What is SDR - Sales Development Representative

What is an SDR?

SDR stands for Sales Development Representative. These are the folks in modern sales teams who specialize in sales prospecting. Broadly SDRs reach out to leads, qualify the leads and then pass on the qualified lead to quota-carrying sales executives who further engage with the prospect to close a deal.


What do SDRs do?

SDRs try to reach out to leads via both inbound ways as well as outbound ways. In the case of inbound, they receive Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from the marketing team who in turn would have got it from their marketing campaigns. Then SDRs reach out to these leads to engage them in a meaningful conversation to explore their needs and try to assess if they are qualified to be pursued further. 

Similarly, in the case of the outbound way, they try to reach leads by researching potential leads and reaching out to them via cold outreach. SDRs use their industry domain knowledge to understand the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of the company’s products & services. This further helps them to filter out and prioritize the leads matching their ICP. 

SDRs try to reach out to prospects via multiple channels such as emails or phones. They become the face of the organization and try to introduce the organization to the prospect during their initial conversation. During their conversation, they try to build a relationship with the prospect and also try to understand their long-term and short-term needs to identify if they are the right fit to pursue them further or not.

If the prospect’s requirements fit the organization’s offerings then SDRs try to suggest suitable products and services which can fulfill their requirements. They try to build a long-term relationship with the prospect so that it will provide a base for the SDRs to reach out to them for future opportunities as well. Once the prospect is interested in the products and services of the organization and would like to engage in further discussions, then the prospect is passed on to the quota-carrying sales executives who take it further for deal closure. 




How does an SDR help the Organization?

  • Having dedicated SDRs helps to standardize the sales process of the organization. This way a dedicated amount of effort is spent every day on sales prospecting activities. This keeps the sales pipeline steady by maintaining the ratio of leads in various stages of the sales funnel. 
  • In many conventional organizations, sales team members are given twin responsibilities of prospecting as well as closing. But in this approach, sometimes sales executives tend to focus more on closing the existing active deal in hand instead of spending more time on nurturing the leads who are at the top of the sales funnel. This may lead to many leads dropping off from the top of the funnel since they were not given appropriate attention during their initial purchase journey. 
  • Having SDRs on the sales team gives a clear predictable insights on the future sales expected since sales leaders can get clear visibility of the sales expected in future months based on the steady pipeline and conversion metrics data.
  • SDRs tend to specialize in the task of doing research about their leads and following up with them. This helps to improve the quality of leads flowing down the sales funnels thereby increasing the chance of deal closure for the sales executives. This in turn helps in faster revenue growth and also leads to higher productivity of sales executives who can focus more on closing deals faster. 


CRM forms an integral part of the work of SDRs and Sales Executives during this process. With the help of CRM, SDRs can keep track of all the leads, maintain track of their conversation history as well as add important notes. This in turn helps the sales executives close deals faster so that they don’t redo discovery calls with the clients again and can close deals more efficiently. 

If you wanna try out Sales CRM for your team, then do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM today.


What is Upselling?

What is Upselling?

Upselling is a selling technique where the seller tries to sell or pitch a higher-value product that is similar to the product which the customer intends to purchase at the moment. This increases the value of the transactions and helps improve the average revenue per transaction. 

This is usually done by proposing a higher version of the product or a similar product with more features compared to the current product under consideration for purchase. The seller tries to drive the customer to understand the value of the higher-priced products so that they purchase them. 



An example of Upselling

Let us take the same Laptop purchase example discussed in our last post on Cross-selling.

Assume that you went to purchase a Laptop from an electronics store. The seller asked about your need for buying the laptop. You explained to him that you need it for your work. The seller tries to understand your context deeper by trying to delve deeper. He inquires about the type of work you would do. He gets to know that you are a Software Engineer and would require a higher-end version of the laptop in the future for better performance. 

Then the seller tries to propose to you to buy an enhanced version of the laptop with more features and capabilities compared to the one which you had initially planned. He tries to explain to you the features of the higher-priced laptop and the value which you may get buying it. You find the discussion convincing enough to purchase the higher-value laptop and finally purchase it. 

