Sales productivity tools help professionals achieve sales effectiveness.
Sales is that department of an organization that follows up on the prospect quota handed over to them by marketing.
They scrutinize their willingness to make a purchase via calls and emails and consults the prospects by moving them forward in their customer journey.
Sales productivity formula
Efficiency
The successful distribution and use of a company’s resources get counted as its efficiency. Whenever efficiency is mentioned, you can be sure that it is related to time. Because time is the most valuable resource for any business and majorly gets counted against time.
Any efficient sales team will spend their most productive time on completing high-impact sales activities for achieving the best sales results.
It is highly recommended for businesses to have sales productivity tools in their arsenal and achieve higher sales efficiency.
Effectiveness
The optimum utilization of company resources for achieving the sales goals is counted as sales effectiveness.
For instance, there are two competitive sales teams that are equally efficient.
Both teams are splitting up their time in the same manner.
The sales reps of each team are spending 80% of their time selling.
20% of their productive time is spent on administrative tasks.
Whichever team increases its effectiveness will successfully outperform the other.
Sales productivity statistics
Sales reps spend an average of 30 hours a month searching for and creating their own content.
A whopping 2/3 of a company’s sales collateral goes unused. But companies are unable to determine which content to use, and what is simply irrelevant for sales conversations.
77% of executive buyers claim salespeople don’t understand their issues and where they can help. 78% claim salespeople do not have relevant examples or case studies to share with them. (Forrester Research)
According to the Aberdeen Group, 55% of companies do not prioritize their reps’ ability to personalize content.
The time spent by sales reps on pre-sales and post-sales activities are up by 15%. The time spent on non-sales (admin) work is up 21%. All this on the expense of actual selling time in front of the customer, which is down a full 26%. (HBR)
Sales productivity examples
Let’s help you draw the line between productive and unproductive sales, shall we?
1. Productive
Salesperson of a startup business is making 100 calls to all the qualified prospects.
While doing so, he is not giving too much time filling out miscellaneous reports.
This makes for a good example of high efficiency and effectiveness.
Unproductive
Sales reps frequently visit trade shows as it offers lots of opportunities for communicating with prospects.
What if the salesperson doesn’t interact with the prospects present in the trade show.
Instead, he chooses to come back to the office for filing the paperwork that piled up in his absence then it’s an unproductive activity
Prospects need to be followed up within the first week after the trade show. Spending too much time on non-selling activities is an ineffective sales approach and reduces the lead quality.
Spending the selling time in feeding data inside the CRM when it can be automated by applying workflows.
Before we unveil our sales productivity tools, let’s show you what a typical sales process looks like. The reason we want you to see the sales process is that we want you to decide which tool will complement the steps.
Just imagine how productive these above scenarios would have been if the businesses were using better sales productivity tools.
As per this image, we can clearly say that the typical sales process has five basic steps.
Approaching the client
Discovering their needs
Matching your solution against their needs
Presenting your solution
Closing the sales
Here are the best 20 sales productivity tools for increasing sales effectiveness.
Salesmate is a customer relationship management (CRM) system designed for automating your manual tasks and streamlining the workflow for your sales teams.
The smart sales CRM offers many features that include contact management, sales automation, email tracking, email templates, sales reports, team inbox etc.
Salesmate is one of the most useful sales productivity tools for businesses of any size. This tool is budget-friendly with prompt and faster customer support and feature-rich.
Tool overview
A smart CRM solution built for resolving issues that modern-day startups and sales professionals face.
The dilemma of going after one lead by compromising another is what troubles the sales professionals a lot.
This tool has been designed for assisting your sales team in filtering the right prospect.
So that they start making the selling process streamlined and focused.
Beneficial features
How will you benefit by using Salesmate CRM:
streamline the sales process and win new customers
robust and powerful tools for reducing manual labor
sales pipeline that provides visually engaging and informative data
smart emails with the ease of performance tracking
shared team inbox for enhancing customer experience
built-in calling and texting tools
record calls and take important notes on-the-go
visualise the sales pipeline activity with smart analytics
workflows that are action-based
have your product(s) listed with price(s) and volume.
The second entry in this list of sales productivity tools is FirstRain. FirstRain offers actionable insights into the sales process to business owners using sales intelligence for making informed business decisions.
