CRM | smallbizdream blog

The Secret To Building Customer Relationships

Most successful businesses are built on customer relationships. Richard Branson built many successful businesses in many different industries but there was one common denominator across the board — his level of customer service was always topnotch.

Building relationships with potential clients and customers takes time and effort. You must have the right tools to get through the whole process more efficiently.

We’ll examine some of the best practices in building good customer relationships and how small businesses can implement a simple CRM app to accomplish that goal.

Manage Customer Data

Data management is the foundation for establishing good customer relationships. Customer information is the ‘missing link’ that connects businesses with potential clients and customers. It’s the secret to staying relevant with them despite the changing trends over a long period of time.

Many businesses have invested a lot of time and money in business applications to manage customer data. Fortunately, we can accomplish the same for just a fraction of the cost. For a typical small business with a limited start-up cost, this seems to be the best, if not the only option.

Small Business Dream’s mini-CRM allows small business owners to collect and control customer information very efficiently for less than a dollar a day. It specializes on the essential features of customer acquisition and simplifies them for the average person, as well as a follow-up system that constantly updates salespeople when a scheduled call, text, or social media message is up.

Additional features include Categories which enables business owners to segment their contacts making each survey, email campaign, and newsletter subscription very specific to different types of contacts.

Personalize Your Message

Customers still want the personal touch. Hence, we need to go beyond the usual ‘name, number, and address’, and learn about their ‘soft spots’ and circumstances that surround each purchase, customer query, or complaint. We need to know what makes them feel good because after all, customers make buying decisions based on how they feel.

To add a personal touch, we need to keep track of every customer engagement. Small Business Dream creates a system that treats every customer as a unique individual. Even as simple as having a Notes section to put down important details from a telephone call, text or email can go a long way in determining what makes our customers tick.

Once you have this information, you can easily personalize your emails from your list of pre-written messages without having to start from scratch. Just a simple mention about their hobbies, pastimes, recent activities, or even little things they cherish will endear your company to your customers. It makes them feel respected and cared for as opposed to just being a number or a tiny dot on the chart.

Personalizing your message also applies to social media. Although secondary to email in terms of communicating with potential clients and customers, we cannot ignore the fact that social media is very much a part of people’s lives. However, we need to cut through the noise by personalizing our messages and let them know we didn’t just hit the ‘auto-reply’.

If they ended up on your Social Connect, which is a part of the Small Business Dream contact management tool, you need sift through the list and connect (‘follow’ or ‘like’) to each one who has a genuine interest in your business. Comment on things they’re currently into and have your pre-written messages below them.

Even a little extra step of personalizing your email and social media messages can make a big difference in establishing relationships with potential clients and customers.

Provide Real-time Customer Support

Real-time customer support is almost non-existent in most big companies. Part of the reason is that these companies have already grown their customer base to a point where it becomes too much to handle. As a result, many customers feel they’re given less priority and they would start looking for other businesses who might have a respect for them as a customer.

Companies who are able to respond as quickly as possible to queries and complaints are highly regarded by customers. They might not have the best products and services, but the fact that they cared a lot about them makes them want to do business. The saying, “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care,” applies in businesses as well.

Small Business Dream has figured out a way to achieve real-time customer support with its Action List that updates salespersons and business owners if a new customer comes in through the Sales Funnel, or if an existing customer has just responded to a customer survey they have given out. They’ll find their way on top of the Action List, so sales people can link up with them right then and there.

Follow up Consistently

Following up with customers allows your business to accomplish two things. Aside from building trust and confidence with your customers, it’s also helps with customer feedback which is a valuable tool in improving products, services, and customer experience.

There are two approaches Small Business Dream can be used to follow up with potential clients and customers: newsletter subscriptions and customer surveys.

Monthly newsletters provide additional information about the service or product they just bought. For instance, you want your customers to maintain their hair’s luster and shine after a keratin treatment. You can invite them to your monthly newsletter about hair care and let them answer a few survey questions.

