Best Books for Marketing Part Two – a Top 5 Review

In part one, we suggested 5 essential books to understand and practice marketing in the modern landscape. Many of you liked the list and asked for other suggestions. Those of you, who missed the first part, click here.

Now we are recommending 5 more books (in no particular order) that should be essential readings for any marketer. Enjoy!

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers By Seth Godin

Written by one of the world’s foremost marketing experts, this avant garde book explains the shortcomings of interruptive marketing and how a permission based approach is essential in establishing long term customer relationships.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant By Renée Mauborgne

A thought-provoking seminal work, this book talks about eliminating competition by finding untapped new market spaces (blue oceans). It will change the way you look at your competition.

Groundswell, Expanded and Revised Edition: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies By Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

One of the original books on social media, it takes an authoritative look at social technologies and how to integrate social media into your marketing strategy.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly By David Meerman Scott

New rules indeed! This book provides a comprehensive view of the new online marketing landscape. It ties all the web 2.0 elements together and provides a blueprint on how to be successful in this changing age.  Full of tactical examples and action plans, it is a must read for inbound marketers.

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity By Avinash Kaushik

Per Seth Godin, “Analytics is vitally important, and no one explains it more elegantly, more simply, or more powerfully than Avinash Kaushik. Consider buying up all the copies of this book before your competition gets a copy.”

Customer Best Practice Series: Steve Ogden improves company-wide efficiency at Imagetek Inc.

Customer Best Practice Series: Imagetek Inc.
Steve Ogden, General Manager, Imagetek Inc. talks about improving company-wide efficiency using Soffront CRM. Imagetek is a national leader in the enterprise content management (ECM) and business process automation industry. Click here to read the success story.

To find out how we can help you similarly in your organization, call us at 1-800-SOFFRONT or take a free CRM test drive.

Innovative CRM Solution for the Cleaning Industry

Fremont, California, Tuesday August 21, 2012 - Soffront Software, Inc., the mid-market CRM software leader, today announced an innovative and unique vertical CRM for the cleaning industry.

This unique solution simplifies many complex operational challenges currently seen by cleaning, maintenance, and janitorial companies. It enables a company to better manage leads, opportunities, and customers. In addition to generating quotes and work orders with approval processes, users of Soffront CRM are able to record inspections, schedule employee and vehicle shifts, and easily create inspection reports for customers. Additionally, tracking contract expirations, employees' leaves/overtimes, and customer complaints/resolutions are simplified and organized.

This easy-to-use solution comes with the flexibility and best-in-class adoption rate of Soffront's integrated CRM software to fully automate sales, marketing and operations. It comes pre-integrated with Intuit Quickbooks and Soffront provides services to integrate with other back-office products using our robust back-office integration tools.

"We did extensive market research among business owners in the cleaning industry. They told us that the business flow for cleaning companies does not readily fit into any generic CRM system," said Manu Das, President and Founder of Soffront. "We worked with cleaning companies to build this vertical CRM to help them automate operations, increase sales, and provide better customer service."

About Soffront

For nineteen years, Soffront has provided CRM solutions for small-to-medium sized companies. Compared to other leading CRM providers, Soffront CRM drives more sales by helping sales teams spend more time selling and less time in the CRM. Companies that switch to Soffront report significant cost savings with drag-and drop customization and the elimination of add-ons. Soffront's integrated CRM contains all of the required functionality including sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service, and project management. Soffront CRM provides a higher return on investment, generating more revenue, more savings and a better user experience. Soffront is privately held, debt-free and profitable.

Trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Soffront Media Contact:
Sudipto Ghosh, 
510-413-9000 x134
sudiptog@soffront.com 

Overworked: Really? 10 Steps to Help You Manage Your Time

Are you working 60+ hours a week?  Is it because you love to work or because your business demands it?

Many people pride themselves on putting in long hours at work.  It gives them a feeling of productivity, making them feel like significant contributors to a greater cause, and giving them satisfaction, happiness, and a feeling of self-worth.

Are all those hours really productive, though?  If you track the hours you spend actually working every day, you would be surprised to know that much of your time is spent thinking about your next task, tonight’s dinner, or how you’re going to get to your kid’s soccer game.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to find a solution to increase your effectiveness and efficiency at work so you could go home for dinner at a descent time?

