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Start Taking Control of Your Pipeline with SalesTools.io

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5 Sales Bloggers who are Disrupting the Sales Industry

Who is Disrupting the Sales Industry?

In today’s society sales researchers & bloggers are leading the innovative process in the industry. Successful salespeople and sales driven companies know it and follow closely their work and research paper. The project between salesforce and Aaron Ross highlight clearly this new type of relationship between researchers/bloggers and innovative companies. In the same idea Salestools.io - Outbound Sales Acceleration is always looking for new processes and features, develop by sales researchers, to help its valuable customers to hit their quota!

Episode 1: 5 Sales Bloggers Every Entrepreneur Should Follow

Trish Bertuzzi

Trish Bertuzzi is a well known name in the sales community. Passionate about Inside Sales she founded and run The Bridge Group where she is helping B2B tech companies to build high class inside sales teams and helping them taking vital decisions about implementation strategy, process, tactics, technology, and and tools. Trish got rewarded multiple times for her contribution to the sales community. One of her best book is certainly The Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales (2016).

Website:www.bridgegroupinc.com 

Twitter:@bridgegroupinc 

LinkedIn: trishbertuzzi

Joanne Black

Joanne Black is a top influencer and writer about referral selling. She has published various sales bestselling book about Referral selling such as No More Cold Calling (2006). She is the author of “No More Cold Calling,” her Selling System is built on the basic system of world of mouth but with our today’s technology. Indeed she highlights the fact than cold call doesn’t work (71% of buyers find cold calls annoying ) and being introduced by someone increase significantly the chance of closing deals.

Website:www.nomorecoldcalling.com 

Twitter:@ReferralSales 

LinkedIn:joanneblackreferralsales

Deb Calvert

Deb Calvert, President of People First Productivity Solutions help companies to build organizational strength by Putting People First. Her work is focus on the human part of the business by focusing on Coaching Executives, Managers & Sales Teams, Leadership Development lessons for Leaders at Every Level, Training for Managers and Sales Professionals, Consulting activity on Team Effectiveness, Sales Productivity & Sales Selection. DISCOVER Questions™ Get You Connected (2013) is one of the greatest sales book, built on a 15 years research, with valuable tips on every steps of the sales process.

Website:www.peoplefirstps.com 

Twitter:@PeopleFirstPS 

LinkedIn:debcalvertpeoplefirst

Colleen Francis

Colleen Francis is recognized as one of the most famous sales consultants in today’s society. She is specialized on Sales Consulting, B2B Sales Prospecting, Sales Networking, Sales Accountant Management & Sales Negotiation. Colleen works with companies to build, implement and refine their sales teams to scale their business. She has published some very valuable sales books such as Nonstop Sales Boom (2014) she  has built one of the top 5 most effective sales training organizations in the market.

Website:www.engageselling.com 

Twitter:@EngageColleen 

LinkedIn:colleenfrancis

Aaron Ross

Aaron Ross is also a well known name in the sales community. He is first famous for having built a Salesforce.com’s $100 million sales machine. Then he his also famous for his book and theory so call Predictable Revenue. His theory totally revolutionized the outbound sales prospecting industry. Predictable Revenue (2011) is a framework for effectively generate high quality leads and contradicts traditional selling techniques. Aaron break the process down into actionable steps, which we’ll be sharing with you throughout this guide. 

“Ross’ Vision:

1. Don’t let the so-called “reality” stop you.

2. Subteams and miniCEOs, cool idea for teams within companies.

3. Design CEOs and VPs of Sales out of the sales process.

4. The future of sales is on new user acquisition and important titles like VP of Lead or Demand Gen.

5. Design self-managing teams.”

Website: http://predictablerevenue.com/ 

Twitter:@motoceo 

LinkedIn:Aaron Ross 

Episode 2 here!

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How to hit your KPI's using Sales Acceleration Technology?

