B2B sales is complex, time consuming, and often tedious. Unlike consumer products, the sales cycle for B2B products can be several months long, requiring a lot of paperwork and processes throughout the cycle.
Using AI and B2B sales automation tools can expedite the process, avoid errors, and increase efficiency of every step of the sales process.
What is B2B sales automation?
B2B sales automation is the process of using AI, automation, and other technologies to automate parts of the sales process and reduce manual work. This involves using tools or other SaaS platforms that help manage processes, and schedule or automate certain events such as sending out emails, qualifying leads, or generating reports.
There are dozens of B2B sales automation tools that help with nearly every aspect of the go-to-market (GTM) process including marketing, sales enablement, outreach, or analytics. B2B sales automation is most often associated with a CRM (customer relationship management) system that automates sales activities in addition to being the single source of truth for all sales data.
Sales workflow automation is the process of automating not just individual tasks such as sending emails, but streamline processes such as lead management or engagement that include multiple subtasks—like multi-threaded sales outreach. In addition, they provide actionable insights that help refine and improve processes.
The benefits of sales automation
Nearly every B2B company today uses sales automation tools for at least a couple of tasks if not for all pieces of the GTM process. B2B sales automation is a lot more than just making life easier for sales and marketing teams, it provides tangible benefits that drive business growth.
Here are some of the benefits of B2B sales automation tools:
Save time and expedite processes
Automation tools handle time-consuming tasks, such as data entry, scheduling, and reporting, allowing teams to focus on closing deals and building relationships.
Reduce errors
With fewer manual processes, automation minimizes the risk of human errors, ensuring campaigns and workflows run smoothly.
Shorten deal cycles
By speeding up sales processes, automation helps shorten deal cycles, ensuring customers convert quicker and revenue flows in faster.
Free up time for deep work
Automation takes over repetitive tasks, giving sales and marketing teams more bandwidth to focus on strategy, creative problem-solving, and customer engagement.
Scale processes
Whether it’s managing leads or running large-scale campaigns, automation helps teams handle high volumes in a shorter period of time.
Discover new leads
AI tools such as Highperformr can help identify high-potential leads from various sources and build lead lists.
Streamline campaigns and communications
Centralizing and automating GTM processes ensures consistent messaging across all communications, particularly when multiple reps from the same company are reaching out to leads.
Get granular analytics and insights
Analytics tools provide data on campaign performance, lead activity, and sales trends, assisting in better decision-making and more accurate forecasting.
Better customer experience
The use of B2B sales automation tools reduces response times, making interactions faster and more efficient. This improves customer engagement and builds trust with prospects.
Declutter data
Automation tools ensure that the CRM is error-free, organized, and up-to-date.
B2B vs B2C sales automation
B2B sales automation is quite different from B2C sales automation, in terms of processes, goals, customer interactions, and the kind of tools used.
B2B sales automation refers to using products like a CRM, sales intelligence tool, account-based marketing (ABM) products, workflow automation platforms, social media management platforms, and other such tools to automate repetitive tasks across the sales pipeline.
For example, sales automation platforms are used for tasks such as lead generation and data enrichment, bulk email marketing, meeting scheduling, etc. the automation tools are meant to be customer facing, and the tools are used primarily to make the work of sales people more effective and efficient.
B2C sales automation is used to enhance a brand’s communication with its customers. For example, sales automation software is used for tasks such as reminding customers about products in their cart, notifying them about products that are back in stock or about new launches, etc.
B2B sales automation software is used to engage and nurture leads to improved sales conversions while B2C automation software is used to build brands and market new products.
Key applications of sales automation
B2B businesses are under greater pressure to increase lead generation and conversion rates with fewer resources and shrinking budgets. Using B2B sales automation tools can help scale operations and enhance efficiency. Here are some examples of B2B sales automation and the processes or activities that are automated using AI tools and B2B sales automation platforms.
Examples of B2B sales automation
- CRM integration: B2B sales automation tools can handle logging sales calls, meeting outcomes, and follow-ups directly into your CRM, saving time and reducing admin workload. The tools ensure these updates are structured and synced without much manual effort and help maintain data hygiene.
- Lead generation: Automation can streamline and scale the process of finding leads that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) and reaching out with personalized messages, making outreach more efficient.
- ICP filtering & prioritization: B2B sales automation tools also help filter and sort through thousands of leads, identify ICP leads, and prioritize them for outreach.
- Lead assignment: Sales managers can rely on automation to assign leads to reps, ensuring timely follow-ups and eliminating the hassle of manual distribution.
