Technology Stack Recommendations
Whether it's for sales or marketing, here are just a few tried and trusted tools that I use to get the job done.
HubSpot CRM & Marketing Platform
HubSpot is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platform designed to help businesses grow their customer base, improve customer retention, and increase revenue. The platform provides a range of tools and features that allow businesses to manage their marketing, sales, customer service, and operations in one centralized location.
How I use it:
HubSpot is what I use for my CRM as well as my marketing platform. From sending email newsletters, automating my sales outreach, scheduling social media posts, managing my sales pipeline, and more. It's the center of my sales and marketing universe.
LeadFeeder
With Leadfeeder, businesses can identify which companies are interested in their products or services, view the pages that were visited, and even track the behavior of specific individuals on their website. This information can help sales teams prioritize outreach efforts, as well as provide valuable insights to marketing teams to improve their website's effectiveness in attracting and converting potential leads.
How I use it:
I have LeadFeeder installed on my website and have set up segmented custom lists and notifications based on my buyer personas. When an identified company visits my website, I am notified, then I am able to source key contacts and execute a convenient, timely outreach campaign to those contacts to get a sales conversation started. I also use it as a 'temperature check' to ensure that my paid advertising channels are sending quality companies to my website.
Wiza
Wiza is a web-based software tool that allows users to extract contact information from LinkedIn profiles and turn them into targeted leads for sales and marketing purposes. Wiza's main feature is its LinkedIn lead generation functionality, which automates the process of finding and extracting contact information from LinkedIn profiles. Users can search for and extract contact information from multiple LinkedIn profiles simultaneously, allowing them to create large lists of targeted leads quickly.
How I use it:
I use Wiza (combined with LinkedIn Sales Navigator) to build hyper-targeted email lists. I then use these email lists in my automated email outreach that's powered by HubSpot's Sequences tool. I tend to get anywhere between 10-20 sales conversations per month just from this approach.
ClickCease
ClickCease uses advanced algorithms and machine learning technology to detect and prevent click fraud in real-time. It works by monitoring a business's PPC campaigns and analyzing the behavior of clicks to determine if they are legitimate or fraudulent. If fraudulent clicks are detected, ClickCease will automatically block them, preventing the advertiser from being charged for them.
How I use it:
I have ClickCease active on my website to ensure that I am not wasting money on worthless clicks when it comes to my Google Ads campaigns. When a click costs, on average, about $18, you can be assured that I want to make sure humans are clicking on my ads and not bots.
Descript
Descript is a web-based audio and video editing software that uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology to make editing media faster and more intuitive. The software allows users to transcribe, edit, and collaborate on audio and video files with ease, using a combination of text-based editing and traditional timeline-based editing tools.
How I use it:
Descript allows me to quickly upload videos that I record to its platform and then generate closed captions for my videos. This allows me to upload these videos to social media platforms where people might not want to have their volume on to listen to a video, so instead, they can read the closed captions and still understand the context of the videos.
Canva
Canva makes designing beautiful creative assets easy for everyone. From social media images, videos and gifs to posters, websites, booklets, multimedia presentations, and heaps more, Canva is an invaluable tool for helping you level up your design skills, even if you're just getting started.
How I use it:
Canva makes it incredibly simple to create images for social media posts, ads, and even design eBooks, checklists, and printed collateral. The templates they have seem endless and allow people who aren't designers (like myself) to to create stunning visuals.
99 Designs
99designs is a platform to connect with web and graphic designers to create any type of design like logos, web designs, illustrations, and many more.
How I use it:
When I need something even more professionally designed than what I can do in Canva, I head to 99 Designs. I am able to create a design brief, and receive anywhere from 30-100+ different designs for an ad, eBook, guide, checklist, nearly any design that I need. I can then select the design that I want and pay the designer to complete the final product.
Creatopy
Creatopy is an online graphic design platform that allows users to create a variety of visual content for their personal or professional needs. With Creatopy, users can design and customize various types of graphics, including social media posts, banners, flyers, logos, presentations, and more.
How I use it:
When I need to create ads that have some motion in them, I tend to head to Creatopy. They have pre-built, customizable templates that I can use and then apply and send to ad platforms like Google's Display Network and Remarketing ads.
Databox
Databox is a business analytics and data visualization platform that enables businesses to track key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time across various sources in one place. The platform integrates with over 70 popular marketing, sales, and customer support tools, such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Facebook Ads, to collect data and display it in easy-to-understand dashboards and reports.
How I use it:
Databox becomes the pulse for all of my sales, marketing, and general business activity. I am able to sync up all the platforms I need, define the KPIs that I want to view, and then create a single link that I can access to know exactly what's going on with my business in real-time.
