The 2 Tools You Need for a Streamlined Sales Process

The Frankenstein monster isn’t fiction. It’s living in your sales department.

Every day, sales managers struggle to find tools that help personalize the customer’s buying experience—cobbling together 5 or 6 tools like a mad scientist. But the monster turns on you, because now you have to manage multiple logins to systems that don’t talk to each other, and you’re losing precious time entering data in several tools. Instead of a better sales system, you end up with inefficiency and chaos.

We’ve been there. But we’ve found a simple and highly effective way to boost sales team efficiency and create amazing customer experiences: HubSpot CRM and Sidekick.

The HubSpot CRM

Most sales teams battle with their CRM system to keep up with data entry—it either consumes most of their time, or they ignore it completely and then struggle to recall information and context for their sales communication.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Finding and Hiring the Right Growth Hacker for Your Company

The HubSpot CRM is an intuitive system that frees up valuable selling time by automatically logging emails, recording calls, and managing sales data.

“Traditional sales technology is necessary but not sufficient,” said HubSpot’s Brian Halligan. “HubSpot’s Sales Platform is designed to arm sales teams with the context they need to improve how they engage with companies, prospects, and leads to drive sales instead of driving people crazy.”

The HubSpot CRM equips you to conquer these challenges with these supercharged features:

Automated intelligence gathering and data entry

HubSpot’s CRM automatically creates company records, associates contacts, de-duplicates leads, and takes care of all the little details you shouldn’t be distracted by.

• You can instantly see new, useful information about any contact or company, including background information, details on key employees, social data, related companies, and more.
• Every email sent from Google Apps, Outlook, Apple Mail, and HubSpot is logged automatically with the contact’s record in the HubSpot CRM.
• The HubSpot CRM organizes every email, call, note, meeting, and website visit into one simple, intuitive Timeline view.

Phone integration and call recording

It’s hard to help a customer in distress when you’re trying to listen and take notes, while also searching around on different screens for context. You need to be fully engaged in calls with customers, and the HubSpot CRM lets you easily make calls with one click from your browser, then automatically log notes and recordings of calls for future reference.

Sidekick

To complement the HubSpot CRM, there’s Sidekick—a powerful tool that provides you with intelligence to improve sales communication.

Supercharged online research

With Sidekick’s Insights, you can quickly gain valuable insight about a prospect you’re researching online, and you can access additional lead intelligence from HubSpot and your CRM. Using this information, you can personalize your approach to opportunities based on data and context, and quickly add information into HubSpot with just a few clicks.

When communicating via email, you can go to Sidekick Insights and get relevant information about the contact’s history, social and marketing engagement, and sales opportunities. Armed with this information, you can supercharge your email to personalize the customer’s experience and send real-time data updates back to Sales HQ.

Mega-powerful email communication

Sidekick’s email integration also equips you with the ability to…

• Strategically plan emails. With just a few clicks, sales superheroes can easily schedule email to be delivered in the future, when it is more likely to be opened by prospects and customers.

• Track an email’s activity. With real-time mobile and desktop Sidekick Notifications, you’ll instantly know when a prospect is reading their email, looking at a proposal, or doing research on the company’s website. You can also tell if your email hasn’t been opened yet.

• Know your contacts better. Sidekick shows you powerful information about your contacts right in your inbox. You can see their professional history, mutual connections, and email history.

• Optimize your email templates. Access to your HubSpot CRM or Salesforce templates means your entire sales team can use the same templates and see which emails are being used and which ones work best.

We’re using the HubSpot CRM and Sidekick, and we’re thrilled with the results. Our sales team spends a lot less time on data entry and a lot more time strategically connecting with prospects in ways that delight. And because they’re HubSpot tools, everything is integrated with our marketing team. So no silos to burn down.

Author: Marisa Smith

Credentials From her early days of playing office in her parents’ basement, Marisa has been gifted with a talent for automating processes to improve efficiency. While working at the University of Michigan in academic advising, Marisa became frustrated by the lack of good electronic tools for managing student records and... View full profile ›

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

The 2 Tools You Need for a Streamlined Sales Process