To build a successful business in any industry, you need a consistent flow of revenue. Returning clients can keep the wheels turning, but finding new clients is essential for continued success. Choosing the right sales tools can make it much easier to hunt down prospects.
Of course, there are countless options to choose from nowadays. Some solutions are aimed at outreach or automation, while others focus on CRM and analytics. You can also find tools aimed at every industry and size of organization.
To help you build the perfect sales process for your business, we went searching for the best sales tools currently available.
Key Types of Sales Tools
From prospecting to closing, the sales process involves many moving parts. While some solutions try to cover the various stages, most companies find that a mix of two or three tools works best. This is partly because specialized tools are often more effective than generalists.
Before we dive into the options, let’s take a closer look at the key types of sales tools you might want to consider:
Sales Prospecting
When it comes to reaching out to potential clients, these tools can help you to make connections and start pulling prospects into your sales funnel. They often help with identifying target businesses, email, social media, and the follow-up.
Sales Intelligence
These apps help sales professionals to gather information about prospects, such as company size and recent launches. This data can be used later during the prospecting and closing stages to build trust and provide a tailored offer.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Every sales team needs CRM software to keep track of leads and deals. Most solutions can handle email and social media. Some are designed for big business, while others are better suited to small outfits — so choose carefully.
Analytics and Reporting
In order to understand what is working and where you can improve, you need data. Analytics and reporting tools can reveal key insights that will shape your sales process in real-time and influence your future strategy.
Automation Tools and Integrations
To make a lot of sales, you need to manage loads of leads and a ton of data. Automation tools and integrations can reduce the amount of time that salespeople spend on admin, leaving them free to concentrate on more valuable tasks.
The 27 Best Sales Tools for Growing Your Business
With these categories in mind, we have hunted high and low for the best available sales tools. Let’s kick off the list with a tool that is very close to our hearts…
1) Datanyze: Accurate Sales Intelligence From LinkedIn
No matter which industry you work in, your sales reps need information. They have to understand their prospects and know how to contact them. Datanyze lets you access these data instantly through a slick interface, and it is truly affordable for any business.
To use Datanyze, you simply need to download our free Chrome extension. You can then visit any LinkedIn profile or company website, and reveal insights about key prospects with a click.
This includes accurate email, direct dial, and mobile phone contact information, sourced from a database of 120 million professionals. Importantly, the data is all GDPR and CCPA compliant.
When you have revealed information about a contact, all the available data is added to your Datanyze account. You can view and search through your full list of contacts, with access for all your reps.
Soon, the Chrome extension will reveal even more about prospects — such as recent company events, which you can use as an icebreaker in cold outreach.
Pricing: Datanyze is free to try for 90 days, and then it’s just $39 per month when paying annually.
The Best Prospecting Tools
Effective prospecting can be a time-consuming process. These tools should improve the productivity of your sales team:
2) LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Social Media Outreach
LinkedIn is the ultimate database of B2B prospects. The Sales Navigator helps you leverage this vast network, with a range of tools for tracking down prospects.
Perhaps the most powerful feature is the advanced search. This offers more than 20 filters, including keywords, geography, job description and job title. Sales Navigator also provides smart lead recommendations, and you can easily find content posted by your prospects.
When you find someone of interest, you can tag them and make contact via InMail.
Pricing: From $79.99/month for each user when paying annually.
3) Milkshake: Build Automated Sequences Across Channels
Outreach is an important part of B2B sales, but it takes time. Milkshake seeks to streamline the process with automation.
This platform validates contact information that arrives from your lead generation effort. You can then create email templates that can be personalized in seconds, and build multi-channel sequences across email, social media, and phone. It even has a built-in dialer.
All this functionality essentially means you can contact thousands of prospects, without sacrificing personalization.
Pricing: Starts at $44/month for each user, billed annually.
4) GetAccept: Enrich Your Email Campaigns With Sales Content
Trying to land leads through cold email can be hard work. To improve your figures, GetAccept helps you spice up your sales outreach with content.
Through the platform, you can easily create case studies, demo videos, and presentations. This content can be inserted into your emails instantly, along with automated live chat and SMS reminders.
GetAccept can even help you close deals, with support for e-signatures.
