With AI making its way into the mainstream, it is quite an exciting time to be in B2B sales. Even as the world of B2B sales is getting more complex, there are modern sales tools to assist sales development representatives (SDRs), account executives (AEs), and sales persons across functions.
From a range of AI-native sales intelligence tools to AI SDR, the B2B sales market is teeming with sales tools to improve efficiency, personalization, and overall performance of every function in the sales cycle. The market includes both AI-native AI-first products that are creating new categories of sales tools and versions of traditional sales tools like CRMs and data enrichment providers.
Essentially, the sales tools market has expanded and evolved. We’ve written this blog to provide you with a mini masterclass on sales tools.
We’ll discuss the different categories of sales tools available in the market today, what tools are essential for your sales teams, what are the new types of products we’re seeing in the market today, how you should evaluate and choose which sales tools you invest in, and where the market is headed. Let’s go!
Defining Sales Tools and Their Importance
First, the basics. Lets look at what sales tools are and why businesses need them.
Benefits of sales tools for B2B sales teams
Sales tools aren’t just good-to-have for B2B companies, they’re essential to drive sales effectively and scale the business efficiently. Most businesses stop with investing in CRMs and data enrichment tools but it is important to have sales tools for other activities such as lead prioritization or outreach because they help improve productivity levels. They help you work more efficiently and do your work smarter and better.
The role of sales tools in achieving sales success:
Automate manual tasks and improve sales productivity
Sales tools help reduce time spent on repetitive manual work so your team can focus on high-value tasks, like developing sales strategies or nurturing leads.
Provide access to recent and relevant data for outreach
The market today demands swift response to buying signals from prospects. Sales tools ensure that SDRs don’t waste time with outdated or inconsistent data because real-time data and buying signals help reach out to the prospect at the right time with the sales pitch. Sales tools help maintain a clean and updated CRM. Recent and relevant data also helps forecast sales accurately so you can iterate strategies in real-time as the market evolves.
Get an end-to-end view of the sales pipeline
Sales tools such as CRMs, GTM workflow platforms, lead management tools, and outreach tools all come with in-built analytics dashboards. These help you gain granular insights into your sales pipeline. This will help you manage tasks better and maximize the sales team's productivity.
Personalize outreach to get better response rates
Sales tools such as Highperformr can curate and provide your sales teams with first-party insight about leads, helping you personalize your outreach and your pitch decks to that prospect or account. Sales intelligence platforms can give you information about a prospect and the account, such as contact details, firmographics, social activity, tech stack, etc. All this information helps tailor your pitch and increase chances of conversion.
Better customer relationships
Sales tools are extremely effective in helping teams engage with customers and prospects. Today, most sales tools have parity when it comes to features, so what really sets one product apart from the others is the relationship the company strikes with the prospect or customer. Sales tools help with identifying relevant contacts, learning about them and personalizing conversations, and ensuring that companies are able to nurture strong relationships with people before and after the sale. Sales tools make it easy for companies to engage with ICP people early on even before they enter the sales cycle, nurture relationships with them, share insights and add value, before they become a prospect or a customer, and ensure that they continue to maintain meaningful relationships after the prospect becomes a customer as well.
Spearfish high-intent leads and close more deals faster
To be able to close deals faster and improve conversion rates, it is important for sales teams to target the right kind of leads. Sales tools help with identifying the ICP leads or accounts, enriching them with buying signals, and helping revops or sales teams prioritize leads for outreach. Going after high-potential leads will increase response rates, improve conversions, and reduce sales cycles.
Enhance alignment among sales teams and improve productivity
At most B2B companies, sales teams include sales operations (salesops) or revenue operations (revops) leaders, SDRs, AEs, market research executives (MREs) and others dedicated to handling specific tasks within the sales function. Sales tools help different members of the sales function collaborate and work effectively without silos.
