30+ Sales Support Tools for a Sales Hacker
Graham RichardsonWhen you work in sales, a big part of your job is interacting with other people, building relationships and analysing needs. However, the more you sell, the more activities you need to automate to sell faster, better and smarter. Only then, you can really hope to scale your business. Below, you will find some tools that can help you with that, making your everyday job a lot easier.
We have prepared for you a ready to use, 2.0 sales pro tools list, which we have personally tested ourselves. The solutions we selected should help you organize and speed up some of the sales associated activities. We have included tools that will help you simplify, optimize and automate the sales processes, from database building, information aggregation, setting up meetings and email distribution, to final offering and documents signing. Want to know more – let’s go!
Database building
Database building is a key stage of the sales process. At this point, success is not simply defined by the number of contacts collected, but also a few other factors that need to be taken into consideration. One of them is, for example, well-defined target group, that you will source your leads from. Another one is the quality of the database, that guarantees that all of the contact details – emails and phone numbers – are real and up-to-date.
RightHello (righthello.com) – this tool will help you select the group of potential customers, based on the parameters you set yourself, like industry or company size. Once you set the parameters, the system will find the list of up-to-date contacts to the people from selected companies. This way, you won’t have to do the manual search yourself.
Growbots (growbots.com) – just like RightHello, it is yet another Polish sales support system. However, Growbots offers slightly more complex solutions for sales automation. It can search a database of over 200 million contacts that might fit your company’s profile, then automate an email correspondence with the potential customers and finally – suggest the best time to contact the hot lead.
Datanyze Insider (chrome.google.com/webstore/datanyze) – this extension is just one of many functionalities of the Datanyze platform. It allows you to create a list of well-targeted prospects, easily export the selected contacts and find email their addresses, without leaving the site.
Hunter (hunter.io) – helps you find and verify professional email addresses to prospects, based on their company’s website. It’s free up to 100 exported contacts a month.
Find that Lead (findthatlead.com) – another database building tool. Just like Hunter, it finds professional email addresses based on the company’s website.
ShopRank (ShopRank.co) – Polish lead generation tool for the e-commerce market. ShopRank has a database of over 1.4 million e-shops, mainly from Europe. It allows you to filter and export contacts you are interested in, based on the technology used, website traffic, type of products used and many other factors. It allows you to integrate the data collected with your CRM. Most of the database is available for free.
Contactout (contactout.com) – this plugin will let you access emails from LinkedIn profiles and then export them to Excel or Google Spreadsheet.
Livespace for Chrome (chrome.google.com/webstore/livespace) – if you are using Livespace CRM, you can use this Chrome plugin to add contact details of a potential client from LinkedIn directly to a CRM in a matter of seconds.
Mail tester (mailtester.com) – once you have a database, it’s worth checking whether all the emails are correct. This tool will help you make sure you don’t have any faulty email addresses (with spelling mistakes, non-existent ones or outdated ones), without having to actually send the message.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator (linkedin.com/sales-navigator) – If you want to sell through LinkedIn, you are going to need this tool. What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator? It gives you an unlimited access to LinkedIn users’ profiles. You can filter them based on the selected criteria, for example; industry, position, country, company size, tags etc. It takes one click to save a selected profile as a potential lead. You can also send messages to LinkedIn users, even if they are not your contacts.
Sales process management in CRM
Sales process management solutions won’t suddenly increase your sales by 100%, but systems such as CRM can help you organize your sales process and automate some of the activities, leaving more time for the business development and the “selling” itself.
Livespace (livespace.io) – forget about your notebook. If you want to scale your business, it’s obvious that at some point you are going to need a CRM. Livespace is a comprehensive solution – an online CRM for sales management, which helps you gather all your contacts in one place, segment it any given way, transfer all of the clients’ correspondence into one platform and organize your sales team activities so that everyone knows what the next steps are to closing a deal. With Livespace you will easily organize your sales processes and automate the communication with the potential or existing clients.
Gathering information about the prospects and preparing for the meeting
Once you finish building your database, it’s worth to spend some time gathering information about your prospects. Time spend on the good research at this point, will pay off in the future – helping you get ready for your first meeting with a potential client and then prepare a personalized offer.
BuiltWith (builtwith.com) – do you sell technologies? This free tool will help you build a detailed contact database and fill in some of the missing information about your prospects. BuiltWith shows you what technologies were used when creating a particular website – such as the one of your potential client.
Clearbit (clearbit.com) – helps you find the information about people and/or companies based on their email addresses or domains. It collects information available online, accessing and gathering data thanks to the integration with other tools you use on a daily basis, such as GitHub, Outlook or Gmail.
Similarweb (similarweb.com) – a complex tool for analysing website traffic. It may come in handy when you want to do a thorough research about your potential clients before the meeting.
SpyFu (spyfu.com) – another tool for analysing websites of your prospects or competition. Thanks to SpyFu you will find out how much do they spend on advertising and what key phrases do they use for positioning.
Detective by Charlie (detective.io) – in short, prospecting 2.0. Algorithm Detective will do a thorough research about the potential client for you, helping you prepare for the meeting. The platform finds important information about the selected person (company, position etc.) and suggests, what might be good topics for conversation. The Detective saves you a lot of time you would otherwise have to spend googling your prospects or trying to find out more about them through LinkedIn.
Sending emails
When you are sending emails to several recipients, your average mailbox will be more than sufficient. However, when you are emailing larger numbers of people or if you want to automate the process than it is better to use some simple email automation solutions.