This way the seller was able to improve his revenue of the transaction and you as a customer were also able to derive a better deal in terms of value.


How does Upselling help?

  • Upselling helps to increase the revenue of the organization
  • Upselling helps the customer to get more value out of his purchase transaction. Customers usually agree to purchase the higher version of the product keeping their context and future in mind. Many customers buy high-value products by foreseeing the future Return on Investment (RoI).
  • Upselling also helps the seller build a better relationship with their customers.
  • Upselling is usually easier compared to another selling technique of Cross-selling. This is because customers are more likely to purchase a similar yet high-value and high-priced product compared to buying an add-on product which happens in the case of cross-selling. 


What is Cross Selling?

What is Cross Selling?

Cross-selling is a Selling technique in which the seller tries to sell an additional product or service to the customer in addition to the core product which the customer intended to purchase. 

This is done by trying to sell related products as per the context of the customer. With this approach, the seller is able to make additional revenue and at the same time customer is able to derive more value from the purchase transaction.



An Example of Cross-Selling

Let us try to understand this technique with the help of an example.

Let’s say you went to an Electronics store to buy a laptop. When you meet the sales executive, he shall ask you about your needs and the purpose for which you will be using your laptop. During your discussion, you mentioned that you require a laptop for office work.

After a while, you finalized one laptop for purchase at the store. Now during that time, the salesperson may propose to cross-sell another related product say a mouse or a headset which will prove to be helpful to you as part of your office work. This way seller tries to match your needs by trying to cross-sell a few additional products or services.

Seller may also offer some discount on the additional products being sold. For example, they may offer complementary antivirus software or laptop warranty services at discounted prices. This way as a customer you may also be able to get more value out of the price paid, otherwise, you might have bought it separately without much of a discount.


How Cross-Selling helps?

Cross-selling helps both the seller as well as the customer.

The seller gets to improve his organization’s revenue and also build a deeper relationship with the customer by providing more value for their buck.

Similarly, the customer also benefits by saving time and money which they might have spent exploring the other related products themselves later.

Contrary to what a newbie salesperson might think, Salesperson, should not hesitate to try to cross-sell add-on products and services to the customer. Cross-sell can be very helpful to the customer if the salesperson is genuinely interested in adding value to the customer.


Difference between Inbound and Outbound Sales
Hey friends, if you have been hearing about Inbound and Outbound sales and feeling confused about these two terms, then you have landed up at the right post. In this article we shall explore what exactly is Inbound and Outbound sales.

Inbound Sales:


As the name suggests, in this sales approach, customers will approach you first, in order to make a purchase.

In this case, customers tend to do their research well in advance and are well informed about the product or solution before they approach the seller. 

After doing initial research, customers shall reach out to you if your product or organisation is having a good brand image or reputation in the market.

In the case of online search, they may land up on your website in case you are ranking better on the search keywords being used by the prospective customer.

These types of leads tend to have a high conversion rate since they are already aware and can be termed as Hot leads. 

Inbound leads shall contact you directly or may leave their contact details requesting for call back. As a sales person you shall be required to reach out to the lead to do a quick lead qualification call and move the lead through the purchase process.

Marketers can also improve the number of inbound leads by having lead magnets in their website. Some of the examples of lead magnets are free ebooks, whitepapers, reports, etc. If the lead is genuinely interested in the lead magnets, they would be willing to share their contact in exchange for any valuable insights.

This type of sales approach works well if your product is easy to understand, needs less handholding and customers tend to be well aware of the product or brand


Outbound Sales:


As the name suggests, Outbound sales is more about going outside to find a customer. In this case sales people shall try to find qualified leads by trying to cold email or cold call leads. 

In case of outbound sales, the sales team may get an initial database of leads either from a directory, social media or from any database provider.

Salespeople shall do cold outreach either on social media, emails or calls and try to initiate a conversation with the lead. This helps them to qualify the lead and understand if the lead is a good fit for the solution they are selling.

If the lead is qualified, it will be taken forward by the Sales executive through the regular sales process involving further discovery call, product demo, negotiation, etc.

Since this method involves cold outreach, the conversion rate in this case tends to be low and the initial leads are mostly top of the funnel leads, say Cold Leads.

