While coming up with lucrative business ideas is challenging, executing them is a whole different ball game. You need to measure the difference between your current position and your forecasted sales checkpoints, identify field-improving tactics to prevent foreclosures and losses, add players that understand your strategy, and incorporate tricks and hacks that get you closer to scoring beyond the break-even point. After all, the aim is to win.
Startups, though equipped with ample sales amplification tools, hacks, and reference platforms, still face challenges when it comes to scaling their sales efforts. It is therefore essential to incorporate the use of effective sales tools for market intelligence, prospecting, sales training, deal forecasting, integration, and reporting.
In this blog, we list five sales tools that startups can benefit from.
Why are sales tools essential?
Like marketing tools, sales tools were designed to help salespeople understand the state of the business’ relationships with its prospects, which prospects have the highest conversion probability, and the steps to take to improve sales pipeline activity. Additionally, the changing buyer-seller landscape continues to increase the need for sales-enablement tools that offer tracking, result measuring, and general sales planning.
As highlighted in the LinkedIn’s State of Sales 2021, 94 percent of sales professionals say sales tools help them close more deals, reiterating the importance of these tools.
Five Sales Tool For Start-Ups
1. CRM Software
A business’s most important relationships are with its clients, and as such, there ought to be systems to give sales and marketing teams a bird’s eye view of how customers interact with the brand, what motivates buy-in decisions, what the retention stats look like, and how these can be improved. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is concerned with this aspect of the business, and it’s advisable for every startup to employ the services of one. Some of the most popular CRMs include Hubspot, Salesforce, Salesloft and Marketo.
2. Hunter
While letters and telegrams were the main mediums for pre-twentieth century comms, when it comes to business, emails are one of this generation’s main communication avenues, and Hunter makes it a breeze to find the addresses you need to send those pitches. The Domain Search provides a list of people that work in a company, their names, and email address, all found on the web. The platform has more than 100 million email addresses indexed and will help you get connected to the core decision-makers, quickly.
3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
With 240 million active users, LinkedIn is the obvious platform of choice when looking to prune potential customers, particularly in the B2B space. The Sales Navigator features include:
- Improved sales network visibility
- Optimized sales and marketing campaigns
- Recommended personalized leads
- Advanced search options
- Social selling result tracking
- Helps reach decision-makers by using customized algorithms
4. Demandbase
Demandbase helps track topics and themes that are vertical-relevant and helps account-based marketing professionals to identify content that has sales-driving potential, and its features include:
- Analyzes the connection between advertising and site visits, assets downloaded, content, and leads generated
- Prioritizes leads using a reliable scoring system
- Obtains CRM data
- Automates marketing processes
- Measures engagement impact
5. Giftsenda
The Giftsenda corporate gifting platform enables you to build relationships with your prospects and nurture your relationships with existing clients in over 200 countries globally through high-quality gift experiences.
Choose from 1000s of gift options in our Gift Catalog. Gifts are locally sourced and specially selected to ensure that they apply to our quality standards.
For brand recognition and loyalty, you can choose to send gifts with your company logo and branding. Our international gift delivery can be as fast as 2-3 working days in some countries. CRM integration is available, and benefits include:
- You need not have recipients’ addresses on hand as they are given the liberty to decide when and where to receive gifts.
- Recipients can either accept, swap, reject or donate the proceeds of the gift to a platform-listed charity.
- You can choose from themed and price-curated collections that can be shared using gift links, and allow recipients to choose from a selection of items.
- Reporting is a breeze thanks to a dedicated campaign monitoring dashboard.
- Integrate your CRM with our platform for easy and automated gifting.
Does using a corporate gifting platform to optimize your sales efforts sound like a win for your startup? Book a 30-minute demo with one of our Gift Campaign Managers to see how our gifting platform works.