Pricing: Free, then from $15/month for unlimited users, billed annually.
5) Nextiva: The Best Way to Communicate at Best Prices
Nextiva is a cloud call center provider for businesses of all sizes that are specifically operating in or moving their phone systems to the cloud.
More than 100,000+ customers trust Nextiva, it’s reliability of performance is 99.9% uptime, but what the company is most well known for is its customer service. It’s quality and speed response from customer support that separates Nextiva from its competitors on U.S. News ratings.
Nextiva customers have no trouble quickly getting through to professional and attentive support staff to resolve any questions they have 24/7 any way you like: phone, email, or chat.
Pricing: Ranging from $11.95 to $26.95 per user per month with annual payment.
6) Aircall: Cloud-Based Call Center
This cloud-based solution helps your salespeople to start making phone calls without any specialist hardware.
Aircall offers all the functionality you would expect in a call center, including interactive menus, call routing, and real-time monitoring. In addition, the platform has several CRM integrations to help you keep track of progress.
Pricing: From $30/month per user, billed annually.
7) RingCentral: Better Multi-Channel Outreach
While Aircall focuses on audio-only conversations, RingCentral lets you set up a multi-channel workflow for sales engagement.
Along with regular phone calls and audio conferencing, this platform offers unlimited SMS, internet fax, and video conferencing. It can handle 200 people on a single call, and it integrates with a range of popular tools, including Microsoft products.
Pricing: From $19.99/month for each user, billed annually.
8) Intercom: Powerful Live Chat and Chatbots
Aside from being a polished live chat platform, Intercom now has a range of features that help you nurture leads.
The platform has a visual builder, which lets you craft campaigns packed with chatbots, widgets, carousels, and other useful parts. It’s very easy to use, and you can connect Intercom to over 250 apps.
Pricing: Plans start at $79/month.
The Best Sales Intelligence Tools
Want to get an unfair advantage over your competitors? These sales intelligence tools will help you unlock more leads:
9) Zoominfo: Deep Sales Prospecting Data
While LinkedIn holds an impressive amount of data about potential customers, Zoominfo offers even more. This B2B sales tool lets you search and cross-reference over 300 attributes for individuals and companies.
The platform also has a smart “intent engine” which analyzes the search activity at each company, looking for smoke signals. Prospects who are actively looking for solutions in your niche are highlighted with a strong ranking.
Zoominfo can even help you improve your sales process. The platform analyzes every call and email to provide conversation and relationship intelligence data.
Pricing: On request. Pro Tip: Check out special startup pricing!
10) Leadfeeder: See Which Companies Visit Your Site
If a buyer or executive visits your company website, there is a good chance they are interested in your product or service.
Leadfeeder uses a huge database of known IP addresses to reveal the identity of these anonymous visitors. At the same time, the platform takes note of how the visitors interact with your site.
You can then follow up, using Leadfeeder’s contact database to find the decision-makers.
Pricing: Basic version is free, then from $73/month billed annually.
11) Zoho SalesIQ: Identify High-Quality Leads
From tailored messaging to live translations, Zoho SalesIQ has many features for marketing and sales. However, the best part about this platform has to be lead ranking.
SalesIQ tracks the activity of prospects on your website, and monitors the way they use chatbots. This data is used to compile an overall score, indicating the quality of that lead. You can even adjust the scoring system to match your own priorities.
Pricing: Free for three users, then from $10/month for each user.
12) Crystal: Personality Insights to Power Your Sales Pipeline
The most effective sales professionals almost seem to get inside the mind of their leads. Crystal gives this superpower to all your sales reps, thanks to behavioral analysis.
Based on the well-established DISC framework, this tool predicts the personality of any prospect. The information is delivered through concise hints, which you can access through a Chrome extension.
Pricing: On request.
The Best CRM Software
A good CRM is the heartbeat of any sales process. There are many to choose from, but these platforms are a cut above:
13) Salesforce: A Powerhouse of Sales Management
What can Salesforce do? A better question might be, “What can’t this platform do?”
From managing contacts and leads to sales forecasting and intelligence, this CRM is an all-in-one sales workflow. That’s probably why it has a massive 19.5% market share in the CRM niche.