This sales strategy is mostly used when your organization is relatively new or unknown in the market and you do not want to wait forever for inbound leads.

This sales strategy is also used in case of large and complex B2B deals which is done by reaching out to only targeted leads who are key stakeholders at big organizations.

Early stage startups tend to use a lot of outbound sales in initial days. This helps them to get some interested leads quickly and they are able to get first hand feedback from their prospects. This helps them in early validation of the product market fit and helps them to iterate and improve their product based on feedback.




Having said that, modern sales organizations tend to sell using a hybrid approach by combining both inbound and outbound sales strategies to maximize its benefit.

Let's say you got an inbound lead who downloaded a research paper on your website. But he or she may not be the right person for you to sell a complex solution. In that case you may do an outbound cold outreach to certain key stakeholders in that organisation to pitch your solution.



Hope you liked reading this post. Let me know your thoughts.

By the way if you want to track your inbound as well as outbound leads, feel free to try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM software for free.

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!

 How to generate B2B Leads organically?

If you are into a business involving B2B clients, then you have landed at the right post. In this article, we will explore how you can generate B2B leads for your business via organic approaches.

Here is what you can do to get organic B2B leads…

    


 

1. Linkedin Outreach

Join Linkedin groups in your similar domain or groups having people with similar profiles as your ideal customer profile. Next, send them a connection request to add to your network. After a few days of the connection, you may send them a cold message for a short discovery call. You may be required to warm up your connection a bit for a few days with your LinkedIn posts to avoid getting ignored when you send a cold message.


2. Business Marketplace/Forums

If you sell a known B2B product that is not too complex to understand and doesn’t require an elevator pitch, then you may try this. Look out for joining various online marketplaces and forums dealing with B2B businesses. You will find B2B buyers and sellers in these marketplaces who are genuinely looking for both buy and sell business opportunities.


3. Join professional networking platforms

If you are a startup or building any B2B products for startups, then you may join professional networking platforms such as angel.co or other startup networking platforms. Try to network with various startup founders and executives to create a connection and get business opportunities.


4. In-person Business conferences

You may look out for various offline/In-person business conferences being organized in your Industry domain by various media houses, industry bodies, trade unions, government, etc. These conferences are attended by the leaders and executives of various companies with the sole motive of networking with fellow business leaders for business opportunities.


5. Cold Outreach like Cold Emails, Cold Calling

You may reach out to various businesses via Cold emails and Cold calls. If you are dealing with small and medium businesses, then you may get their contacts from various online business directories as well as their websites. If you are dealing with a large organization, then you may have to work a bit more to get the contact details of their stakeholders. 


6. Inbound Marketing/Content Marketing

Create the content on the topics around your business. This will attract readers who might be interested in your business. You may create content on Blogs, Social Media, Youtube, write Industry research papers, Whitepapers, Case studies, ebooks, etc. Ensure to write content that is useful to the readers having your ideal customer persona. 

Also, an important element of content marketing is to build distribution. If you do not plan out distribution well, then you may create high-quality content, but there won’t be anybody to read those contents immediately. This creates a longer feedback loop. So, whenever you create content, try to distribute it at more and more channels in order to reach more readers instantly.


7. Short Video Marketing 

In recent years, usage of short video apps such as Tiktok, Reels, Youtube shorts has skyrocketed making them yet another largest marketing channel. Short video platforms were initially apt for B2C products, however, in the recent past, it is becoming equally good for B2B business opportunities. You can make short video clips about your products to attract more B2B leads.

Also, read- Instagram Reels Ideas for Small Businesses


8. Tender Marketplaces/Portals/Blogs

There are some marketplaces that regularly publish tenders of government as well as public companies. This brings you a good opportunity to directly go ahead and bid on existing business opportunities without going through the hassles of business development efforts. 

Also read one of our case studies on How to get Organic leads using Social Media


I hope you liked reading this post. If you are interested in trying out CRM software for your business to track your leads, do check out ToolsonCloud CRM. It comes with a free plan for startups.



How to give a Perfect Sales Demo?

