7 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your CRM This Holiday Season

December is here! ❄️

Time flies, doesn’t it? Seems like 2018 just started, but here we are getting ready for the holiday season already. And if you own or work in a business that depends on the holiday rush, it pays to be prepared.

Planning your business strategies for this bustling season ripe with opportunities helps you optimize your time and maximize your profits. Taking steps to meet the demands of the season helps balance the needs of your business, family, and merry-making over the holidays.

So, how can you go about preparing for the impending mayhem of Oh, Sweet December?

Bring out the CRM.

CRM is the single source of truth for any business that handles customer data. Without a CRM, your data is siloed on different applications making even searching for information a difficult task.

CRM allows sales teams to focus on selling by minimizing data entry and automating manual processes. Keep your sales reps productive during this holiday season to meet those goals.

In this blog post, you’ll discover 7 ways you can make the most out of a top CRM software like Freshsales that will help ring the success bells this holiday season.

#1: Run your business from your smartphone ?

Living in a mobile-first world, the easiest and effective way to stay on top of your opportunities and activities is to be able to run it from anywhere. Freshsales mobile app unlocks the full potential of your sales tool to access customer information, send emails, make calls, know your assigned tasks and appointments, track sales metrics, and also enables infinite possibilities to sell on the go.

Unlike other CRM software which replicate their desktop CRM for mobile, Freshsales app is designed to enable sales reps to interact with minimal clicks. Equip your sales team with the flexibility to connect with customers and close deals this holiday season, from anywhere.

#2: Engage with website visitors ?

Speed is key. Shoppers are ready to spend, but to do that they expect immediate responses. With December being a peak month for online sales, you certainly don’t want to miss out on converting your website visitors. And if you run an online or ecommerce business, live chat is an indispensable sales tool.

An integrated CRM system like Freshsales comes with built-in integration to Freshchat. What this means for your business is you can converse with website visitors directly from the CRM, without having to switch between two applications. Wait, there’s more to it.

The ratio of your online visitors to your sales reps will never be ideal. Also, sales reps may not be available round the clock during the holidays. With Freshchat, you can make use of chatbots to start engaging with hundreds of customers without any delay. If a visitor wants to speak to an agent, you can program to assign the chat to a sales rep, who can then pick the conversation straight out of Freshsales.

#3: Avoid data entry with the help of Smartforms ?

Tap, tap, tap. 71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry. Creating and updating records, assigning leads, and enriching lead profiles are a few basic sales force automations that improve productivity and provide more time for your sales reps to sell.

Your online forms help you generate leads. Obviously, you don’t want to lose these opportunities, but if you don’t carefully capture your web leads and act on them, chances are you may. Freshsales fast-tracks the process of capturing leads from start to finish. Build a form or use your existing form and capture every submission in the CRM. Next, populate it with their social profile information through auto-profile enrichment, and auto-assign them to respective agents through territory management. Freshsales instantly notifies your reps through push notifications on their mobile, email and in-app. Sales reps can then move quickly and start pursuing their leads. Right on!

How about buyer context? Many sales conversations fail because sales reps don’t have insight into the buyer’s behavior. So, increasing your knowledge of the lead’s interest in your business is an effective selling technique. Smartforms in Freshsales captures your website visitors’ activities the moment they land on your website. Use this to get context and have meaningful conversations.

#4: Automate follow-ups and tasks, save time and stay ahead ⚙️

Doing the same task over and over again not only takes up your sales reps’ time but also makes them less efficient at their actual job of closing customers. Free up your sales reps’ time for critical tasks by setting up workflow automations in Freshsales for the mundane ones.

What are some essential workflow automations your business could benefit from this holiday season? Here are three.

