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What Sales Experts Do to Keep Their Sales Pipeline Up and Running

Businesses have been constantly evolving for the last twenty years and are starting to adopt a different approach to lead conversion. Unlike traditional outbound marketing, ‘soft sales approach’ involve several stages in the customer’s journey which lead to a sale or repeat business.

This process can be seen in a company’s sales pipeline. Sales pipeline can be viewed in different ways but the basic idea is the same: “How do I get my leads from point A to point B, and what does it take to get them there?”

Stages in a Sales Pipeline

Companies differ as to the exact number of stages in a sales pipeline. However, most companies will agree that six to seven stages hits the sweet spot. We’ll go through each stage and see how experts lead their prospects from one point to another.

Stage 1 — Generate High Quality Leads

Sales and marketing experts would often use the social media, invite people to a social event, or use an effective content marketing strategy to get as many potential customers as possible. Making the sale at this point is the least of their concerns. It’s more about getting people interested in what they have to offer.

Stage 2 — Educate Leads about the Benefits

What’s in it for them? Leads should be able to see clearly how a company or a specific product can help solve their ‘pain points’ through opt-in subscription to weekly posts or monthly newsletters. Email automation and autoresponders can help accomplish the task via drip emails.

Stage 3 — Get Feedback from Viewers and Subscribers

Being able to collect information from opt-in viewers and subscribers allows businesses to refocus their strategies and be able to address individual needs. Some CRM applications like Small Business Dream enable business owners to collect information from online subscribers and viewers using a survey engine, similar to Google Surveys offered in Google Analytics Solutions.

Stage 4 — Qualify Prospects

This stage will assess the possibility of converting leads to business opportunities, by weighing certain factors such as viewing activity (click and open rate), specific interests, occupation, income, and so on. The result will determine whether they would eventually turn into opportunities or if they needed more time in the previous stages (Stage 2 and 3).

Stage 5 — Assign Lead Scores

Each qualified prospect receives a lead score which indicates his level of interest. Investing more time and money on a qualified lead is considered profitable since the likelihood of conversion is very high. Those who received higher scores are given more priority while those at the lower end can be cycled back to Stage 2 or 3.

Stage 6 — Close the Deal

This stage provides the end-result of all the marketing efforts to win a potential customer. Some of the best-known practices at this stage include upselling and cross-selling. Others will include a ‘post-sale’ where customers are encouraged to patronize their product through follow-ups and having them sign up for loyalty or point cards.

Maintaining a Healthy Sales Pipeline

Maintaining a steady flow of leads, opportunities, and sales is critical in any business. If at any stage the sales pipeline gets bogged down and fail to meet their goals, the company could take a hit and seriously affect their bottom line. Some ways to keep the sales pipeline up and running include:

Checking the conversion rates by stage
Making constant improvements on every stage
Closely monitoring the sales cycle
Holding regular sales pipeline meetings

Running a business shouldn’t be too overwhelming with today’s modern CRM that can store, analyze, and keep businesses attuned to the customers’ needs.

At Small Business Dream, we give you the most up-to-date CRM software to keep track of your customers and provide you with the right information to stay in business.

Even the Government Uses CRM – Here’s Why

When we think of Customer Relationship Management, we normally associate the phrase with big corporations and business institutions.

For quite some time, CRM has been used successfully to attract and maintain good relationships with customers by improving customer service and maintaining constant interaction with them.

It is also a cost-effective way of increasing revenue through targeted leads and emphasizing customer loyalty as opposed to traditional marketing strategies that use expensive ads and gimmicks to get customer attention.

One of the hallmarks of CRM is its ability to respond immediately to customer’s needs and requests — something which most government agencies are incapable of.

Even today, the majority of the public sector still relies on antiquated methods of data storage and data analysis to do their job. Compare this to businesses in the private sector that employ CRM and you will notice just how fast they are able to respond and adapt to their customer’s needs.