Giving a perfect sales demo always helps you close deals quickly and shorten your sales cycle. But often many Entrepreneurs and Sales teams struggle to give a perfect sales demo to seal the deal. 

In this post, we shall explore some handy tips to help you give a perfect sales demo every single time.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION from Pexels


1. Research about the prospect

Sales demo is yet another form of a meeting. To make best use of the meeting, you should do your homework right. Before the meeting, try to spend some time researching your prospect and understand the context. Try to learn more about the company where the prospect works, the industry in which they work, the types of customers they have, their business, their long term and short term goals, their pain points and how your solution is going to help them.


2. Inform the agenda of the demo beforehand

While scheduling a demo, always ensure to inform the agenda and give a brief outline of what you plan to cover during the course of the meeting. Having a pre-planned agenda helps you to avoid any surprise questions during the course of the demo and the prospect would have come prepared. 

Some demos tend to be detailed while some tend to be very short depending upon the solution you are trying to sell. When prospects are aware of the expectations, they are well prepared to focus longer or shorter as per the plan.

In addition to that, this also gives an opportunity to the prospect to suggest any additional topic in advance, which they would like you to cover during the demo.


3. Before starting the demo, establish trust/rapport:

Before you start the demo session, spend a few moments to warm up your prospects. You can ask about what's happening, try to make them feel comfortable with you. This helps to bring a sense of connection and helps to establish trust and rapport. This way they would be attentive and interested during the course of the demo.

 

4. Personalize the demo

Instead of trying to give a plain and generic demo about the product, try to personalize the demo based on their expectations and pain points. You would be already familiar with their pain points based on your previous discovery call or lead qualification call. If you are unaware, then you can also take some inputs from the customers on their pain points during the course of the demo and try to personalize the presentation.


5. Focus on Solution selling than Feature selling

Remember that prospects are more interested to know how your product will help you solve their pain points rather than knowing the nitty-gritty of each and every small feature of your product. Try to sell solutions instead of doing a feature list dump during the presentation.


6. Pause regularly and seek questions/feedback during the demo

A good demo is the one that helps to keep the prospect engaged. Prospects are well engaged if you involve them in a two-way conversation instead of doing a one-way presentation. During the course of your demo, you can pause at regular intervals and prompt them to ask any questions or give feedback during the demo. Making them talk keeps them interested throughout.


7. Note down any specific query to be addressed later

When you are selling a solution, you are bound to get certain queries that you may need to explore further to answer them better. Instead of blabbering any wrong facts to the prospect, you may make notes of the queries in your meeting notes or in a CRM like ToolsonCloud to come back on it later. 


I hope you will find these tips useful.

If you are looking for a Sales CRM to manage your sales process, Feel free to check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. You can also schedule your sales demo meetings directly from your CRM application. 

Glossary of important Sales Terms

Hey folks, I keep hearing from newbie sales professionals that they get stunned hearing some new sales jargon every day and are sometimes left blank when they get asked about those from their bosses.

So, Here is the compilation of some Important Sales Acronyms that came to my mind instantly.

What is an Invoice and how to prepare one?

If you are a seller, you might often come across the term “Invoice”. If you are still unaware of it or have an iota of doubt on this topic, read on to know more.

How to get Organic leads using Social Media
A few months back, I along with my friends did a consulting project for a startup in order to get more lead inflows into their sales pipeline. In this post, I would like to share my experience as to how we did it and how you can also follow the same Lead Generation Strategy in order to develop your Lead Pipeline.

What is Churn Rate?
If you run a subscription based business where you gain monthly or periodically recurring revenue, Churn Rate is one of the important parameters to consider for forecasting your future revenues. This metric is not just a KPI for Sales & Marketing department but also directly impacts Finance department for their future financial forecasts as well as impacts Operations or Delivery department in order to plan for scaling up or scaling down of existing business operations or infrastructure.
Stop committing these 15 Costly Sales Mistakes
I tend to read a lot of books on Sales Methodologies. Now that I have read a numerous materials on Sales, I felt let me share a list of Costly Sales Mistakes or Situations which every sales professional should try to avoid in a Sales Process.

