Across the world, businesses are moving rapidly to set the pace in various markets. Many are heading toward significant breakthroughs, adopting the best solutions to outperform their competitors.

Traditional methods are slowly dwindling in this extremely progressive and developing world of business. To keep up with the changes, business owners like you should start using tools built to help manage your overall operations⁠—from sales, marketing, to customer management. 

Aside from making tedious tasks simpler, the best sales tools help businesses level up their game. They are also integral to growing sales, boosting performance, and generating more revenue. Discussed in this article are examples of sales tools that are essential for your business.

What are sales tools?

Sales tools are digital solutions that make the work of sales professionals easier. The umbrella term “sales tool” encompasses plenty of several technologies, which include sales reporting, email tracking, sales pipeline management, sales automation, and sales calling, just to name a few.

Sales tools help sales professionals know which prospects will succeed with their service or product, when to follow up on these prospects, and what to discuss with them. 

Investing in sales tools software also answers employees’ demand to have better access to advanced tools. This indicates that businesses that still depend on old-fashioned sales tools may both lose sales and talented teams. LinkedIn’s State of Sales 2021 reports that 94% of sales professionals affirm that sales tools aid them in closing deals.

The Right Sales Tools for Your Business

Sales Reporting

Refining your process and filling the gaps in your sales performance are key to progressing in sales. A well-equipped reporting tool can expedite the production of reports by more than 40%. These reports are a necessary source of information; hence use it correctly to improve productivity and amplify sales.

With the right reporting tool, you can make comprehensive reports for:

  • Sales data analysis
  • Vital metrics measurement
  • Informed decision-making
  • Purchasing patterns identification
  • Poor performers tracking
  • Real-time opportunities and problem areas spotting

Email Tracking

Your job does not end with sending a well-drafted email to a sales target. You should know what the target does with it.

Most emails do not get responded to. Most sales representatives do not also follow up, resulting in many lost opportunities. Do not be this kind of a sales rep⁠—use email tracking tools to learn if your prospects are actually reading your emails.

Prospects sometimes do not respond because either they are uncertain about the answer or they just forget. If you use an email tracking tool, you can monitor the open rate and reach out to your prospects to know why they are not responding.

Sales Pipeline Management

If a deal seems rewarding, the most logical thing to do is to ensure that it will push through. For that, you must have effective sales pipeline management to track and handle the progress of your sales. It provides valuable insights into each phase of the sales pipeline for figuring out the risks and taking the right actions.

A sales pipeline management tool helps you to:

  • Determine if you have ample deals to meet your sales target
  • Establish a timeframe to have a better idea of the status of the deal
  • Get rid of low-quality deals to keep the cleanliness and health of your sales pipeline
  • Learn the right time to follow up on a prospect
  • Improve sales results by paying attention and preparing deals in real-time

Sales Automation

Frustrated by having a long list of things to do? Automate some of your tasks! The right automation tool helps set workflow and automate most laborious tasks. You can automate task delegation activities, automatically follow up emails, and update information. It saves time so that you can focus on more pressing business affairs.

Sales Calling

A remote phone system is important in sales for managing sales communication efficiently. By using a communication app, you can access the local or toll-free number of your preferred country and seamlessly manage your inbound and outbound calls. It helps in creating a local presence and gaining the trust of local customers.

A calling tool gives a vast spectrum of features, such as call logging automation, call tracking, and call forwarding.

Sales Acceleration

Sales acceleration is a smart strategy to generate more sales conversations, speed up the sales cycle, and/or get more deals. Sales acceleration software automates administrative duties and streamlines sales processes.

Uncontrolled speed is not the goal, paving the way for sales acceleration technology to come into the picture: to help sales professionals improve efficiency with better organization and engagement throughout the sales process.

Sales Analytics

Sales analytics allow sales professionals and managers to track, assess, and improve sales activities. At the same time, these tools project trends and results and look for hidden relationships. They give sales managers key insights, making sales more understandable. 

Sales analytics tools enable sales managers to systematically gain access to analytics through the tangle of spreadsheets instead of manually collecting them. It is typically carried out on top of CRMs, through algorithms applied to data on hand to disclose insights.

Moreover, sales analytics tools are constantly evolving better versions of their predictive capabilities with AI and machine learning to forecast sales. These frameworks can calculate customer lifetime value from a tiny amount of usage data, for instance.

E-Signature and Document Tracking

E-signature helps speed up administrative work and lessen overhead by delivering a unified view of every process of a contract. This technology is also conducive to paperless transactions. Document tracking, on the other hand, tracks a document in real-time and how and when a prospect deals with it. 

Most e-signature and document tracking tools provide notifications for crucial dates that impact a contract. Some offer templates that let businesses create and store contacts, while others offer tools for making and managing contracts electronically and automating the digital handling of a contract throughout its lifespan.

Data Connector and Integration Tools

A data connector connects various systems so that they can process the same data seamlessly. This indicates that the data can be accessed through one system, which is a big improvement from how it was before.

Data integration tools combine data from various sources into one system instead of just letting the passing around of data between systems.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM helps sales professionals improve customer relationships, retain customers, remain in control of sales and marketing initiatives, automate communication, and close deals. 

With the innovation of technology and the competitiveness of markets, CRMs have evolved into complex, multilayered support solutions. Besides providing updates on the fly and implementing advanced lead scoring, CRMs now also offer numerous features that dramatically improve sales processes.

You can either use an off-the-shelf CRM solution available on the market or opt for custom CRM development, which will be more tailored to the individual needs of your enterprise.

What the Right Sales Tools Should Be

In the end, the right sales tools and techniques will grant you total control of your sales process and help you build healthy customer relationships. Whatever it is that you pick for your business, make sure that you use it purposefully. Most businesses that use sales tools who fail to maintain it achieve undesirable results.

Sales tools can make a huge difference in your ventures. Hence, it’s vital to pick the one simple enough to use and adjust. You can see how it’s done with the tools included in this list of 10 best tools to improve your sales.