Public Service and Customer Service – the BIG Difference

When you go to a hair salon or restaurant with good customer service, their employees make it a point to treat you like their boss and make you feel important, respected, and cared for.

When doing business with a publicly owned institution, you might be able to see the difference because in most cases you are treated way better in commercial establishments than those in the public sector.

The difference between the public and private sector is the way they treat their clients. Most public institutions look at their people as subjects who don’t have much of a choice other than to make use of what is made available for them, and to “pay taxes to whom taxes are due.”

Businesses, on the other hand, stand to lose money. If they don’t have enough customers to keep the ball rolling, they are at risk of losing their business. For the government, it’s probably more than just losing money; they stand to lose the very people who makes them.

How CRM Will Benefit the Government

In this day and age, we don’t need clunky machines and outdated systems to handle large amount of data. We don’t have to settle for painfully slow and overly bureaucratic way of planning, decision-making, and implementation.

Here’s how CRM will allow the public sector to function in the most efficient way possible:

Greatly enhance e-Government implementation — People who have been working in the government knew just how important it is to organize and systematize their tasks to meet their deadlines and avoid getting swamped with pending jobs and unfinished paper work; hence the adoption of the so-called e-Government. This modern approach to governance helps eliminate time-consuming tasks, thereby increasing efficiency and cutting down on operational costs.
Collaborate with other agencies more efficiently — Most government agencies struggle to make their jobs faster because of the very nature of how the system works which involves collaborative planning, decision-making, and execution. Functions within the departments, bureaus, and agencies are also interdependent on each other. CRM can be used as a tool to coordinate these tasks and provide a seamless experience to their constituents.
Be more responsive to people’s needs — Some countries are looking into the possibility of incorporating CRM when responding to inquiries and complaints. Others have already been working with software companies to provide them with CRM applications suitable for public use. Before, they used to have suggestion boxes in conspicuous places. Software companies offer a better solution by providing a CRM app that links every citizen to the public sector and respond to their needs the same way a privately-owned business enterprise handles every customer.
Pro-active approach to problem solving — Most of the time, the public sector could only respond to current situations but not so much in preventing them from happening in the future by taking a proactive approach. With CRM, governments can accurately measure how well or how bad their strategy was so they can plan out well and be able to anticipate any problem that may arise.

To learn more on how you can apply CRM to your small business or any business endeavor, feel free to visit Small Business Dream and we’ll help you out and work things to better improve your customer service and increase your sales.

Sales & Marketing Automation and CRM: Their Differences and Similarities

What is the difference between Sales and Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? And which one is more useful for your business? I’m sure it’s making your head spin.

In the beginning there was much more of a distinction between the two. It was generally believed that CRM was more about customer service and possibly upselling or reselling new and existing customers, while Sales and Marketing Automation were about the sales cycle and how to prospect and initially sell to new customers or clients.

CRMs were hard to learn and quite expensive, most small business owners didn’t bother looking at them.

Sales Automation and Marketing Automation tools were often better priced but seemed to lack power or could only handle ONE or TWO of the necessary functions requiring you to purchase multiple tools and figure out how to transfer info between them to make them work together.

Here’s a rundown showing the differences between the two so you have a better idea what they are, what function they serve, and how you can incorporate them into your business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Profile
Searchable notes and account data on each customer
Sales History that amalgamates up to departments and the entire company
Tracking of all customer communications
Customer service tools
Customer support tools
Customer retention tools
Sales campaign tracking and data utilization

Sales Automation and/or Marketing Automation

Contact Management
Calendars
To-do Lists
Email Automation
Sales lead assignment and categorization
Sales Funnel
Surveys
Customer Records
Salesperson tracking and goal and target feedback

Although they seem similar, their purpose is quite different. Sometimes it’s hard to tell apart which of the two you are currently using. They could be used interchangeably but there’s also an overlap, or they could be used as complementary tools.

How about Today?

The great news is, there are many tools today that blur the differences even more which can be used as a substitute especially for a small business (under $3,000,000/year in sales). For example, you can get software such as Click funnels for $100 a month to handle just the online funnels aspect for you.

