Modern sales tools empower your sales reps, help them make better decisions and vastly increase productivity and revenue.
However, deciding which sales software tools to incorporate into your sales tech stack is a complex process.
In this article, we’ll explore each of the major sales tool categories and why they’re so important, then give you the best sales tools for each group.
Key takeaways from sales tools
Sales tools help SMBs manage leads, automate workflows and make data-driven decisions that improve sales performance.
Choosing the right tools can improve visibility and collaboration across your sales team, helping managers guide reps and spot issues early.
The best sales tools are those that streamline daily tasks, letting SMB teams focus on high-value activities instead of repetitive data entry.
A CRM like Pipedrive gives sales teams full visibility into deals and customer interactions, so nothing falls through the cracks. Try it free for 14 days.
Tools for CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools help manage, track and organize your customer data, streamline customer interactions, enhance relationships and stay on top of sales efforts.
CRM solutions replace spreadsheets, databases and notebooks that businesses use to manage customer data. By consolidating all communication into a single dashboard, sales teams can access information when they need it.
Here’s our shortlist of CRM tools for different use cases:
Best all-arounder: Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an intuitive, scalable CRM system to manage customer data.
The platform is a cloud-based solution designed for marketing success and sales enablement.
Pipedrive’s pipeline customization allows you to track your customers and collaborate on deals. Set reminders, segment your leads and get detailed reporting on all of your sales activities.
Key Pipedrive features:
Unlimited contacts
Custom fields
Sales automation tools
Easy-to-use, Kanban-style visual pipelines
24/7 support on all plans
Scalable pricing as you grow
Pipedrive can handle almost every task in this article. Think customer relationship management, email marketing, lead generation and lead scoring.
Best basic tool: Trello
Trello is a list-based project management solution that improves collaboration between your teams and gives reps a visual overview of where customers are in the buying journey.
With easy-to-use drag-and-drop Kanban boards, sales and marketing teams can focus on what comes next.
Trello’s easy customization means users can turn it into a powerful CRM. Add boards to your workspaces to create sales pipelines and move these along as your relationships advance.
Note: Trello integrates with Pipedrive. So while it isn’t as scalable as a dedicated CRM solution, you can combine it with Pipedrive for more robust functionality as your team grows.
Best free tool: Google Sheets
If you want to save money, a budget CRM solution like Google Sheets is a popular choice for tracking prospects and deals.
It can take longer to set up and will never reach the full functionality of a dedicated CRM, but Sheets is a great starter option.
You’ll need some creativity to build the right custom CRM with spreadsheets. There are plenty of templates available online to help.
Account-based marketing (ABM) tools
ABM software helps SMBs target high-value customers more efficiently to refine their sales strategy.
Using customer data and personalization, the software provides scalable and unique experiences to specific customers.
It realigns your marketing and sales team away from generic approaches to tailored buyer journeys for high-value targets.
Here are our top two picks for account-based marketing tools:
Best for all-around sales intelligence: Demandbase
Demandbase focuses on “ABX”, or account-based experience, integrating marketing, sales engagement and customer experience into one platform.
Demandbase uses your existing CRM and marketing automation data to help you identify key opportunities and orchestrate more effective sales and marketing activities.
Best for AI insights: 6Sense
6Sense is an account-based sales and marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to transform how companies manage their pipelines.
6Sense uses AI to analyze millions of customer data points and uncover key insights into customer behaviors. These insights allow companies to create higher-quality pipelines and improve their customer experience with tailored campaigns.
6Sense integrates with many other sales tools, providing AI-assisted insights to get the most out of your data.
Lead generation and sales prospecting tools
Lead generation and prospecting tools generate more leads and focus on higher-quality sales prospects.
Lead generation targets the top of the sales funnel, attracting qualified leads from channels such as social media, email and landing pages.
Lead generation software collects information from people who have expressed interest in your product, enabling you to target them with more insights. It minimizes the effort you need to focus on the most profitable leads so that you can close deals.
Here are our top lead generation and engagement tool suggestions:
Best for centralizing data: Pipedrive’s LeadBooster
LeadBooster is Pipedrive’s essential lead generation tool that captures inbound and outbound leads, available as an add-on with any Pipedrive plan.
A Chatbot and Live Chat mean you can connect with your customers anywhere, any time.
LeadBooster provides the Prospector tool, where you can discover your next hot lead in a database of over 400 million profiles and 10 million companies.
