Digital Transformation Academy - Growth Opportunities...Digitally !!! #CRM

Is YOUR Sales Funnel...SYNCHRONIZED ?

Mon, 20 May 2024 04:31:22 +0000

Attract hungry, buying audience and conversion will be easy, Grow in business using the right strategies !

When your company is well synchronized with market needs, prospects buy and money flows. Unfortunately, few companies can maintain a constant flow. Salespeople churn out demonstrations, samples and proposals. Marketing departments churn out newsletters, ad copy and brochures. But not enough prospects close.

What makes the sales funnel flow faster? The key is coordinating your sales and marketing efforts—aligning everyone in your organization according to the questions you ask your prospects at different stages in your relationships with them. These questions form the logical connection between the work of sales and the work of marketing.

Marketers need to know the questions that salespeople ask of customers at different points in the selling cycle, so they can provide the correct types of support to make selling easier. Likewise, salespeople need to know when to turn to marketing expertise to build customer knowledge and awareness, especially when customers are not ready to buy.

If you don’t have enough prospects ready to buy, review and refine your questioning strategies, then realign your sales and marketing organization around them. The following are three questioning strategies that you can use to make your sales funnel flow faster, and some examples of how to sales and marketing can work together to move customers through the funnel.

Strategy #1:

The problem/solution question strategy emerged to address the old adage, “You can’t sell the solution, unless you’ve sold the problem first.” For example, Michael Bosworth’s Solution Selling (Irwin, 1995) offered techniques for motivating prospects by uncovering their pain.

If the customer has exactly the problem you can solve, but isn’t consciously ready to buy, problem/solution questions can help you show that the fit is right. But don’t use them when your customers are not in decision-making mode and simply need information.

Strategy #2:

The second type of question gets at your prospects’ business and departmental objectives. What strategies will they use to achieve those objectives? What issues and challenges do they face? Stepping back to get a broader view, you can scope out people’s perspectives (including decision makers’), as well as departmental politics and priorities. You can build relationships, steer clear of time-wasters and start generating a consensus, even
before you start “selling.”

Strategy #3:

Synchronization questions are key to effectiveness. Marketing and selling never work when you ask your prospects to take actions they are not ready for. If the problem you solve is not on a decision maker’s radar yet, that person will not recognize the value of your products and services.

How a CRM can help with your Sales Funnel ?

A CRM system benefits an organisation through the visibility of its sales funnel, including all sales activities. The visibility that the sales funnel gives is fundamental to managing sales performance and control of the sales process. This visibility enables management to understand why, when, who and how opportunities are being won, stalled, or being lost. If it can't be monitored, it cannot be managed. The visibility offered within the CRM system also allows management to make educated business decisions based on hard data. A CRM system will enable structured data to be used to access performance. This assessment should indicate which sales person is out performing others.

ProAptivity are an independent CRM solutions provider with over 30 years experience in helping clients successfully onboard user-customisable CRM solutions. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software supported by our training provide customers with the tools needed to deliver successful business process management.

Fundamentally, we help organisations embed CRM best practice throughout their organisation. This helps organisations become more competitive, customer focused and ultimately more profitable.

Trust – the road to success always, especially in the digital age

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 09:24:00 +0000

Trust is extremely important for customers to come to us. This is of course always necessary but more so in the digital age, as the customer cannot see us so do feel a little confused at times.

Image Source fm-magazine.com

Ensuring the trustworthiness of your online store is paramount, with security being a critical component. Customers are understandably wary of sharing sensitive information or completing purchases on websites that do not prioritize security. To establish a secure environment, consider implementing SSL/TLS certificates to encrypt data transmission, conducting regular security audits to identify vulnerabilities, and enforcing strong password policies, including two-factor authentication. Additionally, using reputable payment gateways that adhere to industry security standards and keeping your website's software up to date with security patches are essential. Educating your customers about online security best practices can also boost their confidence in shopping on your website. By emphasizing security, you can enhance trust with your customers and encourage them to make purchases on your platform.

In order to help you in this aspect of your store, we need to follow 4 tips to have a safe WooCommerce store not only for your customers, but also to help you sleep better at night.

