When you match the right offer to the right lead, making a sale is easy. But to create that ideal situation on a regular basis, you need to have a rock-solid process. Sales management tools help you take care of all the background tasks, so your sales reps can focus on engaging with clients.
Tools in this category come in many different forms. Some help with lead scoring or outreach, while others provide better ways to handle project management and analyze customer data.
The question is, which sales management software is right for your team? In this guide, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the best available options in 2022.
What Is Sales Management Software?
The best way to define sales management software is as any tool that assists the sales process. This very broad term can cover admin, project management, data analysis, prospecting and outreach, training, and more.
More specifically, most sales management tools are designed to automate or streamline tasks that you might describe as “behind the scenes.” We are talking about assigning tasks, gathering contact information about prospects, creating email sequences, and so on.
What Tools Do Sales Managers Use?
Given that sales management tools come in many different types, sales managers will often use multiple solutions within their workflow.
For instance, you might choose a project management platform, a tool for customer relationship management, some outreach software, and a solution for analysis.
Of course, this can produce complex workflows. If you want to combine multiple apps, you will need to make sure that they integrate with each other, or can be connected using a third-party tool like Zapier.
Some companies avoid this issue altogether by basing their entire sales process on one platform. Many of the big names in sales management try to cover all bases — although such solutions usually come with enterprise-level pricing.
The 12 Best Sales Management Tools in 2022
You probably clicked on this link to get to a list of great apps. So, we’re not going to make you wait any longer. Here are our top choices:
1) Datanyze – Best for Prospecting Research
No matter which product you’re trying to sell, researching your potential customers usually pays dividends. Datanyze helps you collect vital information in seconds, via an easy-to-use Chrome extension.
You simply visit the LinkedIn profile or company website of any prospect, and then tap on the extension. Almost instantly, Datanyze will provide accurate contact details and company data. All the information comes from ethical sources, and there are more than 120 million people in the database.
Once any salesperson grabs the data for a particular prospect, your whole sales team can access that information within your online account. It’s a massive time saver.
Pricing: Free trial for 90 days, paid plans from $21/month
2) Salesforce – Best for Customer Relationship Management
For the purposes of this roundup, we are describing Salesforce as CRM software. But the truth is, this platform does it all.
In addition to storing and tracking leads, Salesforce offers advanced lead scoring and the ability to automate key parts of your sales pipeline. You can also consolidate all of your marketing and sales data, see detailed metrics for each prospect, and set clear boundaries between different teams.
Just as importantly, the platform offers integrations with a dazzling number of apps. The only downside? All those features make it quite complicated.
Pricing: From $25/user/month
3) Hubspot – Best for Automated Engagement
Much like the other multi-talented platform mentioned above, Hubspot does it all. However, we’re going to skip over Hubspot CRM and focus on the Marketing Hub.
When it comes to creating automated marketing campaigns, Hubspot has no equal. The platform offers a beautiful no-code interface, where you can set up sequences and add all the conditional rules you could ever want.
Hubspot covers pretty much every kind of lead generation, from email marketing to social media and SEO. The platform also allows you to track your efforts, manage your ads, and even set up live chat.
Pricing: Free basic plan, paid plans from $45/month
4) Ambition – Best for Motivating Your Reps
A major part of successful sales management is looking after your team. Ideally, your reps will be highly trained, super motivated, and equipped with essential data. That is what Ambition is all about.
This platform combines sales performance dashboards with gamification features (e.g. leaderboards), helping you see areas for improvement and encourage some friendly competition.
Managers can break down the performance of teams and even individual team members, and set them some sales targets. It’s a powerful tool, aimed mainly at larger businesses.
Pricing: Starts at $750/month
5) VanillaSoft – Best for Lead Tracking
Knowing exactly which potential clients to target and where they are in your sales pipeline can be a challenge. Through real-time data, VanillaSoft aims to make things easier.
Lead routing is one key feature here. VanillaSoft analyzes potential clients, and dynamically scores and sorts them based on your chosen criteria. The platform also delivers the right script for each lead automatically, and provides sales insights through dynamic dashboards.
It’s a smart mix of lead management and sales enablement.
Pricing: Starts at $80/user/month
6) MindTickle – Best for Sales Enablement
With a focus on training, MindTickle aims to hone the skills of your salespeople and improve the onboarding process.
The platform starts by asking managers to define their “ideal rep profile.” MindTickle then uses this template as a guide for coaching everyone in your sales team.
This app also provides sales managers with detailed insights about the performance and approach of each rep, and this data is used to personalize the learning experience.
Pricing: On request
7) Outreach – Best for Optimizing Your Sales Pipeline
Prospecting is perhaps the most time-consuming sales activity. But by telling your reps what they need to do and when they need to do it, Outreach can help your team reach maximum efficiency.
