Sales Automaton: Best Practices With Packages

I've been asked repeatedly for some information on best practices for using Sendside for sales automation and acceleration. If you're looking to increase your closing speed and gain additional insight into your sales funnel, you'll want to take a few minutes to watch this video.

Sales Automation: Using HTML Tabs In Packages

Needing a little sales automation? Tired of the sentence, 'Have you had a chance to look at that information (email) that I sent you?". Get your noggin around Sendside Packages and how it works.

Here's an inside look at the HTML (Text Editor) tab and how easy it is to use. With this single tab you have some fantasit capabilities to control and personalize your message.

Sales Automation: Using Web Page Tabs

Want to send just a part of your website to a prospect? Need to make changes to your sales and marketing communications after they're already sent? Would you like to send a form or application?

Guys, here's your answer. The Web Page Tab in Packages.

Did that sink in? Is your mind actually reeling with the possiblities? It should be.

The Web Page functionality in Packages allows you to send any valid URL... inside of your communication... AND you get all the reporting and analytics.

The handcuffs just came off.

If you're asking yourself what you'd do with this kind of awesomeness, here's a couple of suggestions for sales and marketing communications that an account with Packages (and Web Page Tabs of course) will give you.

What can you do with Web Tabs and Packages?

• Send your current price list and be able to manage it inside your reciepients inbox.
• Manage product updates changes across your entire organization instantly. You don't even need to notify individuals since you changed their communications instantly too.
• Send a softwere demo, application, form or anything else. Bamm!

Beautiful Sales Automation Communications

I've been building some training Packages for our sales automation clients and I have to say, they're some really beautiful communications.

Don't you wish your sales and marketing emails looked like this?

Once you get the hang of how the peices fit together and get your noggin around the fact that you can actually send any content using one of the different tab tipes (Text Editor Tabs for HTML that's built in the editor, Web Page Tabs for embedding any URL or web page, and File Tabs for showing document inside a tab) you can do some incredible things that provide real business value.

Not only do they look great, but you can see when they're opened and what content's being read. If you're using a CRM you can track all of that information all the way through to sales. It's no wonder that we have clients whose close rates have jumped by as much as 500% within  three months of implementing Sendside into their sales process. Yowza!

If you're already a sales automation and acceleration client of Sendside that's using Packages, you'll be recieving the Package above shortly.

Integrating Sales Automation & Salesforce

Sendside's integration with Salesforce means that your entire inside sales force or even your channel parthers using salesforce.com can use Senside's sales automation tools.

The integration is really slick. The only point where someone would even need to login to a Sendside account is during the creation of the Package, since Salesforce can't support the UI around creating the types of multi-dimensional content that Packages support.

Sendside's integration allows inside sales, marketing or even channel partners to access and send interactive, multi-dimensional communications from inside salesforce and have instant access to open and read activity analytics across individual messages, or the entire sales team.

Sales Automation & The Curse Of Spam

If you look through your inbox and chart the mess, his is what a month of spam actually looks like.

It's the result of emails natural insecurities. Being built in 1982, email didn't have any needs around business or real identity. (Everybody on the web at that time already knew each other.)

These days the needs are quite different, but the technology is exactly the same. The result, anyone can use the email system to pose as any other individual, leading to spam, phishing and the rest of that lot.

I think that almost everyone's aware that there's going to be a change needed from email to a different, secure and identity based platform. We're pretty sure that Sendside's sales automation and sales channel analytics is a pretty good way for any inside sales organizaton to seperate themselves from the deluge of spam that's clogging every recipients inbox.

Marketing & Sales Automation In Financial Services

Wall Street & Technology just pushed an article that has a few Sendside clients mentioned prominently discussing the need for financial service businesses to manage their communication streams and focus on sales automation and customer retention.

Wall Street Adjusts To Transparency Demands

Contango's Bichler points out that while there is no such thing as providing clients with too much comfort, firms must take clients' time constraints into consideration. "We have clients who have a strong understanding of the market but a finite amount of time to do communications," he says. "We need a channel to communicate with them."

Until the financial crisis rocked the markets nearly a year ago, Contango used to send out paper communications or e-mails to clients, Bichler relates. But that's no longer sufficient. The market might move 3 or 4 percent very quickly, and clients want to know immediately what is happening, Bichler says, adding, "We knew we needed a stronger electronic solution."

