What you need to know about sales tools: A detailed guide

Managing a business is a lot like surviving in the wilderness. You have to have grit, resourcefulness, and the skills to create tools to hunt for food, build shelter, and live. The same can be said when you’re running a business. To keep your business alive, you have to use your wits and experience to navigate through every obstacle. You need to use the proper tools that will help your business grow and outlive your competition.

Sales tools are indispensable technologies for businesses that want to increase their sales and speed up their growth. But do you know which tools are the most suitable for your business and how to maximize their benefits?

The benefits of using sales tools

Using the right sales tool can drive sales, improve sales team productivity, and your overall growth. But what are some of the other overlooked benefits of sales tools? Here are a few:

Build rapport with potential customers

When you’re in a competitive industry, how do you nurture connections with potential leads and customers? A smart sales tool can help you do the job. Investing in tools with sales automation and sales reporting enabled, such as HubSpot CRM’s analytics tool, can provide you with actionable insights that will help boost your customer retention strategy.

Advanced tools like Dialpad can make your job easier by giving your team real-time insights into

how to handle objections in sales calls

. Real-time assist cards can be triggered when your team or your prospect mentions a certain word during a sales call.

Keep in mind that businesses with strong and healthy customer relationships enjoy increased sales and have fewer negative feedback. If your business has an advanced sales strategy, buyers would trust your brand more and repay you with loyalty.

Create and manage sales pipelines

With actionable pipeline management software, you’ll be able to track your sales progress and metrics on one dashboard. This enables you to quickly sift through all your deals and eliminate low-quality and focus on high-quality ones. The best sales tools have all the needed functionality for managing your sales pipeline and monitoring your sales funnel. You just have to pick one that works well for your business.

Provide valuable sales and market insights

At the end of the day, the sales process is all about numbers. A sales tool can help you visualize your sales cycle, workflow, and analyze data from your sales process.

With the data provided by the sales tools that you use, you’ll have a better idea who and where to market your products or services, which leads to better outcomes of your strategy.

Automate repetitive tasks and increase sales productivity

By using tools that automate repetitive and tedious processes like logging call information and note taking, your sales team can have more time to focus on listening to the prospect’s needs in order to close deals.

When you use a good help desk software, your sales reps can work twice as fast and use their time towards higher impact tasks.

Types of sales tools available

Sales tools equip teams with better data and a big-picture view of the overall sales process. That being said, not all sales tools are designed with a single blueprint. In fact, there are many kinds of sales tools available online with different functionalities. Here are nine of the most common types of sales tools:

1. CRM apps

These are types of software that work as an all-in-one communication solution. These types of sales tools keep contact and real-time sales info in one dashboard that’s easy to access whenever, wherever you want. Salesforce is a widely-used CRM app that helps teams manage their relationships and interactions with current and prospective customers.

CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot can also integrate with Dialpad, which helps streamline and track communication with potential leads and clients.

2. Sales intelligence

Sales intelligence tools are solutions that give sales teams insights into how to use data to increase their sales and customer retention strategies. With these sales tools, you can view the map of the buyer’s cycle, create a forecast of the sales pipeline, understand the various technologies used by your leads, and identify leads your team should follow up with.

3. Sales proposal

This kind of sales app is used to create accurate proposals and submit them on time. It helps potential leads learn more about your business and convinces them to make the purchase. With sales proposal tools, your team members can hit their goals more quickly.

4. Team management

Sales tools can also help businesses manage their sales professionals, which is especially helpful for larger sales teams. By tracking leads and customer relationships, businesses can ensure that their sales teams are working efficiently. Team management tools can also help businesses monitor and receive notifications about their sales team's performance.

5. Coaching and training

Coaching and training are crucial for any business that wants to succeed in sales. Sales coaching tools can help businesses better train their sales teams and provide them with the resources they need to improve their skills. Sales training can also help businesses train their sales teams on new products and services.

With Dialpad, sales managers can create playlists to coach their team at scale. After identifying examples of successful calls (e.g. calls in which a deal was closed), create a playlist and then ask your team to listen to those call recordings to understand how they can better sell to clients.

6. Sales enablement

These are solutions that help the sales team improve their strategies in engaging customers. Sales engagement tools often include integrations that allow teams to access sales information, data, or content for easy retrieval. With the right sales enablement tools in your hands, you can easily connect your marketing, content, and sales cycle.

For example, Outreach (which also integrates with Dialpad) is our sales engagement platform that we use to automate our outbound sales efforts through communication sequences. It helps schedule emails, phone calls, LinkedIn messages, and other tasks so you never have to manually remember when to follow up or reach out to a prospect. It's can also ensure your enterprise sales process is much more efficient.

If your sales enablement team is responsible for training reps on your org's specific methodology (like BANT, SPIN, or SPICED), one unique feature that our team loves is Dialpad's Ai Playbooks. It's designed to help coaches and supervisors track rep adherence to sales methodologies more easily—Dialpad Ai can automatically suggest questions and phrases that they need to say during a call (for example, asking about budget or purchase timelines), understand whether the behavior was met, and check the task off the list (or notify managers if this isn't being done):

This is helpful for sales leaders, because they don't have to painstakingly review every single call, and can quickly tell which reps need additional coaching or if any parts of the methodology can be improved upon—all thanks to AI.

