Ask any sales person what the biggest pain in their daily routine is. Over 85% of sales people that we talked to, overwhelmingly said that it is completing their Daily Activity Reports (DARs). Here are some staggering stats:

• Most sales people spend 8-10 hours every week filling up DARs
• That’s 4 days every month spent just filing reports
• Over a year, that works out to 48 days or 2 whole months spent filing reports.

Can you think of anything more unproductive?

So, what’s the solution, you ask. The simplest is to implement a cloud CRM such as Impel CRM. Your sales team completes their DAR in minutes and your automated reports let you track activities accurately.

Benefits of cloud DAR and report generation

Impel DAR Screen

• Your data is accurate and up-to-date
• Time required to fill out each activity DAR is negligible
• With Impel, you have a choice of devices to add data – Android phones, laptops, cyber cafe computers…
• Use our GPS based tracking on Android phones to track sales person’s actual locations and therefore expenses
• Activity Reports defined by you automatically delivered to your Inbox at the frequency that you want
• Every sales person has 2 additional months recovered for productive sales tasks!

Extra sales for you and additional time for the sales person’s family

The big buzz today is about “moving to the cloud”. But there are plenty of businesses out there who are afraid to put their customer data on the cloud. Their big concern is whether their data would be secure on the cloud and the perceived higher probability of data theft.

Now this is a legitimate fear for a lot of senior managers and business owners. Their customer data is their life blood and letting it fall into the wrong hands could have a lot of bad consequences.

But there are some serious reasons why managing customer data inside your own four walls is actually less “secure” than having it on the cloud.

Cloud CRM is actually safer than your office network.

Yes, I hear that disbelieving snort. But here’s why this is actually true.

• Most data theft is committed by internal employees. And for your internal employees, it’s much simpler to copy the entire database from an internal server to which they have physical access. With data in the cloud, your internal employees never have direct access to the database. There’s a lot more effort and time involved in getting data from a cloud service provider. And most cloud service providers have logs of data access. So you could actually see if someone has tried to access your data directly.
• It’s much tougher for a competitor to access a reputable cloud CRM provider’s network. For the cloud service provider, the security of your data is of utmost importance. You might have a firewall in place. But any decent hacker would be able to get past that. Most CRM providers have multiple layers of security in place and have state-of-the-art intrusion detection systems in place.
• Cloud CRM providers have highly redundant systems in place. You are much more likely to have your internal networks, servers, databases fail than would a cloud provider. Since the cloud CRM provider is hosting data for multiple customers, they would have multiple layers of redundancy built as also fault tolerance for hardware, software and Internet failures.
• Economies of scale. The costs of redundancy and security is probably beyond most small to medium businesses even if they had the expertise to implement these. But for the reputable cloud CRM provider, their entire business depends on the ability to provide reliable,secure access to customers. With multiple customers paying for the service, the cloud CRM provider has not only the desire but the motivation to ensure that your data is safe.

Cloud equivalent to your bank vault.

Keeping your data in-premise in your office as opposed to with a reputed cloud CRM provider is like keeping your money under your mattress rather than in a bank. Just as for the bank, the safety and security of your money is paramount, so is the safety and security of your customer data for the cloud CRM provider.

In addition, most reputable cloud CRM providers only allow a specific user to see data in a territory that they have access to, never to the complete data. Also, you can decide which of your users can export data.

Data privacy and security continue to be topics of discussion. Do your due diligence and pick the right cloud service provider for your CRM. Ensure that you maintain your data with the right access to the right people. Benefit from your cloud CRM provider’s experience and maturity in handling data security and access issues.

So you’ve signed up with Just Dial and started getting leads. But are you making the best use of those leads? Can you keep track of all of the leads? Do you know for sure that someone from your company is actually following up on those leads?

Impel’s add-on service to Just Dial helps you do just that. We make sure that all your Just Dial leads, get safely into Impel for you and are not lost

Just Dial lead in Impel

on someone’s cell phone or email box. We ensure that you always have that information available, so that you can tap that prospect later, even if you don’t make a sale right away.

With Impel, you get some fantastic benefits:

• Your Just Dial leads get into Impel automatically in seconds. No re-keying necessary
• Your prospect gets an automated, immediate SMS acknowledgment for a great WOW factor for your company
• You can set up automated rules to forward leads to specific sales people in your company based on product / region / any other rules you want
• Your sales person gets automated SMS / Email alerts whenever a lead is assigned to them
• Since you have the prospect’s data in Impel, you can use SMS / Email campaigns to target them for special offers later.

So not only do you get to your prospect faster and more professionally than your competitors, Impel gives you the ability to re-use that prospect’s data for more offers at any time.

When you first think of an email you associate it with accomplishing a few other  tasks like replying to that email, forwarding it to a third person , archiving it, trashing it, labeling it and so on. With Impel’s integrated mail with CRM, you can do a whole lot more.

Get access to a whole lot of CRM functions directly from your mail box. All the emails received into your Impel mailbox automatically get tagged as activities enabling you to automatically associate those mails with a Company or Person or opportunity that you are working on. And these activities are your best bet at keeping record of all the lead/contact interactions you’ve ever had.  Emails received from a person who does not already exist in your Impel database, can be added in as a new contact/lead depending on your qualification for that individual. Then you have all the information that can be picked up from that email which will be associated with the new contact/ lead that you will be adding. Also, Impel’s integrated email provides you the capability of linking a particular email to the various entities in Impel including contacts, accounts or opportunities. And finally a query/problem related email can be added as a ticket in Impel which can then be assigned to the appropriate member of your support team.

With such a wide array of functionalities capable of being achieved, Impel’s integrated email is the most robust email integration functionality to stay on top of all your customer information in one centralized system.  This amazing feature is just one part of the comprehensive yet easy to use system, Impel CRM. To discover the unlimited possibilities that Impel can provide for your business, sign up for the free trial and find out for yourself.