- Notetaking using AI tools: AI-powered tools track meeting minutes and conversations, helping reps focus on selling while ensuring the notes are detailed and precise.
- Lead enrichment with signals: AI-native B2B sales automation tools like Highperformr help track and consolidate social signals and buying intent signals to enhance lead profiles, improving the relevance and effectiveness of cold outreach.
- Pipeline management and follow-ups: AI and automation can be used for lead management and tasks such as follow-up emails, meeting scheduling, and managing other lead-nurturing activities at scale.
- Customer activity tracking: AI-powered automation tools monitor customer or lead activity, highlighting high-potential leads for the team to engage with at the right time.
- Competitor monitoring: AI and automation can be used to track competitors’ social activity and identify new leads engaging with them. Highperformr is a B2B sales automation tool that helps automate the process of tracking and curating all social interactions and other activity of competitors on social media.
- Sales meeting scheduling: Tools can be used to automate the process of arranging sales meetings, sending reminders, and updating calendars.
Key applications of sales automation
B2B businesses are under greater pressure to increase lead generation and conversion rates with fewer resources and shrinking budgets. Using B2B sales automation tools can help scale operations and enhance efficiency. Here are some examples of B2B sales automation and the processes or activities that are automated using AI tools and B2B sales automation platforms.
Examples of B2B sales automation
- CRM integration: B2B sales automation tools can handle logging sales calls, meeting outcomes, and follow-ups directly into your CRM, saving time and reducing admin workload. The tools ensure these updates are structured and synced without much manual effort and help maintain data hygiene.
- Lead generation: Automation can streamline and scale the process of finding leads that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) and reaching out with personalized messages, making outreach more efficient.
- ICP filtering & prioritization: B2B sales automation tools also help filter and sort through thousands of leads, identify ICP leads, and prioritize them for outreach.
- Lead assignment: Sales managers can rely on automation to assign leads to reps, ensuring timely follow-ups and eliminating the hassle of manual distribution.
- Notetaking using AI tools: AI-powered tools track meeting minutes and conversations, helping reps focus on selling while ensuring the notes are detailed and precise.
- Lead enrichment with signals: AI-native B2B sales automation tools like Highperformr help track and consolidate social signals and buying intent signals to enhance lead profiles, improving the relevance and effectiveness of cold outreach.
- Pipeline management and follow-ups: AI and automation can be used for lead management and tasks such as follow-up emails, meeting scheduling, and managing other lead-nurturing activities at scale.
- Customer activity tracking: AI-powered automation tools monitor customer or lead activity, highlighting high-potential leads for the team to engage with at the right time.
- Competitor monitoring: AI and automation can be used to track competitors’ social activity and identify new leads engaging with them. Highperformr is a B2B sales automation tool that helps automate the process of tracking and curating all social interactions and other activity of competitors on social media.
- Sales meeting scheduling: Tools can be used to automate the process of arranging sales meetings, sending reminders, and updating calendars.
Applications of B2B marketing automation
- Email personalization: Automation tools help customize, draft, and send out email campaigns to deliver personalized messages across touchpoints like lead nurturing, onboarding, and marketing, ensuring consistent communication.
- Social media management: AI and automation tools such as Highperformr help create and schedule posts, track engagement, and generate leads with minimal effort, helping you maintain an active and consistent social presence.
- Ad campaign management: AI and automation tools can manage ad placement, budget allocation, and audience targeting using CRM data to enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
- Reporting and analytics automation: B2B sales automation tools collect and analyze sales and marketing data, generating dashboards and insights that help teams track performance and make informed decisions.
Impact of automation in sales and marketing
As you can see from the examples we just discussed, AI and automation can make a tangible difference to the sales and marketing function in a B2B company. The impact of automation can be seen in three main ways:
Increased efficiency
Automation makes it possible for sales and marketing teams to hand over repetitive tasks and basic manual work to machines, allowing them to spend more time on deep work that requires human effort like customer interaction and sales negotiations. This results in improved efficiency and higher productivity.
Better customer experiences
AI and automation tools make it possible to personalize and customize conversations at scale. From the personalized conversation starters, through every other touch point across the sales pipeline, AI and automation tools enable salespeople to tailor every conversation, pitch document, demo, etc. This helps sales reps nurture stronger bonds with the prospect and drive conversions.
Faster sales cycles
Automation helps optimize and streamline processes, and eliminate delays. This helps a lead move through the stages of the sales pipeline faster and shorten the sales cycle.
Higher ROI
Increased productivity, better customer experiences, and faster sales cycles essentially mean that the company gets good ROI on its AI and automation investments in the long run.
