eBusiness Weekly
Robert Gonye
It is not in the nature of the business world to stand still for too long. The rule of thumb in business is, if you are not progressing or changing, you are falling behind. I guess that’s an appropriate way of describing the need for business entities to keep changing. You cannot speak about the ongoing changes in the world of business without speaking about the shifts in digital transformation.
For sales teams, digital transformation means adopting the tools that enable them to meet increasing customer demands while improving performance. Digital transformation is not always easy to implement. It can place high demands on a business, both in terms of time and costs. It gets even worse if the business is not sure which sales tools to use, or how to boost the change with a strategy improvement.
Today we want to take a look at some of the necessary tools a sales team needs to use in order to keep up with an ever-changing market.
A know-it-all system CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is usually the foundation upon which a sales relationship is built. A standard CRM system is a hub that contains every bit of information about a customer a salesperson will need. CRM systems will save a team a lot of time, improve effectiveness, and reduce unnecessary manual work. At the very least, a CRM system should offer easy integration of other important sales tools as well as navigating around the business footprint.
A good CRM tool will transcend its original role. Sales-force for example, is one of the best sales intelligence tools for businesses currently on the market. Sales intelligence tools go a step further from standard CRM systems by helping sales teams find new prospects, as opposed to simply managing the information about the existing prospects.
When looking for a good CRM system for your sales team, be sure to check out additional functionalities you might find useful. It can help you reduce costs, make your deck to be simpler, and reduce the training time.
Cross-team co-operation
Sales teams operate separately from marketing and customer service teams. However, the three teams are what a business uses to guide prospects through their journey of becoming (and staying) happy customers. This is why cross-team co-operation and integration of the key goals businesses set when they want to improve their marketing, sales, and service performance.
Good co-operation between these three teams has to happen on several levels. You have to devise work processes with the other teams in mind. You have to ensure that the teams use compatible tools. You also need to find a good way for teams to communicate. Any tool that allows your team members to communicate and share work is a must and also gives them a searchable meeting place where the teams can get together and corporate.
Content creation
Content creation isn’t the purview of your marketing team alone. Content has its place in every segment of the sales funnel, not just the discovery phase. So, when you think about content marketing, you shouldn’t think of it only in terms of attracting new customers. Content will help your prospects convert, and it can also help them decide to stay with your business.
Sales teams often struggle with content creation, and marketing teams are not always there to save the day. However, businesses undergoing digital transformation can turn to the online world and find writing services online. There are many content creation businesses that offer custom writing services. Because they have a larger pool of talent, it can relieve a sales team from having to find the right kind of writer for their content.
Mass call campaigns
Digital transformation has benefits that extend beyond the digital realm. Your team can use digital tools for more than just work on leads online. There is a host of digital tools that help sales team with traditional sales tasks, such as making a large volume of cold calls.
These tools are usually called dialler’s. You feed them the phone numbers, set up the call parameters, and let them do all the work while you prepare for each call and log it once it ends.
However, if you use a tool like Connect and Sell, you’ll get a bit more bargain for you’re the dollar. The software works with a host of real human assistants that will help you get the prospect on the phone. It gives you analytics to track your performance, and there’s even an option that facilitates sales team coaching.
Analytics and visualization
What gets measured gets managed, or is it what gets measured gets done, right? One of the best types of tools your sales teams can use are the tools that tell them how well they are doing their job. Many of the tools your team use record data that can be used for analysis. The best way to utilise that data is to have it feed into one central hub.
A typical tool for such analytics gathering is Insight Squared. It can pull data from several sources for real-time viewing or the creation of reports. If your sales and marketing teams are having difficulty working together, you can use a single tool to analyse the performance of both and gain valuable insights. Insight Squared also has a specialised sales tool that performs analysis for sales teams, specifically.
The little things matter a lot
Some of the sales tools teams can use deal with the things that impact the team’s performance in a noticeable way. These are the must-have tools like CRM systems, or auto-callers. There’s always room for improvement in a sales team and its process, and some small tools might be worthy of your attention.
Yes, ware is a solution that gives you important email analytics, including email open rates. That alone makes it a great tool because, as opposed to phones, it’s not that easy to find out whether a prospect has opened your email process.
Closing thoughts
There are digital tools out there that can change or improve almost every aspect of your business, including how it manages sales. While these tools might offer you great functionality, none of them work alone to cover every single team your sales team needs. That’s why you need to build an effective tool-kit, and ensure that every tool in the kit works well with the others. If you manage to do that, you’ll be amazed at how much more your sales team can accomplish and how much revenue it will bring to your business.
