On average, sales reps spend less than 36% of their time selling and the rest on non-revenue-generating activities.
Outdated working methods and insufficient task automation no longer cut it in today’s technology-driven market.
Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, there are now plenty of technologies out there which can automate administrative tasks. With so many options on the market, you’re guaranteed to find tools that work for your team. On the flip side, the sheer number of choices can be overwhelming, and you may find it difficult to decide which sales automation tools you need.
Luckily, we’ve produced this guide where we walk you through it.
What is sales automation software?
Sales automation software is designed to automate every step of the sales process, from lead generation and nurturing to closing. These solutions automate a variety of tasks, including contact and customer management, sales forecasting, and much more.
By freeing up your sales team’s schedules from tedious, repetitive tasks, sales automation software allows your reps to concentrate on selling and achieve what machines can’t yet do: develop relationships with customers and earn their trust.
The secret is to pick the appropriate software for your company’s requirements. So begin by pinpointing the tasks that are slowing your sales team down, and holding them back. This will reveal which automation tools you need to look for in order to speed things up.
Ready to build the digital toolkit of your’s and your sales team’s dreams? Below we’ve categorized the most helpful sales automation software tools on the market, and compiled a list of the best options for each.
The software categories we recommend you to consider are:
- CRM
- Prospecting
- Data enrichment and verification
- Sales calling
- Lead nurturing
- Email marketing
- Social selling
- Project managing
1. CRM
Sales teams are constantly interacting with leads and customers in different stages of the sales funnel, and managing these relationships is the main priority of every salesperson. This is called customer relationship management (CRM).
A CRM tool is a type of sales automation software that enables salespeople to:
- safely store and access customer information
- analyze their interactions, and
- measure data throughout the customer lifecycle.
The more effectively your salespeople can manage their leads and customers, the more sales they can generate and the better the experience will be for your customers.
Because a sales CRM automates administrative and data-analysis tasks, using a CRM will shorten your sales cycle and free up time for your salespeople, giving them more time to connect with leads.
All of this is ultimately a big win for your business, so having a great CRM under your company’s belt is crucial. Here are six highly recommended CRM tools:
HubSpot
- Combined sales and marketing workflow
- Website usage analytics
- Live chat, phone, and online meeting support
While many CRM providers offer free plans, none are as functional as the HubSpot CRM free plan which includes:
- contact management
- call and email logs
- deal pipeline
- integrations with apps including Slack and Gmail
On paid plans, you gain additional features from HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales, and Service hubs.
The only downfall is, with the exception of Enterprise, all plans have a cap of 2,000 contacts for marketing purposes (e.g. bulk emails or advertisements), while Enterprise has a cap of 10,000 contacts. But on any plan you can store up to 1 million prospects.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive has a simple yet powerful design that prioritizes usability above all else. It has an intuitive interface which is easy to organize and customize. It also offers easy-to-access resources to assist with learning about the various capabilities.
Features include:
- Mobile app – allowing you to access your sales data on the go from any device
- Lead generation chatbot – so you can automatically interact with your web visitors 24/7
- Contact management – offering valuable insights about your contacts
- Task management – supporting your managers so they can see all sales-related tasks in one place
Additionally, Pipedrive has a robust marketplace where you can integrate other apps such as email, Teams, Zoom, etc.
To improve, Pipedrive could provide more clarity on how to setup workflow automations, and improve their chatbot response time as some users have found it can take over 24 hours to receive a response.
Salesforce
A global leader in CRM, Salesforce has advanced, customizable functionality, user-friendly design, and great reporting tools.
At the core is Salesforce Sales Cloud, which can be integrated with Marketing Cloud for email automation or with Einstein Analytics for AI-powered business intelligence, among others. Features include:
- pipeline management
- call and email logs
- customizable contact management
Enterprize plans include:
- advanced reporting and prediction
- app development
- sophisticated process automations
- external system integrations via web services APIs
- sandbox features
Salesforce has unbelievable power because of its rich feature set and functionality. If you have the time, expertise and resources to unlock those features it can be great. If you find yourself short on time and resources, you may want to consider other options.
FreshSales
Freshsales is perfect for small-medium businesses that prioritize ease of use over advanced customization.
