When it comes to growing your business, the only true constant is change. Changes in what drives your buyers, where they spend their time, and how they make their decisions.
No place is that change more obvious than on your sales team. Sales professionals have a critical role in helping your company grow. But something we’ve seen over time is that many sales teams are held back by outdated tools that don’t help them sell, and a sales process weighed down by manual work.
Announcing Sidekick for Business
That is why today we are excited to announce Sidekick for Business, a suite of tools designed and built to help sales professionals sell better, and sell faster. It works with HubSpot CRM or Salesforce, and it’s available to everyone today.
Selling Faster with Sidekick for Business
What do we mean when we say selling faster? A lot of tools talk about improving the speed with which you can carry out a task. In Sidekick for Business, improving speed was at the very core of what we set out to do. We’ve paid painstaking attention and spent the time to make sure that Sidekick for Business makes carrying out some of the most common tasks in a sales professional's day infinitely faster.
Here is one example -- in almost all of the many discussions we’ve had with folks who sell day to day, it wasn’t much of a surprise to find they were spending nearly all of their time doing one of two things: sending emails, or talking on the phone.
Example: Sending Emails with Sidekick for Business
Let’s hone in on sending emails for a minute. For many reps, the experience of using email templates -- a technology designed to save them time -- does anything but. The rep needs to go to a tool, document, or folder where templates are stored, choose which template to use, copy and paste it into their email tool, then spend time filling in the relevant details that makes it specific to whomever they are sending it to. This process is one in which the sales rep barely saves any time, and the room for error -- copying and pasting formatting, missing a name or a detail that needs to be substituted in -- is high.
Once the email is sent, the rep has to copy and paste it back into their CRM system, filling in details to create an accurate record of the email being sent.
With Sidekick for Business, sending a templated email is as simple as selecting a template from a dropdown in your inbox. Rich details in the email are automatically personalized, from the contact's name to their company, and the message is logged to the appropriate record in CRM without any extra steps. It’s a huge timesaver, especially when it’s something you're doing 20, 50, or 200 times a day.
Selling Better with Sidekick for Business
There are huge opportunities to save time in the day of a sales rep, from the emails they send to the calls they place and the content they share. Sidekick for Business aims to do that.
But in addition to saving time, adding a little bit of data to the average sales rep's day amplifies their effectiveness, and makes the sales process better for the buyer at the same time.
Let’s again use email as an example. Many sales teams have dozens of people sending different variations of the same emails every day to prospects at different stages of the sales process. Any insight into which approaches work best is mostly anecdotal and shared informally amongst people on the team.
With Sidekick for Business, every templated email that gets sent is tracked, and metrics are aggregated from across the entire team. Every rep can see which emails are most successful at every stage of the sales process. When one person on the team hits on an approach that works well, that information is shared with the rest of the team instantly, allowing everyone to benefit.
Example: Documents and Content with Sidekick for Business
The impact that Sidekick for Business can have in helping sales reps be more effective doesn’t stop at the inbox. Many teams face similar challenges when it comes to the documents and content that make up a huge portion of the sales process. Marketing spends countless hours building resources and collateral for the sales team, hands it off ... and then has no idea if it gets used, and no way to prove its value. On the other side, the sales rep is responsible for making sure they are using the correct and up to date versions, and they too lack insight into whether or not the content is being opened by prospects, and if it’s actually having an impact on the sales process.
Now consider what the experience of sharing content with Sidekick for Business is like. A sales rep chooses a piece of content from a dropdown in their inbox. The decision isn’t made blindly -- it’s based off reports that track prospect engagement with any kind of content from PDFs to PowerPoint presentations. Sales reps know when an individual prospect opens a document or shares it within her team, and they get useful aggregate data that helps them better understand which approaches work best. The marketing team can finally ensure that their content is used and is having a positive impact on the sales process. Content is easy to share, and always up to date.
Better For Everyone -- Not Just the Rep
Sidekick for Business aims to help reps sell better. But “better” doesn’t just pertain to the sales process -- it means better for the end prospect, too. We believe that it's equally important to make the sales process better for the buyer as it is for the rep.
As it turns out, the missing link that makes for an unpleasant buying experience is missing context -- context about a buyers’ interests, and context about a buyer’s engagement. By putting that context in the hands of the rep with Sidekick for Business, the salesperson now has the power to focus their efforts where they are well received, and tailor their messaging to be as relevant as possible. Better for the rep because they are more likely to succeed, better for the buyer because it leads to a targeted and relevant approach.
Making a Big Bet on Building for Sales Teams
At HubSpot, we’re making a big bet on helping sales professionals sell better and faster with Sidekick for Business. If you are interested in giving the tools a try, look them over at getsidekick.com/business. Sidekick for Business works in harmony with HubSpot CRM or Salesforce and connects to popular email platforms like Gmail, Outlook for Windows, and Apple Mail. Pricing is simple and transparent -- $50 per user per month, no long term commitments.
Give Sidekick for Business a try and let us know what you and your team think.
