Tell me: How often do you look at your workload and think that it’s just too darn much?
Look, you don’t have to be diplomatic about it. I’ve been in sales long enough to know.
It probably happens daily, right?
But it’s true. Sometimes it’s just too darn much.
All the hard work is on you, after all.
- You have to initiate and manage client relationships.
- You have to sit in on meetings, answer phone calls, and quickly respond to every email they send.
- You have to keep track of every client relationship and log everything in the CRM.
- Not to mention that you have to remember every little thing you’ve discussed with clients and act on it too.
Every. Single. Day.
What’s even crazier is that the more successful you are and the more clients you win, the greater your workload gets.
But did you know that sales automation tools can help you reduce that workload significantly by automating many repetitive tasks?
In this guide, I’ll show you 30 different sales automation tools that can help you reclaim a large chunk of your day and get even more stuff done in the process.
But before we begin, let me show why sales automation is so amazing for us salespeople
We’ve touched on the big issue already – We have to do so darn much. The thing is, we don’t actually have to do it all, at least not manually, and that’s where sales automation comes in.
Here are just some of the advantages you can get by implementing sales automation tools into your workflow:
Much greater output. There are only so many things you can do each day. And when you consider all the administrative tasks that we have to do, the list of actual sales-related tasks we can cram into each day gets even shorter.
Sales automation can increase that number and significantly scale our output by delivering some of those tasks on autopilot.
In just a few moments, I’ll tell you exactly what those tasks are, so keep on reading!
But to give you a greater perspective on the effect of automation on our output – According to various studies, automation can boost our sales productivity by a whopping 14.5%.
Huge, isn’t it?
Improving the quality of the data you work with and make better decisions. With automation, you can access and ingest far larger amounts of data than ever before. From ensuring that your CRM records are up-to-date to uncovering and analyzing vast amounts of data about prospects, automation helps you work with better data and make smarter decisions.
It’s that simple. Really.
Better reporting and progress monitoring. Selling is rarely a solitary game. Although you look after your clients on your own, you collaborate and exchange information with the team to ensure overall sales success. The thing is – For that to work, you need to have a solid way to report and monitor the progress. And that requires a ton of admin work, doesn’t it?
As you’ll see shortly, automation can streamline the reporting processes too. With the right sales automation tools, you can analyze your data and access insights that will help you and other salespeople continuously move the needle.
Faster lead scoring and qualification. Another common challenge we face is going after the wrong leads. It happens all the time. We get a new lead. At first sight, they seem promising, and so we begin engaging them, only to realize that they can’t afford our solution.
Automation tools can help us evaluate larger data sets about prospects and leads and do it more efficiently so that we don’t waste time on poor quality ones.
Cost reduction. Finally, by completing many tedious and time-consuming tasks, not to mention reducing errors that would happen if we tried to do it all by ourselves, automation can drive the overall sales costs down. Really down.
11 aspects of the sales process you could automate with software and tools
I’m sure that, based on what we’ve discussed so far, you have a pretty good idea of what sales automation software is.
You can tell that these tools help automate many tasks and processes that we’d normally be doing by hand. In the process, they save us time and increase our productivity and output.
Thanks to that, we can process more prospects and opportunities, find more qualified leads, and, ultimately, close more deals.
In general, sales automation tools help streamline and optimize workflows like prospecting, email outreach, lead generation, lead scoring, nurturing, sales data management (like finding prospects’ contact information, etc.), sales pipeline management, sales forecasting, and more.
But there are specific aspects of the overall sales process where automation comes in really handy.
(Keep on reading to find out what tools to use to automate these tasks.)
So, you can use sales automation software for:
- Keeping CRM up to date.
- Prospect and build prospecting lists
- Find potential customers’ content information and validate their emails
- Enrich prospect data with information from various sources like social media, etc.
- Engage prospects
- Run email outreach campaigns at scale
- Nurture your leads and follow up with them through sales cadences
- Gather more sales intelligence
- Run and scale social selling campaigns
- Manage sales processes and increase sales productivity
- Report and measure your progress, and more.
But here’s the thing – There is no single sales automation tool that can do it all. Most of these tools focus on automating a particular aspect of the selling process. Some can cover several of them but no more.
Also, many of these tools work in tandem. They combine their data and allow you to streamline more workflows.
Because of that, in most cases, be prepared to use more than one tool to automate your sales.
It’s not a bad thing, by the way, but it’s something I wanted you to understand before we chat about specific tools.
