All posts by John Paul Narowski

I’ve been hacking at various business ideas since I was 16. I’m a full stack developer and love crafting user experiences. I’ve been nose deep in code since I put the legos down, and built several successful businesses in the process. I’ve lost some hair, gained some experience and throughly enjoyed the journey.

Have you decided to use CRM software in your company? Have you started to search for CRM consulting companies? If yes, you have probably noticed that there are many such companies and it is really difficult to choose the most suitable one, which will satisfy your needs and bring value to your organization. Of course, before hiring CRM Company, you have to interview them and just to make your work easier, below we present 7 questions you need to ask a prospective CRM consulting company before hiring.

1. How much do you charge for your services?

When choosing the right CRM consulting company for your business, it is important to find out how much you are going to pay them and whether they are suitable for you. When interviewing, make sure to clarify whether they charge hourly or they have fixed prices, whether they have different packages for different companies, whether there are discounts for loyal customers or not. Try to understand which activities are included in their services and make sure that it is a profitable choice for you.

2. Are you connected with certain CRM publisher/provider?

You may think that this is not so important, as it will limit your potential solutions, but if a specific solution is right for your organization, then such a connection can be an advantage for you. If the CRM consulting company is connected with a CRM software provider, then, of course, they have made efforts to apply the technology for solving some business problems. In this case, they will also be able to provide useful advice for your company’s activities. However, the bad side is that if the consultant has connections with CRM solution, they will always use that solution regardless of the problem.

3. Do you have experience working with a company like ours?

When a hiring CRM company, you need to choose the one which has experience in working with other companies like yours. When choosing such consulting company, you need to make sure that the staff has an understanding of your company’s activities and that they can automate general processes of your business. For instance, if you would like to automate a certain customer on-boarding process, you need to find out whether they have done this before. Thus, if the CRM software is going to work on sales, marketing and customer support, then you should make sure that the staff has the experience in all of these spheres.

4. With whom am I going to have ongoing relationship?

After implementation, you need to find out with whom you are going to be in contact: is it going to be the management team, call center or delivery consultant? In general, the consultants with whom you have already worked are already familiar with your company, its activities and business processes. So, they are the best ones who can continuously help you.

5. How long are you going to be in this business?

How long the CRM consulting company that you are going to hire has been in this business? This is probably one of the most important questions, because the longer they are in this field, the higher is their expertise. Experience is very important here, as if they have already worked with companies like yours, they probably already have the best solutions, and there is no need to come up with them again.

6. Will you be able to transfer your data to the new CRM software?

Of course, it is very important for the CRM consulting company to understand the main processes of your business and as well as customize the CRM software in order to automate these processes. However, does the staff also know how they can take the data from the past system and correctly transfer it to the new CRM software? The consulting company that you choose should be able to handle the whole implementation process, from beginning to the end.

7. How close will the relationship will be with my consultant?

The last things you need to find out are whether the consulting company offers trainings, whether they customize the software to better fit your needs, whether they change the processes after your company grows and whether they help you fully understand the CRM software and implement it correctly. These questions are very important, as it is not only about buying CRM software, it is all about correctly implementing it.

In the end, try to assess CRM consulting company not only by their offers but also by their reputation. In reality, it is quite easy to find a CRM consulting company; however, finding the right one that will understand your needs and will give the right advice is a real challenge. So, keep in mind these 7 questions when hiring CRM company for your business.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software, Small Business

5 Must-Have CRM Integrations for Every Small Business

July 23, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

If you are a small business owner, your first and foremost goal should probably be growth. In order to achieve growth you need personalized, customizable, time saving, efficient and affordable software to coordinate your sales team, increase sales, manage your contacts/leads and , improve customer service and experience. Congratulations! You have landed at the right place. Your solution is called cloud based CRM software and has everything ready for you.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps you organize and coordinate your leads, existing and future customers and keep all of the data concerning the interactions between you and them in one place. CRM not only stores the information in one place, but it’s also accessible by all your employees from anywhere, as long as there is internet connection.

Your sales reps and customer service agents will have access to all the pain points, needs and demands of every specific customer, allowing you to prepare for the next interaction beforehand and make the customer experience very personal and unique.

To maximize the benefits of your CRM system, you want every process to be completed in the shortest amount of time possible (a few minutes), while providing real value and problem solving solutions for your customers. For these reasons, CRM gives you the option to integrate some of your apps with the system and get real time automated updates. Below are the 5 most important integrations that every small business has to do.

Email Integration

You can sync all of your email accounts with the CRM system you use and every bit of new information concerning a lead or customer will automatically be updated in your database. You will also be able to forward, reply or create new emails using the same software: just change the account (ex. Yahoo or Gmail) and you are good to go. This will save you a lot of time between checking multiple accounts and also ensure that you minimize the amount of time that’s needed to spot a specific email from a customer and reply.

