If you're an inside sales team, you know what kind of software you need. You need a solution with integrated calls, emails and possibly SMS. You likely don't have a prolonged sales process and your salespeople work chiefly from a central console. They need to move from lead to lead without wasting time on a ton of clicks or data entry.
If your sales people are frustrated with your CRM, it might be time to change your CRM. If you're not sure what to look for, check out the 20 features an inside sales solution needs.
The right sales CRM can streamline and automate the sales process, track progress toward quotas, and forecast performance. In other words, it puts you ahead of the game. The right CRM integrations for inside sales can take it a step further and put you ahead of your goals. Take a look at these five CRM integrations to help with lead prospecting, cold email pitches, data sync, inbound calls, and more.
1. Generate Leads with Cold Emails and Drip Campaigns.
Some sales CRMs offer email marketing features like two-way sync, email templates, and segmentation, but a solution like Prospect.io is especially geared for inside sales. Its Chrome extension enables it to automatically find and verify prospects' emails, titles, and phone numbers when browsing websites and social media. The app itself can be used to send simple emails or email templates in drip campaigns for follow up sequences. It will also track typical email metrics like open rates, links clicked, conversions, and replies in addition to your own productivity by the day or hour. Users can connect their external webmail or SMTP servers to import contacts and email history. Prospect.io is designed to minimize data entry and requires relatively little onboarding. It integrates with several CRMs including Pipedrive, Close.io, and HubSpot.
2. Boost Inbound Calls and Shorten Callback Wait Times.
Few businesses have sales operations without a complementary marketing approach. Though inside sales is centered on high-velocity outbound communication, there's room for inbound marketing. What's usually overlooked in the hubbub of content marketing and landing pages is the potential for inbound calls. Callmaker purports to increase your sales calls up to 50% by increasing your number of inbound calls. It places a widget on your website offering prospective customers the opportunity to invite a call (which can potentially come within 25 seconds) with a specific sales agent whose name, title, and picture are featured in the widget. (The call can also be booked for later.) If the specific agent is unavailable, Callmaker works as an operator -- it will call the queue of a landline service or mobile numbers until someone on the sales team answers. Once they're on the line, the software calls the prospect and the two are connected. The software logs call details in your CRM in addition to storing call recordings and traffic sources. Callmaker integrates with Pipedrive, Capsule and PipelineDeals.
3. Sync Data Between Third-Party Software and Your CRM.
Your company invariably uses more than just your sales platform. You'll have a marketing solution, accounting software, reporting tools, maybe even an entirely separate CRM. For teams that want to sync data between these and your inside sales solution, Bedrock Data helps integrate multiple disparate solutions without requiring code (or Zapier, for that matter). Bedrock Data's library of connectors range from enterprise marketing solutions to ecommerce platforms to data enrichment, power dialing, email systems and helpdesks. The connectors allow non-technical users to map data fields across systems and manage workflow rules when syncing third-party software. It also prevents data duplication, which frequently occurs when attempting sync through Zapier. While Bedrock Data is hardly unknown, it deserves a spot on this list because inside sales benefits in particular from minimized data entry. Bedrock Data integrates with Base, Insightly, HubSpot, Pipedrive and other CRMs.
4. Generate Ecommerce Leads and Filter by Firmographic Criteria.
SalesOptimize is a lead generation solution that allows subscribers to apply parameters like business country, merchant size, domain, and marketing analytics to a database of over 1.7 million ecommerce websites. It boasts the largest market coverage for B2B ecommerce lead generation, the ability to map over 80% of websites to their trading country, and search filters that allow users to isolate merchants by their digital footprint. SalesOptimize offers monthly subscriptions with unlimited searches; its Pro plan costs $999/mo and allows downloads of up to 900 leads. (Take note that unused download capacity is not rolled over to the following month.) SalesOptimize also offers add-on packages with the ability to filter for distribution carriers, evidence of international shipping or same-day delivery, and your competition's biggest customers. Pricing for add-ons is available on request. SalesOptimize integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Close.io.5. Automatically Collect and Maintain Lead and Contact Data.
Modern CRMs enable profile auto-enrichment, which scours public data, social profiles, and email signatures to populate key data points for contact and lead profiles. This feature may be absent in your inside sales solution, but your team doesn't have to go without. SnapADDY implements this functionality by searching, updating, and maintaining contact data points including names, emails, organizations, addresses, and phone numbers from digital documents, websites and pictures. SnapADDY offers another solution called VisitReport, which allows users to update digital visitor reports from trade events, online questionnaires, documents, and pictures directly into the CRM. SnapADDY integrates with Pipedrive, HubSpot, Dynamics and SugarCRM, among others.
Lastly, Keep an Eye On...
We're not officially including Found.ly in this list because it hasn't been released -- but it looks promising for its purported ability to search and filter sales prospects on social media. The product demo shows an ability to search by demographic and firmographic criteria such as prospect location, company, seniority, years of experience and so forth, which would be invaluable for B2B marketing and sales. Users can pull prospects individually or en masse from networks and enter them directly into Found.ly, which obtains and verifies contact details. Users can sent prospects cold emails and sequences from within Found.ly, which aims to sync with CRMs across the spectrum.
If your sales team needs a jolt of new leads, and new functionality, the right integration can be the stimulant you need.
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