Chapter 15
Bonus Sales Hacks
I would like to share a few bonus sales hacks for you to consider building into your sales process.
E-mail Signature
For starters, too many people throw a bunch of images into their e-mail signatures. I don't care if it looks pretty—don't do it. Make your signature as simple as possible. The only thing you should add is a link to recent positive public relations (PR). If the title of the story isn't very good but the article is awesome, change the title in the link that you are sharing.
Example Signature
- [Name] | [Twitter Handle]
- [Title], [Company name]
- [Mobile/Skype] | [Office/Skype]
- Forbes Names [Company Name] Top 10 Fastest Growing in 2016, Find Out Why!
Just link to the Forbes article in that example signature, even if it's just a slide in the Forbes article titled “Top 10 Fastest Growing Companies of 2016.”
If you're selling home owners on listing their places as short-term rentals on Airbnb, you can take an article titled, “Airbnb Raises $100 Million to Challenger Hotels,” and link it in your signature with the words “Airbnb Raises $100 Million from Top Investors to Make Home Owners More Money.”
My friend, Scott Britton, does this with his blog to increase traffic to his blog.
Scott explains:
Instead of just linking my signature link to my blog, I link to each post individually following the precursor, “Most Recent Thoughts.” This not only ensures my link appears since it's a new and unseen link, but also provides more compelling copy that's likely to inspire a click.
What's the Return on Investment (ROI) on This?
It took me 20 seconds to change the hyperlink in my e-mail signature within my Gmail settings. To measure the amount of traffic this drove, I used a Bit.ly link, which I reserved entirely for the hyperlink within the e-mail signature.
It turns out that 45 people clicked on my “Most Recent Thoughts” link over the past 3 days. From those 45 clicks three people re-shared this content via Twitter. Assuming an equal number of referrals per tweet, I used Google Analytics to project that this link was responsible for over 100 page views. Not too shabby for an extra 20 seconds of work.
Out-of-Office Reply
Another thing you can do is to put your Out-of-Office (OOO) reply to work for you. I see too many people using the generic, “I'm out of the office, with limited access to the Internet, and will be back [date]. If it's urgent, please contact [coworker's name].”
How many e-mails do you get per day? I might get hundreds, so this would be a key time for me to advertise.
Instead of a generic OOO reply, try saying something like this:
I'm currently traveling, with limited access to the Internet, and will be back [date].
In the meantime, check out our most recent article [company blog post, personal blog post, or recent good press].
If it's urgent, please contact [coworker's name].
This way, you're not wasting those views that you're getting while you're offline. Sigstr will allow your marketing team to create and change signatures across the entire sales team.
Mix in Some Humor
Sometimes adding a little humor into your e-mail can elicit a response. Some people like to go as far as adding funny GIFs or other images to e-mails.
This can work well when a prospect is not responding to you or gives you a negative answer. Once, when I was trying to secure sponsorships for a charity event, I received a “no” from a company that I had thought would definitely say “yes.” I knew my audience, so I went for it. I sent over a picture of a really cute dog looking sad. It was exactly what I needed to get the company to give it more serious thought. At the time, I thought it was a reach. Now I'm not afraid to use this approach.
People also like to do this in what is referred to as a “break-up e-mail.” Just don't overdo it, and know your audience.
Figure 15.1 Too Many GIFs
According to Craig Rosenberg, proven sales thought leader and author of the Funnelholic blog:
Embedding GIFs in e-mails can work in certain contexts. It is important to focus on key areas like college, hobbies, puppies, etc. Note: this is best for social media managers, marketing, PR, etc. Don't send GIFs to digital security officers. Know your audience and use this method when appropriate.
Also check out FunnyBizz for injecting humor into all of your sales collateral and operations.
Frenemies
Salespeople are almost always taught to connect with their prospects on LinkedIn. What they aren't taught is how to configure their privacy settings. Therefore, if you are connected to someone and they haven't fixed their settings, you can see when they have a new connection.
Now why am I telling you this? First, connect with sales reps at your competitor's companies. Most of them probably haven't played around with their settings and won't think anything of it when you ask to connect. Once you're connected, keep an eye on whom they connect with. When they connect with a prospect, you'll be notified via a news feed and you can send them a very well-timed e-mail. Just don't mention how you knew to send them an e-mail at the perfect time.
Stay Relevant on Twitter and LinkedIn
When you are involved in a deal at any stage, you always want the customer to be thinking about you. This means that you need to stay on his or her radar. The best way to do this is through LinkedIn and Twitter.
