Introducing: The Sales Communications Dashboard
First of all, Happy Friday.
For those of you that are already ToutApp users, I hope you had a fantastic week of sales communications with new and exciting leads. Thanks to Tout's Live Feed, you already know who your most engaged leads were, and have probably closed a few more deals than you normally would have since you focused your time on the right people.
For this Friday, as you reflect on how the week went and what you want to do differently next week, we want to give you something that helps synthesize how your sales communications went this week.
Today, we're introducing something brand new that is going to take your sales game to the next level. Today, we're announcing something takes all of that amazing analytics and tracking data around your sales emails and wraps it into one meaningful dashboard. Today, we're announcing our real-time sales communications dashboard.
Although its unorthodox to release stuff on a Friday, we thought it would be great because as you wind down on your long week, you can go ahead and log into ToutApp Dashboard, click on the "This Week" button, and see how your whole week looked in terms of your sales communications.
Tout's pulse dashboard will make meaning out of all those individual email views and clicks and tell you:
- Which times of the weeks were busiest for you
- Which times of the week your customers were most engaged
- How many emails you dealt with this week
- Which templates you used the most
- What kind of email content drove the most engagement
- Who your most engaged leads/prospects/customers are
And ofcourse, the dashboard was designed for Managers and Teams in mind first, so it'll also help you tap into the sales communications across your organization and see how everyones doing as a whole.
We've put in a significant amount of investment into the underlying data infrastrucutre for processing our email and engagement data. We think this dashboard is just the beginning.
If you and your sales team aren't on ToutApp yet, what are you waiting for? Get Touting.
How Dyn Uses ToutApp’s Email Tracking and Analytics to Delight Customers
You’d never thought DNS and email delivery could get this exciting. Dyn are the coolest kids on the block making the internet work. They’ve delighted us with their Most Reputable Sender in the World campaign and their nontraditional take on classic internet memes.
When they’re not busy powering the internet, Dyn’s business development and marketing teams use Tout to improve their emails.
Tout is great for "reaching out to existing customers... Since there are wayyyyyyy more customers than there are BDRs, it helps us keep in contact with them all and inform them of other offerings Dyn has." - AJ Garron, Business Development Rep
As a very customer-centric company (we’ve written about Dyn’s credo and how they put the customer first here), the Dyn team use ToutApp to stay in touch with more customers while keeping the conversation personal. Our templates save the team time re-writing the same communications, and email tracking kicks in to make sure that Dyn’s reps are engaging with the most interested customers.
“Our team loves using ToutApp. Efficiency and 'working smart' are some of our credos here at Dyn, and ToutApp is a major tool to help promote both of them. It's a great connection tool that we use every day.' - John Zahr, Business Development Manager
"ToutApp is a great tool to not only learn how effective you are at first impressions, but also increase the number of first impressions you can achieve in a work day. It makes your emails more about the customers, rather than yourself using its customized templates. If there is one tool in your marketing and sales teams’ hands that is fist pump worthy...this is it." -Ryan O'Hara, Event Marketing
Tout’s offerings not only help Dyn send out a larger quantity of emails, they also improve the quality of them. Template analytics keep the team on top of their game by letting them know how effective each email is. Not only does Tout help Dyn succeed as a business, it lets them give their customers more of the information they want.
In fact, if you’re a Tout customer looking for your own email servers to send from, we definitely recommend that you check Dyn out. Existing Tout users can set up SMTP with them here.
You can learn more about why Dyn loves us by signing up for a ToutApp account today.
ToutApp for Outlook introduces Advanced Email and Presentation Tracking
Today, we're announcing Version 2.0 of ToutApp for Outlook. With it, you get a rock solid battled-tested plugin that adds Tout email tracking, templates and our newly introduced presentation tracking to Outlook versions spanning from 2007 to 2013.
Watch the Video Overview
How is it battle tested?
Since releasing our Outlook plugin last year, we've been hard at work working with customers across major enterprises spanning Outlook versions 2007 to 2013 and Windows versions XP, 7 and even Windows 8.
Tout already offers you the most advanced email and templating in the sales communications space, and today we're happy to announce support for presentation tracking right from inside of Outlook.
Why Tout for Outlook?
For those of you unfamiliar with Tout or email tracking in general, Tout's sales communications platform plugs into Outlook, Gmail, and your CRM to help solve these key problems in your day-to-day sales process:
- Not knowing what happens to your important sales emails after hitting "Send."
- Constantly jumping back and forth from your Outlook into your CRM having to manually upadate your sales communications.
- Having to constantly re-attach files, or re-write the same emails over, and over, and over.
Key Features
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Email and presentation tracking with real-time feed: You know when your email is opened, links are clicked, presentations are viewed down to the page and even when someone replies. See who is engaging with your emails as it happens right from Outlook so you can manage your time and follow up effectively.
