In modern business, organization must sell in a smart way by using CRM tools as CRM lets you organize information, keep track of prospects, also helps predict what the customers will buy and when they are likely to purchase it. It also acts as a control to make sales efforts more effective and in turn gives valuable information from sales campaigns to individual customers. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/sell-smarter-not-harder-with-crm-75292

Organizations need to segment their customers and deal with each segment differently. In this way, an organization can give more attention to customers and in return will lead to more profit. This segmentation can be done using tools included in your CRM system. The segmentation becomes easy with the help of CRM tools. But, you must decide how to segment meaningfully. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/segmenting-customers-by-quality-in-crm-74857

Customer-relationship management tools, or CRM tools, provide an important way to connect better with the customer base. In a study, it was found that 71% of telecommunication companies stressed the importance of integrating customer data across the entire organization. An old CRM strategy can become obsolete and cost you new customers and customer retention also become a problem; it could even decrease the overall quality of your customers' experiences. To overcome his problem, software companies are offering modern CRM solutions. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/dont-let-your-crm-go-stale-71154

Customer data is important for any organization, but sometimes, there are no proper backups. In a recent survey, it was found that 45% of companies suffered from data loss, costing companies $9,000 per occurrence. Organizations must follow some best practices for backing up your customer relationship management (CRM) tools which avoids the monetary and productivity loss associated with CRM disaster recovery. The best practices of backup are - Multiple Backup Location, Different Backup Media, Regular Backup Schedule, Tests Your Backups, and Create a Disaster Recovery Plan. Read more at - http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/best-practices-for-backing-up-your-crm-70593

ERP solution takes care of most of back office needs, but organizations still need specialized software within infrastructure for sales, marketing and other departments. Some ERP solutions offer a complete all-in-one solution and include tools like CRM and marketing automation. Integrating ERP with marketing automation and CRM tools is one way to centralize your data and streamline business operations. Another major benefit of integration is improving your customer experience. There are drawbacks of integration. One major barrier to integration is getting a legacy ERP solution to work properly with marketing automation and CRM tools. Read more benefits and drawbacks of integrating marketing automation and CRM with ERP at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/inside-erp/should-you-integrate-your-marketing-automation-and-crm-tools-into-your-erp-solution-70406

CRM tools are important. According to a report, this is a $23.3 billion market and is continually adapting today's sales and marketing needs. CRM companies are now focusing on four major areas as we move into 2016. They are - SaaS adoption, mobile CRM, the impact of IoT and wearable tech, and real-time data. Read more about the trends of CRM tools at - http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/whats-upcoming-for-crm-tools-in-2016-70405

The goal of any business is to improve relationship with their customers. The better any business can manage customer relationships, the better chance to earn more revenue. Nowadays, with the use of CRM tools, one can discover your best customers are their specific needs. CRM technology enables businesses to capture and use sales, customer service, and marketing data which in turn identify consumer trends and expectations. It also helps you gather client data to find out buying habits, service preferences, and purchase power. Use of CRM requires planning and strategies for managing the introduction of the new technology. It also improves data analysis abilities and response time. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/using-crm-to-improve-relationships-with-targeted-customers-70064

CRM tools have many advantages and the basic capabilities should keep track of customer communication, request customer enhancements and manage marketing campaigns to improve customer relationships. CRM can also help a small business to achieve growth. A CRM program needs to be worked on continuously. But, many companies have failed to get results from its CRM because of some bad CRM methods. Companies must implement some latest CRM tools to achieve growth. They are: Social CRM, Cloud CRM, and Mobile CRM. TO know more about how to overcome CRM challenges in small businesses, follow:  http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/enhancing-your-crm-as-a-midsized-business-69920

Retaining old customers is the most profitable task of any small & medium sized business. According to Forrester Research, it was found that retaining 5% more customers can increase profits by 25-125% and it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing client. Customer relationship management (CRM) software can be a vital tool for organizational client retention. Companies use CRM tools for preventing customer defection, increasing client satisfaction and improving cross-selling efforts. Read more at:  http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/5-ways-crm-is-key-to-smb-customer-retention-69833

Customer relationship management or CRM technology improves workflow, automates repetitive tasks and improves their productivity in a small business. It was also found that if a small business adopts CRM technology, revenue increases by 41%. CRM tools provide assistance in many aspects of the sales process, but only if is implemented in the right way. To know more about how to effectively adopt CRM technology for your small business, follow: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/3-ways-to-effectively-adopt-a-crm-for-your-small-business-69782

According to Gartner’s report, “CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives in coming years as enterprises look to create more targeted interactions in a multichannel environment.”

And the basis for these initiatives will be Internet of Things (IoT) because IoT is not only affecting the way people interact with objects and things but also the way customers interact with brands. In this IoT era, marketers have several new options for enhancing customer service as well as experience. Some of them are:

• Real time marketing promotions
• On-demand pricing
• Next-generation customer service
• In-store experiences
• Extensive use of wearable devices
• The self-marketing products

For these initiatives, a sophisticated set of CRM tools like Parature, Geotoko and Aislelabs are also available.

In the nutshell, to deal with today’s digitally empowered customers, organizations are realizing the need to change their focus from products to services.

To know more, please read the following article by Frank Palermo, Senior Vice President, Virtusa, at cmswire.com:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/internet-of-things/a-new-frontier-for-crm-the-internet-of-things-029120.php

According to PwC's Sixth Annual Digital IQ Survey, it was found that collecting, analyzing, and leveraging customer data is a concern for 72% of business organizations, just 44% have taken action to address it. Customer data comes from many sources, like websites, email, social media, mobile, customer service, data warehouses, and more. Collecting, analyzing and using these customer data is a challenge. Marketers should leverage data effectively. Data management and analytics enable marketers to use data effectively.  Businesses need to gain competitive advantage by taking strategic decisions with customer insights. Further, self-learning marketing automation technologies combined with CRM tools allow marketers to set up relevant promotions or information to customers. Read more at: http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital-marketing-data/the-right-path-to-big-data/1327

Analytics for Small Medium Businesses (SMB) today, is a much discussed topic. SMBs face the challenges of effectively using analytical tools to gain precious business insights from data generated. Today markets are able to provide solutions to SMBs which were costly before and this was made possible by the advent of Qlikview, Tableau etc. in Analytics sector. SMBs are realizing that analytics can help them understand customer preferences, expand their market share, cut down cost, increase efficiency and give them a competitive advantage even against the big players. Moreover, with the advent of new technologies like cloud, social media and open source platforms like Pentaho and Hadoop, the requirement for big infrastructural set-up and capital cost have been reduced considerably. The success of Analytics tools depends to a large extent on collecting and managing data and in such case ERP and CRM tools are a must for success. For successful implementation of analytics tool, SMBs need to assess the external market as well as their internal systems and processes. However, SMBs will soon be able to adapt their systems to bring in the external big data from social media like any other big enterprises and hence make their analytics more robust. Read more at:http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/perspective/296888/value-analytics-businesses