Both on desktop and mobile, its interface is highly intuitive, including
- quick access to contact records and communications
- drag-and-drop Kanban-style boards for sales pipeline management
Given sufficient data, the intelligent assistant tool, Freddy AI, can recommend which sales to close and how.
Its main focus is on sales team productivity. Your email client can be integrated with this sales automation CRM software, allowing you to:
- log incoming and outgoing messages
- build email templates, and
- send mass emails to prospects.
A built-in recording function also automatically updates customer conversation records.
Keap
Keap is not your standard CRM application. With native payments, appointment scheduling, and email marketing capability built on top of a core contact and pipeline management system, its broad collection of features blurs the distinction between sales and marketing.
With the aid of sophisticated marketing campaigns, workflow automation, and payment integration, you can convert leads and save time. Even the most inexperienced CRM users will find Keap approachable thanks to its clear design and wide range of help options.
With Keap, there is no steep learning curve meaning your team can benefit from email campaigns and automated triggers from the get go.
Workbooks
With solutions for teams in customer service, sales, marketing, and operations, Workbooks is a great CRM for midsize businesses.
Its Shared Success programme – which provides customers with free consultation hours as well as yearly seminars to ensure the software continues to fit with a client’s goals – is its main point of differentiation.
Unlike rivals such as Salesforce and HubSpot, Workbooks lacks a developer community and third-party app store. For companies who require third party customizations, it might not be the ideal option. Its free edition also offers minimal functionality and is restricted to just two users, making it unsuitable for very large organizations.
Overall, Workbooks is an excellent CRM platform for providing small businesses with CRM software options.
Zoho
The Zoho CRM is fit for purpose for a range of organizations looking for a sales management solution. It effectively manages contacts and pipelines, tracks communications, automates workflows, and reports.
The added value comes from its ability to integrate with other apps from the Zoho sales, marketing, and project management suite, including Zoho Invoice and Zoho Campaigns, which can bring useful prospect data to your pipeline. Additionally, Zoho CRM can scan business cards and collect contact information from social networks, making it a potent lead creation system.
Additional benefits:
- Highly customizable
- Strong reporting and analytics capabilities
- AI feature available on enterprise plans which suggests which leads to focus on, which emails to write, and how to assign workflow.
2. Prospecting
Prospecting tools are a type of sales automation software designed to help salespeople identify potential customers and contact them. They do this by sourcing accurate, up-to-date, and compliant contact information that fits with your ideal customer profile.
The prospecting stage is renowned for being long and tedious, so the ability to automate this process is a breath of fresh air for salespeople.
Prospecting tools support both marketing and sales teams at scale, giving them access to large databases of data and ultimately simplifying all tasks related to lead qualification.
For a sure-fire way of freeing up your sales team’s time and shortening your sales cycle, check out these five effective sales prospecting tools:
ZoomInfo
With ZoomInfo, you can identify and connect with your ideal customers, and utilize automation, integrations, and technology to strengthen each go-to-market phase. These features are designed to help you meet your lead generation, sales, and revenue targets.
The goal of ZoomInfo is to give every business a comprehensive picture of their ideal client, enabling them to execute their marketing and sales strategy more effectively and exceed their sales targets.
Lusha
Lusha is designed to help users enrich their B2B profiles. The Lusha Google Chrome extension enhances business profiles in order to verify and establish trust, however, only LinkedIn and Salesforce are supported by the Lusha plugin at this time.
The overarching purpose of Lusha is to source B2B data you can trust. Great businesses thrive when built on the foundation of reliable and accessible data – and Lusha provides a solution that empowers organizations to do just that.
AeroLeads
With AeroLeads, you can source both the email addresses of decision-makers as well as the phone numbers of companies. According to their website, AeroLeads promises to be the best software for generating business-to-business leads online.
The founding principles of AeroLeads are to innovate by embracing technological advancements and incorporating them into the prospect generation process, as well as to advise clients on how prospect generation can simplify the sales process through automation.
RocketReach
You can connect with almost any professional on RocketReach by utilizing the largest and most precise database of emails and phone numbers to get in touch with the key decision makers.