Sales Analytics

Top sales performing teams are Sales Hackers! Need a proof? Check out the last Salesforce’s state of sales report (2015). According to this research paper, which surveyed over 2.300 global sales leaders, top sales teams supercharge their process with technology (3X more than underperforming teams), “freeing them from process-heavy tasks and giving them more time to actually sell”.

Technology can be used in various ways to boost the productivity and efficiency of your sales team. This article focus on 4 categories of sales acceleration technology that sales leaders are leveraging to checkmate their competitors by closing more deals.

Sales Analytic 

By using the right sales metrics & dashboards, a sales manager can empower its team and transform under performers into sales killers! Predictive analytic especially can increase sales numbers by 3.

Sales analytic offer the power of smart predictions to sales reps in order to contact and invest time on high potential prospects. Sales analytic give as well an overview about sales reps activities to sales managers and help them to manage efficiently their sales team.   

Current Usage:

Sales Analytic

Under performers: 16%

High Performers:    57%

Predictive analytic

Under performers: 8%

High Performers:  33%

Sales Prospecting Software

Sales Prospecting tool is key to perform in our today’s digital era. Top sales performers have stopped wasting their time on prospecting, they automate it in order to focus solely on selling. Sales prospecting software help sales reps to save 45% of their sales prospecting time while increasing the quality of their leads! By using social networks as a source of lead, sales prospecting tool extracts very targeted and updated data and make them exportable to any CRMs or CSV files. Salestools.io is extracting the most up-to-date data, with 80% verified email address, on professional networks, such as Linkedin, in a single click. Sales leaders are top performers firstly because they do not waste their time prospecting manually and secondly because their email sales campaign do not bounce. If 50% of your customer info is wrong, 50% of your time is wasted.

Current Usage:

Under performers: 15%

High Performers:    49%

KPIs

In order to build a team of sales achievers, sales managers have to set the right KPIs based on the best sales metrics. Sales teams have goals to hit concerning their Salesforce activities. Meetings, cold calls, emails and any other tasks defined in your Salesforce org are activities. Sales reps become sales leaders when they are challenged with hard but achievable KPIs on their activities. Moreover measuring your team can help managers to identify performance trends and weaknesses among the team in order to set up new training. For example if you discover that 2 of your best reps achieve 25% more success while emailing, then it will make sense to train the others on email best practices and re-use top performing email templates. This alone could make the difference between hitting or missing quota.

Current Usage:

Under performers: 27%

High Performers:   66%

Outbound Sales Content

Sales top performers are close to Marketers in order to deliver the last and most compelling information to their customers. Using this strategy help reps to be seen as industry experts which immediately transform the sales reps - prospect approach into an adviser - client relationship.

Marketing and Sales have to work closely in order to build the strongest sales pipeline. Content is a great example that emphasizes this theory. Content that your Marketers create to generate leads is often very useful to help reps either to start the discussion (infographics or article in cold emails) or to close deals with industry comparison materials such as grids or review websites such as G2Crowd.

Current Usage:

High Performers:   49%

Under performers: 15%

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The Journey Of an Outbound Lead

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Sales Development Rep vs Account Executive

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5 Quick Tips On Social Prospecting

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4 Steps Every Startups Should Know To Reach The Right Influencers

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How To Improve Your Sales - Best Sales Tips by SalesTools.io

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Ultimate Guide for Building a Killer Sales Team at Your Startup

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur with a startup, then you probably already have some skills in selling a product. When you are running a company, you cannot depend on your sales skills alone, no matter how great they may be. If you want your startup to be profitable, you need to find and recruit the right people to build a trendsetting sales team. This will be the team that will be responsible for pushing new products to customers as your startup matures and expands.

