The heart and soul of every business is the sales team. If you aren’t selling, you aren’t making money, and companies falter when sales slow down. Selling became a huge challenge during the pandemic for many companies, but there are sales automation tools to help.
Sales automation brings technology into the sales sphere, and over the last 12 months, we have been seeing a lot of innovation in this area with new tools to help sales teams operate more efficiently as they move sales online.
As we’ve heard over and over, the pandemic forced many businesses to use digital tools faster than they ever would have. Companies with dedicated sales teams had to come up with creative ways to stay engaged with their customers. The question becomes, as your client’s managed service provider, how can you help the sales teams remain efficient and engaged in an online context.
Whether your clients are B2B or B2C, there are a number of tools that you as an MSP can leverage to help make CRM easier and more efficient to use. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Simplifying the sales process with sales automation
Ironically software can help or hinder the sales process. For example, Salesforce is a powerful set of tools for sales, marketing and service. It can help track your sales motion and let sales management know where a sales person might need help to close a deal.
That means it’s imperative to get the information into Salesforce, and salespeople sometimes balk at this task. Scratchpad is a startup that has created a layer that mirrors the way sales people work in a spreadsheet or note taking program. It connects directly to Salesforce and as the user enters notes and data about the customer, it pushes that information automatically into the Salesforce customer database.
Accord, another startup from two brothers who used to work in B2B sales at Stripe and Google, has created a workspace for complex B2B sales where salespeople can interact with multiple customer stakeholders, and provide a central place for storing key documents and presentations to help keep the sale moving forward.
Accord brings together a complex set of activities and provides an online context for managing everything. What’s more, it connects all of that activity to the underlying CRM tool to make sure these interactions are being captured in the customer database.
Tools like these, and many more, are designed to help simplify online sales. As an MSP, the more you can help your clients’ sales teams operate more efficiently, the more sales they can make. That kind of help is going to get your client’s attention as they modernize and shift online.
Photo: kentoh / Shutterstock
