20 Helpful Tools for Sales Experts

To be a great salesperson, you need to have more than charm and a positive attitude. Today’s sales environment requires you to utilize advanced tools in your sales process. We dug deep into our sales tool belt to provide you with some of the most advanced and highly rated programs and apps. Try out a few of these tools if you are looking to become a stronger, more competitive salesperson in your industry.

Social Media Marketing Tools

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Purpose: Salespeople can efficiently search for potential customers that have shared connections
• Price: Around $1,200 per year
• Platform: LinkedIn
• Audience: Large sales companies looking to build their customer base through shared connections
• Pros: Can import existing contacts from other sources, companies can pool their salespeoples’ connections, created by LinkedIn so information more trustworthy
• Cons: Very expensive, only way to reach leads is direct mail (not always effective)
• Most unique feature: Allows users to filter updates
• Biggest shortcoming: Extremely expensive for being used only in LinkedIn

Socialbro 

• Purpose: Community management and analysis tool
• Price: Free for accounts with less than 5,000 contacts, $6.95 per month for larger accounts
• Platform: Twitter
• Audience: Salespeople focused on reaching clients within a specified geographic region
• Pros: Complete Twitter monitoring in one package
• Cons: Not the most user-friendly structure
• Most unique feature: Custom filters to narrow down your target audience
• Biggest shortcoming: User interface

Twilert

• Purpose: Tracks your company’s brand reputation
• Price: Starts at $9 per month
• Platform: Twitter
• Audience: Companies monitoring brand awareness and salespeople who want to track their reputation
• Pros: Set up email alerts when a customer mentions your brand or related keywords, track specific hashtags and conversations, narrow down users by location, view trending topics
• Cons: Users often frustrated by lack of customer service, troubleshooting email issues with no sources to resolve, must pay for any real business analytics
• Most unique feature: Users can monitor competitor keywords and brand names in addition to their own
• Biggest shortcoming: Not strong in customer support

Hootsuite

• Purpose: Tracks social media engagement across all business platforms
• Price: Free or $9.99 per month for Premium
• Platform: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare, Google+
• Audience: Larger businesses that want a dashboard to track all social media accounts easily in one place
• Pros: Multiple platforms, ability to schedule updates, customized analytics, friendly customer support
• Cons: Reports are expensive and not included, forced to use Hootsuite URL shorteners (which are not always free)
• Most unique feature: Includes mobile app data from Instagram and YouTube in the dashboard
• Biggest shortcoming: Expensive for all the bells and whistles

SocialRank

• Purpose: Increase engagement and brand loyalty
• Price: Free or $25 per month for premium services
• Platform: Twitter
• Audience: Salespeople that want to target their top followers
• Pros: Allows you to see loyal followers and reward them with coupons and discounts, generates monthly reports that are delivered to your email
• Cons: Have to pay to break down followers by geographic location or demographics
• Most unique feature: Focus on combining all metrics to pinpoint “best followers”
• Biggest shortcoming: No way to filter out spam followers in list

TwitBlock

• Purpose: Blocks campaign spammers and removes clutter from your Twitter stream
• Price: Free
• Platform: Twitter
• Audience: Salespeople who wish to clean up their Twitter account without the manual work
• Pros: Clears spam clutter, lets user make the final call on which customers are spam followers
• Cons: Must manually block spammers, does not automatically report spammers to @spam
• Most unique feature: Can examine thousands of accounts and report spam users quickly and fairly accurately
• Biggest shortcoming: Bigger accounts may need to manually remove hundreds of spam accounts, which is time consuming

 Like2Buy

• Purpose: Allows brands to make Instagram images shoppable
• Price: $1,000 per month
• Platform: Instagram
• Audience: eCommerce salespeople looking to increase sales through Instagram
• Pros: Increases user engagement and clicks to website, encourages brand awareness,
• Cons: Helpful only for an eCommerce site, specifically clothing
• Most unique feature: Makes the difficult leap between social media and sales
• Biggest shortcoming: Targeted to big clothing companies that can afford the expensive price tag

TwtQpn

• Purpose: Social media coupon generator
• Price: $5 per 100 coupons, pricing per month options also available
• Platform: Twitter, Facebook, Video, Trivia, Email
• Audience: Businesses that want to create offers and discounts for customers
• Pros: Allows users to create online and in-store coupons, customers must retweet to claim a coupon, redirects to your website (creating more traffic), exports a list of customers that have claimed the coupon
• Cons: Customers may grow tired of spammy coupon offers in their newsfeed
• Most unique feature: Can be used on a variety of social media platforms
• Biggest shortcoming: Still must pay extra to promote posts; cannot directly target a group of Twitter users by demographic or location

Facebook Advertising

• Purpose: Promote business posts, ads, and websites through the company Facebook page
• Price: Pay per ad and run-time
• Platform: Facebook
• Audience: Any business that would like to increase their brand awareness and engagement for their website or Facebook page
• Pros: Customize targets through demographics, location, industries, and other specific areas
• Cons: Not always accurate data, very wide margin for error in ad timing, reach is estimated poorly
• Most unique feature: Built-in dashboard that contains a wealth of information
• Biggest shortcoming: Results have become more expensive and less effective because of increased market saturation

Twtpoll

• Purpose: Survey generator to gain anonymous customer insight and collect feedback
• Price: $7 per question or $19 per month for unlimited use
• Platform:  Twitter and Facebook
• Audience: Salespeople looking for customer feedback
• Pros: Export results easily, make survey results private or public, clear and simple surveys for customers and businesses, four different options for survey types
• Cons: No targeting available for geographic areas or specified customers unless performed manually for individuals
• Most unique feature: Automatically produces a shortened URL to insert in Twitter post
• Biggest shortcoming: Does not allow audience targeting

