Top 5 On-Demand Applications to Boost Sales and Marketing Productivity

By Mike Vicchitto | Editor | The Daily Anchor

Today I’d like to showcase five applications that individually offer great value and functionality, and when considered holistically, represent a complete solution to enable collaboration and increase productivity of Sales & Marketing departments.

Email Marketing, Webinar Management, Surveys: Act-On

It’s great when a single vendor can provide three key functions in one application without an explosion in price. A simple, straightforward email marketing tool that is priced by active profiles per month forms the foundation of the value here. Add the ability to create, manage and execute WebEx webinars from within the Act-On interface, seamlessly linking your registration email campaigns to the webinar management and analytics makes it easier to leverage this highly effective Marketing tool.

On top of all that, the ability to incorporate survey questions in the body of your emails, on the fly, and capture all of that data alongside email & webinar response data, is a game-changer. Reducing a click-through to gather information on your customer or prospect and then pushing that response data back to your CRM, including updating Salesforce.com Campaigns, is an end-to-end marketing communication tool that improves on the current standards. You can read my full review here.

Document Management: ShareMethods

ShareMethods has developed a comprehensive and intelligent document sharing system. It can be used as a standalone or integrated with CRM, and has particularly valuable application to Sales & Marketing processes.

Marketing users can upload collateral and sales material, submit it for review and approval across a team, and receive feedback as well as utilize version control to improve materials. Sales has instant access to tagged, categorized collateral, and actively and passively provides feedback to Marketing by downloading, sending, and ranking the quality of materials.

Sales can also use ShareMethods as their primary contract management portal, by generating mail-merge contracts on the fly from templates and directly sending them to clients. Built in support for EchoSign makes getting a signature a snap!

Learn more about ShareMethods here.

Outbound Calling: ConnectAndSell

You’ve worked so hard to deliver qualified leads to Sales – how do you enforce follow-up? The web-based equivalent of cracking the whip has arrived.  ConnectAndSell delivers a guaranteed 5 connects per hour with the key contacts your Sales reps need to speak to.

Essentially, your Sales reps set aside hour long blocks throughout the week where they strap in to their desks with no distractions. They open the ConnectAndSell portal, or if running Salesforce.com, just access a toolbar that runs across the top of their browser. Marketing, or Sales can submit the target lead list to ConnectAndSell, and their call centers run through your list, navigating phone trees and gatekeepers until they get your contact on the line – at which point, the call is immediately transferred to your Sales rep, who has been standing by.

By enforcing distraction-free cold-calling, or guaranteed connects with key decision-makers on deals, you can be sure that your leads are getting the attention they deserve. The Sales reps also benefit from the intense, high-performance demand of an hour or two in the hot seat giving tight, targeted pitches.

Learn more about ConnectAndSell here.

Lead Generation: PowerSell by ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a great alternative to the traditional list purchase. By licensing access to their database of companies and contacts, the savvy marketer can build targeted lists across multiple segments and distribute leads to the Sales team or individuals. With 5 million companies and 45 million contacts, there’s a good chance there’s enough qualified leads for your business to drastically reduce your average cost-per-lead.

ZoomInfo is constantly crawling the web and updating their database, as well as providing deeper insight on your target contacts, including career history, education and affiliations.  PowerSell represents a complete, thorough prospecting tool that goes beyond the traditional business intelligence to generate true competitive advantage for your Marketing & Sales teams. The CRM integration makes it easy to quickly build lists on the fly and move them into marketing campaigns or the sales pipeline, providing the foundation for both team’s upcoming activities.

Learn more about PowerSell here.

Campaign Planning & Analytics: Salesforce.com

With each of the other four applications I’ve mentioned integrating with Salesforce.com out-of-the-box, I recommend it as your system of record for both Sales and Marketing and to use it as a hub for both planning and post-campaign analysis.

The standard Marketing Automation components of Salesforce.com are simple, straightforward and effective. By adding your leads and contacts to campaigns, attaching key dates, costs, and goals to those campaigns, and monitoring conversion and ROI throughout, Marketing can quickly adapt and react, making data-driven decisions about marketing activities.

The reporting capabilities of Salesforce.com are very strong, allowing unlimited custom reports that can aggregate and summarize data across every standard and custom object and field in the database. If Excel spreadsheets are your cup of tea, each report may be exported to .xls or .csv format and further refined and manipulated.

However, the native Dashboards function within salesforce.com provides a great way to visualize key metrics both throughout and after Marketing & Sales campaigns. These can be scheduled to refresh and automatically email to selected individuals or groups, increasing visibility and accountability throughout the organization. You can read more of my thoughts on analytics here.

Tagged as: collaboration, Marketing tools, On-Demand, Productivity, Sales tools