Startup sales forecasting is challenging, but it is one of the most critical aspects of planning for your business' success. Learn how to create a sales forecast for your pre-revenue business.
When is the right time to implement a CRM? If you are experiencing any of the following seven struggles, the time is now. Learn more about how a streamlined CRM can increase sales, improve customer service, and help your company grow.
Sending out prospecting emails can be a time-consuming task, but it doesn't have to be. These customizable prospecting email templates are designed to help sales reps successfully turn prospects into leads.
This list of 20 cold email examples that get results reveals how marketers, sales reps, entrepreneurs, and job seekers use cold email to get the results they want.
For any business owner or salesperson wanting to know how to benchmark their sales processes and get results, this is the definitive, how-to guide.
Looking for the perfect email template to follow up with a cold lead? Need to make one final pitch or check-in after an in-person meeting?
You must tailor your lead generation strategy to not only capture more leads, but to capture targeted leads that are likely to purchase your products. In this post, we’ll offer several unique methods to generate more targeted sales leads and drive revenue growth for your organization. Keep reading!
Every salesperson wants a healthy pipeline, but many don’t have a reliable way to take its temperature. Beyond just “healthy” or “dry,” what do you need to look at to truly gauge the health of a sales pipeline?
Cold emailing can be an effective way to build your network, make sales, share content, or build links. But, it comes with several challenges. Learn how to avoid the pitfalls and write the perfect cold email.
We had just pivoted from a failed CRM company and I owed it to our developers to start selling. If they were going to work late writing code – a task they had been admirably performing for quite some time up to that point – then I had to hold up my end of the bargain.
Propeller offers almost all of the same functionality as Pipedrive, but also provides native Gmail integration, automated email campaigns and workflows, and scalable flat-fee pricing perfect for growing teams.
Sales success starts with lead generation. That’s why we put together this list of prospecting tools that will help you keep your pipeline full with a steady stream of fresh, viable prospects. We’ve included tools to help with everything from generating your list, verifying contact details, and uncovering insights about your prospects, to generating outreach messages, navigating phone trees, and tracking prospect interactions.
There’s more to growing your startup than just making sales. It’s critical to look beyond how many deals you closed this period to the factors impacting your sales team’s success.
The condition of your sales pipeline says a lot about your business. It reveals how close your sales reps are to meeting their quotas, how much revenue you can expect over the next quarter, and whether you have enough new leads to sustain your level of success.
Part of the trouble is estimating which leads are most likely to become customers. There may be a large variance in the size of your opportunities and the likelihood of closing each one. Though there’s no guaranteed way to predict success or forecast sales perfectly, a weighted pipeline can help paint a more accurate picture of your pipeline’s overall value.
In order to pitch directly to prospects with decision-making power, you need to get past the gatekeeper first. These sales tips will help you win over the gatekeepers of the world so you can get patched through to decision-makers faster.
If you want to move leads through your sales pipeline more quickly, here’s everything you need to know about sales lead management – including tips for engaging with prospects and nurturing leads into customers.
What’s the best sales forecasting methodology for your sales team? Is it historical forecasting, multivariate forecasting, opportunity forecasting or another sales forecasting method? The answer depends on whether or not you have reliable sales data from past quarters.
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is vital to the success of your SaaS business. Find out how to calculate MRR in the context of SaaS sales and optimize MRR for faster, sustainable growth and higher profit margins.
Sales teams that take full advantage of technology to streamline their sales operations can sell more in less time. Find out how you can improve your sales operations and planning through analytical tools, automation, social channels, and a cloud-based CRM platform.
Sales Velocity is a valuable sales metric that tells you how much revenue you’re likely to close on a given day. Generally speaking, the greater your sales velocity, the faster your company can grow.
The key to success is sales is developing a sales strategy plan and putting into action. A good sales strategy is designed to optimize revenue by helping target your best customers and streamline your sales process. It provides a clear understanding of organizational goals and how to achieve them.
This article explores how sales teams can set quotas and goals designed to motivate reps and optimize results. It covers the benefits of setting effective quotas and provides 13 tips to help sales managers do so, including choosing the right type of quota, focusing on actionable steps, and setting tough but achievable goals that maximize each rep’s potential.
This article looks at the importance of streamlining your sales process so you can move leads from first contact to close faster and easier than ever. We outline six ways sales teams can optimize their pipeline and speed up their sales process, including qualifying leads early on, eliminating leaks and bottlenecks at every step, and following up consistently.
