Nuts and bolts of a revenue machine [Infographic]

Here at KeyReply, we spend a lot of time researching what our landscape looks like so we can provide the most value to our customers that is not only suited to their needs but also unique and differentiated. So after all the research we’ve done so far, we decided to put together an infographic that shows the best sales tools money can buy today, and where their strengths lie along the sales pipeline.

These tools are truly the nuts and bolts that make up the entire pipeline, running from lead generation to lead tracking, interactions with leads, prospect management, prospect closing, and after-sales service and support.

We offer our opinions on where these tools excel in the sales process, and don’t actually mean that they are only in that space. As you can imagine, most of the CRM tools have overlapping or all-encompassing offerings that go from lead generation to the actual close. Also, we’ve included customer support tools as a way of showing that sales don’t just end with a close — it ends with nurturing and taking care of customers in an ongoing manner.

Detailed explanation of the pipeline process:

In the lead generation space, we’ve included the most effective lead generation tools that run the gamut from inbound to social to sales enablement. These drive leads into your funnel so your SDRs (sales development reps) can qualify them quickly.

After leads start going through the process of qualifications, there are some tasks and actions that need to be done to get them better acquainted with your offerings. For many SMEs, the most effective CRM tools are clustered in this space since they are more likely to have slight shorter pipelines than large sales teams — hence the task management aspect becomes crucial in helping teams to manage their leads.

The interactions with customers need to be tracked, and most people use apps to track how their leads are doing and what they need to follow up on. At this point, after leads have been qualified, more needs to be done in terms of preparations for negotiations and understanding of final decision makers and specific needs. Intelligence and automation in this space is important for a process-oriented pipeline to optimize for negotiations to happen.

Once leads become qualified, they are prospects that we need to drive to a close. This often means that the biggest and baddest (in this context that’s a good thing heh) CRMs are jostling to help teams log their movements through negotiations. You can see that most of the best CRM tools sell their products as prospect management software, even though they do start logging interactions way before this, even as leads. Primarily though, and for illustration purposes, CRM tools fall in the category of prospect management.

Some CRM tools pride themselves on their ability to draw out pertinent data and predict the win rates for prospect accounts (based on the probability that they will close). As we’ve seen above, with access and understanding of the entire process, it can be useful to have a predictive forecast of the likelihood of certain accounts closing, so sales teams can focus on those most likely to be worth their time.

After the close, account management and customer support becomes an imperative to keep customers. You’ve heard the saying — it’s easier to retain a customer than to acquire one, so it’s a company’s job to take great care of their customers with world-class support systems, behavioural/drip marketing (you can find debates on which is better, but we vote behavioural), open lines of communication, and self-service tools.

Where does KeyReply fit in all this?

KeyReply is a mobile keyboard solution that allows teams to reply better & faster. As we’ve developed over time, we’ve added a Mac App too so that teams can use their best replies on desktop too. This means that all consistent and high quality, high converting replies to leads and prospects can be managed by sales team managers or added by sales executives as they interact with customers. With replies at the touch of their fingertips, it literally saves reps 10x as much time spent on replying to redirect towards actually closing, shows their responsiveness to clients, and helps them use great replies they know will increase their likelihood of closing.