Sales Automation Masterclass: Part Five
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Sales and market intelligence. Lead handling and prospecting. Analytics and reporting. Process and training. Automation. The average modern-day B2B company has countless uses for sales tools. But as the sales efforts scale, so do the number of tools and the number of people using them. Your data starts to get scattered across different platforms. This makes it harder to get an overview of how well your sales are doing at a given point of time. But what if you could integrate sales tools to have them work together?
This post is Part Five in our Masterclass series on how to automate your sales. Sales automation will save you loads of time and let you close more deals. That’s why we created this comprehensive series. We'll guide you through all the different aspects of sales that can be automated and explain how you can automate them.
- Jeroen Corthout, Co-Founder Salesflare, an easy-to-use sales CRM for small B2B companies
This fifth lesson will show you how to integrate sales tools to make your process more efficient, and never lose track of data.
1. Sync up your contact databases with PieSync
64% of businesses use cloud apps. On average, they use up to 18 cloud apps for their marketing, sales and operational purposes.
Syncing the contact data bases across all platforms enables you to get a 360-degree view of your customers. It also gives you more control over what data you want to use when working with a specific app.
PieSync enables intelligent two-way sync that consolidates data across multiple apps.
One use case would be to sync your email marketing list with your CRM. With PieSync, you can enable two-way sync between your email marketing tool and your CRM. It also gives you control over what marketing data you want your sales team to use and to what purpose, by choosing to sync only a specific list.
Another thing it can do is sync sales teams' biggest headache when it comes to keeping customer data up to date: phone contacts.
Instead of manually jotting down phone numbers during the sales process, PieSync can sync your phone contacts with your CRM. This way, customers whose contact details are in your CRM, get automatically saved to your phone and vice versa.
What's more, if you’re using Salesflare, the CRM will automatically collect this contact information from email signatures and keep it updated at all times.
2. Trigger smart integrations with Zapier
While tools like PieSync help create a smooth flow of databases between different apps, Zapier helps you automate workflows to integrate sales tools you're using. It automatically moves the synced database between your web apps exactly the way you tell it to, reducing your manual work and letting you focus on having real conversations with customers.
We’ll give you a few examples.
You could set up an integration between your CRM and team chat, like Slack, so that whenever you make progress with a lead, your team is notified of it as well. The same can be done when you win a deal. It helps the team celebrate every won deal and keeps them motivated.
Another example would be integrating your lead forms with Salesflare. Whenever a lead comes in through a marketing campaign, your CRM automatically stores it in the right stage of the customer cycle. This reduces the need to manually upload your leads into your CRM every few days.
Another integration that really benefits salespeople is integrating accounting software. You can trigger Zapier to create an invoice whenever Salesflare notifies of winning a new deal.
But that’s not all you can do with Zapier integrations.
As a matter of fact, we wrote an in-depth post on how to use Zapier integrations to automate and simplify the different processes.
3. Integrate sales tools like a pro
Zapier is a great tool to use if you’re looking for something that is easy to use and enables you to do most integrations yourself. However, if you’re a power user and need to go pro when it comes to wanting to integrate sales tools to work together, consider using Blendr.io or Integromat.
Where Zapier doesn't provide a lot of freedom to branch into different workflows depending on conditions, these platforms make just about anything possible.
So instead of spending too much time and money on building your own implementations to integrate sales tools, you can use these smart platforms to create process templates in minutes and integrate your tools to automate even the most comprehensive workflows.
Here’s how this looks in Integromat.
4. Use Salesflare to automatically integrate your customer data
Integrations make it easy for you to move data from one sales tool to another. And as a sales professional, your data is bound to be spread across your mailbox, calendar, phone, email and web tracking platforms.
That's where Salesflare comes in.
It pulls in all your emails, meetings, calls, contact and company information, as well as your prospects' social profiles and email signatures, and combines all these streams of information in the CRM to get a comprehensive view of your customer data.
Based on the documents you have exchanged, it creates a handy document folder per customer or prospect that's always up to date with no need to do anything manually.
Finally, Salesflare tracks email opens, clicks, website visits and any kind of interaction your prospect has with you. This helps you further customize and improve your sales process to close your deals faster.
Simply put: It reduces manual data input so you can focus on making more sales.
Conclusion: integrate sales tools to increase productivity!
Making your tools work together is kind of like getting more done by working together as a team. You use each other’s strengths to enhance a process further and become more efficient at it when you have the right support.
Integrating your sales tools will not only give you access to holistic insights in your sales process, but also make the team a lot more productive.
Ready to set up integrations and put all your sales tools in the same team?
Let us know how integrating your sales tools helped you achieve more.
Need a quick recap? Read Part Four of the Sales Automation Masterclass: How To Automate Customer Data. With this post, we shared with you the last insights from our second Masterclass series on Sales Automation. But we'll be back next week with the start of our biggest Masterclass series yet, this time on Startup Funding!
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