35 Best Sales Tools for 2023
High-performing sales teams have a lot on their plate, and they don’t have time to waste on workarounds. Your team needs the right sales tools to do their best work.
Having the right tools for your team makes the entire sales process easier to manage. With effective software, your team will have more customer interactions and close more deals — and you’ll have cleaner customer data to inform your overall sales strategy.
Shopping for tools can be a hassle, though. You can spend hours browsing websites, trying to figure out which choices are worth the subscription fees and will work well with your existing tech stack.
That’s why we put together this ultimate list of the best sales tools for 2023.
The recommendations here are sorted by category. You’ll find tools for sales productivity, pipeline management, sales enablement, and much more.
Sales productivity
Sales productivity tools are the best way to help revenue teams increase their efficiency.
The goal is to get more valuable work done in the same amount of time, which is possible because sales reps can spend less time on manual tasks like data entry and more time actually selling.
Weflow
For teams that use Salesforce, Weflow is a powerful way to cut down on busy work so that your reps can focus on what they do best: selling. Weflow connects to Salesforce to track your sales professionals’ activities, including notes, emails, tasks, and meetings.
By eliminating this repetitive Salesforce work, Weflow can save each representative 5 or more hours every week.
Plus, revenue leaders get better pipeline visibility, improved forecasting, and cleaner customer data, all without adding more work to their sales team’s plate. That improved visibility gives you a better way to identify deal risks, and it’s also easier to ensure that your sales processes are compliant.
Improving your data quality in Salesforce is also an efficiency booster for your revenue and sales operations. Spend less time updating records and sorting out data issues, and use to-dos to automatically remind reps about missed steps, expired close dates, or other custom metrics that make sense for your sales process.
Account executives find these deal signals and alerts especially valuable. It’s easier to prioritize the right deals and talk to prospects at the right point in the sales cycle.
If you use a specific sales methodology like BANT or MEDDIC, Weflow’s templates help you keep your account executives focused and compliant.
Later in the sales cycle, when your reps hand over accounts to customer success, Weflow continues to be a valuable tool.
Customer success agents can easily see what’s needed for onboarding and important metrics like churn risk. Handovers are smoother, onboarding is simplified, and account management is much more efficient.
Weflow is available as a Chrome extension, which reduces task-switching and open browser tabs during the sales process. You can also use the web app.
For teams of 5 or fewer, Weflow is completely free to use. The free plan includes:
- Up to 5 users
- Weflow’s Chrome extension and web app
- Auto-syncing notes to Salesforce
- Creating and updating Salesforce records
- Pipeline table and Kanban views
- The ability to update Salesforce on any website
- The task manager
Paid plans allow you to add more users and more functionality to Weflow. You can read more about pricing and compare plans here.
Conversational intelligence
A great conversational intelligence tool gives sales managers insight into how their sales reps are performing. They do this by recording and analyzing customer interactions with your sales team.
Using conversational intelligence is a key part of sales professional development and coaching. It also creates visibility that empowers you to automate recurring sales processes, provide support during the sales process, and ultimately turn your data into more deals.
Gong
Gong creates more visibility into your sales and marketing teams’ performance, market changes that might affect your pipeline, and how your deals are going. It does this by analyzing customer-facing interactions via phone, email, and web conferencing to create better sales intelligence.
This robust sales tool includes an impressive list of features:
- Call recording and analytics
- Video recording
- Customer scoring
- Speech-to-text
- Coaching cards
- Coaching materials and an expansive knowledge base
Many of these more advanced features are supported by machine learning capabilities and artificial intelligence. For example, Gong will use artificial intelligence to help analyze recorded calls to draw insights from these interactions. Those insights inform scores, coaching opportunities, and other alerts that can help your sales reps close deals.
Data visualization is one of Gong’s strengths. Using Gong’s dashboards, you can easily see important trends. For example, one view shows you how your strategic initiatives are going and what impacts those strategies have on your business goals.
Sales managers also like the coaching insights. You’ll spot opportunities for training and development, plus more easily track the frequency and consistency of coaching across your organization.
Gong also offers some useful sales automation tools, such as automated daily task lists and alerts about pipeline risks.
You don’t need to use every feature that Gong offers to adopt this popular sales tool. Implementation is custom. Talk to Gong’s sales team about your goals and your existing tools to get exactly what you need without overpaying for features you don’t want.
Depending on the features you want and the size of your team, Gong’s pricing will vary. You’ll need to contact their sales team for an accurate, custom quote.
In general, you can expect to pay between $100 and $200 per user per month. There is also a base price of $5,000 per year.
Chorus
Chorus integrates their patented conversation intelligence data with the existing contact and company data you get from their parent company, ZoomInfo. Their artificial intelligence technology analyzes calls, emails, and meetings to give you data that moves sales forward.
As a Chorus user, you’ll get:
- Call recording and analysis
- Onboarding, training, and skill development tools
- Team performance insights
- Market intelligence
- Pipeline insights
- Integrations with Salesforce, Zoom, Clari, and more
- A fully functional mobile app
Use the data you gather from Chorus to see what sets your top performers apart, then replicate those key differences throughout your sales team. You’ll get both the insights to spot those important habits and the skill development resources to help you coach your entire team effectively.
