Advantages of Sales Management Software

Using sales management software offers wide-ranging organizational benefits for an enterprise, and can help it to achieve its competitive and profit goals. The best sales management software aids in business budgeting and planning to improve a small business’ overall success. Read on to learn the many advantages of effectively using sales management software.

Strategic Account Management

A top rated sales management system can be a knowledge database that provides access and information about sales accounts. This can help to reduce the challenges and problems faced while handling a large portfolio of accounts. Companies will be able to identify the sales accounts that provide the most promise and revenue. And, they can filter out the less promising accounts. This enables sales managers to distribute and prioritize accounts effectively. The sales team can pitch unique promotions and packages to each account to enhance the chances of closing the deal.

Leveraged Analytics

Comprehensive analytics is essential for improved business planning. Implementing a good sales management software system can help a business assess sales cycle, target characteristics, competitive positioning, and the effectiveness of sales campaigns and tools. These analytics can assist sales reps to concentrate on business areas that are most productive and profitable.

Accurate Forecasting

Inadequate information can lead to inaccurate sales forecasts. The best sales management software systems capture data efficiently and provide critical information that helps sales reps to make accurate forecasts. The data is easily managed and projected. This simple procedure can be quite a relief for sales managers.

 

At the end, we recommend Microsoft dynamics CRM that has a wide range of Sales Management software features.

You can also read more about choosing the right CRM for you.

Top 5 content management systems

There are dozens of great CMSs out there. Regardless of what type of site you’re building, there’s probably one perfectly-suited to it.
The problem is that most designers and developers don’t want to spend time learning a bunch of different CMSs. They want to learn one, or maybe two, and use those for all of their sites. That means they need something that’s both flexible and powerful.
The CMSs below fit that bill pretty well. Some have practically become household names (in designer households, at least), while others are a bit more obscure.
Try them out, and decide for yourself which one best fits your needs and the needs of your clients.

WordPress

A couple years ago, it was widely debated whether WordPress should really be considered a CMS considering its roots as a blogging platform. That debate has pretty much fallen by the wayside at this point, as WordPress now powers plenty of non-blog websites, including everything from simple multi-page brochure style sites right up to full-fledged social networks (using plugins like BuddyPress).

Through plugins and custom themes, you can turn WP into a social network, forum, e-commerce site, and much, much more. There’s also built-in functionality for creating blog networks or other multi-blog installations from a single core installation. WordPress.com offers a hosted, less-versatile version of WordPress, though the basic functionality is all there.

Joomla!

Joomla! is used by some very prominent companies as the CMS for their websites, including MTV, Harvard University, and IHOP. It’s suitable for back-end networks, too, and is used by Citibank for just that purpose. Joomla! has been used for everything from inventory control systems to reservation systems, to complex business directories, in addition to normal websites.

Joomla! has a long development history and a very active developer community (with over 200,000 users and contributors), so finding information and tutorials is easy. There are also tons of plugins and add-ons for Joomla!, so extending Joomla!’s functionality doesn’t necessarily require any custom coding.

While there are plenty of themes out there for Joomla!, the quality for many doesn’t compare to what’s available for WordPress. There are some great themes, available, though, if you’re willing to look for them.

Drupal

Drupal is another very popular CMS, used by a number of high-profile companies including the New York Observer, Popular Science, MIT, Sony Music, Fast Company, and others. It includes a bunch of features for building internal and external sites, and a ton of tools for organizing your content.
Drupal has a very active community, with a number of IRC channels, forums, and even face-to-face Drupal events. There’s also community-generated documentation that is constantly being updated and improved. This documentation includes all you need to know about installation, building sites and modules, designing themes, and more.
There are more than 6,000 add-ons (“modules”) available for Drupal, making it easy to extend Drupal’s functionality to do just about anything you want. This means you can spend your time focusing on design and content, rather than having to code a bunch of complicated features.

Website Builder

With Website builder you can build your own website in very simple steps on Microsoft Azure. Websites Builder Solution provides a customizable and secure platform to design and build your company website on the cloud saving time, effort and money.

