Many people pride themselves on putting in long hours at work.  It gives them a feeling of productivity, making them feel like significant contributors to a greater cause, and giving them satisfaction, happiness, and a feeling of self-worth.

Are all those hours really productive, though?  If you track the hours you spend actually working every day, you would be surprised to know that much of your time is spent thinking about your next task, tonight’s dinner, or how you’re going to get to your kid’s soccer game.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to find a solution to increase your effectiveness and efficiency at work so you could go home for dinner at a descent time?

Try replacing those long, unproductive hours with a CRM that defines processes and allows you to share information easily.  You can keep to-do lists, activities with reminders, and notes which encourage immediate action.  You can assign tasks to team members easily, automate work based on assignment rules, and be notified when changes happen.

By incorporating a few simple steps, you can easily increase your productivity.

Here are 10 steps to help manage your time better:

• Define your work and your deliverables
• Define your team and their roles
• Get the right CRM module for the team
• Automate as much as possible
• Use dashboards to get an overview and drill down to the micro-details when required
• Share required information with your team
• Create reports with the click of a button
• Export or import data as needed
• Customize the CRM for your convenience
• Get easy access to support for your implementation problems

So if you have successfully implemented your social media campaign, found your leads, and need conversions to happen, it’s time to focus on marketing automation and reap the benefit.

Snapshot CRM is the right marketing automation tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses.  Both will allow you to get best out of your marketing campaigns. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Look at Pinterest, one of the new emerging social media sites- its visually appealing to the mass, has more women registered than men.  It has become a great tool for building brands for small businesses.

Brand building spreads the word, finds you potential customers, helps you connect and creates the awareness.   But, conversion of those potential leads is a completely different ballgame.

You need a lead management tool to better track and nurture your leads.  A good lead management tool provides a marketing automation campaign to send out targeted messages to the targeted leads.

A great Marketing Automation tool nurtures your lead automatically for you by:

• Giving you the option to choose which leads will receive your targeted campaign
• Providing multiple campaign templates
• Sending out targeted multimedia messages
• Allowing you to track who clicked on the links
• Providing ROI monitoring
• Giving you detailed and graphical reports to plan next campaign

Conversions become easier when you know whom to pitch and what to pitch.

So, if you are a small business owner and have successfully implemented your social media campaign, found your leads and need conversions to happen- it’s time to focus on the Marketing Automation and reap the benefit.

Snapshot CRM is the right marketing automation tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses.  Both will allow you to get best out of your marketing campaign. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

5 Signs of an extraordinary team:

• Go-getters: The team likes to win, they compete. They like to keep track of each other’s achievements and outperform each other every day.
• Team Players: Winners work great as individuals but also are great team players. Individuals working together are unbeatable. They get to know each other well, recognize strengths and work in sync to complement each other.
• Mentors: They work with coaches to know their natural inclinations, strengths and work to pair well with other team players through various assessments.
• Detailed oriented: The winning team goes deeper and thoroughly researches upcoming projects.
• The will to succeed:  An extraordinary team has the will to succeed and the patience to put in the effort to reach the goal.

How do you know that they are winning?  The key is in using tools and methods which allows the winning team to be a winner, one time and every time!

Good Customer Relationship Management software helps the winning team by providing detailed, real time performance reports.  Simple steps are tracked with drillable data and then graphically illustrated.  Success is monitored and rated in a few seconds.

A CRM tool allows them to know what the fellow team member is working on and keep the competitive edge current.

The right information in the hands of the right people can do wonders. A CRM does that quickly and efficiently.  Combining data on past and present customers and prospects with information taken from the sales pipeline and forecasting tools helps to strategize a victory for the team and the organization.

Snapshot CRM is the right tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses.  Both will allow you to get best out of your winning team. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

The biggest advantage is that you are likely to find people who are not already in the market for your products and services. So, you beat the competition. You get a head start.  You understand their current needs and challenges.  You become a consultant.  You start to build trust early. That is a huge advantage!

For certain businesses, cold calling is still the most efficient way to win new business. For example, if you are elephant hunting and you know the businesses to call, cold calling will probably bring the best results.

What if you are trying to sell small ticket items?  What if you are trying to sell to a large population?  Then cold calling may not be the most cost effective way to get new customers.

Here are other ways you can be successful:

Setup opt-in pages on your website. Invite people to subscribe to your blogs, and daily or weekly tips. People love freebies.  Offer something free to encourage them to sign up.   For example, offer a free healthy habit or offer a healthy recipe if you are catering to health conscious audience.

Do the same in your social media sites.

As people sign up to receive tips related to your products and services, you’re building up a database of contacts. You need to turn this database into a database of relationships. How do you do that? You do it by keeping in touch with them on a regular basis.

If you have thousands of contacts, how do you keep in touch with them on regular basis via multiple channels such as social media, SMS, email and direct mail? You need automation tools that will release you from manually nurturing relationships so you can focus on bigger and better things for your business.

Snapshot CRM is such a sales and marketing automation tool for small businesses and Soffront CRM is such a tool for larger businesses. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Wish you knew the birthday of a colleague who never misses yours?  Think you are too busy to follow up on birthdays and the name of your prospect’s spouse? How about those fumbles you had while making presentations?

Here are 8 ways to bring your social zing back with Soffront CRM:

• Add birthdays to activities and get an automated reminder next time.
• Catch up in the cafeteria with Tim. Use Soffront Mobile to see what Tim’s working on.
• Get auto notified on new hires, accounts or promotions.  Send a personalized note.
• Family get-together?  No problems, gmail integration will help you track everything.
• Team acquired a big account?  Quickbooks integration will give you the details.
• Volunteer showing off the productivity increase with Soffront CRM.
•  Impress your boss with great reports and animated power points using current data.
•  Work smarter, not harder and be at home for dinner with your family.