When it comes to customer relationship management and better sales enablement, Chorus gives you actionable insights into pipeline risks and active deals.
Your marketing team will love the AI-driven market intelligence features, too.
Chorus automatically tracks how often competitors come up, at what stage, and which features your prospects mention most often. You’ll see the impact those conversations had on deal wins or losses.
As you’d expect, the reporting and analytics dashboards are powerful. There are more than 20 out-of-the-box reports to get you started, and you can easily create custom reports to gain whatever insights you need.
Like other premium conversation intelligence tools, you need to talk to Chorus’ sales team to get an accurate quote for your unique situation. If you’re already a ZoomInfo user, you can expect to get a more favorable bundled price.
Expect to pay a base price of about $8,000 per year, plus a per-user monthly cost of $100 to $200.
Forecasting and pipeline management
Sales forecasting and pipeline management are some of the most important responsibilities for sales managers and revenue leaders. They can also be the biggest challenges.
Forecasting and pipeline management tools help you collect and analyze real data from your sales process so that you can set realistic goals and make accurate predictions. Good tools also turn those insights into actionable recommendations to help your team close more deals.
Weflow
We’ve already talked about Weflow’s productivity features. Now, let’s take a closer look at how it can help you make accurate forecasts and manage your pipeline.
Pipeline reports in Weflow give you actionable insights into your business metrics. Easily drill down into each deal and account for more detail, focusing on the actions that move your deals toward closing.
Customize reports to show you exactly the business metrics you want to see. Weflow helps you understand your sales cycle and allows you to improve it using the insights you gain.
Because Weflow automatically updates Salesforce with real-time data from your sales reps, your pipeline data stays more accurate with less work. Improved data accuracy plus better process compliance means that Weflow users achieve 92% forecast accuracy.
Clari
Clari specializes in optimizing revenue with their take on conversational intelligence. Their sales forecasting projections are based on data collected by AI, and you can review reports over time to see what kind of activities impact those forecasts.
Sales representatives must manually update statuses for Clari to be most accurate, so the platform automatically prompts your reps to update their forecasts.
When you view forecast reports, it’s easy to see how up-to-date your data is. The intuitive green, yellow, and red icons tell you if a forecast is incomplete, in need of an update, or complete.
For pipeline management, Clari shows you which deals are moving, stalled, or at risk on an easy-to-use dashboard.
As soon as representatives update their accounts, the information appears on your dashboard. Use this detailed pipeline overview to spot pipeline changes, coach your sales team, and get a broad view of prospect engagement.
Clari’s pricing is based on your needs and the size of your team, and they do not share information about their pricing structure online. You’ll need to talk to their sales team for an accurate price estimate.
Sales enablement – content
Sales enablement content makes your sales reps’ jobs easier. Great content like fact sheets, case studies, and proposals give prospects a chance to sell themselves on your offering while they’re still in the information-gathering phase.
However, creating and managing sales content is labor intensive.
Your enablement content must be regularly updated to stay relevant, and it works best when it’s personalized to the prospect.
Without a good tool to help your team find and effectively utilize those resources, all of that investment is a waste.
Seismic
Seismic’s sales enablement tools help your team create, manage, and control content effectively. That means that your reps can access and use the personalized assets they need without changing (or losing) the original version.
The content management features help your reps find the right piece of content by searching the content library and then personalizing it for their prospect.
You can control how flexible customization can be, from changing a few key items to allowing major updates. Set guidelines to stay ompliant and on-brand, then empower your representatives to use the sales content in your library to move deals forward.
When you introduce a new piece of collateral or update an existing piece of enablement content, the library instantly stores the current version for your reps to use.
Nobody will have to use an old version of your pitch deck or waste time searching for the most up-to-date proposal template again.
Seismic also houses your internal sales content library where reps can go to find answers.
Like most of the sales tools in this blog post, Seismic does not publish their pricing on their website. Expect pricing to vary from about $380 to $800 per user per year, though you’ll need to talk to their sales team for an accurate quote for your business.
Highspot
Highspot helps you establish a repeatable process for enablement content delivery, meaning your sales professionals know exactly what content to provide at the right time for optimal results.
You also get detailed analytics about the performance of your sales enablement content. For example, you’ll be able to see if prospects are opening and reading proposals, how far they get in video plays, and how much of your revenue was influenced by specific content pieces.
That performance data is important, because Highspot uses it to automatically recommend the most effective pieces of content to your reps at key moments in the sales cycle.
When it comes to pricing, you can estimate that you’ll pay somewhere around $600/user/year with a minimum user requirement of at least 50. There may also be setup fees or base fees, and the per-user cost may change with scale. You can contact Highspot's sales team for an accurate quote for your business.
Storydoc
Storydoc is an interactive AI proposal and sales deck creator. It enables sales teams, product marketers, and SDRs to engage and convert more leads at a lower content production cost. With plenty of optimized templates to choose from and AI-guided copy and media, you can create highly engaging sales content in record time.
