26 Best Sales Tools in 2023: CRM, Automation, Outreach & More
If you’re like most sales reps, only one-third of your day is actually spent on selling to prospects. Ouch!
Before you ask — YES, there’s a more effective and efficient way to manage your day.
You just need to integrate relevant sales tools into your sales process. They can automate tedious manual tasks, ensure your sales workflows run smoothly, and improve your relationships with prospects.
This article will list tools across various sales software categories to help you streamline your sales process, simplify your day, and get more done. But first, what do we mean by sales tools?
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What Are Sales Tools? A Simple Definition
Sales tools refer to tools and technology salespeople use to streamline important sales tasks.
The common sales tool is a sales CRM to manage client relationships and provide sales intelligence based on customer interactions. But each part of your sales process can use different tools, from lead generation to qualification to closing deals.
For instance, Close CRM offers sales tools that can power your sales outreach efforts, such as:
- It lets sales representatives email, call, and text prospects from a single platform,
- It comes with email automation features for personalizing your messages,
- There’s a predictive dialer that can dial multiple numbers and connect sales reps only when there’s a human answering a call.
- Further, sales managers can use the CRM to monitor their KPIs and the overall health of their sales pipelines.
The right sales tools make it easier to prioritize the best leads, make cold calls faster, score leads, take notes after a call, send follow-up emails – and a lot more.
High-performing companies are two times as likely as underperforming companies to describe their sales processes as automated. But with the plethora of tools in the market, how do you determine your ideal sales stack?
Below, I'll explore my favorite sales software and tools for different parts of the sales process. I tested out each of these tools to make sure they actually deliver value to the sales process and shared info from customer reviews so you can make really informed decision.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
When you talk about sales tech, CRM software is the default tool that comes to mind. This tool alone is sufficient for performing sales operations and managing customer relationships effectively. Or at least, the CRM tool is the primary software where most sales reps and leaders spend their work day.
Here are the top sales CRMs:
1. Close: CRM for SMB and Startups
Cost: Starts at $99/month for three users
G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars
While I might be a little biased, Close excels as an all-in-one platform for SMB. This platform manages your sales pipeline and lets you call, email, and text from one platform. Smart Filters make it easy to filter through a large lead list quickly, and lead scoring makes it easy to find hot leads faster. Small business leaders love Close reports for their actionable insights on their sales pipeline health and individual sales rep's productivity.
Other features include:
- Email templates and automated workflows to speed up the sales process
- Sales pipeline view to see where deals are (and where they're going)
- Sales reporting so you can see if your sales strategy is effective
- Calling features, like a PowerDialer that make cold-calling more effective
- Sales coaching features, like Whisper
- Enhanced mobile experience: Take advantage of our massively improved mobile app, offering better navigation and quick access to your Inbox, Leads, Contacts, and Pipeline report. Now, you can manage your sales efficiently on the go, making it even more convenient to stay on top of your deals anytime, anywhere.
- Close Workflow: Streamline your sales processes further with Close Workflow, enabling automated and efficient lead management, communication, and task assignment to boost your sales team's productivity.
Further, the learning curve and onboarding of new customers are smooth — given that Close has one of the fastest adoption rates as a CRM. It also caters to the specific needs of your sales process and integrates with a bunch of specialized software like Slack, Calendly, Hubspot, and more. Plus, the new app makes it easy to stay connected to your sales pipeline on the go.
Watch a free demo of the Close CRM, or start your 14-day free trial to test its features.
2. HubSpot: Great for Large Sales and Marketing Teams
Cost: Free for up to 5 users
G2 Rating: 4.4/5 stars
Another market-leading customer relationship management software that gives you real-time, visual insights on your sales activities is HubSpot. I've used this platform plenty of times over the years, and one thing that always stands out is Hubspot does a lot. They offer multiple sales and marketing tools--but for this post, we're talking about their CRM specifically.
