Big data is intimidating. Quality data, on the other hand, can and should be a core decision factor in everything connected to your business. Data-based decision making, in fact, is starting to be a unifying factor among small and medium-sized businesses looking to survive and thrive in competitive environments. You might have heard about big data, the idea that the rise of digital technology has overwhelmed businesses with so many data points that they can be difficult to analyze. What should be an opportunity quickly becomes a problem, as your decision makers drown in analytics without the ability to differentiate and evaluate. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the case. Increasingly, thanks to new technologies and a better grasp of the depth of big data, businesses of all sizes are beginning to use it more effectively to their advantage. The Increased Usability of Big Data A recent survey by the Harvard Business Review returned a promising result: in 2017, 80 percent of businesses deem their big data and analytics investments to be successful. Used correctly, decision makers across industries state that it can decrease expenses, suggest new innovation technologies, helps in launching new products, and creates more revenue. In other words, as HBR points out: Big data is already being used to improve operational efficiency, and the ability to make informed decisions based on the very latest up-to-the-moment information is rapidly becoming the mainstream norm… About half of the executives (…) predict major disruption on the horizon, as big data continues to change how businesses operate and compete. Companies that fail to adapt do so at their own competitive and market risk. The same survey also saw a shift in the challenges facing big data adoption. Technologies that include the plethora of options to optimize data collection and analytics software are no longer the problem. Now, the biggest challenge is cultural, as companies run into road blocks looking to change their culture toward more data-based decision making. For businesses across industries, that shift is excellent news. The fact that the challenges are now qualitative means that implementation of a data-based strategy is no longer impeded by structural hurdles. Big data may still be intimidating, but a clear road map to success has been drawn. New Technologies that Build Big Data Capabilities When looking at companies’ priorities in data analytics, this shift can be seen in action. VentureBeat outlined five ways in which companies of all sizes are starting to utilize data analytics to their advantage: Predictive analytics, allowing your business to better understand what your customers need before they have to ask for it. Getting customers excited about their own data that can be relevant to their relationship with your company. Improving customer service efforts by providing quicker, more proactive, and more relevant assistance for any issues that inevitably come up. Identifying customer pain points through better audience analysis, allowing you to address underlying issues through core value propositions. In the healthcare industry, saving people’s lives through improved treatments. All of these […]
What makes your company and its product or service different from your competition? As any small or medium-sized business owner knows, the answer to that question is vital to long-term success. If you cannot differentiate yourself, your audience will eventually veer toward the lowest price point, making any business growth unsustainable. That’s what makes a value proposition such a crucial part of your marketing efforts. If you can concisely describe why your product is both valuable to your audience and different from its competition, you can build your entire business on that description. But how do you get there? Especially for startups and small businesses, coming up with the perfect value proposition can seem like a difficult endeavor. By gathering relevant data, you can make sure that the statement you end up with is not just relevant to your audience, but can also be used as the sustainable basis of your competitive advantage. First Step: Define the Problem Forbes.com quotes legendary inventor Charles Kettering in stating that “a problem well stated is a problem half solved.” Every product and business, at its core, should seek to solve an elementary problem that its audience solves. But how do you know what that problem is? This is where data first enters the equation. Through market research, even small businesses can define latent consumer and business needs that their products might solve. The process can be as simple as customer interviews and surveys, or as complex as in-depth evaluation of your audience’s daily behaviors. The key, on all ends of that spectrum, is the gathering and using of data to judge your results. If your audience wants to give you their feedback on latent or obvious problems they need a product to solve, you have to have a platform in which you can gather and evaluate that feedback. Survey tools connected to your CRM, for example, can help you organize your data in a single space. Second Step: Describe Your Solution Of course, a problem matters little if your business cannot fix it. Your product should promise to provide the solution to the problem(s) you found in the first step, helping to improve your audience’s lives in one way or the other. In this second step, it’s time to find out just how it might do this. At this point, don’t worry about your value proposition being a snappy marketing slogan or differentiating itself from your competition. The goal is purely to make sure that you can define exactly how your product would solve the problem defined in step 1. Third Step: Competitive Research Next, it’s time to understand exactly how your proposed solution fits into the competitive environment. Have other businesses also recognized the same problem as you, and are they trying to solve the problem? If so, is their solution different than yours, or similar? In the course of this step, data once again becomes crucial. Competitive research can go as far as understanding the keywords other businesses bid on in their search […]
If you manage a website, you probably use a content management system, or CMS. If you want to run an efficient sales operation, you better take advantage of a quality customer relationship management (CRM) solution. But too often, the two don’t connect well enough for you to make the most out of either’s functionalities. Fortunately, Sitecore and Dynamics are here to change that. CRM and CMS, Explained Frequent readers of this space know about the benefits of a CRM, and particularly Microsoft Dynamics, to optimize your sales processes. It allows you to keep track of each potential and current customer, providing you with more in-depth information on them as they move through the sales funnel. A CMS, on the other hand, improves your website management ability. It offers you the opportunity to streamline, edit, and manage any content on your website, helping you build a website presence designed to gain brand awareness and audience attention. Rather than having to build the content directly in HTML, you get easy editors designed to create beautiful web pages. Today, almost 50% of the top 1 million most-visited website worldwide use a CMS. 5 Benefits of Integrating Dynamics CRM With Sitecore On their surfaces, CMS and CRM solutions may seem like they don’t have much in common, or that your business is perfectly fine using only one but not the other. But if you dig a little deeper, using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore actually comes with a number of tangible benefits for your target audience. 