Category: Sales

6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Making Any Sales Call

Posted on by callingly

The outcome of the sales call isn’t decided during the call; it’s determined before it. Sales calls are won or lost before you pick up the phone and start the dialing process. And it’s your state of mind that plays a crucial role in painting your success or failure.

Phone sales isn’t easy. You must be fully prepared in order to make your call worthwhile, and your preparation depends on the seven questions that we are going to discuss today.

These six questions will play a major part in any sales call you are going to make. And if you don’t ask the following six questions to yourself before making the call, your success or failure will solely depend on your luck.

Don’t let your luck fail you and ask the following six questions before making any sales call.

1. What’s the Reason for Calling?

One of the most important questions before making any sales call should be, why am I making this call? Is it because this prospect or number is on my list, or there’s a more significant reason for me calling this specific lead?

Ask yourself the reason you are contacting the respective prospect. What’s the main reason behind it, and how it will affect you or the things around you? Is this just another sales call for you, or there’s a higher purpose for it in your mind? Be honest with yourself and find the reason before you pick up the phone and dial in a number.

You must know your why before you are calling as it’s the only thing that will make your work worthwhile.

2. Who Am I Calling and What’s Their Position?

Now here’s a thing, if you are unaware of the person and their designation you are contacting, you have no upper hand! It’s like you are calling an unknown number that’s from a foreign country and expecting miracles. That’s not how a good sales call goes.

You must have a sufficient idea about who you are calling and their respective position in the organization, community, or company. Without any clue about your prospect, you won’t be able to make any impact and personalize the call.

Having a good idea about your prospect and their position will help you to convey your message in an effective way. You will more likely be able to close the deal and sell your services/products.

3. Is the Prospect Influential or Just Another Worker?

So you are all aware of your prospects but do you have any information on how influential they can be? For instance, if you call a normal 9 to 5 employee of a company and talk to them about how your services and products and how it can change their company’s environment, etc., it won’t do any good.

Your call will just waste your time and efforts. So it’s essential to know if your prospect is influential in the company. If you are calling a regional manager and conveying your message, it would be more beneficial than just calling a less powerful employee of that same company.

4. Is the Prospect Amongst the Decision-Makers?

It’s crucial to ask yourself if the prospect you are calling is considered as one of the decision-makers? This will help you to carry forward your sales talk according to the person who’s on the other end. For instance, if it’s a manager, you’ll deal with them differently than a normal employee or a CFO.

It’s important to tell your conscious about who you are dealing with. If the person on the other end is somewhat considered as one of the decision-makers in the company, you’ll go have the ear of someone who can make your sales call worthwhile.

If the prospect you are calling is amongst the decision-makers of the company, you’ll be ready to hit the sweet spots at the right time.

5. What am I Trying to Accomplish?

Before picking up the phone and dialing the contact information on the dialer, you must be crystal clear about the thing you are looking forward to accomplishing via the call. Your end-goal of the call must be super clear to you.

If you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish via the sales call, you won’t be able to sell your services or products. Without the end goal, there will be no difference between the customer and you, as both of you will be unaware of the bigger picture.

Ask yourself questions that will help you to identify the goal you are trying to accomplish via the call. Don’t get too overwhelmed by how you are going to do it; just remember the end goal, and you’ll reach there anyhow.

Create a scenario in your mind palace about the things you are trying to accomplish via the call to the point where you can clearly see them.

6. How Am I Going to Accomplish My Goal?

Once you have the goals you want to accomplish with the call, it’s time to create a plan for how you are going to do it. This roadmap will include all the details related to achieving the end-goals you have set to accomplish via the call.

You are allowed to go deep into the specificity and line-up any sort of game plan that works for you. But that plan must be getting you closer to accomplishing the goals you have set to achieve on the call.

If you don’t know how you will achieve the end goals, your call will not benefit you or the company you are working for. It’s just like saying “I want to become a billionaire”, and not changing any behaviors to accomplish that.

So before you call your prospect, be sure about the things you are trying to accomplish and adhere to the plan.

Conclusion

And that’s about it. Ask the six questions we have mentioned above to yourself before making any sales call.

7 Best Cold Calling Books

Posted on by callingly

Cold calling isn’t easy. And as the sales industry is changing at a rapid pace along with society, the rules of cold calling are also transforming. That’s why you and your team need the proper resources to get the most out of your cold calling campaigns.

As they say, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.” You and your team need a couple of books that will help you to make your cold calling campaign effective and worthwhile.

In today’s piece, we’ll be showcasing the ten best cold calling books for sales. These books have assisted many cold calling sales teams in boosting sales and making their clients happy. So let’s learn about the ten best cold calling books available in the market.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters the Most

Published back on November 2, 2010, and authored by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations is for all the sales professionals who are unaware of the power of applying emotional intelligence.

Difficult Conversations primarily focuses on teaching the art of tremendous emotional communication during formal negotiations. This book covers the practical path towards having difficult conversations, improving negotiation skills, increasing listening power, and more.

