Sara Kelzer

For live demo recordings, Gong.io is the best, hands down. Since the recording is stored in their cloud service, you're easily able to send a link to a prospect or client after it's done processing, vs. downloading and uploading to dropbox or other storage solution. The recording service is helpful in that it allows for you to skip to the next speaker, play at 2x speed, or only send a snippet of the call so you can remove the frontend small talk. On the backend, the recordings are shared among the entire team helping influence product development, marketing resources, best practices, and of course help encourage team selling.

Canva is an amazing tool that allows you to create beautiful designs for social media. Whichever your medium, I highly recommend getting the pro version of canva. They recently added in magic - it's an AI generative tool that helps you take your eBook and create a summary or something more digestible for social. It can easily format your resources into the proper formart.

I'm not sold on email sequencing especially with the issues with deliverability. If you do end up choosing a tool, Apollo.io is amazing. It has an easy to setup sequencing, meeting scheduler, data enrichment, A/B testing with emailing. I'm new to Apollo, but excited to try out their "plays" which allow for you to automatically add in people to a sequence based on some criteria. Ex: new job in last 90 days. If you do end up using an email tool, make sure to follow Sam McKenna's rule "SMYKM" aka "Show Me You Know Me" - I love referrals, niching down to industry and segment, understanding the stage they are in, tools they are using, and structure of their organization. The more upfront you can be about your research on them, the better.

Consider adding Vidyard's "rooms" for personalized landing pages with video, links, and documents. It's excellent for follow-ups, onboarding, and nurturing client relationships. Think: utilizing rooms to do conference follow up. ChatGPT is invaluable for research, industry insights, and crafting compelling content, even for discovery call preparation. Input a URL, ask for top priorities, and align your value propositions effectively.

An unpopular opinion: I don't like CRMs. In my opinion, they are for management not for the individual contributor. Often times they are bloated, hard to collaborate within, and take too much time to update. I've utilized SugarCRM, Hubspot, Dynamics, homegrown, and Salesforce. The bandaid I've been utilizing has been scratchpad, however, I find the most valuable deal progression tool to be Gong.