Seven Simple Tools to Make Your Sales Life Simpler

As a runner in the rat race, it’s the little things that get you through the day. Stepping on the platform at the exact moment your train comes in; a colleague cracking open a fresh packet of biscuits; the clock striking five, knowing it’s time to get through the day. The little things are great. Contrarily as a salesperson, it’s easy to get bogged down in little things; the things you don’t want to do but you’ve got to do them. Data entry despisers, tired internet trawlers, unmotivated e-merchants, and send-button-smashers unite!

We’ve put together a list of the sales tools you need to move away from the bad little things, and towards the good little things.

What are sales tools?

Sales tools are digital tools that salespeople use to make their working day a little bit easier. They come in a range of shapes and sizes, and help sales teams in a range of different ways. From generating leads, to understanding them better; helping communicate more easily with them, and providing motivation to close more deals, sales automation. Sales tools take away data entry. After all you’re not a data enterer, you’re a sales professional!

73% of sales reps who use automation software close more deals.
[LinkedIn]

Implementing the right sales tools for your business increases productivity; productivity increases sales, and sales increase revenue. You’ll never be able to completely lose the human element of sales, but the manual tasks you’re doing every day can do one. If technology improves and evolves your processes, use it. There’s a whole Internet of tools out there waiting to help you grow.

Email Finder

What is an Email Finder?
If you’re in sales, you’ve probably found yourself banging your head against a wall on more than one occasion. However, not much is more head-bangable than finding the perfect lead without a published email contact with which you can reach out to them on. You can spend hours, days, weeks, even months trawling the internet looking for contact details… or you can use a tool that’ll do it for you.

Saves a lot of time.
Prevents sales teams from running up dead ends trying to find contacts.
Helps sales professionals find the decision makers in a company.

NetHunt recommends Hunter.

Hunter works in two ways. First, as a simple Google Chrome extension. Download it, visit the domain of the person you want to find, and if the icon is orange, then you’re in luck. Hit the icon and browse the list of email addresses that Hunter has found. It’s quick, but it might not always find the exact contact you need.

For larger corporations, you might need to use Hunter’s second method of scraping data. Don’t worry, it’s just as easy. Head to their website and open the Finder tool. Then, simply enter the first and last name of your desired contact and their company domain. Easy.

Hunter is free up to 100 emails, afterwards it’s $39/month.

Bulk Email Automation

What is Bulk Email Automation?
Typing out the same email over and over again to different clients is easily one of the worst parts of being a sales person. It’s boring, repetitive, and time seems to tick by so slowly when you’re doing it. Email automation is a way of laser-targeting your email outreach with half the work of doing it manually. It allows sales reps to send the right email, at the right time, to the right person… every time. Typically, email automation software includes different methods of perfecting email outreach campaigns, such as mail merge, bulk email sending, scheduled emails, and trigger-based emails.

Automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
[Campaign Monitor]

NetHunt recommends Outreach.

Outreach comes with a full bag of features that are going to hyper-personalise your email campaigns, automating them at the same time. It offers analytics such as open rates and click-through-rates. It integrates with your preferred email platform to provide templates, notifications, and email scheduling. Finally it features personalisation features such as mail merge, saving your tired fingers from typing out everybody’s name on your email campaigns.

Outreach comes with a free trial, but the base starting price is $100 per user, per month.

Email Tracking

What is Email Tracking?
Email tracking is the process of gathering data from sent emails, such as whether an email has been opened, and whether links in an email have been clicked on. It works by inserting a tiny tracking pixel within an email or hyperlink. When that email or hyperlink is opened, a request is sent to the email tracking provider’s servers; this request is counted as a view. Sales and marketing professionals can then use this data to make informed sales and marketing decisions.

Helps them write better emails by knowing what has been opened before.
Saves them time and effort by reaching out to people they know are engaged.
Provides valuable data that drives their business to success.

NetHunt recommends Mailtrack.

Mailtrack is a simple email tracking tool that integrates directly with Gmail. Using a technology that is patent pending, users are given insight into email analytics such as opens, click-throughs, times, dates, and devices. Mailtrack provides real-time notifications when an email has been opened. It’s as simple as that.

There is a free version available, but the Pro version starts at $4.99 per month.

Workflow Automation

What is Workflow Automation?
Every professional process in the world requires a workflow. These workflows can be expensive, error-prone, and painfully time-consuming. Workflow automation is technology that follows a pre-set list of rules to automate these manual processes; it takes care of the mind-numbing tasks that are easy to do and even easier to make a mistake with such as data-entry and lead nurturing.

