Sales Tools – Choosing the Right Tech for Your Sales Team

Posted on July 7, 2023February 19, 2024 by irc

In our high-tech world, skill, experience, and training will only take you so far – and choosing the best sales tools and technology can be the difference between success and failure. But finding the right sales technology for your needs isn’t easy. After wading through marketing messages, sales demos, and over-hyped user reviews, you still need to find technology that fits your budget, team size, and specific business needs. Just as important, the sales technology you select needs to play well with the other tools in your tech stack – or you risk information silos and communication errors that can bring your team’s momentum to a grinding halt.

You may be wondering if these technological unicorns even exist. Thankfully, we can answer this question with a resounding yes!

The Sales Tech Stack

There are three primary types of sales technology:

CRM — all-around sales management software
Sales prospecting tools — specialized software for engaging leads
Targeting tools — specialized software for finding leads and contact information

At the very least, every sales team needs a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM). Depending on your sales process, you may also need a targeting or sales prospecting tool, or software for scheduling meetings, making cold or follow-up sales calls, and the like.

Using multiple specialized sales management tools doesn’t need to be a hassle or cost a fortune. One tool that does everything is ideal, but it’s not necessary to learn to code or have a large budget to integrate software or use multiple tools. Most sales tools integrate well with other sales technology and you can put together a good sales tool tech stack for under $500/mo.

For example, consider a B2B sales team that needs to find their own qualified leads for high-volume outbound prospecting, and has a long, detailed sales process. A cloud-based CRM like HubSpot can manage the sales process for $50/mo, but it has no targeting capabilities and charges $500/mo to add most prospecting features. Here are their options:

Option 1: HubSpot Sales Professional (sales and prospecting for $500/mo) + LeadFuze (targeting for $135/mo). Total fee = $635 per month.

Option 2: HubSpot Sales Starter (sales for $50/mo) + Reply (prospecting for $70/mo) + LeadFuze (targeting for $135/mo). Total fee = $255 per month.

Option 3: HubSpot Sales Starter (sales for $50/mo) + Growbots (prospecting and targeting for $200/mo). Total fee = $250 per month.

Not only is option #1 the least specialized option (HubSpot has less prospecting capabilities than Reply or Growbots) but it’s also nearly three times the cost of the other, more specialized bundles.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of the sales technology stack, we’ll dive into each of these tools in detail, along with our top recommendations for CRMs, targeting and prospecting platforms, and other sales productivity tools we use and love.

But first, let’s dive into why you need a CRM and how to find the best one for your team.

Sales CRMs

Every sales team needs a CRM tool. Yes, even a sales team of one.

To close deals and succeed in sales, you need to follow clearly defined sales methodologies, you need to be efficient, and (if you have a sales team of more than one) you need to be transparent. A good CRM will help with all of this.

Sales CRMs are designed to manage everything sales-related. They track the entire sales cycle, sales process, prospecting, customer lifecycle, KPIs, commissions, sales performance, sales analytics, website traffic, all customer interactions, customer satisfaction and more. And they alert your team with notifications when key activities occur to keep the workflow moving. CRMs are vital to maximizing customer experience, and they can significantly improve your customer success program.

Sales CRMs also contain sales enablement tools, marketing and sales process automation tools, sales AI tools, and nearly everything else needed for modern sales teams to manage sales efforts and stay competitive. Inevitably you’ll need other tools to level up your sales efforts further, but the CRM is where nearly all sales professionals live throughout the day.

Not only do you need a CRM, but you need a good CRM and to configure it to match your processes. A CRM that’s not a good fit for your business (or just bad software) will cause unnecessary drag on your salespeople – and often does more harm than good.

Sales CRM Categories

CRMs typically fall into one of three categories:

Lite CRMs – software that wasn’t specifically designed as a CRM, but can be adapted to provide basic CRM functionality. Examples of this include Asana, Notion, and Airtable.
Standard CRMs – this category includes the majority of CRMs and typically works best for small to midsize sales teams (100 sales reps or less). Examples include Pipedrive, Copper, and Close.io.
Enterprise CRMs – this is full-sized software for full-sized companies, and most enterprise options end up being unnecessarily complicated and expensive for the average sales team. Salesforce, Zoho, and NetSuite are all examples of enterprise CRMs.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. While most CRMs fit firmly in one category, we’ve found that HubSpot works well for everything from tiny sales teams to full-scale enterprise organizations.

Questions to Answer Before Choosing a CRM

When selecting a CRM there are a few things to carefully consider:

Will it support all aspects of your sales process, or will you need to integrate other software to fully meet your needs?
What is the user interface like? Is it straightforward and easy to navigate, or does it have a steep learning curve?
What features can be automated? What information will need to be entered manually?

CRM Features Every Sales Team Needs

Determining which features are important to you will depend on your sales strategy, marketing activity, and existing tech stack. Some words to be on the lookout for are:

Email Sequences — every sales team needs the ability to send sequenced emails automatically. As we mentioned earlier, some sales prospecting tools do this better than most CRMs (and cost less) but it’s much less hassle when possible in your CRM.

Multichannel Sequences — nearly everyone doing outbound sales prospecting should use multiple channels to connect with leads. This feature includes email sequences and, again, some sales prospecting tools do it better than CRMs (and cost less) but the integration can be a hassle.

Automation — all sales teams should use automation, at least to streamline basic tasks and workflows. This doesn’t need to be done in the first year while your process gets ironed out but you’ll need it eventually. It’s fine to start with lower automation capabilities as long as the next tier(s) will fit your needs as you grow.

Pipeline — sales managers spend most of their time looking through the pipeline and individual deals. When these screens aren’t customizable or intuitive, or don’t mesh well with your team’s process, it’s a pain and sales representatives will use them less. Look for a visual sales pipeline and a streamlined user experience.

Meeting Scheduler — every sales team should make it as easy as possible to schedule a sales call. Finding a sales CRM with this native feature is the easiest way to do it.

Sales Playbooks — sometimes called dynamic call scripts, intuitive call notes, or “blueprints,” playbooks are interactive call scripts that guide sales professionals through calls and organize their notes. This has a massive impact on the quality of sales calls, data reporting, and transparency, but is only valuable if you have written sales processes.

Integrations — all CRMs like to advertise how many automations they have. Native CRM integrations usually work better than 3rd party integrations (like Zapier) but it’s always better to have that capability as a baked-in feature of the CRM.

Popular Sales CRMs:

The most popular sales CRMs are:

HubSpot

Unlimited scalability, with a great user experience regardless of team size

HubSpot is the best all-around sales CRM on the market. It’s the best sales CRM for startups, small businesses, and most large businesses because it strikes a perfect balance between user experience (UX), scalability, and pricing. They’re also releasing new AI sales tools, like a content assistant and operational chatbot built on GPT.

What you need to know about HubSpot:

The only enterprise CRM with great user experience at every level. This combination of scalability and UX is priceless. Competitors like Salesforce and Zoho have similar capabilities but are so ugly and clunky that sales professionals hate using them. HubSpot gives you the strengths of an enterprise CRM that you’ll never grow out of, without jeopardizing buy-in from your team or giving them a steep learning curve. This is important when it comes to adoption and onboarding.
Unlimited efficiency from automations and integrations. HubSpot has every workflow and task automation you’d ever need. Sales Hub, which is also a sales enablement platform, offers enough automation at the Professional tier for most teams and costs a maximum of $500/mo for five users, whereas Sales Hub Starter ($20/mo for two users) is just enough automation for small sales teams or startups.
Affordable lower tiers. HubSpot gets pricey when you add many hubs (especially with many marketing contacts). But these hubs and higher tiers aren’t necessary for small, low-revenue teams. HubSpot’s $20/mo Sales Team Starter tier is loaded with more features than every other similarly priced option on this list.
High quality of training. HubSpot’s training academy is incredible. The courses for learning how to use HubSpot are best in the business, plus they have some of the best online sales training courses we’ve seen. Conversation intelligence also helps sales managers coach their sales reps on recorded calls.

HubSpot’s Pricing:

Sales Hub Starter ($20/mo for two users) is enough to get you started if this is your first CRM, but larger and experienced sales teams will eventually want Sales Hub Professional ($500/mo for five users). The Enterprise tier ($1,200/mo for 10 users) unlocks playbooks, custom objects and reporting, and advanced analytics and automation.

HubSpot only charges for seats that use Sales Hub features. Most admins and non-sales reps will NOT require a paid seat. Non-sales users are free.

Check out our full review of HubSpot Sales CRM here.

Pipedrive

Simple, affordable and easy to use

Pipedrive is the best standard CRM for small sales teams, and the best budget CRM for startups. It doesn’t have the scalability of HubSpot, but it still has an excellent combination of great capabilities and excellent UI/UX.

What you need to know about Pipedrive:

The best value CRM. Pipedrive’s 2nd and 3rd tiers ($28-$50 per user per month) have more capabilities than other CRMs at the same price point. The 3rd tier includes workflow automations, webhooks, custom fields, quotes, e-signatures, email sequences, custom reporting, scheduling, a dialer, and more. The majority of these features are either not included with other CRMs or in the range of $100 per user per month.
Good UI/UX. It’s tough to pack many features into a CRM while maintaining an excellent look and feel. Many people leave CRMs like Salesforce, Zoho, and ActiveCampaign because the UI is too confusing and it’s tough to get reps to buy-in. Pipedrive is visually appealing and easy to get situated without formal training. Each screen strikes an excellent balance, containing lots of data while still being easy on the eyes. While plenty of CRMs suffer from “great data; terrible to look at,” Pipedrive deserves credit for avoiding the fate of Keap and Close, which prioritize great UI at the expense of minimal data.
Limited scalability. Pipedrive has similar features as enterprise CRMs, which may make it seem like you’ll never grow out of it. However, these features in Pipedrive have fewer capabilities and customizations than in premium tiers of HubSpot or Salesforce. This is okay since the cost is 10-20x lower than a premium tier enterprise CRM, but since migrating CRMs is such a big job, scalability is key for growing sales teams. Examples of features that need more depth are reporting, deal customization, and automations.
Some key features require paid add-ons. Many of these features are very basic and really shouldn’t be behind another paywall. For example, it’s an additional $32/mo for a meeting scheduler, live chat, and web forms, which are all included in HubSpot’s completely free tier. Document library, document tracking, proposals and quotes, and e-signatures cost another $32/mo. The list goes on.

Pipedrive’s Pricing:

The Advanced tier ($28 per month per user) is good enough for very basic sales teams. However, most good sales tools are in the Professional tier ($50 per month per user), such as extra deal and field customization, advanced reporting, and more.

See our full review of Pipedrive here.

ActiveCampaign

Email marketing-centric but well-rounded with great marketing automation

If you’re looking for customer relationship management but still need affordable technology for your marketing teams (marketing automation, email automation, etc.) then ActiveCampaign may be perfect. It has solid CRM functionality for the price, and significantly more automation capabilities than non-enterprise sales software on this list. Although we haven’t tested them yet, their new sales & marketing AI and AI lead generation tools seem more like simple workflows than high-powered machine learning and AI sales technology.

What you need to know about ActiveCampaign:

Scalable and efficient. A big reason for this is the wide array of sales and marketing automation options. You get a lot of automation tools even at the lower tiers, and the price to upgrade to Professional or Enterprise tiers is reasonable compared to competitors.
Affordable, especially if you have a lot of marketing contacts. While this is more of a concern for marketing-heavy companies, many CRMs get extremely expensive as you scale to 5k, 10k, 50k, or more contacts. ActiveCampaign’s price remains reasonable as you scale.
User interface isn’t great. The UI is a bit outdated and geared more toward marketing than sales. This is a matter of preference, but many people used to using sales CRMs may not like this interface.
No competitive advantage if not utilizing marketing automation tools. In other words, if you don’t need marketing software then choose a more sales-focused CRM.