Soffront CRM keeps you happy and well liked at home and at work.

We at Soffront are very excited to have adopted the Scrum process, and we expect to stay agile and competitive in the demanding market.  Sprints are progressing very well in all departments, including development, support, sales, marketing and professional services. Early prognosis is very encouraging.

The autonomy, individuality, and freedom to work are what we hope teams look forward to with the scrum process implementation. Being a globally dispersed team, the primary goal is to ensure that everyone is on board and willing to try out the new methodologies. Meetings are held over Skype or GoToMeetings, and backlogs are maintained through Google Docs.

The main impediments have been the demand of the training about the Scrum process, conveying a message of empowerment to team members, and discouraging interference from management.

There have been mixed reviews from teams about implementing scrum, but the kinks are being resolved on a daily basis.  We look forward to constant improvement in team velocity and performance as we sprint.

The implementation continues to spark animated discussions over tea breaks.   The team has been very enthusiastic about Scrum, and is hard at work implementing Scrum’s best practices.

Here are six simple tips which will help you stay happy, keep you calm, and be successful:

1. Know your role- Clear knowledge of your deliverable and expectations is paramount.  Strive to fill in your role and then try to work for something that you want to build your expertise on.
2. Focus on your goal- If you know what to aim for, you will know how to get it done as well. Having straight written goals prevents you from deviating from the task at hand.
3. Have a social life- Have hobbies and a social life outside of your work.  The work stress melts away if you have other passions to immerse yourself in. Then at work, you can stay refreshed.  Don’t linger on the stresses of yesterday or tomorrow.
4. Get a mentor- Find someone who understands you, your goals, has the same background as you, and has found success in their career. Having someone to guide you can make you understand how to navigate through office politics or your career smoothly.
5. Organize- Don’t juggle with too many things at a time.  Keep your work space clean and inspiring. Find out the time when you are most creative and productive, and then keep the work that needs the most attention during that time span.
6. Plan your project- It’s said that 37 % of projects fail annually. Plan it well and use project management software. It’s always better than keeping it all on unending spreadsheets. A software that allows you track the plan, resources, billing, changes and all in an automated pace will work wonders for you and your sanity.

To find out how a CRM Software can help you organize your day (tip #5), let you plan your projects properly (tip #6) and keep you happy @work, call 1-800-SOFFRONT or take a free CRM test drive.

Implementing an effective sales forecasting system is a smart and cost-effective move for any business. With the streamlined data on your fingertips, you now have the tools to save money on inventory and stick to your budget.

How an effective sales forecasting help your business?

1. Sales forecasting allows you to pinpoint exactly how many customers you need to gain, what sales you can expect from the average customer, and other important customer insight.
2. Sales forecasting allows you to plan for the future. How many new hires should you have? What new projects you can take? What changes need to be made?
3. Sales forecasting helps you see what customers really want and how you can fill their needs.
4. Sales forecasting allows you to target your demographics. You can see the returns from each type of customer and re-strategize your efforts to gain maximum revenue.
5. Sales forecasting allows you to distribute a sales target based on accurate data, not random speculation.

No matter what the size of your company, don’t underestimate the power of sales forecasting.

To find out how Soffront CRM Software can help you with an effective sales forecasting, call us at 1-800-SOFFRONT or take a free CRM test drive.

Who are you?  Let your vision and mission statement take the center stage.  The customer purchase cycle has recently undergone a huge change; it’s all about informed decisions which depend heavily on word of mouth and feedback from others in the industry.  Mention it in your website, blog, and social media profiles.  Keep a web contact page that encourages people to ask questions and interact. They could be potential leads!

What do you offer?  Let them know about your products and what you can do to help them.  Collaborative effort helps businesses.  As a small business owner you should join communities, spread the word, attend webinars and seminars, try hosting your own webinars and seminars, and give away free e-books and whitepapers.  Share your knowledge and you will become a valuable thought leader in your industry.

Stay connected.  Newsletters are a great way to stay connected with your audience. Don’t fill it with industry jargon and repeated information on your company; instead keep it simple with useful information your contacts will appreciate.  In return for the valuable content you provide, you can expect referrals.  Always keep an option to sign up for your newsletter on your blog/website.

Write!  Your subject matter expertise is as good as your offering.  Write in company blogs, publish white papers, and volunteer to send contributions to award-winning blogs and websites. This will enable you to build a community that supports you and stays loyal to you.

Be thankful.  Thank your readers and customers—they are the reason your company is afloat!   Send thank you emails to loyal customers and also to interested prospects.  This will allow you to keep the conversation going in order to find out more about them and their needs. Be human; it’s not always about sales, and establishing a good relationship goes a long way.

Soffront’s marketing automation can help you stay connected to your customers and anticipate their needs with email automation and campaign performance tracking.  To find out how Soffront CRM Software can help you acquire and keep loyal customers, call us at 1-800-SOFFRONT or take a free CRM test drive.

Research firm M2 says that by 2016, the gamification market, currently sized at $100,000,000 will reach $2.8 billion, with 200% growth in 2012.  “Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change,” said Brian Burke, analyst at Gartner.  The goal of gamification is simply to achieve higher levels of engagement, change behaviours and stimulate innovation.

An integrated CRM system is another essential way to provide an interactive customer engagement experience.  With a fully integrated CRM system, you will be able to monitor customer suggestions, feedback, and customer interactions from start to finish through the entire sales cycle starting with initial contact to customer service and defect resolution.

Soffront offers an integrated CRM that spans sales, marketing, customer service, project management, defect tracking, and more.  To find out how Soffront can enable you to engage your customers, call us at 1-800-SOFFRONT or take a free CRM test drive.

Reference article:    2012 is the era of customer engagement