If you want to give your sales team a leg up, a full suite of sales tools makes a huge difference. While sales training resources focus on getting your team up to speed, sales tools help them efficiently and successfully tackle day-to-day tasks and projects.
Sales tools come in all shapes and sizes, and they ensure your sales team:
Ultimately, the benefits of using sales tools are endless. But it’s also easy to get overwhelmed, so be strategic about which ones you add to your toolbox.
Here are 28 of the best sales tools for everything from customer relationship management (CRM) to sales intelligence.
According to McKinsey, sales teams who add automation tools to their deck of cards early on reported a 10 to 15% boost in efficiency, plus 10% in sales uplift potential. McKinsey also noted that “best-in-class companies” use automation tools to drive cost efficiency and boost sales. If that’s not reason enough to start automating your sales process, I don’t know what is.
Almost every part — if not all — of your sales process can benefit from sales automation tools. Like I mentioned before, sales tools come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from:
How much time do your sales reps spend on administrative tasks? How much time do they spend not selling?
If you don’t outright know, chances are your team spends about 65% of their time not selling, based on a survey by Inside Sales. The survey also found that 15% of that time is spent on admin tasks, 12% is spent researching, and 11% and 10% are spent on follow-ups and prospecting, respectively.
Sales tools can help your team automate every single one of those tasks and gain more time for actual selling.
If you’re looking for the best sales tools to improve your team’s efficiency and boost time spent on selling, look no further.
CRM software helps your sales team keep track of existing customers, their contact information, a log of past interactions, relationship status, and more. The goal of a CRM system is to manage and improve customer relationships.
HubSpot is a big name in the marketing and sales world, and for a good reason. Its Sales Hub software offers a full suite of tools, including CRM, engagement, lead generation, and sales analytics.
Pros
Cons
There’s a free plan, and paid plans start at $45 a month.
ActiveCampaign is another Swiss Army knife you can add to your sales toolkit. The software comes with over 750 automation templates to keep your communications flowing and your customer data up to date. ActiveCampaign also allows you to track client behavior and incorporate data when deciding on the appropriate messaging.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $9 a month for 500 contacts.
Another jack of all trades, Salesforce offers multiple extras along with its sales CRM software, including pipeline and forecast management tools, workflows and automations, and reporting tools. Salesforce is touted as one of the most powerful sales tools available.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $25 per user per month, and a free trial is available.
If you’re running a small business and don’t need a buffet of additional tools or features (and the price tag that typically comes with them), Less Annoying CRM might hit the spot. This CRM tool boasts a simple approach to managing your contacts, leads, and notes, plus you can track your to-do lists and check your calendar, all in the same app.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $15 per user per month, and a 30-day free trial is available.
If you’ve put in the hard work to create your sales playbook, sales decks, and other resources, a sales enablement tool is a great place to store it all. This type of sales software ensures that your team members send the most up-to-date and correct information to prospects and conduct sales calls with the latest tactics.
Sales conversations can be difficult. Salesken uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to give your reps real-time cues during their calls, such as what to say when the prospect objects to the price, when to ask questions, and when to empathize. It also lets you dig into call analytics to learn more about what went wrong (or right) during the call. In short, Salesken is a must-have tool for keeping your sales playbook up to date and training your team.
Pros
Cons
Contact Salesken for a custom quote based on company size, budget, and needs.
Seismic offers a handful of enablement tools, from buyer engagement to content management software. Or you can access all of them with the Seismic Enablement Cloud. Seismic makes it easy to keep your sales professionals on the same page — literally — when it comes to using the most up-to-date assets. It also has the option to set up a customized Digital Sales Room for clients that showcases your sales deck within a microsite.
Pros
Cons
Contact Seismic to book a demo and get a quote.
If you want to add a dose of AI to your sales enablement, try Highspot. It uses AI to make on-the-spot recommendations to sales reps regarding resources to use while they’re on the phone or in the middle of a video conferencing call. Another highlight is Highspot’s coaching dashboard, which lets you provide direct feedback on each sales rep’s engagements.
Pros
Cons
Contact Highspot to book a demo and get a quote.
Guru markets itself as both a company wiki and a sales enablement tool. Either way, it brings assets to the forefront so your sales team can stay on top of tasks. One feature that sets Guru apart from your typical wiki is that it includes insights into your most viewed assets and what your sales reps are searching for (and might be missing).
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $5 per user per month. There’s also a free plan for up to three users.
Also called sales prospecting tools, this type of software scours data to help you improve your sales outreach process. These tools aim to boost the quality and number of leads by compiling useful data like contact info, job titles, recent funding, changes in tech stack, and more.
While also useful for outreach, LinkedIn Sales Navigator pulls together the level of buyer intent, mutual connections on LinkedIn, profiles for decision-makers, employee headcount, and company growth. Coupled with LinkedIn, Sales Navigator makes it incredibly easy for your sales team to do their research and reach out — all in one platform.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $79.99 per month.
For any sales team searching for verified emails and phone numbers, Apollo.io is here to help. It allows you to easily filter your searches based on several characteristics, and you can also dig into analytics that help you improve your team’s messaging. But one of the best features might be that you can score, favorite, and rank your leads.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $39 per user per month, and there’s also a free version.
Cognism promises 98% or better accuracy for its dataset of cell phone numbers — the company manually double-checks each number. Cognism also includes data from global Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), US and Canada (NAM), and Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets and allows you to integrate your CRM and sales engagement platforms.
Pros
Cons
Contact Cognism to book a demo and get a quote.
Marketing automation tools also have a place in any successful sales team. As you’ve likely guessed, this software automates common tasks and actions. This means your sales reps are free to focus on more profitable tasks and spend less time on data entry and other admin tasks.