ActiveCampaign’s pricing:

You can subscribe only to their marketing features ($49/$149) or sales features ($19/$49) but ActiveCampaign is best when bundled. The Plus bundle ($93/mo for five users) is an excellent, affordable option. The Professional bundle ($386/mo for 10 users) adds AI prospecting and AI lead generation, as well as sales engagement and advanced automation.

Copper

Niche but powerful CRM that lives entirely inside Google Workspace

Copper is the best CRM for people who live inside their Gmail or Google Workspace. At first glance it’s tempting to write it off as a niche Gmail plugin, but Copper is capable of more than most other standard CRMs.

What you need to know about Copper:

Designed for Google Workspace. It’s unmatched in terms of its integration with Gmail and the rest of the Google ecosystem. If you value this more than anything, look no further. Copper is the only sales CRM recommended by Google, and they’re a Google-backed company – they have no real competition here.
Ease of use and easy sales rep buy-in. Copper may be the easiest CRM to get employees to buy into using since everything is a click away from their email inbox.
Scalability is an issue. Copper lacks many of the advanced capabilities you’d find in an enterprise CRM. You can use integrations when necessary for calling, automations, quotes and proposals, etc., but all these integrations add up to being expensive and a hassle.
Gets expensive. Subscriptions are per person (regardless of roles) so a team of a couple sales reps, a manager, and operations rep can cost over $500/mo. At this price it can be tough to justify the lack of scalability and enterprise-level capabilities.

Copper’s Pricing:

The Basic tier ($23/mo) is too limited and doesn’t even include reporting, integrations, or email templates. Most will need the Professional tier ($59/mo) which is also limited. The Business tier ($99/mo) unlocks email sequences, lead scoring, and more.

Close

Great for outbound sales calling, but seriously lacking in reporting and customization

Close is a good CRM if you need one that comes fully equipped for phone calls. It has a good range of CRM features, especially at higher tiers, but some of these features are so severely limited that it’s tough to recommend Close over other similarly priced CRM software and sales tools.

What you need to know about Close:

Very well-equipped for calling. Power dialers are the first step toward consistently making a high volume of sales calls, and Close has this feature natively. This is great since adding an efficient dialer onto most other CRMs is either impossible, expensive, or requires a complex integration. With Close you get this feature right out of the box at $99 per month per user.
Easy to use. This is due to its lack of features and options, but regardless, it sticks to its core activities (namely calling and deal tracking) and does those well without distracting in the process. Centralize your workflow by syncing with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers.
Reporting is extremely limited. You can only view reports or dashboards that report on very basic information, like the number of leads created or calls made. There’s no way to even check conversion rates per pipeline stage or lead source, which is just basic reporting to most other CRMs. Close is aware of this – they have a blog post on their website which is essentially a guest-sponsored ad for a $60-$260 per month integration for advanced reporting.
Very little customization available. Close will look pretty much the same for any teams using it. You’re not able to change the user interface much, and while you can create custom fields and properties to record data, you can’t do much with them. Currently there are no extensions available at the Chrome Web Store.

Close’s Pricing:

Most small sales teams can use their Startup tier ($99/mo for three users), which includes a power dialer. Their Professional tier ($299/mo for three users) and Enterprise tier ($699/mo for the users) aren’t worth the price unless your sales reps need to make thousands of cold calls per day for high-ticket sales.

Keap

Loved by some for payment processing but known for a steep learning curve and bad UX

Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform with solid CRM and payment processing capabilities. It’s more of a one-stop-shop for small business owners or freelancers than a high-powered CRM.

What you need to know about Keap:

Simple and polished UI. This sales software was clearly designed by someone with aesthetics in mind, which may be helpful in getting buy-in from users. However, this simplicity and compact design may be a downside for users looking for a full-suite CRM.
Great automations for the price, and easy to implement. In part due to its simple UI, it’s easy to automate workflows in Keap. There’s a vast number of automations you can use within Keap, and it’s easy to create automations from your sales pipeline. You won’t find more automations than in enterprise CRMs like HubSpot, but it’s easier for users to configure these automations on their own (in part due to their simplicity).
Strong and simple text messaging. Keap has a tab dedicated to text messaging and it’s easy to send quick texts to contacts from their file. Sales teams who rely heavily on texting may find this worth the price of admission.
Limited complexity, customization, and reporting. Companies with complex deals and detailed, data-driven sales processes simply cannot use Keap. In the sales pipeline, only basic properties like deal value, deal contacts, deal stage, and deal status are available. This is fine if you’re selling simple widgets, but teams selling complex products or services need more customization in their sales pipeline, contact, and company screens. You can’t create custom reports or dashboards based on metrics or custom properties you’re interested in.

Keap’s Pricing:

The Pro tier ($149/mo for two users) is likely enough for most users. If you need more e-commerce features like promo codes or marketing analytics tools, get the Max tier at $199/mo for three users.

Salesforce

Every feature imaginable but exhausting to shop for, learn, and use

Salesforce is a multi-faceted CRM with extensive capabilities… at a price. Due to the availability of features, the user interface can feel busy and overwhelming. The learning curve is substantial and implementation often requires (paid) professional assistance.

What you need to know about Salesforce:

Unlimited functionality and scalability. Salesforce is ubiquitous in the sales and software industries. It’s everywhere because it can do everything. It’s designed for large, enterprise companies who want to invest in one super-powered CRM they’ll never grow out of. Salesforce is constantly adding new functionality, improving existing technology, and buying massive companies (e.g., Slack, Tableau) to roll into their offering. This has an absurd effect on the buying experience (detailed below), but if you’re okay with that and its other weaknesses, you will find everything you need in Salesforce.
Terrible user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). Salesforce is far too complex for its own good. You need a certified Salesforce consultant to set it up and extensive training for anyone using it. That’s not to say all enterprise CRMs are simple to use and set up, but if you care about an intuitive and easy-to-use CRM then HubSpot beats Salesforce in nearly every category.
Horrible buying experience. There are 13 different products, each with up to four tiers. Nearly all are designed to rope you into their FIFTY-SIX PAGE list of add-ons. If you want to “sync your email, calendar, and customer data” – a feature that’s included free in every other CRM on this list – Salesforce has an add-on called “Inbox” for an extra $25 per person per month. But on their pricing page for Sales Cloud (which includes sales forecasting), their “Email Integration” feature, which is included in all tiers, is defined as “automatically sync email with CRM data.” And on their Sales Cloud Edition Comparison chart, the Inbox feature is included in the 1st tier (“Essentials”) and the 4th “Unlimited” tier, but is “available for purchase” with the 2nd and 3rd tier.

Salesforce’s Pricing:

See above then buy HubSpot (or anything else) instead.

Zoho One

Affordable with extensive capabilities, but clunky and complicated UI/UX

Zoho One is an affordable all-in-one business solution that includes enterprise CRM, sales marketing, finance, and web features. It contains impressive automation and AI capabilities. However, the learning curve is significant and minimal training materials are available. If you’re going with Zoho, buy the bundled Zoho One instead of Zoho CRM.

What you need to know about Zoho:

Great value. The Zoho Bundle comes packed with 40+ “apps” with a wide array of functionality. It’s annoying that these are bundled as separate apps (discussed below), but Zoho One does pack an immense amount of functionality that’s well beyond every CRM on our list (aside from maybe Salesforce). To name a few: loyalty and affiliate management platform, surveys, e-commerce management, service desk, inventory, payroll, bookkeeping, recruiting, contracts, password manager, and more.
Terrible user interface (UI). Zoho looks terrible and is confusing to navigate. Similar to Salesforce, Zoho is far too complex for its own good. As HubSpot has shown for enterprise CRMs (and Pipedrive on the standard CRM level) it’s possible to display a lot of data without making sales reps’ eyes bleed.
Separating features into 40+ “apps” makes for a bad user experience (UX). Many of these are very basic features included in any other CRM, such as a meeting scheduler, forms, pipeline management, live chat, and a document library. Even the CRM in Zoho is considered an app. While some CRMs may charge extra for certain features, it’s insane to compartmentalize each one. Users need to constantly click to the main menu, find another app, open it, perform a task, click to the main menu, go back to the CRM, etc. Furthermore, since apps are separate modules, it’s often not possible to link tasks between two modules.

Zoho One’s Pricing:

Zoho has 40+ apps, including one Zoho CRM app. If you like Zoho we recommend just buying Zoho One. If you buy Zoho One for all of your employees the price is $37 per user per month. If you only want Zoho One for several employees the cost is $90 per user per month.

See our full review of Zoho One here.

Other CRM Options and Next Steps

Other popular CRM choices decision-makers should consider are Apptivo, Freshworks, Airtable, Notion, and Touchpoint.

Once you’ve settled on your top three choices for CRM, it’s time to look at other parts of your tech stack. If targeting or prospecting are a big part of your sales process, you may want to consider a tool specifically for that task. Most targeting and prospecting tools are designed to work hand-in-hand with your CRM.

Sales Prospecting Tools

Prospecting tools explained:

If you’re reaching out to leads by cold calls or cold emails, you probably need a prospecting tool. This type of sales outreach is necessary for many companies, especially for startup sales with no inbound leads yet, but it must be done efficiently to make it worthwhile.

Higher efficiency leads to more outreach attempts, more leads, and eventually more deals

Some CRMs have a full suite of prospecting features, but if you try to use a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot to match the prospecting power of a tool like Reply or Growbots, you’ll pay far more money with the full-suite CRM than you would with a specialized prospecting tool.

A good sales prospecting tool will:

Automate or semi-automate multichannel outreach through email, LinkedIn, and phone.
Provide better, more affordable outreach capabilities than what’s packaged with a CRM.
Be easy to integrate with CRMs and targeting tools.

How to choose a sales prospecting tool:

First decide which channels are important to you: email, LinkedIn, calling, texting, or a combination of multiple channels. Compare prospecting tools according to these key features:

Multichannel sequences

Along with email automation, this is the most common use for prospecting tools. Every tool we recommend has this built in; it’s just a matter of how they do it.

Email automation

Automatically personalize and send email templates and sequences. This is why most companies need a prospecting tool. Prospecting tools also help with email tracking by monitoring email open rates and clicks in real time. And they help you send automated emails in a way that maximizes deliverability, like with email sending limits. Most prospecting tools have settings for tweaking send habits and frequencies to improve deliverability and avoid spam filters. CRMs weren’t designed for outreach and don’t always have these settings.

LinkedIn semi-automation

Efficiently send LinkedIn connections and messages while prospecting. Email and LinkedIn always increase success when paired together, so this is important for everyone whose target market is on LinkedIn.

This is tough to fully automate since that’s technically against LinkedIn’s terms of service, but some (like Zopto) pull it off. Usually, sending LinkedIn connection requests as part of a multichannel sequence is semi-automated. For example, in Reply to complete “tasks” for each LinkedIn connection, you click a button, which opens a new tab on your browser for that contact’s public LinkedIn page → it automatically clicks the “connection request” button → automatically pastes your pre-written message → automatically clicks send → then you close the tab and repeat for each request. This takes around 10 minutes per day since LinkedIn limits you to around 20 connection requests per day.