Integrate Storydoc with any CRM to personalize and automate your decks at scale. You can also embed any tool from your sales stack into your decks, such as calendars, chatbots, sales intelligence tools, and sign-up forms.
Importantly, Storyodoc’s ready-to-use analytics allows you to know how, when, and by who your decks are being read, offering you invaluable visibility into your prospect and their company’s decision-making process.
Storydoc offers a 14-day free trial.
The Starter plan starts at $30/month per seat giving you access to unlimited templates and presentation analytics.
The Pro account comes with everything from the Starter plan plus custom branding and deck personalization with dynamic variables.
Sales enablement – training and learning
The other side of sales enablement is focused on information for your sales professionals instead of the information you publish for your prospects.
Training helps your reps become more knowledgeable about your offerings and more skilled in the profession of sales. You probably already have some kind of training program in place for onboarding your new agents.
However, one-time training is not enough. People quickly forget the details of a training course, and without a way to refresh that learning, the benefits quickly fade.
These tools give your sales team ongoing access to the training and learning they need to be most effective.
Mindtickle
Mindtickle collects your sales data to identify top opportunities for improvement. Then, the platform delivers your sales enablement training to reps and uses artificial intelligence to reinforce that training at key moments.
Once training is deployed, you can measure the impact over time both by representative and by business outcomes.
Participation and completion rates tell you which courses are getting traction with your team, and the results of those courses are mapped to your business goals so you can see whether or not they’re effective.
Ready-to-use templates help you launch your training quickly using proven best practices.
Based on a few online sources, you can expect to pay in the range of $30 to $50 per user per month, plus a one-time implementation fee that may be between $3,000 and $5,000.
Brainshark
Brainshark specializes in sales enablement through representative “readiness,” which means that your sales professionals know everything they need to do to make the sale.
First, you’ll deliver your onboarding training through Brainshark. Make courses mandatory or optional at your discretion.
Then, continue offering sales enablement learning and training based on the coaching opportunities identified by Mindshark’s artificial intelligence. Your reps can access training from any of their devices, and your courses can be text- or video-based.
If you have agents working in areas with low connectivity, Brainshark offers solutions that can give them access to training even without an internet connection.
Brainshark does not publish their pricing information online. They bill by the user and offer both annual and monthly plans, though the annual plan is likely to save you money. You can contact the Brainshark sales team for an accurate quote for your business.
As an estimate, you can expect to pay about $20,000 annually for a team of 20 users for their premier plan. They also offer a starter plan at a reduced price.
Sales compensation management
It’s an important question in sales: how do your reps get paid?
Payroll is probably your largest expense. Whether you pay a base salary, commission only, or some kind of structured plan that combines the two and varies based on performance, you need a compensation management platform to simplify those payments.
Regular payroll software is awesome, but it lacks some of the nuance you need to navigate the more complex payment structure of a sales team.
CaptivateIQ
CaptivateIQ helps you design a competitive commission structure and implement it in your sales team.
Whether your compensation structure is simple or highly complex, CaptivateIQ can handle it. Out of the box, you can integrate with 20+ data sources, and the tool supports over 7,000 commission plans.
Want to know if your compensation structure is effective at motivating your sales reps? Easily track key metrics and use intuitive reports to measure sales performance and inform your strategy.
CaptivateIQ is built to allow you to test and change your commission structure as you see fit. Make changes easily and transparently — your reps will always know how they get paid.
CaptivateIQ pricing will vary depending on the size of your sales organization. There is also a one-time setup cost for their full-service implementation. Contact CaptivateIQ’s sales team for an accurate quote; they do not publish their prices online.
Spiff
Spiff specializes in commission management for enterprise and high-growth sales organizations. They value transparency and visibility so that your reps trust your compensation structure, and they prioritize ease-of-use and flexibility so that sales leaders don’t have to waste time making the software work.
Want to optimize your commission structure to motivate your sales professionals with a focus on scalability? Your compensation scheme should drive growth, and SPIFF helps you do that with intuitive workflow builders.
Spiff integrates easily with your CRM, payroll software, and HR tools.
The company doesn’t disclose prices on their website, though they do specify that you should have at least 25 users, and there will be a one-time implementation fee.
Expect pricing to start at $35/user/ month, with increased prices for more premium plans.
Forma.ai
Forma.ai is a next-generation sales performance solution that Forrester described as having “the most potential of any in the SPM space.”
The secret sauce is Forma.ai’s unique collective data model that seamlessly unifies the design, execution, and orchestration of sales compensation programs, empowering enterprises to mobilize sales teams better and continuously optimize their performance.
Forma.ai’s unique approach means no more trade-offs between ease of use and go-to-market strategy, allowing you to design, model, and implement the right incentives to motivate the right behavior from your sales team, all without using formulas.
The platform integrates with all your existing tools and processes to become a consistent, trustworthy source of real-time performance data, allowing for continuous monitoring, infinite scenario modeling, and fully customizable, on-demand reporting.
Forma.ai is best suited to organizations with over 100+ sales reps looking for a purpose-built enterprise-grade solution with a dedicated, global support team to ensure the best results.
