Sales Productivity Tools at their Finest
Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days. -- Zig Ziglar
You're a salesperson. You have 24 hours. 24 hours to work towards closing another deal, pushing another opportunity down the pipeline and nurturing your 50 to 100 opportunities while mananging to keep this workflow productive and streamlined in the meantime. How are you spending those 24 hours? Are you using that time effectively? You're shooting off emails left and right, calling over 100 prospects a day. Do you know if your messaging is resonating? Or if you are even calling these prospects at the appropriate hour? Do you even have a process? Does your current process allow you to be successful?
Holy guacamole.
That's a lot to take in. But, just as the legend stated it himself, lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. So, which direction do we need to take in sales? What do we need in order to sell effectively? The answer is simple. Sales Tools, my friend. You need to be leveraging sales tools. Why? In order to effectively and productively prospect, build relationships, keep track of follow up and close more deals - you are going to need that extra leverage.
You want to be successful in sales? Listen up and start taking advantage of the following sales tools that are changing the game.
Find prospects with LinkedIn.
Start expanding and use your LinkedIn network to get those introductions and leverage those gosh darn common connections. LinkedIn is going to help make finding and attracting prospects a cinch, help learn about their levels of expertise and experience and what they need. For more tips and tricks around how to make LinkedIn your secret weapon check out How to Build a Kickass Sales Pipeline.
Engage Prospects with Twitter.
Find out what your prospect is up to on a personal and professional level and use social selling to reel them in. And why not engage them in a conversation over Twitter? For awesome best practices on how to do this check out How to Use Twitter for Sales Prospecting.
Stay up to date and in the know with Google Alerts.
These alerts are great for staying up to date on your leads and prospects company or industry. Google will email you daily or weekly updates by the latest relevant google news on the web. Test this out and use this valuable information to reach out to your prospect - they will be impressed you are in the know and care about their company.
Keep Track of everything with Salesforce.
Salesforce is one helpful beast that helps you manage everyone and everthing from customers to sales opportunities and product support to reporting. Salesforce keeps everything up to date in one place and helps you to remember the important things about people and tasks that you would normally forget. Check out how more Salesforce Best Practices here.
Get them on the phone with Time Trade.
Whether it's a demonstration, team training or prodcit informational call, Time Trade helps your prospects create online appointment from your schedule. It connects with your Outlook, iCal and even Google Calendar - so no worries around double booking. Just email your scheduling link to your prospect and let them book the appointment. Makes it super easy for them and you.
Follow up and close the deal with ToutApp.
It wouldn't be a complete list without the leading sales communications solution available today. Tout helps your sales reps process leads faster, land more meetings and inherently close more deals. How? Tout plugs in to your day to day sales process streamlining it with templates, tracking and analytics.
Everyone is trying to find that "new sales productivity-time-managment application" that will increase their productivity to the max. Well, let's face it. There is no one application that can do it all. But the tools above have been a game changer for so many and they tool can help you stay on track in your day to day sales workflow.
What are you waiting for? Start leveraging these puppies.
ToutApp + Highrise = Email Bliss
When people ask us for a simple CRM solution, we always recommend Highrise. Highrise is a simple CRM that helps you manage your contacts and helps you to remember the important things about the people you would normally forget.
I wouldn't be where I am today without ToutApp, and the integration with Highrise. -- Matt Rae, Tripzaar Inc.
Before the days of Highrise, managing and tracking your customers was no fun. Lacking visibility into your sales team's activity, your customer data was all over the place on sticky notes and reporting and analysis was painful. Highrise changed the game with visibility and collaboartion across your sales team and the ability to have reporting around progression. Essentially, Highrise helps manage your contacts, keep track of who said what when, schedule follow-ups, set reminders and convert leads into done deals.
Now before the days of ToutApp, your emails would fall into a black abyss. Lacking visibility into exactly what is happening to your emails after you hit send and lacking knowledge of whether your messaging resonated with your prospect or even was effective at all. ToutApp plugs right into your day to day workflow and helps streamline and crystalize your communications process with real time tracking, powerful templates and analytics around the emails you are sending. Lastly, ToutApp bridges the gap between your email and your CRM.
ToutApp has been a fantastic sales tool to monitor who has and hasn't opened my personal emails and clicked on the links, this helps me see who is more engaged with what I am saying and who to keep in contact with. It also saves me time copying my emails to Highrise, ToutApp does it for me. Very useful, highly recommended. -- Nick Storr, Sales Manager at Connected
ToutApp + Highrise
Now, combined the two and bam...something magical happens. Mergence of the two = pure email bliss. Giving you the ability to send trackable emails from within your Highrise and get reporting around those emails. Imagine the effectiveness and time saving capabilties here.
