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Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of contacts you need to wade through every day? Not sure which contact to call on next, or which task should take precedence? You may be suffering from contact overload.
It is very easy to get to the point where you are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of contacts in your CRM. The good news is, with a few tweaks, it is also pretty easy to bring your contacts under control. When you do it right, you can build meaningful relationships with your most important contacts.
Minimize contacts
The first rule of thumb for controlling contact overload is to avoid having too many contacts in your system. Be realistic about what your business can accomplish. Thousands of cold leads from a list you bought may just get in the way of meaningful interactions with qualified prospects and active customers.
There is nothing wrong with a list of cold prospects that could turn into customers one day. Its just that you need to be strategic and organized in how you handle a large amount of contacts. It is far better to segment that list out from your active group of contacts that you are having ongoing interaction with.
Batchbook is best used to build and maintain relationships with customers and other important contacts (including qualified prospects). Focusing your primary efforts here will help you avoid the feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of people that you think you need to reach. Instead, move qualified leads and customers to the front of the line, and use Batchbook to better manage you relationships with them.
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Tags: batchbook, how-to, sales, small business CRM
I woke up this morning to an early Christmas gift from Jonathan Blum at TheStreet.com. He posted a great review of BatchBook this morning entitled “To Sell Better, Sell Smarter.” While Jonathan had some very nice things to say about the simplicity of BatchBook as a CRM tool, he also had some very insightful criticism as well.
Jonathan writes that “BatchBook is no CRM final solution. As with all CRM tools, BatchBook is no miracle.” I could not agree with him more. I wrote an article for Network Solution’s Grow Smart Business blog a few months ago titled “For Start-up Businesses, CRM Software is Not the Answer”, where I argued that CRM software is a tool that can help small businesses collect and share information across the team as they learn together what their winning sales strategy will be. I argued that “there are no magic growing beans for new businesses. The fun part is figuring it out as you go.”
CRM software that tries to sell a small business the right sales funnel or the winning pipeline is selling magic beans. Even within the same industry, same market and same product offering, two competitors are going to have very different sales strategies. If not, neither is likely to succeed. What your CRM software should do is make it easier for you, your team, your network and your customers to work together to find the right way to make your business successful.
As Jonathan notes in the article, “Cleaner, faster, leaner selling will be job No. 1 in 2010. Or you can expect not to make it to 2011. And BatchBook is as simple a way to fight that fight, as I have found.” With BatchBook, we’ve provided a tool to help small businesses be more successful in managing their contact network. In 2010, we look forward to both expanding our tool set and helping our customers better manage their workflow processes.
Tags: crm, small business, small business CRM, social crm
We’ve put together a new program here at BatchBlue. You see, as we’ve grown our product and our relationships with the folks who are using it, we came to realize there are some very smart people out there who are coming up with some ingenious ways to set up and use BatchBook for their various CRM needs.
We wanted to introduce you to the folks who we know from their involvement in our forums or with our customer service team as expert BatchBook users. They each have experience setting up BatchBook accounts for themselves and their own clients, and are now available to help our users with some of the more advanced functions in BatchBook such as:
- Prepping database and spreadsheet files and importing them into BatchBook.
- Setting up custom fields using SuperTags and importing custom data from other systems.
- Developing custom reports and lists.
- Writing scripts to connect the BatchBook API to other products such as e-commerce forms, blog site, etc.
- Using the BatchBook API to migrate data from other CRM systems
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Tags: batchbook, crm, Customer Service, customers, experts, small business CRM
As small business owners, we work hard to best support our customers by quickly and efficiently answering questions and responding to issues. Now that most folks are online, our customers are contacting us in a variety of ways: through email, on the phones, in forums and even on Twitter.
Our latest integration partner, Zendesk, allows us to provide a huge step in better keeping track of your customer base and their communications with your company. Zendesk is a complete support site for your customers that allows you to collect and organize customer requests in one place. See a tour of Zendesk’s features in action.
With the BatchBook and Zendesk integration, you can view Zendesk tickets right from your BatchBook Dashboard. Once you’ve created a Zendesk account, head over to the Sync tab in your BatchBook account, select “Zendesk”, and add your Zendesk login information when prompted. Voila! The accounts will be integrated. This means that in BatchBook you’ll see: (more…)
Tags: batchbook, contact management, Customer Service, small business CRM, zendesk
This feature release is so big we’re taking the whole week to announce it! For the rest of the week, we will be highlighting some of the exciting new features in our BatchBook for Sales release, including a new tab for tracking Deals, an all-inclusive calendar and permissions-based access to your BatchBook contacts and communications.
We’ve worked hard over the past year and a half to bring the personal side of small business relationships into BatchBook. SuperTags allow you to build a richer profile of your customers, social media integration allows you to engage with them in a more personal and accessible way, and our Small Business Web partnerships provide a single source of information for all of the other systems you are using to run your business.
Now, we’ve combined this with the deals and leads tracking tools of enterprise sales management products so you can better understand how to turn these personal relationships into new customers. Share conversations across your team, track important action items and capture all signals your customers are sending out – whether a complimentary Tweet or a frustrated blog post.
At BatchBlue, we believe that open, on-going communication with your contacts is really the lifeblood of your business. With BatchBook for Sales, the sales pipeline just got a little more personal. Because you should never have to force a sale.
Tags: contact management, crm, sales, small business CRM, Social Media
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