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. 


 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.



Which sales metrics should I track for my business?

If you run a business or are a Sales Leader in your organization, then you might have come across this question often.

Which Sales metrics should you track may vary depending on the line of business you operate in. Based on your industry vertical, certain sales metrics would be extremely important for you to track while the same metrics might not make any sense for someone in another industry.

Nevertheless, there are certain Sales Metrics that are Industry agnostic and can help you measure sales performance irrespective of the line of business.

Here are the top 5 sales metrics you can track in your business


Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

1. Conversion Rate

This refers to the number of leads that got converted to successful deal wins. Monitoring this metric will help you to channelize your effort on the leads which have a high probability of conversion so that you can improve your revenue faster.


2. Average Sales Cycle duration

This refers to the average time it takes for your sales team to move a prospect from the opportunity creation stage to final deal closure. Monitoring this metric and aiming it to keep lower helps you to close more sales in a lesser amount of time. If you want, you can go more granular by monitoring the duration of each sales stage so that you get a flag whenever a deal is stuck in a certain stage for longer than usual.


3. Average Deal Value

This measures the average revenue you are bringing with every deal win. Over time, you should try to increase the average deal value and aim to grow the high-value accounts. This can be a powerful level you can use to pull up your revenue with the same amount of effort.


4. Topline & Bottomline Growth

These metrics help you visualize your revenue (Topline) and margin (Bottomline) growth over a period of time say monthly, quarterly or yearly. When you see the growth in numbers, it gives a clear and quantified validation of your growth.


5. Average Customer Lifetime value

This is an often ignored metric and people tend to associate it only with Saas businesses, but this is extremely important for any kind of business. Whenever you notice your average customer lifetime value is dropping then it’s a clear flag that there is something wrong with your offering which is leading to customer churn. This helps you focus on nurturing & retention efforts.


By the way,

If you liked reading this post, feel free to check out our tool at - ToolsonCloud CRM, where you can create wonderful custom sales reports and visualize your sales performance in real-time.

Moreover, it’s free.


How to drive CRM adoption in Sales teams?

You invested a lot of time as well as money trying to implement a CRM solution across your organization but it ended up as a failed project.

How does it feel? It doesn’t sound cool. Isn’t it?

But this is often the case with many organizations who are unable to derive value from their CRM implementation even after making huge investment in this regard. The biggest reason for CRM project failure is low CRM adoption among the end users of the system. If sales leaders can lead their team to adopt CRM faster, they can quickly start reaping tangible benefits out of their CRM implementation. 


Photo by Mikael Blomkvist from Pexels


Here is what you can do to drive CRM adoption within your sales team:

By the way if you are still looking for a CRM software for your sales team, do check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.


1. Keep team involved from the beginning

When you are implementing a CRM solution in your organization, try to involve the end users from the beginning. Listen to their challenges, ask for feedback, implement their feedback. This way you make them a stakeholder in the implementation. When you respect others’ input, they tend to associate themselves as a part of the project. They tend to own it end to end. This way you stand lesser chances of failure since the end users are going to drive it in future on their own.


2. Choose an easy to use CRM

One reason why users tend to avoid using a CRM is due to the complexity of using it. The objective of implementing a CRM is to make the lives of the sales team simpler and easier rather than making it more complex by asking them to use a hard to use CRM. Always ensure to take trial of the CRM software and test its usability and user experience before making a final purchase.


3. Provide adequate Training

If the end users are not familiar with the terminologies, various stages and workflows in a CRM, they would hardly use it to maximum potential. Always provide adequate training to your end users on the various functions of a CRM and the purpose of using it. Making people familiar with the basic controls and letting them know the purpose of using it makes it much easier for driving faster adoption.


4. Provide appropriate user guide

When you are providing training, the users may tend to forget it overtime unless and until they are actually using it. Conducting regular CRM training sessions may not be feasible for numerous reasons. Assigning a peer to help a new employee to learn the tool may not bring out consistent knowledge transfer. This problem can be solved if you have a well documented User guide. It can serve the purpose of looking up for some on-demand information or clarification which the end user may have. You may request your CRM vendor to provide the same or may also refer to the knowledge base section of the respective product page such as we have it for ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.


5. Establish easy to follow CRM processes

Often the sales team tends to think of a CRM to be a database rather than a modern tool to manage your sales process. This ideology may prevent them from updating their sales activities in real time and they will end up updating the tool once in a while just to keep the data in place. This way the CRM system will end up reflecting stale and unusable data for the sales leaders to analyze and get insights as to where they can step in for certain tangible help. To solve this, you may need to establish well defined guidelines and processes which can serve as a single stop blueprint for your team to follow.


