2. The goal of Tellwise is to help you manage and be more efficient communicating
with your prospects from initial touch all the way through to close. Specifically,
Tellwise is a communication technology that will give you more insight into your
prospects behavior, better structure to your communication process, a better
experience for your prospects and give you time back for active selling. That is
a lot of promises but it can be achieved with innovative software and some best
practices. Combined together, you will achieve amazing results.
01. Have a communication strategy.
02. Get visibility into your
prospects’ behavior.
03. Prospecting is still a
numbers game.
04. Timing matters a lot.
05. Persistence wins.
06. Prioritize your prospects.
07. Analyze, analyze, learn.
This document covers many of the best practices that can produce
the most effective sales process.
3. Tellwise + Best Practices = Results!
Best Practice
Have a communication strategy.
Communicating effectively with prospects is the foundation of any good sales
process. You have to do it well to be successful. The first step is to have a commu-
nication plan for every prospect that you touch. How many emails are you going to
send every prospect? What interval are you going to use? When do you call? How
do you make sure that all sellers are creating a consistent experience? It needs to
be repeatable to ensure quality but also to enable measuring the results and driving
continual improvement. Most importantly it has to be simple to implement for the
sales team.
Tellwise Solution
Tellwise provides an ability to create a structured communication process but is still
flexible enough to allow sellers to make decisions where appropriate. It starts with
creating smart message templates that provide ease of use but also reproducibility
in the sales process. Think of templates combined with sophisticated reminders as
the building blocks for your outbound sales process. Tellwise reminders show up
in a ‘To Do’ list that is created uniquely and automatically for each rep. No more
guessing what to do next or when to do it.
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4. Best Practice
Get visibility into your prospects behavior.
You need every advantage to best connect with a prospect and one of the first is
understanding their behavior and interest level. That means you need tracking.
One of the most powerful ways to start this process is to track how buyers interact
with your email and content. Did they open? Did the click? What did they click on?
Are the online right now? These are all critical questions that paint a picture of your
individual prospect but can also give you a sense of how well your messaging is
performing overall. This is only the first step in the process but it is a critical one.
Tellwise Solution
The Tellwise platform creates smart messages which is a unique combination of
email, realtime collaboration (instant messaging, slide sharing, etc.) and
analytics. Smart messages are the link between the seller are their prospects.
Your prospects just see an email (at first) but for you it is a complete
management system around how you communicate with that customer. Smart
messages track behavior like open, click, forward, content views and more.
Smart messages essentially track everything that your prospects do with your
content to provide you with two things. Firstly, this information can be used to
prioritize your follow up (more on this later) and secondly it paints a picture of
the interest level of the prospect.
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5. Smart messages are valuable in all situations but these
in particular:
01. Cold email campaigns
You want to see who’s interested and what’s working
02. Nurture campaigns
You have a series of messages that you want to send in a structured way
03. Critical content delivery
You have a proposal, pricing or contract that you want to track
04. Where speed matters
The biggest challenge with regular email is it goes into a blackhole
waiting for the recipient to send another email. Smart messages give
you the reach of email but then the speed of instant messaging and
live slide sharing.
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6. Best Practice
Prospecting is still a numbers game.
A refined sales process is a series of milestones in the buyer’s journey. Each mile-
stone can be measured including your conversion rates from one milestone to the
next. However at the very top of the process you are still better off to talk to more
customers to drive better results at each phase including closing the sale. When
executed properly larger numbers in produces larger numbers out. The key in that
statement is ‘executed properly.’ It is also possible to create a poor prospect
experience by going too broad. You need to select a volume level where you can
still maintain an acceptable level of personalization and responsiveness. Don’t
send to more customers than you plan to nurture.
Tellwise Solution
Tellwise allows you to send content to larger numbers of prospects while still
providing a great personalized experience for each one of them. Tellwise tackles
this best practice in two unique ways.
01. Tellwise makes it very easy to create and send campaigns that can range in size from just a
few to hundreds. Using the ability to do advanced mail merge with content from Salesforce or
your own spreadsheets, each prospect receives a unique message and experience.
02. Based on Tellwise advanced content tracking, you will get immediate feedback on the
engagement of your prospects across the entire campaign. Another unique aspect of smart
messages is every recipient receives a personalized collaboration environment. These are
created in realtime by the Tellwise platform and branded to your company.
03. Tellwise not only provides statistics on the effectiveness of your communication but also
enables you to better understand what’s working and what’s not working. More advanced
techniques includes using A/B testing that sellers in organizations of all sizes can use.
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7. Best Practice
Timing matters a lot.
Your prospects are busy. They have many more emails waiting for their attention.
When they do engage with your content it is very important to engage with them
quickly. There are many studies that show how quickly an opportunity can be lost
based on response time. You work hard to get there attention so you should grab it
when they give it to your message and content. You need to reach out to these
customers in the moment or as close to the moment as possible.
Tellwise Solution
Tellwise tells you immediately when your prospects are online and viewing your
content. The platform tells you specifically what content they are viewing and
allows you to join them online. At this point, you can seamlessly instant message
with prospects that works across any device with no friction for the customer. Ask
them if they have any questions or if they have time for a quick call. Instant
messaging is the preferred way to communicate these days. If you are able to
engage more deeply, Tellwise allows more sophisticated functionality like live slide
sharing to drive your sales conversations even faster.
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8. Best Practice
Persistence wins.
There is a lot of research that shows you need to touch a prospect many times
to maximize your conversion rate. The numbers tend to range for 8 - 12 times.
This is typically a combination of emails and phone calls. This needs to form
the foundation of your prospecting communication strategy and it needs to be
consistent. It’s not helpful to do it with only some prospects or only some of the
time. You never know exactly when a prospect will be interested in your solution
so you need to drive your communication strategy consistently.
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9. Tellwise Solution
Tellwise makes following up simple because the workflow and reminders are built
right into the communication process. As you send smart messages they can be
easily tagged for follow up and the Tellwise platform will ensure that you don’t
forget. Smart messages that are tagged for follow up are automatically added to a
To Do list that is then prioritized by the due date of the activities. In a glance, you
can see what needs to be done and get it done very efficiently. This will help you
make sure that you execute your complete communication strategy.
Best Practice
Analyze, analyze, learn.
Your sales process, messaging and success rate is a moving target. There is always
an opportunity to make it better. Better can be defined in many ways including
more revenue, less effort, more satisfied customer or all of them. Like any
management practice, the key to improvement is being able to measure how you
are doing and this is historically difficult to sellers to figure out. How effective is this
messaging? Did this email work better than the last one? What is more like to work
in this situation? These are all critical questions and they need to be continually
answered and refined in order to improve your sales success.
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10. Tellwise Solution
Tellwise provides easy to understand statistics on all of your communications.
Whether you are interested in what a specific user did or you are interested in the
performance of a particular email template - that information is available. This
makes it possible to do advanced analytics like understand the performance
difference between different messages or content. Continually watching this
information and refining your approach will help you achieve better results.
Buyers have changed and they way we sell to them has to change as well.
Tellwise brings together software and practices that allow sellers to better
manage their communications across the entire sales lifecycle. Never forget
a prospect, miss critical communications, focus on the wrong prospects again by
leveraging these best practices and improving your sales performance.
Summary
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