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Sales
8 posts about Sales. Every summary links to the original.
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Empire Selling's Dan Swift on leveraging social media for sales
Dan Swift, CEO of Empire Selling, explains that cold calling is nearly obsolete and that successful sales prospecting now relies on social media and live chat to build relationships. He launched LinkedIn’s social selling business and later led sales at Sprinklr before founding Empire Selling, which trains B2B companies in digital and social selling techniques. Swift advises being transparent with employers about side businesses and using that time to test content and market viability before going full-time. He recommends using The Challenger Sale methodology to challenge traditional industries like financial services, and stresses the need for a common sales language and strong culture when scaling. Swift emphasizes optimizing LinkedIn profiles to appear as trusted advisors, connecting with everyone in the organization, using Twitter as a research tool, and exploring video as an emerging channel with rich analytics.
What We Shipped: 7 New Data And Customization-driven Features
Intercom released seven data and customization-driven features to help sales and marketing teams optimize their funnel and personalize customer experiences at scale. The updated Clearbit Reveal app uses Clearbit data for personalized auto messages, routing conversations by company size, and viewing company data in the Inbox. New Revenue Reports, powered by the Salesforce app, show opportunities, pipeline, revenue influenced, and which landing pages and messages generate the most opportunities and conversations. Sales Team Performance Reports provide leaderboards for largest deals closed, response times, and meetings booked. Control groups on the Messages Premium plan enable A/B testing by withholding messages from half the audience to validate performance, while other features include duplicating Custom Bots for experimentation, customizing Operator’s bot identity with a name, logo, and color scheme while keeping it clear it’s a bot, and advanced Messenger security options like blocking GIFs and attachments in emails, available on new Premium plans.
Sales Follow-Up Email: How to Automate in 3 Steps [+ Setup Guide]
Sales teams often struggle to balance chasing large deals (big whales) with nurturing many small accounts (long tail). Intercom addressed this by automating sales follow-up for smaller accounts using Smart Campaigns. The three-step process involves segmenting leads into high-value large accounts with multiple stakeholders and long cycles, and high-velocity small accounts with single stakeholders and quick cycles; personalizing the first two touches using saved replies and product-specific templates; and then automating follow-up with campaign rules, goals, variables, cadence, and exit points, including removing leads who reply, start a trial, or become customers. Results include a nearly 50% response rate among previously unresponsive small accounts, an 8% increase in pipeline opportunities, and five hours saved per account executive weekly. The post also emphasizes keeping automated messages personal with emojis and gifs, and always adding value with case studies and demos.
Try Before You Buy: How Sales Can Maximize the Free Product Trial
SaaS free trials are easy to start but low switching costs mean prospects can leave quickly, so maximizing trial success is critical; typical opt-in conversions are around 25% and opt-out around 60%. Intercom focuses on three pillars: understanding the prospect’s use case quickly, driving frequent and smart usage, and reducing in-trial friction through friendly support and onboarding. Sales reps engage trialists via live chat or in-app messages to learn their reasons and set expectations for the next two weeks, using internal notes to loop in support. Messages should be meaningful and triggered by prospect behavior to avoid fatigue, with in-app messaging preferred over email to keep users engaged in the product. Fast, collaborative communication between sales and support reduces time wasted on support requests and helps convert trials at higher rates, setting up customers for long-term success.
How Live Chat Can Warm Up Your Cold Outbound Leads
The post describes a technique that combines cold email outreach with live chat to avoid spammy follow-ups, based on research that leads are 82% more likely to convert after a chat. When a prospect clicks a link in a cold email, they receive a proactive Visitor Auto Message personalized with a unique UTM code, such as the author’s initials ‘?nml’. This turns outbound emails into inbound conversations, with near 100% open rates and over 25% reply rates, and allows scheduling demos in under five minutes. The post includes an example email citing Tradeshift’s success with live chat, reducing lead qualification days from 21 to 3 and increasing sales by 32%. It provides a step-by-step guide on setting this up in Intercom by creating UTM codes and triggering Visitor Auto Messages based on URL matches.
Make Sales & Product meetings a win-win
Fortnightly sales-product meetings at Intercom use a structured feedback loop to align product strategy with market needs. Sales teams first meet internally, using a shared Google Doc to categorize recent feedback and prioritize three to five items backed by concrete data such as the customer’s job title, revenue at risk, and competitor presence. The cross-functional sync includes representatives from each sales segment (SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise) plus product owners, who ask context-gathering questions and share roadmap progress. This method replaces ad-hoc feature requests with evidence-based discussions, helping product understand customer impact and sales set realistic expectations with prospects. The process has resulted in popular features like automatic conversation routing to the right team and stronger cross-functional collaboration between sales and product teams.
Understanding your customers with live chat - The Intercom Blog
Sales conversations have shifted from phone calls to live chat, making textual clues the primary way to understand customer urgency and mood. The author’s team uses an Operator bot for initial qualification and then relies on context clues from the dialogue, such as opening style and formality. Customers who open with a direct question signal high priority and expect a fast answer, while those with traditional greetings prefer conversational rapport. Observing details like whether the customer uses formal greetings, technical vocabulary, long essay-style messages, or short abbreviated bursts (common among chat-savvy customers) helps salespeople match tone and use appropriate emojis like the rocket ship for growth or thumbs up for agreement. Successfully interpreting these subtle cues allows salespeople to establish healthy relationships from the first conversation, avoiding the struggle of working “out of the mud.”
A Complete Guide To Live Chat Support | Intercom
Live chat is a messaging channel that enables real-time conversations between businesses and customers on websites or apps, aligning with the philosophy of sending the right message to the right person at the right time. It serves marketing, sales, and customer support by engaging prospects, driving conversions, and resolving issues instantly. Companies report significant improvements: Living Spaces handles over 8,000 weekly conversations with an average first-response time under a minute, tado° saw a 92% decrease in first-response time, and Qonto reduced median first-response time to two minutes while saving over 1,000 team hours per quarter. Website visitors who chat first are 82% more likely to convert, and bot conversations convert 36% better than those without. Proactive messaging and integrations with tools like Clearbit help businesses anticipate needs and reduce inbound queries, making live chat a standard for personalized, efficient customer experiences that customers increasingly expect.
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