For example, a GTM workflow platform can help with managing data for the MRE team, passing it on to the SDRs, enabling AEs drive sales, and also give the revops leaders a complete picture of the deal and forecast revenues accurately. Sales tools can be the single source of truth for any B2B sales team, making them essential in any GTM tech stack.
Steps to choosing the best sales tools
Now that you know how valuable sales tools are, it is time to dive into the world of sales tools and choose the best one for your business.
Buying sales tools for your business requires a lot of planning, research, and evaluation of the options available. It is important to plan the process and go through it methodically to ensure that you don't get overwhelmed and are able to make the best choice for your business.
Step 1: Identify your sales objectives
Evaluate Your Current Sales Performance
The process starts with first taking a stock check. This includes documenting and understanding basics about your business and the sales function. Here are some questions you should answer:
- What stage of growth is your business in?
- What is your go-to-market strategy?
- How large is your sales team?
- How is your sales team structured?
- What are your sales objectives in the near term, mid-term, and long term?
- How have you been managing your sales - do you have any sales tools or are they being done manually?
Get a clear understanding of the status quo and your current sales performance before moving on to the next step.
Define clear sales goals and metrics
Once the background and current status is clear, you can move to the next step of defining your goals. This is perhaps the most important step as this will largely determine what kind of sales tools you will buy and how your team will use them.
For example, if your goal is to scale sales quickly, you will have to buy a set of sales tools like AI SDRs or cold calling software to automate processes and drive volumes. If your goal is to drive revenues and increase conversion rates, you will need to buy sales tools that help with lead prioritization and focused outreach to high-potential leads so as to increase conversions.
So, be clear on what your goals are and what metrics you will use to measure sales effectiveness, and use these to buy the right kind of tools.
Step 2: Exploring the different categories of sales tools
There are hundreds of sales tools available, each serving a different purpose in the sales process. This can be overwhelming, especially for those new to B2B sales tools. To simplify things, we've grouped these tools by the problems they solve and the teams they’re built for.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
The term sales tool is almost synonymous with CRM. The CRM is the single source or truth for any business, with details about the customers, prospects, past contacts, and all relevant business contacts. The CRM software is an end-to-end sales tool that keeps track of all customer conversations on one database. It tracks details about every lead, every prospect, and every customer and helps manage your company’s engagement or interactions with each of them, making it a critical tool to gauge the overall financial health of your business.
When it comes to investing in sales tools, the first one that nearly every B2B business invests in is a CRM. While some basic CRMs only serve as a database for information about leads, prospects, and customers, there are other advanced CRM platforms that enable you to manage a host of other sales tasks such as lead management, sales forecasting, automated outreach, and more.
Some of the more popular CRMs in the market include Salesforce, Hubspot, Freshworks, Attio, Pipedrive.
Lead generation tools
The first step in the sales process is to generate leads and there are sales tools that help businesses with generating leads or identifying ICP leads to target. Over the last year, we’re seeing many AI lead generation tools popping up in the market, using AI to make the process of identifying high-value leads faster and easier. These lead generation tools help with finding ICP leads, orchestrating campaigns to build lead lists, spotting leads from social media, finding warm leads by tracking job changes, and more.
We now live in times where operating out of a static account book is no longer enough. Businesses need to prioritize high-potential leads and chase them to increase conversion rates. This makes it essential to find newer and better ways to generate leads, and lead generation tools are built for this.
Sales engagement platforms
Sales engagement tools are designed to help push the leads through the different stages of the sales pipeline.
In most cases, only 5% of the leads you generate are in the buying cycle and ready to buy a product like yours. Nearly 95% of the leads you generate are not in market. It is essential to engage and nurture these leads until the time they’re ready to buy a product. Sales engagement platforms are sales tools that help you with this process of engaging leads and nurturing them.
Each lead or prospect would be in a different stage of the buying cycle, some aware of what you offer, some evaluating your competitors, and some others not at all looking to buy a product in the near future but interested in the space you’re in. Depending on the stage they are in, the kind of nurture tactics and engagement methods you will take will vary. Sales engagement tools help automate and orchestrate these activities. They can help you identify, segregate, and manage leads so you can efficiently move them along the pipeline and ultimately convert the lead into a deal.