As per my experiences, the following 15 types of sales mistakes should be avoided at any cost:
Benefits of Vertical Selling over Horizontal Selling
Are you a Newbie just delving into your Sales Career?
or
Are you a Sales Manager looking for assigning a territory to a newbie in your team?

or
Are you a Newbie startup looking to start with Selling your Product or Solution?


If answer to any of these questions is "Yes", 
Then you should focus on Vertical Selling instead of Horizontal Selling!


Surprised? In this post, I would tell you why is that so!


3 Price Negotiation Mistakes every Salesperson should avoid
Often, Salespersons tend to make mistakes during their Sales Negotiation conversations and tend to lose out on the sales wondering what exactly happened. The lead which they have been following up for many month now is lost just at the last phase of the sales cycle at the time of Sales Negotiation. These are the 3 expensive mistakes which every sales person should avoid at the time of negotiation.


What is Sales Prospecting
A complete Sales lifecycle comprises multiple stages. But it always tends to start with Prospecting. But often newbie salespersons ponder upon the same question, 

"What exactly is Sales Prospecting?".

In this post, I would like to help those newbie and ambitious salespersons to understand what exactly is Sales Prospecting.
5 features to look before buying a Sales CRM
Very often CEOs and CMOs of startups who are searching for a CRM for their Sales Team find themselves in a confused state. With numerous CRM applications available in the market, they are in a dilemma to choose from various available options.

To decide which CRM is the best for you, you need to list down the functionalities you expect from a CRM system. After my interaction with multiple people in sales on LinkedIn, I found a number of things which are being expected from a CRM.

Complete guide to Social CRM

What is Social CRM?

Social CRM refers to approach of managing customer relationship by using Social media as the channel to listen and engage with Customers.

In CRM Software context, when a traditional CRM is integrated with your social media channels to help you manage your customer relationships from social media channels, it is termed as Social CRM.


Need for Social CRM:

Marketers tends to make mistake of thinking Social Media platforms as the place to only broadcast their social media posts and drive traffic. 

But there is more to it. Social Media should be used for more for listening to the customers or prospects and engaging with them. 

Social CRM Landscape


Some associated facts:

As per a 2017, Techwire Asia article 
  • 95% of customer complaints on social media don’t reach companies.
  • 1/3rd of all customer complaints on social media are ignored.
  • 80% of surveyed companies said they deliver exceptional customer service on social media but only 8% of their customers agreed on the same.
  • 63% customers expect companies to offer customer service on Social media channels.
  • 90% of social media users used social media to engage/communicate with a brand.
  • When people get responses on social media, they are 30% more likely to recommend a brand to others.
  • Implementing a good Social CRM could help improve annual revenue by 81% through referrals as well as reduce customer churn by helping you improve customer retention up to 92%.

Benefits of social crm for sales teams:

  • Increase in Lead Inflow: Sales teams get to generate more leads from Social Media.
  • Hot Leads: The Leads from social media are mostly comes from referrals via viral posts or comments from their friends thus they are far more likely to convert.
  • Reduced Sales Cycle: The leads from Social Media are informed prospects, hence the sales cycle duration reduces thus helping in faster sales conversion.
  • Multichannel Selling: Modern Social Media platforms are also equipped with sales store front. Thus Social CRM helps track the sales or leads getting generated from multiple social media channels and bring it together inside one single CRM, thus enabling the organization towards multi-channel sales.

Benefits of social crm for Marketing team:

  • Better Customer Segmentation: Social CRM contains a lot of customer demographic information from social media. It helps the Marketers in better customer segmentation and enables them to create more contextual and personalized marketing campaigns.
  • Instant Feedback & Sentiment Analysis: Customers find it easier to interact on social media comments and messengers compared to usual email or ticket based communication on website. Social CRM is helping the Marketers get more up-to date real-time customer sentiments and feedback about their products and services from social media. This helps them improve their product and service offerings. Also it helps them optimize & improve their marketing communications.

