In the beginning, the best sales tool was a Rolodex.
In 2022, sales teams need much more sophisticated tools, and that got us wondering:
What is currently the best software for sales?
As with most things, the answer isn’t perfectly black or white because there are different tools for different aspects of the sales process. A SaaS tool that helps you find prospect contact info won’t likely help you with eSignatures.
And that got us thinking—what is the ultimate sales software stack? Is there a perfect combination of tools that can help you optimize each step of your sales process?
In this post, we’ll break down the best software for the full sales workflow, from prospecting to nurturing to close. Let’s dig in.
What is Sales Software?
Sales software is a digital tool—typically offered as “software as a service” (SaaS)—that helps sales professionals find, engage, and close new customers. Some software is specialized to one specific use, such as contracts, while others provide utility in several areas.
Another way to think about it is to break the sales process down into different steps and consider how you can use technology to optimize each step. That said, you’ll need tools for (at minimum) the following steps:
- Prospecting
- Management
- Presentation
- Close and sign
There really isn’t one tool to rule them all, so what you’re actually looking for is the top software from each category that you can integrate into a powerhouse of a sales technology stack.
The following list follows the chronological structure of a basic sales process.
The Best Sales Tool for Prospecting: Datanyze
If you’re looking to optimize your sales process with tech, there’s no better place to start than the beginning. If you don’t have a list of qualified prospects, no amount of software will help you win more business.
Datanyze makes prospecting easy by combining two necessary sales aspects:
- Social selling
- Contact info
Most sales teams have long ago realized the power of LinkedIn for prospecting—with 810 million users globally, if your ideal prospect is employed, they’re probably on LinkedIn. In this way, “social selling” has basically just turned into “sales,” but just because you found your prospect on LinkedIn doesn’t mean that’s the best channel to begin the sales conversation.
Successful salespeople know that persistence, paired with a multi-channel outreach approach, is the best way to engage prospects. This is where Datanyze comes in.
As you’re browsing LinkedIn, you can use the Datanyze Chrome extension to pull accurate and actionable contact info in just a click. This helps you be more efficient with your time during your prospecting while also building a qualified list.
Datanyze allows you to collect email addresses, direct dial, and mobile numbers directly from social media profiles and company websites without ever leaving your browser.
The Chrome extension also lets you tag and organize your prospects into segmented lists so you don’t have to waste time with admin work. Simply upload your contact list to your CRM and get to work.
One of the best features of Datanyze is the flexibility in pricing. We offer paid individual plans as well as team subscriptions for as low as $21/month. And you can get started with a free plan!
Sign up for a 90-day trial here.
Honorable Mention: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is a powerful place to search for prospects, but can you enhance your prospecting tactics significantly with their premium feature specifically designed for sales reps to increase sales performance.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to use advanced search filters, save searches, set alerts, and also receive 50 free InMail messages per month. The downside is that for $79.99/month, you can’t be sure you’ll get additional contact info for your prospects, so you’re limited to using LinkedIn Connection Requests and Messages to engage with your targets, instead of a more sophisticated multi-channel approach.
The Best Sales CRM: HubSpot
If you’ve ever searched a sales or marketing topic online, odds are you’ve come across a HubSpot blog post. While it practically invented the marketing automation software category, over the last several years HubSpot has made huge strides in terms of its offering for sales pros in the form of its CRM software.
With the HubSpot Sales Hub, sales professionals have more technological support than ever to start conversations, build relationships, manage pipelines, do sales forecasting, and track everything in real-time. Here are a few features we like:
- Sales Pipeline: See your entire pipeline broken down into deal stages that you customize in a sleek and intuitive interface.
- Email Campaigns: Use templates for common openers, responses, and follow-ups while also tracking email opens and clicks.
- Sales Automation: Create scheduled email flows to nurture prospects, automate tasks to streamline contact management, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
- Sales Metrics: Track all of your lead management and sales activity like calls, emails, and meetings in a leaderboard-style dashboard.
Additionally, HubSpot CRM has hundreds of integrations, so there’s a great chance you can connect it to the other software solutions in your sales stack. All in all, HubSpot is a terrific and well-rounded sales tool, as well as our choice for customer relationship management software (CRM).
