In today’s fast-paced business environment, sales teams are constantly under pressure to meet their performance targets and sales quotas while balancing between an array of tasks – from sending emails and making cold calls to following up with prospects, nurturing leads, and staying updated on the industry trends.
Needless to say, how stressful that can be. This is why sales productivity tools have become incredibly important for sales teams.
There’s a bunch of sales productivity tools and platforms that can automate, enhance, and optimize processes at every stage of the sales cycle, helping sales teams streamline their workflows, manage tasks more efficiently, and ultimately drive more revenue. However, choosing the right tools from a wide range of available options might be challenging and time-consuming.
Below, we’ve outlined the top 7 sales tools for productivity your sales team can instantly benefit from. Select those that best align with your business type, industry, and the size of your team to improve performance without overwhelming your sales agents.
Why Do You Need Sales Productivity Tools?
Today, sales is not just about sending sales email sequences to prospects or making cold calls and following outbound call center scripts. In the highly competitive marketplace, sales reps have to build and nurture relationships with prospects and customers. According to Salesforce, sales agents spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks. These include meeting customer budget needs, personalizing communications, and building strong personal relationships. While these are important, it also means sales reps spend less time actually selling.
Sales productivity tools can help your sales team automate repetitive tasks and optimize sales processes, enabling them to close more deals and reach their sales targets faster. They also help reduce the number of tasks sales reps have to do manually so they can focus more time on higher-value, revenue-generating activities.
Types of Sales Productivity Tools Your Sales Team Can Benefit from
Productivity is a broad term – and there are numerous ways for sales reps to enhance their sales productivity across all stages of the sales pipeline. For most teams, however, it won’t make sense to invest in a sales productivity tool for every stage throughout the sales funnel. In fact, according to research from HubSpot, 45% of sales professionals are overwhelmed by the amount of tools in their tech stack. So you may want to choose only those that will improve the areas where your sales team really needs to optimize processes and save time.
In general, sales productivity tools can be classified into the following categories:
- Pipeline management and CRM
- Sales prospecting / lead generation tools
- Outbound sales dialers
- Email tracking and automation tools
- Sales engagement platforms
- Meeting scheduling tools
- Sales intelligence and analytics tools
Top 7 Best Sales Tools for Productivity to Enhance Your Sales Team’s Performance
Let’s now take a closer look at some of the best tools in each of the categories we’ve listed above, designed to enhance and streamline the day-to-day operations of sales teams.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Out of the numerous pipeline management and CRM systems, Salesforce Sales Cloud stands out as one of the most comprehensive solutions for sales teams. It can help your sales reps track and manage leads, automate multiple workflows and routine tasks (like follow-ups, reminders, and approval processes), leverage real-time insights into sales forecasts and quotas, track performance through advanced reporting tools, and do much more, helping your team boost productivity.
According to Salesforce itself, customers who use Salesforce Sales Cloud report a 29% increase in sales productivity. The best part is that the platform is highly customizable and caters to businesses of all sizes, including SMBs and large enterprises.
Key features:
- Lead and contact management
- Sales opportunity management
- Customizable reports and dashboards
- Workflow and process automation
- Quoting and contract approvals
ZoomInfo Sales
ZoomInfo Sales is a popular lead generation platform for B2B sales teams, offering the biggest, most accurate, and most frequently updated B2B contact database with over 70M direct dial phone numbers and over 174M verified email addresses. With access to this comprehensive database, your sales reps can easily identify decision-makers, qualify leads, and engage with them through built-in dialer and email tools.
What’s remarkable about ZoomInfo Sales is that it also enables you to identify prospects at the beginning of the buyer’s journey by tracking companies researching solutions like yours, as well as discover and connect with decision-makers exploring your website.