6. Create CRM Advocates

Creating CRM advocates or ambassadors from the end user of the tool is always helpful. Modern marketing revolves a lot around influencer marketing. You are much more likely to religiously try a new product if you were told about its benefit by an influencer having a similar background as yours. Your sales team will be able to appreciate the value of crm implementation only when they start using it. They will religiously use it for sometime only when you have CRM ambassadors from the team guiding them on the best practices and effective utilization of the tools.


7. Reward early practitioners

Getting the sales team to adopt a new tool can be tough. But it can be made easier if you start rewarding those early adopters who shall be setting up a benchmark and advocating best practices to peers. Reward the users who religiously update the tool and keep the status up to date. Reward the users whose CRM data is clean and is of high quality to derive fruitful insights out of it.


I hope you will find these tips useful for you. 

If you are looking for a CRM solution for your team, feel free to try out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. It’s Free!


What is a Sales process and why do I need one?

This is one of the commonly asked questions from sales professionals as well as entrepreneurs who are getting into sales for their startup.

Let us explore more about the Sales process and the need for it in detail


What is a Sales Process?

Sales process refers to the well-defined steps for sales comprising various sales activities which helps in closing the deal thus leading to final conversion. The process of every organization may differ depending upon the industry in which they operate and the complexity of the business. However, there are certain common steps that are part of the sales process which are used as a reference. These are:


  1. Prospecting for Qualified Leads
  2. Pitching them the solution to generate interest
  3. Based on their interest, having further discussions with a detailed presentation, demo, etc.
  4. Negotiation on contract, pricing, and terms & conditions.
  5. Deal Closure
  6. Order, Invoicing, Payment follow-up, etc.

Sales Cycle

Using these steps as a reference, a Sales Manager or an Entrepreneur can easily build their sales process as per the context of their organization structure and process.

Well before we proceed, if you are planning to make use of CRM software to help organize your sales process, feel free to check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM.


Why do you need a well-defined Sales Process?

More often we may find a defined sales process is only present in large organizations and not followed religiously in small businesses or startups. When the startups start scaling up, they realize their sales process is too complex to scale fast. This is where they start looking towards building an effective sales process.

Here are some of the reasons why you may need a well-defined sales process…


1. Scalability

When you have defined steps to follow as part of your sales process, it becomes a framework or a blueprint for your team to follow. Your team can just follow the blueprint and easily close the deal faster compared to when each of the sales representatives tries to follow their own approach which might work or might not.


2. Easy to Learn, Train, Mentor

Having a clear process that is followed across the team helps your team to easily learn that and they are equipped to easily train your new joiners to onboard them faster. Otherwise, if there is no process, whenever you assign a mentor to the new joiner, the takeaways will always be different for each new joiner and may lead to misalignment.


3. Low Customer Acquisition Cost

When you have a well-defined process, teams tend to spend less time recreating already validated experiments and focus on what works. This allows them to close more deals in a lesser amount of time which automatically brings down your sales operation cost. Lower the sales operation cost, lower becomes your customer acquisition cost. This way, you will be ready to close more deals with the same amount of sales budget.


4. Better Brand Image and Customer Loyalty

Customers often love organizations that follow a well-structured approach to whatever they do. This also includes how they sell and onboard the customers. If the sales process is streamlined and smooth, the customers will also be able to sense it based on the different sales touchpoints they experienced and how fast they were onboarded. Having a good onboarding experience always helps build a better brand image and customer loyalty. Loyal customers often become evangelists and they refer more customers to you.


I hope you liked reading this post. A good CRM tool always helps the sales team to work on a pre-planned and streamlined sales process. This also helps the sales manager keep track of the state of any particular lead so that they can pitch in to help out the team at the right moment. 


If you are yet to try out a CRM tool for your team, feel free to check out ToolsonCloud Sales CRM. ToolonCloud CRM allows you to create your own sales process with the help of customizable deal pipelines and stages.


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:
Guide to get Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Deals

 Heya, Hope you liked reading my previous post on Sales Suspecting. In this article, we shall discuss a detailed guide to understand the Business Process Outsourcing business and how to win BPO deals from the organizations willing to outsource.

Let us get started...

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.
6 Proven Ways for Sales Suspecting
You might have read multiple articles on Sales Prospective guide, but this post is about Sales Suspecting. 

Yes, you heard it right! In this post, we shall explore 6 Proven Ways for sales suspecting.
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:

How to track Sales Deals Effectively
Hi, Hope you are doing great. In this post, I wanted to bring out a list of most important items to track for effective Sales Deal tracking.

To meet Sales Quota, Your Sales persons should follow a well defined sales process to efficiently close deals at the fastest pace possible. But very often even with a good sales process, teams might miss hitting targets. One of the obvious reason is lack of effective tracking. Sales Management is no less than Project Management and effective Project Management is all about timely tracking.