For most new entrepreneurs, building teams of any kind is a challenge. Building a sales team can pose a particular type of challenge. Professionally, young businesspeople may not trust themselves to make the right decision, or may be too scared of making a mistake when hiring, so they end up hiring no one. This is not the situation you want to be in when you introduce a new product. Therefore, here are some highly useful tips for hiring the perfect sales team for your startup without delay:

Make the Application a Test

You can limit your final choices by making the process of applying for the position itself a test of sorts. Post your vacancy ads everywhere where people look for marketing related jobs. However, don’t make it easy to apply, such as submitting a resume by email. Instead, ask the applicants to complete certain tasks, so you know from the get go which applicants can follow directions. This will save you the trouble of having to choose the best candidate out of a pool of unqualified applicants Prospecting software.

Seek Diversity

The more diverse your team is, the more ideas and opportunities it will be able to provide your company with. It’s important to hire a sales team that is diverse when it comes to factors such as gender, ethnicity, age and sexuality. As your target audience will be diverse as the general population is, having a team member from a particular group can help you tailor your marketing material uniquely to a community. It’s also important to hire members with diverse work experience. Each will be able to bring in insights and advice from unique perspectives, which you will need to polish your sales pitch.

Good Referrals are Important

Do not limit your hiring options to job advertisements. You can widen your scope by asking colleagues or friends for referrals. Employers usually refer only the trusted and hard working employees to others. Employee referrals can help you find team members with skills that are hard to spot just with a resume, such as commitment, loyalty and trustworthiness.

Be Open Regarding Compensation

Do not be vague when discussing compensation with potential hires. All your clauses should be very clear to a hire before they become full-time members. Compensation issues are one of the most prominent causes of dissatisfaction among sales employees. If your sales team is dissatisfied, demoralized or outright hates you for not paying them properly, your marketing efforts will go down the drain. Therefore, make sure nothing is left to the imagination when it comes to the compensation.

If you find it’s still too difficult to assemble your dream sales team, you should consider hiring a headhunter to get the right people to you. This option costs more than hiring people on your own. Therefore, try to hire the right team by following the tips above Prospecting tools.

About Author

Article written with love by Mohit Tater - SEO, marketing expert and blogger - at entrepreneurshiplife.com and mohittater.com. Apart from advising clients on SEO and marketing strategies, he also runs an investment firm BlackBook Investments that helps people invest in online businesses and digital assets. When he is not working (which is almost never!) he likes to read, travel the world and connect with other entrepreneurs

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Target Very Specific Industries, Companies and Know Their Needs - SalesTools.io

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Cold emailing techniques that just makes your life easier

Our customers asks us how to build an effective cold email campaign. Which subject line should I use? What kind of content works the best? Which tone work the best while cold emailing a big fish? .

If you are asking yourself those questions, then you are reading the right article!

Must have for an impactful and informative cold email

1) Subject line:

Comparable as a gatekeeper preventing a sales rep from reaching a manager, a subject line can block a prospect from opening a sales email email finder tools.

Sales email subject lines that rock and get a high opening rate are creative, interest-provoking, and informative without giving too much away.

3 best tips to keep in mind while writing your subject line:

Short: Your subject line ideally will be 3 words. Keep it short.

Casual: Write a subject line to a specific person. Be human.

Relevant: Keep your subject line related to the email. No bait and switch.

Find out the 5 best subject line approved by salestools.io:

1) "A quick question about [goal]"

Put as a subject line a question related to your prospect goal.  

2) "[Mutual connection name] recommended I contact you"

If you share an acquaintance with your prospect, be sure to put that person's name in your email subject line. There is nothing more powerful than a true referral. More your prospect trust the referrer, more chance there will be your email got open and you get an answer.

3) "Our next steps"

Great follow up after a first connection, or to re-engage a lead gone quiet.

4) "Do not open this email"

A classical reverse psychology effect that works well in sales approach. Telling someone not to do something tends to have the inverse effect.

5)"Should I stay or should I go?"

If you haven't heard since ages from a prospect then it’s time to use this classical but very efficient subject line.