Calling automation

You need a native dialer in your prospecting tool if you want to add calling to your multi-channel sequences. Cold calling today is largely dependent on volume – if you’re not doing it efficiently then it’s probably not worth the effort. That said, if cold calling isn’t part of a multichannel sequence with email or LinkedIn, then a VoIP with a power dialer like Aircall is all you need.

Keep an eye out for capabilities such as call recording, click to call/click to dial, and the ability to bring your own VoIP or phone number versus needing to use one provided by the prospecting tool. If you’re required to use theirs then it’s likely a higher monthly fee.

Texting automation

Adding texting to multichannel sequences can be very effective, especially in B2C. But as with calling, it must be efficient to be worthwhile. If you plan on texting leads then make sure to choose a prospecting tool that has native texting and an SMS inbox. Some tools let you bring your own VoIP or phone number versus needing to use one provided by them. As will calling automation, if they require you to use theirs it’s likely a higher monthly fee.

A/B testing

Test multiple different copy options in your emails, LinkedIn messages, and SMS. A/B testing is necessary to figure out which subject lines, introductions, offers, and calls to action bring the best results. The best prospectors and marketers don’t magically write perfect sales messages – they start with a bunch of options then A/B test until they find the best.

Email domain warm-up

As described in the cold email guide, you need to warm up new emails and new email domains prior to sending 50+ sales emails per day. Many prospecting tools have this feature built-in, which is extremely useful for people launching their first automated prospecting campaign. This will take three to four weeks to finish (you won’t need to touch it once it’s set up). Google is requiring many prospecting tools to shut down email domain warm-up features, so if you use Gmail it may be tough to find this feature.

Multichannel inbox

This is a comprehensive inbox for all sales channels, letting you read and respond to messages from email, LinkedIn, SMS, and more all in the same tab. This is only important if you do a lot of messaging across multiple sales cycle prospecting channels. This is fairly common in CRMs.

Best Sales Prospecting Tools

Reply

Reply is a simple prospecting tool for automating email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns, and semi-automating LinkedIn outreach. Reply has a fantastic UI/UX and is easy to learn. Reply can be used as a lead generation tool as well, but its prospecting and outreach experience is unmatched for the price, making it one of our top sales tools overall and our top recommended sales prospecting software.

Features:

Amazing outreach and prospecting abilities
Good lead database for targeting and contact information
Best-in-class UI/UX
Best-in-class LinkedIn semi-automation in multichannel sequences
Texting, A/B testing, email domain warm up, and calling automation

Pricing:

Most users will need the $90/mo Professional tier. A free tier is available for trial and there is a $60/mo tier for email outreach only.

Growbots

Growbots is a basic prospecting tool with a great lead database and targeting capabilities. These are better than other sales tools with both targeting and prospecting, but its outreach and prospecting aren’t as great as what’s possible with Reply. UI/UX is very good and customer support is great.

Features:

Great at finding targeted leads with contact information
Good outreach and prospecting capabilities
Email automation, A/B testing, email domain warm-up
Multichannel sequences with LinkedIn
No texting, multichannel inbox, or calling automation

Pricing:

A $49/mo tier is available for outreach efforts only, but since Growbots shines most as an all-in-one targeting and prospecting tool, we recommend the $199/mo tier.

Apollo

Apollo is a good all-in-one sales technology for lead generation and beyond. Prospecting and lead targeting are both core functions. And while it may not be the best software for either prospecting or targeting, it’s priced well for an all-in-one software and the unlimited email credits at every tier are tough to beat. Apollo is great for managing nearly all sales activities prior to the sales process, and while it’s not a full-fledged CRM, it’s better than most prospecting software in terms of sales intelligence, sales automation, and general sales enablement.

Features:

Great prospecting/targeting combo tool for the price
AI-assisted cold email writing
Click-to-call dialer with call recording and calling automation
Buyer intent feature targets leads who may be searching for your product
No email warm-up, SMS texting, or multichannel inbox

Pricing:

We recommend the $99/mo Professional tier, which includes AI-assisted email writing, buyer intent, and calling automation.

Zopto

Zopto is a LinkedIn automation tool – think of it like an automated version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It provides significantly more LinkedIn automation than other prospecting tools, but it isn’t helpful for email automation or other prospecting channels. You need a paid LinkedIn Sales Navigator account to get the most out of Zopto.

Features:

Fully automated lead targeting and outreach on LinkedIn
Automatically send connection requests to website visitors and form submissions
No email, phone, texting, or other social media prospecting capabilities
Great when using another tool for email marketing campaigns, but tough to coordinate timing perfectly

Pricing:

Pricing is simple and starts at $215/mo. If using Zopto for cold outreach, you’ll also need LinkedIn Sales Navigator for $99/mo.

Some prospecting tools have targeting capabilities which allow them to search for leads and contact info to be used in your prospecting campaigns. If it doesn’t have that capability, you’ll need to input your own lead lists or use a separate targeting tool.

Targeting tools

Targeting tools explained

A targeting (or “lead generation”) tool is software for finding leads and their contact information. You enter the industry and characteristics you want to target, and the tool spits out results. This info is usually pulled from large databases or public information, but methods for sourcing data aren’t always transparent.

Targeting tools:

Find leads based on buyer personas and ICPs (ideal client profiles)
Provide contact data such as email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, collegiate affiliations, interests, and LinkedIn URLs
Provide company data such as revenue, number of employees or locations, years in business, funding acquired, ad spend, staff changes, and technologies used

The targeting software recommended below are specialized tools whose core function is finding leads and their contact information. If you’re also shopping for outreach software, all-in-one platforms like Reply or Growbots may be the right sales tools, especially for startups or small businesses on a budget.

There are targeting tools to fit just about any need. First figure out what features and capabilities you need, then begin your search.

How to choose a lead targeting tool:

The key distinctions and features to look at when choosing a lead generation software for your sales team are below.

Pricing

Naturally, pricing is important. Targeting tools typically charge a monthly (or annual) fee in exchange for a number of leads per month (or year). Top tiers may have some extra features, but the biggest distinction is always with the number of leads you receive per month. Note that some software (e.g., Hunter, RocketReach) charges per search instead of per lead, so don’t compare these figures head to head with price per lead in other tools (e.g., LeadFuze, Dealfront).

Data Quality

Data quality is tough to determine without testing. Sign up for a trial or entry-level account or try this: come up with a list of 10 companies in your target market, preferably ones you’re familiar with (e.g., current customers) and can verify. Email the targeting tools you’re considering and ask them for contact information within those accounts. If they have no data on these companies they’ll deflect your answer. If they have data, they’ll tell you.

Bulk Enrich

You need this feature to enrich existing lead lists with contact information. For example, if you have a spreadsheet with company and contact names but need contact email addresses or phone numbers. All targeting software on our list has this feature.

Search by Technologies Used

This feature analyzes target company domains to see which technologies are in use. This is huge if you sell products or services that work (or don’t work) with certain technologies. For example, if you work exclusively in WordPress this feature will target companies using WordPress, ensuring you don’t waste costly lead credits on those with Wix, Squarespace, etc.

Search by Buyer Intent

This feature (in theory) lets you know when companies in your target demographic are searching for services like yours. Typically this data is acquired from 3rd party sites that detect a spike in one company’s domain researching the same solution. We’ll have a higher opinion of this feature once the accuracy is proven to be better.

Organizational Charts

This feature tells you who reports to whom within your target organization. Similar to buyer intent, this is a feature that sounds great in theory but rarely lives up to the hype.

Once you’ve determined which features make the best sales tool for targeting in your industry and what customer data or lead data is important to you, it’s time to take a closer look at our recommended tools.

After a lot of trial and error, we’ve come up with a short list of options we’d recommend.

Popular targeting tools

LeadFuze

LeadFuze is an easy-to-use targeting tool specifically for outbound sales, marketing, and recruiting teams. It has excellent data quality and data volume for a reasonable price. We really like the AI-based feature that continuously matches and verifies new emails, numbers, and socials.

Features:

Hundreds of filters to fine-tune searches
Add contact info to existing lead lists through upload
Search for companies based on technologies used on their domain
AI feature constantly searches for new leads according to your saved searches
No buyer intent or inbound features like tracking web visitors

PRICING:

The first tier ($147/mo) is enough for around 25 emails per business day. Contact their sales department to increase leads per month or upgrade to their unlimited tier for $397/mo. Unlimited leads requires an annual subscription.

Dealfront

Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) is a robust option that generates cold leads for outbound sales plus inbound leads and ads. Their price per lead isn’t cheap, but the lead quality in our testing was excellent. Fully loaded Dealfront will cost more than other tools on our list, but it’s far stronger than most. We recommend Dealfront over ZoomInfo as the top premium lead gen tool.

Features:

Excellent data quality when finding outbound leads
Identify inbound leads and gather sales intelligence from website traffic
Retarget website visitors with ads and account based marketing (ABM)
Bulk enrichment of existing lead lists, search by buyer intent
AI-based targeting and deeper company profiles in the Pro tier

PRICING:

The base plan costs $199/mo for 208 credits per month. Credits are used for targeting outbound leads or tracking inbound web visitors. For more leads, upgrade to Pro ($999/mo for 1,250 credits per month) or buy lead credits in bulk (e.g., 1,200 credits for $999).

Hunter

Hunter is a decent budget option for finding lead contact information. They boast a database of over 100 million email addresses, but the data quality can be dubious and many are guesses (e.g., “firstname.lastname@domain.com”) rather than verified contacts.

Features:

Upload CSVs to bulk-enrich existing lead lists with new email addresses
Search for companies based on technologies used on their domain
Email outreach capabilities included in paid tiers

PRICING:

Pricing is based on searches and verifications, not leads provided. Users need one credit to search and another credit to confirm the information is correct (and the result may still be partial confidence). For this reason, the Starter tier ($49/mo for 500 searches) isn’t enough to send 25 emails per day. Most users will need the Growth tier ($149/mo for 5,000 searches).

RocketReach

RocketReach is fairly expensive and has a bit of a learning curve, but it has much better data quality and functionality than most targeting tools on the market. It’s a great choice if you need high-quality lead data without a ton of volume, since it gets expensive beyond 200 leads per month.

Features:

Massive database with over 700 million profiles
Bulk-enrich existing lead lists (Pro tier) and CRM leads (Ultimate tier)
Search based on technologies used
Organizational charts and company trends (Ultimate tier)

PRICING:

Similar to Hunter, RocketReach is pay per search. You may need multiple searches to find one lead. Their entry tier ($80/mo for 80 searches) is email-only and very limited in volume. Most users need their Pro tier ($150/mo for 200 searches) or Ultimate tier ($300/mo for 500 searches). Annual plans provide a 50% discount on these prices, but we recommend testing data first while on a monthly plan.

Other sales technology

The following tools aren’t sales-specific, but we’re including them here because they are an essential part of a streamlined and transparent sales engagement process.

VoIP

Every sales team needs a dedicated phone system for their sales reps. Even if you have the most dedicated reps, cell phones are just too distracting and lack the transparency and recording capabilities of a good VoIP.

There are a ton of VoIP platforms to choose from, but here are three:

Aircall — industry leader with power dialer and advanced call center options. Integrates extremely well with any major CRM software.

Kixie — another high-powered VoIP platform with a power dialer, voicemail drop, and automated SMS. Integrates well with popular CRMs.

JustCall — budget-friendly option with a power dialer and nearly every capability Aircall has, except for a few enterprise-focused call center options. Integrates well with most major CRMs.