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen had carefully crafted this book for all sales professionals who are finding it hard to take the emotional track during formal conversations. Give it a read today and learn how to handle difficult conversations.

Your Growth Hacks Aren’t Working

Your Growth Hacks Aren’t Working is written by Steli Efti, and it was published in 2017. This book offers a handy guide for all the startup founders who are looking forward to setting up cold calling for their business.

In this book, Steli Efti starts by defining the basics of cold calling and then takes the discussion on how you can integrate it into your business. Moreover, Steli also briefly covers how you can create a sales process on the basis of cold calling.

From how successful sales teams are using cold calling and how to improve productivity with it, Your Growth Hacks Aren’t Working covers everything!

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cold Calling

Are you a newbie who’s just starting to grasp the basics of sales? If that’s the case, this book will significantly help you to understand the concept of cold calling in businesses. This book is a perfect introduction that’s digestible for newcomers.

There are five sections available in this book that can be used to create your own process of setting up cold calling. Apart from cold calling, this book also includes topics like improving customer interaction, motivational stories, and more.

What’s interesting about this book that it covers everything about cold calling from scratch so that every type of person can take advantage of the information.

Gap Selling

Gap Selling by Kennan takes you on a ride of unlearning everything you have experienced so far and develop new real-world beliefs. Kennan breaks all the myths and beliefs in the sales world and helps you forget about all the nonsense you have been hearing for years.

Gap Selling focuses on new insights, fresh frameworks, and ideas that actually work in the sales world. From showing you how to engage with customers during the buying process to helping customers, this book introduces a new set of ideas that aren’t readily available online.

If you are serious about changing the game, Gap Selling will help you do just that.

Fanatical Prospecting

Although Fanatical Prospecting was published back in 2015, it’s still relevant and goes down in history as a work of art in the sales world. It’s directed towards new sales reps who are just making their mark in the sales world.

The author, Jeb Blount, has helped readers understand how they can converse successfully with their potential customers. Moreover, this book also covers an ample amount of sales strategies, motivational stories, and detailed frameworks for cold calling, email communication, and social selling.

What makes Fanatical Prospecting stands out is the author’s way of describing and explaining the concepts to new sales reps. Buy this fabulous piece today, and you’ll never regret your decision.

How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling Power of Contact Marketing

Written by Stu Heinecke, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone is directed to all kinds of sales professionals. This book hugely focuses on contact marketing and showcases twenty such categories of campaigns.

This book explains the concept of contact marketing and describes how cold calling can work for companies. Stu has compiled numerous tips, techniques, and tactics that will help you and your sales team convert higher prospects and boost cold calling game plan.

This material by Stu Heinecke is still relevant to this date. And if you are looking to get your hands on one of the best cold calling books, this book is your way forward.

The Founder’s Guide to Sales Negotiation

If you are a startup owner and you don’t have any clue on how to set-up cold calling operations, The Founder’s Guide to Sales Negotiation is your best bet. This book will help you to establish smart cold calling strategies and build sales negotiation.

This book will help you to become better at sales negotiation without sacrificing the real worth of your services or products. The book starts off by introducing you to the negotiation mindset. The next chapters then deep dive into negotiation tactics like showing vulnerability, postponing, the importance of silence, and more.

No matter who you are, an experienced cold calling professional or a newbie, this book will help you to look at the concepts from a different angle.   

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap. The books we introduced above are the best cold calling books available right now. These books will help both sales amateurs and professionals make the most of cold calling in businesses. Grab any one of the seven books we have mentioned above and level-up your cold calling game.

7 Tips to Give an Effective Sales Presentation That Closes Deals

Posted on by callingly

Pat yourself on the back for finding leads for your sales operation, but now it’s time to buckle up and prepare a killer presentation that will help you to close deals! How are you planning to make your sales presentation a compelling one? Here are some great tips that will help you give a successful sales presentation that will surely assist you in closing deals.

Tell A Story, Don’t Just Present Stats

According to one research by Chip & Dan Health, 63% of all the people in a presentation remember stories, and only 5% remember statistics. Well, this research truly defines the real power of storytelling.

While you are giving a sales presentation, don’t overwhelm your audience with stats. Instead, tell a story or present a narrative based on the problem and how your product or service is solving it.

Capture the feelings and frustrations of the domain you are tackling and show how your product or service is the way forward. The story can be anything, from how the service/product changed your life to how your company adopted it; just focus on storytelling and present stats when necessary.

Use the Power of Visuals

Nobody likes to read a paragraph full of text and no visuals. And the same goes for the mentality of your audience in the sales presentation. When preparing a sales presentation, make sure to include visuals that go along with your idea.

Words are powerful. But according to Neo Mammalian Studios, the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Use the power of visuals to simplify the complex stuff in your presentation and see how your audience will engage and help you close more deals.

The main takeaway is to complement text with meaningful visuals so that your audience can fully immerse themselves in what you are selling.

Know Your Audience

According to IDC, nearly 57% of B2B prospects and customers feel that their sales teams are not prepared for the first meeting. When you don’t know about your audience, you won’t be ready to make your mark.