Mutual action plan
As your sales cycle moves from closing to onboarding, your sales reps should have a mutual action plan that lays out exactly what to do next. Both your customer success agents and the customers themselves have specific responsibilities.
Mutual action plan software helps manage this process to smooth closings and onboarding. It’s a way to manage the collaboration between both sides and ensure that nobody slips through the cracks.
Plus, it’s much more user-friendly than spreadsheets and checklists.
Recapped
Recapped manages the collaboration between your sales and customer success agents and the other stakeholders involved in each purchase. Customer interactions are more productive, and everyone stays informed.
Any process that requires input from both sides — closing a deal, offering a pilot period, or implementing new software — is easier to complete in Recapped.
All stakeholders are invited to collaborate and can log in to see the next steps, notes, and completed to-dos. Each party is held accountable for their responsibilities, so your sales team stays on task, and customers get the appropriate nudges to act.
Buyer intelligence is another major bonus.
Instead of trying to track using CRM stages, Recapped empowers you to track buyer-specific signals like Deal Engagement Score and behavior during onboarding. You can then use this visibility to accurately forecast late-stage metrics.
Recapped’s pricing starts at $95/user/month. This price includes up to 4 users, unlimited client collaboration, and automatic email reminders.
For more users and features, you can opt for the Business ($145/user/month) or Enterprise plans ($195/user/month).
Accord
Accord keeps your sales and success teams on track by walking them and their customers through repeatable processes. You map your sales journey and integrate with your CRM, and Accord makes sure that everyone completes all of their steps for each deal.
From defining scope to managing implementation, you’re able to see customer engagement data at every step.
Accord helps you connect with your internal champions. Those customers who aren’t on your sales team but still have to sell your offering to their team will be able to loop in key decision-makers at the right times.
For solo users, Accord is free. The free plan is intended for solo AEs and founders, and it includes playbook templates, resources to learn best practices, and access to email and chat support.
Sales teams should select one of the two paid plans.
The Growth plan starts at $599 per month and includes 2 seats, though you have the option to purchase additional seats at $129 per month. Growth gives you access to CRM integrations, CSM support, onboarding sessions for your team, and invoice features.
The Enterprise plan is the most robust. Starting at $2,999 per month, this plan includes 15 seats with the option to purchase more at $129 per month. Enterprise gives you unlimited integrations, unlimited secondary collaborators, and full-service implementation and CRM setup.
CPQ
CPQ (configure, price, quote) software is a must-have for organizations that generate custom quotes for potential buyers. It automates the manual process of quoting prices, plus it reduces human error in complex calculations like volume and conditional pricing.
DealHub
DealHub generates personalized quotes and proposals for complex pricing models in minutes.
Once your proposal is sent, you get real-time insights into your prospects’ engagement and level of interest based on their interactions.
Even for organizations with particularly complex pricing models, DealHub is easy to implement. They’ll walk you through setting up your product data and business rules to get you up and running quickly.
From there, your sales reps go through a user-friendly, question-based flow to find the right product fit and generate an accurate custom quote for the prospect.
DealHub allows you to configure multiple sales scenarios and playbooks to suit different stages of your sales cycle. It will automatically suggest upsells and cross-sells at the appropriate time to maximize your sales opportunities.
Using DealHub helps keep discounting and pricing structure consistent across your organization, and it’s a seamless way to make sure that any pricing or product updates are communicated to your sales professionals immediately.
There are two main DealHub plans.
DealRoom is focused primarily on creating sales proposals. You’ll be able to create digital sales proposals and collect signatures and information securely using integrations with tools like DocuSign.
Their CPQ plan is called DealHub CPQ. It includes the quoting features mentioned above, plus team collaboration tools, a guided selling playbook, digital sales proposals, contract management, and more.
You can contact DealHub to get an accurate quote for your business. They do not list pricing publicly.
Conga CPQ
Conga CPQ specializes in generating fast and accurate quotes, even for companies with extremely complex pricing models. It’s part of the Conga Commerce platform, so for companies already using Conga Commerce, it makes sense to add their CPQ functions for your quotes.
If you offer a subscription service, Conga CPQ can also help you manage those subscriptions.
Conga CPQ includes contract lifecycle management, order management, and contract intelligence, too.
Conga doesn’t publish their pricing structure online, but you can estimate that it will start at around $35 per user per month.
Contract lifecycle management (CLM)
A contract lifecycle management (CLM) system automates each step of the contracting process, from initiating and writing the contract all the way to maintaining compliance and encouraging renewal.
This kind of software is a key part of the tech stack for sales teams that operate on annual contracts.
Ironclad
Ironclad is used by both legal teams and sales departments to handle every phase of the contract lifecycle. It can handle all types of contracts, which means you can use it both internally and externally.
Contract creation is faster and easier with Ironclad. Once you’ve created your agreement, manage the negotiation process and ensure compliance with all terms within the platform.
You need to know that your contracts are performing the way you expect, and you get that with Ironclad. It enables you to track data from adoption and engagement using artificial intelligence-powered analytics.
