Marketplace Businesses must Empower their teams to manage end-to-end-Seller Journeys + Enhance Buyer Experience

Why do Marketplaces need a CRM?

1. Marketplace businesses manage customer information, activity, and interactions.
2. They need to collaborate with team members, streamline workflows and monitor marketing tactics in real-time.
3. Marketplace businesses must maintain buyer and seller relationships. This complexity means that not just any CRM will do for a Marketplace business.
4. You need a CRM that can handle both relationship types because without sellers, you have no business and likewise without buyers, you have no business.
5. Marketplace businesses success depends on the quality of their vendors or sellers (depending on your terminology).
6. So, identifying the right sellers is important and then giving them a great onboarding experience is the start of your relationship with your seller.
7. Once the seller is onboarded you going to want to track their performance and engage with your vendors according to your business structure and performance metrics.

A Marketplace CRM needs to enable you to manage different kinds of relationships like;

1. Vendor Relationships

• The marketplace controls every aspect of the vendor relationship, starting from onboarding, communication, contract documentation etc. With so many moving parts, marketplace businesses need a flexible, scalable CRM system with purpose-built features for marketplace businesses?to ensure nothing falls between the cracks.

1. Vendor – Customer Relationships

• To meet buyer needs, vendors must collect and analyse accurate data on their customers. Vendors must be able to segment their customers (by demographics or purchase activity for example) to set promotions or create marketing campaigns. Vendors need information on their customer behaviour and their eCommerce activity to make the most of their participation in the marketplace.

1. Marketplace – Customer Relationships

• To offer customers the best possible experience, marketplaces must track everything from page views to purchases and abandoned carts. Depending on the marketplace, the marketplace operator can offer customer service, promotions, discounts, or offer value-added services. With a CRM system, marketplaces have the data they need to address transactional, delivery, or any other customer dispute.
• ?Marketplaces depend on strong relationships, and today’s software is the glue that binds these relationships. Let’s compare the differences between a simple eCommerce CRM and a complex B2B marketplace CRM.

?Before you even get into the details of features, what I can tell you is that we work with some of the top marketplace businesses in the world today and when we ask them why they keep choosing LeadSquared it comes down to these 3 reasons:?

1. The agility of LeadSquared enables our Marketplace clients to make tweaks and changes instantly without any involvement of the IT department. They love the robustness that LeadSquared offers them.
2. LeadSquared has reduced their operational costs by at least a third.
3. Very importantly as their businesses scale and they need changes implemented, the LeadSquared team offer phenomenal support and professional services at a low cost which means there is never a barrier to growth.

When you get into evaluating key features of a Marketplace CRM you should bear in mind that a Marketplace CRM is complex because of the various relationships than need to be managed and at the same time, it needs to enable alignment between the various divisions in your business, so you get to have a single view of every relationship.

Obviously, I want you to explore LeadSquared but very importantly, I would like you to avoid the mistake of just buying something off the shelf is not going to serve you because we have seen how much money our clients have lost through trial and error, and you don’t have to do the same.?

We know this industry.

From the most common to the most unique, here’s a look at the key features of a CRM marketplace.

?Contact management

Marketplaces generate large volumes of customer data, so centralizing contacts is a must. This feature is a crucial part of any CRM, as it enables you to present customers with the marketing material, promotions, and products relevant to them.

Lead management

When buyers visit the marketplace, you need to make the right connections to convert them into customers. To ensure that leads don’t fall between the cracks, look for a CRM that delivers real-time customer activity data and maximizes conversions with customer engagement tools.

Opportunity management

As sales cycles increase, teams need to manage opportunities effectively. As opportunities move down the pipeline, the CRM can help prioritize them, as well as offer data on past opportunities to keep campaigns on track. Think about an opportunity like this and you will understand the complexity. ?

In the image below this is what I mean by opportunities. No Marketplace wants a consumer to order once and never come back again.

Opportunity Management enables you to record every order type and this will enable you to hyper-personalize your engagement with your buyers.?

Obviously, you can see I am a fan of solar lights and dog food but do these marketplaces know why? The answer is no because they have not implemented a hyper-personalized communication channel with me yet. ?

So, in closing before you spend a gazillion dollars on another solution, just spend an hour with us at LeadSquared. It will most likely be one of the best hours you spend exploring a Marketplace CRM solution.

?https://www.leadsquared.com/marketplace-crm/

Sales performance management

While sales teams nurture leads and grow customer relationships, sales managers need to understand how everyone performs. With the CRM providing a clear overall picture, they can drill down to individual team members and see exactly when and where they need additional help.

We have done works of wonder in this space and set this on fire with our latest feature called ACE.

Reporting and analytics

Aside from nurturing sales leads and managing opportunities, you must also monitor outcomes. Sales analytics and reports are tools to aid in better qualifying leads, engaging with customers, and improving marketing strategies.

