A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a place for businesses to collect data that can help increase productivity, internal communication, and training support within your sales team. It can also help to create a bridge of information for marketing to use for optimizing campaigns. But, your CRM can reach beyond these two teams, providing valuable information for many other departments at your company that can help your executive team make decisions.

Gamification has some proven benefits to increasing customer engagement, but what can it do for your sales team? In many industries, risk aversion and market volatility mean slower sales cycles, lack of clarity on how to sell in a changing environment, and general sales malaise. Adding an element of fun and competition might be the answer to jumpstarting your sales team’s activities and helping them hit sales quotas.

Whether you’ve been storing data in a CRM for years or your brand new to the tool, there are common challenges companies face that make their tool less effective. These challenges can impact your team’s efficiency, as well as your bottom line.

Can your company relate to one or many of these scenarios? If so, read on!

• We have a tool, but no one uses it.
• We have tools that seem to be working, but no measurement of ROI.
• We have 5 tools, but I think we could consolidate.
• We want to do more, but we haven’t committed to spending the money on a tool to help.

In a vast sea of marketing automation (MA) platforms, it’s hard to pick the right tool – let alone fully understand what you’re even getting from your tool. And let’s be honest, every tool has email marketing and at the right paid level some type of automation, so what else should you be looking for when evaluating MA platforms? While our team is platform agnostic and works in powerful tools like HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketing Cloud, this blog post will dig into a few key features SharpSpring has to offer and why we feel they are valuable!

Several of today's popular CRMs offer a variety of services all within the cloud. Cloud computing can do wonders for efficiency, allowing for more data storage, faster data retrieval, and ultimately higher satisfaction for end users and customers. But, with more companies across all industries moving sensitive information into the cloud, data security is becoming a greater concern.

Follow our 3-step process to make the switch to salesforce lightning.

The Spring ’19 release of Salesforce is less than a month away. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to browse through the official release notes, here’s a quick rundown of the most important new items for this first update of 2019.

Whether you’re choosing your first CRM or transitioning to a new one, it’s a big decision — one that will lead to even bigger impacts on your team. Training your team to use a CRM efficiently is as important as the data that will be kept in it. If they don’t know how to use it comfortably, the transition into a new CRM tool can be a difficult one.

Client relationships are an incredibly valuable resource for businesses of any size, and the holidays are a perfect time to reach out with warm wishes to all of your contacts. But wrangling a huge mailing list can get overwhelming during a hectic yearend. So what’s the best way to check off your holiday “nice” list? Channel your inner St. Nick and get it all done in a wink using a full-featured CRM like Salesforce!

Your company is small but growing. When should your team consider implementing a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM)? A better question may be, how far do you want to go?

Considering all the decisions you have to make in setting up a CRM, closely aligning your sales process with your stages should be at the top of your priority list. In a healthy pipeline, the two will work together to help your entire team communicate effectively. Alignment also helps sales managers efficiently oversee the sales process, pipeline and staff.

Regardless of which CRM application you use, some denotation of deal status will exist. You may just need to dig your way through the jargon to get there. For example, Hubspot CRM calls this “Deal Stage,” while Salesforce.com just calls it “Stage”. Either way, it's important not only to understanding the role of a stage, but also to make sure it's clearly defined.