Clearscope
Clearscope is a content optimization platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help content creators and marketers improve their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The platform analyzes content and provides recommendations to help users optimize their content for specific keywords and phrases, based on factors such as keyword usage, content structure, and search intent.
How I use it:
When I want to make sure that the blogs and articles I am writing are optimized for search indexing, I head to Clearscope. Clearscope allows me to take my content and it then analyzes it and makes recommendations so it's perfectly optimized.
Saile.AI
Saile.Ai is a software company that provides an AI-powered chatbot platform for businesses to improve their customer engagement and support. Their chatbot platform is designed to help businesses automate customer interactions through natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.
How I use it:
Saile has made it so I do not need to hire a traditional SDR for my prospecting. It's replicates and SDR at a fraction of the cost of one full-time SDR hire. It generates me sales-qualified conversations - helping me focus only on revenue-generating activities.
Zoom Sales IQ
Zoom IQ for Sales analyzes customer interactions to surface key insights, actions, and content from sales meetings. Sales leaders can also use this data to help make better-informed management decisions regarding their sales teams.
How I use it:
Zoom Sales IQ automatically records my sales calls, transcribes them, and then provides me detailed analytics on my conversations. It allows me to understand 'why' I might win deals, lose deals, if I am talking too often, too little, using filler words, and more. This allows me to constantly improve my prospect and customer conversations.
Fomo
Fomo works by displaying real-time notifications on a business's website that showcase recent customer activities, such as purchases, sign-ups, and reviews. These notifications create a sense of urgency and social validation, encouraging other visitors to take action and make a purchase.
How I use it:
I have FOMO installed on my website to create a higher degree of social proof. It creates a sense of urgency and peace of mind to a prospect that they aren't the only one filling out a form, downloading a guide, purchasing an eBook, and more.
HotJar
Hotjar.com is a cloud-based web analytics and feedback platform that helps businesses to analyze and understand user behavior on their websites. The platform provides a range of tools for website optimization, such as heatmaps, visitor recordings, conversion funnels, and form analysis.
With Hotjar, businesses can track how visitors interact with their website, identify areas of improvement, and gather feedback from users.
How I use it:
I have HotJar installed on my website so I can continue to improve my conversion rate. I can better understand how visitors interact with my website, identify areas of improvement, and gather feedback from users.
Sendoso
Sendoso is a cloud-based software platform that provides a range of solutions for modern direct mail, gifting, and engagement for businesses. The platform helps businesses to build and execute targeted and personalized campaigns for their prospects, customers, and employees.
How I use it:
I have used Sendoso as a way to easily send 'Thank You' first to existing clients while at the same time, sending physical items to high-value prospects that I want to get a conversation with. It's a great tool to help 'stand out' from the crowd.
Zapier
Zapier is a cloud-based automation platform that allows users to connect and automate workflows between various web applications and services. With Zapier, users can set up "Zaps," which are automated workflows that connect two or more web applications to automate repetitive tasks.
Zapier supports integration with over 3,000 web applications, including popular tools such as Gmail, Slack, Trello, Salesforce, and many more.
How I use it:
Zapier allows me to 'connect what was once unconnectable' when it comes to my technology stack. It helps to automate both simple and complex tasks that ensure my backend operations run a smoothly as possible.
Repliq
RepliQ is a video generation tool that allows you to automatically create thousands of personalized videos.
How I use it:
The ability to use one recorded video and then scale it across thousands of URLs is incredibly powerful. I use this tool as part of my sales outreach campaigns. It has dramatically improved my response rate.
Offeo
Offeo is a cloud-based video creation platform that allows users to create professional-quality videos easily and quickly. The platform provides users with a range of customizable templates and tools that they can use to create animated and explainer videos, social media videos, ads, and other types of video content.
How I use it:
Offeo allows me to create highly engaging video ad campaigns. These have motion that is hard to create in Canva, Creatopy, and Descript.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI. It is a large-scale neural network that has been trained on massive amounts of text data using machine learning algorithms. ChatGPT can understand natural language inputs and generate responses that are intended to simulate human-like conversation.
How I've used it:
I've used ChatGPT as an accelerator for both short and long form content such as blog posts, checklists, answers to questions, and more. I use it as a copywriter on demand.
CallRail
CallRail's Call Tracking lets you track calls, texts, forms, and chats as easily as you track clicks. Get the metrics you need to spend smarter on everything from paid search to print ads in one easy, powerful dashboard.
How I've used it:
I've used CallRail to help with Paid Search attribution when it came to tracking and analyzing the quality of calls coming from that channel. The ability to get a high-level ID of the caller as well as listen to the calls has been invaluable in understanding how sales teams are communicating at the first point of contact.
