The sales space is replete with tools to help you organize your sales process. From qualifying to outreach to analytics, there are hundreds of tools available to optimize your workflow.
Yet, hardly any of them get used. An Accenture study of 800 sales reps showed that only 13% are using sales tools to their full capacity. A well-defined sales process is critical to sales success, but the tools that are used for this process are getting ignored.
One reason for this is that tools are added to the workflow without regarding the reps’ current workflow. If a rep is happy with a single tool in their process, then anything that doesn’t play well with that tool will be ignored. By building this process within a tool they already use, Outlook, you can get quicker and higher adoption of your process within your sales team.
Here is how you can move a lead from prospecting to proposal to closed-won, all within Outlook.
1. Learn all about your prospects with Clearbit
High-volume, low-quality sales processes of yore would phone first, learn later.
The sales world is different now. Modern sales is based on information. Individual reps, or SDR/AE teams, want to find as much information about a prospect as possible before that all-important initial contact. Their reasoning is simple: higher-quality leads generate more revenue.
Low-volume, high-quality sales techniques such as account-based sales are now becoming more popular. In these, your sales teams pre-qualify prospects, finding exactly the right companies that will succeed with your product, and the key stakeholders therein that will make the decision. Only once they have all this information will they reach out.
Clearbit for Outlook gives you all the information you need on prospects directly inside Outlook. You can do two things from within the add-in:
- Enrichment—if your sales teams is being passed MQLs from your marketing team, you can enrich each lead to find out more information before you reach out. Clearbit Enrichment lets you take a single email address and turn it into personal information such as names, titles, and roles, and find company information such as size, industry, and current tech.
- Prospecting—if you are contacting cold, then Clearbit Prospector allows you to find the right people at your target companies. You can enter the domain of the company you want to prospect, then the title or name of the person you are interested in. You’ll then get their email address so that you can reach out.
2. Connect with prospects repeatably using WittyParrot
The point of building a process is to build something repeatable, and that will have consistent results and save time.
Time is the most precious asset for a sales rep. They have to do the research above, then reach out to each new lead. This is all before they actually get anywhere near the ‘selling’ part of the sales process. This reach out stage poses a catch-22 though for reps. It needs to be quick so they can get through their quota each day, but it also needs to be good if they are to get any response. Usually “quick” and “good” don’t play well together.
But they can in this part of the process with templating. By building templates in WittyParrot for their most common emails, reps can reduce the act of writing and emailing new leads from minutes to just a few clicks
An email add-in for Outlook might seem redundant. But WittyParrot’s power lies in its ability to let sales reps modularize their emails. Reps write “wits,” small snippets that they can then drop into each email depending on context.
This doesn’t mean that each email to each lead is the same. Instead, after building the email from the template, reps can replace variables with personalized data, such as that gleaned from the Clearbit Prospector. Emails are then both produced quickly, but are also valuable and customized for each target, making sure they receive a reply.
3. Meet your opportunities using FreeBusy
Internally, meetings help sales teams form a cohesive strategy and share notes about what’s been working and what hasn’t. Externally, meetings are where pitches are made, demos are presented, and, ultimately, deals are sealed. But figuring out meeting times that work for all parties usually results in an unnecessary back-and-forth that wastes your time, and your prospects attention.
FreeBusy is an add-in that makes scheduling meetings a matter of five minutes, no matter how many people are involved.
FreeBusy lets your whole team connect as many calendars as they have— whether they’re on Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Google, or iCloud. Internally, you’ll be able to pick a time that works for everyone, and externally, you can send along all your availability for your contacts to pick from with one click.
4. Present your solution with Join.me
Once meetings are set, you need to show the stakeholders your product. The demo stage is the most vital of the selling parts of the process. If you are able to show the true value of your product to your prospects, then they’ll buy. If not, then this is the end of the line.
So the last thing you need is for your demo to be held up or halted by errant video conferencing. The Join.me add-in for Outlook lets you set up demo calls and video conferencing using your Join.me account.
This means you can include video links and audio conference details directly in the invite email. All your audience needs to do is click the link and they’ll be straight through to your demo. From there you can:
- Share your screen so that everyone can see the product in action.
- Swap presenters if you want different members of your team to talk the prospects through different features of the product.
- Annotate and highlight different parts of the screen so you can draw prospects’ attention to the key features that will matter the most to them.
5. Close the deal with DocSend
The final component of any sales process is the finalization. Up until now, everyone might have been talking about making a deal, but it’s not until the contracts get signed that you can start working together.
This is an element of the sales process that has resisted modernization the most. Contracts and other documentation would just be attached to an email, printed out the other end, signed, scanned, attached and emailed back. Far from the most efficient process.
DocSend takes this inefficient process and turns sales content into something that your team can have total control over. Instead of sending attachments, the Outlook add-in lets you send a link to DocSend where your sales documents live. This works not only for final contracts, but for all your sales content throughout the process.
This has some major benefits over regular document attachments:
- You can track who at your prospective customer’s company is viewing your content. Is it just your main contact, or is it being passed up to the CFO or CEO?
- You can understand page-by-page engagement for all your documents. Who is really reading your content and what is most interesting? Who is downloading to read later?
- You can restrict access to certain team members if you want to keep some components of your product secret, or want to stop prospects from having access if the deal becomes closed-lost.
- It allows you to make updates even after you hit send. Because you still control the documents, you can update the documents in your DocSend folder and prospects will only see the latest version. It’s great for when you are negotiating over the final contracts.
By tracking content and documents within Outlook, your team never has to worry about a missing attachment, or which version of the updated contract they are supposed to be sending.
6. Track your process with Trello
Each of the above add-ins helps with a defined part of your sales process. But Outlook can also help you keep track of the process as a whole.
Using Trello for Outlook, you can organize your dealflow and move people from one stage to the next without leaving your email.
Email can be turned into actionable items in cards in Trello. From within Outlook, you can create cards for new prospects or sales activities, then move these along your process. If you need to follow up on an email by the end of the month, you can add it to a Trello card and add a due date to make sure you get notified. Every person, every email, every activity can then be tracked.
Once you are doing that, you can see where your team is spending their time, and start to optimize each layer of your process within Outlook, until it is as efficient as possible.
Curious how else you can boost closed deals for your sales reps (and revenue for your company)? With DocSend, you’ll be able to share sensitive materials with external business partners while getting real-time, actionable, feedback on document engagement, so you can be in full control of your business outcome. Say goodbye to email attachments once and for all, and click here to get started with a free trial of DocSend!
關於作者
Andrew Tate is a UK-born, US-based writer. He spent 10 years working as a scientist in labs around the world and now specializes in using data to tell stories.
