Compare The Best Sales Tools

Want to jump straight to the answer? The best sales tools for most people is Salesforce or HubSpot. 

Sales tools are integral for managing and automating your sales processes. Whether you have trouble with lead generation or onboarding new hires, a sales tool can help you simplify these processes. 

Investing in a sales tool can transform tedious tasks with automation and create personalized workflows. You’ll be able to manage a complex side of your business with this list of some of the best sales tools on the market today. 

The Top 5 Best Sales Tools 

• Salesforce – Best for automating the sales process
• HubSpot – Best for email marketing
• Pipedrive – Best for pipeline management
• Salesloft – Best for multi-channel messaging
• Clearbit – Best for B2B data activation

After reviewing dozens of sales tools on the market today, we narrowed it down to the top five best tools for improved automation and sales management. Continue reading to learn more about which option is right for you. 

Salesforce — Best For Automating the Sales Process

If you are looking for an all-in-one sales hub that helps you automate your sales processes, look no further than Salesforce. You can run any business with point-and-click simplicity and create a successful automated sales strategy without investing endless hours.

Salesforce offers a Process Builder to help you craft the perfect automated business processes. From automatic approval requests and email alerts to auto-assigned tasks, Salesforce helps improve your entire process as a deal moves through different stages. 

You can also utilize drag-and-drop actions within the Process Builder to make complex sales processes easier. With the drag-and-drop action, you can create custom workflows and proposals that guide your sales agent through important conversations. 

If you have trouble keeping your deals on track, Salesforce lets you create an automatic approval process for any business requests. Whether you need discount approvals, travel, or expense reports, Salesforce will directly address these requests through email or Chatter. 

Continue to grow your business with confidence through pipeline management and forecasting. Salesforce uses predictive AI to ensure accuracy by creating flexible forecasts based on KPIs that match your business model. You can also use data insights to get real-time visibility into your forecasts and easily maintain the health of your pipeline. 

And speaking of data insights, Salesforce lets you track lead volume, conversion rates, and customized sales forecasting reports. You can build reports and modify charts with drag-and-drop actions for custom fields, groupings, and charts you want to expand.

With unique reporting tools, you can track your team’s performance with dashboards and make changes to most components with just one click. Salesforce lets you make decisions from anywhere by using customer analytics from any device. 

Salesforce’s mobile CRM is expansive and lets you manage your day on a single, unified app. You can view meetings and events and get account updates on the go. Or if you need to close deals fast, the Salesforce mobile app lets you track accounts and approve deals. Another nifty detail about the mobile app is that you can create a customized version through Mobile Publisher—changing the icon, colors, and name.

You can try Salesforce for free, but you can utilize the software best through one of its four paid pricing plans. Here’s a quick overview:

• Essentials — $25 per user per month. Includes account, contact, lead, and opportunity management, plus email integration with Gmail or Outlook.

• Professional — $75 per user per month. Includes everything in Essentials, plus pipeline and forecast management. 

• Enterprise — $150 per user per month. Includes everything in Professional, plus workflow and approval automation.

• Unlimited — $300 per user per month. Includes everything in Enterprise, plus sales engagement, insights, and 24/7 support.

HubSpot — Best For Email Marketing

HubSpot can help you close more deals faster, especially if your go-to marketing and sales strategies are through email. With software that can help you deepen your customer relationships and manage your email marketing efforts better, HubSpot is an excellent sales tool for your next email campaigns. 

Save time, money, and effort by transforming your best-performing emails into customizable templates you can share with your team. Instead of spending the majority of your time drafting repetitive emails, HubSpot lets you create a personalized template that you can send from any inbox—whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or Office 365. 

You can also optimize each email template by using HubSpot’s real-time email tracking system, which gives you data on the templates that are performing well and the templates that need attention. Through email metrics, you can view open rates and click rates to find out what subject lines are doing well and what buttons, links, or attachments your customers explore.

Share your best templates with your entire team, so everyone has the best email at their fingertips and can close more deals immediately. HubSpot also allows you to automate your email marketing efforts through email sequences that you can set to autopilot, depending on the day, time, or action. Email sequences let you sit back and close deals on up to 50 warm leads without the need to chase prospects through back-and-forth manual emailing. 

HubSpot’s automation doesn’t stop there, as it offers additional sales automation tools to help streamline your workflow. You can use these custom workflows to rotate leads, create deals, automate tasks, manage data in bulk, and update properties. You can also enable internal notifications, so your team knows when a contact takes a noteworthy action or who they should follow up with. 