Follow-ups can also turn into cross-selling and upselling opportunities since some of your product or service can be tied to another one they just had.

After having their cars thoroughly cleaned and polished in your carwash, have them fill up a short survey form asking them about a few contact details, and if they want to be in your mailing list and avail of free car care tips, discounts, and free offers. For instance, you can inform your customers about the negative effects of using detergents on their car’s polish and why they should be using your car care products instead.

Small Business Dream’s Email Auto-responders and Survey Engine allow you to accomplish both with less effort. If you have prospects or customers that need to be followed up by phone, email or social media message, their names will show up on the Action List on that particular day. This makes sure you never miss on any of your potential clients and customers.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Improving Customer Acquisition with CRM

The biggest challenge facing small businesses is how they can get more customers and maximize their return on investments.

Fortunately, we can easily find ways to improve customer acquisition without having to spend a lot of money on traditional outbound marketing strategies. It only takes a little bit of creativity and trying out new ideas.

There are two main ways – offline and online. We will talk about both ways here.

Promote Your Business Offline

Everybody is online so why not try the personal touch. A lot of customers still like and require the personal touch.

Some offline customer engagements are as effective as a marketing strategy today as it was 100 years ago when the majority of businesses didn’t have a website. These include:

going to networking events
taking your business outdoors
sponsorship & giveaways

Meeting up with people in a friendly, non-selling environment like networking events increases your exposure without spending too much on paid ads. However, to be successful, you have to present your business in light of the customer’s needs, pain points and how your products and services can provide a solution to these problems.

The idea is to go and help people, and to show how your company can create value for them. It may not always lead to an immediate sale, but it can help grow your network and develop good relationships with potential buyers and customers.

Whenever possible, bring along something that reminds them about your business. It could be your business card, key holder, bunker ring, or any small gizmos you can carry along. I always carry bunker rings with me to networking events. Why? Because my potential customers will stick my bunker rings on their phones and every time they glance at their device, it will remind them of me.

Another way to help you with customer acquisition is to take your business outdoors by having your own space during special occasions or community events where people can find your company, products, or services. Talk with the organizers and make some arrangements to have your own booth set up.

Event organizers might also look for sponsors to reduce the overall cost of running the event. You can take this opportunity to have your company name or logo displayed in conspicuous areas for a few hundred dollars’ worth of donation.

Once you have talked to them and exchanged business cards, then it’s a good idea to put them into an online follow-up series so they don’t forget about you.

If you want them to get to your sales funnel, you can use Small Business Dream’s Customer Acquisition tools and have your landing page address or QR code printed on your Sales Funnel Card.

Most importantly, always make an effort to follow up with them as soon as you can.

Take Your Business Online

Promoting your business online is a sure way to improve customer acquisition using cost-effective marketing tools over the Internet. However, it’s tough to get noticed. Some of the best ways to increase customer awareness about your business include having a blog or website, a social media account, and a sales funnel.

Your blog or website can serve many uses for your business. It helps educate people about the benefits of using your product or service, provide useful information about the subject they’re looking on, and can be used for earning residual income through affiliate links, Google AdSense, etc. But most importantly, it helps maintain people’s interest and lead them closer to your goal – to get more customers.

Social media can also be used in customer acquisition, but because marketers have been using social media the wrong way, business owners have started to lose interest in it. They don’t have a system to follow up with fans and followers in a realistic way. Most of them aren’t even real, so business owners end up using auto-responders (‘robot secretaries’) the whole time. Most businesses don’t think strategically when it comes to social media but use a shotgun blast approach, hoping to catch somebody or something.

Small Business Dream is an inexpensive tool that helps business owners manage their social media contacts more efficiently with their Social Connect, and the Social Series in the Action List. Social Connect gives them the option to curate and import fans and followers to their contact list.

