SALES DEVELOPMENT TOOLS THAT YOUR MARKETING AGENCY SHOULD USE

As the businesses thrived in the present century, Marketing became more convoluted. Just think for a moment about the complexity and the number of different tools available just to wake you up or to make your day more productive? From spreadsheets to emails, cloud enabled services to lead generation tools. The goal remains the same: — More Sales! (Cause without them you won’t be having much of a business that is).

What’s the need for Sales Development Tools?

As easy as it appears to be when you read  More Sales! There are lots of complexities involved with the options and the services each one of them has. But yeah you got that one right, the basic need of Sales Development Tool is to ease our job while having more Sales. There are lots of dimensions involved when I talk about increasing sales so I’ll leave the depth of it for some other day. To start your work in the right direction, to optimise the smart work instead of hard work, to get ideal leads in less time, to analyse upon the quality of work, to synergise with your team and planning ahead etc. are some very basic sectors where Sales Development Tools come into play.

Why am I writing this article then?

Oops. The goal is to help you in knowing the options available so that you can choose the best ones. There are thousands of Sales Software available with very similar features and sometimes with relatively similar pricing. Hence it’s very vexing to choose the right one fit for the job and for your need. Grab your coffee and stick with me as I’ll help you in finding the best ones to choose from!

TOP SALES DEVELOPMENT TOOLS THAT YOUR MARKETING AGENGY

1. Customer Relationship Management software

Salesforce — for CRM/sales/marketing

The undisputed leader of CRM industry, Salesforce is the leading SaaS provider for CRM software since 1999. One of the first software to set benchmark for the industry (especially with the concept of cloud), it is a success story for any PaaS/SaaS company. In recent years, they have worked extensively on Sales and Marketing software, although this software has extensive capabilities, small and mid-sized businesses almost never take full advantage of all the features and pricing is also comparatively high.

Zoho — for CRM/sales/marketing/finance/email hosting

Zoho not only provides a great CRM tool (their flagship software) but a great package for any business to work on their sales, marketing, finance or business e-mail hosting. Not only has it worked competitively on its pricing but on its development as a Sales tool as well. It’s a complete package for any business to work upon.

Hubspot — for CRM/sales/task management

Like Zoho, Hubspot is a very competitive player. It tries to fill in some gaps with interactive and fancy features like cloud based “hub” integration with their email/sales tools and many others.

It is priced similar to Zoho in terms features and services. Quite handy for small to mid-size businesses.

Pipedrive — for complex customizations in CRM

One of the most popular CRM tool, Pipedrive aims to reduce the tediousness in data. With its automation feature, it helps in reducing administrative pressure. It’s one of the best tools available for small businesses with relatively low person to job ratio and it’s cheap as well.

Airtable — for spreadsheet based customisable management

If software is disrupting your work customisation then Airtable is for you. It allows you to use spreadsheets on steroids. These customisations will allow you to use CRM according to your needs and with greater efficiency with your own ecosystem.

 

Sales Intelligence tools

Zoominfo — for lead/contact discovery

Zoominfo is a great tool for Contact Discovery as it allows you to search through millions of businesses online. Vital information like business e-mail and company’s contact info is sometimes difficult to find which is where Zoominfo comes into play. Unfortunately, sometimes the information isn’t that accurate.

LinkedIn Sales Solutions — for finding leads/contacts/ICPs

With more than 433 million people connected to LinkedIn, it kind of acts like Facebook for business personals. With such a vast network and presence, LinkedIn can work as an excellent Lead generation tool. With LinkedIn Sales Solutions (especially Sales Navigator), it becomes way too easier to find your Ideal Prospect.

Leadseek — for lead/contact discovery

Leadseek is an excellent lead generation tool. Not only it searches for ideal leads as per requirement but it can help you to craft a customisable email campaign. Its good a package for companies who wants to “push” their agendas.

