Sales teams often deal with inefficiencies, lack of streamlined processes, and an overwhelming number of tools available, each promising to revolutionize their sales strategy.
This sheer number of options available can make it difficult to choose the right sales tools for your business. Without a clear understanding of the best tools available and how to leverage them effectively, teams can find themselves bogged down by administrative tasks, misaligned communications, and missed sales opportunities.
In this guide, we’ll go over the different types of sales tools you should consider and what to look for, highlighting 25 best sales tools across different industries. We’ll look at:
- Sales Tools for Lead Management
- Sales Tools for Voice Communication
- Sales Tools for Email Management
- Sales Tools for Chat and Messaging
- Sales Tools for Intelligence and Analytics
By understanding how to integrate these sales tools into your B2B sales processes, you can enhance efficiency, streamline operations, and drive more successful sales outcomes.
Importance of Finding the Right Sales Tools
Successful sales are almost always a primary source of revenue for any business. Hence, it’s important to ensure your inbound sales teams are equipped with the right tools and resources to help them close those big deals efficiently.
If not optimized, your inbound and outbound sales processes can have inefficiencies like missed follow-ups, delayed responses, and wasted time on data entry. These issues can create a drag on your team’s performance, hindering their ability to close deals and ultimately, grow the business.
Sales tools are designed to combat these challenges and drive business growth. For instance, sales intelligence tools can analyze vast amounts of customer data, revealing trends and identifying high-value leads. Imagine the advantage a salesperson gains by knowing a prospect’s previous purchases or browsing history before a call. These insights facilitate targeted communication and personalized selling strategies.
Benefits of Using Sales Tools
So, why do you need to pay attention to what tools your sales teams are using? This will help you identify gaps and inefficiencies that you can fix when you upgrade. And this is especially true if your teams are currently using outdated, legacy technology and methodologies.
When you use the right sales tools, you can experience a variety of benefits that let your business:
- Identify High-Value Leads Faster: AI and automation analyzes data to predict promising leads before the competition.
- Streamline Sales Process: Automated workflows ensure no steps are missed, keeping deals on track.
- Boost Sales Rep Productivity: Automate repetitive tasks, freeing reps for high-value selling.
- Enhance Team Collaboration: Shared calendars, customer information, documents, and communication features keep everyone informed.
- Create Data-Driven Strategies: Gain insights to optimize strategies, target high-quality leads effectively.
25 Best Sales Tools for 2024
A strategic inside sales approach hinges on utilizing the right mix of sales tools. From lead management to advanced sales analytics, these solutions can transform a disjointed sales process into a cohesive and tandem system.
Here’s a round up of 25 sales tools that can help your business across domains:
Sales Tools for Lead Management
Lead management software offers a wealth of features to help sales teams capture, nurture, generate, and convert leads more effectively; all the while making the process feel seamless and under control.
There are lead management apps for businesses of all sizes. They typically include CRM-like platforms that centralize all lead information, making it accessible and organized for sales teams. These solutions offer a range of features, including contact management, click-to-call, sales pipeline visualization, lead scoring, and task automation. With automated sales tasks, you can set up follow-ups, status updates, call logs, and email communications, ensuring that no lead falls through the cracks.
Another critical feature is lead scoring, often powered by AI, which ranks leads based on their likelihood to convert. This means your reps can focus their efforts on high-potential prospects, maximizing their chances of success. Many lead management solutions also offer customizable sales pipelines, workflow templates, and business integrations. These aid in visualizing and streamlining the progress of leads through different stages of the sales funnel.
Best lead management platforms for sales include:
1. Zoho CRM
2. Pipedrive
3. HubSpot Sales Hub
4. LeadPages
5. Zendesk Sell
Sales Tools for Voice Communication
Voice communication tools are indispensable for sales teams, especially when it comes to outbound calling and global outreach. Many VoIP providers not only offer cost-effective local and international numbers, but also capabilities such as international forwarding, advanced routing, call recording, transcription, international calling, softphone integrations with CRMs and other platforms, among others.
