presented by Constant Contact featured partner Dropbox.
Form even deeper connections with remote customers—and close deals quicker—by integrating real-time collaboration and productivity tools into your sales workflow.
The CRM is the heart of every sales and marketing relationship. Both teams know how important real-time customer information is. A sales team’s success depends on building relationships. How much easier is it to build those relationships with prospects when you have real and relevant information about what they think and what they want? When marketing can pull accurate information on prospects and customers to run demand generation and account-based marketing campaigns, they can reach new levels of alignment with sales. How much more can you do for a customer when everyone’s on the same page?
As sales and marketing teams have transitioned more than ever into a hybrid-working world, CRM software is more valuable than ever. But pivotal questions—and opportunities—remain when it comes to connecting with customers, says sales-training leader Ray Makela, CEO of Sales Readiness Group. “How are you managing collaboration, communication, and the customer experience? How are you sharing documents back and forth with customers? How are you submitting proposals, how are you providing references?” How this work gets done in a hybrid world requires a very different playbook.
A CRM is an invaluable tool—for you and for your customers. But your ability to connect, communicate, and collaborate, both internally and externally, is equally valuable. One could go so far as to say that they’re the other half of the customer relationship story, especially in a remote- and hybrid-working environment.
“Top sellers combine foundational selling skills with digital fluency. They’re using tools to be faster, more focused, and more efficient—getting closer to customers and delivering better results,” says Ray Makela, CEO of Sales Readiness Group and a consultant with experience helping organizations from Accenture to Walmart amp up their sales teams’ impact.
How can a CRM work hand-in-hand with collaboration and productivity tools? It starts with a smoother, simpler experience using synchronized tools. Constant Contact partner Dropbox has been helping sales teams connect and communicate for years with features like DocSend and Dropbox Sign, supporting internal and external collaboration from the first pitch to final signature.
What are the benefits of marrying these tools with your CRM?
1. Sync instantly with customers
Let’s say you’re working out contract details with a potential customer. You’re probably not sitting across the table from them. You’re sending comments back and forth; you’re fielding questions left and right; and you’re dealing with changes straight out of left field. And that’s on a good day.
If you don’t have a simple, centralized place to connect on all of these negotiations, how do you know they’re all being managed? When they’re scattered across 19 different emails from nine different teams, how can you be sure you caught them all?
Eliminate back-and-forth email exchanges. Syncing your changes as soon as you make them ensures all of your users will have real-time access to the most recent version of your content.
2. Get campaigns out the door faster
Small business owners need to spend their time focusing on things that matter, like programs and initiatives that boost profit. Searching for scattered files and switching between apps to launch a campaign wastes precious time, but integrating your CRM with a file management can streamline the process, ensuring revenue-driving campaigns are on-time and on-point.
Uploading directly within your CRM, instead of searching for scattered files and switching between apps means you can spend your day focused on programs that boost profit.
3. Keep your team aligned
How are you currently making sure everyone on your sales team is on the same page with your proposal? If one rogue person on your team makes one wrong move—a price change that hasn’t been approved, let’s say—and it goes out, how many things can go wrong?
(Answer: lots.)
Your sales team needs a seamless way to connect and collaborate on your pitches, prices, and proposals, and if they don’t have it, all the CRM tools in the world aren’t going to hold everything together. Real-time collaboration tools can eliminate this issue through live updates and syncing across users.
4. Know how(and when) to follow up
It’s tough to know what your prospects are thinking over a phone or video call—even with all that CRM data. Once you send off the proposal, it can feel like a guessing game to understand how interested they really are.
With a file and document sharing solution like DocSend integrated into your CRM, you can combine your campaign analytics with page-by page document analytics and granular permissioning like email capture, one-click NDAs, and password protection. That way you can know which pricing tier within the proposal a prospect is gravitating towards, and whether or not it was shared with other decision-makers across the company. When you know the prospect has spent 80 percent of their time on pricing option B, it’s much easier to tailor an effective and proactive follow-up conversation to close that deal faster.
5. Close deals faster
Time for the dotted line? By embedding electronic signature capabilities right into a CRM, companies can put the lengthy print, sign, and scan process to bed. Speed up the signing process with a mobile-ready eSignature experience, complete with reminders and notifications. If things change on the fly, you can amend agreements or add signers instantly. You can even track document status to see what’s viewed, opened, declined, or signed. And if there’s nothing on the dotted line, auto-reminders let recipients know a signature is needed.
It’s a simple little way to get the signoffs that help you close deals up to 80% faster.
You can also keep your contacts, statuses, and data all in one spot, and because agreements are automatically saved as soon as they’re signed, you can spend more time nurturing relationships.
About Dropbox
Dropbox is the one place to keep life organized and keep work moving. Used by more than 700 million people across 180 countries, Dropbox is on a mission to design a better way of working. For more information about our mission and products, visit http://dropbox.com.
Constant Contact customers receive an exclusive offer of 30% off Dropbox Pro. Learn more.
