Category: Sales Teams

How to Help Marketing Generate More Qualified Leads with Automated Scheduling

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Sales and Marketing alignment can be challenging, especially in large enterprises. Getting teams on the same page about targeting the right audiences, effectively creating conversions, and generating more sales is possible with the right strategy and tools. The most crucial part is ensuring that both teams agree on acquisition goals and deliverables while attracting the right customers. 

A recent survey shows that organizations prioritizing alignment between sales and marketing achieved revenue goals 27% faster with a 36% higher customer retention rate than companies where team alignment wasn’t a priority. 

If your marketing and sales teams can agree on who to consider a high-quality lead, marketing can effectively find and deliver these leads to sales for conversion. A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who is most likely to become a customer based on a predetermined set of characteristics including various demographic and business attributes along with the number of initial interactions with your brand such as website visits, open emails, social media likes, and more.

Generating MQLs and converting them into customers can get complicated without automation that minimizes time-consuming and error-prone manual processes. Even highly qualified leads can quickly lose interest in your brand if they wait to schedule a call and can’t effectively access your teams and resources. 

Learn more about SUMO’s Event & Course Scheduling

4 Ways to deliver more MQLs with smart automation

Integrate a scheduling calendar with your website, social media, and email

As lead generation begins with a prospect’s first-time engagement with your website, social media, or email campaign, it’s essential to offer an opportunity to connect at the peak of their interest. A form fill is not ideal because it adds an extra step of verifying the prospect’s and sales rep’s availability for a call and does not provide them with the assurance that someone will get back to them within a reasonable time frame. Even a 5-minute delay can increase the risk of prospects losing interest and going elsewhere.

Embedding SUMO’s Online Scheduler on your website, and adding a “Schedule a Call” or a “sign up for an event” link to an outbound email campaign are highly effective ways to connect your sales and marketing teams with new prospects. Our self-scheduling tools empower customers to book appointments directly on sales reps’ calendars, automatically filling their schedules while removing the headache of appointment coordination from the sales process. This frees up sales teams to spend more time doing what they do best – selling.

Automate lead management with Salesforce native functionality

It’s understandable that not every person who hits a “Schedule a Call” button is a good match for your company’s products or services as it’s hard to gauge the true level of a new prospect’s interest from their first interaction with your brand. Once submitted, the information they enter still needs to go through your customer relationship management system (CRM) for further verification and qualification. 

Luckily, SUMO’s native Salesforce functionality offers intelligent field mapping and record creation that can make your lead qualification process more efficient and effective. The software automatically creates leads and contacts for new prospects while simultaneously capturing demographic information through customizable data fields. These capabilities, when combined with SUMO’s powerful assignment logic, empower your team to better understand lead profiles while ensuring that appointments are assigned to the right sales resource.

Align internal teams and resources

Sales and Marketing alignment requires that everyone involved in the lead generation process stays on the same page. As teams partner with each other and outside teams and vendors, it’s imperative to have an infrastructure that allows for seamless, headache-free coordination of the internal and external resources.

SUMO’s Multi-Calendar tool offers an easy-to-navigate 360-degree view of customer meetings and experiential marketing events. The calendar provides powerful filtering tools that sales leaders, marketing directors, and individual contributors can leverage to manage all of their customer-facing activities across multiple teams, locations, and venues.

Stay on-brand with customizable templates and designs

A unified brand makes a great first impression. That’s why all custom-facing collateral and messaging should align with your company’s brand.
SUMO’s highly customizable scheduling tools make it easy for marketing teams to design all customer-facing scheduling websites, appointment invitations, and reminders to their exact specifications. Content graphics, colors, and fonts can be managed through the software’s admin settings to ensure that all outbound messaging is constant and up to date. No design skills or software needed!

Successful marketing and sales alignment start with the right tool!

As your company continues to grow and schedules become more hectic, forging a sustainable connection between sales and marketing in their ultimate search for high-quality prospects can be a complicated and time-consuming task. With the right tool at your disposal, you can considerably improve shared availability and bring teams together. SUMO helps your marketing teams find more qualified leads and automatically hand them off to the sales for final conversion. And the result is an ironed-out demand generation process that ensures the expansion of your sales pipeline while generating more revenue for your entire organization. 

Does Your Sales Team Need More Qualified Leads? Let’s chat! Click here to learn more or book a free consult with an expert!

10 Essential Elements of Successful Customer Engagement

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

In today’s highly saturated, digital first landscape, customer expectations are rapidly evolving. Tech-savvy consumers want their relationship with companies to be more meaningful, with direct access to human resources and support when and where they need them. Smart businesses have recognized this trend and are modernizing their engagement strategies to feature technologies that connect staff and customers. As a result, they are seeing a significant increase in sales, customer satisfaction ratings, and retention.

This article will help you to better understand how a customer engagement software platform can help your company to improve its strategy and provide you with guidelines to help you choose the right solution for your company.

What software tools should you onboard as part of your customer engagement strategy?