For pricing, you’ll need to contact Ironclad’s sales team. They don’t publish their pricing publicly, and your rate will vary depending on the features and functionalities you want to use.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a popular tool for managing proposals, contracts, and quotes. The simple interface and drag-and-drop editor make it easy for your whole sales team to use with little training. There’s also a huge library of templates to help you get started on your contracts.
Integrate with your CRM to keep data consistent. Your contracts will automatically populate with customer data directly from your systems.
Automatically generate proposals, collect signatures, and easily manage negotiation within PandaDoc.
Before you sign up, PandaDoc offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. After that, there are several plans that might meet your needs.
The free plan simply allows you to upload documents, gather eSignatures, and collect payments.
Essentials is the first tier of paid plans. At $19 per user per month, this level gives you access to templates, the drag-and-drop editor, and document analytics.
For $49 per user per month, the Business plan will integrate with your CRM and with Zapier, give you access to a content library, allow you to customize your branding, and give you the option to build approval workflows.
There is also an Enterprise plan that includes notary services and team performance metrics. You can contact PandaDoc directly for pricing.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
We’ve mentioned CRMs several times throughout this blog post already. If you’re leading a sales team, chances are, you already use some form of customer relationship management software.
CRMs are the hub for most sales teams. They’re where you store customer data, manage the sales cycle, and often the tool you use for customer communication. As far as sales management tools go, your CRM is possibly the most important.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce is one of the largest and most flexible CRMs on the market. It scales particularly well for enterprise teams.
Out-of-the-box, Salesforce Sales Cloud is packed with features that help your team operate. You get sales automation tools, AI-powered forecasting, sales opportunity management, and detailed reporting to drill down on any answers you want to find.
The available add-ons can make this system particularly powerful. Manage your CPQ, sales engagement, or even physical sales territories within Salesforce.
Because Salesforce is such a popular CRM, many of the other tools you want to use have built-in integrations already. It’s easy to make Salesforce the hub of your sales tech stack.
No matter which plan you choose, Salesforce offers a 30-day free trial.
There are four available plans to suit your needs:
- Essentials ($25/user/month) – Good for up to 10 users. This plan includes basic account, lead, and opportunity management with email integration into Gmail or Outlook.
- Professional ($75/user/month) – Includes an unlimited number of users. You also get pipeline management and forecasting.
- Enterprise ($150/user/month) – Adds workflow and approval automation. This is a much more customizable plan, especially for large teams with complex processes.
- Unlimited plan ($300/user/month) – The most robust plan, which provides you with sales engagement metrics and insights, sales cycle intelligence, and premium customer support.
HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot is another highly popular CRM for all types of sales and marketing teams. The HubSpot Sales Hub is focused on streamlining your sales pipeline so you can close more deals and deepen your customer relationships.
This CRM includes sales engagement tools, CPQ, in-depth reporting and analytics, and even conversation intelligence.
One of HubSpot’s strengths is a strong link between sales and marketing. For example, your sales agents can connect with website users in real-time through the live chat feature on your most popular website pages.
Whether you’re a HubSpot user or not, you’ve probably used some of their blog posts or educational content at some point. They offer an impressive training library for everything from inbound marketing to specific sales techniques.
There is a free version of HubSpot Sales Hub. It’s limited to a single user and 100 contacts associated with each engagement. Note that the features included for free are “light” versions of the paid versions.
The Starter plan costs $50/month. It supports up to 2 users and includes features like email scheduling and tracking, a document library, meeting, scheduling, live chat, and more.
For more users and features, you can opt for the Professional ($500/month) or Enterprise ($1,200/month) plans.
Close CRM
Close is built with sales teams in mind. Unlike many other CRMs that are designed to handle all the functions of sales, marketing, and support, Close is laser-focused on what sales operations and representatives need.
This system works especially well for remote teams because it’s designed to work well with an asynchronous work style. It’s also great for smaller teams that are looking for a cost-effective way to scale.
Once prospects are in your CRM, reach out to them with a built-in dialer, email, text, or with a live or prerecorded video conference.
You’ll get all the core features you need, and for more functionality, Close will integrate with many of the other tools you’re already using.
For any Close plan, you can start with a 14-day free trial. Here’s the paid plan breakdown:
- Starter ($29/user/month) – This plan includes a limited amount of leads and contacts, gives you email and SMS templates, shows your pipeline and activity reporting, and integrates with Zapier. You can use the API to connect to other tools.
- Basic ($69/user/month) – With this plan, you have an unlimited amount of leads, contacts, and opportunities, plus custom activities, leaderboards, and more control over user permissions.
- Professional ($99/user/month) – This plan adds sales automation sequences, multiple pipelines, bulk email, a power dialer, and call recording.
- Business ($149/user/month) – Includes call coaching, a predictive dialer, voicemail drop, and some beta features. You’ll get a support service level agreement at this level, too.
Account-based marketing and buyer intent
If you have an ABM team, you already know that account-based marketing is highly specialized and requires a different set of tools.
Account-based marketing and buyer intent tools create more visibility and enrich your data. That deeper understanding of your customer is key to making the sale when you’re targeting specific accounts.
