Outside sales reps are accustomed to being on the road. Field sales comes with a lot of great opportunities to travel and meet new people, but it’s also a very stressful and demanding career. Mobile phones make outside sales work more manageable between planning routes and meetings, keeping track of notes, and staying on top of goals. But what are the best outside sales tools you can use to be a more effective and efficient sales rep? Fear not – we have created a list of some of the top tools that will help you stay organized and successful working as an outside sales rep.
Prospect/Client Research
Before you head off to visit a potential customer or a current client, you must know who they are and what pain points you can solve for them. LinkedIn is a great sales tool on its own for prospect research, but LinkedIn Sales Navigator takes the power of the platform to an entirely new level. It’s great for sifting through millions of LinkedIn profiles to find the ideal prospects you are looking for. You can filter by location, title, company, or any information that might be useful. Once you have your results you can reach out to them on LinkedIn or turn to ZoomInfo for more contact info. ZoomInfo can also filter and par down a search, providing direct contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers of prospects.
Route and Meeting Planning
It’s crucial for outside sales reps to be efficient with their hours on the road, as extra driving takes away from time you could be meeting with other prospects. Although using Google Maps to plan your routes is always an option, Geopointe is more tailored specifically to outside sales and service reps. Geopointe sits on top of Salesforce CRM and allows reps to schedule and choose the shortest, most efficient routes from customer to customer each day. You can schedule for drive time between meetings, enter cancellations, schedule changes on the go, and take notes for each meeting within Salesforce mobile – saving the information directly to CRM. Geopointe is a huge time-saver and a great app to boost productivity for sales reps on the move.
Communication
As a field sales rep, it’s important to pay careful attention to your efforts to communicate with your clients and team. Being outside of the office so often makes it more difficult to collaborate with your team and gain valuable time with your manager. Slack is a great tool to help you stay in touch with your team, whether your need advice on a deal from a teammate, share files or images, or create separate channels by departments or selling groups. Slack is a handy app for your phone, computer, or tablet and a great way to communicate.
It is also extremely important to be responsive to your clients. Have your email provider’s app on your phone (such as Outlook or Gmail), so that you can respond to emails immediately, and have a to-do list of emails you must reply to. Set up a Calendly account as well. Calendly allows prospects and customers to schedule a time with you based on your availability, so you can avoid going back and forth via email to set up a meeting time.
There you have it! A few suggestions on how you can better manage your time and organize your work as an outside sales guru. Let some of these apps do the work for you and use the rest of your time to get on the road and start surpassing your sales goals.