Sales forecasting

With reporting data in one place, it’s easy to compare current performance with past results. A CRM with sales forecasting features helps identify areas of focus for future marketing endeavors.

Automation and workflows

Automation is critical to keep staff productive, reduce errors, and offer personalized customer experiences. Markets and buying preferences change over time, and flexible CRM automation features adapt to changing needs of users.

Campaign management

Once campaigns are launched, they must be monitored and managed. Look for a CRM that features campaign dashboards with analytics features that can manage multiple campaigns from a single place.

Mobile-friendly support

Vendors and buyers are attached to the phone or tablet, so mobile functionality is a must-have for any CRM system. Look for a system with an app or responsive design that works on any mobile device.

Roles and permissions

If your marketplace operates in a B2B eCommerce environment, the CRM should support the business structures unique to business customers, including multiple brands and sub-brands, corporate hierarchies, and user permissions.

Approvals and contracts

Business customers usually consist of many decision-makers and approval structures. Managing these processes by hand can be prohibitive and invites opportunities for errors. Look for CRM that can support multiple approvals, contracts, and RFQ workflows.

?Document management

As your marketplace business grows, you’ll need to accurately store, track, and process your business documents. From emails to contracts to sales documents, the CRM should provide the right file and version when needed.

Vendor onboarding workflows

For marketplaces and third-party eCommerce sites, vendor experiences are important. A poor vendor experience will lead to vendors leaving for competing marketplaces. Look for a CRM that can handle your routine tasks through automation.

Don’t take my word for it. You can read up here about How Meesho used LeadSquared to Increase its Supplier Onboarding Productivity to 70%.

Vendor approval workflows

A marketplace must quickly and effectively identify new vendors and offer them a smooth verification experience. Look for a CRM that can manage vendor contracts, proposals, and unique seller specifications or requirements.

Vendor reports and dashboards

Marketplace CRM systems should track vendor performance and customer activity including clicks, purchases, shopping, and checkout behaviour. You may want to provide each vendor with their own sales performance and customer activity dashboards, too.

Integration, flexibility, and customization

No matter your eCommerce or marketplace environment, you depend on multiple business systems to operate. The CRM is a central part of your software stack, boasting a wealth of customer information – which is critical if you want to eliminate time-consuming data entry and make better data-driven decisions.

Integration facilitates critical functions such as real-time customer updates and order history synchronization enabling you to offer customers a personalized experience. Look for a system that integrates with tools you already use but also consider their architecture, APIs, and development resources.

CRM integration

With integration, you essentially combine your customer data and eCommerce activity. You enjoy the freedom of choosing a system that meets your needs while enabling data transfer with your marketplace management platform.

ERP systems generally serve as the backbone of complex marketplaces. Since an ERP spans all departments (production, inventory, sales, accounting) and gathers virtually all data necessary for the organization to function, it remains the marketplace operator’s single source of truth.?

https://apidocs.leadsquared.com/

Why LeadSquared?

We aim to build truly connected, empowered, and self-reliant sales organizations, with the power of automation. Our sales tech stack –?sales execution, digital onboarding, and marketing + process + field force automation, currently empowers 250,000 users worldwide.

and because our Mission is -

To offer the best sales execution platform for high-velocity sales teams.

We are purely focused on reducing the total time a sales rep spends on any operational task that doesn’t involve directly interacting with customers. We do this with hyper-automation, customer journey designer, and regimentation.?

Zero distractions and 100% productivity for sales reps – that’s our aim.?

The Idea

It’s 2013. 15 months into working with dozens of clients for our agency MarketXpander Services, we realized something.....

The market is full of horizontal CRMs built solely for tracking sales reps; empowering them and driving sales productivity is a mere afterthought.

Businesses are forced to choose horizontal, inflexible sales solutions and add a layer of customization to make them work, leading to high TCO and high implementation timelines.

We wanted to change this.

That’s how the idea for LeadSquared is born.

The Difference

LeadSquared has been built using a vertical-centric, use-case first approach, instead of keeping features at the centre of the software.

The Result:?A configurable, scalable, industry-first solution?(that adapts to the customers’ processes, not the other way round)?with sales empowerment at its core.

?Series B, 800+ Employees, and More.

We continue to reimagine high-velocity sales execution as we raised $32 million in our Series B led by Gaja Capital. Existing investors Stakeboat Capital and Jyoti Bansal also participated in the round. Our mission to empower salespeople and digitize remote work continues to guide our product roadmap. Carter, our very own AI sales assistant was launched, as was Converse – our seamless conversation platform.

https://www.leadsquared.com/marketplace-crm/

LeadSquared is fast becoming the first choice for marketplace businesses around the world.

and we are here for you.

reach out - [email protected] or call on +27713009435

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