Sales tools are no longer just a “nice-to-have” today. They help sales reps do so much more, by either automating day-to-day operations, boosting sales efficiency across the board, or just simplifying various areas of a sales rep’s tasks to free up time that can be better spent on prospects and new transactions.
How Important Are Sales Tools?
As you scale your business’s growth, your tech stack will also invariably expand. However, deciding which sales tools to invest in may be a very daunting task.
There are so many sales tools types available today and within each category, there are dozens of specific tools to choose from.
That’s why we’ve put together this list of the best sales tools, ranging from the mandatory CRM software solutions to AI-driven tools and chat & engagement management software.
For each sales tool, we’ll highlight the features that put them on our radar and why they made it on the list. These can range from one-of-a-kind, innovative features, to those that have proven most useful for sales reps overall.
Here are our recommendations, in no particular order:
19. Salesforce
Tool Category: CRM software
Best Features:
- Email Integration with Gmail or Outlook
- Lead Registration and Rules-Based Lead Scoring
- Pipeline and Forecast Management
- Workflow and Approval Automation
- Reports, Dashboards & Sales Analytics
Starting Price: $25 USD/user/month, billed annually
Not only is Salesforce the market leader in CRM software, but it also is the gold standard against which all new CRM products are measured.
You may have asked yourself: why is Salesforce so popular? It comes down to the number of highly customized and customizable integrations, as well as their very active community.
Salesforce has many capabilities to help small and large enterprises increase sales, automate operations, and enhance productivity. However, smaller businesses (that aren’t actively trying to scale) may find Salesforce more complex than necessary for their more basic needs.
From a Customer Success POV, with the data from Salesforce, you can segment your customers, define lifecycle stages and build playbooks based on data like annual revenue, and so much more.
18. Hubspot Sales Hub
Tool Category: Sales Automation Tool
Best Features:
- Sales CRM
- Sales Automation
- Sales Engagement Tools
- Quote and CPQ Functionality
- Reporting and Analytics
- Email Tracking
- Pipeline Management
Starting Price: free and premium plans, starting at $45 USD/month
The basic version of the HubSpot Sales Hub is a fan-favorite, as it’s free forever and it works well for every team, with the user-friendly design helping teams track crucial information at a glance.
HubSpot is a great option for people who don’t want to code or work with engineers. The platform, which is aimed at small businesses, offers a freemium model as well as a variety of add-ons.
By importing your data from Hubspot to your CS tool, you’ll be able to enhance customer success playbooks and define health scores.
17. Pipedrive
Tool Category: CRM software
Best Features:
- Pipeline and Deals Management
- Lead Generation Chatbot
- Lead Qualification
- Automation
- Insights and reporting
- Email and Communication Tracking
Starting Price: €12.50 USD/user/month, billed annually
Pipedrive is a CRM software that focuses on sales. It helps teams easily visualize leads and aids in the optimization of the sales pipeline. It also enables teams to be proactive by coordinating calls and emails across devices and calendars.
The standout feature of Pipedrive is its visual representation of the sales funnel from beginning to end, along with its intuitive interface with a deal-driven workflow.
Using the deal data from Pipedrive, you can build customer success playbooks. For example, you can set automated email sequences or assign different tasks to your CSMs when certain stages are reached.
However, setting up automated email sequences in Pipedrive translates to setting up trigger reminders to send an email, there is no actual option to set up email automation from within the platform.
16. Zoho CRM
Tool Category: CRM software
Best Features:
- Process Management
- Journey Orchestration
- Sales Analytics
- Performance Management
- Predictive Sales
- Customization
Starting Price: €14 USD/user/month, billed annually
Zoho is a flexible solution that helps B2B and B2C businesses of all sizes convert more leads, engage with customers, and increase revenue with ease.
Their CRM helps increase income through lead creation and client management. It’s a cost-effective sales tool with plenty of features to serve even the most overworked sales team.
With affordable pricing and an extensive set of features, Zoho CRM is a good fit for a wide range of businesses of varying sizes.
