Pitfalls That May Hurt Your Small Business CRM Software’s Productivity and Stall Business Growth

Do you feel like that your sales team could have performed more? Are you putting the blame on your CRM for SMB?

If it is so, remember even though easy to use CRM software is a cutting edge business growth technology nonetheless it cannot generate accurate insight and data unless your team members consistently use the system and also manage and update it on a regular basis. But, then again, once you buy CRM it will not be managed, taken care of, used, and updated until it is considered to be worthy to the members of your team.

Hence, what should you avoid performing with your small business CRM software, when you are trying to get everyone on board?

Here are 3 key factors which you must consider for optimal performance of your CRM for small and medium businesses:

1. Guidance and Long-term Strategy

According to Gartner, more than 70% of business establishments did not have mutually agreed upon setting up the goals for their projects prior to their CRM implementation process. Hence, it has been observed that teams are setting themselves up for failures all across the globe because they are practically spending thousands of dollars on a business solution without any apparent reason as their goal.

Therefore, for your CRM’s success, and for your team to remain productive and responsibilities, the job roles, incentives, and accountability around the system needs to be clearly defined prior to installation of the easy to use CRM software. For this, you must involve people in the implementation process, who have a good understanding of the key benefits of using a CRM platform, so that you can easily define your goals behind the CRM implementation for your organization.

It is best to ask yourself questions as stated below before you install the CRM system:
 - Do you want to buy CRM and use the software solution to perk up the effectiveness of your business or to improve the level of customer satisfaction for your brand?
 - As a business growth tool how will easy to use CRM help your company to boost its sales cadence or other workflows and processes required in sales?

2. Bad Data

Data is the lifeblood of any CRM. Registering spelling mistakes, incorrect numbers, or outdated contact information can bring down the efforts of your entire team if the data is left unchecked in the CRM database.

However, this is food for thought, as to why does data error occurs in the first place?  In most cases, data errors happen because your team is entering the data manually. No matter how much educated and smart your team is you always run the risk of someone among your team members inputting incorrect data into the CRM platform. 

So sidestep and go around the barn by eliminating data entry mistakes with automation. A good CRM should without human intervention supply data into the CRM system without the users having to lift their fingers for manual entry of necessary information into the CRM database . 

3. Overtly Complicated Integration

Finally, most CRM system implementations require some customization, but integrating systems tend to bring inconsistency between two or more separate applications. This can eventually lead to problems that can keep your team from finding what they need out of your Customer Relationship Management software.

Therefore, always take the help of professional CRM consultants to help streamline and smoother your CRM integration process. CRM consultants are the only qualified professionals who can find a solution that integrates your CRM with what you are already using as your business tool.

Are you still worrying about the productivity level of your CRM system? Do you think your software is not where it needs to be?  If it is so, call a cloud based CRM integration professionals, and we are confident that your problems will get solved easily.

Does Your Business Needs an Email Inbox or a CRM like ConvergeHub

Even after using an easy to use CRM software , whether we admit it or not, using our email’s inbox can be addictive.

After all, checking an email is as uncomplicated as refreshing a web browser or tapping on an app. Checking emails gives us the hope that our aspirations will be realized soon. Be it for an exciting business opportunity waiting for a reply, or an update on your shopping cart list etc.

Nevertheless, keeping the addiction aside, email inbox, in reality, makes an awful to-do list. Unfortunately, there are still several business organizations those that use email to structure their day-to-day works. In spite of, the prevalence of affordable project management apps, there are many among us those that just cannot break free from the age-old shackles of email.

In this article, we shall discuss a few reasons as to why you should discontinue using your email inbox and instead use the best small and medium business CRM software to manage your new to do list:

Your Inbox Does Not Worry About Importance

As a small or medium business owner in a typical day’s work, you need to pitch new clients, deal with employee issues, develop game-changing marketing and support strategies, and others. With so much on your plate, you surely cannot afford to lose time and waste your work hours on non-value-added tasks.
However, all these being said, why do you then spend so much time hunting between emails? Granted that it is truly impossible to make out when a vital email will arrive, keeping a close watch on your email’s inbox indeed makes sense from this standpoint. Nevertheless, we can wager that more than 90% of the emails that you receive every day are far less than important.  Mostly your inbox gets a lot of stuff like these:

• Promotional emails from your vendors
• Industry newsletters
• Emails from sales reps, who want to sell you things
• Low-priority requests from employees, vendors, or clients
• Social media alerts and others

Additionally, your email’s inbox does not put the most important task related emails at the top, and therefore, important request sinks down into obscurity as additional emails arrive every day.

