Sales Tools Analysis – Tools For Best Business Performance

The business world has progressively shifted into the digital age with economy, growth, and competition requiring every enterprise to adapt to the latest selling methods. Salespeople are spending less time visiting customers in person. Thus, sales tools become an inevitable part of growing businesses as they facilitate accessible communication between the seller and potential clients.

In the article, we’ll dive into the challenges most entrepreneurs face when managing sales and the most popular tools for sales you shouldn’t miss out on.

What are the Challenges in Managing Sales?

There are three critical challenges to sales processes that most businesses face, and those include:

1. Lack of communication
2. Data gaps create a lack of knowledge on market trends, product performance as well as other business metrics
3. A weak infrastructure for managing leads and increasing conversion rates for a targeted audience

Sales tools can help alleviate the most pressing issues. Modern marketers are relying on sales tools to support their sales activities and achieve positive ROI. Using data and automation can reduce time waste, improve productivity, and increase conversion rates for CRM database marketing.

How Do You Grow Your Sales Team with a Small Budget?

The good news is that you don’t need to have a large budget to grow your sales team. You can hire and retain great talent at affordable prices by productively using modern tools. Here are a few ideas:

1. Use quality content marketing as an essential contributor to growth
2. Build your social media presence on platforms that are relevant to your business; consider Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn
3. Use sales tools for lead management like CRM software (e.g., Salesforce, Zoho)
4. Create a strategic plan to improve your customer retention rate and reduce churn rate
5. Generate leads with the help of content marketing

Many small businesses have budgets that are too small for a full-time salesperson. You can find great contributors to your sales efforts with limited funds, including leveraging freelance networks such as Upwork or Fiverr, advertising in digital job boards like Indeed, using recruitment agencies, etc.

How Do You Motivate Your Sales Team?

Motivating salespeople can be challenging. This is especially true for a small business with limited resources and budget. However, you can increase your sales team’s motivation by providing the best tools to help them do their job and supporting employees in achieving their professional career goals.

1. Make sure you have a clear vision of your company
2. Involve salespeople in the decision-making process so that they feel like their opinion is valued and heard
3. Encourage open communication; while having a leader can help move things forward, don’t forget to listen to outside ideas
4. Create a culture of transparency and open communication
5. Provide the best technologies for salespeople to make their job easier and ensure that they get more out of each day.

For instance, you might assign tasks requiring specific skills to help employees develop those abilities as part of their job. This can increase motivation levels among your workforce and save you time, money, and energy.

How to Implement an Easy-to-Follow Sales Process

When building a sales process, start with the end goal in mind. Do you know who makes up the best prospects for your company? The answer is not always obvious, especially when you are targeting a local or global market. However, sales tools can help you find valuable leads that match these characteristics:

1. Target prospects with fewer competitors. You will have an easier time selling your products or services if you can outrank the competition
2. Reach new opportunities by using retargeting tools such as Facebook Custom Audiences. This can help you target leads that are browsing specific sites, social media platforms, and online stores within your niche
3. Target potential customers at the right time
4. Define your Lead-to-Close Ratio

Sales tools can improve the workflow in any company, but this is especially true for SMB’s. For instance, you might not have a clear idea of how much time it takes to close sales deals and what problems your team faces as part of their job. Finding out and establishing deadlines can help motivate your workforce and encourage them to do better.

What Are Some Helpful Sales and Marketing Tools for Small Businesses?

The volume of tools for sales, marketing, and other departments is vast. Here are some helpful tools for SMB’s:

1. Marketing Automation Tools: Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) For Small Businesses: Salesforce, HubSpot.
3. Sales Tools: Call tracking tools, customer relationship management (CRM) devices such as Salesforce, and marketing automation software.
4. Digital Marketing: Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Ads, etc.

There’s no denying that CRM software is a vital part of any business, but it’s even more essential for SMBs. With this type of software, you can track and manage every single customer within the company all from one place.

The sales team can see what’s most crucial to each customer and which items are most important on a daily or weekly basis – the CEO, for instance, will likely want to know how many new customers have signed on so far this month. It also increases visibility to everyone else in the company that deals with customers (Marketing, Customer Support, etc.) and makes sure that everyone is on the same page.

Sales tools are a great way to help make sure your employees don’t waste time on non-productive activities or commute from the office or remote workspaces. This alone can boost efficiency and increase satisfaction among employees and their loyalty to the company.

When you have several sales channels in place, each with its own set of unique statistics and KPIs related to your marketing efforts, tools like Google Analytics allow you to monitor them all from one central hub. You’ll be able to look at page views on your website’s blog, for instance, and see how many of those actions led to more site visitors or new leads in Salesforce so you can track the effectiveness of offline as well as online marketing efforts.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on expensive tools. There are plenty of inexpensive options that can help your small business grow and maintain sales goals.

Need Help Improving Sales?

If you’re ready to take your sales and marketing efforts to the next level, we can help.  Our consultants will work with you to develop a customized plan that will focus on your unique business goals and objectives. Contact us today!