Now is the best time to be in a startup or SMB sales team.

Great Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sales apps are coming to market at a rapid pace and they’re affordable to boot. These focused apps are leveling the playing field between the enterprise sales engines and the little startup that could. And unlike your traditional sales tools, these light-weight sales apps possess enough features to get the job done without becoming bloated and hard to use.

Seems perfect, right?

The problem arises when you try to use a number of these very niche sales apps together to create an integrated sales workflow – aka your sales stack.

The problem with the disconnected sales stack

Unlike the software large corporations use, each piece of your startup’s sales stack is made by a different company, does a very specific job, and doesn’t necessarily play well with the rest of your sales stack. This makes for a stack that is just waiting to crumble.

Worse, when your sales tools don’t play nice together, manual data entry is required to keep your entire sales stack in sync.

If your sales team is wasting time with manual data entry – they aren’t spending their time crushing sales activity and revenue quotas.

Below is an example of a sophisticated sales stack, originally posted at Sales Hacker, that covers most sales activities across all levels of the sales funnel. Note that things get messy with much simpler stacks using fewer tools.

Contacted

• List Building – Datanyze/Import.io
• Contact Info – SalesLoft/Toofr
• Lead Research – InsideView/GageIn/LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Segmenting – Google Spreadsheets
• Email Tracking – ToutApp/Yesware/Outreach/Cadence

Qualified

• Pre-call Research – Charlie App
• CRM – Salesforce/Pipedrive/SugarCRM
• Note Taking – Evernote
• Dialer – InsideSales

Demo

• Demo Software – Join.me
• CRM updating – Cirrus Insights
• Content management – Dropbox/Box

Proposal

• Proposal creation – Tinderbox
• E-signature – Echosign/PandaDoc

Closed

• Contract management – SpringCM
• Referral – Influitive

Each of these tools does their small piece of the sales process extremely well.

But, creating a complete sales workflow by getting them to work with each other, to send data between each other automatically, and to stay in sync without manual data entry is no small task. It requires leveraging API’s to build data “pipelines” between each app. If this sounds highly technical, that’s because it is. This is work for software engineers.

Like many of you, we are a startup ourselves. So, I know that your engineering talent is already giving 110% just trying to ship your own product and squash your own bugs. They don’t have time to wrangle API’s for your sales team to help you reduce the amount of work required to keep your sales workflow afloat.

That’s where we plan on helping out.

Blitzen’s mission is to integrate your sales stack without IT

At Blitzen, we want to empower the startup sales team to integrate their own sales stack made up of the best SaaS tools, without IT. Just simple point ‘n’ clicks and drag ‘n’ drops to get the job done.

We’re wrestling all of those API’s for you so that the complicated stuff hums along in the background without you having to worry about it. Just tell Blitzen where you want your data to go and when, and then watch it go there automatically, without having to bug your engineers.

And here’s why you should care:

• Less copy/paste to keep your sales stack in sync means more time for sales activities like generating leads, calling leads, doing demos, and closing deals.
• You reduce the human error that occurs when you get your talented team to do mundane manual data entry instead of what they were hired to do.
• Leaving your engineers to build and maintain product means bringing better solutions to market faster.

We were our own first users and wrote a post about how we hacked and upgraded our startup beta signup process using Blitzen. We connected a Blitzen customer discovery and sign up form to Pipedrive (CRM), MailChimp (Email Marketing), and Slack (Team Messaging) without help from our engineers.

The result?

• Our CRM was always up to date with detailed sales lead information.
• New signups were added to our MailChimp subscriber lists automatically.
• An organized spreadsheet was also updated automatically.
• All of this happened the moment a prospect hit the “Submit” button on our forms and surveys, and it all happened without needing to learn code or hassle engineering.

And this is just the very beginning…

We have some exciting things on the horizon such as:

• A one stop shop to create different kinds of lead capture forms and customer discovery surveys.
• The ability to automatically enrich lead data with social media profiles, company size, company revenue and much more.
• A robust analytics dashboard to help you understand which forms are performing well, who is signing up, and what people need from your company.
• A lot more.

We truly believe it’s possible to have the usability and affordability of light-weight sales apps combined with the integration and automation your enterprise friends enjoy.

If you’re a startup or small-medium sized business…

And you’d like to be a part of our private beta and have your say, sign up at blitzen.com or connect with us at hello@blitzen.com.