 focus on taking everything learned in 2020 and applying it to a better, more robust B2B marketing strategy.

Do you need help getting the most from your software? Struggle with executing your marketing strategy? It can be tough, but we are here to help. Contact us today for a free consultation.

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How You Got to a Disconnected Workforce …and How to Break Down the Silos

Does it ever seem like the pieces aren’t fitting together correctly at your company? It’s not that the work isn’t getting done, or that any one department or team is failing. It’s more that this powerful business machine is losing horsepower, and it’s not entirely clear why. There’s a disconnect — or maybe several disconnects — somewhere, and it’s starting to create a serious drag on the entire business.

If the above scenario hits home, then you’re right. There is a disconnect, and it’s a bigger problem that you may realize.

As a successful company grows, the pressure on that business also increases. The external pressures tend to be more obvious — competition, customer acquisition, expansion costs — and as a result it’s easier for the company leadership to respond to. It’s the internal pressures that often go overlooked. The first tiny cracks are easy to ignore, but unless they’re dealt with, these fissures only grow over time.

How it Started

Maybe it starts with something small, like the customer service and sales teams wanting to have their own customer records. Perhaps one manager doesn’t like the way the company’s CRM stores prospect data, and keeps their own records on an ever-growing Excel spreadsheet. It could even be that the COO and the CFO prefer to use their own reporting software, requiring two parallel systems that pull from similar, but slightly different, sources. Over a long enough time, most companies will build up hundreds of little eccentricities like these. Individually, they may seem harmless, but each one represents another fracture in the system.

Most of these fractures are ultimately about controlling the flow of information. They create little strongholds — known as silos — where individual people or groups can limit access to company data. This usually isn’t done for any nefarious purpose, but it does have the effect of creating an increasingly disconnected workforce.

So, what can your company do about it? How can you break down these silos, repair these fractures, and get the engine that drives your organization back to operating at full power once again? What role does technology play in repairing the damage?

Understanding the Disconnected Workforce

Why do these fractures and silos form in the first place? Most of the time, they happen as a result of fairly mundane stresses and pressures within the company. To understand why, let’s simplify the business into three fundamental layers: C-suite, frontline workers, and middle management.

The C-suite is responsible for making the big decisions that drive the company. They develop the long-term strategies, the major partnerships, and the overall vision for where the business is headed. Sometimes they make those decisions based on a fairly limited set of data — often specially prepared reports that focus in a handful of KPIs. This can result in blind spots when it comes to things those reports don’t cover. This lack of visibility into the company’s operations can be a real problem, particularly when this overlooked data tells a different story than the C-suite’s grand plans. As a result, the C-suite doesn’t always have a strong incentive to focus on the more mundane, practical issues faced by the rest of the company.

Frontline workers are on the other side of the equation. They have almost no control over the operation or direction of the business, and they have no ability to make meaningful changes. They use the tools and technology they are given to do the tasks they are assigned. Their jobs can be tough, and their wages and job security typically come from meeting assigned targets. As a result, they don’t have a strong incentive to draw attention to any problems or inefficiencies they encounter, as they’re just trying to make it through the work day. Worse yet, their opinions are not always asked on how to create a more efficient workflow.

This brings us to the middle managers, who are tasked with enacting the C-suite’s decisions while still delivering the expected results from frontline workers. When something goes awry, no matter how big or small, they tend to get the brunt of the blame. Managers also may get pitted against each other, so they fight for the resources they need to deliver the results the C-suite expects. Not surprisingly, they tend to be protective when it comes to sharing data about the performance of their teams.

Everyone in this simple model has at least some motivation to overlook, ignore, or even obscure some kinds of important information. They also have reasons to keep information to themselves, even if it would help the company to make that information available. Why enter information you don’t absolutely have to as a sales rep? Who wants to draw attention to a troubling customer trend as a manager? Why even share information between departments if it might reflect badly on your team? Why not protect that data, and limit access to it? Should it just stay safely in your silo?

All of this hoarding of data creates disconnects — little fractures and cracks — across the entire company. In a real company, with many more layers of complexity, the number of these disconnects can be exponentially larger. It’s becomes clear when you have a disconnected workforce.

So how do you break down these silos?

Breaking Down the Silos

As with so many things, the first step is admitting that there’s a problem. This can be hard to do, particularly when the company is successful. Given enough time, however, these fractures will start to have serious impacts on customer satisfaction, employee productivity, company reputation, and (eventually) profitability. That’s why it’s always best to fix these problems while they’re still relatively small and inexpensive.

Breaking down silos means replacing these cracked, broken systems with something specifically designed to get that company data flowing again. This means having clearly defined, concrete workflows that take the motivations of every stakeholder and user into account. It also means creating a unified framework — killing all those internal databases, spreadsheets, and prospect lists locked away on a manager’s computer, for instance — that provides real visibility into the company’s operations.

This can be a tough sell. Everyone at your company has gotten used to the piecemeal collection of software that they currently use, and many of them will be reluctant to switch to something new. This will happen at every level — from grumbling salespeople to “I didn’t mean men” C-suite members — but it’s absolutely essential that everyone buy into the new solution.

On a practical level, this disconnected workforce issue is solved by finding the right technology, and developing a careful, step-by-step plan for implementing it.

Creating the Unified Tech Stack

Every company will have unique needs when it comes to business technology. Some companies will need little more than a new CRM solution and training in how to use it. Others will need a full suite of integrations — ERP, CRM, marketing automation, AI-sentiment analysis, virtual office — to meet all their needs. It’s not really about creating a specific tech stack. It’s about finding the right technology for your needs. The goal is to build a strong, silo-smashing framework that solves the company’s problems while also delivering complete visibility into its operations.

There are other key elements — careful data migration, integration with other business systems, and the all-important step of training — that also play a role in the success of these new anti-silo initiatives. The system has to work for everyone, and at every level.

If it’s not done correctly, even the most comprehensive (and expensive) tech solutions will ultimately result in the quiet, slow return of the same old silos. That’s why it’s absolutely essential to find the right business technology partners for your company’s needs.

If your company is looking to repair its disconnected workforce, and establish a better system where silos simply can’t exist, it’s essential to get right on the first try. We can help. Contact FayeBSG today for a no-risk consultation.

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