No longer do you have to pay thousands of dollars to have these tools. They can actually be quite affordable. In fact, there are some companies that integrate both the sales automation with customer management like Salesforce, Hub spot, or Marketo. But for a vast number of small businesses and small shops they are still too pricey. For example Hubspot starts at $200 a month for the very basic package.

Small Business Dream combines the power of Hubspot, Marketo, and Salesforce for just $99 a month and can be customized to fit the needs of every small business owner. With their suite of tools you’ll get:

• Contact Management
• Automatic email follow-up
• Calendar integration
• Survey Engine
• Social Media semi-automation tools
• Twitter functionalities
• Sales Funnel
• Business Card Scanning and Transcription service
• Mobile app
• Web App

Visit us at www.smallbizdream.com to learn more about our suite of tools

How All the Social Media Experts Got it Wrong

We all know email is a powerful tool to follow up with your prospects and customers but social media can be equally as powerful if you use it correctly. The problem is that most so-called experts have it dead wrong! They think it’s about posting as frequently as possible when in fact, it’s about having a clear, concise message and engaging people through proper follow up.

Now let’s be clear, as with all types of messages: DON’T SPAM people! What’s the difference between proper messaging and spamming?

The key is to provide value and message them about something they are ACTUALLY interested in! Don’t talk about yourself like some egoistical fool! Engage them with information that is relevant and important to their business.
How do you do that?

You want your follow up to be semi-automated so you set up a series with a very specific idea of what you intend to say and then begin with a line that is completely custom. Then you copy and paste it in your Facebook messenger or LinkedIn messenger and you send it.

I talked to someone who was using social media as part of her sales funnel. She was posting messaging in Facebook groups but she wasn’t individually messaging them and she wasn’t following up with them. When you use any sort of sales message you need to follow up, politely but firmly.

If you think that by posting into groups is going to work, then you’re not studying how Facebook works anymore. Two percent of people are seeing what you post and it’s about to go to one percent! Two percent of all your Facebook group people, unless they specifically go to your Facebook group and look what’s there, won’t see your message. Facebook has strictly become a pay to play network! Most of your connections won’t see what you’ve written on your news feed. The problem is if you’re relying on groups and posts for all your communications, you’re missing out on a lot.

Isn’t it interesting that social networking has made a bunch of things easier, but has made us so lazy that we don’t follow up, we think because they joined our Facebook group, anything we post there, they’re seeing and they’ll take action

The good news is that it’s still relatively inexpensive to boost a post. It’s definitely worth it to spend a couple bucks on each post to make sure people are seeing it. The added benefit of boosting a post is that you also increases the organic post. They piggyback off of each other. Many times if I boost a post for seven bucks I get over a 500 organic reach. Not bad for the price of a Triple Venti Mocha!

If you’re smart, you’ll use a customer management tool that actually reminds you to restart the conversation when you’ve not been in contact for awhile. Once you come to the realization of how important that is, you’ll be swatting away the customers!

Everybody out there it’s all excited about social media, but nobody is figuring out that if you engage someone on Facebook messenger, it has to follow up just as much as you would on the telephone or by email.

With messaging everything should be a series to get them connected over time. Yes, when we were talking that someone by direct message on LinkedIn or direct message on Instagram or Snapchat or anything, everybody is sending one message and then that’s it! They give up!

As a small business owner I know you’re busy and you have a lot of things on your plate. That’s why you need a system that does all your thinking and the legwork for you. The CRM tool reinitiates conversations and says ‘hey, you need to talk to this guy again! It has been six days and go here to remind you and this is what you need to say to reengage him!’

If you follow these rules and strategies, you’ll have more clients than you’ll know what to do with and you’ll need help managing all the leads you get. Small Business Dream can help you. For just $99 a month, you can manage all your customers and make sure that you keep them engaged! We can do that through both email and social media campaigns that you can completely customize!