Try replacing those long, unproductive hours with a CRM that defines processes and allows you to share information easily.  You can keep to-do lists, activities with reminders, and notes which encourage immediate action.  You can assign tasks to team members easily, automate work based on assignment rules, and be notified when changes happen.

By incorporating a few simple steps, you can easily increase your productivity.

Here are 10 steps to help manage your time better:

• Define your work and your deliverables
• Define your team and their roles
• Get the right CRM module for the team
• Automate as much as possible
• Use dashboards to get an overview and drill down to the micro-details when required
• Share required information with your team
• Create reports with the click of a button
• Export or import data as needed
• Customize the CRM for your convenience
• Get easy access to support for your implementation problems

So if you have successfully implemented your social media campaign, found your leads, and need conversions to happen, it’s time to focus on marketing automation and reap the benefit.

Snapshot CRM is the right marketing automation tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses.  Both will allow you to get best out of your marketing campaigns. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Lead Management: The Art of Conversions!

Yes, you can master this art too.  How?

Look at Pinterest, one of the new emerging social media sites- its visually appealing to the mass, has more women registered than men.  It has become a great tool for building brands for small businesses.

Brand building spreads the word, finds you potential customers, helps you connect and creates the awareness.   But, conversion of those potential leads is a completely different ballgame.

You need a lead management tool to better track and nurture your leads.  A good lead management tool provides a marketing automation campaign to send out targeted messages to the targeted leads.

A great Marketing Automation tool nurtures your lead automatically for you by:

• Giving you the option to choose which leads will receive your targeted campaign
• Providing multiple campaign templates
• Sending out targeted multimedia messages
• Allowing you to track who clicked on the links
• Providing ROI monitoring
• Giving you detailed and graphical reports to plan next campaign

Conversions become easier when you know whom to pitch and what to pitch.

So, if you are a small business owner and have successfully implemented your social media campaign, found your leads and need conversions to happen- it’s time to focus on the Marketing Automation and reap the benefit.

Snapshot CRM is the right marketing automation tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses.  Both will allow you to get best out of your marketing campaign. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com orwww.soffront.com.

Can you have a business without a database? 

The short answer is “not for long”.

Those of you who are not familiar with a database, it is a software program where you keep all of  your business and/or personal contacts. Trying to run a business without an effective database is   like trying to run a marathon barefoot: if you don’t have the right gear, you’ll be in a lot of pain and probably won’t be able to reach your goal.

Some business owners keep all of their contacts in their smart phones. Smart phones are a great place to start putting your contacts. But, you can’t share these with your business partners or other employees. You can’t keep track of the conversations you had with them over time. You can’t save all the documents that you mailed to them. You get the point.

The next choice is Microsoft Outlook or Google contacts. These are better than your smart phone because you can categorize them and notify a group of people in one click. But it is limited in what you can share with others, and won’t keep the history of calls or emails in one place.

A better idea is a database also known as a CRM database. A CRM database saves your contacts, categorizes them, and sends relevant messages. It can setup reminders on when to contact people. Most importantly, when you pull out a contact two years down the road, it shows the history from day one: how you met, how you grew your relationship, what photos you shared, or the business you did together. When you are ready to make a call, CRM shows you the phone, address, and relevant information along with the entire history together with all documents. So now you can make that call knowing that you did not miss any important information.

A CRM database also helps you to keep track of the products and services that you sell. It can tell you which services you are selling more and which ones you hardly sell. So, you can strategize your business better and price your services.

A good CRM database also can save customer feedback. You can analyze the feedback and learn about your brand.

Most CRM databases are hosted in the cloud so you don’t have to worry about losing the data or backing it up every night. You can sleep easy knowing your data is safe and secure and available to you 24x7.

For a free 30-day trial of cloud CRM that will help you effectively manage your customers, contacts, documents and more, check out Snapshot CRM at www.snapshotcrm.com.

Next week’s topic: How to grow your database.

4 Must-Haves for a Small Business

Small businesses need many things to succeed. These four must-haves will allow you to maintain and grow your business.

     1. A good attorney. With ever changing rules and regulations of employment law, a small business owner has to have an attorney. Imagine what could happen if an employee complains to the labor board for some reason. As a small business owner, you don’t want to take a risk in handling this yourself. You need an attorney because it’s important to protect yourself and your company.

