Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
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Top Salesforce automations to keep your business on track

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With over 150,000 customers worldwide, Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) apps available. Businesses large and small use it to track their leads, manage the sales cycle, execute drip marketing campaigns, and more.

Lots of teams—especially sales teams—spend the majority of their working day in Salesforce. It houses an enormous amount of data, including all of your customers' contact information, the products they've purchased in the past, and the status of sales opportunities that are currently in progress.

While Salesforce is an incredibly useful and customizable tool, no one wants to spend more time than necessary moving data around. Here are five automations that can help you get the most out of Salesforce—while reclaiming precious time to spend on higher-value activities.

Never manually create a new lead or contact again

When someone clicks on an online ad, fills out a form, or responds to other marketing campaigns, what happens to that lead? Do you manually download their information, reformat it, and upload it into Salesforce? Do you sit down and type their details into your CRM? If so, you know that managing new leads can be a time suck, especially if you're working with a high volume of them.

Instead of managing your Salesforce leads and contacts manually, you can use Zaps—Zapier's automated workflows—to transfer lead information into Salesforce automatically. Here are a few sample Zaps that will do the trick:

Effortlessly track warm leads and opportunities

When a new lead comes in, you often have only minutes to reach out if you want to convert them into a paying customer. Staying on top of new leads in real time can be frustrating, especially when you're trying to track hundreds or thousands of sales opportunities.

A great solution to this problem is to push new leads into whatever chat app your team uses. That way, they can immediately see when a new lead comes in, along with the relevant contact information they need to reach out. Here are a couple of Zaps that can do this:

Stay on top of Salesforce tasks with your favorite to do app

Salesforce offers a create task feature that allows you to associate tasks with leads or assign them to specific people on your team. But the truth is that everyone has their own method for managing their to do list, and lots of people prefer to use an app other than Salesforce to track their work.

Looking for ways to manage your tasks? We've done the work of testing and recommend these as the best to do list apps and these as the best free project management solutions.

Instead of manually copying your Salesforce tasks into your favorite to do app, here are a couple of Zaps that can do it for you:

Keep your sales data and financial data in sync

Another area where many businesses can save time is in keeping their accounting app up-to-date based on the most recent Salesforce data. When a new contact or opportunity is created in Salesforce, you'll eventually also need to create a corresponding contact or customer in your accounting program. Similarly, when a Salesforce opportunity closes, you'll have to create an invoice for that amount in your financial hub.

That's a lot of data entry to ask of your sales and accounting staff, so here are a few automations that can lighten the load:

Love these automations, but not sure how to get started with Zapier? Learn more about setting up your apps to work together with Zapier.

Headed to Dreamforce this year? Here are 5 tips to get the most out of the conference—and stay productive.



from The Zapier Blog https://ift.tt/2NIIeBw

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