The best sales tools to accelerate revenue in 2023
The success of your sales efforts depends on so many things like understanding your audience, developing proper content to reach out to prospects, building consistent processes to never miss any opportunity, enthusiastic and proactive salespeople, and the stack of the sales tools to organize, automate, and accelerate sales activity.
Companies have around 10 sales tools in their arsenal, and this number is constantly growing.
If you think that you can just buy the set of sales tools, and your team will start using it right away, you are most likely wrong. To create a sales stack that your team will use, push off your existing sales process.
A well-structured sales process allows salespeople to close deals in a predictable way. The tools you purchase should turn your process into something more efficient and productive. Therefore, before you even think about adding new tools, make sure you have a well-defined process.
With the variety of sales tools on the landscape, it can be tough to make a proper decision.
Luckily, you know that we, at NetHunt, will never leave you alone with any challenges. This is why we bumped our heads at and remembered all the platforms that each of us used one day and created a list of sales tools to power-up your processes.
We’ve tried to divide the tools into separate categories, even though many tools cover extended functionality and can substitute other tools that are more narrow-focused.
All-in-all, here are the categories of tools for sales that we frame in this article, trying to break them down from the initial stage of the sales process till the last one.
Account-Based Sales and Marketing
Demandbase
Nowadays, companies are trying to win larger deals on accounts of their ideal customer profile. This is where Demandbase helps salespeople by finding lookalike accounts to your best existing customers, nurture leads, reactivate, retarget, and upsell. Demandbase’s ABM Analytics helps users to understand which marketing campaigns work best to reach target accounts and provides insight into which accounts have the highest engagement and opportunity for growth.
Influ2
The software goes beyond the accounts and lets you target specific relevant people. Knowing your target persona, Influ2 allows you to run ads with personalised messages relevant to the person’s job function or area of expertise. Track all the intent signals on a person-to-person basis, prioritise the most effective messages for particular accounts, and identify sales-ready targets by behavioural scoring.
Terminus
Terminus offers detailed first- and third-party data to create a segmented list of accounts and start running tailored campaigns. Terminus let you run campaigns where your audience spends time – on social media, the web, or their inbox. Website personalisation, account-based chat, LinkedIn stream, custom email signatures – everything is possible within the tool.
Datanyze
Using Datanyze, the sales team can evaluate the software environment of the prospect to create personalised engagement through the right channels. To find your target accounts, Datanyze has more than 200 data points on 35M global companies. With the help of data enrichment functionality, salespeople can qualify leads faster and convert them at a higher rate.
Lead Generation
Intercom
Intercom is an all-in-one tool for customer communication that allows users to chat with leads, engage them, and convert into paying customers. Besides, with intercom, you may send push notifications, in-app messages, and send targeted emails sequences. Run A/B tests and see which messages perform better to engage your prospects.
Apart from the live chat and chatbot, Intercom can be used as a platform to create the knowledge base for your product.
To mention, Intercom is integrated with some CRM systems, NetHunt in particular, so all the communication in Intercom chats can be linked to the CRM user records. That’s a perfect solution for conversational customer experience.
Crunchbase
Crunchbase is the leading destination for company insights from early-stage startups to the Fortune 1000. It is the platform where you can discover innovative companies, connect with the people behind them, and pursue new opportunities. There are over 55 million professionals —including entrepreneurs, investors, market researchers, and salespeople.
LeadGen App
LeadGen App is a form-builder that easily creates user-friendly online forms to receive more responses in lead generation campaigns.It enables creating enticing Multi-step forms, also called multi-page or wizards that are a great way to generate leads and collect customer data. Multi-step forms can be used for many different goals: Winning new leads, qualifying leads, running surveys, collecting applications and more.
Acquire
Acquire helps you target your ideal prospects, automates the lead generation, and converts visits into sales. On top of that, it allows you to set up the right web chat messages to fire off at the right time by utilizing sales chatbots to increase the chances of getting qualified leads while your team is offline.
Poptin
Poptin is a user-friendly tool that helps eCommerce websites, enterprises, and digital agencies convert more visitors into email subscribers, leads, and customers. It enables users to create engaging pop ups and embedded forms even without prior coding experience. Its feature-packed popup builder includes exit-intent technology, premade templates, smart triggers, targeting rules, A/B testing, and analytics.
