Whether you are starting your business or running a small sales team it’s no secret that sales are the lifeblood of your company. You need to utilize as many key resources as possible to get in front of the right people, manage your sales funnel, and make connections at the right time.
This blog post will detail the five sales funnel tools I have added to our sales team at LeadQuizzes in the past year to dramatically increase our contact rate and close more deals.
Tool 1: CRM (Customer Relationship Management System)
A good CRM is the most beneficial tool you can have for your sales funnel management. It will allow you to setup proper sales funnel tracking, open deals, and keep track of current customers. You will want to utilize this as your main tool to track and report on revenue.
If you are a small business or entrepreneur looking for an effective sales management tool, then HubSpot Sales could be a great fit. Even better, they have a free version! HubSpot Sales works very similar to Salesforce with some minor differences in naming conventions.
One plus is the interface is really nice and much easier to use compared to Salesforce. The downside, is that once you start dealing with enterprise level clients, you will want to utilize a larger CRM like Salesforce.
HubSpot’s CRM is broken down into the following components:
- Contacts – these are your leads or potential customers in HubSpot. You will see all the information about the contact in a timeline fashion (think Facebook). This makes it easy to see any email, task, note or call you have made on the record.
- Companies – Pretty straightforward here. This is the company the lead works for. Again, if you are dealing with smaller businesses or entrepreneurs this could be the same name as the contact.
- Deals – HubSpot’s version of opportunities. Once you have pitched the contact, you open the deal and track each sales funnel stage to close. HubSpot has great reporting which can show you deal forecast and actual closed amounts.
As you can see, HubSpot Sales is a great tool to start managing your sales funnel no matter where you are in your business. But, if you put out a little more money each month, their HubSpot Sales Pro is well worth the price for some key additional features:
- Unlimited Email Templates and Tracking – quickly send emails from your library of templates. There also is a Google integration so you can send templates directly from Gmail. Every time you send a template it is tracked in HubSpot so you can see your open and click rates. This gives you the data to see if your emails are actually getting read or going right to the trash. This allowed our sales team to test multiple subject lines and we are now seeing a 40% open rate on our emails!
- Email Sequences – this allows you to enroll any contact in a series of emails. Email sequences are separate from your email marketing campaigns because these are targeted sales emails meant to start the conversation with your prospect. You can edit each email and tailor it to your prospect. Then you choose the time between each email and enroll them in the sequence. When the contact responds, the sequence stops and you take over.
- Meetings – One of my favorite features that allows contacts to click a link in your emails and book a time to meet with you. You can even set up team calendars with a round-robin feature. It’s nice to have this integrated right into your CRM as opposed to using an outside service like Calendly. This is because you can create custom fields like revenue and website that are required when your prospect books a meeting. HubSpot will automatically update the contact record with this info after they book.
- Notifications – get notified any time a contact opens an email. The best salespeople know when to reach out and there is no better time than when the contact has revisited your email from two weeks ago.
- Simple Dialer – a dialer is a simple tool that allows you to call prospects quicker one after the other right from your computer instead of manually dialing. In HubSpot, you select the leads you want to call, and it calls each one and allows you to put the notes from the call before moving on to the next record. This will save you a lot of time and ensures you never forget to update records and notes after a call.
If you are anticipating growth to a multiple person sales team and enterprise level company, Salesforce is the most well-known CRM for a reason. It can fit any business and scale with you as you grow. Even though it is one of the most widely used options, it can be daunting for small businesses at first.
For our smaller customers, I would recommend using the bare bones salesforce approach to minimize confusion and learning time. Take it from me, we utilized Salesforce completely the wrong way when we made the switch from Infusionsoft because it can be intimidating to know where to begin.
To keep it simple, I would utilize the following aspects of Salesforce:
- Leads – these are potential customers. Anyone that has submitted their information on your website or you have identified as a potential target should be added to Salesforce as a lead. Make sure to note the lead source (referral, website, paid social, etc). As you grow, you want to be able to track what sources your sales are coming from so you can focus your efforts.
- Contacts – these can be people in your network, current customers, and even competitors you want to keep an eye on.
- Accounts – The account is the company. If you are selling to entrepreneurs, a lot of times the lead name can also be their company.
- Opportunities – This is how Salesforce tracks a sale. When you believe a lead has the potential to turn into a sale, you convert it to an opportunity and track each stage of the sales funnel to close.
At the end of the month, you can pull reports from Salesforce to make key decisions moving forward. Here are a few reports you should be pulling:
- Revenue by Lead Source – will show the most profitable lead sources to focus your marketing efforts. Pull this report on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.
- Revenue by Account – this report shows your top customers by revenue. Pull this report on a quarterly and yearly basis. These customers will be your evangelists. They will generate referrals and can be used as a model when prospecting new business or creating your ideal buyer persona.
- Activities By Salesperson (if applicable) – if your organization has a salesperson under you or a full team, you need to pull reports to measure salesperson effectiveness. This report will show you total activities and sales by each salesperson. This should be pulled on a weekly basis and reviewed individually with each rep.
This is bare bones and simple approach to Salesforce I wish I could have read when we first started using the software. Most people reading this that are utilizing Salesforce for the first time or implementing it for a small sales team will benefit by using the simple approach above. The great thing about Salesforce is that it will scale with you no matter how big your company grows.
You cannot go wrong with either option you choose. If you want a system that will scale as your company grows and has unlimited customization options, Salesforce is the choice.
If you are a smaller business that needs all the benefits of a great CRM for a low price, you cannot beat HubSpot. We actually use both because I love some of the above HubSpot Pro features : ) They integrate perfectly together so all information input into one is synced to the other.