Customer Relationship Management Tools

Pipeliner

• Purpose: CRM software that lets salespeople visualize sales funnel and gain actionable insights
• Price: $35 per user per month (billed annually)
• Platform: Online and offline on computer, mobile, or tablet
• Audience: Salespeople looking for a more visually stimulating CRM
• Pros: Visually appealing, provides target goals, accessible online and offline, affordable, great customer support
• Cons: Not ideal for marketing campaigns, free version lacks most helpful features
• Most unique feature: Clear, engaging visual design
• Biggest shortcoming: No color or font customization

Sales Force

• Purpose: Customer relationship management tool to track sales and goals
• Price: $25–250 per user per month         
• Platform: Cloud-based CRM dashboard
• Audience: Companies looking to better manage their leads and sales funnels
• Pros: Unlimited options for data manipulation, excellent customization
• Cons: Not intuitive, easy to get bogged down in too much data, very expensive for larger businesses
• Most unique feature: Flexible program that works with any system or internal structure
• Biggest shortcoming: Lack of support for multiple developers

Sales Tracking and Analysis Tools

Pipedrive

• Purpose: Serves as a framework for sales process
• Price: $12 per user per month
• Platform: Website CRM dashboard (functions on desktop, mobile, or tablet)
• Audience: Salespeople who want to track customers through the sales funnel
• Pros: Intuitive navigation, visually appealing, inexpensive
• Cons: Cannot create service tickets or invoice customers, searching on phone or tablet is more difficult
• Most unique feature: The rotting feature, which alerts you of deals that have been idle for long periods
• Biggest shortcoming: Lacking in the mobile department

FunnelSource

• Purpose: Modern forecasting and revenue analytics
• Price: $39 per month
• Platform: Desktop, tablet, and mobile sales app
• Audience: Salespeople interested in a simpler CRM tool
• Pros: Dashboard fits on one page, flexible forecasting, allows businesses to manage coaching efficiency, great customer support
• Cons: Skims the surface of available information, advanced sales data analysts may prefer a more in-depth program
• Most unique feature: Simplistic yet powerful tool
• Biggest shortcoming: Most basic CRM available

InsideSales

• Purpose: Optimize calling and email tracking
• Price: $125–295 per user per month
• Platform: Cloud-based interface, works online with any phone line
• Audience: Sales companies with a focus in call sales
• Pros: Advanced list prioritization, pre-recorded voice messaging, inbound call routing, intelligent prospect sorting, puts incoming leads at the top of the list
• Cons: Customers note service interruption issues
• Most unique feature: Local presence (your number shows up as local)
• Biggest shortcoming: Back-end setup tool not user-friendly

HubSpot

• Purpose: Inbound marketing and sales platform
• Price: $200–2,400 per month
• Platform: Desktop software
• Audience: Salespeople looking to attract customers, convert leads, and close sales
• Pros: Helpful customer service, transformation from outbound to inbound leads is easy, intuitive and functional software
• Cons: Lack of flexibility in pricing tiers, overwhelming amount of content for some, lacks metrics, expensive
• Most unique feature: Constant improvements based on customer reviews
• Biggest shortcoming: Lacking in the analytics department

Meeting Mapper

• Purpose: Meeting management and customer interaction tracking
• Price: $9–20 per user per month
• Platform: Cloud-based software
• Audience: Businesses that want to improve and track their meetings
• Pros: Easily share meeting reports, gather actionable data, identify meeting insights, determine level of participation
• Cons: Not free
• Most unique feature: Automatically updates Salesforce objects like accounts, campaigns, cases, contacts, and leads
• Biggest shortcoming: Overall, none. Solid program with a clean interface

Banana Tag

• Purpose: Tracking emails sent to prospects and clients
• Price: Free to $10 per user per month
• Platform: Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, iOS Mail, Android Mail
• Audience: Salespeople who want to track email use and know when emails have been received and read
• Pros: Track and schedule emails, CRM integration, link-click notifications, email metrics reports
• Cons: User ability to block this feature
• Most unique feature: Lets you know when a client opens and reads your emails
• Biggest shortcoming: Users have issues tracking emails sent to multiple recipients

Datanyze

• Purpose: Lets salespeople track who is using a competitor
• Price: $600–1,200 per month
• Platform: Online sales intelligence platform
• Audience: Companies looking to find new customers through competitive businesses
• Pros: Can target new prospects who use similar products or services, targeting, CSV importing and exporting
• Cons: Expensive
• Most unique feature: Gives you competitor data not freely provided
• Biggest shortcoming: The price tag

Marchex

• Purpose: Call recording and tracking program

• Price: Starts at $100 intro-cost and $.05 per click
• Platform: Mobile advertising technology platform
• Audience: Businesses that depend on consumer phone calls to drive business
• Pros: Strong focus on call reporting, keyword-triggered call tracking, download call logs, excellent raw data structuring, API connects smoothly with analytics
• Cons: Lack of CRM integration, call logs not separated by client; has to be done manually after download, difficult user interface, not the best customization options
• Most unique feature: Easier code implementation for website
• Biggest shortcoming: Integration functions have room for improvement

While some of these tools may be too advanced for a novice, over time they can turn you into a master salesperson. If you feel overwhelmed by some of the programs on this list, start by implementing one or two that offer a free trial and see if they have a positive effect on your sales results.

Do you use other sales tools to succeed in your selling process? Let us know about any tools you love!