Mail Chimp Integration

If you are a mail chimp user, you should know the benefits of having all the information automated and together in one place. CRM allows you to integrate your mail chimp account and bring all the data from your customers and leads to your software. Having everything before your eyes is going to save you tons of effort, time and resources that are wasted in vain without using a CRM. That effort and time lost can instead be directed to something more meaningful than simply looking through files and notes to find information you need and save yourself quite a bit trouble.

Social Media Integration

Every smart business owner knows that you should be reachable on all the available channels. This means that you are most probably present on all social media channels and constantly monitor their activities to in order to increase engagement, answer questions, provide solutions etc. CRM lets you integrate all of your social media accounts at once and monitor everything with a single software: just change tabs. This will help minimize the amount of messages and tweets you might miss and also respond much quicker to increase customer satisfaction.

Google Apps Integration

Integrate google apps, google calendar and google contacts with your CRM system and automate your processes even more! Think about how much your sales reps can benefit from this automation. Since all the information is ready and available 24/7, it takes much less effort and time to prepare for every customer interaction prior to the meeting and make it as personal as possible.

Website Integration

The last, but certainly not least, important step to take is to integrate your website with the CRM software you use. This gives you endless opportunities to maximize your sales if used correctly. Think about a prospect viewing your pricing page, and in a minute or two, he/she gets a call from your sales rep and provides prominent advice and suggestions. The impact will be huge and your sales number will increase by a lot. Clients report up to 40% sales increase with the perfect utilization of CRM software.

CRM software is a cost efficient and effective solution for small businesses that want to grow in their sphere. Integrating your favorite apps with the CRM will increase your productivity and drive your sales up like never before.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software

Using CRM to Improve B2B Customer Experience in 2015

July 22, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

For a small business owner, having a suitable small business customer management software (CRM software) is an essential component to ensure steady and timely business growth. One of the important factors here is the steady increase in the number of customers a business generates, and to achieve this goal, you need to provide the most delightful customer experience.

Creating a positive customer experience is quickly shifting from being a top offer from industry leading companies to a standard that every company has to deliver in order to stay competitive. Customers expect companies to deliver high quality service and experience. Good products and services are great to have, but customers demand a memorable experience and it’s essential for your company to live up to their expectations.

CRM software is primarily designed to increase your sales and profits and one of the KPIs of high profit margins is customer experience. The more satisfied and happy customers you can get, the higher your margins will be. Every customer interaction is important since even a tiny increase in customer retention rate can increase your profits, particularly:

2% increase in customer retention rate is equal to cutting costs by 10%
5% reduction in customer desertion can increase profits by 25-125% depending on the industry
An average company loses 10% of its customers each year
Customer acquisition cost is approximately 5 times higher than the delight and retention cost of existing customers
Customer profitability rate is directly linked to the lifecycle length of the existing customers. The longer the lifespan, the more profits you get.

Small business customer management software can help improve your customer experience through sales processes greatly. Sales teams generate a lot of data with every deal they close and if analyzed carefully, the information inside the data can give a lot of hints on how to improve your processes and deliver exactly what your customers demand.

The data can be broken down into 2 parts: Quantitative and Qualitative.

Quantitative data

Quantitative data usually includes information about pricing, numbers, estimates, etc. Sales reps update the information with the CRM software easily after each deal and this information can be used to better segment your audience.

Are there any specific actions that resonate well with some of your customers, while fail with the rest? Can that information be used to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns? What pricing strategy was used for that client? Does it work for more clients?

These types of questions of quantitative data can serve as a measurement of success for your campaigns, which essentially means the quality of your customer experience.

Qualitative data

Customer feedback is usually collected via surveys, social media engagement and email campaigns, but if you take a close look at the qualitative sales data, you can decipher tons of important and relevant information that customers tell your sales reps during a deal.

This information can help your sales team improve their approach to customers and find breaches in your marketing and sales strategy. For example you might be missing some important pain points for your customers and since part of sales team’s job is to uncover those pain points and align them with your company’s offers, qualitative data can help you understand if your company is addressing customer’s issues the best way possible.

It’s important to be constantly upgrading your customer relationships and looking for new ways to deliver high quality customer experience to your target audience. To achieve this goal, you need to follow these 3 steps:

Consistency

Delightful customer experience needs to be consistent at every stage of the buyer’s cycle and across all the touch points with the customer. If you deliver quality service at first, but fail to do the same later on, you will just lose your customers. Small business customer management software lets all of your employees have equal access to customer information and better prepare to answer questions, suggest solutions and do everything in a timely manner.