The goal of RocketReach is to promote a climate of high accountability and little oversight, where data and knowledge inform strategy. They have a strong commitment to user demands, data, science, and elegant solutions.
SalesLoft
B2B sales teams can close more deals with the aid of SalesLoft. It links with the best CRMs available today, transforming your data into simple, achievable multi-channel processes that help your sellers acquire a deal quicker.
The main goal of SalesLoft is to assist brands in establishing genuine and lasting connections with their consumers in order to give value and foster trust. You can connect with customers on SalesLoft, on their terms.
3. Data enrichment and verification
A sales automation software you might not have considered until now falls in the category of data enrichment. When your company is sat on a database full of first party data, data enrichment tools allow you to gain deeper insights into their records.
This is incredibly useful for giving your team deeper insight into their prospects, making the qualifying process that much easier. If prospects don’t immediately fit into your ideal customer profile (ICP), they should be removed from the funnel so your reps can prioritize higher quality leads.
Your marketing teams will also benefit from having access to richer prospect data; the deeper their understanding of your target customers, the more tailored their outputs will be.
Choose one of these seven tools to fill in the blanks so your sales team can qualify quicker, and your marketing team can provide more relevant messages to convert your leads and increase sales:
SEON
Thanks to four data enrichment tools that you can set in accordance with your demands, SEON provides reliable fraud protection.
Additional features:
- reverse phone lookup
- reverse email lookup
- reverse social media lookup
- IP address data enrichment
- BIN number-based method for learning more about credit cards
SEON are also transparent with their pricing, which is rare for data enrichment and fraud prevention tools.
Experian
One of the most well-known credit scoring businesses in the UK, Experian also provides global data enrichment services with a focus on completing customer records. If you need to fulfill KYC verification and AML (anti-money laundering) regulations, this may be helpful.
Experian is a household name in the credit scoring world, so you can trust their data intelligence. On the downside, as they offer numerous services and tools, it can be difficult to understand exactly which one you need for your data enrichment requirements.
Clearbit
The marketing data platform used by Intercom, Asana, and Hubspot, Clearbit’s applications include:
- B2B audience targeting
- business process optimization
- customer journey personalization
What makes Clearbit different? Data enrichment is performed 100% in-house and not outsourced to other data providers. Clearbit works by scanning 250+ sources including websites, public records, legal filings, and social media networks. Each data source is scored and ranked according to trust level.
The only drawback is the price, though not visible without speaking to the sales team, the vendor is said to be expensive, according to reviews.
Crunchbase Enterprise
Crunchbase is another well-known brand that provides data enrichment, and the world’s most popular database for startups, funding rounds, and investors also doubles as prospecting software to help you find and close the right deals.
With Crunchbase Enterprise, you can use a straightforward API connection or a bulk CSV export to access all of a company’s business data directly in your CRM.
Unfortunately, it’s been reported that Crunchbase can occasionally present outdated information.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a B2B intelligence and contact data enrichment solution that evolved from a directory. The unique selling point with this software is that ZoomInfo (formerly DiscoveryOrg, which it purchased in 2019) can be used for recruiting as well as sales and marketing.
The business is today utilized by some of the greatest corporations, like Google, Amazon, and, yes, Zoom video, which otherwise has no connection to ZoomInfo.
Two problems with ZoomInfo are:
- Overwhelming: ZoomInfo offers a lot, so it can be daunting to choose between the different tools and packages.
- Delayed updates: due to the extensive size of its databases, which are sometimes checked manually, some users report a delay in how often they are updated.
BuiltWith
Thanks to this database and online service, you can see what more than 673 million websites were made with, which is perfect for those more interested in finding information about technology, rather than people and businesses.
CMS, CDN, software, and competitor comparison are all covered. Additionally, you receive use notifications, predictive leads, and contact names, emails, and titles (within GDPR constraints).
BuiltWith is also a go-to resource for technology data and market research. Through a plug-in extension, API calls, and a wide range of third-party integrations, all of this data is accessible.
Unfortunately, this in-depth offering comes at a cost. There’s a free version for individual lookups with limited functionality, but for anything more advanced you’ll need to allocate a serious budget.