Perhaps the strongest suit of this platform is automation and integration. With a little coding knowledge, you can easily deploy custom apps on this CRM and connect your workflow to hundreds of third-party sales tools.
Pricing: Starts at $25/month for each user on the Essential plan, billed annually.
14) Pipedrive: Affordable Lead Tracking
If you just need a straightforward way to track your sales pipeline and store customer data, Pipedrive may be your best option.
This CRM has a really clean interface, with cards and columns to help you organize new leads. It’s ranked highly for ease of use, with features that help you close deals, rather than simply checking boxes. According to Pipedrive, users actually close 28% more deals after using this SaaS.
If your sales team currently uses other tools, Pipedrive integrates with over 250 apps — plus you can import data from other CRMs.
Pricing: Starts at $12.50/month per user, billed annually.
15) Hubspot: Complete Sales and Marketing Automation
You can essentially divide Hubspot into two main sections: the Marketing Hub and the Sales Hub.
While the Marketing Hub helps to automate lead generation, the Sales Hub is a powerful CRM that is free for small teams.
The standout features of this solution include email templates, email tracking, AI-powered conversation intelligence, and 24/7 customer support. You can also build sequences with ease, assign tasks, and view real-time analytics.
Pricing: Free for all basic features, with extra functionality from $50/month for two users, billed annually.
16) Zoho CRM: Visualize the Sales Pipeline
Part of the wider Zoho productivity suite, this CRM helps you manage sales across email, phone, live chat, and social media.
This platform is easy to customize, and it has a unique feature for tracking leads. Rather than displaying your sales pipeline in columns, you can visualize the whole thing through flow diagrams.
Zoho CRM also offers real-time notifications for when leads engage, and an impressive range of automation features.
Pricing: Free for the first three users, then $14/month for each user, billed annually.
17) Streak: Gmail-Based CRM for Email Campaigns
For smaller businesses that concentrate on email marketing campaigns, Streak is a great little CRM.
Another add-on for Gmail, the app offers a simple spreadsheet-style interface for managing your pipeline. Every email you send and receive is logged in the dashboard, and you can easily manage contacts within your inbox thanks to the official Chrome extension. A mobile app is available, too.
Pricing: Free, then from $15/month for each user, billed annually.
18) Copper: The Perfect CRM for Google Workspace Users
It might not be as well known as other CRM options on this list, but Copper is still worth your attention. The platform strikes a nice balance between functionality and usability, and it has a unique level of integration with Google Workspace.
This means that every email is synced via Gmail, every meeting goes straight into your Google Calendar, and you can build reports with Sheets.
Pricing: From $25/month for three users, billed annually.
The Best Sales Analytics and Reporting Tools
When it comes to improving your sales process, data is your friend. These analytics and reporting tools can help you crunch the numbers:
19) Chorus: Track Key Metrics From Sales Calls
Gathering data on emails and social media is relatively easy, but calls pose a greater challenge.
Rather than listening back to sales calls and manually recording data, you might want to try Chorus.
This platform uses natural language processing to create a complete transcript of every call. At the same time, you get detailed information about aspects of the call, such as the number of questions asked or the length of monologues.
Pricing: On request.
20) Tableau: Assembled Sales Data From Multiple Sources
Strictly speaking, Tableau isn’t a sales analytics platform. It’s more of a data management system. But that is exactly why it can be useful for sales teams.
The platform makes it easy to access and work with information from all your databases, including your CRM and other analytics tools.
Pricing: From $70/month for data admins, from $12/month for access accounts.
21) Heap: User Behavior Analytics
You could quite easily put Heap with the sales intelligence apps. But we think that the best features of this platform are the analytics tools.
More specifically, Heap helps you break down user behavior on your website. This can reveal friction points, helping you to reduce churn.
To help you improve your numbers, Heap combines with a range of other tools for testing and optimization.
Pricing: Free for up to 10,000 sessions/month, then custom quotes.
22) Google Analytics: Essential Website Data
When it comes to reporting, no list of apps would be complete without Google Analytics.
This venerable dashboard helps you monitor any page on your website, providing a wide array of metrics. The platform is particularly useful for seeing where leads bounce, so you can improve your sales engagement.
