2. Efficiency: Track prospects as they move through your sales funnel

Your customers don’t care that you’re juggling 78 new conversations, 24 product demos, and 131 responses to a cold email campaign every single day. In order to maximize the ROTI (return on time invested) with each prospect, you need a smooth process and workflow for tracking them from lead to opportunity to customer.

Sales management software gives you a full view of your relationship with each lead so you can treat them like they’re the only person in the world. Keep all your sales activities in one place so you don’t miss a call, email, text, or task. Track every individual touchpoint to see when you should follow-up or change your sales strategy. Or organize leads in your pipeline by value and the likelihood they’ll close to make sure your efforts are bringing in the biggest return.

Why this is important: Once a prospect is in your funnel they’re yours to lose. Don’t waste all the time you put into finding and qualifying them simply because you didn’t have the right tools in place.

What you’re missing without it: Every sales funnel has room for improvement. But without tracking leads inside your pipeline, you have no insight into how you can improve, grow, and continue to automate your sales process.

3. Performance: Monitor and support your sales reps to do their best work

Your sales team is only as good as the players on it. And as their coach (or manager), it’s up to you to ensure they’re doing their best. Sales management software gives you an overview of your team’s productivity so you can identify issues, track individual performance, and help empower them to get more done.

And this knowledge isn’t just for you. Individual sales reps can use the performance metrics in their software to inform their own sales strategies and also check the team leaderboard to see how they stack up against their co-workers.

Why this is important: As a sales leader, you can’t just rely on your gut. By monitoring and tracking the data from your team’s sales activities and performance you’re in a much better position to adjust strategies and make smarter decisions for everyone.

What you’re missing without it: You can’t guide your team if you don’t know what their strengths and weaknesses are. Without gaining transparency into your team’s performance and productivity you lose valuable moments for teaching and coaching them.

4. Automation: Scale up your sales efforts with automated communication and follow-ups

The right Marketing software speeds your team up in a number of ways. One of the most powerful of which is through automation. In fact, according to Velocify, high-performing companies are 2x as likely as underperforming companies to describe their sales processes as automated.

Marketing software can reduce the time spent on manual outreach and follow-ups so you can focus more on actually selling. For example, SkyLimitApp Dialer can double your team’s outbound call volume by automatically working through a list of leads right from your Marketing App.

Why this is important: Whether you’re sending follow-up emails, setting up drip sequences, or calling prospects, the more volume you can do in a day, they more sales you’ll bring in.

What you’re missing without it: If you’re not getting to your leads in a timely manner someone else will. Without sales automation, you’re potentially losing out on 60% of the leads you bring in.

5. Outreach: Build better relationships with your customers through email, calls, and text

It’s a simple fact that the more prospects you talk to, the more sales you’ll convert. However, 68% of companies say they regularly struggle with lead generation. Sales management software makes it easier to be in touch with your prospects, leads, and customers. By integrating your emailing, calling, and texting with your other sales tools (like Marketing App), your reps are in a much better situation to track their sales activities and close more deals.

Why this is important: Your customers expect a seamless and enjoyable experience when you contact them, which can only happen when you combine your sales and outreach tools.

What you’re missing without it: There are just too many opportunities for errors when you’re constantly switching back and forth between emails or your phone and your Marketing App and other sales tools.

6. Integration: Connect your sales efforts to the other tools you use to run your business

You use a wide range of tools to run your business. And to be as efficient as possible, those tools need to work together. Sales management software can’t be completely separated from your support platform, email marketing, or other tools. Instead, it should integrate and work directly with them so everyone’s on the same page.

Why this is important: Everyone’s more efficient, informed, and productive when your company’s software stack works together.

What you’re missing without it: Not being able to integrate your Marketing software with your other tools means losing time and efficiency as well as valuable knowledge from other teams and departments.

7. Focus: Reduce the noise that distracts your team from what really matters

There are thousands of things competing for your sales team’s attention every single day. Sales management software provides everything they need in one place so they can focus on what’s most important: Closing deals.

For example, many people want social media marketing features integrated into their Marketing software, which sounds good in theory (your customers have social media accounts so why not connect with them there?) However, the activity that still brings the most value is actually talking to prospects and engaging in meaningful sales conversations. Not replying to their tweets.

Why this is important: Focus and efficiency compound your sales efforts. The more your Marketing software defaults to only showing the best sales activities the better.

What you’re missing without it: Your sales reps could spend time in all sorts of ways. And without a way to focus their efforts, they’re more likely to spend them on low-value or time-wasting activities.