Knowing your audience is essential to closing deals. If you are clueless about the people who you are presenting to, you won’t be able to connect with them and lose the chance of turning them into customers.

Make sure to do some extensive research on the party you are going to be briefing. Learn about their values, mindset, and everything in between to sell your product or service to them in a tailored fashion.

Engage Audience During Presentation

Sales presentations that are dominated by one-side often end up bad for both parties. Effective sales presentations are like a two-way street where both the presenter and the audience have somewhat equal responsibility for engaging. But it all depends on the presenter. If the presenter is doing a monologue, the audience will not feel comfortable to engage.

As a presenter, you must go slow and build a friendly relationship with your audience along the presentation to open the gate of engagement. Avoiding rushing and allow your audience to ask questions during the presentation.

“You are a human and not a robot.” Think about this phrase before giving a sales presentation. Break the stereotypes and be engaging with your audience by making an emotional connection, using approachable non-verbal communication, and working on your authentic voice.

Value and Money, In That Order

Never ever talk about price or money before you are done showcasing the value of your product, service, or solution. One of the golden and all-time rules of sales is to never talk about price before value.

If you first start to talk about your solution’s price, the chances are that your audience will label your solution as a commodity. They will begin to think that the solution you have come up with is all about funding rather than innovation.

While giving a sales presentation, stress more about the value of your product or service. This way, you are highlighting that your solution is more than just a wholesale bandage that can be found somewhere else.

So remember this when you are giving a sales presentation: showcase the value first. And then worry about negotiating the money or price of your product with the audience.

Don’t Spend More Than 9 Minutes Presenting

According to a survey conducted by Presentation Panada, 79% of people agree that presentations are boring. The human brain gets easily bored; that’s why you have to decrease your presentation time.

Divide your presentation into sections, and each section must not exceed nine minutes. Use this principle in every sales presentation, and you’ll see a positive engagement shift within your audience.

According to Gong, the sweet spot for winning sales presentations is 9.1 minutes. So what are you waiting for? Partition your presentation into multiple sections of nine minutes each and see the magic of time!

Make Your Presentation’s Last Minutes Memorable

The last minutes of your presentation must be effective and provide excellent value to your prospect’s time. Conclude your presentation with something memorable that positively impacts your audience. Whether you end your presentation on a serious note or joke, make sure it sticks inside the head of your prospect.

The last five minutes of your presentation will decide the outcome, so make sure that you are full of ideas and energy to end things in your favor. Leave an impression that will make your prospect feel viola.

One way to make the ending of your presentation worth remembering is by outlining the importance of the product, service, or solution you are selling. And how the change can affect things. That’s how you make your sales presentation effective and close more deals! Speaking about closing more deals, Callingly is a Lead Response Management software built for the sales team to respond faster and close more. With Callingly, your leads will get calls within seconds, and every result will automatically be uploaded to your CRM. So what are you waiting for? Get a quote from Callingly today or register to get started for free.

 

Should you outsource cold calling?

Posted on by callingly

Introduction

Cold calling is still alive and kicking in 2020. According to one study, 82% of buyers say that they have accepted meetings with salespeople after a series of contacts beginning with sales cold calls.

More and more, though, people are racing towards outsourcing cold calling, despite businesses that outsource cold calling continuing to see productivity boosts and cost savings. But should your company take the risk?

Well, that’s the mystery we are going to discover today. But before that, we’ll cover everything from ground basics. So let’s start and see should you outsource cold calling or not.

What’s Outsourcing?

In business practice, outsourcing is referred to as a company hiring a party outside of its operation to provide services, manufacture products, etc. With the help of outsourcing, businesses aim to cut down costs and generate more revenue.

According to SmallBizGenius, it’s estimated that over 300,000 positions are outsourced every year. Outsourcing has excellent potential for businesses that are operating in an expensive market. By hiring a third party to perform business tasks, it helps them to reduce their investment and increase their gains.

All around the world, big businesses take advantage of outsourcing so that they can maximize revenue and minimize their spending.

What’s Cold Calling?

Ever got a call from an unknown company or business who’s trying to sell you a product or service? Well, that’s a perfect example of cold calling. Basically, cold calling is referred to as a procedure in which a sales agents contact consumers who have not been previously contacted.

A cold call refers to a call that has not been previously made to the recipient by the contact party. Cold calling has shown phenomenal results. According to the RAIN Group, of buyers who accepted sales calls, 75% reported interest in the product as the most important reason.

What’s Outsourced Cold Calling?

Outsourcing the process of cold calling is very common. Outsourcing cold calling gives businesses peace of mind, better expertise, and cost-savings as well. Typically, when the cold calling function is outsourced, a business hires a third party outside of their own business operations to handle their cold calling sector.

The third party is now in charge of handling the whole cold calling department of the business who has hired them. Think of outsourcing cold calling as a process of delegating the duties of cold calling to a brand-new team outside of the business. This team specializes in cold calling and have their own employees who have years of experience.

In recent times, the act of outsourcing cold calling operations in on a high. Companies are investing in outsourcing their cold calling departments more than ever. If you are thinking the same, here’s what you need to keep in mind.