Beneficial features
Organizations can use FirstRain for
Utilizing data visualizations, see activity trends, and use predictive analytics for identifying improvements in their sales process
Identifying crucial information like company and industry briefs, active business influencers, famous market drivers, management changes, and market influencing trends
Receiving real-time notifications related to customers and markets on their desktop, mobile device, tablet, or even web application
Increasing quality and frequency of customer engagement using social selling tips
Making it to the third rank this productivity tool list is InsideView. This sales productivity tool helps businesses identify and gather prospect information using market intelligence. The tool is helpful in deriving insights for making better decisions.
Beneficial features
Businesses can benefit a lot by using InsideView for
Building better connections across their social networks
Curating their newsletters based on the social insights of prospects for creating engaging conversations
Building a list of quality prospects from company and contacts database
Receiving daily alerts regarding their prospects activities and related insights
EmailAnalytics visualizes you and your team’s email activity in Gmail and G Suite. This enables you to easily get insights into your busiest days of the week for email, busiest times of day, top senders, and top recipients. Additionally, the tool calculates average email response time, which is a key KPI for sales and customer service teams.
Beneficial features
By using EmailAnalytics, business can:
Monitor email activity of teams of employees
Create filters to include or exclude certain emails from reports
Get daily or weekly reports via email
View historical email history from 3+ years ago
Track and improve average email response time for employees
ZoomInfo provides actionable business information regarding the B2B industry that empowers the sales and marketing campaigns of businesses. By using the data provided by Zoominfo, businesses can easily improve their marketing campaigns. This data can also be segmented to reach decision-makers quickly.
Beneficial features
With the B2B database acquired from Zoominfo, businesses can
Keep their information fresh and updated
Easily pinpoint the decision-makers
Get or create prospect profiles
Access historical information of their prospects
Receive real-time alerts related to prospect profiles update
Hunter makes it incredibly easy for sales, recruiters and marketers to reach out to other professionals with simple but powerful tools.
Hunter crawls the web and indexes publicly available professional email addresses. The data is easily accessible via a simple user interface to find the right person in a company or find how to contact already identified professionals.
Besides that, you can easily automate the whole outreach process with Hunter by verifying the emails you found in the app and setting up simple and powerful cold outreach campaigns.
Beneficial features
Businesses can benefit a lot from using Hunter for:
Finding email addresses (every day, Hunter visits millions of web pages to find actionable business data, like search engines, Hunters constantly keeps an index of the entire web and organizes data that isn’t in any other database)
Verifying email addresses (validations made at multiple levels: format, domain information, response of the mail servers and comparison with their unique database)
Sending and automating the outreach process with the free tool Campaigns that built to make your outreach incredibly simple
Checking the free and largest directory of cold email templates to get inspiration for the cold campaigns
LevelEleven, being a sales performance platform helps organizations in increasing the sales teams productivity. The tool provides real-time visibility into the daily sales performance.
Beneficial features
While using LevelEleven businesses can
Provide personal analytics, historical trends, and performance comparisons to sales reps
Build campaigns for boosting team morale
Increase team collaboration
Easily define critical sales behaviors
Keep sales teams on track with daily, weekly, and monthly goals
Utilize the real-time data for gaining quick sales funnel insight
Create a healthy competition using contests and leaderboards
Repsly is a B2B mobile cloud software solution that helps businesses in-field activity management. The tool is used for tracking sales reps’ on-field activity.
Beneficial features
With Repsly, business owners can
Integrate and use mobile forms to get feedback from on-field sales reps
Enable team members to collaborate more effectively using internal text messages, team announcements, and client notes
Build a personalized and structured database using customer fields
Track their field reps in real-time using geo-tagged activities
Accelerate sales by capturing e-signatures on the spot
ConnectAndSell, a web-based sales acceleration helps businesses improve communication between sales reps and prospects and helps them reach the decision-makers quickly.
Beneficial features
Businesses that use ConnectAndSell are able to
Transfer their sales calls internally with a single click
Improve their prospect communication using 3-way conferencing options
Enhance the response time using auto-dialing
Set call benchmarks against industry standards
Get visibility into sales team activity using in-depth metrics
InsideSales.com, a sales acceleration platform, utilizes predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine. This tool helps businesses drive their revenue growth by delivering an optimized buyer and seller experience.
