Which sales automation should you use?

Many companies use sales automation software to streamline and standardize a number of the routine tasks, which are part of the sales process. This includes lead generation, analysis, and sales performance evaluation. A good sales automation package saves time, because the tasks you would normally do manually, such as entering data into spreadsheets, or manually paging through sales history records are all automated. Reporting is also a part of any good sales automation package, as is email management.

Imagine being able to track your sales lifecycles automatically, or look at sales performance by drilling down into regions, customers, even specific products. Keep reading to learn about some of the best sales automation tools available today. These tools include customer relationship management, lead distribution, lead generation, reporting, and campaign development.

LeadExec

LeadExec is designed specifically for marketing professionals. It offers up management and distribution of leads in real time. This lead capture software package automates capturing leads and transmitting them to your CRM software.

In addition to this, there is a feature that allows reporting on rejected/bad leads vs. captured leads. This is a great product for any business who has distributed sales teams or franchisees, because it makes it simple to distribute leads to the people who can do the most with them.

Reports available through LeadExec include ROI charts and pivot reports. These customized reports help to improve the overall profitability of your leads.

Pardot

If you are focused on B2B, you might consider checking out Pardot. This Salesforce lead management and marketing automation utility can be a big help to both your sales and marketing teams. By using this product, both sales and marketing teams can collaborate to create and run marketing campaigns. By automating this process, Pardot helps organizations to increase efficiency. If you use other tools such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, Netsuite, or other packages, you can interface with them automatically with Pardot.

InfusionSoft

If you are interested in an all in one solution that you can use right out of the box, take a look at InfusionSoft. This highly rated sales and marketing platform might be the web based solution that you need.

InfusionSoft’s features include task automation, email marketing, lead capturing, contact engagement, creating  marketing strategies, ecommerce integration and management, and sales process management. The latter includes lead generation and distribution, sales tracking, and forecasting.

According to Paul Scott, Marketing & Technology manager at The Hireman, "We believe that having a fully integrated solution wherever possible gives businesses the ability to maintain focus on what matters. We would much rather have our sales and marketing staff creating brilliant campaigns and liaising with customers, rather than spending their valuable time struggling with time consuming manual tasks."

XSellco High 5

Getting feedback from customers is a great way to gain important insights into your products as well as the customer experience that you offer. It’s also a great way to create engagement, and build trust in your products. Of course, the better the feedback is, the more trust and engagement you will earn.

XSellco High 5 is a sales utility that solicits feedback from highly satisfied customers, at the ideal point in time. The product can be used with open APIs from Ebay, Amazon, and other eCommerce marketplaces. XSellco High 5 will then send out requests for feedback to the most satisfied customers.

In addition to asking for feedback, the product also automates review management. This helps you to respond to negative reviews quickly, and provides a way to encourage those submitting positive reviews to share their thoughts with others. Whenever follow  up is needed, Xsellco can help with that as well.

Pricing is hard to beat  here as well. There are rates available for small businesses, mid size organizations, and enterprise level firms. Subscriptions are paid monthly, and you are not obligated to sign a contract, although there is a discount for paying annually.

Zoho CRM

They to any business is getting the attention of customers, ensuring that they are satisfied, and then retaining them. Using a great CRM package is key for this. One of the best CRM packages available today is Zoho CRM.

This package is absolutely scalable. This means that no matter how much you grow, you won’t have to worry about finding a new package. Zoho has solutions available for startups to  corporate enterprises.

Use Zoho to automate sales tracking and customer engagement. Zoho can also be interfaced with a variety of other apps. This means even more pathways to creating engagement. These include MailChimp, ConstantContact, and Microsoft Outlook. If you are a Quickbook user, you can track sales revenues by connecting Zoho with it.

One of the problems that sales and marketing teams encounter is that they spend too little time actually doing the mission critical work of selling products and services, or innovating new ways of reaching target customers. By using sales automation tools, the time spent on record keeping, manually tracking leads, even making phone calls can be automated. This leaves  your teams with more time to do what they do best.