In the age of digital marketing, data, and networking, sales processes have become more streamlined. The new norm of working culture wants more sales reps who are intellectually smart, efficiently productive, and immensely adaptative in this fast-paced numbers game. After all, sales numbers exponentially matter if you want to stay competitive. In order to generate proficient numbers, you must leverage the power of technology before your competitors take away your market share.
Statistics That Shows the Need for Sales Productivity Tools
Sales reps tend to spend too much time on unproductive or administrative tasks. Here are some statistics to support our statement.
Automating the repetitive activities using sales tools can add to the productivity of your sales team. This gives sales reps more time talking to prospects and selling while reducing the human-errors in repetitive activities. Let’s explore more areas where sales productivity tools can boost the game for your sales team.
How Sales Productivity Tools Help Sales Reps
Selling is not easy. A sales rep goes through different hurdles of inefficiency in their day-to-day. Even if you have your B2B sales process and strategy ready, you need to address these hurdles to ensure productivity isn’t lost throughout your sales process.
Here are three Cs where sales reps often face challenges and where sales productivity tools can help become their savior.
1. Consistency
While sales reps have specific selling skills and talent, in some cases they lack to maintain consistency as a complete unit. There should be consistency in the process that’s common to all.
For example, when sales reps are talking to a prospect and asking for additional information, sales tools like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform gives them a clear idea about what they should ask the prospect. This way, they do not have to spend extra time chasing for missing information. Additionally, sales tools can help them plan their day instead of hopping from one task to another. It’s always a good idea to figure out which sales productivity tools you really need, there is a great guide on how to do that on SmallBizTools here.
2. Concentration
Concentration is important to succeed in sales. The more disturbances, the more problems you have in closing deals. There could be in-office disruptions, unwanted meetings, mental disruptions, email follow ups for nurturing the cold prospects, and much more. Eliminate activities that take away from your main concentration or block time for certain tasks in your daily schedule. Sales tools can help you to do that.
For example, if you are executing an email campaign, it could get challenging when sending next level emails when nurturing your leads. Email marketing tools allow you to set and automate the campaign workflow so you can concentrate on more important things like converting the bottom of the funnel leads to sales.
3. Constant Innovation
The pace at which competition is growing means that sales reps need to come up with productive ways to reach the ready to buy prospects, keep them engaged and close the deal. To do this effectively, make sure you are introducing new tools and techniques for your sales reps and encourage them to use.
For instance, you can be more productive in the prospecting stage by chasing the right prospects instead of spending your time nurturing unqualified leads. Data portals not only help sales reps with the quality contact numbers of the decision-makers, but they provide other vital information including firmographic and technographic data, and buyer Intent Data. This allows the sales reps to focus on qualified prospects.
10 Tools to Improve Sales Productivity
The best sales tools can allow your top salespeople the opportunity to automate their manual sales activities. The manual process tends to be very tedious and generally where most salespeople spend most of their time.
Here are the types of tools that can help increase sales productivity:
(Editor’s note: The tools are listed randomly. Numbers do not represent the priority of the tools.)
- HubSpot for CRM
- Bombora for Buyer’s Intent Analysis
- CircleBack for ABM
- SalesIntel for Prospecting, Lead Generation, Buyer Intent Analysis
- Kred for Content Marketing
- Marketo for Email Marketing
- LevelEleven for Performance Management
- Zendesk for Sales Pipeline Management
- Prosposify for Creating Proposals
- Adobe Sign for Contract Management
1. HubSpot for CRM
The HubSpot CRM was designed from the ground up, intuitive and automated where other systems are complex and manual. HubSpot CRM takes care of all the details — logging email addresses, tracking calls, and handling the data — reducing precious selling time in the process. It is consistently ranked as one of the best CRM software tools for small businesses. It comes natively integrated with other free features that are essential for small businesses as well as large enterprises. These features include email marketing (up to 2000 emails per month), scheduler meetings, forms for website and landing pages, email tracking, live chat, chatbot builder, dashboard reporting, contacts, and pipeline management.
2. Bombora for Buyer’s Intent Analysis
Get to know the buying intentions of your prospects. Bombora gathers and analyzes data from different sources to determine which of your prospective organizations are actively looking for the type of product or service you are offering. Discover valuable information to prioritize the leads and separate ready to buy prospects from the cold ones.
3. CircleBack for Account-Based Sales and Marketing
Without getting decent contacts, you can’t be a great salesperson. CircleBack allows you to organize all contact details from your phone, email, social media accounts, and even your wallet into a single streamlined address book that enables you to create meaningful and productive connections. CircleBack automatically discovers new contacts, updates records, eliminates duplicates, and saves information from business cards scanned. Integrate CircleBack into your CRM to keep your lead pipeline strong.