Text messaging isn’t dead, and neither is email. (Do we have to keep saying this?) Omnisend lets you use both to connect with your customers with fully customizable templates or a drag-and-drop email builder. You’ll also get access to automation templates and audience segmentation tools that help you engage the right people at the right time during the sales cycle.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $16 a month for up to 500 contacts, and there is a free version available.
Ever wish you could send an email when someone interacts with your website a certain way? Encharge lets you do just that — you can set this SaaS up to send an email after a certain amount of time has passed, a form is submitted, or a trial starts or ends. You can even integrate Encharge with other apps and sites, including HubSpot and Facebook
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $79 a month for up to 2,000 contacts.
BloomReach is an automation toolkit focusing on omnichannel customer journeys. Along with customer segmentations, real-time triggers, and automations for email, SMS, notifications, and ads, BloomReach helps you stay on top of everything with a built-in campaign calendar.
Pros
Cons
Contact BloomReach to book a demo and get a quote.
If your sales and marketing teams need help engaging with clients and leads, a sales engagement tool can help. Use this software to streamline communication across emails, phone calls, social media posts, text messages, video chats, and more.
From scheduling meetings to email tracking, MixMax aims to make your sales team’s job easier. The feature I enjoy most about MixMax is the ability to add interactive elements to your emails. This includes adding Google Maps, live web page previews, polls, and survey questions.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $24 per user per month, and a free version is available.
For any sales team connecting with clients across multiple channels, Salesloft offers powerful automations. This includes a real-time sales playbook walkthrough for sales reps that reminds them of best practices and vetted sales plays. Salesloft also includes customizable email templates and integrations with apps like Vidyard and Seismic.
Pros
Cons
Contact Salesloft to get a quote.
Raise your hand if you have more than five browser tabs open. (I’m raising mine.) Scratchpad hopes to give sales reps a reason to close those tabs — and keep them closed — by rounding up notes, customer data, activity, and calendar entries all in one place. And since Scratchpad is a Chrome extension, you can pull up Salesforce data without having to tab or click over to another window.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $39 per user per month, and a free version is available.
Data is king, and sales analytics and performance tools can help sales managers ensure their team is on track to hit goals.
Sales analytics software allows you to dig into performance by sales activities and individual reps, as well as provide leaders with critical info for forecasting. Performance tools shine a spotlight on successes or areas for improvement so sales leaders can take action.
This list wouldn’t be complete without Arcade. Along with a full kit of gamification tools to keep your sales team engaged and productive, Arcade leaderboards give you insight into team performance. This includes quotas, customer feedback, and goals — all of which are visible to the entire team to encourage friendly competition.
Pros
Cons
Arcade offers a forever free plan, book a demo with us today to learn more.
Looker provides comprehensive data reports that are fully customizable and able to update in real time. That can be critical for the sales team that needs the most up-to-date customer data to close a deal. Looker reports can also be scheduled and sent out, so sales leaders are sure every member of the team has the most current data. Time to ditch the spreadsheets?
Pros
Cons
Contact Looker to book a demo and get a quote.
Despite the name, there’s nothing elementary about Crayon. Through AI, machine learning, and manual curation, this data visualization tool helps you build a full profile stacked with competitive intelligence to reduce churn and boost your win rates. While you can custom-build your views, Crayon also offers templates to get you started.
Pros
Cons
Contact Crayon to book a demo and get a quote.
Using AI, Gong analyzes customer interactions and provides data-driven insights to help sales teams close more deals. Gong also lets you analyze any interaction with clients — whether via phone, email, or video chat — which can be helpful if sales leaders need to review performance.
Pros
Cons
Contact Gong to book a demo and get a quote.
Clari is a sales intelligence tool that helps sales teams track their progress and pipeline across your entire business. The platform then assembles that data into real-time insights and forecasts using — you guessed it — AI. Clari provides data-driven insights and recommendations to help sales teams close more deals.
Pros
Cons
Contact Clari to book a demo and get a quote.
Productivity tools come in many different flavors, but all are created to help your team streamline the digital sales process.
If you’re looking for a full productivity suite and collaboration tool, look no further than ClickUp. It’s a central hub where users can chat, share documents, track goals, and plan projects and tasks. The company doesn’t pull punches when it says it replaces other tools, from Asana to Trello.
Pros
Cons
ClickUp states that it’s free forever, all you need to provide is your email.
PandaDoc is document automation software that helps your sales teams close deals faster. Along with over 750 templatized proposals, PandaDoc’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create custom documents. It’s also used to e-sign, automate workflows, and create contracts and proposals.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $19 per user per month, and there is a free plan available.
Need to create professional-looking proposals? Proposify offers templates, branding capabilities, e-signatures, and integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. It also provides proposal statistics, including top-viewed sections, view time, and more, to help you pinpoint what’s working.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $49 per user per month.
Calendly is a scheduling tool that allows you to plan appointments and events easily. You can even set it up to allow clients to book time on your calendar. In addition, Calendly integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, and Office 365 and offers a free plan if you only need the basics.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $8 per user per month, and there’s a free plan available.
Badger Maps is a route planning and mapping tool designed specifically for sales reps. With Badger Maps, you get features like territory management, automatic route planning and optimization, and CRM integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho.
Pros
Cons
Pricing starts at $49 per user per month.
Sales teams aren’t meant to get stuck handling time-consuming administrative tasks. Make sure your team stays as productive as possible by providing a full suite of effective sales tools for managing customer relationships, analyzing data, and gathering intel.
Your salespeople (and your revenue) will thank you.
Tap into a sense of friendly competition to encourage higher performance.