About 73% of salespeople use software to increase their productivity, according to the Linkedin survey. Besides old age cold calling, companies are increasingly using new technology to win more deals. For instance, training platforms that offer courses in various sales training topics might empower salespeople and boost their performance. By the way, the average selling company uses about 10 tools (and still wants more).
In other words, the sales setup of an average business is constantly growing
But what is a sales setup anyway?
Let’s talk about this and discuss the top 22 tools for your sales team. We’ve broken them down by functionality:
- Lead generation tools;
- Internal communication tools;
- Engagement and outreach;
- Analytics and automation tools;
- Document management;
- Marketing sales support.
What Is a Sales Setup?
Sales setup is a set of tools and technologies that your salespeople use to generate leads (potential customers), store contact information, generate offers, get signups, and communicate effectively with both the rest of your team and your customers. A normal setup should include tools that integrate together, meaning your sales team can easily access the features and information they need.
How to Create a Sales Setup
In case you think that after creating such a setup, your salespeople will immediately start using it, you’re wrong.
Creating a sales setup is a little more complicated than simply buying a toolkit. If you want to build a stack that your sales team will actually use, you should base it on your existing sales process.
A well-defined sales process allows salespeople to close deals predictably. Tools you acquire should turn your process into something more efficient and productive. So before you even think about adding new tools, make sure you have a well-defined sales process.
7 ways to understand your sales process and build your sales setup based on it:
- Define your customer profile(s);
- Identify where your leads are coming from;
- Find the best method to represent your product/service to potential customers;
- Create a structure for handling general objections;
- Determine your perfect follow-up schedule;
- Determine which sales metrics are the most crucial for your business;
- Figure out which actions lead to closing more deals (cold calls, emails, SMS, etc.)
Once you deal with all the seven points above, you can start building a sales setup that will function within the complete system.
What Tools Should Be in Your Sales Setup
We’ll show you the top 22 tools to have in your sales setup and explain what to consider when choosing similar tools for different aspects of your sales process.
Lead Generation Tools
How do your salespeople collect data about potential leads and generate new ones? We know that 89.9% of companies use two or more sources of contact information to meet sales development needs.
Along with that, LinkedIn counts a 54% increase this year in the number of salespeople who use tools that help them reach the right audience faster. Among sales teams who use sales analytics tools, 74% said they are extremely important for closing deals.
The best options for sales prospecting and lead generation are as follows:
LeadFuze
LeadFuze is a popular lead generation tool that helps salespeople quickly find new leads who meet the right criteria. You can set a job title, business niche, location, and company size. LeadFuze will then create a list of matching leads.
The tool is best used when you have a clearly defined customer profile. If you have accurate data and criteria for finding the right leads, LeadFuze will definitely work out for you. It also finds email addresses, phone numbers, social network profiles, and much more.
Price: from $132.30 per month.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a lead generation tool designed for B2B companies that need the most up-to-date information. It allows you to filter by industry, location, company size, income level, job, etc. Moreover, ZoomInfo has the most accurate and up-to-date database for B2B. If that’s not enough, the tool is also AI-based, which is great for analyzing your search history and recommending new contacts.
Price: upon request.
LinkMatch
If you and your salespeople like to use LinkedIn to find leads and have been looking for a tool to integrate LinkedIn with your CRM, you’ve just found it.
LinkMatch shows you which LinkedIn profiles are saved in your CRM and which are not. It also allows you to save profiles directly to your CRM and even synchronizes data when a contact updates his/her LinkedIn profile. Basically, it does most of the manual work associated with conducting a LinkedIn sales outreach for you.
This tool integrates directly with top CRMs (e.g. Hubspot, Pipedrive).
Price: $5.99 to $50 per user per month. The price depends on a CRM that you want to integrate with.
Hunter.io
If you need to get or check email addresses fast, Hunter is sure to help. This easy-to-use prospecting tool can find the email address of almost any professional. Search by name and company, do a bulk list search or search by domain to find all email addresses of this or that company. By the way, the dev team has recently designed a tool for low-volume basic cold emails, i.e. Hunter Campaigns. The company now prepares cold emails and follow-ups, allowing for adding a personal touch to your message.