How A Salon Used Customer Management Relations to Boost Sales

Once upon a time in a city far far away, there was a little hair salon that decided to do the unthinkable. The hair salon owner decided to try and actually follow up with their hair salon clients to check in, not only on customer satisfaction with the hair stylist, but also to increase their sales frequency and profit.

Here is the surprisingly simple way the hair salon owner did it. First, the salon owner made sure to give every customer a client number and a simple loyalty card for the Hair Salon. This started as a stamp type loyalty card, very simple, and it had a place to write by hand, the clients name, and their ID number on the card.

Once the customer visited the hair studio 10 times, they were entitled to one of many free services, which included a hair color, hair protein treatment, a hair wash dry and set, a bottle of shampoo, or a colour root touch up.

In order to prepare the customer card, the little hair salon owner had customers fill in a simple survey pertinent to a hair salon, including the customer’s phone number, email address and hair styling preferences, and known allergies. They also offered all new hair salon clients the chance to opt-in to their weekly hair styling newsletter, and if they did, they would be placed in a draw for a monthly free $50

Hair Salon owner increases sales 63% in 47 days with this simple secret The hair salon owner decided to try and actually follow up with their hair salon clients to check in, not only on customer satisfaction with the hair stylist, but also to increase their sales frequency and profit.

The hair salon owner was very progressive and set up some simple sales and marketing automation software using Small Business Dream in order to follow up with the customers over the next few months.

As customers have enough cards to carry around, the hair salon owner decided to keep the loyalty cards at the front desk for the customer so they never needed to remember it, they simply needed to give their name.

Every time a customer came in to the hair salon, the receptionist or a stylist found their card and confirmed their number.

After the client was done with their hair cut or hair color or hair service they came for, the hair stylist pulled up their information in the marketing and sales automation software, filled in what hair services the customer had done in the notes field, as well as any other pertinent details that would allow them to better service this customer the next time they came in to the hair salon, AND reset their automated email follow up campaign (email autoresponder). The email campaign was a big key to the increase in sales in the hair salon. It was structured in the following way.

The Day AFTER the hair appointment, the hair salon sent an email from the hair salon owner checking in on the previous days service and asking for feedback if anything was wrong and how the hair stylist performed. This surprised the salon as the owner got both GOOD and BAD feedback about the hair stylists they employed. This allowed them to rectify errors and retain good customers even in the event of a mishap.

Two weeks after the hair appointment, they sent an email letting the customer know they could pop in for a professional wash, dry, and hair set for just $30, a way to get that just been to the hair salon look, at a fraction of the cost for a special occasion. Four weeks after the appointment, they sent an email asking if it might be about time to come and get a haircut again.

They were stunned by how many responses this email got, and VERY positive ones, actually thanking the hair salon owner for the reminder stating that the customer often forgets to book, and this email reminded them to get it done and it was simple, as they just replied by email, to book the time that they wanted. This system made it EASY for the customer to book a hair styling appointment.

Now the cool part of this for the hair salon was, this took the average rebooking time from 7 to 8 weeks, to averaging 6 weeks, which meant a MASSIVE increase in annual sales. Here’s the math (yuck) on how this increased sales frequency generated by the sales and marketing automation software affected the hair salons sales and profitability (Yes!);

Let’s say your average hair salon sale is $65 and your customers come in every 8 weeks. This means your hair salon customers comes to see you about 52/8 = 6.5 times per year. So your average annual sales from your hair salon’s clients are 6.5 x $65 = $422.50. If you got them back an average of 1 time each 6 weeks instead, it would be 52/6 = 8.67 times. Your average annual sales form a client then would be 8.67 x $65 = $563.33.

That is $140.83 additional hair salon revenue PER client. This is a WHOPPING 33% increase in Annual Sales!!!! What if you only had 500 hair salon clients? $70,415 extra sales annually What if you had 1000? $140,830!!

At 6 weeks, an email went out re-suggesting it was time to rebook a hair cut as they were likely getting pretty shaggy.

