Leverage Web Apps to Build an Automated Inbound Sales Funnel

The more personalized and customized you can make your sales outreach, the more likely the buyer will tune in and respond. But, say, you are a startup with only one or two salespersons and have 25,000 leads to pursue. How do you build a sales process that reaches all those leads and yet connect with each in a meaningful way? 

At LocalRaces.com, we use a set of inexpensive web applications to automate much of our inbound sales process so we can focus our precious human resources on closing deals.

Yesware

We use Yesware to automatically send a series of personalized emails to prospects over time, right from our inboxes. These “drip” campaigns use templates which allow us to personalize each email sent, referencing their name, organization, location, and their known pain points we can solve. We utilize a three-email progression over a three-week span that focuses on different product features based on how each recipient responds to the prior email sent.

Intercom

If a prospect clicks through to view our demo or create an account, the prospect is then tracked with our Intercom site integration. Besides supplying live chat capabilities for our customer support team, Intercom follows up each new account creation or demo view with another three-email progression IF the prospect does not proceed to acquire our services after account creation. Again, we can use their behavior on our website to customize the content of these automated, yet personalized email communications.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is our web-based client relationship management (CRM) application of choice. On Pipedrive, we create a “deal” and track the prospect through a self-defined pipeline of steps which we can customize. At LocalRaces.com, our clients are organizers of running and cycling events. Our sales pipeline is organized as follows:

Race Organizers Engaged > Account Created / Demo > Merchant Account Setup > 1st Race Live

Our two-person sales team manages over 1,000 active deals on Pipedrive! Meanwhile, Pipedrive provides me with activity reports and sales conversion analytics to benchmark my sales team and provide me with tangible metrics to grade each sales associate.

Zapier

Zapier makes it easy to automate tasks between web apps. This is where the magic happens. We create “zaps” in the form of if/then statements which make Yesware, Intercom, Pipedrive, and our internal admin tools work seamlessly and automatically with each other. When a prospect creates an account from a drip email, a zap triggers the automatic creation of a deal in Pipedrive and moves that deal as the prospect moves through our sales pipeline steps. Another zap appends Intercom collected data to the deal files on Pipedrive, including which ad or sales person was the source of the new account creation.

Slack

Slack brings all the internal communication together in one-place. It’s a real-time messaging platform which is organized into channels. A business can set up group channels for each department of the organization as well as a general channel for reaching the entire organization. Slack also supplies real-time, one-to-one private communication for our team members. Additionally, files may be attached to Slack messages and past slack communication history can be searched.  We use the Slack API and Zapier to automate event notifications which auto post to our Sales channel on Slack when a prospect creates an account or views our online demo.

Combined, these web applications allow us to manage a very high volume of deal flow with just a few team members. It’s also important to note that each web app mentioned has a companion mobile app that allows us to track and update our sales funnel from anywhere. We utilize monthly plans in the $12 to $25 range for most of these web apps, providing our company a huge return on our investment in sales funnel automation. 

Toby Teeter is the President of LocalRaces.com. He can be reached at [email protected].