Ready to find out how you can use technology to close more deals and bring home more wins for your team? Let’s take a look at how different types of sales automation can help you overcome 10 of the most common sales challenges.
This article outlines how you can hack your sales cycle, so you can close more successful deals in less time. That means bringing in more revenue – and doing it faster than ever. These 14 tips will help you shorten your sales cycle, move leads through the sales funnel more quickly, and prevent common bottlenecks from slowing you down.
Outbound sales is tricky, especially when you’re starting with a list of cold contacts. The best practices outlined in this article will help you improve and simplify every aspect of your outbound sales process – from lead generation to outreach to qualifying leads to closing.
These days, you don’t need to meet prospects in-person to sell your product or service. In fact, the majority of your lead generation, pitches, and sales probably take place via phone or email. Today, we’ll look at why inside sales is important for growing your business, how inside sales can propel your success, and walk through the stages of an effective inside sales funnel.
A guide on how to choose the right CRM platform for startups and small businesses, including the different types of platforms available, features and functions to consider, and how to avoid common pitfalls when implementing a new system.
A roundup of 19 sales tools to help startups accelerate their growth. This list includes tools to simplify, streamline and automate sales activities ranging from prospecting to outreach to lead qualification.
Effective pipeline management allows you to take control of your sales opportunities. This article provides tips for improving pipeline management by keeping it full of high-quality leads, organizing prospects by priority, and tracking the right metrics to keep tabs on your pipeline’s health.
This article offers advice for sales reps looking to break into SMB sales, including why SMBs are valuable customers, tips for connecting with SMB owners, and how to increase the likelihood of closing a sale.
This article provides tips and advice for more successful sales prospecting. It walks through building a list of contacts, researching and qualifying sales prospects, cold emailing and calling, the importance of following up, and the value of using a CRM like Propeller to track and analyze customer data to improve your sales process (include prospecting).
The ideal sales pitch is a two-way conversation between the seller and prospect, rather than a one-sided lecture. Of course, you can have a sales script in mind, but it’s just as important to listen to your prospect and adjust your offering based on what they say.
A well-defined sales cycle can help you streamline your sales process, increase sales velocity, and more accurately forecast close dates and incoming revenue. The length and stages of your sales cycle depend on your industry, product, price point, and customer profile.
Just look around and you’ll see that artificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated almost every industry and profession – including sales. In fact, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, about half of a sales rep’s workload consists of activities that can be automated by AI. But that doesn’t mean AI is a threat to your job; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. There are many potential benefits of using artificial intelligence in sales.
Most founders hate the idea of sales--it feels foreign and disingenuous at best. But, if you’re a founder, you can’t let that hold you back.. You don’t have to “be a salesperson” to close. And you really don’t have any options. In other words: You sell or you die.
The importance of building a talented, reliable, well-trained sales team can’t be overstated. Regardless of your business’ size, revenue, or industry, you need great salespeople to support your business as it grows. This guide is designed to help you with all aspects of hiring and building a sales team, including what to look for in a candidate, how to interview, when to expand your team, and how to create a payment structure that attracts, motivates, and retains top talent.
Looking at sales benchmark rates provides you with valuable context that can teach you a lot about your sales process. Sales benchmark rates give you an informed basis for creating your own quotas and goals. Of course, you should think of sales benchmarks as data to guide your decisions, rather than absolute truths to live by.
Once you start moving leads through your pipeline, you might wonder about the difference between leads vs. opportunities vs. prospects. This article will explain how to define, qualify, and manage leads and opportunities as they move through your pipeline.
In this guide, we’ll cover how to take the first steps and build a cold email campaign from scratch. Using Propeller, it’s dead simple to setup and manage your campaigns. That way, you can focus on all of the opportunities that come from the process.
We’ve compiled these cold email statistics to give you a benchmark of successful cold email campaigns. Hopefully you’ll learn something that can be applied to improving your own campaigns and entice your contacts to see what you have to say.
This article will explain what sales prospecting is, how it works, and how to do it well – including what skills, techniques, and tools a prospector needs to be successful.
Unfortunately, email spam is still very much a problem in 2018 – especially for the many businesses who fall victim to spam and phishing scams year after year. Today, we’re focusing on how email spam can affect you as the recipient, including who’s sending it, which country is most susceptible, and which ‘phishing lures’ are most the most popular targets for credential theft.