10 sales automation tools for B2B businesses
Of the hundreds of B2B sales automation tools in the market, we have picked out the top 10 tools that you can explore and use if you’re interested in automating your sales and marketing processes. The tools we have listed cover a range of automations across different aspects and segments of the GTM process.
1️⃣ Highperformr
Highperformr is a AI-native platform that helps businesses automate the process of identifying, enriching, and engaging with leads.
With Highperformr, you can
- Identify ICP leads from target accounts, websites, B2B events or trade shows, social platforms, or other sources using first-party data
- Automate lead enrichment and get contact information, firmographic data, social intent data, social signals
- Automate lead management and prioritize the high-potential leads based on buying signals and spearfish the leads that are most likely to convert.
- Manage social media presence, using the Social Media AI Agent to create personalised social media posts, automate scheduling and publishing, drive employee advocacy, and amplify brand voice on social platforms .
Highperformr is the best B2B sales automation tool as it helps identify ICP leads and enrich them with more contextual data and insight beyond contact numbers and email ids. This way, you don’t just get a row of names and contact information but can automate the sales research process and get recent and relevant contextual data about leads that match your ICP. This will enable you to understand your leads better and connect with them meaningfully, and increase response rates.
Key features:
- First-party data: Highperformr is the only B2B sales automation tool that has direct access to LinkedIn data under the hood. This enables Highperformr to provide the latest, most accurate data about LinkedIn contacts. Highperformr has real-time access to LinkedIn data that can help you find not just the contact details of the person but also get insight on how active they are, what topics they talk about, who their recent LinkedIn connections are, etc.
- White-glove onboarding and Applied AI solutioning: Highperformr provides every customer with white-glove onboarding and implementation with the help of an Applied AI Engineer who can work with you to use Highperformr to find the right kind of leads and book meetings effectively.
- Automated list building with similarity search: With Highperformr, you can find contacts similar to an ICP contact you have, and find companies similar to accounts you’re targeting.
- Automated leadgen: Highperformr enables you to build lead lists that match your ICP based on event or tradeshow participation, keyword search, social media engagements and audience, competitor audience analysis, etc. Essentially, Highperformr helps you automate lead generation using AI and identify ICP contacts in addition to enrichment of leads you already have.
- Intuitive and easy to use: Highperformr has been built to be a simple, self-serve platform that revops leaders, sales folks, lead development representatives (LDRs) and market research teams, can use to enrich and filter leads easily.
- Integrations: Highperformr fits seamlessly into your existing sales and marketing techstack and has be connected with 50+ products.
- Job change tracking: Highperformr enables you to track any career moves of key contacts or prospects. You can get real-time updates on job changes, promotions, or additional responsibilities of your contacts.
- Chrome plugin: The Highperformr Chrome extension can be used to easily and quickly add contacts or posts from LinkedIn to your Highperformr dashboard.
- Automate social media management: Highperformr comes with a GenAI-native social media management platform which you can use to create and publish posts on social media, track the audience engaging with the posts, and identify leads from among your social audience.
Pricing:
Highperformr offers a simple, free product designed for individual users. For teams and larger enterprises, there’s a 14-day free trial with 100 credits to explore advanced features. Paid plans start at $59 for lifetime access, with optional credit add-ons available starting at $10 for 1,000 credits.
2️⃣ Hubspot Sales
Hubspot Sales is one of the leading B2B sales automation tools in the market. The product automates multiple aspects of the B2B sales process, and provides tools for sales engagement, deal management, reporting and analytics, among others.
Key features:
- Lead management & prospecting: GTM teams can use Hubspot Sales to manage leads and upcoming sales activities using the AI-powered sales prospecting workspace.
- Breeze prospecting Agent: The AI Agent helps users focus outreach efforts on quality leads.
- Meeting scheduler: This feature uses AI to help you prep for, follow up on, and schedule meetings.
- Email tracking: The feature automates the process of scoring deals, assigning tasks, and tracking
- Sales process automation: This helps set up a series of automated, personalized multi-channel communications and follow-up tasks to your prospects and leads.
- Call tracking: The feature enables users to make, record, and automatically log calls in the CRM.
Pricing:
The basic version of the product is priced at $15/month per user and has multiple packages with wider feature sets, with its all-encompassing package priced at$150/month per seat.
3️⃣ ZoomInfo
Zoominfo is a data enrichment platform that helps B2B companies automate their sales and marketing workflows such as outreach and data management.
Key features:
- Salesflows: Customers can create multi-channel prospecting campaigns that include automated emails, calls, and other tasks like social connections.
