As your business gets off the ground and you start getting used to the rhythm, you might find your sales performance plateauing. You’ve hit the limits of bootstrapping and the work you can comfortably take on with your current production capacity.
So now what?
Luckily, modern technology has developed scores of new sales tools solely to help small- and medium-sized businesses. Whether you’re looking to increase your output, cut costs, or improve customer relationships, there’s a sales tool out there for you. To understand your options, here are five of the top sales tools to boost your business.
1. CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) software tracks individual customer interactions through their sales journey so companies can hopefully improve these relationships at every touchpoint. It gives businesses a central platform to see the details of each customer’s transaction, how many customers are in each stage of the sales pipeline, and what actions need to be taken for each customer.
With this information on hand, businesses can quickly manage each transaction, speeding up the sales process and making more sales in a shorter amount of time. Plus, with the customer’s personal details recorded in their profile, sales reps can create personalized messages and packages for each customer’s unique needs. This boosts customer satisfaction and promotes customer loyalty.
If you’re not sure about what your sales process is or how to train your sales reps in the first place, don’t worry. Making That Sale is a great resource for new entrepreneurs to help set up the essentials of their sales team.
CRM software is great for businesses both big and small: you can use it to build close one-on-one relationships with the few customers you have, or use it to manage hundreds of customers at once. It’s no wonder that over 91% of businesses use a CRM system.
2. Email and Marketing Automation
Email automation software, or marketing automation software in general, speeds up the marketing process by helping marketers design, create, personalize, and send out emails on a massive scale to leads and customers.
Almost everyone in the world has an email account, so email marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract new customers to your business. But sending emails out one by one can be a struggle. Email automation software will send out customized emails in bulk to your potential customers based on certain triggers, such as if they visited your website, or put an item in their basket but didn’t complete their purchase. By paying personal attention to each customer’s sales journey through unobtrusive emails, a company can attract new customers and nudge them to complete a purchase — all without any human oversight. This frees up your marketing reps to focus on more important strategic tasks.
As a bonus, email and marketing automation software can usually integrate straight into a CRM platform, helping you track which leads turn into which customers and providing a complete view of the customer journey.
We’d recommend email and marketing automation software tools for businesses that already have a rock-solid sales process and are looking to massively boost their lead generation efforts.
3. CMS
A content management system (CMS) is a central platform that allows business owners to create media-rich websites without any coding knowledge.
With the rise of online shopping in the digital age, consumers are increasingly turning to the virtual marketplace for their every whim and purchase. For business owners, a sleek, professional, and well-designed website is the bare minimum necessary to seem respectable in the eyes of potential customers.
CMS tools host photos and videos and allow users to manipulate those media files into an attractive website, boosting a company’s online reputation. If your business wants to increase its online presence but can’t afford a website programmer, a CMS would be perfect.
4. Call Tracking Software
If your business relies on inbound phone calls from customers to make sales, call tracking software would be a good investment to help you determine where the most valuable calls come from.
Say, for example, that your company runs an ad on Facebook and Instagram, with instructions on both to call your company to make a purchase. If your call tracking software told you that almost all of your inbound phone callers came from Instagram, you would know to stop paying for Facebook ads and focus more of your attention on Instagram ads instead.
With the data provided by call tracking software, companies reliant on inbound phone calls can optimize their advertisement strategies.
5. ERP
Finally, for medium-sized businesses looking to expand even further, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can help your business manage every aspect of its operations and finances, all from one platform. ERPs provide a birds-eye view of the entire company, linking production, order fulfillment, accounting, and more into one shared database.
With an ERP system, anyone in the company can view accurate, up-to-date information on the company’s activities, letting decision-makers make informed decisions lighting-fast. The business will also be able to see and correct bottlenecks and inefficiencies, optimizing operations and reducing costs.
ERP platforms are best for larger businesses with several departments and large data silos.
Which One Should I Choose For My Business?
We’ve discussed quite a few sales tools today, each with their own unique perks and benefits suited for different businesses.
If you don’t have any of these tools, we’d recommend purchasing a CRM first, as it’s the most versatile for companies of any size. Most other sales tools will integrate into a CRM platform, as well, making it a central hub for all of your tools.
After a CRM, which sales tool you should invest in next depends on your individual business needs: marketing automation if you want to drastically increase leads, CMS if you want to improve your website, call tracking software if you rely on phone-based sales, and ERP if you’re looking to break into big business operations.
No matter what your industry you operate in or what your business goals are, there’s likely to be at least one tool on this list that appeals to you. With this list of sales tools in hand, you can go out and make an informed decision about the best sales tool to invest in to boost your sales and grow your business
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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