Salesloft is a subscription-based SEP that provides tools, resources, and training for sales teams to scale their lead-gen operations. It has plenty of pros, but when it comes to its UI, pricing, and lack of other features, there are many alternatives to Salesloft worth considering.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What Salesloft is and what it’s suitable for
- Why look for a Salesloft alternative
- Plus the top 13 Salesloft competitors and alternatives to consider
Let’s get started!
What Is Salesloft and What Is It Suitable For
Salesloft is a comprehensive omnichannel SEP that hosts a range of tools for sales outreach. It combines outreach across email and mobile with lead tracking and customer relationship management (CRM) all under one hub similar to Salesforce and Hubspot.
It’s best suited for outbound campaigns and team performance tracking. The platform is built with an emphasis on lead generation and tracking rather than customer nurturing, with its primary users being medium to large enterprises.
Why Look for an Alternative to Salesloft
Salesloft has been around for over 15 years and has built a strong reputation in the SEP space. It has a healthy range of pros but is not without its share of cons. The following are the main drawbacks of Salesloft.
Limited Integrations
Salesloft integrates primarily with Salesforce and does not support integration with other major CRMs like Hubspot, Zoho, Zapier, or others. This can be an issue for businesses already using one of these platforms looking to migrate to or add Salesloft to workflows.
Complicated User Interface
A common complaint is that Salesloft’s UI is difficult to navigate and needs training to get familiar with. If you’re looking to quickly onboard sales reps or kick-start prospecting, a complicated UI can put a delay in the process.
Limited Email Automation and Formatting Options
Salesloft focuses on providing multiple outbound outreach channels through email and mobile, making its range of specialized email tools understandably limited. The email analytics provided are basic and formatting and editing emails can be difficult.
For example, being unable to remove the ‘Unsubscribe’ button from targeted personalized emails was one common complaint among users.
13 Salesloft Competitors and Alternatives for Sales
If you’re looking for a SEP that is easier to navigate, includes more features, or is more suitable for the size of your business, check out the following list of the top Salesloft alternatives and competitors.
Instantly.ai
Instantly.ai is a sales engagement tool designed to scale your email outreach campaigns with unlimited email accounts to send from, smart email warm up, and powerful automation tools.
Instantly users have access to an intuitive and visual dashboard with several sections that include:
- Leads: import your list of leads through Google Sheets, CSV files, or manually add prospects.
- Sequences: create email and follow-up sequences with a range of options like smart send and automated email rewriting to avoid spam.
- Scheduling: schedule emails to be sent periodically at the best dates and times of day that result in the best reply rates.
- Analytics: access and analyze sent emails, open rates, reply rates, and more to monitor campaigns and scale up.
You can link an unlimited number of email addresses to your account from any established email service provider and send thousands of emails per day.
Instantly’s automated email warm up saves time and boosts the deliverability and sender reputation of each individual account, making sure emails land in the right inbox and stay out of spam.
Key highlights:
- Automation tools to mimic optimal email sending patterns, perform follow-up sequences, and warm up emails.
- Smart features such as smart send and auto email rewriting to make outreach unique and avoid spam.
- Built-in mail merge tools for personalized messaging at scale.
- Add an unlimited number of sender email accounts.
- 14-day free trial.
Interested to learn more on how Instantly can help scale your lead generation and sales to new levels? Click here to find out!
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a well-known CRM platform that gives users a great run for their money. It’s suitable for all business sizes and includes a range of automation and analytics tools. Sales teams can track and respond to customers across multiple channels and use AI-powered sales assistants along the way.
While Salesloft integrates primarily with Salesforce, Zoho CRM includes integrations across G Suite, WordPress, Mailchimp, and Unbounce, to name a few. They offer a free version and free trial, allowing users to test the platform before making a final decision.
Key highlights:
- Wide range of integrations
- Affordable price
- Email marketing and management tools
- Robust reporting and analytics
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a deal-driven CRM built for all team sizes. With over 100,000 users, its simple and powerful design lets sales teams to easily jump into closing more deals. The platform allows teams to visualize their sales process from start to finish.
Their per-user pricing is affordable and falls less than most CRM options out there. Similar to its dashboard, the analytics and statistics tabs are visually appealing and easy to understand.
Unlike Salesloft, the platform offers both Android and iOS support and integrations across top CRMs and tools such as Google G Suite, Zapier, and MailChimp.
Key highlights:
- Affordable plans
- Customizable sales pipelines
- Email features such as bulk emailing, automated reminders, and scheduling
- Can be fully customized thanks to API access
InsideSales (Formerly XANT)
InsideSales is a cloud-based CRM platform that focuses on connecting sellers to buyers. It is more enterprise-focused, with a tailored pricing plan based on your team size.
If your team has a lot of moving parts, InsideSales focuses on speed and closing deals with sophisticated AI-powered data collection and analysis. The platform is well-designed and aims to help teams boost productivity, tailor customer interaction, and connect buyers to sellers.
Key highlights:
- Detailed inside sales dashboard and campaign management
- Email tracking and automation features
- Workflow management
- Sales goals and quota management
Groove
Groove, like Salesloft, is a SEP that was built to work primarily with Salesforce. It offers multi-channel automated sequences for LinkedIn, cold calling, and emails. Templates can be created from results-driven sequences to be reused in future campaigns.