4. Sales calling
Your team’s workload can become overwhelming when they are trying to call more than 50 prospects a day, whilst also:
- researching and qualifying new prospects
- following up with prospects already in the funnel
- noting down every conversation, and
- logging all of this information in the CRM.
Constantly toggling between 10 different tabs makes it difficult to properly research and qualify prospects, allowing for poor-quality leads to slip through the funnel. Calling up these leads is an inefficient use of your team’s time, the prospect’s time, and can lead to a number of consequences:
- Your company’s reputation will suffer due to calling up leads who don’t want what you’re offering
- Your salespeople’s confidence will take a hit from constant rejections, which can lead to lowered performance
- Your bottom line will dip due to wasting time on bad leads
But there is a solution: why not just technologize your cold calling process with productivity tools?
With the time saved, your salespeople can focus on what they do best: persuade more prospects to schedule appointments with you.
Read our list of best cold calling sales automation software:
HubSpot Sales Hub
One of the best accessible cold calling software options is HubSpot Sales Hub, which has one of the most comprehensive call tracking features. With a comprehensive feature set and an easy-to-use interface, the software can be tailored to meet the demands of almost any company, individual rep, or manager.
Key features and benefits:
- CRM data-driven call prioritization
- Direct from desktop dialing
- Conversational intelligence capabilities
- Automatic CRM call logging
Connect and Sell
ConnectAndSell is a sales and conversation acceleration platform. It supportys businesses with getting prospects on the phone, allowing sales teams to engage, qualify and close deals easily.
By providing routine lists of prospects, it streamlines operations and eliminates guesswork. It offers features including clean prospect listing, agent-assisted dialing, benchmarking, analytics, and expert coaching.
Features include:
– mobile app
– quick lists
– coaching
Additionally, it automatically prioritizes leads and contacts while customizing and automating voicemail, email, and phone follow-up with templates.ConnectAndSell integrates with Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho CRM, Oracle CRM On Demand, HubSpot and Marketo.
AirCall
One of the finest cloud call center options for sales and support teams is Aircall. This software is ideal for team leaders looking to increase each rep’s performance and streamline cold calls for your business.
Key features and benefits:
- Automatic call data entry
- Automatically triggered post-call workflows
- First-rate call analytics
Toky
Another cloud-based sales calling solution, Toky, provides a comprehensive set of tools, including cross-system monitoring for data-driven decision-making, rapid CRM call tracking, and several integrations.
Key features and benefits:
- Extensive integrations
- Accessibility from anywhere
- Call logging
RingCentral
A dedicated outbound sales and cold calling resource, RingCentral offers a host of features that strike a perfect balance between accessibility and powerful functionality, including:
- drag-and-drop scripting builder
- versatile dialer system
- real-time insights
- several integrations – including HubSpot and Salesforce
Klenty
For both sales reps and sales managers, Klenty provides a dynamic calling solution that streamlines and makes cold calling simple. To reduce waiting times between calls, the software offers one-click call-placing.
Key features and benefits:
- One-click dialing
- Coachable call recording
- Actionable call reports
Rafiki
With sophistication without compromising usability, Rafiki offers a powerful conversational intelligence platform. The programme records and transcripts sales calls, uses artificial intelligence to analyze the data it gathers, finds subject trends, records KPIs, and subsequently delivers meaningful information.
Key features and benefits:
- Customer insight
- Opportunity identification
- Organizational intelligence
Gong
According to Gong, businesses that leverage this software see an estimated 27% increase in revenue per rep, a 20% increase in additional time saved, and a 53% decrease in onboarding time.
Although the platform is a little more specialized than the majority of the products featured here, it’s difficult to find a better conversational intelligence platform to support your overall cold calling efforts than Gong.
Key features and benefits:
- Actionable next steps
- Top-performer playbook sharing
- Potential “close lost” deal identification
5. Lead nurturing
Professionals working in B2B sales often find themselves asking the same question:
“How is it that so many leads seem to be slipping through my fingers?”
The answer lies in a deeper understanding of B2B buying habits.
Today’s technology-connected consumers demand a cross-channel experience. They are attracted to personalized marketing, and will only stick around if the experience is seamless. The majority of B2B prospects are knowledgeable, tech-savvy people who are looking for solutions to their problems in numerous locations online.