Pricing: Free.
23) InsightSquared: Over 350 Sales Reports to Choose From
Reports are not just about understanding your prospects — they can also reveal much about your sales process.
InsightSquared offers over 350 reports, along with AI-powered sales forecasting and revenue analytics. The platform can also sync activity and sales data, while managers can get an overview of their sales pipelines.
It’s a little pricey, but a very powerful solution.
Pricing: From $65/month for each sales rep.
24) Crystal.ai: Access Data Insights Through AI Chatbots
Yes, another tool named Crystal. However, this one offers something very different.
Sales analytics are very important. But it’s sometimes hard for reps to pull out the key insights from a mountain of data.
Crystal.ai makes the data more accessible by allowing you to ask questions about facts and figures through a simple chat-style interface. It’s essentially an intelligent chatbot for reporting.
Pricing: From $41/month for each user, billed annually.
The Best Sales Automation Tools and Integrations
Automation allows your reps to spend less time on admin, and more time on selling. Here are our top picks:
25) Zapier: The King of Integrations
Sometimes, you might want to use two different apps that don’t play nicely together. That is where Zapier steps in.
This platform offers integrations with over 2,000 platforms, including sales CRM platforms, email marketing apps, sales pipeline management tools, and email providers.
You can use these connections to build custom automations, where an action in one app triggers a specific action in another. It’s really useful for passing data between your favorite tools.
Pricing: Free, then from $19.99/month when paying annually.
26) Outfunnel: The Easiest Way to Connect Sales & Marketing tools
Outfunnel helps with connecting your CRM to your marketing tools and its App Connector is one of its best features that keeps your marketing contact lists synchronized and automatically communicates with sales about marketing data.
You can connect your data from a range of different email software like MailChimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Pipedrive, and more.
You can also make use of its web tracking and lead scoring features. Lead scores are customizable with email and web engagement data to gain focused data on each lead.
Pricing: Three plans, ‘Starter’ at $19/month, ‘Growth’ at $49/month, and ‘Professional’ at $125/month.
27) Boomerang: Schedule Email via Gmail and Follow Up
Sometimes, the simplest apps are the best. Boomerang is essentially a plugin for Gmail which allows you to schedule the sending of emails in advance. If you don’t hear back initially, it will remind you to try again with follow-up notifications.
As an added extra, Boomerang can analyze your emails and help you optimize the content for better engagement.
Pricing: Free, then from $4.99/month for each user.
How to Choose the Right Sales Tools for You
All of the apps above are good at what they do. Some are designed to handle your entire sales process, while others focus on specific tasks.
However, no business can use them all. At most, you can probably squeeze four or five into your workflow. Any more than that, and you are likely to find that things get over-complicated — and a little expensive.
So, how to narrow down the options? Just follow these steps:
1) Analyze Your Current Sales Process
Before you start thinking about ways to improve your sales process, you need to analyze your current approach.
Think about where your leads are coming from, and how you make contact. Consider who is involved, and how your sales team works together. This exercise will highlight your needs.
2) Identify Areas for Improvement
In most cases, you will only turn prospects into sales by interacting with qualified leads. The more time your reps can spend on this task, the higher your revenue will be.
So, ask yourself or your sales staff this question: where are you wasting time?
The answer is likely to reveal areas for improvement in your sales process where new tools could increase productivity. If the answer isn’t obvious, consider automation.
3) Streamline Your Choices
It’s entirely possible that you can identify ten different apps that will speed up your sales operation and help you close more deals.
But it’s always worth remembering that apps don’t make sales — people do. The last thing you want to do is make life complicated for your most effective reps.
This is actually a common issue: a survey by Accenture found that 59% of reps feel they have too many tools to handle.
Bear this in mind when narrowing down your shortlist.
Datanyze: An Essential Tool for Any Sales Team
Collecting information about leads is a vital part of sales, but it’s one of those tasks that wastes a lot of time.
Datanyze provides a simple solution that your reps will understand from day one. After installing our free Chrome extension, you can navigate to any LinkedIn profile or company profile page and reveal key data with a click.
Sign up today to see if Datanyze is a good fit for your business, with a free 90-day trial.
