Tell me if this sounds familiar: you’re at a major conference. You’re on fire. You’re picking up business cards and charming the socks off CEOs all over the shop.
You’ve got your leads lined up. They’re giving you all the right signals. You know you’re going to get some serious deals tied down when everyone gets back to their respective offices next week.
Except you don’t.
The first few times you get in touch, your prospect’s PA is mega-helpful. But four emails later, the boss is still busy, there’s still no mutual time for a meeting, and their patience is wearing thin. Uh-oh.
Or maybe you sent out a super-enthusiastic flurry of emails the day after the conference, but now you’re struggling to keep up with who said what and which ones are genuine leads and where you are with each of them… and now they’ve begun to slip through the net.
Whatever the cause of it, that ol’ conference magic seems to be wearing off – and there’s a major risk that all your hard work and slick pitching has been in vain.
But don’t despair! Because there is – as ever – an app for that. In fact, here are three of the smartest new email apps from up-and-coming startups that will leave you wondering: “How did I survive without this before?”
Locked in an epic email back-and-forth as you struggle to find a time you’re both free to meet? Never fear. This app has a wonderfully easy-to-use solution.
Simply integrate it with your Google Calendar, click on the times that you’re free, and have these automatically listed as possible meeting times at the bottom of your email.
All the other person needs to do is click “Works for Me” next to the time they want and the meeting is automatically scheduled, sending both of you a confirmation. Works for us!
Imagine if you actually knew if and when your prospects had opened your emails?
No frustrated waiting around while wondering if they’ve even seen your message, or agonising over whether to resend the same information again. A spooky ability to make a follow up call at just the right moment, when your email is still top of mind.
Sound good? Thought so. No one likes to be left in the dark – and not knowing is often worse than a flat-out rejection. But now, thanks to Getsidekick, omniscience can be yours.
You simply install the plugin and the app tracks your emails, alerting you as soon as they’ve been opened. And it doesn’t stop there: your communications are linked to the contact’s profile, giving you a detailed record of your past exchanges, as well as details like mutual connections that help you add a little personalisation or icebreaker when you’re composing your email.
As a result, you can easily stay on track of where you are with a client, helping to make sure that you don’t let any juicy leads fall by the wayside.
Plus, thanks to a new feature currently in development, you can also use SideKick to write and schedule your emails ahead of time, meaning that you can race through the “admin” side and organise emails in bulk while you have free time, but optimise the times of day or week that they actually get sent. A godsend for busy (or scatty) reps.
Finally, if you’ve managed to rack up a huge number of leads, or if you need to “cold email” a bunch of new prospects, you might be in a position where you don’t have time to individually tailor each one. But as we all know, sending out a faceless cut-and-paste job is likely to send your missive heading for the recycle bin faster than you can say “customer engagement”.
So what’s a salesperson to do? Luckily, Sendbloom.co has some ideas. You move over your list of leads and the app-based service adds a ton of information both from public and private sources, turning the different types of data into fields that integrate with email templates and link up to Salesforce.
All of a sudden, you can automatically personalise each email to reflect the client’s industry and job role, as well as where they’re based. “Hand-crafted”, targeted emails… in a millisecond.
So there you have it: 3 email apps we think will supercharge your sales and make follow-ups a breeze. But what tools do you use to streamline your sales journey? Let us know in the comments below!