Exploit every channel

After closing your leads into customers, it’s important to be utilizing every channel of communication available, since different people have different preferences when it comes to communication. Phone, email, face to face meetings, social media, postal service: make sure to include everything from A to Z.

Personalization

Your every other customer interaction has to be more personalized than the previous one. Your customers have to feel that you really care about them and their problems, and that your company pays attention to every small detail concerning them. This will help you build a great reputation among consumers and enjoy higher level of customer satisfaction.

Improving customer experience requires a lot of dedicated hard work, but it’s also the most important factor to drive profits and sales, cut costs and reduce annual customer desertion rate. This is why it’s so important to make delivering exceptional customer experience your top priority, and small business customer management software is the perfect tool to help you achieve your goal.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Productivity, Sales and Marketing

The Past, Present and Future of Sales Team Management

July 21, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

The way people used to sell products in the past completely differs from the way they sell them today. The art of selling has improved a lot and it still continues to evolve. This is thanks to developing customer lifecycle as well as sales team automation technology. Collaboration technology changed all the sales processes and strategies, starting from lead coordination for sales team, ending with trainings of salesmen. However it wasn’t like this before. To give you a better understanding of how sales processes have changed during many years and how they are still changing, today we will focus on introducing the past, present and future of sales team collaboration.

The Past of Sales Team Management

1950-1970s are sometimes called the age of advertising, when the selling process faced some major changes. This is the time when all the companies started to implement traditional marketing strategies, such as direct calling and targeted advertising. The reason was the development of modern technology. Just because the selling process was transitioned from personal, face-to-face meetings to phones, sales teams had to try very hard to better understand their customers’ needs and promote their brands in the right way.

However, if we move forward to the years of 1990s and 2000s, when Internet was not as available as today, e-mail marketing was on the top. The age of Internet adoption took flight, when sales teams started to use email and user profiles in order to connect with customers and suggest them some special offers, such as discounts. However, it is worth mentioning that nowadays more than 60 percent of customers still provide their email addresses to the companies to be informed about their news and their offers.

The Present

Nowadays, when Internet is used so much, other selling strategies have emerged. There are new methods and tools that today’s’ sales teams are used to implement, such as, customer relationship management(CRM) softwares, social networks(Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn), and other software which helps to collect, integrate and analyze information relating to customers. According to the infographic of Velocify, it was revealed today:

More than 80 % of middle sized companies use CRM in order to collect and keep information relating to their customers
About 75 % of B2C companies got clients with the help of social media networks, like Facebook
More than 60 % of B2B companies use social media networks in order to increase lead generation
About 85 % of top companies are using or are planning to use automation for sales
Social media lead conversion rates are about 15 % higher than the average rates

All that matters today is to tailor your sales strategy to fit each stage of customer’s buying cycle. It’s very important, as about 70 % of customers said that they refused to buy from a company after having a bad experience, 65 % bought from a competitor after that bad experience and more than 80 % say that they are ready to pay for better services. In the past, the selling process was all about the seller, nowadays, it is all about the customer.

The Future

The future of sales team collaboration seems to be brighter than it is today. The specialists of Esna, which is a great source for communication and collaboration tools, believe that first of all, Web RTC (Real-time communication) is going to be on the top, as it has the potential to change the way companies communicate and collaborate. Secondly, sales strategies are going to evolve along with the changes in consumer preferences and include better lead coordination for sales team. With the speed that technology is developing, it is expected that in the future sales processes are going to be much easier and convenient for both sides: customers and sellers.

To conclude, in order to have successful sales strategies and to be good at sales team collaboration, you should be flexible to changes and always adapt to innovations. Remember, the world is changing every second and you should keep up with it to be on the top.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software, Sales and Marketing

5 Benefits CRM Will Bring to Your Sales Team

July 21, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Are you looking for ways to better manage and improve your sales team and selling processes? If yes, then CRM (customer relationship management) solution is what you are looking for. CRM software is created to help companies and their sales teams to make sales processes better, convenient and practical. It makes easier for sales reps to manage, track and collect important information relating to their current and potential customers. Let’s look at 5 benefits that your sales team will get if they use a CRM software.

1. Centralized Data

Data is considered to be one of the most valuable strategic assets for every of company. CRM software help sales teams by collecting and keeping important information about current and potential customers. Of course, data is not so practical if you don’t have the right tools in order to analyze it. Here, CRM software comes to help again, as it offers a lot of third party tools that help salesmen to understand the data and learn some important things and facts about their customers, that would not be possible in another case.

