People often say software is eating the world! Well, it’s true in many cases from managing small household chores to listening to on-demand music on our smart seekers at home, we are used to using digital tools and software products in our daily lives. B2B sales are a bit difficult. Unlike B2C sales, B2B sales include longer sales cycles and the usage of technology to drive traction.
From growing revenue for companies to managing remote staff, software plays an important role for organizations across the globe. Here is a list of the best sales tools that your B2B Sales and marketing teams would need to optimize their conversion and generate more revenue.
1. CRM Tool
The first thing a salesperson learns in the process of selling is that managing relationships and taking follow-ups matters the most for any sales cycle. This is not limited to any product or niche, this pattern is repeated in every business where prospects are converted to paying customers.
There are several famous and effective CRM (customer relationship management) software available in the market including HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and more. All these tools are designed to address one or other needs of the business and sales team – but at the same time, they solve the core problem of the sales team.
2. Marketing Automation Platform
Marketing automation tools are generally very effective if you are working with a wide range of audiences across the globe. These tools will help you manage multiple things under one roof. From social media marketing, running paid ads on social media platforms, search engine marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), managing various engagement accounts, managing reviews, and running outreach campaigns to support the sales reps.
Marketing automation software is generally a cloud-based tool that offers various functionalities in one go. Thus, they could cost more for SMEs (small and medium enterprises). But, these tools are an effective way to manage your marketing activities, which are the backbone of sales.
3. Sales Engagement Tools for Sales Team
Sales outreach and sales engagement tools are the tools that help brands reach their prospects across the desired channel. Some sales engagement tools are designed in a way that they provide multi-channel outreach support, where sales representatives can use only one tool to reach their clients via email, text messages, calls, and social media platforms.
Depending on the niche and products a business has, it can select the right tool for them. Tools like Lemlist, SendBuzz, Saleshandy, and Klenty are some of the best sales outreach tools available in the market. You can also use manual outreach techniques. But, for scaling, these tools are good to have.
4. Customer support tools
Sales and support go hand in hand. Some products would take weeks or months depending on how complex they are to use at the technical level. So, if you are dealing with such products, you need to make sure that your customers get technical support and product implementation support as quickly as possible.
Advanced tools like Intercom, Freshworks, and others provide ticketing and chat support tools that you can integrate into your websites and applications. So, using these tools will save a lot of time and give customers a sense of satisfaction that their complaints are being addressed.
5. Online Reputation Management Tools
ORM (online reputation management) matters the most. Many times, the reviews and feedback of a product via peers would affect the decision-making process of other prospects as well. A review and feedback management tool with the sales team would help them build relationships and keep the positive word about the product active in the market.
6. B2B Sales Prospecting Tools To Qualify Leads
Lead prospecting tools are needed to keep the sales pipelines filled with new leads. For this, sales reps generally rely on third-party tools to get bulk data of prospects or do manual prospecting from their accounts. There are various social media prospecting tools and CRM integration prospecting tools available in the market that make this work easy.
There are various Chrome-based extensions available in the market that will help you build a list of contacts from anywhere. You can sign up for these CRM integration tools to sync your data quickly and easily.
7. Sales Performance & Sales Intelligence Tools
Analytics tools help you check where your queries are running in the sales pipeline. Measuring the lead’s conversion rates to checking where they drop off the sales pipeline will help the sales leaders make decisions.
Many enterprise-grade CRMs offer this feature built into their tools, but some stand-alone tools are also available in the market that help you track analytics for the tool.
8. Sales Management Software
Calling is a crucial part of the sales process. From cold calling to measuring the calling performance of your entire sales team, calling software comes in handy. Tools like CallHippo and other call-center management tools will help you get this done.
Calling software generally has the option to procure new numbers as well. So, a team can use it for end-to-end processes.
9. Grammar-checking software
Grammar-checking tools are very effective when you write your emails manually and personalize them to an extent. With such software tools, you will be able to remove any silly mistakes from your emails and make them as professional as they can get.
Not only that, but the grammar-checking tool also helps you with checking plagiarism on the web pages, landing pages, or emails you are sending to your prospects.
10. AI Tools To Improve Writing
AI writers, ChatGPT, and content spinners are at the top of the discussion for people working in the sales and marketing industry. If you can successfully feed data about who is your prospect and what is their segmentation, you will get good copy text to write in your emails and have a word on a phone call.
Many sales engagement tools have integrations with AI writing tools in their text editor. You can get access to API from one of such tools and can make your outreach scalable.
11. Workflow automation tools
We talked about integrating and automating a lot of sales processes. There would be a lot of places where manual data entry would be needed and the sales team would end up creating a bottleneck.
In those conditions, tools like Pabbly, and Zapier are leaders in the space where teams can automate their entire workflow to remove manual bottlenecks from the system. When a huge B2B sales team is working on winning sales, things might become complicated and waiting in queues.
12. Cloud Storage Software
Cloud storage software is a good feature for scaling teams. This way, your sales reps will be able to use this centralized space to manage their professional documents, use it to store the updates, and marketing collaterals, and manage legal documents.
Majority of the business suites like Zoho and Google Business Suite give storage space, but you can also use Box, Dropbox, and other third-party applications.
13. Kiosk Software
Various Kiosk software is available in the market to manage the digital devices you provide to your sales team. There are Android, iOS, and Windows Kiosks available in the market that will help you lock down the devices your team uses.
By using Kiosk mode, you can manage your devices and applications that are accessible to the team.
14. Calendar Booking Tools
If you are using a round-robin solution for your B2B sales team, then a calendar booking application is a must-have tool. You can simply load the iframe on your website’s contact page and users will be able to directly book the meeting slots with your team on the go.
Sales tools like KalenderPro, Cal(dot)com, and Calandy are famous for this solution. These tools also offer direct integration with CRM solutions.
15. Social Media Automation Tools
While bigger teams can buy marketing automation tools to get all things done under one tool, social media marketing tools will help organizations and individual sales team members run their separate outreach campaigns. The B2B sales team can take advantage of automation tools for this.
This also includes scheduling posts on social media, using accounts to create engagement, and running paid social media campaigns. Tools like Sproutsocial, Buffer, and Zoho Social provide these types of services.
16. SEO Tools
SEO (search engine optimization) is the key process to make sure your website ranks higher in Google search and other search engine platforms. The marketing team generally manages this activity. But, with the involvement of the sales manager, marketing teams will be able to check which keywords are converting and the intent of the traffic coming on the platform.
17. Productivity Tools
Getting a lot of technology products for your B2B sales team might end up becoming overwhelming sometimes. A productivity tool and project management tool can come in handy for your team’s productivity. Simple tools like Trello, Jira, ClickUp, and Asana would help you work with the sales team and collaborate with the product team in one go.
So, these are the top 17 software tools where a B2B sales team needs to make investments to save their time, money, and energy to generate more ROI. If you think that we missed a software or two, do reach out to us so that our team can mention them in this blog.
Happy revenue generation to you!