Things to Keep in Mind Before Outsourcing Cold Calling

If you are outsourcing cold calling, you must first get an idea about the concept by giving it an in-house trial. Suppose you own a startup, set up an in-house practice of outsourcing cold calling, and test its dynamics according to your business. Don’t rush forward and check if outsourcing cold calling is working for you.

Next up, be real and authentic to yourself and your business. If cold calling isn’t playing a massive role in your business or your business nature doesn’t support it, there’s no point in using it, let alone outsourcing it. Set clear expectations, and don’t let the idea of outsourcing cold calling overwhelm yourself.

Lastly, before you decide to make the most of outsourcing cold calling, make sure to educate yourself about it. As the operation of outsourcing cold calling is enormous, and your whole business depends on it, you must be very careful when including it in your business.

Why Outsource Cold Calling?

Here’s why companies outsource cold calling:

Productivity Boost

Depending on a trustable outsource cold calling agency, you can ensure that many phones are ringing. And when phones are ringing, more people are getting to know about your services or products, hence more chances of sales. And on the other hand, your in-house sales team is free, and they get more opportunities to focus on high-impact work.

Outsourced sales teams can make hundreds of calls per day, which means your business is getting the productivity boost it deserves.

Efficiency and Accuracy

Outsourcing cold calling agencies have trained professionals that are only meant to do one thing – cold calling. They are more efficient than a typical sales team as it’s their only job. Moreover, as these agencies are created explicitly for cold calling, they have access to the right equipment and better procedures.

Low Cost

Companies outsource cold calling as it helps them to save money. For instance, if a company in the United States sets up a cold calling department in their location, it will cost them more than outsourcing the job to international cold calling teams. Moreover, outsourcing cold calling will help a company to save money on training, equipment, and more.

More Insight

Cold calling is itself a lengthy process. So how can one expect a sales team to do it and additionally bring in insights? That’s where outsourcing cold calling can help. Outsourcing cold calling agencies not only provide cold calling services but give detailed insight on customers, market, and everything in between.

Is Outsourced Cold Calling Right For You?

Outsourcing cold calling is for every company that’s seeing great potential in cold calling but can’t afford to handle it on its own. Outsourcing cold calling provides excellent benefits to companies who are looking forward to seeking the greatness of cold calling.

If your company wants to adopt cold calling or is already making the most of cold calling, outsourcing it would be a level up. Outsourcing cold calling will aid you with all the golden benefits of cold calling along with other significant impactors like cost efficiency, accuracy, productivity boost, more insights, and low costs.

Final Words

So, what’s your take on outsourcing cold calling? According to us, it’s one of the biggest upgrades both to the companies who are already cold calling or who haven’t even experienced its benefits.

 

No code tools to give your sales team a competitive edge

Posted on by callingly

As a sales team manager or leader, you might have experienced that your SaaS pipeline is overloaded with things like bugs, changes, re-designs, you name it. Since you’re always evolving to meet users’ requirements, the process of updating and rebuilding is just endless.

Although big firms can afford to have multiple IT and tech teams that are always fixing bugs, and planting re-designs, it’s hard for a new or small sales team to keep up. And that’s where no-code tools can give your sales team a competitive edge.

Your sales team is only meant for selling and not programming. But there can be times when your sales team has to do all the heavy lifting as you can’t afford the IT support. And that’s where no-code tools give your team a handful of shortcuts in terms of developing features, updating designs, and more.

With that being said, here’s how no-code tools can give your sales team a competitive edge in the market.

No Professional Developers Required = Big Save On Cost

Professional developers are expensive. And hiring a bad developer comes with a huge cost. No-code tools give you the advantage of not hiring a single developer. As no-code tools are based on pre-built modules and drag and drop functionality, your sales team can make the most of them to keep up with all the digital transformation. From building landing pages to planting chatbots and automating your workflow, no code tools help you to build everything a developer can without overdoing your budget.

Superior Agility

Sales teams are meant to sell, right? But most of the sales team waste their time preparing for work rather than doing work. With no-code tools, your sales team will be able to save more time on coding. Any application your sales team is planning to build can be brought to life in two to three days as no-code tools are solely based on pre-built modules. Even the testing process is automated, which means that you don’t have to manually adjust to changes.

No-code tools will give your sales team super agility and flexibility as they no longer have to worry about the complicated road of creating an app. With no-code tools, they can simply launch a no-code tool solution and use it just like any other user-friendly app to actually build an app that will help their sales operations.

Specialized Support and Maintenance

No-code tools are like applications that require a subscription. And with a subscription, one gets access to its features, team support, and maintenance. As sales teams aren’t the tech and nerd type, specialized support and maintenance teams of the no-code tools are always there to help them out. Whether your sales team is stuck on how to center the logo or launch the testing process, they are just one call or message away from superior assistance.

As most of the sales teams fall into the non-technical category, with no-code tools, they don’t have to worry about being technical. All they need to do is just call or message the support center of their respective no-code tool to get supreme assistance on pretty much everything.

