There’s a shocking statistic floating around the business world: sales reps currently spend 63% of their time on non-Sales activities. This means that they’re only doing actual selling for 37% of the time they spend working.
How is this possible? What’s happening to all of their time? The answer is, they’re focusing on processes, paperwork, and myriad other time consuming, yet menial tasks. Sales reps are so inundated with busy work, that they can’t focus on doing what they do best: selling.
Enter Sales 2.0 and Modern Marketing. Modern Marketing tools can automate and streamline most of the processes that take up so much office time. If used correctly, they could free up perhaps 60% of the time that reps now spend at the desk, instead of out selling. They’re a part of an overall movement towards automation that enables companies to increase revenue through sheer efficiency. When time consuming tasks are automated, Marketing and Sales can focus on getting customers.
But just buying the correct technology isn’t enough; you have to know how to use it to its full potential.
That’s why we’ve put together a guide to the Sales 2.0 and Modern Marketing toolbox. There are five categories in your core suite of tools: Content, Marketing Automation, Sales, Contract Management, and e-Signature. For each of these stages you can utilize tools to automate everything that doesn’t involve interfacing with customers– which is where your trained Sales professionals come in.
The toolbox includes all levels of the buying process– from content and marketing, to the final contract stage. Collectively, these tools will make your process more efficient and pleasant for you and your customers.
1. Content
Content Marketing has become the preferred method of high level marketing in the last 5+ years. Through it, companies can establish themselves as educators and entertainers (rather than “sellers”), and thus gain customer trust and loyalty.
Content Marketing Software can create content workflows, a publishing system that pushes content out to different channels, and analytics systems for seeing how different content is received and where it gets the most traffic. The content workflow is especially useful for collaborative content– where different people are working on different stages of the same piece, and need to be in consistent communication with each other.
One of our favorite content marketing tools is Kapost. Kapost has an impressive array of workflows, has many high profile customers, such as Intel, Oracle, and AT&T, and recently raised $5.6 million in Series C funding. Kapost connects leads to content to potential customers through its analytics and content workflows.
Another good option is Betaout.com. Betaout markets itself as a “content collaboration” tool. Their two different apps, “Newsroom” and “Workbench” allow different users to have tools and dashboards tailored to their user roles. This role-based accessibility ensures that all different titles– like Managing Editor vs. Copy Writer– can get information and apps pertaining to their particular needs.
2. Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation Software is the Marketing equivalent of CRM software. Both tools essentially bring together information from different data sources about customers so that the company has a holistic view of their customer. With these products you can store contact information, accounts, leads, opportunities, and prospective clients in one location so that they’re easily accessible. Furthermore, Marketing Automation Software allows you to push out content, provides data analytics, and allows for A/B testing with content.
Marketing Automation Software is useful for monitoring and publishing on social media, as well as creating workflows for prospects and contacts. Our preferred Marketing Automation Software, Hubspot, gives a weekly report on performance change for your company’s blogs, landing pages, emails, as well as a “performance snapshot” of your site’s total visits, your new leads, and your new customers.
One of the neat features of Hubspot is that it not only allows one to push content out through different social media channels, but it’ll also post to different LinkedIn groups. Aside from content, Hubspot will show data on page performance, keywords, and competitors. Essentially, what Hubspot and other Marketing Automation Softwares do is give visibility into your marketing performance, and allow you to keep all of your contacts and leads in a single repository, so that they’re easily accessible and visible.
Other Marketing Automation tools include Marketo, Pardot, and Act-On. Marketo is one of the most popular enterprise Marketing Automation tools; it incorporates an email marketing solution, deep CRM integration, automated multi-step workflows, integrated social marketing capabilities, and highly visual analytics to gauge the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Pardot was acquired by Salesforce.com in July of 2013. Pardot offers modules to build, manage, and activate email marketing campaigns, landing pages, and lead nurturing. They have over 1500 clients in the B2B industry, and continue to satisfy customers.
The last Marketing Automation tool that we looked at was Act-On. Act-on boasts marketing automation that shares data with Sales, as well as an email marketing tool that has a 40:1 ROI. They also have lead management throughout the entire customer lifecycle, and in-depth reporting and analytics.
3. CRM
As mentioned above, the Sales 2.0 version of Marketing Automation is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With CRM software you can store contact information, accounts, leads, sales opportunities, and prospective clients in one location so that they’re easily accessible. This location now typically resides in the cloud for maximum accessibility by multiple people in real time.