1. Build Targeted Content Based on Contact Information Personalized web content is becoming more and more important to impress and convert your website visitors. In fact, three quarters of consumers get frustrated when the content they encounter is not personalized to them. Of course, you need your visitors to convert in order to have a chance of turning them into customers, and frustration is not a great motivator to accomplish that. Given that statistic, imagine being able to leverage the information you gather about each of your CRM contact into more relevant website content. That’s exactly what Sitecore integration can provide. Now, you can show each one of your contacts information tailored specifically to their needs as soon as they visit your website and contemplate whether they should become customers. 2. Automate Lead Generation Stream into CRM As beneficial as a CRM can be for your sales efforts, it can be frustrating on the marketing side. Too often, there is no easily automated way to feed new leads into the software that then automatically assign to the relevant sales agents and territories. But what if you could build your lead generation web forms in Sitecore, and transfer them over to Dynamics automatically? Now, an otherwise manual process becomes easily automated. In addition, you can even configure Sitecore to capture information from partially filled forms, increasing your insights into your target audience and web visitors. 3. Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts Despite constant efforts to push it off its throne, email marketing […]
The core benefit of using a CRM to work with current and potential customers is its ability to automate your marketing, sales, and other business processes. But what if you could actually use it to gather intelligence about your audience, and create more targeted outreach as a result? Traditionally, CRM and survey software are separate tools. Even if you offer your customers the ability to provide feedback about their buyers’ journey and sales experience, that feedback will likely be collected in an external solution, with little connection to the customer record within your CRM. Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer looks to change that disconnect. By integrating with your Dynamics CRM solution, it can help you not just gain information about your audience, but put that insight into action immediately using your CRM features. Keep reading for a more in-depth overview of the add-on. Understanding the Core Features At its core, Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer add-on is a survey tool. What makes it different from most others, of course, is that it’s directly integrated within a CRM. In fact, Dynamics users can build a survey, set up auto responses and workflows, and view both individual responses and analytics all within the CRM. The result is a more integrated survey experience, on both ends. Members of your audience will easily identify the survey not as a stand-alone communication, but as part of an overall communication plan in which they’re participating. On the backend, users can more easily build surveys that make sense within the communication plan, both in terms of time frame and in terms of branding. Flexible Surveys to Elevate Communication A core reason why this add-on can be so beneficial is its flexibility in creating surveys. The branding is completely customizable, complete with a progress bar across the top of each question page. These pages are designed responsively, automatically adjusting to the audience’s screen size. Meanwhile, each survey can be personalized with data piped directly in from the attached CRM. That flexibility, of course, doesn’t end at the survey design. Users can build up to 200 individual surveys, helping to create a response mechanism for every need. Each survey can include up to 250 questions, to be distributed to up to 10,000 potential respondents at any given time. Customizable Post-Survey Response and Analysis Building the survey, as described by this tutorial, is relatively straightforward within Dynamics. The tool’s true strength comes in what happens once your audience answers the questions you send them. For starters, responses to non-anonymous surveys are captured directly on each respondent’s CRM record. Next time a sales agent looks to gain information about that lead or customer, the responses can act as valuable feedback on that contact’s experience and preferences. In addition, installing the Voice of the Customer Add-on automatically creates a new section of dashboards within Dynamics that allows for effective survey reporting. Here, you can gain a quick overview of the total number of respondents, response rates, and responses to your individual questionnaires. Finally, Microsoft lets […]
If you run an Ecommerce business, you know that working with both future and current customers is crucially important. You are not just using your website to sell your audience on potential engagement and purchases down the road, but asking them to become a customer and complete their buyer’s journey right there, on the spot. It’s only natural, then, to ask whether you should add Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to your Ecommerce system. Though the implementation is not instantaneous, the long-term benefits are significant. More specifically, here are 5 reasons to add a CRM to your Magento Ecommerce site. 1. Provide a More Complete Sales Funnel When do you first learn about your customers? If it’s the moment they check out, your marketing strategy could use some enhancement. Ideally, you should begin to learn about potential customers long before that moment, when they first express interest in one of your products. Using only Magento, that feat can be difficult to accomplish. But through a CRM, you can begin to build strategies that help in the process. For example, you can begin to build lead-generating landing pages that get potential customers into your sales funnel before they’re ready for the purchase. Then, you can build specific email drip campaigns that slowly and strategically nudge them toward the shopping cart. 2. Collect Customer Information Once you embrace gathering information about your customers before they take that final step, you need a system can hold that information. In addition, wouldn’t it be great if you could track the various ways that your potential customers begin to interact with you, such as replying to emails and visiting specific pages on your website? Through a CRM, you can accomplish just that. Once a lead is in your database, the software dynamically gathers the information about potential customers, allowing you to take marketing and sales-related actions based on this intelligence. In addition, you can use the information the system gathers for you for the next step: 3. Segment Contacts For Targeted Outreach Not every potential customer comes to your website for the same reason. Especially if you offer a wide range of products or services for sale online, the audience your website tends to attract may fall into more than one core group. In that case, segmentation becomes crucial. Integrating a CRM allows you to group potential customers together in segments that are homogenous across a number of characteristics. As a result, you can send more customized marketing messages and ensure more relevant outreach. Rather than simply sending a ‘Holiday promotions’ email in the days before Christmas, you can send specific, product-focused promotional emails during the same date that more directly speak to your individual audience segment. 4. Build an Abandoned Cart Strategy If you’re like most Ecommerce merchant, chances are you have an abandoned cart problem. A meta analysis of studies on the subject showed that almost 70% of shopping carts across industries are abandoned. Losing customers during the checkout process is difficult to stomach. They […]