Let's us take a look at some of key things you should track to meet your sales targets always.
How to to Sell Corporate Training Programs


If you are into the business of selling Training Programs to Corporate companies, then you have stumbled upon a right blog post.

In this post, let me tell you stuffs you need to know in order to effectively engage the prospects in selling Corporate Training programs.

  • Your Buyers within the Organization would be mostly Human Resources, CEO, Project Managers, Procurement Team, Sales Managers, and Organizational Learning & Training Department.
  • Most of the Organizations invest in training programs around the following focus areas:

    1. Finance & Accounting training,
    2. Sales and Marketing Training,
    3. Customer Service training,
    4. Health, Wellness and fitness  programs,
    5. Management & Leadership development programs,
    6. Innovation and Creative Thinking,
    7. Team Work, Team Building & Development,
    8. Information Technology related Training programs


  • In order to win Corporate Training contracts or deals, you may try out following tips:
    1. Create a Professional looking website with a few marketing collateral, brochures, etc. if you are going to train corporate staffs, your website should also resonate in line with those staffs and your website’s look and feel should be of highest quality standards.
    2. While meeting the Client’s decision makers for the deal, try to demonstrate your credibility by sharing some glimpse of past training programs with other Clients in similar sector. You may to cite a few feedback & testimonials from Client & training attendees.
    3. If you have an active mailing list of subscribers, you may send out some periodic invitations of free introductory webinars ever fortnight or every month in order to gain some marketing traction, so that you can get more leads who can be potential buyers at some point of time in future.
    4. Put up the webinar recordings on public video sharing platforms like Youtube or Vimeo. It shall add more credibility for your training programs for such clients who might be apprehensive in buying your program without getting a taste of it. The number of views and likes on your videos shall give a clear indication to them on the quality of the work your trainer does and they can take a clear call on the purchase decision if it matches their expectations.

  • Sometimes while trying to sell the training programs, you may face Client demands on some customized training programs. Most of the times it may happen that you have not conducted any training on that topic in the past but you or your trainer have the required skill or expertise to take up that customized training program. In those cases, you may be required to do pre-sales of the training package.
    1. In Pre-sales of your training package, you do not actually prepare the full content of the training programs since you are very well aware that the discussion with Client is in initial stages and spending huge amount of time on full content preparation doesn’t guarantee deal closure.
    2. Hence, instead of preparing full training content, ask your trainer to give a course structure or the topic outline of the training content which can be reviewed by the Client if it matches their needs or if they would like to customize it further with some topic addition & deletion.
    3. This way after the complete course structure is defined clearly, it can give you more clearer guidance on the price quotation which you can put forward in their RFQ or RPF.


I hope, the readers in Corporate Training sales would find this blog post useful. Do comment below and let me know your thoughts.

If you are looking for a Sales Deal tracking software, Checkout Toolsoncloud CRM now, Its free to get started.

Essential Tips for B2B Sales
Getting a meeting from a C-suite executive of a mid or large corporation is one of the most daunting task for a salesperson in B2B. This is because, unlike other prospects who are in the lower hierarchy of an organization where the salesperson can pitch in multiple times and try out different ways to approach the prospect, with a C-suite executive, the salesperson stands just one shot.

That's the reason why sales professionals should have a foolproof strategy while approaching a C-suite executive while trying to get him for a sales meeting.

Here are 3 B2B Sales tips from my experience which can help you get a reply from C-suite executives while trying to get their response for a sales meeting:

Btw, before we get started, If you are new to ToolsonCloud, Feel free to check out website to learn about ToolsonCloud CRM. It can definitely help improve your sales productivity.




1. Try asking for a referral within the organization.


Most of the time, top-level executives especially CEO, CMO, CFO or COO would be involved with multiple internal tasks that they would hardly get any time for an external salesperson which is you. Even if they find your short sales pitch to be interesting, they would hardly have the bandwidth for a meeting. This is the reason they would try to defer it. But most of the time, CXOs would be ready to delegate it to their Subordinates or Executive Assistants. 

A few of the executives would refer you to another person in their organization on their own, but not the case with everyone until you ask them for that. So, next time you send a cold email, try asking them for a referral in their organization whom you can talk for discovery interviews or sales meetings.



2. KISS - Keep It Short & Simple


Almost every CXO of an organization is a busy person hardly having any time even for self. During these moments, if you get a chance to talk to him on phone, don't waste his time asking long discovery questions which you can ask others within the same organization. Try to keep your talk short, crisp and to the point instead of trying to blabber round and round about a concept just to gain his attention. Instead of getting his attention, chances are there that you would lose his interest which is lethal in sales.