The best customer engagement technologies satisfy a wide range of business use cases. These applications automate the sales, support, and service appointment scheduling processes to help companies grow their sales pipelines, increase their marketing outreach and improve customer support response times. They tackle essential administration tasks such as lead/contact creation, CRM data integration, and analytics reporting. Most importantly, they integrate with existing technologies to create a seamless customer experience while improving operational efficiencies.

Let’s take a look at the 10 most important elements of a successful customer engagement platform.

Robust Automation

Independent studies have found that companies that have integrated customer engagement tools to their website and social media pages have increased their monthly customer interactions by over 70%. When polled, these customers stated that they are far more likely to interact with a company online vs traditional outbound marketing, telemarketing, or ad campaigns. They want the ability to visit a company’s website and to choose engagement options such as a quick virtual call with a customer service agent, schedule a one-on-one appointment with a sales consultant, or to attend a live product event. Applications such as SUMO Scheduler, a leading Salesforce native customer engagement platform, make it easy for companies to integrate these capabilities into their existing digital marketing platform.

Seamless Integration

An effective engagement platform offers simple, out-of-the-box integration with your existing customer relationship management system (CRM) to keep previously stored information untouched and secure. If you use Salesforce as your main CRM, choose a native Salesforce platform like SUMO Scheduler to seamlessly connect to your database via an API and ensure a smooth transition.

Single Panel View

The capability to recognize customer information across multiple communication channels and bring it together is an important element of a successful customer engagement platform. SUMO’s omnichannel approach brings data points and customer information gathered during the appointment and event scheduling processes directly into Salesforce without the need for a connector or integration. This powerful feature enables teams to make intelligent, data-driven decisions fast and takes the guesswork out of your engagement strategy.

All-in-One Calendar

In addition to leveraging Salesforce as a single source of truth, it’s important to see how your team interacts with your customers, and how often meetings get attended, rescheduled, or canceled. SUMO offers a powerful Multi Calendar that integrates with your Salesforce and organizes disparate team calendars into a single master calendar. With features like location selector, color coding, drag&drop rescheduling, no-show warning indicator, proximity search, and automated reminders, you can rest assured that your team has all it needs to effectively connect with your customers.

Ability to Self-Schedule in a 24-Hour Format

The ability to self-schedule is another useful perk that comes with automation. Look for a platform that lets your customers schedule calls with your team on their own time, from any device, and in any location. SUMO does it all for you. As today’s consumers choose companies that make interactions simple, the ability to book a meeting outside of normal business hours can drastically improve the number of customer interactions and allows your teams to become more effective in closing deals and engaging with clients.

Simple Integration with Online Conferencing Tools

In today’s world of anytime connectivity, it’s no surprise that video conferencing became an integral part of everyday business. According to SISCO, video will comprise 82% of all IP traffic by the end of 2022. Additionally, inadequate work conferencing practices can result in up to $34 billion in losses annually due to low productivity and lost time. Since video conferencing is not going anywhere in the near future, it’s important to ensure that a customer engagement platform you choose can integrate with multiple conferencing tools. SUMO’s recent release offers powerful integrations with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, so you can access all of your scheduled meetings right from your conferencing platform and connect with call participants faster.

User-Friendly Experience

How you make your customers feel determines the success of your engagement with them. A meaningful user experience where everyone enjoys interacting with your company keeps your following loyal and retention strong. A smooth user experience defines customer journeys that are conducive to your engagement strategy. With adjustable templates that match your brand’s look and feel, SUMO offers full customization and provides highly configurable admin tools to match your brand’s voice and appearance.

Ability to Scale

Depending on your business requirements, you want to be able to modify your customer service strategy by selecting only the tools and features you need so you can later scale them up or down depending on your company’s goals. This is important in order to retain the quality of your customer service during expansion without sacrificing operational efficiency. With SUMO’s customizable offerings, you can select necessary features and products and change them at a later time as your company grows.

Powerful Analytics Tools

Teams that utilize insights from their customer interactions to make educated, data-driven decisions have an upper hand in today’s market. Customer analytics not only decreases service costs but also helps firms personalize messaging and build a robust engagement strategy. With half-a-dozen out-of-the-box dashboards available in SUMO’s Analytics and Reports Builder, you can track staff utilization rates, appointment volume, and other trends grouped by specific location, region, or group of regions. Most importantly, SUMO’s advanced analytics capabilities allow your teams to understand if current efforts make a difference in your overall engagement strategy and what needs to be done to improve them.

Enhanced Security

In a world where consumers demand everyday convenience and protection, security must become an essential part of any new integration. People expect seamless experiences across all channels without having to worry about their personal data being compromised. SUMO takes privacy and security seriously. Our platform is fully compliant with ISO, HIPAA, and GDPR and ensures responsible data collection and distribution. We utilize a multitenant environment that protects your data from cross-pollination while maintaining maximum performance. We routinely back up your data at the server level and constantly monitor and protect it. Our staff is immediately alerted if any potential issues are detected, which allows us to proactively resolve any vulnerabilities before they are exploited.

Conclusion

As your business continues to focus on improving customer service, investing in an engagement platform like SUMO can empower your teams to deliver better results in terms of customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies. In the end, a happy customer and a productive team are the main cornerstones of business stability and vitality. A successful customer engagement platform can ensure that your company can thrive in any economic condition.

