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Tag Archives: Leverage

Free Training – How to Leverage Sales Intelligence to Improve Sales Performance

March 10, 2021   CRM News and Info

Join us for this free training session and learn how to leverage sales intelligence technology to improve sales performance.

Date: March 18th 
Time: 12-1pm Eastern

Research has proven that incorporating sales intelligence in your sales process significantly improves sales performance for B2B sellers.  Harvard Business Review found that top-performing sales teams cite intelligence as a key driver fueling sales growth:

  • 41% improvement in targeting
  • 40% improvement in forecasting
  • 34% improvement in lead quality
  • 27% reduction in time spent looking for data
  • 20% improvement in won opportunities
  • Be our guest for an informative session and learn how to incorporate sales intelligence into your sales cycle.

During this session you will learn: 

  • What is sales intelligence?
  • The cost of missing & bad data to sales
  • How to uncover deep information about your prospects & customers
    • Annual Revenue, ownership, employee count, and more
    • Key contacts with verified email and telephone
    • Technologies in use
    • Industry info. and similar companies
  • Automatically update prospect & customer info
  • Day-in-the-life of sales using intelligence
All Attendees will receive 30 days of access to InsideView Insights, a leading B2B sales intelligence platform

CLICK HERE to register

About the Author: David Buggy is a veteran of the CRM industry with 18 years of experience helping businesses transform by leveraging Customer Relationship Management technology. He has over 17 years of experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 and has helped hundreds of businesses plan, implement and support CRM initiatives. To reach David or call 844.8.STRAVA (844.878.7282) To learn more about Strava Technology Group visit www.stravatechgroup.com

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How Accounting Firms can Leverage Dynamics 365 for their Operations

November 25, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

While it’s mostly known as a customer relationship service (CRM) solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 does far more than that. It not only offers a range of modules to optimize your business, but it’s also flexible enough to develop industry-specific solutions. JOVACO has done this for accounting firms. The resulting solution sits on top of the standard Dynamics 365 solution, while allowing for industry-specific business rules. It also helps with the initial setup as fields standard to the accounting industry are already there without requiring additional customizations or developments.

How Dynamics 365 can help your accounting firm

Integration between Dynamics 365 and Dynamics GP

Thanks to the integration between Dynamics 365 and Dynamics GP, data flows freely across the entire system. The information entered in timesheets and your planning tool will be reflected in the rest of the solution in real time. A timesheet like TEDI Time and Expense ensures real-time visibility on time spent on mandates, allowing for greater visibility on an employee’s activities of the week.

Specific invoicing process

A solution specifically designed for accounting firms accelerates all processes related to invoicing as well as your invoicing cycle. Different billing options lets you meet all your clients’ criteria easily. The integrated timesheet reduces the number of manual adjustments as hours are automatically entered to the right account.

Management of accounts and groups

The CRM functionality of Dynamics 365 can be leveraged to manage your mandates, clients, and contacts. Client information is centralized and up to date, ensuring that all users can access the latest data at all times. The classic client-to-contact relationship can be taken one step further to focus on groups of accounts to facilitate management the way accounting firms are more used to doing.

Increased autonomy for associates

The solution also gives the autonomy to your associates to make their own adjustments. Fewer requests are sent to administration for modifications, reducing their workload and the risk of errors. Associates can also benefit from improved visibility on key data such as the profitability of services. This allows them to make quicker decisions and strengthen their relationship with the accounts assigned to them.

Reporting adapted to your needs

Reports designed specifically to meet the needs of the accounting industry let you improve your analytical capabilities. Review profitability by service, associate, or staff member for better visibility into the metrics you need. This lets you better analyze the health of your organization and discover new business opportunities.

Ready to implement Dynamics 365 within your accounting firm?

These are just a few ways that the Dynamics 365 platform can be adapted to meet the needs of accounting firms. By leveraging the robust features of Dynamics 365, accounting firms can optimize their operations, complete mandates more efficiently, and maximize profits. What to learn more? Read our to learn how a professional service firm can now process invoices 4 times faster or how Dynamics 365 can optimize the sales of professional services firms.

By JOVACO Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics 365 specialist in Quebec for accounting firms

About JOVACO Solutions

JOVACO Solutions is a leading ERP and CRM solution provider operating in Quebec for over 35 years. As a specialist of Microsoft Dynamics business management solutions, we offer a wide range of products and services to meet all the needs of professional services firms and project-based organizations. We also offer specialized project management tools and timesheet add-ons fully integrated to Microsoft Dynamics solutions. Visit our website or contact us for more information.

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How to Leverage CRM Predictive Analytics Tools to Improve Sales

August 24, 2020   CRM News and Info
crmnav How to Leverage CRM Predictive Analytics Tools to Improve Sales

Predictive analytics takes CRM data and uses it to make predictions about future events. In terms of sales, predictive analytics looks at information from the entire customer life cycle to predict how customers will behave, such as whether or not they will convert.