Beneficial features
Businesses using InsideSales.com can
Work smarter by predicting prospect behaviors
Utilize data dashboards for identifying sales trends
Make their available data actionable for making smart decisions
Use the PowerDialer and Click-to-Call
Record, monitor, and generate sales rep performance report
Receive an immediate notification on email activities done by prospects
DocuSign, an e-signature and digital transaction management software, helps team members of any business become more productive with faster electronic exchange of business documents.
Beneficial features
The features that make DocuSign a must-have for businesses are
A simple, intuitive user experience accessible from any location and device
Helps to replace paper-based processes
Protects business-critical data with bank-grade security for confidentiality
Allows bulk-send for sharing custom documents simultaneously
Accelerates sales process where the signing of contracts is necessary
Helps to upload a variety of file formats from desktop or a file-sharing site much quickly
Allows users to customize and streamline their document workflow
Sertifi accelerates sales funnel activities as it provides an integrated solution for sending contracts, collecting electronic signatures, and accepting payment. Being an e-signature tool, it provides better convenience and security that enables workflow automation and drives productivity.
Beneficial features
Businesses using Sertifi can benefit a lot as
Can choose from 300 different file types
They get complete transparency into the deal status
Can develop workflows for managing complex deals
Reach agreements faster using real-time collaboration tools
Can quickly upload documents from hard drive, document storage system, CRM, or app
Calendly, an online meeting scheduler, enables businesses to streamline their workflow as it allows both the inviters and invitees to schedule events. They can also add the events in their Google, Outlook, or iCal calendars.
Beneficial features
Businesses that use Calendly can benefit a lot from it
The meeting tool enables reminder automation for all the event attendees
GoToMeeting, an online meeting app enables multiple solutions. The tool has desktop sharing and video conferencing which helps business users engage and collaborate in real-time.
Beneficial features
Businesses using GoToMeeting benefit a lot from its array of features
Personal interactions with colleagues and customers from any location and on any device
Integration with VoIP and telephone for HD video communicate in real-time
Enables keyboard and mouse sharing
Schedule meetings or instant meets
Initiate business meetings using MS Office, email, or any instant-messaging tools
Boasting over 1,600 integrations with cost aggregation and creative support platforms, Singular is a marketing intelligence software.
The software integrates both attribution and campaign data from all available sources.
The software analyzes all the figures, automatically revealing ROI from the marketing campaigns, advertising endeavors, and other marketing projects.
Beneficial features
Singular is a beneficial productivity tool that enables the users to
Collect, connect, and make sense of data
Use all the real-time insights for making data-driven decisions
Collecting data from all your sources
Include direct API integrations, email, web-based dashboards, external applications, internal business intelligence software, desktops, and mobile devices
Powerful data analytics and proprietary algorithms bridge marketing metadata to behavioral data right at the user level
Conclusion
Turning a dream or the idea of fulfilling a dream takes much than unlimited funding. There is no cheat code, there are no shortcuts. When your business starts growing, the inflow of orders, contacts, emails, messages, calls, and deals gets a bit hectic to manage.
Business tools enable you to smoothen your sales cycle and streamline the business process using smart workflows. Business tools in this modern business era are more like companions that take care of all the manual labor and help you sail smoothly.
We hope the aforementioned tools will find a place in your sales tool stack and will also help you act quickly on your business processes. If we have missed out on any tool, do mention them in the comments section. We will keep researching and updating this list, exactly as your business grows and needs better tools. Ciao till then, may the Gods of productivity be with you, always!
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Sales productivity tools help professionals achieve sales effectiveness.
Sales is that department of an organization that follows up on the prospect quota handed over to them by marketing.
They scrutinize their willingness to make a purchase via calls and emails and consults the prospects by moving them forward in their customer journey.
Sales productivity formula
Efficiency
The successful distribution and use of a company’s resources get counted as its efficiency. Whenever efficiency is mentioned, you can be sure that it is related to time. Because time is the most valuable resource for any business and majorly gets counted against time.
Any efficient sales team will spend their most productive time on completing high-impact sales activities for achieving the best sales results.
It is highly recommended for businesses to have sales productivity tools in their arsenal and achieve higher sales efficiency.
Effectiveness
The optimum utilization of company resources for achieving the sales goals is counted as sales effectiveness.
For instance, there are two competitive sales teams that are equally efficient.
Sales productivity statistics
Sales productivity examples
Let’s help you draw the line between productive and unproductive sales, shall we?
