What Are the Tools You Need for Remote Selling ?
Companies often enlist tools that solve the same problem in their remote selling tech stacks and some of them were selected based on recommendations, not their ability to solve a strong pain point.
Every remote tool should justify its spot in the stack by improving a vital step in your sales process – from prospecting, and lead nurture, to qualification and closing. This way, you will have a structure around how the tools are utilized across several stages of your sales cycles.
To implement your sales process, many tools must be combined, which is why this guide dives deep into the hidden gems that will help you produce the right numbers in your business.
Essential Remote Selling Tools
Every remote sales team needs the following category of software to function – CRM, prospecting, productivity, video conferencing, and communication. Let’s look at the software that excels in this category, starting with …
Video Conferencing Tools for Sales teams
The foundation of remote selling is video conferencing. It allows remote connectivity with customers and teammates separated by distance. A good video conferencing tool should create room for engagement, conversion, screen sharing, and video recording. Some of the names worth looking at include:
Google Meet
Google meet is the best choice if you want a free video-conferencing tool with just enough features to communicate effectively with prospects. It’s easy to set up and has unlimited call restrictions. You will also benefit from its integration with meeting scheduling tools such as Calendly.
However, the free plan doesn’t allow real-time video recording, which is bad news for sales teams who like to record and store meetings for future use.
Zoom
Zoom shares a lot in common with Google meet. But unlike Meet, it has all the bells and whistles sales teams need to succeed.
Provided there’s a stable internet connection, sales teams can benefit from its crisp video quality, real-time recordings, screen-sharing, and chat and survey features that offer a deeper understanding of your prospects.
There’s a steep learning curve for sales teams who want to utilize its full feature set, but it gets easier with time. Also, Zoom is available on desktop and mobile devices; hence you can join a meeting from anywhere.
CRM Tools
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool organizes all your customer’s information on one board so that it’s accessible to everyone in your company. Think of a CRM as an administrative tool that stores prospect information, automates your email sequence, searches for sales opportunities, streamlines file sharing, and records interactions that would have been lost if stored in the salesperson’s head.
But choosing the best CRM hinges on many factors such as company size, budget, and the jobs to be done. Looking at the options available, we’ve enlisted 3 of the best in the industry: Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce.
Hubspot CRM
Hubspot CRM is a complete solution designed for demand generation. This makes it a perfect fit for companies who want marketing and sales to work as a team.
Some of its best features include email marketing, social media marketing, reporting, and attribution of customers database. One of Hubspot’s sticking points is that it’s scalable, and its functionality expands along with your sales team.
Pipedrive
With Pipedrive, you have a CRM that’s easy to use and onboard new employees. You will get all the basic features you need from a CRM in exchange for a few bucks. What sets it apart from other CRM is that it accepts a wide range of integration, allowing you to improve its functionality.
The not-so-good part about Pipedrive is that it’s designed for certain business sizes and only goes as far as assisting sales, not marketing.
Salesforce
Salesforce is the hallmark of CRMs. It packs the most features required for teams of all sizes – from contact and leads management to opportunity management. However, with Salesforce, you will require a steep learning curve and possibly need a designated Salesforce consultant to train you on how to do reporting.
Plus, Salesforce is quite pricey and majorly suitable for enterprises because it’s bloated with some features that might prove useless to SMBs.
Prospecting Tools
Outreach
Outreach is evolving into a CRM but remains a top-tier outbound marketing software. Its outbound suite allows you to create drip campaigns, email sequencing, and templates that can be combined with LinkedIn messaging and phone calls. Outreach automates the engagement process with cold leads, and you can blast personalized emails to prospects using custom variables from your database.
Even though it doesn’t make any sense to have 2 CRMs in your tech stack, The advantage of this overdose is that it keeps track of communication, and you can keep track of prospects that are still dialed into your sales sequence and those that have opted out. Rich in features, no doubt but does require some level of training to understand.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn sales navigator is a prospecting tool that helps you narrow your search down to the decision-makers in a company. It provides the name, email, location, and position of many contacts within your target audience. This ensures that your sales team is speaking to the right person, rather than just a random employee in the company.
Also, salespeople can benefit from its news feed function. This helps you track contacts’ activity – published posts, engagement on others’ posts, and other activities that offer a low down on their area of interest. We also loved the email feature, which helps you send messages to contacts. Even better, its list-building feature helps export contact information into a CRM.
Clearbit
Clearbit is a feature-packed lead nurturing tool for collecting information about sales leads and is great for companies with ABM outbound prospecting. By simply inputting the name of a company in the search board, you will be given all information about the employees – emails, names, LinkedIn profiles and contact information.
We also love that it can be used directly on Gmail to generate valid emails. You will also benefit from its integration with tools such as Zapier, Salesforce and Hubspot.
Productivity Tools
Productivity tools ensure you save time by organizing all your needs in one place. You might want to look at one of these tools to streamline your sales workflow.
ShowPad
Showpad is a hidden gem in your sales arsenal in how it organizes your tool and sales content. An upgrade from Google drive in how it creates a centralized zone for sales teams to discover, organize and share content with prospects. Even better, it’s integrated with a tracking system that captures clicks to measure the impact of your content – know who has opened your content and who has not to help qualify prospects.
Engage by ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo can double up as a productivity tool because it provides various automated features that improve employee workflow. With its “set it and forget it” methodology, outreach is automated, and your responses start rolling out to users without lifting a finger.
Sales reps can’t ignore its chrome remote desktop extension, which allows SDRs to export contacts from LinkedIn.
Communication Tools
Sales reps can’t be available round the clock. Hence software is needed to initiate a quick response from anywhere. Some of the best remote tools for communication include:
Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer support software that helps you resolve issues that arise via email or Facebook. This cloud application streamlines customer communication by automating tickets and emails to help troubleshoot issues faster.
With software like this one, you can improve customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, its deployment is limited to Mobile and cloud-based solutions rather than remote desktops.
Drift
A cloud-based solution that helps sellers engage with website visitors in a conversational manner. Drift provides awesome features like chatbots, live chats, meetings, and other self-service options.
Zoho Desk
Zoho desk helps you create a customer support system for your business. With it, you will be able to resolve queries raised by customers, and you can keep track of every interaction your salespeople have with bereaved customers.
Assembling the Right Remote Tools
There are many tools to choose from, but the key to achieving the results you want is to pick the one that aligns with your business goals and size. For instance, if I am the Sales Manager of a startup trying to build my team from scratch and have little funds to work with, here will be my best combination for remote selling.
- Pipedrive or Hubspot – For CRM
- Drift – For communication
- Zoom – For Video conferencing
- Clearbit – For prospecting
- ShowPad – For productivity
This is a selection that meets my needs in terms of functionality, costs, ease of use, accessibility ( available on Windows and Mac, as well as on iOS and Android), and ability to sync with other items in my remote tech stack.
Need a Better Tool to Engage Customers During Virtual Meetings?
Here comes SalesDeck.
Though a new arrival on the scene, SalesDeck offers something different from the likes of Zoom by introducing gamification to virtual selling. Its design models that of deck-building games such as Pokemon. Like in Pokemon, SalesDeck facilitates a two-way exchange between both parties ( buyer and seller ) in a virtual environment, hence, improving engagement during product demos or discovery calls.
With SalesDeck, the much-acclaimed death by PowerPoint is minimized, and you can sell more quicker and faster. In addition to client meetings, SalesDeck helps you onboard new reps faster by training them on how to use your sales process to qualify and close leads.
This trick alone can minimize the ‘learn and forget” circle common with sales reps. Want to try something different? Grab a spot in our Early Adopter Program.