This brings us to the most important part of this guide – A list of the best sales automation software you could use to scale and improve all these aspects of your sales process and more.
So, here we go.
30 absolutely best sales automation tools available today
(A quick note before we begin – I organized the list below by a particular use case or aspect of sales that these tools can automate. This should help you find the right sales automation tool for your business much quicker.)
I. Best sales automation CRM systems
HubSpot
FACT: Everybody knows HubSpot.
It’s by far the most popular marketing automation platform on the market, after all. And it also offers a powerful CRM solution – HubSpot Sales Hub – that’s suitable for anyone, from a small company to an enterprise brand.
The Sales Hub gives customers access to everything you’d need from a full-fledged CRM – contact and pipeline management, email marketing, meeting scheduler, live chat, analytics and reporting, and more.
On top of that, HubSpot allows you to take sales automation to a whole new level with programmable JS-based automations that you can set up to manage various different aspects of your sales process.
Pipedrive
Pipeline is another CRM with advanced automation capabilities. Apart from all the usual bells and whistles, you’d expect from customer relationship management software; the platform also includes Ai-driven features to help you analyze opportunities and find ways to close more deals. You can set up custom pipelines in Pipedrive, automatically filter, categorize and segment your leads, report on your progress, forecast revenue, and automate countless other aspects of your work.
Close
Close is an absolute powerhouse of modern CRM systems. It boasts an impressive and ever-growing feature set, many of which you can automate. From customer data management and email follow-ups down to even predictive dialing and automating cold calling outreach, Close can take your work to the next level.
Copper
What makes Copper different from other CRMs on this list is that it works primarily with Google Workspace accounts. Copper integrates with your Gmail, Calendar, and Docs and allows you to manage the sales pipeline directly from this suite of tools.
One of the amazing things about Copper is its workflow automation. With it, you can set up action-based automations for various tasks and notifications, and Copper will save you time by either completing a specific action or notifying you when you need to act on a particular aspect of the sales process.
Automations start with simple and mundane tasks such as data management, but your sales team can also use them to manage outreach and follow-ups, and more.
II. Best sales automation tools for prospecting
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
It’s true – It’s hard to compile a list of sales prospecting tools and not mention LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. It is the tool to use if you want to tap into the social platform’s vast data set, after all. With the Sales Navigator, you can search for prospects using advanced filters, display more detailed information about each contact you review, save leads, and then even reach out to them with InMail (if you don’t want to use other outreach methods.)
Postaga
Postaga (disclaimer: this is our tool) isn’t primarily a sales prospecting tool. As you’ll see in a section on email outreach tools, our platform helps you reach out, connect, and build relationships with prospects using cold emails.
But… Postaga also offers a powerful prospecting tool that allows you to find the right businesses and contacts to reach out to. Using simple but powerful filters, you can specify your target audience’s characteristics, and Postaga will automatically find people who match those criteria.
What’s more, our tool will also find their contact information (i.e., email address) and validate it to ensure that your outreach reaches the right people every time.
Zoominfo
ZoomInfo gives you access to a massive business database to use to identify and qualify prospects and build prospecting lists. In fact, the tool promises to allow you to research “the world’s most comprehensive B2B database.” A bold claim, nonetheless. That said, the platform’s customer testimonials suggest that the claim is true, with many organizations using Zoominfo praising its large database and the results they receive.
FindThatLead
FindThatLead is another prospecting automation tool that allows you to specify target audience’s characteristics and receive a list of people matching that criteria. On top of that, FindThatLead allows you to search for email addresses of your ideal prospects, verify contact details of your existing prospects list, and even reach out to those people with cold outreach.
LeadFuze
LeadFuze began as a manual prospecting tool, where a team of professionals would research prospects based on your target criteria. The platform’s evolved since then, and today it’s a powerful search engine for leads. With LeadFuze, you can use various criteria, including personal information and buying intent signals to identify highly-targeted potential customers and build a prospecting list.
The platform also includes FuzeBot, an Ai-powered system to help you automate as much of the prospecting process.
And on top of all that, LeadFuze can also verify those people’s emails, and present you with a complete list of contacts that you could start reaching out to right away.
Uplead
Uplead is similar to Zoominfo. When you’ve signed up to Uplead, you get access to a large B2B contacts database that you can sift through, filter, and discover the people you’d like to connect with.
Uplead prides itself on data accuracy, promising to deliver you leads without dodgy data, poor fit, or incomplete information.