1. Productive
Salesperson of a startup business is making 100 calls to all the qualified prospects.
While doing so, he is not giving too much time filling out miscellaneous reports.
This makes for a good example of high efficiency and effectiveness.
Unproductive
Sales reps frequently visit trade shows as it offers lots of opportunities for communicating with prospects.
What if the salesperson doesn’t interact with the prospects present in the trade show.
Instead, he chooses to come back to the office for filing the paperwork that piled up in his absence then it’s an unproductive activity
Prospects need to be followed up within the first week after the trade show. Spending too much time on non-selling activities is an ineffective sales approach and reduces the lead quality.
2. Productive
Creating a series of personalized prospecting templates for automating email outreach.
Unproductive
Spending the selling time in feeding data inside the CRM when it can be automated by applying workflows.
Before we unveil our sales productivity tools, let’s show you what a typical sales process looks like. The reason we want you to see the sales process is that we want you to decide which tool will complement the steps.
Just imagine how productive these above scenarios would have been if the businesses were using better sales productivity tools.
As per this image, we can clearly say that the typical sales process has five basic steps.
Here are the best 20 sales productivity tools for increasing sales effectiveness.
1. Salesmate
Website: www.salesmate.io
Salesmate is a customer relationship management (CRM) system designed for automating your manual tasks and streamlining the workflow for your sales teams.
The smart sales CRM offers many features that include contact management, sales automation, email tracking, email templates, sales reports, team inbox etc.
Salesmate is one of the most useful sales productivity tools for businesses of any size. This tool is budget-friendly with prompt and faster customer support and feature-rich.
Tool overview
A smart CRM solution built for resolving issues that modern-day startups and sales professionals face.
The dilemma of going after one lead by compromising another is what troubles the sales professionals a lot.
This tool has been designed for assisting your sales team in filtering the right prospect.
So that they start making the selling process streamlined and focused.
Beneficial features
How will you benefit by using Salesmate CRM:
2. FirstRain
Website: www.firstrain.com
Tool overview
The second entry in this list of sales productivity tools is FirstRain. FirstRain offers actionable insights into the sales process to business owners using sales intelligence for making informed business decisions.
Beneficial features
Organizations can use FirstRain for
3. InsideView
Website: www.insideview.com
Tool overview
Making it to the third rank this productivity tool list is InsideView. This sales productivity tool helps businesses identify and gather prospect information using market intelligence. The tool is helpful in deriving insights for making better decisions.
Beneficial features
Businesses can benefit a lot by using InsideView for
4. EmailAnalytics
Website: www.emailanalytics.com
Tool overview
EmailAnalytics visualizes you and your team’s email activity in Gmail and G Suite. This enables you to easily get insights into your busiest days of the week for email, busiest times of day, top senders, and top recipients. Additionally, the tool calculates average email response time, which is a key KPI for sales and customer service teams.
Beneficial features
By using EmailAnalytics, business can:
5. Zoominfo
Website: www.zoominfo.com
Tool overview
ZoomInfo provides actionable business information regarding the B2B industry that empowers the sales and marketing campaigns of businesses. By using the data provided by Zoominfo, businesses can easily improve their marketing campaigns. This data can also be segmented to reach decision-makers quickly.
Beneficial features
With the B2B database acquired from Zoominfo, businesses can
6. Hunter.io
Website: www.hunter.io
Tool overview
Hunter makes it incredibly easy for sales, recruiters and marketers to reach out to other professionals with simple but powerful tools.
Hunter crawls the web and indexes publicly available professional email addresses. The data is easily accessible via a simple user interface to find the right person in a company or find how to contact already identified professionals.
Besides that, you can easily automate the whole outreach process with Hunter by verifying the emails you found in the app and setting up simple and powerful cold outreach campaigns.
Beneficial features
Businesses can benefit a lot from using Hunter for:
7. Clari
Website: www.clari.com
Tool overview
Clari is a sales productivity platform.
This productivity tool uses data science for guiding sales teams in enhancing their selling process.
Your sales team members will see an increase in their productivity and forecasting accuracy by using this tool.
Beneficial features
By using Clari, businesses can
8. LevelEleven
Website: www.leveleleven.com
Tool overview
LevelEleven, being a sales performance platform helps organizations in increasing the sales teams productivity. The tool provides real-time visibility into the daily sales performance.