Whether you need to book a quick appointment or host an important business meeting from abroad, HubSpot offers an intuitive meeting scheduler that will eliminate the back-and-forth of traditional scheduling. HubSpot’s meeting scheduler automatically syncs to your chosen calendar, allowing prospective customers and team members to find times that work for both of you.

If your sales team needs more management support, HubSpot offers sales management playbooks that allow you to create custom content to help them win the day. From product sheets to pricing guidelines, you can equip your team with any playbook they need to excel.

Not only can the sales playbooks help your team, but you can also use them to help new hires get up to faster speed. With an interactive interface, your team can take notes and optimize each playbook accordingly. 

You can try HubSpot for free to utilize tools, such as contact management, email scheduling, deal pipeline, meeting scheduling, and live chat. However, if you want more advanced tools, you will need to check out its paid plans. Here’s a quick overview: 

• Starter — $45 per month. Includes two users, conversation routing, task queues, and email and in-app support.

• Professional — $450 per month. Includes five users, sales analytics and automation, custom reporting, sequences, and phone support.

• Enterprise — $1,200 per month. Includes 10 users, advanced permission, custom objects, playbooks, and conversation intelligence. 

Pipedrive — Best For Pipeline Management

Pipeline management is an integral part of running a successful sales team. With Pipedrive, you can create advanced and customizable pipelines and track your documents using real-time software.

Gain complete visibility into your sales pipeline with an intuitive interface and organized prompts that help you take action while staying in control of complex sales processes. Pipedrive offers an intuitive and fully customizable pipeline that you can fit into your unique sales strategy. 

You can add as many stages, team members, or activity types as your pipeline needs. If you become overwhelmed with the features Pipedrive presents, you have control over enabling and disabling certain functions to create a unique and customizable experience.

With drag-and-drop functionality and a foolproof menu system, you can add deals, contacts, or activities to your pipeline in seconds. Pipedrive gives you the clarity you need by categorizing each deal into sales stages, allowing your team to prioritize and refocus efforts accordingly. 

If you want to know how successful your customized pipeline is, Pipedrive offers comprehensive sales reports and insights to help you understand your data and transform it into profitable action. From visual charts and interactive tables to revenue forecasting and customizable reports, Pipedrive has it all. You can report leads, track deals, and generate custom performance and conversion reports while utilizing goal-setting software. 

Pipedrive lets you create a deal or activity-based goal and further specify them through assignees, types, pipelines, durations, and intervals. Goal setting can help your team focus and prioritize the deals they want to get done by a certain time.

You can also eliminate busy work and tedious tasks through Pipedrive’s sales automation system. Pipedrive helps you automate your sales processes through a unique AI sales assistant that can give you performance tips, notifications, and progress updates. You can also benefit from workflow automation and prevent deals from slipping through the cracks.

If you worry about privacy, Pipedrive offers an advanced security center that will protect your data and customer information. Within the security center, you get visual dashboards, rules and alerts, user access and device logs, and email notifications. 

With SSO single sign-on and AWS hosting infrastructure, your sales CRM software is secure and GDPR compliant for good measure. 

You can try each of Pipedrive’s pricing tiers for free for 14 days. But here’s a quick overview of each plan: 

• Essential — $14.90 per user per month. Includes lead, deal, calendar, and pipeline management, data import, and 24/7 support.

• Advanced — $24.90 per user per month. Includes everything in Essential, plus full email sync with templates, group emailing, and workflow builder.

• Professional — $49.90 per user per month. Includes everything in Advanced, plus one-click calling and tracking, eSign documents, and revenue projections with custom reporting. 

• Enterprise — $99 per user per month. Includes everything in Professional, plus unlimited user permissions, heightened security preferences, and no feature usage limits.

Salesloft — Best For Multi-Channel Messaging

With Salesloft, you don’t need separate messaging solutions or dialers. You can make one-click sales calls and texts a part of your everyday workflow without the hassle of tracking multiple prospects and contacts across different platforms.

Salesloft has a combined dialer and messenger solution that can help you keep track of calls and texts. You can log all sales conversations and sync them back to Salesloft’s CRM system, making it easier for you to manage conversations and view rep performance. 

With Salesloft’s combined conversation measures, you can benefit from things like: 

• Calling prospects in local areas
• Pre-recorded voicemail drops
• Live call studios for coaching
• Disposition and sentiment tracking
• Call collaboration
• Local and international talk and text

Not only can you record and transcribe phone calls, but you can do the same for video meetings. If you need to schedule meetings quicker, you can sync your availability to any calendar to help you share bookings more efficiently. You can then utilize Salesloft’s AI-based analytics to highlight where team members spend their time, identify call trends, and pinpoint specific topics of conversation.

