It’s no surprise that sales have become increasingly analytical as sales teams focus on targeted marketing campaigns, and determining the success thereof, but what about the processes and tools that take us from a mere name on a lead generation sheet to an established, paying customer relationship?

Taking the sales industry by storm, sales acceleration tools aim to do just that by tracking the sales process from start to finish with tools and technologies that involve everything from communications, analytics, social networks, apps, etc. These tools streamline the sales process by dependably and repeatedly bringing a prospect to the close, given that the sales person has some experience and knows what they’re doing.

It's More Than Just Lead Generation Software

Many systems may limit themselves to lead generation software, but acceleration aims to systematically turn a simple name on a list into a paying customer with an efficacious sales process. This helps sales teams develop more high quality leads, reaching out to them with amplified and more accurate information, effectively accelerating the sales process.

When a salesperson can quickly reach out to interested leads and address their needs or interests, they can better capitalize on the prospect’s interests or needs by accurately understanding the customer and how their product or service can fulfill the prospects goals, engaging them in communicating with their service.  

List of our Top 10 Sales Enablement and Acceleration Tools [as They Relate to Asset Managers and Their Business]:

2. Bigtincan is on the forefront of content automation, collaboration and communication tools on the market. This tool assists by altering the sales and service interactions, presentations, thus boosting collaboration/content sharing and customer engagement on mobile devices. bigtincan facilitates increased sales volume for companies all around the world, across all types of industries and is one of the most rapidly expanding mobile software organizations, headquartered in Boston, MA with regional offices around the world.

3. Charlie lets you stand out in any meeting by getting you up to date research on the individuals you’re meeting with and the pertinent information on their company. You will be able to walk into the meeting with insight about what matters to them and be head and shoulders above the competition with the most relevant recommendations. Charlie automatically sends you research about your meeting before you walk in so that you can have the competitive sales advantage when it comes to knowing your customer when it matters most – when it comes time to assess your client’s needs and make a proposal. You can always find Charlie working from his corporate office in Chicago, IL.

4. Like a personal assistant, Cloze keeps your contacts up to date and organized by pulling all of your data about all of your interactions with all of your contacts across every app, email, phone call, document, note, and social media interaction, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Cloze even pulls contact information from email signatures so as to maintain the up to date contact information for each connection. Cloze determines which contacts are the most relevant and keeps them at the forefront, producing reminders to communicate with a contact that might be becoming distanced. From Somerville, MA, Cloze keeps it all organized, by contact, company, and meetings.  

5. Developed by former Google employees in Mountain View, CA, Groove automates customer engagement by building advanced relative lists allowing you to speedily contact leads from a month ago, to customers  in any significant demographic or contact group. Say goodbye to manually composing emails or utilizing automated softwares that seem to computerize your interactions with your customers - Groove efficiently automates personalized contact experiences for your clientele. Groove was made by experienced sales teams for likewise sales teams. It seamlessly integrates Salesforce/Gmail allowing you to develop and implement your own sales strategies to reach out to your customers with ease and rapid pace.   

6. You can take your sales activity management to the next level with Level Eleven. This acceleration tool enhances productivity by pinpointing the most effective area and method on which to focus your sales efforts. Analyze performance and predict outcomes by keeping salespeople involved in efficient practices that yield results. Level Eleven was founded in Detroit, MI, in 2012 and boasts well over 200 customers that include Comcast, Dun & Bradstreet, Ford, Symantec, and ReadyTalk.

7. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Live Hive helps you automate sales processes and accelerate results without hiring more reps.  Its advanced automation tools permit more connections with more prospects in less time. Follow-ups are streamlined with automated email and call concatenation to ensure consistent contact methods with prospective customers so that sales reps can focus their energies where they matter most. Engagement analytics determine contact relevance by prioritizing interactions with clients by their relevancy impact rankings in order to keep sales effort efficacious. Live Hive analyzes leads to focus engagement efforts resulting in higher quality sales and larger pipelines for more meetings, more presentations, and increased sales volume in a lower time frame. This tool ensures that your processes are optimized to the highest levels of performance for every rep, based on solid data.

8. Mixmax deploys a secure, advanced sales platform technology to enhance consistency, adaptation, accessibility, security, and pertinence, a customer engagement platform that provides customers with current and useful data for a more informed purchasing decision. Mixmax delivers sales solutions for Fortune level companies the world over, with services that foster effective personal sales engagements that make the sales process easier for the sales rep and, most importantly, the customer.

9. One can take advantage of PGi’s sales collaboration technologies GlobalMeet® and Agenday™ to enable sales reps to work more leads, schedule more sales appointments, and close more deals from anywhere. Actively assisting companies and their collaboration needs from their headquarters in Alpharetta, GA, for over 25 years, PGi boasts having hosted more than 300 million meetings, and features New York Life as one of its prestigious clients. This will allow the user to develop their sales pipeline quicker and maintain increased productivity while on the go, while more effectively building higher quality relationships with more prospective customers and optimizing sales activities and mobile team collaboration. GlobalMeet® produces meetings across any platform to develop and share with guests from anywhere in a single click. With Agenday, one of PGI’s feature products, you can schedule meetings fast and participate with just one touch on your mobile device, view all your calendars in one place, automatically by the usage of this product one can edify the Salesforce, and keep a sales team apprised of updates.

10. ringDNA is an inside sales platform by Salesforce proficient for Salesforce customers, providing a customer relationship management integration that amplifies inside sales performance. It optimizes how sales reps qualify, contact, and close more prospective customers from their operations headquarters in San Francisco, CA. Sales teams can reach more quality leads and convert more calls to paying customers with more targeted campaigns.  These campaigns are designed around a systemic process while monitoring sales calls across the team. Call analytics allow managers to determine where, when, and how their team is producing results with their call activities. The analytics show how they can improve them by pinpointing what produces results and what hinders them, so that managers can stay on top of their team’s performance from anywhere at any time.   

Sales Accelerators Can Make a Major Difference

The aforementioned sales accelerators can make a major difference in how many leads your team is able to generate, in how many contacts they are likely to make, how many meetings they will be able to facilitate, how many proposals will be delivered, how many deals will be closed, and, most importantly, how much revenue will be added to the bottom line.

Access to a larger range of customer data makes it easier to see where the industry is headed and to set goals accordingly. Better customer engagement equips sales representatives with the capability to offer personalized responses across a variety of platforms and mediums. More effective implementation of sales strategies using sales acceleration tools provides companies with the ability to drive production while cutting costs and streamlining processes.

Implementing sales acceleration strategies will allow asset managers to get a hold on where and how to meet potential customers where they are. By using quantified, relevant information about how their customer expects to be treated and move ahead in the quest to meet their goals, solve their needs, and accommodate their interests with proposals based on data that is founded in relevant contexts what the user has indicated as valuable to them. These tools are just a part of the already $1.2 billion sales acceleration market according to Live Hive, as of 2015.