It may be a daunting task for small companies to compete in a world of sales full of giants with huge opportunities and audiences.

But what if they take advantage of sales tools to help get a competitive edge?

Keep in mind that the company size and niche of business don’t matter as long as the sales manager has a set of powerful tools at hand to streamline, automate, and optimize work processes. This approach will help sales departments work more successfully and boost sales.

So, no worries! We’ve put together an ultimate list of the best sales tools that can be a magic wand for small companies looking to get powerful functionality and save budget at the same time. For the ease of navigation, we’ve broken down the variety of tools into 9 categories.

Table of contents:

• Category #1. Email finding solutions
• Category #2. Phone number finding tools
  
• Category #3. CRM platforms
• Category #4. Video services for online meetings
• Category #5. Surveys to sell better
  
• Category #6. Top email management software for sales
  
• Category #7. Best billing and invoicing software
  
• Category #8. Content management and sharing apps
  
• Category #9. CLM tools
  

Wait, but what exactly are the sales tools?

Sales tools are software, apps, extensions and other types of platforms — virtually everything you can utilize to take your existing sales system to the next level, automate the workflow, and improve the work of your sales department.

How can you benefit from using these tools? You will get better sales, better revenue, and business growth in general!

Typically, the sales tools include sales prospecting, CRM (customer relationship management), sales analytics, sales acceleration, email search, phone number search, video conferences, outreach automation, and more.

Let’s have a closer look at some examples!

Category #1. Email finding solutions

What can be better than adding quality targeted leads to your sales funnel. Here are some of the go-to solutions for this task.

Hunter.io

https://hunter.io/

Hunter.io is a perfect way of extracting an email address from a database of more than 60 million public sources. After that, once the email identified, it’s possible to check if it’s valid.

Using this email finder tool, you can enable filters and activate the search by the company’s name or domain, the employee name, and other parameters.

Just like other similar services, Hunter.io offers a Google Chrome extension that you can take advantage of to detect email addresses on any site without needing to switch between the tabs. What’s more, the email verifier feature is also in place here!

Pricing: The Free account comes with 25 searches/month. The paid subscriptions start at $49/month, which offers as many as 500 searches.

Snov.io Email Finder

https://snov.io/

It has never been easier to find someone else’s address. With Snov.io, you can hunt for target email addresses by name, custom domain list, company name, domain, social media, job title, and location.

The tool comes with 2 Google Chrome Add-ons:

1) LI Prospect Finder that collects emails from LinkedIn

2) Email Finder that extracts emails attached to any website

Snov.io generates results in just a few seconds, and you get a list with an email address of your prospects that can be downloaded in CSV, XLSX, or Google Sheet formats.

What’s more, Email Finder comes with the integrated Email Verifier offered as part of the subscription, which makes lead verification processes as simple as 1-2-3!

Pricing: The platform offers a wide range of subscription depending on the team size and needs. The lowest “S Plan” costs $39/month, while the highest “XXL Plan” costs $738/month. If you choose to pay annually, a discount is offered and you’re given 2 bonus months for free.

AeroLeads Email Finder

https://aeroleads.com/

AeroLeads makes it easy to find business details and b2b data, such as emails, phones, etc. with its app and Google Chrome addon. It’s perfect for bulk email search, individual email search as the service offers as many as 15 type of information: full name, job title, location, LinkedIn profile and more.

On top of this, you can export the data to Salesforce, Zapier, MailChimp and other platforms with just one click.

A nice bonus is that this app has the integrated feature to analyze bounces — it identifies the cases, such as: account abuses, spam traps, and fake domains. If you even run into an issue, no problem — the team behind AeroLeads offers amazing support to its users via phone, chat, and email.

Pricing: You can go for a free trial. Then paid plans start at $49/month for the “Take Off Plan”.

Category #2. Phone number finding tools

These solutions are super handy in case you resort to cold calls as your primary strategy for selling your products and services and wish to contact the prospect customers without waiting for them to find you. The aim of cold calling is to filter and grow the client base.