The tool also includes Web Forms so that your inbound leads have an easy way to share their contact information with you.
Best for lightweight lead generation: Leadfeeder by Dealfront
Leadfeeder by Dealfront combines your sales and marketing data to show you who visits your website, how they discovered you and what they’re interested in so you can personalize your outreach.
The tool uses Google Analytics and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to provide more information about the leads most likely to convert.
Note: Dealfront integrates with Pipedrive, so you can use the automation feature to save your sales team time.
Sales forecasting and analytics tools
Sales forecasting software predicts how much demand there is for your company’s offerings.
By accessing first-party data and your sales pipelines, the software estimates your future sales and team performance.
Tip: Pipedrive’s CRM has forecasting tools baked in so you can visualize forecasts and cash flow right in your sales dashboard.
Sales forecasting tools help decision-makers manage inventory, resources, staffing and sales strategy more effectively.
Here are three of the best sales forecasting and analysis tools:
Best for B2B: Custify
Custify is a platform designed to help B2B sales businesses identify growth, renewal and upsell opportunities.
The tooI analyzes product usage, as well as first-party data from integrated CRMs like Pipedrive and customer support tools to provide easy-to-understand metrics in an intuitive dashboard.
It alerts you when a customer is at risk of churning so that you can send a follow-up. It also provides workflow automation to cut down the manual work required to increase customer satisfaction.
Best for user experience: Salesloft
Salesloft eliminates time-consuming, error-prone sales forecasts and delivers predictable revenue with AI and real-time human insights.
The platform helps sales reps gain full visibility of their pipelines, enabling them to meet quotas and improve their sales processes.
With actionable insights and intuitive pipeline visualization, salespeople can easily target the most important KPIs, identify bottlenecks and streamline sales management.
Best for robust analytics: Outreach
Outreach uses AI-powered forecasting to help revenue teams predict results accurately and make confident, data-driven decisions.
Some of the core features include:
Forecasting that incorporates past shortages and surpluses
AI that monitors and reports on potentially at-risk deals
A scenario planner to help salespeople simulate best- and worst-case scenarios
The platform pulls data from your CRM, looks at deal progress and predicts outcomes based on past performance.
Download Your Guide to Sales Performance Measurement
Sales productivity tools
Sales productivity software helps sales professionals streamline their activities.
From more effective pipeline management to email automation, better integrations, workflows and onboarding, these tools are essential for companies to scale.
Here are three of the best sales productivity tools on the market:
Best for AI sales insights: Pipedrive’s Notifications
Pipedrive’s AI-powered Notifications help reps focus on high-value activities by analyzing deals to suggest actionable next steps.
Notifications works with your CRM data to continuously scan your pipeline, highlight which deals need attention and predict win probability. Thanks to AI, it gets answers instantly. You don’t have to rely on creating time-consuming reports.
With AI-driven insights, reps spend less time on manual tracking and more time closing deals, while managers get a clear view of team performance.
Best for complex scheduling needs: Calendly
Customer success tools
Customer success is the process of boosting retention and loyalty by proactively addressing challenges and providing solutions. Customer success tools analyze your customer satisfaction rates, generate ideal customer profiles and help you work out where to focus your efforts to boost customer happiness.
Here are the best customer success solutions:
Best for B2B: Custify
Small businesses and large enterprises alike use Calendly for meeting scheduling.
Similar to Pipedrive’s Scheduler, sales reps plug their availability into Calendly, then share it with customers and prospects when they want to set up a meeting. The prospect schedules an open slot, and Calendly syncs this information between calendars automatically.
This speeds up the time it takes to schedule meetings, something which can be time-consuming if contacts work in different time zones.
Calendly integrates with Pipedrive, Google Calendar and Outlook, incorporates group meetings and has affordable pricing plans. The free plan includes unlimited meetings.
Tip: Pipedrive’s built-in scheduling tool lets you organize meetings without a separate calendar subscription.
Best for getting deals closed faster: Pipedrive’s Smart Docs
Smart Docs streamlines the final stage of your sales cycle by letting you send, track and sign documents directly in Pipedrive.
With Pipedrive’s Smart Docs, you can create templates that auto-fill with deal data, send trackable quotes and proposals and request eSignatures directly from clients. You’ll also get instant notifications when a prospect opens a document, helping you follow up at the perfect time.
Smart Docs supports Google Drive and OneDrive integration, so teams can collaborate on documents easily.
