Sales is a people business, but that doesn’t mean that tools can’t help you work more efficiently. Data, automation and integrations can make your work easier, your customers happier and your business more profitable.
If you haven’t already embraced the flood of great software in the sales market, it’s time to start. Here are some of the best tools out there for modern sales reps.
Clearbit Connect
Clearbit’s Gmail extension is already used by more than 40,000 people. It sits on top of your Gmail to enrich each of your contacts with contextual information about where they work, their role, the company size, fundraising updates and much more.
That alone is worth the free install, but there’s more to it. You can use Connect to find email addresses from people within a company and search for people by job title. This is the easiest tool we’ve ever used to find more lead opportunities. Paired with tactful outreach emails, it’s a no-brainer for sales teams.
InsightSquared
The bigger your sales team, the more opportunities there are to optimize the sales process. InsightSquared helps you glean insights into your sales pipeline. Want to know more about lead velocity? Forecast future sales? Set goals for your sales team? InsightSquared is a full-featured tool for all those and more.
Even better, it plugs into your existing tools, like Salesforce, so the setup time isn’t cost-prohibitive.
Troops
Finally, an AI tool that has practical applications for a sales team. Troops makes it easy to read and write to Salesforce right from Slack as well as configure workflow so things don’t slip through the cracks. With a few simple commands in Slack, any rep on your team can see customer data at a glance. If they notice something needs to be updated, they can do it right from Slack.
The Troops bot makes time-consuming research tasks so much easier and faster. The future of sales is AI and this is your first glimpse.
Calendly
Scheduling demos and meetings is a friction point that we can all say goodbye to.
You choose your available hours and meeting length, then send your future customers a simple Calendly link that they can use to book a convenient time. It’s a solution to a simple problem, but it often eliminates a lot of back and forth emails about scheduling.
It integrates nicely with all the major calendars as well as tools like Zapier, MailChimp and Salesforce. That means when people book meetings, you can trigger events such as automatically sending them a spec sheet via MailChimp or an email asking for feedback after the meeting. This tool is an absolute must.
Followup.cc
What doesn’t Followup.cc do? Here’s an overview:
- It connects to your Gmail to track opens.
- It can automatically send follow up emails when people don’t respond to your emails.
- It’s super flexible. Just BCC a custom date–like august16@followup.cc or4days@followup.cc–to any email to get a reminder on that date.
- It allows you to schedule emails to be sent later.
It works great for sales teams and anyone else in a customer-facing role.
Scannable
Whether you’re collecting business cards or scanning your notes, Evernote’s mobile scanning app is the best way to go paperless. It automatically recognizes business cards and pulls out pertinent information like name, business and email address to be saved in your contacts.
It even has a template to automatically follow up with people you’ve just met. You could pair that with Clearbit Connect and Followup.cc for a seriously efficient outreach process.
Help Scout
Isn’t Help Scout just for customer support teams? Yes, but there’s so many cool ways to use Help Scout alongside a CRM or email marketing tool. Here’s a sophisticated, but seriously cool use-case.
Using Customer.io’s new Actions feature, you can automatically create a support ticket in Help Scout when a customer goes inactive. The support team can reach out and at the same time, you can trigger a personalized retention email in Customer.io. It all works seamlessly and automatically.
Qualaroo
Qualaroo is a tool that lets you run simple surveys on your website. You can target people based on referral source, time on page or even the likelihood that they’re getting ready to leave.
It’s a great tool for marketers, but there are some cool ways that sales teams can use it also. For example, you can route a new lead to a salesperson based on a survey response. You can also collect valuable data on why prospects leave before signing up for a demo or free trial using their exit surveys feature.
Attach
You probably use PDFs, presentations and other documents in your sales process. Those documents are really easy to lose track of–until you start using Attach. This toolhelps you track where a document goes and who interacts with it even after you hit send. It’s like mixing Dropbox with Google Analytics.
Mention
Social media is an excellent resource for sales teams, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the fast pace. Mention helps marketing and sales teams create and monitor alerts for prospects, competitors and even their own business.
Monitoring works across all the popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn as well as blogs, forums and news sites. If the people, companies or keywords you track get mentioned anywhere online, you’ll know about it.
Zapier
All of these tools work on their own, but they work even better as pieces of a larger sales strategy. Zapier is a tool that connects more than 500 apps, making it easy to create automated workflows. For instance, you can pass data from Mention to Help Scout or from Clearbit to Calendly. There are so many ways to make these apps work together to save you time.
The future of sales will rely on data, great tools and informed sales teams. Don’t fall behind the curve–now is the time to start adopting better sales tools.
What did we miss? Let us know your favorite sales tools in the comments below
