Digital marketing has always been important but has become vital in the past few years. Especially during COVID, more brick-and-mortar stores have shifted from physical to online in terms of advertising and sales.
via BigCommerce
The numbers above show a clear tendency towards a digital-first approach, so much so that businesses in 2022 have shifted towards a digital workplace model altogether.
Making the shift and creating a digital plan will help you save time and resources and boost sales. It allows sales teams to work remotely and service more customers in less time while leveraging the data they willingly give you nonetheless.
Of course, to boost your sales, you will need more than a simple digital mindset. Sales apps, marketing calendars, digital planning, and many scalable actions like producing an app for sales are in order.
Let's get into more detail.
A sales app that only sells is not a sales app that is worth the time and effort. Many sales apps are meant to save time and resources and allow sales teams to focus on more important tasks. Make sure your sales app carries some of the following features:
Best for: Sales task management
ClickUp is one of the best productivity apps, where project management meets fully customizable features that offer flexibility to your sales team and allow you to incorporate your sales pipeline in the overall overview of your brand's tasks.
ClickUp works beautifully for both small businesses and ventures with larger teams by offering project management solutions, workload views, project updates, and team collaboration tools to help bring all your work—all in one place. This all-in-one app also integrates with over 1,000 other work tools, creating a seamless workflow and experience for its users.
Its free plan covers more than most tools a project management app should offer, like its Notepad feature or collaboration abilities. It takes just a few clicks to use the in-app chat feature, and its easy-to-use interface can make administrative tasks and comment sharing easy and intuitive.
Get started with ClickUp for free. No credit card required.
Best for: Email marketing and lead generation
Moosend is among the best email marketing and marketing automation platforms. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and small businesses, Moosend sports an easy and intuitive interface with a small learning curve that can turn each email into a sales rep by selling the right thing at the right time.
Perfect for email marketing on a budget, Moosend, and its competitors can double as sales apps as they follow the self-service system. Its automation capabilities can sell without selling by suggesting just the thing your recipients will love.
The platform is also ideal for lead generation, with fully customizable and responsive landing page templates and subscription forms. Its drag-and-drop editor is easy and intuitive, while the function of viewing your template on multiple screen types like tablet and mobile devices can ensure nothing goes amiss.
As far as lead management is concerned, Moosend integrates with 100+ apps, lead management apps among them.
Best for: Social selling and social listening
Sprout Social is one of the apps that allow brands to integrate their sales plan with their social media management plan. Not a sales app in and of itself, but a powerful booster to any sales plan, Sprout Social offers social media management options through a single platform.
The social media management and optimization platform can boost the functions of the other apps for sales your brand trusts by giving you a comprehensive hub that includes social media performance, analytics, and the engagement your brand scores with all the different parts of your audience. That way, you can make data-driven decisions, analyze your social media traffic and branding trends, and tag your content to measure your campaign's performance across all channels.
Best for: Powerful sales hub
HubSpot is one of the undoubted leaders when it comes to sales apps. It's quite famous for its sales CRM capabilities, the HubSpot sales hub is a tool that is quite sought-after by sales reps and sales teams, and the Marketing hub can help marketers juggle tasks all in one app.
HubSpot offers a mobile app to ensure that nothing goes amiss, while its advanced capabilities can boost customer engagement and the customer experience as a whole, giving you more inbound leads.
HubSpot also offers all the capabilities of popular sales apps, like omnichannel workflows, social media ad tools, and lead-tracking options. HubSpot's tools allow you to understand your sales pipeline, your customer engagement, and various data entry and data management integrations.
For HubSpot Sales Hub, prices start at $45/month. More specifically:
Best for: Qualified leads with the use of chatbots
Acquire is a live chat software that promises to provide a perfect customer experience, making it a real booster for your sales apps and sales plan as a whole. Its advanced capabilities allow customer support agents to solve any customer issue in real-time, through desktop or using its mobile app.
Chatbot technology like Acquire carries can ensure an omnichannel experience with many features, like message routing, the chatbot app, and screen sharing, that can solve any issue.
The latter, along with the live chat software, guarantees that users understand they're communicating with a support agent instead of a bot. This, in turn, can ensure that users won't be left with an answer from the canned responses feature of the app. Rather, they will know that the brand took the time and effort to service them.
Acquire also offers a video call feature that can be useful when a customer query gets a little too complicated, making the customer experience perfect. And, as all brands know, perfect customer experiences are the best sales apps one could have before purchasing the actual sales apps that can boost their efforts.
Acquire's pricing is custom, so the best you could do is to contact the sales team and discuss a quote you'll be happy with. Note that the plans are:
Best for: Surveys simply care and boost your sales
Collecting and incorporating data into your sales management plan is something that all sales managers want. And there's no better way to do this than having a dedicated survey app to boost your sales activities simply by incorporating your users' feedback into your overall plan.
Typeform is fantastic for creating forms that are interesting, intuitive, and follow the natural continuation of a user's action. This helps users engage organically, making Typeform one of the best online form builders.
Typeform's result is conversational and engaging and allows users to feel like they're collaborating with your brand instead of just gathering information and data. This, in turn, allows brands to create a sales process that will be customer-centric and leverage user data to yield the best possible result. You can also create a form and embed it into your brand's mobile apps, no questions asked.