Surely, you can keep the pace by archiving or deleting unimportant emails. However, is this the best use of your precious time? Probably not.

You Cannot Mark an Email as “Done”

Let us take for granted that you have somehow even managed to devise a process by which only “important” emails make it to the inbox. For this, you have unsubscribed all non-essential emails, have set filters to auto-forward any business emails to your assistant, and have convinced your customers and team members to reach you out sparingly.

However is your email inbox the perfect to-do list now- we still assume it is not so much.

To illustrate this point, let us guess you have the following emails anticipating your attention:

Email Subject: Finish Slide Deck for next week’s presentation

Email Subject: Select a venue for your company’s vendor meeting

Email Subject: Please Sign Up for ConvergeHub 14 Day’s free trial

Being an efficient businessperson, you may be able to complete all these tasks within an hour. However, sadly your all these three tasks are still in your inbox. What should you do with them now? Delete them? Move them to another folder? Do you need to answer to each person, indicating that your job has been done?

Would not it be nice if you can just mark your tasks as ‘done’ and move on with your work? Sadly, emails do not work that way.

Delegation is Messy

To include another layer of complication, not every chore fits precisely into a single email exchange tread.

For an example, let us take up this subjected email “Select a venue for your company’s vendor meeting”. Now, what seems like a relatively straightforward decision can very fast evolve into several separate email threads. Shortly after sending your email for approval, you can receive dozens of added emails from coordinating staffs at the venue. Even their accounts department may need you to make an advance payment by the close of your day’s businesses. You can receive a 20-page PDF document, containing all kinds of menu options, information on sitting arrangements, and other important details.

Will it not be more productive for you if you can allocate all these different tasks to some other members in your company? Nevertheless, here lies the lacunae of using an email inbox, since delegating tasks from your inbox can be really messy.

In the modern times, you virtual assistant may not take much time to forward messages to your marketing and accounting department, however, the problem is there is no guarantee that your staffs will remember to follow up on the issue, as their inbox is also overflowing with tasks. Therefore, using the inbox of your email, you have no way to check whether your delegated job has been accomplished within the deadlines.  

There Is a Software Designed Specifically For Organizing Your To-Dos

By now, you must be agreeing with us that your inbox is indeed letting you down.

However, there is good news, as we alluded on the beginning of this post; there are several online SaaS platforms that can structure your company’s works.
ConvergeHub CRM, which is best known for its sales management tasks, also provides a suite of integrated business growth and productivity tools.

Let us find how this best small business CRM software can solve many of your headaches right away.

Sequencing important tasks

Unlike your email inbox, ConvergeHub brings clarity to your most important tasks. Using this easy to use CRM software , you can assign due dates, the priority of the job, completion report, and status update of your important tasks with just a few clicks.

Tracking completed tasks

Tasks tracking with best CRM for SMB like ConvergeHub, will also fulfill your desire to check tasks off your to-do list. Using this customer information database software marking any task as “Done” is as easy as clicking a button on your computer or mobile screen.

Delegating tasks to others

Getting all the members of your organization working in sales, marketing, support and even finance departments into ConvergeHub, can be really beneficial for your company.
Rather than delegating works from your email inbox, this Salesforce Alternative CRM provides a more structured workflow.
Using this business growth technology you can create tasks to occur on a repeated or single-time basis, which makes the very act of delegating your works more efficient.
To start assigning jobs to your other employees, just select the correct team member’s name from an intuitive drop-down once you buy CRM like ConvergeHub and connect the task to a larger project.

You can also add detailed notes as you allocate your jobs, to ensure that your teams find no more excuses.

Connecting Sales and To-Dos

For added context on sales and marketing related tasks, you can seamlessly link items to opportunities in your sales funnel. With just a click or two using an easy to use cloud based CRM software like ConvergeHub, your team can have access to information that would have otherwise resided only in your mind.

Takeaway:

Leadership comes from the top, so by continuing to rely on email inbox dependent processes, you are just telling your employees to do likewise.

Therefore, take a bold step now and find a better approach to streamline your tasks for enhanced productivity.

Doing this you can be sure that your team will thank you- and so will your bottom-line.