Hunter also has a handy Firefox extension that lets you search for email addresses without even opening another window.
Price: the free version is up to 50 queries per month. Paid versions start at $49 per month.
VoilaNorbert
Like Hunter, this tool is great for finding email addresses and adding new qualified leads to your lists. VoilaNorbert also allows you to create lists in the web app and use a prospecting API to integrate Norbert’s real-time email finding abilities with any part of your software and business processes. This allows you to automatically find email addresses for name + company.
This tool also allows you to automatically enrich contacts with contextual data that builds. When you perform an additional search on a checked email list, VoilaNorbert will gather publicly available information and details such as company names, job roles, locations, social media profiles, and more from hundreds of sources.
Price: $49 to $499 per month, depending on how many leads you’re looking for. Email confirmation and advanced search features are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Perhaps one of the most popular social search tools available today, LinkedIn’s native tool gives an incredible boost to your LinkedIn sales strategy.
It starts with an advanced search for leads and companies. Using certain criteria, you can narrow your search results down to leads that are most relevant to your business. Once you start adding them to your lists, LinkedIn will add recommendations, helping you automatically find new leads.
Once you purchase LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you’ll also get access to an expanded list of people who viewed your profile, InMail messages, and real-time updates in your lead notification feed.
Price: from $79.99/month (Professional) and $134.99/license (Team).
Wiza
Best suited for sales professionals using sales navigator, Wiza is a LinkedIn prospecting tool that helps create email lists from LinkedIn in a single click and you can export verified email addresses directly to your CRM or to a CSV file. So if you are looking for ways to export emails from sales navigator for your sales/ outreach campaigns, this tool would be worth considering! Wiza requires a chrome extension and also offers a free email finder and verifier option.
Price: You could start using Wiza for free but would need to pay $0.15 for each credit (1 credit=1 email address) with subscriptions beginning at $50 a month.
Prospect.io
Finding potential customers can be quite boring, but not if you use Prospect.io. This cool tool can become your perfect assistant in cutting down on boring searches and actually being productive. Prospect.io can help you with finding email addresses, uncovering prospects’ information, building lists, segmenting leads, setting up automated drip campaigns, and more. Because Prospect has a Chrome extension, it’s always in your browser, which is very handy.
Price: from $39 per month.
What to look for in lead generation and prospecting tools?
- Adaptation to your customers’ unique journey: they are on their way to purchase, so your lead generation and prospecting tools should be tailored to that individual journey. For instance, if you notice that “warming up” leads work best on social media, you can choose LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LeadFuze, LinkMatch to help you find their social media profiles. Then you can set up a warm outreach based on your existing social connection – destroy that Like button!
- Maximizing the best lead generation channels: when you first reach out to potential customers – which channel is more effective for you? If it’s email, focus on tools that find emails. If calling your clients by phone is more suitable, try first to verify the right contact via LeadFuze or ZoomInfo before making any calls.
- Prices are another important aspect to consider, as well. If you want to spend less money without losing quality, try Hunter.io or other free email hunter tools.
Internal Communication Tools
Communicating with your sales team is just as important (if not more important) as communicating with your potential clients. This became even more relevant when many teams had to switch to remote sales.
So what tools can you add?
Zoom
When an email just doesn’t get the job done.
To build a team culture and camaraderie, you have to be able to talk to someone face-to-face and engage in fun activities together. But when real, face-to-face communication isn’t possible, video calls come to the rescue.
Zoom is a perfect platform to help create a good culture in a remote sales team. Whether you’re playing Zoom Games with your team, learning more about each other through ice breaker questions, or just taking a lunch break with colleagues. Its high-quality, secure video conferencing capabilities, the tool is an essential piece of technology for any sales team.
Of course, Zoom isn’t just for internal communication – it’s ideal for remote video calls with customers, product demonstrations, and much more. Just make sure you dress appropriately for the call.
Price: free for meetings of up to 100 participants/maximum 40 minutes, or for a monthly fee starting at $14.99 (1GB cloud recording (per license), social media streaming, group meetings for up to 30 hours, etc.).