If using HubSpot or need multiple phone numbers, we recommend Aircall due to the excellent integration and overall ease of use. If you only need one phone number then we recommend JustCall since it’s more affordable, especially with fewer than three phone numbers.

Conversation Intelligence

A step above call transcripts and recordings, call intelligence gives you real time data you can use while you’re on the call (and after) to highlight key points, questions, and action items. Gong is a well-known call intelligence option, however, it can cost thousands per month, making it out of reach for many startups and small businesses. Fortunately, there are several more affordable options. While they’re not quite as full-featured as Gong, these platforms meet our minimum requirements for conversation intelligence software:

Automatically record calls on Zoom and Google Meet by joining the meeting as an attendee.
Transcribe sales calls using GPT to make the transcriptions much more accurate than anything pre-AI.
Automatically save meetings with timestamps for takeaways, topics, or questions covered in the call. Click on what you’re interested in and it plays that portion of the call.

We’ve tested several affordable conversation intelligence solutions, and have narrowed it down to two that we’d recommend:

Read.ai — Seems like it was designed for larger teams, or for sales managers reviewing rep performance en masse. Scores meeting performance and participation. Gives feedback on attendee engagement, talking pace, interruptions, non-inclusive terms, bias and more. For each meeting it documents: summary, chapters & topics, action items, and key questions. Recording can be glitchy.

Tl:dv — Simpler approach than Read.ai: meeting reports contain “takeaways” throughout the call. AI does a good job of recommending these, plus they place a button in your meeting client so you can manually set markers with one click during a call. Great for when you know in real-time that something is important. There are integrations for automatically logging calls and highlights in HubSpot, Salesforce or Slack, and you can easily create clips of takeaways or other key moments and share them.

Proposals, Contracts, and eSign

The tools in this category perform two or all three of these functions:

Proposals — present statements of work, pricing, and more to potential customers who haven’t yet entered the sales funnel
Contracts — upload full-length contracts for customers to enter their information into custom fields and create legally binding agreements
Clickwrap — lets users check a box to accept agreements, which is legally binding but not a full-service, robust contract manager like above

While there are a lot of options to choose from, these are some of the best options for small to midsize teams:

PandaDoc — full-service tool with proposals, contracts, clickwrap, and more. Easy to use drag-and-drop editor where proposals are fairly customizable, look good (not great), and the price is reasonable, starting around $25/mo.

Proposify — full-service tool with proposals, contracts, clickwrap, and more. Drag-and-drop editor allows for immense customization, but it’s clunky and buggy, and proposals look far from beautiful. Price is reasonable but starts at $50/mo, which is double the cost of Pandadoc.

Qwilr — only for proposals and clickwrap agreements. Users with zero design background can easily create beautiful proposals. Customization is lacking but the price is reasonable at $35/mo.

If you want the most complete all-around tool, go with PandaDoc. We’ve tried all three at IRC and this is the one we prefer (and still use).

Content Creation Tools

Targeting lead sources with carefully crafted content is an important avenue for attracting inbound sales leads. For example, creating more impactful blog content or videos for YouTube can equal higher conversions for landing pages, product pages, and other money pages you want to drive traffic to.

A user-friendly YouTube shorts video editor can lower the barriers to creating professional videos, and a generative AI tool for writing web and blog copy, can help more leads discover your content. These aren’t simply marketing tools, but powerful lead generation tools for advertisers.

Internal Processes and Communication

Some of the biggest challenges to being a sales rep have nothing to do with sales. Internal communication about products, processes, and expectations can make or break your team. Fortunately, there are a wide range of platforms that make it easier than ever to bridge this gap.

Here are several that we regularly use and recommend:

Clockify – This time-tracking app is simple, reliable, and has great reporting capabilities. You can also use it for scheduling and time-off requests.

1Password – This password manager is similar to LastPass but we think it’s easier to use. Along with upgrading your security, password managers will make you better prepared when sales reps leave or are terminated.

Slack – Slack brings internal and external teams together across locations, time zones, and working styles, instead of confining work to email’s siloed communication. We also love that all content in Slack channels is searchable, so it’s easy to find past conversations or get new team members up to speed.

Notion – Notion is the connected workspace where better, faster work happens. We use Notion to host our sales manual, SOPs, and working documents. It’s great for creating wikis, project trackers, and complex databases.

Scribe – Scribe allows you to turn any process into a step-by-step guide, instantly. It’s the easiest way to communicate processes and SOPs with ease.

Loom – Rather than taking the effort to document your progress in writing, simply hit the record button and update your team members with async video.This platform is also great for back-and-forth communication when email or Slack just won’t cut it.

Asana – Asana is the #1 software in product and project management. It works well for small teams and scales easily as you grow. Our favorite part about Asana? It makes communication and transparency about projects and tasks simple and searchable. Plus its Zoom integration allows video conferencing.

In today’s fast-paced business world, selecting the right sales technology can be the difference between failure and success. When choosing tech for your sales team look for tools that are high-quality, easy to use, and integrate well with other platforms. The goal is to create efficient, transparent processes that allow your team to spend less time on non-sales tasks and more time actually selling. Making the right choices in sales technology can provide the competitive edge needed to thrive in today’s highly competitive market.

How to Boost Your Sales on LinkedIn in 2023

Posted on May 30, 2023November 1, 2023 by irc

With over 900 million members worldwide, LinkedIn has become the go-to platform for professionals looking to network and connect with others in their industry. But did you know that it’s also a powerful tool for businesses looking to boost their sales?

That’s right! LinkedIn can help you reach potential customers, build relationships, and ultimately increase revenue.

Let’s go over six cutting-edge strategies to help you unlock the full potential of LinkedIn and take your sales skills to the next level in 2023.

1. Make your profile shine

In the world of business, first impressions matter, and your LinkedIn profile is no exception. Since your LinkedIn profile is frequently the initial interaction between you and prospective customers, optimizing it to leave a lasting impression is crucial.

To optimize your profile, start by ensuring that it’s complete. That means filling out every section, including your education, work experience, and skills. Make sure to include your current job title and a clear and concise headline that accurately reflects your area of expertise. This will help potential customers quickly understand what you do and whether you’re the right fit for their needs.

Next, it’s essential to use a professional photo. Choose a high-quality headshot that portrays you in a positive and professional light. Avoid using photos that are blurry, low-quality, or inappropriate. Remember, your photo is one of the first things people will see when they view your profile, so make it count.

Another key component of optimizing your LinkedIn profile is to write a compelling summary that highlights your unique selling proposition. This is where you can showcase your skills and experience, as well as your passion for your industry. Use your summary to demonstrate your expertise and explain how you can help potential customers achieve their goals.

Lastly, use relevant keywords in your profile to make it easier for people to find you. Think about the terms your potential customers might search for when looking for businesses like yours, and include those keywords in your profile. This will help your profile appear in search results and increase your visibility on the platform.

2. Smartly cast your net(work)

Connecting with your target audience is crucial to building meaningful relationships on LinkedIn — and you can’t make sales without establishing relationships first.

The first step is to use LinkedIn’s search feature to find potential customers who fit your ideal customer profile. This can include people in your industry, companies you want to do business with, or individuals with whom you share common interests.

When sending a connection request, it’s important to include a personalized message that explains why you want to connect. Avoid using generic messages, as they are less likely to be accepted. Instead, take the time to research the person you want to connect with and personalize your message accordingly to show that you are genuinely interested in connecting with them and increase the likelihood of them accepting your request.

Once you’ve connected with your target audience, it’s essential to engage with connections regularly. Comment on their posts and share valuable content that they will find interesting and relevant to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and build trust with your connections.

However, it’s important to remember that quantity doesn’t always equate to quality when it comes to LinkedIn connections. It’s important to manage LinkedIn connections carefully and keep your network relevant. You should regularly review your connections and remove those who are no longer relevant or active on the platform. That way, you can ensure that your network is focused on your target audience and increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts.

3. Ignite engagement with valuable content

Sharing valuable content on your LinkedIn profile is a great way to establish yourself as an industry expert, build trust with your connections, and ultimately boost your sales. When sharing content, it’s important to make sure that it is valuable and relevant to your target audience.

One effective way to share valuable content is to create and share your own blog posts, articles, and videos. These types of content allow you to showcase your expertise and share insights on relevant topics in your industry.

Another way to share valuable content is to curate content from other sources. Share articles, blog posts, and videos from reputable sources that are relevant to your target audience. When sharing content from other sources, be sure to add your own commentary or perspective to the post, which can help establish your own expertise and point of view.

4. Utilize the power of LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups is a powerful tool for businesses looking to build relationships with potential customers and establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Joining relevant groups helps you connect with others who share your interests and engage in meaningful conversations that can help you grow your business.

To utilize LinkedIn Groups effectively, first search for groups that are relevant to your industry or niche. You can do this by using LinkedIn’s search feature and filtering the results by group. Once you’ve found a group that looks interesting, join it and start participating in conversations.

Engage in conversations by commenting on posts, sharing your opinions, and asking questions. Engaging with posts in LinkedIn Groups will help you build relationships with other group members and demonstrate your expertise in your field. Additionally, sharing valuable content, such as articles or infographics, can help establish you as an industry expert and attract potential customers to your profile.

5. Add more value with LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads are a great way to reach your target audience on the platform. With LinkedIn Ads, you can target your ads to specific industries, job titles, and locations, making it easier to reach the right people. This targeted approach can help you save time and money on your advertising efforts and increase the effectiveness of your sales strategy.

When creating LinkedIn Ads, it’s important to use compelling ad copy and visuals that grab your audience’s attention. Your ad copy should be clear and concise, and highlight the benefits of your product or service. Additionally, your visuals should be eye-catching and relevant to your ad’s message. By doing so, you can increase the likelihood of your target audience engaging with your ads and ultimately converting into customers.

Finally, it’s important to set a budget for your LinkedIn Ads and monitor your spending carefully. This will help you ensure that your advertising efforts are cost-effective and align with your overall sales strategy.

6. Don’t forget to measure

Measuring your results is an essential part of any successful LinkedIn sales strategy. Tracking your engagement and reach allows you to determine what works and what doesn’t, and adjust your approach accordingly.

LinkedIn’s analytics tools provide valuable insights into your profile’s performance, allowing you to track your engagement and reach over time. These tools enable you to see how many people are viewing your profile, engaging with your content, and clicking on your links. When you monitor these metrics, you can identify which content performs well and adjust your strategy accordingly.

It’s also essential to track your conversion rates, which can give you insight into how effective your sales strategy is. This means tracking how many of your LinkedIn connections convert into customers and analyzing what factors may be influencing this conversion rate.

In addition to tracking your analytics, it’s also essential to pay attention to feedback from your connections and customers. Customer feedback will help you identify pain points, concerns, and opportunities for improvement in your sales strategy.

Wrapping up

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to boost their sales in 2023. By optimizing your profile, connecting with your target audience, sharing valuable content, utilizing LinkedIn Groups, using LinkedIn Ads, and measuring your results, you can build relationships with potential customers and increase revenue.

With these six tips, you can make the most of LinkedIn in 2023.

Predictable Revenue — How to Create a Successful Sales System

Posted on January 19, 2022July 21, 2023 by irc

Order your copy: Amazon, Bookshop, Audible

Need a Quick Overview of Predictable Revenue?

In the outline below, you’ll find highlights on:

The difference between different types of leads (and why it matters)
What to do instead of cold calling
Prospecting best practices
Sales best practices
The Predictable Revenue 3 Hour and 15 Minute Sales Process
How to increase call effectiveness without call scripts
How to create your own sales machine
Why specialization always wins
How to cultivate team talent
How to create alignment within your sales and leadership teams

Whether you don’t have time to read the book, or just need a quick refresher, this predictable revenue summary covers the key concepts you need to know to create your own successful sales system.

