16 minute read
What's up startup crew!
Navigating the jungle of sales automation tools feels like choosing a Netflix show on Friday night—overwhelming, right? But chill, we've got you.
This post is your flashlight in the dark, guiding you to the tools that'll make your sales process as smooth as a slick Spotify playlist.
Whether you're just kicking off or aiming to fine-tune your sales game, stick around. Let’s dive in!
CRM
HubSpot Sales: Your sales and marketing BFF. It's the Swiss Army knife for startups and small businesses craving that all-in-one magic. Track leads, manage your pipeline, and launch campaigns that actually speak to your audience. And email automation? HubSpot’s got you covered, making it a breeze to keep those leads warm.
Salesforce: The OG of SaaS, Salesforce is like the seasoned band headlining the festival. It's robust, with everything from account management to analytics that sing. Plus, their mobile app means you can close deals on the go.
Pipedrive: Built by salespeople, for salespeople. It's like having a GPS for your sales pipeline, ensuring no lead gets left behind. Its simplicity and power make it a top pick for startups.
Copper: The best buddy for Google Workspace users. It integrates so smoothly, you can CRM straight from your inbox. It's all about keeping those relationships warm and deals closing.
Close: Perfect for the remote team looking to dial in (literally) on their prospects with a multi-channel approach. It’s affordable, straightforward, and doesn’t skimp on the features.
Our choice: HubSpot Sales
Sales Compensation
Spiff: When it comes to commission for your sales team, Spiff is a no-brainer. Spiff takes the pain out of manually figuring out commission on spreadsheets and outdated software, and gives your team visibility with real-time transparency. If you’re a startup sales team about to scale, or if you are having issues with your current commission system, I would definitely recommend Spiff.
CaptivateIQ: CaptivateIQ is an incentive commission platform designed to evolve and adapt to changing business goals. The platform integrates with your CRM as well as your payroll software to perfectly align deal data with compensation payout. This allows reps to have total visibility into their earnings, which in turn leads to increased motivation across your team. CaptivateIQ is able to take even the most complex commission plans, and turn them into easy to understand charts that all of your reps can understand. If you’re a sales leader struggling with a constantly evolving commission structure for your reps, definitely consider CaptivateIQ.
Quotapath: Quotapath is the only commission-tracking software built not just for sales, but for finance and RevOps teams as well. With integrations to top CRMs, you never have to worry about having out-of-date data. Powerful reporting and insights let reps on your team see how much they've earned, and motivate them to keep hitting their monthly and quarterly goals. Overall, Quotapath is a solid option for commission tracking software.
Our choice: Spiff
Contract Management
Mobileforce: Enter Mobileforce, the game-changer in streamlining your contract lifecycle from draft to done deal. It automates the nitty-gritty, freeing your team to focus on what they do best—closing. Fast-track document creation, approval, and signing processes with this powerful addition to your toolkit.
PandaDoc: Your go-to for creating docs that dazzle and secure signatures without a sweat. PandaDoc offers an arsenal of templates for anything from proposals to contracts, with real-time collaboration to boot. Sleep easy knowing your docs are locked down with top-tier encryption.
Qwilr: Transform your documents into engaging, interactive experiences that captivate your prospects. Qwilr’s page notifications give you the scoop on what grabs attention, letting you fine-tune your approach and cut down the time from pitch to signature.
Proposify: Ensure every contract and form reflects your brand’s essence with Proposify. This tool’s content management and role-specific document access keep your team’s outputs cohesive and in the right hands. Plus, admin insights help you steer the ship with data-backed decisions.
GetAccept: Step into the future with GetAccept’s Digital Sales Room—a collaborative haven where deals are made. This platform revolutionizes the buying journey, making long, confusing email threads a thing of the past. Invite stakeholders to a shared space where every interaction moves you closer to "yes."
Dealhub: For those dreaming of a unified revenue engine, Dealhub is your knight in shining armor. This platform excels in keeping buyers engaged and informed, syncing seamlessly with your CRM and delivering real-time updates as deals progress.
Our choice: Mobileforce
E-Signature
Dropbox Sign: For teams already nestled in the Dropbox ecosystem, integrating Dropbox Sign is a slam dunk. It melds seamlessly with your stored files, making it incredibly easy to get documents signed and sealed directly within Dropbox. Plus, the trusted name of Dropbox means your data's security is top-notch, giving peace of mind to you and your clients.
DocuSign: The heavyweight champ of e-signatures, DocuSign, commands respect across industries for its robust, user-friendly features. Serving over a million customers globally, it's the gold standard for signing documents digitally. From CRM integrations to digital ID checks, DocuSign covers all bases, ensuring a smooth sign-off process for businesses big and small.