Since we don’t want our customer database to be stuffed with unwanted (fake, pseudonymous, or artificial) contacts, we need to screen them out of the social contact list, and leave the ones who show genuine interest to learn more about the company. This would allow sales people to work on the Action List’s Social Series more efficiently and get real results from using social media to get more customers online.

Sales funnel is a very useful tool in customer acquisition when used with offline and other online methods. With Small Business Dream, business owners can easily create their own sales funnel like a pro without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and use the link for their Social Series and opt-in subscriptions online. They can also use the link offline through Sales Funnel Cards, tent cards, signboards, or directly through an iPad or tablet set up to the sales funnel in-store.

Build a Customer Base to Promote Your Business

Your first customers constitute the core of your business from which you can grow more customers. Coming up with a loyalty program, customer specials, customer referrals, offering discounts, and commissions, can help accelerate your business.

Although it might cost you a little bit of profit, you’ll have greater gains in the long run as your business gains momentum. Looking at it from an angle, think of it as being a part of your marketing expenses. But instead of them going to paid advertisements, they go directly to your customers who will benefit from them. The result is a happy customer base who will talk about their experience with your company to other people, and your business becoming an instant success.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Managing Customer Data for Small Businesses

In order to maximize CRM’s capabilities in managing customer data, we need to consider the important aspects of data management such as data gathering, organizing, updating, amongst other things. We’ll take a look at some of the data management strategies used by successful business owners and how we can apply them using Small Business Dream CRM.

Decide What Information to Collect and Store

When it comes to data collection and storage, we only need what’s essential to making the sale and how to get them to that point. It makes perfect sense, since we are dealing with large numbers of prospects and customers, and we don’t want our customer database to be cluttered with useless data.

The following customer information should be your top priority:

contact information (email, phone number, social media account)
location (address, country, time zone)
personal information (name, sex, age, date of birth, occupation)
transaction history (notes about recent customer engagements such as calls, emails, text messages, surveys, etc.)

Most people will have at least three ways of communication – email, phone number, and social media account. Communicating with prospects and clients by phone may seem old-school, but it still ranks as one of the best methods of sales conversions.

Email and social media accounts of your customers enable you to collect more information about them through surveys and customer feedback, as well as educate and communicate with them through automated and semi-automated messages.

Other information about the customers can be used as well. Countries and time zones lets you know when the right time is to make your scheduled call. Holidays, birthdays, and personal milestones helps maintain customer loyalty by adding a personal touch to your messages.

Of all these information about your customer, the transaction history will make up most of your customer data as they will be constantly updated each time you interact with them. Salient points from every phone call, text, email and social media message must be diligently put on record in order to stay on track with every customer.

Small Business Dream CRM has a place for each of the four types of information. Its Contact Manager has a very intuitive way of looking up every customer information, and is seamlessly integrated with other useful features such as the Action List, and the Survey Engine.

Adopt an Efficient Way to Collect and Store Data

Collecting information from prospects and customers is one of the most time-consuming aspects of managing customer data. With the advent of CRMs in business, companies have been able to collect customer information more efficiently through sales and marketing automation.

Nowadays, it only takes one, easy-to-use, simple CRM to collect customer information in a snap. Small Business Dream captures all the information you need from your customers through the Client Acquisition tools. This can save you many hours collecting and typing all the data by yourself – possibly losing it in the process.

Typing customer information on the fly is also very efficient with Small Business Dream’s user interface as it allows salespersons to add notes about their customers in more ways than one, i.e., through the Action List, Contact Manager, or customer feedback.

Centralize Customer Information for Quick Access

Salespersons should be able to access customer data, all in one place. Some companies make the mistake of having different salespersons collecting and analyzing different types of information from prospects and customers. Since only a particular data is available to some, this might create gaps in communication which either makes it too generic or completely miss the intended audience.

Getting full access to customer information, including records of previous customer engagements allows salespeople to stay relevant with them and avoid repeating the same action with a customer over and over again.

