Generating sales is one of the toughest things about running a business. 61% of sales reps claim selling is harder now than it was five years ago. Moreover, at least 50% of your prospects are not a good fit for your products or services.
No wonder, it is hard to meet sales targets!
With the pressure mounting, salespeople are looking for new ways and tools to get more business. These tools not only automate routine sales processes, but they also help brands upsell by using modern methods such as social selling and influencer marketing.
While many tools claim to aid sales generation, not all of them have the same purpose or performance. Using the wrong tools can cost you unnecessary subscription fees and cause lost sales opportunities. So, how do you pick a winner?
What Are the Best Ways and Tools to Generate More Sales?
Sales generation tactics are evolving fast. To remain relevant and outperform competitors, brands need to adapt to the changing ecosystem.
Luckily, you don’t need to grapple with the nuts and bolts of modern sales methods. You just need a handful of tools to handle the basics while you focus on expanding your business.
Here are three ways in which you can sharpen your sales game and meet your ROI targets. Ready to get started? Let’s dive right in.
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is emerging as a profitable growth-hacking method for brands. If your focus is solely on increasing sales conversions, you should collaborate with influencers.
Eight out of every 10 consumers said they made a purchase based on the recommendation of an influencer. So, it’s evident that influencers can help you drive sales.
But that’s not all.
Influencers can help you boost brand awareness, reach a new target audience, drive engagement, and build consumer trust.
If you’re wondering which social channel will be most effective for influencer campaigns, Instagram is the top choice of 87.6% of marketers, followed by Facebook (42%), and YouTube (37%).
Sure, selecting the right channel and influencer is a great start. But they can’t ensure good results. You’ll need to work out a content strategy with your influencers and optimize your sponsored posts for platform and audience.
The use of user-generated content and relevant hashtags in posts can further make them more readable and visible.
Since growing brands can’t really afford to miss the mark when it comes to sales targets, influencer marketing tools can come in handy.
Which Are the Best Influencer Marketing Tools?
Fourstarzz Media is an influencer marketing platform designed for the needs of startups and small-medium businesses. With unlimited access to more than 700k pre-qualified micro-influencer profiles and reports, a wealth of data, influencer contact data, and an in-app campaign workflow management system, this tool can help skyrocket your sales figures.
Tidal Labs is a platform to manage influencer content campaigns efficiently. The built-in CMS enables you to edit, review, and distribute your sponsored content. You also get access to analytics for each campaign.
VURoll is another platform that can connect you with influencers, bloggers, and content creators in your industry. You can create full-blown campaigns and measure ROI in real time.
2. Email Marketing
Sales development representatives (SDRs) have a tough job. Buyers are getting more and more discerning. Cold calling isn’t working anymore. It takes about 18 calls by reps to connect with clients. Even then, the chances of making a sale are slim. Intrusive sales methods are on their way out.
In such a scenario, email marketing can help. Emails do not invade the recipients' privacy. They aren’t pushy or demanding. People can browse through them at their own pace. For these reasons, 87% of smart marketers use email campaigns to nurture customers and prospects.
But email marketing isn’t always easy. To get results, sales emails need to be optimally composed and timed. User-generated content (UGC) and videos in emails can further boost their click-through rates.
To derive great returns, segmentation, personalization, and A/B testing of content should be at the core of your email campaigns. Automated tools can make your job easier and error-proof.
Which Are the Best Email Marketing Tools?
Constant Contact is an email marketing tool that can send triggered emails and auto-resend messages. It segments your contact list intelligently so that you can send the right message to the right person at the right time.
Outreach Plus is an email marketing software platform for designing outbound sales emails. The prospect analysis feature helps segregate cold, warm, and hot leads. The Campaign Wizard gives you a panoramic view of all your email campaigns so that you know exactly where a prospect stands in the sales pipeline. Their A/B tests evaluate content for efficacy.
Prospect.io is an email marketing tool as well as an end-to-end solution for lead generation. Its email finder searches for verified email addresses of your website visitors. Then, it lets you build email campaigns to convert random visitors into paying customers. Integration with CRMs like HubSpot lets you manage and analyze customer interactions better.
3. Sales Automation
Many deals and opportunities are lost because busy entrepreneurs can’t devote time to the manual aspects of the sales process. They waste productive hours to add customer records to CRMs, send follow up reminders, and delegate tasks to colleagues.
Sales automation has the potential to turbocharge your sales process.
How?
Whether it is furnishing customer testimonials or scheduling meetings with a hot lead, sales automation tools can accomplish everything in a jiffy. Moreover, you can cut labor and consumables expenses by going paperless.
Most sales automation platforms are equipped with auto-dialers that line up meetings based on sales intent rather than fruitless parameters like alphabetical order. They also have CRM integrations that sync customer records with relevant projects and teams.
You can also plug many platforms into your social accounts. Your social contacts are automatically added to your CRM and labeled and segmented according to set parameters.
Which Are the Best Sales Automation Tools?
OptinMonster is a robust tool that can help with campaign building and sales conversions. Its geo-location targeting lets you build location-specific campaigns. Its disruptive exit-intent technology sends targeted messages to website visitors when they abandon your site. You can add on-site Drip campaigns to produce better results.
D&B Hoovers is another platform that helps with prospecting. It houses a commercial database with nearly 120 million businesses and analysis about them. Using the data, you can identify sales-ready leads and pursue them with a laser focus. You can add the tool’s plugin to your CRM system to get a more holistic solution.
Lead Forensics is a tool that compiles real-time data about website visitors. Then, it scores each visitor against parameters such as purchase intent and engagement. It even attributes the exact source from where most leads are originating.
That’s a Wrap
Sales growth requires more than just a good stack of tools. But the right tools can certainly simplify tasks and extract maximum productivity.
They can also ease the grunt work of your over-worked sales reps. Depending on your preferred lead generation method, you can subscribe to a few of these tools and evaluate their performance during the trial period.
Have you used any of the tools mentioned above? Please share your experience in the comments section below.