In order to close sales, you need to be serious about following up with your prospects. Unfortunately, many sales reps struggle to send effective follow-up emails that grab their recipients’ attention without spamming their inbox. This article will show you how to write a sales follow-up email that gets a response and isn’t annoying.
As your business grows, so does the number of customers and contacts you have to keep track of – which is where a robust cloud CRM system comes into play. If you haven’t made the switch to a cloud CRM yet (or you haven’t made the leap from spreadsheet to using a CRM at all!), you could be hindering your sales team and slowing down your business.
Although most sales reps don’t send emails with the intent of spamming their contacts, the line between the email spam and legitimate cold email can sometimes seem a bit fuzzy. So, exactly what is the difference between cold email and spam? More importantly, how can you prevent your cold emails from being classified as spam?
Creating a balanced sales territory plan helps ensure you’re targeting the right customers at the right times and assigning the right accounts to the right reps. This also allows you to reduce your sales costs and improve productivity – which hopefully leads to even more sales.
You can’t measure what you can’t track. Without tracking these essential metrics, you lack the ability to judge your team’s performance or take steps to improve your ROI. This list of must-track sales metrics can help you make informed decisions about your sales process, so you can grow your business and keep your pipeline full.
Your sales process is the set of steps your sales team follows when moving a customer along the sales funnel. It begins before you make contact with a prospect and often continues long after the sale is finalized. A comprehensive sales process encompasses all major customer interactions from prospecting to selling to nurturing.
Your CRM platform is likely one of the most essential pieces of technology for your entire business. It should be an enormous asset, which allows your entire to operate more efficiently and with greater insight. It’s the heart of sales, marketing, service, and many other business functions. But, not without the right investment.
Sometimes your prospects are this close to making a purchase, but for whatever reason, you can’t quite close the deal. Well, we’ve put together a list of eight sales “tricks” that will help convert these tricky leads into customers.
When you manage a team of sales reps, your compensation structure determines the type of talent you’ll be able to hire. Not only do you want to attract and retain gifted sales reps, you want to motivate them to do the best job possible.
Product-market fit (PMF) is arguably the most significant indicator of startup success. What having PMF does do is prevent startups from throwing money at a problem than can’t be solved. It proves you’re on the right track and that your startup stands a chance.
For sales team, sales quotas act as a benchmark and can provide the motivation reps need to perform their best and support the business’ goals. Many sales teams thrive with the help of quotas. The key is to set quotas that are both challenging and attainable.
Fortunately, you don’t need to pay a fortune to build a powerful sales stack that sets your startup up for success. In fact, you can get everything you need for $29/month! Today, we’ll discuss how you can put together a fully-loaded sales stack and suggest an affordable, scalable stack you can start using right away.
What’s the number one mistake salespeople make that costs them sales? Not following up! Even if you follow up once or twice per lead, you need to up your game.
Even if you’re perfectly content with your current lead conversion rate, there’s always room for improvement. Whether you want to increase your revenue or grow your customer base, the benefits of improving your conversion rate are clear. Try out a few of these strategies to boost your conversion rate.
If CRMs are so great, why do so many sales reps have horrible experiences using them? More importantly, how can you ensure your team has a healthier relationship with your CRM? Let’s take a look at the most common reasons salespeople hate their CRM platform.
This guide will teach you how to create an ideal customer profile so you can find and target the high-quality leads your startup needs. We’ll also look at different ways to find your ideal customers and questions to ask yourself during the process.
Overcoming sales objections is difficult--it can be paralyzing. The truth is that both new and experienced salespeople often struggle with these situations. It’s hardwired in many of us to not push too hard on anyone to try to get them to say yes when they don’t really seem sure. And when you don’t have a response figured out, it can be extremely difficult to come up with one off the top of your head.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to land your first customers. Especially since new startups lack the brand awareness, social proof, and referrals that provide many established businesses with valuable leads. Today, we’re going to cover four actionable strategies to help you acquire the first 100 customers for your startup.
Uber, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Apple, and Amazon are among the biggest, most valuable brands in the world. Today, these businesses are massively successful – but they were started by entrepreneurs who worked their way up from the bottom. In fact, you might be surprised by the events and circumstances that led to their success.
Today, we’re going to talk all about annual run rate (ARR): what it is, how to calculate it, and why it’s not the most accurate way to forecast your sales revenue.