Productivity Boost

With no-code tools, your sales team members are no longer dependent on IT guys to make the apps. As they are all free to create, edit, and launch their own apps independently, it gives the sales sector a huge productivity boost.

Thanks to no-code tools, your sales guys now don’t have to wait months or years for an app. They can simply fire up the no-code tools, get assistance from the respective support center, and try out ideas to create a brand-new application! No more depending on the IT department for creating apps that aren’t liked by most of the sales team members.

Transitioning to no-code tools will surely give your sales team a productivity boost. Callingly can help you to transition to the world of no-code tools easily. Callingly is a Lead Response Management tool that will help your sales team to respond faster and close more. This no-code LRM tool will easily get integrated with any CRM, website, or form to assist your sales operations in closing more leads.      

Easy Changing and Editing

In traditional coding, changing design and functionalities take great time and effort. Especially, when you are a foreigner to programming and tech. And as most of the sales team members don’t have a strong understanding of coding and development, it’s impossible for them to bring any required change or edit to their applications. But with no-code tools, changing something in an application or editing a feature is potentially just a matter of a few minutes.

With no-code tools, you can implement any change or edit without investing a significant chunk of time and effort. This means that every sales member on your team will have the ability to edit or change the application without any special assistance or support.

Few to No Risks

Traditionally, IT sectors are responsible for handling all the tech-related stuff in organizations. And this means that they have access to all the sensitive and secured information. However, as no-code tools are governed by the sales teams, the IT staff will have nothing on the organization. Everything will remain intact with the members of the sales department, which will cut down the risks of breaches, outside threats, hacks, and other security risks. Even if something goes wrong, the sales department will be alerted first. And as the sales department has full control over everything, they don’t have to wait for the IT department to take the first step to safeguard what’s let loose.

No-code tools are taking the world by a storm. By using no-code tools, sales teams are now working smartly and efficiently to build their applications in no time. And as the world is moving forward towards digitization, you and your sales team can make the most of no-code tools to get a competitive edge and highlight your success without any assistance from the IT sector.     

What Is Sales Automation?

Posted on by callingly

Did you know that by the end of 2020, 85% of sales tasks will be automated? Sales automation might be the next deal-breaker for your sales department, but you might be asking how that’s possible. If you are facing the following troubles in your sales department, then sales automation can bring a process upgrade to your organization:

  • Continually losing leads
  • Wasting valuable time by manually adding leads to your CRM
  • Difficulty managing how to contact leads
  • Agents are losing precious leads due to scheduling mismanagement
  • Digging through files for hours just to find client info or a specific testimonial

Relatable? If so, then sales automation is the holy grail that will save you and your sales department from the lost opportunities. But what exactly is sales automation? Stay tuned as our next section will cover just that.

What Is Sales Automation?

Sales automation is the process of automating manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks in sales using software, AI solutions, and other digital tools. Sales automation aims to manage everyday tasks in a sales environment like automatic dialing, connecting agents with leads, tracking information, and more.

The sole aim of sales automation is to cut down all the manual tasks that a sales rep or sales manager has to pull off in a manual sales environment. Sales automation helps both sales reps and managers concentrate on what they are hired for rather than on repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

Why Sales Automation?

A sales process consists of multiple steps before the actual sale is complete. A sales rep has to go through a dozen steps from generating leads to contacting leads and finally collecting payment. But most tasks in a sales process are repetitive, time-consuming, and manual. Making calls, storing lead details, sending quotes, and following up are just some of the responsibilities that a sales rep has to fulfil manually. And this takes precious time away from sales reps that could be used for actually selling. All these extra tasks lead to blurring the vision of sales reps. And that’s where sales automation comes in.

Sales automation helps sales reps and sales managers focus more on core sales activities rather than manual tasks. Sales automation tools handle everything. They identify leads, collect their information, store them, connect them with agents, sync the data with CRM, and more. A sales automation tool does all the heavy lifting for the sales department so that the staff can purely focus on sales-related activities.

What’s Sales Automation All About?

Forget about sales automation; just imagine a sales department. What does a typical sales environment look like? Sales reps are busy gathering information on leads, calling them, and securing deals. Then, they are creating reports, scheduling follow-ups, writing emails, and analyzing data. At the same time, sales managers are occupied routing leads to different sales reps, handing out leads to the correct person, creating reports, and managing their teams.

80% of the sales departments are all about calling, reporting, storing information, and contract creation. And in a typical sales environment, all these tasks are done manually, which sucks all the time and focus of sales reps and managers away from the core of their roles. Sales automation is all about automating the overall environment of any sales department. Every process is done automatically via a tool, from calling to following up on leads and assigning leads to sales reps. Sales automation saves time and energy that’s consumed in carrying out manual and repetitive tasks.

Benefits of Sales Automation

Sales automation has changed the whole course of how sales teams used to work. Thanks to sales automation, sales reps and managers are now free from activities that weren’t productive yet essential to their work.

