Best Sales Productivity Tools

Sales productivity tools are available to assist salespeople in becoming more productive. But in fact, 66% of sales reps are drowning in too many sales tools  – which distracts them from connecting with prospects and customers.

Many organizations across the world are relying on sales productivity tools to automate operations and increase efficiency. This underscores the need for businesses to choose the right sales productivity software. This guide will walk you through the top sales productivity tools available in the market and how to choose the right fit for your business.

What Are Sales Productivity Tools?

Sales productivity tools are software designed to enhance the efficiency of sales teams in completing tasks proficiently.

There are a lot of tasks involved in the sales process – from composing emails and scheduling appointments to composing proposals and other administrative tasks. While these tasks are essential for business processes, they can distract them from their main job.

Sales productivity tools are designed to automate the process so that your team can focus on doing what matters most: closing deals.

Since many different tasks are involved in the sales process, many different sales productivity software are specifically designed to address each part. There is also software that offers bundled solutions for all the different parts.

Sales Productivity Formula

Sales Productivity = Sales Efficiency + Sales Effectiveness

Before discussing the benefits of sales productivity tools, we must understand what sales productivity even means.

Sales productivity is a method of evaluation of sales teams' efficiency and effectiveness in terms of revenue generation. 

Productivity is the ultimate goal of any sales improvement effort — when you improve the efficiency or effectiveness of your salespeople, their productivity unavoidably goes up.

1. Efficiency

   Being efficient means that your sales team can get more things done in less time. If you manage to increase the number of phone calls your sales reps have from 1 sales call per day to 5 sales calls per day, then you have improved the team’s efficiency. Hence, it is important to track sales activities to maximize efficiency.

2. Effectiveness

   Being effective means your sales team can generate more output with less effort. A salesperson who generates 10 qualified opportunities from 20 calls is more effective than a salesperson who generates 5 qualified opportunities from 50 calls.

   Improving sales efficiency and sales effectiveness will increase sales productivity. Sales productivity software can help you achieve this goal. Features like lead management can reduce the manual work that your team has to do, which leads to higher efficiency. In contrast, data and analytics features can help your team improve their effectiveness by knowing which approach worked and which didn’t.

   In the following section, we will dive deeper into how sales tools can benefit your organization in multiple ways

What Are the Different Types of Sales Productivity Tools?

It is essential to understand several kinds of sales tools. Here are a few examples of sales tools you could come across; continue reading to discover more about each software usage and how beneficial they are to your business:

1. Customer relationship management

   Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is an effective tool to assist sales teams in managing customer data, interactions, and connections. It captures client information, monitors sales engagement, and offers insights into customer behavior and forecasting.

   CRM software can assist sales reps in prioritizing leads, automating sales processes and follow-up chores, identifying cross-selling and upsell opportunities, and automating workflows. 

   CRM is also well-known for its collaborative approach toward other teams, such as marketing or customer success.

2. Communication & collaboration

   Your sales team needs to be aligned to work on a common goal. Communication and collaboration tools assist teams in staying on track. Teams may use these technologies to communicate and cooperate by exchanging documents, data, and other up-to-date information in real time. Emails, wikis, and video conferencing software are some examples of communication & collaboration tools.

3. Sales force automation

   SFA software automates repetitive sales operations such as data input, lead prioritization, and follow-up emails. SFA software allows sales representatives to concentrate on completing deals rather than administrative responsibilities, which shortens the average sales cycle. SFA software can also provide insights into the sales funnel, allowing managers to spot possible bottlenecks and adapt sales methods accordingly.

4. Lead generation

   Lead generation software enables sales teams to identify and nurture new clients into leads. Examples include lead collection forms, social media monitoring tools, and email marketing software. These solutions can assist sales representatives in identifying quality prospects, filling their sales pipeline, and automating follow-up chores, allowing them to concentrate on completing agreements.

5. Meeting scheduler

   Meeting scheduling software enables sales representatives to swiftly book appointments with potential customers. Calendar integration, automatic reminders, and time zone awareness are some examples. By eliminating the back-and-forth of scheduling, these solutions can help sales professionals save time and improve the client experience.

6. Sales project management tools

   Sales project management software assists sales teams in managing complicated transactions and projects. Task lists, schedules, and project templates are examples of what they can contain. These tools can assist sales representatives in staying organized and completing tasks on time and under budget.

7. Sales intelligence tools

   Sales intelligence tools reveal information about consumer behavior, market trends, and competition activities. Examples include data analytics software, social media monitoring tools, and sales forecasting software. These tools can assist sales representatives in identifying new prospects and making educated judgments regarding sales methods.

Benefits of Sales Productivity Tools

Sales productivity tools are crucial to improve the sales teams’ efficiency and effectiveness. Here is how these tools can help you boost your sales productivity:

1. Increase in overall efficiency

   Sales productivity tools can help with your sales reps' time management. They lead to an overall increase in productivity and enable organizations to gain a competitive edge over rivals.