2. Improved Customer Relations

One of the most important benefits for sales teams using CRM is obtaining improved, better customer relations. If you use a CRM software, then you can be sure that all your activities concerning your customers, such as marketing, service and sales would be greatly organized. Thus, when these activities are done in the right way and at the right time, you end up providing better services to your customers which in turn helps increase the customer loyalty and decrease their dissatisfaction level. Moreover, your sales team will have the chance to continuously receive feedback from customers relating the good and bad sides of your product/service. When your connections with your clients move to a new level, then it is more probable that they will introduce your business to others and you will have more customers.

3. Improved Internal Communication

Another great benefit of CRM software is creating better communication inside the company and inside the sales team. Just because you can easily share information regarding your customers with others in and out of your department, it makes teamwork easier. This is, definitely, better than working in isolation, because when everyone on your team is aware of what’s going around, it becomes easier to satisfy the customers. For example, with the implementation of CRM software, all members of your sales team will have the opportunity to view a contact and see all the past interactions and communications with that person. In addition, the information concerning customers is continuously updating automatically without you having to worry about it.

4. Higher Accountability

When there are no tools for sales team to manage relationships with their customers, it is possible that sometimes customers experience lack of attention. However, CRM systems help sales teams to ensure that there are no such problems, as there is higher accountability to the customer relationship management processes. A good CRM software helps understand their responsibilities concerning every stage of customer lifecycle, and when these responsibilities are not met, CRM makes it easy to understand in which stage something went wrong, who is responsible for that mistake and how to ensure that the same problem will not be repeated again.

5. More Convenience

CRM software is also available for use on phones, tablets and other portable devices. Having this solution at hand lets sales reps make some updates, take notes and record their communications and interactions with a customer when they are out of the office. There is no need to go back to record that information or write it down with a pen. CRM software creates more convenience, saves time and ensures that there is no information that is missed from the system.

So, here you have the most important 5 benefits of CRM software, which proves that your sales team must definitely use it, in order to have better relations with their customers. If you have been using CRM software in your company and there are more benefits you would like to share with us, please leave them in the comments below.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software, Sales and Marketing, Small Business

5 Ways CRM Software Can Increase Your ROI

July 17, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

When making a decision about investing in any product/service for your company, probably the first thing that comes to your mind is: Will the return on investment (ROI) be high? To put it simply, will the benefits from that product be more than the costs associated with it?

Of course, when you buy products/services for your business, like CRM software, you expect to have positive ROI. There are some products that require a lot of time, sometimes many years, in order to show the benefits. However, this is not the case of CRM softwares. The reason is that just because CRM softwares have so many advantages, you notice a positive change from the first moments of implementation. Below are 5 ways CRM software can increase ROI of your business.

1. Excellent Targeting

Sometimes, businesses spend a lot of money on people who are not their potential customers and do not need their products. These businesses apply “big net” approach to marketing. They start promoting their business to everyone and then select a few buyer personas out of thousands. As a result, a lot of money, time and, of course, effort is wasted. CRM makes it easier to create targets and perfect buyer personas. This means, you will be spending less time dealing with unqualified prospects and therefore increase your ROI.

2. Better Nurturing

Now when you have qualified prospects, you still need to convert them into your clients. With the help of CRM software, it’ll be much easier for all of your team members to deliver the right messages to the right buyer personas. When you find information about the interests and needs of your prospects, then you will have the chance to put your efforts in the right direction.

Moreover, CRM softwares are continuously providing businesses with feedback about what’s good, what needs improvement and what should be eliminated from the marketing strategy. With such information available, you can implement some quick changes and there will be no need to wait for the monthly and annual reports.

3. Improved Customer Service

Experts say, that it usually takes 5-10 more time, effort and money to attract new customers than it takes to keep the existing ones. So, increasing customer loyalty is among the best ways to save money and marketing efforts and we all know that in order to create loyalty, it is important to have excellent customer service. CRM software can help you here as well, as they provide you with all the necessary tools and information in order to provide high level of customer service.

You will have better customer service, as all of your employees will have access to the same data and, as a result, errors and misunderstandings will be eliminated. For example, if a customer communicates with service department, all the comments, complaints and suggestions are kept. In this case, if the same customer connects with that department again, the next employee will not need to ask all the questions from the beginning, as he/she will have the data concerning that customer on his/her hands. So, with CRM, your customer service quality will be improved a lot.

4. Less Efforts Wasted

Another way that CRM software can increase ROI is by reducing your efforts. Just because everybody who communicates with a client is able to see all the past communications with him/her, there will be no need to repeat the past actions again and again. Repeated efforts waste time and money, as a result, lowering the efficiency of your business. However, with CRM, you can be sure that your efforts will be less wasted.