Eight months ago, Contango started using technology from Sendside Networks, which launched a new tool for brokerage and hedge fund clients that combines Web content, audio, video, Flash presentations or existing print collateral into a single, multimedia message.

To avoid overloading clients, "We're trying to tailor our communications to what our clients want to see," Bichler explains. "People who want to simplify their lives do not want too much excess content." Personalizing communications to customer preferences, he continues, is what creates loyalty.

To that end, says Loughton of Praesideo Management, which also uses Sendside, the insight the solution provides on how clients respond to messages is particularly valuable. "You can see whether they're opening a message and [in the case of an audio message] spending time listening to it," he relates.

Here's a video explaination of how Sendside's sales automation works for Packages:

Sales Channel Management

This is one of the best, most intuitive tools I've seen in a long time. It's perfect..."

M. Burns, Arrow ECS, Novell Reseller

A video oveview of Senside's sales channel communication management SaaS offering.

Sendside's a perfect solution for companies that sell through the channel with VARs, resellers and channel partners. They now have visibility not only into their channel partners, but through their partners to the end buyer with real time reporting and analytics that offer awesome new insights into exactly what content is being opened, read, and what messages are resulting in sales.

And it doesn't stop there. Towards the end of the video you'll see that there are a host of other capabilites around content dissemination and control that give organizations sales channel analytics and control they never dreamed of.

Where does Sendside address Sales Automation?

Where does Sendside fit as a sales automation platform? Right here.

By providing a SaaS solution that takes disparate single point applications and building a platform that addresses these needs in a comprehensive way, Sendside fills the void for sales organizations around 1 to 1 external communications that accerlerate sales

Sendside Salesforce App Exchange 5 Star Review

Sendside's integrated with Salesforce CRM and we're now available on Salesforce's Appexchange Marketplace for any business using Salesforce.com. And... we've received our first review, a stunningly well written comment from one of our clients, Vetrazzo, a green manufacturer of high-end recycled glass surfaces.

Here's what Vetrazzo has to say about Sendside in their review of Sendside on the Salesforce Appexchange.

Integrating with Salesforce gives Salesforce users all the benefits of Sendside's external communications (multi-dimensional tabbed messaging, Sendside Packages, instant notifications, detailed reporting and analytics) directly from inside a Salesforce account. It's a perfect pairing of two complementary technologies.

The result is that management can see into the sales funnel (which is why businesses implement Salesforce) and gives the sales team a real reason to use Salesforce and close more deals (which the sales guys like).

Click to read more ...

Sendside Packages: Sales Automation + Acceleration

A simple diagram of how Packages work for sales, marketing, and management.

1. Marketing creates the content.
2. Sales personalizes and sends as a 1 to 1 'personal' communication with instant read notifications.
3. Management, Marketing, and Sales can all see the results.

For Marketing

Packages give marketing capabilities they never had before.  In the past, Marketing was responsible for 'getting leads' and then handing them off to sales. It's a 'fire and forget' system that doesnt' give Marketing any feedback into what's actualy working to close deasl. But with Sendside, Marketing can design the individual, personal communications that are being used by Sales, and see exactly how they're being used, and what's working.

For Sales

For a sales rep, Sendside opens up an entirely new world. No more time waste. Instead of wasting time making endless follow-up calls to ask if a prospect has 'had a chance to take a look a those materials", every sales rep is instantly notified when a prospect opens a Package, and knows what they're looking at. The effect is dramatic. Some of our clients are seeing sales acceleration above 50%.

For Management

Sendside's reporting and analytics give sales managers insight into the individual communications that the sales team is sending. What's working. What's not. Management know has the ability to make better decisions because they can actually see how successful deals happened, and they can reproduce that exactly in the future.

Sales Acceleration with Sendside

Sendside's Sales Acceleration & Sales Automation Platform explained.

The presentation above details some of the value around Sendside's sales accleration for sales teams. The studies discussed are from MIT Sloan School of Management and Kellogg School of Management and were commissioned by insidesales.com.

If you'd like these studies, just fire off an email and we'll be happy to send them to you.

Dortch on Sendside

via Michael Dortch's blog on SaaS

Sendside: Sales Automation and Sales Acceleration as a Service – SaaaaS!

Let’s start with some disclosures. Before I became Director of Research at Focus, I consulted with Sendside, and am a big fan of the company and its management team. So it’s with at least a small dash of personal pride that I write about the company here – but you can and should still take my opinions at least semi-seriously.