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Customizable templates. Write emails faster with saved templates. You can also draft an email up on the fly and save it as a template. Bonus - add a trackable attachment just as you're about to send the email.
- Auto-update your CRM. Forgot to update your CRM? No need to include a BCC or hop into your contact record. Tout auto updates your CRM once you send your email.
To get started with ToutApp for Outlook, you can download the latest version here.
If you don't have a ToutApp account yet, start here.
Trada Hones in on Hot Leads with Tout
About Trada
Online advertising is a crowded, confusing industry that Trada brings sanity to. They run the first and only crowdsourced, community-based marketplace for online advertising. Clients sign up, detail their needs, and are matched with industry experts, eliminating the need for a full in-house paid search team. Their business provides an easy solution that’s ideal for mid-market and larger small businesses.
We've profiled Trada in the past to spread word about a job opening for Business Development Reps. Check it out to learn more about their team and great culture - as well as their annual scooter race!
The problem
Trada’s messaging and lead follow-up process were systematized, but they lacked key insights into their day-to-day sales communication. Their Business Development Reps weren’t sure which leads were the most qualified to follow up with, and they also weren’t sure what communications resonated the most with prospects.
The Solution
Trada’s sales and marketing departments worked together to get Tout running for the team. Marketing created templates for sales, and sales used these in their everyday communications to A/B test and gather usage metrics. Tout’s templates save Trada time writing repetitive emails, and they ensure that messaging is consistent across the team. As a fast-growing company, new Business Development Reps can quickly get up to speed on the sales process and messaging. Trada’s sales team can now gain critical insights on a lead-by-lead basis - by knowing who opened their emails - to hone in on the most interested leads with targeted follow-up.
Tout enables our sales team to prioritize their day. In the past we wasted time chasing leads who never opened the emails we sent them. By using Tout we can now target prospects that we are confident have opened their email. Tout also gives us insight into how quickly they are opened, how many times and what action they take after reading,"
- Chris Crawfurd, Director of Training and Sales Enablement
Bonus: ToutApp best practices from the Trada team
- Move recipients with the most clicks and views on emails to the top of the list for follow up
- Have marketing and sales work together to create and test sales email templates
- Follow up with an email or phone call when the Live Feed shows a lead viewing your email
- A/B test sales templates to see which perform the best, then use the ones with the best statistics.
Why your Enterprise Sales Team Needs to Get Honest
A Tale of Two Teams
Two teams at competing companies sign up for a productivity app. Both are large, aggresive sales teams with big budgets and overlapping products. One of them takes full advantage of the app's collaboration features with tons of management buy-in; the other team is unable to be truly be transparent and collaborative and suffers from lack of leadership. So who wins? Which company is ultimately more successful?
You know the answer as well as I do: the more collaborative team. In the end, though, it’s really easy to recognize this as a successful model, but it’s really difficult to act on it. At a past employer, I struggled through a corporate job at a major tech company where this was the case; there were many complaints about a lack of internal transparency, but no one really stood up to change this. In the end, though, this is a detrimental cycle that only hurts you, the company, and your job.
Ultimately, it all comes down to this: someone has to either step up to reshape corporate culture to be more transparent, or the company will flounder.
The latest shake-ups at Yahoo are a clear example of this: the company floundered under weak leadership; now, the appointment of a new CEO has led the company in a far more decisive direction. The decision to “open the kimono” and really communicate across the team doesn’t just lie with management. Each employee has the choice of whether they want to get candid, and this can have far-reaching effects.
Sales Teams Need to Communicate - Here's Why
Sales is an especially challenging arena to be transparent in. It’s a department that’s traditionally based on competition. But the best salespeople out there can’t just be competitive - they need to be team players. Each salesperson brings a unique strength to the table - whether it be an insight into messaging that works, a secret to better prospecting, or a wealth of connections in their personal network. Uniting these strengths together is what makes a sales team unstoppable and their company more successful.
While working at Tout, I've dealt with a lot of teams with different organizational structures, and I’ve seen that initial model I mentioned of two competing companies with different internal structures. That’s why, in creating a sales productivity app, we’ve gradually shifted our whole ideology from the individual salesperson to the team model. There are a lot of sales team collaboration features in ToutApp - template and group sharing, deep CRM integration, team analytics, and best practices on which templates work best.
I see a ton of startups and smaller companies taking huge, huge advantage of our team collaboration features. It’s the larger companies that struggle with a sense of appropriateness, openness, and clear leadership. And, ultimately, the ones who are able to behave with a truly transparent attitude are the ones that will differentiate themselves from the competition.
So go ahead and share a "secret" or best practice with your boss or coworker. Help teach them something they didn't already know. Pass on your knowledge and talk frankly. You're not creating competition for yourself or giving anything away - you're helping your company and becoming a leader.