Salesloft also offers a powerful analytics engine that can give you a deeper look at your sales processes and revenue to improve team productivity and prioritize effectively. You can create custom reports with advanced filters that help you look at your data through account, cadence, and team. 

You can also share post-sale call data with your entire team after you’ve closed a deal, helping you create a learning space for your team to go forth and create an excellent customer experience for the next client. 

Salesloft can help you automate your workflow with forecasting, coach to close, and deal intelligence to give you a comprehensive view of your pipeline, see what deals are at risk, and ultimately close deals faster.

Salesloft currently doesn’t disclose pricing on its website. However, you can request a free demo of its sales product today. 

Clearbit — Best For B2B Data Activation

If you are running a business in the B2B space and need help with managing your sales data, Clearbit is the perfect place to start. With flexible management functionalities and seamless app integration, you can activate your data and accelerate your business growth. 

Clearbit can help you activate your data in two easy steps to drive revenue and apply real-time intelligence across your GTM systems. The two steps include connecting your data sources to Clearbit’s software and installing the Clearbit tag for activation.

Once you activate your data, you can build up-to-date and relevant target audiences for your chosen target market. With a flexible management interface, you are in full control of your data and have the option to enhance your data with Clearbit’s firmographic, technographic, and website intent signals. 

Automate your entire workflow and buyer’s journey with Clearbit’s Reveal software, which turns website visitors into pipelines and tells you which companies are on your website and what actions they are taking, even if they are anonymous. 

The Reveal software can help you create targeted account-based experiences by personalizing your website using firmographic data. You can choose to show relevant content and segment visitors into categories based on industry, company size, and technologies used.

Clearbit also offers revenue analytics to help you determine how much website traffic you are getting and what makes your customers a valuable part of your journey. You can see who is behind page visits, clarify what is and isn’t working, and discover your actual ICP. 

If you want to make Clearbit even more powerful, it does offer a wonderful variety of app integrations for insights, marketing, and communications. Some of the most popular integrations include Slack, Zapier, Pardot, Segment, and Marketo. 

Clearbit doesn’t currently disclose pricing on its website. However, you can request a free demo, and Clearbit bases each package on total ad spend, monthly web traffic, and database size and growth. 

How to Find The Best Sales Tools For You

There are a few factors that go into finding the best sales tools. Sometimes it can be difficult to choose the right tool because the market is saturated, and free trials or demos are limited. So we put together this methodology of the three most essential elements to consider before choosing a sales tool for improved management and process automation. 

Compatibility With Your Sales Goals

Before you think about investing in a sales tool, you need to evaluate your sales goals and figure out what you need and why. Different sales goals will require different solutions, and your strategy should match the tool you plan to use. 

For example, some businesses will have a high-volume sales strategy while others will sell a product or service at a low rate. Some businesses will require an all-in-one CRM solution with subscription management and payment features, but a business working on a smaller scale won’t need to invest in an all-in-one platform if they only need a tool for lead management. 

It’s imperative to think about how your business currently works and how a sales tool could improve it. 

Automation Solutions

Most sales tools will offer a solution to help automate the most tedious tasks, such as email marketing, lead generation, and forecast management. You should find a tool that helps automate these processes since that is the purpose of a sales tool. 

You should avoid sales tools that don’t offer automation solutions or offer either a small volume of options. It’s also not ideal if the automations are incompatible, slow, or constantly crash. 

Reporting and Analytics 

If you are investing in a sales tool, there’s a high chance you want to know how your business is performing and how it can improve. Luckily, most sales tools will offer a hub for reporting and analytics, and it’s an integral aspect of a sales tool. 

You should look for tools that offer reports in various formats, such as graphs, pie charts, documents, and bar charts with lots of color and filtering options. Choosing a tool with variety will help you create more stimulating reports that are easy to read and break down with your team. 

The Top Sales Tools in Summary

Overall, Salesforce and HubSpot are our top two recommendations for the best sales tools on the market today for most people.

Salesforce can help you automate your sales processes and streamline your workflow with its Process Builder and automatic approval requests. HubSpot is excellent for transforming repetitive emails into templates and stepping up your email marketing efforts with real-time metrics and email sequences. 

On the other hand, Pipedrive can help you gain complete visibility of your pipeline through organized menus and customizable elements. 

And Salesloft and Clearbit are excellent alternatives if you want B2B-specific data or multi-channel messaging solutions.