6sense
6sense can match anonymous data to known accounts, enrich leads and contacts, and help you find third-party buying signals.
High-quality leads are the key to successful ABM strategies. That’s what 6sense does — it improves the quality of your pipeline and gives you the insights your sales team needs to move high-value deals forward.
You’ll get valuable features for your marketing team, too. Predictive analytics, audience-building, and advertising features all boost your lead generation capabilities.
6sense does not publish their pricing online, so you’ll need to reach out to their sales team to get a quote.
The data and predictive analysis that 6sense offers is highly specialized and very valuable, especially for sales teams that are pursuing large deals. You can expect pricing to be premium.
Demandbase
Demandbase is a go-to-market software that helps you identify the accounts most worth targeting.
The point of Demandbase is to hone your targeting so accurately that you don’t waste any time or money trying to sell to accounts that aren’t ready to buy. By combining your data with theirs and applying artificial intelligence, Demandbase digs deep into potential buyers and shows you the ones that are most likely to make a purchase now.
This platform helps both with finding the right accounts and then contacting them at the right time. Your reps will see insights into what those buyers care about so that they can target their messaging appropriately.
Demandbase has a lot of offerings, and their platform is highly customizable to what you care about. As such, they don’t publish their pricing online and expect you to speak with sales to get a quote.
The company offers two levels of sales intelligence plans for sales teams. The Enterprise plan is comprehensive, and the Elite plan adds a little more functionality and volume.
Again, this is a highly specialized product for sales teams that close big deals, so expect an appropriately large price tag.
Lead generation
It’s the lifeblood of every sales team: lead generation. Your sales professionals always want more leads, and they’d prefer that those leads be of good quality.
There are entire books written about the best lead generation tools. For the purposes of this list, here’s our pick for the most reliable:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a popular tool, especially for B2B salespeople. Since most professionals have a LinkedIn profile, Sales Navigator is able to use that data to connect sales teams to the right prospects.
Search for companies and individuals who are likely to be the best prospects, then use LinkedIn to reach out and qualify them directly.
When used according to best practices, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be one of the most efficient ways to generate leads.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Core plan costs $79.99 per month, billed annually. It includes advanced search features, alerts, and the ability to save and manage leads on lists.
The Advanced plan is $131.25 per month, billed annually. You get everything from the Core plan, plus the ability to share content, track engagement, and get warm introductions from teammates.
To integrate with your CRM, you’ll need the Advanced Plus plan. You can contact LinkedIn’s sales team for pricing.
Lead enrichment
The more you know about your leads, the better your sales reps can build those customer relationships. It’s tough to start a sales conversation when all you know is a first name and an email address.
Lead enrichment tools look at the data in your pipeline and compare it to other known data. When there’s a match, it syncs that information back to your CRM so that you learn more about the prospects in your pipeline.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo specializes in B2B leads. Define your ideal customer, and ZoomInfo will search its database of millions of phone numbers and email addresses to match you with prospects that fit your requirements.
You can also turn on website tracking to get information about the potential buyers that spend time on your business website.
The lead enrichment features capture, append, correct, and update your lead information to make sure that your prospect list is up-to-date. The rules-based data orchestration can standardize, de-duplicate, segment, and map all those untested leads in your CRM.
ZoomInfo offers several different paid plans. While they don’t list pricing online, you can expect to pay around an average of $250/user/month. The Enrich tool is an add-on feature and may come at an extra cost.
Apollo.io
Apollo.io uses its extensive database to enrich your leads with up-to-date data.
If you don’t already have a preferred tool to manage your workflows, your team can do that in Apollo. Their data will also sync with your preferred CRM.
To help combat data decay, Apollo reviews your existing profile and automatically updates any prospect information that appears to be out of date. Your sales reps can also get alerts when one of their leads changes job titles, allowing them to reach out appropriately in case of job changes or promotions.
Apollo.io offers a free plan which includes 50 email credits per month and a few basic features. Paid plans start at $49/month.
Sales engagement
While your CRM generally handles your database and pipeline, your sales engagement software adds an extra layer on top of your CRM that makes your sales activities more effective.
A great sales engagement platform gives your sales team a single place to plan, work, track, and optimize every interaction between prospects and salespeople. For sales leaders seeking a way to build the most efficient and effective processes, a sales engagement platform is a must.
Outreach
Outreach builds and optimizes your sales workflows to maximize your agents’ productivity and results. This tool walks your reps through a proven, data-driven workflow while surfacing the information they need to make smart decisions about their sales strategy.
The built-in AI takes into account the prospect’s engagement, buying signals, similar accounts, and learnings from A/B testing to help your reps make every touch count.
Plus, Outreach integrates with the systems you already use for data management and communication to make sure that your data stays up-to-date without extra manual data entry.
Like most enterprise-level software, Outreach doesn’t list their pricing online. They offer a variety of tools, and pricing will vary depending on your team size and needs. Expect pricing to start around $100/user/month and increase from there for more premium features.
Salesloft
Salesloft offers in-depth analysis and insights to help you optimize every part of the sales cycle, from prospecting to post-sale engagement.
