The ClinchPad Blog
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Campaign Monitor is an email marketing tool which is popular for sending and managing newsletters. It is a web based application. With a free plan, it is widely used by many to send periodic emails to their customers and prospects.
We’re pleased to announce that now you can add Contacts in ClinchPad to your Campaign Monitor subscriber lists. This reduces the time spent on duplicate data entry and makes it easier to keep your subscription lists up to date.
To get started with integrating your Campaign Monitor account with ClinchPad, read this integration guide.
Madmimi is an email marketing tool which is popular for sending and managing newsletters. It is a web based application. With a free plan, it is widely used by many to send periodic emails to their customers and prospects.
We’re pleased to announce that now you can add Contacts in ClinchPad to your Madmimi subscriber lists. This reduces the time spent on duplicate data entry and makes it easier to keep your subscription lists up to date.
To get started with integrating your Madmimi account with ClinchPad, read this integration guide.
MailChimp is an email marketing tool which is popular for sending and managing newsletters. It is a web based application. With a free plan, it is widely used by many to send periodic emails to their customers and prospects.
We’re pleased to announce that now you can add Contacts in ClinchPad to your MailChimp subscriber lists. This reduces the time spent on duplicate data entry and makes it easier to keep your subscription lists up to date.
To get started with integrating your Mailchimp account with ClinchPad, read this integration guide.
“What do you think about the weather?”
A question like is not a conversation starter. It’s not going to keep the listener engaged enough to hear what you have to say anything after that. Having fresh and interesting things to say is key to an engaging conversation and a foundation of a great working relationship.
When you are in sales, it’s far more important to be great conversationalist and an expert on a wide variety of topics. The emphasis is on wide variety of topics for one simple reason - you don’t know for sure the topics that are of interest to your prospect.
Sure, it takes a number of factors to be a good conversationalist other than a deep understanding of a gamut of topics. Not being an introvert and having great body language are a given. For the purposes of the article, I’m gonna assume that you have mastered those skills.
So, what does it take it to be a person who has always something new and interesting to add to the conversation? Let’s check it out!
The market for CRM systems is a huge one. Gartner reports predict the market size to grow exponentially to $36 billion by 2017. That’s a really sweet number if you are a CRM vendor! Truth be told, it’s a win-win situation for CRM vendors and their customers. The bottomline of businesses on both sides of the table tend to go up with CRM adoption.
In reality, the business of CRM is a very competitive vertical. There are a couple of CRM biggies who have already taken a major chunk of the market share and are being implemented in enterprises across the globe. The bigger the bloat, bigger is the price tag!
However, our aim was to make ClinchPad the world’s simplest, fastest & most intuitive CRM system and to keep that philosophy at the core as we build our product and grow. Our ultimate goal is to create a CRM that doesn’t relegate users into data entry robots. Keeping the sales software as invisible as possible when it comes to managing sales pipelines is what we strive for.
These are big ideas that drive product development at our company. We brainstormed on every little function of every feature in ClinchPad trying to somehow reduce the time being spent to add data to our lead tracking system.
The very first thought that occurs to you when your sales numbers arrive is, perhaps, “We could do better”. You ponder over the figures, trying to find out what is that one clot in the vein that keeps the sales from flowing smoothly.
You raise the targets for your sales force, push them to bag more deals, but you are possibly not even considering the fact that they may already be over burdened. Besides, if a salesperson could do all the tricks, there would be no need for people who support their efforts.
A sales operations team enters the picture at this juncture. It functions to provide the administrative and infrastructural support to the sales guys so that they can keep their heads out of administrative activities and simply focus on one thing - closing deals!
From strategic planning to tactical planning, from forecasting to sales reporting, the sales operation team does it all. They are those indispensable guys who do the back office work so that your boys can clinch more deals in the market.
Contact management today is so much more than just saving and accessing contact information. Gone are the days when that Rolodex on your desk was all you needed to keep track of your business contacts.
In a world of multiple channels of communication, a more evolved system of contact management is the need of the hour. In fact, contact management has become an integral feature of modern day CRM systems.
Online contact management software allows you to store and retrieve not only the contact info of a lead but also the history of all interactions. And, this is just one of the many advantages on offer!
There are many ways in which an online contact manager can contribute to your bottom line through increased efficiency and better customer service. Let’s have a look at the five major benefits it brings to the table.
I’m a big admirer of bootstrapped businesses. Running a self sustaining business without ceding control to investors is a great way to experience entrepreneurship nirvana.
I’ve nothing against getting external funding for a business early on and avoid all the heartburn of juggling growth and revenue. However, from the point of running a business exactly the way you have envisioned, all the while holding on to the majority stake, bootstrapping is the way to go.
There is a catch though. Bootstrapping is an enamoring idea on paper. When you try to put it in practice, it might not be as appealing. The problem is, you’ll have to run a business that’s lean, agile and is extremely well budgeted.
Every business has it’s own set of expenses. IT spending is something that’s common across all verticals. So, if you are small business trying to stick to a budget, you would be better off choosing the right, cost effective set of software to run your business.
We all love Google’s products and services to varying degrees. Their privacy policy isn’t something that’s very inspiring and they love tracking people online. Keeping that aside, they do offer a bunch of amazing tools to communicate, collaborate and run your business on the cloud.
After the break, let us take a look at how effectively a small business can put a bouquet of Google apps together for a streamlined workflow on the cheap!
We just redesigned the List View. You’ll notice the following enhancements
We’ll be enhancing the list view with even more functionality soon. If you have any suggestions, do let us know in the comments!
66% of Small Business across USA don’t use a CRM. This is despite the CRM market being a $12B industry. We examine the factors behind why the adoption rate among Small Businesses is low.
We collected data from 25 different sources to determine the huge cost in time and money of implementing a traditional CRM. Here’s a checklist that a CRM must satisfy to avoid being a huge drain on a Small Business’ resources.
Does your sale process inevitably suffer from delays? Are you looking to cut your sale process short? Is your win rate not as high as you’d like? If the answer to either or all of these questions is a resounding yes, then you may want to tweak your sales cycle to make it more efficient and yield better results.
The first step to a better, more productive sales process is to identify the area of weakness. You can’t prescribe a medicine without first diagnosing the ailment.
So you need to start by breaking down and examining each stage of your sale process.
We’re all familiar with the concept of the sales funnel by which we guide leads through stages of prospecting, qualification, actual purchase and finally – repeat sales.
It is necessary to measure the rate at which a lead is moving through each stage of the funnel and identify which stage a lead may be stuck at for a long period.
There is always a mad rush among businesses to drive more traffic to their web properties. Given the single digit conversion rates, it’s totally understandable the urge to get more and more eyeballs to a website.
With some hardwork doing SEO, social marketing and content marketing, it’s very much possible to bring massive traffic to a website. After reaching that goal, the focus shifts to making the most of the inbound traffic.
It used to be really tough to measure the right metrics that matter to your business. Some would like to know exactly where their visitors have been before reaching their website. On the other hand, some would like to know more about what these visitors do on their website.
For a very long time, Google Analytics used to be the silver bullet for all things traffic number crunching. In fact, it still is a highly relevant and indispensable tool to measure and monitor web traffic.
The problem is that it takes a lot of work to bend Google Analytics to your business needs. And, businesses tend to outgrow the limited scope of making sense of the traffic data. Eventually they start looking for an app that gives them fine grained analytics.
After the break, let us take a look at a list of web apps that are doing a fabulous job when it comes to helping you understand the numbers and the customers better. Read on!