On Twitter, Follow, Favorite, Retweet, Respond. All of these show up on the Twitter notifications tab with your name, image, and handle.
For LinkedIn, try a tool called SearchQuant. It will allow you to select a subset of LinkedIn profiles based on an attribute like vice president (VP) of sales and then it will automatically view VP of sales profiles. In the VP's account, it will show that you viewed his or her profile, thus coming up on the VP's radar.
Other Unique Solutions for Hacking Sales
MailLift
Go offline with MailLift, which sends handwritten letters to customers in bulk for you. You might not have physical addresses for your accounts, but you should start collecting them. You need to know what office your target customer is in, and find the corporate address. Once you have that, send the target customer a letter using MailLift. You supply MailLift with a template, as you would in an e-mail campaign, and a list of contacts, and MailLift will write the letters and send them out. You'll have a lot less competition getting in front of someone in his or her physical in-box, and the target customer will appreciate the gesture. Rarely do people send physical letters anymore, so you'll look good.
Also check out Postable for handwritten notes.
As a follow-up to this, I also recommend sending the main decision maker a gift basket after a deal has been closed. This is only for deal sizes of a certain amount, but it will go along well when it comes time to resign or up-sell, and it starts the relationship off on a good note.
After I graduated from college, two friends and I started a business in which we sold real estate agents on running their social media for them. The goal of this business was to make American money while living abroad in Central America, which we did successfully. When we'd close a new account, we'd send the women flowers through 1-800-FLOWERS and the men unique cookies. They would arrive almost instantly. Even though our deal sizes were $600 to $1,500, it was worth it to send $30 worth of fresh flowers or cookies to their offices.
What happened next was fascinating. Other real estate agents from that office would see the flowers or cookies arrive and inquire. They would then call us and order a social media package for themselves.
Sending the flowers was a great way for us to indirectly advertise our services to the rest of the office. People like to feel special. Go the extra mile, even after—especially after—the deal has closed.
Active Admin
Try out Active Admin, a Ruby on Rails plug-in, as a way to track trials and uncover accounts to follow up that are in the database of users. It's almost like a Dashboard-as-a-Service, and it was designed for nontechnical users, so anyone can get the most out of it. You can create a dashboard from Salesforce data or from your own server's back-end data that your sales and customer success teams can easily sort through.
Olark
Olark is a live chat tool that sits on your website and allows you to talk with inbound leads in real time. By using Olark, you can do a lot of the discovery and needs assessment before your leads ever even make a call. You can have marketing development reps (MDRs) or sales development reps (SDRs) arrange to take turns managing the chat and qualifying leads.
In addition, you can create a team that is completely outsourced, either in the Philippines or locally (Phoenix, Austin, Omaha) to control the sales inquiries and pass them to your account executives (AEs), once they're ready.
Whoever figures out the on-page chat, lead qualification system that cuts out the in-house MDR and outsources it completely will have a massive advantage. The team can then take that saved budget and put it toward driving more inbound sales. This becomes infinitely scalable, without the need to invest in more capital, and should drive a lot of qualified leads to AEs.
I recommend testing Olark out if you think you have a service and a team that can pull it off. Let me know how it goes!
Also check out Zopim, LiveChat, LivePerson, BoldChat, HelpFlow, and SaleMove.
Twilio
Twilio is an application program interface (API) that allows you to build custom voice and SMS solutions. You can choose to use this in your cadence by leaving customers generic voicemails or text messages.
You can template these things. Here is an example:
Hey, [First Name],
It's [Name] from [Company]. I sent over an e-mail earlier regarding how we can help you with [product value]. Please [enter ask here]…
Sales from the Streets
For more tips and tricks from top sales professionals around the world, check out the free app called “Sales from the Streets,” created by John Barrows and friends. It brings the sales community together to share what's working and what isn't when sales reps are closing deals.
The tips are broken down into categories that span every stage of the sales process, along with other critical aspects of sales, like preparation and motivation. Since the video tips are all actionable and less than three minutes each, they can be used immediately for specific sales situations or can be digested during a sales rep's downtime, like while commuting to work or waiting in line for coffee.
You can also record your own videos and share them with others to help build your own personal brand and presence in the profession.
I always like to see salespeople helping salespeople.
Visit www.SalesHacker.com/library for more sales hacks that we couldn't fit into this book.