- Sales call analysis: The ‘Chorus’ feature helps sales teams capture and analyze all customer calls, meetings, and emails.
- Deal forecasting: The feature helps you automatically capture and sync contacts and communications to your CRM to gain visibility into deals and analyze aspects like churn risk or deal momentum.
- Advertising: The tool helps automate the delivery of ads to specific market segments.
Pricing:
ZoomInfo doesn’t reveal its pricing packages on its website – just highlights that users can choose packages based on their use case, such as sales, marketing, or recruitment (talent). Check out Zoominfo competitors & alternatives.
4️⃣ Apollo
Apollo is a data enrichment tool that also enables users to automate other parts of their sales and marketing workflow such as personalized outreach and CRM enrichment.
Key features:
- Automate research: The AI research assistant feature helps you get insights about prospective customers.
- Email personalization: The tool enables you to automate the process of personalizing emails for every prospect. You can also edit emails in bulk and save finished emails to use in your outreach.
- Automate outreach: The product has features that enable users to customize outreach sequences for each lead based on what you know about them.
Pricing:
Apollo offers a free plan, and has multiple packages starting from $49 per user billed annually for a Basic version to $119 for larger organizations. Email credits are at the centre of Apollo’s pricing plans and users can purchase more credits as per their needs. Take a look at Apollo competitors to weigh the pros and cons of Apollo and other similar tools.
5️⃣ Clay
Clay is a data enrichment tool that helps B2B businesses with their outreach efforts.
Key features:
- AI research agent: The feature helps automate some of the lead research that is done before sales reps reach out to them with a pitch.
- Integrations: The tool integrates with 100+ sales and marketing products.
- Automated outreach: Clay comes with AI features that help you craft relevant, compelling messaging based on the data.
Pricing:
Clay offers a free plan with 1.2K credits per year, and the paid plans start at $134/month for 24K credits. There are multiple tiers based on the features available and the credits available for purchase, going all the way to $1800/month for 1.8M credits a year. You can also choose to customize a package for your company based on your feature set and credit needs.
Many users feel that Clay’s pricing is expensive and find it difficult to use, particularly considering the pricing structure, prompting many businesses to look at other Clay alternatives for data enrichment.
6️⃣ Zapier
Zapier offers a suite of automation tools that helps with integrating various apps and tools to streamline and automate workflows. It enables users to automate repetitive tasks by creating automated workflows known as Zaps, which consist of triggers and actions.
Key features:
- Automate multiple activities: The product helps automate tasks and activities across multiple functions such as lead management, sales pipeline, marketing campaigns, customer support, data management, project management, tickets, and incidents.
- Extensive apps list: The product can enable no-code automation across 7000+ apps.
- No-code: Zapier is a no-code platform that makes it easy for teams to automate workflows quickly and easily without relying on developers.
Pricing:
Zapier provides a free version of its platform with some basic features. Paid plans are tiered based on the number of tasks automated. The basic plan for individuals starts at $19.99 per month, while custom pricing is available for advanced plans tailored to teams and large enterprises.
7️⃣ Leadfeeder by Dealfront
Leadfeeder is a B2B sales automation tool that helps businesses identify and engage with companies visiting their websites. It automates the process of lead scoring and identifying high-intent leads.
Key features:
- Filtering leads: The product automatically filters the lead list to remove bots, ISPs and other valueless traffic.
- Integrations: The product can be integrated with other sales and marketing tools to automatically send Leadfeeder’ data to over 5,000 apps, including CRMs, spreadsheets, and BI tools.
Pricing:
Leadfeeder by Dealfront offers a free version with some basic features, and a paid plan that costs €99 per month.
8️⃣ Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling automating platform and a B2B sales automation tool that helps automate the process of scheduling meetings and managing meeting workflows.
Key features:
- Reminders: The product helps automate the process of sending email and text reminders and follow-ups for meetings that have been scheduled.
- Pool multiple calendars: The feature helps bring together the team’s schedules to offer more booking options to customers, or automatically combine availability to schedule co-hosted calls.
Pricing:
The product has a free version for individuals starting out with basic scheduling. The paid plans start at $10/month per seat, and Calendar also has feature-rich packages for enterprises starting at $15k/year.
9️⃣ Salesmate
Salesmate is a CRM platform that helps businesses with sales automation and marketing automation.
Key features:
- Automated scoring: The platform has features for personalized lead scoring that will allow you to send only the finest leads to the sales team.
- Outreach: You can automate your outreach and follow-ups and automate your entire cadence until the prospect replies or is ready to engage.