AI sales engagement platforms not just automate and manage these tasks, but also assist with personalization and timely outreach. For example, AI-native tools like Highperformr can track a prospect’s promotion or job change, and alert you to the change, so the sales rep can engage with the prospect accordingly. A congratulatory message can lead to a conversation about the need for sales tools for the new role, and open up an opportunity for a deal.
Sales intelligence and sales prospecting tools
When it comes to B2B sales, it has been proven that the more you know about your lead, their role, and the company, the better your pitch will be. Sales intelligence tools make this possible. This category of sales tools include products that help you with data enrichment, sales intelligence, intent signals, competitive intelligence, and any other kind of insight you might need to understand your lead better. Sales prospecting tools help with identifying relevant contacts and building lead lists while sales intelligence tools help enrich the lead list with basic information and buying signals or insight.
Zoominfo, Apollo, Highperformr, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and Lusha are some of the more popular sales intelligence and sales prospecting tools for B2B businesses.
Sales automation tools
Sales automation is the process of using AI and other technologies to automate repetitive parts of the sales process and reduce manual work. 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. For example, they help with automating and managing certain events such as sending out emails, qualifying leads, or generating reports so sales teams can focus on more strategic work.
Sales enablement tools
Sales enablement is the process of equipping sales teams with documents, competitive insight, and playbooks about the product and the market so they are in a better position to pitch the product to potential customers and close the deal effectively. In most B2B companies, there are dedicated sales enablement teams that create battle cards, pitch decks, training videos, and other collateral to help sales teams in the sales process. Sales enablement tools are products that help with this part of the sales process and are used by sales teams and sales enablement teams to collaborate effectively.
Sales enablement tools are important as they help simplify the training process when new sales people come on board. These sales tools provide the new employees with access to all sales enablement collateral and help them get up to speed with the product or brand positioning and the sales process. Similar to other sales tools, these help improve efficiency, break silos between teams, and enable better collaboration through the sales process.
Sales analytics and reporting tools
Monitoring and measuring progress of every activity in the sales cycles is critical as it helps identify roadblocks and gaps while also highlighting successes so the team can double down on those. There are different kinds of sales tools that can be included in this category.
For example, there are tools that help track productivity and performance of sales teams, manage sales commissions and quotas etc.
There then are sales analytics tools that help with tracking sales pipeline metrics such as pipeline velocity, customer acquisition costs, etc.
Also included in this category of sales tools are those that help revops and sales teams with revenue forecasting, workforce planning, territory planning, etc.
Almost all sales analytics tools come with easy-to-read dashboards that give you a quick overview of where things are right now, what works, and what doesn’t so you can iterate or change your plan accordingly.
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Sales Tools Category
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Functionality
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Effectiveness
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
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Manages customer interactions, tracks leads, prospects, and customers, automates sales processes, and provides insights into customer behavior.
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Enhances customer satisfaction, increases sales efficiency, improves collaboration, and reduces customer acquisition costs.
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Lead Generation Tools
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Identifies high-value leads using AI, builds lead lists, and tracks job changes.
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Increases conversion rates by prioritizing high-potential leads.
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Sales Engagement Platforms
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Automates and personalizes lead nurturing through various stages of the sales pipeline.
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Moves leads efficiently through the pipeline, improving conversion rates.
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Sales Intelligence and Prospecting Tools
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Enriches lead data with insights and competitive intelligence.
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Enhances sales effectiveness by providing detailed lead information for personalized outreach.
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Sales Automation Tools
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Automates repetitive sales tasks using AI.
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Reduces manual work, allowing teams to focus on strategic tasks.
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Sales Enablement Tools
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Equips sales teams with necessary collateral and insights.
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Simplifies training, improves collaboration, and enhances sales performance.
