What is CRM and Why You Do Need One

Whether you are starting a new business or trying to grow a small, existing one, the first thing you should do is organize everything about it. Have your customer database in order, know exactly what your sales team is doing and what partners you have beside you. All of these are not simple tasks when you begin gaining more and more customers.

And no, an Excel sheet is not the optimal solution for organizing. After that exact phrase comes the CRM. I believe you already know what a Customer Relationship Management solution is. And if you do not, all the information you need about it is this: a CRM is a software solution that can organize your entire activity occupying less space than an agenda and containing more information you can ever inclose in the Office Package.

Over time, CRM software got more and more complex and gained a lot of features that can help you do almost everything in an automated way. But statistics show that managers and salespeople use only 30 % of the features of a CRM. Taking that into consideration, my advice to you is not to suffocate your sales team with unnecessary features and stick to a basic, customizable CRM solution.

Try Zimplu for free and get a complex, but uncomplicated CRM solution.

Now that we cleared that out, let’s see what you can do with a CRM solution to improve your business.

Improve your customer relationship. The first thing your CRM can help you with is organize your sales team and your help desk team to serve better the needs of your clients. Know when to call whom and find their contact in seconds. Know what was your last conversation with that client even if you hadn’t talked to him directly.

Increase revenues. Believe it or not, a CRM solution will put a plus into your sales. Organizing your database, you will get to know your customers better and, afterwards, target your products strategically to the customers that need them most. Your efforts will be more effective and the profits will come easier.

Market your product better. Knowing who bought what, when and how long took him to purchase can help the marketing team to launch their campaigns to the exact segment of population you target. Without a CRM that is an almost impossible task, but with the help of one, the public are segmented properly and more effectively for your business’s growth.

Ease your in-house communication. With a CRM you have all the data about your customers, sales team and partners in one place organized to be found in seconds. Every sales person’s conversation can be written down and everyone will know about what to talk about when calling that customer. Of course, a manager can get reports about sales and sales team every time he wants for a better leading operation.

Save time. The most important asset none of the people in business market have is time. Automation of your internal and external processes save you and your team a lot of time to spend on other important aspects like soft skills, aspects that can never be automatized and that will improve your business’s image and bring the human touch.

So think about it. Is your business big enough to need a CRM solution or is that the reason it is not?

Teaching Kids Entepreneurship Risk With a Doll

How many of you had any idea about starting your own business till at least high school? And how many of you followed that dream? Not many, for sure.
The fact that children thought so rarely about being entrepreneurs was also the drive of American Girl company to create a doll that can teach children the basic notions of starting their own business and transform their dreams into reality.

The story of Grace Thomas starts with a passion for baking with and for friends. After a trip to Paris she is inspired to transform her passion into a successful business. Her path follows the usual financial and bureaucratic procedures for registering the new “La Patisserie” simplified for the little ones.
The idea came naturally as a result of the high interest in stories about girls doing business. Cited by the Wall Street Journal, Julia Prohaska, senior director of global brand marketing for American Girl, also declared that “Marrying the idea of girls’ high interest in baking and cooking with entrepreneurship was just a natural fit.”

Besides the beauty of learning through games, the American Girls doll approached a real problem of the new generations: the low tolerance for risk. “We are creating generations of people who are terrified to make a mistake,” says Ted Ganchiff for Wall Street Journal, founder of the Science & Entrepreneurship Exchange, a Chicago-based nonprofit that runs classes about engineering and entrepreneurship for children between 9 and 15.

The so-called “Millennials” dramatically decreased the percentage of young people starting a business. “Only 3.6% of businesses today are started by people younger than 30. In 1989, it was 10.6%.” shows the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances cited by WSJ.
In addition, the gap between women and men entrepreneurs is still wide with around 200 000 business a month in the last five years started by women, compared to 325 000 started by men, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit in Kansas City.