Lead nurturing was born from these expectations; buyers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be heard. In fact, businesses that effectively nurture their leads enjoy 50% more sales.
Lead nurturing platforms allow you to build trust and brand loyalty in two ways:Create relationships with potential customers and prospects
- Maintain these connections as they move through the funnel
A lead nurturing program empowers your business to build lasting relationships, increase click-through rates and ultimately boost sales. You can also use the data you collect from this software to analyze customer behavior and optimize future campaigns.
Here are six examples of excellent lead nurturing sales automation software solutions:
HubSpot
This lead nurturing marketing software by HubSpot lets you create targeted outreach, offers, and marketing emails based on the actions of your leads. Furthermore, your sales people can plan personalized emails to send at specific times to reach prospects.
This tool is renowned for its robust list generation and management and campaign management features, and can be integrated with your HubSpot CRM.
On the downside, its customer support is weak and there’s not a lot of flexibility when it comes to customizing and managing your themes for emails and landing pages.
Trendemon
With the help of Trendemon’s website journey orchestration, every visitor and target account receives automatic customized content at the right time to move them closer to your company’s goals. Hyper-targeted calls-to-action based on marketing automation lists, engagement levels, and campaigns allow users to enhance conversion rates.
Linking revenue attribution, web personalization and journey mapping, Trendemon enables you to increase your website’s influence on your sales pipeline. It’s the only attribution-powered personalization platform that uses real-time personalization to drive growth and clearly demonstrates the effect of marketing on sales.
To sing this tool’s praises even further, it comes equipped with amazing training and customer service, and it makes web customization and marketing personalization easy and accessible to any team member.
Unfortunately, its reports could be more intuitive, and dashboards and analytics could be more customizable.
SharpSpring
This platform focuses on revenue generating marketing, it helps small businesses increase lead generation, sales conversion rates, and return on marketing investments. SharpSpring features an open architecture and free customer support. At each stage of the sales process, it nurtures your leads by sending precisely timed emails, making sure that your brand is getting noticed.
Highly praised features include VisitorID and the marketing automation builder. It sends customized emails in response to lead behavior, and its marketing automation’s visual builder streamlines tasks making life easier for your team.
Unfortunately, many smaller businesses may find this software too pricey. With so many features, it can also be hard to navigate, and the many metrics may confuse some users.
Keap
Keap is a lead nurturing solution that helps you from start to finish of the customer journey. As soon as leads complete a contact form, the platform divides them into several categories and sends them precisely timed communications based on their actions. Keap offers:
– Lead capturing
– Nurturing
– Pipeline management
– Invoicing
– Payment processes
A few minor issues include: a steep learning curve for many of its features, emails can reportedly end up in the spam folder, and reportedly, sometimes it fails to save progress if the software freezes or logs out.
Exceed.ai
This conversational marketing platform automates the lead qualification, scoring, and nurturing processes for sales and marketing teams by utilizing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and conversational technologies. Exceed.ai offers tailored, two-way conversations that are human-like across email, internet chat, and SMS, in real-time. The AI assistant quickly loops in sales when a qualified lead is prepared to speak with a sales rep and automatically sets up an appointment in their calendar.
Strong customer service is a plus, and you can create an unlimited number of sequences that span a wide range of use cases. However, the software occasionally lacks flexibility due to various built-in restrictions and its CRM integration is a little awkward.
6. Email Marketing
Whilst marketing trends change and evolve over time, one channel that has remained consistent is email marketing. It also happens to be the top channel for content marketing for 87% of B2B marketers. With that said, many marketers and salespeople face email marketing-related challenges. Namely, how long it takes to craft a great email.
With email marketing tools, this process can be simplified and automated, so that it takes less time to produce stunning emails.
Browse our top 5 list of email marketing sales automation software:
Mailchimp
Any business looking for an easy way to send emails should use Mailchimp as their go-to tool. When you upgrade to the first paid plan, you gain access to more sophisticated features like A/B testing and multi-step journeys. It also has an easy-to-use email editor. Your salespeople will appreciate the straightforward reporting that enables them to identify what is and isn’t working. Business owners can immediately determine whether readers are responding to their outputs by looking at open rates and click-throughs.
