With the right toolset, sales managers and leaders can transform the selling experience for to make it extremely pleasant and safe for both sales professionals and the prospects.

Sales Automation: Emails, Calls, & Updating

Sales is already hard enough, so removing repetitive tasks makes life easier for sales reps. This provides them extra time to increase prospect touches and personalize communication.

Sales reps will appreciate this since it will remove some routine tasks that will free them to do other things. These tools automate simple, repetitive tasks that take time, such as high-volume call and email campaigns.

Tools:

• Outreach - Outreach is a sales automation tool for SMB and enterprise organizations, which allows users to triple the number of leads they convert to appointments. Outreach enables users to design a series of touchpoints that prospects will receive until the prospect replies, combining automatically sent emails with manual steps (such as calls and personalized emails). Users are able to determine spacing between touch points, delivery times, and A/B test on the fly.

Outreach empowers sales teams to automate and optimize their sales cadence for cold outbound, web inbound, MQL appointment setting, and more - helping them close more deals. Outreach analytics allows sales teams to continuously monitor and improve their inbound and outbound sales operations and reduce the time to close.

• PersistIQ - Launch personalized campaigns with multiple touch points in just minutes to get more conversations started from your cold leads. Eliminate the common mistakes that plague outbound sales; leads falling through the cracks, misformatted emails, crossed lines of communication, forgetting to follow up, or getting the dreaded reply, “You reached out last week and we already scheduled a demo… #fail!” PersistIQ’s powerful platform integrates into your existing workflow, CRM, and marketing automation systems. Personalization is key in selling and automation is key in productivity. PersistIQ lets you do both.

• RingDNA - RingDNA helps inside sales teams sell smarter, faster and more efficiently. Within the Sales Acceleration landscape, RingDNA is differentiated by its strength in optimized communications, workflow and data-driven training tools. Companies use RingDNA to improve overall sales execution for both inbound and outbound sales. The RingDNA UI is designed to enhance a typical sales rep’s workflow while still leveraging all the benefits of Salesforce data and reporting capabilities. In addition, thanks to the strength of the product’s Salesforce integration, sales reps are onboarded in minutes, a strong advantage compared with legacy solutions, which entail weeks or months to get up and running. RingDNA maximizes inside sales performance by helping inside sales teams qualify, connect with and convert more customers.

• Cirrus Insight

Cirrus Insight brings context to communications with prospects and customers by presenting information from Salesforce in an intuitive way exactly when you need it in the inbox:

• View Lead and Contact information as soon as you open an email

• Save emails to related Contacts and Leads and Opportunities and custom objects

• Create new Leads and Contacts in seconds

• Track email opens and link clicks

• Schedule Events and create Tasks with ease

• Merge Salesforce templates into your email

• Schedule emails to send later

• Set reminders so you always remember to follow up

• Sync calendar events between Google Calendar, Outlook, and mobile with Salesforce

ToutApp

Sales Operations and Goal Management Software

This sales tool helps you manage your sales team and sales processes by automatically creating a dashboard for every employee & help organize employees into roles, short-and track their productivity.

This sales tool provides you with analytics such as pace/projections, spreadsheet export, activity triggers, productivity quadrant and simplified graphs

Tools:

• Ambition

• Hoopla - Hoopla is the new way to win for sales, marketing and customer service teams. Hoopla’s team performance software combines modern game mechanics, data analytics and broadcast-quality video in a powerfully simple application that makes it easy for front-line managers to motivate team performance and score more wins. Using Hoopla, managers can quickly create contests, competitions and leaderboards around any CRM metric, and broadcast live performance updates to TV, web and mobile screens throughout the company. Hoopla's Sales Motivation solutions engage the entire company in an exciting, play-to-win culture that delivers measurable gains in team productivity and performance.

Sales Engagement Platforms

a solid platform to manage the customer engagement process from end to end.

Sales engagement is more than just sales outreach. It also involves the quality of that outreach, the efficiency of prospecting activity, and the effectiveness of conversion efforts.