Here are some helpful platforms to try:

Whitepages

https://www.whitepages.com/

Whitepages is an intuitive service to search for people, check their background info, and find contact details. Using it, you can easily find such info as a person’s phone number (by entering the person’s name and place of living).

The tool can be used to search for people within the U.S. If that’s what you’re looking for, Whitepages will be super handy in detecting landlines and mobiles. What’s more, Whitepages provides an opportunity to determine who owns a phone, person’s location, and perhaps linked business.

Pricing: Detecting landlines comes for free. More information, such as mobiles numbers and other details, is available starting from $4.99 per month.

AnyWho

https://www.anywho.com/

Directories of businesses and people search are the two key things we’ll be focusing on next.

The directories of businesses feature is used to search for local businesses within the United States — you’ll see businesses displayed on the map and accompanied by basic information (phone numbers included). All you need to do is type in the business category or name. The search runs like a clockwork!

Meanwhile, people search catalog gets updated every week with phone numbers of people from all over the U.S. For the best experience, we suggest that you enter the full name plus the zip code of the person whose phone number you look for.

Pricing: Free of charge.

BeenVerified

https://www.beenverified.com/

BeenVerified is a convenient service that provides an opportunity to get information about a person of interest in a fast and affordable way.

Using only a person’s first and last name + their location, you can quickly obtain necessary details about prospects. It can be done both on your PC and mobile (Android and iOS).

Take advantage of the People Search option to craft detailed profiles of your leads, including contact information such as a mobile number, place of living, email address, and more. The service is also good at providing data on the person’s social networks and criminal record.

On top of the People Search feature, BeenVerified also generously provides other products to its users, including the following info about people: social media activity, relatives, bankruptcies, photos and more.

Pricing: under $5 for a 7-day trial period and then $26.89/month for a paid subscription.

Category #3. CRM platforms

When utilizing a CRM in work processes, a sales manager not only knows the steps of the sales funnel for each client, but also has access to additional info that helps understand the client better – the name, gender, age, city and state, marital status, approximate budget and  what and where they like to shop. Without a doubt, knowing all this increases the chances of sealing the deal.

Pipedrive CRM

https://www.pipedrive.com/

Another powerful and super handy CRM that’s ideal for small sales teams!

Pipedrive makes the sales process much easier by redesigning the way of how your prospects and leads show up in pipelines. The service offers a comprehensive, all-inclusive approach to working with sales deals, providing everyone on the team with the opportunity to view and take part in the work processes, thus helping to stay the whole team updated on the new developments. The platform reduces the manual actions and automates a big deal of things.

Another cool feature about Pipedrive is the option to create staff plans to help employees  be in the loop with customer dealings. The feature super easy to enable and integrates well with other services.

Pricing: Free 14-day Professional plan as a trial period. No credit card required. After that: €150 per user/year.

Zoho CRM

https://www.zoho.com/crm/

Surely, we couldn’t help but mention this giant in the world of CRM platforms!

This one comes with an exceptional set of features, such as the automation of sales forces, management of work processes, sales enablement, performance management. And that’s just to name a few!

The personal and other type of data on the platform is securely stored, like in any bank, and the platforms also offers tools for customer support teams and marketing efforts, combining all these cool options under one roof.

Zoho CRM helps you monitor your sales, further automate them and seal more deals in a short time. Thanks to Zoho, you’ll be able to make good use of existing customer data for cross-sales and up-sales in the future interactions.

Pricing: 15-day trial — free of charge. Meanwhile, paid subscriptions start at €20 per month.

Snov.io CRM

https://snov.io/sales-crm

This is an extremely intuitive, yet fully-featured CRM that perfectly meets the needs of small business owners!

What if you give this CRM a try? With it, you can fixate on the most profitable deals and build your sales funnel from zero. So, you can hunt for contacts of prospective clients, verify obtained data, create deals, craft custom pipelines consisting of over 100 steps, track each stage of interactions with your prospect leads, and quickly turn them into lifetime customers.

