We are asked many times at Tubular, “What made you build a sales funnel CRM software in an industry that seems busy.” The answer is frustration. Frustration that CRM and sales software appears to be a control mechanism inserted into organizations without any particular division seeming to understand, or really care for, the organization objectives from adopting a CRM. From the thousands of conversations we’ve had with our clients since developing Tubular, we have learnt that many people shared our frustration. The most common question being…

Why are the existing CRM softwares so complex and difficult to use, and why does CRM implementation detract from the job many companies have to sell?

Those who follow the latest trends in sales will know that the traits which contribute to a successful sale tend to be resoundingly personal traits that can be attributed to the learned or natural skills of the sales person. Included are these traits:

• Confidence

• Tone

• Trustworthiness

• Authenticity

All of these personal characteristics are not features within a CRM. Yet stumble upon a CRM landing page and you are given the false impression that implementing a CRM will convert sales just by merely opening up an account.

Wrong!

A Sales CRM systems provide a platform to engage, prospect, nurture, and gather intelligence which a salesperson can combine with positive personal traits to build great rapport and convert leads, prospects and clients into sales.

So let’s take five points that sales CRM’s are incredibly useful for:

• Capturing leads
• Engaging
• Prospecting
• Nurturing
• Gathering intelligence

These are all activities which you would prefer to be doing faster. It’s a no brainer, but if you were to ask a company if they would rather spend one minute accurately prospecting leads as opposed to 20 minutes prospecting a lead, you would choose the faster option, as long as accuracy is not lost in speed. Speed and accuracy can be a deadly combination.

With that being said and as a huge inspiration for building Tubular.io, we continually asked ourselves,

Why is the CRM industry a throwback to 90’s-looking database industry, with little navigation providing an enjoyable User Interface (UI) or User Experience (UE)?

We set ourselves the following benchmarks.

1. Can we build a CRM where any analytical statistic relevant to a sales pipeline can be obtained in under 14 seconds, and in no more than six clicks?
2. Can we build a CRM with a minimalist interface that provides enough detail to engage, prospect, nurture and gather intelligence on a lead without looking like a Beethoven manuscript?

The answer is yes – but not overnight, and not without pouring hours and hours into updates and feature releases to ensure we never get away from our ethos. Updating your CRM should never be more than a few clicks away. After creating our benchmarks, we put ourselves to the test.

To test our benchmarks, we set up a list of tasks the people find a nuisance to perform in their CRM, the ones commonly forgone and that form organizational information silos. Can we create and complete these tasks in a matter of seconds? Can we make CRM software relevant and fun?

The following set of tests measured average number of clicks and average time it takes to complete each of the following tasks.

The Results

1. Creating a lead  

There are a number of triggers you can set up through Zapier to automate lead creation.

Adding one manually:

• Average No.of Click : 4
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:14

2. Add a task

In Tubular, tasks can be added to Leads, contacts or deals.

• Average No.of Click : 3
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:12

3. Add interaction/note

Within Tubular Deals and Leads portal – you can email, store notes and add tasks.

• Average No.of Click  : 3
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:07

4. Set reminder to follow up

Reminders can be added to deals, contacts or leads.

• Average No.of Click  : 4
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:14

5. Change lead status to “qualified”

In Tubular, leads are qualified and in your sales pipeline when they have a deal added to them.

• Average No.of Click  : 6
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:18

6. Attach a document

In Tubular, PDF’s and or Google Docs can be added in the deal flow.

• Average No.of Click  : 4
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:14

7. Generate a report

In Tubular, multifunction reports can be drawn up in the click of a button. The options available are endless to assist you in obtaining the financial and performance breakdown of your activity within your sales funnel.

• Average No.of Click : 3
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:12

A unique interface!

In building Tubular, we realized that we had to keep a minimalist interface that provides enough detail to engage, prospect, nurture and gather intelligence on a lead without looking busy, or becoming too cumbersome for multiple divisions within a company.