Businesses can expand internationally by getting local phone numbers from anywhere in the world and using local caller IDs. With cloud telephony, sales reps can make and receive calls from their computers or mobile devices, regardless of their location. This means, your US teams can call APAC prospects with a local Thailand or India number. Managers can track productivity and core call metrics for sales teams by analyzing call records and reports.
Top players and sales tools for voice communication:
6. Global Call Forwarding
7. United World Telecom
8. Skype
9. Zoom
10. Microsoft Teams
Sales Tools for Email Management
Email management tools have come a long way offering solutions from decluttering inboxes to streamlining digital workspaces. For sales reps specifically, these business email tools and enhancements can truly make a difference.
For instance, the ability to schedule emails ensures timely communication, whether it’s sending a follow-up at a specific time or hitting a prospect’s inbox first thing in the morning. Some sales tools even analyze your interaction history to prioritize incoming emails. This way, important messages from key clients or hot leads rise to the top, saving you valuable time sorting through your inbox.
Tracking and real-time notifications are also commonly offered features—allowing you to see when your emails are opened or links are clicked. This insight can enable sales reps to tailor their follow-up emails for better response rates.
Additionally, these tools simplify internal communication allowing sales reps to work on emails with colleagues, share drafts, and assign tasks. This ensures everyone is on the same page, fostering teamwork and streamlining the sales process.
Some of the best email sales tools are:
11. Google Workspace
12. Microsoft Outlook
13. Mailchimp
14. Yesware
15. Streak CRM for Gmail
16. Mailsuite
Sales Tools for Chat and Messaging
Alternative channels of communication like live chat, instant messaging, and AI-powered chatbots are now essential tools for sales. These platforms allow for quick interactions with potential customers, keeping them engaged throughout the sales lifecycle. Live chat apps can be added to business websites for customer support and engagement. One significant feature that many chat app makers are offering is chatbot.
Chatbots can be configured to answer routine questions, qualify leads, and even suggest products automatically. This frees up sales reps for complex queries and personalized interactions. AI-powered chatbots are also useful as virtual assistants.
Similarly, instant messaging apps like WhatsApp for Business offer a variety of communication options like texts, videos, images, etc. So besides responding to queries, sales reps can share product demo videos or send voice notes for a personal touch.
Widely used sales chat tools include:
17. Slack
18. Zoho SalesIQ
19. WhatsApp Business
20. Intercom
Sales Tools for Intelligence and Analytics
These tools help convert raw data into actionable insights, providing right information to reps at the right time. They gather data from a variety of sources, including market research, website visitor data, client feedback, and social media. Then by analyzing comprehensive data sets, these apps produce reports offering a clear picture of customer demographics, buying behavior, etc. Businesses can use these reports to create sales strategies and identify areas of improvement.
Furthermore, sales intelligence software leverages predictive analytics to analyze real-time data and identify high-value opportunities with a higher likelihood of conversion. This proactive approach allows salespeople to prioritize their outreach efforts and target the most promising leads at the opportune moment.
Beyond basic contact information, many sales tools offer deep insights into each lead’s preferences. This enables personalized outreach. These analytics can even suggest the next best action based on customer data and past interactions.
Major apps in this domain:
21. Leadfeeder
22. Linkedin Sales Navigator
23. ZoomInfo
24. CIENCE GO
25. Cognism
How Can Global Call Forwarding Help?
Keeping up-to-date in sales isn’t just about knowing the latest trends. Advanced and AI-powered technology helps by giving instant insights, automating routine tasks, and making customer interactions more personalized. This agility will help sales teams adjust quickly to customer needs, stay ahead of competition, and seize new opportunities.
A reliable business communication system is crucial for sales, ensuring seamless interactions and timely responses that build relationships with customers and drive growth. Global Call Forwarding has been guiding businesses across the world in upgrading their business phone systems.
Want to learn more about our cloud phone solutions for sales teams? Speak to our experts and let us help you up your game!