However many find themselves needing tech-savvy people simply to navigate the Zoho interface, an experience that can be challenging and not-very-user friendly.
Based on account types from Zoho, you can define lifecycle stages and make sure customers stay on track with tasks and alerts assigned to CSMs.
15. Close CRM
Tool Category: CRM software
Best Features:
- Import Leads & Smart Data View
- Built-in, Synced Email Communication
- Automation
- Pipeline, Lead, Account, and Tasks Management
- Dashboards & Reports
Starting Price: $29 USD/user/month
Close CRM is a sales tool used by small- and medium-sized businesses that captures, nurtures, and converts leads into buyers, automating the sales process.
Besides its follow-ups automation feature, it also gives you easy-to-understand information on email delivery and open rates. Leads from other platforms can also be imported. The only thing that might not be ideal to be set up with Close CRM is the tracking of sales outreach processes and sequences.
Besides segmenting your customers based on data from Close, you can create health scores based on annual revenue or potential deal value and set alerts to your CSMs when these reach certain levels.
14. 6Sense
Tool Category: AI Account Engagement Platform
Best Features:
- Persona Map
- Account Insights & Activity Graphs
- Patented AI Predictions for Timing
- Dynamic, AI-Based Customer Journeys
- Multi-Channel Digital Experiences
- Account, Task Management
Starting Price: not provided
6Sense uses AI to predict when customers are ready to buy, allowing you to make use of intent data and extensive insights to proactively target the ideal accounts and close more deals.
6sense helps teams engage with the customer at the right time and make every conversation relevant, by figuring out how their prospects are engaging with different keywords, topics, website pages, and campaigns.
13. Postal.io
Tool Category: Sales Automation Tool
Best Features:
- Direct Email Automation
- Offline Marketing Automation
- Demand Generation
- Personalized Triggers & Gifts
Starting Price: not provided
Postal.io is a customer engagement-boosting automated direct mail and gifting software that interfaces with your marketing automation and sales enablement systems.
By sending customized mail and e-gifts through Postal.io, sales reps can add greater value to their outreach, and, as a result, attract more qualified prospects and hot leads soon to be closed.
If integrated with your CS tool, Postal.io can help you create customer playbooks, by deploying email drip campaigns or assigning certain tasks to your CSMs. But sometimes things can get a little confusing when Postal.io is used across sales and CS teams.
12. Proposify
Tool Category: Sales Productivity Tool
Best Features:
- Proposal Analytics
- Electronic Signatures
- Content Library
- Design Editor
- Interactive Pricing
Starting Price: free and premium plans
Proposify is a sales tool used for creating customized proposals, agreements, and contracts, and its main purpose is to check and make sure the team’s messaging, pricing, and workflows stay consistent and on-brand with the company.
Proposify’s Content Library is full of templates that help speed up the whole process altogether, ensuring only impressive proposals are being sent and more deals are being closed. Keep in mind though that having lots of templates to choose from doesn’t always mean building a proposal will take less time than doing it from scratch.
11. LeadIQ
Tool Category: Sales Prospecting Tool
Best Features:
- Prospecting Workflow
- Analytics Dashboard
- Enterprise-Grade Governance
- Automation
- Custom Field Mapping
- Advanced Database Search
Starting Price: free and premium plans, starting at $60 USD/user/month
LeadIQ is designed to organize and sequence all outbound prospecting contact information.
It works by first helping teams identify a target account and finding it on LinkedIn Sales Navigator with LeadIQ. Then, it narrows the number of people on your contact list and looks for other similar contacts, and saves their information. You’ll be able to capture new leads just by browsing LinkedIn or any other similar website.
The only feature that we found missing with LeadIQ is that it doesn’t provide as many integration options as other sales tools out there on the market.
10. Intercom
Tool Category: CRM / WebChat
Best Features:
- Group Conversations
- Customer Context Views
- Call-Out Collaborations
- Chat Management
- Third-Party Integrations
- Knowledge Base Management
- Lead Qualification
Starting Price:
For sales, support, CS, and marketing teams of startups and small- to middle-sized businesses, Intercom is a popular customer messaging platform, especially because of its user-friendly interface.