Know the Difference Between Seeds, Nets, and Spears

Before attempting to build your own sales machine capable of generating predictable revenue, it’s important to understand the different types of leads coming into your business. Leads fall into three categories: Seeds, Nets, and Spears.

Seeds are the most profitable type of lead, but they require a long-term approach and commitment. Seeds are created by developing happy customers and user groups, publishing helpful content online and on social media, boosting organic internet searches, and optimizing for SEO. All of these elements take time to cultivate, but once they’re in place you’ll enjoy a steady stream of word-of-mouth referrals and positive PR.

Nets generate leads through a one-size-fits-all, cast-it-out-and-see-what-you-catch approach. This style of lead generation is typically used by traditional marketing, including email campaigns, pay-per-click advertising, traditional advertising, and conferences. Nets can generate leads faster, but they still take time and don’t always generate predictable results.

Spears involve highly targeted outbound efforts, and a dedicated amount of human effort and interaction. Because of their time-intensive approach, it’s important to clearly define exactly what makes a lead a good fit. Otherwise, you may waste significant time “hunting” leads that won’t benefit from your offering after all.

The Better Alternative to Traditional Cold Calling

Traditional cold calling techniques involved dialing your way through poorly targeted lists, essentially rolling the dice over and over hoping to increase your odds of finding a good fit. Cold Calling 2.0 improves this process by leveraging technology to create highly targeted lists, using multichannel outreach to create a connection, and cultivating warm leads before you ever pick up the phone.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT COLD CALLING 2.0

Create Highly Targeted Prospect Lists. Using Ideal Customer Profiles, define the qualities and characteristics that make up the top 5-10% of your customer base, meaning the ones who are most likely to purchase at the highest revenue. Then create highly targeted lists of prospects whose companies match the qualities in your Ideal Customer Profile.

Overcome the Biggest Obstacle to Prospecting

The biggest obstacle in prospecting isn’t getting to the decision maker, it’s figuring out who they are in the first place. To overcome this, call low in the company to get information, and email high in the company to ask for a referral to the best person to contact. A referral from above will open the doors to the right person, who is often already expecting your call.

Run Highly Effective Outbound Email Campaigns

Instead of sending mass emails hundreds at a time, have each rep send 50-100 emails per day, a few days each week, to the prospects on your highly targeted list. The goal of these rolling campaigns is to generate 5-10 new responses per day, enough for a rep to handle without dropping the ball.

Emails should be:

Text based (not fancy HTML)
Brief and easily readable on a mobile device
Simple, friendly, and to the point
Ask just one easy to answer question

In short, create an email that looks like a quick note from a friend, not a lengthy sales pitch.

Sell the Dream, Not the Solution

Selling the dream, in this case, means to help the prospect create a vision of a dream solution for whatever problem or challenge they are facing, and then to connect your product or service to their key business issues as part of their dream solution.

Ask open-ended questions about your prospect’s business and challenges. Avoid becoming too eager until you’re certain there’s a mutual fit. Until then, your biggest challenge is to stay focused on the prospect’s business and not your own product or service.

Cold Calling 2.0 is best for:

Companies who can have at least one person fully dedicated to prospecting, and:
A sales automation system/CRM
Prospects who use email
A proven product or service that has generated revenue
Customer lifetime values of $10,000 or more

Will Cold Calling 2.0 work for companies with lower customer lifetime values or those without a dedicated prospecting team? It will, but it may not be as profitable as it will be for companies who are a better fit.

COLD CALLING 2.0 STEPS

Clarify Your Ideal Customer Profile

Define three to five key criteria that define your ideal customer, any red flags to watch out for, the type of ideal contact within that organization, and their core challenges.

Build Your Prospect List

You can DIY lead generation, but it’s better to use a hyper-targeted list creator like LeadFuze and other lead gen platforms to quickly generate lists that match your ideal customer profile.

Run Outbound Email Campaigns

Send 50-100 targeted mass emails a day. Use these emails to generate referrals to the right person in the company, then follow up on the referrals and responses with phone calls. Emails should be plain text, to the point, and ask just one simple question (for a referral).

Sell the Dream

The goal of selling the dream is not to “sell” them on your product or service. Instead, you want to help your prospect visualize a dream solution that will solve their problem, and then help them to connect your product to their issue as part of the solution.

Pass the Baton

Establish what exactly makes a lead qualified, then create and use a clearly defined process to hand off to the Account Executive who will then re-qualify and (ideally) close the prospect.

Ultimately, Cold Calling 2.0 is successful when sales reps use these systems consistently and focus their attention on actions that generate results.

Prospecting Best Practices

Intentionally design your day for success. To maintain enthusiasm, make sure to take a break every 90 minutes, take a full lunch break, and commit to stopping work at a set time every day.

Use these tactics to avoid common prospecting mistakes:

Make sure your expectations are realistic. Even short sales cycles can take upwards of two to four weeks.
Keep your emails bite-sized and honest, and only ask one question per message. Writing long, overly detailed emails, and/or using gimmicky sales tactics will only hurt you in the long run.
Send emails before 9am and after 5pm, and avoid sending on Fridays and Mondays.
Go deep instead of wide. Consistent effort with targeted accounts is going to be the best use of your time.
Don’t give up too quickly on targets that are a good fit.
Don’t linger too long with non-ideal targets that aren’t a good fit.
Make sure you’re tracking the right metrics. Don’t just throw activity at a goal; measure actions that are proven to get results.
Call low to learn about the company.
Email high to get referred down to the right person.
Remember you’re a non-threatening researcher, not an insensitive, pushy salesperson.

Carve out time each week for activities that are important but not urgent. Like eating right and exercising, if you don’t make time for something it won’t happen. Don’t fall into the trap of being so busy that you don’t get anything done.

Sales Best Practices

Sales used to be all about promotion, and involved controlling and manipulating prospects just to get a sale. The actual product didn’t matter. But the advent of the internet changed sales forever, putting power in the hands of the buyers.

Great companies and salespeople have recognized this change and switched to using attraction instead. Instead of pushing people toward a sale, attraction is a much gentler and respectful process that is focused on adding real value to the prospect before, during, and long after the sale. This creates long-term relationships, referrals, and goodwill and trust toward you and your company as a whole.

Instead of obsessing about closing, become passionate about helping your customers succeed. Selling with your prospects’ success in mind will help you pull them through a buying journey rather than push them through a sales cycle.

You’ll also want to focus on the decision-making process, rather than putting too much emphasis on the decision maker.

You can do this by asking questions like:

How have you evaluated similar products or services?
Who is involved in making this decision?
What are the most important factors in the purchase decision?

Don’t hold back on building a relationship with the decision maker, just keep your questions focused on learning the process and gathering information rather than instantly closing the deal.

The Predictable Revenue 3 Hour and 15 Minute Sales Process

The Predictable Revenue 3 Hour and 15 Minute Sales Process is based on answering three simple questions to determine fit and the prospect’s willingness and ability to move forward.

In a nutshell, the process looks like this:

STEP ONE: (15 MINUTES)

Connect with the prospect in a quick, 15 minute call. This is the time to ask targeted questions that will answer the question “Is this a waste of time?” If the answer is no, move on to Step Two.

STEP TWO: (ONE HOUR)

Schedule a one hour discovery call with one or two of the prospect’s point people. The purpose of this call is to determine “Is there a fit?” If the answer is no, the process stops here. If the answer is yes, move on.

STEP THREE: (TWO HOURS)

Set up an in-depth, two hour working session to answer the question “Should we work together?” Work together with the client to create a clearly defined and compelling vision that will pull them forward through the buying journey.

The 3 Hour and 15 Minute Sales Process is effective, because by eliminating poor fit prospects at the beginning of the sales process, you’ll be saving time for the prospects most likely to buy overall.

How to Increase Call Effectiveness Without Scripts

Call Scripts have been the gold standard for cold calling, and they have their place, but people are becoming increasingly attuned to canned questions. To address this, use call planning and call flows to increase the effectiveness of your calls without using call scripts.

CALL PLANNING

Consider using the AAA Call Planning technique. This involves making a quick list prior to a call that defines the answers you want to learn, the attitudes you want your prospects to feel, and the desired actions that should occur after the call.

CALL FLOWS

Ideally, you should take a research based approach with prospects, using the first half of the call to learn about their business and needs, and the second half of the call to position your service and value specifically as it relates to their business challenges and needs.

HOW TO LEAVE VOICEMAILS THAT GET RESULTS

Avoid being overly businesslike when leaving voicemail messages. Be warm and sincere, like you would talk to a family member or friend. Speak slowly and clearly, state your full name and phone number at the beginning and end of the message, and give them a clear and compelling reason to return your call. Voicemail is particularly effective when used in combination with email.

How to Create Your Own Sales Machine

A sales machine that generates consistent, predictable revenue involves three key parts: predictable lead generation, a specialized sales development team, and consistent sales systems (because without consistency, predictability is impossible).

9 BUILDING BLOCKS FOR CREATING YOUR OWN SALES MACHINE

Patience. Creating predictable revenue can take a year or more. Keeping this in mind will help you avoid the temptation to throw in the towel before you experience measurable results.
Experimentation. While there are many solid principles you can use to improve your sales results, the reality is that your business is unique. The best way to overcome this is to experiment, use A/B testing, and try different methods evenly across your prospect list and then measure the results.
Prioritize repeatable projects. One-off projects can be tempting, but repeatable processes are where you’ll find predictable results.
Use a CRM. Create a company-wide standard that if it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t count. Spreadsheets just don’t cut it when it comes to the automation and reporting capabilities of even the most basic full-featured CRM.
Visualize your process. If your sales process has too many steps to be sketched out on a piece of paper or whiteboard, it’s just too complicated. Simplify your process to three to seven high-level steps that answer the following questions: What is the desired outcome? What does the process have to look like to lead to this outcome? How are we already using the process today?
Focus on results. Tracking activity feels good, but activity alone won’t get you where you need to go. Instead, focus on tracking the right activities that directly lead to your desired results.
Track the right metrics. Avoid the temptation to over-build results and dashboards, as this makes it difficult to focus on what really matters. Work with your team to prioritize the metrics that will lead to measurable results.
Pay attention to the handoffs. Problems or issues in the sales process pop up most often in the transitions between teams, so pay attention to the passing of batons within your sales process. Evaluate and redesign how these handoffs occur to minimize friction and reduce the chance of issues and balls being dropped.
Prioritize small improvements. While it’s tempting to make sweeping changes, it’s baby steps taken over time that add up to the biggest results.

Remember, creating a predictable revenue sales machine takes time. Keep your expectations realistic, and give your company the room it needs to grow.

THE MOST IMPORTANT METRICS TO TRACK EACH MONTH FOR EFFECTIVE LEAD GENERATION AND SALES DEVELOPMENT

Number of new leads created
Number of qualified sales opportunities created
Total dollar amount of new qualified pipeline generated
Conversion rate percentage of leads to qualified opportunities
Total business or revenue, split into new business, add-on business, and renewals
Win rates

Tracking the right metrics will give you the data you need to adjust systems and processes over time, fine-tuning them for long-term success.

Specialization Always Wins

Specialization is key to creating predictable revenue within your company. While it might be tempting to lump lead generation, qualification, prospecting, closing, and account management into one general “sales” role, this blending of responsibilities is a huge productivity killer.