     2. A good accountant. With thousands of tax codes, it is a no brainer to make sure you have an accountant who understands your business. One single audit can destroy your company. Don’t wait until you get audited. This is another necessary cost that will ensure you have properly audited financial reports, and in the end it will help you sleep at night.

     3. An optimized website. Your website is your storefront on the internet, whether or not you do business on the web. People find you by coming to your website. If the website is not optimized for major search engines such as Google and YouTube, people will not be able to find it.

     4. A CRM (customer relationship management) or contact database. The main asset of your business is your customer contacts and the relationships that you have built with them. So it’s essential that you have a database of contacts and relations that is secured, fail-proof, and on 24/7/365. A CRM database is the central point of your business. A CRM database must collect people who are visiting your website and nurture the relations by sending periodic emails with useful information. You must grow your database to grow your business. If you are not using a CRM database you are not working smart.

If you are interested in finding out how a CRM database can help you grow your business by collecting leads, nurturing them, and getting new orders visit these websites: www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

IMAGETEK SAVES TIME, INCREASES REVENUES USING SOFFRONT CRM

—Companywide Efficiency Improves 20%; Expects 75% Savings with Full Implementation—

Fremont, California, March 26, 2012 – Soffront® Software Inc., www.soffront.com, the leader of mid-market CRM software, today announced that Imagetek Inc. (www.imagetek-inc.com) implemented Soffront CRM to improve efficiency companywide and provide a more comprehensive view of the customer. Imagetek is a national leader in the enterprise content management (ECM) and business process automation industry.
Imagetek determined that they needed a CRM solution to improve efficiency and provide companywide access to all aspects of their business. An exhaustive six month research effort included big name CRM vendors in the industry, such as Goldmine, NetSuite, On Contact, SalesForce.com, and Soffront). The company chose Soffront Software because of the product’s range and flexibility.
“Although a couple of products met our needs, Soffront was the most powerful,” summarized Kyle Foster, Director of Research and Development at Imagetek. “With Soffront, our capabilities are limitless. The product is so scalable that we can customize it to do anything we need.”
Imagetek purchased all of the Soffront modules and began a phased roll out. “Hardware uses it to better track assets for service requirements, sales can more effectively understand the client’s contracted professional and technical services, and marketing can better track leads. Additionally, everything is available on the customer portal for our customers to log in and see any outstanding issues and resolutions.”
According to Foster, Soffront saves the company time, improves customer service, and is increasing revenue. “I can conservatively estimate we have improved efficiency by at least twenty percent. As we continue to deploy the product, we expect to ultimately achieve a seventy-five percent increase in efficiency.”
About Soffront
For nineteen years, Soffront has provided CRM solutions for small-to-medium sized companies. Compared to other leading CRM providers, Soffront CRM drives more sales by helping sales teams spend more time selling and less time in the CRM. Companies that switch to Soffront report significant cost savings with drag-and drop customization and the elimination of add-ons. Soffront's integrated CRM contains all of the required functionality including sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service, and project management. Soffront CRM provides a higher return on investment, generating more revenue, more savings and a better user experience. Soffront is privately held, debt-free and profitable.

---
Sarah Bond, Office & Accounting Manager
Soffront Software, Inc.
45437 Warm Springs Blvd. Fremont, CA 94539
Ph: 510-413-9000 x115, Fax: 510-413-9027

http://www.soffront.com/

Do you have a winning team? How do you know?

You love winning, you take risks and are used to getting what you want. But, how do you know your team is a winning team?

5 Signs of an extraordinary team:

• Go-getters: The team likes to win, they compete. They like to keep track of each other’s achievements and outperform each other every day.
• Team Players: Winners work great as individuals but also are great team players. Individuals working together are unbeatable. They get to know each other well, recognize strengths and work in sync to complement each other.
• Mentors: They work with coaches to know their natural inclinations, strengths and work to pair well with other team players through various assessments.
• Detailed oriented: The winning team goes deeper and thoroughly researches upcoming projects.
• The will to succeed:  An extraordinary team has the will to succeed and the patience to put in the effort to reach the goal.

How do you know that they are winning?  The key is in using tools and methods which allows the winning team to be a winner, one time and every time!

Good Customer Relationship Management software helps the winning team by providing detailed, real time performance reports.  Simple steps are tracked with drillable data and then graphically illustrated.  Success is monitored and rated in a few seconds.