The following are some of the benefits that sales automation brings to the table:

  • No need to send manual follow-up emails, reminders, notes, or greetings. Sales automation software will handle all the work related to follow-ups so that your sales cycles remain intact and staff stay free.
  • Calls will be automatically recorded and synced to your CRM. Which means you don’t have to monitor or record the calls manually.
  • Sales automation tools provide analysis and detailed reports of the data that’s been collected. Now there’s no need to write reports and analyze information manually.
  • Every lead will be contacted in seconds, and agents will automatically receive a call when a specific lead is ready.
  • Leads will be routed intelligently based on category, sales territories, and team schedules.

Now that you know everything about sales automation, it’s time to find the perfect tool. We’ve got you covered.

Callingly: A Lead Response Management Tool to Automate Your Sales Department

There are many sales automation tools out there. But if you want a mighty partner to handle your sales calls, agents, follow-ups, and everything in between, Callingly is the way forward.

Callingly is a lead response management tool that takes care of every task related to your leads. With Callingly, your every lead will get a call within seconds, and every call will be tracked and automatically synced to your CRM.

What makes Callingly unique is that it can be connected to any landing page, form, or CRM. And as soon as a new lead comes in, Callingly automatically notifies your sales team based on the scheduling and rules you have set up. If the agents aren’t available, Callingly waits and tries again.

When an agent picks up, they hear your custom whisper-text. And whenever they are ready, Callingly dials the lead for them. After the call, recording, analytics, and reports are automatically synced to your CRM, website, or form.

Callingly supports lead routing, SMS responses, scheduling, call recording, analytics, reports, customer caller IDs, whisper-text, follow-ups, and everything to make your sales department automated and straightforward. With Callingly, your sales department will never have to lose a lead again.

There isn’t a better time to make the switch than today. Start making the most of sales automation and take your department on a whole new level of success.

 

Why it’s important to optimize your remote sales process

Posted on by callingly

After the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more businesses are switching to remote work. The switch can be challenging for salespeople who aren’t used to the remote selling environment. But if done right, it can elevate your selling campaign.

A formal and structured remote sales process sets apart a high-performing organization from an underperforming organization. According to an HBR survey of sales leaders, 51% of high-performing sales organizations had a formal and structured sales process. And that’s precisely why it’s important to optimize your remote sales process.

Optimizing the remote sales process is important, but how can one do it? In today’s piece, we’ll one by one see how one can optimize different parts of a sales funnel and their importance in the sales process. Now without further ado, let’s get started.

Lead Generation

Importance of Lead Generation

Lead generation comes first in the sales funnel. This part of the sales funnel deals in identifying the right prospects and deliver the best value to build interest. Lead generation involves getting prospects or leads to your website and engage with them once you have their contact information.

This part in the sales funnel has enormous importance as it involves generating the leads or customers you will sell to. Lead generation must be taken seriously in your remote sales process as, without it, you won’t be able to target a specific audience. How To Optimize Lead Generation?

To optimize lead generation in your sales funnel, your sales and marketing team must be on the same page. Instead of demanding better leads from your marketing team, your sales team must work with them to define the customer profile you are looking forward to catching. Ensure that your sales and marketing teams share lines up with your pitch and address the important points.

Invest in a marketing technology like Marketo, Hubspot, or Callingly, so you can experience seamless data flow through remote sales and marketing teams.

Lead Qualification

Importance of Lead Qualification

Lead qualification lets you learn about your customer expectations and demands. Without lead qualification, you won’t be able to find out what your customers desire and need. And to connect with the leads, you must start a conversation via email or phone. But note that only 23.9% of emails are opened. And it takes an average of 18 calls to actually connect with a customer over the phone. Without lead qualification, your sales team will not be able to contact customers and learn about their challenges and experiences.

How To Optimize Lead Qualification?

As the lead qualification is all about connecting with a set of customers, you must invest in a lead response management system. Callingly lets you respond faster and close more! Whenever new leads come in, Callingly immediately calls your sale agents and connect them with the leads. With Callingly, every single lead is going to get a call in less than 30 seconds.

We don’t think there’s a better way to optimize lead qualification in your remote sales process than investing in Callingly.

Product Sales Demo

Importance of Product Sales Demo

This part refers to as scheduling and presenting your demo. It’s the point where your presentation will either turn the tables or scare away the customers. You can use this demo to address as many questions, objections, or queries as possible to clear doubts from your customer’s mind.

This demo will help your customers to see how your product will solve their problems. Making the most of this opportunity will increase your chances of moving the sale along.

How To Optimize Product Sales Demo

Trust and engagement are the two most important things when you are delivering a product sales demo. To optimize this part of the sales process, use the screen sharing tools to deliver a face-to-face demo, send follow-up emails, and remove any sort of abstraction. Build a strong relationship with your customers through the product sales demo and make them feel like you are solely connected with them. Moreover, try to remove as many barriers between yourself and your customers to communicate with them fluently.

Purchase Decision

Importance of Purchase Decision

A purchase decision is a part of the sales funnel that’s very essential for every sales process. This is the time a customer will decide to reject or accept your product. No matter what the result is, the purchase decision part teaches a great set of lessons for the future. If you have built a strong relationship with a customer throughout the sales process, this stage will go smoothly. If not, your sales team will learn a bunch of lessons to implement in the future.