On the downside, this tool is pricey for larger contact lists of more than 15k subscribers, it comes with very limited phone support and truthfully, it’s not designed for advanced marketing teams.
ActiveCampaign
The best email marketing software for automation is ActiveCampaign, which offers hundreds of pre-built automations to assist you in customizing campaigns for each subscriber. As you set up the platform, there are help instructions available throughout, and ActiveCampaign offers prompt, friendly customer service.
Reportedly there is a challenging learning curve with this tool, and the Lite plan is very limited (and includes ActiveCampaign branding). Be prepared for plans quickly jumping in price with the number of contacts.
MailerLite
Because of its drag-and-drop interface, MailerLite is the simplest email marketing tool to use and lets you easily create your desired look. The company’s purpose is centered on simplicity, hence the programme has a streamlined and clean appearance.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t include CRM functionalities, but does allow for CRM integration. You will also need to provide a lot of company information to get an account set up.
Hubspot
Because it includes excellent tools and reporting for all of your marketing efforts across numerous channels (website, social, email marketing, and more), Hubspot is the greatest all-in-one marketing suite. With Hubspot’s CRM, you can keep track of every contact information and attract customers through lead forms, live chat, and online advertisements.
Although highly comprehensive, this tool comes with some downsides: it doesn’t offer a free-forever or a low-cost plan. It’s not recommended for businesses strictly looking for email marketing tools, and it’s very difficult to integrate a non-HubSpot CRM.
Moosend
The most cost-effective choice is Moosend, not only because its premium plans are cheaper than most on the market, but also because you can opt to pay either by the number of subscribers or the amount of emails sent, whichever is more affordable for you. Additionally, its simple to use and easy to send your audience engaging emails at the appropriate times.
Sadly, you can’t send emails from a Gmail or Hotmail address with Moosend, and its user interface is less-sophisticated than other options. It also offers limited integrations.
Drip
Because of its comprehensive workflows and cutting-edge list segmentation, Drip is the ideal email marketing tool for e-commerce enterprises. Subscribers always receive timely follow-ups based on their interactions with your emails and tailored emails that are triggered by their purchase behaviors on your website.
Like Moosend, it also lacks a few key integrations. Additionally, it has no drag-and-drop functionality for designing templates, and customer support is only available weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST.
7. Social selling
Using social networking services to find prospects, develop relationships, and close more sales is known as social selling.
Social selling places a greater emphasis on fostering one-on-one connections with business leaders and prospects than social media marketing, which allows organizations to target specific populations (think recent home buyers looking for furniture and homeware).
Basically, it means “being genuinely helpful online and possibly selling at some point.” Salespeople that use social selling are taking the long view rather than focusing on short-term gains.
Since salespeople already utilize so many channels, social selling may seem unnecessary, but according to LinkedIn, salespeople who use social selling are 51% more likely to fulfill their quota.
If you’re looking to dip your toes into this strategy, see our top five social selling sales automation software tools below:
SEMrush
The main selling point of SEMrush is that it is a comprehensive SEO software suite.
You can customize your posts using the link shortener, picture editor, and UTM builder before scheduling them. The social media tracker then enables you to monitor engagement across platforms, enabling you to compile report statistics into a single dashboard. The main advantage, however, is that SEMrush offers a practical platform that unifies everything in one location and allows you to combine your social media management with your whole SEO and marketing strategy.
Disadvantages:
- Doesn’t have all the tools some rivals possess
Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers a centralized platform for managing social media accounts on several channels. There is a search and filtering tool for existing social media, allowing users to look for brand mentions, insights, and demographic data. Additionally, there is an analytics function that lets you monitor and assess performance in relation to KPIs. Because reports may be customized, you can make sure you only display and read the data you need to focus on.
A number of integrations are also available, such as Asana, Slack, Mailchimp, Trello, and Zendesk, which is incredibly useful for collaborative teams.
Disadvantages:
- Mainly focused on Twitter
Sprout Social
The main benefit of Sprout Social is that it offers a single, easy-to-use platform for managing and scheduling posts across all of your social network profiles. Additionally, it serves as a powerful tool for data analysis. To pinpoint precisely which content is engaging particular followers, you can sort by a variety of demographic and geographic factors. Sprout can manage many accounts and track keywords across all social media channels.
