Useful Growth Hacking Tools For Salespeople

“Growth hacking” is a buzz phrase we’ve all heard (most often used by marketers) that’s focused around improving efficiency and productivity to fuel growth.

But it’s not just the marketing team that can benefit from growth hacking. Your sales team can and should steal some of their techniques to improve the sales process and close more deals faster.

From social media hacks to email marketing techniques, here are four tools salespeople can use to become more effective for minimal effort.

1) LinkedIn Ads

It’s well-known that LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for researching and connecting with

prospects. But your sales team could also be using LinkedIn to land major customers they’re having trouble reaching via email.

One of the most effective lead generation techniques is to advertise something your prospects can have for free (everyone loves free). Offering a trial of your product through a LinkedIn Ad is a proven tactic, but if that’s not possible, content is always an option. Why not create a downloadable PDF offering 10 tips your prospects could use to solve a business challenge?

Once you’ve determined what you’re giving away, it’s time to target the specific people you want to give it to via LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn Ads can be customized by specific employee titles, profile keywords, and more so you can create personalized ads targeting decision makers at the companies you want to connect with. Forego generic ad copy and boldly call out their company by name to grab their attention.

Once a prospect clicks on your ad and signs up for the freebie, they've demonstrated interest. Reach out right away, while you’re still top of mind, to seal the deal.

2) Email Marketing

A good salesperson knows that keeping in touch with customers and prospects on a regular basis is the key to relationship building. But if each of your reps has thousands of contacts to keep track of, it’s unrealistic that they’re going to personally touch base with each of them on a weekly, monthly, or even annual basis. That’s where email marketing can save the day, by automating the process without losing that personal feel.

Specific tactics, such as regular newsletters, make it easy to utilize existing contacts (all of which should be easily uploaded from your CRM system), and sales reps can even further segment them into groups based on relationships. For example, a salesperson might want to send one email to prospects that are highly likely to convert, and another to those they haven’t heard from or connected with in a while.

Today’s email marketing tools also make it easy to set up RSS-driven campaigns that share new content from your company’s blog or resource center. Reps can then use standard analytics and measurement features to see who opened emails and clicked on links -- a display of interest that might indicate a certain prospect could use a call.

3) IFTTT

IFTTT is a service that uses conditional statements to trigger action when changes happen on certain platforms and apps. It’s a great productivity tool for anyone, but especially for salespeople.

For example, you can set up an alert that will be emailed to you when one of your contacts changes their job title on LinkedIn. It might be a good time to reach out, congratulate them on a promotion, or see if their new company is a potential customer. Field sales reps can also set up IFTTT “recipes” that will help them more easily track mileage, stay on top of news about their customers, and monitor competitors.

4) Twitter

Twitter can be even more valuable than LinkedIn when it comes to sales prospecting. With more than 300 million users, Twitter can drive increased web traffic and leads.

But how do you get people to follow and engage when you don’t have time to spend all day on social media? Meet Happy Cyborg, a Twitter management tool that intelligently posts on your behalf. One of the most useful Happy Cyborg features for salespeople is its ability to find and follow people who might be interested in your product. When you follow them, they might back, meaning they’ll start reading your insightful industry-focused tweets.

While some sales reps have been hesitant to embrace new technologies and social selling, the platforms available today are incredibly easy to use. These four strategies just skim the surface of growth hacking for sales, but as a rule, it would be wise if your sales team started paying more attention to what Marketing is doing, all the time.