Benefits of social crm for service teams:

  • Customer Issue Resolution: Sometimes Customers use social media channel as an escalation mechanism if they are not happy with the resolution provided by your usual service help desk. This shall help Service teams take the issue on priority and shall help them transfer the ticket to a more experienced customer service rep to take it to satisfactory closure. 
  • Process Improvement and Knowledge base Development: With social media sentiments on the issues, you get to understand certain frequently occurring issues which are painful for your customers. This data helps you do deep dive towards improving your customer resolution process better and improves you’re the knowledge base documentations for your service teams to serve future similar issues better.
  • Ease of Connect: Whenever customers are unable to get certain help with your product and services from available public sources, they find it easier to interact with their brands via social media or on your social media community to find answers to their queries.

Things to look for in a social crm:

  • Integration: Features such as Integration with top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.
  • Analytics & Insights: The platform should be equipped to extract data from your social media channels to give you reports, analytics and actionable real-time insights on what is working out versus what is not working.
  • Social Media Management: It should let you manage your multiple social media accounts from one single platform such as post scheduling, comment and message notifications. Primarily it should equip you with Listening, Publishing and Engagement on your social channel.
  • Team Collaboration: It should offer a collaborative way of working so that you can add your team members in the application and work together.

Advances in Social CRM:

  • Automated Chat bots for answering to user messages, product enquiries, frequently asked questions sent on Social Media messengers.
  • Follower tracking features which lets you track lost followers in addition to new followers. Source of followers such as organic vs paid.
  • RoI Insights such on Organic Impressions vs Paid Impressions.
  • Budget based alerts and controls on Paid Social Media campaigns.
  • Integration with Video meeting platforms such as Skype, Zoom, Slack , etc, to take up instant product demo, calls or meetings with prospect.
  • Integration with document storage platforms to automatically sync and store artifacts related to key client conversations.
  • Social media sales workflow for automating many repeatable sales processes associated with new lead capture and nurturing via social media channels.
  • Ability to pull contact and other information from Prospect’s social media public profiles such as LinkedIn, Public databases, etc.

If you liked reading this post, Do comment below and let me know your thoughts. 

Do not forget to share the post. Also subscribe to our free newsletter to get updates on similar posts in future.

Looking for a Sales CRM? Try ToolsOnCloud CRM for free


How to Reduce Churn Rate – 3 Legitimate Tips
Heya, in my previous post, we learnt what exactly is Churn Rate. Now you know, that more churn is bad for your business. Let us discuss some cool tips to reduce churn rate in your business.

Reason I titled this post with “Legitimate Tips” is because we would focus on building our fundamentals strong instead of trying out some quick fix leak patching techniques. This would take a bit of longer time, but is worth it in the long run, especially when you look towards sustainably scaling your business in the long term.


Legitimate Tips to reduce churn rate:

Preventing Customer Churn or Exits or Opt-outs

  • Price:

One of the primary reason many customers opt out of your service is because they do not like your price. Remember that nothing is too expensive for a customer if he is made aware of the real value of the product. Hence, work with the customer to make them aware of your product features, functionalities and business benefits so that they gauge the real value of your product or service offering. You may cite the benefits by doing a cost benefits analysis of non-tangible things like Time Value, Quality of your offering, ease of use, Customer Support and assurance being delivered in your offerings, etc.


  • Mis-selling:


Second biggest reason why Customers leave is because after few months they realize that the product is not really meant for their usage or they are not appropriate intended user for the offering. They realize that some sales person did a push sell just to complete their sales quota. In this case it is bound to backfire to your business, since they would opt-out in reasonable amount of time. In this case, try to avoid doing mis-selling or push sales. The world is big enough and hence try to sell to those whom you thing could be interested in your offering or are the right intended users.


  • Customer Success or Engagement

Many Businesses think that once they onboard any customer to sell their subscription based service, their job is done. Chief Marketing Officers should realize that once the sale is done, job is not yet over. The real journey of customer begins from the moment they start using your product or service. Hence it is important that you start engaging with your customers by involving them in regular product update announcements, social media interactions, priority support, training sessions so that they can effectively use your product to realize its true potential benefit.

Hope you liked reading this post. Follow us on our social media channels or email to get regular updates.

Related Post:

5 common sales questions asked by every Client during a Sales deal
Any Sales training workshop you attend you will hear one common saying: "Sales can be very well learnt and is not only for the most creative folks."

