Your sales process needs to be efficient. If not, your profit margin is reduced and your ability to scale and make even more sales at a faster pace is greatly hindered. To solve many marketing and sales flow processes, companies often choose to adopt a variety of marketing tools such as email marketing, automated followups, calendars and booking softwares etc.

Looking to implement and integrate software and tools to help your sales process can be a great thing but it can also cause more problems than it solves if not done correctly. In many cases, it is hard to find an all-in-one solution so companies resort to utilizing several tools and integrating them together. This involves multiple logins, payment plans, learning different interfaces and more.

According to recent research,  more than 50% of marketers said they are spending over 30 minutes a day integrating marketing tools, maintaining existing integrations, and managing their marketing technology. In fact, a shocking 28% said they’re spending an hour or more each day managing tools.

That’s a lot of wasted time in a year to spend on these tools that can impact your ROI.

Setting up  your marketing funnels and sales process shouldn’t be this challenging and certainly shouldn’t consume this much of your teams’ effort and time each day. Plus when you utilize cumbersome tools you can leave your sales process disjointed and the customer experience goes way down.

So how do you avoid marketing tool overload and ensure that your entire team is operating at the most efficient pace possible? Well, start by finding tools that can talk to each other and integrate seamlessly. Instead of adopting an entirely new tool every time you encounter a problem with your marketing and sales process, do some research and take the time to find the most suitable tool that can grow with your business and possibly even be customized to include features you will need along the way.  This can help to reduce the learning curve for existing and new employees as well as ensure that training manuals can remain consistent for the long run.

There are many tools and software platforms out there that can solve some or all or most of your marketing challenges. Take some time this week or weekend and write out your entire sales process from start to finish. Try and identify areas your company is doing well and areas that your company can improve on. Then make a note of software and tools you are using now to help with the process. From here you will be able to make a bullet list to help you in your research when looking for the perfect sales tool.

Keep in mind that not everything is digital. When you are compiling your list of things that can help your sales process, don’t forget about things like printed business cards, custom printed brochures and carbon copy order forms etc. Custom printing plays a very vital role in helping to solve many of your marketing challenges and can help bridge the gap between the offline and online tools you are using to grow and manage your business.