Hence, the next time you get to talk to a C level executive, try presenting key benefits for him which you can offer via your products, instead of asking him his 5 year vision of his organization and asking generic time consuming questions as to what are their challenges. Ideally you should ask these questions, only if you have a longer meeting planned with the executive, especially for a discovery interview.



3. Follow Up


Following up is the key to sales success. But it takes key precedence if you are trying to sell to busy C-suite executives. Often CXOs would be traveling a lot, meeting people around the world. This means he would stay away from his base office often. Chances are there that in his run-up to catch up on his own work, he would forget about your last meeting. This necessitates that you follow up with the executive by cut-off date before any competitor pitch in and grab the deal.

So, the next time you finish off a meeting with an executive, make sure you ask him when he shall be available for the next meeting and make sure to add that date to your CRM so that it can remind you for another meet-up.


I hope you enjoyed reading the post. Do let me know your thoughts on this.

Have you tried ToolsonCloud CRM yet? It certainly helps you throughout your B2B Selling process from lead capture to deal follow-up reminders. 

Try ToolsonCloud CRM today. Moreover, it's free.

Should Startups Price their Products too Low?
Recently, I was going through the websites of many newbie startups started by first time entrepreneurs and found that almost all of them have priced their products or services very low. In this post, I will tell you why this is one of the very bad pricing strategies and is a recipe for ultimate disaster.
Sales tracking for Freelancers using Free Sales CRM
Being a freelancer is not an easy job. In Freelancing, you are the Chief Operating officer, you are the Chief Marketing officer and you are also the Chief Finance Officer of your Business. If you are a freelancer and are looking for ways to organize your sales tracking process, then read on...

Becoming successful in Freelancing requires you to use the right set of tools so that you can focus more on the important tasks than spending precious time in data entry and sales tracking activities. But the fact is, to keep going, you need to make sales and to keep doing sales, you need to track your sales deal pipeline regularly and do active follow-ups to keep having a steady sales pipeline and revenue stream. 

With too much on your plate, it's tough to do all without going mad and experiencing burnout!

This requires that you use the right set of tools for organizing your sales process and automating the tracking processes around it instead of scrambling through your countless emails and excel files.




Why CRM is better compared to tracking in Email?


  • Emails are not organized, it never gives you a clear picture of a story with your client...
    • The kind of conversation you had with him, 
    • Sales analytics such as how long the deal is being open and 
    • What is the average time needed for closing that deal, 
    • When do you need to follow up next, etc.
 
For all those things, you definitely need something more than Emails. That's where ToolsonCloud Sales CRM comes into play and helps you organize your Sales so that get a clear sight of what is the action you need to do next instead of scrambling through emails and trying to figure out what is required to be done.


Why CRM is better compared to tracking in Excel?


You can definitely use Excel for simple sales tracking with a small amount of data. But as and when you gain more and more data, you will start feeling the real pain with excel files. 

  • Over time you will accumulate different types of information in a lot of tables and worksheet which will become overwhelming to understand.
  • Spreadsheets cannot help you figure out the relationships between various customer information such as deals, leads, tasks to be done, stakeholders in those deals, key contact person in the organization, history of the organization, etc.


Opportunity Cost of not using a good CRM


  • If you spend even 1 hour a day trying to do data entry in excel and then another 1 hr trying to do joins, combining tables, and trying to make pivot tables and charts on it, you will realize you are losing your 2 hrs every day. You may estimate the potential opportunity cost of that by Multiplying the hours with your Hourly Bill rate of the work you charge to your Clients. 
Imagine the amount of potential loss which you incur if you do not use the right set of tools to do the time-consuming tasks for you.

Hope this help you take right decision on the pros and cons of manual sales tracking vs CRM-based Sales tracking. 


ToolsonCloud Sales CRM for Freelancers


  • ToolsonCloud CRM helps freelancers organize their sales process from lead capture to deal closure.
  • They can easily store their leads, nurture them over time using emails directly within the CRM, qualify the leads to deals, track deals to closure, track sales activities such as follow-ups, reminders, To Do, Meetings, etc. 
  • They can store their Client's contact information and the organization's contact information at one place. Over time this data will accumulate and will give a timeline-based single-page view of all your interaction with that organization and the client.
  • It allows you to customize the deal flow stages as per your sales process
  • You can also create multiple deal pipelines if you are managing deals from different categories. E.g. you may want one pipeline for Content Writing deals while another pipeline for Graphic Designing deals for better segregation.
  • It comes with a completely Free Plan for Freelancers.

Do check out ToolsOnCloud Sales CRM for your sales tracking needs as a freelancer. You can sign up and get started instantly for Free.