When you generalize sales responsibilities, you also run the risk of:

Distracted and disorganized sales reps who are spending their time on low-value tasks
Less opportunity to grow and develop talent
Unclear reporting and messy metrics
Lowered visibility into problems and their solutions

Specialization allows each member of the team to do their job with laser sharp focus and less task switching, improving their efficiency and effectiveness.

FOUR CORE SALES FUNCTIONS

There are four core sales functions in any sales team:

Inbound lead qualifications: Qualifying leads from inbound web and phone leads.
Outbound prospecting: Dedicated to proactive business development through developing lists of prospects into highly targeted leads.
Account executives: Quota-carrying reps who close deals.
Account management/Customer success: Dedicated to making sure customers stay successful after the sale.

In many companies, this division of responsibilities includes a Market Response Representative who qualifies inbound leads, a Sales Development Representative (or Business Development Representative) who is responsible for prospecting and qualifying targeted leads, an Account Executive who works the active sales cycle and closes leads, and a Customer Services Representative or Account Manager who nurtures customer relationships after the sale.

As your company grows, these core functions will likely become even more specialized, but they shouldn’t ever become less specialized. If you need to have one person take on more than one sales function, ensure that they’re batching responsibilities and setting aside dedicated time to work each “role.”

WHEN AND WHERE AN ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE SHOULD PROSPECT

It’s important to focus your highest value people on the highest value work. That’s why Account Executives should focus primarily on closing. When they do prospect, it’s best to focus on existing customers and a short, targeted list of vital accounts and channel partners.

When accepting leads from the qualifying team, the Account Executive should re-qualify the lead through a demo or discovery call before accepting it into their own pipeline.

THREE TYPES OF SALES PROFESSIONALS: QUALIFIERS, CLOSERS, AND FARMERS

The four core sales functions can be further divided into three types of sales professionals: Qualifiers, Closers, and Farmers.

As the name suggests, Qualifiers (like the Market Response and Sales Development Representatives listed above) are responsible for qualifying leads early in the sales process.

Closers (Account Executives) take these qualified leads through the active sales cycle, focusing their efforts on nurturing and closing deals. In general, a Sales Development Representative can support two to five quota-carrying Account Executives. In higher-value sales, a 2:1 or even 1:1 ratio of Sales Development Reps to Account Executives can still be VERY profitable.

While often overlooked, Farmers (Account Managers and Customer Service Reps) are also an essential part of the sales process. Ensuring customer success and satisfaction is crucial to creating happy customers who then generate referrals, renewals, and repeat business.

Cultivating Sales Team Talent

Great sales teams don’t happen automatically. Finding great salespeople is one thing, but keeping them engaged and productive is even more challenging. Focus on creating a great company culture that empowers your employees to learn and grow step by step.

HOW TO FIND AND HIRE GREAT SALES TALENT

It can be really challenging to find great sales talent, so often the best course of action is to grow them yourself. Your team should be made up of one part experienced veterans, and three parts young, smart, and adaptable new hires. The best salespeople are the ones who have grown up in your company culture and know your product, prospects, and priorities from the inside out.

Hire people who:

Are problem-solvers
Listen more than they talk
Know how to get things done
Understand the challenges and needs of customers in your industry
Believe in your product and company
Demonstrate personal and professional integrity

As you build your sales teams, be intentional about creating a defined career path so that each member of your team has space and incentive to develop personally and professionally. This will create happy employees, which will result in happy customers and more predictable revenue.

HOW TO KEEP YOUR SALES TEAM IN TOP SHAPE

Invest in your people, especially new hires, with consistent and cohesive training and coaching. For any program to work, your management team needs to be fully committed to consistency and follow through. If your management isn’t committed, your sales team won’t be committed either.

Effective sales training should include:

New hire training, including a sales boot camp
Internal training embedded into the career path
Regular role-playing
Self-managed internal training with leadership rotating through each member of your sales team

Implementing regular, consistent training with your sales team is one of the best ways to guarantee long-term success.

Create Sales Team Alignment with Leadership & Management

One of the most common issues for sales teams is misalignment. This can be corrected by careful hiring, training, and ongoing coaching and review.

BECOME A GREAT MANAGER

Hire carefully. Hire for talent and adaptability rather than experience.
Set expectations. Define roles based on desired results, not activities.
Remove obstacles. Prioritize simplicity and clarity to improve productivity.
Inspire your team. Understand what helps each member of your team find their own reasons to excel and achieve their full potential.
Create room for growth. Work for your team by treating mistakes as learning and coaching opportunities, and by being intentional in creating room for career growth.
Review and improve. Make a point to regularly review the previous five steps to look for ways you can improve and change as your company grows.

Being intentional about creating alignment within your sales teams will lead to improved productivity and predictable results.

UNDERSTAND WHAT IT TAKES TO SHIFT FROM ORGANIC TO PROACTIVE GROWTH

While organic growth is based on existing relationships and organic internet marketing, proactive growth involves investing time and resources into new systems, programs, and practices. It takes time, both from trial and error and from the delays and frustrations caused by learning and doing new things.

Understand that shifting from organic to proactive growth is an essential part of creating predictable revenue, but it’s also a process – it’s going to take time, energy, and discomfort. In order to be successful, you need to stay committed, persistent, and patient as you go through the hot coals of transition, whether it takes months or even years.

Predictable Revenue Summary

Creating your own predictable revenue sales machine starts with defining specialized roles and responsibilities within your sales team. Using prospecting and sales best practices, you’ll determine your ideal customer profile and use this to create highly targeted prospect lists. Your dedicated prospecting team of Sales Development Reps will reach out to these prospects using a combination of mass email campaigns using short, friendly emails, and phone outreach using call plans, call flows, and voicemails that get results.

Once leads have been qualified by the prospecting team, they’ll be transferred to an Account Executive whose time is dedicated to nurturing and closing high-value accounts. Eventually, your Account Manager/Customer Service Team will continue to farm these accounts, cultivating happy customers who then generate return and renewal business, along with referrals, reviews, and positive PR.

To ensure your employees are engaged and equipped, you’ll prioritize frequent and consistent training, with clearly defined career paths and room for growth. As you add new members to your sales team, you’ll look for talented and adaptable individuals who are hungry to learn and tackle new challenges. As your sales team grows, you’ll always look for ways to specialize to reduce distractions and optimize your reps’ productivity and performance.

Conclusion

While we’ve packed as much information as possible into this overview of predictable revenue, we’ve only scratched the surface of the book as a whole. As mentioned before, we highly recommend reading Predictable Revenue for yourself – in fact, we frequently recommend Predictable Revenue to our clients.

Buy the book here: Amazon, Bookshop, Audible

Want professional guidance from industry experts? Check out our Sales Team Starter here!

Sales Automation – How to Automate Your Sales Process

Posted on November 17, 2020February 27, 2024 by irc

If you’ve ever lost a deal because you forgot to send a follow-up email, or you feel like there’s barely any time left for sales after trying to schedule meetings or logging information in your CRM, then sales automation is for you.

In fact, the average sales rep only spends 34% of their time selling. The rest of their time is spent on administrative tasks, such as:

Writing emails
Manual data entry
Prospecting, researching leads, and finding contact data
Attending internal meetings
Scheduling meetings
Training
Reading industry news and researching sales tips

By automating the small tasks involved in your sales processes, your sales reps will have more time to sell and reach their sales goals.

Sales reps aren’t the only ones being held back by administrative tasks. Sales managers also find themselves using their time to complete repetitive tasks that could be automated, especially time consuming sales tasks such as assigning leads to their reps.

In this article, we’ll go over what sales automation really is. After that, we’ll go over 10 ways you can automate your own sales process to maximize its efficiency.

What is sales automation?

Sales automation is the process of streamlining manual, tedious, repetitive tasks and time-consuming tasks in your sales process so that your sales reps can focus their time exclusively on selling. This is accomplished with the use of sales automation software, artificial intelligence (AI), and other sales automation tools.

The tasks that are automated are mostly things like data entry and customer relationship management, manual tasks that sales reps and their managers would otherwise do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

How does automation increase sales efficiency?

Proper automation of your sales process can improve your sales efficiency in a number of ways:

It allows your sales reps to focus more on sales and less on administrative tasks.
It can accelerate the sales cycle by expediting repetitive tasks like follow-ups.
It ensures that sales leads won’t fall through the cracks.
It can lead to increased customer satisfaction by reducing response time.
It maintains consistent sales data across your organization.

Can I use sales automation to replace my sales team?

Despite what the name may imply, the goal of sales automation isn’t to replace sales reps.

In fact, the goal is to extract as much value as possible from your sales reps by enabling them to focus on more important things, like building relationships, improving the sales process, working on new sales methodologies, and giving their leads more personal attention.

If you’re looking into using sales automation tools in an attempt to replace sales reps by blasting out generic emails or using autodialers, you’re doing it wrong.

Sales process automation – 10 ways to automate your sales process

Put your LinkedIn prospecting on autopilot

If you’re using LinkedIn for your sales prospecting, there’s a simple way to set it up so that you don’t have to constantly run the same types of searches.

If you have a LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator account, you can set up custom filters to get emails from LinkedIn every day, week, or month with new potential prospects.

LinkedIn only sends new profiles, so don’t worry, you won’t see the same ones again and again.

Once you get these emails all you have to do is go through each profile. For each one that’s a fit, get their contact information and put them through your sales cadence.

If you’re the type that likes to fully automate this type of thing, you can do so with a tool called Zopto.

To use Zopto, you’ll need to have an active LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator account. Once you create your Zopto account, you’ll use the same filters and data points from LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator to tell Zopto who your target markets are.

After you’ve filtered your ideal prospects, Zopto lets you automate different levels of engagement, such as Connection Invites, Sequential Messaging, Free InMails, Twitter Engagement, or Profile Views.

Pretty soon, you’ll find your LinkedIn inbox filling up with new leads on autopilot.

For more info on Zopto, check out this tutorial.

Automate lead enrichment

Lead enrichment is all about finding out everything you can about your prospects in order to properly target your sales pitch to them.

In this case, knowledge is power. The more you know your prospect’s industry and company, as well the challenges and goals they encounter on a daily basis, the better you can tailor your pitch to their needs.

Lead enrichment tools like LeadFuze work well for this kind of thing. LeadFuze is one of many powerful sales tools to consider for your sales team. It gathers information from hundreds or thousands of data sources on over 300 million people from over 14 million companies to give you a complete, up-to-date profile of your prospects.

If you’re looking for a specific prospect, you can use their “Account Based” search to gather more information about this individual.

You can also use LeadFuze to find new prospects using their “Market Based” search tool.

For example, if we’re selling a CRM tool for enterprise companies, we might want to use this tool to search for enterprise level companies that use SalesForce.

This would give us a list of qualified leads with all of the necessary data.

If you’re getting your leads through another channel such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can leverage LeadFuze’s database to automatically gather powerful lead enrichment data with their Zapier integrations.

LeadFuze integrates natively (or via 3rd party integration like Zapier) with many CRMs. This means you can tell LeadFuze which leads you’re interested in, and every day it will find new leads for you and automatically place them right into your CRM. Which leads us to…

Create and manage CRM contacts

Many sales teams still create and update their CRM contacts manually. Thankfully, there’s a better way. Most of this can be automated.

For much of this, you’re going to have to get workflow automation capabilities in the CRM you choose. This will enable you to automatically create and edit records for leads who meet a certain criteria.

For example, maybe you want to define a lead as “Qualified” if they have a certain title or role in a company and have read specific articles on your blog.

