Friday, March 24, 2017

What Is SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)?

In most CRM systems, the term sales qualified lead (SQL) designates a lead that has been vetted to fully fit prospective customer profile. The SQL pool is formed by working with marketing qualified leads (MQL) and weeding out leads that don't fit the SQL profile. Here's an example that shows the difference between SQL and MQL. 

Suppose you sell X-ray machines to dental clinics. Your experience shows you in order to sell you equipment successfully, the following conditions must be true - the clinic should have at least five dentists working there and their existing X-ray unit has to be at least five years old. 

Your marketing department obtains a list of all dental clinics in the state. These are MQLs, because dentists are your target market. However, this list contains no information about the number of dentists working for each clinic and the age of their X-ray equipment. You'll need to call or visit each clinic in order to obtain this information. Only the clinics that meet your buyer profile will be added as SQL. Most modern CRM software allow you to automate the process. 

If you are looking for free CRM and lead management software with over 20 sales and marketing tools, consider Bitrix24.


Thursday, February 16, 2017

Best Free Online Gantt Chart Software

Tuesday, July 05, 2016

How To Build A Great Sales Team In Four Simple Steps

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Sales is a lifeblood of any business. The primary goal of the sales team is to generate revenue concurrently building customer trust and increasing brand awareness. Patricia Fripp once said “Youdon’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise.” The fact that 8% of sales people get 80% of the sales is another proof that the choice of your salespeople plays a crucial role in business development. The following tips will help you create the best team to skyrocket your sales. 

Hire salespeople on an ongoing basis 

Great salespeople are rare. It takes much time and effort to find and hire the right ones for your team. Rather than looking for candidates when somebody is leaving and you need to hire a new team member urgently, you should constantly keep an eye on the sales talent pool. As soon as you see great candidates available on the market, don’t miss a chance to recruit them. As it was said, outstanding sales reps are rare, don’t let them go to your competitors. 

Don’t trust your gut 

The biggest hiring mistakes are made due to the confirmation bias which makes you hire not the people who perform best, but whom you like the most. There are different assessment tests which will allow you to predict the future performance of your sales person. You can check TriMetrix, Grit or any other tests which combine personality with sales aptitude checks. The hiring decisions based on both interview and unprejudiced assessment results are proven to be more accurate. Checking the candidate background and fit to the team will also help to make the right choice. 

Be precise describing your open vacancy 

Different selling types require different skills and personality traits. Inside or outside sales, commission types, the industry are among many other factors which influence the type of person you are looking for. Even very decent salespeople will show low performance if there is a poor job fit. Therefore be as precise as possible describing the vacancy and the chances are high you will attract the right sales talents to your team. 

The will to win, the desire to succeed… 

Sales is one of the most competitive fields. Be sure that you choose people who thrive on competition that pushes them out of their own limits. It’s not only important to select competitive and passionate salespeople, it is crucial to understand what motivates them. It can be solely competition, monetary compensation or the career growth. Use this information to keep your team motivated and ignite their desire to do the best!

See also:


Monday, May 23, 2016

Top Totally Free CRM Systems


Bitrix24

free open source CRMMost of the CRM applications with free basic plan allow only couple of users to have free account but Bitrix24 allows 12 users to create free account with 5 GB space. That is likely enough for a small or medium business to get start. 

Free CRM Bitrix24 account comes with unbelievable features–
– CRM includes almost all major business requirements like sales automation, contact management, quote management, business rules automation, invoicing, reports and sales funnel, direct email or call to clients from dashboard, integration with third party applications. It has mobile app for iOS and android to browse client records, create quotes, verify product catalog.
– It provides inter company social networking with ‘Like’ button, instant chat facility, computer telephony integration, photo and video sharing capability. It also includes employee motivational tools like badges, awards to show appreciation towards co-workers.
– It provides 5 GB free space for online file storage and document collaboration. There is no other CRM right now that provides 5 GB space with free plan. Also users can create or edit documents in Bitirx24 without any office suite.
– It has built in task and project management capability as well. Task can be created for oneself or assigned to colleagues, task report helps upper management to understand how much time an employee spends on a particular task.
Overall Bitrix24 is an application that helps an organization to run from one place.

Free account limitations:
12 users
5 GB storage
No record limit

Zoho CRM

cloud based free CRM software
Zoho is well-known CRM application with great features. It has web apps for almost everything that aSME needs like CRM, email integration, file sharing, social networking. It’s free edition allows an organization to create 10 free accounts with 1 GB space and limited functionalities but all these are sufficient for a small or medium company to generate leads, manage contacts and increase revenue.

Here are the few important features that Zoho CRM free edition provides:
– CRM includes almost all important features that an enterprise needs like sales force automation, marketing automation, lead management, contact management, quote management, live chat and email, tasks and activities handling, business rules and workflow management.
– It provides 1 GB space to an organization as document library. It can be used for file/folder sharing and documents attachment with file versioning capability.
– Zoho can be easily integrated with social networking sites like Twitter / Facebook or other Zoho apps like Zoho Projects, Zoho SalesIQ. It can be synchronized with various Google apps as well like Google calendar, Google contacts. Also it provides web to lead and web to contact form facilities to capture leads or contacts in web forms.
Free account limitations:
10 Users
1 GB space
No record limit

Insightly

free CRMInsightly CRM free edition grants 2 free accounts per organization with 200 MB storage. It includes almost all basic CRM features like Contact Management, Project Management, Task/Event/Calendar Management, Opportunity Management, Social Networking, Reporting, Email Integration. It provides the capability to import contacts from Gmail or Outlook or a simple spreadsheet.

Main drawbacks of Insightly CRM Free plan – it limits to store only 2500 records and allows to create 8 custom fields. Also its free plan does not include email marketing. But if these limitations are acceptable and want a simple way to start CRM, it is worth to give a try.

Free account limitations:
2 Free users
2500 records
200 MB free storage

Capsule

CRM Free
Capsule CRM is another lightweight and user friendly CRM application. Its free version provides very basic CRM functionalities with 2 free user accounts and 10 MB file storage. Beside CRM functionalities like contact management, opportunity management or task management, it has an unique feature called List. List uses filtering criteria based upon any possible options in CRM like name, updated on, type or status to group similar kind of contacts or opportunities or cases. With CRM object navigation bar at the top, there is a text link bar as well to bookmark contacts, cases or opportunities that you have accessed recently. Though it has good integration capability with other third party applications, free version has very limited integration features. Another drawback with free plan is that it allows to store only 250 contacts with unlimited opportunities and unlimited cases.

Free account limitations:
2 free users
10 MB storage
250 contacts with unlimited opportunities and cases

Really Simple Systems

cloud based free CRMReally Simple Systems CRM is really simple application with great functionalities like Sales automation, Contact Management, Opportunity Management, Task and Activities handling, Reporting. It’s free edition allows 2 users to have free account and 100 MB file storage. It also includes integration with KashFlow and SageOne accounting applications, custom reports, custom fields on all objects. 
Drawbacks: Free plan supports only sales automation, not marketing automation or customer service management. Also it limits to create only 100 accounts with unlimited contacts, tasks and opportunities.

Free account limitations:
2 Free users
100 MB storage
100 accounts with unlimited contacts, activities and opportunities

Via TechOneStop

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