It isn’t easy to succeed in sales in the 21st century. Having the drive and grit to sell your product won’t cut it anymore! Recognize your brand’s potential and discover what your customers want to stay relevant.
So how do you help your sales team achieve their full potential? The secret is having the right sales tools.
Why Your Sales Team Needs Tools
When you are launching a product or service, ensure that your sales team is ready to sell. This requires both training and tools for you to successfully convert prospective leads into buying customers, whether you have an entire sales team or only one salesperson.
Sales tools are digital tools used by sales professionals that make their jobs much simpler and straightforward. These tools are often categorized into different groups such as marketing automation, sales analytics, video conferencing, and more.
LinkedIn’s State of Sales 2016 report suggests that top sales representatives perform better when they use the right sales tools. In fact, 82% believe that these tools are key to them striking any deals, compared with 66% overall. These sales representatives are more likely to use email tracking tools, sales intelligence tools, social selling tools, productivity apps, and customer relationship management systems.
Choosing Quality vs Quantity When It Comes to Sales Tools
A growing sales organization usually correlates to a growing tech stack. Sales organizations must reallocate their resources and adjust their investments to technologies and processes that can support digital selling.
Exploring your company’s necessary sales tool investments can be overwhelming — and we haven’t even touched on using the sales tools yet! This is because there are endless sales tool options available in the sales tech space, with more added on a daily basis. Even if you’re experienced in sales operations, building up your tech stack can be a daunting exercise.
The saying “The more, the merrier”, unfortunately, does not apply when you are choosing sales tools for your team. Having too many tools means…
More training efforts
More time spent on administrative tasks
Less time spent on actual selling
Higher costs
With the high number of sales tools offered to teams in an increasingly digital world, how do you determine which types of tools are essential for your team without missing out on the real game-changers?
How to Choose the Right Tools
When you build your team’s sales stack, consider what each one can accomplish and how their functions complement each other. Keep in mind your company’s needs as well, because no single organization is exactly the same.
You must first build a list of your sales organization’s core needs. Next, make a list of your customers’ needs and see how this aligns with the earlier list. Consider everything from both your company’s and your customer’s perspectives during the sales process, making sure you keep both in mind when evaluating potential tools.
Here are some questions that could be helpful while you make your lists:
What are the different stages of purchase for our customers?
Where does my sales team struggle in their process?
What part of the process usually has positive or negative feedback from clients?
How can I help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of my sales team?
4 Types of Sales Tools You Must Know in 2021
We recommend introducing your company’s sales representatives to the following types of tools:
CRM software
A customer relationship management software, or CRM software, helps companies manage their relationships with customers while staying organized and focused. This is done by tracking existing clients, improving client retention, automating communication, managing sales and marketing, and enhancing company-client relationships.
Because you will eventually have to integrate this software with other platforms and apps as your organization grows, you must be able to pick the right platform that won’t limit you later on.
Sales intelligence and prospecting software
Sales intelligence and processing software helps companies find, track, and comprehend information about the daily business of both existing and prospective clients. More than 40% of salespeople say that the prospecting part of the sales process is the most challenging, which is why prospecting tools are so critical to sales.
This is more than simply acquiring email addresses and phone numbers, and is a much faster process than manual research — if used correctly, you can identify who your potential prospects are and determine the best way to approach them.
Contract lifecycle management software
Compared to prospecting, working with contracts is relatively easy yet potentially tedious. This can be simplified with contract lifecycle management software, or tools that automate adding information to client contracts. This information is saved in one place to avoid misplacing important documents.
This type of software also includes customer e-signatures and can integrate with CRM systems, file sharing solutions, and email clients.
Sales analytics software
Sales analytics software allows sales managers and sales teams to monitor, evaluate, and improve their sales activity performance. The software can find insights and predict trends, providing managers with an understandable sales breakdown that can be reviewed for process improvements.
This is a great improvement from spreadsheet usage to manually figure out analytics.
Conclusion
Sales is one of the most important business functions and can directly affect your organization’s bottom line. Your business will be more profitable if your sales team is more effective, so having the right, high-quality tools for your teams is critical to your success.
Tools like SimpleSell, which conveniently offer free trials as well as quality information over quantity, can reduce challenges and boost efficiency for your sales team. They offer solutions to problems your team might encounter regularly, which allows more time for selling instead of dealing with hurdles.
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