Ready to explore how SUMO can help you boost your customer engagement? Click here to learn more or book a free consult with an expert!

5 Ways To Turbocharge the Impact of Your Customer Meetings with Data

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Top companies are leveraging data and analytics to maximize the impact of their customer-facing meetings. SUMO Scheduler, a customer engagement platform that includes online appointment scheduling, event scheduling, and queue scheduling, has seen firsthand how its customers have benefited from leveraging data in their day-today customer engagements. Check out a few ways they’ve identified how data can be incorporated into a company’s automated appointment and event scheduling process to increase sales, ensure customer retention, and improve employee satisfaction.

1. Know Thy Customer

Gathering key customer demographics during the appointment scheduling process provides your sales and service teams with critical information that can help them plan more impactful meetings. Salesforce native applications, such as SUMO Scheduler, can push information from your custom scheduling flow to the Salesforce record for easy reference and reporting.

2. Educated Buyers Are Active Buyers

Knowledge is power, especially in the sales process. Companies are leveraging file upload/download capabilities within their appointment scheduling processes to provide prospective clients with the information that they need to make informed product decisions or to apply for services. By doing so, they are removing decision-making barriers and speeding up the sales process.

PRO TIP
Implement a Salesforce native appointment and event scheduling application that offers file-sharing capabilities. Not only will you see the direct benefits of an educated customer but you can store files directly within your org for easy access.

3. Meet Your Customers Where They Live

Today’s customer expects companies to provide them with multiple methods for scheduling a meeting with a live person. From online chatbots to website scheduling portals to social media listings, tech-savvy buyers want to engage with your team on their terms.

4. Optimize Your Sales/Customer Engagement Process

Leverage Salesforce Analytics and reporting tools to drive improvements in your sales customer retention processes. By analyzing appointment data trends such as the number of meetings, status, and outcome and pairing them with key sales metrics such as stage duration and conversion rate, sales managers can pinpoint opportunities for improvement and drive meaningful change in their organizations.

PRO TIP
The changes that result from this data can lead to a significant boost in productivity, employee/customer satisfaction, and profit. Make sure that your scheduling application leverages Salesforce object reporting to maximize your reporting capabilities.

5. Maximize Your Most Valuable Resources

A company’s most valuable resource is its people. Nothing is more frustrating to a sales or customer service manager than underutilized talent. By combining Salesforce analytics, dashboards, and appointment scheduling software, managers can have a real-time view of staff appointment availability and utilization so that they can make informed decisions regarding staffing and role assignments. This optimization, in combination with empowering customers to schedule directly on staff calendars, ensures that sales and customer service representatives spend more time in front of clients.

PRO TIP
In order to maximize staff utilization, a scheduling application should utilize advanced appointment assignment logic that offers employee availability such as skill, role, availability, territory, and location.

Original text: SalesForce AppExchange

How To Keep Your Prospects Hot Through Automated Appointment Scheduling & Engagement

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

As your sales team works closely with marketing to establish a steady stream of prospects, you may ask yourself if the leads it generates are qualified and how long it takes to convert them into customers. It’s a well-known fact that not every lead is a good quality lead. In the end, your success largely depends on the responsiveness of your account managers and their ability to quickly schedule appointments with potential customers.

Overcoming Sales Hurdles

According to Glenister Research, only 25% of marketing-generated leads are typically hot enough to become sales qualified. Additionally, there’s a 10X drop in lead qualification when you wait longer than 5-10 minutes to respond. That’s why instead of spending time and energy working with prospects who aren’t ready to buy, you need to have an efficient system that prioritizes highly-qualified leads and offers clear and error-free lines of communication.

SUMO’s Appointment and Event Scheduling tools are designed to bridge the gap between your sales teams and future customers, generate more qualified prospects, and reduce lead response time. Our Salesforce-native platform eliminates manual effort allowing your staff to schedule calls fast enough to keep prospects interested and efficiently move them through the sales funnel.

Automated Self-Scheduling for Lead Management

In today’s age of digital transformation, many businesses are still relying on manual lead capture processes, antiquated spreadsheets, and multiple calendars to manage their sales funnels.

SUMO modernizes your sales process by automating lead, contact, and record creation directly in your Salesforce CRM as prospects book appointments directly on your sales reps’ calendars. This drastically reduces the amount of time that sales reps spend on administration tasks, eliminates scheduling conflicts, and frees them up to do what they do best, meet with customers.

SUMO Scheduler goes far beyond its simple and easy-to-use interface. Our self-scheduling feature helps your prospects automatically set up appointments without having to wait for a rep to call them. They can easily schedule appointments, reschedule calls, select staff availability, and upload attachments on their own time and from any device.

Every action taken by your prospects inside our intuitive web-based platform is automatically linked to their Salesforce record allowing your sales team to accurately estimate their lead status and prioritize meetings based on a prospect’s level of interest.

Our customers report that eliminating the manual aspect of lead management with SUMO has saved their teams 35% of their time which they can now spend on what matters the most – selling and engaging with prospects!

