Empower Your B2B Sales Team: 18 Essential Tools 2024

In the dynamic world of B2B sales, having a team with the right tools is crucial for business success. Whether it’s nurturing leads, closing deals, or analyzing performance, having the right technology can make all the difference. In this blog, we’ll explore 18 essential B2B sales tools categorized into six key areas, each designed to streamline and optimize various aspects of the sales process and business.

These three types of sales tools form the foundation of a strong sales infrastructure, enabling businesses to effectively manage customer relationships, streamline sales processes, and make informed decisions to drive revenue growth. Combining these tools with a well-defined sales strategy and skilled sales team can lead to improved performance and sustainable business success.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools:
   • CRM tools are the backbone of any sales operation, allowing businesses to manage interactions with current and potential customers. They centralize customer data, track interactions, and facilitate communication between sales teams and prospects.
   • Key features often include contact management, lead tracking, pipeline management, task automation, and reporting/analytics.
   • Examples include Salesforce, Close CRM, Zoho CRM, and Pipedrive.
2. Sales Engagement Platforms:
   • Sales engagement platforms focus on streamlining and optimizing the sales process by providing tools for outreach, communication, and engagement with prospects and customers.
   • These platforms often include features such as email tracking, sequence automation, call logging, and analytics to help sales teams manage their workflows efficiently.
   • Examples include Outreach, SalesLoft, and Groove.
3. Sales Intelligence and Analytics Tools:
   • Sales intelligence and analytics tools provide insights into sales performance, customer behavior, and market trends, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies.
   • These tools may analyze sales data, customer interactions, and market trends to identify opportunities, track KPIs, and forecast sales outcomes.
   • Examples include Gong, Chorus.ai, InsightSquared, and similar platforms leveraging AI and analytics to improve sales effectiveness.

If you don’t have time to read the whole

Follow : These 8 Steps to Choose the Right Sales Tools for Your Team

Selecting the right sales tools can be a hard task, balancing team performance, budget constraints, and usability. To guide you through this process, we’ve prepare a concise checklist to ensure you cover all the essential criteria when evaluating sales tools. By following these steps, you can make informed decisions that align with your team’s needs and objectives.

1. Assess Your Needs:
   • Identify the specific challenges and gaps in your sales process that tools can address. Consider factors such as lead management, communication, analytics, and collaboration.
2. Define Goals:
   • Clearly outline your objectives and define what success looks like with the implementation of new sales tools. Determine key metrics you want to improve, such as conversion rates, sales velocity, or customer retention.
3. Consider Integrations:
   • Choose tools that seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack. Look for native integrations with commonly used platforms like CRM systems, email clients, and marketing automation tools to streamline workflows and data management.
4. Find a User-Friendly Interface:
   • Prioritize tools with an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate and requires minimal training. A user-friendly design ensures higher adoption rates among your sales team, leading to faster implementation and improved productivity.
5. Determine Price-to-Quality Ratio:
   • Establish a rough budget for each tool and evaluate whether it offers value for money. Consider not only the upfront cost but also factors such as scalability, customer support, and ongoing maintenance fees.
6. Think About Scalability:
   • Select tools that can scale alongside your business growth. Consider your future needs and ensure that the chosen tools can accommodate an increasing volume of users, data, and transactions without compromising performance.
7. Use the Trial Period:
   • Take advantage of trial periods offered by sales tool providers to assess their compatibility with your team’s requirements. Test the functionality, usability, and performance of the tools in real-world scenarios before making a commitment.
8. Seek Feedback:
   • Involve your sales team in the decision-making process and gather their feedback on the shortlisted tools. Consider their insights, preferences, and experiences to ensure that the selected tools meet their needs and enhance their productivity.

Close CRM: Best For Growing Small Business and Startup Teams

Top CRM Tools for Small Businesses to Keep on Your Radar – Close CRM G2 Review: 4.7 out of 5

Price: Startup — $49, Professional — $299, Enterprise — $699 (per month, billed annually)

Looking for the ultimate sales tool to turn more leads into revenue? Close CRM might just be your best option. (Okay, maybe we’re a bit biased!)

