Three Sales Tools That Make Prospecting New Clients Easier

Prospecting for new clients is no easy task. It requires patience, persistence and exceptional organization and time management skills. Also, the ability to persevere through frequent rejection is an absolute must. Luckily the market is full of technologies, tools and platforms designed to help salespeople prospect and sell smarter. Having spent the past decade as a salesperson and technologist, I have had the opportunity to try, test, implement and critique a wide array of sales technology products. Here are my top three tools to help with prospecting.

Visistat: Stop guessing who’s knocking at your door.

Understanding your web traffic is critical to sales and marketing, especially if your website is promoting or selling a product or service. Google Analytics is the most widely used freemium web analytics service on the internet. In my opinion every website, business or personal, should be integrated with Google Analytics. Even as a free service, the benefits are too good to pass up.

The folks at Google Analytics are sticklers for privacy, making it difficult to unearth any personally identifiable information about your website traffic. Google’s adamance towards privacy is a hard stance to knock, however it is a small impediment for sales driven organizations looking to make data driven decisions. Visistat is a tool we use at Brolik to identify the actual companies and organizations visiting our website who would otherwise remain anonymous.

Additionally, Visistat tracks each visitor’s behavior as they navigate throughout the website. Knowing which sections or pages a particular company is viewing improves our chances for prospecting them with a timely and relevant solution. Another area where Visistat shines is usability. The user experience is straightforward and the data reads simply, making this an excellent resource for almost anyone, regardless of any formal analytics training. Lastly, small to medium size businesses who wish to implement Visistat can do so without breaking the bank.

As further reading, PC Magazine reviews Visistat at greater length and links to alternate products which I have not had a chance to test.

Rapportive: Be done with blind dates.

I am a proud early adopter (circa 2010) of Rapportive, a plugin for Chrome and Firefox which allows you to view LinkedIn profiles inside Gmail. I am always pushing Rapportive to every salesperson I meet, continually finding that the majority of sales professionals I encounter have never heard of the tool. I am absolutely hooked on getting people hooked on it. So, what is the big deal with Rapportive and why should you be using it?

For starters, Rapportive is free! Each time you compose an email in Gmail, Rapportive simultaneously populates rich contact profiles for each email address included in the thread. Instantly, you are shown what a prospect looks like, their profession and where they are located. You can pinpoint any mutual connections across your social networks. You can even get the scoop on mutually shared interests, something you can mention in an introductory email to establish a rapport. Also, Rapportive is a great way to verify the email addresses of prospects you are cold emailing.

If you need help sharpening your skills, the folks at Wordstream have put together this great resource for identifying unknown email addresses. For those of you who prefer boolean sourcing for emails, I am a big fan of Erin M. Page’s blog on all things boolean. Lastly, the folks at Visistat recently introduced a new service called KickFire designed to help with researching leads and sourcing email addresses. I have only recently begun using KickFire for Google Chrome and although the initial experience is promising, as with any new product it has room to improve.

Yesware: No more hoping someone gets your message in a bottle.

Most salespeople accept that the majority of our cold emails will go without response. Persistent salespeople will typically follow up with prospects until the effort feels desperate or futile. What most prospects do not realize is that a salesperson actually prefers a “no” than no response at all. A definitive response prevents from being berated with further follow ups. In the past, aside from read receipts, there was little innovation for email tracking and salespeople were often left wondering if their correspondences were forever lost in the ether. Enter Yesware.

Yesware is an email tracking tool that provides meaningful details on what happens to each individual email after it is sent. Yesware tracks if an email has been opened, what time it has been opened and even how many times it has been opened. The service can even tell you the location of the recipient when they opened the email, as well as the device and browser type. Best of all, the data is real time and great for situations where a salesperson can catch a prospect in the moment, using the ability to infer if they are at or away from their desk.

Yesware is far more than just email tracking however. The service tracks links within emails, if attachments are opened and can even tell you which pages, and how much time prospects spend on a particular page of an attachment. Yesware also allows you to create email templates and A/B test them for performance, providing data on open and response rates. Email template testing is great for tinkering with subject lines and body content. It is a feature both your sales and marketing teams can leverage.

As a whole, the data captured by Yesware is powerful enough to help each of your salespeople make smarter, more calculated correspondences. It eliminates wondering if sales email have been lost in the ether and has helped me reduce the number of pesky follow up emails I need to send. This is not only a win for me but I imagine also for those who I am prospecting.

Do you have a sales tool or platform that has changed how you or your company prospects? Please feel free to comment and share.