So if you really care about your customers and your business, it is already taking time to apply the following tips:

Tips for Woocommerce

Install a security plugin

There are several very powerful security plugins for WordPress that obviously also work with WooCommerce. They can be downloaded for free from the official WordPress plugin repository. Although they are free, their configuration panel is quite complete and both are really effective. Of course, you should only use one of them.

Use SSL certificate to encrypt the information

The initials of SSL come from Secure Socket Layer and it is a cryptographic protocol used for secure connections between client and server. Without going into technical details, when you install an SSL certificate on the server where you have your WooCommerce store, you guarantee that all the information or data that you exchange with the client has been encrypted to ensure that no one can steal it.

Download from the official repository or known marketplace

Download and install plugins or templates for WooCommerce only from the official WordPress repository website or if they are paid, always buy them in well-known marketplaces.

Mobile, another market place

The mobile is yet another market all marketers should master. We need to know how it translates into action in terms of presence and breadth of mobile strategy, mobile ad spend growth and ROI tracked through mobile channels by companies and brands.

As of now, just 25% of brands claim to have a mobile strategy and some out of this sparse statistic incorrectly believe that simply having an app or a mobile-friendly website suffices for a strategy. 45% of companies choose to exhibit their content on desktop sites only and not on the mobile.

Things are changing now. For instance almost everyone has a mobile now and even does shopping from there.

Corona and digital marketing

With Corona, the situation has changed even more. With Covid 19 truly capturing everyone’s attention across the globe, one can also see many people trying their best to control in the best possible manner. The aim of course is to end the suffering. Business is also doing its best to make it easier for people to work, whether remotely or with all measures in place for keeping welfare of the employees as the most important factor. The challenge of course is both economic and biological. The challenge therefore does need to keep both factors in mind.

Supply chain

All supply chains are becoming digital. Deliveries need to move quickly. Digital is becoming the new norm and companies are indeed adopting this approach. In fact, many companies are becoming even more efficient than earlier. This is surely because of the positive approach they have embraced. Global supply chains too are becoming a common norm in many places, now more than ever before. The market is indeed becoming more and more digital in all areas so the physical location doesn’t really matter at all.

Paraidigm shifts

Whatever the circumstances a company may face, paradigms are changing and therefore one needs to adapt and move ahead with this new perspective.

Using Data

Here, data is a great tool.

What could we do with this data

1. Site Tracking

A customer journey is the path that a customer takes on our website to become a paying customer or lead.

By tracking all the events that our current users are going through to reach conversion (e.g. clicking on to the page, reading info, filling form, etc.), we can understand how customers engage with our site.

2. Chat-based Data Collection

Another way to understand the customer journey is by using chat to source common user questions. Customers do feel comfortable sharing information and asking questions to a chat agent, whether human or artificial.

Leveraging this phenomenon on our website, we can add a chat widget to our website where customers can ask their questions about your offerings and then use that chat data to inform our website managers.

3. A/B testing

A/B testing is often recognised as the most important data-driven tool in any marketer’s arsenal.

In this method is we show half of our site visitors one version of our website, and the other half another version of our website (usually with a single change made to it) and see which performs better to decide on the final copy. This is often used by many as the digital world does make it easy to implement.

It is a slow and iterative process but well done well, the results are truly rewarding.

4. User Segmentation

By dividing our customers based on attributes like location (users that visit your site from x location), analytics data (device type, number of pages per session, number of visits, etc) or CRM data (purchase history, company, vertical, etc.), we can create marketing strategies that are hyper-personalized to the preferences of our customers.

Conclusion

Embracing change, especially in the digital realm, can open up a world of opportunities. The digital age has arrived, and to thrive in it, we must fully embrace digital tools and platforms, such as computers and mobile devices. By doing so, we can transform our businesses into digital success stories.

A key aspect of this transformation is leveraging data. Data analytics allows us to gain valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. By understanding our customers better, we can tailor our products and services to meet their needs more effectively.

Ultimately, by embracing the digital world and harnessing the power of data, we can position ourselves as leaders in the digital transformation game. It's not just about keeping up with the times; it's about using digital tools to propel our businesses forward and achieve greater success.