It’s difficult to increase sales productivity if you’re stuck doing administrative duties, like data entry, cold outreach, updating customer profiles, prospecting, scheduling meetings, etc.
In fact, sales reps spend only 35.2% of their time selling. Whereas, countless hours are spent on activities that have little or no connection to selling.
The good news is it doesn’t have to be like that — technology can help your employees save time money, so sales reps can do what they do best – sell.
In this article, we’ll discuss the 11 best sales tools on the market today, all designed to get your sales numbers up and improve your sales process. Let’s dig in!
What Are Sales Tools?
Before we begin, it’s best to explain what sales productivity tools are. This article will explain several tools that can help your sales reps speed up the sales process, assist with customer management, improve lead generation, communication, and boost sales.
How Can Sales Tools Help Increase Effectiveness?
Every successful business owner knows the importance of efficiency and effectiveness.
By efficiency, we mean the smart distribution and use of a company’s resources. And since time is one of the most valuable resources for any business, efficiency has to be related to time. Hence, your goal is for your sales team to spend most of their productive time on high-value sales activities. You start by eliminating other, low-impact activities, such as data entry, emailing, and double work.
On the other hand, effectiveness is how well you utilize the company’s resources to achieve your goals. And this requires a bit of skill. But you can use technology to increase effectiveness as well. There are great reporting tools, communication records, engagement metrics, etc., that’ll do wonders.
So, let’s take a look at those sales tools that’ll help you boost your team’s productivity levels.
11 Best Sales Productivity Tools You Can Use
If you’re in sales, you know the everlasting dilemma of going after one lead while having to sacrifice another. So, good customer relationship management (CRM) tools can assist your sales teams in filtering the right prospects. That way, you get a sales process that is more focused.
1. CRM Software
CRMs automate manual tasks and streamline workflows. Some CRMs have many excellent features like sales automation, contact management, email templates and tracking, sales reports, a shared inbox for your team, and more. And they can be found at an affordable price.
Many come with the option of sales pipeline management, where you can easily see and understand data. Other features include smart emails, calls recording, smart analytics, etc. And when connected to your business phone, your teams enjoy a seamless integration for instant notifications of incoming calls and contact profile pop-ups.
2. Sales Analytics and Reports
If you want a tool to help you make informed business decisions easier, you need a way to check activity trends, provide data visualizations and predictive analytics, so you can stay on top of things and quickly adjust the parts of your sales process that need improvement.
Forecasting Reports enable you to identify key information, such as company briefs, business influencers, market drivers, and industry trends. You can then make good use of social selling to improve the frequency and quality of customer engagement on your landing pages. Some platforms offer real-time notifications about customer actions on your website through Instant Lead Response, so you can respond quickly.
Lastly, sales analytics let you know if your team is hitting its sales goals, so you can adjust benchmarks accordingly. Track your team’s productivity, with real-time info on your sales reps’ daily performance. Compare individual stats and quickly pinpoint problematic behaviors for improved correction. Valuable data like this improves team communication and morale, while simultaneously building healthy competition among team members.
3. Power Dialers
Perfect for call lists, Power dialers enable your sales team to call 100 potential prospects per hour without hanging up the phone or manually dialing numbers. Save time, energy and increase contact rates and appointments by uploading a call list of hundreds of contacts and letting the system automate the dialing process. Power dialers have been known to increase sales by as much as 300%!
4. Emails with Performance Tracking
Nurturing is easier and following up is more effective when you know how your audience interacts with your content. With Email Performance Tracking, you’ll know how someone interacted with your email for better insight, and whether or not they clicked on your call to action button or link.
This way you’ll know who is more interested in your product or service and can group contacts based on their level of interest.
5. Instant Lead Response
Quickly respond when someone expresses interest in your product or service on your website. The moment a prospect completes a form, your sales team is notified with all the contact information, so an available sales rep can hop on a call. Nine out of ten leads buy from the first rep to respond, so an Instant Lead Responder ensures your at the front of the line.
6. Follow-up Sequences
Nurture leads over time with valuable content to build a relationship and gain a prospect’s trust. Pre-schedule a series of emails, business texts and phone calls over a specified period of time to follow-up and further learn their pain points and needs, so you can offer a tailored package or service.
7. Built-in Calling and Group Texting Tools
Oftentimes, small businesses rely on multiple tools for outreach. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Today, some platforms have call and text built right in, so staff can access everything they need in one place.
This is often in the forms of a call center or using an all-in-one platform. The convenience of texting someone while seeing their entire contact history and profile is an incredible time-saver and being able to group contacts in folders and text them all in one shot saves time and money.
8. Ability to Record Calls for Later Access
To ensure you’re providing the best service possible, there’s no better way than being able to record calls for later access. Listening to past calls prevents miscommunication and ensures consistent messaging across departments. Call recordings minimize the need to take notes, so representatives can focus on the conversation at hand. Supervisors can refer to past recorded calls to demonstrate successful customer conversations and establish best practices – a perfect tool for onboarding new hires.
9. Important Notes Attached to Each Contact’s Profile
Remembering important facts about a customer or prospect can be the difference between closing or losing a sale. Automatically attaching notes to a contact’s profile, enables you to to better understand their needs. Everything is neatly organized and a rep can even pull up all the notes pertaining to a specific contact while on call with that customer or prospect. It’s the electronic equivalent of paper sticky notes.
10. Visualize the Sales Pipeline Activity
The ability to visualize the sales pipeline activity means you’ll know where each contact is in their buying journey. You’ll see what outreach techniques generated the largest interest and the number of touchpoints it took to make a connection. Why does this matter? Because if you know a prospect’s intention and needs, you can better qualify them as a potential customer, forecast the chances of closing the sale with greater accuracy, and make adjustments for future performance.
11. Folders and Lead Scoring for Grouping Contacts
Folders and lead scoring are two ways to group contacts. Folders make it easy to send group messages and lead scoring is perfect for prioritizing your calls for the day. People go through multiple stages before buying. The more complex the purchase, the more stages involved. Knowing whether a prospect is in the awareness stage, consideration stage, decision stage or negotiation stage is extremely helpful for preparing what to say and how to say it. Folders and Lead Scoring do that.
Which Sales Tools Work Best For You?
The right sales productivity tools make the difference between hitting average sales numbers and topping the charts. The key is to learn your team’s weaknesses and find the right sales tools that will help improve their numbers.
What are some tools you’ve used in your business and which of the sales tools listed above can you imagine helping you further? Let us know in the comments. And if you have any ideas for future articles, write us at feedback@dyl.com. We’re always looking for new ideas!