Finteza
Finteza is an advanced analytics solution that provides a detailed analysis of all your marketing data you need in one place to run your business from A to Z. The tool allows you to measure traffic quality in real-time, build and analyze conversion funnels, A/B testing, create detailed and intuitive audience reports, and launch your advertising campaigns. With Finteza, you can easily save your advertising budget, increase conversion rates, create effective ads in your location, and control advertising returns. Finteza is better suited for business owners, marketing specialists, enterprises, UX specialists, webmasters, and content managers.
ProProfs Survey Maker
ProProfs Survey Maker is a must-have lead generation tool that helps you understand the behaviour of your potential customers. By editing and sharing the readymade survey templates, you can monitor the purchase intent of your online consumers.
Use ProProfs Survey Maker to:
- Access twenty versatile question types
- Personalize your survey with brand logos
- Share surveys through email, social media, website, link sharing, and more
- Research your target audience & generate reports
Qualaroo
Qualaroo provides a complete CRO and lead generation structure under one roof, making it a one-stop solution for all your marketing strategies. Deploy personalized surveys to understand your visitors and, at the same time, embed lead forms in them to capture leads.
It offers a variety of features to create and analyze surveys, such as pre-built templates, question branching, advanced targeting options, multi-channel deployment, multi-lingual support, AI-based sentiment analysis for data mining, and more.
CallHippo is a virtual phone system provider. It enables the users to make and receive calls via laptop or any mobile device. It supports more than 85 integrations like zendesk, zapier, shopify and many more, making it easy to connect with other business tools. It has got features like power dialer, global connect, call tracking, call analytics which makes it one of the helpful tools for your sales team.
Email Finders
Hunter
Hunter is a tool that helps to find email addresses behind any domain in seconds along with scoring. The has the filters to search for generic or personal emails. Every email address has public sources you can check along with the last discovery dates.
ContactOut finds personal email and phone numbers on top of LinkedIn profiles. It works as a Chrome extension. Using ContactOut, you have access to the dashboard with all your saved leads in one place, allowing you to organize them in dedicated folders and share them with teammates.
FindThatLead helps to find business emails of new leads at any given company using just their first names, last names and website names. It uses advanced algorithms to quickly verify an email. It also helps you build a targeted campaign and send it to your leads with performance analytics.
Simply input your search criteria and their email extractor will provide a list of names with corporate emails, position, LinkedIn profile URL, company name, industry, website and much more.
Sales Intelligence Tools
Zoominfo maximizes productivity of B2B salespeople by finding new information on company’s contacts. It captures leads that visit your website, build segmented audiences to run outreach campaigns. The tool offers a combination of professionals’ and company’s data. Overall, it helps to identify the most targeted accounts that match your Ideal Customer Profile.
Leadfeeder identifies the companies that visit your website, how they got there, their behavior, and their purchasing intent. It also shows the industry breakdown which helps companies to adjust their company and make sure they target proper audience. Leadfeeder also helps to determine the best person to contact from a visiting company.
Clearbit catches the visitors of your website and transforms anonymous website sessions into actionable data and potential leads. Clearbit shows individuals and companies that visit your rand website with attributes like company size, industry, and employee details along with job changes.
Sales Automation
NetHunt CRM
NetHunt is a sales automation tool that lives inside Gmail. NetHunt turns your favourite email service into a powerful and fully-customisable CRM system. The platform has a visually intuitive interface and a short learning curve.
Workflows are automated and the bulk email feature allows users to send mass, pre-templated, segmented marketing campaigns straight out of a Gmail inbox. It is an intuitive, flexible system with native integrations to LinkedIn, Intercom, and Sales Navigator for maximum lead generation and enrichment featurability.
- Set up drip campaigns and email sequences to nurture leads
- Capture webform leads and pop them in your CRM enriched with data
- Automatically link email conversations to client profiles
- Have an algorithm move a lead to the next stage based on the lead’s response
- Set alerts for noteworthy events with leads and customers
- Automate data entry from emails, LinkedIn, Intercom conversations or Facebook chats.
