You might find that using Excel or pen and paper to handle every aspect of your sales operations is no longer feasible when your company grows and takes off. If so, utilizing sales software tools to assist you scale up your sales processes will be a game-changer.
But which sales tools specifically should you buy? These are the top 15 most important sales tools that you should think about investing in if your company is just getting started and has a tight budget.
Why Do Sales Tools Matter?
Software technologies known as sales tools assist a company in streamlining and optimizing its sales process. To enable your sales teams to make decisions more quickly and based on facts, they streamline sales processes or combine your sales data.
These days, the market has made sales management solutions standard equipment rather than optional; without one, you risk lagging behind rivals in the same field.
To help you choose the best investments for your sales team, we’ve carefully considered and ranked this list of the top 15 sales tools for both B2B and B2C companies.
Now, it would take a lot of energy to go through every sales tool individually. We’ve divided our list into three functional categories—sales process tools, marketing tools, and internal productivity tools—to make it easier for you to find the ideal tool for you quickly.
You may significantly enhance your sales and marketing procedures as well as strengthen client relationships by utilizing the greatest sales instruments available from each of these holy trinities.
Tools for the Sales Process
The company’s sales pipeline and sales activities are closely related to our first category of sales tools, which includes lead nurturing, completing sales, and guaranteeing client success and happiness.
To help you close more deals and speed up your sales operations, here are the top six sales management tools.
Software for Customer Relationship Management
CRM software, often known as customer relationship management software, is our first and most important sales tool. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution generates data profiles for every lead and customer, monitors customer interactions across the sales funnel, and functions as a database for past prospect and account information. This makes it possible for every member of the sales team to handle and develop leads fairly, resulting in a quick-witted and effective sales system.
A company may continuously improve its sales process, raise customer happiness, and make more data-driven decisions on a more detailed and comprehensive level by utilizing and evaluating the customer data in the CRM system. It makes sense that CRM software is at the top of our list with so many advantages in one application!
Tools for Internal Productivity
Sales productivity tools are the last group of tools you should utilize for managing your sales team, department, and individual salespeople. These tools are used internally in businesses. Even though these tools don’t deal directly with clients, they do a great job of preparing your sales representatives to carry out your sales strategy quickly and effectively. The following list of 4 best sales tools will increase sales productivity.
Tools for Project Management
It could get harder for each member of your sales team as the group expands to keep up with additional tasks, organize their workflows, and communicate with coworkers.
Project management software is therefore necessary to support the coordination, productivity, and teamwork of your salesforce. With the aid of these sales productivity tools, you can manage information centrally, give tasks to staff members, monitor project workflows and timeframes, and have private and team communications.
By combining all of the company’s resources and project management into a single platform, these software solutions are essential to the success of your sales team even though they may not immediately connect to sales. For online or hybrid organizations with staff who may be dispersed around the world, this is extremely important.
The following are a few instances of project management software:
- Basecamp
- Asana
- Trello
- ClickUp
- Wrike
Data Integration Tools
By now, your organization probably has a good number of sales tools in its toolbox, handling various critical aspects of its marketing and sales activities. Even though each tool might be fantastic on its own, they would be even more useful if they interacted with one another to eliminate information silos in your tech stack and produce an interactive database that is genuinely comprehensive.
This is made possible by a data integration tool, which compiles all of the various data from your business into a single database, data warehouse, or platform, giving your sales managers a comprehensive understanding of your marketing and sales divisions. This facilitates the access, management, and cleaning of your sales data, making it simpler to use for making data-driven decisions.
Here are a few instances of data integration tools:
- Zapier
- Oracle Data Integrator
- Informatica PowerCenter
- Hevo Data
- Zigiwave
Tools for Communication
Managing internal and external interactions with leads and prospects can become more and more challenging as your business expands. The effectiveness of these interactions can also make the difference between a technical slog that takes two hours and a productive fifteen-minute conference call.
Because of this, specialized communication tools like email providers, messaging platforms, VoIP calling software, and video conferencing software are crucial for optimizing messaging between members of your marketing and sales teams and establishing a seamless, media-rich, omnichannel sales experience for your clients.
Furthermore, advanced communication and video conferencing tools could be a wise investment to do demos digitally, saving on trip expenses, if you work in a B2B environment and spend a lot of time and money traveling to display your product demo.
Among the instruments of communication are:
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom
- Chanty
- Skype
Productivity Management Software
Employee productivity management software is the last but equally important sales tool we’ve included. It allows you to measure and monitor the performance of your sales department.
In order to provide reports on the tasks that employees are working on and when, these systems automatically gather, log, and analyze employee activity, including keystrokes, applications, and calendars.
By using these metrics, sales managers can minimize employee payroll costs by ensuring that staff members are putting in a lot of effort and identifying potential candidates for new initiatives. A software solution that tracks and records productivity also gives managers objective performance KPIs to use when creating feedback reviews.
Some companies that offer software for managing staff productivity are: