As businesses grow, they quickly find their workload exceeds their staff’s capacity. While hiring more people to get the work done is always an option, it’s not the most cost-effective choice. Investing in small business software will make your team more productive and help you guide your business in the right direction.
Nevertheless, many business management software vendors hype up their products and underdeliver. Anthem Software aims to give your business the best tools to get more done in less time. To that end, we’ve given considerable thought to how to develop the best small business software in the industry, and we’re confident we have a winning formula. Here’s what your business management software ought to do for you.
Four Things Your Small Business Software Should Do
1. Turn Leads Into Sales Automatically
Salespeople value the importance of a personal connection with their clients, and rightly so. However, not everything needs to be done by hand. If your sales team is spending excessive amounts of time emailing, calling, and generally communicating with clients, you’ve got a problem to fix.
There’s nothing wrong with your sales team keeping up with existing clients, but in order to grow your business, you also need to bring in new customers. If existing clients are taking up all of your salespeople’s useful time, when are they going to follow up on leads? Good business management software can help your sales team do both. Although it’s widely known that it takes much more effort to convert a new client than it does to retain an existing one, your small business software can reduce that effort significantly and bring balance to your sales department.
Make Your Sales Team More Efficient
Some estimates claim that sales reps spend about a fifth of their day just dealing with their inbox. Email can be automated quite easily, if your business management software is up to the task. Anthem Software has made it easy to automate emails to your potential clients.
You’ll need to craft a few boilerplate emails first. You can identify places in the email that should be replaced with personalized information or details from the client’s data. Once that is done, you can then automate how frequently to email people based on the level of contact they’ve had with your company.
With this system, you could have one cold email for uncontacted customers, another for lukewarm customers who might have reached out to you first, and still another for those customers that are on the verge of making a purchase. Instead of tediously typing out emails to everyone, you can automate this laborious portion of your sales work.
Automation Works
Social Media Today reported that about 75% of all businesses are using some form of marketing automation software. Of that remaining 25%, about 40% planned on implementing a similar tool in the next year. It’s clear that the vast majority of businesses have recognized the importance of automation in their sales workflow. Don’t get left behind.
While automation is primarily focused on lead generation, it’s also useful for actually converting those leads into sales. Really, this ought to be your top priority when considering any small business software. If it doesn’t help you sell, it’s not going to have a positive ROI.
2. Build Relationships With Customers
Once you do secure a sale, what comes next? As we said, it’s much easier to keep an existing client than it is to find a new one. So how do you turn those freshly minted sales into long-term customers? Simple. You build a relationship with them.
But doesn’t that put us right back into the same problem we started with? Not if your business management software can automate CRM or customer relationship management. A good CRM software for small business can make it easy to build stronger relationships with customers.
The key to any long-lasting relationship is communication. Unfortunately, most businesses communicate with all of their customers in the same way. There is little personalization and little relevance to each individual. That pushes customers to unsubscribe from emails and avoid your business. What can you do instead?
Customer Relationship Management Software
CRM tools allow you to visualize a client’s history with your company in seconds. You can see every purchase they’ve made and even view your communication history. Based on this data, you can configure automated actions that remain relevant and timely.
For example, if a customer recently purchased a camera from your store, you might send them a follow-up a few months later asking about their purchase. If they had a problem with a previous order, you could follow up to find out how they felt about your customer service. If you have no way of tracking this information, then the only option is to do all of this manually.
Automating your customer relationships even makes it easier for your sales team to add a personal touch when they contact your customers. Having a detailed history of past actions is helpful when you’re on the phone or emailing a client. Something as simple as asking if a product from an old order is still working well can go a long way with a client.
3. Keep Clients Coming Back
We’ve automated sales and we’re turning leads into profit. We’re keeping up with our customers and establishing better relationships. Now it’s time to really reap the rewards of automation. Repeat business is where your investment truly pays off.
When you have a clear profile of each customer, it becomes much easier to get them back into your store or onto your site to make a purchase. You already know what they like, so automate your messaging towards those established interests. Whenever you’ve got a new product or service that you think a customer would love, send them a message.
You might think that as you get more information about clients, your messaging must get more specific. This is true, but that doesn’t mean you have to exert significantly more effort. Once again, automating these tasks with your small business software can make it easy.
Automation to the Rescue
You can write emails and other messages that accompany a new product, service, or a special offer. Using your business management software, you can automatically send those messages out to only those who you think would be interested. Base your decisions on previous data, including sales or clicks that you’ve kept track of.
This way, you don’t have to write each and every individual to let them know what services you think they would love. Instead, you automate the dirty work and let your sales team respond to actual requests and real leads.
You can even automate discounts for a single client. Picture that camera buyer from before. You could set up a discount on lenses that are automatically sent to buyers of that specific camera, ensuring they get a deal on something they were likely looking for. It’s this kind of intelligent, automated marketing that actually drives sales and boosts your business.
4. Deliver Feedback for Improvement
All of the tasks we’ve mentioned are critical for the success of your business. But there’s one more that matters just as much, if not more than the other three. Your small business software needs to give you detailed reports so that you can improve your business with each marketing campaign. What should these reports tell you?
First of all, you need to know how your existing efforts are going. A good automated system should not only automate tedious tasks, but it should also tell you how successful those tasks have been. So, if you sent out automated emails to prospective clients, what percentage of them opened the email? How many responded? How many more still need to be prodded?
If you sent out special discount codes to your loyal customers, how many of them made another purchase? Did they spend money more freely than before? Did they buy what you expected them to? All of these questions are crucial to figuring out how to adjust your marketing strategies.
Find Your True ROI
With reports, you can get a clear picture of your sales after implementing new software. That, in turn, tells you how valuable of an investment your software purchase was. This is the only way to know the true ROI of any business management software.
Every software vendor promises a high ROI, but they often cite industry numbers and fail to speak to the value of their code. Within the industry, there are plenty of great programs and many more that fail to deliver on what they promise. Anthem Software stands firmly with the former.
If you would like to see what our software can do, contact Anthem Software today. Our software was tailor-made with small business owners in mind, with the most important features clearly in focus. We know what you need to make your business bigger. Call Anthem Software today or visit our website to take a closer look at our software