How do you structure deal stages, deal tags, deal values, forecasts, forecasted weighted average, payment terms, emails, to-do’s calls and documents associated with a deal in one place – with no information overload?

The answer is yes, with the correct use of modals, drop-downs and infinite scrolling, you are able to remain concise yet provide detailed deal information to stay informed and on top of your sales pipeline.

Tubular is a UK based Sales Pipeline CRM that puts User Interface and User Experience at the heart of every feature. It has numerous awards for its UI/UX design, including being ranked in Capterra’s top 10 most user friendly CRM software.

The post Why UI/UX matters when choosing your CRM appeared first on Tubular.

Stats like these back up the predictions:

• 9 million active weekly users
• 2 million paid accounts
• 60,000 teams
• An impressive annual recurring revenue of $200 million (USD)

Great! Good news for Slack. But how can your business best utilize the app?

Firstly, stop seeing Slack as a messaging app. It’s a platform for increasing business productivity, which, when used correctly, will change the way you manage your business strategies and operations.

Here are some tips to create a killer Slack strategy.

1. Keep it transparent

The days of sales professionals guarding their leads as though their lives depended on it are dying fast—software now manages leads and promotes transparency. This prevents the classic case of Sales Agent A leaving company X, and taking their address book of contacts and leads with them (in all likelihood to your competitor).

Firms are waking up to the fact that sales funnels are collaborative. In the agency world, designers, copywriters, and account executives work together to submit prototypes, wireframes, and mockups to the client before contracts are even signed.

We recommend syncing the Tubular and Slack webhook, so your entire lead generation platform is online, and your team receives notifications whenever a lead comes in via a website, cold call, exhibition, or whatever lead generation strategy you have in place.

2. Strategize on a Monday

Keep your team focussed and incentivized by pulling in daily, weekly, or monthly sales funnel statistics.

This provides a great instant snapshot to see where your sales funnel has any potential bottlenecks. Recognizing the bottlenecks makes it easier to create and implement a strategy to improve them.

Organize group meet-ups on Mondays, so you have the rest of the week to implement plans and efforts to nurture clients through the stages of your funnel.

If you need any tips on strategies to prevent a bottleneck, book a call here.

3. Unify your tasks, to-do lists, sales pipeline reports, and internal communications on one platform.

In a day and age when marketeers own your email inbox, it’s worth using Tubular and Slack as a platform to keep internal communication, tasks, to-do lists, and sales funnel reports together.  This one act should streamline the huge volume of company email “chit-chat” that clogs up your inbox.

Imagine: no more inbox overload.

Book a free 20-minute session to discuss how best to use Slack and Tubular.

The post Leverage Slack and Tubular to Jumpstart Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on Tubular.

It is tempting to view travel time as a break from the office; as an opportunity to sit back in your airline seat and page through a magazine, read a novel or simply catch a snooze. The problem with this approach is that the business day does not stop simply because you are travelling – when you land there is sure to be a host of unanswered emails and messages demanding your attention.

Our team is highly-collaborative, we are constantly communicating with one another – whether we are in the same room, the same country or divided by an ocean – the flow of communication remains constant.

The Right Tool at the Right Time. After some trial and error, we have landed on the right mix of tools to keep our team synched and to support a continuous flow of communication and productivity.

Slack

Slack is a robust team communication app; we use it almost exclusively for all internal communication. After implementing Slack, our email traffic was reduced by nearly 70%. Not only does this make our inboxes much less foreboding, it also gives us more time to focus on the emails we do receive, which are now primarily from customers and potential customers instead of the guy across the room.

Buffer

Staying on top of social media posts is a challenge even when I’m not travelling but mix in several hours of zero connectivity and maintaining our social media presence was nearly impossible – until I found Buffer. I load all of our social media content for the day while I am waiting to board my flight; then Buffer posts all of it according to the schedule I established. Tubular’s social media activity is seamless, even when I am offline.

