8 Small Business Tools for Online and Offline Sales

One of the top goals for sales professionals and small businesses in 2019 is generating more qualified sales.

Doing so is harder than ever, with more and more competition in nearly every niche.

Having the right tools can help you reach out to the right leads at the right time.

But most people are limiting themselves with just online tools. They need to emphasize offline tools, too.

Here are eight small business tools for both online and offline sales in 2019.

8 Tools That Help With Online and Offline Sales

1. PandaDoc
2. JetGlobal
3. Coworking
4. FocusMe
5. Postalytics
6. Twitter
7. HubSpot
8. Unbounce

1. PandaDoc: Secure Your Contracts and Customer Data

In 2017, 61% of small businesses were victims of cyberattacks and/or the leaking of customer data.

That’s extremely high, especially for smaller businesses. All we hear in the news is major corporations taking the heat for leaked data or cyberattacks, but small businesses are just as much at risk.

When it comes to small business sales, your customers need to trust you. And you need to handle contracts and invoicing with secure software you can trust.

That’s where PandaDoc contract management software comes into play.

No longer are the days of sending clunky, old PDFs that aren’t secure or professional. Those old PDFs don’t integrate with your CRM either, forcing you to conduct even more data entry on your end. 

Whether you are meeting in-person or closing deals strictly online, PandaDoc software handles sales proposals, contracts for work, quotes, and secure document signing.

As icing on the cake, PandaDoc customers are seeing 28% improvements in closing sales.

2. JetGlobal: Use Business Intelligence Dashboards

According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound, improving the efficiency of the sales funnel is one of the biggest priorities for sales teams.

Gaps in your sales funnel are a recipe for lost sales. Gaps often originate from one single cause: wrong data.

Whether it’s the wrong personalization data, customer data, or time of contact, poor understanding of your data results in poor sales numbers.

And as a small business, every sale makes an impact on your downstream profit.

Enter: JetGlobal’s drag-and-drop BI dashboards.

With drag-and-drop functionality, you simply drag blocks of customizable (or templated) data such as key performance indicators, customer info, and more.

Data is everywhere. But useful data isn’t. Create dashboards to better understand your clients, and your sales will increase.

3. Coworking Spaces: Close Deals Offline

Sales tools aren’t just online — and they aren’t just tech products or software.

Old-school sales techniques are far from dead. In fact, sales professionals rank in-person discussions as a leading source of closing deals.

As a small business, you might be only online. Real estate is becoming increasingly expensive and far less needed than before.

But it’s still critical to closing professional, big-ticket sales. That’s where coworking spaces come into play. Coworking office space is cropping up all over, such as Expansive.

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Coworking is becoming popular for many startups and small businesses and can be found in many cities across the country.

You can use a coworking space’s conference rooms, lounges, and more to provide a more professional, premium experience to big clients.

4. FocusMe: Improve Sales Efficiency

Managing sales for your small business online often requires you to jump from tab to tab and app to app.

Whether it’s a spreadsheet, your CRM, a calendar, or all of the above, sales efficiency can quickly decline.

Getting distracted online can happen in just seconds.

You need an application that helps you eliminate distractions if you are running sales for a small business.

FocusMe is a great option with diverse features from time-tracking to website blocking.

For instance, you can block specific websites that plague you with distraction, helping you to focus on the tasks at hand.

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You can block any website that could distract you from getting work done.

Or you can use FocusMe to track time on sales projects to generate comprehensive ROI data.

Whether it’s staying distraction-free or tracking time, sales efficiency is key for producing bigger profits.

5. Postalytics: Realize Direct Mail Is Far From Dead

Direct mail may seem like an outdated form of communication, but for sales, it’s far from dead.

In fact, direct mail is still thriving, as many competitors have left the space in favor of digital marketing.

This means you are grabbing more attention and appearing less spammy.

About 54% of consumers want to receive mail from companies for promotions, deals, and information.

For sales, this is a dream come true. The only problem is that managing offline analytics, tracking, and ROI is difficult, and connecting the dots is far from easy.

Thankfully, Postalytics exists.

Postalytics connects directly to your CRM and allows you to customize direct mail for specific targets, segments, or groups of leads.

Don’t neglect offline sales marketing; it can be extremely powerful for the right leads.

6. Twitter: Use Social Listening

Social media is great for generating sales. You can directly advertise, promote products, and engage with customers on a daily basis. 

But platforms such as Instagram aren’t going to be your biggest wins. Neither will Facebook.

Instead of thinking in terms of direct sales, you want to use social media for another purpose: social listening and brand awareness.

Social listening has numerous benefits, from product feedback to customer service improvements and, most importantly for sales, attracting new customers.

If you can understand customers’ pain points, you can solve them. If you can solve them, you can nurture them into loyal customers down the line.

Connecting with people on Twitter could turn them into new customers. Social listening tool Brand24 is a good example.

Brand24 started a conversation with a user who was interested in a social listening tool and sparked her interest, likely resulting in a sale.

Another benefit is monitoring your content marketing efforts for brand awareness.

For example, you can promote your latest podcast on social to see how it performs compared to video.

You can also test new calls-to-action before setting them live on a sales page.

Twitter is the best social media channel to use for social listening because it’s mainly text-based. You can perform keyword searches directly on Twitter to listen for brand signals, pain points, and sales data.

7. HubSpot: Prepare for Offline Meetings With Persona Data

Every good sales team needs a good CRM.

Currently, HubSpot is the champ of CRMs.

With a free forever plan, you can test the waters with contact deals, insights, and actionable tasks for each lead.

Reaching out at the right time is critical for sales. Reach out too early, and you will overwhelm leads. Reach out too late, and your nurturing process was for nothing. HubSpot can help with this.

Use a good CRM such as HubSpot to help manage leads and contacts and reach out at the right times.

8. Unbounce: Set up Sales Pages in Minutes

The name of small business sales is personalization.

It’s probably why most of your customers chose you in the first place: You are a small business that takes care of your customers, rather than treating them like another number.

And if you want to continue to convert leads into sales, you’ll need to continue your personalization efforts.

In an increasingly online world, this becomes harder and harder.

But one method is time-tested and proven: personalized landing pages. Take this landing page from Housecall Pro, for example:

Notice how it’s directly targeted at an incredibly specific niche (plumbing)?

Now look at this landing page:

Looks nearly identical, right? Right, but, it targets a new niche (electricians) speaking directly to the visitors’ pain points.

Rather than generic bullet points, Housecall Pro taps into the emotions of each segment, leading to better close rates.

Typically, this type of development is very expensive. And that’s why Unbounce is key for your sales tools stack.

You can create drag-and-drop landing pages, develop your own templates, and publish them within 30 minutes.

Personalization doesn’t have to be hard or expensive – not with Unbounce.

Diversify Your Online and Offline Sales Tools

Martech has exploded in recent years, and for good reason: Using these tools can help you expand your lead pool, make personal connections, and automate tedious processes.

But in all of this innovation, we’ve neglected our roots: offline sales.

Using these eight tools, you can better communicate both online and offline to your potential customers and improve sales.