The CRM has a user-friendly interface and probably the most generous free plan on the market. Overall, HubSpot is great for B2B sales teams with 100+ sales professionals that rely heavily on its marketing software and make very few sales calls. As it offers scalable tools for your marketing, sales, customer service, content, and operations departments, your company can rely on it alone for customer relationship management. But HubSpot does have a couple of limitations:
- It can have a learning curve, and you may have to pay for configuring the CRM to your needs
- The pricing is complicated and rises steeply as you bundle multiple hubs
Check out our HubSpot vs. Close comparison to see how we stack up. And remember, you can sync your Close data while still using HubSpot for marketing through our integration with HubSpot.
Uncover the hidden potential of CRM benefits in maximizing sales productivity.
3. Pipedrive: CRM for Pipeline Management
Cost: Plans start at $14.90 per month for their Essential plan
G2 Rating: 4.2/5 stars
Another top web-based CRM focused on helping you visualize and manage your pipeline is Pipedrive. I spent some time testing it and was impressed by the features that let you automate sales tasks, like emailing and workflows. It also lets you synchronize calls and emails, and create an intuitive deal-driven workflow. Its mobile apps are an excellent addition for accessing your sales data on the go.
Its pricing is steep for its features, and the tool can have a learning curve. Learn the difference between Close and Pipedrive to see which better suits your business needs.
Another leading CRM software that’s fit for a large enterprise is Salesforce. It can handle everything Close does, but you may need to pay a sales consultant to set it up.
Sales and Marketing Automation Tools
Many sales professionals waste a lot of time on data entry tasks after taking sales calls, video conferencing, or communicating via email. This can be a time suck– and it can lead to mistakes. Automating those tasks is one of the best ways to speed up your sales process and make sales reps happier.
Let's take a look at sales and marketing automation tools that will help your team spend more time selling—and less time typing.
4. Zapier: Sales Automation on Steroids
Cost: Free for up to 100 single-step zaps
G2 Rating: 4.5/5 stars
When you think about automating your lead management and customer communication, it’s hard to ignore Zapier. It connects different tools and shares data across your tech stack where direct integration is unavailable. It can also help automate your sales process.
One of my favorite ways to use Zapier is connecting other marketing and sales platforms to my CRM. Getting all that data into one place is key to spending less time on repetitive tasks.
The great news is, it's super easy to use. No coding experience is needed to create ‘zaps’ that automate specific steps in your workflow. For instance, you can subscribe or pause an email sequence for a user based on predefined triggers, track lead custom field changes, etc.
Start automating Close with Zapier.
5. Process Street: Customizable Automation for All Work Processes
Cost: Plans start at $100/month
G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars
Want to ensure that your sales department follows a uniform process for every incoming lead? Process Street is a great tool for documenting your team's knowledge and ensuring consistency. It’s an SOP software that lets you create checklists and manage your recurring workflows.
One of my favorite things about this tool is its library of workflows. It can feel a little overwhelming when you get started because you can build such complex workflows with conditional logic, stop tasks, due dates, etc. The library of templates, however, makes it easy to get started with workflows for sales discovery calls, weekly sales meetings, a cold calling checklist, etc. And all of these are completely customizable.
Want to create checklists for specific tasks such as qualifying leads, onboarding new clients, etc? You can do that--and a whole lot more. Plus, its integration with Close can bring the checklist data back into your CRM. 🚀
6. ActiveCampaign: Powerful Email Marketing Automation
Cost: Email automation plans start at $49/month
G2 Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Marketing teams that are serious about nurturing leads through email love ActiveCampaign. It has templates for automating your marketing, managing lists and contacts, and even deals if you use their CRM software.
You can use the tool to send various types of emails, such as autoresponders, newsletters, triggered messages based on visitor action, etc. Where it stands out, though, is its 500+ automation recipes across different functions.
With its Close integration, every new contact can become an ActiveCampaign subscriber. Or vice-versa.
Want to find the perfect ActiveCampaign alternative? Explore these top 9 choices.
Email Management Tools
If your company is deep into email marketing, here are additional email management tools you can add to your workflow.
7. QuickMail: Send Outreach Emails at Scale
Cost: $0/month for up to 1,000 leads
G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars
If you send cold emails, you know the delivery rate can be low. While there are ways to improve your open rates, tools like QuickMail help ensure your emails don’t go to the spam folder.
