15+ sales productivity tools to increase sales effectiveness

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

1. Sales reps spend an average of 30 hours a month searching for and creating their own content.
2. 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.
3. 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)
4. According to the Aberdeen Group, 55% of companies do not prioritize their reps’ ability to personalize content.
5. 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.

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.

1. Approaching the client
2. Discovering their needs
3. Matching your solution against their needs
4. Presenting your solution
5. Closing the sales

Here are the best 20 sales productivity tools for increasing sales effectiveness.

9 in 10 companies use 2+ lead enrichment tools to learn more about prospects.

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:

• 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.

Build stronger customer relationships.

Try Salesmate CRM for free.

Signup Now!

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

• 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

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

• 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

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:

• 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
• Compare metrics across teams or individuals

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

• 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

Less hassle, increased win rates

A smart CRM designed for modern sales teams

Try Salesmate for Free

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:

• 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

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

• Get the help of data science and machine learning
• Deliver useful insights to sales reps on-the-go via mobile alerts
• Quickly uncover revenue-generating patterns
• Use actionable insights for closing the deals much faster
• Prevent the cases of lost deals
• Avoid any delay in sales activities
• Improve team communication using conversation history
• Utilize the built-in Deal Accelerator and update deals on-the-go

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

• 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

Get everything organized in Salesmate CRM

less work, more sales

Try Salesmate NOW

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

• 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
• Visualize sales rep activity dashboards

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

• 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
• Create a call-list from your CRM

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

• Automate dialing to detect and filter busy signals, fax machines, voicemail, and disconnected lines
• Operate at peak efficiency using call metrics algorithm
• Integrate with CRM and various campaign management systems
• Use built-in analytics for coaching sales reps and improve their sales performance

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

• 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

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

• 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

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

• Document tracking in real-time
• Signing and returning business documents using any web browser or device
• Archiving signed documents in secure cloud storage automatically
• Seamless integration with CRM

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

• Provides bank-level security to its users
• 17 built-in popular file formats
• Develop and use flexible workflows
• Sends real-time document-related status notifications
• Fill out and sign digital documents inside Gmail
• Allows easy and quick document customization for corporate branding
• It integrates with Google business applications without unnecessary hassle
• Utilize in-person signing from a smart device like a tablet

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

• 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

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

• Access meetings using any computer or internet-connected device that supports browser
• Collaborate with up to 100 participants
• Attent audio conference from any computer
• Desktop sharing while attending audio calls
• View participants’ information
• Share important files
• Call-in or call-out options
• Save the conferences in MP3 format

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

• The meeting tool enables reminder automation for all the event attendees
• Users can generate a unique URL for each event
• The tool can designate availability preferences
• Prospects can easily schedule their own meetings

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

• 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
• Record every interaction
• Store and share every conversation

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

• Collaborate with clients and prospects via voice, video, and chat features
• Exchanges important business files and images of any size and format
• Customize their caller ID
• Enhance selling efficiency using Click-to-Call functionality
• Engage with their social media followers directly from Skype

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

• 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!