Guest Article
Sales people are miracle workers who can make an entrepreneur’s dream come true. However, sales goals have become harder to achieve even for experienced sales people due to lack of technology support and strategy in the sales process. Top level businesses equip their sales people with technology to boost their performance and close ratios. Sales enablement tools offer advancements and conveniences to sales people and business owners to track performance. Here are the 5 top technologies to use to streamline your sales process.
Email is still the most used tool for sales and marketing. Email marketing helps with customer acquisition and retention. If your sales team utilizes email marketing, it would be wise to track the performance of your campaigns. Almost every marketer uses email marketing applications to track open rates and click-thrus. Try Infusionsoft, Aweber or MailChimp to boost sales with email.
- Social Selling
78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers. So train and encourage your sales team to use social selling tools. Basically, there three categories of social media tools: Listening; Content Creation; and Customer Relationship Management. Listing tools allow you to listen to what customers and industry people are talking about your products or products like yours. You typically leverage hashtags for this.
Content creation tools enable you to create compelling content for your social media campaigns for blogging or directly on social media using tools like Facebook LIVE. Customer relationship management tools (social CRMs) help you manage your customers based on their stage in buyer journey.
- Communication Tools
Effective communication is the best and only way to sell. You use social media and emails to communicate with your audience. Your ads on digital platforms communicates with your prospects and encourages them to check out your landing pages and buy your products. However, it’s not always about interacting with your prospects customers. The communication gap between your internal staff can slow down the sales process. Leverage communication tools such as Slack in order to help your sales reps stay connected to the office and the latest product information, specifically during sales calls. You can also leverage Zoom to provide your team with some highly developed audio and video conferencing tools.
- Competition Tracking
To make sure you are heading the right way, you will need to develop wise strategies that allow for tracking what your rivals are doing. Use Google Alerts to track competitors and their products. Check their websites regularly. Invest your time and money in competitive analysis. Doing so helps you develop strategies for growth, as you learn a lot from their movements and achievements. It’s right time to start tracking your rivals by introducing a competition analysis dashboard in your process. If you want to track a competitor’s online ad spend look at iSpionage. This tool analyzes multiple aspects of PPC campaigns, including how many keywords a brand is targeting on AdWords. Sprout Social will help you figuring out a competing brand’s messaging to how often they’re pushing content across social media Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content for relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors.
- Automation
Sales automation tools are software-based solutions that help you perform many sales tasks. In today’s technology-driven world, sales automation software can infuse new prospects into your pipeline, prioritize leads, and enhance the buyer journey. Automation benefits business processes starting from customer support and onboarding; from operations management to project tracking; and from inventory management to sales enablement. The typical starter sales automation tool is a CRM system which allows you to address your prospects and existing customers’ problems socially. My favorite CRM tools are ZohoCRM or Insightly for smaller companies.
The role of your sales person is to bridge the gap between your potential customers’ needs and your products with the help of sales strategy and technology. There is no denying that the role of sales has changed significantly. To see your sales flourishing, make sure your sales people have the best technological advancements. Technology not only empowers your salespeople but it also streamlines your sales process. Strategize on the use of technology to streamline your sales process today.
About the Author
Birbahadur Singh Kathayat is an entrepreneur, online marketer and writer. He has over 10 years of experience in online marketing and content marketing. He is also the director of LBSWebSoft, a leading digital media solution company.