Putting aside the great educational intentions, Grace Thomas is a $120 doll, the 2015 American Girl character, following the company’s tradition of releasing a special doll that can draw children's attention from traditional toys every year since 2005. Compared with the Barbie entrepreneur, priced $12.99, Grace Thomas is no bargain for a tight budget real entrepreneur, as the accessories, the business bakery and the make-believe ingredients, sell for $500.

Photo source.

Start Small, Don't Lose Data, Grow Big

You just started your business and your biggest concern right now is to find customers to sell your products or services to. There are probably thousands of prospects to call, emails to send and lots of things to keep track of. As a startup business it's easy to handle all the information, but can you keep it all whole and safe for when you grow big?

Now it’s the perfect time to prepare for later challenges. Until you become a significant company on the market, you’ll gather stories about every prospect you get in contact with, and you'll learn what their needs and opinions are. You must secure all this information, or you'll lose it in a couple of years. And then, what if you'll want to continue the conversation with prospects you already met?

There is no better time to implement a CRM than the startup stage

Often, startups decline to use a CRM system thinking that such technology is more than what they need for their business size. A few clients are easy to handle, but problems appear when the portfolio develops quickly. There are several on-demand CRM solutions available with affordable subscription plans for any startup company. So there's no reason not to take advantage of the benefits offered by CRM these days.

It’s difficult to manage all information, like contact details and discussions, if they are kept in a notebook or a spreadsheet. The business might not be suffering now, but as time passes, unorganized data and activities will affect you one way or another.

How implementing a CRM can help your startup in the long run?

To achieve performance, employees must be well organized and focused on their daily must-do activities. Furthermore, you should be aware of your company’s progress, which you can measure only by analysing data. A CRM system is exactly the solution that can help your company make the right adjustments in order to improve business.

“Always be Marketing” is a quote you want to stick to for as long as you do business. Having a CRM software can also help you communicate better with your prospects. Some of them won’t buy from you right now, but maybe they will some other time. It’s your job to stay in touch and build a strong image of your products or services.

3 Best Options for Businesses in Online Advertisement

This decade was a real revolution for the Marketing that we used to know, people don't watch TV as much as they used to and they don't read Newspapers like before, we all watch movies, listen to music and read news on the Internet. All these interactions with the Internet make the Internet Marketing grow stronger every day and the way we promote our Business is considerably changing, commercials are now moving on Youtube and all newspapers have an online version.

The biggest question these days is "What is the best way to promote my business online ?" and here are some of the most known options.

Google Adwords
Google Adwords is the most known and pretty much the main tool businesses use for advertising. The main advantage of using Google Adwords is having an extremely detailed advertising campaign with lots of options to choose from, especially starting from the last year.

What I also like about Google Adwords is that it spends as much money as you want to, of course everybody has this option now, but spending more money on advertising than you wanted to is not something that will make you happy. You can choose the location, languages and even age, but unfortunately, the people's age that click on your link is not that accurate, at least not as accurate as it would be if you used Facebook.

The bad thing about Google Adwords is that you actually need to watch your Adwords Campaign, otherwise you risk to pay too much or your ads won't show to the right people in the place where you wanted to, it is pretty tricky. Key words are also a problem, some key words are way too expensive or too close to other words that you don't want to be associated with and you get big Bounce Rates because of this.

Facebook Ads
We just started to look over Facebook as a tool for our Business but I don't know if people want to hear about business solutions (if you are B2B) while reading their friends stories. I think this is an excellent B2C tool but people say that it can also be used as a B2B since you can target, for example, business owners, or you can target people that work in a specific company.

Facebook Ads are very close to Gmail Ads, but when was the last time you clicked an ad when you were reading your emails from your Gmail Account ? Me myself, I can't remember.

Another problem is people's age that use Facebook. I am pretty sure that there are people in their 80s that use Facebook, I even met some, but when you think about Facebook and people that use it, the first thing that comes to your mind are probably people in their 20s, especially in Europe. You might say that you can only target people with a specific age, but if you want to target people in their 50s, you won't find too many on Facebook.