Loom
Asynchronous communication for remote commands may seem inefficient. Whether sending emails or text messages, your emotions and tone are invisible, and the meaning of your message can be misinterpreted. Loom solves this problem.
The video messaging platform allows you to share video messages from your screen and simultaneously show your face. This means you can convey ideas and express yourself as if you were talking to someone face-to-face, even if that person lives somewhere far away and will see your message when you’re already asleep.
Price: free or payable from $8 per month. Loom only charges for creating videos – watching is for free.
MyOperator
Sometimes emails and messages go unanswered and video meetings can be too intimidating to start. That’s where calling your prospects becomes the best option to contact them and take the sales conversation ahead. For connecting with prospects on call, you can use a cloud-based call management tool like MyOperator. Using MyOperator mobile app, you can make outbound sales calls on your contacts or CRM data and use business call features like call recording, call tracking, missed call follow-ups, etc.
MyOperator provides a built-in feature to connect all your sales agents on your account and build remote sales teams as well.
Price: Payable from USD 10 per month.
What to look for in internal communication tools?
- Appropriate for remote and dispersed teams: as face-to-face meetings are limited due to recent events, salespeople have become more video conferencing. Your internal communication tools should be suitable for dispersed teams;
- Easy, simple, individual: whether your team is in the office or dispersed, working from home or in a coffee shop, your internal communications sales setup should help them feel unified in achieving common goals.
Engagement and Outreach Setup
How does your sales team reach out to your potential clients?
Outreach could be called an integral part of sales: after all, how can you sell to someone without talking to them?
Here are our top options for outreach and engagement tools you should have.
Drift
Drift is a great tool for conversations across multiple channels. It allows you to start a conversation via email, continue when a potential customer comes to your site, and finish again via email. Drift also has a chatbot feature that automatically qualifies potential customers.
You can even send a personalized video message while chatting with potential customers on your site.
Price: free for live chat. Paid packages are available upon request.
Intercom
Intercom is another messaging tool that is much more than live chat. It’s a combination of AI-based chatbots with live chat, self-service tools for leads on the site, and in-app messaging.
In addition, Intercom helps manage all conversations with potential customers by offering a shared inbox for the entire team, as well as detailed reporting. For sales teams, there are useful add-ons like Product Tours, which allows them to bring in new customers and demonstrate product features to them.
Price: starting at $39 per month (Start).
Calendly
Calendly is absolutely essential for salespeople who regularly schedule meetings and demonstrations with their potential customers.
Remember all those emails back and forth, trying to set a date, time, and place for a meeting? With Calendly, all of that is now a thing of the past! All you have to do is set up an available time and send your potential client a link where they can choose a convenient time period for them. It’s literally the easiest way to schedule appointments.
Price: the free version works with limited integration, paid packages start at $8 per user per month.
Customer.io
Customer.io is much more than just an automated platform to send emails, push notifications, and SMS. Being primarily a marketing tool, it helps both marketing and sales teams improve communication with customers and integrates well with sales tools.
Simple and logical segmentation: this tool updates profiles based on current information, including all activity on your website or any other information you want to integrate with its simple API. This means that your potential customers will be segmented based on their actions.
Customer.io also includes an intuitive workflow automation tool, providing the ability to set specific triggers and create complex workflows for your email campaigns in a simple and straightforward way.
Price: starts at $150 per month.
Help Scout
Help Scout is primarily a customer support tool. However, with easy integration, this tool is definitely worth checking out if you want to help support and collaborate in sales more effectively.
This tool sets up shared inboxes that collect all of the team’s emails. You can tag each other in comments, ask for help, or even use another salesperson’s inbox while he/she is away. Since Help Scout integrates with Pipedrive, Hubspot, and other sales tools, it allows your support to send requests to sales or key accounts when needed.
Moreover, the tool includes detailed reports to help team leaders see how their salespeople are performing.
Price: from $25 per user per month.
What’s important for engagement and outreach setups?
- Facilitating communication with potential customers: seamless communication is very important these days. Your potential customers expect a seamless conversation in different communication channels. They want to be able to use one and then switch to another channel without any interruptions. That’s why you want to make sure your outreach tools work well in a multi-channel environment;
- Providing a personalized approach to each client: while outreach is important, personalized outreach is simply a must. Your set-up should include tools that make it easy to personalize each conversation with your potential customers.
