5 Free tools to make the sales process easier

What if I told you that there is no need to spend all your budget on super modern CRMs and expensive sales tools in order to start getting your first leads?

The right choice of your sales tools and practices becomes crucially important, as, in digitally influenced sales, the whole process is no longer focused so much on giving pitches and pricing, but aimed at well-thought value proposition personalized for each client.

In JetThoughts, we strive to experiment and try out as many practices as we can to get the predictable sales traction while building up a stable sales process, but with more experiments being conducted, it becomes harder to keep everything in place.

That’s why we’ve gathered a shortlist of tools which help us to always stay on track and deal with the most common issues of asynchronous workflow and remote environment, yet the same tools could and should be used in any other workflow type as it makes the sales management lot more understandable and self-controlled compared to the classic micromanagement schemes.

TOOLS WE USE

Here’s a thorough list of all the tools used to speed up the sales process and get the full setup of the environment for lead generation and further prospecting.

Schedule and Progress

*Trello* — probably one of the best project management boards we use almost everywhere, it’s free yet very powerful and could be accessed from both PC and Smartphone and has tons of integrations with other services.

As of now, we have 2 boards called Lead Generation and Leads.

Lead Generation board is a sales-centric ecosystem where we store all the cards related to lead generation and sales experiments, while Leads board stores cards with the leads and clients we want to seal a deal with.

The main rule of both boards is to keep each card fully autonomous and self-sufficient so that any other team member could exactly understand what’s going on and why this card was created without asking additional details from the card creator.

There are several tips to achieve it:

1. Every card should have a person responsible for it.

2. If there are any materials attached to this card, there should be links to external materials and all the info should be well-documented.

3. Once the task is finished, the card should always be sent to verification and if there are any issues while dealing with the task described in that card, you should ask help with a real call to action to another team member you want to get help from.

While Trello is used for sales management, there are some other tools we use to generate leads and send the cold emails to them:

G-Suite as CRM and Sending Infrastructure

G-Suite — we use everything Google offers: in Google Sheets, we gather all the info about leads, Gmail is used for email campaigns and Google Docs is used for email drafts. We don’t use more advanced CRM systems as we didn’t find the right solution yet.

LEAD GENERATION

So when it comes to the lead generation process, we use job boards, platforms like Angel.co, Behance, Dribble, etc. to find leads, and Linkedin to find the information about the company executives we want to reach out to via email. There are numerous tools which allow getting someone’s work email, but we stick to Email Hunter as it’s basic version is free. You would just need to know the full name and company website to guess the email.

Once the required quantity of leads is generated, we use Yet Another Mail Merge to send the customized emails to the recipients. We also use Power Tools & Split Name spreadsheet plugins to clean up data within the lead generation spreadsheets.

WHAT’S NEXT?

When we receive the emails with positive replies, we gather them to Leads board so that the team could see all the details.

Paul Keen is an Open Source Contributor and a Chief Technology Officer at JetThoughts. Follow him on LinkedIn or GitHub.

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