With the abundance of tools now available for businesses, picking the right ones can be tough. Every week, a new productivity tool or sales CRM platform springs up, making getting your tech stack right a difficult job.
However, with the right guidelines and a few recommendations, picking the right tools is actually a lot easier than you might think. In this blog, we’ll look at how to assess sales tools, and the best on the market today.
How to assess sales tools
Before you do anything, you need to think about how each sales tool can address your needs. For instance, do you require an automated tool to generate leads? Or do you require a more integrated tool that does a plethora of things? Or do you require something to manage your social profiles?
Once you’ve identified that, you need to think about which tools fit that specific need better than others. The key is in finding tools that fit your exact needs, rather than ending up with loads of tools that cross-over and don’t specifically do what you need. Simply adding tools isn’t going to solve your challenges, and can often lead to a wasted investment (particularly if nobody uses it!). At the end of the day, sales tools are designed to improve processes, so you don’t want your team spending ages using them.
Most tools for sales teams focus on CRM platforms, productivity, or data. However, market intelligence, lead generation and prospecting, analytics, training, and integrations are all useful tools in the tech stack. Here are our 10 sales tool recommendations for 2020:
1 – SugarCRM: The industry leader amongst CRM platforms. It offers plenty of integrations and can sync data with tools to keep contact records up-to-date. It’s the powerhouse of the industry.
2 – HubSpot: For a more agile, cost-effective and scalable option, HubSpot is a fast-growing CRM and marketing platform that has a freemium model. HubSpot has its own chatbot feature as well as clever automation functionality.
3 – LinkedIn Sales Navigator: This tool enables sales teams to tap into the enormous LinkedIn network to make prospecting a piece of cake. If you want to identify specific decision-makers and job titles within a business, this is a great tool to use.
4 – Wistia: Video has become the go-to form of content and will continue to be so in 2020. Wistia is a clever tool that allows you to record your webcam and screen. That makes the creation of personalised videos a breeze – particularly useful for giving a demo, sharing a tip, or delivering a personalised sales message.
5 – Databox: It’s important to know your metrics for reporting, and Databox helps take that to the next level. It’s a powerful analytics platform, with a free version, that will help you see multiple data points and better understand your KPIs. Plus, the reports are highly visual and look seriously cool.
6 – Leadfeeder: Turning anonymous data into leads might sound odd, but that’s exactly what Leadfeeder does. Essentially, it reveals which companies have visited your website and matches them in your CRM. Very handy if you get decent amounts of web traffic.
7 – Drift: If you want to add live chat, so your salespeople can speak with web visitors in real-time, Drift (or Intercom mentioned above) lead the way. That means you’ll be able to guide, educate, qualify and convert as people are on your website, all from your mobile device.
8 – DocuSign: Nobody wants to print, sign, and scan documents any more. It’s a hassle. DocuSign enables electronic signatures to make completing order forms and so on easy.
9 – Zapier: If you need to automate, well, basically anything, Zapier is your tool. It comes with a massive amount of templated automations that help sync different tools together, as well as workflows to pass data from one place to another, and is a great tool for doing custom things you want.
10 – Typeform: Contact forms seem boring. But Typeform has made them interesting. You can use Typeform to collect contact information via standard forms, interactive surveys, lead gen forms and more.
Grow your bottom line with the right tools
These are just a few recommendations, but spread your wings and find the right tool for you. Whichever tools you implement, always think about how they can help make your business more profitable. Specifically, find the processes that need help, find the tool that can improve that process, and integrate your tools to fuel growth faster.