As a startup founder, the time will come where you need to hire your first salesperson. Now this can be scary. First of all, you’ve likely never hired a salesperson before--what do you even look for? Secondly, your first salesperson will be responsible for the core revenue generating activity for your entire company. This guide explains how you should go about making that all-important first sales hire: when you should hire someone, where to look for the right talent, how to screen and interview, and how you can close the deal with the right candidate.
To get the most bang for your buck when it comes to your marketing budget, it’s important to recognize which leads will be most receptive to your content and efforts. This is where marketing qualified leads (MQLs) enter the picture. The more accurately your marketing team can identify the right leads – those that are actively seeking information about your solutions – the better you can allocate your resources and only target those who are most likely to become customers.
Whether you’re sending cold emails, corresponding with potential investors, or offering support to your customers, your email signature is attached to every email you send. It only makes sense to put effort into designing the perfect signature. This article will cover what you should include in your email signature, design tips, how to generate your own signature, and provide the resources you need to get your signature set up and properly formatted in your email client.
As a startup, you must carefully balance your need for sales with your need to conserve resources. Combine that with the fact that most startups lack defined hiring and onboarding practices and things start to get complicated real quick. Today, we’ll look at the steps you should follow if you want to build a sales team that drives revenue for your startup without sacrificing culture or performance.
Making the jump to enterprise sales is more complicated than scaling up the strategy you already use to sell to SMBs. Enterprise sales is a whole different beast. If your company is looking to sell to larger companies and land more valuable accounts, it’s important to rethink several key aspects of your sales process to make sure you get it right.
If you don’t know what a sales hacker is, you might assume this article is about salespeople looking for shortcuts to success or a guaranteed way to close every single deal. Either way, you’re a bit off the mark.
Being a good storyteller is good for business. If you can infuse your sales process with inspirational, persuasive, and memorable anecdotes, you can make a bigger impact on your prospects and steer them towards the decision to buy. Science backs this up. An engaging story can trigger the release of oxytocin, which is also known as the trust hormone. This reaction increases your prospect’s trust in you, your brand, and the product or service you’re pitching.
Not all leads are created equal. Some sales leads are just tire kickers looking for a deal. Others are ready to buy and they’re looking to make a decision as quickly as possible. Once you’ve started to build a reliable sales pipeline, your focus shifts from getting leads to identifying, nurturing, and closing those leads--making sales. How do you know if someone is a good sales lead or not?
We’ve put together a list of 24 common sales terms you need to know. So if you’re a marketing expert, you can communicate better with the folks over in sales; and if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you can nail the lingo right out of the gate.
Deciding how to compensate your sales staff can sometimes feel like a “chicken or the egg” scenario. You need good sales reps to get customers and you need paying customers to expand your hiring budget. So, how do you strike a balance? By developing a scalable sales compensation plan that can evolve with your business.
There’s no getting around the fact that it takes time, practice, and resilience to master the art of cold calling. Maybe that’s why so many new sales reps want to believe cold calling doesn’t matter anymore? But cold calling is far from dead. I repeat, cold calling is not dead.
The sales pipeline coverage ratio is the metric of choice for sales managers that want to keep a close eye on the health of the business and make sure their reps are on track to hit their quotas.
Before your sales team can deliver a winning pitch that lands a new customer, they need to know who they should be pitching to. If a lead is passed on to sales before they’re serious about making a purchase, the conversation isn’t likely to end well. So, how can you tell which leads are done window shopping and primed to buy? By following a lead qualification process to help your marketing and sales professionals identify sales qualified leads (SQLs).
When assembling your sales team, you need to consider if you want reps who are agile jack-of-all-trades-types or specialists who truly shine in their given role. Smaller teams are more likely to benefit from sales reps who can do a little bit of everything. But as your startup grows, along with your need to bring on new hires, it becomes increasingly important to hire specialists for each of the sales roles on your team.
The key to sending a successful cold email isn’t necessarily writing the perfect sales pitch or sending it at just the right time (though these are important, too) – it’s convincing your prospect to open and read your message. Once you’ve identified who you want to contact and managed to find their email address, crafting the perfect cold email subject line is the number one thing that influences how likely your prospect is to read your message at all. Not only is the subject line your first chance to make an impression, it could be your last if it doesn’t get clicked.
Many successful CEOs read an average of 4-5 books per month. When it comes to books on professional development and improving your sales techniques, there are tons of titles to sift through. We put together this list of the best sales books ever written to help you choose a starting point.
