Are you looking for opportunities to grow your business in 2021? For many companies, 2020 didn’t go as planned. To see growth and business success in 2021, you’ll need the right set of tools.
Sales tools alone can’t grow your business or do all of the work for you, but they can make your job much easier. A great package of sales tools can help you and your team start the year focused and productive.
CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a software that helps you organize and manage your interactions with customers. A CRM system can automate tasks and provide great insights into your sales pipeline.
Since every business has customers, everyone can benefit from using a CRM. The insights and automation offered by a CRM improves your prospect insights, helps organize the data you collect, and helps communicate with your customers. There are a few different options when choosing the right CRM and some key features you need.
What to look for in a CRM
Every CRM software will offer unique features. We recommend starting by identifying your top priorities. Do you want ease of use? Are you on a strict budget? Do you want your entire team to have access?
Once you know what you need, you can start comparing different CRM plans and find the one that best fits your needs. A CRM should be easy for you and your team to use, and help you stay organized, instead of causing more headaches.
Our favorite CRM: HubSpot
HubSpot’s suite of solutions is trusted thousands of companies every day to track emails, use customizable templates to create sales funnels, and provide better customer service. HubSpot also offers a set of free CRM tools that help manage your sales pipeline with ease.
Sales Intelligence
Sales intelligence tools help your team connect with qualified leads. You and your team can spend hours searching for potential customers and trying to find the best way to connect with the right people.
Sales intelligence tools can save your team time and effort by connecting you with the right person. This can help you gain traction as a new startup and narrow down your list of potential leads, so you’re not sending hundreds of unread emails.
Our favorite tool: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is one of the best platforms to connect with B2B clients. Sales Navigator features advanced search capabilities, improved visibility into networks, and personalized algorithms to help you reach the right decision maker and avoid wasting your time pitching the wrong person. You can also create custom lists based on keywords and company size, and save up to 1,500 leads.
Live Chat
A live chat is one of the best ways to interact with website visitors in real-time. Live chat tools can help answer questions and help close the gap between leads and customers.
How to incorporate live chat in your sales process
A live chat can engage customers at the perfect time. When visitors arrive on your homepage, you can welcome them and provide a more personal connection. When they’re on a sales page or comparing your products, you can answer their questions and find out what they’re looking for.
How live chat promote customer delight
Most of the time, people don’t want to do all of the research on their own. Your customers shouldn’t need to search through your entire website to find what they’re looking for. A live chat tool can send customers to your services team and pass leads to the salesperson who owns that relationship.
You can customize your chat widget to match your brand and create a welcome message for different pages so you can start the right conversations with the right people.
Our favorite live chat: HubSpot
HubSpot’s free live chat tool provides everything you need to connect with customers and track your conversations for future reference. Every conversation is automatically saved and stored in your inbox and on the contact’s timeline giving your team a crystal clear view of every interaction.
Proposals and Quotes
After you connect with new leads, sending proposals and quotes is the next most important step in your sales process. Using a great tool to create and send proposals makes the job easier, and your new customers accept the proposal faster.
How you do anything is how you do everything. When you send a proposal that’s professional, organized, and easy to accept, your customers will see that your business is well-organized and holds to a high level of standards.
Our favorite tool: PandaDoc
You can use PandaDoc to create proposals, interactive quotes, track customer engagement, and get real-time notifications. This helps your team spend less time creating custom proposals, and they’ll know when your customers are ready to take the next step.
Panda Doc also integrates seamlessly with HubSpot to improve your sales workflow, and give your new customer a fantastic buying experience from start to finish.
Video
Videos are one of the best ways to develop connections with your clients, and they’ve been proven to increase sales.
Videos can show your audience who you are, creating a more personal connection, and show off your products or services in action. Plenty of people are more willing to watch a 3-minute video than read an article or look at pictures.
The best part is there are plenty of tools that make creating studio-quality videos without breaking your budget.
How to use video in your sales process
Connecting with new leads: Videos make great content for social media, ads, and email marketing add-ons. They are a terrific way to communicate with people who don’t know you yet.
Launching a new product: Do you have a new product or service? Creating a video is a great way to show off new features and benefits of your product.
Share a quick tip: Sharing quick tips can show your audience why your product would benefit them or help them better use your products.
Our favorite video tool: Wistia’s Soapbox
Soapbox makes it easy to create video content in just a few clicks. Your business will enjoy higher click-through rates, GIF creation, and easy video editing tools.
The right tools for your business
Should you use all of the sales tools in 2021? That depends on your goals, team, and budget. We know that investing in the right sales tools has a great return on investment and makes the sales process more enjoyable.
If you’re ready to take the next step, check out how our services can be tailored to your marketing plan and business goals.S