My favorite features include an auto-warmer to boost your sender reputation, the ability to use multiple inboxes, and automated workflows. I also found it pretty easy to use, especially considering its power.
You can also scale your email marketing campaigns by adding inboxes, personalizing and A/B testing your messages, automating follow-ups, etc. What’s more? With QuickMail’s Close integration, you can sync your interactions and data seamlessly with Close.
8. Clean Email: Reduce Email Clutter + Stay Focused on Leads that Matter
Cost: $9.99/month for one user
G2 Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Clean Email is a comprehensive email management app designed to help sales managers stay organized, boost productivity, and maintain a clutter-free inbox. It offers a robust set of features that streamline the email workflow and enhance efficiency in dealing with high volumes of emails.
My favorite feature is Auto Clean, which lets you to set up rules for handling incoming emails, minimizing manual sorting. This tool keeps your inbox organized automatically and saves valuable time by eliminating the need for constant manual intervention.
The Unsubscriber tool enables you to effortlessly opt out of unwanted subscriptions, further reducing inbox clutter. If you're looking to prioritize customer and lead contacts, this is a fantastic tool to keep you focused.
9. Email Analytics: Deeper Insights Into Email Activity
Cost: $15/inbox/month
G2 Rating: 4/5 stars
Are you looking to improve your email response rates and see how email impacts your bottom line? Give EmailAnaltytics a try. This easy-to-use tool tracks email traffic, send times, top senders and receivers, and makes it easy to manage your inboxes.
Once you connect your email with EmailAnalytics and add your team members — which is as simple as logging into your Gmail or Outlook account — it starts email tracking in the background. It can help you visualize your team’s email activity and monitor KPIs such as:
- Average email response times
- Emails sent
- Email activity by the hour of the day and the week
The resulting team’s email insights can reveal your top performers and help you improve your response times.
Sales Tools to Improve Productivity
We all have the same 24 hours in a day, but smart sales professionals know there are ways to work smarter. Sales productivity tools can streamline your tasks, help you focus on what matters and get more done.
Let's look at my favorite sales productivity tools to help your team work faster and smarter.
10. SavvyCal: Schedule Sales Meetings Faster
Cost: $0 for limited plan/ paid plans start at $12/month
G2 Rating: 5/5 stars ⭐
Scheduling meetings can be a PIA. There's a bunch of back and forth as you try to find the right time- especially if you're trying to meet with two or more folks. Which is why you need SavvyCal. While there are several similar products the market, I find SavvyCal is the easiest to use, and I love that it lets you create shared calendars between teammates.
Simply sign up, set your working hours, and add your calendar. SavvyCal generates a link you can send prospects so they can pick a time that works for them (and you!)
You can embed SavvyCal directly into your website and let prospects schedule meetings with your team. The booking software can also automate round-robin lead distribution and shows the collective availability of your team members to recipients.
You can set your preferred meeting times and create time blocks to control your availability. Best of all, SavvyCal integrates with Close and can update your Close contacts when a prospect books a meeting with your team.
Bonus Sales Tool: Calendly is another meeting scheduling tool worth checking out. I've used both tools with different clients; Calendly does tend to offer more integrations, but both are solid meeting scheduling tools.
12. Zoom: Easier Remote Selling via Video Calls
Cost: Free for up to 40-minute meetings/paid plans start at $150/year
G2 Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Close has always been a remote company, but remote selling picked up steam during the pandemic. Video is now an integral part of the sales funnel, and Zoom makes video conferencing with prospects a breeze.
It’s the default platform to get more face time with prospects, and our native Zoom integration lets you take calls in Close itself. My favorite features include the ability to integrate with so many of our sales tools and screen sharing, which makes sales demos a breeze.
12. Better Proposals: Onbrand Proposals and Automation
Cost: $19/user/month
G2 Rating: 4.4/5 stars
Want to easily create, manage, and send beautiful proposals to your prospects? Better Proposals automates the proposal process with more than 200+ templates for crafting persuasive proposals. I like its easy-to-use proposal editor, which helps you customize the customer experience and keep it on brand.