Tool 2: The Dialer
Gone are the days of taking a list of leads and manually calling each one. This is extremely slow and inefficient. These two options will integrate with Salesforce, but as I mentioned above, HubSpot Sales Pro has a simple dialer built in.
We have found Dialsource to be a great tool in increasing our call volume and correct contact rate. It’s no secret in sales that your success comes down to hitting your key activities. For us, two of those are dials and correct contacts.
We know if we get on the phone and have conversations with 8 people a day, at least 25% of them will close into something. That’s why it is necessary to use tools to help you reach those numbers.
Dialsource allows you to create call lists from reports and call through each lead. After each call, you click a button at the top called a disposition. This simply means a call result. Some of our possible dispositions include: Left Voicemail, Correct Contact, Correct Contact (Busy), Wrong Number, and Voicemail Full.
The best part is that you can go back and see a report on all the dials made and the result of each call. This will help you understand your correct contact rate and how many dials you need to hit it.
One of the leaders in this industry is Inside Sales who offers some excellent additions to Salesforce. I have been actively eyeing their newest product and just got a demo this week. It’s called Inside Sales Playbooks.
One thing you want to test when reaching out to leads is a sales cadence. This is just a rhythm of how many calls, emails, and other actions you will take over a given time.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and blog engagement are also great ways to stand out with a potential customer. Here is an example sales cadence we use:
- Day 1 – Call 1, VM 1, Email 1
- Day 2 – Call 2, Add on LinkedIn
- Day 3 – Call 3, VM 2, Email 2
- Day 5 – Call 4
- Day 6 – Call 5, VM 3, Email 3
- Day 8 – Call 6
- Day 9 – Call 7, VM 4, Email 4
That above cadence would be your “play.” Playbooks allow you to set up multiple plays. You can add every lead to a play and it will tell you every day you need to make a certain number of calls, emails, and other actions. You can see your progress every day and where each lead is in the play.
Finally, you will see reporting on each play so you can find the one that gets you in contact with the most leads.
Tool 3: Email Tracking Software
In today’s environment, it is harder and harder to get the prospect’s attention. They are getting bombarded with sales emails, marketing emails, networking emails, personal emails. This goes on and on.
You need to be more strategic with the content in your emails by providing immense value in every one, but you also have to think of creative ways to get your emails opened.
The best way to do this is by tracking open and click rates. This is a standard feature on most marketing platforms, but salespeople never really had the benefit of knowing these numbers until recently. I talked above about how HubSpot Sales Pro includes this feature above.
They do this by adding an extension to your Google email which tracks every email. You can also quickly pull up an email template and fire it off to your prospect. HubSpot’s reporting makes it easy to see which templates have the best open and click rates so you can make adjustments.
Another great feature is the ability to be notified every time someone opens an email. This can be crucial in timing your call follow-ups by knowing they are again interested in the service.
Another great tool for this is Mix Max. Mix Max is almost identical in features to HubSpot Sales Pro email features. It will allow you to integrate with Gmail, create templates, and track opens.
Tool 4: Scheduling Software
This is easily one of the most necessary tools in sales. It used to be a thing that you had to exchange multiple emails with someone to get a meeting booked. You sent them your availability, they sent you theirs, and it went on and on.
Appointlet is a free tool that lets you setup your own calendar link that syncs with your calendar. Your prospect clicks the link and automatically sees the times you can meet. They pick a time and it is on both of your schedules.
I also use this as an opportunity to capture some additional information about the prospect. Sometimes I only have name and email when someone opts in on our quiz or site. With Appointlet, I can ask a couple of additional questions like company, website URL, annual revenue, and location. The more information you have before the call, the better. And this is a great and non-threatening way to do that.
HubSpot Sales Pro and Mix Max Professional also included this feature which are both paid plans.
Tool 5: Artificial Intelligence Software
We have entered an exciting time in business with new and more effective software popping up everyday. One of the hardest things for a salesperson to manage is their follow up. Sales greats like Grant Cardone and Ryan Stewman constantly elaborate on how the money is in the follow-up. And it’s true.
One of the most common objections I encounter is timing. But it would be foolish to write off these prospects and move to the next. This is where an effective follow-up system or “coach” comes into play.
SpiroHQ is a tool that syncs up with your CRM and email provider to get a better understanding of who you need to be following up with and when. Once it syncs up to both and understands all your open opportunities or deals, it prioritizes and reminds you when to follow up.
You can do this from your desktop or through an iPhone app. I have found that it dramatically decreases my data entry and allows me to wake up deals from the dead.
I block thirty minutes to an hour everyday to log in to SpiroHQ and work through my follow-ups. This could consist of calls, emails, closing tasks, or updating deal data. The nice thing is, that SpiroHQ prioritizes the people you call by looking at all your data available. You can also send a quick follow up email through their built-in templates.
You can even choose the persona of your “coach” and receive motivational and sometimes funny notifications that it is time to follow up with a prospect. This will help you stay on top of all your open deals and make sure none of them fall through the cracks.
Another tool that you can try is Lemlist – it’s a good Mailshake alternative you can use to engage with your potential customers through cold emails. But what makes Lemlist different than other cold email tools is its deliverability rate and the possibility to create personalized images, videos and personalized landing pages.
Whether you are a one-man show or have a small sales team, the salespeople that win are the ones that have great sales funnel management, hit their key activities, and actively follow up at the right time. By using these above sales funnel tools you will increase the number of prospects you get in touch with and close more sales.
I hope you find these useful and would love some feedback from anyone that tries them out. I would also like to know what I missed. What sales tools are you using that you find most effective?