   Sales productivity solutions help automate time-consuming chores like data entry and lead nurturing. Less time spent on repetitive tasks helps your team to focus on their primary competency: selling.

2. Seamless communication

   Sales productivity solutions enable your team to interact and work in a seamless manner.

   It is very important to keep in touch with the team as well as other departments. Sales tools are helping sales teams to collaborate seamlessly with other teams, such as marketing, customer support, etc.

   Sales teams may communicate more efficiently with other departments by offering a consolidated platform for communication and collaboration, such as tracking leads from marketing and getting context from their existing campaigns, communicating with customer success and gaining insight related to products and client updates, taking internal notes for active leads, active client, to churn leads for better learning processes.

   These can thereby effectively improve sales efficiency and the organization's overall performance.

3. Data-driven insights

   Ever find a bottleneck, but you are unsure how to solve it?

   Without sales, a productivity tool, you may have all the data, but it gets scattered across different platforms or files. There's a chance that a document is accidentally deleted, which means you don’t even know where to begin improving.

   Sales productivity software collects important data that allows you to measure your sales team's progress, identify bottlenecks in your sales process, and evaluate sales performance.

   These actionable insights can help you make data-driven decisions to improve your sales strategy and increase conversions.

4. Improved email outreach

   Utilizing sales productivity tools to improve email outreach by providing templates and automation features can reduce time consumption and ensure consistency across all communications channels.

   Additionally, sales productivity software can provide the sales team with contextual information about the prospects. Such insights can help sales reps personalize their email outreach, making it more effective.

   Some tools provide email tracking and analytics, allowing sales teams to understand the most effective emails and adjust their approach accordingly.

5. Enhanced  customer experience

   Sales tools empower teams to give prospects and customers a more personalized and engaging experience.

   Ever received that awkward email or chat from sales? Well, say no more. Sales productivity software assists your sales team in having a better-personalized approach through data and insight, as well as customized emails, calls, etc. Resulting in a better overall customer experience.

   Tools such as CRM can also help you track and monitor customer touchpoints, including the conversations and other activities already happening. This will help you gather more insights into their feedback, preferences, persona, and the challenges they are facing.

   With all this data, you have more concrete knowledge of your customer behavior, thus giving you more insightful interactions with all the prospects in your sales pipeline.

Factors to Consider While Selecting Sales Productivity Tools

Before we jump into the tools, it is also crucial to understand what your business needs. We break it down into several points below for your consideration to ensure that you choose only the best tools to support your sales productivity.

1. Ease of use

   The simplicity of use is an important feature to consider when choosing sales productivity software or tools. The tool should be user-friendly and simple to use. If the instrument is overly complicated or difficult to use, it might reduce productivity and waste important time.

2. Consider team feedback

   Before deciding on any sales productivity platform, it is critical to have feedback from your team. Because your sales team will be using the tool on a regular basis, their feedback is critical. You may ask your marketing, customer success, or other involved team.

   When you ask your sales team - to inquire about the features they want to see in a sales productivity solution and the pain areas in their present sales procedures.

   When it comes to marketing, you may inquire about what kind of touchpoint and platform they would like to optimize, what kind of reporting they will consider useful, and what their expected collaboration between sales and marketing is.

   Receiving input from your team will allow you to make a better decision that will benefit the whole team.

3. Look at your budget

   Sales productivity solutions have varying pricing plans, and it is critical to evaluate your budget before picking a tool. Establish your budget and the maximum amount you will spend on a sales productivity tool.

   It is crucial to realize that the most costly tool is not necessarily the best alternative. Look for a product that provides capabilities critical to your business's demands while staying within your budget.

4. Sign up for a free trial or product demo

   Many sales productivity software provide free trial periods or product demonstrations. Take advantage of these possibilities to try out the tool before purchasing it. Pay attention to how the product operates, how user-friendly it is, and if it matches your company’s needs during the trial or demo. This will give you a better idea of if the tool is a good match for your company.

5. Integrations

   You must consider compatibility with your current software and systems when selecting a sales productivity solution. The technology should effortlessly interact with your existing CRM, marketing, sales automation, and other critical technologies. The integration will aid in the streamlining of your sales operations and the enhancement of productivity.

6. Adaptation

   After deciding on the tools, you might also need an onboarding or training session. It could be with your respective team leads, or you might want to invite a whole team for a session.

   Ask for a day or some time to understand the usage and the basic function, or you can even get specific to your most needed feature to save time.

   The adaptation might take longer, especially if it is your team's first time familiarizing it. So, ensure you can always get back to the person in charge for another training or troubleshooting.

7. Customer support

   You may encounter some issues in the future, and having solid customer support from the chosen products will also save your productivity. It's always good to know if the product you choose has either 24/7 AI chat support, a fast response, or a dedicated person in charge to solve whatever issues you have in the future.

Conclusion

It is critical for businesses to take the aspects mentioned above into account to choose the right tool for their business.

By implementing the right sales productivity tools and strategies, sales teams can improve their efficiency and productivity, increase their customer base, and ultimately drive revenue growth.