It also has a legally binding e-signature to speed up your sales process. You'll also get notifications when the prospect opens, clicks, prints, or signs on the proposal. What’s more? With Better Proposals CRM Integration, you can create and track documents from Lead Information within Close.
Along with activities like cold calls made, emails sent, opportunities created, etc., you can also consider employee time-tracking apps like Connecteam to enable you to easily streamline your entire time tracking and management process for your sales team.
Sales Enablement Tools
Providing your sales team with the necessary training, education, and content to close more deals can directly impact your bottom line. Here are a few sales enablement tools to ensure your sales team has the tools they need to succeed.
13. Highspot: Drive Revenue with Content, Training, Coaching, and Sales Insights in One Place
Cost: Contact for pricing
G2 Rating: 4.7/5 stars
Want to equip your sales team with relevant content to engage prospects, then train & coach your reps to leverage it? Highspot combines these with its AI-based sales enablement technology. Features of note include:
- Sales content library
- Digital sales rooms
- Build training and onboarding workflows
- Sales training scorecards
- Detailed analytics
Your reps can access the right content for pushing prospects through the pipeline at the click of a button. Further, it can analyze how your prospects respond and demonstrate your team's value.
14. Showpad Content: Centralized Sales and Marketing Content in One Place
Cost: Contact for pricing
G2 rating: 4.6/5 stars
Showpad is useful for sales teams in two major ways. Managers can use it for training and coaching. They can deliver bite-sized learning experiences based on different parts of their sales process and evaluate their team with quizzes.
Also, its AI-powered recommendations can instantly surface the right content from your entire content library for sales reps. You can also evaluate the effectiveness of different pieces in closing deals. It also makes it easy to collaborate with buyers--and track the effectiveness of your content and your reps.
Customer Success Tools
Sales-driven customer success is essential for sustainable business growth. Here are some tools to create more happy customers:
15. Catalyst: Deeper Insights into Customer Data for Sales and Success Teams
Cost: Contact for pricing
G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars
Catalyst is a customer success platform with automated workflows to retain and upsell your existing customers. With its customer health profile feature, you can proactively identify churn risks and take appropriate actions.
While digging into this product, a few features stood out: first, the ability to find customers ready to buy more. For example, the platform can highlight a team that might be ready for an add-on solution you offer or to move up to a bigger plan.
It also helps reduce customer churn by highlighting signals that a customer is likely to churn so sales or support can provide the resources needed to keep them on track. If you're a SaaS company, this is a fantastic tool to close more deals--and keep those customers longer.
Its customer insights can also make the CS handoff process easier.
If you're looking for ways to improve your customer success efforts and drive long-term growth, check out this article on the top customer success tools to streamline your operations.
16. Zendesk: AI-Enabled Customer Support Platform
Cost: $19/month/user
G2 Ratings: 4.3/5 stars
One of the most popular help desk software, Zendesk, provides a multi-channel ticketing system for offering customer support. It can act as the central hub for tackling your customer questions and issues submitted via email, social media, chat, voice, etc.
The more impressive features of Zendesk include:
- AI and automation to solve customer problems faster
- Help center platform so users can help themselves
- Personalized messaging synced across platforms
- Smart routing to send tickets to the agent best able to help
Built on the open Sunshine platform, it offers you tons of flexibility and customization options. Also, its Close integration helps you log your important customer communication in Close.
Sales Analytics Tools
Sales needs to be data-driven, but the world of sales metrics can get confusing. How do you make sense of the massive amount of customer data? Which metrics should you track?
Any CRM worth its salt will provide built-in reports to monitor important KPIs, perform accurate sales forecasts, and derive actionable insights. With Close sales analytics features, you can monitor your sales pipeline health, get real-time leaderboards on the performance of your sales reps, etc.
But you might also consider adding the analytics tools below into the mix for specific use cases.
17. Google Sheets: Mangage, Sort, and Analyze Data at Scale
Cost: Free
G2 Rating: N/A
A growing startup typically relies on post-its, sticky notes, and dry-erase boards. But once you start getting more leads than you can handle this way, the next organizational step is a spreadsheet CRM. Google Sheets is a cloud-based app, and it’s perfect for customer relationship management.