     2) Email body content:

An  informative and specific body content should always follow a catchy subject line.  An important reminder: Don’t be too aggressive. Avoid usage of the “and” word as much as possible. Make points to make your informations “reader friendly”.

In terms of attaching of the images avoid using the html format if you don’t want to send it straight to spam!

A recent  research conducted by Yesware  show that the usage of 3 p’s is a game changer in cold email campaigns:

Praise: Receiving a compliment always sends     positive signals to the brain.

Picture: Studies have shown that if anyone     explains the cause and effect, mutual trust is built.

Push: This is the ending part, it is good to     push but not too much, give an idea of what they might get if they want to     get contacted, but don’t give each and every detail.

3) Conclusion:

Whenever you are sending out emails to your prospects or any professional in your line of work, be sure to be direct. In your email  you should make them understand the benefits of working with you rather than the features of your products and services.

4) Set up Call to action:

Finishing line for every email should be to request the customer to be called via phone. Make sure to mention how long it will take ( between 10-15 min not more) & the date. Another good example can be please visit the company URL or watch our demo video ( be sure to mention the required  URL).

The 5 salestools.io tips to improve your cold email:

1) Getting the feedback: It is a very good practice to get feedback from your current clients in order to improve the content & form of your emails. A good tip is to get the feedback of your dear customer using surveys such as google form or SurveyMonkey and offering incentives (free credits, white papers, e-book, etc.).

2)  Usage of A/B testing: Use extensively A/B testing to improve the quality of your emails by tracking the opening rate, response rate, ect. Realizing A/B testing on cold emails means  sending 2 or 3 different emails to prospect in order to pick the best!

3) Keeping track: Do Analytics on your emails and check out the response rate.  Reach 30% and your sales reps can open a bottle of champagne according to Close.io.

4) Softwares: Software can automate the your sales campaign while personalizing the process according to each customer segment. MailChimp, Replyapp, Marketo or salestools are disrupting this industry!

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Follow the 3 steps below and build the best before sales strategy ever

Step #1: Build your personalized Customer Profile

You need to research, define and ascertain who your ideal customer is. For that you need to identify and qualify them according to criteria they have in common? Without understanding your customers and establishing a very complete buyer persona profile you won’t develop a successful sales model.

Step #2: find out Scalable Lead Sources

After Step one you should know who you want to target and how to qualify them. Now you need to find the right sources that will help you to leverage leads. Here it is the most crucial steps in your whole sales process. If you cannot find high quality inbound leads via some social media marketing and inbound marketing operations and/or find great sources to generate high quality outbound leads you cannot start any sales campaigns.

For inbound leads you need first to create great content and start a real inbound marketing strategy. Hubspot & Marketo are great solution to track your inbound leads and get the most of your inbound marketing.

For outbound leads you need to use a sales prospecting tool. The best software on the market extract contact info on social media, as people update continuously their profile, and make them exportable to various CRMs or CSV files. Salestools.io is one of the best in the market right now as it generates up to 500leads/day on Linkedin, Crunchbase, Github, Viadeo, Xing and Twitter with an accurate rate of 80%.

Step #3: Build the best sales content ever

Once you know who to sell to and you know how to reach them you should start building your sales content in order to start your sales campaign. First build a killing email content with very high quality subject line and a convincing message. Prepare as well your follow up message.

Then build the best script for your phone call campaigns. For that you need to identify pain points of your customers and highlight them. You also need to know by heart your product, industry and the industry of your customer. Be an information sponge about everything related to your business and your customer business.

Here we go, you master your before sales process. Now it is time to send emails, follow up, “pick up the phone and start dialing”!

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5 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE MAKING  A SALES CALL

Sales calls are indispensable to turn prospective clients into long term customers. Reaching out through the phone assists you in promotion of your business and ultimately closing the deals. It’s very essential to create a strategy that can bring growth results for your business. A vital component of telesales strategy involves choosing the best time to call your potential clients. As a fact, an average sales representative spends 22% of his/her time on selling, so it becomes highly important when you make the call and reach your prospect successfully.

