Top Mobile Apps for Sales Teams - NextWaveMarketingStrategies.com

When you send your sales agents out into the field, you want to be sure that they have all the equipment they need to do their jobs. While this kind of technology used to mean hauling a laptop everywhere, much of it is now accessible via smart phone. These five apps can help your agents when they are away from the office.

Touch Base with GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting allows your staff to conduct an entire meeting online or to join a live meeting in progress. State of the art technology allows them to watch presentations and view reports as if they were there…without the added expense of bringing them in from the field. GoToMeeting does not currently work with BlackBerry.

CamCard Lite.

During an evening of networking, business cards are annoyingly easy to misplace. Even if you hang onto them, by the time you get into the office the next morning, you’ve often forgotten why you thought that person was an important contact. CamCard Lite allows you to read cards immediately and save the contact information. It also allows you to group your different contacts in ways that will make it easy for you to follow up with them. The service costs $6.99, but there is a free trial available. It works with all smart phones including Android and BlackBerry.

DocScan

Do you need to get that signed contract to the office right away? Don’t drive miles out of your way. Instead, scan the document and email it to the person who needs it. If you use Googledocs or Dropbox, you can also upload them to these programs. DocScan is available to i-Phone and iPad users only.

Apple’s Keynote

This handy application allows you to bring sales presentations with you on your phone. You can view and edit presentations in both Keynote 09 and MS PowerPoint. When you’re ready to start your speech, simply plug your phone into a projector and HDTV and watch the images appear. As the name suggests, Apple’s Keynote works only with the i-Phone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Customer Relationship Managements Apps

There are many different applications that can help you manage your relationships with customers. Most of them allow you to keep track of client contacts and follow up on leads while in the field. You can also communicate with sales staff in the office who can help you meet the needs of your customer right away.

Whether you have an Android, an i-Phone, or a BlackBerry, there are several applications that you can use to help you keep track of meetings, important documents, potentially valuable contacts, and client information. Use the technology available today to stay a step ahead of your competitors.

Aged Auto Insurance Leads - NextWaveMarketingStrategies.com

If you mention buying aged leads, especially auto insurance leads, many sales agents will look at you as if you’ve just grown another couple of heads. Be smart and ignore their skeptical responses. The truth is that aged auto insurance leads can play a significant role in increasing your sales and breaking in new employees as the year draws to a close.

Next Wave Marketing Strategies Auto-Dialer-Power

When it comes to facilitating business-to-consumer sales, auto dialers can be consider a powerful weapon for telemarketing teams. The threat of having automated software that can make more calls, with more ease, efficiency, and productivity, is a major advantage to sales agents.

Whatever leads your company has gathered, aged leads or real-time leads, the integrated dialing capability will have calls moving in a speedy and convenient manner.

Here are some ways auto dialers are helping many companies hit their sales milestone:

Pump Up The  Volume of Calls

One of the main ways that auto dialers are advantageous in the terms of cold calling is that they are simply much more efficient than manual dialing. There is no time spent with telemarketers looking at numbers obtained from internet leads or some other method on a sheet and manually entering digits. The dailer handles all that. Taken over the course of an entire shift this can result in substantial amounts of time being saved and contacts made. More contacts in a given time period mean more possible conversions and ultimately translate to higher profits per time spent.

Are They Interested? Automated Follow Ups

Dialers can be set to redial numbers that were not contacted the first time. This maximizes the chances of reaching the lead by phone. It also eliminates the need for telemarketers who are doing the cold calling to keep track of which parties have had call attempts made and which ones have not. Follow up is an important part of lead management. Dialers make sure that follow up contact attempts happen in a regularized fashion. This has an overall effect of insuring that more marketing contacts are made and that selling goals are reached.

Automatic Voice Messages

One final feature that dialers often support is the ability to automate the entire process of telemarketing contact. The software can be set to make calls and play an automatic prerecorded message when a party answers. This can free up huge amounts of employee time and resources for other things. However, automated messages often do not have the effectiveness that a live contact does, but this can still prove to be a quite effective way of increasing the amount of contacts made and for allowing employees to concentrate on more decisive phases of the selling process.