In addition, the service facilitates the efforts of your team to close a greater amount of deals by allowing them to share comments and use ready-to-go templates. While you, being a sales manager, are able to assign roles to your subordinates and view the progress of all your teammates in teal time.

You can find out more about the Snov.io CRM by watching the video below:

Pricing: Free of charge.

Category #4. Video services for online meetings

First of all, budget-wise, holding a meeting online is much more affordable than doing it offline! And in today’s pandemia circumstances, having a video call is the only way to stay in touch with your customers and business partners.

Secondly, video conferencing is definitely superior to conference calls. You can engage people more effectively and convince a potential client during the chat, build trust, etc. After all, online communication is as close to the communication at a regular meeting as it can be.

Zoom

https://zoom.us/

Zoom is one of the most top-rated cloud platforms for running video conferences, web conferences, webinars, and other kinds of online events. On the plus side, it comes with HD audio + video calling. Also, it’s possible to share your content with around 1K attendees of your online event. Zoom can also sync to your calendar via Gmail and other platforms.

Unlike other services, Zoom offers cool tools, such as filters for your appearance and virtual backgrounds to hide things that could turn your communication with clients into a failure. What’s more, you can protect your online meeting with a password and encrypt your chats in a way so that your Zoom data will always be preserved. You can even see logs from months and years before!

Pricing: Free of charge for meetings of up to 100 members and 40 mins. Paid subscriptions start at $14.99 per host / month.

GoToMeeting

https://www.goto.com/meeting

GoToMeeting is a robust platform well-equipped for video conferencing, online meetings, demonstrations, slide decks, and team brainstorms. One of its main pros is that it maintains cloud recording, so you don’t have to bother about finding space on your PC to store everything. Besides, GoToMeeting automatically backs up conversations, which is a great plus.

Another option worth mentioning is the ability to share screens, leave comments, and create private rooms for meetings. Also, if you need it, there’s a mobile app. Using it, you can share your screen on the go — on your mobile (or a tablet). And yay! Good news — mobile conferences are recorded too.

Pricing: Paid memberships start at $16 per month.

Google Meet

https://meet.google.com/

This is a service for business communication that makes creating a secure online meeting and group chats a piece of cake! It works wonders not only on desktop but also on mobiles, so you can discuss everything you need with ease from your smartphone.

Besides, Google offers video conferencing available to everyone who requires it, for free. So, using your Google account, you can have a video call on these terms: max 100 users and 60 minutes.

Those companies that have advanced needs and requirements can take advantage of premium features, including hosting calls with around 250 participants and 100,000 viewers per domain.

Pricing: Lifetime subscription. Paid memberships start as low as  $8 per user (billed monthly).

Category #5. Surveys to sell better

Customer surveys are a part and parcel of any successful sales strategy. They come in handy when it’s needed to quickly act a reaction to the market situation, while the survey results will help you adjust your sales strategy and the overall work of the company.

But surveys and forms should never be approached offhand, as their creation requires expertise and skills. Before launching the survey, it’s important to understand each survey’s goals, choose the right template, and, of course, pick the fitting platform that will offer the survey tools.

SurveyMonkey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/

SurveyMonkey is one of the leaders in the world of online survey services. And for a good reason!

Using it, you can easily design customer forms and surveys and share them with your clients  via a link, email, chat, on a site or in social networks. The learning curve there isn’t steep, you can surely get the hang of things without being a pro or having some specialized knowledge. The obtained responds can be viewed and analyzed directly on the platform.

What’s even better, the platform provides an option to collaborate while creating surveys and collecting results. Another significant feature is an export of responses to PDF, CSV, PPT, and XLS,  and you can integrate your results with your apps.

Pricing: Paid subscriptions cost €30 per month and more.

Typeform

https://www.typeform.com/

Typeform is another top-rated and intuitive tool to research the market, run surveys to collect your clients’ feedback, and create other forms, such as polls, quizzes, tests, questionnaires, and more!