Sales Enablement is the systematic approach to increasing sales productivity, by supporting reps with the content

Tools:

• Clearslide - ClearSlide offers the most complete and open Sales Engagement Platform that integrates content, communications and actionable insights to improve business results. Customers achieve higher seller productivity, increased sales management effectiveness, and stronger content ROI. For managers and leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and stronger forecasting. For content users and creators, ClearSlide makes it easy to recommend content tailored by sales stage, with next-step interaction suggestions. For reps, ClearSlide intuitively delivers content, communications, and analytics in a single platform experience.

• Brainshark - Brainshark helps organizations ensure their reps are prepared for every sales conversation with powerful solutions for sales readiness and enablement.

• CustomShow - CustomShow was built on the idea that the sales presentation is special. Unlike a website, printed brochures, TV commercials or billboards, the sales presentation is where the rubber meets the road in business. When giving a presentation, the salesperson meets the client, engages, persuades, and hopefully closes the deal.

Sales Forecasting

A Sales Forecast is a prediction of sales revenue based on the analysis of historical sales, market conditions, and salespersons’ estimates.

Sales revenue affects all aspects of a business, thus making accurate sales forecasting integral to informed business decisions.

Tools:

• Clari - Powered by artificial intelligence, Clari eliminates the blind spots, improves forecast accuracy, and shows the entire sales org where to focus to close more business, faster.

• InsightSquared - For fast-growing SaaS companies that require data to achieve optimal sales performance, InsightSquared is a sales performance analytics solution that provides hundreds of pre-built reports for every major sales metric. Unlike spreadsheets, InsightSquared’s visual, maintenance-free reports and dashboards provide a custom lens into real-time sales performance.

Sales Engagement Analytics

Necessary to centralize interactions among sales and marketing across communication channels, such as email, online presentations and meeting in person.

Aragon Research predicts that Sales Engagement Platforms will grow into a five-billion dollar industry over the next five years. This growth will be fueled by demands from sales and marketing teams to better communicate and engage with customers through an integrated, easy-to-use, highly mobile platform – one that enables the sharing of high-impact content, delivers insights for what to do next, and integrates and auto-logs to CRM.

There are hundreds of sales enablement tools available, but most only accomplish a small part of the selling process.

Stitching together disjointed tools can be confusing for sales rep adoption, hard for enablement and operations teams to manage, and may actually limit productivity. In fact, Aragon Research reports that the average sales rep must use anywhere from five to eight different tools to reach prospects.

The Sales Engagement Platform supports the customer lifecycle from prospect, to close, to support and expansion. It also consists of sales communications, sales content management, and analytics

Tools:

• LiveHive - LiveHive’s sales engagement platform automatically alerts every time a prospect forwards a sales document or email and can provide complete profile data for the recipients. They can see exactly what pages are looked at and for how long. With all of this information, sales teams can better forecast and qualify leads.

• Zoho Motivator - Zoho Motivator is an insight driven software designed to maximize revenue and drive engagement of sales team. This is done while promoting the best practices for sales behaviors and activities. With Zoho Motivator, businesses can effectively leverage gamification to boost the productivity and performance of sales teams.

Zoho Motivator is an adaptable system that works well as Zoho CRM, and uses contests, scorecards, and leaderboards to help salespeople enhance their productivity, which can result in improved revenues and better team engagement. With Zoho Motivator, sales teams are no longer focused squarely on targets, which often leads to the neglect of the best practices that lets them achieve those targets. The system helps drive desired behavior and improve the sales workflow, but also offers the fun element while salespeople work at their targets.

• ClearSlide - We aspire to make every customer interaction you have successful. Every email, every meeting, every presentation and proposal should be amazing so your customers are delighted to engage with your company. Our mission is to deliver the most complete and open Sales Engagement Platform that brings all facets of Sales Enablement, content, communications and analytics together to create amazing sales experiences and improve business results.