If sales was a round of golf, the clubs you have in your bag would be just as important as your skill with them, or your familiarity with the course. Gary Player said, “A good golfer has the determination to win and the patience to wait for the breaks.” He could have been talking about sales. At The Masters, like sales: you get a lot of prospects on the first morning; some don’t make the cut as you go into the weekend, then as each stroke takes you closer to winning, your experience and ability to choose the right club at the right moment becomes more and more important.
There’s a big difference, though, between hacking your way around the local links, and a weekend at Augusta – and the real masters like Sergio know which clubs they need from the first tee to the nineteenth hole.
Driver. What you need to get things moving, fast and accurate.
Winmo: build prospecting lists that convert
A great drive depends on making a solid contact. With the ball, sure. One of the most frustrating things sales reps come up against is inaccurate data for making prospecting call lists from. Computer operators and software engineers have said for decades that data outputs have a basic principle: if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.
That’s why Winmo has a dedicated team responsible for making sure its data is verified by humans at least three times every year, and is updated any time the company learns of changes to decision makers at brands, agencies and companies in its platform.
With a slew of filters and tools, seeing agency/brand relationships, planning period and media spend data, you can determine when to begin your outreach to be the most successful. With WinmoEdge, the platform’s daily opportunity briefing (formerly named DailyVista), you get intelligence delivered to your mailbox that you can use act on immediately.
Crush your tee-shot: Get your Winmo trial today!
Fairway Irons. For those times you need a more tactical approach.
Salesforce: track and time your outreach
The value of a CRM for sales teams can’t be overstated, and the industry leader is Salesforce. By filtering your opportunities to make sure you can focus on the deals that need your immediate attention, you can put your focus on selling rather than all those annoying data entry tasks. As a sales professional who takes pride in your work. You punish yourself for avoidable mistakes, but that’s just part of your winning mentality: you don’t show up to lay up. That’s why being able to keep track of your conversations with prospects is important to you; the appearance of having a great memory is almost as good as actually having one. All this keeps your deals moving smoothly down the middle of fairway.
Short Irons. To put you closest to the hole.
LinkedIn: understand the person behind the name
We put a big emphasis on getting the right contact information for your prospects, but that’s like having a good outward nine. The other half of prospecting intelligence – your back nine – is understanding who they are and what’s important to them. That’s why LinkedIn is one of the clubs you should be able to pull from your bag. Knowing a prospect’s alma mater, or the charities they hold closest to their hearts helps you understand who your prospect is and how they behave in the world. It can be the difference between a decent round versus “having that opportunity on that final round, final nine, to come down the stretch with a chance to win.”
Putter. When all you need to do is sink it.
Docusign: eliminate time waiting for documents to be mailed
Once you have that verbal “yes” on your deal, you need to quickly get the contract over to your (now) customer. There’s a reason “time is of the essence” is built in to contracts, and that’s where Docusign excels. Get rid of “we didn’t receive your fax” and “the courier hasn’t arrived yet” as excuses for deals being delayed. No more missing signature pages when the contract comes back, with digital contracts being delivered for one-click initialing and signing in a matter of seconds.
Wedges. In the weeds? This will get you out of trouble.
SharpSpring: stay on their radar
You probably have five articles in your email from various places that talk about the importance of personalization and/or email marketing automation. If you feel like you’ve hooked your tee-shot into some deep rough, one way to overcome any less-than-stellar impression you might have made is to send content to your prospects that’s pertinent to their business, valuable to them right now and delivered when they need it. That’s what marketing automation does, and with a product like Sharpspring you can personalize your emails so your prospects feel like you’re talking to them. By targeting specific content to lists of prospects you can show how in-tune with their pain points you are. You can even create lists based on whether a prospect took an action like visiting a particular page of your website, or clicking through a link in your newsletter.
So if your sales swing is more Happy Gilmore than Ben Hogan, making sure you have the right clubs can help you hit more sales goals and make more green(s).