This guest post was written by Max Aschulter, CEO of Sales Hacker, a worldwide media company that specializes in helping salespeople and sales organizations leverage technology to become more efficient sales machines. He recently wrote a book showcasing his unique process including over 150 tools to use, called Hacking Sales.
Here it is:
At the end of 2014 I wrote my bold predictions article for 2015, the key being The Year of the SDR. But one of my predictions was Extensions Galore. With there being so many awesome new tools available for salespeople, many companies are trying to figure out where they want the end user to live. As a company, your three options are usually to force them to live in Salesforce or their CRM, their Email Inbox, or on your Application.
Most of the companies that make you live in their app take you out of your normal workflow, so this can cause the products to be used a lot less frequently. With Browser and Email extensions, these companies allow users to work from wherever they please, without interrupting their usual workflow.
Here are a few I think every sales rep should be taking advantage of.
Boomerang
I found out about Boomerang about 4 years ago, and I’m not sure how people work without it. Boomerang allows you to push emails back into your inbox at a later date. You can even check a box that says to only push the email back to you if nobody responds.
For example, if someone tells me to follow up in two weeks, I can set it to shoot that email into my inbox two weeks from now. Most people make a note on the calendar, but that’s so much more tedious.
Boomerang also let’s you send emails at a later date. Like if you’re trying to impress someone with your hard work by sending him or her emails at 3am.
*Example of Send Later and Return Conversation to Inbox. Both work very well.
Discover.ly or Rapportive
Rapportive was the best but ever since LinkedIn bought it it’s gone down hill. Now I use Discoverly, which does the same job and Rapportive.
Check emails by inputting the email address into the To: or Cc: fields and see if any social profiles show up. You can input various versions of an email to test it.
It also helps when you already know the email and or are responding to an email and would like a quick look into their social profiles.
*Access to social and personal info right in the side bar in my email.
Connectifier
Connectifier sits on the right side of your screen as soon as you open a Twitter or LinkedIn profile and pulls up all of their other profiles across the Internet and sometimes it even shows email addresses.
This is a great tool to use when researching prospects and gives you free emails. If I cold emailed you to your Gmail, it was probably from Connectifier.
*Similar to Rapportive and Discoverly, the right bar pulls up more information you can use in your lead/customer research.
Datanyze/Salesloft
Add a lead or prospect to your contact list through Linkedin to quickly retrieve their email address. Both services allow you to quickly click a button in the browser and add multiple leads to a list on a separate page. You can then take that this and contact those individuals by email as well as by LinkedIn.
Picking people off one by one allows you to be more targeted in your list building. Leveraging these tools in tandem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator make both more useful.
*Either Datanyze or Salesloft will allow you to add Craig as a prospect and best guess his email address. I can send him and Inmail and an email.
Import.io
Import.io allows you to set up a crawler so you can easily screen scrape across the web. Why would you do this? Maybe you go to a site that has a list of potential customer companies and you should contact and you’d like to put them into a spreadsheet so you can pull their names and emails.
The Import.io Chrome Extension allows you to do just that, saving you the time of manual entry. This can be used to scrape sites like Glassdoor, Yelp, etc.
*No big deal, just downloading a .csv of all the companies hiring for Sales Development in San Francisco. Thanks Import.io!
Buffer
Use Buffer to schedule tweets to your prospects and the overall Twittersphere. Sharing relevant content with individual accounts keeps your front of mind. Posting information or news keeps your name in the feed and builds credibility. You should always stay on the radar. Buffer just allows you to automate it a bit.
*Go to any page and just pull up the Buffer plug in and send from multiple accounts or schedule it to send at a different time.
Assistant.to
Set meetings quickly and easily with this Gmail extension that sits right in your email compose box. Assistant.to connects to your calendar and pulls in available times that you can select and de-select to allow the recipient to choose a time that also works for them. Once the time is selected, it syncs and sends invites to both calendars.
*Just pick the times that work for you and it inserts them with this text automatically.
Jing/Skitch
Take and share quick screenshots with a simple link. You can keep it open in the top right corner of your screen and easily take a screenshot and send it to someone without having to open an files or access your email. I use this with my product team internally or to send something relevant to someone playing with the product.
*Nice and easy way to send an image via link that you can annotate and draw on.
Bonus
Google Labs in the Settings area of Gmail is pure gold. I use the Undo Send all the time. There are a few other ones in there that you might enjoy like embedding Google Calendar in your Inbox, Mark as Read, and Apps Search which allows you to search Google Docs through Gmail.
*Pick your poison from Google Labs.
Want more? We showcase over 150 tools without bias in my new book Hacking Sales, out now on Amazon.
Max Altschuler is the CEO of Sales Hacker Inc., a worldwide media company that specializes in helping salespeople and sales organizations leverage technology to become more efficient sales machines. He recently wrote a book showcasing his unique process including over 150 tools to use, called Hacking Sales.