Typeform's tool carries a conditional logic feature to create a more human look and feel, making filling out the form as easy as talking to friendly sales reps and giving them all the right information about the product you're interested in. It also allows brands to skip unnecessary questions and get straight to the point.
Best for: New leads and sales through referrals
Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the oldest sales tactics in the book, and referral tools are among the top sales apps. ReferralCandy allows you to leverage the power of referral marketing and inbound lead generation simply by helping you run your referral program while you sit and relax.
ReferralCandy tracks and rewards users who bring out the best in their social circle and refer their peers to your business, powering up the sales app you're using. Connect it with your brand, mobile sales apps included, and see your conversion skyrocket.
ReferralCandy carries multiple integrations with some of the most popular apps for sales, like Shopify and email marketing and marketing automation platforms. Just build your referral marketing program and turn your audience into sales reps by giving them a unique link and encouraging them to share it with their peers.
Closing sales is not easy for a sales team, and it's true that more than most consumers have grown weary of field sales reps that would try and sell them something irrelevant to their needs. The same goes for a sales call or a generic email offer. Consumers trust digital more and more each day simply because sales apps leverage data through real customer interactions.
This leads to users receiving suggestions based on their preferences, which means they'll come back and perhaps refer some new customers while at it. But some business fundamentals go into using and leveraging customer relationships that have more to do with your sales agents understanding your users and less with the sales apps you're going to choose.
One major issue that goes into customer relationships that most marketers forget is creating and adjusting the tone of voice after understanding what the ideal customer looks like. Understanding this can help brands leverage real-time insights and data and make closing sales easy for their reps.
To create tailor-made offers that will help you be on the same page as your customers, you need to create the profile of your ideal customer or buyer persona. This should be as detailed as possible. The details, such as geographic location, educational background, gender, etc., should lead to a specific benefit your product can offer and the problem it could ideally solve.
After that, you will need to leverage real-time data and analytics. One of the main reasons why digital efforts like email marketing rely on apps that can provide real-time data is to come up with a spot-on solution to the customer's problem. Many of the best apps, like Moosend and other ConvertKit alternatives leverage customer data to create sales recommendations that will have users contact sales reps and turn recipients into hot leads.
Of course, understanding your brand's tone is just as important:
via SimpleStage
Your tone of voice makes you memorable and able to connect with your ideal customer persona. It's what will shape your digital sales efforts, from spot-on ads to personalized videos that sell without selling. It can also set the mood for what you offer or even what your next move is going to be. This is why your brand's tone can be adjusted according to the platform you're using at that stage or the sales rep who handles an interested client.
First of all, you'll need to create a plan that will be SMART:
via The Coaching Tools Company
Goals that are specific are easier to reach. Measurable sales goals will show you the progress you've made. Actionable and realistic goals allow sales reps to understand what they're doing and marketers to know what the best sales apps are for each goal. Finally, time-bound goals allow your marketing and sales teams to understand how to invest their time and what priorities they need to set.
After that, start creating your sales plan that will boost sales, lead generation, and overall awareness. You need it to be tailor-made and carry calculated actions. Perhaps, for your audience and your offer, a sales call will work better than a catchy subject line. It's up to you, your offer, and your plan.
Never forget the importance of market research and understanding your competitors. You know your product, sure, but how does it work against what users already know? Perhaps one of your competitors has a sales app, for example. Will creating a mobile sales app help you boost your sales and attract their audience, or is a mobile app something your ideal customer won't bother with?
Creating a cohesive plan for your market research will not only help you understand your target market and your competitors. It will also allow you to understand the task management steps your sales teams need to take, the automation recipes you need to take notice of - always in tandem with your customer data, of course - and the sales process you need to develop, especially if you're a small business.
Market research will, eventually, show you how to turn your goals into action plans and your pain points and your customer's pain points into strengths. It can also help you understand the people you want to sell to, how to practice spot-on lead generation and sales prospecting, and how to, eventually, increase sales without trying too hard.
Speaking of marketing, create and honor a service-level agreement (SLA) between your sales and marketing teams. This agreement will detail how each team can support each other, contribute to the other's goals, and honor boundaries in a way that still moves prospects toward conversion.
The role of marketing, digital or not, is to create space for new leads and retain old customers. The role of the sales teams is to keep a repeater's CLTV high while promoting new offers and benefits. It makes huge sense for the two teams to be aligned in both larger and small businesses through streamlined processes and collaboration tools. Of course, this takes a customer relationship management tool that keeps both teams updated about how prospects react to products.
A sales CRM can help unify the efforts of both sales and marketing teams by aligning their goals and building a sales funnel that will make sense both from a marketing and a sales perspective.
All in all, unifying sales and marketing will help your sales reps understand your marketing team's vision and your marketing team understands how your sales reps communicate with consumers.
Of course, none of the above is possible, as we mentioned before, without using some of the best sales apps and customer relationship management apps and coming up with new sales activities.
I couldn't close this chapter without including a couple more sales strategies that could help brands and sales reps alike.
One thing to remember is that no matter how well-developed your mobile app is and how good your sales reps are, you won't boost your conversion without being flexible and using multiple channels for customer acquisition.
Create a blog, become authoritative in your niche, find the tools that meet your needs, and see your small business thrive in no time.
About the Author:
Téa Liarokapi is a Senior Content Writer for Moosend, an email marketing and marketing automation platform, and an obsessive writer in general. In her free time, she tries to find new ways to stuff more books in her bookcase and content ideas - and cats - to play with.