As technology evolves and the world becomes more engaged digitally, you need to know your customers and prospects better than they know themselves. This helps you tell them what they need well before they realize it on their own. By leveraging CRM predictive analytics, businesses are able to connect and engage with existing and potential customers in a new and much more effective way.

While existing customers and potential customers are always waiting to have a need fulfilled, the question is – are you prepared to sell at the right time, in the right place, and using the right channel? How do you make sure each sale happens at the right moment? How do you ascertain each interaction provides a value-added experience for you and them?

The Need for CRM Predictive Analytics

Meeting your annual sales targets is critical to the success of your organization. This requires you to accurately forecast your sales revenue in order to make informed decisions and accelerate opportunities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM’s predictive analytics models (built on Azure Machine Learning and algorithms such as latent semantic analysis and regression analysis) augment human judgment with seller feedback and ongoing model retraining, which results in analytics-based insights. These analytics capabilities help your sales executives to better plan and prioritize their opportunity pipelines and improve their forecast accuracy.

While your sales force is the best judge of whether or not your organization will win a deal or how successfully (or poorly) an opportunity is progressing, there are a host of data-related challenges that they face that hinders them in making the right sales decisions. Some of the top challenges include:

  • The presence of humongous amounts of customer data – with practically no insights
  • No access to valuable data that can help improve forecasting accuracy
  • Absence of predictive capabilities in modern tools that results in disconnected experiences – with reduced productivity and increased inefficiency
  • The incompleteness of CRM data in systems hampers good quality predictions (machine learning tools learn and train from complete, useful, accurate data)
  • Data is tied to monthly and quarterly business tasks (data is typically entered during specific times, leading to insufficient real-time data)

Modernizing sales and marketing capabilities requires you to adopt customized sales solutions that streamline seller tasks – solutions that are built on advanced analytics models that increase the ability of your salespeople to make informed decisions, provide data about each customer opportunity (based on telemetry and visualization), and offer suggestions for specific actions. Access to advanced analytics supplements their decision-making abilities, enabling them to rethink and revamp their judgments. Having a better understanding of the risks in your pipelines allows you to adjust schedules and take advantage of hot opportunities.

Improving Sales with CRM Predictive Analytics Tools

IDC predicts that worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow from $ 130.1 billion in 2016 to more than $ 203 billion in 2020. Predictive analytics methodologies make use of millions of previous opportunities sellers have worked on over the past couple of years and calculate near real-time opportunity win/loss predictions with sophisticated machine-learning algorithms. By aggregating end-to-end sales information and feeding it into predictive analytics models, you can receive powerful analytics-based insights and recommendations.

Key Capabilities of CRM Predictive Analytics

CRM predictive analytics can improve sales outcomes by enabling businesses to:

  • Get an end-to-end view of the sales processes and desired outcomes
  • Enable your sales staff (sellers, managers, and executives) to spend more focused time on customer-facing activities
  • Get actionable suggestions along with opportunity indicators to drive sales in the right direction
  • Leverage historical data to get concrete, analytics-based advice to finalize deals
  • Get perspective and anticipate pain points before customers even realize they exist
  • See which opportunities are hot, warm, or cold and get recommendations for data-driven actions
  • Provide feedback to the tool and help improve recommendations (and value) the tool provides

With Dynamics 365, you can build and attach your own predictive model using Azure Machine Learning. Leverage the sophisticated predictive technology to have your historical data (sales orders) analyzed, while also easily evaluating your sales pipeline for positive outcomes.

Final Thoughts

Make the most of these predictive analytics tools by offering a way to engage with clients, learn more about individual opportunities, and improve sales productivity and customer satisfaction. With predictive analytics, you can take your CRM game to the next level and enjoy unprecedented profits in the long run.

To discover how a technology partner can help your business maximize CRM predictive analytics capabilities to meet your specific needs, contact an expert at Synoptek.

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3 Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Webinars to Attract, Engage, and Gain New Customers

April 17, 2020   CRM News and Info

Have you seen the rulebook for B2C marketing?

Trick question! It doesn’t exist. And even if there was a rulebook for B2C marketing, COVID-19 has changed everything.

B2C marketing is personal. You need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, share a better story about how they can transform their lives, and keep them coming back for more.

B2C Webinar Hero 3 Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Webinars to Attract, Engage, and Gain New Customers

As you plan the future of your business in a post-coronavirus world, you need to engage potential customers on their terms. This is where B2C webinars can give you a huge advantage. B2C customer webinars are a great way to make your business more personal, form authentic connections with your community, and write your own rulebook.

Let’s get started. 

Wait… Aren’t Webinars Just for the B2B Crowd?

If you want to create your own best practices for B2C lead generation, take a page from the B2B playbook. B2B companies produce webinars because more than 70% of buyers have used them to make a purchase decision in the past 12 months. And if webinars can help B2B buyers navigate complex solutions, they can definitely help new customers understand your company’s value. B2C webinars are a fantastic way to highlight your products and services, attract new customers, and grow your community.