5. Comfortable Structure

Nowadays, most businesses apply online CRM. This is a great chance for businesses to lower the operating costs, and as a result increase the revenues. Keeping customer data may be really expensive, because you must buy servers, software, set and maintain data center and all of these are costs for your business. However, with cloud model, you only need to pay for the monthly/annual plan. This is another way that CRM software helps decrease costs and increase ROI.

With the help of CRM software, your company can have higher sales, lower costs and overall better efficiency. Of course, there is no software that can help you solve all of your problems, but there are some tools that can help you make better decisions and improve the operations of your company. CRM software is one of these tools and you will be able to enjoy the ROI as soon as you start running the software.

So, do you still think that your business can survive without CRM? I don’t think so 🙂

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

CRM Software, Productivity

6 Important Factors to Consider When Shopping for CRM Software

July 16, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Customers are the heart of any kind of business and you cannot just let your customer relationships be out of your attention. Fortunately, nowadays there are a lot of customer relationship management (CRM) softwares which are there to help you. CRM software is one of the main tools that every business owner, manager and employee should have at their disposal. Instead of collecting contacts, documents, folders and writing information on sticky notes, CRM software lets you collect all these data just in one place.

But how can you choose the right CRM software for your business when there are dozens of those out there? Today our focus will be on introducing 6 factors that you need to consider when shopping for CRM software.

1. Price

Of course, price plays a huge role in making buying decisions. Depending on the budget and financial situation of your business, price can be one of the main limiting factors. However, the good side is that price will help you set a range and narrow down the list of CRM software you consider using. Keep in mind that when you have some options, you need to consider both long term and short terms costs to fully understand how much is the software going to cost you at the end of the day

2. Specialization

Another thing you should pay attention to when choosing a CRM vendor is what customers they usually collaborate with. Of course, this is not the most important factor, but it is really worth taking this into account. The reason is that there are some CRM vendors who have experience working with certain fields and they can’t be so useful for you. For example, if you have a healthcare business and the CRM vendor works with construction companies, the probability that they will not understand your needs is really high.

3. Ease of Usage

CRM is not just there in order to keep the contacts of your customers organized, it is there for you to increase your sales and help you implement your marketing campaigns. This is why CRM software is important for every employee in your company. So, make sure to examine several CRM softwares and understand which one would be easy to use for all of your employees.

4. Scalability

Today you may be a small company with less than 40 employees, but several years later you may have more than 300 employees. When choosing a CRM software for your business, make sure to check its scalability as well. Talk with the vendor and see whether he/she allows you to move up and down with the pricing based on the needs of your business.

5. Integration and Compatibility

Though today this is not a problem anymore, you should still look at the compatibility and integration of the CRM software you would like to buy. Make sure that it is a cloud based one, so it could be available for all of your employees, anywhere and anytime. Moreover, examine it a little bit and see whether it can be integrated with today’s technologies or not.

6. Customization

Though all of the CRM softwares are created in order to help all businesses maintain good relationships with their customers, it is good if the CRM software is customizable and can be modified if needed. The more customizable the software is, the more attractive it’s for businesses. Even if it’s more expensive t’s really worth paying more but having a software that would fit the needs of your business.

Besides these factors that you need to really pay attention to, there are some important questions that you should ask before making a purchase:

What kind of unique feature this software has?
How can it improve my business?
If I have some problems with this software, is there somebody who will help me?
When I can start working with it, if I buy it today?
How many clients do you have now?

CRM software is there in order to make customer relationships better, save time and increase effectiveness of the business. If the software does not do these 3 things, it means that you are just wasting time and money. So, keep the tips mentioned above while searching for CRM software and you will make a much smarter decision.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Customer Service, Sales and Marketing

5 Customer Service Metrics Every Business Owner Should Follow

July 15, 2015 John Paul Narowski 1 Comment

Good customer service is the lowest criteria every business has to correspond to, in order to enter the business environment in their industry and at least be able to stay afloat. Great customer service is what most of the companies offer their clients and thus, make their business appear at the top of their industry.

However, if you want to truly shine, you have to offer not just great, but superior customer service. Customer service is one of the most important parts of any business, in the same tier as product/service quality and pricing. etc.

If a product is working fine, everybody is happy, but when there is a problem, even if it’s a tiny one, this is where a superior companies differentiates from just good ones. It’s important to understand that the customer is less concerned about the actual problem, than what solution he/she will be provided with.

At the same time, these metrics can be a great way to assess the effectiveness of your work staff. The happier your customers are, the more bonuses your employees deserve.

Let’s take a look at the 5 most important customer service metrics that every company has to track and upgrade continuously, in order to achieve the highest possible level of customer satisfaction.