Overall, the initial contact process can be time consuming and slow your sales force down. In listing the help of an auto dialer is about doubling the marketing output of the firm, wether its saving money on wasted leads or allowing your company  to put effort in other types of marketing.

Every “no” reminds me how much sales sucks. But, each “yes” makes me hunger for the next big win. This is the emotional roller-coaster of sales. How do you train to fight through rejection and increase your sales performance?

Good Sales is …

Good sales is a position of confidence and aggression. You attack rejection and drive it out with a positive experience, and you won’t stop until you get that positive turn of events.

Rejection is a natural part of life and takes center stage in every sales organization. Good sales folks figure out how to minimize its effectiveness–even turn it into motivation.

Bad Sales is …

Bad sales is a position of negativity and uncertainty. Bad sales holds onto every rejection and uses a rejection as a stopping point.

Rejection will happen. Are you going to make it the the focus of your sales plan? Don’t!

Powering Through Rejection

One of the biggest mistakes in managing rejection is allowing it to kill momentum. I see it over and over…a rejection triggers a break from selling. This is like icing the kicker or a free-throw shooter with a time-out. You are locking in that negativity and giving your time to psyche yourself out of a success.

Take the opposite tack–use rejections as power pivots. Turn it into motivation for a “power hour.” See how fast you can get the next “yes.” Or, if you are still talking to the prospect see if you can pivot it into a referral opportunity.

Powering Up Sales

Fighting rejection and using it to power you into the next success is the key to winning big. Rejection, managed correctly, can become the juice that make your sales soar.

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Internet marketing is an amazingly complex and sophisticated art form. The things marketers are doing to bring you the “right” customer is incredible. However, do not over estimate the capability of marketing to close a deal for you–it can’t.

In fact, there are some studies that show, at best, the marketing techniques are only about 50 percent correlated to conversion. That is pretty weak statistical linkage.

That leaves the sales process to play a pretty big role in landing that deal. So, lets take a look at a few things that will make that part of your business better.

Sales Organization

Organization, and more importantly culture, is what makes revenue pump out of a sales team. It is the fine balance between initiative and accountability that will make your numbers consistently strong.

Best practices in sales management have a few common threads to building a strong sales organization:

• Start small
• Measure performance
• Develop leadership
• Reward results
• Quickly cut losses

The key theme in these bullets is maintaining high expectations for success.

Business Model

The business model you chose is going to significantly affect your sales process. How you get paid is core to how you sell.

However, regardless of your business model your sales process should emphasize revenue not activity. Too many sales processes are built around activity, not necessarily action.

Closely track your successes and losses, mapping your path to the former and crushing the obstructions that caused the later. This will give you a clear process based on definitive actions that increase the probability of closing deals.

Products

Products and services are the core of why you are selling. But, don’t make this a crutch. A good sales process can make these (as counterintuitive as it might sound) less relevant. A good sales organization will actually fuel a need for more products and services.

Could sales become your business’ core competence?

Customer Follow-Through

Now, for the grand finale. The secret to sales process success. You can do everything else wrong, but if you follow-up and follow-through with the customer you will win more deals than the competition.

A strong sense of urgency puts you in the pole position when your customer is ready to move forward on your offering. Never let someone else be there when your customer is ready to pull the trigger.

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As the market continues to deal us tough challenges it is time to look deeply at your sales and marketing strategies. Take a few moments away from trying to grind out sales and think about the big picture. Where are you headed in 2009?

1. Write Down Your Mission: It is amazing how powerful simply writing down an idea can be to it’s execution. Think about what you are trying to accomplish. Make that concept simple, but big. Then write it down.

2. List Your Strengths and Weaknesses: Take inventory of what you have to work with in making that mission a reality. Every organization and/or individual has strengths and weaknesses–list them. Now understand how you can leverage the strengths while minimizing or improving the weaknesses.

3. Review External Threats: Who are your competitors? What technologies, processes, or approaches are beating you in the market? These are your threats. Review them for opportunities to pivot or beat them head-on. Don’t hope they will go away–deal with them.

4. Look for Growth Opportunities: You will be amazed at how likely you are to find these growth opportunities in analyzing your threats. Regardless of where you get your inspiration, itemize your potential opportunities and use them as a foundation to your plan.