Intercom

I’ve talked before about Intercom before in an earlier Blog. We use Intercom for both internal and external communication and it is fantastic. Anyone with the application installed can communicate with a member of our team in real-time. If a team member needs to be offline, there is a simple delegation option that ensures messages do not go unanswered. Our team has even turned reacting to support requests into a contest because of Intercom – each one vying to be the first to address an open ticket.

Basecamp

The Tubular team is a huge fan of Basecamp and its founder Jason Fried; we have used it for at least five years to manage all of our project planning. I read Getting Real – The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application, written by Basecamp’s founder, and it truly shaped the way I developed our companies. I followed it like the Bible and it became my inspiration for joining the SaaS world.

As a tool, Basecamp is amazing. It ensures that everyone is aware of what everyone else is working on all the time. It completely eliminates the need for status meetings and maintains team momentum even when one of us is offline while travelling.

Planning to Work – A Mindset of Productivity

I never stop working simply because I am offline or away from the office – I continuing working on planes and while in cars. Treating a travel day as a business day has some unexpected benefits; rarely do I have several hours of uninterrupted time to focus on a project and I take full-advantage of those opportunities while I am traveling.

Inevitably, emergencies will arise when you are least equipped to address them so developing a plan for those that are connected to address those issues is essential. There is no worse feeling than reconnecting after a long flight only to find that you have 18 messages from a customer that is experiencing a tech support issue.

Never Play Catch-Up

With the amount of travelling I do, it would be nearly impossible to do anything other than play catch-up if I did not maintain a consistent level of work on travel days. With all of the cloud-based applications available, there is no need to wait until you are “in the office” to work – the office is anywhere you have a connection.

Our own experiences traveling for business inspired the development of Tubular – we built our application to be just as supportive outside the office as it is inside the office. The native application ensures that users always have access to customer data enabling them to quickly make decisions and update the team on status changes.

The emphasis is on usability because we learned from our own needs – the more barriers to communication that exists; the less the team will communicate.

In a globally focused business environment, travel is inevitable. However, working with the constant stress of snowballing tasks does not have to be – use the right mix of tools and strategies to maximize travel days and never get stuck on the catch-up wheel.

Sign up for a FREE Tubular Account today.

All photos are taken from my Instagram Account 

The post Tools & Strategies for Avoiding the Travel-Induced Catch-Up Game appeared first on Tubular.

We learned that while these large companies had established sales teams and budgets, they did not necessarily have the tools to support their sales teams. Fortunately, we were prepared for this. Simplifyd was built on an API making it easy to mold the product to meet market demands. We were able to quickly create Tubular as a stand-alone solution, on its own framework, without impacting any portion of Simplifyd.

This forethought proved to be a godsend but there have certainly been other challenges along the way; some unique to my current geographic location (UK) and some that are universal.

Fail fast or never fail?

In the UK, failure is still a bad word and the British certainly prefer to never fail and avoid the risk of failure all-together. This risk averse mentality conflicts with the entrepreneurial spirit which is difficult for fledgling entrepreneurs to face. It breeds doubts that are not present in American culture, which embraces failure as an opportunity to learn.

During my entrepreneurial journey, I fought through this by looking outside the UK for motivation and inspiration. I learned to embrace a “fail fast, learn fast” mentality and overlook the doubts that often arose during conversations with friends and family about my business decisions.

Finding the first client

Perhaps just as challenging as persevering in a culture that opposes risk, is bringing in those first clients that give you the experience and reputation needed to grow your client or user base. This is especially true for companies developing B2B products. Most businesses are weary of doing business with new companies, preferring instead to work with those that are established providers in the industry. This makes entrance into the market extremely difficult.

At Tubular, we had to give away a lot to build trust within the marketplace and demonstrate our capabilities as a provider. Doing this required a pivot in our own mindset; shifting focus from monetary value to the value of the experience for the client. As a result, we were able to build our product, gain brand recognition and grow our paying client base.