How To Optimize Purchase Decision

There’s no specific magic known to humanity for finalizing the sale quickly. If the sale didn’t go through this stage, it means that something was missing in the sales process. Now all you can do is make the most of the purchase decision data and track-back to the sales funnel to see where things went south.

Customer Success

Importance of Customer Success

Once you have made the visitor your customer, your job is just beginning. It’s essential to stay in touch with the customer and maintain a good relationship even after you have sold your product or service.

Serving customers even after you have sold them your product or service will make them turn into referral machines. Your good relationship with them will automatically make them create referrals for your company.

How To Optimize Customer Success

Offer your customers with generous support, monthly, or weekly contact them to make sure everything is going fine at their end. Frequently tell them about new products or services that your company is selling. And lastly, treat them as a human being rather than a customer. Use sales and marketing tools to keep them in the loop.

Optimizing your remote sales process is necessary as it’s a chain with multiple pieces that require frequent maintenance. Don’t let your remote sales process suffer and start optimizing it to boost your sales.

 

5 Sales Automation Strategies To Take Advantage Of

Posted on by callingly

According to the National Association of Sales Professional, data entry is one of the top time wreckers for the people who are into sales. Many salespeople spend hours entering data and doing other manual tasks during their work-time. It doesn’t only waste your precious time but kills your sales instinct.

With sales automation software, you can eliminate the data entry and manual tasks. Your Customer Relationship Management or Lead Response Management tool will automatically enter and organize the data for you.

By getting rid of the manual tasks, you’ll be able to concentrate more on selling things rather than managing unrelated stuff. Automation will open up your mind to make more sells and perform better.

To automate your sales sector tasks, you can look for CRM tools that track interactions or standalone software that automatically update, store, and manage the profiles or leads. This strategy will not just unburden your shoulder from time-wasting tasks but help you to be more consistent in selling.

Go Beyond The Basics Via Automatic Report Generation

When you’re making sales, there’s a handful of data rushing through your gateway. From the number of calls to customer information and sales value, you deal with a handsome amount of data.

Instead of wasting human-hours on making reports, you must go beyond the basics and leave everything on your sales automation tool to analyze data. Many CRMs gives you the ability to generate complex and advanced reports.

A report provides you with critical insights on a bunch of things. From efficiency to team productivity and loopholes, a report holds immense importance in the sales sector. And if it’s generated by smart software or tool, then things get way more comfortable.

A typical automatic generated report from a software or a CRM tool consists of all the essential round-up of everything that matters in any sales sector. Reports are the pathway towards revolutionizing your sales department.

Many business software or sales automation tools will provide you with the ability to generate reports. But you need to make sure that the reports are visually great, easy to digest, and readable.

Close Leads On The Spot With an LRM!

What’s perfect, then closing leads on the spot when you are making sales? As we earlier talked about instant gratification, closing leads on the spot is one of the best sales automation strategies to take advantage of. It will not only better your customer list but save you from all the waiting, dialing, and dropping cycle that goes on forever.

Want to learn how you can close leads on the spot? With Callingly, you can respond faster and close more deals on the spot within seconds. Callingly is an LRM tool that gets connected with every CRM, website, or lead platform.

Whenever a new lead comes in, Callingly automatically starts ringing your sales team within seconds (Yes, no more shouting or manual dialing the clients after a day or two). If no one is available, Callingly keeps on calling until an agent picks up. After that, the agent hears a whisper text that tells him/her about the leads’ information. And when the call is over, the recording and analytics are automatically synced to your CRM.

With Callingly, you can close more leads on the spot within seconds without webbing yourself into the never-ending loop of making visitors into customers. Callingly guarantees call for every lead in seconds so you can make more sales.

Close leads on the spot with Callingly and enjoy additional features like lead routing, call recording, follow-up calls, reporting, analytics, and more.

Use Automated Emails For Making Follow-Up Contacts

Emails can come in handy for making follow-up contacts, but sending them manually can be a tedious job. Don’t indulge yourself or your sales rep into sending emails as it will just waste their time.

Instead of manually sending out follow-up emails, you can invest in an email marketing software. It will automatically capture your current and send out follow-up emails to your contacts.

Another thing you can do is look for an LRM or CRM that supports automatic follow-up emails. You can even pass back lead call results to a marketing tool such as ActiveCampaign and set-up an email marketing campaign and track it to see the results. But using automated emails for follow-up contact is one of the best sales automation strategies, you should make the most of.

Automate the Dialling Process

The dialing process is an essential part of any sales sector. Without dialing, a sales rep usually can’t connect with the lead or the customer. Manually dialing hundreds of leads isn’t an efficient way to make more sales as seconds of gap between calls can really add up. That’s why you need to automate the dialing process in your sales department.

A CRM or auto-dialer such as AirCall will not just assist you with the auto-dialing feature, but it will prioritize contacts based on their importance in the sales funnel. With automatic dialing, your sales reps will be busier in making sells rather than dialing numbers manually.

