Salesflare: Leveraging Data Without Getting Buried by Numbers

Curses lifted

The folks at Salesflare, the CRM for small businesses doing B2B, operate on a stand-out adage: “Managing data is the salesperson’s curse!”

What could they possibly mean? Well, for so long, the entire CRM industry has been hammering home that each and every contact, customer and client ought to come fully wrapped in data, so that salespeople can best understand them, sell to them, and maintain their loyalty.

Except there’s one little issue: People are more than their data. 

The Salesflare blessing

And that’s why the Salesflare team has built their CRM platform around the premise that, if you’re going to separate people from data, let the software handle the data so that the salespeople can work with the clients.

They achieve this with a combination of several qualities: 

The software is very simple to use; they’ve pared a CRM’s many tools down to the best and most useful; and they’ve incorporated a solid dose of intelligent automation to work alongside the human reps, tracking contacts through the sales journey at every key touchpoint.

So, to reiterate the connection between data and “the salesperson’s curse;” The more sales reps get bogged down in data, the less time and energy is left over to expand and deepen customer relationships.

Saving time

If it’s a question of saving time, then Salesflare lays out three main tasks which are laborious, time-consuming, and ultimately, low down the scale of an expert salesperson’s required skill sets. They are: 

Saving time on entering data: This means filling out a contact’s profile information, including their personal contact details, their position at the company they work for, any mutual connections you may have with this contact, and other details to be found on their online social profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more).

Saving time on reporting activities: Every meeting you have, every call you make, every email sent or received; these are all activities that Salesflare automatically logs for you, so you can easily access a total engagement history with each contact without having to be responsible for writing every event down. It does this by connecting with your calendar and other mobile apps.

Saving time on finding files: A lot of documents and media may get exchanged in the run up to a deal, and often, some files prove to be useful for more than one contact. Salesflare organizes all files uploaded and exchanged for easy searching instant retrieval, even on mobile.

On with the tour

Following up

Key to maintaining good customer relationships is never letting an opportunity slip by for lack of reminders or organization. Salesflare gives you this overview in either a timeline view or a stages view, this latter one being similar to a kanban structure.

The software’s intelligent tools are able to pick up on all the tasks and opportunities coming up to show you which ones are the most important, either based on the size of the deal, the deadline, or the priority of the customer. From here team leaders can assign opportunities to members of their team, so they can take over doing follow ups.

Keeping track

It’s one thing to build a killer website or send out an amazing email to a list of contacts. It’s a whole other ballgame to know how these contacts are engaging with your content.

Salesflare can track and notify you whenever someone opens one your emails, and whether or not they’ve followed any links you put in there. Same goes for websites and landing pages, you can see who has visited and what pages they looked at.

The data on an individual’s activity will get stored on their contact profile, but it also gets aggregated to give you useful bigger-picture reporting.

The collaborative edge

Ever heard of the saying: Too many cooks spoil the broth (otherwise known as the law of diminishing marginal utility, if you’re an egghead). The idea being: Getting more people on the job makes it go faster… up until a point (where the cooks all start getting in each other’s way).

Using Salesflare helps teams collaborate by firstly making sure that no two reps cross paths over one contact, or step on each other’s toes on the same deal.

On the other hand, the app makes working together easier, allowing one rep to jump in to assist another, or even making for smooth handoffs of whole contact cases. There is a tool that lets reps even listen in on colleagues’ calls or follow an email thread.

Network building

Salesflare can be set up to go through your network to draw out for you how your contacts are connected with one another, which by extension opens up new avenues to reach out and expand your client list.

By scanning your Outlook or Gmail accounts, it can sync up those contacts with the ones already in your CRM, and from there, it’ll fill out any extra information from one platform onto the other.

New: Email workflows

There’s no one perfect product, because the technology is always improving and the competition is always stiffening.

Salesflare stays on top of the game by regularly listening to their users, and meeting their expectations with new features. So in April 2020, they rolled out email workflows. These can be done directly within the CRM and can go out via Outlook, Office 365 or Gmail, among others.

The feature can auto-send emails, like for example, when an opportunity advances stages in the sales journey. Say, someone has made a purchase to order a good, they can automatically get an email thanking them, confirming the details, and informing them of expected delivery times.  

It doesn’t always have to be a single standard email for every contact and every action they may take. You can set up alternative emails for different kinds of interactions. 

For example, those that open your email and click a link, those that open the email but don’t click anything, and those that never even open the email… all three recipients can get different followup emails sent out automatically. 

You can also set up drip email campaigns, choosing when they start, how frequently they send out an email, and when they should end. Other pre-scheduled emails can also be set up. This, and other features, are all bundled into the latest Salesflare’s email workflow upgrade.

Conclusion: One package goes a long way

The Salesflare focus has always been on smaller businesses and organizations, and their pricing reflects that. There are no complicated package structures with add-ons and extras. 

It’s a one-price-fits-all tag at $30 per user per month billed annually. Those wanting to test the waters can try it out free-of-charge for 2 weeks.

It’s a small price to pay for the combined powers of, firstly, capturing as much data as possible, and secondly, letting the automation do the data work, while the salespeople can focus on networking, selling and creating long-lasting business relationships.