Software may not actually do the selling for you, but it sure makes the job easier. Here are the tools we’re using at Proposify to simplify and automate parts of our sales process and how we tie them all together.

Software tools have become essential parts of our daily lives and businesses. Every department needs at least one good tool to aid their process, save time, and make communication easier.

If you’re building an inbound sales team to field new business leads and guide them towards becoming a customer, you need systems in place to manage that activity and track and measure how your salespeople are performing.

Every sales team is different, and everyone has their personal favourites. If I made an exhaustive list of “the best CRM platforms”, it would be a bore to read, and I’d likely be barraged with comments like, “You left out my favourite! ” or “That product sucks!”.

Instead, I’ll outline the tools we rely on here at Proposify for our sales process and show you how to use integrations to tie them together, making life easier for both your sales reps and the person managing those reps.

Before digging in, let me point out that my focus for this post is on inbound sales tools. In other words, the sales reps are not required to cold email or call prospects, or attend networking events and hand out business cards to gather leads — they only deal with warm leads who have already expressed an interest in the business and volunteered their contact information.

For the purpose of this article, I’m assuming you have a marketing team responsible for generating leads using inbound and paid tactics, so I won’t clutter this post with marketing tools.

This week on Proposify Biz Chat I interview Paul Boag, a well-known user experience expert, author, speaker, teacher, and the host of the popular web design podcast, Boagworld. Paul has spoken at events like Future of Web Design and SXSW, and is the author of a number of books including Digital Adaptation and his up and coming book, User Experience Revolution. I’ve been a huge fan of Paul’s work for more than a decade, and his podcast inspired me to start my own.

 

Shownotes: https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/023

It was one of the most important decisions of our lives: do we sell the company that’s been our source of livelihood for five years? The process took an arduous and brutal ten months, but nearly three years later, both my business partner and I can say with confidence that selling our web design agency was one of the best decisions of our lives.

Headspace, a web design agency, was my first company — my christening into entrepreneurship — but I couldn’t let my romantic attachment to the agency, or my pride, get in the way. My business partner, Kevin Springer (now my co-founder here at Proposify), and I needed to exit the agency industry.

The decision to sell our agency would have been more difficult if Headspace had been rolling in cash but splitting our focus between running a successful agency and trying to build a fledgeling Proposify hurt us, and we needed to shit or get off the proverbial pot.

After a few promising leads that went nowhere, we got a call from a local businessman who seemed serious about buying Headspace. For nearly a year that followed, we endured call after call, email after email, countless legal complications, and cash-flow crunches, all while desperately trying to keep Headspace afloat and Proposify moving ahead.

I took on some low-paying freelance work just to personally make ends meet, and Kevin lined up a full-time job, just in case things went south. It was, without a doubt, the lowest period in my life as an entrepreneur. I thought everything was all going to come crumbling down at any time.

Finally, the deal went through.

Here’s what we learned about trying to sell an agency that might help your process be somewhat less painful, and hopefully sets you up positively for your next business venture.

See it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtS4rKQOOtU

This week on Proposify Biz Chat, I interview Dr. Carrie Rose, an expert in online education and founder of Brand Legend, a company that helps their clients create valuable and impactful online courses using innovative teaching strategies. Carrie is an educator, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker, and she was named one of The Huffington Post’s Must Follow Women Entrepreneurs in 2017.

What it’s about

Here are two staggering facts:

1. The online learning industry is worth $100 billion dollars.
2. The completion rate of online course is a dismal 3%! That means 97% of people in that $100 billion industry aren’t completing courses.

Insert shocked face here, right?

That’s what Dr. Carrie Rose of Brand Legend is trying to change. In this interview, Carrie shares why so few people who buy online courses don’t finish them, how you can create a course that actually connects with people and delivers the value you promised them, and she’s got a smart hack on how to use Amazon to figure out what content you should build into your course.

Show notes: https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/021

I’ve often referred to my experiences running an agency with my business partner, Kevin Springer in this blog. We were small, and I kind of wore it as a badge of honour. I thought being a small agency made us more nimble, able to provide better service, and it was easier to manage. We operated on referrals and local business, and it was tough. I make no claims on being a successful agency owner.

