When you start your business, you need to be prepared for what comes next. With growth comes new, time-consuming processes. And your teams can’t afford to be bogged down with the minutiae of tasks that no longer have to be done manually.
From managing invoices to finding the right sales prospects, there are tools on the market today that can take away the most time-consuming tasks and allow your team to get more done faster without sacrificing quality. Creating a more efficient company requires the right tricks and tools, especially in today’s modern world, with many types of software on the market.
Check out these five sales and operations tools that will make every position in your company more productive and bring your business to a new stage of growth:
Email verification tool
When sending emails as an eCommerce company, your ultimate goal is for your intended recipient to click on your email and make a purchase. But what if your emails never even reach them?
Every company is given a sender reputation score assigned by their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Many factors go into creating this score, such as how often your recipients mark your emails as spam or how frequently you send emails. But one of the most significant factors is your bounce rate.
Your bounce rate refers to how often your email is undeliverable and comprises both soft and hard bounces. Soft bounces refer to when an email isn’t deliverable at the moment but can be in the future, such as when you’re sending an email to someone whose inbox is currently full. A hard bounce is a more severe issue as it refers to when you send an email to an email address to which it can’t deliver.
Hard bounces occur more often than you might think. For example, your subscriber could have miswritten their address. Or you might have a work email address, but the recipient no longer works at that company.
And the more you attempt to write to an address that doesn’t exist, the higher your bounce rate will be. And the higher your bounce rate, the lower your sender score. If you have a low sender score, your ISP may prevent your emails from reaching their destination or have you land right in the dreaded spam folder.
A tool like NeverBounce can save your sender reputation score. An email verification tool keeps you from going through your subscriber list with a fine-tooth comb. Instead, the software will go through your list and determine what’s real and what isn’t. Then, it’ll remove the email addresses that are no longer or never were valid.
Sales prospecting software
If you ask a salesperson how much time they spend selling, they might be inclined to say they spend all their time doing it. After all, “sales” is in their title. But the reality is salespeople typically spend closer to 35 percent of their time selling. Much of the remaining time revolves around admin work, internal meetings, and lead generation research.
Researching prospects is a vital part of a salesperson’s job. They can’t sell if they don’t know the person to whom they’re selling. But if they only spend about 35 percent of their time making sales, they might not reach quotas as efficiently as you’d like.
That’s where a tool like ZoomInfo comes in. A sales prospecting software like ZoomInfo can help you research your potential customer. You can build your Ideal Customer Profile using data-driven insights and access a massive database of B2B decision-makers to contact those who fit your profile. You can also keep track of the decision-makers who are already interested in you by using the tool’s website visitor tracking.
Sales prospecting software makes your sales team more efficient, saving time and resources. In addition, by utilizing such a tool, they can focus more on the selling portion of their day, making them more likely to reach and exceed their quotas.
Invoice automation and management tool
As your business grows, so will the number of invoices coming in and out of your company. You’ll have more vendors and contractors and will both expect to receive and be expected to make regular payments. Processing payments will fall to your accounts payable team.
But your accounts payable team will have plenty on their plates if you’re not using efficient software. Instead, they’ll be manually entering in data, fixing processing errors, and sending out reminder after reminder about invoice approval. By leaving these processes up to your accounts payable team, you’re leaving yourself open to a high likelihood of human error and filling up their days with tasks that are no longer necessary for them to do.
Why do 72 percent of companies regularly experience a slow invoice approval process? Or 80 percent of companies say they’re often overwhelmed by invoice volume? If you were to automate invoice management tasks, the process would naturally become faster and more efficient.
You’ll also be less likely to miss deadlines and have to pay dreaded late fees.
Receiving an invoice triggers many steps for your accounts payable team. They’ll need to verify the invoice, talk with the right parties to approve it, and ensure any payment being sent out is tracked in the right places. Unfortunately, all of these variables leave room for error.
But by using a tool like Stampli, your invoice management becomes automated. Such a tool can automatically key in essential information, send out approval requests, and track where you are in the invoice process. Ultimately, you’ll save time and resources and boost your accounts payable team’s productivity.
Project portfolio management software
At any given moment, your company likely has many moving parts. Perhaps your business is a software company. Your engineering team may be working on a new feature, your marketing team may be building out your blog, and your customer success team and sales team may be working on an event to retain current clients and attract new ones.
Perhaps there’s even a good deal of overlap, like an engineer writing a few blog posts to give insight into the new feature or your marketing team creating content that will be showcased at the event.
With so many people playing so many different roles, it’s challenging to keep track of who is working on what and when the deadline is for all the various projects. What’s easy, though, is losing sight of what’s happening in each project.
Which blog posts need editing? Where are you in the beta tests for the new feature? And have you secured the guest speakers for your event? Who booked the speakers’ accommodations? Did anyone?
With so much happening, a project portfolio management (PPM) tool becomes essential. A PPM, like Monday.com, allows you to keep track of each project in one place. You can assign roles, set deadlines, annotate your process, and let your team have access to track everything along with you.
That transparency is crucial to prevent an overlap of roles and redundancy in your projects. With a PPM, you’ll find your business more productive, with fewer questions and confusion over what’s happening in your various projects.
SEO-enabled AI writer
In 1996, Bill Gates penned an essay asserting that content will be “king” on the Internet. He suggested that the Internet will allow a high distribution of articles and other media. Any company could participate in this “marketplace of content.”
Gates was correct in his assertion, but he may not have been able to predict just how flooded this market would become. Despite the billions of daily Google searches, your posts and products may never be seen if you’re not ranking high enough. Over 25 percent of people simply click the first Google search result for their query.
Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your content climbs. Although Google lists sponsored results first on their search result pages, using SEO can help you land just under those sponsored links. Ideally, you want to aim to be the first authentic, non-sponsored link on the search results page. But without SEO, you can’t expect to reach that coveted position.
As you grow your company, consider using an SEO-enabled AI writer like Zupyak. This AI writer uses a machine-learning algorithm to create content focused on a specific topic or keyword.
While there are other AI writers on the market, an SEO-enabled AI writer gives you a leg up on your competitors because your content uses SEO elements, like meta tags and backlinks, to ensure your links rank highly on search engines like Google. You’ll be more likely to reach your target audiences and increase your brand’s visibility.
Wrapping Up Your New, Efficient Tools
As you grow your business, efficiency becomes paramount. With new growth comes more emails, sales prospects, invoices, projects, content, and time spent on all these various new processes. As a result, you need to cut down on the time and resources used for each function, making your teams more productive and able to grow.
With an email verification tool and an SEO-enabled AI writer, you can create content and make sure it's seen. Meanwhile, an invoice management tool makes your accounts payable team more efficient, while a sales prospecting tool does the same for your sales team. And PPM software makes every project more well-run.
With your new army of tools, you’ll be ready for your next growth stage in no time!