5. What are Your Options: Roll together your strengths and weakness inventory, your threat analysis, and growth opportunities. Now look at that data and assess your options. This is going to help you build all of the facets of your strategy.

6. Create Long-term Goals Vision: The foundation of your strategy needs to have a vision. This is supported by long-term (specific) goals. Get as concrete and measurable as possible. Again, write it down!

7. Develop Short-term Benchmarks: Break that big goal into little bite-size chucks. These smaller goals should be easily actionable and tied directly to measurements. These benchmarks are going to be your roadmap to success.

8. Implement Business Plan: Planning time is over. Now it is time to get to work. You now have a new business plan. Start executing. The hardest part is the first step–do it!

9. Evaluate Decisions, Adjust: No plan executes flawlessly. Your benchmarks and metrics are going to help you quickly identify what is working and what isn’t. Don’t ignore these indicators. Adapt and reposition your plan. Every decision gives you an opportunity to build a new success, make sure you are evaluating each carefully.

Don’t put your head in the sand in these tough times–look at it as an opportunity to grow and build marketshare.

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Do you want your sales team to reach their maximum potential? Of course you do. Unfortunately, we as sales managers often make simple mistakes that cripple the motivation and productivity of our sales force. Here are some of the most common you should guard against.

We are already battling a tough sales environment. Customers are hesitant and fearful. This is lowering the motivation and confidence of your sales group. The last thing you want to do is to add to this negativity and impact sales production. This is why you need to take a careful review of your sales management and make sure you are not making these common mistakes.

1. Avoiding the Truth for the “Corporate Line”: You sales team is smart. They read the news and watch the numbers in your organization. They know if things are good or bad. They hate surprises as much as you do.

So, avoid the corporate-speak and get to brass tacks when you talk to your team. Tell them the truth. Tell them where they need to be. Tell them where the organization needs to be. You will be amazed how often they take you there.

2. Over Promise, Under Deliver: Missed expectations and disappointments are killer attacks on sales performance. Set realistic goals and objectives. Connect them to reasonable incentives. Then follow-through at all costs.

If possible, surprise the team with more on account of exceptional performance or accelerated performance.

3. Pumping Up Some at The Expense of Others: This is a common error. We always preach praising in public, but never do so at the expense or embarrassment of others.

This technique is like comparing brothers on the baseball diamond or using one sisters’ performance in a competition to teach the other–these are recipes for destructive competition.

4. Discouraging Learning & Training: Training takes time and often cost money. This causes a lot of managers to discourage personal development to hit the monthly number.

Remember there are creative ways to work training and learning into every sales meeting, email, and voice mail you lead your team through. Reward and encourage those that take learning and training into their own hands.

5. Leading with Fear: Threats and punitive reinforcement simply backfires. You can’t coerce your team into performing. It will wound your sales team and your customer. Keep your shop flowing with motivation and confident encouragement.

6. Micromanaging: Running ram-shot over your sales team is unlikely to achieve strong performance. And it will certainly never yield remarkable results. Truly amazing performances and mind blowing months are always the result of creativity, innovation, and initiative.

Micromanaging your sales team kills all of these critical factors for unexpected success.

7. High Expectations & No Direction: Putting an arbitrary goal on the leader board does no good. Your sales team needs direction. They need an idea on how to get there. Give them direction that makes them confident in obtaining the prize.

8. Not Leveraging the Experienced: Chances are your sales force is not without a significant amount of experience. Even the smallest shop has that one or two seasoned veterans. Find ways to leverage this experience. Get them to assist with training, motivation, leading. Get all of those secrets to success out of their heads and out on the sales floor.

9. Wasting Time with Voice Mail & Email: An idle sales manager often feels like he or she needs to be doing something. That usually leads to a useless, pointless, lengthy email or voice mail. Save it. Resist the temptation. Your sales team is already overwhelmed with serving new customers, assuming you were listening to 1-8.

Don’t add unnecessary noise to their sales day.

10. Coaching with Negativity: Like I mentioned in point 5, negativity is the bane of any sales team. Keep it off the sales floor. Avoid leading any coaching session with a negative example. Pick an example or scenario where you can teach the same principle, but lead it with a positive result.

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Sales compensation and commissions are somehow embedded in the DNA of good sales people. They can optimize the pay-out math on their sales pipeline faster than calculating new debt or mortgage payments.

