Most businesses think in terms of marketing strategy when they go about building a successful enterprise. However, marketing strategy is not the be all and end all for ensuring a success story. When your planning has been laid down on the table, it is the execution that will determine whether your customers deem you to be a good provider or not.

To ensure your triumph in the competitive world of business, you need to be prepared with a stellar sales team who will engage your customers and make sure that every interaction clients have with your business is a positive and lasting one.

Your sales team is tasked with chasing after leads, closing deals, establishing a good rapport with leads, preparing their pitches and doing product demos for potential clients, and more.

You will need to help your sales team make the most of their skills and talents with a host of appropriate tech tools to make their job easier, as well as enhance sales productivity and improve success rates. Here are some of the most effective sales tools to equip your sales force with and help step up your sales process:

1. Create an electronic signature for your business – don’t delay the execution of your business or sales contracts by insisting on having a paper document with actual written signatures. The bottleneck created by prolonging the sales process will only lose you clients and choice sales deals. Instead, close sales transactions a good deal faster by using electronic signatures for your contracts and other business agreements.
2. Have a digital order form online – in this digital age of online shopping, many of your customers are pressed for time and prefer making quick decisions. Have what they need ready when they require it with the entire catalog of your products and services right at their fingertips.
3. Have standardized digital documents in place – Have digitalized brochures, sales letter templates and automated quotations ready for deployment to save time and promote efficiency. Not only will your customers thank you for giving them opportunities to make well-informed choices, your sales team will thank you for making their jobs easier, as well.
4. Install Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology – CRM software is basically a comprehensive customer database containing client contact details and other information. However, it also presents the added functionality of appointment diaries, copies of letters, emails and phone conversation data, and reminders for follow-ups. The CRM database will help members of your sales team orient themselves before initiating client contact. More importantly, CRM software provides management analysis on which sales activities are effective, which sales representative is most successful, and what other products or services might interest which particular customers.
5. Give your sales team access to cloud database technology – with your sales team on the go, they’ll need customer information on-hand to be able to meet your clients’ needs in a timely manner. Improve your sales team’s productivity by giving them access to relevant information to serve your customer base. Access to sales contracts, and even CRM data on the cloud will help your sales team make the most optimal decisions and improve collaboration efforts among your sales staff wherever they may be.

By ensuring that your business and your sale teams are equipped with these useful technology tools, you’ll be certain your customers get the VIP treatment they deserve. Not only will a better-equipped sales team give you a higher customer conversion rate, you’ll be retaining more satisfied clients, as well.

Photo courtesy of DeviantArt.