Novocall
Novocall is a holistic call management software that automates your sales call processes. With a suite of call management features such as callback automation, outbound calling, call tracking, and call scheduling, the software aims to improve customer engagement and reduce lead response times.
Better Proposals
Better Proposals helps you automate the way you create, send and manage business proposals. Create beautiful proposals that convert within 15 minutes and let your customers sign and pay them immediately from the proposal. Choose from 100+ proposal templates for different industries and over 40 integrations with popular CRMs and other sales tools.
Sales.Rocks
Sales.Rocks is an all-in-one sales automation platform based on a huge business database to provide SDRs and AEs with a 360° view of their target and existing accounts to ensure higher CvR and ROI.
- Email Warmer to avoid the spam folder, increase your email reputation & deliverability;
- Prospecting using filtering system to narrow down your ICP with 50 different data points;
- Multi-channel automated outreach via Drip Campaign (LinkedIn & Email);
- Hyper-Personalized outreach to ensure reply rates of up to 45%.
ActiveCampaign
This is a tool for automating email marketing campaigns. This tool pretty much has everything you need to boost your email campaign performance, such as building and segmenting contact lists, sending professional targeted emails, even tracking and analyzing customer behavior. What’s more, drag-and-drop features and drop-down menus make it easier for even new users with minimal training to build an effective campaign.
Process Street
Process Street is a workflow documentation software. The intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it simple for anyone to start documenting their sales processes in minutes. This process documentation gives greater control and visibility to team members, improving consistency and accountability.
Use Process Street’s Approvals feature to assign, reject and approve documentation and tasks automatically, within seconds.
- Set up automatic task reminders using Process Street’s Dynamic Due Dates feature.
- Use Process Street’s Conditional Logic feature to automatically adapt your workflows to your unique circumstance.
- Communicate with other applications at the click of a button from within a Process Street workflow.
Sales Engagement
Outreach
Outreach is the market-leading sales engagement platform, helping you track, pace, analyze and automate your email and voice messages to your customers. Outreach helps to create sequences with a series of touch points to drive higher engagement with prospects and customers.
SalesLoft
SalesLoft is a sales engagement tool that onboards customers, drives them through adoption and automates renewals. SalesLoft tracks engagement and website interactions, syncing activity with the appropriate CRM contact and account records. With SalesLoft you can identify at-risk customers, trigger actions to connect and schedule calls with customers who need extra support. The tool helps to improve retention and drive strategic growth.
Mailshake
Mailshake is a sales engagement and automation tool that aims at building sales outreach sequences with email, phone, and social media. Personalise cold emails at scale, automate follow ups, integrate phone dialer, engage with prospects via social media and check aggregated analytics in a single dashboard.
Yesware
Yesware is an easy-to-use service that plugs into your email client, syncs with CRM, and provides in-depth analytics on how to best engage prospects at every stage of the sales pipeline.
VanillaSoft
Used standalone, or in combination with CRM systems, VanillaSoft empowers sales reps to respond to new leads within seconds, interact with leads more consistently, across more channels, and generate more qualified sales opportunities. VanillaSoft’s lead prioritization engine serves up the next best lead automatically based on your ideal profile, intent data, and cadence schedule. VanillaSoft’s cadence serves up the right lead at the right time, resulting in substantial gains in speed-to-lead, persistency, productivity, and revenue-per-rep.
Groove
Groove is a sales engagement platform that improves productivity by automating time consuming tasks such as email logging, outbound call logging, activity capture, and meeting scheduling without data latency or sync errors. They offer a 120-day free trial. Whoa!
Bloobirds
Bloobirds is a sales engagement + playbook platform that guides SDRs and closing reps to convert more prospects into customers. It partners your existing CRM. Bloobirds sits on top of it to make it more functional for the sales team.
