Your business is going to starve, if you don’t start selling.
So it can be said “Sales fixes everything.”
You should always be selling, not strategising about selling. Don’t just test, test, test – that’s a game for big companies. Don’t worry about being embarrassed. Don’t wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough. There will be plenty of time for refinement later. It’s not how great you start, it’s how great you end up.
A well said quote by Guy Kawasaki –
A lot of startups fail because they are not able to generate enough sales. Or it can be said the sales are undervalued or are not enough for the startup to sustain itself.
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Sales are a crucial part of any business. Sales brings in the cash flow and as long as the company has cash flows –
- You can fix the team, technology, or marketing methods if required.
- With customers inflow, your investors won’t bother you.
- The business will continue to move forward.
The entire sales process can be a complicated process. A lot of companies have integrated the sales tools to get through the process.
5 Challenges faced by the sales team
- Accessing the latest technology –
With the advancement in technology there are a number of tools that are being used by salespeople for closing and managing the deals.
Cloud technology, CRM systems, data analytics tools, web content management, and sales software exist to make the job easier.
Machine learning, artificial intelligence, content distribution systems, augmented reality and virtual reality are also out there and becoming more widespread because of their accessibility, interactivity, and effectiveness.
However, companies need to prioritize their technology stacks in a way that will align with both sales and marketing’s needs and goals.
2. Inaccurate Information –
Sales reps are often left to craft their own emails and often those emails might be inaccurate or ineffective.
Sales reps need to engage with their prospects and clients, but every rep and every buyer is different.
This sometimes leads to non-standardized email messages and varying levels of success when reps are communicating with prospects and clients.
It can get even more difficult for new reps.
These problems can be managed by sales tools.
With automation an on-brand template and content can be created by the marketing team and given access to all the members of the sales team.
3. Multitasking –
Sales reps are juggling with different kinds of calls – closing calls, qualifying calls, or discovery calls along with other tasks that also require simultaneous attention.
It can be hard for sales reps to prioritize who they should contact first. All prospects are important right?
But if you don’t contact the most interested candidates in a timely manner, you may lose them to competition or make them feel that your business doesn’t keep its commitments.
The sales tools allow you to quickly communicate with more than one prospect at a time and effectively manage them without leaving behind any lead.
It even allows you to multiply yourself and send more than one email at a time with personalization of the content.
4. Behavior visibility –
The sales reps might be communicating with prospects who aren’t interested in and losing valuable time that could be utilized over potential clients.
Sales tools help the sales rep to know who opened the email and also get valuable insights that might help with marketing. These insights can depict the prospects of specific activity and engagement with the email.
A salesperson needs to quickly qualify the level of interest of the clients and move on to the next prospects.
5. Customer relationship post-sale –
Even though the sales reps need to bring in new customers, but they are also required to nurture the relationship with the existing customers.
It is important to maintain a relationship with your current customers. They need to know that your business has invested in them and their success and that the sales team didn’t just sell them.
With the sales tools acquired you can manage all the customers by keeping track of your current customers and their engagement level. Personalized emails and content can also be sent to them to keep them motivated towards your brand.
What are sales tools?
Sales tools are the digital tools used by the sales professionals, so as to make their work easier and accurate.
Sales tools include various categories as discussed below.
How to choose a Sales Tools?
Having a lot of choices often makes people confused and funneling down to the right alternative can take a lot of time. Choose the right tool as per the requirement of the business.
Sales tools helps the sales rep take an easier grasp at –
- Understanding Lead Qualification
- When to reach out to those prospects
- What they should be talking about with them
- Managing long, multitouch sales cycles
- It makes the sales team more productive or drives faster growth.
- Supports and improve your sales process
6 need-to-know sales tools categories –
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Sales and market intelligence
- Lead handling and prospecting
- Analytics and reporting
- Process and training
- Automation and integrations
40 Sales tools for the startups –
Below, we’ve compiled a list of the best startup tools we could find to help you grow your company.
Sales and market intelligence tools –
You can Integrate Prospect.io with the tools you already use. The 2-way sync integrations allow you to focus on your job, not on the processes.
Features:
- Organize your prospects and manage your lists.
- Use your own email address to send emails. This is the “Sending Address”.
- Find email addresses online using our Email Finder.
- Automatically send cold emails using the drip campaign feature.
- Track, Report, and Stats of Emails
2. Clearbit
The tools are the marketing data engine for all the customer interactions. Understand your customers, identify future prospects, and personalize every single marketing and sales interaction.
Features:
- Helps you identify ideal prospects
- Automatically enrich every record
- Turn anonymous traffic into opportunities
- Turn any email or domain into a full person or company profile
3. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is one of the best-automated tools for sales and marketing in the industry.
Features:
- Identify leads with advanced company and contact search
- It automatically pushes data directly into your CRM
- You can easily build out territories, score leads, prioritize follow up, and so much more
- Leverage Linkedin data
- You can identify and prioritize your outreach
4. Leadgenius
They provide with high-quality data with a unique combination of in house human researchers and machine learning.
