Smart Tools To Improve Your Business

If you came here to find out how to improve your sales cycle and still saving money and time, you’ve come to the right place.

We need to improve as we are getting more and more feedback from you, and we have found that there are a lot of tools that can be implement in our company not only to improve sales , but also to boost our productivity and the way we manage our customer relations and processes.

We all need to be more productive (remember, WFH is staying for some time) and still take care of all our prospects, leads, customers and people. This is key for sales reps, but also for any company, as this means every single process has to be changed or, at least, adjusted to this new situation. And as money is what makes dreams happening, saving money while improving competitiveness and productivity seems a good idea for anyone.

We wrote about some sales cycle improvement strategies before, but now we will be telling you about some tools you shall be using. And with examples of lifetime or annual deals.

To show you the importance of this, we will use a car dealer as an example.

Why? Well, it’s familiar to us, they have a unique product and they represent a good example of all the stages of a sales funnel as we saw a few posts back.

Content Marketing

First things first. You need to get to those users that are will to know more about your product or service. No matter if its software, if its a car or whatever you are selling, you need to show it the world. Most of marketing now depends on what is called OTS, Opportunity To See.

But with so many competitors around willing to get actions from the same audiences, you need to create better content. Or at least impress your potential customers with content that they will love and arouse their curiosity to know more.

Is a good idea to start a podcast? Or create videos with cool content? Who are the most influential people in your area? How about some giveaways?

Too many questions and too many it depends answers for our car dealer. First things first.

Content marketing can be a mess. You need to be aware of formats and sizes (apart from other Facebook rules about text), so if you want to add all the cars, you need to remix and resize all that content, so it can be used in any platform.

Is a YouTube channel a good idea? Well, it can be. Let’s suppose that our car dealer has an auto parts service: a YouTube channel is a good place to show how to perform some easy car maintenance operations or how to change a flat tire.

These are only two good examples. Tools like RelayThat for content remix or Woorise for giveaways are options that have been around for a while. And, of course, rely on content publishing platforms as Publer.

And if you are more into podcasting or video, try BounceCast or Multimedia5.

The entry point: your website

Yes, we know. There are lots of tools out there that help you on this tough task. And we do know how hard is managing leads. They take a lot of time and even a small detail can make the difference. But, once you have capture your audience attention with your content, it’s time to convert that attention into leads, real business opportunities. And there are a lot of tools to do get the best of your website.

Forms: the data

Take our advice: use forms on your website. why?

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the main one is that you need to qualify any prospect once it’s in the pipeline. No matter if your sales are based on outbound calls, if you are using inbound marketing or you are running a store. Qualifying your leads will help you closing more sales or deals and will make you improve the sales cycle of your business.

And your entry point in your sales pipeline is important. As many of you will be running a website, this entry point is key for your business strategy success. And forms are one of the most underrated items in sales cycles.

Which are the most important questions to you? Apart from name and an email or phone, you need to ask some basic questions to start qualifying your prospects but this is not a discovery call and you don’t need to overwhelm your prospects with a zillion questions.

Let’s see this with an example: our car dealer has a website and they want to introduce the World a new and smart vehicle. They already have a huge form in their website full of dropdowns and conditional questions, but this time they want to know the actual car prospects are interested on. So, they implement a new form with an invisible field that pass to dealer’s CRM the car itself and these list of simple questions:

• Name
• Email OR Phone no.
• When do you want your new car?: Now, within 3 months or later.

These questions are enough to prioritize contacting the leads that are responding now on the form.

Happy Forms is a cool way to do this on a WordPress site, as you can create unlimited forms on your website. Its features cover from saving abandoned responses to resume later to multi-page forms on which you can apply conditional logic for nurturing.

Chatting and calling: customer communications

But some clients may not want to share their contact information in a form. Not only because they are not willing to share that but also some data protection concerns. Or because your forms are overwhelming. So many questions (up to 5, O-M-G) is a waste of time.

So, for all those users, having a chat or call service is a must. You can capture data from your visitors and get some valuable feedback that you will use to create a FAQ area on your website or to improve your sales pitch. And, also, you can even use the chat to start a sales call. Why not?

Btw, all collected data must be synchronized with your CRM and have some behavioral capacities. This will open you a lot of possibilities: from nurturing leads to live support and, of course, sales.

For our car dealer this is important for each and all the abovementioned reasons. A visible chat bubble in a specific page can make users to start a conversation with an online agent. This conversation can start with a simple Hey, I’m Esteban. May I help you?. That visitor may be confident enough to say Hi, I’m looking for sth, and start providing information.

These conversations are actually one of the best strategies to convert, specially if those conversions are taking place in a location, as our car dealer.

But calls can go a step further from this. And using chat to go on a call can boost your conversions. They are friendlier, you can save a lot of time to your visitor and to your agents and cna focus on the most important things. No matter if you use click-to-call solutions or direct videocall solutions integrated into your website. You will be getting the most information at a glance and you can see your prospect face or notice their tone of voice to take further steps.

At this time, here at Quoters we are using Intercom and Froged for their chat capabilities, though they are one step ago from being only a chat. And if you want to integrate some other call or video solutions, take a look to Ringblaze or eyeson.

Shared inboxes: everything under control

Shared inboxes are one of the greatest ideas to implement on your company. It is not only useful for your sales process as we told you, but also a way to improve your business efficiency and customer satisfaction.

These tools will help you using the same inbox for teams, no matter the size or the purpose. If you want to have all your lead contacts centralized in just one email account, do it so. Support? Sure. Billing? Why not? Define team access to those inboxes and start real collaboration happen.

Loop Email and Helpwise can be both good options for this. No more Hey, who was dealing with this contact? in the office.

CRM: from sell to upsell

Yes. You need a CRM. Period. If don’t have one, let me quote 2000 Dunk Contest Vince Carter: is over.

So, you will be collecting data from calls, website and visits to your location. All those data need to be processed and easily available. What is best than having a CRM to control all your customers’ activity? And things get even better if you can add features as a client portal, time tracking for your salespeople, documents, file storage… And integrations.

Imagine that car dealer office without a CRM. Salespeople interacting with the same customers, sending them the same information or, even worse, different information about the same car. Deals that are not closing and a long etcetera of issues that will be affecting the business.

If you are looking for a CRM and still being pricey, Plutio can be a choice. It has all the features (and even proposals, as we do) and can be a good point to start improving your business. And a good way to improve your customer lifecycle. Once you are selling, why not start upselling?

All these tools will help you to close more deals, as this is what business is about.