5 Sales Tools to Make Your Life Easier
We love finding (or building!) new tools to make our daily life easier so that we can spend more time on the most important things, like keeping our customers happy and getting new ones.
Here are a few of our recent favorites:
1. Calend.ly
It goes without saying that the back-and-forth in the sales process can be…stressful at times. Make a piece of it go away by using Calend.ly — seriously, the rollercoaster of trying to schedule a meeting will just disappear.
We love Calend.ly because it saves time and elimates a barrier between you and the prospect. Instead of having to look through your calendar and propose 3 different times, just send the prospect your schedule and let them pick a time that’s most convenient for them!
2. RocketBolt
In an outbound campaign, a 1-2% response rate is pretty normal, but click rates are typically much higher (anywhere from 5-20%). So, what are you doing to target those prospects that are visiting your website, but have yet to respond to an email?
Rocketbolt solves this problem by tracking leads through a unique code that you simply add to the end of each link in your outreach. Their product notifies you when a prospect is on your website, and it even distinguishes your most important leads and sends you an email as soon as they get on your site.
3. Talkdesk
Any salesperson worth their salt will tell you that they never stop selling…which means that business often gets mixed with pleasure. Talkdesk gives you a virtual number so that when you’re answering calls on your cell outside of business hours, you’ll know which call is a prospect and which call is your significant other (though we don’t recommend ignoring either).
We also like that it integrates with Salesforce. If you get a call from a number that’s already in your SF.com account, Talkdesk marks it as an activity in Salesforce and links to a recording of the call. Big win.
4. Docusign
We draft and send all of our SOWs through Docusign. One of the things we like most about it is that it just does what it’s supposed to do — it isn’t super complicated or fussy, and the interface is really user-friendly.
Docusign is also a great way to keep everyone in the loop. Once an agreement has been signed by both parties, someone from each functional area on our team gets an email notification — Customer Success sets up an on-boarding call, Operations sets up billing, and Sales sets up an internal hand-off. And suddenly, everyone is on the same page with new customers.
5. Salesforce
We’ll be the first to admit that Salesforce has some flaws. We use it to manage our sales funnel, but even our team is split on how much we actually like using it. But like it or not, you’re going to need Salesforce if you plan to scale your sales team.
Other CRMs might be effective for a short period of time, but you’ll eventually need all of the bells and whistles that only SF offers once your sales team starts to grow. It’s a great tool for organizing your entire team’s prospect data in one place — and it can even encourage some friendly competition between reps when you build custom reports to show exactly how close each of your reps are to hitting goals.
And because we really love finding ways to make selling easier…here are 3 extras that would’ve made the list if “8 Sales Tools…” sounded better than “5 Sales Tools…” (But it doesn’t. 5 sounds better.)
RevBoss
A little shameless self-promotion here, but we know firsthand that RevBoss makes prospecting, outreach and closing deals life easier. After seeing a demo of the product, one of our prospects once commented, “But, if we sign up for this, what will I do?”
RevBoss automates tedious sales processes that take up a lot of time, when you should be spending that time on closing deals. We help sales teams source target prospects, execute outbound campaigns and grow sales pipeline. We use RevBoss every day. It’s our favorite. 🙂
Hemingway App
We’ve written so much about how to write better sales messaging that even we’re getting tired of listening to ourselves preach. But, messaging is one of the hardest parts of the process and we’re all for making it easier.
With Hemingway App, you can copy/paste your messaging into their online interface and get immediate feedback on the readability of your message. We use it frequently for ourselves and for customers.
Books!
Most people on our team have read Predictable Revenue and/or Secrets of Question-Based Selling. If you ever stop by RevBoss HQ, you’ll probably see a few well-loved copies of each floating around.
We’re big fans of both books and refer to them frequently. Let us know if you have any other good book recommendations!
We covered quite a few, but we’re always excited to look into new sales tools — let us know what your favorites are so we can check them out!