But there are lots of ways to do webinars wrong. Here’s a quick list of what to avoid:

  • A non-stop commercial. People don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy. If your customer base is already carving out time in their busy schedule to learn from you, make it worth their while. 
  • A 30-minute monologue. It’s possible to make this work, but you need to be an amazing storyteller. 
  • 20 PowerPoint slides with flashy animations. Seriously? This will send your attendees running for the hills. You can do better.

So, if the examples above aren’t the right direction, what are the elements of successful B2C customer webinars? How can you use these online events to attract people to your site, engage new customers, and drive repeat business?

Best Practices to Secure Registrations and Attendees for Your Next B2C Webinar

People crave connection. And if they’re on your, site they’re open to learning something new. Webinars merge these twin interests to tell a more powerful story.

Here’s how to launch a successful B2C webinar series:

  • Write a list of potential webinar topics based on keyword research and your ideal customer profile.
  • Be consistent. Pick a day to broadcast your webinars and stick with it. Treat B2C webinars like a blog, a podcast, or any other form of content. If you’re consistent, it will be easier for you to schedule your webinar and easier for your audience to plan their schedules around it.
  • Practice beforehand, especially if you’re going to invite guest speakers to share the spotlight with you. Sometimes the best ideas are spontaneous; they come from brainstorming and thinking out loud. You can learn a lot just by bouncing ideas off someone in a rehearsal. Then you can take that same energy into the live webinar.
  • Do it live! Treat each of your B2C webinars like the blockbuster event it is. When you do it live, you can take questions from the audience in real-time and give people the answers they’re looking for.
  • Have fun! On webinars, people will pick up on the tone of your voice and your body language — sometimes even more than what you actually say. Your enthusiasm will shine through and punctuate your messaging, so make sure to make it exciting!

These are the basic steps to producing successful B2C webinars. But how do you get people to attend once you’ve put all the pieces in place?

  • Think “focus group.” Before you announce your first webinar to the masses, plan and produce one just for your top customers. You can either prepare a presentation in advance and take their questions at the end or ask them to submit their top questions and turn the whole thing into a live conversation. Offer them a coupon code in exchange for attending the webinar and submitting their comments and questions. Your biggest fans have valuable insights that can make your next webinar even better. 
  • Treat your B2C webinar like a new product launch. Each of your webinars deserve a dedicated landing page where people can register for the big day, top billing in your B2C newsletter, a headline in your email marketing outreach, and buzz on social media. Integrated growth marketing platforms like Act-On allow you to manage all aspects of your webinar campaigns in one place.
  • Always bring it back to what your customers want. Again, you can draw inspiration from social media posts, keyword research, and what your competitors’ customers say about their products on review sites. Then record a quick video with the same format as your webinar, “We often get questions about ‘How do you ABC?’ or ‘How do you get better at XYZ? So we’re holding a webinar to answer your questions like this and much more! Join us next week…” You can either livestream these previews through Facebook and YouTube, or record them for playback on Instagram TV. If a guest speaker will join you, invite them to join you on the teaser video.
  • Be patient. The more often you do B2C customer webinars, the more you’ll understand what makes them a success. The flipside? You probably won’t get 1,000 highly qualified leads from your first attempt. But good things come to those who wait. And B2C webinars are the perfect complement to everything else you’re doing to generate demand and attract new customers to your business.

Every time you plan a new B2C customer webinar, you should map out three different email nurture campaigns:

  1. Emails for your target audience with an invitation to RSVP
  2. Another series of emails for people who register, so you can encourage them to share details of the webinar on social media (and also remind them to attend)
  3. After the webinar, send an email to everyone who registered and thank them for attending. You can even write two different versions: one for attendees, one for people who skipped out. Both versions should include a link to the recording so they can watch the webinar on-demand. 

Emails in the first two sequences will point people to your landing page where they can register for your email. But the third campaign transforms your webinar from a one-time event into a piece of evergreen content. 

Hosting On-Demand Webinars as a Lead Generation Tactic

Anyone who visits your site is looking for ways to become a better version of themselves. And when they think of your products and services, you should think “on-demand webinar lead generation.” B2C webinars are premium content designed to address your new customers’ questions in depth. If you’ve done your homework, your webinar will be just as relevant one year from now as it was the day you recorded it. 

Once you record the webinar, embed it in a new landing page on your site. Then update the original landing page with a new form to gate the embedded webinar. The same keywords still apply, which means you can add this webinar to your email marketing sequences as well as your organic & paid SEM campaigns. And when it’s time for a refresh — for example, if you have updated keyword results or you identify a new influencer who would make a great co-host — plan a new webinar and begin the whole cycle again. 

Plan and Execute Your B2C Webinar Through Act-On’s Marketing Automation Platform

If you wrote your own rulebook for B2C marketing, what would be rule #1?

