This is a guest post from Kyle Anderson; a freelance tech journalist whose typical day is spent scouring the web for the latest developments in the world of business tools and software. He loves any type of software that automates his life! For his pastimes, he is an avid lover of travelling, poetry, and photography.

When it comes to prospecting and the wider sales process, there’s never a shortage of tools you can use to make your work easier and more efficient. One of the most versatile of them is Outlook, a Microsoft tool that is popularly known for email and business calendar management.

However, Outlook is not limited to just these two functions.

You can easily unlock its hidden power by integrating it with compatible add-ins and other extensions. In the end, you’ll be able to complete a broad range of business functions including market/customer research, communication with your clients, document sharing, accounting, and more.

In this Process Street post, we take a look at how you can run a successful outreach campaign for your sales cycle using Outlook and its supported add-ins.

We’ll cover:

• Lead qualification Outlook Add-ins
• Email template Outlook Add-ins
• Meeting scheduling Outlook Add-ins
• Contract signing Outlook Add-ins
• Accounting and invoicing Outlook Add-ins

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Being able to sell is a skill.

You know this if you’ve ever tried working in sales.

My first efforts working in a sales capacity were slow.

There were no management structures in place in that small startup to support me, train me, or guide me.

I was going it solo.

There was a lot to learn and, in a role which thrives on confidence, a lot to be anxious about.

Learning the basics of how to sell is important even if you feel you have the natural skills to do well in the area.

For me, learning the basics of the trade came from a little book. A little red book. Jeffery Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling, to be precise.

After recommending our audience Gitomer’s text in my best sales books roundup post, I managed to sit down with our best selling author and sales champion to explore the craft.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover:

• To learn how to sell, you have to learn to communicate well
• The Little Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
• How to make sure you get things done
• Build your personal brand and support it with social media
• How to use humor as an effective tool
• How to understand what’s required for sales leadership

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We all enjoy coming up with solutions. Unfortunately, if the solution needs to be internalized by a group of people to improve team execution, it can be a frustrating and time-consuming effort to get everyone on board.

Let’s say you have clearly identified that a process inefficiency is causing a bottleneck in sales productivity, and have built a solid process to address the issue. You’ve got the green light from senior management, they think it looks fantastic and can’t wait to see the impact it has.

Now, the real work begins – communicating the value of the process to your sales team and convincing them to implement it in their day-to-day work. Not as easy as it may sound.

Well, in this post I hope to relieve you of at least some of the stress that comes with sales process adoption by highlighting 9 tried and tested tips that will address 2 key obstacles you’ll face:

1. Convincing sales reps that the process works and helps them achieve their sales goals.
2. Providing the tools that enable reps to easily integrate the process into their day-to-day activities.

Successfully tick both those boxes, and you will be well on your way.

Let’s get started.

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Retaining valuable customers is a necessity

In one of her hit songs, Adele famously sings the words “Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead”.

Minus the sentimental value, this also applies to the world of business. It is a simple reality that customers come and go and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it.

On the other hand, sometimes it lasts. Sometimes you can retain a customer for a long period of time and build a fruitful, trusting relationship that enables both of you to be more successful.

There has been some fascinating research done in recent years to highlight just how important it is to keep your customers happy.

Beyond the well-known Pareto principle that states 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its customers, Harvard Business School Professor, Sunil Gupta, has provided further evidence to show the importance of retaining customers that provide high levels of profitability.

Furthermore, Bain & Company have found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%, and it is widely agreed upon in the SaaS world that the cost of acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-25% more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Needless to say, making a concerted effort to retain your customers is just as, if not more important than acquiring new ones.

Execute account management processes flawlessly

Retaining customers, particularly high-value customers, is nothing short of essential for the growth of SaaS and other subscription-based companies, and to do so requires excellent account management.

That’s why we’ve gone ahead and created this set of checklists; to help you flawlessly execute various processes from conducting a thorough analysis of your competitors to the daunting task of preventing a valuable customer from churning.

Ever found yourself struggling with the sales-to-service handoff process or upselling? We’ve got those covered, too.

In this post, I’m going to provide a brief outline of each checklist and summarize why it’s a good idea to integrate them into your account management processes.

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Sales is one of the core aspects of how a business functions.

Without sales, your brilliant product will just sit there, neglected and unused.

But no one is born as a brilliant salesperson, just as no one is born with an innate knowledge of how to run an effective outbound strategy.