“The amount of appointments that we are able to make has increased by over 70%. My agents no longer have to play the game of back and forth to try to find a time that works for both parties. This app has been a game-changer for our organization. My agents are now able to concentrate on other clients and communications knowing that they can send the scheduling message and the client is able to self-serve.”

Kerry Hoisington
Director of Customer Experience, Careerstep

Helping Marketing Generate More Leads

SUMO not only simplifies lead nurturing by removing lengthy manual tasks from the scheduling process but also centralizes lead generation by extending its integration across all marketing channels helping your advertising campaigns achieve better results.

For example, your marketing team just launched a social media campaign to showcase your latest product with a call to action to schedule a demo. SUMO offers a custom scheduling link that matches the prospect with an appropriate staff member immediately upon submitting the contact form. As soon as the request for a demo has been received, your sales rep gets notified to reach out to the prospect.

If your company uses paid advertising to attract potential clients, SUMO can help here too. Our online scheduler can be easily embedded into paid ads banner, encouraging prospects to schedule a meeting at their key point of interest. You can also redirect your prospects from an ad to a custom landing page so they can learn more about your brand and convert faster. The possibilities are limitless.

Bottom Line

SUMO offers a white-glove automation service that elegantly hands prospects to your sales team from any inbound channel. The only obstacle that stands in the way is an outdated manual process that must be eliminated if companies are serious about improving their lead generation and nurturing. Now is the time to make the change and raise the standards.

At the end of the day, providing excellent service is what matters the most, and it all starts with the very first interaction a potential customer makes with your brand. SUMO is here to help build a trustworthy relationship with your prospects from day one. Ready to make the shift and bring your scheduling process to the next level of success? Click here to learn more or book a free consult with an expert!

13 Reasons Your Organization Should Focus on Customer Experience

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Research shows that customers will pay more, buy more and be loyal to a company that delivers an excellent customer experience. Customer experience should not be confused with customer delight. When a company delights a customer, they are usually going above and beyond the customer’s expectations for a specific moment.

Customer Delight vs Customer Experience

Zappo’s customer service reps, who are called genies, are famous for their examples of customer delight. One of Zappo’s genies, Steve, is famous for having spent over 10 hours on the phone with a single customer. This act was going above and beyond that customer’s expectations and thoroughly delighting them.

Customer experience is the customer’s summary impression of a brand after several interactions. Sample interactions include a company’s website or social media posts. From these first touchpoints, the customer may go to a brick-and-mortar location to view the item in person. If the customer sees a product or offer online, then visits a store and finds the sales staff is unaware of the item or the item is not in stock, the customer is given a negative experience. Every interaction should make it easy for the customer to do business with your company. The customer experience does not end with a purchase either. Interactions with a company’s service or support departments need to still maintain focus on the customer, the brand promise and be obstacle-free.

Digital solutions play a significant role in the customer experience. They are instrumental in a modern customer experience strategy. Companies investing in these types of technologies that are made to cater to customer expectations will easily surpass their competitors.

Examples of removing obstacles for customers and delivering a seamless experience with digital solutions like AI, CRMs and online scheduling include offering services like reserving an item online and pick up in-store, sales and service knowing a customer’s purchase history and preferences, and allowing customers to schedule an appointment or join a virtual queue via mobile phone, website, or an on-site kiosk.

Delighting a customer is isolated to moments with a single customer. Customer experience is the consistency at every touchpoint along every customer’s journey with your entire organization.

The Numbers

This data is merely a sample of statistics spanning the past 5 years proving that customer experience is too valuable to get it wrong. Companies that are focused on a customer experience strategy and embracing digital solutions as a part of their strategy to meet customer expectations will easily surpass their competition.

When asking consumers what impacts their level of trust with a company, offering excellent customer service is ranked number one. (Zendesk) 2013

52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience. (Zendesk) 2013

Gartner predicts that 89% of businesses are expected to compete mainly on customer experience. (Gartner) 2014

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increase in profits by 25% to 95%. (Harvard Business School) 2014

26% of companies leading financially use CX technologies, compared to 7% of laggards. (Bain) 2015

A customer experience promoter has a lifetime value to a company that’s 600 to 1,400% that of a detractor. (Bain) 2015

75% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a company that knows their name and purchase history and recommends products based on their preferences. (Accenture) 2016

54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today compared to one year ago. This percentage jumps to 66% for consumers aged from 18 to 34 years old. (Microsoft) 2017

70% of consumers say they have already made a choice to support a company that delivers great customer service. (American Express) 2017

84% of organizations working to improve CX report an increase in revenue. (Dimension Data) 2017

47% of consumers have made the choice to switch to a different brand due to bad customer service within the last year. (Microsoft) 2017

33% of customers who abandoned a business relationship last year did so because personalization was lacking. (Accenture) 2018

Forty-two percent of consumers said they would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience, and 52% would pay more for a speedy and efficient customer experience. Of course, price and quality are still the top considerations when consumers make a purchase decision. (CMO) 2018

10 Statistics on Why an Omnichannel Strategy Works

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Customers are shopping online, in-store or both at the same time. Their expectations of brands have become more demanding in terms of the shopping experience they encounter. There is a wealth of touchpoints for a customer to connect with a brand and the customer expects their interactions to transition smoothly from one channel to the next no matter where they begin their journey – online or offline, on an app or with a customer service rep.