Pipedrive in action: Operations management company Redlist was manually creating proposals, which took hours of its sales team’s time every week and left room for error. The company was already using Pipedrive, but hadn’t explored all available features.
The team started using Smart Docs to set up templates, autofill proposals and send them out quickly, saving each rep the equivalent of one working day per week and ultimately boosting revenue by 200%.
Email management tools
Though many sales tools have built-in email capabilities, email management can be challenging.
Email management tools help users declutter their inboxes and automate their email strategy. You’ll find templates for easy campaign generation, key email metrics and list segmentation.
Here are some of the best email management tools you can find:
Best for CRM integration: Campaigns by Pipedrive
Campaigns by Pipedrive is Pipedrive’s full-featured email marketing software that helps sales teams create, send and track personalized campaigns without leaving their CRM.
The tool’s intuitive campaign builder uses drag-and-drop elements and ready-made templates.
It includes powerful segmentation capabilities so you can target your audience with personalized messaging. The email tracking and analytics let you analyze what’s working and what isn’t.
Tip: Pipedrive’s AI-powered email writer helps sales reps craft high-quality, personalized emails and summarize long threads instantly. Avoiding writer’s block helps your team work more efficiently to build better prospect connections faster.
Dedupely is a lightweight software that finds and removes duplicates in your email list to improve your campaign accuracy..
The platform integrates with most major CRM platforms, including Pipedrive, and detects duplicates in real time.
Dedupely also provides automated merging, prevents duplicates across multiple CRMs and has advanced filtering capabilities.
Best for customer support teams: Front
Front is email management software for customer support teams to deliver “one-to-one experiences at scale” with a shared inbox system.
Cross-functional team members can easily collaborate on any support requests on any channel – all in one place.
Sales mapping tools
Sales mapping software combines sales data with location data so sales managers can generate territories and visualize leads and customers on a map.
Sales reps can also use it to plan effective routes when scheduling sales meetings.
Sales mapping tools show you customers’ and leads’ locations, the distribution of customers in certain areas and how this corresponds to your sales team.
Here are two of the best sales mapping tools:
Best for field reps: Badger Maps
Badger Maps is a sales territory management tool that helps sales reps in the field streamline their meetings and reach new leads.
Sales reps use Badger Maps to plot the fastest route between customers, with live traffic updates to avoid delays. It includes visualization and data analysis tools to uncover new growth areas, identify neglected leads and find upsell opportunities.
The tool helps sales managers track salespeople in the field and keep sales teams in communication. It integrates with every major CRM platform.
Best for geo-mapping sales managers: WeMapSales
WeMapSales is a geo-business sales intelligence tool that helps sales leaders optimize their sales territories, pair the right reps with the right accounts and increase productivity.
The platform combines an interactive dashboard with powerful mapping tools to optimize sales activities. It provides sales data visualization and reporting to help uncover key insights and make better decisions.
Note: WeMapSales integrates with Pipedrive and is available as a mobile app.
Communication and conferencing tools
Communication and video conferencing tools are crucial investments for remote work.
The best conferencing software helps sales teams stay in contact by direct message or video chat.
Powerful communication apps also track and log key conversations and integrate with other apps.
Here are the two best communication and conferencing tools available now:
Best for secure video conferencing: GoTo Meeting
Video conferencing is vital for running sales calls and internal conversations as customers expect convenient, easy and secure video meetings.
GoTo Meeting provides top-of-the-line encryption and security to ensure that conversations remain private.
It supplies users with essential tools to get the most out of their video chats, like background noise reduction, iOS and Android apps, commuter mode and screen-sharing capabilities.
Automated transcriptions and recordings mean users can share meetings with anyone who couldn’t attend live.
Best for internal chat: Slack
Slack is one of the most well-known collaboration tools on the market to enable easy communication between teams and customers for businesses of any size.
Some of Slack’s features include:
Channels to organize conversations, files and people
Slack Connect to collaborate with teams at other companies
Huddles to hold video meetings
Software and CRM integrations with 2,200 apps, including Pipedrive’s Dealbot for Slack app
Workflow automation to streamline communication
Top-line security to ensure your communications remain private
Final thoughts
The right tools can maximize your sales rep’s productivity, speed up the sales cycle and boost profits.
Before choosing a tool, take your time to ensure it meets your business needs, goals and budget. List the must-have features and compare each solution until you find the one that matches your requirements.
Pipedrive can help you centralize your tools to support deals moving through your pipeline. To learn how it can boost your sales efforts, try it free for 14 days.
