A new form of CRM, Social CRM often referred to as CRM 2.0, has grown from social networking and web 2.0.
Are you maximising the tools available to you to communicate with your customers?
S3 CRM is working with networking platforms such as twitter, linkedin and facebook to integrate its customer relationship management tools with social media offering a new branch of communications with your customers.
CRM (customer relationship management) tools are fast becoming one of the most well used and useful tools that a business can utilise. They can help to streamline tasks and processes and enable excellent customer service. With this in mind all the smart businesses are using CRM tools to enhance the service that they provide. When it comes to choosing the right type of CRM tool it can often be a tricky process. After all this tool will be instrumental in creating customer relationships that will be retained long term and which will help the business to increase its profits.
As there are so many CRM tools on the market right now it pays to think about the needs of the business before selecting one. So think about the following areas.
If your employees spend a lot of time on the telephone chasing leads and making sales you need a CRM tool that is easy to use and can be updated in real time. It also helps to have a quoting and invoicing feature as standard as this can make your employee’s jobs a little easier.
Can you afford for yourself and your employees to spend a long time getting to grips with the new CRM tool?
If the answer to this question is no (and it should be) you need a CRM tool that is easy to learn and easy to use. It is pointless opting for a tool that might be the latest ‘big thing’ but if it takes too long to learn how to access and use and it is overly complex to use on a day to day basis it will cost you too long in working hours. Go for a CRM tool that can be learnt in a couple of hours and which can be used whilst your employees are on the telephone and you will not regret it.
The cost of tools and applications should always be a factor for any business. Don’t be tempted to go for the most expensive package that you see thinking that it will be the best, as often this is not the case.
If you want to have access to your business from anywhere in the world (with internet access) you need to choose a web based tool. With this you will be able to keep in touch with the business and see what your employees are doing at a glance.
If you want to expand your business you need to be able to add new users as needed. Select a CRM tool that will enable you to do this easily if needed, otherwise you could find that you CRM tool is letting you down.
These are just a few of the things that you should consider when you are choosing your CRM tool. Make sure that you choose the right one first time and you will find that it works for you.
One of the main reasons that businesses fail today is that they do not stay in touch with what their customers want and begin to appear dated in the way that they advertise, conduct business and contact their customers. What might have worked well for a business 20 or so years ago will not cut it in the consumer world of today and businesses are realising they need to reinvent themselves to keep up to date. Initially it can seem like a costly venture for any business owner to reinvent their business, but thanks to S3 CRM it is much more cost effective than you might think.
S3 CRM can help businesses to reinvent themselves by streamlining their procedures and process through:
1. Providing the means to create easy to access and add to customer and employee contact databases.
Creating invoices and quotes quickly and easily and attaching them to customer contact details.
Plan projects and assign them to employees using S3 CRM, business owners are also able to see who has the most projects, which projects are open and which are approaching their deadlines.
Set alerts for when projects and tasks are nearing completion dates.
2. Create email marketing campaigns using an easy to follow structure which means that even a novice can successfully create email marketing campaigns in minutes. Email marketing is one area that many business owners are wary of as they believe that it takes certain expertise to do so and as a result shy away from attempting to produce them. With S3 CRM a business can move forward and reinvent themselves adding email marketing to their methods of contacting customers. Once an email marketing campaign has been sent users can check on its effectiveness using the reporting tools available through S3 CRM.
3. Send SMS messages using S3 CRM – this is another great way for businesses to stay in touch with customers.
4. S3 CRM also has additional reporting tools which can allow business owners to see the conversion rate for quotes, which customers have the most outstanding invoices, which customers have the placed the most orders and so on. In fact using S3 CRM can help a business to get the best from reporting so that it can increase profits and reduce outstanding invoices.
5. Each individual user is able to customise their own dashboard upon which they can place widgets of the features they use most often, this helps to cut down on the time spent opening different features and scrolling through screens.
6. As S3 CRM is web based users can access their account from anywhere in the world with internet access, this allows a business to provide the same service from anywhere – a total reinvention if users previously all had to be based in the same office.
These are just a few of the ways that S3 CRM can help businesses to reinvent themselves and there are many more to choose from.
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is the name for the various systems that businesses use to track customer contacts, store customer details, identify customer trends, create invoices and quotes, creating marketing campaigns and so on. In short any business that wants to provide a customer experience that is second to none, generate and increase profitability and stay ahead of the pack should use CRM. As all good CRM software packages can be accessed online so there is no reason why businesses all over the world can’t take advantage of this type of tool.
