It's a new year, and with it, everyone is making goals with the intention of improving lives and careers. And if you're in the business of selling (aren't we all?), you're figuring out how you can have your most successful yet.
With dozens of tools, apps, and more telling you how you can increase your leads, keep your pipeline moving, and , even the idea of attempting to improve can cause overwhelm. Since the average SDR performs 94.4 activities a day, including social, call, voicemail, and email touches, it's time you can't afford to lose.
If you're not using a CRM already, then that should be your first priority. CRMs have been proven to shorten your sales cycle and help sales reps meet their goals.
Next up, consider how you can keep the top of your pipeline full. HubSpot Research discovered that 72% of companies with less than 50 new opps per month didn’t achieve their revenue goals. In comparison, 15% of companies with 51 to 100 new opps didn't make it, and only 4% of companies with 101 to 200 new opps didn't hit their targets.
While email scrapers are great for initial lead generation - you can see our top recommendations for those here - there are other ways you can further improve your workflow so your pipeline stays consistently full.
There are many apps available to help you maximize your impact while saving time on data entry, followup, and more - but that's no reason to get trapped in a place decision fatigue. Below, we've narrowed it down to four great apps to help you improve your sales processes quickly and easily.
Four sales apps that are proven to help you close more sales
1) Sales Flare
One of the biggest complaints sales professionals have about CRMs is how much time they end up spending on data entry, filling out dozens of boxes in Salesforce or other tools. Sales Flare successfully addresses this by automatically filling out as much of the basic information as possible by collecting data about a prospect via LinkedIn, emails, social profiles, and more.
From there, it further improves your workflow by displaying where your leads are in your pipeline visually in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Advanced tracking lets you know if leads are engaging with you, letting you know whether they've opened your emails or visited your website, as well which pages they've spent the most time on.
The final value add that makes Sales Flare sing is the collaborative aspect. Rather than relying on relaying information to colleagues via conversations or additional emails, you can share an account with someone to let them see exactly where you stand with that deal.
2) Hubspot Sales Chrome Extension
I'm a huge fan of Hubspot - we use it to manage and create all of our content here at Prialto - and it's just as helpful for sales as it is marketing. A Chrome extension you can add to your browser, Hubspot Sales gives you a stripped down version of Hubspot's best sales features, including email open notifications, automatic interaction tracking, automated personalized follow up emails, and much more.
If you love using this tool, I'd recommend also signing up for Hubspot's free CRM tool and marketing hub, too. The tools sync, eliminating unnecessary data entry.
3) Salesforce Lightning for Gmail
Salesforce is the leading heavy-hitter for CRM software on the market right now, and this kind of efficiency is part of how they hook you from day one.
A lightweight extension that blends seamlessly into your Gmail inbox, Salesforce Lightning pulls data on your leads from your emails and by scraping the lead's information and adds it into your Salesforce records. It allows you to copy emails over from Gmail to Salesforce quickly and easily to avoid data entry.
The extension also integrates your Google Calendar with your Salesforce calendar, giving you an added layer of protection against unintentionally double-booking yourself. Finally, the software saves you time by keeping your email templates easily available, making followup a breeze.
4) Streak
If you're early stage, your inbox is your sales engine, and you might not be ready to invest in an expensive software suite like Salesforce yet. That's where Streak comes in.
With impressive case studies featuring Chris Bacca, founder of Lowercase Capital, and Bo Bergstrom, COO of Uvise, the use cases for Streak are detailed and incredibly helpful for establishing your own best practices regarding sales flow.
While the free features are similar to the other programs (think Gmail integration, email tracking, etc.), the upgrades you get with paid program are impressive. With a Zapier integration, email support, and more, you won't regret at least exploring the possibilities Streak has to offer.
What You Should Do Now
If you need help with sales support, here are a few options to help you:
- Download our eBook "Spend More Time Selling with a Virtual Assistant" and get a better understanding of how a virtual assistant can handle tedious sales tasks to give sales leaders and teams more time to sell and take care of customers.
- Book a free consultation call with Prialto. We can help you regain more of your time to sell by offloading repeatable tasks to a fully managed virtual assistant. One of our experts will help you create a plan to delegate your tasks and we will even train your sales assistant for you.
- If you know someone else who’d benefit from sales support, share this post with them via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.