Having all the information about the customer in one app means salespeople can get back to their customers and continue where they left off. The Notes function in Small Business Dream’s Contact Manager gives a full history of all the customer engagements they have with a particular customer, each note time-stamped and arranged from the most recent ones for easy lookup.

Have a System for Sorting and Prioritizing Contacts

Salespeople waste a lot of time calling up random contacts without doing research or even getting to know their potential prospects – what they want, who they are, or their business. This type of scattered approach could mean a lot of missed sales opportunities.

Small Business Dream can deal with these situations and makes it easier for salespeople to take action by simply following the system.

Here’s how it works:

Sorting contacts based on priority. Small Business Dream’s Action list sorts out customers based on their priority score (some CRMs use the term ‘lead score’). High-yield customers and patrons provide most of the company’s revenue, thus putting them on top of the list whenever a scheduled call, email, or social media message is due. New opt-ins and potential customers are considered high priority as well. Low priority contacts are dealt with afterwards. However, it’s important not to pre-judge and link up with all your prospects and customers regardless of their priority score as they could turn up into high priority contacts later on. Once the Action List is empty, you’re task is done for the day.
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Setting priority scores. Small business owners can only do so much with their limited time. Hence, they must be able to evaluate and set priority scores for each client to maximize their use of time. Small Business Dream’s Contact Manager contains a lot of tools that allows salespeople to make a quick assessment of potential clients. The Notes section in the Contact Manager contains all the useful information about the customer from phone calls, emails, social media messages, and answer to survey questions which serve as a guide for sales people in giving their priority score (scale of 0 to 10 from highest to lowest).
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Segmenting your contacts. The Contact Manager also has a feature to segment your contacts for your email campaigns, newsletter subscriptions, and regular updates about special events, promos, and discounts. With this feature, you’ll be able to stay top of mind to your customers with very little effort using sales and marketing automation aimed at specific type of customers only.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Time Management Skills for Increased Productivity

Time management is an essential part of becoming a successful entrepreneur. The ability to make full use of time can have a huge impact on productivity and is one of the contributing factors in growing a business.

Acquiring this skill takes discipline, having the right mindset, and the right tools to get the job done. This can be achieved with modern business applications, time management tools, and CRMs such as Small Business Dream.

First, we’ll take a look at how to identify the problems and difficulties that limit our ability to stay focused and be more productive. Next, we’ll explain some ways to take control of our time and introduce a CRM application to enhance time management skills of business owners and the workforce.

Eliminate Distractions from Work

Distraction is the thief of time. Many businesses are losing a lot of money due to unproductive use of time. Unfortunately, most of them are pretty common in the workplace. Recent surveys reveal that nearly half of the working hours are lost to unrelated activities such as making personal calls or using the social media and the Internet for non-work purposes.

Eliminating distractions from work frees up a lot of time on your daily work schedule and allows you to accomplish more than you used to. Some distractions are unavoidable, but for the most part, being distracted is a matter of choice.

Keep a Record of Time Usage

The first step to mastering your time is to trace back how many hours you’ve spent on a given task. If you’re like a lot of people and don’t know what you do half the time, using a time tracker will be useful in monitoring where you’re spending your efforts. You don’t need to use a fancy app or program. Just grab an excel sheet or print one off online.

Using a time tracker, people can spot the problems right away. They’ll be surprised to know how much of it is squandered away on activities that have nothing to do in achieving their goals. Others find they are spending too much time on tasks which have little or no impact to their job.

Try to recall everything you’ve done on regular work days and make an estimate of how much time you’ve spent on each one. If possible, include every distraction, idle hours, and other non-related activities in between.

Notice how much time you’ve used on each group of tasks. Sort them out according to the ones that have the greatest impact to your line of work to the least ones. Using this information, you can map out a strategy to maximize your time, eliminate time-consuming tasks, and concentrate on the most important ones.

The ideal number of hours spent on each task usually depends on one’s role. For business owners and seniors who need to coordinate tasks and make corporate decisions, they are most productive doing leadership roles in key areas. Micromanaging every task may not be the best use of time for this type of work.