There are numerous of theories about the right time of making sales calls. In this article, I will suggest a few guidelines to schedule your sales call.

1. Best Days in a Week:

In a week, the day that you choose for sales call is very important. Making a call on a Friday afternoon, won’t be productive since people in the office are more likely of using their seat ejections to escape their desks for the weekend. Likewise, calling on a Monday won't go be that good either, as some people have hectic schedules and at some workplaces they are under the influence of weekend hangover.

Nevertheless, some days are more efficient than others. In a research conducted over three years, it has been found that Wednesday and Thursday are the most productive days in terms of sales calling. As obvious, the least businesslike day of the week is lovely Friday!

2. Morning Calling:

Timing is everything while scheduling a call. An early morning call provides you a better chance of opening. In a study, it has been concluded that the sales calls are most productive between the hours of 8 and 9 a.m.

If you make sales call before 9 a.m., there are more chances to directly connect with a senior person without the intervening of receptionist (known as gatekeeper in the world of sales). These people are the decision makers in the company and the people with the authority to buy. These are the people you would like to reach.

3. Skip During the Lunchtime Hours:

Sales calls that brings the least results are made during the lunch hours. It shows that  time running up to and right after lunch is not the good time to make a sales call. So it’s a good strategy to leave these hours alone and concentrate on researching potential clients and prospects.

4. Timing for Afternoon Calls:

The best time of making afternoon calls is always between 4 and 6 pm. At this time, most prospects are chaining up their projects for the day. Tasks are completed and to-do lists got scanned off, so this is a great moment to reach out your prospect. With all the work out of the way, your prospects have more time for conversations and listen to what you offer.

5. Get Back to Inbound Leads Within Five Minutes of Receipt:

Incoming leads are always one of the happy moment for sales reps, but the time you take to reach back to your prospects is an important factor to turn the prospects into your clients. In a research, it has been found that after 10 minutes of reaching out to the prospect, the chances of qualifying the lead decreases significantly. In a nutshell, a quick response in getting back to your prospect yields the best results in your sales calling social prospecting tools.

Salestools Tip:

Ultimately, choosing the right day and timing of making your calls is indispensable for sales acceleration. While the guidelines mentioned above will definitely bring astute results in your business growth. However, in this process you may redefine some of your self made strategies that suits well for your business. You will be flabbergasted finding out that many more prospects can be reached with a very simple tweak carried out in a mechanised way.

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Your sales standstill? Find right now the best solutions to pick up your business growth.

There are always ways and tools to increase your sales, however only successful sales companies growth hack their business with a very tight budget.  Indeed skyrocketing your growth while keeping your marketing/advertising budget under control is not easy.

Here few tips to boost small businesses sales with a tight budget.

1. Be in touch with your current customers

Gaining feedback from your current customers is the best way to increase in a short period of time with a very low time/resource investment. Indeed if you have built relationship with your current customer, then they are familiar with your product, know the quality of your solutions and consider you as a trusted partner. The best way then is to call them or meet them and let them speaking. By listening, you can easily detect their current challenges and explain them how your product/service can solve them. Using this approach will help you to continue to be a trusted partner while boosting your revenue.

2. Bundle your Products/Services

Bundling your product/service in a bigger package than selling them individually. Customer want to have a full solution that solve completely their problems. However keep some flexibility while creating your product/service package, because some of your customer will only need 1 or 2 services that fit their business.

3. Ask for Referrals

Your current customer are your best evangelists! If you know which clients have been very satisfied with your solution, then you should play this card and ask for names and contact informations of other companies that might be also interested by your product/service. Actually after every close sales you should ask for referrals. Satisfied clients can also be used to build Happy Customer newsletters or testimonials. It can help you to enumerate some targeted happy clients that fit with the industry of leads your are contacting.