You want to know more you say?
ToutApp will automagically update every single email sent through ToutApp to Highrise and assign it to the proper contact. You honestly will never have to worry about copying your CRM's BCC address again, because Tout will always take care of that for you.
Beautiful, we know. Beyond copying all your emails, Tout will bring a whole new level of data to your CRM that will truly help you understand the interaction with your contact, and once again make Highrise a valuable source of information that shows the value of your relationships.
Everytime your contact is viewing, clicking or has replied Tout will send a notification of the activity to Highrise.
We know how tiresome it can be having to create a new contact in your email client and your Highrise each and every time you want to send an email. ToutApp takes that pain point away in a snap. Each time you shoot off a Tout email to a recipient who is not in your Highrise, ToutApp will create a contact for that person with their name and email, and copy all associated emails to that contact.
All done seamlessly and automatically. Don't believe us? Check out what our happy ToutApp and Highrise users are saying...
ToutApp's integration with Highrise makes me life much easier! I can see when my contacts open and read an email and what better time to reach back out and engage with them than right after that! -- Callie Harris, Public Relations Manager at uKnow.com
ToutApp with Highrise is magically efficient! You haven't seen efficiency until you have used ToutApp with Highrise. -- Matt Rae, Tripzaar
If you want to scale the way you track your leads and customers to stay competitive and close more deals start Touting... in Highrise of course. Of course, for those of you who something even simplier than Highrise there's the ToutApp Lab Spreadsheet CRM.
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“ToutApp gives me complete visibility into every single email I send”
Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Max Altschuler, VP of Business Development at AttorneyFee. Every week or so, we'll profile a different user who uses our platform to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.
I'm the VP of Business Development at AttorneyFee. We are a consumer legal startup aiming to help connect consumers with legal issues to credible attorneys in their area. On the Business Development side, we are constantly trying to find new partners that will drive consumers in need, to our platform. There are tons of potential partners in this space and is becoming very exciting.
Where does Tout fit?
I have been able to use Tout at two different business. At one, I was sending thousands of emails over the course of the week. At the other, I was sending twenty to fifty emails throughout the week, however a lot more personalized. Tout streamlined my process at both businesses and has made really easy for me to connect with more and more people. I can see what is working and what is not. ToutApp gives me complete visibility into every single email that I send off.
ToutApp has been a huge help to track and optimize our emails.
Why do you love ToutApp?
ToutApp allows me to stay organized and connect with partners in a timely manner. I can track everything that goes on between my outbox and someone else's inbox. This gives me the transparency I need to trigger follow up emails. It also acts as a very lightweight relationship management tool that I can use straight from Gmail. This is exactly what I need for a job that requires fewer overall connections but more depth to each one.
What is one unique trick you use with ToutApp?
ToutApp allows me to take the next step of action and hit call from the Live Feed. So, if I notice someone is viewing my email, I take that as an opportunity to call them straight from the Live Feed. It's a great little trick to get people on the phone. Especially, as they are looking over what you had sent them.
I can attribute a lot of success to getting new customers and clients because of ToutApp.
For more tips and tricks for how to best use Tout, check out our Sales 101 page.
My Best Sales Hack
I recently was on a screen share and saw an inbox on the other end of the screen that was immaculately organized! I was actually suprised and a tad bit jealous to see such a clean looking inbox to be honest. If you're an avid emailer you probably understand my pain of owning a mess of an inbox. Working at ToutApp I've become completely email obsessed, so of course this discovery of a poster child for a perfect inbox got me pretty excited.
Here is how I came to love Gmail's multiple inboxes.
The Problem
I live and breathe email (and a lot of Salesforce) so Gmail for me is where I spend a lot of my time. The big problem was my Gmail inbox looked like a Rubix Cube before it was solved -- a complete jumble.
The bigger problem was the important email responses from hot leads that were getting buried in my inbox. 
Writing sales emails and follow ups with the goal in mind to get a reply is always at the top on my mind. With ToutApp I've been able to hone my messaging to identify what email messaging and follow up typically generate replies.
Too many replies is a good problem to have, but a messy inbox makes it difficult to prioritize and manage following up efficiently. I needed to find a way to make it easy to identify the most important email replies in my inbox.
The Solution
Multiple inboxes. Beyond just the ability to organize your read, unread and starred emails, I discovered creating filters was the best way to keep important replies easy to identify in my inbox.
If you're not feeling my excitement just yet, here's how I've put this solution into play.