Prospect.io — for email based leads/contacts

Prospect.io works great for small companies that thrives on big results. It’s quite good for email marketing campaign and includes various synchronisation tool to track the data (along with a Chrome extension)

 

LeadGenius — for lead data mining

Similar to LinkedIn and Zoominfo, Leadgenius is also a demand generation tool. It’s a Sales Intelligence tool which helps you in finding better leads and work upon email marketing with the help of computation and artificial intelligence.

 

3. Prospect Handling tools

Custom Bots by Intercom — for saving time and energy with constant engagements

Engagement with the prospect is a very important aspect of any process. With Custom Bots by Intercom, you can save man power with the interaction part. Custom preset messages/chat process can help in dealing with the prospect query more efficiently.

Calendly — for work scheduling/management

Time is the most important for any business, managing it is the most important aspect to succeed. Calendly is one of the many scheduling tools which eliminates old-school way of using email and phone tags for scheduling appointments, calls, interviews, demos, and more.

 

FrontApp — for email management

Managing e-mails can be tedious if you ask me. FrontApp is designed just to solve that problem only. It’s great to handle multiple e-mail accounts, collaborating the same with your team and much more.

 

DocSend — for collateral sharing

Communication is also one of the many aspects in the business which is very important. Sharing documents, pdf’s, collaterals etc. can be troublesome for a unified medium. DocSend is that unified medium where sharing becomes easy, in a way it is sales proposal automation tool.

 

PandaDoc– for proposal sharing on single platform

Similar to DocSend, PandaDoc is another alternative for sales proposal software for sharing documents, pdf’s, collaterals etc. on a single platform. It also comes with built in electronic signatures.

 

4. Analytics and Management tools

Asana — for task management

Dealing with stress and deadlines sucks. Here’s where Asana will be your best friend. It’s an awesome tool for task management. It replaces all those junky email work into a smartly enhanced platform meant for teamwork and targets.

Clari — for AI boosted insights on sales

Clari helps in forecasting sales. It takes in the market data from the user and gives a near accurate insight using Artificial Intelligence.

 

Guru — Guru provides clarity on sales demographics

As an alternative to Clari, Guru is an AI aid to assist in giving Sales insight and forecast.

 

Dropbox — for asset management

Dropbox is a very smart cloud based tool. It helps in asset management by permitting access to your files, wipe data when you lose a device, and recover files when it is lost. It’s quite useful for storing your files.

 

Wrike — for analytics tools for Task Management

As an alternative to Asana, Wrike includes more sophisticated analytics which can be used for tasking people. Apart from that, it has workflow customizations which helps according to your complexity.

 

5. Customization and Integration

InVisionApp — for prototyping and creating designs

Very creative app for designing and creating graphics. Priced “free forever” for one prototype. InVision app contains lots of customizations for making your work easier.

Canva — for creating visuals/graphics

Canva should be considered as jack of all trades. Without any need to install any software, it’s mostly free to use and accessible via its website. It’s the easiest to create visual and graphics with tons of templates available.

Zapier — for integrating data from sales tools

Zapier integrates more than thousands of tools together to ease the workflow together. It’s quite essential if you want to harmonize the sales data and its works adroitly for mid to big size industries/companies.

Segment — provides integration and management of data from sales tools

As an alternative to Zapier, Segment does the similar job with some tweaks. Moreover, Segment helps simplifying the integrated data which can be used as an alternate objective. (Its integration size is around 200 companies though)

Frame.io — for state of the art video creation

Frame.io have tons of customisation regarding video creation. For creating media via video, Frame.io is one of the best tools out there.

CONCLUSION

Make sure you take a review of your own requirements of sales development tools, take into account future growth aspirations and accordingly evaluate the software which suit your needs. Feels free to try the trial versions 🙂

Looks Interesting?

You will also like reading 36 business blogs to follow for business growth, 7 best sales closing techniques and why they work, lead generation vs lead prospecting, challenges proposal writers face. Also know about tips to write winning proposals, and online proposal software benefits.