Analytics and Automation Tools
No matter how well your sales process runs, to seriously scale it and improve results, you need two things: sales analytics and automation.
With the right analytics tools, you can not only collect data but turn it into actionable estimates and practical ideas for your team.
Using a combination of automation and analytics, you’ll get a clearer picture of what’s going on with your sales and team, as well as maximize your efforts to get the best results.
Apify
Apify is a flexible platform that enables you to automate anything you can do manually in a web browser, and run it at scale. This effectively means that you can turn any website into an API and extract structured data from any web page.
Apify Store has hundreds of ready-made automation tools to extract data from a range of popular websites. The data can be downloaded in versatile formats such as JSON, XML, Excel, and CSV and used in your own database or favorite applications.
Price: The free version is fully functional and gives you a $5 platform credit every month. Pricing starts at $49 per month.
Zapier
Most programmers have probably heard about Zapier. Basically, if you want two different tools to communicate with each other well and share data, you should try Zapier.
The automation set up in Zapier creates an “if …, then …” type of workflow. When a certain event happens in one tool, the other tool already has a certain result.
For instance, you can set up an automation that links VoilaNorbert to your favorite CRM (e.g., Hubspot – Zapier allows sales teams to integrate Hubspot with more than 2,000 different apps). Then, whenever you discover a new contact in VoilaNorbert, a new lead is automatically created in your CRM.
Price: the basic free version includes 5 Zaps (automation) and 15-min update time. Paid versions start at $19.99 per month.
Process Street
As a workflow management tool, Process Street allows you to create documentation for standard operating procedures that everyone knows about and can collaborate on.
It’s much more than a boring checklist. Process Street provides the freedom to create simple, collaborative workflows, including conditional logic or rich content, e.g. audio and visuals. You can then schedule them as daily, weekly, or monthly workflows and automate the approval process.
Price: from $25 per user per month.
Gong
If your team makes a lot of calls and you want to deeper understand how they work, this tool is for you.
Gong is an extremely in-depth call analysis tool. It’s much more than just recording calls. With Gong, you can see how your potential customers react to various introductions, how long salespeople listen/talk, or how often a certain word is spoken. By analyzing patterns and real call data, Gong is even able to alert you if a deal is about to fail.
Price: upon request.
ChartMogul
If your team is in SaaS sales or you have a subscription sales business, you should definitely try ChartMogul.
Subscription-based businesses have their own unique set of metrics and data, and ChartMogul collects them and turns them into digestible information. This tool can help you see monthly recurring revenue, churn rates, lifetime customer value, and more. The best thing is that you can use intuitive filters and segments to customize your data and share it with an unlimited number of users.
Price: free if your business has less than $10k in MRR (regular monthly revenue). Paid plans start at $100 per month.
What to look for in analytics and automation tools?
Reporting for you, not others: when it comes to analytics and automation software, the most important thing is customizability. If you can’t customize how your data is analyzed and converted into action, you’ll never be able to tailor that data to your personal needs.
Different sales team members need different types of data. Thus, salespeople are more interested in sales data, while SDRs (sales development representatives) and AEs (account executives) need information on customer satisfaction and quota achievements. The more customizable the analytics tool, the better.
CRM-directed links and other data collection tools: any normal analytics tool should connect directly to data collection tools. In the case of a sales team, it’s absolutely essential that your analytics tools link directly to your favorite CRM.
Document Software
Proposal creation, contracting, signing, and approving documents are an integral part of a sales team’s day-to-day operations.
That’s why you should have very strong document software.
PandaDoc
When it comes to creating documentation for potential clients, you have to do a lot of work. And a lot of time can get wasted, from creating a proposal, getting your team to approve it, sending it to the client, finding out if they received it, to final approval and signing.
PandaDoc helps you create documents in half the time, plus they will look even better than before.
This tool is simply a treasure trove of great features, from easy-to-use templates and a drag-and-drop style document builder to real-time reports on engagement and activity in those documents. You don’t just send simple PDFs here – you can add multimedia, links, comments, and even a customizable pricing spreadsheet that lets your potential customers choose from multiple options, change the number of items, and much more.
