View Call Logs against a Lead

Hello everyone, we just went live with a new update on ToolsonCloud CRM. With this update users will be able to view Call logs associated with a lead at one single place without the need to search each and every call log.

Here’s a brief of this release…

Need?

Prior to the update, ToolsonCloud CRM had Call Logging module using which users can add and keep track of their call logs done. Users can associate each call log with a linked lead or contact or a deal.

There was a need for the users to get a quick glance of all the call logs associated with a particular lead. 

What’s New?

With this update, if users have associated a linked Lead while creating a Call Log, then they will be able to get a list of all call logs associated or linked to a particular Lead.

Users will be able to view all the call logs associated with a lead at a single place. To get these call logs, users can go to the respective lead’s detail page and can find all the call logs in the right side bar as shown in the below image:

This section will list down all the call logs tagged to that particular lead and will display the call notes and the date and time of the call.

If the user want more details about any particular Call Log, he can click on the call notes to view the detailed Call Log’s page.

I hope you will like using this feature, do let me know your thoughts on this…

What is a Lead Magnet?

If you have been listening to the term “Lead Magnet” lately and would like to know more about it, then you are at the right place. In this post, let’s learn what exactly a lead magnet is and how can it help you…

As the name suggests, Lead Magnets are some kind of resources which helps you attract leads. They are a type of marketing resources which helps you generate more leads. These resources provides something of value to the prospective customers due to which they are willing to share their contact information in exchange for the value provided in the resources.

Lead Magnet [Image credits]

Let’s learn this with an example.

• Let’s say you are searching online to invest in a Real Estate property. You came across a website which had a well-researched whitepaper available with analysis of real estate prices across different localities.

• From your perspective, this is a very useful resource available to you, however you need share your contact information on the website to receive the whitepaper.

• If you find the content summary to be useful and you trust the website, you would willingly share your contact information.

• Now, apart from sending you the whitepaper, the website seller (of course with appropriate permission) may also share you some more useful information or great deals which you might be interested in.

Here, the Whitepaper is a Lead Magnet, which helps generate leads via an opt-in form. This is an inbound way of marketing without having to push sell anything.

Businesses usually make use of this marketing tool to provide information & insights of value, to the prospect for free. This encourages the prospects to share their contact information on an opt-in form to receive more such relevant information. These contact information can be leveraged later to warm up the prospects through a marketing or sales funnel for nurturing the leads for a sales conversation.

Examples of Lead Magnets

If you want to create Lead magnets to generate leads, you can do so in many ways. Some of the examples of lead magnets are:

1. Ebooks
2. Whitepapers
3. Free Trials of products and services
4. Discount codes
5. Webinars
6. Videos
7. Templates such as Business plan template, marketing plan templates, sales email templates, Pitch deck templates, etc.

You can prepare these resources by providing a comprehensive and informative content which is focused on a particular topic around your niche. These might be some problems which your target audiences are generally searching to solve. 

Here, you can provide more insights and solutions to the problems faced by your prospects. With these you can demonstrate strong expertise in your domain to establish a trust with your prospect, which will ultimately help improve your chances of getting any business in future.

Having said that, you should always remember that the goal of creating a lead magnet should always be to initiate a conversation with your audience instead of trying to strike a sales deal with them from day one. The goal is help your audience and nurture the relationship.

Hope you had a good time learning about Lead Magnets. If you are interested in trying out a CRM to track your leads, feel free to try out ToolsonCloud CRM. It’s free.

What is Lead Nurturing and How to do it?

Lead Nurturing refers to the act of engaging with the your leads in order to develop a relationship. The purpose of lead nurturing is to create brand awareness and create a positive brand image of your organization in the minds of the prospect. 

Lead nurturing may not lead to immediate improvement in sales revenue figures. The objective of lead nurturing is not outright sales but to play a long term game of building brand trust and loyalty. 

Most of the leads which usually fall on the top of the marketing funnel are usually not ready to make a purchase immediately. Nurturing them helps to build an everlasting relationship due to which, whenever the prospect is ready to make a purchase, they shall choose your organization's products or services to make the purchase.

How to Nurture Leads?

Nurturing leads usually means engaging with the leads at various stages of his buying journey. This can be achieved by providing them the much needed information to solve his pain points. 