While Intercom is accessible as a separate solution for different departments, for many businesses, it is an all-in-one solution that links marketing outreach activities with support and sales.
When integrated with your Customer Success tool, Intercom will enable you to segment your customers based on data from Intercom such as the number of open conversations, snoozed conversations, or last-heard-from date.
9. Custom Chatbots from Intercom
Tool Category: Chatbot Tool
Best Features:
- Business Messenger Engagement Tools
- Customer Data Platform
- Live Chat
- Support Bot
- Product Tours
- Campaign Builder
Starting Price: from $67 USD/month, billed annually
Intercom’s chatbots for sales are meant to help business boost their sales pipeline by starting chats with high-value website visitors, as well as qualifying and routing leads.
With these chatbots, you can create custom paths by looking at visitor data. This means every lead is routed to the proper conclusion, whether that’s booking a demo, signing up for a webinar, or interacting with a sales rep in real-time.
Using custom bots, customers get the help they need before they feel the need to reach out to support.
8. Salesloft
Tool Category: Outreach Workflow & Automation Tool
Best Features:
- Sales Analytics & Reporting
- Conversation Intelligence
- Cadence & Automation
- Lead Nurturing Management
- Sales Playbooks
Starting Price: not provided
Salesloft is a sales acceleration & CRM platform that helps sales teams from B2B companies to capture leads and close more deals, by ensuring high-value touches go out to every customer.
Salesloft helps manage every interaction between sales reps and prospects. Just beware that Cadences are intentionally more user-based processes. So if you’re looking for a more dynamic automatic option, Salesloft might not be the best tool for you.
With data-driven insights around email personalization and real-time tips on increasing inbound performance, Salesloft plans to power your overall sales success.
7. Outreach.io
Tool Category: Outreach Workflow & Automation Tool
Best Features:
- Sales Engagement Automation
- AI-Driven Data Intelligence
- Pipeline Workflows
- Custom Playbooks
- Sequences
Starting Price: not provided
As its name states, Outreach.io is a tool that helps you build outreach processes. Sequences is a fan-favorite feature because it helps drive further engagement with prospects. The platform offers a lot of options and places on the dashboard to execute similar tasks, so it might become a little bit confusing at times.
With the use of playbooks and workflows, Outreach.io manages to keep every sales rep on top of their tasks. From a CS POV, Outreach.io provides proactive health checks and sales playbooks which can then be used to drive further success for customers.
6. Troops
Tool Category: Sales Engagement Tool
Best Features:
- Workflow Automation
- Integration With Messaging Apps
- Customized Notifications
- Troops Command
- Deal Rooms
Starting Price: $19 USD/user/month
Troops is a sales communication software that helps businesses with sales, customer acquisition, and customer retention. It integrates all of your messaging apps to your CRM tool, putting all of your customers, prospects, leads, and the communication with them, in one place where all your team members can see and access the data easily.
Troops keeps track of all of your databases and record-keeping systems. It also alerts your team if anything happens that may have an impact on your revenue, such as an urgent support ticket, allowing reps to take action immediately.
5. InsightSquared
Tool Category: Sales Forecasting and Sales Analysis Tool
Best Features:
- Pipeline Management
- One-stop Dashboard
- Sales Performance Analytics & Reports
- Revenue Intelligence
- Customized Sales Rep Coaching
Starting Price: not provided
InsightSquared is a sales, marketing, and customer success revenue intelligence platform. It is really complex and sophisticated, so it might sometimes require maintenance from an operations person.
The platform automatically syncs deals and engagement details right within your CRM tool. It powers teams with actionable, real-time intelligence on sales KPIs.
To help you better understand how different elements of your business (e.g. sales predictions and product roadmaps) are performing, InsightSquared combines data from rep-to-customer conversations (e.g. transcripts or talk time) with lifecycle data.
