4 simple hacks to boost your sales and marketing efficiency

I know his name … How do I get his email address?
How do I get to know more about this guy?
Did he open my email? Did he read it? Should I write again?
Eureka, Will send a mail in the evening.
(next day)
Oh God, totally forgot to send!
Oh God, I had to follow up with him last week …. Totally forgot …
He is not in my network, how do I get in touch with him?

Does this sound familiar? These are common day to day obstacles holding us back everyday in our path to glory. This not only leads to productivity loss, unnecessary delays but a lot of frustration as well.
I have myself suffered for a long time because of this and decided to take matters in my own hand. After a lot of research and experiments with various tools for over more than 12 months, I found answer to most of these problems. I was mighty surprised by the simplicity of these solutions and thought of sharing them.
In this post, I am not going to give the traditional route of various standard complex tools available but rather show you a few simple yet powerful tricks that work to improve your efficiency:
Yesware: Next time you want to know who opened your email, when was it opened, where was it opened? Look no more. This powerful tool will take care of all of this and give your powerful analytics to measure as well. I use this very effectively to know when to follow up and to whom. To top it up, you can even set up reminders to follow up if you have not heard up from your prospective customer/anyone. You all know, reaching out to your prospect at the right time is heck important to close a sale. A must have if you are targeting a lot of people and want to make the impact you looking for.
Note: The paid version has a whole bunch of powerful features to make you look really sexy.
Rapportive: Next time you need to find out an email address and want to know a little more about the prospect to send a personalized email and not sound cold, be sure to check out the Rapportive extension and this excel file to find anyone’s email address.
Rapportive extension gives you a brief about the person available from his social profiles including LinkedIn by just having their email address (even if you aren’t connected to the person). The excel file will allow you to have a number of possible email address by just knowing someone’s first and last name. Then, you put those email addresses one by one in your compose window and if the email address is valid, the rapportive extension will show you their social profiles. It’s just a brilliant way to find out anyone’s email address in a whiff. So, now crib no more about not having anyone’s email id to reach out to and just shoot your way into your prospects inbox. Happy mailing.
Boomerang: Another brilliant tool that I love. Are you the kind of person who has a thousand eureka moments a day and want to shoot out an email immediately (even if it may not be the correct time to send the mail, given that the chances of the other person opening the mail is low)? Well, then you are no different, there are millions of them with the same problem. Now, this is where Boomerang comes in, use this tool to create the message with the eureka idea that just popped and schedule the mail for a date and time you deem will make the most impact. The icing on cake is “Remind me” feature, if you want to follow up with the person after sometime in case you do not hear from him then use this feature to get a reminder to follow up. That’s it. No more getting lost in the maze of emails.
LinkedIn Groups: A kickass method to message a Linkedin user if you are not connected to him. This is one of the lesser known yet powerful tricks to get in touch with someone. Let me tell you now on how to do it: A) Assumption, you are not able to connect with the prospect B) Do not have any common connects to ask for reference. To connect with your prospect, the first thing you need to check is the groups you are associated with. Join the groups he is in blindly. Go to the group and then click on members tab. You will be surprised to see that you are allowed to message the member even if you are not connected to them. Cool, right? Happy sane spamming.
These are small yet extremely powerful tools to take your sales and marketing process to the next notch and make you fall in love all over again. There are few more powerful tools for growth hacking but these are a good starting point. These have personally done wonders for me and I would recommend all to use it and more.
Would love to hear from you on your experiences and any such tools you have personally used?