3 Sales Tips for Today's Sales Professionals

So here are my three top tips to rock your sales emails:

Be yourself.

Be concise.

Be consistent.

Stella Fayman, Marketing Ninja at FeeFighters, turned Blind PR Outreach into a Streamlined Business Process

PR is Hard. It’s time consuming, it’s challenging to find the right message, and it’s next to impossible to track – especially if managing your company’s PR is just one part of your job. Stella Fayman, Marketing and Customer Service Ninja at Fee Fighters, understands the pains in the PR workflow – she found a solution that allows her to cut time, track results, and improve her message.

Fighting for Small Businesses

Stella is passionate about helping small businesses get the most bang for their buck. Back in 2009, FeeFighters identified credit card processing as a huge pain point for many new companies. Despite a wide range of options, it was hard to find true visibility when shopping for a processing system, which hindered competition.

FeeFighters decided to shine a light on credit card processing options. They developed a tool that allows business owners to compare rates; it has saved businesses, on average, about 40% on their credit card processing fees. Most recently, FeeFighters developed Samurai, a tool that “allows any business to send any transaction to any processor, with no lock-in.”

It’s Stella’s responsibility to make sure that small business owners actually know about FeeFighters. She’s driven by her passion to help small businesses succeed:

Helping business owners and seeing how happy they are is hands down the best feeling.

Still, small business owners are a hard group to reach, because they’re constantly busy running the many parts of their business. In order to spread the word about FeeFighters, Stella has developed a wide range of marketing and PR tools and workflows.

Implement, Measure, Learn

Anyone who has worked on the PR side of an organization knows that while it’s critical to new customer acquisition, PR is also time consuming and very difficult to track. Stella spent hours sending personalized PR emails to reporters all over the web, but she didn’t have a meaningful metric for her work. There was no way to know if a reporter read it, loved it, or missed the message.

Stella decided to use Toutapp to send her PR messages. Not only did Toutapp save her a ton of time, but she was also able to create a process around tracking her clicks and replies.

Toutapp has helped me turn our PR strategy into a process instead of a crapshoot.

Armed with actual data points about the success of her emails, she was able to tweak and change her messaging to drastically improve the success of her PR outreach.

I am able to gain insight from each email I send out, and see the effectiveness of different messaging options.

Stella took a complex and time-consuming task and streamlined it into a measurable business process – one that is now key for FeeFighter’s customer acquisition strategy. If you’re interested in doing the same thing, give Toutapp a try.

How Alexis Tryon, Co-Founder of Artsicle, gets Customer Feedback - Fast

Ah, the life of a startup founder. On the one hand, you’re living your passion each and every day. On the other hand, it’s seemingly impossible to get it all done, and your business – and your livelihood – hang in the balance.

If you’re looking for an example of someone who’s doing it all, meet Alexis Tryon, the co-founder of Artsicle. Alexis left her job in finance to pursue her passion for art. She co-founded Artsicle, a totally ingenious way to share art with the world, especially with new art collectors.

For the love of Artsicle

Artsicle allows members to rent original art for a small monthly fee, with the option to buy if they find a piece they’re in love with. The Artsicle artists are a group of hand-selected, up and coming artists in the New York area and beyond, and Artsicle provides them with a new way to be discovered by those who are passionate about (and often new to) the art world.

For Alexis, building Artsicle from the ground up with her co-founder, Scott, was truly a labor of love. One of the most critical parts of building a new business, especially one that is centered around providing top-quality service, is getting feedback from customers. Still, with one-to-one emails, it was impossible to for Alexis find the time to reach out the way she wanted.

Individual outreach like our customer feedback campaign didn’t happen because it was too tedious.

This was a huge problem – if Artsicle wasn’t getting feedback from customers,  how did the team know what they should build or change next?

Creating A Scalable Customer Outreach Campaign

Alexis decided to try Toutapp very early on – she was one of our first customers! Once she started using Toutapp, she was able to quickly send necessary emails, without sacrificing an entire day’s work.

