Busy sales and marketing pros know how to use technology to their advantage.
The best and brightest don’t let themselves get bogged down in admin tasks like reading and answering emails or scheduling meetings. They put technology to work for them and automate the tasks that eat away at precious minutes that could be better spent.
What’s their secret? Having the right tools.
By using software to automate tedious tasks that don’t directly impact their bottom line, they can focus more on closing more deals.
Here are five tools you can use to help you be more productive and become a sales superstar.
Getting everyone together to sign a contract can be difficult. When multiple people need to review and sign documents to start work, Docusign makes it easy. Simply create and upload your documents, then send to everyone that needs to review and sign. Esignatures are legally binding, and everyone gets a signed copy when the process is complete. Integrates with popular software including Salesforce and Google.
Tired of the back-and-forth when trying to schedule meetings with a prospect? Calendly lets you provide a link to make scheduling a breeze. Your potential client or client can pick a time from the open slots and include relevant details. Integrates with various calendar apps so no one misses an appointment.
Email makes it easy to stay in touch, but keeping up with it can be impossible. Mixmax is a Gmail-based productivity tool that allows you to outsmart your quota by enhancing, automating, personalizing the email communications required to build your sales pipeline.
Features include:
Email Tracking: Check and see when and who opens your emails.
One-Click Scheduling: Share availability instantly.
Automated Follow-ups: Create templates and automated drip campaigns.
CRM Integrations: Update information instantly in Salesforce and LinkedIn SalesNavigator.
Workflow: Automate manual tasks that take away your focus from engaging customers.
IFTTT is automation software on steroids. The best part? It’s free! Your imagination is the only limit to what IFTTT can do. The software uses “recipes” to automate tasks and connect your apps and devices.
Though the learning curve is steep, once you understand how to create your own recipes you can automate everything from work to pizza delivery.
Sample recipes for sales pros include:
Add new Google Contacts to a Google Sheet to track sales leads
Get a text when an opportunity is closed and won in Salesforce
Mute your android phone ringtone at a certain time of the day
We all have the same amount of hours in the day. It’s how we use them that makes the difference. While not technically an automation tool, RescueTime automatically tracks how you spend your time on your phone and computer throughout the day. Once you know where your day is going, you can make a plan to cut out those tasks which are eating into your productivity.
Your productivity (or lack of) is on you. By using the tools mentioned above, you’ll be able to save time on email, paperwork, and everything in between.
Start by learning where you’re wasting the most time. Then give these tools a spin and you’ll find out just how easy it is to squeeze value out of every moment of the day.
The post 5 Automation Tools That Will Improve Office Productivity appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.
One of the great things about enterprise chat applications, beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration and communication application, and ServiceNow announced a new chatbot to make it easier for employees to navigate a company’s help desks inside Workplace Chat.
The beauty of the chatbot is that employees can get answers to common questions whenever they want, wherever they happen to be. The Workplace-ServiceNow integration happens in Workplace Chat and can can involve IT or HR help desk scenarios. A chatbot can help companies save time and money, and employees can get answers to common problems much faster.
Previously, getting these kind of answers would have required navigating multiple systems, making a phone call or submitting a ticket to the appropriate help desk. This approach provides a level of convenience and immediacy.
Companies can brainstorm common questions and answers and build them in the ServiceNow Virtual Agent Designer. It comes with some standard templates, and doesn’t require any kind of advanced scripting or programming skills. Instead, non-technical end users can adapt pre-populated templates to meet the needs, language and workflows of an individual organization.
Screenshot: ServiceNow
This is all part of a strategy by Facebook to integrate more enterprise applications into the tool. In May at the F8 conference, Facebook announced 52 such integrations from companies like Atlassian, SurveyMonkey, HubSpot and Marketo (the company Adobe bought in September for $4.75 billion).
