One of the opportunities offered by the web 2.0 world, or as many around sales like to call it social selling, is to leverage a number of tools to improve and accelerate the quality of interactions, especially at the early part of the sales cycle. The challenge is how to leverage the various tools, integrate them into your daily sales-flow and work-flow, without adding, or being forced to alter your work-flow in order to get benefit.
In the process of lead-gen, lead gathering, evolving and lead conversion, some sales people and organizations are often faced with a choice, find an all in one tool that has key features and elements offered by other tools and apps built in, in effect a Jack-of-all-trade approach. Alternatively, use the best of breed tools, but be left on your own to integrate them on a work-flow level. Add to this the challenges around functionality, and something that should be fun and productive ends up being work.
One tool I have discovered allows me to keep using my favourite tools and apps, integrate them into a work-flow that matches my approach, and reflects my style of lead-gen and prospecting, is Salesformics. Here a couple of examples that will illustrate what I mean. Twitter is great gleaning and mining all kinds of executable information and insight about prospects, issues, and more. While there are some great tools for slicing and dicing twitter feeds, there is often the issue of shuffling that with other information, and creating action. With Salesformics, I am alerted to specific key words or phrases by potential leads, current prospects or clients. I can then initiate a sales-flow, either constructed or in response to the way things are unfolding.
As someone who delivers events, I am a user of Eventbrite, great tool. Eventbrite helps me grow your network and email lists by promoting my live or web events, and even allows me to do a great initial follow up. Salesformics takes that a step further by integrating with Eventbrite, one can enhance the follow-up, and ensure that I don’t miss a chance to follow up with a contact well after the event.
I also use Constant Contact, and have had to deal with some of the manual realities of using both Eventbrite and Constant Contact, given the overlap. With Salesformics, I can get the best of both, and keep my hair, more importantly, automate, use the work-flow, and gain back my most valuable resources, time, and all while gaining effectiveness as well as efficiencies.
A lot of people struggle with segmenting their social media followers and then adding them to email marketing services like Constant Contact, but Salesformics has a marketing automation platform that allows you to build workflow that bridge across third-party solutions, including the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn, Buffer, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Dropbox and more.
In the end, we only have two hands and 24 hours with which to win sales, any tool that helps with that is a bonus, a tool that helps me get more out of and across all my tools and apps, like Salesformics, is a triple bonus.