Eliminates mistakes.
Takes care of simple tasks.
Boosts productivity and improves workflow productivity.

Workflow automation can be especially useful for sales teams to make sure there is a standardised treatment for all prospects and leads, to prevent those leads from falling through the gaps, and if there is a problem with the sales process; automation clearly visualises where that problem stands.

NetHunt recommends Zapier.

Zapier lets users create workflows called Zaps. These Zaps can be based on triggers, where a certain action is taken after an event; or they can be based on actions, where Zapier follows a course of actions one after another (see: drip campaigns). Zapier probably already connects to all the apps you work with, so there’s no need to change your processes to fit. For example,

LinkedIn Lead Generation

What is LinkedIn Lead Generation?
Traditionally, lead generation is a long-winded, arduous, and completely manual process. It’s hard work, scouring the internet looking for leads and then manually having to transfer all their data to a contact database, one-by-one. But, when it comes to lead generation, you don’t get much better than LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator is a paid tier of LinkedIn, and it was built for sales professionals to take advantage of the hundreds of millions of LinkedIn users across the planet. Navigatorers receive regularly updated lead recommendations, gain access to more comprehensive search filters, and, after searching, results provide more profile data for a better overview of potential leads. You can save up to 1,500 leads and accounts that have tickled your fancy and might need actioning later. With Sales Navigator, it rains leads.

NetHunt recommends NetHunt’s LinkedIn integration.

Having access to all those leads is great… but you need somewhere accessible and organised to store them. We’ve gone back-to-basics with our CRM, and the LinkedIn integration is no different. All you need to do is click an icon to pull a lead’s information straight from their LinkedIn and into your existing NetHunt CRM system. Cute as a button.

Find and engage new leads faster.
Automate lead capture and data entry.
Full context, on hand, and leads automatically added to the pipeline.

Sales Navigator starts at $59.99 per user, per month with a one month free trial. The NetHunt integration is free on top of your existing NetHunt.

Lead Enrichment

What is Lead Enrichment?
Data drives business. Without data, you don’t know your customers, you don’t know your most effective sales processes, and you don’t know who’s the hottest on your sales teams. With bad data, you might know all those things… but you’ll be wrong. Lead enrichment is the process of collecting, correcting, and verifying customer data to make sure data is complete and to a high quality.

Better personalised outreach.
More specific customer segments.
Helps other areas of business, such as product development and marketing.

On-the-surface data is generally of little use to businesses. It doesn't dive into the preferences and behaviours of certain customers, and is only very basic demographic and contact information. Lead enrichment is hard work. That is, manual lead enrichment anyway. There are a plethora of tools on the market to help sales teams get a grip on their data. The only thing is… they’re not cheap.

NetHunt recommends LeadGenius.

LeadGenius is an on demand lead enrichment service. It enriches your existing data with automated and human-curated data, claiming to provide the most accurate B2B data on the market today. Unlike most lead enrichment platforms, all the data available is verified by real human beings.

On top of the wealth of data at their disposal, it also allows businesses to connect with company decision-makers with a tonne of different features inside the dashboard. Those features include targeted account list creation, email campaign personalisation, A/B testing, engagement assessment, and lead and prospect records.

LeadGenius doesn’t offer a free trial, and basic prices start at an eyewatering $2,999 per user per month.

Sales Gamification

What is Sales Gamification?
You might have heard of marketing gamification, an external strategy of improving engagement, from our previous article. Sales gamification is an internal strategy, visualising and gamifying sales metrics to pit sales reps against each other in the name of friendly competition. Sales reps, by nature, are generally competitive people. By gamifying their day-to-day tasks, team leaders can take advantage of this to boost motivation and improve sales performance. It’s fun; it spices things up a little… but it also works.

87% of employees agree that gamification makes them more productive.
[Bravon]

Sales gamification could be a game-changer for your team, and the best thing is that the technology is very simple.

NetHunt recommends Hoopla.

Hoopla is a gamification software with a heap of different features to get the adrenaline flowing for a sales team. Beautiful sales leaderboards offer up-to-date insights on team performance; heated sales contests such as battles, tournaments, races, and face-offs engage the workplaces; deal alerts offer on the spot recognition for employees who smash a big deal; and showcases put those sales leaders on a pedestal.

Hoopla starts with a free trial, and pricing afterwards is on a by-quote basis depending on your team size.

It’s the little things that get you through the day. The little sales things that help you do little sales tasks help you get through the day even faster. Don’t implement all the tools, you’ll get tool overload and your accountant will never speak to you again. Implement the ones that work for you, that’ll automate your growth.

Let’s get growing.