III. Best email finder tools
Hunter
Hunter is probably, the most well-known email finder and email verification tool on the market today. I can’t remember if they were the first to offer such a service, but they have certainly become the most recognizable brand.
Hunter helps you find your prospects’ emails or verify the ones on your existing prospecting list. What makes Hunter amazing is how simple it is to use. To find a person’s email address, you just have to type in their name and domain into a search box, and the tool returns their email (providing they have it in the database, of course.) And if you want to verify emails on your list, you just need to submit the file to the system, and it will do the rest.
Postaga
I introduced one capability of our tool in the earlier section but Postaga does email finding and verification too. Just like Hunter, Postaga lets you search for people’s emails and bulk verify your existing contacts to ensure that your emails don’t bounce or go to the wrong person.
Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert is another email finder tool you can use to find your prospects’ email addresses quickly. Just like with other tools, to find someone’s email, you just need to type the name and their company, and the tool will automatically search its database for their email address.
Name2Email
What makes Name2Email different from the other email finders is that it works with Gmail as a Chrome plugin. Unlike the other tools, Name2Email doesn’t search for email addresses based on the name and the company on their site. Instead, it works as part of Gmail, so you conduct that search directly in the new message “to:” section. So, when composing an email, you just need to type the person’s name and domain, and the tool will match it with emails in their database. From then on, you can just finish composing a message and click send when it’s ready to go.
IV. Sales data enrichment and data verification tools
Clearbit Connect
Clearbit Connect started off as a simple Gmail plugin to display additional sender data (aggregated from social media sites, etc.) Over time, however, the tool grew to become a major platform for sales and marketing. Clearbit offers real-time data enrichment as part of its tool stack, and the feature allows you to get a full context on every company you’d like to reach out to. Instead of spending hours scouring the web for information, you can quickly build the full picture of your target accounts and get insights that will help you drive engagement and sales.
ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce is an email verification and lead-scoring service. It allows you to clean the email list from poor-quality or erroneous information quickly. You can then score those contacts to see if those addresses are still active. What’s more, the platform’s Ai can assess the likelihood of the person engaging with your emails and discovering high-value accounts.
V. Best tools to automate email outreach and follow-ups
Postaga
Postaga (reminder: this is our tool) is a sales automation tool that helps you conduct email outreach campaigns at a scale.
With Postaga, you can run email campaigns to connect with new customers quickly, follow up with them, and engage them until they’re ready to buy.
Postage’s core features include:
- Prospecting: The tool will first help you find the right websites, businesses, and contacts to reach out to.
- Email Sequence: You can then use our tool to build a highly personalized email sequence.
- Follow-Ups: Postaga will also automatically send email sequence follow-ups and stop once your prospects reply.
What’s more, Postaga features ready-made campaign templates to help you get started on your outreach program faster and a whole lot more features that will help you take your outreach campaign to the next level quickly.
Check out how Postaga can help you run incredibly successful email outreach campaigns. Sign up for a free 14-day trial.
Mailshake
Mailshake is another sales engagement and automation software that helps sales teams reach new prospects, engage with them, and initiate a sales conversation. Mailshake offers all the functionality you’d expect from an email outreach tool – The ability to send cold emails, follow up, and track responses. On top of that, you can also use Mailshake to cold-call prospects with their power dialer feature.
VI. Best cloud phone systems for sales automation
JustCall
JustCall is a cloud phone system that promises to boost your sales rep productivity. And the system certainly boasts all the features needed to make such a claim come true. With JustCall, you get access to an outbound call center, a sales dialer, an SMS bot and SMS automation, to call queues, an appointment scheduler, and even features to help with conversation intelligence that will transcribe and score your calls to deliver data-driven insights to help you improve your pitches.
Aircall
Aircall is a VOIP call system that offers everything from toll-free numbers to call routing, interactive voice response, filters, analytics, call whispering, and so much more. But most importantly, it boasts an impressive set of features for sales teams to help automate cold calling and phone outreach.
Aircall integrates with various CRMs and lets you surface previous call notes and customer data when you’re on the phone with them. Aircall’s power dialer and the click-to-call feature will help you go through the call list faster, and your call activity will get automatically logged into the CRM.
CloudTalk
CloudTalk is the outbound call center that allows your reps to automate many tedious tasks relating to cold calling. From an automatic dialer that helps you make more outbound calls to sales reporting so that you always know how the team is performing, CloudTalk features all the capabilities you’d need to scale your phone outreach.