Using Typeform, you can even launch surveys with multiple pages, experiment with a wide range of survey designs, types of content, such as images and videos. You can do virtually everything to make your survey enticing for customers. By the way, the responses from your clients work great on any device, be it a PC, smartphone, or tablet.

In addition, Typeform provides analytical tools and reports. You can see customer answers, analyze the average time people needed to complete the survey, view summary info on  devices respondents used, and how many people decided not to take the survey.

Pricing: Freemium. If you need advanced features, paid subscriptions start at $29 per month.

Google Forms

https://www.google.com/forms/about/

If you were looking for a convenient tool to run surveys and forms, look no further! Google has something to order in this category as well.

With Google Forms, you can build powerful forms with attractive images and videos, create your custom designs, or, alternatively, you can resort to a professional library with ready-made templates. Choose one, customize it, and you’ll be live in no time.

The statistics are displayed directly in your account and can be converted into a convenient table. Besides the survey responses, you can also collect other types of data like emails, phone numbers, addresses.

As for cons…Adding Google Forms to a site will only work via adding a link. But on the other hand, Google offers an unlimited package. The number of surveys is not limited by anything, and the form itself is hosted online (respondents don’t need to download it).

 Pricing: Free if you have a Google account.

Category #6. Top email management software for sales

Email marketing is a time-tested technique to boost your business by leaps and bounds. But you need to make sure you select the right tool for your business to go places.

Reply.io

https://reply.io/

Reply.io is a platform that automates sales efforts in teams, i.e. helps business owners streamline email communication with existing customers and attract new ones. With this Reply’s toolset, you can automate your email campaigns, calls, and other kinds of interactions based on what’s specified in your sales plan.

What’s more, Reply.io brings you the best designer-made email templates that you can benefit from and thus speed up the email campaigns.

One more cool feature about this platform is that it brings AI to the table, for example, it sorts emails into 6 themed categories. Thanks to it, you can focus on the most important things, while the routine work is being handled on the background.

Pricing: A free 14-day trial, after that: $70/month per user.

FunnelBake

https://funnelbake.com/

FunnelBake is a service for organizing email campaigns and sending bulk emails. It’s especially good at cold email outreaching, which will move your leads steps by step through your sales funnel. You can also automate follow-up emails, customize email designs, schedule emails for a particular time, and more!

FunnelBake offers easy-to-master tools: in just a few minutes, you will know how to prepare an email design, configure triggers, and schedule time and date and successfully launch the mailing campaign.

In addition, the service comes with advanced analytics that will give you detailed reports with your campaign metrics.

Pricing: A free 14-day trial. Paid memberships can be bought starting from $9/month per user seat.

Category #7. Best billing and invoicing software

After you attracted customers, the next big thing is billing. Collecting payments is an important task where several tools may be super handy to automate things. You just need to choose the software that suits you best.

QuickBooks

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/global/

The first software option on our list is QuickBooks, which is very popular as it conveniently integrates with your accounting details to help you monitor all transactions. On top of this, it offers features to boost sales + some customer management options letting you store all invoices under one roof.

Thanks to QuickBooks, you can easily generate reports with custom data, schedule events, and send reports at the exact date and time to the company’s stakeholders. Also, you can enjoy more than 600 integrations with third-party services, thus taking the routine things out of your accounting.

Pricing: Comes with a free 30-day trial. Memberships cost from $4/month.

Zoho Books 

https://www.zoho.com/books

Zoho Books is the best thing that can happen to small businesses in terms of invoicing, as it automatically generates and sends professional invoices to clients, keeps track of stock, and manages all needed contacts directly in the service.

Using Zoho Books, you can effectively take care of your data, keep data on your local server and in external data centers, which is the most secure way, and restore it whenever you require it. Along with that, the platform automatically creates data backups on a regular basis.

Pricing: Free plan is offered to businesses with income of less than $50K/year. Paid memberships are available from €12/month.

Wave

https://www.waveapps.com/

Wave is one more powerful billing app that empowers small business owners to easily create and send out invoices in just a few minutes, as well as configure recurring invoices and credit card auto-charges.