Allow us to make a suggestion: 

“Give the people what they want!”

Remember, people do not want your product. But they do want a better story about how they can transform into a better version of themselves. 

Producing a successful B2C webinar requires a lot of moving parts, so you need a marketing automation platform that’s up to the challenge. In order to produce a webinar that drives more qualified leads to your site, you’ll need…

Act-On’s marketing automation platform has everything you need to make your webinars a key part of your demand generation strategy. To learn more, reach out today and schedule a quick demo with one of our marketing automation experts!

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5 Ways B2C Companies Can Leverage Email for Better Results

February 8, 2020   CRM News and Info

4) New and Updated Product Launch Emails

Good businesses are constantly releasing new products, services, and features. Great businesses are able to disseminate that information to their customer base in fun and innovative ways that lead to better engagement and more sales opportunities.

Whenever your company releases a new product or updates an existing product, you should include a strong email marketing campaign as part of your holistic go-to-market strategy. Think about it: your existing customers are already invested in some aspect of your company and offerings, so there’s a very good chance that they’d also be interested in what’s coming next!

New and updated product launch emails are designed to do more than generate sales; when done properly, they help foster connection to your entire brand. You’re advertising your bright, shiny, and new offering, so you want to create a real sense of enthusiasm that you can transfer to your existing customers. This means using big, sharp images and clever, concise copy. Most importantly, you want to make sure your branding elements jump off the page while also tying seamlessly to your new product. 

Use the subject line and preview text to let your audience know that they’re about to view or learn about something new and exciting, being as explicit as possible with the limited characters at your disposal. Include a prominent CTA that clearly states the desired action, and make it easy for your customers to access the new or updated product by redirecting them to a clean and simple landing page where they can request a free trial or purchase the new item outright. 

5) Use Email to Gather Customer Feedback

Successful B2C companies are constantly innovating and improving upon their product and service lines. And one way they can do that is by understanding what is and isn’t working. Sending emails prompting customers to take a survey or leave product feedback can help your company gather the data you need to develop and deliver the best possible offerings and experiences. 

Obviously, you want to make sure you’re sending survey emails to customers who have actually purchased something from you in the past. So, a common best practice is to send these emails as part of a trigger campaign following a sale or interaction with customer support. These emails empower your customers to voice their opinion of your products and services, which helps to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Further, it allows you to understand where you’re succeeding and where you might have missed the mark, so you can continue to improve your offerings with each new iteration.

In addition to surveys, which usually limit the interaction to objective yes/no or multiple-choice questions, you should encourage your customers to give more detailed feedback by inviting them to leave a review or testimonial. You can leverage great reviews by sharing them on your website, product pages, or social media platforms. Or, you could even follow up with the customer directly to see if they’d like to participate in a more involved case study or success story. 

Even negative reviews can be extremely helpful as they give you the chance to improve your product and reach out to the reviewer directly to help make the situation work to your advantage. In some cases, these reviews (and your responses) can help your other customers solve their problem, which could save you from additional negative reviews in the future. For example, a customer trying to decide if they want to buy a pair of jeans might notice a negative review suggesting to size up, which would prevent them from making the same mistake. 

If you aren’t getting much traction with your customer feedback emails, consider adding additional value to incentivize your customers to participate. This might include a standard discount with a simple user code or maybe a free trial to your next product release. Make sure the offer is included in the subject line to inspire your audience to click through to the email.

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4 Ways to Leverage Your Current Customer Base to Drive More Business

December 12, 2019   CRM News and Info

by Helen Veyna

Last updated December 12, 2019

As marketers, we’re always chasing the next big trend and trying to come up with new and innovative campaigns that will enable us to stand out and resonate with our target audience. What many of us fail to realize, however, is that our own customers can often speak better to our value than a quirky ad or paid campaign, meaning that developing solid and lasting relationships with them can pay off big in the long run. 

shutterstock 1176073267 4 Ways to Leverage Your Current Customer Base to Drive More Business

Leveraging your current customers to secure new leads is one of the most effective marketing techniques at your disposal. Your current customers understand your lead’s pain points, speak their language, and have amazing results to share that show how your solution works. They can make the case for your product in less time than it takes for leads to go through an entire nurture campaign. That’s not saying you should abandon those efforts (because they are extremely important to creating an enjoyable customer journey), but it’s essential that you have several customers who are willing to speak to your organization’s excellence.  

Your current customers aren’t just valuable in helping you attract new leads. When you fully leverage these relationships, you’ll find that there’s immense room for growth within your current customers. If you do your due diligence in collecting customer insights and checking in with clients to make sure they’re getting the most out of your products and services, you’ll discover that many of them are great candidates for upsell or cross-sell opportunities. 

Still not convinced? Keep reading to learn 4 ways to leverage your current customer base to drive more business. 

