Choose the right tools to improve your sales strategy

Companies globally are moving at an exponential pace for being the front runners in the market. Everyone is endeavoring to ignite the fire of innovation and embracing the best tools for surpassing the competitors. Conventional methods, strategies, and techniques are gradually fading away in this highly advanced and developing business world.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to grow and survive, then you’ll have to move quickly in a new direction and do whatever it takes to succeed. Your top-line growth is dependent on your sales. The more you sell, the greater will be the revenue. Unfortunately, this isn’t an easy task, but that doesn’t mean it’s beyond the bounds of possibility.

“The difference between the impossible and possible lies in a man’s determination.”

Change the way you function for improving operational effectiveness. Technologies are advancing to free you from the modern-day drudgery. So, why not make the most of it.

Haven’t you been in situations where you missed a follow-up or lost a vital client’s information or worst, couldn’t achieve your sales target due to various unproductive tasks?

As per a research, administrative tasks are responsible for 14.8% of the effectiveness drain.

Such scenarios arise when you don’t have a proper system in place. An unorganized structure will lead to unwanted results.

Several tools are designed to help you in managing your sales, project, customer communication, and overall business. You just need to find the best tools and use them smartly to leverage maximum benefits.

Advantages of using the best sales tools

Best sales tools don’t only make your work simpler but also help you up-level your game to beat your sales competition.

Let’s see what are the benefits of using the best sales tools:

1. Ease your work and save your time

Sometimes sales reps unknowingly make their work difficult by trusting their mind rather than technology for keeping the client’s information.

Experts believe that you can store approximately seven items in short-term memory for about 20 to 30 seconds. Don’t take the risk of forgetting the crucial details of your clients instead keep it secured and organized with the right tools.

Sales tools add more hours to your day and make your life easier.

With the best sales tools, you can –

• Automate most of the tasks that you do manually
• Track activities that are important for boosting sales 
• Find everything you want in a neat structure without any hassle
• Focus your efforts in the right direction

2. Build better connections with clients

The real-time response has great value in a highly competitive environment. 30-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Most of the times some customers feel neglected due to failure or delay in response to their queries. Due to which they ultimately lose interest and approach the competitors.

Yes, it is challenging to give each client equal attention when you have so much to do. This is the reason you need to take advantage of the tech advancement available.

With smart sales tools, you can-

• Stay informed and receive every update about your clients/ prospects
• Receive alerts about upcoming or due tasks and appointments
• Get notified about clients’ email and respond to their queries in real-time
• Track clients’ conversation to stay on track and maintain a good relationship with them
• Check interest level of the prospect and accordingly plan your follow-ups

3. Available anywhere

Opportunity can knock your door at any moment, so you need to be prepared. For instance, you might get a call for pricing or product information when you are traveling for a trade fair or a client meeting. You surely can’t keep the potential sales prospect waiting just because you don’t have access to your data.

Eliminate the following situations using sales tools:

• Most of the sales tools have mobile apps so you can access your data from anywhere (Organizations using mobile apps achieve a 74% increase in customer satisfaction due to faster response to requests and inquiries)
• Update information at any hour of the day
• Turn your dead time into productive hours
• Take quick decisions with easily accessible sales information

4. More transparency and easy collaboration

Nowadays, most of the sales tools are cloud-based, so everything is stored in one centralized location. Everyone in the company can follow each detail about the buyer’s journey.

The modern sales tools enhance productive collaboration and create synergy between teams. All the employees of the organization can easily share information and brainstorm new ideas for increasing profits. There is less dispute and better coordination as everyone is on the same page.  

With the sales tool:

• Collaborate seamlessly with teammates in different cities or countries
• View the communication of any specific teammate to handle the sales deals in his/her absence
• Track how the best performers are interacting with the clients to learn effective tactics for selling better

Make the right decision

Now that you know how beneficial sales tools are, you need to focus on implementing the right ones. The market has a wide spectrum of sales tools with different functionalities; you need to pick the ones most required. For this, analyze your requirements. Map out your process to find out what functionalities will you require for gaining sales efficiency and providing utmost satisfaction to your customers.

Based on your analysis, create a list of sales tools you will require to excel in sales. Be as detailed as you can be about the features you want in the tools. Conduct market research to understand what’s trending and which tools your competitors are using. These sales tools can help you grow and thrive so be very careful while selecting them.

What should the best sales tools consist of?

Sales tools are crucial for generating more revenue. However, this source of revenue even needs investment. For getting maximum ROI, you need to ensure that the sales tools have these three elements:

• Integration flexibility

Whichever tools you choose make sure they work well with other business tools as well. For instance, your contact management tools should work well with your email management software. Look for flexibility of integration in tool to increase functionalities, avoid any hindrances in your work and make your process smoother.

• Customization

Your issues, concerns, and goals might be different from other businesses operating in the same field. So, choose the tools that allow you to customize the processes as per your specific requirements. The best tools will allow you to customize your reports and other processes for making your work easier.

• Scalability

Growth is a dream that every entrepreneur sees. Even you would want to grow and pave your way to the top, don’t you? So, go for a solution that grows with you. This year’s decision shouldn’t be your next year’s regret, therefore take this step wisely and pick a scalable tool that innovates and improves constantly.   

What types of tools does a sales-driven organization need?

There are multiple sales tools, but out of them, there are certain tools that are requisite for improving performance and increasing sales.

