CHAPTER

8

Leveraging the Right Tools

Since sales productivity tools come, go, and change so rapidly, we debated whether or not to include them, but, in the end, we decided to move forward by bringing their function to the foreground and relegating the form, the actual tools, to the background.

Sales tools must be viewed as a means to an end; they should support sales processes that help sales professionals close more deals at a faster rate. While that may seem obvious, nearly all salespeople have been saddled with tools that either slow them down or create barriers to building relationships with prospects. For instance, some tools allow salespeople to engage in less-than-ideal practices such as blasting impersonal e-mails to massive numbers of people. Therefore, we urge sales professionals to make conscious choices about the balance between automation and true personalization at each stage of the selling process.

Below, we outline capabilities aligned with stages of the Predictable Prospecting selling cycle.

Tools for the New Queue

By way of reminder, developing an Ideal Account Profile (IAP) is the first step in the Predictable Prospecting methodology. Where possible, an IAP should be based on one’s best customers—the accounts with the highest lifetime value. At the account level, isolating desirable segmentation criteria, such as industry, size, and geography, is largely a manual task involving crafting and testing hypotheses. While there are statistical packages like SPSS and a growing ecosystem of predictive analytics vendors, most organizations still rely on traditional analysis tools such as Excel and Tableau. Once the IAP is defined, the most popular tool for account identification is Hoover’s, although LinkedIn is rapidly gaining momentum. Additionally, upstarts such as InsideView and Unomy are also entering this relatively open segment.

With a set of target accounts aligned with an IAP, the next step is to build an Ideal Prospect Profile (IPP). Even more than building an IAP, constructing an IPP is a manual and highly qualitative exercise. The good news is that contact discovery and management tools abound for finding individuals aligned to the IPP. The highest-quality contact discovery tools are social networks, including LinkedIn and Facebook, where individuals maintain their own profiles. What’s more, a supporting ecosystem of tools has cropped up to efficiently extract data from these sources.

Though a distant second, the next-most-accurate set of tools are those where contact information is manually verified; DiscoverOrg is a good example, at least for information technology contacts. Third in line are crowd-sourced contact databases such as Data.com, ZoomInfo, and CircleBack. Especially with a crowd-sourced contact database, test rigorously before you buy because they are infamous for low data quality. A forth option are web scrapers, the most popular of which is currently eGrabber. In addition, once a contact is identified, a salesperson can manage and stay engaged by using a variety of tools, including Accompany, CharlieApp, Contactually, Discover.ly, Found.ly, InsideView, LinkedIn, and Nimble.

Now, we move on to sales enablement tools for selecting the right content to use with prospects at the right time. Providers in this space include Act-on software, Bloomfire, CallidusCloud Enablement, DecisionLink, Docurated, KnowledgeTree, Microsoft SharePoint, MindMatrix, Playboox, Qvidian, Seismic, and Skura.

Once a contact database gets even moderately large, it can be extremely difficult to prioritize the right prospects to engage. To solve that problem, a new generation of predictive analytics companies has emerged, including 6Sense, Fliptop, Infer, Lattice Engines, Mintigo, and SalesPredict. Predictive analytics uses machine learning to build and dynamically evolve both ideal account and ideal prospect profiles. Specifically, this software combines internal data such as win and loss information with external data on contacts and accounts to score inbound and outbound leads and to highlight upsell opportunities and retention risks with existing clients.

Though we have focused mainly on tools to build the outbound New Queue, it is, on average, easier to engage an inbound lead than to (re-)activate a nurtured lead. This brings us into the world of marketing automation platforms (MAPs) such as Adobe Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Pardot, and SalesFusion. Traditional MAPs push content (usually via e-mail) and send leads to salespeople once engagement reaches a certain level. Next generation MAPs, styled as ‘virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence,’ can hold electronic dialogue. For instance, Brent Holloway, VP of Corporate Sales at Talend, uses Conversica to reach out to leads with low scores that his sales team would not otherwise have the capacity to engage.

Tools for the Working Queue

In Predictable Prospecting, the Working Queue starts with the first attempt to contact a prospect and ends either when an are-we-a-fit (AWAF) meeting is held or when an unresponsive lead is moved to nurturing. Though managing overlapping multitouch campaigns through brute force is (barely) possible, many sales organizations are turning to sales workflow automation tools, including Outreach.io, PersistIQ, SalesLoft Cadence, ToutApp, and Velocify. Most of these tools have integrated phone dialers, but other options are available, including front-runner InsideSales.com and newcomer Five9.