Organize and Prioritize Your Tasks

There are different approaches to organizing and prioritizing tasks. Some authors encourage doing the most difficult ones first and the easier ones last. These tasks usually have the biggest impact to productivity and they can have serious consequences if not acted upon immediately.

Among the different approaches include:

The 80/20 Rule
“Eat that Frog”
ABCDE Method

The 80/20 Rule is probably the oldest, yet the most powerful principle that applies not only in business but in almost every aspect of life. The rule states that out of every 10 things that must be done, only 2 of them will have the greatest impact in achieving your goal.

After reviewing how much time is spent during a typical working day, you can start identifying the most important ones depending on the type of work you have, or what roles you need to fulfill for the company.

For business owners, they need to prioritize tasks that revolve around their role as decision-makers and overseers. Sales and marketing teams will have to focus more on customer-oriented tasks such as customer acquisition, follow-ups, and closing deals. Smart companies use CRM to increase productivity in these areas and boost sales.

Small Business Dream is one of the best examples of CRMs that help sales and marketing teams deal with every customer-oriented task and reduce a significant amount of time collecting, organizing, prioritizing, and updating customer information.

The “Eat that Frog” principle was coined by Mark Twain, who said “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”

While a bizarre example, it is another approach to prioritizing the most important tasks of the day. Doing the important tasks first, allows you to have the best output since you’re working from a fresh start when your energy is high. For sales people, they need to check on their prospects and customers first before proceeding to their next task. Some CRMs have certain features that force them to deal with those tasks first when they go to work.

Small Business Dream’s Action List will show up every contact they have to link up via social media or phone calls within the day. Failure to communicate with anyone on the list could mean missed opportunities or customers losing interest in the company. This could cost you hundreds, even thousands of dollars, in potential income.

The ABCDE Method is a way of organizing each task based on their implications for the overall outcome.

The ABCDE Method stands for:

A-tasks – These are tasks that only you alone can do and will have serious consequences if not completed within the day. Following up on a key customer is considered an A-task.

B-tasks – These tasks need to be done, but not necessary in achieving immediate goals. These tasks can wait and should be addressed only after completing all the A-tasks. Consequences are minimal for B-tasks (e.g., reading emails, and checking on low priority customers)

C-tasks – These tasks contribute little in achieving company goals and objectives. These tasks are optional and don’t have any consequence at all.

D-tasks – These tasks can be done by anyone else. Delegating small tasks gives you more time to focus on your main objective. Hiring a VA can help you skip most of your routine tasks and work on your main task right away.

E-tasks – These tasks serve no real purpose and are not necessary for getting the work done. Hence, they must be eliminated.

Plan Your Day Ahead of Time

An hour spent in planning can save you ten hours executing them. Make it a habit to spend an extra hour planning on how you can tackle the job the next day.

Planning not only organizes your thoughts on how to spend the day; it also makes you more confident that you can accomplish your goal because you’ve already planned for it.

List down all the tasks that need to be done and prioritize them according to importance. Apply the 80/20 Rule and focus on things that matter most, first and foremost.

If you have to handle interruptions from work, include them in your schedule. Block off your time and refrain from doing two things at once.

Learn CRM to Manage Time Wisely

Small Business Dream sales and marketing CRM contains many useful features to help business owners and sales people achieve phenomenal growth by focusing on high-priority tasks such as following up with customers on the Action List through social media and phone calls, adding notes about a particular customer, leaving a message and re-scheduling the next appointment at a pre-determined date. Opt-in customers and visitors in the Sales Funnel are added instantly to the Action List.

Sales teams can concentrate on other customer-oriented tasks after completing the Action List for just an hour or two. If the volume of incoming customer information from walk-in visitors and customers gets too high, they can use Small Business Dream’s Card Scan function and save a lot of time transcribing all the customer information.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

How Smart Companies Use Small Business Dream Data to Predict Customer Orders

Being able to predict customer orders based on real-time information is one of the keys to your sales success in today’s competitive market.