4. SalesIntel for Prospecting, Lead Generation, Data Enrichment and Sales Intelligence
More than 40% of sales reps have agreed that prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process, followed by closing the deal (36%) and qualifying the lead (22%). SalesIntel helps sales reps to conduct tailored prospect searches using a specific set of real-time data points. These data points include firmographic, technical, direct dials, etc. SalesIntel is a one-stop solution when it comes to prospecting, B2B lead generation, data enrichment and sales intelligence.
Additionally, SalesIntel has partnered with Bombora to help users with buyer Intent Data. What makes SalesIntel reliable from the other data providers is the human-verified data. Most other data providers rely heavily on machine processed data that lacks human-verification. Compare SalesIntel with the publicly-traded data provider and see why SalesIntel comes out as the clear winner.
5. Kred for Content Marketing
When it comes to content marketing, it’s more than just producing unique and engaging content. You can hope people will come and read your content, but promoting it is as important as creating authoritative content. You need to connect with influencers who can amplify your social media message. This is where Kred is going to help you out.
The platform measures your content influence by analyzing Facebook and Twitter interactions so that you can reach out to influencers who will have the greatest effect on your market.
6. Marketo for Email Marketing
With Marketo’s email marketing tool, you can replace the manual email marketing process with an automated email campaign. Automating a series of emails that are triggered based on the actions of your subscribers is something that can easily be done using this tool.
According to Optinmonster, more than 80% of companies use email marketing for promoting their solution. Out of which, 51% of businesses are using email automation to save time and money. The study also revealed that automated emails resulted in 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails.
Marketo is one of the best automated email marketing solutions currently available for businesses. It creates an opportunity to initiate email campaigns based on 40-plus behaviors which can eliminate the guesswork to a large extent.
7. LevelEleven for Performance Management
LevelEleven is a sales performance management tool that helps you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales teams with real-time visibility into day-to-day results. The solution identifies key selling habits and ensures that the sales team is on track with daily, weekly, and monthly targets. This tool provides sales reps with personalized insights, historical patterns, and peer comparisons of performance results. It develops programs to raise employee morale, and promote vital initiatives along with increased team collaboration and competitiveness through leaderboards and tournaments.
8. Zendesk for Sales Pipeline Management
Zendesk is an intelligent sales productivity platform that improves funnel visibility and increases efficiency for sales leaders. You can tailor sales stages with a drag-and-drop interface team collaboration that shares deals, contacts, notes, etc.
Zendesk gives you full insight into opportunities within your sales pipeline along with visual tracking. It helps you to set, track, and maintain revenue goals and quotas for your team. Predict more accurately with data-based reporting. It can also automatically track, and sort your emails. The best part is, you can integrate Zendesk with your email marketing tool, data portal, and CRM platforms.
9. Proposify for Creating Proposals
Proposal tools help sales professionals create online plans for day-to-day sales operations and new business opportunities.
Proposify allows you to create quick and better business proposals through; interactive quotations, metric measurements, alerts, eSignatures, content libraries, dynamic fields, and variables. Videos can be added, and is available in multiple languages, and features comments and chat.
10. Adobe Sign for Contract Management
Few things can beat the feeling of the accomplishment of closing a big and difficult deal for your company. In most cases, however, verbal acknowledgment does not count until the new client finally signs the contract. Good thing contract management companies such as Adobe Sign are there to help push a contractual agreement between the company and new prospective client.
Formerly known as EchoSign and eSign, this contract management tool is part of the Adobe Document Cloud service, which also includes the legendary PDF pioneer Acrobat. Use Adobe Sign to create, transfer, sign, and manage contracts at any time, anywhere virtually on any device.
11. Weflow for Sales Pipeline Management
Weflow offers a suite of tools designed to help sales teams use Salesforce more effectively. Teams can take advantage of Weflow’s built-in and custom pipeline views to review and manage their sales pipeline more easily.
The automated sales activity tracking and email logging ensure all relevant sales data ends up in Salesforce, keeping data hygiene in check.
Other notable features include a sales notepad and note templates, automated deal signals, and sales forecasting.
12. Apploye for Time Tracking
Apploye is a smart time-tracking and remote employee monitoring tool that comes with a variety of features. It can track how much time is being spent on each task. You can track the progress of each sales project and ensure that they are going to meet the deadline. You can analyze the time data to make data-driven decisions and give tasks estimations correctly.
The idle time tracking feature allows you to know when a sales rep is away from his/her workstation. The clock in & out app also allows you to know who is working on which task in real time. You can also check screenshots, apps & url usage, and GPS location to know if sales reps were working properly.
Apploye also allows you to send invoices to clients based on the project hours, and manage employee payroll.
Wrapping Up
When you pick the right tools and train your sales reps to use them efficiently, it’s as if every rep has a personal assistant. When set up correctly the new assistant can perform administrative activities and help automate work that allows sales reps to spend as much time with customers as they can.
If your team hasn’t had any additions to your toolkit lately, it’s high time to assess which stage or aspect of your sales operations needs to be slightly uplifted. Try some of the tools we have listed here and check how effective they are for your business.