1. Response Time

This is the first touch point between your company and a customer with an issue and it’s pretty simple and straightforward: customers want you to respond to them quickly, they don’t want to wait too long, nor do they have the time for that. If a company fails the first step, it’s a huge hit to customer satisfaction level before starting the process.

Usually, people contact customer service using either phone or email.

Phone Service
Phone call customer service is widely utilized by all companies and it’s a great opportunity for you to show your professional level of service. People consider 3 minutes to be a reasonable wait time for a response. However, you should aim to minimize this number as much as you can, in order to get your customer unexpectedly happy and positive before even beginning the call.

Email Service
Emails are a little trickier to get the hang of simply because they take more time to read and respond to and the average reasonable waiting time for consumers tends to go lower each year.

First, it was considered okay to get a reply via email in 24-48 hours’ time. Today, this number has shrunk to 4-5 hours, with some companies going as far as 1 hour. While it’s important to minimize the response time for your customers, you shouldn’t prioritize it over service quality. If you need more time to respond in order to deliver a higher quality of service, then do it. You can always work on the response times later.

2. Resolution Time

Customers want their issues solved, and they want them to be solved fast. Here is a fun fact: companies that provide fast and quality service regarding problem solving enjoy a higher customer satisfaction rate than companies whose product/services do not have any problems in the first place.

This is enough to show how much great customer service is valued among people, and you better stand up to their expectations, if not exceed them. Aim to minimize the amount of sessions your customers need to take in order to resolve the issue. Ideally, that number should be one.

3. Did You Solve the Problem?

Customers contact your company because they have a problem, and you should have the solution. It’s very simple and straightforward. You need to monitor and follow-up if you were able to provide a solution for your customer. If you could not, then think about what you can do, in order to solve that same issue later for other customers, since if somebody had that problem, it’s natural to assume that others will have it too.

Track the time on how long your customers stay on an article/blog post you created for the resolution of common problems. If that time is less than 1 minute, then there probably is something wrong with your article and it doesn’t help your customers much.

Use social media to your advantage and engage with your audience. Constantly ask them to provide feedback about your product/service and possible problems/improvements that you should know about.

Answering their questions online will not only help increase your brand awareness and trust among consumers, but will also save your time on phone calls and emails about that problem, which is already answered on social media and can be well known to your audience.

Encourage your customers to engage with each other. This is a great way to help resolve any issues they might have. Simple problems are common among online businesses and there is a high chance somebody has already had some issue solved and he/she can assist another person in your stead. This will basically create your social media customer service team online, with zero costs and no additional work for yourself.

4. Overall Experience

Overall experience is measured by all of the metrics above, combined. How much time did it take for you to respond? How many sessions did you need to resolve the issue? Did you resolve the issue?

The importance of steps goes from last to first. The most important thing is surely to resolve the issue regardless of the response time and sessions. Then you look at the number of contacts needed for resolving, followed by the response time. Ideally, customers are most happy with your company, if you resolve their problems on first touch and fast.

Another important metric to track is how many issues were solved upon the first call? More often than not, customers have more than 1 issue that need solutions and you should be able to provide all of them during the first session. Getting this metric up is a solid sign of superior customer service.

5. Channels

Last but not least, you should measure the volume and capacity of your channels. Track the time during the day that your customers tend to contact you the most, and be prepared for it. You can impress your customers by being prepared at the busiest moments of the workday and increase satisfaction level.

No need to mention that your customer service must be active and reachable 24/7. When a customer has a problem, he/she isn’t going to wait for a convenient time to call you, they want their solution right there and now. The more you can put up to those standards, the better your business is going to get.

Satisfied Customers Involve Their Friends, Unsatisfied Ones Involve Google

By providing superior customer service, you will not only save a customer for yourself, but also get him/her to tell some friends about your company, resulting in more business for you.

Unhappy customers will most often post their disappointment online, and you know how quickly word spreads nowadays. Do yourself a favor and avoid a bad online reputation. If your customers are really unhappy, they will let everybody know.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Productivity, Sales and Marketing

Six actionable tips to help you capture the power of relationship building in sales

July 14, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Sales seem to be an arcane art at times but the truth is it usually boils down to the value you can provide.

This doesn’t only apply to your product. It applies to your ability to craft value in the form of meaningful relationship building.

Every marketer knows that their product succeeds once they put the right message in front of the right target audience. If you know who you’re selling to and exactly what they want, you should strive to know who they are and what pain they’re looking to solve.

This isn’t a one-way street either. Building a meaningful relationship implies a level of trust and commitment that can help you close present and future sales. By crafting a finer understanding and empathy with your customer, you can get them to open up and be genuine with you.

By offering honest feedback, you can listen to the customer and get not only a sense of what they want from you, but also you will be able to confidently gauge what step in the selling process they are. You’ll get more sales doing so because you’ll be able to get real feedback at every step in your process.

