No matter what type of business you run, sales is a necessary part of your company’s growth. You could manage without marketing or HR, but sales – not so much. Unfortunately, sales is also one of the most difficult aspects of running a business, especially if you’re in the B2B sector.
One of the underlying issues with sales is just how much time it requires – especially if you’re a solo founder trying to get off the ground. Luckily, there are plenty of tools nowadays that use automation to make sales a process you love. Here are a few of those tools that makes sales easier and quicker so you have more time for the things you truly love.
Better Proposals
Talking to a lot of people in sales and many agencies, I’ve found that people, in general, hate writing proposals. It’s tedious, it takes a long time and you’d rather watch paint dry than write up a proposal. Luckily, Better Proposals has emerged as the ultimate solutions to automating the art of proposal writing.
You can use templates to create beautiful proposals that convert. Then you can re-use those templates time and time again, just changing up a few sentences when the next client comes along. Work on the template once and reap the rewards for as long as you like.
On top of this, there are some other ways Better Proposals can speed up your sales. You can track whether the client opened the proposal, how much time they spent reading and how much they read in total. To top it all off, clients can sign and pay directly within the app instead of going to a third-party website.
PS. If you want to learn more about proposal writing, check out the company’s guide on how to write a business proposal in 2019.
Docsend
Working in one of my previous companies, this was one of the sales team’s most used tools. In simple terms, Docsend allows you to host a document on their servers so you can send it to your leads for a reading. You may be thinking – but wait, why shouldn’t I just send an attachment in an email?
Docsend does more than that. It identifies who’s read your document, how much of the document they’ve read and what links they’ve clicked on. Best of all, it identifies emails as well, so you can see if the recipient shared the document with someone else from their team.
Besides eliminating the need for attachments, Docsend shows you who is reading your most important documents and how they’re treating them. With their latest update, they also allow your contacts to safely sign the documents directly within the app. If you work with a lot of documentation, Docsend could make your life a whole lot better.
Clearbit Connect
If you haven’t already heard about it, Clearbit offers a whole suite of tools for sales teams to manage their pipelines and automate their marketing, prospecting and closing. If you need all of that – absolutely go for it. But we’re here to talk about Clearbit Connect.
This is a seemingly simple Google Chrome plugin that you install and it then helps you find stuff that Google can’t – email addresses. Whether you’re doing cold outreach or just trying to find that CFO after seeing their LinkedIn post, Clearbit makes it easy. Just type in the person and the company and the plugin does the heavy lifting for you.
PS. You can also use this tool for recruitment, link building or to spam your ex’s work email – it’s versatile like that.
ContactOut
Email is the best means of communication and according to google there are 269 billion emails being sent every single day and a lot of it is sent on the wrong email address, Contactout can help you with that it's a simple extension that helps you find email addresses and phone numbers of anyone on LinkedIn.
They've been around for just over three years and already have thousands of users from a third of the Fortune 500 (like Microsoft, PwC, and Symantec). ContactOut finds emails from 75% of Linkedin users (2x better than the next closest competitor) at a 97% accuracy rate. It’s earned us multiple mentions on the ahrefs blog as one of the best freemium email outreach tools available.
The free trial also available!
Salesflare CRM
You can’t possibly have a list with sales tools without mentioning a CRM. One reason for this is that there are so many CRMs nowadays that you simply can’t make up your mind. They all seem to do the exact same thing, so how to choose the right one? Salesflare does a lot of things great and they have built a rock-solid fan base that does their marketing on the company’s behalf.
Salesflare pride themselves on minimizing manual work. They do this by seamlessly enriching all of your entries in the CRM by pulling data from LinkedIn, email, social profiles and other sources. Less time spent on data entry = more time spent on sales.
The second reason Salesflare is great is that it keeps everything in a single place. It gives you an overview of a lead, complete with all their data, the interactions you had with them and when they opened your last email. All of this is stored in a separate folder for that lead.
You also get a birds’ eye view of who communicated with the lead from your team. Everyone is on the same page and the entire sales process is streamlined to save your time. By now, you probably get the point – this CRM is efficient and quick and your sales team will love it.
Yesware
You’ve probably heard that email marketing brings a crazy return on investment – more than $40 for each dollar spent. Whether you’re serious about your email marketing or not, it’s clear that it’s a goldmine, if used the right way. There are lots of apps to help you get more out of emails, and Yesware is one of the best.
First off, it lets you track what happens once the emails are out. You can see who opens your emails and attachments, on the granular level of a single email. If you want to close that next big deal, you can see if the manager’s been dodging your emails and use that information to plan your next move.
Besides the standard features such as advanced analytics and delayed sending, there’s one feature which I like in particular. Yesware has a tool that gives you the best time to send an email if your recipient is in a different time zone. Just enter their email and you can set it up so that it’s sent at an optimal time. No more waking up your leads at 3 AM with an email about your latest lead magnet!
These are just some of the tools you can use to automate your sales processes and win back the time you need for other tasks in running your business. Do you have another tool you would recommend for speeding up sales? Do let us know in the comments!
Author’s bio:
Adam Hempenstall is the CEO and Founder of Better Proposals, simple proposal software for creating beautiful, high-impact proposals in minutes. Having helped his customers at Better Proposals win $120,000,000+ in one year only, he has launched the first Proposal Writing University where he shares business proposal best practices.
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