Globally there are different types of customer relationship management software being created all the time, so businesses have a lot of choice when looking for a CRM solution. There are so many positive reasons that a business should use this type of software that the future of CRM looks set to be very positive. Such reasons include:
Accessibility – as customer relationship management software can be easily accessed from anywhere in the world with a PC and an internet connection, business owners can see what is happening in their business and stay in contact. This makes business trips a breeze as business owners do not have to take their laptops to meetings, they can simply go to a meeting and log straight into their account and have their own dashboard at their fingertips.
Flexibility – good CRM software solutions such as S3 CRM offer users the flexibility to create their own dashboard with the tools and features that they use most frequently which improves the user experience. Any features which are not needed or not used as frequently do not need to be added to the dashboard.
Features – as CRM software has so many different features it makes running a business so much easier.
Ease of use – good CRM solutions are easy to use and this will make them popular globally. Time in any business is precious and users simply do not have the time to spend working out how to access and use tricky systems.
Reasonably priced – as businesses globally are all feeling the effects of the recessions that have hit the UK and USA saving money is very much the order of the day. Due to this CRM solutions, like S3 CRM are set to become even bigger globally as the majority of small to medium sized businesses can’t afford to run several different types of software to complete various functions. Having one CRM software application that users are able to perform a multitude of tasks on is obviously preferable to having one for each task.
These are just a few of the reasons why the future of CRM globally looks set to be even bigger and better as time goes on. Business owners are looking for flexible, accessible, straightforward and cost effective ways to manage their customer contacts and more and CRM solutions like S3 CRM meet all of these needs and more.
Finding a software solution that you can virtually run your business from can seem like an uphill struggle and that is why a great deal of businesses wind up using several different software applications. This is not only hard to work with (no one likes to have to have four or more applications open at one time and have to flick between them constantly) it is also very expensive. Due to this many small to medium sized businesses find that they have to cut corners or decide which software solutions they can afford to run at the expense of others. If you are the owner of a small to medium sized business that wants an amazing all round CRM solution S3 CRM really is a one stop shop. Here is what you can expect from S3 CRM the most flexible, accessible, comprehensive, cost effective and user friendly CRM solution available:
- Customer contact and employee contact information storage – here users can store all customer and employee contact details in different categories for easy retrieval.
- Storage features – quickly and easily store all information relating to a customer with their contact details so no information will ever go missing again.
- Quoting and invoicing tools – create quotes in moments on multiple lines and with VAT added as standard. When a customer accepts a quote users can easily turn these into invoices to be sent at a later date.
- Employee calendars – this feature allows a business owner to see which employees are available, on holiday or away sick.
- Project tools – use this feature to plan and implement projects, assign projects to users and see which users are in charge of which projects. Using this means that no project deadline should ever be missed, even if the user in charge of a project is absent.
- Email marketing – create email marketing campaigns in minutes and send them to your email marketing list.
- Reporting tools – see which invoices are outstanding, who has replied to email marketing, which customer has the most repeat orders and much more.
- Easy to use dashboard – users can create their own dashboard with all their regularly used features and tools on it. Business owners can tailor theirs so that they can see their business at a glance.
- Accessibility – as S3 CRM is web based users can log into their account from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection which means that business owners can stay in touch with the office even when they are not in the country.
- Easy to use – S3 CRM is so easy to use that anyone can learn how to access and it’s features in just a few hours – so say goodbye to long and expensive training days for employees. Just sign up a new user and they can be using S3 CRM in well under one day – without any intensive training.Cost effective – S3 CRM costs £4.99 / $9.99 per month which makes it one of the most reasonably priced CRM solutions on the market.
In addition to these features S3 CRM also offers – document storage, meeting planning tools, route optimisation tools, recycle bin – the list is endless, proving that S3 CRM really is a one stop shop.
For any business to succeed and be able to compete alongside other businesses that offer similar products and services it is a good idea to generate strategic partnerships with others. Strategic partnerships are a formal alliance that is normally between two commercial businesses with a contract involved. Such partnerships however are not legal partnerships as neither party wants to internally develop the other and vice versa.
Instead these partnerships are formed when each side has an asset or more that will assist the other, a good example of this is the relationship between a manufacturer and a developer. Typically the manufacturer would be a larger company and they would provide the product, capital needed for growth, marketing and distribution and the developer will provide the technical knowledge and expertise to enhance the product.
Another example of a strategic partnership is that between a supplier / manufacturer and the distributer. By creating a close relationship between the two separate and very different businesses enables them both to share the marketing, development, branding and so on of a service or product.
It is essential that strategic partnerships are formed as there are few business that are large enough and wealthy enough to be able to complete the entire cycle for a product or service alone. There are of course many who think that they can and this overestimation of capabilities is one of the reasons that a lot of businesses fail – they do not have strategic partnerships.