Used by giants like Adobe and Microsoft, this platform combines real-time engagement data and AI to provide sales intelligence on demand. In addition, managers can get better sales forecasting.
Outreach even offers some sales automation features, such as template snippets and account-based workflows. It’s a powerful optimization tool, with some great sales reporting options.
Pricing: On request
8) Chorus – Best for Analyzing Sales Calls
Analyzing buyer-seller interactions that happen through digital channels is pretty straightforward. But what about good old-fashioned phone calls? That’s where Chorus comes in useful.
This app records sales calls and uses speech recognition technology to provide written transcripts. At the same time, Chorus analyzes every aspect of the call — from how long each person spoke for, to what was said.
These metrics can provide some really valuable insights for sales leaders who want to improve their team’s success rate for cold calling and follow-ups.
Pricing: On request
9) Close – Best for Improving Sales Performance
As the name implies, Close is a CRM platform that aims to improve your sales performance — particularly in terms of closing deals more efficiently.
From the perspective of your reps, Close saves time by prioritizing the highest-quality leads. You can also build dynamic, automated sequences, and track down specific contacts with advanced filtering.
For sales leaders, Close lets you create a customized onboarding experience and analyze KPIs through a user-friendly interface. It even offers some pipeline management features, along with a raft of integrations.
Pricing: 14-day free trial, then from $29/month
10) Troops.ai – Best for Workflow Automation
Of course, you may be largely happy with your sales stack. If you would like to add on some automation, Troops.ai provides plenty of functionality.
This platform is all about siphoning data between different apps, and delivering it to the people in your team who need it. For instance, you can set up a workflow that alerts reps through Slack when one of their assigned leads moves to the next stage of the funnel.
Troops.ai works with most sales CRM platforms, including Salesforce and Hubspot. It can also hook up to Slack and MS Teams, Outreach, and many other apps.
Pricing: 30-day free trial, then from $19/month
11) Mailchimp – Best for Email Management
When it comes to outbound email, Gmail and Outlook will only take you so far. Mailchimp provides a much more robust set of tools for email management and automation.
Sales managers can create professional templates without code, and you can easily import data from 250 other apps, and even Excel documents. Mailchimp also has some nice audience management features, including analytics.
While there are more cost-effective options for big corporations, Mailchimp’s free and PAYG plans are ideal for small businesses and growing startups.
Pricing: Limited free plan, paid plans from $11/month
12) Monday.com — Best for Sales Task Management
Although Monday.com is very versatile, this project management tool particularly shines in sales.
Why? For a start, the platform is really easy to use. You can set up various views, including kanban boards, all packaged in a clean, colorful interface. As a result, you can check off tasks and view your progress at lightning speed.
In addition, it has all the features you would expect from a sales management system: task and contact management, deal tracking, email templates, phone scripts, and much more.
This all comes at a very reasonable price, too.
Pricing: Free for one user, then from $8/user/month
Choosing the Right Sales Management Software for Your Business
We have covered a wide variety of tools in this roundup. Some might make great additions to your sales workflow, while others may not be relevant.
When you come to choose your stack of sales management tools, here are some of the key points to consider:
- Functionality – Obviously, you need to choose apps that can handle everything involved in your sales process. That said, try to avoid overkill, as this may have a negative impact on the next point.
- Usability – In theory, putting your entire workflow on one platform should be really efficient. In practice, the complexity might just slow everyone down and make onboarding more difficult. Once you have a shortlist, make sure to trial the options and get a feel for ease of use.
- Integrations – So, you’ve found two great apps that do different things. But do they work together? If possible, it’s good to have a stack that is connected with native integrations. As an alternative, you may be able to push data between apps using a tool like Zapier or Troops.
- Flexibility – Every sales team has slightly different needs. When you choose your apps, consider whether they can be customized for your specific requirements. The more flexibility you have, the better.
- Speed – Every app developer will tell you that their product is really fast. But the truth is, some are faster than others. Check reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra to learn from the experience of existing users.
- Pricing – Of course, it all comes down to money in the end. For larger companies, it may be worth investing heavily in a custom solution. Meanwhile, smaller businesses might have to pick and choose for a good deal.
Upgrade Your Sales Prospecting With Datanyze
From onboarding reps to closing deals, sales management covers many different tasks. However, the first stage is always scouting for prospects.
If you would like to speed up this process and get better intelligence on potential customers, Datanyze should be in your stack.
Our easy-to-use Chrome extension allows reps to grab accurate contact details and company information from any LinkedIn profile or company website. All it takes is one click, and that contact is then available to view within your online dashboard.
We have over 120 million professionals in our database, and all the information comes from good sources — our product complies with GDPR and CCPA.
Best of all? It’s super affordable and free to try.
Sign up today to get your free 90-day trial and discover just how easy sales research can be.