That said, observers and pundits, including Gartner, are increasingly saying that if and as the economy begins to improve, one of the first things areas in which companies are going to re-start spending is in sales. Specifically, companies seem likely to invest in solutions that will help them make more sales more quickly and more inexpensively.

Hard to argue with logic like that. No better way to accelerate economic recovery than to shorten sales cycles and increase sales numbers. But how best to do so?

I would argue that anything that helps to engage, inform, persuade and invite prospects to take further action – like, for example, to give your offering a try – is a likely winner here. And I believe Sendside has developed a platform and an architecture that can help almost any company do all of these things, in ways that are automated, repeatable, scalable, economical and effective.

With Sendside, you can combine traditional e-mail with all kinds of other communications, in a variety of formats. What’s really cool, however, is that you can combine these into packages that are as easy to send, receive, open and share as a typical e-mail. No more convoluted combining of documents, spreadsheets, marketing collateral and what-have-you. No more bulky, slow-to-send-and-download giant e-mails. And no more concerns about whether or not your recipient has all of the software necessary to read/see what you’ve sent the way you meant for it to be read/seen. Your electronic outreach is faster, easier, less intrusive and confusing and more likely to be more readily consumed and more effective.

What’s more, Sendside can tell you who’s received what, who’s opened what, and when they did so. This makes following up – what sales and marketing people sometimes refer to as “lead nurturing” – easier, more consistent, and more effective. It can also greatly accelerate sales cycles and prospect conversion.

You can learn a lot more by visiting www.sendside.net and downloading one or both of the white papers I wrote for them before joining Focus. One takes an IT-centric view, while the other is more business-focused. Then, check out the Sendside solution itself. Ask the Sendside team to send you a Sendside package, then maybe get yourself a personal Sendside account so you can send some packages to your colleagues. Then, let the Sendside team and me know what you think.

Sendside partner: Salesforce.com

Extend Salesforce's reach into amazing external communications.

Salesforce CRM already tracks your leads and manages your prospects, but by integrating your existing Salesforce application with Sendside, it can do much, much more.

If you're already using Salesforce.com, Sendside completes your sales process with instant read alerts, message activity tracking, eSign, multi-dimensional messages, media-rich Packages and more. While Salesforce CRM is 'managing' and tracking your sales teams activity, Sendside is the communication platform that provides the strategic marketing and sales acceleration capabilities you need to close more deals, faster.

 Mind-blowing features available from inside Salesforce.

With Sendside's Salesforce CRM integration, you can send incredibly media-rich and high-touch sales communications, be alerted instantly when your message is opened, and see what a prospect is looking at inside the message. Sendside can actually deliver your web site, presentations, or application as a dyname message, not a static landing page or HTML email. Anything that can be displayed on the web can be part of your communication. And you can do it from inside Salesforce.

 

What can you do with Sendside & Salesforce CRM?

Sendside's API integration with Salesforce gives you unlimited communication abilities from inside Salesforce. 

• Send Multi-dimensional Packages. Deliver pre-created, media-rich tabbed messages to any email address.
• Send Secure Messages. Need security or control? Sendside is already used by banks and financial service companies for their most secure communications.
• Send eSignatures. Execute complicated contracts and agreements in minutes.
• Instant read notifications. Have Sendside call your cell phone or send an email when your message is opened.
• View read activity. See what your prospect or lead is looking at inside your message.
• Prevent printing, forwarding or downloading sensitive information. Keep your information under control with Sendside's prevention features.
• See what's working. Know which personal sales messages are closing deals, and which are not.

The Utah Jazz on Sendside

The Utah Jazz is the first NBA team to begin using Sendside for sales acceleration.

In addition to being an NBA franchise, the Jazz sales team have a lot of sales to make. An NBA team, a stadium, a race track, movie theaters, concerts and events... that's a lot of inventory to move.

Sendside gives the sales reps, sales management and marketing, the ability to craft their messages and be notified when they're opened.

For high-value sales that gives you an amazing ability to follow up while your content is fresh in a prospects mind.

For our part we love having the Jazz on Sendside. In fact, I have a personal side bet with the Jazz management. If the Jazz sales team is able to meet a revenue goal that's directly attributable to Sendside (completely at the discretion of the Jazz managment), we'll get four corporate season tickets.

We're pretty sure that using Sendside the Jazz can beat that goal pretty easily so I'm looking forward to watching a lot of Jazz games from court-side next season.