7. Lead generation and prospecting

These are tools for sales reps that aid the process of securing qualified leads, which includes gathering their contact information in order to conduct outreach and lead scoring. If the leads are responsive, the next step is nurturing them for conversion. These solutions also allow businesses to know which demographic or type of customers is the most profitable or most interested in their brand.

8. Sales outreach

Sales outreach tools connect your team with potential clients. Outreach tools include sales dialers, but they can cover a variety of channels beyond the phone. For example, Dialpad can be used to call, text, or schedule meetings with prospects over a video call.

It’s important to equip your sales reps with the right outreach tools that match your audience. In certain industries, people may prefer to receive a phone call over video conferencing. And because sales outreach is often the first time your potential customer interacts with your brand, it’s essential to choose a good sales outreach tool.

9. Marketing and promotion

Businesses can use different automation tools to streamline their sales efforts with their marketing team and company promotions. By using this type of sales tool, businesses can save time and resources while still reaching a large audience. These tools can also help businesses track their marketing campaigns, follow up with potential leads, and measure their results.

How much should you invest in sales tools

Before you start researching the best sales tool to use, it’s important to first set your budget. Your sales budget defines the amount you want to invest in improving your sales. But, how much should one invest in sales tools? How do company decision-makers know how much they should spend on sales?

According to experts, companies should follow the 5% rule when it comes to their marketing investments (this includes sales tools). The 5% rule means that businesses should only spend around 2-5% of their overall sales revenue on marketing, better customer experience, and sales enablement. The larger the company, the more it can spend from its budget.

There are also other metrics to consider such as the financial situation of your business, your goals, and your current sales strategy. Ensure that the budget and pricing of the software you decide to invest in are compatible with all these three factors to avoid problems and issues in the future. Mention all these when you decide to schedule a demo of potential sales tools for your team.

How to choose the right sales tool for your business

Choosing the right sales tool for your business is arguably one of the most critical parts of the whole sales process. You can’t even begin to start your sales journey and marketing outreach without first investing in the right sales tool. Here are the factors to consider when selecting the best tool for your sales team:

Type of sales (B2B or B2C)

B2B sales or business-to-business sales need to use sales tools that are designed for companies to sell services to other companies. Moreover, B2B ecommerce platforms streamline this process with features for custom pricing, and efficient management of transactions between businesses.

B2C sales are business-to-consumer and will need sales tools that are more effective in creating emotional connections with customers.

Sales process

Each company has its own sales methodology. Choose a sales tool that can help you centralize information and customer data. Also, choose software that will guide you in navigating each sale stage and will propel your team forward to success.

Budget

As mentioned earlier, understand how much your business can spend on a new sales tool. Knowing your budget outlook will ensure you can get the best tool you can afford. It will also allow you to run your business without any financial issues along the way.

Company requirements

Each company will have its own set of sales requirements. Find the sales tool that will best fit your needs. It’s also recommended to create a sales playbook that will help your teams adapt to each new situation.

Company culture

Using the wrong tool or software can potentially have a negative effect on your company culture. If it’s not working well for your team, this can lead to frustration and low productivity. A frustrated team can also cause a negative impact on your customer support services and sales outreach.

Tips for effectively using your sales tools

Sales tools, when used properly, can empower and boost the productivity of your sales team. Although there are a number of things to keep in mind to maximize your sales tool’s value, the following are the top three points to keep in mind:

Understand how the tool works

Sales tools come in all kinds of features and types. Before investing in one software, research how it’s used and how it benefits the business. If possible, ask for a custom demo so that you can better understand exactly how to use the tool without wasting time learning about features you may not use.

Use the tool as a supplement to your sales skills

Remember that these tools are used to help improve how you and your team works. The right tools can provide you with much-needed data and insights to bridge training gaps among agents to close more deals and drive customer success.

Your sales tools are a way to amplify and improve your customer interactions. But it shouldn’t replace the current interactions with your customers.

If you’re using sales prospecting tools, you should retain your human approach to customers. If you’re using pitching tools, they should be used to support your sales pitch — don’t rely solely on the email templates provided to craft the exact pitch for you. Make your own and be creative.

Customize the tool to fit your team

Not all sales tools and CRM tools will work for your team. Make sure that you know how to customize the tool so that it works for your team and your unique use case.

At the same time, don’t rely too much on your sales tool alone. Treat it as part of your strategy, not your overall strategy. Better yet, use it with other digital tools or strategies (ex. social media marketing, email marketing, etc.) you’re already using in your team.

Set your sales team up for success with the right tools

When it comes to sales strategy and proposals, it’s important to note how you plan to use your sales tools to empower your team. Sales tools aren’t just to help sales teams be efficient — they also help businesses understand the needs of their customers better. Whether it’s a tool to streamline customer and client interaction or a tool to generate more leads, the advantages of using sales tools make it a valuable key to business success.