  1. Welcome emails: Engage with business prospects by automating the welcome email whenever a lead is created in Freshsales. By not setting up this automation, you risk the chances of losing a prospect due to tardiness. This automation will enable prompt conversations to increase buyer engagement.
  2. Create a deal: Cart abandonment is a threat to business. It happens, but it’s not the end. You can use this as an opportunity to reach out to buyers and make the sale happen. Set up a workflow to create a deal and a task reminder when a shopper adds an item to their cart or their wishlist. Now if they complete the purchase, ka-ching! The deal is marked won. But, if they abandon the cart, the deal sits in your sales pipeline waiting for the magic to happen, i.e., you!
  3. Segment shoppers: You’d sure like to know who your shoppers are for the season so that you can send them relevant emails, add them to campaigns, and save them for the next holiday nurture programs. How do you sit and sort through all the leads that come in? Create a workflow to update all leads created between November and December with a custom field, say “Holiday VIP leads.” As time goes, you can filter them by the field value and perform your next set of actions.

#5: Set up your holiday email campaigns ?

Email marketing plays a key role in ramping up your holiday sales. With a slew of holidays lined up, customers need to be aware of your offers and promotions to increase your web traffic and ring up revenue growth. This means your emails need to stand out in a crowded inbox of holiday emails. The solution? Sales Campaigns.

Sales Campaigns in Freshsales is the hallmark to boost your email open rates. Choose between classic and smart campaigns to personalize and automate your outbound emails in the CRM.

Classic campaign

Quite similar to drip campaigns, you can set up a classic campaign to run at specific days. Say you offer different discount sales for every new week in December. You can schedule your promotional emails at an interval of every seven days to your email list. Classic campaigns also come in handy for setting up onboarding emails for your new subscribers. Keep your customers engaged with your business even while you’re holidaying.

Smart campaign

Your holiday sale may run for a couple of days. During this time you probably want to be relentless with your campaign. So you may think to send an email every day to everyone because that’s the best way to get them all to your website. Nope. For one, it’ll appear like you put no effort to personalize your email and two, your unsubscribe count will probably be bad news. A behavioral campaign strategy will make shoppers more receptive to your emails.  Smart campaigns help you do just that. Remember the cart abandonment scenario we discussed earlier? Use smart campaign in Freshsales to set up an email campaign that changes based on the customer’s behavior to your first email (whether opened, replied, clicked, etc.).

Get creative with your campaigns by designing your email templates, personalizing with names and relevant custom fields, and tracking the performance of your campaigns right out of Freshsales.

#6: Know your best shoppers ?

We all know how difficult it is to find items we need in stores. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Nearly impossible. And sometimes they’re right there in front of us, but we miss to see them.

Now imagine the life of your sales rep trying to find hot leads during a cold season. Luckily, Freshsales solves the burden of qualifying your leads with the help of AI-based Lead Scoring. If you don’t already know what Lead Scoring can do for your business, read this. In a time crunch like this, lead scoring helps to effectively prioritize leads and close the most promising deals by ranking leads as hot, warm and cold. So, no time is wasted, and sales reps can reach out to leads on priority.

We’ve already discussed five ways to configure your CRM for the holidays, now incorporate them into modifying your lead scores as well. Add points for leads who open your email campaigns, increase points for web and chat leads, include points for webpage visits, etc.

#7: Track your holiday sales ?

Lastly, it’s always good to know how your business is performing, holiday season or not. Reports allow you to analyze important KPIs and metrics by pulling together data to give you the big picture.

Freshsales CRM reporting tools help you monitor progress, gain insight, and identify bottlenecks to help you crush your sales goals. Get started by setting up your real-time reports dashboard. Sales managers can display a summary of new leads, deals, conversions, sales cycle, and sales team activity. Freshsales comes with out-of-the-box reports, and you can create your reports too.

Gain insight and visibility on how your team is performing, and make data-driven decisions using your CRM software. Reporting in Freshsales is handy because you can schedule reports to be sent directly to your inbox— daily, weekly or monthly. You can view these reports directly from your mobile, and keep tracking those metrics.

That’s a wrap! ?

Are you ready to prep for the holiday sales?    

Put these seven ways to work, and help your business achieve the maximum and your sales team be more productive during the holiday season.

Watch the hands-on video of our webinar, “Getting Ready for the Holidays with Freshsales”, on how to take advantage of the automations, productivity features, and email marketing capabilities.