Supercharge your Sales with these 7 Handy Outlook Addins

Feel like having a coffee meeting with a prospective client without ever leaving your desk ? Need to build a scalable, efficient and auditable sales process to capture leads, integrate these with your CRM, control the sales process ? Engage your client ? Want to stop wasting time scheduling meetings, webinars and sales calls ? Then you need to read this article.  Most emerging wealth managers that are struggling to fulfill their potential struggle due to lack of sales. Even though we do some pretty awesome stuff with our coaching clients, here are 6 or 7 Outlook add-ins that can supercharge your sales process (assuming you have one).

1. Learn all about your prospects with Clearbit

When we all started in this business, someone handed you a phone book and said "start calling" - The sales world is entirely different now. Modern sales are based on quality information. A super efficient salesman wants to find as much information about a prospect as possible before that all-important initial contact. Their reasoning is simple: higher-quality leads generate more revenue but are harder to reach.

Low-volume, high-quality sales techniques such as account-based sales are now becoming more popular. In these, your sales teams pre-qualify prospects, finding exactly the right investors that will succeed with your fund / service, and the key stakeholders therein that will make the decision. Only once they have all this information will they reach out.

Clearbit for Outlook gives you all the information you need on prospects directly inside Outlook. You can do two things from within the add-in:

• Enrichment—if your sales team is being passed enquiries, leads or data from your marketing team, you can enrich each lead to find out more information before you reach out. Clearbit Enrichment lets you take a single email address and turn it into personal information such as names, titles, and roles, and find company information such as size, industry, and current investments.
  
• Prospecting—if you are contacting cold, then Clearbit Prospector allows you to find the right people at your target companies. You can enter the domain of the company you want to prospect, then the title or name of the person you are interested in. You’ll then get their email address so that you can reach out.

2. Connect with prospects repeatably using WittyParrot

The point of building a process is to build something repeatable, and that will have consistent results and save time.

Time is the most precious asset for a business development executive. They have to do the research above, then reach out to each new lead. This is all before they actually get anywhere near the ‘selling’ part of the sales process. This reach out stage poses a catch-22 though for reps. It needs to be quick so they can get through their quota each day, but it also needs to be good if they are to get any response. Usually “quick” and “good” don’t play well together.

But they can in this part of the process with templating. By building templates in WittyParrot for their most common emails, your team can reduce the act of writing and emailing new leads from minutes to just a few clicks

An email add-in for Outlook might seem redundant. But WittyParrot’s power lies in its ability to let sales reps modularize their emails. Reps write “wits,” small snippets that they can then drop into each email depending on context.

This doesn’t mean that each email to each lead is the same. Instead, after building the email from the template, your sales team can replace variables with personalized data, such as that gleaned from the Clearbit Prospector. Emails are then both produced quickly, but are also valuable and customized for each target, making sure they receive a reply.

 3. Meet your opportunities using FreeBusy or Calendly (Gmail)

Internally, meetings help business development teams form a cohesive strategy and share notes about what’s been working and what hasn’t. Externally, meetings are where pitches are made, relationships are created, and, ultimately, deals are sealed. But figuring out meeting times that work for all parties usually results in an unnecessary back-and-forth that wastes your time, and your prospects attention.

FreeBusy is an add-in that makes scheduling meetings a matter of five minutes, no matter how many people are involved.

FreeBusy lets your whole team connect as many calendars as they have— whether they’re on Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Google, or iCloud. Internally, you’ll be able to pick a time that works for everyone, and externally, you can send along all your availability for your contacts to pick from with one click.

If you are an avid g-mail user - then Calendly is the solution for you. So for example you would like to schedule a call with me, Anric Blatt to discuss what Global Fund Advisors can do for your and your business, instead of sending 15 emails up and down to find a suitable time that suits us both across time zones, just click this link and it takes you straight to Calendly which integrates with my calendar, and voila a time is scheduled for us both.