Feature:
- Monitor your key accounts and contacts for signals and triggers
- Helps us ensure the quality of the lead data into your CRM
- Plan, Prioritize and Prospect Smarter with Custom Data
It allows you to tap into their massive network to learn more about the prospects.
Features:
- A search experience that delivers the most relevant prospects
- Target accounts with suggestions customized for you
- Log Sales Navigator activity to CRM in a single click
- Get insights on your accounts and leads
Let’s you turn anonymous Google Analytics visits into actionable sales data.
Feature:
- Find ready-to-buy sales leads
- Beat your competitors with a sale by contacting the leads before your competitors
- Build better sales pitches
- Integrate your sales and marketing data to improve sales
It gives the real-time API that tells you the value of your prospects wherever they are.
Feature:
- Qualified leads with direct access to the sales reps
- Re-computes the right firmographic, demographic and technographic signals that match your specific business needs.
- Qualify leads on Social media Ads
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools
8. Salesforce
Sell faster and smarter with one of the best sales platforms.
Feature:
- Tracking of customer information and interactions in one place
- Make more insightful decisions with up to date data
- Drive customer engagement by automating and personalizing your email marketing
- Deliver exceptional social experiences by connecting them to marketing, sales, and service
- The Salesforce mobile app turns your mobile device into a portable sales office
- CRM software features that turn data into actionable insight
It’s simple to use and totally customizable. You can build your own CRM with this tool.
Feature:
- Integration with other software available.
- Insightful overview of your sales process
- Organizes your business leads
- Link related content intelligently
10. Alore CRM
It helps to keep the prospect data in sync.
Feature:
- Find the details of your prospects with our Email Finder
- Utilize social insights to make the process of qualifying and scoring leads much easier than before.
- AI-powered drip campaigns, you don’t lose track of any prospect
- AI-powered Virtual Sales Assistant
- Publicly recognize and showcase superlative performance.
- Stakeholders informed in real-time.
11. Close.io
Supercharge your sales with the best CRM for startups and SMBs.
Feature:
- Track all sales activity for each member of your team
- With the Activity Comparison report, get all the insights
- A custom dashboard, spreadsheets or advanced BI tool
Manage all your contacts, deals, emails, files, and more in one place.
Feature:
- Better client relations for advertising and media agencies.
- Consulting Manage clients and deals from one central place.
- Technology Innovate and scale faster with less CRM busy work.
Marketing, sales, and service software that helps your business grow.
Feature:
- CRM – get deeper insights on every lead, and monitor deals with ease
- Bring all-in-one marketing software
- A full suite of sales tools for your whole team
- Create, edit, and maintain a more secure and optimized website with or without a developer.
Quite easy to use and effective sales pipeline management makes the most popular sales tool in the market.
Feature:
- An insightful overview of your sales process.
- Organizes your business leads.
- It helps you to maintain the customer database safely and tracks all the records.
- Integration with other software available.
SalesSeek is a sales CRM, Marketing, and Customer Success Platform.
Feature:
- Sales pipeline with our unique, highly visual and customizable Sales Funnel
- Manage your sales on the go with our iOS and Android mobile App
- Manage your contacts with its centralized customer database software
- Email marketing & marketing automation tools
- Log Sales Navigator activity to CRM in a single click
Lead handling and prospecting tools
Feature:
- Customizable Modern live chat and Integrated apps
- Automatically assign sales inquiries and easy collaboration with support
- live chat with smart automation and bots
- Measure customer acquisition ROI
- Powerful apps and integrations
It is a leading revenue operations platform for high-growth B2B organizations to accelerate revenue and improve performance.
Feature:
- Aligns marketing and sales with Lead-to-Account Matching, Routing, Engagement, and Attribution solutions
- Sales reps receive the data to drive more revenue
- Integrates Seamlessly with Your Tech Stack
Sales Engagement platform for providing better buying experiences and closing more revenue.
Feature:
- Streamline, automate and quickly personalize our sales outreach
- Manage the post-sales customer experience
- Manage deals with data, not just instinct
- Design email templates reps can personalize to better engage customers
The tool provides with Outbound call center features. Manage all call activity and the automated workflow directly inside Salesforce, HubSpot, and other leading CRMs.
Feature:
- Seamless integrations with CRM and CTIs for automated workflows
- Trigger post-call automation and workflows to minimize downtime between calls
- Tracking sales team activity
Bonjoro is a simple platform and powerful integrations make it easy to convert your customers with video.
Feature:
- Create a campaign
- Send an engaging video to each contact
- Quick and easy integration
CloudSponge allows your users to share without ever needing to remember, type, or upload emails manually.
Feature:
- Easy install with quick integration dozens of address books
- Completely customizable with their JavaScript options and callbacks.
- Implemented stringent physical, operational, and software security measures t
Securely share your documents with DocSend for maximum control and real-time, actionable analytics.