Omnichannel marketing allows traditional consumer companies to more effectively compete with their online-only counterparts. The value and returns created from an omnichannel strategy are greater than the initial investment in building out a seamless experience across multiple channels.

The following statistics deliver a compelling argument for any consumer-facing company, from retail to financial services, to invest in an omnichannel strategy.

Be Everywhere Your Customers Are

Omnichannel customers spend 4% more in-store and 10% more online than single-channel customers. For every additional channel they use, customers spend more money. (Harvard Business Review, 2017)

48% visit brand websites to research products. Younger consumers (37% of teens and 27% of Millennials) use video channels to research. (CMO, 2018)

73 percent of customers shop across multiple channels (Harvard Business Review, 2017)

49% of consumers buy from their favorite omnichannel brands at least once per week (Marketing Land, 2016)

Give Your Customers What They Want

9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication methods. (UC Today, 2019)

71% of consumers want a consistent experience across all channels, but only 29% say they actually get it. (Gladly, 2018)

Nine out of 10 consumers say they expect a seamless transition when moving from one communication method to another. (NICE inContact, 2018)

Omnichannel Investment Pays Off

Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15% revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial services sectors. (McKinsey, 2017)

49% of consumers buy from their favorite omnichannel brands at least once per week (Marketing Land, 2016)

Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses that don’t. (Aspect Software, 2014)

Omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel. (Google, 2014)

It’s Not Too Late

And here’s one more bonus statistic: According to Rakuten, 26% of companies have yet to take any action regarding an omnichannel strategy.

It generally costs a brand more to win a new customer than retain an existing one. With an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, brands can not only have an edge on their competition for new customers, but they can also build long-term loyalty amongst their existing customer base.

Help Your Sales Team Schedule Leads & Prospects Lightning Fast

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

SUMO’s one-on-one scheduling feature, Appointment Wizard, is a fast and easy way for sales teams to book appointments with prospects or customers. Let your sales reps book an appointment, recording the What, Who and When, and send a confirmation without even leaving Salesforce.

The Appointment Wizard can be accessed from within a Salesforce lead record.

SUMO Home Appointment Wizard

Set Up a Menu of Service Types

Customize both the service type and times for the types of appointments your sales reps need to offer. You can define the menu of services as well as the time limits for each service type.  

SUMO Service Menu Appt Wizard

Book From a Pool of Resources

Have an SDR, admin or other employee that schedules appointments for your sales team? The Appointment Wizard will show the appointment setter a list of available reps based on the service required.

SUMO Pool of Resources Appt Wizard

View a Sales Rep’s Availability in Real-Time

Once a service and a representative is selected, the Appointment Wizard will show all available days and times for the chosen rep. This information is all in real-time as the rep’s calendar is synced with the Appointment Wizard to provide the most up-to-date availability.

SUMO Availability Appt Wizard

Set Up Appointment Reminders

SUMO allows for up to three different reminder channels, phone, text, and email, that can be set to remind your prospect or customer anywhere from 1 to 3 days prior to their appointment. SUMO has found these type of appointment reminders reduces the probability of no-shows by up to 35%.

Built to Extend the Power of Salesforce

As SUMO is built native on the Salesforce platform, no additional manual admin work by your sales rep to record the booked appointment is required. All details for the appointment are automatically logged within the lead record once the appointment process is completed.

SUMO Confirmation Screen Appt Wizard

White Label Templates

The confirmation email template your prospect or customer receives can be personalized with a customized confirmation message and your company’s brand identity from your logo to brand color scheme.

SUMO Branded Email-Appt Wizard

Delivering a Positive Experience

Although the appointment is now set, there is still the possibility that the prospect or customer will want to reschedule their appointment. A self-scheduling link embedded in their email confirmation will let prospects and customers reschedule their appointment anytime from a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. The self-scheduling link also reduces the risk of a no-show and the pain of playing phone or email tag with your sales reps.

SUMO Re-scheduling link Appt Wizard

This self-scheduling link will take the prospect or customer through each step in the scheduling process and the appointment will be immediately be updated for both the prospect/customer and their sales rep.

SUMO Self-scheduling screen Appt Wizard
SUMO New Time Appt Wizard

Once the new time is chosen, the prospect or customer can even update their appointment reminders.

SUMO Reschedule Reminders Appt Wizard
SUMO Reschedule Confirmation Appt Wizard

An End-to-End Sales Solution

SUMO’s Appointment Wizard is a customizable feature that is the same whether your organization is using Salesforce Classic or has converted to the Lightning Experience. It reduces the time your sales team spends trying to book one-on-one appointments with prospective and current customers. It also helps manage the appointment even after the booking is complete with our Reminder Engine and self-scheduling capability available 24/7 365 across devices.

Adding online scheduling to your sales team’s technical toolbox helps combat the back-and-forth of communication tag and lowers no-shows while creating a positive experience for a potential future customer. 

