Best sales tools to take advantage of in 2024

It’s clear to see that automation truly changes the way businesses operate nowadays – and sales teams are no different. Let’s face it: the daily life of sales reps revolves around many different tasks, which is why performing all of them manually can take a lot of time and effort. Each and every day.

In such circumstances, staying on top of things is not the easiest task. That’s precisely why many sales teams rely on technology – and rightly so. In fact, high-performing sales teams use nearly three times the amount of dedicated sales tools than underperforming ones.

That’s hardly surprising, given that sales automation can help you reduce manual labor, give your sales team some more time on less manual and repetitive tasks, and save you money along the way. It’s actually predicted that automation can cut operating costs up to 90%.

If that sounds like a good enough reason to start automating your sales process – you might as well dig into all the right tools that can help you get there. Here’s what software you may find useful in the long run.

Best sales tools to leverage in 2020

When choosing the best sales tools for your business, it’s important to start with identifying specific tasks and parts of your sales process that could use some automation in the first place. The most common types of tools that can help you streamline the whole process are definitely:

• A CRM system,
• Communication tools,
• Business phone system,
• G-Suite or Outlook tools,
• Appointment scheduling software.

The only issue here is that there are plenty of such tools out there, and choosing only one might easily be challenging. How to ensure you’ll make the best choice, then?

Focus on your needs and requirements first, do your research, and test out at least a few alternatives before you settle for one. Heads up: it’s not going to be an easy choice, simply because many apps will seem very similar to you especially at first.

Luckily, we have a few best examples of dedicated sales software to get you started.

The best CRM system: Livespace

A powerful CRM is an absolute essential for every sales team out there. As a matter of fact, 50% of researched sales teams reported improved productivity with a CRM, while mobile access to a CRM is said to increase sales force productivity by an average of 14.6%. Therefore, if you choose your customer relationship management software wisely, it can really make a difference for your sales team.

Livespace is a perfect example – it’s a new generation CRM used across the sales teams in small and large companies around the world. It makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates on your prospects and customers, while giving you an immediate overview of your sales funnel. Not to mention that it automates repetitive tasks and advises on actions that should be taken in order to make the most of generated leads.

Best internal communication tool: Stackfield

In some cases, a CRM might not be enough to handle all your projects and collaborate with your team effectively. That’s precisely why project management tools exist – to help you communicate better.

Stackfield is an interesting choice if you value data privacy & security. It can help your sales team easily work on tasks, documents, and projects together, with the unique ability to encrypt data end-to-end as needed, so that everything is kept secure. Plus, you can use the team chat and comment sections to discuss every matter with all your team members, or even create meetings and appointments to invite your colleagues to them.

Best external communication tool: LiveAgent

Apart from internal communication, there’s another thing that matters: being in touch with your customers. LiveAgent can easily help you do it – it’s a help desk & live chat software in one, which allows you to handle all communication with your customers from a single dashboard. All emails, messages and calls are transformed into tickets for your convenience. This way, you have an overview of all inquiries and you can easily prioritize them to solve the most time-sensitive ones first.

Best business phone system: CloudTalk

Speaking of being in touch with your customers, you might also want to take your phone-based support to the next level. CloudTalk can truly help you do it – it’s designed to help your sales reps make more inbound and outbound calls and thus, have more opportunities (and time) to close deals. Plus, thanks to post-call automation, keeping customer data consistent and up-to-date between the systems is easier than ever.
 

Best G-Suite or Outlook tools: SCFG

Apart from calls, there’s also one important communication channel: emails. If you rather use Gmail instead of dedicated emailing software, you might want to boost your inbox with available plugins and tools. Take Shared Contacts for Gmail, as an example.

Basically, it lets you share your Gmail contacts with the whole sales team (and people outside of your organization, for that matter) while keeping your address books safe by delegating permissions. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with Google Apps and allows you to add & update shared contacts directly from Gmail – which, in turn, makes the whole process fast and simple. Not to mention that there’s even tablet and Outlook shared contact synchronization in place.

Best appointment scheduling software: Harmonizely

Meetings, product demos and calls can make a difference when it comes to closing deals. Scheduling them, though, can easily give your sales reps a headache. It’s mostly because synchronizing calendars and agreeing on a time that would suit both parties can take ages.

Fortunately, Harmonizely makes this process much faster – it allows your prospects and customers to easily schedule calls and meetings with the members of your sales team. Your sales reps can simply share a dedicated link and encourage the prospects to choose the best time for them. There are many calendar integrations available, not to mention that the time zone is automatically detected so the date and times are always expected the same.

Make the most out of your sales tools

Apart from testing out and choosing the best sales tools for your team, you should also think about integrating them at some point. In fact, you should check how easy it will be to integrate any prospective tool with your CRM or any other essential software you already have in place. Especially since 17% of salespeople name the lack of integration with other tools as the biggest challenge in their jobs.

Once you integrate the right tools, you can bring out the best out of your software, have all your data synchronized, unify some of your business processes and automate certain tasks. There you have it: your very own toolbox with the whole sales process up and running.

About the Author

Kinga Edwards, CEO w Brainy Bees – content team working for SaaS & IT companies all over the world. She thinks that insights are everywhere!