Here are the features offered by this CMS:

• Customizable
• Responsive design
• Page templates
• Drag and drop widgets
• Multi Language support

TextPattern

TextPattern is probably one of the more overlooked CMSs out there. TextPattern is a highly flexible CMS, though, that’s easy to use out of the box and easy to customize by designers and developers. It uses a tagging system to make content retrieval and display easily controllable. TextPattern uses Textile to quickly convert plain text to valid XHTML in your articles and content, which makes it very user-friendly for less technical users.
TextPattern doesn’t have the huge variety of themes or templates available for WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla!, with only a little over 120 front-end themes readily available. They also offer back-end admin themes, for customizing the user experience for content creators.
There are nearly 700 plugins for TextPattern, and another 50+ mods. Plugin categories include image galleries, integrations, e-commerce, custom fields, archives, articles, admin features, navigation, and more. The mods and plugins available greatly increase the functionality of TextPattern and can make it a much more powerful CMS.

 

 

Choose the right CRM for you

CRM software can organize and record the institutional knowledge all businesses maintain about their customers. Employees might use a spreadsheet to pass on information about past sales or share email threads that show a customer has been a loyal patron.

But how to choose the best CRM software for you?

How to choose the best CRM software

Price can be a significant factor when evaluating CRM software but that analysis should focus on more than just the upfront costs. Most packages offer per-user pricing but check what’s included in that price. Training can eat up a chunk of the budget as can upgrades and ongoing support. Consider how much it would cost to integrate the software with existing systems and whether or not you would need additional equipment. That mobile implementation looks slick on the vendor’s website but will it still look that slick once you’ve designed the CRM forms your business will use every day? Does it mean the sales or customer service teams need new smartphones?

As CRM software has grown more sophisticated, it’s branched out into many different directions. There are plenty of options for implementing your CRM Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or for deploying it on-premises using your own server. You can look for the software which has deep hooks into social networking platforms so you can record customer interactions on Facebook or Twitter, or you can choose a platform that integrates with your phone system if capturing call information is more important to you. Look closely at your business processes, discuss with employees what they need and want, contrast that with your bottom line, and you’ll quickly have an accurate picture of the right CRM software for you.

It’s tempting to forgo this homework and simply pay for one of the big, all-inclusive CRM software packages just to have access to every feature you might need now or in the future. But that approach will almost certainly wind up costing you more in both time and money, while probably delivering less flexibility than you’d expect. That’s because these large CRM software packages are often platforms rather than tools, meaning those myriad features they advertise are really the product of integrating with a host of third-party solution providers, not options you can simply turn on. Third-party integration means not only added licensing dollars but also new integration costs.

A better approach is to understand how your employees have to use the software as well as how they want to use it. Think about what tools your team is currently using and what processes they follow. Figure out how those tasks map to the CRM software you’re evaluating. Consider what some of the most common tasks are. For example, if the users have to dig through menus and submenus every single time they want to log a call or email, the tool will actually complicate their jobs instead of simplifying them. Form a small group of users who understand these day-to-day issues to help you in your evaluation. You don’t want to impose a tool that actually makes key tasks more difficult or complex just so you can pay a premium for features those same employees may never touch.

Also, remember that new technologies, while slick, aren’t automatically pervasive. For example, social media is a hot technology for interacting with customers but that doesn’t mean email is dead. Most customers still expect to interact with you via email, and an email can still capture much more data than a Facebook post or a tweet can. Understand how your company interacts with customers over email and make sure your CRM software acts as a complement to that relationship, not a hindrance. CRM software should automatically capture data from email interactions, not force your employees to manually enter email data. Similarly, integrating your CRM software into your email platform means that entering the customer’s name or ID in one platform automatically brings up data from the other.

Take the time to properly evaluate the mobile app; this should be considered a separate app, not just as a mobile “capability.” Mobile devices are an entirely different breed from desktops or notebooks. Employees use them differently and software renders on them differently, and that means business processes that involve them will behave differently. Make sure your CRM software of choice can support the mobile device platform your team uses and carefully evaluate what the app can do. Some apps offer a read-only view of your sales pipeline or contacts so that you can look up the relevant information while out and about. Those apps won’t let you make updates until you get back to a computer. Others offer a seamless experience, letting you do everything you would do on a mobile device that you would with a computer (but usually presenting tools and features differently, which can be difficult for some users to get used to).

 

Finally we recommend Microsoft dynamics customer service CRM.