So you’re looking to improve your sales and you understand that the only way to do that is to get your marketing in check. But improving your sales is about a lot more than getting a superstar marketing team; it’s also about improving your productivity by being able to perform the best analysis and generate top-notch reports. You need more than just random data on your consumers; you need to get insight into how to use that data to carve a great future for your revenue.
In today’s world there is a vast ecosystem of marketing apps and plugins that make all of this possible. The one problem is that the ecosystem is so vast that you’re literally bombarded with an avalanche of options the minute you try to look for marketing solutions for your business. Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow get a curated list of the best and most useful applications and plugins to take your marketing and sales to the stratosphere? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. We’ll look at some of the best apps and plugins on the Salesforce AppExchange as well as a variety of Gmail and Chrome plugins that you can use to your advantage.
1. InsideView
InsideView is a Salesforce app that is focused on social selling and sales intelligence. It’s pretty much focused on being able to deliver the right message, making sure it gets to the right person, and at the right time. This is achieved through analyzing the connections on your social networks and using special trigger events. If you don’t have much of a Salesforce database of contacts, then InsideView allows you to both update and import these contacts. It will then let you monitor a large number of sources (over 25,000 as at this writing), and allows you to gather crucial sales intelligence in the process. You can then use that intelligence to inform your product releases, business mergers, executive shifts, and much more, all the while staying way ahead of your competition.
InsideView allows your sales and marketing team to get very valuable information from your leads and prospects using a feature known as People Alerts. This feature allows you to track their social profiles for their activities and, at the right moment, reach out. There are plenty of filters you can use to curate lists, including recent events, industry, revenue, and so forth.
2. DemandTools
DemandTools is an app on Salesforce that deals with administrative and data quality management. It was specifically designed to help you deal with the gargantuan task of organizing and managing your administrative tasks on Salesforce, especially if you’ve got a very large database. When you’re dealing with a database, there is a whole range of things you need to do regularly, such as importing, verifying, and removing duplicate data. All of this can get quickly overwhelming on a large database. That’s why DemandTools is here. It allows you to make quick work of these monotonous and time consuming tasks. It will clean up and standardize your data as well as remove duplicates, making it easy for your data to be filtered, sorted, and acted upon.
DemandTools is usable and easy to automate, making it the administrative tool of choice for database management.
3. Conga Composer
This Salesforce app is all about being able to create and deliver proposals and presentations. This invaluable application lets you take your objectives and fields on Salesforce and turn what, at the heart of it, is just ugly data into plans, contracts, documents and much more using Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. It will also work seamlessly with PDF and HTML-based emails. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to create proposals, quotes, invoices, and so on.
One of the most valuable features of this app is how it is able to easily integrate with your existing workflow on Salesforce. It will use all the existing rules to create and deliver automatic reports. It will deliver them via Google Drive, email, Salesforce or make use of DocuSign, Sertifi, EchoSign, and other e-signature capabilities. You can also use event triggers to drastically improve your productivity and, using the mail merge feature, create literally thousands of documents.
4. Geopointe
Geopointe is a Salesforce application that deals with mapping analytics. It is highly crucial for businesses that would like to get geographic data about their customers. It is pretty much the most popular such application on the AppExchange and is recommended widely. You can make use of such systems as Google Maps to create boundaries, assign territories, plan optimized routes, and, through the Salesforce mobile app, enable checking in and check out capabilities. The application collects addresses and then cleans them and standardizes them. It vastly improves the productivity of both the salespeople and the subcontractors and, in the process, opens up new locations where you can take advantage of new marketing opportunities.
5. Rapportive
Rapportive is a great Gmail plugin that’s been around for a while. It was recently acquired by LinkedIn. It has evolved over time. However, its ability to bring social power to your Gmail inbox is still unmatched in the market. The simplest version of Rapportive will bring in LinkedIn profiles to your account. This can prove to be very useful for a variety of reasons. It will give you useful insights in what your contacts do and what they are about. A person’s profile can give you nuggets of information that you can use to improve your connection with them. The plugin also saves you time because with it you don’t have to keep alternating between LinkedIn and your Gmail inbox.
This plugin will only work if a contact also happens to be a LinkedIn user since it doesn’t have access to other social media profiles. Luckily, however, LinkedIn is the leading professional networking platform globally and so most people will have a profile.
6. Streak
Streak is a Chrome extension that suits market professionals like a glove. It is built especially to be used with your Gmail account so it’s a great tool to have if you conduct most of your business on your email. It’s got a great range of features that you will deeply appreciate. It has collaboration tools, that make it easy to share files, contacts, and a lot more, it’s extremely easy to use and has absolutely no learning curve, compared to other CRM programs. It also has a very flexible structure that you can adapt to your business.
7. Yesware
This tool is a great convenience to have. If you would like to be able to track an email after you hit the send button, then you absolutely need to have the Yesware plugin. You check the box labeled “Track” right before you press the send button and you will be able to track every action taken by the recipient of the email. You can use it to track the rates at which your emails are opened and replied to and that can give you valuable insights about what content does better and what subject lines to stick to. You can vary your subject line different restrictions in order to see which one works better. You can also create email templates and save them for use later. It allows you to make use of the best performing email without having to recreate it each time.
8. Feedly
Feedly is a great Chrome extension that gives you the opportunity to add stories to your feed that you come across during your day. You can then come back later and go through these stories at your own pace. It’s a kind of container that you put stuff you find interesting that you can’t read in-depth just yet. You can then come back later and check them out in detail. The extension also allows you to share these pages and email them to your colleagues and friends through the click of a mouse button.
9. Momentum
Momentum is a more general plugin and isn’t restricted to any particular industry. It can, however, still be a great and useful tool for marketers. It brings in some exciting discovery in your day. It creates a default new tab and fills it with a page full of an inspirational background from any one of numerous beautiful locations around the world. It also includes a motivational quote and a place where you can write down your goals for the day. It doesn’t directly help you to market, per se, but it does make your web browser much more exciting and brings in inspiration and motivation into your day to spur you forward.
10. Evernote
Evernote fulfils one of the most basic but also the most important needs of any marketer. It allows you to organize your articles and to read your notes in a way that greatly improves your productivity. You can even work offline with this Chrome extension, collecting web articles and photos and taking notes in a single organized space. You can also share resources with teams and access your things on any device using the Evernote app.
Conclusion
All of these tools are important and highly useful, increasing the productivity of your marketing team and taking your sales to new heights. There are, of course, a multitude of other applications that help marketers in a variety of ways. However, these 10 are a great place to start and will spur you on to incredible productivity.