When to say “No”

Unfortunately, many startups underestimate how long it will take to establish credibility and build trust within the industry. As a result, and out of desperation, they begin taking on any project – at any cost. After having a few experiences like this in my own journey, I have learned that sometimes “no” is the most profitable answer you can give.

Entrepreneurs naturally get excited about new opportunities. We are always looking for a problem to solve and tend to view every chance to flex these skills in a positive light.

Be on the look-out for red flags that signify a project or client may be best left alone:

1. Sounds too good to be true. A super infusion of cash from a potential client in exchange for just three hours of support a month…no thanks. Three soon turns to 30!
2. Too excited, too quickly. I have found that if I am too excited, too quickly, it is probably not going to work out. Settle, take a step back, and make sure you have looked at the opportunity from multiple angles.

3. Saying “yes” too early can drain all of your resources. Before agreeing to a particularly strenuous project, consider how it will impact your current projects and the future growth of the company.

4. Saying “yes” will take you away from developing your core product. Before abandoning ship, consider why you were on that ship in the first place – you probably have a host of reasons for developing your core product; don’t give-up on it too easily.

5. It is hard to convince your team to say “yes”. If you find yourself trying to overtly convince your lead developer or co-founder just to gain their agreement, it is time to take a step back.

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it requires lots of hard work and the ability to shake off a lot of naysayers. When challenges arise, use them as opportunities to learn, and resist getting distracted by staying focused on what is working and trusting both your team and your own intuition.

The post How Saying “No” Can Grow Your Business appeared first on Tubular.

In a time when most communication occurs in keystrokes, the premium on meaningful and thoughtful communication is high. Many businesses fall into a trap of following touch points instead of really diving-in to understand their client’s input to foster exceptional client communication.

What is Exceptional Client Communication?

In short, it is communication that reaches people on a personal level and builds relationships.
It starts by researching your audience to understand who they are, what they care about and what they need. The best places to start are social media, LinkedIn and company pages (found using a simple Google search).

Exceptional client communication also requires choosing the right method at the right time. At Tubular, we use Intercom as our real-time chat solution. It is ideal for quickly handling small issues, addressing minor concerns and when a client simply needs to touch base with us.

When relaying product information and providing tutorials, email is best. The recipient can file the message and then refer back to later or easily forward the information to a colleague; making it ideal for actionable and value-packed content.

Often over-looked, yet extremely valuable is the client interview. Client interviews demonstrate that you care about your client’s wants and needs with the added benefits of giving your development team clear direction on what to build and what to fix.

Client interviews should be conducted over the phone or via a web-conference. The goal is to understand the client, their business and how your product supports their goals for the future. During the interview learn:

·       What do they love about your product?

·       How are they are using the product now and what they would like to use it for in the future?

·       Who or what is influencing their decisions?

·       What short-term and long-term goals are they working towards?

Applying the Results to Your Business

The results of client interviews, feedback, tech support requests and all of the other communications you have with your clients will naturally influence future product decisions. However, you can take it one step further and use this data to build user-communities centered around your product. A robust and active community acts as a product feature by providing benefits to your clients and generating data on their experiences with the solution.

A robust and active community acts as a product feature

Understanding your audience’s needs allows you to supply them with the right communication at the right time. If you learn that a potential client is focused on features, send out a link to a free trial. When the trial period is over, touch base to understand which features they like and which they did not like -also find out if there were any features they expected to see but did not.

This provides the perfect opening to discuss features that are currently being developed. Demonstrating that the company is always growing, the product is always improving and that the users have real input on what is built. Most users are happy to share their feedback when they believe that it will have an impact on the product.

Building a culture of exceptional client communication provides long-lasting benefits to your product and your company. When you understand what your client needs, wants and will buy, product development becomes easy. When your client feels genuinely cared for and relies upon your relationship, business development becomes easy, too.

CREATE A FREE TUBULAR ACCOUNT TODAY

The post Secrets of Exceptional Client Communication appeared first on Tubular.