SMB teams are finally able to leverage the same level of technology as large enterprise sized company’s. Amazing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sales apps are coming to market at a rapid pace and they’re affordable. These focused apps are leveling the playing field between the enterprise sales engines and the little startup, and unlike your traditional sales tools, these light-weight sales apps possess enough features to get the job done without becoming bloated and hard to use.
The problem arises when you try to use a number of these focused sales apps together to create an integrated sales workflow — a.k.a. your sales stack.
The problem with the disconnected sales stack
Unlike the software large corporations use, each piece of your startup’s sales stack is usually made by a different company, does a very specific job, and doesn’t necessarily play well (synch) with the rest of your sales stack. This makes for an unstable sales stack that is just waiting to break / disconnect.
Worse, when your sales tools don’t play nice together, manual data entry is required to keep your entire sales stack in sync.
If your sales team is wasting time with manual data entry – they aren’t spending time closing their sales activity and revenue quotas.
Below is an example of an SMB sales stack, that covers most sales activities across all levels of the sales funnel.
Contacts
- List Building – data.com / discovery.org /
- Contact Info – SalesLoft / LinkedIn/ google
- Lead Research – InsideView/GageIn/LinkedIn
- Segmenting – Zoho CRM
- Email Tracking – Zoho Campaigns / Pardot / Vertical Response
Qualified
- Pre-call Research – InterConnecta / Linked-in /
- CRM – Salesforce/Zoho CRM/SugarCRM
- Note Taking – Evernote
- Dialer – InsideSales
Demo
- Demo Software – Join.me
- CRM updating – Cirrus Insights / InterConnecta
- Content management – Zoho Documents / Dropbox/Box
Proposal
- Proposal creation – Zoho Invoice / CRM
- E-signature – Echosign/PandaDoc
Closed
- Contract management – Zoho CRM / Zoho Invoice
- Referral – Influitive
Each of these tools does their small piece of the sales process extremely well, but creating a complete sales workflow by getting them to work with each other, to send data between each other automatically, and to stay in sync without manual data entry is important. It requires leveraging API’s (application program interface) to build data “pipelines” between each app. If this sounds highly technical, that’s because it is. This is work for software engineers.
Like many of you, we are a startup ourselves. So, I know that your engineering talent is already giving 110% just trying to develop your own product and address your own bugs. They don’t have time to fumble API’s.
That’s where InterConnecta attacks.
InterConnecta’s mission is to integrate your sales stack and fill the holes in your process either with people or technology.
At InterConnecta, we want to empower startups and SMB sales team by helping them identify and integrate their own sales stack made up of the best SaaS tools.Just simple point ‘n’ clicks and drag ‘n’ drops to get the job done.
We code and develop all of those API’s for you so that the complicated stuff hums along in the background without you having to worry about it. Just tell InterConnecta where you want your data to go and when, and then watch it go there automatically, without having to scratch your head. We add our own telephone based sales reps and launch multi-channel marketing campaigns on your sales stack so that we experience real life sales development scenarios “with you” during the setup of your sales stack; giving us real time insights into your operational sales flow and help adjust the automation on your sales stack accordingly. Just consider us your sales “pit crew” right out there on the track with you.
And here’s why you should care:
- Real live veteran sales representatives working hand in hand with your sales teams to help architect the most useful and adoptable sales stack configuration.
- Real time analysis on your messaging and how its being receivedReal time analysis of the Lists you are using and if the contacts are any good or outdated.
- More automation / Less copy/paste to keep your sales stack in sync means more time for sales activities like generating leads, calling leads, doing demos, and closing deals.
- You reduce the human error that occurs when you get your talented team to do mundane manual data entry instead of what they were hired to do.
- Leaving your team to build and maintain product means bringing better products to market faster.
Results?
- CRM is always up to date with detailed sales lead information.
- Real time insight into your “pitch” and the lists your working on.
- New signups are added to you Email subscriber and CRM lists automatically.
- Lead scoring helps determine the level of sales follow-up requiredSales activites are auto-created and assigned to proper sales rep for follow up based on territory or special rules.
- All of this happened the moment a prospect hit the “Submit ” button on our InterConnecta forms and surveys, all branded with your company logo and theme; and it all happens without you needing to learn code or hassle your team.
And this is just the very beginning…
We have some exciting things on the horizon, such as:
- Automated Analytics – for that mobile executive who needs data at a glance.
- Real time auto campaign suggestions / based on historical marketing results.
We truly believe it’s possible to have the same power an enterprise sales team possesses by modifying light-weight open source sales apps combined with the integration and automation your current proven sales process requires.