This is part of a broader enterprise chat application trend around making these applications the center of every employee’s work life, while reducing task switching, the act of moving from application to application. This kind of integration is something that Slack has done very well and has up until now provided it with a differentiator, but the other enterprise players are catching on and today’s announcement with ServiceNow is part of that.
Practicing law was not meant to be for Crystal Ricevuto. When she graduated from law school, the market was in a tailspin, and she decided not to pursue law as a career. Luckily, she landed at Citrix in a support …
Alibaba has made an acquisition as it continues to square up to the opportunity in enterprise services in China and beyond, akin to what its US counterpart Amazon has done with AWS. TechCrunch has confirmed that the e-commerce and cloud services giant has acquired Teambition, a Microsoft- and Tencent-backed platform for coworkers to plan and collaborate on projects together, similar to Trello and Asana.
There were rumors of an acquisition circulating yesterday in Chinese media. Alibaba has now confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but declined to provide any other details.
Teambition had raised about $17 million in funding since 2013, with investors including Tencent, Microsoft, IDG Capital and Gobi Ventures. Gobi also manages investments on behalf of Alibaba, and that might have been one route to how the two became acquainted. Alibaba’s last acquisition in enterprise was German big data startup Data Artisans for $103 million.
As with others in the project management and collaboration space, Teambition provides users with mobile and desktop apps to interact with the service, and in addition to the main planning interface, there is one designed for CRM called Bingo, as well as a “knowledge base” where businesses can keep extra documentation and other collateral.
The deal is another sign of how Alibaba has been slowly building a business in enterprise powerhouse over the last several years as it races to keep its pole position in the Chinese market, as well as gain a stronger foothold in the wider Asian region and beyond.
In China alone, it has been estimated that enterprise services is a $1 billion opportunity, but with no clear leader at the moment across a range of verticals and segments that fall under that general umbrella, there is a lot to play for, and likely a lot more consolidation to come. (And it’s not the only one: Bytedance — more known for consumer services like TikTok — is rumored to be building a Slack competitor, and Tencent also has its sights on the sector, as does Baidu.)
As with AWS, Alibaba’s enterprise business stems out of the cloud-based infrastructure Alibaba has built for its own e-commerce powerhouse, which it has productised as a service for third parties that it calls Alibaba Cloud, which (like AWS) offers a range of cloud-storage and serving tiers to users.
On top of that, Alibaba has been building and integrating a number of apps and other services that leverage that cloud infrastructure, providing more stickiness for the core service as well as the potential for developing further revenue streams with customers.
These apps and services range from the recently-launched “A100” business transformation initiative, where Alibaba proposes working with large companies to digitise and modernize (and help run) their IT backends; through to specific products, such as Alibaba’s Slack competitor DingTalk.
With Alibaba declining to give us any details beyond a confirmation of the acquisition, and Teambition not returning our requests for comment, our best guess is that this app could be a fit in either of areas. That is to say, one option for Alibaba would be to integrate it and use it as part of a wider “business transformation” and modernization offering, or as a standalone product, as it currently exists.
Teambition today counts a number of Chinese giants, and giants with Chinese outposts, as customers, including Huawei, Xiaomi, TCL, and McDonalds in its customer list. The company currently has nothing on its site indicating an acquisition or any notices regarding future services, so it seems to be business as usual for now.
The opportunity around collaboration and workplace communication has become a very hot area in the last few years, spurred by the general growth of social media in the consumer market and people in business environments wanting to bring in the same kinds of tools to help them get work done. Planning and project management — the area that Teambition and its competitors address — is considered a key pillar in the wider collaboration space alongside cloud services to store and serve files and real-time communication services.
Slack, which is now valued at over $7 billion, has said it’s filed paperwork for a public listing, while Asana is now valued at $1.5 billion, while Trello’s owner Atlassian now has a market cap of nearly $26 billion.