It eliminates admin tasks, makes selling more intuitive and makes sure reps follow best plays with the in-app playbook’s help. Bloobirds helps sales teams flow through their pipeline, it also collects crucial data and creates competitive insights.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Hubspot
Hubspot is a good choice for growing teams, who want to save time on logging and maintaining customer data. Pipeline management, full context of customer communication on the left hand sidebar, leads and deals – these and more are possible to manage within the tool. Hubspot has a forever-free plan with limited functionality. Alongside CRM, it offers accompanying free products as website forms, email signature, live chat, meeting scheduler. Marketers can benefit from landing pages builder, ad management, reporting, etc.
Insightly
Insightly is a simple CRM solution for small businesses. Insightly is, first and foremost, built as a tool for managing leads and their journey through the sales funnel. Insightly’s other strengths include its potential as a project management resource and its comprehensive marketing dashboard that offers full insight into the successes and failings of marketing campaigns.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is designed for salespeople to stay laser-focused on the right deals. The tool helps to prioritize deals, track performance and forecast revenue. While using Pipedrive, you have a customised reports to get insights into your sales and business processes. You may assess the system from the mobile and integrate it with other sales tools that you use daily. They state they are used by over 90,000 companies.
Zoho
Zoho is a fully-customizable CRM solution for growing teams and enterprises. It’s a simple, yet effective CRM system that empowers salespeople with management of the sales cycle, from lead generation to after-sales activities. It integrates with landline telephony, live chat, email, and social media to connect with the customers wherever they are. They have also developed a Home-Office toolkit that makes the work from home easier.
Freshsales
Freshsales offers a lightweight CRM solution for SMBs that want to simplify their sales process. As expected from the CRM system, it has the functionality of contacts and deals management, lead scoring, sales pipeline visualization, and sales reporting. Sales reps can also benefit from contract-renewal alerts, deduplication functionality, and alerts for deals that require attention. The software is available in more than 30 languages.
Contract Management
DocuSign
The tool that helps companies connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements. DocuSign offers eSignature which allows salespeople to send contracts and other documents and get them back signed the same day. It makes this back and forth collaboration easier. It satisfies legal requirements for storage.
HelloSign
HelloSign is an affordable and easy-to-use eSignature tool. It helps to eliminate any paper-based contracts and makes the documents get signed fast. You can easily customise signature request by adding your brand logo and personalized message. It provides the non-editable audit trail with the proof of document access, review, and signature.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is an all-in-one document automation software to streamline the process to creation, approval, and eSign proposals, quotes, and contracts. It provides custom-designed themes, templates, and embedded rich media into the proposals, quotes, and contracts.
Adobe Sign
Adobe Sign is a document platform with the e-signing solution that turns an existing signing process into 100% digital workflow. With Adobe Sign, you can automate signing and approvals across your entire organization. It has both a web version and mobile app.
Sales Educational Resources
Sales Hacker
It’s a media for B2B sales professionals containing articles, podcasts, webinars, as well as the community to discuss the most burning questions happening in the sales world. They have a high level of the content as it is created by the sales professionals who share first-hand experience.
TheSalesBlog
TheSalesBlog posts daily sales tips and tricks written by the sales leader, Anthony Iannarino. It also has other resources like podcasts, e-books, infographics, and newsletters.
JB Sales
JB Sales is a learning hub for sales professionals created by John Barrows. It has a blog, sales podcast with invited sales rockstars and live events like webinars and Q&A sessions to discuss sales topics from lead qualifications to strategies to close more deals faster.
Surf and Sales
Richard Harris and Scott Leese united to host a series of sales podcasts. It’s a podcast where they share their own life experiences, real-world job experiences, and what they see sales reps and leaders do right, and equally important do wrong so you don’t have to. Occasionally, they also share surf stories as well.
No More Cold Calling
It is a blog created by Joanne Black for sales people who want to learn referral selling. In her blog, Joanne Black helps salespeople, sales teams, and business owners build their referral networks so they can quickly attract more business, decrease operating costs, and ace out the competition every time.
LinkedIn for Sales Customized Team Training Workshop
It goes beyond the basics of using LinkedIn (although we can incorporate best practices from our LinkedIn for Business Professionals Workshop) and focuses on how to strategically use LinkedIn as a part of the sales process. This program includes advanced strategies, tips and tricks that will take your LinkedIn effectiveness to the next level.
Article by: Anna Pozniak
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