B2B sales technology is barely in its infancy, but sales automation tools are the key to bring it to maturity.
Max Altschuler mentioned in his “10 Bold Predictions for Sales in 2016”, that sales is going to get even hotter. It’s going to be a really important year for sales.
A massive transformation is coming to the industry as new technology and data become available. There’s plenty of reasons to get excited about the future if you’re a sales automation and growth geek like me.
To kick-off this year, we organized a Sales Hacker meet ups with Betts Recruiting and Point Nine Capital to take a deep dive into the hottest trends in sales. We met with over 100 sales experts in London and Berlin.
There we discovered the #1 thing that everyone is most excited for in sales this year. That universal feeling is that:
New technology will change B2B sales forever.
In 1781, James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotary motion with a power of about 10 horsepower. By 1883, less than a century later, we had engines that could provide 10,000 horsepower and would revolutionize the manufacturing industry.
Thanks to Mr. Watt, production soared during the Industrial Revolution. This was because one man was now able to produce the same output that used to take 20 men to accomplish.
A similar revolution is on the horizon for the sales industry. But this time it’s not steam engines, it’s sales automation tools.
We, here at Growbots, feel that something BIG is about to happen in sales technology. So it wasn’t surprising that the single, most-asked question we got during both meet up events was, “What tools are your team using to scale your sales?”.
We’re going to share the answer to that question here. It will be with you, for the first time. These are the 6 sales tools we use which allowed us to scale from 0 to 300 demos each month.
6 Sales Automation Tools You Need To Grow Your Business
#1: Growbots
Okay, we may be a teeny-bit biased but you can’t deny the facts. It automates each and every step of the sales process that we previously had to do manually. Here’s how we leverage Growbots to compound our prospecting efforts:
Our team of 16 sales development reps (SDRs) decides on a weekly target (let’s say sales people working at SaaS companies in the US with 201–1000 employees and use Salesforce).
We schedule two new campaigns to 200 prospects daily. With Growbots, this takes only 30 minutes per day for each SDR.
In the past, about 70% of an SDRs’ time is spent on prospecting only. That creates HUGE inefficiencies. The majority of their efforts are focused on people who have shown zero previous interest. Thanks to Growbots, our SDRs are now able to cut their total time spent on prospecting down to 7%. That’s a 10x increase in efficiency!
Now the majority of their day (7.5 hours to be exact) is spent on interested prospects only. This results in a massive increase in conversion rates. This enables us to ensure SDRs add the most value at the most important step. That is converting prospects into leads through highly engaging, personal communication.
#2: Yesware
We use Yesware to get the most out of manual follow-ups with our high profile prospects.
It allows us to reach the best prospect at the best possible time by scheduling messages in advance. What’s even cooler we’re able to track the device they viewed the email on. If the device was a mobile phone, we schedule another follow-up.
This was to make sure we reach that person when they’re more likely to be in front of their computer.
#3: Close.io
With this powerful CRM, we’re able to streamline the process between our SDRs, accounts and customer success teams. For example, instead of sending emails and using a calendar, we simply create an opportunity in Close.io. It appears in the accounts dashboard and both task and meeting are automatically set.
SDRs can now easily plan their day because they have all the prospect’s information in one place and the prompts to encourage them to complete actions.
Plus, no more follow-ups falling through the cracks. SDRs and account managers use task fields to make sure the next team in the process will follow-up with the prospect or customer in the appropriate time and manner.
#4: Salestools
Growbots’ growth is fueled by automatic lead generation. When we’re looking for a specific person, we use Salestools. We’ve recently been organizing sales meetups in London and Berlin, and we wanted to invite particular thought-leaders from those cities. We used Salestools to find their email addresses using a simple search.
However, we noticed that the email addresses it discovers are not always accurate. In our experience, only about 30% are valid. That’s where the next tool comes in handy.
#5: Briteverify
This tool is a lifesaver. It will verify that you are sending messages to valid email addresses. It’s one of the simplest tools we’ve found to improve our email deliverability by leaps and bounds (and protect our sender reputation).
#6: Mention
We’ve been experimenting with social selling a lot lately. And Mention is one of the best social selling tools out there. It allows us to monitor people looking for an alternative to their current outbound sales platform and automatically get alerted when they mention it.
These alerts are working incredibly for us: “alternative to [competitor’s tool]”, “outbound tool”, “prospecting tool”, “lead generation”. After getting a notification, we can instantly engage in a discussion with the person who wrote it This creates a perfect sales opportunity. You can learn more in this short guide by Aircall.
If you start using these 6 sales tools (or even just a few), you will spend less time on prospecting and have more time for closing. After successfully implementing your sales automation, your next challenge will be making sense of the incoming information. This will mean you can begin experimenting how to optimize your results.
Your ultimate goal is to use the flood of data coming from different sales automation tools to continually improve your sales process.