Google Sheets is also ideal for creating reports, analyzing data, and understanding your leads better. If you need more help, consider using these Google Sheet add-ons to super charge your sales process.
If your team uses Gmail, they can seamlessly collaborate using Sheets. You’ll find dashboard templates for lead generation, revenue growth, etc. And even integrate Sheets with other tools or export its data for further sales analysis.
Beware of the warning signs of a CRM spreadsheet so you’re prepared to make a move to CRM software went the time is right.
Ready to optimize revenue growth? Discover CRM's role in our informative article.
18. Gong: Revenue Intelligence Platform to Help Sales Teams Better Understand Where Revenue Comes From
Cost: Contact for pricing
G2 Rating: 4.7/5 stars
While folks declare cold calling dead, it continues to drive significant revenue in B2B sales settings. Gong provides conversation intelligence to sales teams so that you convert more of your pipeline into revenue.
Its audio analysis tools give sales managers full context of the customer interactions of sales reps. It can include:
- the top questions your prospects are asking,
- how they react to different opening lines,
- the time the reps spend on subjects such as pricing, competitors, etc.
Other features of note include data segmentation so you can better understand different customer needs, lead scoring, sales pipeline management, and sales coaching scorecards.
Gong integrates with Close letting you get text transcripts of your calls, analyze them, and even tag specific portions of the call to review later.
Sales Prospecting Tools
The whole foundation of a sales funnel is based on sales prospecting to find new and qualified potential buyers. Gathering information on your prospects and streamlining this process with prospecting tools can make your job easier and quicker. Here are the top options you can consider adding to your sales process:
19. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: LinkedIn Prospecting Made Easy
Cost: Contact for pricing; expect to pay around $100/month/user
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 stars
If you’re using LinkedIn for prospecting, its Sales Navigator is a must-have platform to track lead activities on the social media platform. You can save lead lists based on your chosen criterion and get customizable notifications about your prospects.
The tool’s most popular feature is probably its search filters for people and companies that let you discover new leads.
My favorite feature, however, is the ability to see who has viewed your profile--this lets you see if leads have been checking you out. It also allows you to reach an extended network, send InMail, and create custom lead lists to target propsets in the right stage of your sales cycle.
You can consider adding the Wiza Chrome extension on the top of LinkedIn to get the contact info of your leads at scale. You can also add leads from your LinkedIn marketing campaigns to your Close sales pipeline via a Zapier integration.
20. LeadFuze: Automatic Lead Generation
Cost: Paid plans start at $147/month
G2 Rating: 4.6/5 stars
Looking for more leads? Not sure how to reach decision makers? Once you narrow down your target market, LeadFuze delivers a list of leads based on your criteria, such as job title, location, etc. No more searching or using lead enrichment tools with old data.
After searching in its database of over 300M+ people, this tool returns the contact information for your leads, including their emails, phone numbers, etc. Even better, the Close integration with LeadFuze lets you automatically add any online profile as a lead in Close.
21. Detective.io: Prep for Sales Meetings Faster
Cost: $50/month for single users
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Tired of spending hours prepping for cold calls? Detective.io researchs people you are meeting with and provides a one-page brief with relevant insights on them and their companies.
The tool lets you become strategic in your sales prospecting outreach without spending hours researching your prospects. That gives you more time to spend on other sales activities--like making more cold calls or perfecting your sales demo.
22. HelloSells: 24/7 Lead Qualifcation and Call Answering
Cost: Reach out for pricing
G2 Rating: N/A
Being available to answer your lead's inquiries 24/7 is a challenge as a business owner. HelloSells acts as an extension of your in-house team, with live receptionists capturing and qualifying incoming calls and chats 24/7.
Their agents can also schedule appointments on your behalf for your follow-up. With HelloSells, you can customize your script so that every phone call and chat sounds exactly like your business.
HelloSells also includes a suite of sales tech integrations and tools to help run your business. You can view messages and your lead’s inquiries on the go with their mobile app and connect with prospects instantly with their video conferencing software.
