Mobile marketing tips for small businesses
Posts tagged sales pipeline stages
Connecting with Small Business Decision-Makers through Social Media
Jan 18th
We all know that business owners and other decision-makers are busy. But all this time, we thought they were busy tending to the needs of a growing company with limited resources.
Boy, how wrong we were.
Instead, as research at Forrester indicates, business buyers are spending all their time playing around with social media.
All right, so that’s not entirely true, but here’s what the study did show: 91% of the B2B buyers surveyed used social media. That is, almost everyone is involved to some extent with social networks. Primarily, people are doing what everyone else does online: Spectating. This means that while you might think business buyers are nowhere to be found online, due to their lack of commenting and content creation, the opposite is true. They make up a silent crowd that you can count on to consume your social media content.
Even more interesting was the fact that about 70% of those surveyed used social media for business purposes!
Since the survey didn’t target small business decision-makers specifically, we can’t go crazy drawing inferences. What the survey does indicate, however, is that business decision-makers of all kinds might be keeping a closer eye on social media content than you might think, given that they may not be particularly vocal.
Don’t let the silence fool you – they’re out there.
Speak, and they will hear you.
How “Full-Box” and Mobile approaches are Disrupting CRM
Jan 10th
In the past, many CRM offerings featured robust relationship management tools, but it was up to the user to supply the leads themselves. That is, the programs offered up the “RM,” but the user had to supply their own “Cs.”
Not anymore!
Now, many CRM solutions are “full-box,” meaning that they either come with a database of leads or, and this is much more likely, they allow users to search publicly available databases such as Google Places in order to locate leads that can then be imported into the CRM tool.
This feature enables users to avoid wasting hours scouring for leads and then manually entering contact information into their own house databases. The time lost across industries due to searching for leads and the related data entry is a huge number of hours in the aggregate, and full-box CRM lets companies avoid the expense entirely, freeing up employees and resources to perform other functions.
Essentially, with a full-box CRM, a sales team can spend more time selling and less time preparing to sell.
Our highly streamlined, simple CRM solution, Bizness CRM, does exactly that. Local leads are organized by small business industry via Google Places, and then users can narrow them down based on numerous optional criteria to help surface qualified leads. Think of it this way: other CRMs are like BYOB parties, where you’re supposed to bring all of your own stuff. Bizness CRM, on the other hand, offers a fully stocked open bar, with millions of small business leads built in.
Instead of having to do all your own legwork, it’s all done for you, automatically. When you fire up Bizness CRM, everything you need to start selling is already there.
(We know which party we’d rather go to).
We’re also aiming to disrupt larger, traditional CRMs with our mobile first approach. Some companies (which shall remain nameless) offer a mobile CRM user experience that makes it obvious that their full product was essentially thrown into a garbage compactor and compressed, and then painfully shoved into a mobile device. This doesn’t lead to a very good tool.
In contrast, our native app (iPhone available; Android and iPad in the works) is designed from the ground-up to work beautifully on your mobile device. Sales don’t always happen in the office, so we’ve taken an approach that lets users handle sales activity anytime, anywhere.
If that doesn’t increase sales, we don’t know what will!
To learn more about Bizness CRM and our free trials, click here.
Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses and Bizness CRM, a CRM designed to make selling to small businesses easy.