The good thing is that, like Adwords, you only pay for the clicks, so if someone is not interested, it's ok, but if someone is interested you can pay less than you would pay for a Google Adwords Click.

AdRoll
If you want your marketing to work, you have to deliver your message through as many channels as possible. What is the logic in this ? "Studies" say that a person is a lot easier persuaded and, more important, he gains more trust when he sees ads from a product in different places, at different times and in different formats (internet, flyer, outdoor etc.). That's how Marketing Campaigns started and that's the main principle when launching one.

This is actually the main idea of AdRoll, bringing you back what you saw before and what made you a little curious. If yesterday you saw a banner with a nice pair of headphones and you clicked on the banner but for some reason you started to do something else the very next moment, Adroll comes back to you with the same banner the very next day, on a different website that you are visiting. Not only that it reminds you about the headphones you just saw, it actually makes you think about them intensively.

I believe that this is the perfect tool for converting website visits into sales and it is cheaper than Adwords so this can lead to a better ROI.

The main disadvantage is that it might not work that well for a B2B, businesses that sell shoes or headphones will probably get better results with AdRoll than you will.

How can Social Media Influence your Business ?

We can consider Social Media to be a form of communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages and other content (like videos).


Forms of Social Media that are well known until now:

• Forums;
• Social Networks ( like Facebook or LinkedIn );
• Blogging;
• Microblogging ( like Twitter );
• Video Sharing ( like YouTube or Vimeo );
• Social Bookmarketing ( like Digg );
• Broader Content ( best examples are Slideshare and Scribd);
• Social Gaming - this concept has just been recognized even if it exists for a long time, even before some of the ones listed above.

Most of the Businesses perceive Social Media as a good thing, as an opportunity, but there are not many Executives that think about the negative effect Social Media can have on their Business. Before Social Media existed, if you had a problem with a company or a business, the information would have stayed in the circle of your friends with a very small chance to move forward to other people. With  Social Media, your information will circulate faster and more persons will know about it.

Social Media is what makes Word of Mouth more powerful, a lot of businesses acknowledged this effect and as a result today we are using concepts like Social Media Marketing, we didn't even imagined it would exist years ago. Nowadays, one in seven companies have a formal process for Social Networking in their business and one in five companies have established policies about the use of Social Media in their Company.

Virtual Organization

Virtual Organization is a group of manufacturing companies located in different places, working together in a distributed environment to achieve a particular objective, substantially remodeling its involved activities , focused on the generation and use of knowledge which takes place between intense communication processes corresponding to certain standards and using substantial new information and communication technologies.

It is not the same thing that most of us thought it is in the first place, isn't it ? When most of the people talk about a Virtual Organization they actually think of a Virtual Business or maybe something else.

The term Virtual Organization, released in the 90's, began to be used with a relatively high frequencey only in recent years. Connotations and meanings of this concept differs appreciably from one specialist to another.

A Virtual Organization is established and it is based on several precepts:

• begins with identifying by a company or a group of companies, usually small, an opportunity of innovational nature, which involves a considerable amount of knowledge and other kind of resources that can only be provided by several firms;
• complementarity of the firms involved, which allows obtaining a synergistic effect on the generation of new knowledge;
• speed in decisions and actions of the companies involved is a Sine Qua Non for its capability to identify and capitalize the opportunity;
• acquisition of economic mass that facilitates obtaining profitability, even when there is a big competition;
• basis for carrying out activities on a fluid organization, which is able to adapt to specific participants along with the effective focus to achieve the forecasted objective;
• optimizing the use of knowledge and other resources involved in the project, given the fact that participating firms share the infrastructure they own, the knowledge, risks and business profits;
• completion of activities that result in new competitive products, on the one hand because of the intense processes of generation and use of knowledge and, on the other hand, because of various processes to reduce costs due to the technical and special skills possessed, plus a rational labor division between partner companies.