The considerable strong point of Wave is that it’s a great time-saver thanks to automated invoices, bills, and reminders.

Additionally, you’ll be able to monitor the status of transactions of your business on the go with mobile apps and get updates each time when an invoice is due, overdue or paid.

Pricing: Free of charge.

Category #8. Content management and sharing apps

Mundane tasks such as management and sharing of content most often than not drives businesses crazy if done manually and across a variety of software. But if you decide to combine all tools to automate these work processes in one place, such routine tasks will no longer tie yourself up in knots.

Allbound

https://www.allbound.com/

Allbound is an all-in-one platform that helps you automate routine tasks connected with network content management. With the strength of the platform’s Content Management Tool, you can share your content with your partners.

As a big advantage, in this app you can analyze how your partners interact with your content and make changes to the content for future use, taking into account the helpful insights. Below is the info you can obtain:

• Partner visits and views
• Shares, and likes
  
• Possibility to pick a date range to see what kind of content is performing in the best way
  

Security levels and access control is another great plus about the Allbound app. Its diverse options to set individual content access rules for your teammates will let you avoid many issues with sharing your content.

Pricing: Fees are available upon request.

WordPress

https://wordpress.com/

WordPress is one of the most well-known CMS builders and on everyone's lips. Using this service, you can craft your DIY site and maintain it without extra help of professional web developers. A lot of companies benefit from it because it is easy to master and comes with a great variety of ready-to-go templates for sites.

Usually, this CMS is resorted to when a company needs to create a blog to promote a brand. You can also make use of it to launch your online store, portfolio, or any other type of site.

WordPress has easy-to-understand editor, so you won’t have issues getting the hang of things. The web app allows people who work with content to manage and publish content without any specialized knowledge.

Pricing: Paid subscriptions are available at $7/mo.

Category #9. CLM tools

Why do businesses need contract lifecycle management platforms (CLM)?

Here’s why: they help your sales team to minimize financial and audit risks + increase deal closing speed.

Concord

https://www.concordnow.com/

Concord makes it a piece of cake to keep control over your contracts’ lifecycle management. The app features such options as the ability to craft templates, use pre-set designs for faster creation of contracts, take advantage of workflows, and have interactions with stakeholders within the platform.

What’s more, Concord’s feature of version controls makes sure everyone gets the most relevant document version.

Apart from that, your clients can modify and sign the contract electronically at no additional fee. The app also has an integrated electronic signature option that optimizes the contract lifecycle management process and removes the need to sign an agreement.

Pricing: Free trial period. Premium memberships are available starting from $17 per month.

PandaDoc

https://www.pandadoc.com/

PandaDoc is a comprehensive platform for organizing document workflows and automating processes of contract management. The app’s big advantage is that it has integrated electronic signatures, a wide range of third-party apps you can synch with, ready-to-use templates for contracts, and the possibility to experiment and craft your custom templates.

PandaDoc is perfect for those who are looking for a solution that helps to submit multiple contracts in one transaction. The app safely transfers client’s details from an existing document to a new one in an automated mode.

Alongside drafting new contracts, the app tackles contract renewals due to notification emails.

Pricing: The tool comes with a free 14-day trial. Paid memberships are available starting from $29/month.

Proposify

https://www.proposify.com/

This tool is a game-changer for SBO!

Proposify is a builder of proposals and contracts that allows small businesses to design and calculate quotes efficiently. On top of having a library with different types of content, the app offers electronic signature support to use in docs. With it, you can also create templates and gather payments.

Its metrics function lets you track the proposal progress and see who’s viewed your documents. Meanwhile, with its integrations (e.g., Stripe, HubSpot, QuickBooks, etc.), you can connect the tool with your customer relationship management tool of choice and close deals faster.

Pricing: Free lifetime plan. Paid plans cost starting from $49/month.

All in all

We’ve vetted the best tools for improving sales to help small businesses seal the deals with ease. Now you have the chance to try out different ones and go for the best solutions for your team, taking into account both the budget and the suite of features.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to act and boost your business!