For teams that are hyper-focused on one phase of that journey — for example, reps that are dedicated to prospecting or customer success agents that focus exclusively on the customer experience — you can choose a Salesloft package that specializes in that area. There’s also an enterprise package that includes everything.
Like most sales engagement tools, Salesloft offers a variety of workflows to guide your sales reps toward more successful outcomes. Whether you focus on dialing, cold email, or other strategies, this tool can help close more deals.
Pricing will vary depending on the size of your sales team and the type of sales engagement tool you want. Salesloft does not disclose their pricing publicly, and you can get a quote from their sales team.
Expect to pay around $75/user/month for the specialized plans that focus on a specific area of the sales funnel and around $125/user/month for the Enterprise plan that includes all features. There may be minimum user requirements.
Outbound calling
How does your team handle sales calls? Whether you’re doing cold outreach or calling warm leads, you need a professional (and compliant) way to dial. Reps should never make sales calls from their cell phones.
That’s where outbound calling tools come in.
The days of noisy call centers with clunky desk phones are gone. Today, even dialing is done digitally. Take a look at these outbound calling tools to power your outreach.
Orum
Orum is more than just a dialer. This AI-powered sales tool filters out bad numbers, detects voicemail, and even navigates phone directories so that your sales reps can keep prospect data clean and waste less time on calls that don’t connect.
For voicemail, you can choose to disconnect or leave a prerecorded message.
To maximize efficiency, Orum integrates with your CRM and other sales tools. Data automatically syncs to remove bad numbers, update entries, and more.
There’s a free trial available before you decide on a paid plan. Orum doesn’t publish their prices online, but based on online reviews, you can expect to pay somewhere around $450/user/month for a basic plan.
Orum offers 3 different paid plans — a basic package called Launch, a more fully-featured package called Ascend, and an enterprise-level option called Beyond.
Launch includes unlimited dialing and voicemail drops. Upgrading to Ascend gets you international calling, the ability for a manager to listen to live calls, and more team features. The Beyond plan includes some data enrichment options, too.
Nooks
Nooks is a parallel dialer that can call up to 5 lines at once. It disconnects from bad numbers or voicemail and only connects your sales reps with answered calls.
When the system detects a bad number, it automatically removes that number from your CRM. It can also update call history, account notes, and other data through direct integrations with LinkedIn and Salesforce.
Does your team prefer video calling or conferencing? Nooks includes a native video conferencing tool that can be used internally or externally. This video meeting room is designed more like a digital sales floor with a virtual bullpen. Reps can drop in and out, listen in to live calls from their colleagues, and celebrate wins together.
You can take advantage of Nooks’ free trial before becoming a customer.
Nooks doesn’t list their pricing publicly. Pricing is likely comparable to other AI-assisted parallel dialers, which tend to be more costly than single line dialing. You can contact their sales team for a quote.
Outbound email
There are plenty of options to handle email for your sales team. Small teams might rely entirely on their CRM or a third-party service like Google, and that’s okay.
However, your sales email tool can be a lot more powerful.
Sales teams that use a smarter outbound email tool can save time, increase close rates, and get a lot more value out of their email outreach strategy.
Lavender
Lavender helps improve positive reply rates with an AI-assisted email coach. Think of it as a personal assistant that helps your reps write better emails faster.
To use it, your sales professionals simply install the Chrome extension and write their emails while the “coach” reads it in real-time and assigns a score. They’ll get suggestions to improve that score as Lavender highlights any pieces that are likely to hurt reply rates.
The personalization assistant surfaces prospect information to make it easier for your reps to connect with customers effectively.
On a global level, Lavender analyzes all the emails your team sends and receives to generate better insights and incrementally improve your team’s results.
For small teams, Lavender offers a free plan. Simply install the Chrome extension and get emailing. It’s a pretty limited plan, though, which maxes out at 10 emails per month.
There’s a 7-day free trial for the paid plans. The Pro plan is $29/user/month and includes the personalization data and productivity tools for an unlimited amount of emails. For $49/user/month, you can get the Team plan that also includes native integrations with other sales tools and shared team analytics.
Direct mail and gifting
Gifts and incentives are a tried-and-true part of sales team success. A small gift can motivate prospects to take action, often for a much lower cost than it would be to pay your reps to make multiple attempts.
Modern gifting and direct mail platforms make it so much easier to offer these kinds of incentives.
Sendoso
Sendoso makes it quick and simple for your sales reps to send physical or digital gifts. You set your budget and access rules, and your agents can offer a variety of incentives for prospecting, customer engagement, and more.
One of the most common use cases for Sendoso is offering a small gift to increase response rates during prospecting. That gift might be a digital gift card, a branded piece of swag, or a different physical item that gets sent in the mail.
You can even send your own physical inventory to Sendoso’s warehouse for them to manage and ship.
Sendoso recently introduced a new free plan that includes only digital gifting.
For the full Sendoso experience, pricing is not publicly listed. You can talk to their sales team for a quote.
Expect to pay a platform fee in the ballpark of $20,000 per year, plus a monthly charge per user that will run around $30 each.