New to SUMO? Visit our Salesforce AppExchange listing for more information and a full video demo of this SUMO feature.

Nurturing Sales Leads with Online Scheduling

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Your company has armed the sales team to the teeth with every selling tool in the market. From a CRM platform to a dialer to a library of content pieces from the marketing team. However, there is one piece of software that may be missing. It is a piece of software that fits seamlessly into a B2B selling tool suite: online appointment scheduling.

The B2B sales cycle is a sales process with little variance in most industries. The steps in the process all tend to be the same and it is usually the length of the cycle that can vary the most.

A B2B sales cycle can be outlined in 6 stages:

  • Prospecting
  • First Contact
  • Qualification
  • Presentation
  • Evaluation
  • Closing


Incorporating online appointment scheduling during some of the key stages of the sales cycle not only lightens a sales rep’s daily task load during the process, it can also help facilitate the sale.

Prospecting

Filling up the top of the sales funnel is hard work. Whether your company has a dedicated SDR team or your salespeople do their own hustling to fill their pipeline, prospecting can be time-consuming.

Besides cold calls and emails, your company can support your sales team’s prospecting efforts by implementing self-scheduling across several online channels. Embedding scheduling CTAs on your company’s website, microsites or landing pages that showcase important features, offer interesting content or pricing pages can compel a visitor to click for more information.

First Contact

Sales teams can expend a lot of time and energy researching prospects. Not only is there research to be done, but they may also need to compose the perfect email and phone script. These first touches are most often a soft pitch, an introduction rather than a hard sell. Your team may be sending an email and following up with a phone call or vice versa. If the sales team has done their research, the information that is provided is highly relevant to the prospect’s industry and particular needs. Once the first contact is made, the last thing a sales rep wants is to make it difficult for their prospects to connect with them again.

Adding a self-scheduling link to an email signature or to the marketing collateral included in the email presents a prospect with the opportunity to schedule a short meeting with an SDR or sales rep to learn more about your company, its product or services.

Qualification

A sales cycle may include more than one discovery call. A sales rep’s first meeting with a prospective client may not have been with the decision-maker but rather a gatekeeper. In this case, your sales rep will need to organize another call. A sales rep providing a scheduling link to the new contact removes the hassle of email and phone tag that normally occurs to get such an important call booked.

Evaluation

In this critical stage of the sales process, your sales rep can be partnering with several other internal departments. This stage can be quite lengthy depending on the size of the prospective client organization and the number of departments that may be using your company’s product or service. Your sales rep could be facilitating anything from reviewing redlines in a contract, overseeing a technical scope with your engineering team or perhaps they are asked to do a third demo.

Online scheduling helps a great deal in responding to proposals from prospects as well as returning customers. It also helps avoid those dreaded “no-decision” losses.

An Extra Helping Hand

The role of appointment scheduling throughout the sales process can be a valuable tool. It can not only support a sales team during every stage of the sales process, it can also help guide prospects through the customer journey and help reduce the length of the sales cycle.

Salespeople benefit from not having to chase after a prospect for a meeting date and time, prospects can enjoy the convenience of the scheduling experience. Online appointment scheduling software also connects with your company’s CRM platform, recording a prospect’s contact information, saving your sales reps time on such manual tasks. Improving the “last mile” of selling and customer interaction, online scheduling gives your sales team an edge over those sales teams that do not have it.

How Clienteling with Online Scheduling Drives Retail Sales

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

The Modern Retail Customer

Retail companies are having to work harder nowadays for a customer’s attention. The well-tested strategies of luring customers into stores with one-day sales, direct mail pieces, limited time giveaways and special events are not always as effective as they used to be. Brick and mortar retailers that shift their marketing and sales tactics to include digital tools can better connect and interact with customers that are now used to being romanced by companies across both online and offline channels.

Brick-and-mortar retail locations will most likely continue to reduce their footprint but the physical storefront will still continue to exist despite the onslaught of competition from online-only retailers. Making sure your company is delivering convenience and a positive experience for your customers is a solid place to start building and retaining your company’s customer base. The art of clienteling combined with a little technological support can play an important part in this customer nurturing process.

More than half (54%) of retailers said the customer experience is their most important area of focus, way ahead of cross-channel marketing (16%), data-driven marketing (14%), mobile (11%), and programmatic buying/optimization (4%). (Adobe)

Clienteling Still Matters

Clienteling, a buzzword for retail salesperson’s art of catering to customers, is still a very valid practice in modern retail. By establishing long-term relationships with their key customers based on their particular tastes, preferences and past purchases, the lifetime value of a customer can increase.

In the good old days, the salesperson had a sort of little black book with this valuable information, allowing them to provide a highly personalized shopping experience. Personalizing the customer experience has now since moved from Rolodexes and paper files to software applications, specifically mobile apps.

Taking the Black Book Digital

In the new omnichannel world of retail, the traditional black book is no longer as powerful as it used to be. Your customers are mobile and can be present in many locations, whether they be global or national or local. Your customer’s relationship with your retail business could include more than one storefront as well as your online channels. This customer mobility creates a challenge for a salesperson that uses a black book. How can the data and insights it provides be available for stores wherever the customer chooses to shop?

