Top 5 Tools You Need to Rock Your B2B Sales Process
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In order to keep afloat, every company must constantly look for ways to improve itself. That includes educating and training your employees, as well as working with the best hardware and software imaginable. Luckily, we live in a time with a vast variety of different tools that can help us automate a part of business, making us more efficient and quicker.
The trick is to pick the right tools for your needs. In order for you not to get lost in the sheer number of different softwares that’s currently on the market, and in order for you not to lose time trying every tool under the sun, we curated a list of all the tools you need to try.
This is an overview of the best sales tools to create and manage a sales process in a B2B environment. They will help you bring your sales process to a new level and give you more insight into your customer base.
The more you understand your target customers, the better chances you’ll have to shape your sales strategy and create a bulletproof sales funnel.
We’ll start with proposal software then move to a tool that helps you manage communication through your entire sales funnel. From there we’ll move to software that helps you manage an inbound call centre. We’ll also present software that will take care of your email marketing needs, and lastly a CRM that will help you manage your entire sales pipeline.
1. Better Proposals
A reliable proposal software will revolutionize your sales process. If you’re still sending PDFs and procrastinating every time you need to start on a new proposal because the process seems daunting, you’ll love all the options Better Proposals offer.
The software lets you choose between a large diversity of prewritten templates suitable for any industry. If you want to create your own, you can do it with ease because the editor doesn’t require you to have any design experience.
Once you create a specific part of your proposal, you can save it in your content library and use it in your next proposal, without the need to copy and paste huge blocks of text. Aside from creating proposals, Better Proposals lets you manage and send your proposals as a landing page with a secure link.
This makes your proposal look more professional and saves you from having your email be marked as spam by your client’s mailing system. One of the best features of Better Proposals is the proposal AI that compares your proposal to other successful proposals that were sent out, signed and paid and tell you what to change.
All you need to do is choose the right industry and you’ll get insightful and actionable tips on how to better your existing proposal before you send it out.
The proposal analytics will tell you exactly when your proposal was opened, by who, on which device and how much time they spent on each of the segments. This makes it easy for you to follow up since you’ll know what your client has a problem with.
The proposals work as legally binding documents, which can be signed with a digital signature that transforms your typed in name into an electronic signature. Lastly, clients can pay you from the proposal by using any of the 3 payment methods – Stripe, PayPal or GoCardless.
Sign up for a free trial and experience it for yourself! Once the trial is over, you can choose between 3 packages that start from $19 per month.
2. Intercom
Intercom is one of the most popular customer engagement tools that offers conversational customer service. The tool’s primary use is helping you build relationships with your customers. It can also be used to offer product tours as well as to provide support at every step of the sales process.
It takes live chat to a new level with versions of it available for your website, mobile app and more. This approach makes it easier for customers to approach you and have their problems resolved, which in turn leads to more repeat business.
Intercom tries to truly shift your sales process from sending mass messages to potential clients and seeing what sticks, to a customer-level model, focused on a personalized approach, which is what customers expect nowadays.
With Intercom, you can see who your customers are and what they want from you. You can track them, filter them and segment them based on important data. You can extract company data – like their business type, location and such as well as behavioural data that will let you target customers based on actions they took or didn’t take on your app.
You can also track custom data unique to your business, like a pricing plan or product type. Moreover, you can use Intercom for your conversational marketing needs. It lets you automatically get more leads from your website.
The bots help you qualify, route and schedule meetings and chats with the most promising leads in real-time. Once you locate the most promising leads, engage them with targeted email and push notifications.
When it comes to pricing, Intercom offers a starter pack for small businesses at $79 per month and 3 different packages for medium to big businesses.
3. CloudTalk
For all your VoIP needs, CloudTalk is one of the best business VoIP providers. It gives you the freedom to make calls through your phone, laptop, tablet or any other device you would like to use. It allows you to create a call centre operation no matter where you or your employees are located.
CloudTalk helps you maintain a local presence with an international phone number, making your call centre easy to run and operate. You can choose between setting up a customer support centre, or a sales centre.
CloudTalk Support is intuitive and easy to use. Everything you need is displayed in one place so it’s easy to manage customer interactions efficiently and boost productivity. That way you’ll never get charged for an inbound call and you’ll have an overview of past interactions making it easy for your agents to make calls and have your clients feel at ease.
