While some of us can grow to enjoy life's chaotic chops and changes, for sales teams -
predictable revenue stability is where it's at.
While predictability may be the end goal,
landing new deals is not exactly a walk in the park.
In fact, some may say it's never been harder.
Thankfully, the New Age is making lives easier for sales reps to boost their
productivity, make better decisions and basically get stuff done.
Want to find out how?
Listen in as we look at the seven stages of a typical sales funnel and pit it up
with an online sales tool that will act as a guaranteed life changer for prospecting
at each stage of the sales pipeline without breaking the bank.
Howdy
guys, it's Liv here from Neighbourhood, where we help brands find, sell and keep
their people. Before you can make a sale, you need to find someone to sell to.
While lead generation can be somewhat of a nuanced business,
there are a growing number of lead
generation tools on the market that can help take the effort out of the equation
on your end and crank up the results from their end.
The answer? Look no further than sales navigator by LinkedIn.
It cost us eighty dollars per month
and you get access to Linkedin's database of seven hundred million active users.
Best of all, you can filter their data to find your perfect match. Proper lead
research is time consuming.
It requires multiple tools and extensive labor investment.
You can cut your generation costs by over 80 percent by working with a list building
company that specialises in B2B lead research and outreach.
Once you've found your people, it's time to contact them.
The right way to do this is with a specialised outreach tool.
But there's no point sending your message by pigeon.
You need an outreach solution that will automatically follow up with prospects
and also recognise when a prospect has responded.
The best email outreach tool for small businesses is persist IQ.
It's designed so you can easily craft
highly customisable emails and go way beyond standard fields like first name.
Instead, you can improve the whole customer experience by customising entire
sentences so your prospects know that you've done your research. Persist
iQ has a robust free tier and the lowest
paid tier is hands down the best value in the industry.
Comparatively expensive outreach tools typically do have increased functionality,
but only a minority of users require an expansive toolset.
Now that you've got a steady stream of new
sales leads coming in, it's time for your teams to get organised.
And for that you need a customer relationship management tool or CRM.
A CRM is a place to house all your contacts and tells you at a glance where
they are in your sales cycle. More than just a list of people,
a good CRM makes it easy to spot leads or
deals that require your attention. As well as this,
it enables sales teams to optimise their sales efforts and overall process.
One of the most popular CRM for small businesses is pipe drive.
It's set up as a highly intuitive kanban board.
As prospects progress towards closing,
you can move their status card across multiple stages from left to right.
The highly visual reporting helps sales managers know exactly what the big picture
looks like at any point in time, giving them the insight they need to make phone
calls, send a bunch of messages, set up a meeting or note down tasks.
It's important to note, though,
that nothing replaces a full featured CRM like HubSpot.
But if you only have a small number of potential customers,
then you can temporarily use a kanban style tool to help keep track of sales.
Now that your CRM has you tunnel visioning only the cream of the crop,
your door should be getting beaten down with a request for proposals.
But what's the best way to create and manage your professional proposal?
And how do you get your offer signed off easily?
In meeting these goals, consider using proposal software like Proposify.
Proposify makes it easy to create visually
appealing proposals with lots of customisable templates.
And when your client is ready to proceed,
they can just sign the document in a legally binding way,
all while saving paper and making the process easier for everyone involved.
Proposify does have a free trial,
so test it rigorously to see if it integrates well with your process.
You don't want to find out that the payment systems don't connect
in your country after you've sent a real proposal. For sales reps,
waiting for a document to get signed is a part of their job they'd rather speed up.
But why does it cause so much anxiety?
Because a lot of the time it's entirely out of their control.
They can wait days, weeks or even months for a client to find
time to print out an agreement to sign it and post it back for processing.
The fortunately, those days are behind you
with the advent of sales technology. With a handy signing tool,
your customers can click on the link in an email, review a document and sign.
It only takes a minute or two,
and electronic signatures are legally binding
in most jurisdictions.
There are lots of signing tools
on the market with limited differentiation for regular uses.
But if you're looking for a simple signature tool, try out Digisigner.
You can upload template documents and send prospects a link for signing.
The process is dead easy for all parties
and everyone can get a copy of the document as needed.
Digisigner also recognises the importance of brand consistency.
You can add your company logo to both
the web interface and email sent on your behalf.
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The last sales tool you'll need to throw in the mix is an all important data
dashboard that will seamlessly integrate your marketing and sales data and show you
how your revenue generation efforts are performing for your company.
Data Box is the OG for business analytics.
No need to log in to a bunch of different
tools just to see how you're stacking up. With data box,
you can do all of your performance data in one place so you can spend less time
doing the numbers and more time acting on insights.
So while the sales profession is arguably harder and more competitive than it's ever
been, sales technology has been keeping up the pace.
The seven sales tools we've discussed are
equally as innovative and affordable for almost any organisation, small or global.
When used to their maximum capacity,
they're guaranteed to put all important and well missed time
in your day, from the beginning of your search for prospects right through to close. if you found this video helpful, then feel free to share it with someone
that you know that needs a hand with the sales process.
You can also subscribe to our blog where
you'll find a bunch more tools, tips and templates,
Help you Find Sell & Keep your people, just like Neighbourhood does.
But for now, that's it for me. Happy selling.