75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, OR knows their purchase history. (Accenture)

Acting as a digital black book, clienteling apps can help your sales staff better serve your customers and better serve your business. A good application will take all the important black book insights your business has about a customer and put it all in one place, at the fingertips of your sales staff, so it’s visible across devices and locations. Clienteling apps provide your salespeople with these useful features:

A Catalog – your products with inventory levels, location availability and customer reviews at their fingertips from a tablet or mobile phone.

A Customer Profile – including purchase histories, special dates, the locations and frequency of their visits.

A Personalization Multi-tool – integrations with CRM platforms, social media, and mobile POS software can provide salespeople with several opportunities to serve the customer directly on the sales floor, and send personalized emails or text messages about sales, store or life events.

This centralized data helps a salesperson deliver recommendations and guide the customer experience in-store. This data can also better engage customers on your website in a similar manner. An evaluation of your business’ needs is a good starting point to use as a comparison against an application’s functionality, scalability, and cost before committing to one. 

A Natural Partnership for Success

Another perhaps less sexy yet just as effective ways to continue to deliver the convenience and positive experience that modern retail customers now expect is with online appointment scheduling.  Something as seemingly simple as automating appointment scheduling can closely tie together with clienteling practices for the convenience and positive experience that the modern retail customer now expects.

An appointment scheduling application used in tandem with your clienteling app can help to pull your online customers into your physical stores, give your salespeople more time to serve your customers and can extend the impact of convenience, personalization and positive customer experience.

At SUMO we have seen a proof of this concept with one of our large retail clients, a jewelry retail chain. The retailer implemented SUMO with a goal to carry the business through daily sales cycles and boost sales for the upcoming holiday season. The retailer implemented SUMO’s self-scheduling buttons on various pages on their website. They also had their salespeople use SUMO in tandem with their regular clienteling application activities. The retail chain was able to combine the convenience of self-scheduling with the positive experience of personalized service to great effect. The retailer was able to track website traffic that walked into their stores. They also saw an uptick in the growth of their client base.

A Retail One-Two Punch

Retail customers, more than ever, are accustomed to being catered to as a valued client whether it’s their first visit to your store or their fortieth. Clienteling applications deliver the experience the modern retail customer expects. An online appointment scheduling platform extends the experience while delivering the convenience the modern retail customer likes. The combination of these two sales tools can go a long way to both growing and sustaining customer loyalty.

94% of consumers name a consistently good customer experience as the main reason they remain loyal to a brand (Blackhawk Network)

Your Sales Pipeline is Leaking

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

Where Does the Time Go?

In 2016, the Sales Enablement Optimization Study from CSO Insights stated that salespeople lose about 64.1% of their time doing non-selling activities. The loss of time to non-sales activities continues to be an issue for inside sales teams.

Fast forward to the present and time wasted on administrative tasks is still an issue. A few of the areas that tend to drain time from a sales rep’s day include:

  • Creating outbound sales emails and quotes
  • Documenting sales activities
  • Scheduling meetings with prospects and customers

Strengthening the Pipe

At any size organization, from small business to enterprise level, losing any amount of time on administrative activities can mean the difference between your team making or missing their quota goals. Optimizing certain sales processes with cloud-based automation tools can put a stopper in the these non-selling activities for your sales team. With a cloud-based solution, sales teams have full access to necessary resources and information at any time, from a desktop to a laptop to mobile devices, giving them the ability to be proactive rather than reactive. Let’s look at three areas that could be effectively improved by automating them, giving sales reps back valuable selling time.

Composing Emails and Quotes

Sales reps send out a lot of emails. The outflow is usually composed of email campaigns and related follow-ups. Cutting down on sending emails is not necessarily an option but providing an approved set of templates in a central location can cut down on composition and response times. The same strategy works for quote requests. A closed deal is more favorable for the sales rep who is the first responder.

Out of 433 companies tested for their response times, only 7% responded in the first five minutes after a form submission. More than half didn’t respond within five business days. Source: Drift

Manual Data Entry

Manual data entry is not only huge time suck, it can be costly and the data could be full of errors. Instead of selling, sales reps can be wasting this time managing the recording of every interaction, email and documents generated for a prospect account. Importing quotes, cutting and pasting in emails, and typing notes into a prospect or account record are not a revenue-generating activities.

In their 2017 State of Inbound, Hubspot reported that 45% of salespeople say they spend over an hour performing manual data entry. Source: Hubspot

A cloud-based automated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is the answer here. A CRM platform will help your sales team streamline and centralize, among many other sales-based admin tasks, the documentation process. Approved email templates can be pulled into the CRM for global accessibility. Emails can be simultaneously sent, logged, and even tracked within the platform. Every interaction with a prospect can be also be automatically logged with follow-ups and alerts scheduled.

CRM system adoption increases sales by up to 29%. Source: Salesforce

Cloud-based CRMs are continuing to prove to be one of the most invested technologies for companies looking to grow their businesses. Super Office shows the adoption growth of cloud-based CRMs over the past 9 years has overtaken the traditional on-premise solution.