Key features:
- Access to company and contact database
- Data segmentation and filtering
- Org charts and buyer insights
- Sales automation
- Website visitor tracking
VoiceSpin AI Dialer
Offering an AI-driven auto dialer is VoiceSpin software for sales and telemarketing. The dialer can help your sales team automate and optimize the outbound calling process, eliminating the need for your reps to dial numbers manually and saving them a great deal of time and effort. What sets VoiceSpin’s dialer apart from other auto dialing solutions out there is that it uses AI and ML algorithms to intelligently score and prioritize leads and connect them to the best-suited sales reps based on the probability of making a successful sale.
Plus, it comes with lots of other advanced features, including predictive dialing, local caller ID, DNC list filtering, automated voicemail drop, and more tools to help you maximize the efficiency of your outbound calling campaigns. What’s even better, you can integrate it with AI speech analytics and leverage conversational intelligence to increase performance.
Key features:
- Predictive and power dialing
- Number reachability scan
- Intelligent lead distribution
- Local caller ID and access to local numbers in 160+ countries
- Automated voicemail drop
Yesware
Yesware offers email tracking software for sales teams, helping them manage and optimize their email communications with prospects and customers. With Yesware, your sales reps can easily track email outreach activity, including when and where emails are opened, and whether links are clicked and attachments are viewed while providing your team with real-time notifications.
Additionally, your reps can set reminders for follow-ups, automate email campaigns, create email templates, and more. Insights help sales agents prioritize leads and tailor follow-up strategies for better conversions. What’s also great about Yesware is that it’s super easy to implement – you can set it up in only 2 minutes.
Key features:
- Email open tracking
- Email link tracking
- Email attachment tracking
- Recipient engagement reporting
- Shared templates and campaigns
SalesLoft
SalesLoft is a powerful sales engagement platform that can automate many tedious processes, freeing up your sales team to focus on higher-value activities that drive revenue. That includes everything from sending emails and follow-ups to scheduling appointments. With SalesLoft, sales reps can also create personalized, multi-step cadences, which are sequences of emails, calls, and social touches to boost their outreach efforts.
Additionally, the platform uses AI and ML to provide sales reps with helpful recommendations based on past performance. SalesLoft is also known for its in-depth reporting and analytics features and the ability to easily integrate with CRM systems and other sales and marketing tools.
Key features:
- Pipeline generation
- Full customer lifecycle workflows
- Conversation intelligence
- Opportunity management
- Foresting and revenue management
Calendly
Calendly is a well-known online scheduling tool used by millions of sales professionals worldwide to streamline the process of booking meetings. Your prospects can select meeting times from your available slots, while automatic time zone conversion ensures meetings are scheduled at appropriate times for participants in different locations.
The tool is incredibly easy to use due to its intuitive interface, highly customizable, and offers a range of automation features, such as automated reminders to reduce no-shows. It also integrates with 70+ third-party systems, including CRMs, video conferencing tools, and even payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
Key features:
- Automated scheduling and customizable availability
- Automated reminders and follow-ups
- Integrated video conferencing
- Advanced analytics and insights
- Integrated payment collection
io
Gong.io is a sales intelligence platform that captures your customer interactions across platforms (email, phone, and web conferencing), analyzes what was said in these interactions, and delivers AI-driven insights to help your sales reps win more deals. It allows you to track specific keywords and sentiment and provides sales reps with real-time alerts about engagement levels, sentiment changes, or deal progression. AI-driven insights also help with sales coaching, enabling sales managers to deliver targeted feedback to their team members.
Gong.io can be integrated with the leading CRM systems, web conferencing tools, telephony systems, and other third-party platforms.
Key features:
- Conversation intelligence
- Live pipeline management
- AI-driven analytics and reporting
- Predictive forecasting
- Keyword tracking and sentiment analysis
Final Thoughts on Sales Productivity Tools
Sales productivity tools enable sales teams to sell faster and smarter while reaching their sales targets effectively at every stage of the sales process. And choosing the right ones can truly be the key to unlocking next-level sales productivity.
While you don’t necessarily have to use a bunch of sales productivity tools that might only overwhelm your team, consider implementing some of the platforms we’ve outlined above to automate, optimize, and enhance your sales processes where your sales team struggles most and where improvements are needed.
