The right combination of sales tools is essential for consistently converting leads into paying customers. Sales tools automate the selling process, leverage lead data for personalization, and enable reps to focus on what they do best—closing.
But with thousands available, which one do you choose? What features do you need to look out for? And, what factors do you need to consider when investing in new sales technologies? We’re here to help answer these questions. Let’s get into it.
Non-Negotiable Sales Tools
Every sales process is unique. Businesses use different tools. But, the fundamental sales tools stay the same. Sales teams need tools for finding leads, reaching out to leads, and managing them down the sales pipeline.
Lead Finder Tool
Inbound sales strategies are great for finding organic leads interested in your products. But you can’t rely on inbound sales alone to sustain your pipelines.
Lead finder tools enable you to proactively find people that match your ideal customer profile and buyer personas. You get important info like contact details, company descriptions, and demographics.
Before doing outreach, always validate leads first. You don’t want to waste time personalizing emails to a lead that doesn’t exist.
But, this won’t be a problem for Instantly B2B Lead Finder. All 280 million plus leads in our database are pre-validated. All that’s left is to reach out.
Sales Outreach Automation Software
Sales is a numbers game. You can’t realistically reach out to every lead in your email list and personalize copy for each one.
That’s where outreach automation software comes in. They let you automate drip campaigns, add dynamic personalization, and A/B test email variations to help you find your best email.
Many sales outreach tools also leverage AI to help reps manage campaigns. For example, Instantly’s AI inbox manager automates replies to positive emails based on context.
Prospects don’t fall through the cracks. Sales reps are immediately notified when hot leads are found. Instead of monitoring campaigns, reps can focus on leads most likely to convert.
Lead Management Tool (CRM)
Each sales campaign you have could have hundreds or thousands of leads. You’ll need a tool for managing these leads down sales pipelines. That’s why CRM tools are essential.
They centralize all data, interactions, and history of leads and customers. CRMs automate data entry, see trends based on customer behavior, and facilitate data-driven decision-making.
Sales reps use CRMs to analyze data, create comprehensive reports, and personalize outreach. Some CRMs like Instantly CRM are even built for cold email outreach campaigns.
Instantly CRM combines emails, texts, calls, and tasks into one master inbox. It also leverages AI to gather insights into your prospects and automates outreach for the hottest leads.
Must Try Sales Tools for Every Sales Team
Trying out sales tools takes a lot of time. To help streamline the process, here are the best sales tools we recommend for lead generation, outreach, and lead management:
Best Lead Finder Tools
Having a sustainable source of leads is essential for business growth. The following lead finder tools offer quality B2B leads, large databases, and advanced filtering features.
Instantly B2B Lead Finder
Lead generation and validation go hand in hand, but they are often two separate tools. This means extra costs and constant switching between apps.
If you want something more streamlined, look no further than Instantly B2B Lead Finder. You only pay for validated leads. After finding your ideal prospects, you can reach out with one click.
There are over 280 million leads and millions more coming soon. Use advanced search filters like lookalikes to find leads similar to previous clients.
If you’re selling SaaS, you can use the technologies filter to find prospects using similar products. You can also go from general to specific using keywords related to your industry.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Growth Leads: $37.9 for 1,000 leads
- Supersonic Leads: $77.6 for 4,500 leads
- Hyper Leads: $169.3 for 10,000 leads
- Enterprise: Custom pricing for 100,000 leads
Apollo.io
Apollo is also a popular lead finder tool, and for good reason. Apollo gives access to intent data, website visitor tracking, and AI recommendations for hot prospects. If you’re looking to build a company email list, Apollo lets you find all key stakeholders in an account.
But as always, verify leads first before running cold outreach campaigns with them. Some users have expressed that lead quality was low when they used Apollo. Your mileage may vary depending on the industry you’re targeting.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Free: 10 export credits per month
- Basic: $49 for 1,000 credits per month
- Professional: $79 for 2,000 credits per month
- Organization: $119 for 4,000 credits per month
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for prospecting. You immediately see leads that aren’t just validated but are also active in their community.
That means you have plenty of opportunities to research prospects and hyper-personalize outreach. LinkedIn Sales Navigator streamlines and automates that process for you.
