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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5 sales automation workflows to help you close more deals

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Time is your most valuable asset.

There's always more to do: Leads to develop, prospects to pitch, churned customers to re-engage, and sales campaigns to develop. Time spent on these high-value, high-leverage activities delivers business results.

But there's a bottleneck: Repetitive information processing. Without sales automation, every task produces information that requires you to port it from one app to another.

Below, we break down five automated workflows—we call them Zaps—that will enable you to sell faster and with less effort. You'll need a Zapier account to use the workflows in this article. If you don't have an account, you can sign up for free here.

Note: Some of the apps highlighted in this article require a paid Zapier account, or that you be in your two-week trial period. Learn more about our plans and pricing.

Automatically capture leads

The speed of your sales pipeline depends on how fast leads flow through it. The faster you generate leads, the more deals your sales team can close. But lead tracking can be tedious, especially when done by hand.

You can use automated workflows to capture more leads, more quickly, and with less effort. Create a landing page and automatically send prospects to your customer relationship management (CRM) app with Zaps.

If you use Facebook Lead Ads, you can use these Zaps to feed those leads to your marketing and sales automation platforms.

Cultivate leads with webinars and drip campaigns

Not all leads will be ready to close on day one. Sometimes, you need to nurture leads over time, warming them up to eventually convert.

Lead nurturing takes work, and it's important to keep it top-of-mind. Feed their interest in your company with content from webinars and email drip campaigns—all aided by sales automation.

According to the 2019 ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report, 76 percent of companies say webinars help them drive more leads. To take advantage of that opportunity with your own webinars, use these Zaps to register leads for webinars.

Email is another effective lead-nurturing tool. In fact, nearly two-thirds of respondents to one Databox survey said it's the most effective tactic—far higher than social media retargeting, display retargeting, and search retargeting.

Webinars work hand-in-hand with emails—you can send follow-up information to attendees and allow them to sign up for your drip campaigns. Here are some Zaps to automate the process to funnel contacts to your marketing email app from various sources.

Automatically follow up with prospects

It's important to capture your leads when they're most interested. Diligent follow-ups help you nurture the relationship while staying top of mind. But with lots of leads to track, it's difficult to pinpoint when and how to follow up.

With automation, you can follow up instantly and start closing the deal before your leads reconsider. Use these Zaps to automatically follow up with interested leads via email.

You can also use Zaps to keep your team informed, sending notifications about new leads, so they can jump on the deal while it's hot.

Close the deal

Closing a deal is bittersweet: It's a victory, first and foremost, but it's also the start to a whole lot of paperwork and data entry. Cue automation.

According to Chorus.ai research, the late stages of a sales cycle account for 60 percent of the time spent to close a deal. Instead of letting this process drag on, use Zaps to transform manual tasks into hands-off processes.

You can automatically request signatures to make the deal official as soon as your prospects are ready. Any delays could mean changed minds and lost opportunities.

Then get notifications for new signatures, so you can keep things moving forward.

And then automate invoice generation to avoid delays in payment and keep everything synced.

Confirm the sale and retain your customers

While it's easy to focus on customer acquisition, closing the deal is only one step. The real magic happens when you create a loyal customer base. Just a 5 percent increase in customer retention leads to a 25 percent increase in profit.

Once you make the sale, use sales automation to help you maintain an ongoing relationship with your customer. At the start, use Zaps to confirm purchases and thank new customers.

You can also save new customers to your CRM, so you can build their customer profiles and funnel them into relevant campaigns.

Sales automation makes you a better salesperson

Sales is a human-facing, high-touch role. The more you're in front of clients, the more deals you'll be able to close, and the more you'll be able to develop your business.

Every minute spent entering data or copying and pasting fields of information is a minute spent on work that doesn't fit your human skillset. Use sales automation via Zapier to handle the tasks you don't want to do, the tasks that suit automation instead of human work.



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

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