VII. Best sales intelligence tools
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is quite an interesting tool. Instead of giving you access to a database of information to sift through, this sales automation software shows you which companies have been visiting your site. Leadfeeder also lets you see how they’ve engaged with your information, how long they spent on the site, and so on. Based on that information, you can assess which of these companies might be seriously interested in your products or services and include them in your sales outreach campaign.
Execvision
Execvision delivers conversation intelligence data that lets you see weak spots in your sales pitches and helps you coach and improve the overall quality of your calls with clients. The power of Execvision lies in surfacing insights that can help you coach reps better. The tool does it by ingesting, transcribing, and analyzing them (with the help of an Ai) to uncover valuable, actionable insights so you and your sales team can reach their full potential.
Gong
Gong is another sales automation tool that helps you analyze and understand customer interactions to help your sales team improve those continuously. Gong’s software can analyze every customer call, conference, web call, and more and uncover what customers have really said during those.
But Gong goes beyond just automating conversation intelligence. The tool can analyze other aspects of the revenue generation process – your sales pipeline, sales forecasts, etc. – to uncover what works and what doesn’t. Based on that, Gong can deliver powerful workflows to double down on the former and eliminate the latter.
Rollworks
Rollworks helps sales teams scale their account-based marketing campaigns. With the tool, you can quickly identify your target accounts, and engage them with account-based or personalized ads, retargeting, and automated emails and follow-ups. You can also measure every aspect of the campaign and collect insights to reveal what’s working and what’s not.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs is quite a unique lead scoring software. Instead of just using selected third-party data to evaluate the likelihood of a new lead for becoming a client, Breadcrumbs lets you use its no-code connectors to bring your existing marketing, sales, product, and CX data to generate a 360° view of each lead. This means that, with Breadcrubms, you can combine the ideal customer profile, their activity data, and intent signals to determine your best HQLs, MQLs, SQLs, and more.
VIII. Best tools to automate social selling and social monitoring
Mention
Mention is the tool to use when you want to monitor and listen to what your target customers talk about online. With Mention, you set up alerts for different keywords – these could be phrases relating to your products, or mentions of your brand, or anything else that would help you identify that a conversation is relevant for you.
In turn, Mention will monitor various social media sites and the web in general for any such mentions and alert you of those.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch offers a consumer intelligence platform that allows you to monitor posts, comments, and conversations that are related to your brand or product. You can also filter and categorize them by different aspects of the conversation and use those insights to spot trends and gain valuable insights at scale. Finally, with powerful integrations, you can share what you’ve learned with the rest of your organization and turn it into actionable insights.
Best apps for sales process automation and management
Process Street
Process Street is the software to use when you want to document and implement various workflows and standard operating procedures (SOPs), and that includes your sales process too. With Process Street, you can outline every step in the process, down to the tiniest and most mundane actions, assign those tasks to specific reps, set dynamic due dates, and even use conditional logic to define the next steps based on different scenarios. On top of that, Process Street integrates with various tools (and you can connect it with even more platforms through Zapier) to ensure that tasks never go missing and your process runs smoothly.
Zapier
Zapier is the absolute powerhouse of software automation. With Zapier, you can connect over 5000 apps and define actions in one app that will generate outcomes in another. You can use Zapier to pass information between apps, trigger specific notifications, and even use conditional logic to ensure that no matter what action you take, relevant data gets passed to other tools you’ve integrated with it.
Sales reps use Zapier to automatically update lead information, reduce admin tasks by passing information between relevant systems, and more. With Zapier, your opportunities for sales automation are truly endless.
Teamwave
Teamwave incorporates features from several categories we’ve covered on this list of sales automation software. It includes a powerful CRM, sales pipeline management solution, project management, and even HR software to ensure that every aspect of your sales operations runs as smoothly as possible. With Teamwave, you can even track the time your reps spend on specific tasks, schedule and track meetings, collaborate with clients across the team, and analyze performance through various reports and dashboards.
Best sales automation software for reporting, forecasting, and analysis
InsightSquared
InsightSquared helps sales teams generate powerful sales forecasts, pipeline management, performance analysis, and more. Not only that, but the tool can also help you automate forecast submission across the entire sales team, validate the data with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and deliver insights to help you minimize risks and maximize the outputs.
And that’s it…
Now you know what the best sales automation tools that you could use in your business are. What’s left for you to do is review them and pick the ones that you feel would deliver the biggest value to your organization.
Good luck!
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