Sales teams are all about efficiency. The faster they can get from contact to contract, the better. Sometimes, increasing sales velocity means investing in training. Other times, it requires reconfiguring team roles. But the easiest way for most teams to convert more leads is simply to get better tools.
6 Sales Tools for Boost Revenue and Drive Growth
From saving time to improving engagement, the following companies showed up in the top of my own search for sales tools that drive growth.
Table of Contents
Content Summary
Calendar
Regie
Ontraport
Intercom
Hubspot
Salesforce
Calendar
Much of building a stronger sales team is simply managing your time more effectively. Spending hours on cold calling doesn’t make sense when there are more hot leads than your staff can handle. But without a data-driven picture of how you’re spending your days, you can’t hope to improve.
Calendar’s analytics suite shows which meetings are taking up your time. You can break them down not just by name, length, and number of participants, but by individual encounters. To see how your schedule has changed, you can review meetings by day, week, quarter, and year. The key is making small, daily changes to optimize how and with whom you’re spending those precious work hours.
Regie
Even with insight into who’s read your email, it’s still tough to know the perfect thing to say. Regie takes your audience’s demographic and psychographic details into account, generating copy that’s likely to resonate. After sending each message, Regie analyzes responses for continuous optimization.
Did that vice president you’re trying to reach attend the same university you did? Expect Regie to play that up. If you worked for the same company decades ago, Regie is likely to unearth that, too. And if you don’t know who you should be trying to reach in the first place, Regie can make recommendations there as well.
Ontraport
Sales automation frees your team from mind-numbing, time-consuming tasks like data entry. CRM Ontraport’s sales force automation lets companies customize their own system to not only manage sales workloads, but also track leads with a visual pipeline; send email and SMS follow ups; and forecast the value of each lead. Known for its integrations, Ontraport users can hook the tool up to Quickbooks, Google Calendar, JotForm, and more.
To make sales even more hands-off, Ontraport makes it easy to set up partner programs. Created programs track when partners make a sale, giving them a platform to monitor their sales and commissions. By giving partners commissions on your product, you gain more customer relationships without additional work.
Intercom
Salespeople answer the same questions again and again: How much does the service cost? Which features come with which package? Is setup included, or is it an extra fee? Intercom’s chatbots can tackle those questions and more, freeing you up to pursue prospects and give presentations.
One of Intercom’s most useful features for salespeople is its team inbox. By creating a central communication hub, teams can make sure no message slips through the cracks. The team inbox can be split into sections for sales and support, with settings that let both groups collaborate on tough questions. For questions that come up while you’re traveling, Intercom offers native iOS and Android apps.
Hubspot
Hubspot is a heavyweight in the sales world for a reason: It’s as close to a do-it-all tool as they come. In addition to its CRM, Hubspot’s Starter sales package includes email tracking, email sequences, live chat, meeting scheduling, and productivity analysis. Step up to its Professional plan, and you also get personalized outreach, Salesforce integration, and data organization tools.
Hubspot’s Enterprise plan isn’t cheap, at $1,200 per month, but it’s worth it for efficiency- and security-minded teams. Call transcription, predictive lead scoring, and recurring revenue tracking all save time. Large teams will appreciate its customisable user roles and single sign-on features.
Salesforce
Popular CRM Salesforce caters to sales teams at small businesses, enterprises, and everywhere in between. Although the heart of the tool is still its relationship management features, Salesforce can do more than track prospects’ pipeline progress and the company’s interactions with customers.
Salesforce CPQ automates pricing for different product configurations, while Salesforce Pardot shows where sales and marketing can collaborate to accelerate revenue. Its Sales Cloud Einstein uses artificial intelligence for predictive lead scoring and capacity forecasting. And if any of those tools take too much time to figure out, Salesforce is known for its customer service.
By Michael Brenner