1. Collaborate With Customers to Develop Success Stories 

As I previously mentioned, your customers likely have great results to share that prove the value of your product or solution. It is also very likely that they are already sharing their success among their marketing friends and putting in a good word for your brand. And while that might help you secure one or two new customers, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t find a way to share these stories with a wider audience. 

Developing customer success stories is simple (the hardest part is just scheduling a brief 30-45 minute interview) and can result in significant ROI. For example, a good success story can help you close a deal if a customer is looking for a particular use case that resonates with the challenges they are currently facing. 

To make sure you have all your bases covered, a good place to start building your success story library is by identifying a few happy customers in various industries. Reach out to them and ask if they’d like to schedule a time to talk and collaborate with them to create content pieces you can share through your website, automated nurture campaigns, and social media. 

Don’t worry if you’re new to reaching out to customers to secure interviews — the process is much simpler than you probably think. You can identify happy customers who might be willing to talk to you by speaking with your account managers, reviewing customer surveys and net promoter scores (NPS), and monitoring social media for any positive mentions. You can even place a prominent callout in your customer communications to see if your contacts are interested. Chances are that many of them will jump at the opportunity. After all, who doesn’t love some free publicity? 


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2. Invite Your Customer Advocates to Spread the Word on the Web

In a world where customers are accustomed to conducting thorough research before making a purchasing decision, establishing a positive web presence is invaluable. To do that, however, you need to customers who are willing to leave a good review on an industry website or rave about you on social media. This sort of advocacy is critical to your success. 

Your target audience likely references popular and trustworthy websites when weighing their options. Inviting your customer advocates to leave a good review for you on these sites can help you put your best foot forward. Although many customers won’t need an incentive to share their feedback, sending a small gift (such as a Starbucks gift card) is a great way to show your appreciation and increase your chances of securing a review. 

You should also make it a priority to have a positive presence on social media, especially since many of your current customers and leads are likely active on these channels. A great way to do that is by encouraging your advocates to share positive results they’ve experienced on their personal profiles or company accounts, making sure to tag your company and use relevant hashtags. This will improve your chances of appearing in relevant searches and help you establish positive brand recognition among your target audience. 

Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module can help you easily monitor mentions and engage with your customer advocates. Continuing the conversation by commenting on their posts will allow you to keep the momentum going on their own profiles, improving your chances of showing up on your prospect’s feeds. You can also repost any posts that really stand out on your own social media profiles to ensure your followers see them as well. 


3. Ask Your Customers to Serve as References

Your high-intent leads are probably evaluating several options when the time comes to talk to Sales. They’ve probably already read up on everything you have to offer and maybe even sat through a demo, so what they’re looking for at this stage is additional proof that you can truly do what you say you do. 

This is a great time to pull out some of those success stories you’ve developed. Or you can go the extra mile by scheduling some time for your leads to chat with current customers. This allows your prospects to ask questions they wouldn’t be able to ask one of your salespeople and learn more about how their peers are benefiting from your solution. 

To increase your chance of success, you should aim to set up leads with customer advocates who work in similar industries or have similar use cases. Getting as targeted as possible with your customer reference will help ensure that they can provide helpful answers to all your lead’s questions and highlight your organization’s best features.

4. Nurture Your Customers to Improve Retention and Match Them With New Products and Services

We’ve talked a lot about how to leverage your current customer base to charm new leads. A mistake that many companies make, however, is failing to acknowledge the opportunity for growth that exists within their current customer base. 

Your current customers have already demonstrated that they believe in the value of your brand, so half your work is already done. Your task now is to keep them happy and offer them opportunities to grow with your company. 

An easy and effective way to do that is by entering your customers into automated nurture campaigns that share best practices about your product and offer the opportunity to learn about new products and/or services. You can then track engagement to automatically segment customers that are prime upsell or cross-sell opportunities and enter them into relevant campaigns to help them learn more about these new options. 

Last but not least, you should also be tracking customer engagement to identify which customers need a little bit more love. Integrating your CRM with a marketing automation platform can make it easy to flag these contacts so that your account managers can reach out to them directly to offer extra support. Studies show that attracting new customers costs 5X more than retaining current ones, so it’s in your best interest to show them that you’re committed to their success. 

Marketing Automation Can Help You Build Long-Lasting Customer Relationships

Whether your focus is customer retention or converting more leads, the right marketing automation tool allows you to leverage your current customer base with ease. Act-On can help you easily distribute content, develop automated nurture campaigns, collect valuable customer insights, and even manage your social media efforts so you can drive more ROI from your current customers. 

If you want to learn how to leverage marketing automation to strengthen your customer relationships and drive more business, check out our eBook “Optimize the Customer Journey” (linked below). 

And, if you’d like to learn more about Act-On’s capabilities and how our marketing automation platform can help you build a more comprehensive and effective digital marketing strategy, feel free to fill out this brief form to book a demo with one of our digital marketing experts. 