Looking back now, I realize it’s not that I wanted to be small, it’s that I didn’t know how to be big. I didn’t understand that for an agency to be super profitable, you must scale. You have to put aside your fears of hiring more people, of carrying a bigger payroll, of delegating control to others.

The reason Viveka Von Rosen became “The LinkedIn Expert” is because back when she first discovered online networking, LinkedIn was the only game in town; it was before Facebook, before Twitter (gasp!). It was a business tool for her ideal client  - B2B, small business owners. LinkedIn still is the most powerful and effective business networking site, if leveraged properly. And in this episode, Viveka shares the three pillars to help you leverage LinkedIn for yourself and your business: branding, content marketing and lead generation.

For show notes: https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/019

 

Want to know the ONE thing, THE most important thing, that will make your proposal process more successful? It’s this: Not every sales lead deserves a proposal.

If you’re delivering a proposal to everyone you meet or speak with on the phone, you’re wasting valuable time and money. Chasing leads that have no chance of going anywhere distracts you from nurturing quality leads, leads that are far more likely to close, leads with better deals at stake.

Some people subscribe to the quantity over quality proposal process. They churn out proposals like hot dogs at a ball game, filling up their sales pipeline and trying to look like ballers (or so they think).

But if none of those proposals closes, who’s the bigger baller? The fast and furious sales rep with 15 proposals pending but only two closed? Or the laser-focused business development pro with five proposals in the funnel and four of them are ready to be signed on the dotted line?

The proposal process eats up a lot of resources - scoping, writing, designing, sending, following up, revising. You need to be sure you’re investing those resources wisely by only sending proposals to sales leads that have a high probability of converting into closed deals.

You need to figure out which leads have that high probability of closing before you enter a single word in your proposal.

Full post: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/how-to-qualify-a-lead-proposal-rfp

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufmeYOZPuJM

 

As founder of Content Kite, Simon Thompson is naturally very interested in the power of content to help businesses grow. He kept hearing that agencies were traditionally not very good at creating content for themselves, instead relying on referrals for 90% of their sales leads. But this was all anecdotal information, so Simon wanted to see what the data had to say.

 

Simon and his Content Kite team analyzed the websites of 1000 digital agencies. They categorized each site as:

No blog

Had a blog and posted once a quarter (None)

Had a blog and posted 1-3 times /quarter (Poor)

Had a blog and posted 1-3 times/month/ (Mediocre)

Had a blog and posted once a week or more. (Great)

 

Once a week or more would be what Simon would consider an optimal agency blog.

 

The alarming stats from this showed that only 7% of agencies posted once a week, while 36% of the agencies sampled were only posting a few times a year. And 30% of agencies had no blog at all, deciding for one reason or another it’s just not for them.

Simon believes that good content marketing can help agencies bridge the ‘feast or famine’ gap that many suffer from, bringing in quality, sustainable leads. In this interview, he shares his tips for how agencies can get serious ROI from their blogs.

Show notes:  https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/017

“I know someone who needs your services. I’ll send them your way.”

If you run a company, you’ve likely heard this from friends and people in your network. But is this simple statement of referral - one we all make almost daily recommending lawyers, hair stylists, mechanics, restaurants, accountants, and businesses of all kinds - worthy of a chunk of your profits?

My opinion is, no.

Let me be clear that what we’re talking about here is not about paying commission to sales people who work for you. I have no problem with that, obviously. But in my experience of running an agency where we experimented with paying referral fees to outside colleagues and partners, I don’t think it contributes profitably to scaling a business.

 

Full blog post: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/finders-fees-for-business-referrals

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb_NzgtJS60

Andrew O’Brien, AKA ‘The Publicity Guy’, believes strongly in the power of media as a sales tool, a trust building tool, a credibility building tool, and a brand tool. But he sees a lot of entrepreneurs never going after media exposure because of self-doubt. They think it’s impossible to get an media exposure; they think their story isn’t strong enough, or they don’t have enough clients, or recurring income. “People doubt that their company is worthy so they don’t even give it a shot,” says Andrew. In this interview, Andrew shares his expertise on how you can get the attention of the media and how to turn that exposure into revenue.

Shownotes: https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/015