One of the formative questions businesses ask themselves is, “How do we grow?” They want to know where the next stream of sales is coming from. They’re also keen to understand what they should put in place to facilitate sustainable growth. Often, businesses find that they can turn to technology. That’s where business development tools can help.
These tools can enhance a business’s productivity, boost growth, and bring order to their operations. The key is selecting the right tool from a seemingly never-ending list. Two key questions are apparent. What types of tools do you need? Which tools are the best ones to select?
The identification of the correct tool is a daunting task. It’s one that is worth dedicating time to. Make the right choice, and you’re taking a hugely positive step toward business development and growth.
In this article, we’re going to share the three tools that we believe every expanding business should have in its tech stack. We’ll also share which tool we think fits the bill for most businesses. You’ll learn their key features and how they’ll fit into your wider business growth strategies.
- How to fit business development tools into your business
- Leveraging tools for growth
- Aligning tool selection with your business objectives
Types of Business Development Tool
Of the three different tools we’ve selected, each serves a different purpose. They tackle different challenges that your business will face when growing. We’ve distilled the swathes of business development tools into three core sections. They are:
- Customer relationship management tools (CRMs)
- Project management tools
- Sales engagement and lead intelligence tools
With one of each of these tools, your business will be best positioned to accelerate development. The key is to ensure that you get tools that seamlessly work together. The last thing you want to have is roadblocks from something that is supposed to facilitate efficiency.
Business Development Tool 1: The CRM
Customer relationship management tools, or CRMs, are the foundation of many businesses. CRMs are your gateway to the customer. They hold vital information on customer details, history, and retention strategies.
Businesses use CRMs as a way of centralizing everything about the customer. Previously, email communication, phone calls, contact details, and purchase history were all kept in separate clusters. CRMs bring it all together in one dashboard. That means anyone in the business can access everything they need to know about a customer in a few clicks.
There’s more to a CRM than contact management. They often connect customer support, sales and marketing departments. Seeing as everything is kept in one place, each department has access to the same information at the same time. This makes cross-department cooperation far more streamlined and effective. Sales can be forecast, marketing activity tracked, and customer issues and objections handled.
The best tools will remove repetitive administrative tasks through automation. That frees up your team so they can focus on growing the business in a tangible way.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive appears simplistic at first glance, but there’s incredible power and efficiency under the hood. It does everything that a great CRM should do but in an incredibly accessible way. First, you create pipeline stages. These are a visual representation of your sales process. Name them as required.
Once your pipeline is in place, you can create (and focus on) action. Calls, emails, meetings, everything can be recorded in Pipedrive. All of this can help you track activity and see progress toward closing a deal.
The best part is you can let Pipedrive create automation for admin tasks and integrate it with hundreds of other tools.
Key Features
- Manage leads, deals, and track communication
- Automate administrative tasks
- Learn from insights and reports
- Securely stored customer data
Pricing
- Essential starts from $21.90 a month for a basic version with multiple further tiers that offer additional features.
Business Development Tool 2: Project Management Software
Project management software may not directly help you grow the business through new sales, but it does help you grow sustainably. Without the right foundations and structures in place, when new growth comes, your business won’t be prepared to cope with it.
These tools allow you to build a collaborative environment across your teams and help to streamline their workflows. It’s a place where you can plan strategies, assign tasks, and complete goals.
The best tools offer various ways of visualizing projects depending on what the user prefers. That could be with cards, timelines, or lists. Many of them are also adaptable to fit a business’s project management style. That includes Agile, Scrum, and Waterfall, to name a few.
These tools are also created for management to keep track of their employee well-being. With task and time tracking, you’re able to monitor their efforts and ensure that their workload is manageable. That, in turn, helps you to ensure you’re delivering projects within the agreed budget and before deadlines.
Asana
Asana is an incredibly powerful project management tool. It is easily customizable to each department in your organization. Marketing teams can create campaigns and focus on meeting goals. Operations are able to see real-time progress toward objectives and help unblock teams when they’re stuck. Product teams can track development and ensure launch information is completely centralized. The list goes on.
A new feature in Asana is Asana Intelligence. Asana’s AI helps you to develop smart goals based on historical performance and allows you to ask questions using natural language. Combine that with the 300-plus integrations that Asana offers, and you have a great project management solution.
Key Features
- Workflow and automation systems.
- Resource management
- Smart goals and insightful reporting
- Huge bank of project templates
Pricing
- Asana has a free tier to get you started that allows collaboration between up to 10 teammates. The first paid tier costs $13.49 a month per seat and gives access to some core features that you will likely want to use, including timeline view and Asana Intelligence.
Business Development Tool 3: Sales Engagement and Lead Intelligence
Marketing automation platforms come in many different shapes and sizes. That should be expected, seeing as there are so many different avenues of marketing. These tools will allow you to create workflows, sequences, and automation for outreach. That could be through email, social media, digital advertising, or other channels.
The aim of these platforms is to enable businesses to scale their efforts easily. They remove administrative and repetitive tasks so that marketing and sales representatives can focus on delivering value and building relationships.
Many of them allow you to take detailed lists and split them into smaller segments. For instance, you’ll want to undertake some email list segmentation so that you can tailor email marketing to best suit a certain group’s interests.
The leading platforms will come complete with detailed analytical dashboards. These will allow you to gain insight into crucial marketing metrics. At a glance, you’ll learn information on headline figures such as engagement, performance, and ROI.
Instantly
Email marketing is a primary source of growth for many businesses, and Instantly is the platform to use to facilitate that. Before you even start a campaign, Instantly works to ensure you have the best chance of success. Using the email warmup feature, your accounts are slowly nurtured to have the highest deliverability rates.
You can then manage your email lists and create segments for personalized marketing campaigns. Pair that with advanced personalization through merge tags, and you have email campaigns with the potential for huge response rates.
Each campaign is more than a single email. Whole flows and sequences can be created and then followed with automation. You simply need to tag prospects and customers accordingly and Instantly handles the rest. Once it’s underway, you can carefully track progress toward your business objectives in the comprehensive analytics suite.
Key Features
- AI-Powered account warm-up
- Add unlimited accounts for infinite outreach
- Email validation to protect deliverability
- Build campaigns and sequences for list segments
- Rotate inboxes for effective outreach
Pricing
Instantly's pricing starts at $37 per month, with the most popular Hypergrowth package costing $97 per month. The Light Speed package costs $358 a month and offers an enterprise-level solution.
Key Takeaways
On the face of it, these tools might seem like effective ways to save time. After all, they major in automation and help streamline communication. There’s more to them than that. These tools allow you to build customer relations on a level and scale that could never be achieved manually. With that level of connection, it’s natural that your business will grow in scale and efficiency.
- Be sure that you take the time to integrate these tools carefully. Everyone in your team needs to be on board for them to have maximum effect.
- Where possible, aim to use tools that have integrations with each other.
- Many tools have free trials so that you can try them before you commit to purchasing.
To achieve effective business development, you need to scale your outreach efforts. That’s precisely what Instantly can help you achieve. Start today by signing up for a free trial.