Considering what we presented, we can think of a Virtual Organization as a type of evoluted Cluster which possesses specific characteristics determined by its focus on production activities, the high share of innovative processes and the use of advanced informational and communication technologies.

Virtual Organizations will probably proliferate as their foundations are experiencing a rapid growth, causing them to obtain competitive performances on the domestic and international markets

Business Environment and Entrepreneurship

Systemic approach to Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial phenomenon reflects itself by taking in consideration of the interferece with the Business Environment involved. Starting points in this approach is generally knowing and understanding the concept of Business Environment. When we talk about Business Environment we designate all the company's exogenous elements of economical nature, managerial, technical, demografics etc. that marks a significant progress and results of the activities.

According to some experts, contemporary Business Environment has 3 main features:

1. Turbulence, which means numerous, fast and unexpected changes, mostly of low magnitude, that generate many flows and economic, social, technological impacts. The main factors are generated by economic changes, social changes and mutations in the relation between market and customers.
2. Fast evolution of  Business opportunities that represent at least two major components. The appearance of numerous economic opportunities, appreciably more than the prior periods, which are combined simultaneous with their succession at a reduced time interval compared to the dynamics of earlier decades.
3. Amplification of uncertainty, which is a result of the many changes that can not be predicted and quantified with sufficient precision. The fact that in the economical activity are involved more local variables, national and international, of very different nature, in an increased proportion of new situations is reflected in multiplying risk and uncertainty, increasing difficulty in collecting, directing and controlling economic actions.
   
   
   

Entrepreneurial enviorenment has a partially different content from the corporate Environment, as we will reveal below. In fact, in recent years there were detected and analyzed two types of entrepreneurial/business Environments: real and perceived.

         Real Business Environment

Real Business Environment designate all the contextual elements that influence the Entrepreneur's efforts in all phases of its activity, inducing change in the decisions, actions, behaviors and performances. Its main characteristics are:

• incoporates both exogenous and endogenous elements of the organization but only those that singificantly affect the starting and running of the entrepreneurial processes;
• varies from one Entrepreneur to another, depending on the type of the entrepreneurial initiative, geographic area, location and involved resources;
• differs for the same entrepreneur over time, depending on the stage of company's life cycle and its economic power; As the company grows the Business Environment field widens and its size increases.

There are a lot of exogenous elements that can influence your Business activity but the elements that usually have a more direct and substantial influence are: taxation, acces to credit, law, inlfation, national economic strategy and population attitude towards Entrepreneurs.

Depending on the parameteres of the mentioned elements and how they combine, it can result for Entrepreneurs, in a particular country, three real Business Environments:

a) Unfavorable Business Environment that is characterized by the fact that entrepreneurial actions are prohibited or restricted. Therefore, there are no small to medium private firms or their number is very low in the economy.


b) Permissive Business Environment provides the ability to initiate and carry out entrepreneurial activities, but the actual existing conditions are heterogeneous, some of them having a temporary or inhibitory influence on private initiatives. Economic and administrative initiatives face quite a few difficulties that Entrepreneurs have to overcome.


c) Favorable Business Environment, which by all or most of his behaviors, stimulate entrepreneurial activity, establishment and development of private enterprises. It is the type of Environment which, from political and cultural elements and ending with the economic and legal elements, aims to create as many as possible strong private companies.

          Perceived Business Environment

The perceived Business Environment designs those elements of real Business Environment which the Entrepreneur appreciates and feels as having a significant influence on its actions and performance. It is specific to individual nature of the Entrepreneur, because each Entrepreneur characteristics are reflected in its ability to perceive the context and define the Environment that he consideres to have a greater impact on his entrepreneurial activities.

The perceived Business Environment has a dual dimension: cognitive and affective.

          a) Cognitive dimension refers to contextual information which the Entrepreneur identified and reviewed in the entrepreneurial processes that he initiates and carries. Cognitive dimension is even more evident if the Entrepreneur has high level of training, a good sense of observation and it invests more time in the entrepreneurial aciton.

          b) Affective dimension reffers to the background information of the Entrepreneur that he considers to be really important with which he gets attached or even afraid, they are significant and deserve a special attention. Also, it is an indirect reflection of the entrepreneurial spirit and native talent that the Entrepreneur possess.