So how does a business go about generating strategic partnerships? One way is to look at your competitors and see if they can do something that your business can’t, then see what your business can bring to the table and get in touch with them. Speaking to competitors in this way can sometimes help to build a strategic partnership which can be mutually beneficial to both sides.
Are you involved in a business to business industry? If so you might already have relationships with other businesses, so why not see if a strategic partnership between yourselves and them might be in the interests of both sides? That way both businesses could drive customers to each other and reap the benefits. Say you sell gardening supplies and you form a strategic partnership with a business that sells electronic gardening equipment, a simple link to each other’s sites can provide huge traffic to each other that would not necessarily have been there otherwise.
To generate successful strategic partnerships it is also worth noting that all transactions between the two businesses need to be open and honest – as without these fundamentals trust will quickly be lost and this can be difficult to repair, if not impossible. So when generating these partnerships make sure that everything is out in the open as this is the only way in which partnerships like these will work. So follow these hints and start to make positives steps to creating and generating strategic partnerships that will benefit your business and raise your revenue quickly.
Hi all,
Hope you are all looking forward to Christmas 
With Christmas less than 2 weeks away we have been busy at S3 CRM launching new functionality and improving the existing application.
This week sees the launch of the ability to import your contact information via CSV file into your S3 CRM address book. This has been requested by a number of you so we put it to the top of our development stack to ensure we brought the functionality to you as soon as possible.
Have a look and let us know your thoughts. You can either post on the blog, on our forums or email me at;
info@s3crm.com
Hope to hear from you soon.
Sarah
Reason No. 6
“S3 CRM has total accessibility for authorised persons from anywhere in the world – Many business owners take trips overseas or to other parts of the country and many feel as though they take their finger off the pulse of their business whilst they are away. As S3 CRM is a web based application it can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, so you are never more than a click away from your business or your employees.”
You no longer need to be tethered to your computer or desk. You can get access to information from any internet connected computer (including the Apple iPhone) and read, add and update your business records immediatly.
Consumers expect quick turnaround and quality replies - and there is no better way of doing this than ensuring all of your activity is administered online - thereby removing unecessary duplication of work and ensuring timely responses.
Regards
Dean
As anyone with their own business knows it is important to keep up to date with the market they are in both in terms of products and competition. Failing to do this means that ultimately your business will not be as forward thinking as it could be which will result in losing out to competitors – something that no business ever wants to do. So what is the answer to staying ahead of your competition today? A good CRM or Customer Relationship Management application, that’s what.
There are various CRM software applications that are available at the moment but the best one of these by far is S3 CRM which is not only easy to set up and use but it also grows with your business. S3 CRM can help you to stay ahead of your competition in the following ways:-
1. Keep detailed records of your customers – S3 CRM has unique features which allow all information that is relevant to a particular customer to be saved in that customers record. This can range from contact details to quotes and invoices to documents and even photographs of your customers if you or your reps meet with them on a regular basis. This will improve the customer service that your business provides, which is often lacking in many businesses today and this will give you the edge over your competition who might still be using outdated methods to store and retrieve customer information. Stay professional – use S3 CRM.
2. Quote and invoice with ease – quoting and invoicing often takes up a great deal of time within a business and this can frustrate your customers and lead to them going to your competition for a faster, more efficient service. Stop them in their tracks by using S3 CRM to streamline and centralise all quoting and invoicing. S3 CRM even takes the strain out of adding VAT to invoices as it will automatically add it and make the calculation for you, giving you and staff more time to spend in other areas of the business. Similarly invoices are easily produced using the same feature within the application.
3. See your business at a glance – by using the dashboard feature you can place all the areas of your business that you need to see an overview of on one screen. This cuts down the endless searching through screens to find the information that you need, meaning that you can make decisions faster and more efficiently whilst reducing wasted time – can you say the same for your competition? We hope not!
As you can see these are just a few of the features that S3 CRM provides businesses with that will help them to stay ahead of their competition and provide an efficient, customer focused and streamlined service to be proud of. S3 CRM really does make all difference to a business and after using it for a few weeks it will be apparent why as time is saved and profits are increased.
Reason No. 5
“It can help a businesses financial planning – by using the information on which are your best customers and see their re-ordering patterns you can make any financial projections more accurate.”
If your currently using a manual process consisting of excel spreadsheets and / or pieces of paper to do your quotes and invoicing then you may notice its taking a lot of unecessary time and effort to get right. Are you able to quote quickly and efficiently? Do your customer pay on time? Do you spend unecessary time chasing for payment?
If you do, then using simple best practise and automated tools to alert you when things “need” to get done - with be both cash flow positive and consume less time and effort.
Regards
Dean