A more productive sales team means a stronger business overall — that's why it's important to make sure they have all the tools they need to work efficiently. Plenty of SMB-friendly tools are on the market to help sales professionals work faster and get more accomplished, and they may be worth bringing into your sales team's workflow.
The foundational tool for many sales teams is customer relationship management (CRM) software, which creates a central repository for all interactions with clients and prospects. CRM giants like Salesforce, Hubspot and Zoho have products for small businesses, so instituting a solid CRM system may be a good place to start if you haven't done so already.
But those sales tools are just the beginning of what's out there. Other sales software can amp up your efforts to find prospects, communicate effectively and save time overall. Here are a few areas where software tools may prove useful to your team:
Locating Warm Prospects
Finding warm prospects and nurturing a relationship with them is the core of effective sales. Your salespeople are probably already on LinkedIn — they might benefit from a paid service called Sales Navigator, which can enhance networking options on the site. It provides advanced search options, offers lead recommendations and integrates with other CRM systems to save the leads and accounts you're selling to.
To help build a relationship with leads, Nudge is an application that will scan the web for insights about your contacts. The software gives you a daily update on relevant details or events. When you're in the know about developments in a client's or prospect's life, it's easier to start a conversation with them.
Managing Email and Texts
Organizing and composing emails can quickly swamp a salesperson's day. PersistIQ lets users sort and categorize their email by automatically changing the status of a lead based on an action they've taken, such as sending a reply or an out-of-office notification. It also provides analytics and a template manager to keep your messages organized. Yesware helps expedite communication about meetings by sending a custom link with times you're available to meet and adding the final time to the relevant calendars after the invitee chooses an option. It also has a Mail Merge feature that automatically sends a series of personalized emails to prospects over time, and Salesforce email and calendar integration.
Texting is also gaining prominence as a way to reach out to prospects, and there are ways to expedite those messages, too. Products like Trumpia and Twilio allow you to program your texts or send personalized texts to numerous prospects at the same time.
Wrangling Paperwork
With digital technology, your salespeople can avoid the hassle of written contracts and keeping up with lots of paper documents. Products like DocuSign allow salespeople to send contracts by email, which prospects and customers can then securely sign from any device without needing to print, scan or fax anything. For service businesses, products such as Coolfront allow salespeople to simplify how they provide pricing and service agreements to customers.
Small businesses that can leverage useful sales tools may have an edge over their competitors, and new options pop up all the time. Pinpoint tools that would work well with your team, and do a test run to see which ones prove effective.