You’ll also get something more than a sale: you’ll get a lasting commitment to one another. One successful sale can often lead to a lifetime of value building.

The power of relationship building

We live in an age where technology has helped reveal innate needs. Personalized ads help drive 10 times more action than conventional digital ads.

74% of people get frustrated when a website offers them content that doesn’t fit their needs. If people are expecting websites to know enough about them to be relevant, the bar for personal knowledge and empathy has surely risen for interpersonal contact.

The need for building and maintaining valuable relationships has never been higher. The Gallup group has come out with research that indicates most Americans don’t trust other people or institutions by default. The youngest generation of Millennials shows that this trend is getting worse as time goes by: while 40% of boomers think people around them can be trusted, only 19% of Millennials think the same. With a gradual erosion of social trust in individuals and institutions, those people who can build and inspire trust will be able to easily differentiate themselves for decades to come.

It’s a timeless truth, one observed by Dale Carnegie decades ago:

“Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.”

That doesn’t mean faking it. It means taking the time to put in the hard work of genuine relationships that provide lasting value.

As Dale Carnagie put it:

“The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out.”

Here are the six actionable tips you need to build powerful relationships from the heart out.

1- Provide value before you ask for it.

Neil Fogarty has been building business relationships for 20 years. His first actionable tip for relationship building is key: provide value before you ask for any.

It’s the same thing Steve Blank says for getting meetings with people too busy to see you.

Neil has a close personal relationship with Richard Branson. Many emails have been sent to him ,intended to ask for an introduction to Richard Branson and nothing else. None of them have been read.

A concrete example: Consider mapping out the industry beyond your product so you can provide value to your client before you ever pitch them anything. If your sales instincts are right, the lead you’ll have hit will be inclined towards the differences in your solution and you’ll have given your customer something before you ever asked for anything.

2) Be an active listener.

Go beyond nodding and smiling: ensure the conversation flows where it needs to. Listen and provide feedback on what you’re hearing. Figure out what your customer is objecting to and tailor your process so that those objections are met.

A concrete example: Ask your customer what their pain points are and focus your pitch on how your solution helps those problems.

3) Be proactive.

If you can see a problem, reach out. If your client starts hinting that there are issues they face with another department, budgeting, compliance–try to make an effort to see if you can help. That effort will go a long way towards building meaningful relationships.

A concrete example: If you’re able to help with a customer problem, reach out. Let’s say your customer really likes your solution but has a hard time pitching it to a superior. If you can sense that, offer to write out a template for them they can use.

4) Be emotionally aware

It’s not enough to just be a listener. You should also be aware of the context of the words and the person who is expressing them. You can take that awareness and translate it into action by focusing the energy and tenor of the conversation towards a mutual win-win feeling of excitement rather than a competitive atmosphere of buyer vs seller.

A concrete example: Rather than driving a hard line over pricing and haggling over every cent over a matter of ego, take your conversations towards a positive win-win atmosphere where you want to provide as much value to the customer as possible. Use your emotional intelligence to assert that your goals clearly aligned, and move towards a resolution once you’ve discerned that the timing is just right.

5) Don’t sacrifice the long-term for the short-term

One of the most damaging stereotypes of salespeople involves the desperate closer, somebody who is going all-out to achieve that sale. That type of mentality can easily burn bridges, especially if a salesperson focuses away from providing value and focuses on providing as much pressure as possible. Sometimes, the timing is just not right, or the return on getting a sale right now might not be worth damaging what could be a long-term win-win relationship.

A concrete example: If you find yourself pushing the customer at all costs to get a short-term sale, step back and think it through for a while. Are you promising things that you won’t be able to deliver? Are you putting undue pressure on a long-standing client? Scale your approach back if so.

6) Prove that they’re not just a number.

You want to be there when it matters, not just to close sales. The best salespeople remember birthdays and events. They remember to send Christmas cards. That’s because, at the end of the day, sales are human-to-human connections built with empathy and maintained with value.

A concrete example: Use a CRM like KarmaCRM to record the birthdates and important events for your clients, then make sure you reach out at exactly the right time.

Want more advice on relationship building and personalization?

Check out this CrazyEgg blog post on personalization, and this post by Jeff Haber.

John Paul Narowski

http://www.jpnarowski.com

Sales and Marketing

Perfect Sales Advice from Nine Of The Best Sales Pros

June 25, 2015 John Paul Narowski Leave a comment

Learning from the best

When it comes to sales, you want to be able to learn from the very best in the field. Here at KarmaCRM, we’ve taken the time to curate together some of the best sales advice we’ve seen from some of the best sales professionals out there.