Reason why Sales can be learnt is because 70% of the sales process is repetitive and can be reproduced and the rest 30% is about individual creativity and the way the sales person handle the situation. This rest 30% can also be learnt with time once you start gaining field experience. With time & experience, rest will just come naturally to you.

Let's talk about the first 70% which is repetitive.

Every sales deal, as you take it forward, you will find some processes which are repetitive in nature and you would have done those in some earlier sales deals already. You just have to repeat the same, by just refining it a bit to suit the context. 

In these repetitive things, the questions asked by the clients form a major chunk. Here are the list of commonly asked questions by clients to any sales rep. Before going to your next sales meeting, if you have prepared for these questions well, you would be more ready than ever.

1. Don't you think your price is too expensive?

Ans: List out all the offering of other competing product in market and do a side by side comparison of your product to them for each feature and highlight the benefits of your products which the competitor products may not be having.

Sometimes, Client may raise this question because they might not be aware of your detailed pricing structure due to which they may feel price is not justified. In that case try to give a detailed breakup of each pricing component which makes up for your total price. This shall present the customer a fair idea of which component is adding up the cost and also make sure to explain them why that costly component is worth adding them in their deal.


2. What are the business benefits of your products and services? Can you give a monetary estimate?

Ans: Remember that when you sell a drilling machine, you are actually selling a hole for the client and the time he saves by using your tool. So do not count features, instead present the features with business benefits in the context of your client. Show them the value in terms of their time and money.


3. How long are you people in Business? Is the product of good quality?

Ans: Customer wants to ensure that you would be there to help just in case he face any problem with your products. Show them your assurance by explaining how long you have been in the market, show them the catalogue of the projects you have executed successfully, show them your list of client base, show them some of the client feedback testimonials.


4. Is your price negotiable, or can I get some discount?

Ans: Almost everyone wants the best value for money, so it is highly likely that they will negotiate on the price. Stay prepared on the different discounting policy you are equipped with. In case you do not have much control on the price, then you may win the deal by restructuring the mode of payments. For e.g. try for something like if they pay for 6 months in advance, may be you can give some discount. This way you will get enough cashflow coming in. Or if the client is not able to pay in full, you can plan your presentation on alternate mode of payments like 3rd party financier introduction or instalment based payments, etc. 
Caution: Do not take too much of credit risk without doing proper validation with your finance department.


5. Can I call you back after some days?

Ans: Most of the time if a client says he will confirm after few days but doesn't give any definite number, then it is very unlikely that he may buy. That is because, probably he may want to buy some time to explore alternate competitor products or may be he don't want to say straight NO to you to maintain future business relationship and would try to avoid having that conversation again so that deal will rot and be considered expired. In this case you may say yes, but ask them if you can call back after 2 days or some definite date. Also if you are comfortable you may try to probe on the reason for delay to better understand client context if it is for some genuine reason or something else.


Hope you would find these questions useful for your next sales meeting.

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What is Topline and Bottomline in Sales?
Hey friends, If you recently took up a role in Sales, then you would have frequently heard the two terms Topline and Bottomline from your executive level bosses. If you want know what are those, you have come to the right place.

These two Business Jargons have simpler meaning than they appear to be. Let me tell you what do they mean.

In any business, while you are doing sales, you would make revenue by selling something. Obviously, Once you sell the products or services, you cannot keep the whole revenue with yourself or organization. Major chunk of that revenue goes towards meeting the cost of making the product, income taxes, hr and administration costs involved in managing staff, etc. After deducting all these operating expenses and taxes, what we are left with is the net profit or net income which we can keep which belongs to shareholders and if they wish to, can be invested further into the business.

In this case, the revenue which you generate on making sales is called Topline and the net profit or net income which you generated after deducting all operating expenses and taxes from the revenue is what is known as Bottomline.

Whenever business executives discuss their financials, they monitor these two numbers very closely. Increasing Topline is one of the priority for them to increase the organization growth. However, with this they cannot ignore Bottomline growth because, if they are not left with enough cash after selling products and services, the business cannot survive for long and is not sustainable for long. 

Hence both the metrics should be monitored together since both go hand in hand for a sustainable growth of business.