Disadvantages:
- Not as high-profile as some rivals
Buffer
Buffer is another all-arounder that allows you to post to your platform and then easily review the outcomes. It’s flexible yet easy to use. Its real-time analytics make it simple to determine the impact of your content right away. The Buffer app also provides seamless Google Analytics connection for tracking the success of your marketing activities.
Disadvantages
- Described as a very ‘general’ option
HubSpot
Hubspot Social Media Software is a suite of social media management tools available under the Marketing Hub. There are various management features available, such as for publishing and sharing content, monitoring mentions, and reporting to let you know not just levels of engagement but also how these translate into actual business metrics.
Disadvantages:
- May offer too many options for some users
8. Project managing
Due to the rise in popularity of remote and hybrid workplace models and geographically scattered teams, it’s crucial now more than ever to choose the appropriate project management software to facilitate team interactions and collaboration.
If you’re looking to start using a project management tool or upgrade your existing one, and want a solution that can centralize everything (or almost everything), you are in the right place. Below we highlight some of the best project management tools and their features.
Asana
Asana is a project management solution which offers a ton of handy features to boost productivity. To ensure that you never miss a deadline, you can make to-do lists, set reminders, add due dates, tag colleagues, and insert instructions and comments to projects. You can also track everything you and your team work on to make sure the project is progressing smoothly and on schedule. You can access a list of teams and individuals to see who is working on specific projects, and there is also a search feature to make it simple to locate the progress of specific tasks.
Trello
Recently, Trello has emerged as one of the most popular project management tools. It lets you organize all of your work-based and personal projects on any device. It works by letting you set up ‘boards’ to organize everything you’re working on, delegate tasks among colleagues, get customized workflows, add to-do lists within task cards, attach files and comment on items.
Zoho Projects
Users of Zoho Projects can organize, plan, and work together on projects while using Gantt charts to show progress and schedules in extensive detail. Additionally, there are capabilities for managing documents, tracking time, and identifying and correcting errors. There are several integrations available, among which are Slack, Google, Dropbox, and the many other Zoho suites.
LiquidPlanner
Liquid Planner offers a comprehensive feature set for enterprise-grade project management. Features include the ‘Smart Schedule’ that helps with prioritizing tasks, allocating resources, and estimating the number of hours required for completion, which then allows the project to be tracked based on the number of hours the assigned team members devote to it.
In contrast, the resource management function may track who is available to be assigned to the next project and display the hours contributed by each employee. All of this data feeds into easy-to-read dashboards that can be integrated into financial metrics and trends.
Basecamp
Basecamp has been around for more than 10 years, and has developed a reputation that makes it a highly credible tool for companies working on large projects. The most recent iteration of the app lets you send direct messages, schedule notifications so that you only see them during working hours, and praise colleagues by pressing the applause button.
Furthermore, you can easily save and track client feedback and approvals, and when you want to collaborate with others, you can create group chats.
Podio
Podio was created for professionals who are managing several projects at once and always coming up with fresh ideas. This tool lets you create tasks and customize them based on your workflow, taking into account deadlines and responsibilities. Additionally, there’s an integrated instant messaging feature so you can communicate with colleagues, share ideas, and monitor progress on assigned tasks. There’s also a handy feature for gaining immediate feedback without having to send numerous emails.
All of the above-mentioned sales automation software is game-changing for increasing team productivity, but only if you deploy them correctly.
Before throwing a bundle of tools at your sales team and expecting instant improvements, you must first take a step back and analyze your current sales process. At Stack, we can help you do just that, and in our experience, we have learned that the following activities can streamline your sales process by up to 50% →
- Disqualifying your prospects earlier
- Reducing C-suites presence in the sales cycle
- Gating each sales activity
- Measuring more granularly in each sales stage
- Equipping sales teams with more key collateral
- Introducing quick wins such as forward calendaring in each call
We built Stack with these activities in mind so that any sales team can implement them without having to invest in expensive sales consultations from professionals like us. We wanted to level the playing field and give any business, no matter what size, a roadmap to a shorter, simpler, and standardized sales cycle for their whole team.
