Your business's success hinges on the accuracy and integrity of your customer data. That's why you go to great lengths to ensure proper disaster prevention and recovery. But while many companies back up their CRM database every day, a surprising number still don't have a grasp on how to protect against database corruption.

Surfing the Technological Tsunami: How your practice can thrive in the digital economy

The Financial Advice industry faces a “technology tsunami” bound to bring sweeping change, according to Market Logics CEO George Hartman in a recent interview. Robo-advisors, video-conferencing, cloud storage and CRM are all reshaping the way advisors work. Those positioned to “ride the tide” will thrive in a digital economy, Hartman added, while those who don’t may find themselves sinking in race-to-the-bottom price competition.

The Holiday Season provides a well-deserved break and an opportunity to reflect and plan.

It is also the perfect time to be thankful and we would like to thank all our readers, customers and partners for this past year together.

We also take the opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, fantastically successful with your CRM!

Businesses continue to collate more and more data. However, what is key to a company’s strategy is the successful interpretation and application of customer data. To get the best results, managing and maintaining key information requires a structured and well-planned strategy. But before you can analyse your findings, centralising your dispersed data via a single platform and by definition, creating ‘one single version of the truth’ is the first step on the road to data management success.

In this blog, we highlight 5 reasons why centralising data will enhance your business.

Cloud computing is hailed as the preeminent advancement for 21st Century businesses. However, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information available on the cloud and making a reliable evaluation can be time consuming and complicated. To help, we have brought together a brief guide to explain the top 5 questions frequently posed by businesses considering cloud software.

You’ve done it. You’ve created your own online business and have products or services to sell. Your website is up and running and easy to navigate, full of pictures of your products accompanied by detailed, engaging product descriptions. You’ve also checked that your shopping cart works. Yet, that might not be enough.

In today’s digital world, it`s necessary to define your strategy for business growth. You have to reach your target audience quickly or your website, along with your products, becomes lost in the sea of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). So, how do you do that?

While many individuals argue they are rational, independent thinkers, the reality is we're all human and subject to biases, shaped by our experiences and emotions. And nowhere is this more evident than in investing. 

According to a recent report from BMO Wealth Management, "Generational Perspectives", people of the same generation demonstrate similar biases when it comes to handling their money. 

As an advisor, part of your job is helping clients put "head over heart" when it comes to building a diversified portfolio, protected against risk. By understanding their common mistakes, you can better coach clients on how to reach their long-term goals. 

Businesses today are spending thousands of dollars on getting new customers. While increasing your customer base certainly sounds great, many forget about retaining the existing customers. This strategy can cause a number of challenges because the probability of selling to an existing customer is actually much higher than to a new prospect.

There is an unwritten rule when it comes to hiring for start-ups: recruit only when your employees are 120% stretched. In other words, start-ups cannot afford to have employees who are not a hundred percent utilized. There is simply no room for ‘excess’. But while this makes business sense, you may also be bringing down the morale of your employees by overworking them. The solution is to optimize your business resources, so that you can extract greater productivity from your team before you start recruiting new people.

You rely on your partners to sell your products across different geographies. But managing these partners can be a huge challenge. You need to motivate a group outside your organization and collect their sales information for forecasts. This may mean spending unreasonable hours on the phone and emailing to keep partners aligned with your business.

As your sales network gets bigger, this work only gets harder, slowing the growth of your channel revenues. But there's a way to scale up with fewer growing pains -- by bringing your partner information together onto the same platform as your direct sales tools.

There are many advantages to utilizing a CRM system; for example, we know that the use of CRM software increases the productivity of salespeople by 15% and that sales personnel who use it are far more likely to hit their sales quota. Once you’ve selected a CRM that suits your business needs, there’s the small matter of implementing it. First things first, you need to pull together your CRM implementation team.

Information management consultants spill a lot of ink about the costs of badly organized data. Few are as incisive as Kevin Parker, winner of the 2016 AIIM leadership award and Senior VP at Tahzoo, an Inc-500-ranked digital CX compan y. He uses the acronym "ROT" to communicate the dangers of bad data management. ROT (i.e., Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial data) writes Parker, represents the junk cluttering up information systems -- leading to wasted time, unreliable reports and bad decisions, costing your business money. 

Lead generation is one of the primary focuses of any business, as it is the core element that leads to growth and drives revenues. Successful customer attraction relies heavily on the effectiveness of your product and, most importantly, how you sell it; therefore, leading businesses employ various growth strategies which revolve around customer acquisition.

Moreover, constant evolution of a business for sustainable success is only possible if entrepreneurs incorporate innovative marketing campaigns to increase their outreach and subsequently, their consumer base.

Traditional marketing yields results, however, the digitalization of every aspect of our lives requires innovative tactics that transform an average company into a customer magnet.

You want to see everything to do with each customer in order to deliver effective, timely service and win customer loyalty. But your business likely uses multiple apps – your email, your accounting software and more. Unfortunately, these apps don't always talk well to each other, creating data silos that hamstring your ability to work quickly.

We recognize our customers' needs for easy, cost-effective connectivity. And that's why we've revamped Maximizer CRM to integrate all your tools, effortlessly. The App Directory connects your diverse business-critical apps, bringing you closer to customers, prospects and business partners than ever before.

What’s so unique about The Library of Alexandria? It was one of the most influential centers of learning in the classical world, so influential that scholars travelled to it from all over the world. The great works contained there included mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and poetry. This all ended in 48 BC, when the library was destroyed - one of the earliest examples of the devastating effect of data loss, with over 500,000 irreplaceable scrolls reportedly lost.

The advent of digital data storage was supposed to increase the level of data security, but it’s not always the case. The volumes of data being generated today are hard to manage and although there are databases designed specifically with big data in mind, database security still remains a big concern today, even with advanced technologies to mitigate the risk.