Do you feel like you and your team struggle to hit your sales goals each month because you are spending so much time doing admin tasks? You can’t avoid this, of course – it is essential to the process but they do take up a lot of time that could be better spent elsewhere. If only there were a tool that could do it for you instead…
Well, you’re in luck because there are plenty of sales tools out there that will make your life a whole lot easier and free up so much of your time – helping with organisation, increasing productivity and ultimately enabling you to hit your sales targets.
Nimble CRM: Modern communication can be spread across various platforms – text, email, social and so on. This can make keeping track of conversations difficult and if these conversations are with a customer this can become a big problem. This tool, however, will help you keep track of all communication and consolidate all the information.
ZoomInfo: This search platform enables you to look for the one thing you really need – people. It crawls the web and organises all the information about individuals and contacts into a readable format, which is great for tracking down contacts and potential customers.
Lead Forensics: This will help you when it comes to getting leads – as the name would suggest. It can instantly identify your anonymous website visitors’ contact details, enable you to gain the competitive edge by not missing a sales opportunity and combine digital intelligence with sales ready leads to accelerate your online ROI.
Yammer: This is an under-used social tool that comes with Microsoft Dynamics, enabling you to communicate and collaborate with internal teams easily and openly, helping you to stay on top of everything. You can share and search for information across teams and organise around projects so you can do more.
Twitter Lists: We all know Twitter can be a great marketing tool but have you tried creating lists? This enables you to create a list of current customers and clients as well as potential ones, so you can keep an eye out for any opportunities or trend changes.
Smartsheet: This tool is used to assign tasks, track project progress, manage calendars, share documents and manage other work. It has a spreadsheet-like interface, which is easy to use and simple to understand.
Basecamp: This web-based project management tool makes keeping track of big complex deals easy.
Rapportive: This Gmail add-on provides contact information straight to your inbox. You can see your contact’s picture, job title, location and social media profiles – which you can click straight through to. When you are communicating with sales leads, this tool enables you to both visualize them and find out more information on them.
LinkedIn Advanced Search: You are probably aware that LinkedIn is one of the most effective social media tools available for sales reps. But by using the advanced search feature you can filter your search by using keywords, location or industry, for example. This enables you to find the people most relevant to you, rather than having to trawl through the more than 400 million users that the site has.
Boomerang: This Gmail tool enables you to draft and schedule an email for later. When you are on a sales call, you may write a follow-up email while it is fresh, but you don’t necessarily want to seem overbearing by sending it straight away. But you also don’t want to forget to send it. So, draft your email and then schedule it to go out at a more convenient time.
Drag: A Chrome extension app that transforms your Gmail into organized Task Lists. It’s a free Chrome extension that turns your inbox into a manageable workspace.
Sales Search: This Chrome extension is helpful when you are looking for leads because you can just highlight key phrases or names and instantly find out more information about it by right clicking. The easy-to-use search tool is ideal for sales reps looking to streamline their constant searching and sourcing.
Salesmate: Ultimately, Salesmate enriches customer interaction, boosts sales productivity and helps win more deals. But, how does it do this? Firstly, it organises and optimises the work of your sales team, defining the sales process using various stages suitable to sell your product. Start by assigning the stages to various sales interactions and then your team uses this to move the sales opportunity from one stage to another.
Longitude: This app from Salesforce is perfect for sales managers as it enables them to oversee all sales, get current projections, monitor their sales team and much more. It also comes with free sales plans that can be customised into your CRM platform.
Cyfe: This all-in-one business dashboard helps you easily monitor all your business data from one place, so you can run sales, marketing, social, CRM – to name a few – from one easy and simple place.
Slack: This is another one you might want to consider for team management and communication. Slack allows you to create channels only open to the members you want to invite and gives endless ways for you to communicate on different projects, assign tasks or even hold meetings. There are also several third party app collaborations that you can install such as Hootsuite.
Contactually: This works with both Google Accounts and Microsoft Office365 to help you target key relationships and strengthen them. It is aimed at salespeople so there is more of an emphasis on closing sales that isn’t always present with other CRMs. You can track these interactions and data to further improve your engagement strategies.
Charlie app: This app enables you to be better informed when you walk into a meeting without having to spend hours doing research. It simply connects to the social media profiles of your targets and offers you a readable but informative report, complete with pictures and personal details. Personal engagement is so important in sales – you want people to like you or they simply won’t buy from you. By doing some quick research with Charlie app, you can quickly build a rapport.
Docusign: This is the simplest way to get documents, proposals and contracts signed in a legally binding way. Simply create the document and send a link through email; the recipient follows the link and then reads and signs. This means that no matter where in the world your client or customer is, you can quickly and easily seal the deal with an eSignature.
FirstRain: Want to make more informed business decisions? Of course you do. FirstRain uses sale intelligence to offer actionable insights into sales processes so that organisations can make these informed decisions.
InsideView: This market intelligence platform identifies and gathers information on prospects and obtains insights from the information. It can build a list of quality prospects from the database of companies and contacts, curate news and social insights about them, and send you daily alerts about prospect activities.
Start using just a few of these tools – perhaps for the areas you struggle in the most – and you will quickly see a positive change in the way that you and your team work.