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Sales Analytics and Reporting Tools
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Tracks sales performance, pipeline metrics, and forecasts revenue.
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Identifies roadblocks, highlights successes, and informs strategic decisions.
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Step 3: Assess your team's needs
Gather input from your sales team
You now know what your business goals are when it comes to sales tools, and you have a clear understanding of the kind of sales tools you can buy for your team.
The next step is figuring out where the gaps in your company are, so you can decide which category of sales tools to invest in first.
Objectively evaluate your sales team and the skills your team members bring to the table. Analyze your team’s current performance to identify areas where they perform well and areas that need improvement and the use of sales tools. For example, your team may have found hacks or tools to track performance but might need assistance with market research. This means that you will need to invest in a sales intelligence tool before investing in a sales analytics tool because enhancing market research capabilities takes priority over other tasks at this point in time.
Understand the challenges your team faces
Spend time speaking to your sales team to understand their requirements, challenges, and preferences. Ultimately, it is the sales team and those on the ground that will be using the sales tools and will reap the benefits, so it is critical that you speak to them before making the choice on the kind of tools to buy and even which brands to buy for them to use.
Step 4: Research and select the right tools
Once you have the requirements, you’re now ready to choose the right sales tools for your team. The best way to do this would be to first make a list of the kind of sales tools you need to buy. This could include a tool from every sales category we discussed above, or a few tools across categories.
Compare features and pricing of popular tools
Once that’s done, pick the top 5 or 10 tools from each category and evaluate them. Go through the key features, pros and cons, and pricing of each product. Some tools are designed for small businesses, some are built for large enterprises. Be sure to conduct your research and shortlist the ones ideal for your use cases.
Evaluate user reviews and case studies
After the first round of research, take the time to look through review websites and communities such as G2, Reddit, and other such public platforms for reviews from customers and users. Reading these discussions will help you ask the right questions during your demo calls with the company, clarify your use cases and requirements, and take an informed decision while signing the contract and buying the sales tools.
To help you get started, we have a list of the top tools in each category.
Sales automation tools
Data enrichment tools
Sales intelligence tools
AI lead generation tools
Sales prospecting tools
Step 5: Implement the chosen sales tools
Buying the sales tools is only half the battle won. The next major phase will be implementing the product, integrating it with your existing workflow, and onboarding every member of the sales or GTM team onto the tool.
Integrate tools with existing systems
The first part is implementing the product and integrating it with your existing processes and workflows. With sales tools, this will involve a lot of data transfer and harmonization of data on the new product. Implementing a sales tool is quite a major change for any business, so this process needs to be done thoughtfully and carefully without disrupting existing processes and systems.Ensure that there is no loss or mismanagement of data when implementing the new system, and that back up processes are in place at least for a little while after you introduce the new sales tool to your tech stack.
Provide training and support for your team
Most sales tools in the market are clunky, complex, and require a lot of training before use. Products such as Clay and Salesforce are in fact so complex that they require product consultants and dedicated specialists to help companies use the product. Considering this, training becomes an important step in the process of implementing sales tools in your business. Be sure to work with the vendor to conduct detailed training and onboarding sessions for all stakeholders, and ensure that white-glove onboarding is a part of your contract.
Step 6: Measure and analyze tool performance
While measuring ROI and effectiveness of a sales tool takes at least a couple of months, it is never too early to start measuring the performance of the sales tools.
Track key performance indicators (KPIs)
You can identify and track key performance indicators to see if the product adoption is good and if things are headed in the right direction. While buying a tool, it is important to clearly define what success looks like and how you will measure it. Get this started soon after the product is implemented, so you are able to make the best use of the sales tools you’ve bought.
Gather feedback from the sales team
Except for sales tools for revenue forecasting or sales pipeline tracking, most sales tools are used by folks across the sale and marketing function. For example, a CRM is used not just by the sales team but by marketing teams, MarkOps teams, and other teams in the GTM function. Gather detailed feedback from all stakeholders to get a real picture of the impact of the sales tool.
