If your sales software and SaaS starts and ends with your CRM, you’re missing out on a lot of powerful tools.
Sales is definitely centered on human connections, but it’s clear that software plays an important supporting role. The right solutions can help salespeople close deals, manage pipelines, and build revenue.
These seven solutions can give your sales team a competitive edge, while diversifying their abilities.
What could your sales reps achieve if they could access 250 million contacts worldwide? Clearbit Connect lets you find out. The Gmail and Outlook extension gives your sales teams a list of key contacts within any organization they search for.
Your sales staff can then view a person’s job title, location, and contact information, as well as their company’s financial and business details. They can also send an email to them directly from their Gmail account. Clearbit Connect draws on hundreds of data sources and is refreshed monthly to prevent stale data.
Best of all, Clearbit Connect is a freemium add-on (though with some limitations). Provided you only intend to look up 100 contacts per month per user, Connect is free to download and use. If you need more, you can pay $6K a year to get 1,000 look-ups per month divided across five users.
Used by the likes of Google, Uber, and Salesforce, Clearbit Connect is a great way to expand your networks and reach new prospects. It can also help you get additional details on existing contacts. But it can’t always make connections between existing contacts and other prospects they might be connected to.
Your salespeople have found a strong lead, made a great pitch, had a strong initial sales call, and were asked to email through more information. Then ... nothing. Did they get it? What happened?
This probably sounds familiar to you. Attach integrates with the email client, CRM, or file sharing service to reveal exactly what happens to your PDFs, presentations, and documents after you hit ”Send”. It can tell you whether a contact received the document, which pages they read, how long they spent reading them, and even who they shared it with.
Not only does Attach give you more data on prospect engagement, it can also help you fix any sending errors. And it lets you update and take back attachments, even after you hit send.
Attach is available as a free trial for fourteen days. After the trial ends, you can select from several different monthly plans based on how many users you have, and what features they need.
Mention is a powerful social selling tool that helps your sales team know when a prospect mentions your brand—or any keyword that has been set—almost anywhere online.
Social activity reports can be collected and sent straight to reps’ inboxes or integrated into your CRM dashboards.
Mention gives your reps a window into how products are being used, and what customers think of them. This helps reps craft more effective pitches in the future.
Available as a standalone application, or in your web browsers, Mention offers several pricing options based on the size of your business and what features your team needs.
If your business sells physical products, you know how hard it can be to serve a global market.
TradeGecko supports global business by combining inventory management and sales automation features. It helps reps keep an eye on global supply chains so they can more effectively sell through different channels and in different regions.
It also makes it easier to place orders, with a full order-to-payment system and the ability to send invoices and track payments in real time.
TradeGecko offers several pay-per-month plans for different sizes of business. It also comes as both a standalone app, and as an add-on that integrates with a range of e-commerce, POS, and shipping solutions.
Email is an important communication tool for sales. But the need to send templated, repetitive follow-ups takes valuable time from your reps—time they could spend selling.
HubSpot’s automated sales features gives reps this time back. By turning repetitive emails into personalized templates, it helps reps automate follow-ups and save valuable time.
With deep insights into how these automated emails perform, it also helps reps develop email templates that get the very best responses.
As Shawn Wong He Tai, Sansan sales consultant, explains: “It’s an easy one-stop place to contact prospects, and all the activities get tracked in a timeline. This information makes it easy to understand your prospect’s level of interest—and when’s the right time to follow up.”
HubSpot is available as its own application and as an add-on to all kinds of enterprise software. It’s also available as both a free and pay-per-month service—each offering different levels of functionality. However, Sales Automation is only available in HubSpot’s Professional plans.
Evie is an AI-based scheduler that can automate follow up emails, schedule meetings, and streamline workflow.
Just copy Evie in on your emails, and it will use natural language recognition to see if a meeting needs to be booked, and start suggesting times and dates. Evie can then follow up with non-responsive prospects automatically, add the meeting to calendars, and even integrate this data into your CRM.
As Evie functions as part of your email client, there is no software to download, install, and update. Though there is a free version of Evie, it will only setup five meetings in a single month. Most businesses will want the business or enterprise versions. Both are offered as a monthly subscription.
Sansan turns business cards into strong lead opportunities. To do this, it reframes contacts as corporate assets.
Users simply scan their business cards using a dedicated scanner or mobile app, and the data on the card is automatically added to a lead database shared across the company. Contacts can be sorted using tags and bulk emails to select contact groups can be sent through the system.
It really shows its strength when you’re looking for an inroad to a target company. Search your company’s database for connections, see who owns the card, and arrange a warm lead. “It enables salespeople to tap into other people’s networks,” Wong explains. “The system makes use of the connections your organization already has. Plus, marketing can target prospects your salespeople have already met—to turn them into warm leads.”
This unique B2B system makes companies more cooperative internally, and nurtures strong client relationships. Available as both a standalone app and an add-on, Sansan seamlessly integrates with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and other CRM tools.
Closing sales often comes down to the energy, quality, and skills of your reps. They are also keenly aware of what they need. If you hear them out and give them powerful new tools to increase their lead identification, efficiency, and follow-up, they can help you build even stronger pipelines and competitive advantage.