4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Tool Category: Sales Prospecting Tool
Best Features:
- Advanced Lead & Company Search
- Alerts On Saved Leads And Accounts
- Custom Lists
- CRM Updates with Data Validation
- Share Content And Track Engagement
Starting Price: $79.99 USD/user/month, billed annually
LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows sales reps to tap into their massive network, helping them to identify qualified leads on LinkedIn and personalizing outreach efforts right on the platform.
Reps are routed to the most appropriate prospects using advanced lead and company search tools. LinkedIn can also help find the correct people to contact at specific target accounts.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is easy to integrate with CRM tools, thus making it easy to log and align all prospect and account data from one place.
3. Freshworks CRM
Tool Category: CRM Software
Best Features:
- Automation for Auto-Assignment Rules, Sales Sequences
- Pipeline Management
- Omnichannel Communication
- Deal Insights with AI-Curated Data
Starting Price: free and premium options
Freshworks CRM (previously Freshsales) is a CRM solution with a user-friendly interface and a robust feature set for sales and marketing.
The key feature of the platform is a native lead scoring module that assists salespeople in prioritizing the relevant leads. Lead management, account and contact management, business management and monitoring, alerts and automation, and a variety of integrations are all available.
Freshworks CRM is a fantastic choice for businesses that want to get their sales up and running quickly thanks to its wide feature set.
2. Zapier
Tool Category: Automation
Best Features:
- Customizable Zaps
- Free Templates Library
- Extendable workflows
- Built-in automation to send emails, filter tasks, convert data, etc
Starting Price: free and premium options
Zapier is an automation tool that does a lot of the hard lifting. Teams can use Zapier to link apps and automate a variety of operations. This can be accomplished without the need for coding or the assistance of a dev.
Zapier helps business owners and developers achieve a more efficient workflow. Zapier allows a wide range of products to interact even if they lack native integration. MailChimp, Slack, Gmail, and Trello are some of the more common connectors.
Zapier allows users to trigger workflows that pass data from one app to another. It’s an essential automation tool for sales.
1. Segment
Tool Category: Data Analytics Tool
Best Features:
- Email Personalization Based On User Behavior
- Propensity Modeling
- Omnichannel Messaging
- Real-time Audiences
Starting Price: free and premium options
Segment is a dev-tool that handles data created by cloud-based applications. The tool assists in the collection of client data and the transmission of organized data to analytics platforms such as MixPanel and Google Analytics.
However, without the support of third-party tools like Stripe, Twilio, and Salesforce, Segment’s raw data is incomplete.
Segment supports multiple languages and is a bit pricy, thus it’s normally only used by large companies.
Special Feature – Custify
Tool Category: Customer Success
Best Features:
- Customer Health Scores
- Customer 360
- Dashboards & Reports
- Automation
- Surveys, Tasks & Alerts
Starting Price: not provided
Retention, upsells, and cross-sells are part of the Customer Success team’s responsibilities in most modern business, not the Sales team, or, at best, a joint effort of the two departments.
That’s exactly where a CS tool comes in. The Customer Service team is in charge of identifying upsell and cross-sell chances during customer discussions or by analyzing product usage stats; then, depending on the task’s complexity, Sales can step in.
Not only does Custify help with the handover process from Sales to CS, but it also helps with onboarding, lifecycle tracking, custom playbooks, and workflows creation. It also helps to proactively reach out to customers that have not yet discovered the full value of the product or service you’re offering.
Even though Custify is still a pretty small business compared to the other tools mentioned on this list, that doesn’t stop us from giving it our all to care for our customers and help them drive further success with their businesses.
Setting Up Your Sales For Success
At the end of the day, your own sales teams know more about what they need than anyone else. So be sure to talk to them while you’re choosing, setting up, and maintaining your sales tools, whether they be CRM, automation tools, AI-driven platforms, or chatbots.
Your sales tools can drive immense growth for your business. Especially when you pair them with the right customer success platform.
Want to find out how Custify can do just that & make your customer success program even more effective? Click the “Request Demo” button on the top of the page & let’s talk!