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What Is Account-Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

November 7, 2019   CRM News and Info

by Helen Veyna

Last updated November 5, 2019

Those of us who are familiar with the sales cycle know that there is usually more than one stakeholder involved in the decision-making process, especially when there’s a significant sum of money at stake. What this means for marketers is that you are likely to encounter multiple personas with varying interests and will have to do your best to engage and persuade each of these individuals. As you can imagine, the amount of work and attention to detail involved in trying to keep multiple contacts moving through the sales funnel can become chaotic and overwhelming.

ABM Hero What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

In these instances, having an account-based marketing approach can significantly improve marketers’ ability to effectively and efficiently nurture multiple stakeholders at an organization. This approach requires marketers to move beyond targeting individuals to a more holistic approach that enables them to nurture an organization as a whole and focus their efforts on better and larger opportunities.

But, before we go into more depth about the benefits of account-based marketing, let’s clearly define what it is. 

What Is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy in which organizations market to target accounts with personalized campaigns and messages that resonate with the collective needs and pain points of various stakeholders. This approach is effective because it allows marketers to tailor the way they approach these organizations based on an aggregated view of how key stakeholders are interacting with their marketing efforts. 

But why is this approach so effective? As we’ve already established, organizations are actively trying to involve key leaders and team members in the buying process to ensure that they are investing in a solution that best fits their needs and will generate a significant ROI. This creates a challenge for marketers who not only have to engage and nurture each of these individuals but also track their engagement to determine where the account stands as a whole and whether this opportunity is worth the time and effort of their sales teams.

Account-based marketing strives to alleviate this obstacle by enabling you to gain a holistic view of an organization’s pain points, interests, and concerns as reflected by the activity and engagement of its various stakeholders. Having access to the full picture allows you to identify your champions and detractors and also develop a marketing strategy that aims to generate enthusiasm for your brand among all key stakeholders regardless of where they currently stand.

Copy of Hows it going  Email banner 5 What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

But this only begins to cover the advantages that stem from adopting an account-based marketing approach. Today we’re outlining 3 key benefits your organization can reap from implementing ABM strategies. 

1. Improve Your Ability to Gauge When an Account Is Ready to Buy

During the sales cycle, you will probably encounter individuals who are “champions” for your solution and would jump at the opportunity to give you their business if the decision were up to them. These individuals are very engaged with your messaging, and their activity and lead score tells you that they are more than qualified to talk to sales — but their enthusiasm doesn’t tell the entire story. 

Analyzing behavior on the individual level instead of across an organization is challenging because it doesn’t allow you to see where the entire buying team stands as a whole. For instance, one person’s enthusiasm could lead you to believe that the organization is ready to buy even if not all stakeholders are on the same page. Account-based marketing removes this obstacle by allowing you to gain a sense of the bigger picture and improving your ability to gauge the most appropriate time to transfer an opportunity to Sales. 

With an account-based marketing approach, you’re still tracking the way individuals are engaging with your marketing efforts, but you’re using these insights to inform your perspective of the account as a whole. Now, many of us know how difficult it is to collect data to begin with, let alone aggregate and analyze. Accomplishing this task, however, becomes much easier when you’re using a marketing automation platform. Act-On has an accounts dashboard that allows you to consolidate and view key information and buyer activity in one location.


xPZBaquxHY6g12bYPdz6tD What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

Using account-based scoring in addition to aggregating data can further improve your ability to determine when a lead is qualified. Using account-based scoring allows you to assign points to each customer action (such as downloading an eBook or viewing a web page) and define a threshold that tells you when a lead is qualified and ready to talk to Sales. This tactic not only allows you to measure behavior and engagement across an organization, it also enables your sales team to focus on more qualified and profitable opportunities. 

2. Nurture Your Detractors to Make Everybody a Champion for Your Organization

As we’ve already mentioned, it is highly likely that opinions will vary among different stakeholders at an organization. While you will have stakeholders that are extremely enthusiastic about what you have to offer and be quick to see your value, others will need your marketing team to pay them a little extra attention before they come around.  

This is another area where account-based marketing is extremely helpful. By looking at how various stakeholders are engaging with your website, emails, and marketing as a whole, you can more easily identify your champions and detractors. This information is extremely important to your success because it allows you to see which efforts are working and which are not, as well as pinpoint the individuals you’ll need to sway in order to finalize a sale.

Once you know who your detractors are, a good plan of action is to segment these contacts based on their interests and priorities and enter them into personalized automated nurture campaigns. This way you can deliver messaging and information that speaks to their specific pain points, interests, and questions to persuade them to become fans of your brand and help them make a final decision. 

By identifying roadblocks that are preventing stakeholders from seeing the value of your product or solution early on, you’ll be able to deliver more qualified and enthusiastic leads to members of your sales team. 

Do keep in mind, however, that paying extra attention to your detractors doesn’t mean you can get away with ignoring stakeholders who are enthusiastic about what you do. You should keep engaging with your champions in order to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page once the time to talk to Sales comes around.

