Last updated on November 25th, 2015 at 12:30 pm
Traditional outbound sales revolved around dialing a list of numbers from a Yellow Page book. Those days are over. Nowadays, most sales come from email or at least start off with an email before leading into a call.
At InspireBeats, we live by email for both our customers as well as our own outbound. We’ve tried most of the known email tools out there.
There are pros and cons for each, but here’s a quick run through.
1. PersistIQ
Probably my most favorite email tool because of how well designed things are and how straight forward the application itself is. PersistIQ is a powerful email app that allows you to set drip campaigns and automated followups based on action and timing. You can personalize every email, set follow ups, integrate with Salesforce and share campaigns with your team.
The only downside I would say is that PersistIQ is solely made for email, at least it is for now. Other than that, everything else is perfect. I was able to get up and running with PersistIQ quickly without anyone walking me through it. The workflow is great.
2. Outreach.io
Outreach.io has been gaining a lot of popularity in the Sales Stack community lately. According to that space, Outreach is the only system intelligent enough to know exactly who needs a follow-up and when they need it, helping you outperform your sales goals. The good thing about Outreach is that you can call as well as send emails, so Outreach works well with phones.
Outreach lets you connect with prospects by creating a sequence of touch points, interweaving phone calls and emails. Another thing is that it is integrated into your gmail and Salesforce, so that’s a big plus, since you’ll be sending emails from your own email address.
Outreach can intelligently shift your messages around weekends and poor performing times of day based on a schedule you setup. Taking outbound sales automation to a whole new level. The interface is super clean and you can see everything all in one place.
3.SalesLoft Cadence
Salesloft’s Cadence is another well known email tool out there. Cadence comes with all the automated follow ups, reply detection etc. , but it’s more known for it’s 7×7 strategy, reaching out to a prospect seven separate times over the course of seven days. Each outreach is composed of a very short amount of time spent letting the prospect know you’re interested in helping them.
This is the basis for contact:
Day 1 – AM: Short and sweet email. PM: afternoon – voicemail
Day 2 – Anytime: Call, don’t leave a voicemail
Day 3 – AM: Call, no voicemail
Day 3 – PM: Leave a voicemail
Day 4 – Anytime: Send a funny email about farm animals in Latvia
Day 5 – Nothing
Day 6 – Nothing
Day 7 – Send a “breakup email”
This entire workflow is integrated into the email tool making it a very powerful outbound sales tool.
4. Toutapp
I was a big fan of Toutapp when it first came out, mainly because it was doing a better job for me than Yesware at the time, but I have to say that quality of Toutapp has gone down over time. I’ve tried using it again recently on a few campaigns and the system is extremely buggy. What I still love about Toutapp is the “Sales Gong” feature, where an employee can “Ring the Sales Gong” when they close a sale. It’s just one of those gamification thing, but it’s fun.
5. Yesware
Yesware is awesome. It was the very first email tool that I used, aside from the old school Mailmerge and spreadsheet way. Yesware is light weight, affordable, and powerful.
It is probably the most powerful outbound sales email tool that integrates directly to your Gmail. The only downside would be that it’s not a complete system, but is above average on every single aspect.
Conclusion
There’s a few more other known email apps out there, but these are my 5 Go-TO email apps. Most of them are pretty reliable and can scale as you grow your outbound sales team. We use our own in-house tool at InspireBeats, but if I were to choose one, it would probably be Persist or Outbound.
This post was originally published by Wilson in the Inspire Beats blog section. Copyright 2015.
