In today’s market, having a sales team is an absolute necessity, no matter your niche. Also in today’s market, sales teams need to move quicker than ever to be able to close and bring profit to their companies.
Unfortunately, sales professionals today only spend 36% of their total time on actual selling. The rest is spent on administrative tasks, email, meetings and anything but selling. Here are some tools that will help your sales team focus on selling instead of arbitrary tasks that don’t improve your bottom line.
1. Grammarly
Chances are, many people reading this article are already using Grammarly. It’s the number one tool for proofreading and text editing in English and you can get it absolutely free. You may be wondering: how does a grammar tool improve the productivity of someone in sales?
As a sales professional, you probably have to do a lot of outreach and other communication through emails, LinkedIn, Facebook and other platforms. Grammarly makes all of your spelling and grammar is spotless and ensures that you appear as a professional you are and not someone who ruins their reputation with sloppy writing.
The free version is excellent, but upgrading to Premium helps to solve issues such as wordiness, impoliteness and insensitive language. At just $12 per month, it’s definitely worth the investment.
2. Gorgias
Speaking of writing emails, if you do lots of outreach and follow up with your leads, you have to send a lot of them. At some point in time, you’ll realize that the majority of emails you write are similar to each other. Writing emails manually takes a lot of time, while automated email scripts are easy to spot and your leads will ignore them.
The solution lies somewhere in between, with Gorgias. This Chrome extension lets you create and use email templates instead of writing everything from scratch.
You can create different templates for different personas and situations and cut down on time spent writing emails. You’ll be able to write faster and still retain the level of personalization of hand-written emails.
3. crowdy.ai
Did you know that about 98% of your website visitors leave without converting? Whether it’s purchasing a product, signing up for a demo, opting in for your email list or something else, the vast majority of all visitors to your website don’t do what you need them to.
crowdy.ai is a set of tools for social proof that makes sure your visitors turn into buyers. It combines testimonials, pushes notifications, star ratings, conversion notifications, and social media count to ensure visitors get swayed into purchasing by social proof. The product is still in beta and it’s completely free for this first 100 users – it’s best to hurry up to get on board immediately.
4. Yanado
Emails can be a drag. When you receive 50 of them in a single morning, it takes some patience to weed through them and find what’s important. Then you need to choose the ones that need your immediate attention and action. You would usually do that using your project management app.
Within Yanado, you can use your Gmail inbox as your project management app. Turn emails into tasks, set due dates and reminders, share tasks and assign them to others, create subtasks and tags and much, much more.
Think of it as adding Trello straight to your inbox – it’s extremely convenient and saves a ton of time. There’s a free plan that gives you the majority of features, while paid plans start at just $6 per user per month.
5. DocuSign
Going digital with your sales processes means a lot of things. Communication, documents, administrative processes and much more. If you’ve just closed an important sale, there’s no celebration until the agreement gets signed.
And if your client needs to receive the agreement in the email, print it out, sign it in multiple copies and then scan it to send it back, it’s bound to become a bottleneck that slows down your sales.
DocuSign is a platform that allows you to create agreements, contracts, and other documents and have them signed digitally. Much more than a simple document, it also lets you create mobile-friendly agreements, as well as send follow-ups and reminders in case the client is taking too long to sign. In other words, the entire process of document signing goes digital with DocuSign.
6. Clearbit
You’ve likely heard of Clearbit before – this comprehensive platform for sales professionals and marketers offers an abundance of great solutions to improve their processes. The one we’re interested in is the Enrichment part of the product.
Using Enrichment in Clearbit, you can enrich your data on a specific lead. For example, if all you have is their name and email, Clearbit can fill out the remaining fields, such as phone number, company, position in the company and much more.
That way, you can lift the burden from your sales team to collect all of this data and focus only on the most necessary points to make the sale. It also lets you create simpler sign-up forms, by only asking for 2-3 data points instead of creating a form that takes an hour to fill out.
7. Toggl
Remember how we mentioned that only 36% of the time of a sales professional goes to selling? Toggl helps you figure out if the same applies to you. This super simple time tracker lets you measure where your time goes at work and what activities take up the bulk of your day.
Once you install it and start tracking time, it provides you with useful reports that go into granular levels of how you spent your day. The basic version is free, with paid plans starting at $9 per month.
Conclusion
The main reason sales team don’t get to do as much selling as before is that there are a variety of tasks around sales nowadays. Little by little, they eat up your time and gnaw away at your productivity. Using some of the tools mentioned here, you’ll be able to regain control of your time, increase your productivity and ultimately – get more sales.
Author Bio: Carsten Schäfer is the founder and CEO of crowdy.ai, the first Clients-Convert-Clients Marketing platform. Inspired by principles and mechanisms of social proof, Carsten is currently on his way to help businesses become trustworthy and thrive in the digital landscape.