Unfortunately, this typically comes at a higher price – especially with the more robust CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce

If you have a decent sized team or a complex sales process, it’s worth taking the time to fit a more robust CRM into your budget and set it up properly.

However, if you’re operating on a tighter budget, Pipedrive is a good option that has a solid amount of sales automation for a decent price.

It’s also important to integrate your various lead generation sources with your CRM. That might be Facebook ad respondents, new email subscribers, event attendees, or new website leads.

If native integration isn’t available in your CRM for this, you can always use Zapier – a tool that seamlessly connects apps.

Use templates to automate sales email outreach

Email templates are a great way to save your sales reps tons of time.

Rather than writing emails to every prospect, templating your emails allows your sales teams to focus only on the important parts of your email outreach campaigns – personalizing the emails and managing replies.

Be careful about overusing templates. Non-personalized templates are easy for your prospects to spot (and ignore) and make it harder for emails coming from your domain to avoid spam filters over time.

Finding a good balance between what should be personalized and what should be templated is important. These days, including the person’s first name and company simply isn’t enough. Everyone does that.

You can balance personalization and templating by writing customized opening sentences in your outreach email for each prospect and templating the rest.

You can personalize your opening sentences by noting one of their recent accomplishments, complimenting their work on a recent blog post, or addressing their pain point on a personal level.

By personalizing all of your emails in the same way, you can easily systemize your outreach process.

If you’re in need of some email templates, they’re available in nearly all CRMs – typically in their first pricing tier. You can also find plenty for free online.

You always use the old fashioned way of copying/pasting from a Word document, but that can still be pretty distracting and surprisingly time consuming. So it’s probably worth just paying for it.

If you have a decent number of prospects in your sales pipeline, then it’s probably worth it to pay for an outreach sales automation tool like Reply or PitchBox. Reply also comes with some LinkedIn automation features, but it’s not 100% fully automated like Zopto

Many sales professionals are using these templates rather than creating their own, so your prospects may get an uncomfortable sense of familiarity from these. It’s worth writing your own templates rather than using the ones available online or via your CRM or email automation software. Just make sure you give your emails a grammar check before sending them out to avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Sales automation tools can also assist with creating and managing content for outreach efforts. For example, if your sales strategy includes utilizing YouTube videos to engage with prospects, you can streamline the process of editing and publishing these videos using a YouTube shorts video editor. Incorporating high-quality videos into your email templates is a way to engage with leads.

To help you write your own outreach email templates, we put together the infographic below about what makes up a good sales email.

If you’d like to post this infographic on your site, please feel free to do so! We only ask that you credit us with a link. 🙂

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Schedule calls and meetings automatically

The process of scheduling a call or meeting with a prospect can feel like the email equivalent of a tennis match. You send them a time, they send back another, you send another, and so on.

This is extremely inefficient and kills the momentum of your deal.

Fortunately, many CRM tools include this in their free tier. If you’d prefer to use an external tool, you can leverage appointment and meeting scheduling tools like Calendly or Acuity Scheduling to combat this issue.

Simply send your calendar link to your prospect and they’ll see a page like this where they can pick a time that works best for them.

Once they choose a time, a calendar invite is automatically sent to both parties.

Scheduling tools can also ask people questions while they’re scheduling a call. These can collect prospect data such as name, email, company, or the reason for scheduling the call.

Making use of scheduling tools is one of the sneakiest ways to save time on a day to day basis. This type of automation tool is one of those things that once you have it and start using regularly, it immediately becomes something that you can’t fathom living without.

Automate sales call dialing and analysis

This is only really important for people who do a ton of outbound calling, which is admittedly becoming less of a priority for many companies in this day and age.

However, if you have appointment setters or other types of cold callers, this can be huge as it removes a ton of distractions from your workflow.

The CRM tool Close has an auto-dialer built into it, but it’s not always a feature represented in CRM’s well. If you have a CRM that doesn’t have a built-in auto-dialer, you can always use software that specializes in this such as Aircall, JustCall, or Kixie and integrate it with your CRM via Zapier.

If you’re looking to improve your outbound calling campaigns, then conversation intelligence tools are what you need. These tools let you quickly see summaries of all your sales calls — both transcribed and analyzed.

Platforms such as Gong, Chorus, and Wingman help with this by pulling out pieces of your conversation (topics you discussed, action items, competitors that were brought up, etc.) to give you insights about your opportunities.

Use sales automation tools to automate touchpoint tracking

You call a prospect, get sent to voicemail, and log the attempt in your CRM.

Call again the following week, have a short conversation with them, log the conversation in your CRM.

You follow up with an email, log it in your CRM.

Instead of manually logging the process of scoring a deal, you can automate these deal-related activities.

Many CRMs can handle this if they have features like automated email sequencing, tracking email opens and clicks, and automatic call logging.

For email tracking with a CRM, it’s often as easy as BCC’ing a unique address assigned to you by the CRM, and the emails will automatically appear in your CRM. If you’re using email outreach software, you can just set it up to always BCC that address so that the emails sync to your CRM automatically.

If your CRM doesn’t have these features, or you’d prefer to use a sales automation tool outside your CRM for something like email outreach, then make sure these tools can be integrated to log deal-driven activities in your CRM.

When it comes to CRM integrations with third party tools, native integrations are best since the developers of both apps got together to make their services work as seamlessly as possible. However, 3rd party integration like Zapier can be just as useful if a tool doesn’t integrate directly with your CRM.

If the tools don’t directly integrate with each other, you can check the available Zapier integrations for the services you’re looking at to see if you’ll be able to link them that way.

For example, let’s say we want to use Close as our CRM, but we want to use a third party sales automation tool for email outreach.

First, we want to see what sort of things we can do with Close using Zapier, so let’s search for the app.

If we then scroll down to their integration details and click “Actions,” we’ll see that there’s an option to update leads.

If we do the same thing for one of the email outreach tools we might consider, like Reply, we can see if they have triggers that allow us to use Zapier to make changes within our CRM when prospects open or click a link inside an email sent with Reply.

In this case, if we search for Reply, scroll down to the Integration Details section of the page, and click “Triggers,” we can see that Reply has the triggers we’re looking for.

This means that we can set up automations in Zapier so that whenever a prospect opens an email, clicks a link, or replies to an email, we can update their lead data in our CRM automatically.

What you can do specifically to automate your deal management will depend on the complexity of your sales process and the length of your sales cycle, but keeping track of these small details can help you attribute specific actions to sales success.

Create documents and proposals automatically

Sales teams spend a ton of time on proposals.

Normally, this is because sales reps have to spend time on manual data entry, copying and pasting information from notes, emails, and various other sources to fill in accurate data on the proposal document.

Fortunately, here’s a wealth of excellent drag-and-drop editors that allow you to streamline this process and create beautiful, interactive proposals very quickly!

With many of them, you also get data insights. This means you’ll get an alert when your prospects open the proposals and how long they spend looking at the document (and in some cases, how long they spent looking at each page).

This also means you can further automate your sales process by, for example, scheduling your automated sales emails to be sent within minutes of the prospect opening it.

PandaDoc is a pretty great option for this. They have a free tier that gives you access to e-signs, so you don’t need to pay for alternatives like DocuSign anymore.

If you’re looking to create beautiful full-fledged proposals, then Qwilr is a great option for this. They even have a huge selection of templates you can choose from if you aren’t very design-savvy yourself.

Both of these (and many more) options will integrate fairly well into your CRM and with various workflow automations.

Use sales automation tools to automate lead rotation

This is most useful for decent sized teams that are used to having a sales manager assign leads manually.

Manually assigning leads takes up precious time that can otherwise be spent on more meaningful sales tasks. Plus, there’s the danger a lead will slip through the cracks, which definitely hurts your team’s ability to meet the sales quota.

Not only that, but manually rotating leads can increase the amount of time it takes to contact your leads, which can reduce your conversion rate.

According to research from Harvard Business Review, most companies are not responding nearly fast enough to online sales leads.

In fact, if companies did not respond to leads within a five-minute window, they were at a high risk of losing that lead entirely.

Rotating leads is fairly easy when you have a small outfit. You’ll soon notice that, as your team grows, it can become a very time-consuming task that really doesn’t bring too much (if any) added value by doing it manually.

If you spend a lot of time digging through leads and assigning them to your reps, then go for this, but otherwise it’s safe to skip it.

If, however, you are spending a lot of time digging through leads and assigning them to your sales reps, you can set up auto-rotation inside your CRM to assign leads by geographic territory, company size, vertical, or a combination of criteria. If it’s a free-for-all, use a round robin style.

Here’s a video that shows you how to do this with HubSpot.

Automate lead scoring and prioritization

Automating your lead scoring and prioritization is the best way to keep your sales reps laser-focused on the best opportunities.

Since, according to research from MarketingSherpa, most businesses don’t use any form of lead scoring, this alone can give you a leg up on your competitors since the ROI of this is so high.

This is done by making use of an automated lead scoring system. This type of sales automation software uses demographic and behavioral data to determine how qualified a lead is.

This way, sales reps know exactly which leads to prioritize.

Unfortunately, this kind of feature is typically in a higher pricing tier for most CRMs. This means that you need to have great data and a high volume of leads for it to be worthwhile.

The data is especially important since you’ll need to make rules for the leads to be scored. If you don’t have much data, then there’s really not much to score.

However, if you have the data and volume, and qualifying leads is important to you, then this is an extremely valuable form of automation. You end up spending less time speaking with leads who have a lower chance of converting.

If you prefer to use software outside of your CRM, you can do this with marketing automation software like Autopilot or ActiveCampaign. You can even connect these to your CRM with Zapier integrations.

Conclusion

With the best sales automation software on your side, your sales team will be able to accomplish so much more. Implement these systems, and the results will speak for themselves!

Have you set up any automations that have helped your sales team? Let me know in the comments!

If you need further guidance when it comes to setting up automations that will help your sales team, check out our self-paced workshop!

Sales Follow-Up Statistics and Process – The Power of Follow-Ups

Posted on July 30, 2020March 26, 2024 by irc

Unfortunately, due to fear of rejection, a difficult (or no) sales process, or a lack of sales automation, most salespeople never follow-up with prospects. When emails or phone calls are ignored, 44% of salespeople give up after just 1 attempt, and only 8% of salespeople follow-up more than 5 times.

There are a number of sales follow-up statistics that back up the fact that following up with your prospects should be integrated into your sales process, regardless of your sales methodology. Most notable is the fact that, at any given time, only 3% of your market is actively buying. Another 56% are not ready, while 40% are poised to begin.

To learn more about why following up is so important and how to implement it into your sales process, check out the infographic below.

If you’d like to post this infographic on your site, please feel free to do so! We only ask that you credit us with a link. 🙂

Saving the infographic and reuploading it to your server is totally fine, but if you prefer to embed it, just copy the code below:

35 Sales follow-up statistics

If you’re interested in looking at more data about how following up can improve your sales performance, here are some additional statistics.

Sales follow-up productivity statistics

Productivity is essential in developing a powerful sales follow-up process. Here are some statistics to help you find ways to improve your sales team’s productivity.