Pricing:
Salesmate has no free versions. The basic plan starts at $23/month per user, additional tiers going up to $63/month per user. Enterprises that require the more advanced feature sets can customize their pricing and features based on their needs.
🔟 Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a CRM platform that helps automate the sales process.
Key features:
- Lead nurturing: You can automate the lead nurturing process by scheduling follow-ups with automated sales conversations and AI-powered prompts to focus on the right leads.
- Email automation: This feature helps you automatically send a personalized email whenever a deal is created or reaches a certain stage.
- Delayed automation: You can use this feature to schedule sales workflow steps to occur at a later date/time rather than immediately.
Pricing:
Pipedrive doesn’t have a free version but offers multiple paid plans with different feature sets. The plans start at $12/month per seat and go up to $79/month per seat. Users can also purchase one of the many add-ons based on their requirements
Best practices for successful sales automation
Simply choosing a modern sales automation tool won’t immediately bring in improvements and results. You need to follow certain best practices to ensure effective implementation and adoption of the product among everyone in the sales team.
Define the objectives
Be clear about what kind of tasks and activities you will automate and use the AI tools for. Is it only for sales tasks? Will you be using it for marketing activities as well? What do you hope to achieve after implementing the tool? Make sure you have clear answers for each of these before getting started.
Train teams to use the tool
Using tools effectively requires training, learning, and some unlearning. Invest in onboarding and training programs for every employee that will be using the tool, so they use it the right way and derive value from it.
Monitor progress periodically
Make sure you set some time aside periodically to monitor the tasks that the automation tool handles, and ensure that you’re on the right track. This will also help you identify newer powerful use cases and more ways to get more ROI from your sales automation software.
Avoid over-automation
There are sales automation tools that take care of nearly every step in the sales process, but it is important to only automate repetitive tasks that can be as effective without human intervention. Tasks such as lead engagement, relationship building, pitch meetings, and contract negotiations should be handled by your sales folks and must not be outsourced to AI tools. Automation is meant to assist humans, not replace them.
Future trends in B2B sales automation: 2025 and beyond
The world of B2B sales is only going to get more interesting and exciting, with dozens of modern companies launching AI and automation tools for B2B sales automation and marketing automation.
For example, AI SDRs have already become commonplace. Many B2B companies are using AI SDRs to scale prospecting. Companies that didn’t have large outbound motions are able to quickly and easily set up an outbound engine using a handful of employees assisted by sales automation tools.
Here are some shifts and trends we are seeing in the B2B sales landscape:
Signal-based selling is the future of sales
AI-native products like Highperformr enable companies to identify real-time first party insight to drive signal-based selling. Companies will be able to track job change signals, technographic data, hiring plans, competitor interactions and other such signals during their prospecting.
Personalization will be a requirement, not a luxury
Tailored experiences and personalization will no longer be an option. AI-driven content automation will help sales development representatives (SDRs) craft hyper-relevant messaging based on each prospect’s activity and business needs. We will see more companies using content personalisation automation as part of their GTM activities to provide prospects and customers custom experiences.
AI will help scale processes faster
Modern AI-first products will help improve sales processes, and enable companies to experiment with different applications of B2B sales automation. Lead qualification, automating follow-ups, and providing predictive insights for sales engagement. Instead of manually researching and organizing data, sales teams will rely on AI to identify high-value leads and optimize outreach strategies.
Social selling will become the norm
LinkedIn and other social platforms will be at the heart of sales because most professionals today spend time on social platforms like LinkedIn or X. AI-native social media management tools are making it easier for sales reps to engage with ICP leads. Products like Highperformr enable you to track audiences engaging with you on social media, and identify leads from your social audience.
Spearfishing will replace spray-and-pray
Companies will invest in spearfishing rather than taking the spray-and-pray approach, because AI tools now enable companies to identify their ICP leads with precision and go after targeted leads.
Better customer relationships
GTM workflow automation will make it easier for companies to nurture relationships with customers. For example, AI makes it possible to use B2B sales automation tools to make pipeline management, lead scoring, customer segmentation, and other such tasks for customer engagement.
Enhance B2B sales automation with Highperformr
Signals are the future of sales, and Highperformr is leading from the front, giving companies access to real-time first party signals and intent data.
Highperformr is the most powerful sales automation tool because it is AI-native, and can help you easily identify, enrich, and reach out to your ideal customers. Highperformr can also be integrated seamlessly with other B2B sales automation tools to make sure that your entire GTM process is efficient and easy to use.
To learn how you can use Highperformr to monitor signals and take instant action by automating GTM workflows, schedule a demo schedule a demo with our GTM expert today
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