Beneficial features
While using LevelEleven businesses can
9. Repsly
Website: www.repsly.com
Tool overview
Repsly is a B2B mobile cloud software solution that helps businesses in-field activity management. The tool is used for tracking sales reps’ on-field activity.
Beneficial features
With Repsly, business owners can
10. ConnectAndSell
Website: www.connectandsell.com
Tool overview
ConnectAndSell, a web-based sales acceleration helps businesses improve communication between sales reps and prospects and helps them reach the decision-makers quickly.
Beneficial features
Businesses that use ConnectAndSell are able to
11. Five9
Website: www.five9.com
Tool overview
Five9, a cloud contact center software, helps businesses increase their call productivity. The tool uses predictive dialing for call optimization.
Beneficial features
Five9 allows businesses to
12. InsideSales.com
Website: www.insidesales.com
Tool overview
InsideSales.com, a sales acceleration platform, utilizes predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine. This tool helps businesses drive their revenue growth by delivering an optimized buyer and seller experience.
Beneficial features
Businesses using InsideSales.com can
13. DocuSign
Website: www.docusign.com
Tool overview
DocuSign, an e-signature and digital transaction management software, helps team members of any business become more productive with faster electronic exchange of business documents.
Beneficial features
The features that make DocuSign a must-have for businesses are
14. EchoSign
Website: www.echosign.com
Tool overview
EchoSign (now taken over by Adobe).
It is a web-based electronic signature and document management system.
This productivity tool enables businesses to accelerate their sales with paperless workflows and a simplified sales process.
Beneficial features
Businesses can gain these benefits by using EchoSign
15. HelloSign
Website: www.hellosign.com
Tool overview
HelloSign, a cloud-based e-signature tool that helps the business achieve a paperless business process.
Beneficial features
HelloSign helps businesses in various ways
16. Sertifi
Website: www.sertifi.com
Tool overview
Sertifi accelerates sales funnel activities as it provides an integrated solution for sending contracts, collecting electronic signatures, and accepting payment. Being an e-signature tool, it provides better convenience and security that enables workflow automation and drives productivity.
Beneficial features
Businesses using Sertifi can benefit a lot as
17. UberConference
Website: www.uberconference.com
Tool overview
UberConference enables a faster and easier way of scheduling audio conferences without any PIN requirement.
Beneficial features
Businesses can use UberConference for various purposes
18. Calendly
Website: www.calendly.com
Tool overview
Calendly, an online meeting scheduler, enables businesses to streamline their workflow as it allows both the inviters and invitees to schedule events. They can also add the events in their Google, Outlook, or iCal calendars.
Beneficial features
Businesses that use Calendly can benefit a lot from it
19. GoToMeeting
Website: www.gotomeeting.com
Tool overview
GoToMeeting, an online meeting app enables multiple solutions. The tool has desktop sharing and video conferencing which helps business users engage and collaborate in real-time.
Beneficial features
Businesses using GoToMeeting benefit a lot from its array of features
20. Skype
Website: www.skype.com
Tool overview
Skype, a telecommunications tool, provides video and voice calls to and from computers and any compatible smart device using the Internet.
Beneficial features
By using Skype, a business can easily
21. Singular.net
Website: www.singular.net
Tool overview
Boasting over 1,600 integrations with cost aggregation and creative support platforms, Singular is a marketing intelligence software.
The software integrates both attribution and campaign data from all available sources.
The software analyzes all the figures, automatically revealing ROI from the marketing campaigns, advertising endeavors, and other marketing projects.
Beneficial features
Singular is a beneficial productivity tool that enables the users to
Conclusion
Turning a dream or the idea of fulfilling a dream takes much than unlimited funding. There is no cheat code, there are no shortcuts. When your business starts growing, the inflow of orders, contacts, emails, messages, calls, and deals gets a bit hectic to manage.
Business tools enable you to smoothen your sales cycle and streamline the business process using smart workflows. Business tools in this modern business era are more like companions that take care of all the manual labor and help you sail smoothly.
We hope the aforementioned tools will find a place in your sales tool stack and will also help you act quickly on your business processes. If we have missed out on any tool, do mention them in the comments section. We will keep researching and updating this list, exactly as your business grows and needs better tools. Ciao till then, may the Gods of productivity be with you, always!
Saptarshi Das
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