According to HubSpot's 2017 State of Inbound report, 70% of company's top priority is converting leads to customers. This may not be too surprising, but the fact that the average tenure for sales reps is 24 months and 26% of turnover is due to missed quotas is startling. There may be a number of reasons why your team is not meeting their quotas. Not able to find the right content, timing of engagement, or ineffectively unable to close are all ways that salespeople can lose a sale, and ultimately lose confidence. It could also stem from frustration, as a failure to align marketing and sales efforts can lead to diengagment.
Regardless, your team will slowly start losing confidence and end up quitting within their first few years. If you are constantly going through turnover it will be hard to build those relationships with your prospects and eventually turn them into customers. Not to mention all the money you spend on training and on-boarding for new hires. One way to avoid high turnover and improve sales performance is by providing them with the right digital tools for prospecting, presenting and negotiating.
Sales enablement empowers your sales reps with data and insight they need to make more sales. By integrating some of the sales support tools I outline below, your teams will find higher quality leads, provide content that is relevant to your consumer, and close deals faster.
Sales Support Tools for Prospecting
Let’s start at the beginning. Take a moment to think, how does your team prospect? Are they still cold calling or going from business to business? How do you find quality leads without spending too much time in the process? The following tools will help your salespeople continue to network and engage with buyers with the help of modern technology.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a tool that needs to be in your arsenal as it moves sales reps away from cold calling and towards social selling. This simple, yet useful prospecting tool allows you to focus on the right people and stay informed with more insights. LinkedIn's algorithm will give you lead recommendations based on your preferences, historical saved leads, and similar influencers in the industry. As with many tools, this tool syncs with HubSpot by pulling prospect information from their LinkedIn profile straight into your CRM by a click of a button.
atEvent
We are starting to see a shift away from cold calling, but trade shows tell a different story. Recent statistics show that 92% of trаdе show attendees ѕау thеу are lооkіng fоr nеw рrоduсtѕ making tradeshows still an effective place to meet prospects and potential buyers. Due to the pace and size of these events, it can be overwhelming for the sales rep to organize and retain all this information received from their prospects. With atEvent, you can easily capture leads by scanning badges or taking screenshots of business cards that then sync with most major CRM systems. The app will then let you associate topics, record important context, and create follow up actions with each contact. Furthermore, atEvent dashboards pull together detailed insights and trending topics for an accelerated and more personalized sales process.
Sales Support Tools for Presentations
After you qualify your leads and start building a relationship with your lead it is time to set up a meeting for a presentation. Regardless if this will be face to face or over the phone, you need to find a way to stand out from the competition while also providing them with content that is beneficial to them.
App Data Room
Part of the sales enablement strategy is to improve the alignment between marketing and sales. So, when I visit App Data Room's website and it states, "Aligning Sales & Marketing to Sell More’, that makes my heart smile! One of the biggest challenges that sales reps face is knowing where to find the content that marketing creates. With this app, it is all in one convenient place. Provide your team with the right content to succeed by putting together case studies, testimonials, and customized brand standard presentations, that can be accessible anywhere in the world. Additionally, App Data Room reports on performance by tracking views, times spent on each media source, and follow ups by Salesperson. Lastly, it will integrate with your HubSpot CRM by syncing with contact and company data, and sales activities.
SlideDog
In this fast pace world, timing and engagement matter more now than ever. Move away from static images on PowerPoint slides and wasting your time by clicking from one page to another and start utilizing tools such as SlideDog. SlideDog is a free (yes, I said free!) multimedia presentation software that seamlessly combines various types of media into one presentation without ever having to switch from programs. Improve engagement with your prospects by giving real-time presentations that have interactive polls and chats that can be added to each slide.
Tools for Closing
By using the digital tools above, you have qualified and engaged with your leads, educated them on your product or service, and now is the time to close in a similar fashion. The next two tools are very similar but first let me introduce you to a Revenue River favorite.
PandaDoc
This Sales Enablement tool automates documentation including proposals, contracts, eSignatures and even hiring and on-boarding. Through PandaDoc you can streamline your collateral to ensure only the current and brand approved content is available for reps. Additionally, it integrates with HubSpot by automatically pulling contacts, dates, signatures and any other custom fields from your CRM and adds them to your PandaDoc.
Proposify
Proposify, comparable to PandaDoc, is a Sales Enablement tool you can use for closing deals by sending trackable proposals and contracts. Personalize and tailor your documents to each lead by using their design editor to create content or speed up the process by using a pre-built template. Either way, this is your opportunity to stand out from the competition. Proposify also integrates with HubSpot so you never miss a beat and can keep track of any changes that are made straight into your Deal’s timeline.
Communication
I wouldn't be able to provide you with a list of digital tools without touching on a few that will improve communication and team efficiency. Of the many things that Sales Enablement teams strive to improve, communication between marketing and sales is a priority and that means going behind just signing a Service Level Agreement.\
Skype
Skype is a tool created by Microsoft and has been used by businesses and individuals for years now. They continue to improve their platform and make it more user-friendly. With Skype for Business, you can create private chat groups, make calls, hold meetings, share your screen, and send emojis or GIFs, because why would you take work seriously all the time?
Slack
However, if you are looking for a tool that is paving the way for how communication is being done within an organization, look no further than Slack. Slack has similar features to Skype but provides you will more options to improve B2B business and internal communication, With Slack, you can set up private channels for projects or teams, pin and search for documents in your messages, and integrate it with hundreds of apps. Integrate your Slack channel with Analytics, Sales or Bot apps, such as Insightly, Tableau, or Survey Monkey, to increase team efficiency and productivity.
These are only a few of the digital sales tools that can help your sales team effectively engage with prospects, deliver presentations that educate and promote your product or service, and nurture leads into customers, and eventually evangelists. If you have a sales support tool that you think we missed, let us know in the comments section.
The technology to better align your marketing and sales teams is out there. Let our Sales Enablement team walk you through additional tools and resources. Reach out to us today!