4. Master your pre-CRM process

You need to build very accurate/clean database before starting your sales campaign. Indeed there is nothing worse than sending bouncing email or calling fake numbers. Save your time by improving your sales prospecting by using lead generation softwares. Salestools.io is one of those softwares that extract accurate data on social media networks thanks t otheir plug-in and make them exportable to your favourite CRM. It will save around 45% of your time during your sales campaign. Moreover sending emails to accurate prospect that fit with your targeted audience will maximize your email campaigns and transform your first cold call into a warm call.

5. Listen

This tips is maybe the easiest one and most efficient one. Listen carefully your customers to identify their needs and have the possibility to address them. Without a clear analysis of customers needs, there is no sales possible. And to understand their needs you need to ask very sharp open questions and listen their answers. Asking questions has to look like a brainstorming session between you and your clients. If your clients feel they are deeply involved in the selling process they will definitely be more confident into your expertize and your understanding of their needs. If you convince your customer, then you close the deal and you boost your revenue.

Salestool tips:

Lead generation software 

Build a killing cold call script

Improve your listening skills

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5 min to Growth Hack your Sales Process! Get the secret tool at the end of the article

You are now ready to call your prospects and follow your script. It is not a cold call!  

Selling is an everyday hard work that pay off only for the best consistent sales person!

You want to sale? You want to make your business a killer one? You want to exceed your KPIs?

Good!

Sales process has been totally disrupted by technology prospecting software that use extensively Artificial Intelligence and cloud based solutions (CRM, social media networks,etc.). Find right now the secret sales methodology successful start-up have applied to master their market and kill the competition.

1- Define your targeted audience

The very first step of your sales & marketing process is to understand who is your Buyer Persona! Define very sharply to whom you want to sell your solution. For that you need to brainstorm and ask yourself few questions about your customer’s characteristics.

Their Organization

Their Culture

Their Industry

Their Drivers, Objectives & Challenges

Their Value Proposition

Their Customers

Their Competitors

Their Hobbies

Your targeted audience is somewhere outside and has a desperate need that only you can solve. Go finding them!You can have extensive informations about this topic on Hubspot.com.

2- Generate accurate data

Now start the prospecting process!

The best way to prospect in today's society is to hunt on social media websites. People fill & update continuously their social profile which include hobbies, preferences, job position, age, needs, challenges, and contact info.

Prospecting on the right social media website that fit with your buyer persona is the best way to generate high quality & targeted leads.

However generating manually data from 10000+ prospects will take forever!

Save your time by using a foolproof prospecting tool such as Salesfinder.io or Salestools.io.  

They are completely disruptive sales software that find up to 70% verified email addresses on various social media websites (Linkedin, Viadeo, Github, Crunchbase, Xing, Twitter,etc.) in a simple baby click!

3- Export your leads in your CRM

Prospecting tools are cloud based solution automatically synchronised with various CRM.

Here 4 reasons why your CRM is a killing tool in your sales process:

Register your leads and contacts (categorise your customers according to their readiness to buy)

Track your customer interaction (Be aware of the relationship your company has with each customer)

Reveals possibilities (keep a “not sold yet” category)

Cloud based (No risk to loose your customer data)

Pick up one of the CRM in the list below, they are all superbe and synchronised with Salestools.io:

4- Send email and pick up your phone

Build a great, straight to the point and attractive content. You need to generate curiosity in the head of your prospects. Make your email as individual as possible! You need to catch their attention. Remember they are totally busy and will give only few seconds to your email.

Send email to start the relationship with your potential customers. Track your email using some tracking tools like Streak and do some A/B testing to improve their design and quality.

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Smart Prospecting Skyrocket Your Sales Campaign Today

User extensively social media, more then 1.4 billion people are present on social media, social media websites are a pool of up to date and accurate leads. Stop searching where there is nothing use professional social media network. Visit us for more details: http://salestools.io/