The tool’s sales call centre includes a power dialer that does all the hard work so that your agents can focus on the quality of their calls. It also allows for live coaching which helps managers hop on calls whether to interrupt the call or to help the agent through call whispering (where the customer can’t hear the manager).
For bigger companies, with advanced needs, the sales reporting dashboard gives you all the data you’ll need. It shows which agents have the best conversion rates, what is the best time to make a call, how many calls were made in a day and more.
CloudTalk can be integrated with your CRM, E-commerce tools, sales tools and more in order to perfect your sales process and make it go smoothly.
You can choose between 4 different packages, starting at 20€. All the packages allow you to have an unlimited number of users and provide one free local number. The differences come in when it comes to storage and the price of outbound calls.
4. Mailshake
Mailshake is a great tool for all your cold outreach efforts. It allows you to connect with more prospects, book more meetings and generate more sales. Its most popular uses are sending cold emails at scale, allowing you to engage with prospects via phone and social media and offering a simple way to manage it all on one dashboard.
With Mailshake you can build an automated omnichannel outreach machine, which makes it easy to streamline your sales process and gives you a good reason to delete a bunch of tools that help with only a fraction of the process.
A great feature Mailshake offers is personalized cold emailing at scale. It allows you to mail merge, monitor clicks, opens and replies, gives you sending controls, allows AB testing, automatic follow-ups and real-time copy analysis.
It also helps you segment your leads on a temperature basis. A lead with 0-1 opens will get marked as a cold lead, a lead with multiple opens, or clicks will be marked as a warm lead and a lead with many opens, clicks and replies will be marked as a hot one.
If there is no action taken on a lead for a significant amount of time, their temperature will drop. This is all presented with easy to understand visuals that will instantly help you understand the situation with every person in your sales funnel.
These features will save you a lot of time and allow you to focus on the quality of your copy and other parts of your job that can’t be automated. Mailshake offers native integrations with Salesforce and any other tool you love through Zapier.
Mailshake has 2 packages – the first one focuses on email outreach and starts at $59 per user per month and the other one focuses on sales engagement starting at $99 per user per month.
5. Cooper CRM
We’re sure you already know the importance of a good CRM – it helps you manage your entire sales funnel by organizing your emails, calls, files and notes on every contact for a full view of your relationship history with each customer.
Automatizing your spreadsheets has never been easier and for all your CRM needs we suggest Cooper CRM. It makes sure no data gets left behind and minimizes the time it takes to enter and organize it.
Copper suggests recent contacts you’ve been emailing to be added to your list so that you don’t lose track of any of them. It automatically pulls in contact details like phone numbers, email addresses and even social media.
You can tag, filter and sort your leads and customers by any criteria to better understand where your business is coming from. That helps you target more specific customers and analyze team activity.
The better you understand your leads, the better chances you have of converting them. That’s why it’s so important to analyze your previous successful sales and know how to approach future ones.
When it comes to special features, you can keep track of your sales agents to see who is the top performer by revenue, meetings set, calls made and emails sent. Lead generation is also made easy by capturing, nurturing and converting more leads, right from Gmail.
Once you track leads and get ready for sales management, you can automatically grow your business by analyzing it through structured insights.
Cooper CRM also allows you to define and create sales stages, forecast future revenue, identify problem areas in your funnel, qualify opportunities in your sales funnel, automate tedious and repetitive tasks with sales workflow to drive efficiency and more.
You could also report and manage opportunities in multiple currencies and get real-time currency conversions.
When it comes to the prices, Cooper CRM offers 3 tiers. The basic one for $25 per user per month, the professional one for $59 per user per month and a business one for $119 per user per month.
Conclusion
Being in digital marketing the last thing any business wants to do is lose time and resources on trying an endless number of sales tools, hoping to find one that works. It’s not just the features of a tool that are important, but the way it integrates with your existing ones as well.
Shifting to a new tool will create more work for your agents in the beginning, since they’ll have to upload information and familiarize themselves with the new interface, so it’s important to find a great match.
The list we created covers every aspect of the sales process and all the tools work great together. It’s important to have reliable proposal writing and sending software, as well as a CRM, a customer engagement tool, a VoIP tool and a tool for cold emailing outreach.
Incorporate these tools into your sales process and reap the benefits of automation, which will leave you with more time to focus on the important things, which is what makes you stand out on the market.
Editor’s note: this is a guest post from Petra Odak, Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals. Do you have digital marketing or software expertise? Pitch your blog idea using our contact page.
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