It automatically puts a handy google hangout link into the calendar entry, so at the appointed time you just click the link and we are connected.

4. Present your solution with Join.me (or Zoom.us)

Once meetings are set, you need to illustrate  your company, your fund and what makes you special. The demo stage is the most vital of the selling parts of the process. If you are able to show the true value of your magic to your prospects, then they’ll invest their time to have a meeting with you. If not, then this is the end of the line. But why leave your desk to fly across the country, sit in traffic, buy lunch if the prospective investors has not yet been qualified or convinced that you have a solution for his problem ?

So the last thing you need is for your intro to be held up or halted by errant or complicated video conferencing. The Join.me add-in for Outlook lets you set up demo calls and video conferencing using your Join.me account.

Lately we have found Zoom works even better - here is the link for the Outlook Add-in

This means you can include video links and audio conference details directly in the invite email. All your audience needs to do is click the link and they’ll be straight through to your demo. From there you can:

• Share your screen so that everyone can see the presentation in action.

• Swap presenters if you want different members of your team to talk the prospects through different features of the company. You might for example schedule your CEO or CFO to join the call for 10 minutes using Calendly or FreeBusy - it makes it real. Investors need to see that there is more to the company than just you. You could even video a short compliance intro by your team and then show that during the Join.me presentation.

• Annotate and highlight different parts of the screen so you can draw prospects’ attention to the key features that will matter the most to them.

5. Close the deal with DocSend

The final component of any sales process is the finalization. Up until now, everyone might have been talking about making a deal, but it’s not until the contracts get signed that you can start working together.

This is an element of the sales process that has resisted modernization the most. Contracts and other documentation would just be attached to an email, printed out the other end, signed, scanned, attached and emailed back. Far from the most efficient process.

DocSend takes this inefficient process and turns sales content into something that your team can have total control over. Instead of sending attachments, the Outlook add-in lets you send a link to DocSend where your sales documents live. This works not only for final contracts, but for all your sales content throughout the process.

This has some major benefits over regular document attachments:

• You can track who at your prospective customer’s company is viewing your content. Is it just your main contact, or is it being passed up to the CFO or CEO?
• You can understand page-by-page engagement for all your documents. Who is really reading your content and what is most interesting? Who is downloading to read later?
• This has major compliance and regulatory benefits

• You can restrict access to certain team members if you want to keep some components of your product secret, or want to stop prospects from having access if the deal becomes closed-lost.
• It allows you to make updates even after you hit send. Because you still control the documents, you can update the documents in your DocSend folder and prospects will only see the latest version. It’s great for when you are negotiating over the final contracts.

By tracking content and documents within Outlook, your team never has to worry about a missing attachment, or which version of the updated contract they are supposed to be sending.

6. Worthy Alternative - Clearslide

We have been using Clearslide for years - in some way - its as close as we can get to emailing a handshake or fedexing a cup of coffee. Without ever leaving your desk, you can host your first one or two meetings with a prospective client from the comfort of your desk (or your beach chair if that's your thing.) Its a fully integrated content management, presentation, customer engagement, CRM friendly platform that allows you to focus on what you do well, allows your sales resources to optimize their time and leaves a compliance trail that would make even Lauralouise Blatt happy.

7. Track your process with Trello

Each of the above add-ins helps with a defined part of your sales process. But Outlook can also help you keep track of the process as a whole.

Using Trello for Outlook, you can organize your dealflow and move people from one stage to the next without leaving your email.

Email can be turned into actionable items in cards in Trello. From within Outlook, you can create cards for new prospects or sales activities, then move these along your process. If you need to follow up on an email by the end of the month, you can add it to a Trello card and add a due date to make sure you get notified. Every person, every email, every activity can then be tracked.

Once you are doing that, you can see where your team is spending their time, and start to optimize each layer of your process within Outlook, until it is as efficient as possible, leading to more closed deals for your reps, and more revenue for your company.