Sales Tools for Small Businesses provides you with a step-by-step coaching and training course based on the highly acclaimed book, Sales Tools for Small Business Owners by author Bob Burg.
Are you a sales professional? Tired of bearing the burden of solo cold calling? Take your sales to new heights with these proven sales tools. Here you will find all the sales tools you’ll need: effective marketing strategies, sales scripts, potential objections, and more.
Salesmate CRM
Salesmate is a one-stop solution for any organization that is looking for a smart sales CRM software. Designed for small businesses, it helps companies to easily automate their sales processes.
Salesmate is a sales automation tool that saves your time with its well-designed sales pipeline, automated data entry features, and customer profile enrichment. All these features will allow you to stay organized on a single platform, making it an ideal CRM tool for small business owners.
Email management tool
Boomerang is one of the most essential and influential tools in your selling arsenal. Being a small business owner, you must enhance your inbox with a sales tool that tracks your recipients’ behavior.
This intuitive tool allows the user to schedule the time of every outgoing email. Even if you are driving to some important meeting and want to keep your eye on the road, the “schedule” feature sends out those import emails for you, eases your work right?
Small business owners who use Gmail for their email needs, must get Boomerang. This smart sales email tool helps you remove emails from your inbox that are not in your priority. The tool brings these emails back whenever you choose.
Smart email tools like MailChimp helps users collect detailed data of their subscribers in such a way that they do not get bombarded with unnecessary emails. MailChimp helps the sales teams pinpoint their target audiences with the app sales tools (introduction emails, subscribing opportunities, etc.)
Invoicing software
Payment is an integral part of an organization’s life. Moreover, business owners are in a rush of everything as they have to build their business and take it to the next level.
Being a cloud accounting software, QuickBooks makes it easy for small businesses to manage their accounting data from anywhere. It also allows the users to access data and collaborate from any location. With customizable reports and dashboards startup owners can track their business performance.
HubSpot CRM: free CRM software
HubSpot is a leader in effective sales and marketing tools, and the company’s free CRM software is a great place for most small businesses to start. The free version comes with CRM, email scheduling, a reporting dashboard and more. You can also use Hubspot to monitor your website visitors and see what pages they view and spend the most time on.
HubSpot’s free sales CRM tools work best for individual sales reps and support up to 100 contacts per engagement method. In comparison, business users can add up to two sales pipelines on paid plans, starting at $50 per month for two users.
No credit card is required to take advantage of the free HubSpot CRM features:
- Contact management.
- Email marketing templates.
- Document library and sharing.
- Task management.
- Live chat.
- Meeting scheduling.
- Deal or opportunity management.
- Gmail and Outlook integration.
- Customer support ticket creation.
- Ad management and retargeting.
Owler: sales prospects and company data
Owler is a go-to source for competitor research, sales prospecting data and relevant news. It offers free and paid plans suitable for solopreneurs, small businesses and sales teams. The difference between plans comes down to the number of companies you can track and the types of financial information you’ll see. Whether you want to keep your fingers on the pulse of your competitors or vet business-to-business (B2B) prospects, Owler is an excellent tool.
The free version offers:
- Unlimited company profile views, including trending news and funding history.
- The top three competitors from over 13 million companies worldwide.
- Ranges for the number of employees and business revenue.
- News and alerts about five companies you’re interested in.
Findthat: find and verify email addresses
Findthat is one of the best free sales tools for finding and verifying email addresses. It uses an email verifier engine to guarantee a 95% deliverability rate. The software comes with a dashboard, or users can install the free Chrome extension to locate a prospect’s email address through company websites.
Paid versions begin at $29 per month and include the bulk find feature and social media support. Findthat integrates with HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, MailChimp, Salesforce and other tools by using Zapier. These connections let small business owners develop prospect lists, find leads and share them with CRM software.
The free plan is for one user and includes:
- 100 verify credits: Improve marketing campaign effectiveness and reduce your bounce rate by verifying current contact information.
- 50 find credits: Find email addresses for prospects and leads to ensure you have the most up-to-date customer data.
A CRM
Keeping track of your current opportunities in a CRM system is crucial to staying organized. Not only does a CRM store all your contacts and their information (email address, phone number, LinkedIn profile, website, etc.), it also records every interaction you have with them. That means you can see at a glance when you last spoke, when you first spoke, whether it was over phone or email, what you talked about, if they’ve bought your products before, how often they visit your website and which pages they looked at, which marketing emails they’ve opened and whether they’ve clicked on the links … and all that happens automatically, without you lifting a finger. If you implement one tool, make it a CRM.
Documents Tool
SMBs should also invest in software that lets them send and receive signatures virtually. This makes it far easier to send proposals and contracts — and since your customer can review and sign in the blink of an eye, you’ll be paid more quickly. HubSpot integrates with HelloSign, PandaDoc, and DocuSign, e-signature tools that will automate your workflow and bring money into your bank account faster.
Inventory and Order Management Software
If you sell a physical product, use inventory and order management to keep track of what you have in stock, purchase and sales orders, and warehouse information. Most systems come with:
- Barcode scanning: Set up a barcode system so you always know current stock levels
- Reorder alerts: Get a notification when stock is low so you never run out of stock again
- Reporting: Learn which products are most profitable, the value of your current inventory, how much you’ve sold this week, month, quarter, etc., and more
Xero and inFlow are both solid options for small businesses.
Survey Tool
My parents — as well as other small business owners I’ve met — were obsessed with learning more about their customers. Their rationale: If they could identify their happiest customers, they could get referrals and repeat business. If they could identify their unhappiest customers, they could proactively reach out and fix the situation (hopefully before they received a withering Yelp review). And the benefits don’t end there. The better you understand your customers, the greater success you’ll have serving and marketing to them.
An easy-to-use tool like SurveyMonkey (which integrates with HubSpot) allows you to build professional-looking surveys — no tech savvy needed. I recommend sending a post-purchase survey to discover how the experience was. You can also send surveys to your prospects, leads, and even employees.
A Video Platform
I’m a huge fan of sending videos to customers and prospects. Not only does it add an extremely personal touch to the sales and post-sales experience, it also makes your business more memorable. As a small business owner, videos will definitely help you capitalize on your anti-corporate appeal. Vidyard GoVideo is a free tool that gives you to the power to record videos on your laptop, share them via Gmail, and even track who’s watched them so you can follow up while your name is top of mind. Soapbox (from Wistia) is also free and has the same features.
LinkedIn Premium Business or Sales Navigator
LinkedIn’s paid versions are valuable for finding and connecting with potential and current customers, partners, journalists, job candidates, and any other people that could help you grow your business. The right subscription plan depends on your goals and budget.
If your business is still in the early stages, and you’re watching every dollar out of your account like a hawk, opt for Premium Business. You can see every user who’s looked at your profile in the past 90 days, check out detailed analytics into a company’s growth, and send 15 InMail messages per month (so you can contact people outside your network). The price begins at $47.99 per month for an annual plan.
If you’re spending more than 30% of your day selling, invest in Sales Navigator. This high-powered tool shows you the most relevant, current updates from your prospects and contacts, suggests new target accounts based on your current list, and allows you to run highly specific searches. The price begins at $64.99 per month for an annual plan.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a sales rep, small business owner or marketing expert – learn how you can use the latest sales and marketing techniques and tactics to bring in more qualified leads and close more sales.