23.DealFront: Turn Website Visitors Into Customers (Formerly Leadfeeder)
Cost: Contact for Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 stars
Ever feel like you're missing out on leads? Dealfront is a powerful lead capture and qualification tool that helps your team find, qualify, and contact prospects.
My favorite feature, however, is the powerful search features. You can see every step leads took through your sales cycle, including what content they read, videos they watch, etc. Leadfeeder's data base also enriches leads so you can easily find decision makers and deliver customized pitches.
Sales Engagement Tools
Sales Engagement Platforms (SEPs) help sellers effectively engage with prospects and customers. They go beyond automating your manual sales tasks, setting up sequences, etc. You can imagine a SEP to be a comprehensive platform with all the necessary tools important to close deals.
Lets take a look at two top sales engagement tools:
24. Salesloft: Better Sales Decsions, Faster
Cost: Contact for pricing
G2 Rating: 4.5/5 stars
A market leader in the SEP category, Salesloft is a comprehensive tool for enterprise companies. They have a suite of products for every stage of the buyer’s journey:
- Cadence + Automation for pipeline generation, lead nurturing, and customer renewals, crucial for effective sales performance management
- Dialer + Messenger for seamless sales calling and texting
- Deals for managing sales performance and forecasting with greater accuracy
- Conversations for call tracking, coaching, and evaluating the impact of sales conversations
- Analytics + Reporting for understanding your revenue team’s productivity
Besides being expensive and requiring paid add-ons for features like email automation, Salesloft does tend to include a pretty steep learning curve. There are free pre-recorded videos to get you started, but customized training and implementation for your team require additional purchases.
You can read our breakdown of Close vs. Salesloft if you’re considering buying one of these two platforms.
25. Outreach: Machine Learning and AI-Powered Sales Cycle
Pricing: Contact for pricing
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 stars
A self-proclaimed sales execution platform, Outreach can offer significant sales intelligence — specifically for a B2B sales setting. It applies machine learning on top of its B2B buyer-seller interaction data to provide revenue intelligence. Its email tools are also a hit with sales reps for automating and managing their sales outreach.
The tool is best suited for enterprise-level sales reporting and insights. Outreach is often compared with Close, but they have different use cases. Close offers better value-for-money pricing plans and is better suited for small and medium businesses.
If you have a large budget and want deep customer and sales insights, Outreach can be a powerful sales tools.
26. Beaconstac: Customized Buisness Cards To Improve Lead Generation
Cost: Starts at $6/month
G2 Rating: 4.8/5 stars
Beaconstac lets you create customized electronic business cards in just a few minutes. It's super easy to use and integrates with your sales stack, so you can automate the process of creating and sharing your digital business cards with contacts and leads.
Moving to digital business cards from paper business cards has many advantages, including not having to reprint the business card every time you update any specific details. You can seamlessly do so from the solution's dashboard and track the performance of your business cards using the inbuilt analytics. Plus, with its premade templates, you don't have to worry about hiring a designer to create a professional-looking business card.
The digital business card solution has over 4000 integrations and is GDPR and SOC Type 2 compliant, which means no more data leaks or unauthorized access. The highlight of this solution is that it lets you share business cards directly through Google and Apple Wallet and generate up to 2000 business cards in just two clicks.
Learn how outbound sales tools can streamline your prospecting efforts and boost conversions.
The Best Sales Tools Help You Close More Deals
For tech-enabled sales teams, digital sales tools can significantly increase productivity and the company’s profitability. The list of the above software is a great starting point for automating different steps in your sales operations and improving your team’s performance.
Ultimately, you need to build a custom toolbox around your sales process to make your team more efficient and enable them to close more deals.
Close lets you manage the entire outbound sales process. It’s an all-in-one CRM tool that saves time for sales representatives by automating data entry and tedious tasks — letting them focus more on selling. Sales leaders also love the actionable insights from our sales reports.
Sign up for a free 14-day Close trial to test these features and enhance the productivity of your team. You can also watch the Close demo to see the product in action.