We learn these things on the way. A lot of the time, we learn from the sales jobs we’ve had. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. Why not learn from the best salespeople, the highest performing companies, and the extreme examples?

In this Process Street article, we’re bringing expertise galore to your bookshelf or Kindle. We’ll go through our 7 key recommended reads, and follow that with 38 more sales books to satisfy your niche, industry, or needs.

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Building an initial sales approach is something loads of us have attempted to do at some point or other.

Sales ends up being one of the key ways companies grow and scale. We all know this.

But there’s a big difference between doing effective outreach for your startup on a high-touch basis where you’re still understanding customer needs and figuring out approaches, and turning this knowledge into a sales machine with a full sales team that can operate in a financially efficient way.

Understanding yourself in the market and growing to be the company you want to be require different slightly strategies.

This growth from tiny solopreneur kind of structures to managing teams with effective documented practices is what this article will be all about!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to take a look into some expert insights from Close.io‘s recent webinar with their CEO Steli Efti, Process Street’s CEO Vinay Patankar, PandaDoc‘s Director of Inside Sales Mike Paladino, and Groove‘s VP of Sales Mike Sutherland.

We’re going to pull out the key questions to help scale your sales in a way that works:

• What do you want to scale?
• Is now a good time to scale?
• How do you build a process for scaling?
• How do you get a sales teams to follow the process?
• When and how do I add people to a sales team?

And finally, we’ll give you 10 free process templates for different areas of sales for you to start using in your business today.

You can watch the whole webinar here: How to build a scalable sales process (Q&A webinar)

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Throughout a customer lifecycle, it is important to take opportunities when they present themselves.

One aspect which many SaaS companies will be familiar with is the ongoing attempt to upgrade customers to the next level of billing.

The core method of achieving this is to add features and improve your product.

This provides provides greater value for the client and gives them more reasons to consider purchasing your services – resulting in an upsell which works for both parties.

I imagine most of you reading have bought something from Amazon at some point in time. Yet when Amazon offer a more premium delivery service with access to films and television shows many of you will have gone from occasionally using Amazon for purchases to being fully fledged Prime users!

Amazon offered greater value and you thought it was worth paying for. You were upsold.

But importantly, both you and Amazon came out of the deal as winners!

In this article, we’ll look at how different companies have utilized upselling to drive their business forward, and try to learn a little something from each.

Then we’ll take a more in depth look at how Process Street upsells its customers, and the importance of seeing this as a company wide effort rather than small aspect of sales.

At the end of the article, we’ll give you a free Process Street process template you can use in your business for upselling customers. This process is geared to be run by a member of the sales team to try to upsell a valuable client, and close the deal.

Checkout the snapshot below!

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Born in 1970, sales operations was originally described as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force”.

Sales is moving from paper rolodexes into the world of AI, automation and cloud computing. With it comes more nasty number things than ever before, making operations staff a vital part of the sales team.

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The following is a guest post from Forster Perelsztejn. As content marketer, Forster gathers sales data at Prospect.io in order to deliver powerful and insightful advice to salespeople. Check out his Top 10 Cold Email Templates Based on 3,327,652 Emails Sent! and connect with him on LinkedIn.

An essential part of my job at Prospect.io is to help customers craft cold emails that actually get replies. Why is that? Because cold email brings business in!

Yet, you’d be surprised at how many of those emails are poorly written. Most of the ones I get are a cringefest even though they were sent by professional salespeople. For that reason, I feel it’s essential to spread the word about cold email best practices.

Use this 10-point checklist below to optimize your sales emails to make it more likely you’ll get results. After all, only around 1.7% of cold emails get a reply…

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Some people seem like naturals when it comes to sales. Their smooth talking and deep product knowledge entices customers and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Source

A high performing sales person is a huge asset to a company, and they’re often paid very well as a reward!

• Maybe you want to start a new business and need to jump into the sales role to get your fledgling startup off the ground?
• Maybe you want to build a sales team to crush sales goals while you focus on your specialty?
• Or maybe you just want to get into sales as a career and need to know how to get up to speed fast?

Well, in this Process Street article we’ll cover solutions to each of these conundrums. We’ll look at:

1. How Salesforce hit their sales goals
2. 10 top tips the sales experts have for a beginner
3. How Close.io CEO Steli Efti builds outbound sales teams
4. What steps you need to take to build sales processes (with a load of premade templates to help you get started!)

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Legendary sales guru, Zig Ziglar.

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