Close is a communication-focused CRM—it’s a fast, simple platform that gives you all the tools you need (and none of the fluff you don’t). Manage your sales pipeline, make faster calls with a Power Dialer, create custom Workflows, and even use AI to transcribe and summarize customer interactions.

Thanks to Custom Activities, Custom Fields, and Custom Objects, you can truly make this CRM your own. Plus, Close integrates with all your favorite tools, including Zoom, Gmail, ChatGPT, Hubspot, and more.

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Monday Sales CRM: For Teams that Like Visual Tools

Top CRM Tools for Small Businesses to Keep on Your Radar – Monday Sales CRM G2 Review: 4.6 out of 5

Price: (3 seats) Basic — $12, Standard — $17, Pro — $28, Enterprise — Contact us form (per month, billed annually)

Let’s get one thing clear—Monday is not inherently a CRM. Their CRM is an extension of the project management capabilities of the tool. The CRM part is user-friendly and offers a visually intuitive interface, which may clarify your sales processes.

Its key functionalities come down to pipeline management, contact and deal tracking, email integration, and automation tools. Also, the tool has an AI component in Beta. It can help you turn ideas or meetings into actionable tasks or create content for your sales emails.

Bigin by Zoho CRM: For Your First Step Up From a Spreadsheet

Top CRM Tools for Small Businesses to Keep on Your Radar – Bigin by Zoho CRM G2 Review: 4.5 out of 5

Pricing: (one seat) Free Edition — $0, Express — $7, Premier Edition — $12

Bigin, a product by Zoho CRM, is designed mostly for smaller businesses and sales teams that want a straightforward CRM. As the name suggests, it’s very “beginner-friendly,” meaning that it’s more of an alternative to a spreadsheet CRM than to more advanced tools.

Bigin helps qualify leads, manage sales deals and sales operations, along with dealing with support tickets and customer onboarding. It’s a cost-effective CRM, offering a price of $7/user/month (billed annually).

Sales Automation Tools: Get More Done, Faster

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 sucker—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.

Top Automation Tools You Should Look Into

Well, if you could cut time spent on tedious tasks by three hours a week, it means 156 hours saved annually. No-brainer, right? Let’s look at three top tools.

Zapier: Sales and Business Automation on Steroids

Top Automation Tools You Should Look Into – Zapier G2 Review: 4.5 out of 5

Pricing: Free, Starter — $19.99, Professional — $49, Team — $69 (per month, billed annually)

Zapier is the most popular powerhouse for anything related to automation. It connects with over 3,000 apps, including Close CRM. What we love about Zapier is that it’s intuitive, even for non-technical sales leaders. Struggling with setting up a zap? We bet there are a couple of good tutorials online that will help.

You can use Zapier to automate lead assignments to ensure your team gets leads based on specific factors. Or you can use it to add contact information to your CRM from the lead form that’s implemented on your website. There are hundreds of ways, really, and if you want some inspiration, our friends at Zapier have a nice sales automation guide.

HubSpot: All-in-One Sales + Marketing Automation Tool

Top Automation Tools You Should Look Into – HubSpot G2 Review: 4.4 out of 5

Price: Free, Professional — $441, Enterprise — $1,470 (per month, billed annually)

HubSpot is an all-in-one, offering CRM, marketing automation, and sales engagement under one roof. You can set up automation there to cut low-impact tasks and free up your team’s time to do more meetings and outreach.

The tool has a two-way integration with Close to pass data back and forth automatically without Zaps or manual management. For example, sync contacts or leads between tools to bring new leads from HubSpot’s marketing tools into Close.

Make: A More Affordable Zapier Alternative

Top Automation Tools You Should Look Into – Make G2 Review: 4.7 out of 5

Price: Free, Core — $9, Pro — $16, Teams — $29 (per month, billed annually)

Make (formerly Integromat) is a budget-friendly alternative to Zapier, offering advanced automation capabilities without breaking the bank. As a sales leader, you can create workflows, automate data syncing, use webhooks, and enhance lead management (psst, it natively integrates with Close, too!).

You can automate the process of updating CRM records based on prospect interactions. For instance, automatically create tasks for sales representatives when leads engage with specific content. If you’re looking for inspiration on automating your sales game, Make has a very cool article on that.