How to Pick the Right Sales Outreach Tools for Your Team
Let's say you lead a 3-person sales team. You're continuously training and hiring.
Your job is to enable the team to close deals. Some deals are based on inbound inquiries. Most deals could be produced by your outbound outreach. As a result, your sales development representatives spend their day on these tasks:
- Finding companies that might need their service.
- Looking for the email address of the appropriate person.
- Organizing a mail merge to mass email all prospects they listed.
- Scheduling follow-ups (hopefully with multistage mail merge).
- Connecting with those who responded.
- Scheduling phone calls and meetings.
- Getting the prospects to sign the contract.
As you look at the clock, time is crunching and you feel the pressure to churn out sales. To assist you, there are various tools for sales teams that'll help boost your sales and make the process more efficient. These are the tools with features that'll align your team on the path to closing more deals.
According to Gartner, companies with sales automation tools observe a 10% or greater increase in revenue after only six to nine months.
Helpful outreach tools, like Vocus.io, are built for teams like yours:
- You share templates and snippets
- There are analytics based on each salesperson's performance
- Billing is centralized
To help you rally the team, make sure you choose tools with such features:
Your tools should integrate with your CRM
Sales teams can't do away with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools.
Even if you're a solo salesperson, you want to track the status and records of each client or prospect.
If you're running a sales team, a CRM is more critical. You want to log information about your contacts so other teammates can get aligned.
Align your team on the latest status of each contact.
Here is a couple of notable CRM apps:
Pipedrive
Andy Karuza of FenSens describes Pipedrive as,
"...a great sales CRM tool that helps you manage your entire sales process from the lead to the actual sale. What makes Pipedrive so great is the visualization it offers for your sales pipeline, which is where it got its name. Organization and follow-up are the keys to any successful sales strategy."
Salesforce
Reports and dashboards are what Chelsea B. likes best about Salesforce.
"Being able to have a go-to reporting system that I can reference throughout the year is vital when using the CRM to manage new clients and clients' activities. The ease of dashboards is the icing on top of the cake."
If you use such CRM apps, make sure other tools in your stack integrate with them nicely. Fortunately, Vocus.io natively integrates with Salesforce and Pipedrive. It also plays well with other tools via Zapier and auto-BCC.
Your tools should enable you to create and share snippets or templates
Do you find yourself writing blurbs of text over and over? Whether snippets are introductions, signatures, thankyous, product lists or descriptions, you can customize Vocus.io to automatically expand a keyword to a long blurb of text.
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Vocus.io lets you share with your team the templates and proposals which really convert and lead to deals faster. In turn, all of your team can work from the best copy, collectively improve it, and achieve even better results in sales.
Your tools should help you track communications
When choosing sales tools, you want to track your team's sales efforts.
You want to see if you're generating more prospects, sending more emails, scheduling appointments, and more.
Vocus.io helps you track your team's sales email activities. Optionally, you can share the subject lines of emails sent with your fellow salespeople.
You want to make sure that your sales tools enable you to keep approaching new prospects and following up.
Your tools should track your team's performance
Tracking of performance through unified analytics lets the entire team see stats for emails sent, engagement, and more. You see each team member's results when you invite them to your account.
Docsify is a tool that tracks team productivity and optimizes your sales process for better results.
Michelle Grant raves about Docsify, “I don't need to go to specific environments or to install any programs on my desktop - all required statistics are in my Gmail. I'm really happy to work with it.”
For example, tools like Docsify and Vocus.io give team members access to each employee's email prospecting statistics. Both work from within Gmail.
Track and share the weak areas that sales reps can improve, as well as their strengths.
The benefit of unified analytics is that you get to measure and analyze the quality of work and efficiency for every employee over a time period. That way, you can find ways to improve all team results.
The screenshot below displays an example of a team of four Vocus.io members with shared analytics permission enabled. On other screens, Vocus.io shows you a breakdown of those numbers, and you'll be able to filter those metrics and activities for one or more members.
Your tools should enable your sales representatives to collaborate
In the world of sales, particularly sales teams, communicating and collaborating are important factors. We need to leverage the right tools to do it properly.
Joshua Thurmond recommends Trello, "[It's a] slick project management app. Good on desktop, good on mobile. It takes some work setting it up, but then it's an easy way to track progress step by step.
According to Salesforce, 71% of salespeople believe that their role will be dramatically different in five years. Are you one of them? Eyal Orgilof Hubspot makes a great point. You should be. "When you know what's coming, you can use it to stay ahead of your competition." Ease the transition and hack the standard sales cycle with the right sales tools and features for your team.
Over to You
It's critical to make your tools work for your team's processes (not the other way around!).
Your business is growing as you scale your sales team's output.
The key? You want to sync up with your team so your sales reps are following the latest & greatest version of your sales process.
You want to track everyone's performance, share your best-performing emails, and get everyone on the same page with CRMs.
If you're currently looking to upgrade your email tools, check out Vocus.io for template sharing, mail merge, email tracking, and more!
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