Woodpecker (woodpecker.co) – is an easy to use tool for setting up a sequence of emails, great for so-called “cold mailing”. What’s important, is the fact that the emails are sent from your own server, so they don’t end up in spam. Thanks to Woodpecker, you can plan a mass, yet personalized mailing chain to your database of potential customers, which will be distributed in a defined period of time. This will save you time needed for manual email distribution. You also get access to statistics, letting you know, for example, how many of your emails have been open.
Mailshake (mailshake.com) – an alternative to Woodpecker. Equally simple and effective tool for cold mailing. It allows you to use your own databases and ready to use email templates.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation tools also support sales. They help you understand your website users and plan personalized communication with them.
SALESmanago (salesmanago.pl) – complex and comprehensive tool for marketing automation, that supports sales. SALESmanago analyses users’ behaviour on your website and allows you to tag each of their actions. You can then divide them into segments based on their actions and the subpages visited, so that you know who and how uses your page. What are the benefits of this? Additional information about your potential customers, which you can use to make an even better, more personalized offer.
Mailchimp (mailchimp.com) – another tool for marketing automation. Mailchimp’s main functionality is an effective management of mass mailing campaigns. You will also find some marketing automation functionalities here. It Is not as comprehensive as SALESmanago, but it is cheaper.
Infusionsoft (infusionsoft.com) – marketing automation and sales management tool, recommended for small companies.
PieSync (piesync.com) – is a complex tool for application integration, which works in real time and allows for a two-way integration. Everything is based on the rules predefined by you. How does it work? If you want the contact you have just added, for example, in Intercom, to be saved directly into your CRM, PieSync will do it for you. It also works the other way – if you add a contact into your CRM, PieSync will also update the data in Intercom. At the moment, PieSync allows you integrate over 160 applications.
Zapier (zapier.com) – another tool for integrating different tools you are using. It automates the communication between different tools.
Setting up meetings
Yes, we have also found some tools for setting up your meetings. Obviously, you can do it via email, phone or SMS… but why, if there are ways to do it faster and more effectively?
Appointly (appoint.ly) – is another Polish solution on our list. It’s a fast and intuitive tool that will definitely save you some extra email or phone exchanges with a client. How does it work? You make your calendar available to a person you want to arrange a meeting with, beforehand defining which dates work for you. Your customer or prospect can then select a date from your calendar that works for him or her and simply click on the selected time. And then it is done – meeting is set! Thanks to Appointly you can book a meeting in a matter of seconds, avoid double bookings, add a date to your calendar and receive an email notification. The tool can be integrated with many other calendars, as well as your mailbox.
Calendly (calendly.com) – an alternative to Appointly.
On-line meetings
Appear.in (appear.in) – the free version allows you to run video conferences for up to 4 people, without the need to login or download additional software. It lets you connect from your desktop or mobile app for Android and iOS. Great solution for quick internal or external meetings.
Go To Meeting (gotomeeting.com) – stable and advanced tool for running video conferences or webinars for up to 25 users. It doesn’t have a free version but guarantees a really good quality of transmission, stable connection and opportunity to record video and sound. Go to Meeting is a good choice for important meetings when you want to make sure that all goes according to plan and there will be no technical glitches.
WebinarJam (webinarjam.com) – a good, very intuitive tool for running online conferences and webinars for an unlimited number of users. It’s a paid solution, but it lets you, for example, co-host webinars with up to 6 speakers and provides easy forms of reporting. It’s a great solution for larger meetings.
Recording product demo
If you sell something like SaaS solutions, you will definitely need to record a product demo before meeting your customers. We also have something, that may help you with that 😉
Loom (useloom.com) – simple and free tool for recording and sharing videos.
Online monitoring
If you think online monitoring only comes in useful in marketing, think again and check out our list to see how you can use It to support your sales processes.
Brand24 (brand24.pl) – good database is not everything. It is also very important to monitor your brand mentions online and key phrases associated with your product and/or competitors that appear online. Every time someone mentions your brand or product, you will receive a notification, which will help you react in real time, potentially acquiring new clients. Brand24 can be integrated with Slack, so you can also receive your notification there.
SentiOne (sentione.com) – Good alternative to Brand24
Productivity
There are many tools and solutions out there, that will help you increase productivity and optimize your work. We have selected a few that are easy to implement and have a real impact on your effectiveness. We have tested them all ourselves 😉
Everhour (everhour.com) – it’s a tool that will help you measure the time you spend on any given task. Analysing data collected you will be able to see, what takes you the most time and optimize your daily workflow. It can be integrated with other popular tools such as Jira, Trello, Github, Zapier.
Pomodoro Technique (tomato-timer.com) – free tool for time management, which will help you control time spend on your work and breaks. You can set notifications to let you know when the time assigned for the particular task or a break has passed.
Timedoctor (timedoctor.com) – SaaS tool for monitoring time spent on completing your tasks and measuring productivity.
Facebook News Feed Eradicator (chrome.google.com/webstore/news-feed-eradicator) – Chrome plugin, that can replace your Facebook newsfeed with … inspirational quotes. It might put an end to endless hours spent on looking through your friends’ holiday pictures.
Trello (trello.com) – very easy, free and popular tool that can be used for organizing tasks and project management. You can use it with your co-workers, sharing tasks, co-managing projects and creating project teams.
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All of those tools are just a drop in the ocean of needs of a real sales hacker. But no tool will ever replace a good sales process and personal connection with a client, but… why not do both?