User of the Week: Owen uses ToutApp for Customer Development
Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Owen McGab Enaohwo, Co-founder of SweetProcess. Every week or so, we'll profile a different person who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.
My co-founders and I are working on a webapp called SweetProcess that will make it easy for entrepreneurs to scale their businesses by helping them quickly and easily create Standard Operating Procedures for their businesses. Our process will allow everyone on their team to know exactly what to do in any given situation and they can make use of the SOPs to deliver a consistent level of results to their customers.
Right now we are in the process of creating a Minimum Viable Product for SweetProcess. Before jumping straight into coding, we decided to call potential customers and interview them to find the burning problems that they have with documenting how processes work in their businesses and the exact solutions they want from a software.
My email process involves sending an email to a list of prospects in my field and having them click a link to answer a simple three-question survey. ToutApp’s analytics let me know who is interested in and who has completed the survey. From there, I have the opportunity to follow up and prioritize my recipients based on who appears to be showing interest. For example, those who complete the survey then get a phone call where we can drill into the problem and the solutions that they want from the SweetProcess software.
ToutApp’s templates, tracking, and follow-up mechanisms help me get my emails done faster and more intelligently. At the end of the day, these features help me stay in touch with everyone, from my initial outreach to my next follow-up to the final phone call.
Sales in the 80’s: What can we learn?
I was born into a family of entrepreneurs. My father started his IT Networking company in a small office out of in our garage in Northern California. Seventeen years later, he is still committed as the first day in our garage. What was originally a one man show has since developed into a team of fifty out of Bishop Ranch Business Park in San Ramon, California. But behind every successful man is a successful women. She not only is an incredible mother, but she was the catalyst of my father's startup. My mother is the ideal, hardworking salesperson.
Without her, my father's energy to create an innovative, technology driven company and the resources behind him would not have all come together. People seem to forget that salespeople, and not necessarily the CEO or founder, are the ones who help funnel the growth of any given company, product, or idea. My mother helps prove that “a company is only as good as its people." Needless to say, my mom has endured years of selling in good and bad economies and has been a key component of my father’s success at his company.
Silicon Valley History
My mother started working in Silicon Valley in 1985. At this time Silicon Valley was booming and exciting. Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Apple, and many more companies were starting up. HP and IBM were already established as the companies to beat.
Most of the entrepreneurs in the valley came from Stanford, and other local California Educational Institutions. Women in sales were a minority at that time in Silicon Valley. The fax machine had just been purchased at my mother’s company and they considered it a marvel to get a "Purchase Order" from a customer within the same day, as opposed to waiting for the US Postal System. Most communication, contracts, Master Service Agreements and Purchase Orders that took as long as 5-7 days through the US Mail system. It was just not as instantaneous as selling today.
Most sales were closed via phone calls and face-to-face meetings, and most appointments were set up by calling the customer from desk phones.
Selling was all relationship-based and you scheduled many lunches and dinners with your clients. The sale was generally written on a cocktail napkin.
Email communication was just starting up, and there was no internet to speak of in the 1980s. The carphone was considered a luxury: you could close a sale while driving to and from work and at the same time check in on your family on your two hour commute. My mother emphasized that most salespeople worked until 10PM at night and enjoyed it. It was necessary to work long hours to reach your sales goals for your company.
Working at that time was considered a career, not a job. Multi-tasking was the key to success at that time. There was no wireless phones and no corner Starbucks to work from. There was no telecommuting. There was no email communication, no software applications to track your sales and your customers, and no websites or social media on the horizon. Programmers were in high demand and considered "Gods” in that time period. You were expected to complete cold calls (100-200 daily) and schedule many outside meetings day after day. There was no Wireless Infrastructure or video conferencing, WEbX, or "Gotomeeting." No Google, no YouTube, blogging, or texting. And not to mention no ToutApp.
It was not a 24x7 real time world like it is today, and you were not constantly being interrupted or distracted as in today's fast-paced, complicated business world. As someone who sold in the 1980s and was lucky to live and be a part of Silicon Valley 's emergence in all its glory, I found the growing technology fascinating.
Today, technology is able to do so much more. We are far more interconnected globally than we were decades ago. We are able to reach a larger audience, more companies, and more decision makers in any given week. Entrepreneurs can grow their company in 1-2 years, rather than 10 years. More entrepreneurs have a chance to be just that.
What can we learn?
Although the art of sales has evolved over decades and had to change alongside its technology, it will continue to evolve at an even faster pace. A salesperson must always be ready to adapt... and they typically do, due to their resilience, drive, and passion for their work. Even if you are one of those in sales that do not consider yourselves as "technically savvy" just remember what really matters: where there is a will, there is a way. And in order for a company to truly be successful, they must have a strong, passionate, and hungry salesforce to bring them to success. A good salesperson has conviction that what they are offering will greatly add to the prospects’ life, belief that this is the best offer the prospect can choose and determination to communicate that they are right.