New ToutApp users are typically put on a 5X5 drip. This is made easy with templates and auto-follow up. One of my inboxes filters only replies from new ToutApp users on the drip.
My most important inbox filters what I deem to be important replies. I've named this inbox "big deals" Example: I send over an email to set up some time to chat with a decision maker connected to a "big deal" I've followed up a handful of times and receive a one-liner "10am Wednesday".
How to get started?
- Head on over to Gmail Settings. Go to labs and enable multiple inboxes.
- You should now have a "multiple inboxes tab". Once you click on the tab you'll see the option to create different searches.
- Create your search queries. This is the key to organizing your inbox. Example: subject:(re:type in your subject line)in:inbox
- Rearrange. Choose the positioning of your new inboxes.
- Lastly, enjoy your new organized inbox!
Take your game to the next level, learn more tips to streamline your email process with email tracking for Outlook and Gmail, analytics and templates. Check out ToutApp or sign up for a free trial.
A Journey From College Grad to Intern to Full-time Marketing Officer
From graduating college to interning to finding a full time job has been quite the ride over the past year. As much as you say you are prepared for the real world no one and nothing can prepare you for this transition. And if you ever meet anyone who says it's easy, they are fibbin'. It's tough. After twelve months I finally found my niche although it was not a breeze, the journey was so worth it.
Growing up, I was told on more than one occassion, "You should do what you love in life." Throughout college and post college I was set on doing just that. With a proud shiny degree from the University of Notre Dame (Go Irish!) I thought I had my career in the bag. However, after months of tedious applications and interviews, I realized I was mistaken. I was unhappy with my first internship out of college and was craving a position of growth; I wanted to be challenged. After browsing for weeks upon weeks on Indeed.com, LinkedIn, One Day One Job, I finally found ToutApp. ToutApp was offering a Marketing Internship, the position summed up as:
If you want to kickstart your career in startup marketing, if you're willing to learn, if you're creative, and if you've got the hustle in you: THIS IS THE ROLE FOR YOU.
I was sold. I interviewed and was offered the position a couple days later. I landed quite a unique internship at ToutApp.
As an entry level Marketing Intern I was given tasks that were not typical for an intern. Instead of the usual hand holding process I was given the freedom to be innovative and share my thoughts and ideas. And with much guidance and support from TK, CEO and Founder of Tout, I learned a great deal more within the startup world than I ever imagined. From monitoring anayltics and metrics of content to creating product videos I was constantly learning something new and fresh everyday. Months later, I was fortunate to be offered a full-time position in Marketing at ToutApp. From the product video development side to blogging to content creation, and distribution, I landed an exciting job within a company in the midst of serious growth and is still growing today.
While working at ToutApp, I was introduced to Paul Singh, and he provided me some of the best advice. Paul told me to search out my greatest strengths and master them. I took his advice to heart. Eight months later, with much mentoring, reading and research within the marketing field I am actually doing something I feel good about and am getting good at.
With the advice of my mentor TK, I have come to realize:
If you really want a rewarding career of growth and ultimately success + happiness - find out your ultimate strengths and skill set and become the most knowledgeable master of them. And once you become really good at what you do each day with research and practice, you'll be passionate about your career.
I will be the first to admit that I'm no Einstein, no prodigy of Marketing, just a twenty two year old college grad trying to find my path to be successful within my new career and thought I would share my experience with you all. My advice to those just getting out of college and have absolutely no idea what you want to do... try the following:
Find a mentor
Find and reach out to someone older, more experienced, smarter and wiser. Ask them to teach you the things they wish they would have known. You will gain a tremendous amount of knowledge. As Neil Patel coined, "Average people learn from their mistakes. Smart people learn from other people's mistakes."
Find your strengths
Apply for an internship for a company that will allow you to grow and take on different tasks and projects outside of your comfort zone. A challenging position will become the most rewarding position.
Master them
Master the crap out of them. Read, chat, join webinars, take a skillshare course, go to a Meet-up. Follow the top twitter accounts, top bloggers and influence leaders in the field. And soak it in and apply it to what you are doing. You will only grow.
Try Sales or Marketing
Many companies have amazing training programs. Take those as an opportunity to grow and learn about the industry. If you are interested in a sales career, check out the ToutApp Sales Job Spotlight featuring awesome sales jobs at companies all over the world. This is a great way for you to kick start your journey.
Have faith
Believe in yourself. You will find your niche. Be patient. Keep working towards your goal, whatever it may be, for the long haul. You will eventually find it.
So venture out into the real working world, your career awaits you. A journey from College Grad to Intern to Full-time Marketing Officer - SHARE YOUR JOURNEY!