For smaller businesses using CRM software, the goal can be simply to put data in the cloud. But as the organization grows, CRM software helps teams collaborate, send customized emails, and gather information from social media sites (one of its more impressive features).
For a comprehensive buyer’s guide to CRM software, see our post on the subject.
Salesforce was the pioneer of SaaS CRM in 1999, and continues to hold the largest market share of any other CRM vendor. Salesforce is most notable for its cloud, which includes the sales force automation module (SFA), Salesforce’s first product introduction, and highest revenue generator. SFA is not functionally superior to other competing solutions, but is popular and successful because of its flexibility and speed of deployment.
NetSuite gives clear visibility into Sales and Marketing performance, streamlines quote-to-order processes, and offers a Global CRM solution for multinational sales. The product can also elevate visibility and productivity, with their “360 degree” view of your customers.
RelateIQ is a new (launched in 2013), and very good CRM solution. It automatically captures communications data pulled from email systems, calls, calendars, and social networks, and then sends follow-ups automatically. You can also see your professional interactions in one place, so that everyone stays on the same page.
4. Contract Management
The contract stage of the sales cycle is perhaps the most crucial stage, but also one of the most time consuming and frustrating ones. Sending contracts to and from different parties, awaiting signatures, and making edits and amendments to the contract can take weeks, and the delays can mean that the revenue doesn’t come in in time for the quarter end, or that deals fall through.
Contract management software cures these pain points. It automatically sends email reminders to whoever is holding up the deal, allows everyone to sign within the software (which eliminates time spent emailing, scanning, and making sure everyone is on the same page), and allows you to save workflow templates. Furthermore, it’s often difficult to know exactly what stage all of your company’s contracts are in, but with contract management software you’ll have a dashboard showing what stage of the closing process your contracts are in, and how long, on average, it takes for your deals to close.
Glider gives a comprehensive dashboard so that you have excellent visibility into where your deals are, and when they’ll close, workflow templates, and email notifications. When the deal has closed, your contracts will all be saved in an easily searchable archive in the cloud. This way, when the contract is due for renewal it’ll be easy to locate the contract, and send it back and forth for negotiations and amendments.
Other contract management softwares include Apttus and Selectica. Both of these solutions are primarily “CPQ” software (configure-price-quote), that also offer contract management services.
With Apttus, you can choose which phase of the contract process you’d like to automate. Furthermore, it’s highly scalable; it functions for companies of one or two users, to tens of thousands of users.
Selectica has nearly a decade of experience with contract management implementations for large businesses like healthcare, government contracts, and entertainment. It offers a 50% reduction in contract lifecycle times with good visibility and a flexible workflow.
5. E-Signature
Docusign and other e-Signature services are important for cutting down back and forth time after the contract phase. Although getting signatures should be a relatively easy process, it takes up valuable time to transfer the contract back and forth manually to collect all of the necessary signatures.
Furthermore, signatures are needed at different stages of the contract phase, not just the end. So having a form of e-Signature allows the contract to move through its different stages quickly, and with less miscommunication between parties. E-Signature is recognized as equally legal as “wet signatures” by the United States, Canada, The European Union, Australia, and myriad other countries.
Glider incorporates e-Signature into the contract management software so that getting signatures isn’t a pain point of the contract process. It sends email reminders to anyone whose signature is necessary for moving the deal forward, and the person whose signature is needed can just log in and electronically sign the contract.
EchoSign, and SignNow are also all reliable options for e-Signature. Docusign is a provider of cloud-based E-signature technology, that allows for the exchange of legal documents that require signatures. EchoSign is a content management system that focuses on document signing, tracking, and filing. And finally, SignNow, the third option, is a “anywhere” signature service, where you can sign in seconds from practically any device, and then SignNow will automatically organize the signed documents so that there’s a “trail” for retroactive visibility.
Conclusion
It’s important to remember that tools are just tools; in order for them to be useful, you need capable people operating them and using them to their full capabilities. Choosing the right tool is only half of the solution. A true Sales 2.0 and Modern Marketing team consists of great tools, and great people managing those tools. So, once you’ve built your tool stack, use it to enable your Sales and Marketing teams to spend more time on prospects, instead of process.