The world of online businesses is bigger than ever, and online marketers will have to leverage everything they can to remain competitive.
Being reactive and adaptive have always been the secret ingredients needed to survive in a brutal competition. Every once in a while, a new online marketing or sales trend arises, which can give the early adapters a boost. This may also give them the momentum needed for growth, and ultimately, success.
In recent years, we’ve seen trends like
The Rise of Automation
The tendency of online marketers to “adapt to survive” has resulted in the widespread use of similar strategies. One such strategy is the use of automation software to make management, marketing, and sales processes significantly faster, more efficient, and easier to manage.
Despite their namesake, automation software or tools require a lot of hands-on optimization to be effective. Since learning them takes time, you need to focus first on the best tools that can help with what counts the most – profits.
Without further ado, here are the top sales management tools that can boost your profits.
#1. Salesforce
Salesforce is arguably the most comprehensive and trusted sales management tool available in the market today. It prides itself as the world’s #1 CRM tool, and it does so with justice. Whether it’s for email integration, sales data analytics, marketing automation, workflow management, or sales collaboration; Salesforce has you all covered.
Salesforce packs all of its sales management components into Sales Cloud, which is focused on helping you close more deals by optimizing customer experience, user engagement, and the lead nurturing process. It can also help with boosting the productivity and performance of your team through sales collaboration and Work.com, which allows you to specify goals based on sales metrics, mediate feedback between team members, leave coaching notes, and so on.
Of course, Sales Cloud is only one of the best things Salesforce can do for you. In order to get the most out of it, you should also consider checking out their other business applications for marketing, app development, community management, and analytics.
Of course, Sales Cloud is only one of the best things Salesforce can do for you. In order to get the most out of it, you should also consider checking out their other business applications for marketing, app development, community management, and analytics.
#2. Tilkee
Tilkee is another tool that can effectively boost your sales by focusing on developing your follow-up approach. Basically, it provides you with a complete suite of tools that will help you track your business proposals so you can determine each prospect’s engagement behavior. For this purpose, Tilkee sends you real-time metrics such as the specific documents opened, total reading time, and so on.
Understanding how your audience interacts with your material is a very reliable way to score or qualify them as leads. It will also help you formulate an appropriate follow-up to boost conversions. Not only will this save you from tons of guesswork when designing your sales process, it will also save you a lot of time in creating business proposals.
In addition to optimizing and tracking business proposals, Tilkee can also help you with developing a content strategy for marketing and managing the performance of your team. Some of the benefits of these applications include predicting sales, A/B testing for documents, and optimizing the collaboration between your sales and marketing teams.
#3. Streak for Gmail
Keeping up with the competition doesn’t always have to be hard for cash-strapped companies. If you want to effectively boost your sales without spending a dime, you may utilize free CRM software such as Streak, which is designed to be integrated with Gmail.
Remember that even today, a lot of online brands rely on basic email services such as Gmail when communicating and nurturing leads. With this being said, using an external tool such as spreadsheets to organize data can be time-consuming and simply inefficient. But with Streak, you don’t ever need to leave Gmail for CRM tasks. In other words, you and your team will get to work within the same familiar environment for a seamless and efficient system.
Just like Tilkee, Streak can provide you with a variety of user metrics that can help you qualify your leads. It is simplistic, flexible, and can be run straight from within your inbox. Basically, it works by helping you organize communication flow, place leads in the sales funnel, track the delivery of your emails, and set automatic reminders that can help with conversation decisions such as follow-ups. It can also improve your team’s collaborative effort through email sharing, but you can also limit their access through filtering and individual permissions. Finally, Streak allows you to create detailed reports and updated data for your potential investments.
#4. Demochimp
An important aspect of the sales process is the live demonstration, wherein you get to engage your potential client directly with your product. This is extremely effective in gauging your prospect’s interest in certain features or the product as a whole. It can also open up opportunities for you to present your brand to the other members of your prospect’s organization.
Unfortunately, live product demonstrations are also one of the most tedious, costly, and inefficient methods when it comes to closing deals. Every new demonstration is also likely to be unpredictable, meaning it’s difficult to establish a permanent, repeatable demo that works 100% of the time. However, you can work your way up towards that 100% using Demochimp, which is a demo automation service.
The simplest way to describe Demochimp is that it boosts the closing rate from live demos by 44% while making sales cycles up to 68% shorter. How? First of all, Demochimp’s automation includes helping you identify the facets of your product appeal to future clients. For this, you can leverage demo analytics or Demolytics, which allows you to study your target customers’ responses to each of your demos.
Additionally, you can automate custom demos that you handpick and optimize in real-time specifically for certain prospects. This will definitely maximize the impact of your demos for higher conversions.
#5. EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval)
B2B sales are not really the easiest ones to close. Each is a gruelling session that requires extensive research and a streamlined sales workflow that’s developed over time. More importantly, the selling process must be optimized and refined specifically for a B2B client. And in order for this to happen, you need to learn as much as you can about your potential client. This is why makes automation software like Demochimp so incredibly useful.
There are also other means of obtaining information freely through government service websites. For one, you can rely on one of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) sites that offer access to such useful information.
EDGAR – short for Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval – is not really a tool meant exclusively for sales management. Rather, it is a searchable database where you can find information about all the registered public companies you could be targeting as potential leads. The information you can find through EDGAR includes registration statements, periodic reports, prospectuses, and activity logs that may also include financial statements. Apart from researching companies, using EDGAR is also useful if you want to start investing in stocks.
Images: ” Author’s Own”
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