Faced with aggressive growth goals from investors and management, technology sales organizations are using sales technology to sell the way their buyers want to buy. Buyers are conducting pre-purchase research using search engine queries, social media and referrals from friends and colleagues to develop a short-list of potential vendors before they ever contact a salesperson. If you don't make that short-list, your chances for closing the sale are minimal.
Technology sales organizations are responding to the new buying paradigm by implementing technologies to accelerate sales and ironically, make their social selling efforts seem more "human" to their buyers. Rather than implement self-contained ERP systems, technology companies are choosing best-in breed solutions that integrate through their CRM system.
Here are 3 killer tools that accelerate sales and help create predictable revenue streams for your company.
1. Marketing automation software - HubSpot
HubSpot offers an all-in-one inbound marketing software solution that attracts visitors to your website, converts those visitors to sales leads and nurtures leads until they are ready for sales outreach. An integrated analytics tool enables real-time marketplace feedback to optimize your digital marketing. HubSpot offers a suite of tools including a blogging platform, social media publishing and monitoring, landing page and CTA creation, email marketing,marketing automation and analytics.
Using HubSpot's campaign feature, you can design and monitor a distribution channel for your lead generation campaigns that tracks performance for all of your marketing campaigns. The real-time analytics allow you to quickly double down on successful tactics and adjust or drop underperforming campaign assets.
Another unique feature is the ability to use context marketing tactics on your website. Consider Amazon.com: when you go their website, you're provided a series of product recommendations based on your past behavior on the site. HubSpot's Smart CTA feature enables the same kind of context marketing for SMB companies.
Using either segmented contact lists or buyer lifestyle stages, the Smart CTA tool displays a different website experience to your website visitors based on pre-determined criteria. For example, a customer could see a different website header than a prospect. You could also display a customized header to your top sales targets.
HubSpot integrates with popular CRM options like salesforce.com to enable data flow with the components of your sales technology platform.
2. CRM-enabled telephony - Ringio
Ringio is a CRM-enabled telephony app that helps accelerate sales team performance by enabling reps to perform all their calling activities right from CRM screens. Ringio enables transparency by automatically logging calls into the CRM system so sales management can quickly identify the best performing reps and sales practices.
Ringio works primarily with technology companies challenged with aggressive growth goals. The Ringio technology is designed to increase sales touchpoints for tech companies that do a high volume of customer and prospect interaction over the phone.
The Ringio solution focuses on empowering employees to have positive interactions by visually presenting all the relevant data about the customer or prospect on the user’s screen. As with the other tools, Ringio gives prospects and customers a more "human" experience by enabling sales and customer service reps with information that helps steer conversations to positive outcomes.
Ringio has out-of-the box integrations with salesforce.com and Zoho and has an active developer community that uses the API to connect to other CRM platforms.
3. Enterprise marketing analytics - TrackMaven
TrackMaven provides a comprehensive dataset of content marketing metrics that enable you to quickly and visually see how your campaigns are performing. TrackMaven draws data across all of your content marketing distribution channels - from earned media to paid ads to social media.
TrackMaven's user interface enables rapid analysis of the right metrics and the visual data presentation provide actionable insights for marketers to take actions that produce results. The ability to benchmark performance against individual competitors and industry benchmarks provide context to the data.
As with the other sales acceleration tools, TrackMaven enables a more "human" marketing outreach that helps give customers and prospects what they want.
Summary
If you're not using sales technology to sell the way your buyers want to buy, you should be. Buyers complete most of their buying process before contacting a salesperson. These sales acceleration tools help buyers find you when they're researching potential solutions and enable a social selling outreach that is personalized to your buyer's wants and needs. What sales acceleration tools are you using?