Team of the Week: Ambassador always has their Live Feed running
Our featured Team of the Week entry comes from Derek from Ambassador, writing this on behalf of his sales team. Every week or so, we'll profile a different person who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.
At Ambassador, we help companies track and manage customer referrals. We'll let you reward your customers (or affiliates) for referring their friends, family, community, or users to you. Once you've tracked referrals, you can issue cash rewards using our integrations with Paypal and Dwolla. We're a hustling Techstars NYC startup in the one and only Detroit, Michigan. I'm managing our sales and customer service communications.
We LOVE ToutApp because we can see how effective our emails are at educating new customers about our product and its features.
ToutApp also lets us see which attachments are opened, when people reference them, and when they go back to review them. Tout also lets us know that a follow-up email has been read or clicked, letting us know that it was compelling to the recipient. Really useful - I always have my Live Feed running!
ToutApp Revamps Email Tracking and Templates for Salesforce
ToutApp's integration into Salesforce provides advanced email tracking and templates beyond what the standard CRM offers.
One of the biggest draws of our Salesforce plugin is that it lets you do all of your email outreach right from within Salesforce while ensuring your emails still get sent through your own email servers.
Once you've installed Tout from the AppExchange, Our Tout Outbox lets you see email analytics in Salesforce, and our "Email with Tout" button lets you send emails with Salesforce templates and tracking. ToutApp will also auto-BCC Salesforce on all your communications, even when you're emailing from Gmail or Outlook.
And now ToutApp for Salesforce is even more powerful, because we'll display email tracking and engagement information whenever you pull up a Lead or Contact.
So for those salespeople who live within Salesforce and can’t imagine needing to navigate away to look up email tracking information, we’ve got your back. Here's what our newest tracking info in Salesforce looks like:
For current Salesforce users, here's a video explaining how to update your Salesforce plugin to the latest version with additional tracking:
Also, if you're looking to take your sales communciations in Salesforce to the next level, here's a book we wrote with the 5 top best practices on how to make the most of Salesforce + Tout.
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ToutApp's Email Templates and Tracking coupled with Salesforce CRM makes a killer combination for your sales team. In this book, we've put together five best practices on how to make the most of your sales communications process with Salesforce and Tout: View PDF or iBook now (no pesky forms necessary) |
Give it a try and email us your feedback or comment below!
ToutApp Adds Presentation and Website Tracking to Sales Communications Platform
We've been pretty busy at ToutApp lately - have you noticed? Today we're announcing two additions to our powerful email tracking: attachment and site action tracking.
Email Attachment Tracking
For the average person in marketing or sales, email attachments are incredibly important. They provide compelling content to the recipient, they supplement what can't be said in a short business email, and they're what help sign the deal. If you know your recipients are interested in the content you're providing them with, you have a far better chance of doing business together.
Now we'll let you know when your recipient opens an attachment and is paging around the content. You'll know when they open it, what's most interesting to them, and if they come back to view it again and again (a good sign!). This new attachments platform is called Tout Connect, and we've got some great additions coming to it soon.... so stay tuned.
Here's an example of what one of our trackable attachments looks like:
Getting Started with Trackable Attachments
Tout Connect works in both on our website and in Gmail and Google Apps.
1) To attach a trackable email, go compose an email, and then click either the "Link" or "Link to File" buttons.
2) Choose your attachment and send it out. We support PDF, Word docs, and Powerpoint presentations.
3) Hit "Send" and fire up your Live Feed. You'll see your recipients as they open and page through your attachments.
Site Tracking Actions
We rolled out our Site Tracking feature a few months ago to let you know when your email recipients independently visit your website.
We rely heavily on Site Tracking internally at ToutApp to see when prospects visit our pricing, "About Us", and trial account pages. However, we quickly realized that there's more to site tracking than just browsing around pages on your website. Now Site Tracking will alert you to the key actions that your leads are taking on your website: buying a product, signing up for an account, downloading an asset, etc etc.
Cool! How do I set it up site actions?
Log into our app and head over to our Site Tracking page in the Integrations pane. Follow steps 1-4.
Site tracking requires you to have access to your website's underlying code. If you don't have access yourself, you'll need to talk to your web administrator to get started. All you'll need to do is paste in some custom Javascript on the pages and action areas you'd like to track.
If you're have any questions, you can always email team@toutapp.com for help.
We hope you get a chance to play around with the new features! As always, we'd love to hear your feedback. And if you haven't had a chance to get started with our app yet, you can start your free trial today.