You may have seen our recent post about the return of mobile sales and the tools field reps need to succeed. But what about your reps who are still inside?
Most inside sales tools can be bucketed into these categories:
- Sales Prospecting
- Sales Intelligence
- Customer Relationship Management
- Scheduling
- Sales Engagement
- Content Management
- Document Automation
- Reporting and Analytics
In this post, we start by doing a deep dive on the categories our solution, Bigtincan, was built to solve for enterprise-level sales teams: content management, sales engagement, document automation, and reporting & analytics. We’ll discuss the challenges that large inside sales teams face in these areas and how a good tool can help solve them. These are lessons we’ve learned from working with companies like Nike, Bosch, and AstraZeneca for over 10 years.
We’ll also provide a list of popular options for each category.
Table of contents
Bigtincan suite of inside sales tools
- Content Management
- Sales Engagement
- CRM and Scheduling
- Document Automation
- Reporting and Analytics
20+ other inside sales software
- Sales Prospecting
- Sales Intelligence
- Customer Relationship Management
- Scheduling
- Sales Engagement
- Content Management
- Document Automation
- Reporting and Analytics
Get a demo to find out more about how Bigtincan’s sales enablement platform can be custom-tailored to the needs of your inside sales team and company branding.
Bigtincan suite of inside sales tools
Content management system: Stop relying on metadata and folders to find content
A typical enterprise-level sales cycle includes a lot of communication back and forth between sales reps and potential clients both during and outside scheduled meetings. Clients may request additional product or pricing information or require specific legal documentation and the rep must find and share the correct information quickly or risk losing the sale.
Additionally, inside sales representatives typically handle many more clients and products than field sales reps, so it’s crucial that their filing system is easy and efficient to use.
That’s why we argue that having a content management system that lets reps find content in minutes without strict filing rules is the most important tool for inside sales enablement.
The problem is most content management systems rely entirely on everyone in the organization following detailed metadata and folder filing rules. Inevitably, some content will be misplaced or mislabeled which makes it difficult for sales reps to find the content they need. Even when content is filed correctly, reps often spend hours searching through folders because they can’t remember what document contained the information or the exact metadata for the file.
Additionally, most organizations find that different departments prefer different content repositories. For example, the sales team may use Salesforce while the product design team may use Dropbox (you can read more about Dropbox and Dropbox alternatives here). This makes it difficult to know where to look for a specific piece of content and reps often end up looking in multiple places — which is very time-consuming.
Bigtincan solves these problems with an advanced search feature that scans all text within a document (not just metadata) across all folders and repositories for a match.
The results that appear are curated based on the user’s role, region, historical preferences, and much more.
To learn more about creating a more effective content management strategy without changing filing habits, read: What Most Enterprise Content Management Strategies Are Missing (And How to Fix It).
Sales engagement: Create personalized experiences for every client
Sales content is often shared with clients via email which presents two major downsides:
- It’s extremely difficult to keep track of multiple email threads with tons of clients, so content and requests for content often get buried and forgotten.
- Once you share the content, you lose all control over how the content is being used.
Bigtincan solves both of these problems with digital sales rooms that are shared via a unique URL. Reps can upload any size, format, or number of files and maintain complete control over each piece of content.
Bigtincan’s digital sales rooms come in three customizable, interactive variations:
1. User-friendly portal for traditional content like documents, PDFs, and videos.
2. Interactive showroom where clients can move through a virtual setting to view content, ask questions, and much more.
3. Augmented and virtual reality that allows clients to view 3D representations of your products in their space.
Unlike content that gets shared as an email attachment, reps can decide whether each file can be shared, downloaded, edited, etc. You’ll also be able to track every interaction with the content so you know when a prospect has viewed the content and what content interests them the most (more on this in a following section).
Finally, digital sales rooms can be viewed from any mobile device and without internet access.
To learn more about Bigtincan digital sales rooms, read: Best Digital Sales Rooms (And How to Use Them).
Document automation: Use customized proposals to close more deals
Almost all enterprise deals require custom proposals — but it’s time-consuming to manually customize each proposal. Depending on the company, reps can spend hours manually customizing proposals for prospects. Document automation tools let you generate custom proposals in just a few minutes, rather than several hours.
Bigtincan’s document automation software lets you create custom templates that will allow anyone to quickly generate sales proposals at scale.
For each template, you can decide which areas will pull data from outside sources (e.g., CRMs, content libraries, etc.), which areas can be edited manually by anyone, and which areas can only be edited by the author.
Then, you can customize how the proposal looks down to the pixel and color code.
You won’t need specialized programming skills to use our proposal automation software. Instead, anyone with a good understanding of tools like Excel will be able to create sophisticated templates. A dedicated customer support team will be available to walk you through the process, but many companies find they’re easily able to create any document template with minimal support.