The Best Sales Tool for Presentations: Zoom
Zoom has been growing in popularity for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2020 sent its growth trajectory to the moon. In fact, Zoom accounts for roughly 40% of all web conferencing traffic (TrustRadius). The Zoom video conference platform is so popular it has reached ‘verb’ status, as in:
“Let me Google that for you / Let’s Zoom after lunch.”
Zoom isn’t necessarily more full-featured than other video conference apps, but everyone knows how to use it. When you’re in sales, tempo is very important–and having your prospect not understand how to start their meeting, how to unmute themselves, or how to share their screen kills your tempo.
With Zoom, everyone already knows how to use the majority of the functionality and the platform is super reliable. And while there may be other options that are cheaper or have more advanced features, Zoom is our pick because all your prospects are comfortable using it.
Honorable Mention: Google Meet
If you have a Google Workspace account—which you can get for as little as $6/month—you automatically have access to the premium features of Google Meet. This includes a maximum meeting length of 24 hours, 100 available participants, and recording.
The Best Sales Tool for Contracts: PandaDoc
If you’ve taken your prospect all the way through the sales process to the point they request a contract, the last thing you want is the actual signing process to prevent you from closing deals. Sales is digital now, and it’s imperative that you have a digital signature solution for your clients.
In fact, eSignature transactions have skyrocketed from 89 million to 754 million in only five years. (FinancesOnline).
And if you’re looking for a contract solution that includes eSignatures, PandaDoc is our pick for a few key reasons:
- Proposal + Contract: With PandaDoc, you can combine your proposal and your contract into a single document. This not only streamlines the contract creation process, but it also increases the odds of your proposal being read and executed in a timely manner.
- Professional Design: No need to have your proposals custom-designed every time—PandaDoc has a drag-and-drop document editor that allows you to create customizable and professional-looking documents (and save them as templates) super easily.
- Merge Tags: If you have the name, email, and job title of your prospect, creating an official contract is easy in PandaDocs. Merge tags ensure the appropriate party is notified when and where to sign with no mistakes.
You can start a 14-day free trial of PandaDoc here.
Other Sales Tools to Consider
The goal of this post was to identify the top software tools for each step of the sales process, but we do realize that each sales workflow is unique and you may require some additional support in between steps.
That said, here are a few bonus tools you can use to level up your sales output.
Mailshake
While responding to inbound leads is great, we all know sometimes you have to go out and find your own sales leads with an outbound approach. By combining prospect and customer data with a cold email strategy, you can effectively turn ice-cold prospects into sales meetings. For cold email, Mailshake is the premier option due to its extensive automation capabilities, domain warming functionality, excellent customer support, and its library of resources on how to conduct effective cold email outreach campaigns.
Dropbox
If you’re not able to use a contract tool like PandaDoc, housing your own contracts (and other sales collateral) in a document management platform like Dropbox is another great option. In addition to your basic document storage capabilities, Dropbox has evolved to offer advanced features for access control, eSignatures, encryption, and collaboration, which is great for small businesses, startups, and enterprise-level companies.
Calendly
In business, two things are always true—everyone receives too many emails, and scheduling is a nightmare. Calendly solves both of these by replacing the email back-and-forth to schedule a meeting with a few clicks to choose a time to meet. While Calendly links should be used with caution, they are an absolute necessity for anybody who needs to schedule a high volume of meetings. Calendly has both free and paid plans.
How to Choose the Right Sales Software for You
There’s no single piece of software for sales that will solve all your issues. As you can see, there are specialized tools that serve a specific part of the overall sales process.
In order to choose the right sales software for your business, you’ll need to examine where your weaknesses are.
For instance, if you have tons of leads but very few are making it over the finish line, you can probably do a better job nurturing those leads. A good CRM system can help you do this by pointing out gaps in communication, automating certain tasks (like data entry), and creating accountability for you and your team members.
On the other hand, if you’re light on lead volume, the best way to correct that is to increase your lead generation efforts. To do so, you’ll need a tool that efficiently provides accurate contact info for you to begin building your outreach list.
If you’re in the latter situation, we encourage you to give Datanyze a try. With Datanyze, you can turn the time you spend browsing social media into ultra-productive prospecting time just by adding an extension to your Google Chrome browser. And the best part—you can try it free for 90 days!