8. Planning: Uncover trends, increase repeat selling, and update your sales plan

Are you going to hit your sales quota this month? Where do your most valuable customers come from? How long does it normally take for prospects to go from outreach to conversion? These are the questions Marketing software needs to answer if you want to plan your company’s growth.

Beyond just reporting what has happened, your software should give a glimpse into the future, whether that means forecasting sales, looking for trends in your prospects, or updating your sales plan.

Why this is important: Everything from your sales plans to your company goals starts with insights into sales. By having the tools to make a better plan, you put everyone on the same page and can build real momentum.

What you’re missing without it: Much like the other reporting features, not being able to plan and forecast sales leave you directionless, blindfolded, and otherwise unable to make smart decisions.

Key features of Marketing software

By now, it should be pretty clear just how much having Marketing software benefits your company. But what about the actual tools themselves?

When it comes to picking the right Marketing software to meet your team’s needs, there are a number of key features you should look for.

Overview of your sales workflow

Sales management software should feel like your personal sales headquarters. The second you open it, you should know where you are, what’s on your plate, and what needs to get done to push deals forward.

For example, when you open

SkyLimitApp, you’re instantly greeted with an overview of all your sales activities as well as an organized and optimized list of your emails, calls, voicemails, tasks, and reminders. Once you complete a task or return a call, they’ll disappear from your list so you can spend time selling and not trying to decide what needs your attention.

Simple and easy-to-use Marketing App

We believe that “Whoever understands the customer best wins.” A simple yet powerful Marketing App helps you keep track of every single prospect, lead, and customer so you can give them the best service possible.

For example, SkyLimitApp is built around a transparent Marketing App that shows all the information and notes you have on customers as well as a history of your touchpoints. This way, you can quickly bring up their history, find trends among the highest-value ones, and provide the personalized treatment customers today expect.

Lead & opportunity management

Tracking leads and new opportunities is a must for any high-performing sales team. A practical Marketing software solution will show you the status of all your deals and opportunities in one place so you can act on them and make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

SkyLimitApp’s Opportunities Report gives you a quick overview of your entire pipeline so you can see the status, value, and confidence level of each deal and pinpoint opportunities to optimize it.

Sales activity monitoring & leaderboard

Your sales growth is directly tied to your sales rep’s productivity. The more active and efficient they are, the more leads you’ll bring in. Your software should give you deep insights into how your team spends its days, including key metrics like calls/emails made, response rate, opportunities created, trials started, and conversion rate.

SkyLimitApp takes this a step further by combining the key information on each sales rep into a sales leaderboard you can view by time, activity (like calls made or call duration), and more.

Built-in calling and SMS

Cold calling in sales is all about volume. And there’s nothing that slows you down like having to switch back and forth between tools. In SkyLimitApp, we’ve combined dependable and high-quality online calling with your contact list, Marketing App, and other tools so you can spend less time dialing and more time closing deals.

We’ve also added time-saving features like an automated Power Dialer, global calling, predictive dialing, automatic call logging and recording, and SMS.

Email integration

We’ve also added a number of features that power up your sales emails, such as shareable custom templates, email scheduling and follow-up reminders.

Customizable for your needs

The right Marketing software is the one that’s right for you. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and you should look for a tool that can be customized to work with your sales plan and strategies. This could mean something as complex as a custom setup or as simple as templates and smart views.

We built SkyLimitApp with a specific vision based on the needs of sales teams at SMBs. But we also understand the need to do things with your data outside of the tools we’ve supplied. That’s why we make it easy to export clean and organized versions of your latest sales data and metrics.

Fast and easy setup

The whole point of using Marketing software is to speed up your sales team. The tool you choose should be easy to set up and not require months of downtime just to train your team on it.

Integrations with other business tools

As a sales team, you integrate with all other parts of your company from marketing to product to support. And your software should do the same. Sales management software should be able to easily capture and collect the information you need from the rest of your company’s software stack.

With SkyLimitApp, we’ve worked hard to integrate with pretty much every app a modern sales team would use. This way, we’ve opened up all sorts of opportunities such as custom reporting, generating automated email digests, and triggering custom workflows.

Support

No software is bug-free. And whether you’re dealing with a product flaw or human error, your software needs to provide the support to get you back selling with minimal downtime. SkyLimitApp has a dedicated success team available to every customer, no matter the size of your company.

Affordability

Choosing a Marketing software solution isn’t just about features and benefits, but also cost. While it’s true that you get what you pay for, some Marketing software uses complex pricing structures that can quickly break your budget. Make sure you look for pricing that is transparent and clear so you know what you’re signing up for.