An End-to-End Sales Stack For Non-Salespeople

I’m not a salesperson. I’m a programmer turned entrepreneur who sells what I build because if I don’t, no one will use it, and then there’s really no point in building it in the first place.

Over the past year as I took my startup Codevolve out into the world and started to sell it, I tried a bunch of really horrible sales tools. But along the way, I found some really amazing ones as well. Put them all together and you have what I consider to be a business-to-business (B2B) sales stack for non-salespeople, something that hopefully anyone new to the world of sales can use without watching hours of Salesforce training videos first.

So here are the top six tools I’ve use to build our end-to-end sales process. My goal is not to teach you how to use them, but introduce you to new tools you might not have heard of until now.

Enjoy!

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The first step of any B2B sales process is to find companies to sell to. This all comes down to two things: the people who work at these companies and their emails. Finding the right person at a company to talk to and a way to contact them is all that matters during this step. Otherwise, you’ll either end up with someone who doesn’t care about what you’re trying to sell or simply a not-so-friendly “could not deliver” message from Google.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an expensive but powerful tool for this step. It allows you to build lists of companies and more importantly the people who work at those companies in the market you’re selling into. You can filter by company market, title, and even seniority to drastically increase your chances of finding “qualified leads” , i.e. people who will actually talk to you.

Here, I usually focus on two pieces of data: the person’s title and relevant keywords in their LinkedIn bio. Look for reasons they might want to talk to you and maybe make a note of these reasons when you import them into your CRM (covered below).

Once you’ve found people who look like they’d actually respond to your email because they have something to gain from what you’re offering, it’s time to stalk them a bit…

2. Email Hunter

If someone works for a a company that owns its own domain name, chances are you can find their email address. It really comes down to one simple truth: everyone uses one of only a few different email formats. For example:

• joe@startup.com
• joekeller@biggercompany.com
• jkeller@anothercompany.com

There are several other variations, but there’s a chink in the armor tools like Email Hunter are built upon: a company almost always uses the same email format for all its employees. So if you find out that Emily Raul’s email address at XYZ Corp is eraul@xyz.io, you can easily find the email for every other person at the company using their first and last name.

Email Hunter does this for you. Automagically. And it’s free for the first 200 emails each month. Also, it’ll place a big ol’ orange button on everyone’s LinkedIn profile, saving you a ton of time and effort (v.s. trying to guess the email manually, which you could do with something like the Rapportive Chrome extension).

Okay, the hard work is over (not quite…)! You found a person and their email, now it’s time to get them into your sales pipeline…

Protips: Non-US companies tend to have more complex emails, like joe.keller@overseasinc.com. Startups are all firstname@domain.com.

3. Pipedrive

I’ve tried a few different CRMs for managing our sales pipeline: Salesforce, Close.io, BaseCRM, and a couple other I cannot even remember. Pipedrive beats them all to pieces, hands down. It’s like Trello for sales.

To get all your companies and contacts loaded into Pipedrive, you can use a tool like Ecquire, although it doesn’t always work that great. Honestly, I prefer to build a spreadsheet with all the info I want to get into Pipedrive, then import it in bulk. Fast and easy, although importing the data might take a few tries the first time you do it.

In Pipedrive, make sure you setup a pipeline with steps that makes sense for your company. It’ll evolve as you learn more about your process and the market you’re in, so don’t worry about getting it perfect right off the bat.

Okay, so you have your pipeline built. This is starting to feel like the real deal! Now it’s time to see if all this work was worth it and blast out some emails…

4. Mixmax

Mixmax is without a doubt the best email tool ever created. I use it for my personal email account as well as my business ones. There are several super useful features for B2B sales:

• Email templates.
• Out-of-the-box open / click tracking.
• Mail merges (bulk emails).

I recommend NOT starting with a mail merge. Instead, experiment with your cold emails until you converge on the one(s) that work best. I’d say track this religiously, but, well, Mixmax does that for you. All you have to do is pay attention to the data they’re collecting for you.

This post isn’t about cold emails, but there are a couple good tricks out there. Go find them, and when you get back, bring a customer ready to sign a contract with you…

5. PandaDoc

PandaDoc is what you’ll use to actually CLOSE this deal. It’s a document creation / templating / signing / management tool that can really help you streamline those last few steps to getting the customer’s signature.

Beware! This is where potential customers often like to jump ship. There are a number of ways you can avoid this: having a sleek tool like PandaDoc is a good first step, but it’s also worth experimenting with trials of your product whenever possible.

PandaDoc’s interface and feature bloat drives me up a wall. It’s really a poorly built product in a number of ways. But be that as it may, it does its job and is better than all the alternatives I’ve tried. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Wait, what? They signed?! Awesome! Okay, now for the fun part…

6. Hiveage

Remember that person who’s face you saw on their LinkedIn way back when? Well, now you’ve somehow convinced them to pay you money.

Hiveage is a really great invoicing tool. It’s not as heavy duty as some of the other ones out there, but at this point, that’s exactly what you need. You just need to bill people and get money. And Hiveage does exactly that, and then some. You’ll be up and running in 15 minutes and paid in Net 30 days ;)

BONUS: MixRank

Shameless plug. I work for MixRank as an engineer and if you’re a company in the online advertising or mobile spaces, you really should check it out. It’s a goldmine of valuable data about companies, contacts, and their products. Even if you’re not in one of these spaces, chances are we can still help you out with step #1 and #2 by getting a massive list of qualified companies and contacts into your hands. Come say hi!

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Alright, that’s the end of ‘em! I hope this list saves you some time, money, and effort when it comes to putting together your sales stack. If you have questions or comments, feel free to respond below :)

If you’ve found this useful, please share it with others and click that magical little green heart. Thanks, and have fun selling!