It’s been a while since contact management software has saved companies from declining sales. Improper contact management results in plummeting transactions, and everyone who runs an enterprise knows how risky it can be for business health.
Statista predicts that the market for international customer relationship management will grow to $40.26 billion in size in 2023, an anticipated rise of over $5 billion from 2018 at a compound annual growth rate of 2.8%
We live in an era where competition is rampant while attention lifespan is dwindling. In such scenarios, if you don’t swiftly hand over information to customers, you risk losing them forever. In these current circumstances, it’s inevitable that contact management can’t be accomplished with spreadsheets, and managing contacts is an extremely essential task to guarantee high conversions and a successful sales process.
If you already have a platform of your own, here are some ways you can work with it to streamline your business process:
- Utilize its searching functionalities
A software geared for CRM contact management enables its users to sift through an extensive sea of contacts on countless parameters such as names, locations, mobile numbers, emails, industry, and query details, among others. Because users can also use powerful search tools to discover contacts by tags, they can also use them to organize and group their contacts.
More than effective contact navigation, a business contact manager can also provide you with email history, pipeline information, and other essential data your team needs to build and cultivate relationships.
- Maximize the centralized database
Your email campaigns can be infused with your personal contact management software, so that the email IDs you need can be directly recovered from the database. Likewise, for SMS campaigns, mobile numbers of your prospects can also be quickly accessed from the centralized database. This saves you time from having to manually go through columns and rows and pick up necessary information piece by piece.
Database size is absolutely limitless, so make the most out of it to organize your marketing efforts.
- Know your leads
So you’ve got a lunch meeting with a prospect coming up. How do you prepare? Small talk about work, the weather and food can only take you so far. You need to guarantee that you will both confidently walk away from this engagement with a feeling that you’re ready to progress with a deal.
To accomplish this, you will first need to establish a personal connection with your client. Achieving authentic connection in any way will make any future business decisions easier down the road, since your link is based on a strong foundation fortified by true personal interest.
One of the tricks to establishing successful and lasting business relationships is allotting time to do sufficient research on your contacts before communicating to or meeting with them. You can attain this by using your software to effectively organize client information and gathering adequate context and insights to formulate that significant and sincere connection. Use tags to go through their backgrounds, fields and interests, so by the time you talk to and meet them, you’re already fully equipped with enough information that can contribute to your conversions.
- Double check for data safety
These days you can never be too sure about safekeeping data.
According to ZDNet, 73% of consumers in the US claim that they’re more troubled about their privacy online.
Meanwhile, 19% consumers from the EU believe that organisations pay no attention to their privacy, as per data from Deloitte.
While contact management software is necessary for your organization’s activities, it’s good to evaluate the protocols it uses to guard the information you possess and your data privacy on social networking sites.
Make sure that your platform is developed with security and privacy as priorities and that it would never ever resell or disseminate stored data. Check if it gets your consent before displaying personal information. Lastly, keep your software up-to-date with the latest security measures, so that your clients can rest easy knowing that their data is in safe hands.
- Work with other applications
Maintaining a professional address book is a sizable job. With a business contact manager, you have the possibility to import contacts virtually from any source, including Excel, CSV, Access, Gmail and other third-party business platforms. It’s easy and fast, and with the appropriate template, you can even import important contacts in bulk. This time-saving process keeps all of your data organized in a single location.
You can also use your software to seamlessly integrate your contact list with your back-end database. Uniting your communication and marketing solutions with your sales platform also allows your team to conduct and monitor all their sales conversions from one tool.
When you’re only starting out, the ability to access client information from your accounting software might be enough, but much like spreadsheets, this actually doesn’t do anything to make or boost sales, so it’s crucial to connect your platform with software that assists in managing your pipeline. Once you do, you’ll find a ton of buried treasure in awaiting leads, and you can act on them with your marketing efforts.
Integrated sales and marketing features drive business growth upwards, and smart integrations to your business applications enable you to interact with your customers and nurture your relationships with them.
- Automate processes
One of the primary reasons organizations turn to software for CRM contact management is to cut down dependency through automation. Top contact management software offers intelligent automation features.
For instance, rather than asking your employee to remind you about hitting up a client once he or she has fit the criteria, you can receive automated reminders from your software when it’s already the right time to reach out to a prospect. Having a personal contact management software can also save you time listing activities, since it automatically does it for you. Plenty of software are also configurable; they can construct repetitive workflows to do exactly what you want, so make sure to check which processes you can streamline.
With automation, you can cut down repetitive tasks as well as human errors and use saved time in more prolific ways. In fact, not only can you use technology to recruit employees, but you can also overlook employees’ work processes digitally.
Having employees scattered around the world has become a norm in many companies nowadays. To make sure you can manage your employees working remotely, this remote team management guide provides essential pointers for you to apply in improving your team’s productivity and efficiency.
- Keep your software up-to-date
Most contact management software offer cutting-edge technology to help you organize client contact information. As customer demands change and your business grows, developers constantly put out product updates and add-ons to keep up with you as your company scales.
The truth is, it’s so easy to dismiss software updates because they take up a chunk of our time and it might not seem important, but this mistake hinders you from making the most out of your platform for customer contact management. So if you haven’t updated your software to the latest version, do it now.
Brushing up on the essential
Contact management software is vital especially for small businesses and startups. With it, you can get a 360-degree perspective of every contact you have. It shows every minute activity with the contact, from complete client information to lead progress.
You have to remember that at some point, you have to invest in or improve the software that proves you are passionate about building relationships with your prospects. Just because your business is doing great doesn’t mean you have to be complacent with what you have. If you want increased conversions, you have to make the most out of your platform, and while it may take time and effort, it would definitely be worth it if you want to foster business growth.
We at Covve, have created an app that accomplishes just the same for you with greater ease, greater convenience and a greater number of features, so you could manage your mobile and contacts hassle-free.
Click the link below if you would be delighted to avail of services to manage your mobile exceptionally well.
Written on 28 Apr 2020.
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