As I walked the long halls of Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas and listened to the company’s marketing and data integration story, I thought about the obvious disconnect that happens between brands and their customers. With tons of data, a growing set of tools to bring it together, and a desire to build an optimal experience, you would think we have been set up for thrilling consumer experiences, yet we all know that is not always what happens when the rubber meets the road.
Maybe part of the problem is that data sitting in databases doesn’t always translate into employee action when dealing directly with consumers. In many cases, the experience isn’t smooth, data isn’t passed from one source to another, and when you do eventually reach a person, they aren’t always knowledgeable or even nice.
It’s to the point that when my data does get passed smoothly from bot to human CSA, and I’m not asked for the same information for the second or even third time, I’m pleasantly surprised, even a little shocked.
That’s probably not the story marketing automation vendors like Adobe and Salesforce want to hear, but it is probably far more common than the one about delighted customers. I understand that the goal is to provide APIs to connect systems. It’s to stream data in real time from a variety of channels. It’s about understanding that data better by applying intelligent analytics, and to some extent I’m sure that’s happening and that there are brands who truly do want to delight us.
The disconnect could be happening because brands can control what happens in the digital world much better than the real one. They can know at a precise level when you interact with them and try to right wrongs or inconsistencies as quickly as possible. The problem is when we move to human interactions — people talking to people at the point of sale in a store, or in an office or via any communications channel — all of that data might not be helpful or even available.
The answer to that isn’t to give us more digital tools, or more tech in general, but to work to improve human-to-human communication, and maybe arm those human employees with the very types of information they need to understand the person they are dealing with when they are standing in front of them.
If brands can eventually get these human touch points right, they will build more loyal customers who want to come back, the ultimate goal, but right now the emphasis seems to be more on technology and the digital realm. That may not always achieve the desired results.
This is not necessarily the fault of Adobe, Salesforce or any technology vendor trying to solve this problem, but the human side of the equation needs to be a much stronger point of focus than it currently seems to be. In the end, all the data in the world isn’t going to save a brand from a rude or uninformed employee in the moment of customer contact, and that one bad moment can haunt a brand for a long, long time, regardless how sophisticated the marketing technology it’s using may be.
It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve.
User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs, and ERA.
User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do far more user research before determining the next product.
In the process of talking to customers to understand their pain points, they realized just how difficult collecting user feedback could be.
That’s how User Interviews was born. The platform’s first product, called Recruit, offers a network of non-users that can be matched with companies to provide feedback. In fact, User Interviews’ first sales were made by simply responding to Craigslist ads posted by companies looking for non-users from which they could collect feedback.
But because the majority of user research is based on existing users, the company also built Research Hub, which is essentially a CRM system for user feedback and research. To be clear, User Interviews doesn’t facilitate the actual emails sent to users, but does track the feedback and make sure that no one from the research team is reaching out to a single user too often.
With Recruit, User Interviews charges $30/person that it matches with a company for feedback. Research Hub costs starts at $150/month.
“Right now, our greatest challenge is that our clients are the best product people in the world, and we have a huge pipeline of amazing ideas that are very valuable and no one is doing yet that our clients would love,” said CEO and founder Basel Fakhoury. “But we have to build it fast enough.”
No mention of what those forthcoming products might be, but the current iteration sure seems attractive enough. User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.
One of the main issues I find across the information security industry is that we constantly need to justify our existence. Organizations have slowly realized they need to spend on IT to enable their businesses. Information security, on the other hand, is the team that is constantly preventing the business from freely doing as they […]… Read More
The post Turning Data into Metrics: A Vulnerability Management Story appeared first on The State of Security.
Google has introduced new methods, an updated user interface and other changes through which 2-step verification (2SV) will work for G Suite accounts. On 26 March, Google announced three changes that will affect admins and end users of G Suite customers when they use 2SV going forward. The first change concerns updated user interfaces for […]… Read More
The post Google Introduces New 2-Step Verification Options for G Suite Accounts appeared first on The State of Security.