Simplify your Business

Today is a regular day at the office. You sit down, you start drinking your coffee and you thought that today you will finally get to work on some new projects, think the strategy for your products and plan the Company's activity for the rest of the year. You were wrong. You start to get phone calls, you need to solve some problems that you were just been told about and you have some new meetings today that you didn't expect to come. The next thing you know is that outside is dark and your watch says 7 P.M.

Sometimes you have to agree that doing things by yourself makes sense but it should not be a habit. As some people might say, Management is all about delegating activities.

Always make sure to Manage well the Communications in your organization and make sure the information gets to the final destination fast and in good condition, this is vital to the management performance. If you fail to do so, you will end up doing someone else's job all day and you won't even know it.

Finances

If you remember old movies or TV Series like Dallas and the scenes in the office, the first thing that probably comes to your mind is a big pile of paper. Think about how to lose as much paper as you can, keep only what you need and go Paperless.

Consolidate your bank accounts, make your financial records as simple as possible, arrange as many automatic transfers you can, this will also help you stick with the monthly plans.

Financial Crisis

You probably start to feel a headache when you hear these two words. You hear the Financial system is going down, market is going down, nobody can sell as much as they used to sell, politics, terror, everything goes wrong. It's the perfect time to make Money. Think outside the box, the crisis is a big problem for most of us but some companies pray for the crisis to stay as long as possible.

We have a problem ? There are no problems, only opportunities, so be the first one to take advantage of these changes.

Computerization

It all started not so long ago when the computer era began, new ideas came along for making work easier and the best example is software solutions. It was a good thing to start from, most of the companies still use a software for their activities and they will probably use them for a long time but what really breaks through right now is SAAS (Software as a Service).

Companies used to buy and maintain an IT infrastructure which proved to be very expensive. SAAS brings a lot of benefits, the software is now shared on the internet and companies don't need to install anything, you can even use the service wherever you are as long as you have an internet connection.

E-Commerce as an Internet Business

Components of an Internet Business

    Every era of business yields new strategies and new ways of doing business. With the advent of radio and television came the first mass-market advertising. Now, the Internet has so radically changed business that the rules for corporate strategy that held for the last 50 years (since the dawn of television) have begun to crumble, says Business Town

   There are some literal elements of commerce that are necessary for any transactions to take place, which are as true for regular bricks-and-mortar commerce as they are for e-commerce. First, whether you are doing business online or in the real world, you have to have a product to sell or a service to offer. Then, you must have a place from which to do business. In the traditional world of commerce this can be a physical store or, in a more figurative sense, a catalog or phone number. In the world of e-commerce the place from which you do business is your Web site.

   In both regular commerce and e-commerce you need to find a way to attract customers to your place of business. This is embodied by your marketing strategy, and everything from advertising to word of mouth fits into this category.

   In order to do business, you also need a way to take orders and process payment. In a retail store there are no orders. Customers simply find the products they want, get in a line at the register, and pay the cashier. In e-commerce, orders have to be placed and items shipped.  Orders are usually handled through interactive, online forms. Money is another issue easily handled in traditional commerce. Customers in a retail store pay by check, cash, or credit or debit cards. Online customers cannot pay by cash or check, only through electronic means. Also, there are issues of security that surround online payment that do not come into play in the traditional bricks-and-mortar world. E-commerce transactions have to take place through secure electronic connections and special merchant accounts for accepting payment.

Once payment is collected, delivery of the product must take place. Fulfillment in traditional stores is as easy as putting the item in a bag and handing it over to the customer. Fulfillment in the world of e-commerce is more difficult, requiring shipping and transportation similar to catalog and mail order businesses. For businesses that integrate e-commerce into their existing business plan, fulfillment is as easy as hiring an extra employee to ship online orders. In Internet startup businesses, fulfillment must often be outsourced to a facility that can handle order processing and shipping in a more timely and professional manner.