Say good-bye to the repetitive task of dialing and managing the contacts, digitize and automate the dialing process with a software or an LRM/CRM tool.

Implement these five sales automation strategies in your sales department and you’ll see astounding results.

 

Lead Management Software

Posted on by callingly

Want to craft a killer sales process? Then it’s crucial to manage your leads with the correct lead management software.

Customers and prospects need different kinds of ‘touch’, depending on where they are in the sales process. Those just entering your pipeline are the most vulnerable ones. The speed of your response is critical at this time. If they don’t hear from you in a timely fashion, they will drift away to another company that will address their needs.

Software for Lead Management

That’s where Callingly comes in. Crafted to be the Killer App for crack sales teams, Callingly unfailingly monitors your CRM for new contacts. When one comes in, Callingly alerts your sales team, who can then call your new customers in a timely fashion.

This is all done quickly and invisibly. You can reach out to new customers right after they’ve given you their contact information — in other words, when your company is at the top of the heap, and is foremost in their minds.

Callingly enables your sales professionals to get on the phone quicker, thus closing your sales faster. Not only that, but Callingly fosters greater trust, and it lets your team build a rapport with each individual customer.

Faster to the Phone

Let’s face it: In the world of sales, the gold standard is a face-to-face conversation. If you can get in front of your prospect, odds are you can close the sale.

In today’s busy world, though, that isn’t always possible. So for speed of service, there might not be anything better than a phone conversation.

If you’re able to have a conversation faster, you’ll advance sales through your pipeline more quickly!

In fact, this study done by Forbes Magazine shows that sales leads spoil over time. “[A] rep is 100x less likely to make contact if the first call is made 30 minutes after submission,” the study notes. “The odds of making contact drop by 3000x if the first call is made 5 hours after lead submission.”

Think email is a viable alternative? Not so much. When using email alone, it takes much longer to answer customers’ questions, thus increasing the possibility you miss the sale entirely.

Emails Aren’t as Effective as Phone Calls

The key to increasing sales lies in your overall responsiveness. Customers are more likely to buy from a company that puts them first, and responds to their questions in a timely fashion. Such responsiveness necessitates a concerted personal effort.

Don’t get suckered into thinking an automatically generated email to a buyers’ request is all that is needed to close deals. It’s not. As you seek to advance your prospects through the funnel while building rapport, your best tool is the phone call.

True responsiveness consists of both great content and a speedy response. Email is speedy, but lacks the “human touch” of a phone call. Email strips out your salesperson’s ability to hear tone and other cues which enable them to offer better suggestions, overcome customer objections, and answer pertinent questions.

The critical factor here is to create sustainable sales-based distinctions by baking total responsiveness into each step of your sales process.

The Best Lead Management Software

Make sure you never lose another lead again. Make Callingly part of your sales process today!

How to Follow Up on Sales Perfectly

Posted on by callingly

Closing your sale is easy … when you do it perfectly. And it’s easy to close sales perfectly when you have a good followup schedule.

Callingly gets you over the first hurdle in sales: Making the initial contact. And that first call is crucial: According to a study conducted by Dr James Oldroyd, Professor and Faculty Fellow at MIT, calls to leads which take place up to five minutes after the customer fills out a web form will get picked up.

But wait just 30 minutes, and the chance the lead will pick up your call drops a precipitous 100 times.

Dr Oldroyd’s study looked at web-generated leads, just like Callingly does. His study also found that if 20 hours are allowed to elapse between initial customer interest and the first sales call, each call your salespeople make will actually do damage to your ability to qualify those leads.

The Perfect Sales Follow-Up

Another study published in the Harvard Business Review shows 37% of businesses respond to leads within an hour.

Just 37% responded within a timely fashion!

Consider the flip side of that statistic: A whopping 63% of businesses surveyed took far too long in responding to their leads. And as noted above, waiting a whole hour can have dramatic consequences.

There are more ways to do business now than at any other time in history. You have to act fast if you want to capture and follow-up with a lead. And if you want to act fast, you have to improve your lead response time.

Responding in Time

That 63% of businesses that don’t respond to their sales leads in time do so because they don’t have the right software and the perfect sales follow up process.

Many sales teams endure broken processes: Leads get stuck in queues because sales reps aren’t notified. Or there are bottlenecks in the process, such as one or two humans who assign leads to individual sales reps.

This is a colossal liability. Why? Because a delay of hours, or even mere minutes can end up with you struggling to get an otherwise interested prospect engaged, as the statistics above reveal.

If you fail to engage your prospects in a timely fashion, you risk losing the sale.

Following Up With Callingly

When you use Callingly to manage your sales lead schedule and process, you know that every single lead is going to get a call. When you have sales agents available, your lead’s phone will ring in less than 30 seconds.

And when the call is over, your CRM will get a recording of that call. Not only that, but you’ll also get detailed analytics of your team’s performance. This includes information about their response rate, speed of response, connection rate, call length, and more.

Every lead gets a call, guaranteed!

Call back every lead in just seconds, not hours.

Track every lead, and every call.

All with Callingly!