With document automation, any rep can generate custom proposals and rest assured that all information was copied over correctly. This is a big win for any compliance-sensitive industry. If something needs to be updated, it only needs to be updated in one place: the master document.
To learn more about creating custom proposals, read 3 Key Features of Sales Proposal Software That Save Time and Help You Convert.
CRM and scheduling: Manage all sales activities from one platform
Inside sales reps use all the typical software that outside sales reps use such as CRMs, content management systems, video conferencing, etc. But they also rely on tools like dialers to make sales without ever leaving the office. Although many inside sales reps use two or three monitors at a time to manage all of these platforms simultaneously, it can still be a huge headache and time-waster to constantly have to switch between tons of platforms.
That’s why Bigtincan comes with many built-in integrations so that you can access other platforms from within Bigtincan, or access Bigtincan from within other platforms.
For example, the image below shows how you can use the Bigtincan search feature from within Salesforce to find the best content to share with a specific client or prospect.
You can learn more about the Bigtincan Salesforce integration in this article: How Bigtincan's Document Management System Integrates with Salesforce (And Solves Common Content Management Problems).
Integrations like these help reps turn a five-minute follow-up into a one-minute follow-up. While a few minutes may not sound like much, this amount of time adds up when you’re contacting multiple clients every day (or hour).
For a full list of Bigtincan integrations, view this page.
Reporting and analytics: Understand what’s working and what’s not
A good sales reporting and analytics tool serves two purposes:
- It helps reps understand what is catching a client's attention, when to follow up, and how to follow up.
- It gives sales managers and marketing teams actionable insights into what content is worth investing more time and resources in, what content is being used according to regulations, what content needs to be archived, and more.
Bigtincan covers both use cases with robust content and engagement analytics that automatically gathers tons of data and lets you display that data on any graph, chart, or format you want.
Bigtincan’s engagement analytics let you track in real-time what content clients are viewing, how long they stay on each page, what content they’re searching for, and much more. These metrics let reps know if their content is going unnoticed or if it’s time to follow up with additional details.
Bigtincan’s content analytics lets managers and marketing answer questions like:
- What content are reps viewing and sharing the most frequently?
- What content is the most effective for closing deals?
- Are sales team members using new material as it’s released or are they clinging to old versions of the same document?
- Is any outdated content still being circulated?
To learn more about marketing enablement software, read: 5 Marketing enablement software (factors to consider).
Below are the results of a recent customer survey on how satisfied customers are with the content analytics and scoring for three popular sales enablement solutions:
Ready to see how Bigtincan can be customized to fit your needs? Get a demo today.
20+ other inside sales software
Sales prospecting
Sales prospecting deals with feeding the sales pipeline through lead generation, lead management, lead scoring, and cold calling or any initial outbound sales communication.
Sales prospecting tools include:
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Mattermark
- Discover Org
Sales intelligence
Sale intelligence includes all forms gathering data points to inform decision-making throughout the sales process from identifying sales leads to maintaining ongoing client relationships.
Sales intelligence platforms include:
- ZoomInfo
- Apollo.io
- Outreach
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) typically involves storing and organizing all content and contact information (e.g., names, phone numbers, etc.) pertaining to individual customers.
Options for CRM software include:
- Salesforce
- Hubspot
- Zoho
- Veeva Vault
Note: Bigtincan offers built-in integrations for Salesforce and Hubspot plus several other CRM solutions including Veeva and Microsoft Dynamics.
Scheduling
Scheduling tools automate the process of scheduling meetings and sales calls by allowing clients to choose a time based on an up-to-date version of the rep's calendar.
Apps for scheduling include:
- Calendly
- Google calendar
- Office 365
Note: Bigtincan offers built-in integrations for both Office 365 and the Google suite.
Sales engagement
Sales engagement tools offer solutions for streamlining and improving interactions between salespeople and clients. They include things like sharing content, recording phone calls, screen sharing, sales automation, and much more.
Some sales engagement solutions are:
- Gong
- Marketo
- SalesLoft
- Zoom
Note: Bigtincan offers built-in integrations for all of these and other sales engagement tools.
Content management
Content management usually includes software to store and organize content along with specific filing structures to follow.
Content management tools include:
Document automation
Document automation eliminates the need to manually create documents by automating the process with AI.
Document automation software options include:
- Documate
- Windward Core
- HotDocs
Reporting and analytics
Reporting and analytics in sales deals with gathering actionable data for a wide range of use cases from predictive sales to determining training ROI to monitoring sales content engagement.
Here we provide a variety of tools to cover different aspects of sales reporting and analytics:
Close more deals with the Bigtincan suite of inside sales tools
Bigtincan is an all-in-one content management and sales enablement platform. It was built to support large, enterprise companies or growing mid-sized companies that need to equip distributed and diverse sales forces. The Bigtincan interface and features are customizable on every level to meet the highest demands.
Get a demo today to see how Bigtincan can be customized to fit your needs.