It is a simple fact of sales management. So, when you consider your sales incentive plan make sure it will optimize for your intended revenue targets.

1. If you want short-term wins: Put your top commissions on simple, broad appeal products. Apply incentives to volume and contact rates, not relationship or pipeline building.

2. If you want long-term sustainability: Put your commissions on managing portfolio-type accounts. These are people that are affluent and typically have multiple transactions or strong referral networks. Apply incentives to pillar relationships with professionals (i.e., accountants, lawyers, and doctors)

3. On all accounts: Commission on sales revenue, bonus on hitting and exceeding targets, profit-share on out of this world results.

As the old sale adage goes, “What gets paid gets done.” Think closely about what you are telling your sales team to work on when you publish your next commission plan. Word to the wise, do the math on the team’s pipeline first. That is the quickest way to forecast the results.

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The natural reaction when sales slow or you hit a closing slump is to cut back on the important things: less training, less motivation, less sales people. This approach is guaranteed to set you on shaky ground to blast your way out.

Sales motivation should be a key element for any “recovery” plan. Just like our economy–consider launching a sales “stimulus” plan in your sales organization.

Sales People are Emotional

The best sales people are emotional. They are high energy, success junkies. They want to win.

If they don’t win they will often descend quickly into a funk. When success comes they hit the ceiling. That is why sustaining motivation and confidence is so important to getting consistent sales performance.

Cutting back on those activities (i.e., sales meetings and motivational moments) is a recipe for sales failure. Or, at least long-term droughts.

Confidence is Contagious and Training Induced

Confidence is contagious. It quickly transfers to other team members and most importantly to customers. Customers are naturally timid to make decisions in tough economic times. Your confidence can help customers through this silent objection.

So, how do you put confidence into the conversation with customers? Training.

Those training sessions with your sales team that motivates them, shares best practices, and gives them in depth information about the value of their products to customers will exude confidence on the very next sales call.

Wins Increase with Wins

The real benefit to getting motivation into sales and confidence on the phone is the win. Winning is as contagious as confidence. Any high school basketball team can tell you the power of a win to get another win–the value of a winning streak to extend it.

That is why pumping up a win, even a small win in your sale organization can spark a rally in your sales numbers. Look for those small examples to get your next rally started.

Sales is the Revenue Life Blood

Remember sales is your revenue life blood. Cutting back on the elements of success in your sales organization is certain to sack your revenue. So, amp up the motivation, training, and confidence and you will be closing more deals in no time.

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There is not a sales person out there that would argue with the role of sales motivation in winning deals. Every sales meeting and rally should be packed with motivation. Motivation to set goals, break records, and bring revenue.

Is something missing? Do you feel like this isn’t working anymore? Are your sales suffering in this down economy? Chances are there were a lot of “yes” answers to these questions. Want the secret to changing that fate–transferring that motivation to your customer?

Don’t Neglect Sales Meetings

Sales meetings are the heart and soul of your sales motivation. Unfortunately, as times toughen I see a lot of organizations abandoning their sales meetings. This will lead to a dangerous degeneration of confidence and motivation.

Sales people are social by nature and need that collaboration to prime their engines. Sharing best practices, reviewing products, and cheering successes are important. Even if sales are down you need to pull together that motivational moment. You need to look for and reward every little positive.

Building Confidence in Your Sales Team

Keeping the negative out of the room is critical. There is certain to be a lot of grumbling and “can’t” floating around the sales floor. That is not going to help any deals get closed.

Confidence is a state of assurance. Most of the sales people in your organization have been consistent closers at one time or another–remind them of those successes. Take some time at your next sales meeting to reflect on what worked to build past successes. Are there ideas to be relearned?

Most importantly look for and highlight the smallest successes in hard sales environments. Look for opportunities to leverage those small successes into larger ones.

Transfer Confidence to Your Customers

Confidence is contagious. That is the most important reason to crank up the sales motivation during tough sales environments. Your motivation, your confidence can and should be transferred to your customers.

Many of the prospects you will talk to will be timid and pensive in this economic environment. You have to cut through this hesitation. You have to flush out this silent objection. To get the deal you need to transfer your confidence to the buyer.

Your motivation will give them confidence to make that decision.

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