Price: free for eSignature features or paid with a built-in document editor starting at $19 per user per month.
GetAccept
GetAccept is another handy tool that’s simply perfect for creating, managing, and tracking sales documentation. In its document builder, you can add personalized videos or use one of the beautiful templates provided.
The tool also allows you to create and customize processes and automation, which helps push deals forward. Thus, if you send a document and it’s not opened upon receipt, you can create an automated chat message to remind the potential client that the document is ready for approval.
Price: from $15 to $49 per user per month. What to look for in document software?
- Process simplification: when you decided to become a salesperson, the last thing you probably worried about was working with documents. Nobody likes dealing with the paperwork, let alone spending all your time on it.
When choosing the right document management software, you should first make sure that it helps improve your workflow, making it easier to create, send, and sign documents. If you find the software uncomfortable to use, it’s not worth your money.
- Proper design features: we know you’re not a designer. So why should you care what your proposal looks like? Because that’s what your potential customers are paying attention to! When choosing documentation software, make sure it has normal templates and simple design features. Since you’re not a designer, any software, which you use to generate offers and contracts, should make it easy to create important documents.
Sales Marketing Support Setup
To make your sales team work smarter and more efficiently, you need to provide them with the right content, help them be more productive, and provide savvy training courses and coaching.
Direct effect on sales: in fact, the percentage of closed deals for a company with formal sales marketing support is 49% higher than average. To implement sales marketing support in your team, you want to add the right support tools to your setup.
Here’s what we have in this regard.
Showpad
Showpad is a sales support and training platform that helps train salespeople, give them the right content when they need it, and hire new salespeople faster. It also helps link marketing and sales while storing all relevant content in one searchable database. That way, salespeople can find and use the right content when working with potential clients. This also allows for effective large-scale training and coaching.
Microlearning is provided to salespeople when they need it to help them brush up on the right parts of the sales process. Managers can also assess their team’s knowledge through quizzes and online surveys to see where some salespeople need a boost.
Finally, Showpad does in-depth analytics. This means that salespeople can see how potential customers are using the content sent to them and how it affects the percentage of winning deals. In their turn, managers can see how salespeople are using coaching/training materials and how that helps improve sales skills.
Price: on request (custom).
Ambition
A major part of sales marketing support is coaching and motivating salespeople, and that’s what Ambition is designed for. This tool is perfect for more structured coaching and creating healthy competition within the team. First, this software identifies which metrics most affect your sales. Based on these metrics, you can come up with contests to motivate your team.
You can also create your own scorecards, leaderboards, and dashboards in Ambition. This will allow your sales team to better report on their results and you – to create strong motivated teams for more winning deals.
Price: upon request (custom).
Flatlogic
One more tool worth mentioning here is Fatlogic web app generator. Both for inbound and outbound sales teams, it is essential for sales software to find new leads, then manage and organize the whole process of making them into customers. So you can consistently create a CRM for the needs described above with the help of a web app builder.
Pick the technology for your sales CRM, frontend, and backend, then choose the design and you end up with a skeleton of your future application. Now, it works with React, Vue, Angular for front end, Nodejs as a backend, and PostgreSQL or MySQL as a database. Java, Python (Flusk), and PHP backend will be available soon, right now they are under development.
Price: $19/month for a personal license, and $99 for the developer license, which includes an unlimited number of entities and priority full-time support.
What’s important for a sales support setup?
- Necessary tools to keep selling even on bad days: sales support content, e.g. cold call scripts or email templates can greatly improve the performance of your salespeople;
- Motivated sales team: the right sales enablement tools should motivate your team in moderation. But every team is different so you want to look for proper impact methods and tools that work best for your salespeople.
Conclusions
First, your sales setup should include all the tools that improve the sales process and increase the productivity of the entire team.
Second, this setup should be tailored to specific methods and processes your team uses.
Third, your setup tools should cover 6 specific areas of the sales process:
- Lead generation tools;
- Internal communication tools;
- Engagement and outreach;
- Analytics and automation tools;
- Documentation;
- Marketing sales support.
Is your favorite tool not on the list? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll add new tools to our guide!
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