Likewise, most of the sales workflow automation tools have the ability to send e-mail as well as to track opens, clicks, and replies. Even if one does not use a sales workflow automation tool, there are many e-mail activity tracking tools available such as SideKick (formerly known as Signals), Tellwise, and Yesware. For mass e-mailing, something we do not recommend unless prospects have opted in, there are many e-mail marketing services, including Silverpop and MailChimp. In addition, there are even e-mail discovery tools that allow salespeople to find e-mails with using only, say, first name, last name, and domain and not having to guess at various combinations. These include Discover.ly, eGrabber, e-mail-format.com, Rapportive, and Toofr. Finally, to save the hassle of going back and forth via e-mail to pick meeting times, meeting scheduling tools like Assistant.to and Calendly are currently popular time-savers.

E-mail quality tools are quick and easy utilities for avoiding spam filters. Many people are not even aware they exist. Just search for “e-mail spam checker” to find countless free, online resources. With some, like mail-tester.com, you can simply send your e-mail to an address for analysis. With others, such as e-mailspamtest.com, http://lyris.com/us-en/contentchecker, or http://info.contactology.com/check-mqs, you can just enter information into a form, and you will get an immediate response. This functionality is also built into many e-mail marketing services (such as those mentioned above).

We are on the fence about whether or not to recommend e-mail verification services like Fresh Address, verify-e-mail.org, e-mail-checker.net, BriteVerify, and Kickbox.io. These services connect with a mail server, transmit a from/to address pair, receive an acknowledgement, and then disconnect before actually sending an e-mail. Most often, the acknowledgement status is either accept, reject, or accept all. Accept, as one would imagine, means the mail server verified the address as valid. However, many companies post “valid” dummy e-mail addresses online as bait to catch spammers so even an accept status is not golden. The reject acknowledgement can be trusted, and those e-mails should be removed from one’s database. And “accept all” means that a mail server, well, accepts every e-mail as valid, which the server does to protect employees from spammers. If a server set to accept all receives too much undeliverable mail, then the sender’s domain will likely end up on an e-mail blacklist. These blacklists are usually shared by many mail servers, and getting removed from any of them can be complex and expensive. No salesperson wants to be the one that got her company’s domain blacklisted. We conducted a small test using one of the services and found 25 percent were accepted, 12 percent were rejected, and the remaining 63 percent were accept all. At the very least, we were able to remove the rejected e-mails from our database.

Contact research tools round out the group of Working Queue resources. They accelerate precadence planning by assembling disparate digital information about contacts in a single view. While some of these are standalone, many integrate with e-mail and CRM systems, mostly Gmail and Salesforce.com, respectively. Three of the many options currently available include InsideView, Owler, and Vibe.

Tools for the Qualifying Queue

The Qualifying Queue has a very short cycle time, ranging from the time a salesperson completes the initial AWAF call to accepting a lead into the closing pipeline. During the AWAF call, many sales professionals deliver at least a few slides of their pitch deck or share their desktop. The web conferencing category is mature with many vendors, including Citrix GoToMeeting, Cisco Webex, ClearSlide, and Join.Me. For salespeople who choose to send collateral and want to verify prospect engagement, there are document tracking tools such as Attach, Clearslide, and DocSend.

Tools for the Closing and Servicing Queue

Since this book is mainly about prospecting new leads through qualifying, we offer only two categories of innovative tools for closing and servicing. In the closing category, digital contract management tools such as Callidus CLM, DocuSign, and EchoSign have become very popular. In the servicing category, particularly for recurring revenue services, GainSight and Salesforce.com’s service cloud are both quality options.

This chapter was written under the assumption that sales professionals have little discretion in choosing their overarching CRM system, so we didn’t go down that road. Likewise, we have avoided business intelligence and reporting tools (of which there are many besides Domo, Qlik, and Tableau). We also skipped the emerging class of mobile-enabled, video-rich, often-gamified sales training tools; however, two we have run across that are sales specific are CommercialTribe and Qstream.