You can prioritize outreach to accounts with the most connections to you, use sales signals to reach out at the right time, and leverage advanced search filters to pinpoint your ideal prospects.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Core: $79.99/month
- Advanced: $135/month
- Advanced Plus: Custom pricing
If you get any Sales Nav plan, you can send 50 InMails monthly. These are messages that don’t require you to have connections with prospects which refreshes each time you get a response.
Best Sales Outreach Automation Tools
After building an email list, all that’s left is to run a sales outreach campaign. Here are the tools we recommend that automate the process, leverage AI, and help you send emails in bulk.
Instantly.ai
Instantly is an email marketing tool built for cold sales outreach. It has all the features you’d need to run automated, sustainable, scalable sales outreach campaigns.
We recently launched a new Advanced Filters feature to filter leads in your campaigns based on the number of times they engaged with your email or clicked on your links. This lets sales reps focus on leads that already show interest but have yet to pull the trigger.
But, if you’re completely new to cold email marketing, don’t worry. You can use Instantly’s AI Sequence Generator to create an entire cold email campaign with just a few clicks.
For sales teams that focus on inbound leads, Instantly also has the new website tracker feature that lets you see information from prospects who visit your site.
All that’s left for you to do is to add leads, create a campaign either manually or with the help of AI, and monitor key metrics. The best part is you can try Instantly for free today.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Growth: $30/month for 5,000 emails
- Hypergrowth: $77.6/month for 100,000 emails
- Lightspeed: $286.3/month for 500,000 emails
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the best platforms when it comes to sales and marketing. Although it isn’t a tool for cold sales outreach, it’s great for nurturing warm leads and automating drip campaigns.
At its core, HubSpot is a CRM with sales and marketing tools built around it. You get email tracking, email automation, lead scoring, and performance monitoring.
Hubspot also has several sales enablement tools like playbook creations for your entire team, call transcription and coaching, and a centralized sales workspace.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Sales Hub Professional: $90/month/per seat for 500 daily emails
- Sales Hub Enterprise: $150/month/per seat for 1,000 daily emails
Gmass
Gmass transforms your Gmail account into a sales outreach machine. You can use it to automate cold emails, follow-ups, and A/B testing.
One of the most impressive features it has is Mail Merge with Google Sheets. This allows Gmass to read live data from your Google Sheets and send emails automatically to new entries.
Gmass can break Gmail’s sending limits. However, this is something you must approach with caution. As a rule of thumb, you should stick to sending 30-50 emails daily per sending account.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Standard: $25/month
- Premium: $35/month
- Professional: $55/month
Best CRM Tools
Once campaigns are running, you need a sales tool that can help you monitor leads down your pipelines. Here are the top customer relationship management (CRM) tools we recommend.
Instantly CRM
If you’re focusing on cold email outreach, Instantly CRM is a no-brainer. But it doesn’t stop with emails. Instantly CRM centralizes all communications from text, and SMS, to calls.
Sales reps get a holistic view of each lead and customer, allowing them to tailor engagement. When you click on a lead, you get a detailed view of your lead, company details, competitors, pain points, customer profiles, and dollar opportunities.
You can also assign tasks for your team like follow-ups, demos, or any specific request. Each lead can also be directly added to another campaign or be used as a reference for finding similar leads in B2B Lead Finder.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Growth CRM: $37.9/month
- Hyper CRM: $77.6/month includes Salesflows and Website Visitors
Salesforce
Salesforce is an industry standard. Think of it as the Windows of CRM. A ton of people use it and it has amazing support from developers, which makes it easy to build on top of.
Salesforce leverages what’s called declarative coding. Even non-coders can customize specific use cases for their exact needs.
But the true power of Salesforce lies in its interoperability. You can integrate Salesforce with thousands of other tools and platforms making it one of the most versatile CRMs on the market.
Pricing (Billed Yearly):
- Starter: $25/month
- Pro: $100/month
- Enterprise: $165/month
Key Takeaways
Modern sales require a blend of traditional sales skills and the right tools to streamline, automate, and scale campaigns. If you’re looking for a tool that has all the sales essentials, Instantly.ai has you covered. Try it out for free today and start scaling your sales campaigns with Instantly.
