Growing your business is all about gaining attention of potential users, converting them into leads, and then nurturing those leads through your sales funnel. At the same time, you want your satisfied customers to be loyal and to spread the word about the product or service you offer. You can’t compete with the “big boys” with massive ad campaigns, but you can use some great tools for reasonable cost to get yourself out there and leverage your reach. Here are ten sales tools to get you started.
OppSource
If you are looking for an all-encompassing sales/customer management tool to track all of your leads, contacts, and generate touch points all along the way, then OppSource is for you. This software lets you create phone, email and social touch points via individual lead, as well as generate analytics to determine which outreach campaigns are performing the best.
Fanplayr
Harness big data to profile site visitors, based upon their experiences and behaviors on your website. Fanplayr provides real-time engagement and clickstream, identifying time of day, visit frequency, and demographic data. You can automatically make offers that are customized for that visitor at that time. It is important to remember, however, that customer loyalty is not built a single offer or sale. Use the data you get to reach out and begin to establish connections and relationships.
Colibri.io
This great tool will tell you where your target customers are online. You can then join into conversations all across the web. It also acts as a social monitoring tool so that you can see what your customers are saying about you and about your competitors – valuable information to have indeed. Colibri also integrates with Google Analytics.
Pay with a Tweet
A simple and easy way to reward users who retweet news about you and your products. You give them access to your product or service in exchange for a specific number of re-tweets or shares on other social media channels. Pay with a tweet is a powerful way to spread your brand quickly for a low monthly price.
Nimble
For the price, Nimble is one to consider. It’s a total relationship management function that will combine your contacts, social signals, email, and other activities (e.g., follow-ups) from all over. You will be notified of such things as birthdays and any conversations in which you are mentioned, so you can join in.
Twilighter
You may have great posts but unless you encourage your readers to share them and make it really easy for them, you are missing out on great opportunity to grow your following. This handy tool lets visitors to your site or blog highlight any part of it and share it on Twitter. And Twitter has become a great user acquisition tool of itself. Setup is super easy, and it’s free.
MailChimp
MailChimp tool has been around for years, but it continues to improve. You can segment your email lists based upon where your targets and customers are in the conversion processes; you can send targeted emails based upon visitor behavior on your site; receive analytics about open rates and best times to send your emails.
Polldaddy
Keeping current customers satisfied and conducting important market research is a critical part of growth and sales. This tool lets you create surveys and polls to get feedback on your products, services, or customer service. You can collect responses on mobile, via email or on your site. Customize your surveys and publish them anywhere, and customize them for segmented audiences.
Olark
Here’s a chat app so you can chat with visitors to your site in real-time. You will know who is visiting and their location, what they are looking at, and time on your site. You can connect more personally with this information. The cool thing about Olark is that it integrates with most CRM’s, like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Highrise.
Marketo
Here’s the granddaddy of all marketing suites – a combination of tools that covers automation, campaign management, analytics and email, to name a few. You can launch targeted campaigns for segmented audiences with minimal effort – automated but still allowing you to develop more long-term relationship with current and potential customers across all channels. This suite will keep sales and marketing teams coordinated.
Growing a startup to success is not always about the financial backing or having the best product anyone has ever seen. It’s about finding the right audience, winning interest and engagement and turning those things into relationships and ultimately sales.