Today, almost every company has developed its own way of establishing meaningful customer relationships, including loyalty programs, customer referrals, or even network marketing to some extent.

We’ll take a look into customer relationship management (CRM), particularly Small Business Dream, and how it helps smart companies to predict customer orders and stay ahead of the competition.

Getting Down to the Facts about Your Customers

Collecting important information about your customers is the starting point in developing a strategy to determine what your customers would be interested in.

Small Business Dream’s client acquisition tools provide companies with a very efficient way to collect customer information from high-quality leads.

Small Business Dream accomplishes the task in two ways:

card scan function
sales funnel

To get only the best, high-quality leads, we need our client acquisition tools to target specific type of customers based on their needs and interest.

A walk-in customer who gives away his business card or contact information is interested to know more about the company and what it has to offer. It’s the same thing with online visitors and customers signing up to the mailing list on a website’s sales funnel.

As more information about your customers becomes available for the company using Small Business Dream’s follow up and customer feedback tools, you can start analyzing the data, connect the dots, and predict customer orders.

The following information from Small Business Dream’s customer data is crucial for anticipating customers’ response and buying habits:

Time/Date. What particular time of the month or year do they usually make these transactions? What particular time of the day or week do they prefer scheduling their appointments? This information will help you when preparing your next inventory or accommodating old and new customers days or weeks ahead.
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Frequency. How often do they make their purchase or avail of theservice? Do they take action to your drip campaigns and surveys often or does it take them weeks or months? Noting this customer habit will help you determine the likelihood of having repeat customers or converting new ones.
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Customer response. Your customers may not always give a direct response whether or not they are likely to buy the same product or use the same service, and some might respond better with more subtle ways like asking them if they would recommend using your product or service to anyone or asking their own honest opinion about it.

Big companies use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to know exactly which products and services are frequently bought or used.

Small Business Dream allows tech-savvy users to accomplish the same with just a little trick using Excel spreadsheets. Customer information can be easily downloaded in CSV file, and users will be able to process and analyze all the data presented in exquisite detail.

The big advantage of CRMs like Small Business Dream over ERPs is that it lets business owners and sales agents deal with every customer on a personal level, make their own assessment about the customer, and set priorities based on how they respond to the call.

Small Business Dream uses a scale of 0-10 to indicate which customers need more attention and which ones require less. However, it’s important to never prejudge your prospects based on customer data alone as there are cases when low priority clients make major buying decisions out of the blue.

Enhance Customer Engagement with Small Business Dream

The ability to record conversations with your prospects and customers, make notes, set priorities, and schedule next upcoming events all in one place makes Small Business Dream extremely valuable for both online and offline businesses.

This CRM feature makes real-time customer engagement possible for tech-savvy companies, especially those with salespeople working in shifts who need to get the facts right about each individual customer on the spot.

Small Business Dream makes it all possible by allowing business owners to categorize each customer for an easy lookup if they want to check on a specific type of customer only.

For instance, they can view just the customers who have subscribed to any of their email drip campaigns and check on whether they wanted to know more or if an upcoming purchase is already in order.

Another feature which makes Small Business Dream such a jewel in predicting customer orders is its ability to create highly personalized surveys through the survey builder. You can embed a tracking code for Google Analytics into your surveys to monitor real-time statistics about your prospects and customers.

Although Google Survey offers the same functionality, they are not as flexible as Small Business Dream’s survey builder. Moreover, Google will also require some fees to access some of their premium features, and are limited as to the number of surveys that can be done each month using its free service.

Choosing the Right CRM to Predict Customer Orders

With plenty of CRMs to choose from on every turn, you might be thinking which one will actually help you to predict customer orders. Small Business Dream offers a helping hand to every business owners who want to grow their business FAST without spending a lot of money in the process.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.