Scheduling Appointments

Getting an appointment booked with a prospect is a hard task for sales reps. Beyond outbound campaigns, a good number of emails sent are ones trying to book a demo or discovery meeting with a prospect. Automated scheduling can reduce the time they waste on trying to schedule and reschedule appointments. The right online scheduling solution can have a positive impact on sales enablement and help drive revenue growth.

Roughly 12% of clicks turn into appointments: a survey by Pingup reported that 11.9% of clicks on “book an appointment” buttons resulted in scheduled appointments. Source: LSA Insider

Self-scheduling is one way for your sales reps to reduce time wasted on scheduling meetings with prospective customers. When a scheduling link is used in their outbound emails or even email signatures, they give their prospects scheduling control. Their prospect has the ability to easily select an appointment time convenient for them from your sales rep’s open time slots. An added convenience is that this is an activity that can be done any time of day or night since the link is not dependent on your sales rep’s office hours.

Scheduling happening 24/7: the company observed that 40%of bookings were happening after business hours. Source: LSA Insider

Online scheduling can lessen the time your reps waste on chasing prospects in email or on the phone to schedule and often reschedule appointments. Self-scheduling can also give your sales reps a greater assurance that the prospect will keep the appointment. Online appointment scheduling not only lets your sales reps get back to selling, no-shows become less likely.

Their Time is Valuable to Everyone

This list is certainly not representative of all the daily tasks that can consume a sales rep’s day while they are trying to hit their numbers. However, when automation tools are used, and used correctly, for these three tasks, then the time recovered for actual selling increases. An investment in automation tools benefits your sales reps with an upstream effect for your organization’s top-line growth. Win-win!

Is Your Sales Team Really Selling?

Posted on by Olga Kamylevich

It’s Monday and time to switch gears from chilling to selling. You’ve mentally prepared yourself for the day on your ride into work and now it’s time to review your schedule and see what appointments have been booked for the day. There’s just one problem with this very logical plan…you can’t access your appointments.

That appointment software that your company invested in a couple of years ago has done a scheduled maintenance and as per usual, it won’t let you log into it. This nuisance is something you’ve gotten used to and you could almost overlook it if this same appointment software wouldn’t consistently have various glitches throughout the year. Your mental state has now gone from ‘make a sale’ to an urge to smash something.

The vendor said this software would make everyone’s job easier. Time for another coffee.

Getting the right online appointment application in place for your company is vital. Reliability is a key factor but you also want an application that is easy to use, has a features you and your team can actually use, and can scale as your team or organization grows. If you feel you’re just getting by with the software you’re currently using, it may be time to consider a change. In order to narrow the field, here’s a list of things worth considering when researching providers for the right online appointment system.

So easy the boss’ dog gets it.

Easy-Peasey. Your sales team does not have any interest in learning a new software program. An online appointment application cannot be difficult to navigate or your salespeople will find ways to manage without it. It should not only improve your team’s current appointment-making methods but also fit seamlessly into their daily workflow. From day one, everyone should be able to understand the features after a brief training session or can figure it out on their own.

Where is everyone?

A work shift management function should be able to create more than just work schedules. The software your company chooses should be able to give you complete control over your entire workforce. Scheduling at any of your locations or at the customer location should be the least you are able to do with your appointment app. Other features like drag & drop rescheduling, room scheduling, no-show warning indicator and proximity search can give your team control over their schedules and the flexibility that customers want.

The appointment app should also include reminders and alerts. Your salespeople are focused on their quotas, they need to be reminded of different events and changes to their schedules. Another way to keep it easy-peasy while improving the workflow of the company.

But I’m in Dublin today and Atlanta tomorrow.

All this information should have the ability to be shared on mobile devices with the tap of a button. Salespeople need to be able to access their schedule any time and for some organizations, from anywhere in the world. A study conducted by Cisco found that only 11 percent of users access business applications 100 percent from their brick-and-mortar office locations.

Message? What message?

Along with the ability to use the software across all mobile devices, your new appointment application should also have calendar integration. This means that work schedules should be accessible and shareable using some of the most popular calendar applications like iCal, Google Calendar or Outlook.

Show me the numbers.

Lastly, you want an application that can prove to you it is working. The capability of an online appointment application to produce reports on everything from staff utilization, appointment volumes to no-shows as well as custom reports goes a long way in returning both valuable data and ROI in exchange for your organization’s investment.

Time to play matchmaker.

Now that you’ve considered the needs of your sales team, there’s one other party that you will need to consider as you make this decision and that’s your IT Department. All the research you’ve done into online appointment application providers and the time you took to schedule and attend a demo could be all for naught if your technical team finds the provider cannot accommodate their requirements. When you have a consultation and a demo with the provider, you want to understand not only that it is user-friendly but both technical and user support is provided for it and IT actually feels good about it.

As you sit back down at your desk and try to not think about that potential pipeline of sales appointments your current software is holding captive, consider this information when you’re ready to choose your company’s new appointment application. By understanding what works for your team and fits with your organization’s technical capabilities,you’ll have no trouble picking the right system and your sales team will also have an easy time adjusting to the new software.