ABM Banner What Is Account Based Marketing? 3 Reasons Your Organization Should Leverage This Tactic

3. Help Your Sales Team Seal the Deal

Speaking of closing deals, ABM can be just as useful to members of your sales team as it is to your marketing team — for many reasons. To start, when you transfer more qualified and enthusiastic opportunities to your salespeople, you improve their chance of gaining that final conversion and making a sale. 

One thing to note, however, is that a qualified lead doesn’t necessarily translate into a sales conversion. Nothing is worse for your salespeople than going into a phone call not being prepared to answer difficult questions regarding your qualified lead’s concerns and pain points. 

When the time comes to make that call, your salespeople have to be equipped with the right information to make their case, and that’s where having a holistic view of the challenges and sentiments across an organization comes in handy. Equipping your salespeople with insights about who they’re talking to, what they care about, and how they’ve engaged with your marketing campaigns and materials will prepare them for more productive conversations that leave lasting impressions.

If marketing and sales alignment is a challenge for your organization, a marketing automation that integrates with your CRM can help you improve collaboration. Integrating your marketing automation with a CRM system allows you to set up alerts that notify your sales team when a lead becomes qualified and facilitate the transfer of important information.

The Right Tool Can Help You Easily Implement, Launch, and Refine Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Developing and implementing an account-based marketing strategy can seem like a huge endeavor, but with the proper tools, it doesn’t have to be. A marketing automation platform like Act-On can provide all the tools you need to build engaging campaigns, measure engagement, consolidate insights, and test and refine your efforts. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On can help you enhance your marketing strategy as a whole, we invite you to schedule a demo with one of our experts.

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Posted on November 7, 2019

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5 Ways Oilfield Services Companies Can Leverage Advanced Technology

November 3, 2019   NetSuite
GettyImages 1129209309 5 Ways Oilfield Services Companies Can Leverage Advanced Technology

5 Ways Oilfield Services Companies Can Leverage Advanced Technology

Posted by John Goode, Senior Director, Channel Marketing

Technology like NXTurn’s OFS Vertical Edition for NetSuite can help oilfield services companies improve efficiencies, streamline their supply chains and save money. 

For many oilfield services (OFS) companies, the boom or bust nature of the business, requiring a focus either on responding to rapid demand or suddenly needing to cut costs has left them without a reliable technological backbone. Most are a long way from what some have termed the “digital oilfield.”

“Dependence on legacy systems and remotely scattered oil and gas fields are further complicating data-capture from all producing assets,” GlobalData Analyst Ravindra Puranik wrote recently, noting that full-fledged adoption of the digital oilfield is still a far way off. “Nevertheless, oil and gas companies have managed to achieve productivity gains through improved reservoir understanding, remote monitoring of operations and with logistics and supply chain optimization.” Learn how to implement these strategies in “Driving Revenue Growth and Streamlining Processes for the Oilfield Services Industry”.

Here are five more reasons why all OFS companies are implementing digital strategies today:

  • Gain efficiencies and improve profitability. Worth an estimated $ 63 billion as of 2017, the U.S. oilfield services industry has experienced some major fluctuations over the last decade. From 2012-17, for example, it experienced steep declines, losing an average of 13.6% annually. For the more than 21,000 firms that are currently active in the U.S. oilfield services industry today, managing market volatility has become a way of life. NXTurn’s OFS Vertical Edition for NetSuite helps streamline the dispatch-to-cash process, manages well activity, and provides a procure-to-pay process. Combined, these functionalities vastly improve the manual, paper-based processes that many OFS companies continue to rely on.
  • Maximize value across the entire supply chain. NXTurn’s OFS Vertical Edition for NetSuite takes a systematic approach to helping companies find the efficiencies in the services process, and then maximizing that value across the supply chain. The solution’s streamlined dispatch-to-cash process, for example, ensures that any service that’s been assigned will be billed.
  • Eliminate disconnected, legacy technology systems. Along with their paper-based systems, most are using a variety of different systems to run their businesses, including accounting platforms such as Sage, QuickBooks or SAP. When financial management, revenue management, fixed assets, procurement, order management, billing, inventory management and services delivery don’t “talk” to one another, this disconnected approach is inadequate at best for today’s growing businesses that seek real-time visibility into essential business data.
  • Integrate key functionalities. Like many industries, the oilfield services sector has historically relied on disparate, legacy systems that don’t talk to one another. This creates data, information and knowledge gaps that have to be “filled in” using manual processes. By integrating all functions into a comprehensive cloud computing suite, NXTurn’s OFS Vertical Edition for NetSuite improves command and control of an OFS business and simplifies field service. This unified operating system empowers employees to view and share one true version of data in real-time, leading to greater collaboration among departments, clear visibility for management, increased productivity across the business and greater revenue.
  • Gain from unexpected “wins.” For some OFS companies, the biggest “wins” that come from adopting a digital oilfield approach are the ones they weren’t even expecting. For example, NXTurn’s OFS Vertical Edition for NetSuite’s well and lease code database often fulfills an undiscovered need that the OFS company didn’t even know it had. The company that receives a wireline perforating job at a certain well in the Permian, for instance, can gather all of the pertinent information (i.e., revenue generated at that site, its latitude and longitude, etc.) right in its ERP. “The ability to see the history of a particular well site and services performed across divisions is a game-changer for a lot of our OFS customers,” said Joshua Bone, NXTurn’s Professional Services and OFS Manager.