What is E-Commerce ?

   Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, ecommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks says the definition at Wikipedia. It also includes the entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction's life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices and telephones as well.

E-commerce can be divided into:

• E-tailing or "virtual storefronts" on Web sites with online catalogs, sometimes gathered into a "virtual mall"
• The gathering and use of demographic data through Web contacts
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the business-to-business exchange of data
• E-mail and fax and their use as media for reaching prospects and established customers (for example, with newsletters)
• Business-to-business buying and selling
• The security of business transactions

The Necessities of E-Commerce

   Businesses that choose to engage in e-commerce have to remember the primary principals of commerce:

• Providing a product or service to be purchased.
• Customers need to know how to find the product or service, so marketing is necessary.
• The exchange of money for the product or service.
• A delivery mechanism.
• Customer service and communication.

These fundamental aspects of commerce are then modified to suit the e-commerce environment.

Successful E-Commerce Operations

   Companies like eMarketer have made it their business to study the trends of e-commerce and generate information on the topic.

Their studies have found the following to be successful e-commerce opportunities:

• Apparel
• Books
• Computer hardware, software and accessories
• Electronics
• Entertainment
• Financial services
• Flowers
• Gifts
• Information
• Music
• Travel services
• Toys

This is not to say that your venture won't experience success by the standard e-commerce definition; it's just that consumers have grown accustomed to purchasing these products and services online.

  To build your business through E-Commerce develop a good understanding of the Internet, how Web sites work and the components that make an effective e-commerce Web site. This doesn't mean you have to design the site yourself, but to have an underlying comprehension of terms is always helpful.

There are a variety of books available to help you learn this, including:

• For the novice: Internet for Dummies by John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young and Carol Baroudi. The Dummy series breaks things down into simple terms and tip references.
• For the advanced: Designing Easy-to-Use Websites by Vanessa Donnelly. A handy guide for those with more technical knowledge.

   Next, ramp up your Business plan to include an effective e-commerce position. Working in the world of e-commerce can upset the apple cart of traditional business models. That is often a positive thing, but if your current business plan doesn't include e-commerce, or your product or service needs to be amended to enter into e-commerce, you'll have to create a new plan.

   Finally, cultivate an awareness of how marketing for an e-commerce enterprise is different from the traditional retail store front or small business arena. A helpful resource for this might be the book Streetwise Lost-Cost Web Site Promotionby Barry Feig.

   An e-commerce definition need not be complicated, but it does ebb and flow with changes in the electronic age. While the foundation is rooted in standard commerce principles, e-commerce will more than likely continue to revise elements that apply only to its practice is what Love to Know Business says.

How Can Technology Change Your Business?

How can Technology change your Business ?

Technology changed the way Business is done over the last decades, but how can technology change your Business in 2012 ?

Information technology is no longer in its infancy, but represents a greater transition phase, for example  nowadays we cannot imagine accounting without an accounting software or either way it would be pretty hard to work without it.

A lot of entrepreneurs recognize Technology as a way to eliminate the expenses with unskilled labor and substitute it with machines that will do the work cheaper, faster and at a higher quality.

Information Technology is different and it’s recognized for improving labor productivity, “makes things easier” as they would say. Information has an enormous importance, the speed with which it circulates through the system, the accuracy of the information and its redundancy cannot be ignored. As a result to all these, a lot of companies, even the small ones, implemented Computer Software to handle the information in the system.

The year of 2012 comes with something completely different, Cloud Computing is something we started to hear a few years ago and it’s becoming more and more visible and powerful. All of the technologies that were applied in the last century needed more or they were not complete so new technologies came up. Cloud Computing is what will make companies considerably reduce their costs and will make work easier since you can solve your problems anywhere you are.