Buyers may have a needs of different types of information depending on the stage of his buying journey. Top of the funnel leads might be looking for information about his specific pain point awareness while the bottom of the funnel leads might have already done their research and would be in the stage of evaluating and comparing different products which may include yours as well as competitors' products. The goal of nurturing should be to quench the thirst of information for various leads depending on the stage of their buyer's journey.

Some of the ways by which you can nurture your leads are preparing contents around the pain points you are solving, the challenges faced in the Industry to which you are catering to, and the solutions which you offer to solve those pain points and challenges.

You can write blogs, prepare whitepapers, ebooks, social media posts, email newsletters, run sequence based email marketing campaigns, etc. One of the simplest approaches is also to create user guides or knowledgebase of your products which are available in the public domain or can be accessed easily via an email opt-in form. 

You may also try out by writing on topics which lead your customers to succeed. For e.g. ToolsonCloud is Sales CRM which helps to improve sales productivity of sales teams. This motivated us to write on topics which help our customers to improve their sales and sales productivity.

Sharing contents regularly to the leads serves two purposes. Firstly showing up regularly ensures that leads feel you are alive and they can trust you for a long term engagement. Secondly, when they find the content to be helpful for them to make purchase related research and decisions, it builds much needed brand awareness and builds loyalty.

I hope you liked reading this article, do let me know your thoughts on this.

By the way, If you run a startup or a small business and are looking for a Sales CRM software to track your leads better, then do try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. You will definitely love using it.

Practical Cold Emailing tips for Entrepreneurs

Cold emailing is one of the powerful tools in an Entrepreneur’s arsenal. If used well, it can do wonders for a startup. You can use it for sales, getting deals, getting investments, getting mentors and many more. But the fact is most often cold emails get ignored. If your approach is incorrect, you may rarely get a reply from the recipient. 

In this post, I would like to share some tips to make your cold emails more appealing. This shall surely help you get more replies to your cold emails.

1. Personalize and Customize

The most important element of any cold mail is personalization. People won’t even bother to read any email from an unknown person let alone reply to it, unless it is relevant to them. You can make your emails relevant to the recipient by personalizing your email. 

Remember, sending cold emails is different from a mass email campaign. Since cold emails are sent to a limited set of people, you should be able to do a bit of research about your prospect before sending them a cold email. 

You may look out for publicly available information on company websites, their social media profiles in Linkedin or Facebook, any newspaper articles, etc. In your email, you may cite such instances such as you liked reading their article on Linkedin or liked reading their thoughts on media publications, etc. This will help you warm up your prospect.

2. Keep it short, quick and easy to read

When you are sending your first cold mail, ensure to keep it short and concise. Avoid sending any detailed business proposals in the mail content when you are just trying to initiate the conversation. A short and to the point content is faster to read and act. The easier it is for the reader to understand and act, the faster you tend to get replies.

3. Talk about solving a business pain point

If you are selling to a B2B client, then everyone’s goal is to solve some or the other business challenges in their organization. Instead of selling the features of your product you will be required to talk about solving a business pain point being faced by your prospect. This will generate more interest and will help you improve your reply rate.

4. Don’t sell anything in the mail 

Many beginners tend to make mistakes by trying to sell their products within the first cold email itself. This approach is bound to just worsen your brand image and you may never get a response. The purpose of a cold email is to get a meeting or an appointment with the prospect. The best approach is to ask for a short discovery call to begin with. The first discovery call will give you enough information to decide whether it is a qualified lead worth pursuing further or not.

5. Avoid describing product features

As I wrote earlier, avoid describing your product features in your first cold email. This is because, in the beginning, even you will not be aware of your lead having any real requirement for your products or services. Additionally, you should avoid pushing any unsolicited information to the lead such as product features and specifications without gauging the level of interest from the leads.

6. Avoid sounding like a template

Many beginners tend to make the mistake of using cold email templates available on the internet. While it is not wrong to use templates, often they send the same email contents to the prospects without modifying as per their context. While you may feel confident with that, the fact is people can smell templates because those are so common. People want to hear from People instead of Machines. So you must bring out your personal tone in your emails. This shall help build a connection and a relationship to initiate a conversation. 