Combined, these advantages can give OFS companies a leg up in a competitive industry where every dollar, minute, and man-hour count. Whether you looking to effectively manage supply inventory, efficiently dispatch technicians and track their activity, streamline invoicing, integrate with field service platforms, or anything in between, NXTurn’s OFS Vertical Edition for NetSuite is designed to help you achieve your business goals.

Read “Driving Revenue and Growth and Streamlining Processes for the Oilfield Services Industry” and view the infographic.

Posted on Fri, November 1, 2019
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Dynamics 365 Portals – Leverage Liquid and Java Script Custom Code to Enhance Portal Capabilities

October 3, 2019   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
crmnav Dynamics 365 Portals – Leverage Liquid and Java Script Custom Code to Enhance Portal Capabilities

Dynamics 365 Portals

Dynamics 365 Portals offer a great way to enhance customer experience by extending some CRM configurations directly to the customer.  There comes a time when you may want your portal to perform some action that is beyond the out-of-the-box functionality.  Extending portal functionality often requires custom Java Script and or Liquid code.  Get familiar with some of the basic understandings of these two programming languages using this guide.

Liquid Code

Liquid code runs server-side- meaning that this code works great for making queries back to Dynamics to deliver data or perform an action.  Suppose you want to display some information from a parent record on the current record that a user is viewing from the portal.  You can use Liquid Code to define the field on the parent entity as a liquid object, and display the object on the web page.  Code like this is often times implemented on the Web Template portal entity.  Web Templates are used to structure and display data in particular ways for all Web Pages that utilize that Web Template.

Java Script

Java Script comes in handy when you want to improve the user-experience, but not always the best option to meet a business process’s needs, as Java Script can be subverted.  Want to hide/show a field on a portal page based on another field’s value? This is precisely where Java Script should be implemented.  It doesn’t stop there, though.  Use this code to pre-populate fields, hide/show sections and tabs, send an alert to a user, lock down fields, even make collapsible tabs!  Java Script is most commonly used as a way to mimic Dynamics 365’s Business Rules.  Implement this style of code of Web Forms, Entity Forms, Entity Form Metadata, and Web Templates.

Using Liquid and Java Script in conjunction

It is possible to use these two styles of code on the same portal component, within the same script.  Be aware though, that this method will not work in some cases.  For example, say you have a Java Script block of code that looks for a change of a field, and you want to execute a block of Liquid code when that field changes.  While this type of code could prove useful, it’s not possible, as Liquid runs server-side and cannot run after a web page has already been loaded on a browser.

Contact us!

Beringer Technology Group is always here to provide expert knowledge in topics like these. Contact us with any questions that you may have!

Beringer Technology Group, a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and CRM for Distribution. We also provide expert Managed IT Services, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Cloud Based Computing and Unified Communication Solutions.

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Telecoms Leverage Omni-channel Collections to Reduce Churn and Improve the Customer Experience

June 20, 2019   FICO
Screen Shot 2019 05 30 at 9.00.22 AM Telecoms Leverage Omni channel Collections to Reduce Churn and Improve the Customer Experience

Telecoms today face many challenges, including high roll rates and expensive high-touch contact strategies. A key challenge is to more effectively communicate with customers. A growing number of consumers prefer to conduct business on their mobile devices, and many have a preference for the type of communication they receive, whether it’s via IVR, email, or SMS. Telecoms are struggling to establish best practices around how to optimize these interactions.

Telecoms have to do more with less.  By deploying advanced analytics, including AI and Machine Learning, they can gain a greater understanding of customer expectations and experiences. By automating processes and improving the customer experience, we have actually seen delinquency rates drop by 40%, collection costs drop by 15%, and a reduction in the number of days it takes to collect.

Customer experience and satisfaction has been ranked a number-one business priority by a large majority of the top telecoms, globally. By incorporating automation into their business, they can deliver the value of the company’s best-performing agents, while flexibly scaling them to handle whatever level of capacity is required on any particular day. These new tools help telecoms deliver the right message for a consumer, and convey it via their preferred channel at the right time – thus maximizing the likelihood of a successful outcome.

FICO and Cox Communications recently presented a webinar on “Telecom Trends and Best Practices in Omni-Channel Collections.”A recording is available at: https://content.fico.com/l/517101/2019-04-04/7xfg5

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