Let Technology Do the Legwork For You in Sales Yet, this long tradition does not mean that sales teams cannot benefit from the latest technology.
By Bhavik Sarkhedi •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
In many ways sales is an old-fashioned profession. Merchants have been salespeople for millennia, after all, possibly dating back to before history.
Yet, this long tradition does not mean that sales teams cannot benefit from the latest technology. On the contrary, technology can help you grease the wheels of a sale and bring it to a more satisfactory conclusion. All the while, you are putting in less effort and spending less time per close.
To get ahead in this way, make good use of the following bits of modern technology to enhance your age-old sales techniques
Marketing Automation Systems
Nearly every salesperson uses email these days, but the way they use it may be eating up more time than it saves. Instead of having to personally write every email, they can save their responses for blue-chip clients and leads that have made it to the later stages of the funnel.
As for the rest, those emails can be handled by marketing automation software. This type of system can automatically qualify which stage an email recipient is at in the pipeline and send off content that corresponds to the messaging they would need the most to get them to the next stage.
For instance, someone who entered their email on a landing page or as part of a lead capture campaign could receive an email entitled "Welcome to SalesCo! Try These 10 Productivity Tips" for their first email. If they click on videos as a result of links in the email, the software could detect that click through and then send them content according to the solution they would be most likely to pursue.
In this way, marketing automation can skip the most cumbersome and least beneficial steps of the funnel and allow a sales agent to focus their energies towards closing. If your organization lacks this software, Marketo is a world leader in marketing automation for companies of any size, and has solutions for every digital marketing need.
Social Media
Social selling has become a powerful tool thanks to the simplicity of paid social media campaigns. All you need is great content or a tempting offer to link to, some decent creative and a budget. After that, platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can allow you to automatically serve ads to certain demographics, like high-paid employees in a target industry.
Social media can also allow you to carry out unpaid organic campaigns, where you share content in groups and on personal profile that draws in clicks and brings people to the start of your funnel.
Sales Video Cloud Solutions
You may think of sites like Youtube when you think of posting and sharing video content online, but the truth is that there are much better ways to share videos. Youtube is an uncontrolled environment, after all, so a viewer is just as likely to click on links to a competitor or even a cat video rather than watch the next piece of content you suggested.
Youtube also lacks the robust viewer metrics provided by other tools, meaning you cannot tell if you are reaching your target audience, let alone seeing how many of them converted to the next step of the sales process.The moment the prospect or client views or shares the video, the salesperson is instantly notified with what, where, and how much they viewed so the rep can immediately follow up.
That's where and when 2Win! Bridge enterprise video sharing technology is changing the landscape in the sales technology industry. 2Win! Bridge is a video cloud solution that enables your sales team to move more business through the sales funnel faster than ever before. Sales professionals can leverage Bridge's Personal Video feature to create individual connections with prospects that will result in click through rates that destroy conventional approaches. Differentiating company and product videos designed with 2Win!'s time-tested methodologies can accompany Personal Videos thus providing a prospect with a complete message that results in more sales conversations. With such software, there is no user gating so when a prospect shares the videos, their trusted colleagues are provided with a frictionless buyer experience.