7. Follow up till you get a reply.

Success in sales lies in timely tracking and follow-ups. Many research suggests that salespersons tend to get replies after the 8th follow-up. You may not need to wait till the 8th one if you do a timely follow-up. It is highly likely to get a reply in your 3rd or 4th email. So always ensure to follow up with your prospects. Ideally, you should follow up within 2-3 days otherwise the prospect may forget.

Hope you found these tips useful. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for Cold Emails and Lead tracking, Do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!

4 Tips on How to Convert Your Leads into Sales

 

Photo by Lukas from Pexels

It takes skills to find leads, but it requires more effort to convert these leads into sales. Based on the research conducted by Verse, marketing and sales teams leave about 55% of leads neglected. This shows how the majority of leads don’t convert into sales are put to waste, but you can take measures to reduce lost leads and produce better conversion rates.  

Leads are vital if you want your company to succeed and different teams from your organization should work together. Read more on how to convert leads into customers.

1. Assess Your Organization

Identify the pain points in your company to improve your lead generation and conversion process. You may look into the following factors during the assessment:

• Company size - How you will approach conversion depends on your manpower
• Channel - Look at the existing channels which will reveal which is the least profitable and most effective channel
• Demographics - Understand the demographics of the market conditions, your target leads, and local competitors
• Industry - Taking a look at the general picture of your industry will also help to stay updated on trends in the targeted leads
• Conversion cycle stage - By analyzing the exact points where leads’ interest go downhill, you’ll be able to adjust your conversion process.

2. Stay in Touch with Your Audience

Buyers and consumers are more skeptical of the rampant push-for-sales and advertising they see online. Hence, you must maintain constant communication with them. Instead of spending the majority of your time researching leads, scheduling calls, and planning emails, allot time to actually talk to your existing prospects. Doing this will take you out of the loop of simply generating and capturing leads and contacts without converting them into sales. 

Lead conversion software can help you keep in touch with your audience as you no longer have to manually manage your leads. ToolsonCloud is one CRM application that can help you organize your leads. Its email integration feature sends emails to contacts directly from the application. In addition, it is cloud-based which stores all information online. With this feature, you and your team can organize personal contacts for your leads.

Part of keeping in touch with your audience is determining unresponsive leads. You may do this through quick follow-up emails or phone calls asking your leads if they are interested in purchasing the service or product. This is an effective way to weed out dead leads and to quickly convert leads into sales before a lot of time passes. 

3. Focus On Monitoring

After identifying your dead and active leads, you already have an idea on what specific leads to invest your energy and time into. It’s best to know what stage your leads are at the moment. Better visibility on the active leads will give you insights on the next steps to take.

From the moment that the leads are generated, make it a habit to record the leads. As you do this by using CRM software, you’ll be able to monitor the leads better throughout the sales funnel. 

Furthermore, CRM helps with this tracking process. If you can find one that provides reports and insights, then that would provide data-based decisions for your organization. ToolsonCloud has very useful tracking features like adding activity and setting reminders for follow-up tasks, insights reports, and sales pipeline manager.

4. Collaborate with Your Team

You must communicate goals to your team. Goals are set by the upper management, but it's the entire company that will have to implement them. There are many ways to communicate goals. You can do it via a formal document, face-to-face or virtual meetings, or through a software that allows collaborative features. Whatever way you choose, it’s important that you define your goals, craft a strategy, stick to it, and implement it. 

The best lead management software allows social collaboration. ToolsonCloud provides you with the freedom to collaborate within sales teams with its options to assign leads, deals, or tasks. You may also measure the performance of your employees with ToolsonCloud which promotes accountability.

Path Towards Sales

It can be overwhelming to figure out how to convert customers into sales. However, you can take on the above-mentioned actionable steps.

Your journey towards converting leads to sales may also be aided by different platforms and software. You may build organic leads using social media or manage active leads using a CRM software.

You can take your pick for the platform and software that you are going to use. If you are looking for a CRM software with a clean and lightweight user interface, then try ToolsonCloud by signing up here for free.

Free Sales Lead Tracker Excel Template

Dear Reader, Greetings and welcome to ToolsonCloud Blog!

We have been listening to our reader's demands and many of you expressed interest in a Sales Lead Tracker template to organize your leads in excel. In this post we would like to share with you a universal sales lead tracker template prepared in excel. You can easily reuse it as per the sales process followed in your company.