Monthly recurring revenue (usually referred to as MRR) is one of the most meaningful metrics a SaaS business can measure. After all, the entire subscription-based business model hinges on the ability to generate and maintain a profitable MRR.
We want to help you deliver impactful sales or product demos that allow you to close more deals and grow your company. So whether your demos are already pretty good or still need some work, try out these tips to make your demos amazing and take your sales to the next level. That’s why we put together this list of 14 proven tips for sales demos that convert more prospects into customers.
Have you ever gone looking for advice on the best time to send your email and walked away feeling more confused than confident? You’re not alone.There is lot of conflicting information out there about when and how to send emails in order to get the best results. Literally, dozens of studies have been done and almost all of them offer up slightly different conclusions.
Understanding your customer lifetime value allows you to predict how much revenue a new deal will bring in over the course of the customer relationship.
While all businesses should pay close attention to their churn rate, it’s particularly important for SaaS companies that operate on a subscription model. Some of your customers will stick around for decades, but other will drop off your radar as soon as their free trial ends.
This list of useful and shocking sales stats offers insight into how buyers make decisions, the importance of persistence, and why most of your cold calls don’t lead anywhere.
These 39 sales quotes will inspire you to take control, encourage your team, and remind you why you do what you do - even on your most difficult days.
Crafting a targeted cold email campaign is one of the best ways to grow your business. It allows you to warm up leads, connect with prospects, and access a world of potential sales opportunities.That’s why we created The Beginner’s Playbook to Running a Cold Email Campaign. We want to help you develop cold email campaigns that get delivered to your ideal targets, clearly communicate your value, and produce real results for your business.
This guide is a step-by-step process for finding almost anyone’s email address on the web. And it’s ridiculously effective, without relying on expensive tools or technology (unless they’re absolutely necessary).
Different types of CRMs support your business goals from different angles. Choosing the best CRM system for your company requires looking at your objectives and determining the main customer management problems you need resolved.
One of the most effective ways to measure your customer’s happiness, loyalty, and likelihood to refer you new customers, is with Net Promoter Score or NPS. NPS is a 10-point rating system allows you to quickly gauge your customer’s overall satisfaction and is also designed to tell you who among your current customers are your most ardent supporters.
Landing new clients is the name of the game in sales, but that doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax as long as there’s money coming in. It’s also important to look at how much is actually being spent to turn leads into paying customers. That is, you need to calculate your customer acquisition cost.
IBM created the BANT framework as a simple way to qualify the leads who were most likely to buy and disqualify the ones who probably wouldn't.
Hollywood loves to typecast salespeople as ruthless, corrupt, and hilariously corny. But sales movies can also capture the passion, energy, and ambition necessary to launch a successful career. We’ve rounded up 26 of the best sales movies that will teach, entertain, and inspire you!
Cold emailing doesn’t have to feel like a shot in the dark. There are a number of cold emailing techniques that are proven to increase There are a number of cold emailing techniques that are proven to increase response rate, warm up leads, and open up the high-value sales opportunities you’re after. In this article, we’ll break down four highly successful cold email campaigns to find out exactly what they did right and how you can follow their lead.
When it comes to connecting with customers via email, one of your biggest hurdles is simply getting noticed. Your average customer’s inbox is teeming with competing messages and sales pitches. So what does it take to ensure your email stands out, gets opened, and gets read? We’re going to provide you with 13 proven tactics that will increase your email open rates for existing contact lists and cold email campaigns.
So you built a SaaS product. Great! But now you have to sell it, and if you’re just getting started there can be a number of metrics that can seem dizzying to a first time entrepreneur. To make sure you’re covering all your bases, read below to find the 9 critical sales metrics you should be tracking from day one.
OK, so you know how important it is to build a high quality, targeted lead list for your email campaigns, but is the thought of doing all that research by yourself beyond daunting? If so, there’s a simple answer: outsource the job to a web researcher! Not sure where to start? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to identify your ideal target, hire the right professional, and start building your lead list.
Today, I’m excited to announce an integration with another company designed to make work easier: PieSync. With PieSync, you can sync your Propeller data across dozens of business applications like Google Contacts, MailChimp, Zendesk, and more.
First, let’s start off with the elephant in the room: there are already a lot of CRM products out there. And Salesforce is the largest SaaS company in the world. Isn’t this market all wrapped up? Aren’t we wasting our time? But if you dig deeper, you’ll actually see a common problem with existing products: they were built to manage sales, not to make sales.