Then at 8 weeks, an APOLOGY email went out, YEP, that’s right, they apologized for not doing a good enough job to have the client come back to the hair salon and they offered at 10% discount with the apology email if the customer rebooked within 3 days.

At 12 weeks, an extension of the apology re-offering the 10% off went out, and tossing in a free bottle of shampoo, or free protein treatment if they booked again in the next 3 days. This wasn’t as random as it sounds, they knew that their average time of rebook was 7 weeks, so at 8 weeks it was likely frustrated customer, or a super cheap one that would wait 10 or 12 weeks to come back. By offering the 10% the made the unhappy client feel cared for, and often coaxed the cheaper customer to come again to chase the discount. This again drove annual sales up dramatically by increasing customer frequency.

Once the hair salon had collected its customer database including email address, it also started to implement a Web Special page on its hair salon website that it email blasted out each 2 weeks as part of their bi-weekly newsletter.

The web specials page contained super hair salon amazing deals, sometimes as much as 50% off, but only for specific hair stylists and time slots. They used it to fill their empty seats, this decreased dramatically their sales vacancy and once again increased their hair salon profits.

If the hair salon ever got in a real bind with hair stylists having empty seats, they did an instant blast to everybody offering a great hair salon service deal on a super short time frame to fill that spot. It may have been a haircut, or a hair color, or even a hair straightening, it just depended on what the hair salon could handle in the time available.

The results were out of this world. Hair Stylist’s empty seat time vanished. Stylists made more money in tips. The hair salon owner made more money as a hair salon. Other hair stylists started to want to work there as they heard how always busy the hair salon was.

Another benefit the hair salon found as it implemented its simple CRM sales and marketing automation software to track and follow up with its customers was the ability to track Customer Preferences to increase customer satisfaction.

One of the final things the hair salon owner put in place was a reminder phone call, text (SMS), Facebook message, KiK message, or any other method of communication the customer had indicated they preferred for all appointments coming up the next day. The sales and marketing automation software made this easy for the hair stylists to do, so they weren’t as likely to try to skip it!

This simple action decreased no-shows to the hair salon significantly, and made the customer feel extremely cared for.

In Today’s online world, the likes of Yelp and others are making it more and more important to have at least a simple web presence for review and referral sites to link to. By having your own hair salon website, all the ranking sites for Hair Salons will send traffic to YOUR site where you control the narrative, vs. scraping information they can find publicly available about your hair salon.

As a result of this and the web-specials concept the hair salon put together a simple website (Small Business Dream also allows you to build a simple website for this purpose) and even started to use their new found cash flow to do super targeted advertising on Facebook, twitter and Google AdWords.

This traffic simply was directed to the hair salon’s website which had the ability to sign up to the newsletter for the possibility of winning that $50 salon gift certificate. This drove engagements, and the ability for the email follow up series to be employed to convert this look and see traffic to an actual customer.

The final thing the hair salon owner DID was implement a referral program. They simply offered that anybody who had their friend signup to the hair salon newsletter would earn one draw per person they referred into the draw for a $100 gift certificate at the hair salon. (drawn monthly) This turned happy clients into referring ADVOCATES or FANS! It grew their list dramatically, which converted to new hair salon customers over time.

It is simply amazing how simple it can be to increase a Hair Salons sales with some simple techniques and CRM Sales and Marketing Automation Software that costs as little as $99/month.

Small Business Dream is exactly that sales and marketing automation software for hair salons and for $99/month, it can handle all the marketing automation mentioned in this article.

1. The ability to make a Simple website and web specials page

2. The ability to have data collected and used for an email blast like that for web specials or weekly newsletter.

3. The ability to collect data on prospects generated by Facebook and Google, and follow up with them automatically over time with a timed series of emails to convert them to a client.

4. The ability to make a calling list of all appointments the next day easily and take notes as you make the calls.

The best part is, we have a template of the hair salon system, so you simply need to make minor tweaks to the content and you should be up and running in a very short time reaping the rewards of good sales automation for your hair salon.