What is cloud computing and CRM for client app?

     

       Cloud Computing is a remotely hosted platform. It has the infrastructure, platform, and application. The infrastructure includes the computer, storage facilities, and network. The network could be centrally located or spread out internationally. On that particular hardware, there is a layer called platform. It is all about the object storage, identity management, run time environment for programs, databases etc., For ex, the various kinds of hosting platforms where you have the basic storage, databases and run time engines etc., There are various applications running on the software side. The platforms and infrastructure are managed by centrally provided companies like AWS, Microsoft Azure etc., Actually, you are logging in to the application through servers by desktop, laptop, tablets and doing your work. Everything can be installed on the cloud and not installed locally. This is called cloud computing.



The sales process in CRM can be defined as,

                        Generate   ------------>  Qualify  ----------------> Close

Qualifying Leads: For a long time, B2B businesses (not just SaaS businesses) have been using the qualifying leads. By qualifying leads, a business makes the sales process more efficient. The sales team highlighting the leads that have the highest likelihood of converting to customers. It is determined by two factors
  1.  Firmographics and,
  2.  Interest
        Firmographics measure the business characteristics of a lead. How big is the company they're with? what is their job title? what industry they are in? Qualifying firmographics hones your sales efforts on your target customer profile. Interest measures the lead's interest in buying your product. The more they do, the more interested they are and more likely they will buy. There are 3 types of leads to focus on. Those are,
    1. Marketing Qualified Leads(MQL)
    2. Sales Qualified Leads(SQL)
    3. Product Qualified Leads(PQL)
     MQL factor in firmographics and interest. They have shown little interest(eg., signed up the opt-in)to marketing initiative and some kind of firmographic criteria. These kinds of leads deserve attention but are not quite ready for a personal touch from a salesperson. SQL has a deep interest and taken actions that justify attention from a salesperson. Typically, SQL has visited your website several times, downloads the whitepaper or requested a demo. In the modern world, the free trials and freemium has changed the deep interest of the qualifying lead. But, people aren't going to pay for a product until they've seen value on it. PQL shows true deep interest by,
   * Using the Product
   * Hitting First value
    Traditional qualification criteria include downloading an ebook or visiting pricing page activities that imply an interest in your offering. The user set-up a trial so they could give your product go. From there, some will love with the features and insightful methodology on their own terms. The ones that continue the setup process for your product end-up hitting the first value. This is how to distinguish themselves as truly interested. It means the lead has found value from using the product and more likely to keep wanting to use it. PQLs are more likely to be long term successful customers.

Business Setup for PQL: To build a proper PQL process, you need to define the criteria that will make someone product qualified and have set of guideline for turning these leads into paying customers. There are 6 steps for setting up PQLs. Those are,
1. Understanding Activation(Rate) and Measurement(Score) - the two key PQL measurement
2. Set up a system for keeping tabs on product data
3. Define Activation Criteria for Product
4. Create engagement scoring engine
5. Rank Activated trials by engagement
6. Make sure sales team access to the data

    There are few steps a new user needs to do to get set up and get the value of your product. They are typically product-specific. For ex, In the modern SaaS company with GSuite Plugin for email collaboration, the activation rate is the percentage of steps completed. If the account or user has done 2 out of 5 steps, they are 40% activated. Once the account is activated, you can dig deeper into their PQL status by looking at their engagement score. This is all about the events or actions a user can take in your product. There are several things one might do in the SaaS product like creating a report, check the payment systems, etc., Suppose you have a user who sets up a trial, he could give your product go. You can figure out 3 or 4 actions that allow a new account or user to experience "first value"? These actions are the activation checklist. Because you are tracking your product data and you'll be able to track activation progress of your accounts. The engagement scoring engine allows you to give each of your users and accounts an engagement score based on how much they use your product and what features they are using. Once you created the engagement scoring model for your product, you need to compare and rank them.
         When the customer asks how they should be designing their PQL process, the first question to ask yourself is,  How complex is your product? More simply, how hard is it for a new user to self-serve their way to first value? It means manual support of intervention from your team. Simple products have a free trial and freemium model as well. Intermediate models are complex than simple, but there is an opportunity for a fair percentage of users to self serve the way to value. The complex products require manual support to get to the promised land. It requires technical implementation, access to data or tools from other departments or deeper domain knowledge for a user to get value. Typically, the complex product has a free trial period, but they can only sell to customers who go through a sales demo with a more hands-on approach.

CRM Basics:  There are 4 basic features in CRM. Those are,
         1. Marketing,
         2. Sales Force,
         3. Customer Support and
         4. Service Automation for internal service
     In business, you need to generate leads, prospects and turn them into customers so that the business will grow in that way. The leads can be generated through online, offline, websites, cold calls, emails, social media etc., How does the business nurture the lead? When you have the lead, the marketing automation sends some promotional material and you can program your emails for the automated campaigns. First, The qualified lead is to be converted. It is the transition from the formal sales process. The qualified lead needs to assign, follow up, gauge interest, gauge intent and identify the opportunities. The converted lead considered to be a sales prospect. Sales are the strategy to exchange goods. At any given time, the multiple prospects will be in different stages. You need to define your sales processes like stages, progress, and the probability of success.  The sales funnel, deals and tracking the sales are managed in the sales force automation. The prospects and stages are defined as a sales pipeline for the business. In the contact center customer support, you will be able to assign various cases to representatives and assign cases to various people to give support and decide when the services are going to happen. In service automation, you can create projects, calendars and automate the features of messages, reminders, and alerts. So, Design something that works for your business. Here is the sales cycle that must be refined over time.
     One of the main utilities in CRM is Analysis. You will be able to create the reports from various sources like leads that are to be converted, budgets, sales, number of support service calls, calls answered, and cases solved. It is important to analyze all the data and construct business decisions out of the state. The Collaboration utility will help you to collaborate with the marketing, sales, HR and accounting Team. Also, you can send emails together or each other to work with the project. It is possible to collaborate in any office and any part of the world with remote login to that place and do the collaboration. Next, the Relational Intelligence is to understand and analyze each and every customer with the number of deals doing with them, how much we spend for our product, product preferences, material they are supplying etc., From the data, you will be able to understand the relation with the customer or vendor and able to predict the future from the past history. Lastly, the customers are coming from various channels like online, offline, telephone etc.,  All the input channels can be collected into a central database that can be categorized and assigned individually. This is called multiple channel integration. For ex. the cloud based SaaS agile CRM automate sales, marketing and service in one platform.
      The CRM works in a way that the leads are coming from verbal communications, telephone marketing, emails that are send to appropriate data classification. First, it is send to composition and insertion of organizational database that will classify into various categories. Once the data has put into organization database that data gets analyzed and disseminate into various departments like the support queries goes to support, leads goes to sales, campaign related queries goes to marketing and management related queries goes to management.


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