Reachdesk
Reachdesk is a similar style of gifting platform that can handle both digital and mailed items.
Do you sell internationally? Reachdesk is capable of managing gifting globally, so you can still connect with your prospects who live in a different country.
The analytics dashboard in this platform is insightful. Choose gifts based on how successfully they’re achieving your goals. For example, if you notice that an e-gift card for a cup of coffee isn’t being redeemed, but the online retailer cards are always opened, you know which one to send.
Reachdesk does not publish their pricing or plans online. You’ll need to contact their sales team for a quote.
Video
In today’s marketplace, sales teams need every advantage to increase their visibility and engagement. Videos are a great way to make your sales materials more engaging, but they can also be complicated and expensive to produce.
Good sales video tools make it easier (and cheaper) for your sales reps to create personalized videos that sell.
Vidyard
Vidyard is a sales-focused video tool that gives sales reps a simple way to record and send polished videos to prospects.
Whether it’s a quick recorded demo, a walkthrough of a contract, or a personalized meeting follow-up, your sales reps can create and edit professional-looking videos in just a few minutes. These short videos are a great way to connect with prospects on a deeper level asynchronously.
The free video templates help combat idea paralysis so that your reps actually use the tool.
Plus, video analytics can quickly tell you what’s working and what’s not, so you know where to invest your time.
Vidyard’s free plan is a great way to get started. On the free plan, you can create and store up to 25 videos, then send them by email, social media, or other platforms.
The Pro plan gives you an unlimited amount of videos, analytics, and the ability to add CTAs to your videos starting at $29/user/month.
For larger teams, the Business plan includes CRM integrations, more robust analytics, and more personalization options. Vidyard does not list pricing for this plan, so you’ll need to talk to their sales team for a quote.
Loom
Loom is a video platform built around the need for asynchronous video communication. Rather than specializing in sales videos, it’s a flexible option that acts more like a video meeting tool than a marketing tool.
If your team does a lot of screen recording, Loom might be the best option.
Since asynchronous communication is the priority at Loom, the collaboration features on videos are more developed. You can react to videos with emoji or comments, and future viewers will be able to see those reactions at the corresponding timestamp.
This can be valuable if your videos will be shared among multiple people at a company, for instance.
Loom’s free Starter plan includes up to 50 creators, 25 videos per person, and a maximum of 5-minute recordings per video. Features may be restricted on this plan.
The Business plan is $8/user/month billed annually. It includes unlimited creators, videos, and recording length, and you’ll also have custom branding, better analytics, and the ability to embed links in videos.
To integrate with Salesforce or upgrade your data security, you’ll need the Enterprise plan. You can contact Loom’s sales team for pricing.
Scheduling
Finally, we’re talking about one of the things that are always on a salesperson’s mind: scheduling.
Managing a sales team’s schedule can be complex, and trying to book sales meetings manually is simply not feasible in the modern marketplace. Still, a lot of traditional scheduling tools leave a lot to be desired.
The best scheduling tools balance your sales reps’ availability and your prospect’s needs without offering an overwhelming amount of information.
Chili Piper
Chili Piper focuses on generating more meetings from inbound leads.
Those inbound leads are valuable, but not as visible as the prospects you find during outreach. Adding Chili Piper to your pipeline allows those motivated inbound prospects to qualify themselves, find the right person to talk to, and book their own meetings.
It’s important to act quickly while these leads are still warm, and by automating the booking and handoff process, your reps get to the meeting faster.
Pricing for Chili Piper depends on whether you want an a la carte product or a bundled deal.
The least costly option is the Instant Booker at $15/user/month. This plan handles scheduling for individuals or groups and includes integration with Salesforce.
For real-time lead qualification, more flexible booking form creation, email and SMS reminders, and all the features included in Instant Booker, you can get the Form Concierge plan for $30 per user per month. This plan will also include a platform fee that is tiered depending on the number of leads you process each month.
Calendly
Calendly is perhaps one of the most recognizable scheduling tools on the market. Using your existing Google or Microsoft calendar, it gives you a booking link that automatically shows your availability and allows people to book a meeting with you.
The interface is super easy for prospects, so there’s less friction during booking.
Plus, you can turn on features like team scheduling, screening questions before a meeting can be scheduled, and automated follow-ups.
Calendly’s free plan can manage scheduling for a single calendar. Paid plans start at $8/user/month. For that price, you get two calendar connections, unlimited event types, and reminder and follow-up emails.
For more advanced features, you can opt for the Professional ($12/user/month), Teams ($16/user/month), or Enterprise (custom pricing) plans.
Wrap up
There are lots of valuable sales tools on the market, and your team probably doesn’t need all of them.
If you read this blog post and realized that your sales tech stack could use an upgrade, we recommend that you take some time to define your priorities. What do you most want to improve about your team’s performance?
Rather than implementing multiple new tools all at once, choose the one that you believe will have the greatest impact on your goal.
Bookmark this post so that you can find it again when you’re shopping for your next sales tool. In the meantime, here are some additional guides to help you dial in on your top priorities:
