The 5 Essential Tools to Boost Sales Performance

The world of sales prospecting has transformed in recent years. Smartphones have replaced feature phones, CRMs have replaced Excel files… This renewal in the profession aims to facilitate sales prospecting, which has become increasingly complicated for salespeople.

Indeed, salespeople are in the eye of the storm: they must satisfy increasingly expert clients, redouble their inventiveness and use the right tools to reach their prospects and close new deals. Similarly, increased competition pushes versatile and increasingly expert clients to see if the grass is greener elsewhere, hence the importance of maintaining a good customer relationship and continuously training their sales force.

Ultimately, to be as productive as possible, salespeople should integrate an analysis of their KPIs into their routine, which are often too numerous and difficult to interpret…

What are the tools used by the best salespeople daily to carry out their various missions? We’ll tell you all about it!

Social Selling

Social networks are wrongly considered a waste of time. Over the years, they have, on the contrary, become real sources of information for salespeople, who can inquire about prospects, clients, potential investors, or even colleagues. They can also follow industry news, develop new relationships, and discuss various topics with others. Even better, they can become content creators themselves and establish themselves as influencers, before building a certain credibility in the field that will allow them to forge relationships more easily.

Today, having a social selling strategy is essential. Its effectiveness has already been proven many times, and it clearly has an impact on a company’s business development. If you’re still hesitating, know that you no longer have time to hesitate. Your competitors are already doing social selling!

CRM

Although some consider it a complicated tool to use, CRM is necessary for sales effectiveness and customer loyalty. It notably allows for a 360° view of the customer by centralizing all important information about your clients in one place: invoices, quotes, exchanged emails… It allows you to identify your best clients and also manage communications with them.

Indeed, with the rise of social networks, communication channels have multiplied. CRM allows you to keep an eye on all your communications with prospects and clients. Depending on the company’s activity, it is essential to choose software adapted to the client’s needs. Some CRMs will be service-oriented, others will help improve your company’s organization. Choose according to your objectives to improve your sales performance! We recommend the CRM from Oracle, but those from Salesforce or Microsoft are also very good!

Incenteev

Incenteev’s mission is simple: to help sales departments shape more effective, agile, and happier organizations. We co-build with our clients (Bouygues, Samsung, La Poste, Nespresso, Volkswagen…) sustainable and modern strategies to motivate performance-driving behaviors.

Incenteev is a mobile and desktop application that allows you to motivate and manage your teams’ sales performance through 4 strategic features:

– Manage your teams’ performance in real time
– Engage your salespeople with innovative challenges
– Create connections and strengthen cohesion within your teams
– Train and support your salespeople’s ambitions

Incenteev aims to reinvent sales performance in the digital age, with a Simple, Mobile, Fun, and Human application. These four values are the gateways that connect our platform’s features to provide sales organizations with an innovative and engaging user experience.

Managing performance in the digital age

Productivity Tools

The key to good sales prospecting is organization. It’s difficult to achieve good results if our actions are not coordinated, especially when working as a team. Knowing who does what, and when, is essential for effectiveness, and to avoid duplicating efforts or, even worse, losing prospects due to lack of time. That’s why using dedicated productivity applications is useful. There are plenty on the market, for all uses.

Our favorites at Incenteev: Trello, for organizing tasks, Dropbox, for storing files online and collaborating with others, Evernote, for writing articles synchronized across all devices, or the famous Excel, for listing actions to be taken. But there are other, lesser-known tools that can be useful for your tasks: Pomodoro, for managing your time, Slack, for real-time discussions with your sales team, Scannable, for scanning documents on the fly, but also Spotify, for relaxing with music from time to time. Because you’re always more effective when you’re relaxed.

Email Tracking

Knowing whether your prospects have opened your emails or, on the contrary, completely ignored them, you dream of it, don’t you? It has been possible for several years now, with solutions offered by Hubspot, Get Notify, or Mailtrack for Gmail. Specifically, how will you leverage the results of your email campaigns? Depending on your open rates, you will be forced to change the content and form of your emails. In this regard, there are many tips to improve your email open rate: change the subject, opt for very visual emails or, on the contrary, very simple ones, consider mobile compatibility… Test constantly to get the best results, and improve your relationship with prospects. You will certainly see an impact on your performance.

Daily, salespeople use a mix of tools that can sometimes be very (too) extensive. Or, on the contrary, very few tools, which can also be problematic. Using the right tools will allow any salesperson to improve their sales performance. We hope that with this non-exhaustive list, you will become more effective!

Download this White Paper for Free to Discover Simple and Effective Techniques to Significantly Improve your Sales Teams’ Performance: Managing Performance in the Digital Age