Feature:
- Real-time file engagement notifications
- Advanced document management
- Advanced administrative controls
- Advanced security and storage
- Easy integration and support
Sales tool software for modern sales management technique
Feature:
- Send personalized cold emails at scale
- Engage with prospects via phone and social media
- Add automatic follow-ups to your outreach campaigns and personalized emailing
- Easily communicate with leads in one place
24. Outreach.io
Free your reps from admin, so they can spend more time engaging customers. Outreach Galaxy integrates all critical sales actions into your workflow.
Feature:
- Intelligence and insights to optimize customer engagement
- Email & Activity Tracking
- Integrated Sales Dialer
- Online Meeting Scheduler
- Sales Intelligence Dashboards
Marketing and sales software that helps to create videos for engaging customers. It turns video viewers into brand advocates
Feature:
- Deliver your videos to anyone, anywhere, with the fastest, highest quality playback.
- Help your audience take action with CTAs, email gates, Annotation Links, and more.
- TV-quality experiences videos
- CRM integrations
Analytics and reporting tools
Tableau Creator is for the analysts and power users who ask deep questions of their data and discover insights.
Feature:
- Powerful analytics to ask deeper questions and deliver more meaningful answer
- Securely consume your data via browser, desktop, mobile, or embedded into any application
- Can integrate into your existing data
Bombora makes it easy for us to uncover the key decision-makers we should be reaching out to and move deals forward.
Feature:
- Use this free Intent data tool to proactively coordinate sales and marketing activities
- Intent data and provides tips for driving sales and marketing ROI.
Clari works with your CRM, using AI and automation to give you greater control over your revenue process.
Feature:
- Focus on the Right Deals
- Track Marketing and Customer Success to address pipeline gaps
- Spend Less Time Updating CRM
- Spend more time discussing closing strategies
- Data security
Easy-to-use, intelligent software pinpoint when, where, and how user struggle is affecting your revenue and retention.
Feature:
- Custom conversion analysis
- Generate a funnel visualization showing how many users complete each action
- Top UTM sources and referrer URLs, so you can easily see what’s driving traffic.
- JavaScript console log for powerful debugging data
- Page speed metrics and Manage multiple accounts
- Wide array of integrations
Modern sales engagement platform for the enterprise
Feature:
- Optimize engagement to build more closeable pipeline
- Auto-sync activity to CRM to track and analyze rep activity
- Custom prioritization sorts based on your data and rules
- Native gamification engine built to motivated with daily challenges, leaderboards, and goals
- Advanced Email Tracking and syncing
Process and training tools
Understand what’s actually going on with your sales team, deals, and market with Revenue Intelligence from Gong.
Feature:
- Time-efficient call coaching
- Sales team’s true areas of improvement, driven by data and facts
- Sales conversion measurable and visible along with personalized feedback
Automates your CRM so you can Sell more with less admin work slowing you down.
Feature:
- Smart syncing with CRM
- Update your pipeline in seconds
- Close more deals with talking points, content, and kill sheets
- Quality level data in Salesforce
Use it to complete order forms and master service agreements (MSAs) in hours, not days, from almost anywhere in the world
Feature:
- Reduce deal turnaround time to get revenue in the door faster
- Deliver a better experience and reduce the time reps spend on manual contract
- Easy integration with the systems you use
- Everything is stored in your CRM
It’s a knowledge management solution that makes you spend less time searching & more time doing.
Feature:
- Captures and organizes the data
- Real-time knowledge keeps up with a fast-paced product and turns prospects into happy customers
- Easy integration with the systems you use
35. Chorus.ai
Record and transcribe sales calls for better documentation in your CRM.
Feature:
- Real AI for sales and real results
- Get conversation insights
- Build a coaching culture
- Automatically updates Salesforce deals
- Easy integration with the systems you use
Capture screenshots and screen recordings instantly.
Feature:
- Edit and customize screenshots
- Can add your webcam to make it more personal
- File upload & link shortener
The Industry’s Fastest eSignature API Integration.
Feature:
- Squeaky clean documentation gets you testing in seconds
- All signatures are 100% legal and all info is stored securely
- API Dashboard and SDK in 6 languages
A powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures.
Feature:
- Track activity from the dashboard
- You can create a single instance, multi-stage or sequential approvals.
- Use our Zapier integration to connect
- Use forms to collect structured data in your checklists.
Free access to millions of images and videos.
Feature:
- With custom layouts, you’ll put your best foot forward every time
- Engage your audience with conversational forms & surveys
- Works great on every device
- Anticipates question types as you jot them down
Automation and integration tools
Stitch is a cloud-first, open-source platform for rapidly moving data.
Feature:
- Extract from the sources that matter
- Detailed documentation
- Track and control your pipeline
- Data analysis tools and platforms.
About the author
Everyone at BigRadar contributes to the blog.
4 thoughts on “Sales tools for startups 2020”
Impressive list.
May be you could have mentioned free sales tools for startups in a different section or post.
Thanks for the suggestion Kevin.
We will definitely come-up with free tools list in next post.
Cheers,
few tools seems to be very expensive.
I am looking for a small crm which can provide pipeline view like pipedrive.. but at a smallar monthly or annual fee.
Hey,
You can try Zoho Bigin. It is very much an affordable and easy CRM tool for startups.