A CRM tool allows them to know what the fellow team member is working on and keep the competitive edge current.

The right information in the hands of the right people can do wonders. A CRM does that quickly and efficiently.  Combining data on past and present customers and prospects with information taken from the sales pipeline and forecasting tools helps to strategize a victory for the team and the organization.

Snapshot CRM is the right tool for small business and Soffront CRM is the right tool for larger businesses.  Both will allow you to get best out of your winning team. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Don’t Cold Call: Here’s why

Cold calling has been a great tool since the telephone was invented. It has many great advantages.

The biggest advantage is that you are likely to find people who are not already in the market for your products and services. So, you beat the competition. You get a head start.  You understand their current needs and challenges.  You become a consultant.  You start to build trust early. That is a huge advantage!

For certain businesses, cold calling is still the most efficient way to win new business. For example, if you are elephant hunting and you know the businesses to call, cold calling will probably bring the best results.

What if you are trying to sell small ticket items?  What if you are trying to sell to a large population?  Then cold calling may not be the most cost effective way to get new customers.

Here are other ways you can be successful:

Setup opt-in pages on your website. Invite people to subscribe to your blogs, and daily or weekly tips. People love freebies.  Offer something free to encourage them to sign up.   For example, offer a free healthy habit or offer a healthy recipe if you are catering to health conscious audience.

Do the same in your social media sites.

As people sign up to receive tips related to your products and services, you’re building up a database of contacts. You need to turn this database into a database of relationships. How do you do that? You do it by keeping in touch with them on a regular basis.

If you have thousands of contacts, how do you keep in touch with them on regular basis via multiple channels such as social media, SMS, email and direct mail? You need automation tools that will release you from manually nurturing relationships so you can focus on bigger and better things for your business.

Snapshot CRM is such a sales and marketing automation tool for small businesses and Soffront CRM is such a tool for larger businesses. For more information on these tools, feel free to visit www.snapshotcrm.com or www.soffront.com.

Email Marketing Holiday Tip: Use Small Business CRM Software

Posted: December 27, 2011 in Uncategorized

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So it’s the end of the month and you need to create reports like tax documents, profit statements, complaint documents and an inventory of items sold. The oldmethod would be to pore through the hard copies of the records and create lists one by one.

Small Business CRM cando all this for you! With a small business CRM all you have to do is click the reporting tab and generate the reports that you need.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is acloud-based database entry and storage system that allows you to input information taken from customers and other business-related interests for storage and easy access.

Small Business CRM and Customer Care

Customer service is almost as important as the product or service being sold. Often times a high-quality product is not sufficient, particularly in this day and age when almost everyone has a great product or service to sell. Currently, creating cost means thetotality of service; which translates to pre-sale and post-sale services. A small business CRM can help accomplish this because it allows any member of your business team to access related information entered by other team members quicklyand easily.

For example, Negotiator X is assigned to the account of Mr. Y. Negotiator Xinputs information relative to his or her conversation and transaction with the Mr. Y on the CRM. If for whatever reason, Negotiator X is not present (i.e. sick, on leave or has resigned) to take the call of Mr. Y, then any negotiator can just access the small business CRM to verify information and make customer care faster, more secure and more accurate.

Small Business CRM and its Benefits

Have you ever heard of the motto “speed kills”? Well in business, speed creates more revenue and confidently kills your competition’s business. By using a CRM client communication program, your business becomes faster, more accurate and more secure. Just think about this, as an alternative of leafing from end to end tons of paperwork to determine the purchase date on an item; you can just type in a few security codes, the name of the customer and information pops out of the screen. This means you get to deal with more customers in a day and each customer knows that when they patronize your business, they get results fast.

Have you ever gotten a call from your sales representative or business partner telling you that your customer just walked in and wants to talk to you about a purchase he made a few months ago? He wants to make the same purchase, the problem is he forgot the serial number on the item purchased. If you have a small business CRM, then your partner can just open up the database and tell him exactly what he purchased and make the sale right then and there. This means that you make a sale and your customer is not only satisfied but impressed at your efficiency and effectiveness. This translates to repeated business and more profits.

To get your end-of-year reports together fast, sign up with Snapshot CRM for free at http://snapshotcrm.com/