On average, 42.5% of sales reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to a company’s bottom line. This is after an average of 10 weeks of training and development (source).
Salespeople only spend 34% of their time actually selling (source). The rest of their time is spent as follows:
- Writing emails – 21%
- Data entry – 17%
- Prospecting, researching leads, and finding contact information – 17%
- Attending internal meetings – 12%
- Scheduling meetings – 12%
- Training – 11%
- Reading industry news and researching sales tips – 11%
Sales development reps average 94.4 activities per day (source). These activities lead to an average of 14.1 conversations, 16.7 opportunities, and 3.7 deals closed, and are broken down as follows:
- 32.6 emails.
- 35.9 phone calls.
- 15.3 voicemails.
- 7 social media touches.
The best sales onboarding programs help new sales hires become productive 3.4 months sooner, on average, than firms with low-performing programs – a time-to-productivity that’s 37% faster (source).
Firms that use technology effectively were, on average, 57% more effective at sales training and development than ineffective technology users (source).

Sales channel follow-up statistics

The sales channel you’re using can influence the success of your follow-ups. Here’s a look into some sales channel follow-up statistics.

Email

Email marketing has a 2x higher ROI than cold calling or trade shows (source).
The average click-through rate (CTR) for email across all industries is 1.33% (source).
33% of recipients open an email because of its subject line (source).
Email usage statistics indicate that 91.5% of outreach emails are ignored. (source).
64% of workers make spelling or grammar errors in their emails, so it’s important to do a grammar check on them before sending (source).
Including the recipient’s first name in the subject line can boost open rates by 29.3% (source).

Phone calls

55% of high growth companies stated that cold calling is very much alive (source).
One study showed that telephone outreach out-converted emails by a significant margin – 8.21% vs 0.03% (source).
The average sales development rep makes 52 calls daily (source).
The average response rate for a voicemail is 4.8% (source).
80% of calls go to voicemail. 90% of first time voicemails are never returned (source).

Texting

Prospects who are sent text messages have a 40% higher conversion rate than those who don’t receive texts (source).
Texts are better used as a follow-up than an initial point of contact. Texting before having had a phone conversation decreases the likelihood of the prospect ever becoming a lead (source).
Texting someone after having made contact leads to a 112.6% higher lead to engagement conversion (source).

Social media

Sales reps who are active on social media get 45% more sales opportunities than those who aren’t (source).
Sales reps that use social media as a sales channel are 51% more likely to hit their sales quota than those who don’t (source).
98% of sales reps with more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections meet or surpass their quota (source).
78% of salespeople who use social media perform better than their peers (source).

Multi-channel selling

Sales development reps that leverage 3 or more touchpoints have 28% higher MQL-to-SQL rates than those who just make a phone call or send an email (source).
Sending emails to leads in between phone contact attempts increases your chance of contacting them by 16% (source).

Sales follow-up cadence statistics

A well put together cadence makes following-up very easy for sales reps. Here are some data points about sales cadences to help you build one for your business.

On average, high growth organizations report 16 touch points per prospect within a 2-4 week timespan (source).
The most optimal number of follow-up emails to send is 2-3 (source).
95% of all converted leads are reached by the sixth call attempt (source).
44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up attempt (source).
92% of salespeople give up after no sales on the 4th call. 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes (source).
50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first (source).

Sales follow-up response time statistics

Sometimes, it takes prospects a while to respond to your follow-up efforts. Here’s some data on that.

In a test of 433 companies, only 7% responded in the first five minutes after a form submission. Over 50% didn’t respond within five business days (source).
Those who attempted to reach leads within one hour are 7x times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those who waited even 60 minutes (source).
On average, it takes 8 follow-up calls to reach a prospect (source).
50% of email responses occur within 60 minutes (source).
If the recipient is going to reply to an email, there’s a 90% chance that it will happen within 2 days of the email being sent (source).

Looking to create your own follow-ups? Check out our Sales Team Starter here!

10 Ways to Find Anyone’s Email Address

Posted on May 6, 2020September 11, 2023 by irc

Over the years, I’ve sent thousands of emails and have leveraged dozens of different methods for finding email addresses.

After doing this for so long, I’ve narrowed down my list of ways to find email addresses to these 10:

1. Use email lookup services

If you have the budget and are looking to automate your sales process, email lookup services are the easiest way to find someone’s email address.

There are lots of tools available. Some are better than others, but they all work in the same basic way. Just input a name, website, or both, and they’ll give you what you’re looking for.

With some services, you can even find email addresses using LinkedIn URLs.

Here are some of the most popular of these services with a breakdown of what they offer:

Voila Norbert
- 50 free searches total as a part of your trial.
- Paid accounts start at $49/month for 1,000 searches.
Hunter
- 50 free searches per month
- Paid accounts start at $49/month for 1,000 searches/month
- Search for email addresses using a domain, a person’s name, or both.
Find That Email
- 50 free searches per month
- Paid accounts start at $29/month for 500 searches/month.
- Use their Chrome plugin to find email addresses from social network profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
RocketReach
- Paid accounts start at $75/month.
- Includes options for phone number lookups.
- Plug in LinkedIn URLs to find the email address of a specific LinkedIn profile.
Clearbit Connect
- A Chrome extension that gives you 100 free lookups per month.
Snov.io
- 50 free searches per month.
- Paid accounts start at $29 for 1,000 searches per month or 500 bulk searches per month.
- Available as a web app or Chrome extension.
Contact Out
- This service is supposedly the most accurate on the market. By their own claims, they’ve found 75% of emails in the western world.
- Their Chrome extension lets you easily find email addresses based on LinkedIn profile pages.
- Pricing isn’t publicly available.
FindThatLead
- 50 free searches per month.
- Paid accounts start at $49/month for 5,000 searches/month.
AeroLeads
- Paid accounts start at $49/month for 1,000 searches/month.
- Searches include phone numbers, full name, company name, title, and URL.
Name2Email
- A completely free chrome extension that gives you unlimited searches per month.
- No bulk email search features.

Even though these services are great, they aren’t perfect. Sometimes, you’ll enter a URL and get no results.

Other times, they’ll only give you email addresses that are simple guesses or are no longer valid.

2. Guess and verify

Most email addresses follow one of many common formats.

Because of this, you might be able to find anyone’s email address as long as you have their first name, last name, and website domain.

Here are the most common email address formats:

First name (nick@theirc.me)
First name + last name (nickrubright@theirc.me, nick.rubright@theirc.me)
First name + first letter of their last name (nickr@theirc.me, nick.r@theirc.me)
First letter of their first name + last name (nrubright@theirc.me, n.rubright@theirc.me)
Initials (nr@theirc.me)

This is great, but formatting an email address into all of these formats would be time consuming.

Instead, you can use Email Permutator from Metric Sparrow to generate email addresses in these formats.

Once you have this list, you can throw these email addresses into an email verification tool like Neverbounce or Zero Bounce to see which of them (if any) exists.

3. Reach out on Twitter

Twitter is a great way to reach people with short messages.

The downside here is the fact that the messages are limited to 280 characters.

If 280 characters isn’t enough for what you’re trying to tell them, simply ask for their email address. Lots of people do this with a good amount of success.

To have success with this, make sure you use a real, personal Twitter profile and give them a compelling reason to respond.

In any case, engaging with your prospects on social media is smart to do before sending initial or follow-up emails.

4. Use Twitter’s advanced search features

Since many people are asking for email addresses on Twitter, that means lots of people are sharing them, too!

You can use this behavior to your advantage with Twitter’s advanced search.

When people share their email addresses in Tweets, they often attempt to hide them from bots by replacing “.” and “@” with things like “dot” and “at,” or by separating the parts of their email with spaces.

So when using Twitter’s search, you can use words like “email,” “me,” “contact,” “reach,” “dot,” and “at” to find times they may have shared their email address in a tweet.

If you want to search for exact phrases, like “email me,” just surround that phrase in quotes.

5. Leverage Google search operators

Using Google, you might get lucky by typing your prospects name and “email address” into the search box.

Unfortunately, if your prospect has a common name, this may be difficult. This is where Google search operators can come in handy.

Basically, search operators are a way to further filter your search results in Google. For example, if you put “site:irc.me” into your search, it will only show results for that domain.

You can use some of these to your advantage when looking for email addresses.

Here are some examples of search strings you can use to find email addresses in Google:

[name] + email (or) email address
[name] + contact (or) contact information (or) contact me
[name] + email
[name] + contact

If you know what site your prospect is a part of, try these:

site:companywebsite.com + [name] + email
site:companywebsite.com + [name] + contact
site:companywebsite.com + firstname.lastname [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + firstnamelastname [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + firstname [at] companyname.com
site:companywebsite.com + firstname_lastname [at] companyname.com

If these don’t prove successful in Google, try another search engine. Different search engines use different algorithms, meaning the results will be different.

6. Contact them through their email list

If the person you’re trying to contact has a website or blog, you can often reach them through their email list.

Usually, these emails are sent out using their personal email address at this domain.

This means that when you get emails about new blog posts from this email address, you can respond to it and they’ll get your email!

This can be a great way to build relationships.

Here’s an example of how I did this to connect with Neil Patel:

All I did was sign up for his newsletter, and when I noticed a typo in the article he sent out, I replied to the email.

Granted, I wasn’t pitching him anything here, but this is just to show that the concept works.

Keep in mind that, sometimes, these emails will be sent out from generic email addresses like newsletter@domainname.com or similar email addresses.

If you reply to these, your response might still forward to the contact’s personal email address, so it’s still worth a shot.

7. Ask for an introduction through their generic email or contact form

Most big websites and companies have generic email addresses listed on their site (such as info@domainname.com) or have contact forms on their site.

Usually, emails sent through these are handled by assistants or the company’s support team.

So to get in contact with the right person, just send a simple message through this channel asking for an introduction. Something like this will work:

For best results, it’s best to use a signature in your email that clearly describes who you are. If you’re using VA’s to collect contact information for you, make sure their signature mentions the fact that they work for you.

8. Check about us, contact, or author pages

Sometimes, finding an email address really is as simple as looking for the right page on your target’s website.

Many companies will list email addresses on contact, about us, or meet the team pages.

If the site is content heavy, they may even have author pages that contain the author’s email address.

Sometimes, finding these pages directly on their website can be difficult. If you’re having a hard time finding them, you can try typing the following search strings into Google:

site:example.com about
site:example.com contact
site:example.com team
site:example.com + your contact’s name

While I’ve found using Google to be the best approach for this, you can also try typing these common URL formats into your browser:

example.com/contact
example.com/contact-us
example.com/contact-me
example.com/about
example.com/about-me
example.com/about-us
example.com/team
example.com/our-team
example.com/meet-the-team

9. Use Facebook

When people set up a Facebook page, they often enter as much information as they can and then forget about it. This includes email addresses.

The email addresses they entered can usually be found on the “about” section of their Facebook page:

Since Facebook blocks web scrapers, this method can even work when the email finding tools mentioned above, like Hunter or Rocket Reach, don’t find anything.

10. Ask people in your network for referrals and introductions

If the person you’re trying to reach is on LinkedIn (as they probably are) you can check to see if someone in your network is connected to them.

Just pull up their LinkedIn profile and look for mutual connections in the “Highlights” section of their profile page.

Once you see which of your contacts might be able to connect you, shoot them an email or LinkedIn message and ask for an introduction.

In addition to asking for introductions to specific, targeted prospects, you can also use referrals as a way to expand your prospect list to gain more opportunities.

This is usually best done after you’ve delivered some kind of value.

For example, after writing a guest post for a site I often ask the editor of the site if they can refer me to anyone else who’d be interested in accepting a guest post from me.

If you’ve added lots of value over the course of your engagement, they’re often more than happy to help.

Did I miss anything?

There you have it – 10 ways to find anyone’s email address.

Just be sure to use them responsibly.

Looking for more? Check out our Sales Team Starter!