“Don’t sell, find out what people want.“

Kevin Catlin, the owner of two businesses that rely on client sales, got this piece of sales advice from a surfer who managed to convince him to drop $250 on a backpack.

It hearkens back to the core of good salesmanship: don’t sell. Listen.

“Good sellers often set sales conversation agendas in advance.”

Mike Schutlz, the President of RAIN Group and best-selling author of Insight Selling urges preparation and review of an agenda for sales meetings.

“When you start a sales conversation, review and confirm the agenda and then ask the following question, ‘If we left this meeting and someone in the hall asked you a) if you got everything out of it that you wanted, and b) if it was worthwhile, what would we cover – and how will the conversation play out – so that you do, indeed say that?’”

This gets to the original cardinal rule of sales: find what your customer wants, and deliver it. Spend time preparing your approach and it’ll pay off in spades.

“Engineer your sales process.“

Anthony Iannarino, the author of Sales Management, maintains that every successful sales organization has a level of process behind it. Boiling down this standard for people who are solopreneurs, or a “sales force of one”, Anthony goes into how you can tie in the qualifying, discovery, proposal and acquisition steps of the traditional sales process and adapt it to your own line of thinking.

The important takeaway is that you should ask your customer for their commitment before passing from one stage to the next–and you should have an organized and delibrate method to do so, a respected process you can go back to time and again. While Anthony’s advice is meant for solopreneurs, it can be used by everybody in sales.

“Have a clear picture of who your potential clients are.“

Ian Brodie, noted as a top sales influencer, brings up an important part of any sales process: qualifying and finding out exactly who you are selling to.

As he puts it:

“Most people have an idea of who their target clients are – but they haven’t really got under their skin. They don’t really understand them. They maybe did an exercise at a workshop for 20 minutes once, and that’s it. Or they “just know”.
But the truth is that unless you really put work into it, you don’t know. Not enough.”

Ian spends hours upon hours thinking about how to solve problems for his clients. The amount of work pays off because he really is on their side when he wants to make a sale, he isn’t just pretending. This level of research and conviction leads to the right type of enduring client relationships.

“Segment your prospects.“

Mark Hunter, the founder of the Sales Hunter blog and the author of the book High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price emphasizes that you should segment your customers based on their different needs.

Clients will differ from what they want from you to how they like to be approached. By listening to their needs, you’ll be able to differentiate between groups of people who may seem similar at first glance but may prove to be anything but.

Use those differences to tailor customized approaches and you’ll see more sales.

“Practice.“

Mike Weinberg, the best-selling author of New Sales. Simplified: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development brings up an uncomfortable reality.

“The truth is that we spend significantly more time preparing for internal QBRs (quarterly business reviews) and meetings with executives at our own company than we do for presentations to customers.”

The truth of the matter is that in order to close deals, you need to have practiced how you’re going to do the crucial sales pitch that will make the difference between success and failure, something too few salespeople think about.

Come armed with objection busters, customer testimonials, and a killer presentation. It’ll be worth your time.

“Follow up. Make an impression.“

In that same vein, Jeff Shore, the founder of Shore Consulting underscores the importance of following up on meetings without the usual nausea that comes with the word “follow-up.”

Instead of being lost in a wave of automated emails, Jeff tailors a very actionable piece of advice: send a video email.

He notes that

“I remember exactly two things from my last birthday: a card from my mother-in-law (there was a check inside) and a personalized video email greeting from my friend Mike Lyon.”

This piece of advice isn’t something that remains static with time. His point is that you want to follow up and show that you care, but also that you should do it in a way that makes your response stick out.

“Use your CRM to create strategic advantage.“

Nancy Nardin, the foremost expert on using sales tools and the president of Smart Selling Tools brings up the notion that you need sales tools and you need them to perform well in order for you to create and nurture a strong sales pipeline.

There is no tool more central to the modern sales process than customer relationship management software or CRM, a centralized data warehouse where you can store all of your company’s contacts and information about each time there has been an interaction with them. 58% of customer loyalty is based on sales rep activity.

She advocates using a CRM system that helps salespeople record data and remember to conduct followups and build lasting relationships. With data indicating that 50% of CRM systems are failing to deliver on that premise, the right CRM for your business can mean all of the difference.

“Stepping out of your comfort zone is always tough. Things do get easier over time.“

Jill Konrath, best-selling author of Agile Sellingis filled with sales insights and advice. She harkens back here to a time when she committed her first act of sales bravery: convincing a sales lead to sign a contract before they had received a final okay from corporate HQ by marching back in after a demo.

The natural response of the mind to potential failure is to bring stress hormones flooding into the body. The only way to overcome that is to act.

As Jill puts it,