With Toutapp, I get incredible feedback from users I have never met on how we can make Artsicle better. We get email responses, calls, surveys completed, etc., all from a short email.

Now that Artsicle is improving and growing like crazy, Alexis has started using Toutapp in more and more parts of her business -  including in the hiring process!

She even found a pretty clever way to describe Toutapp:

Toutapp makes repetitive email stupid simple, with great data to boot.

Toutapp helps Alexis do it all. If you want to find a way to stop writing the same emails over and over, try Toutapp. Faster emails, better results. And if you know someone who’s looking for a job at a great startup, be sure to pass the message along -  Toutapp and Artsicle are hiring! 

Business Development Specialist T.J. Jones Doubles B2B Sales with Toutapp

TJ Jones certainly knows a thing or two about working with small businesses. He’s gone from working in his dad’s family business to growing a career in SaaS business development: he’s a linchpin at Monk Development.

MonkDev is a software development company that truly works for the greater good – they specialize in providing software and web development for non-profits and ministries across the country.

TJ Jones: Business Development

It’s TJ’s job to reach out to potential clients, identify how and why they would find value in Monk Development’s software, and build a relationship with those groups. He’s able to take a group that was once primarily in-person, and provide them with a robust online presence, expanding their impact in the local community and beyond.

TJ’s job requires him to spend a lot of time building relationships over email. Like most people who spend a lot of time in their inbox, it was a challenge for TJ to keep up with – he was constantly asking the same questions: Who did I email? Did they reply? When should I follow up? Plus, between sending an email and receiving a reply, there’s no way for him to understand what was happening to his emails.

TJ uses Tout to beat his sales quota

TJ wanted to find a better way to manage his emails, but he needed something that would work with his existing workflow. He started using Tout and it was a perfect fit – it allowed him to send the same emails he was writing before, standardize and track them, and send them much, much faster.

“The ability to move back and forth between different templates in order to reach multiple audiences has cut down the amount of time it takes to process email during my workday.”

For TJ, it wasn’t a matter of changing his business process, but rather finding a way to manage his day-to-day interactions.  As it turns out, making one small decision to use Tout made a huge difference:

At Monk Development, TJ’s business development role is critical, and the fact that Tout helped him double his sales in one month has had a huge ripple effect in the company. TJ is able to make an even bigger impact at a growing firm, and do it faster and more efficiently than before.

Are you tired of rewriting the same emails? Need a way to sort and track the templates you’re using? Try Toutapp.

Don't Let Being Organized Keep You from Being Productive

Chris Edgar of Stepcase Lifehack wrote a cool post about the value of “workplace yoga,”  and it had some great insights on the difference between productivity and organization:

“Usually, when we think about productivity, images of well-organized e-mail inboxes and color-coded folders come to mind.  But these things alone aren’t enough to make us efficient.  If our minds aren’t disciplined — our attention is scattered, or we feel sluggish or anxious — work will be a struggle, no matter how organized our workspace is.”

As someone who spends a lot of time organizing, thinking about organizing, and reading about organizing, I know firsthand that organizing can be an excellent procrastination tool. When you spend time cleaning and arranging your space, it relieves stress and takes time, so it’s almost a positive form of procrastination. At least that’s what I tell myself… But hey, even Alexander Pope said, “Order is heaven’s first law.”

Just because you’re organized doesn’t mean you’re going to be productive. There’s a huge difference between having your time managed and using your time effectively. When you get up in the morning, do you sort through your emails and categorize them, or do you just answer the ones you can and move on? Creating a system to save time doesn’t guarantee you’ll be more productive. Toutapp can save a ton of time on emails, but not if you’re spending your time on Toutapp constantly tweaking and reorganizing your templates. Write one, write it well, label it in a way that makes sense, then send it (over and over) and move on. Focus on the ways that tools like Toutapp make you productive rather than organized.

Tired of re-writing the same Emails? Want to know when someone has Viewed or Clicked on an Email? Use Toutapp.

photo via BLW Photography