Groove has automated follow-up tools that integrate with Salesforce to update records as well as add new campaigns. It can automatically log email interactions with leads and includes all the standard features of email outreach such as email tracking, open rates, and analytics.
Key highlights:
- CRM automation tools that update information on sales leads.
- Export Salesforce data to Gmail or Outlook for better flexibility.
- Multi-channel support across email, LinkedIn, and mobile.
ClickPoint
ClickPoint is similar to Instantly in that it makes it easy to track and follow up with leads without any guesswork. Sales teams can be guided to automate lead prioritization and easily know who and when to call or email.
Managing thousands of leads is simple with efficient tools such as automated SMS, email nurturing, and local presence dialing. Web and phone leads can be automatically captured and segmented, making it easy to collect and follow up with warm leads.
Key highlights:
- Free trial available
- Suitable for all business sizes
- Easy to navigate dashboard
- Includes email marketing and analytics tools
Hubspot Sales Hub
Hubspot is a comprehensive CRM with a wide variety of integrated sales engagement tools across hubs that range from sales and marketing to content management.
Hubspot gives enterprises a customizable pipeline to track every step sales teams take with prospects. The platform shows where each customer stands in the sales process and the history of interaction.
Most major social media and email channels can be integrated with Hubspot to centralize outreach, engagement, and customer relationship management.
Key highlights:
- Create and send email campaigns that include follow-ups through the Hubspot CRM.
- Track key metrics such as open rates, click rates, and customer engagements.
- A wide range of results-based email templates for cold outreach and follow-up.
Salesflare
Salesflare is a SEP and CRM platform that uses AI to simplify email outreach and lead generation. It allows sales teams to generate and follow up with leads at scale with AI-assisted sales automation and tracking.
The software offers full functionality across many platforms and applications from Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, Gmail, and Outlook. It is primarily used by SaaS B2B companies, marketing agencies, startups, and real estate agencies.
Key highlights:
- Free trial available
- Robust knowledge base
- Intuitive and easy to use
- Suitable for freelancers and small companies
Pipeline
Pipeline is a sales-based CRM platform with tools that focus on customer interaction. The platform was built with small to mid-sized enterprises in mind and includes tools to help businesses close deals faster.
Pipeline allows sales teams to internally share information and use the permission feature to delegate tasks. Reps can view open and content download rates from email campaigns and internally chat and share results with team members.
Key highlights:
- Internal chat features and integrations
- Email marketing tools with data analytics
- Social media and other business app integration possibilities
Vocus
Vocus is similar to Instantly in many ways but on a smaller scale. You can create multi-step cold email campaigns, automate follow-ups, and personalize emails.
It’s a platform built more for individuals or very small teams, making Instantly a better option if you’re in need of something more versatile, automated, and scalable.
Vocus also includes a Gmail extension that allows you to access its tools through your Gmail inbox. It does not include an automated email warm up feature, making it difficult to have optimal deliverability for your campaigns.
Key highlights:
- Gmail and G Suite extensions included as part of a standalone platform
- Templates can be saved and reused for future campaigns
- Includes multiple integration options with common CRMs
- Detailed tracking and analytics reports
Close.io
Close is a CRM with a range of sales engagement tools to keep sellers in touch with customers through automated email sequences, phone calls, SMS, and automated Zoom schedulers. Data is collected from each outreach channel, giving teams detailed insights on which channel to focus on and for which prospect.
Each action reps take is logged into the CRM, giving a detailed history of the sales process and buyer’s journey. If a prospect doesn’t reply through email but engages more by phone, sales reps can focus on that form of communication moving forward.
Key highlights:
- Analytics tools to track CRM metrics and sales
- Built-in email sequences, sales dialers, and SMS tools
- Can be integrated with other sales tools and CRMs
Yesware
Yesware is a multi-channel sales engagement platform (SEP) designed to help with email outreach.
Like Instantly, Yesware has tools to help users create email templates that can be personalized and sent out in bulk for instances like follow-ups and reminder emails.
Follow-up messages can also be scheduled and sent periodically. Once a contact replies they are automatically removed from follow-up sequences, which is a nice automated feature.
Key highlights:
- Built-in calendar booking feature that can be attached to cold emails
- Can be integrated with Salesforce to keep data on one CRM
- Includes email analytics
- Multi-channel personalized outreach campaigns
Reply
Reply is an email-focused outreach platform mainly built for large enterprise sales teams. Starting out, it requires a minimum of three people to be using the platform.
Reply includes most of the standard features expected from an email marketing tool but also has interesting features like an AI-powered cold email rating system based on how engaging your email is.
It can be easy to get lost in Reply’s UI and list of features, as well as its rather steep pricing per user.
Key highlights:
- Suitable for medium to large teams
- Integrates with most CRM platforms
- Multi-channel outreach options across email, phone, and LinkedIn
- Includes standard and unique email marketing and tracking features
Key Takeaways
If you’re looking for a Salesloft alternative that is easy to use, has multiple integration options, and is suitable for all business sizes, then the options on this list are top contenders to consider.
When choosing a SEP or CRM, keep a lookout for:
- Free trials and versions to test out the platform
- Smart AI-powered automation tools
- Intuitive UI that makes tracking, organizing campaigns, and analytics easy to follow
- Templates, sequences, and personalization features that will save you countless hours
Instantly provides all of the above and offers a 14-day free trial. Click here to learn more!