Here are four types of sales tools that are necessary for your business:

1. Sales reporting

If you want to progress in sales, you’ll have to constantly refine your process and fill the gaps in your sales performance. Reporting tools can help you with this. Using the right reporting tool, you can create insightful reports for-

• Analyzing your sales data
• Measuring vital metrics
• Taking informed decision
• Discovering buying patterns
• Tracking poor performers
• Spotting opportunities as well as problem areas in real-time

A complete reporting tool can speed up the production of reports by more than 40%. These reports are a vital source of information so use it wisely to enhance productivity and drum up your sales.

2. Email tracking

You spent time drafting an impactful email, reread it, got it rechecked by your colleague and then sent it to a high-potential sales prospect. Does your job end there? After spending your precious hours on that email, wouldn’t you want to know what are the prospects doing with your emails?

Most of the emails never return with a response, and some of the sales reps don’t even follow-up due to which many opportunities are lost. I hope you aren’t one of those sales reps. Using email tracking tools, find out if the prospects are clicking and reading your emails.

Sometimes prospects don’t respond because either they forget or are not sure about the solution. For instance, a prospect is continuously opening your email but still isn’t responding; there might be chances that he/she is interested but are not sure about something. So, with the email tracking tool, you can track the open rate and call the prospects at the right time to understand what’s bothering them.

3. Sales pipeline management

You wouldn’t want a lucrative deal to slip through the cracks. Would you? Therefore, you need a sales pipeline management CRM to visually track and manage your sales progress. It renders detailed insights about every stage of the sales pipeline for identifying risks and taking timely actions.

With sales pipeline management tool-

• Know if you have enough deals to fulfill your sales target
• Set winning and rotting period to get a better idea of the deal’s progress
• Eliminate low-quality deals in real-time to keep your sales pipeline clean and healthy
• Know when it’s time to follow-up a prospect
• Optimize sales results by giving attention and warming deals in real-time

4.  Sales automation

You might be having a long to-do list. Why don’t you automate some of the tasks? With the right automation tool, you can set workflow and automate most of the redundant activities.

Using this tool you can automate your task delegation activity, automatically send follow-up emails and update information. It saves your precious time so that you can concentrate on tasks that drive sales.

5.  Sales calling

Being in the sales domain, you require a virtual phone system to manage your sales communication effectively. With a calling tool, you can get the local or toll-free number of your desired country and effortlessly manage your inbound and outbound calls. It helps in building a local presence and winning the trust of local customers.

Calling tool provides a wide spectrum of functionalities like automate call logging, call tracking and forwarding for making your sales calls better.

Everything you need in all in one powerful CRM – Salesmate

Technology is developed to help businesses, but most of the times it becomes difficult to manage too many tools together. 59% of all surveyed sales reps think that they have too many sales tools to get acquainted with. Sales reps don’t have enough time for acclimating to new systems. So, it’s better to use one tool that has all the features.

Salesmate CRM is one such feature-rich system tailored to sales professional needs for helping them win more sales. It is an all-in-solution that can play the roles of many tools.

With Salesmate CRM you can-

• Manage your sales pipeline efficiently
• Create detailed sales reports
• Track emails easily
• Integrate with your favorite app
• Customize specific fields
• Communicate with your prospect efficiently

Salesmate does much more besides providing the functionalities of above necessary tools for sales.

Sales pipeline management

• Create multiple sales pipelines as per your needs
• Get real-time visibility into your sales pipeline
• With the pipeline view, spot deal that needs immediate attention
• Drag and drop deals from one stage to another

Email tracking and management

• Track your emails to know whether your prospects are reading your emails
• Get vital email insights to know which subject lines and CTAs are getting the highest clicks
• Set reminder while drafting an email and get notified on time
• Keep all the sent and received emails neatly organized in the timeline
• With email threads, keep track of the context and manage your email communication

Sales reporting

• With visualized pipeline report track the progress of each deal
• Track the performance of your team
• With sales forecast insights predict revenue
• With sales leaderboard see who is winning and who is losing maximum deals

Contact management

• Keep your contacts neatly organized
• Maintain a single source of contact information
• Access contact information anytime from anywhere
• Prioritize communication and build a better relationship with clients
• Get complete details of the contact history
• Perform various activities of multiple contacts at the same time

Deal management

• Gain control over your deal cycle
• Import deals and manage them from one place
• Get the past and present status of the deals
• Define clear deal parameters
• Prioritize deals and focus on quality opportunities

Sales automation

• Automate most of the time-consuming tasks and increase your productivity
• Automatically assign activities to your teams
• Set workflows and automatically update records
• Set up a sequence of emails and automatically send a series of emails at the right time
• Use workflow to create activities as the deal progresses in the sales pipeline

Built-in calling & text

• Make and receive calls within the CRM without juggling between applications
• Add notes while communicating with the clients
• Send bulk text messages to your customer base
• Forward calls to your teammates
• Track your inbound and outbound calls
• Record calls for training purposes and enhancing customer experience (Note: Before enabling call recording, ensure you have followed the privacy law and other legislative norms of a particular city.)

Sales activity tracker

• Track activities of your sales team and know where are they spending their precious time
• Plan activities and measure performance
• See which activities are done and what’s pending
• Give your team a perfect to-do list to keep them on track

Conclusion

The best sales tools will give you full control of your sales process and help you maintain strong customer relationships. Whatever you choose for your business, ensure you use it dedicatedly. Most of the companies implement sales tools but fail to maintain it due to which they are not able to achieve the desired result.

Sales tools can make a big difference for your business; so, choose the best one that’s easy to use and adapt. Like Salesmate CRM that has a simple interface and great functionalities. Even the world’s largest leading digital software review platform Capterra has awarded Salesmate with 2018 best value for money and best ease of use.