SignNow: Tailor-made for small to mid-sized businesses, SignNow offers a straightforward, efficient platform for your e-signature needs. It packs a punch with features like team collaboration, instant notifications, and mobile compatibility, wrapped up with stringent security measures. SignNow is the agile solution that startups need to keep their document workflow agile and secure.
Our choice: Dropbox Sign
Conversation Intelligence
Gong: A titan in the conversation intelligence arena, Gong does more than record calls—it's like having a coach for your sales team. By analyzing customer interactions, Gong offers the insights your team needs to refine their approach, enhance performance, and ultimately, clinch more deals.
Jiminny: Not just another tool in the shed, Jiminny offers a holistic view of customer interactions and sales pipelines, making it invaluable across departments. From sales to customer success and beyond, it ensures everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, keeping your team aligned and informed.
Fathom: For those who live and breathe Zoom calls, Fathom is a godsend. This AI notetaking service integrates directly with your digital meeting space, offering real-time transcription and easy recall of key moments with the click of a button. Ideal for startups looking for simplicity in call management without the deep dive into analytics.
Avoma: Picture a world where you never have to scribble notes during a call again. Avoma is that reality. This AI assistant doesn’t just record and transcribe your meetings; it smartly segments conversations into actionable insights like "Discovery" and "Pain Point," making follow-ups and coaching a breeze.
Chorus: Riding alongside Gong in capabilities, Chorus shines with its seamless CRM integration and the added muscle of Zoominfo’s data enrichment. It’s a powerhouse for those already in the Zoominfo ecosystem, ensuring your customer data is not just vast but also pinpoint accurate.
Our choice: Gong
Sales Intelligence
In today's market, it’s pretty hard to run any sort of sales motion without Sales Navigator. LinkedIn is still the best source of individual employment history data, and it has been for a while now. On top of the data from LinkedIn, Sales Navigator has some very useful list creation and lead filters to help reps stay organized, and on top of their game. While Crunchbase takes the cake for company list generation, Sales Navigator dominates in lead list generation. Intuitive filters can get reps accurate lists of leads in a matter of a few clicks. Running Sales Navigator with the Seamless.ai Chrome extension is an absolute must-have for any startup sales team.
Finding emails of prospects you are trying to reach is key when prospecting. I know there are a lot of good options out there, but I think Seamless.ai takes the cake. The Chrome extension works beautifully when viewing contacts on LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. A button appears that simply reads “find”, and with one click you can find the email address and phone number of that contact. It also beautifully integrates with Hubspot and can populate a list of contacts automatically with all of their contact information already filled out. Seamless.ai is a must-have tool.
Crunchbase has become the industry leader when it comes to fundraising data. So much so in fact, that it has almost become impossible to prospect without using Crucnhbase somewhere in your workflow. My favorite feature in Crunchbase is the list generation ability. I like to use this as a starting point for my prospecting. There are a bunch of filters you can apply to narrow down your search such as headquarters location, most recent funding round, specific industry, and many more. Overall, Crunchbase is a great tool for generating lists of companies you are trying to target, and the best tool for finding company fundraising data.
Zoominfo SalesOS has “the biggest, most accurate, and most frequently refreshed database” on the market right now. They have become the industry standard of sales intelligence for modern go-to-market teams. The Zoominfo suite also runs natively with Chorus conversation intelligence. Paired together, these tools can provide your sales team with the best data and insights to help you close more deals.
Apollo is another great Sales Intelligence platform with a multitude of solid integrations to make sure your sales team has the best possible prospect data. The all in one Apollo Suite allows reps to: create target account and buyer lists, enrich contact data with accurate phone numbers and email addresses, as well as reach out to these contacts with email sequences and a built-in dialer. While many of the features are the same as Zoominfo, I would recommend Apollo to earlier stage startups due to their ease of use and functionality.
Our choice: Seamless.ai
Sales Assistant
Clari is a revenue platform that syncs data from all of your existing channels, and delivers valuable insights so your sales team can focus on selling. Clari uses data science to provide critical projections to show sales leaders where there team is headed, and what changes they need to make to make to stay on track. Also, with a well-designed mobile app, reps and managers can stay on top of their quota from everywhere.
If you are an Account Executive or Sales Leader using Salesforce, Scratchpad is a must-have. Scratchpad seamlessly integrates with Salesforce to eliminate hours of manual data entry. With an automatically updating, spreadsheet-type layout, it provides a familiar, yet powerful user experience. Create custom views, so you know where your most important information is at all times. Overall, AE’s and Sales Leaders shouldn’t have to spend hours combing through Salesforce to find the data they need, instead, use Scratchpad to free up time for whats important, building relationships and selling.
Dooly is another tool designed to cut out time spent on Salesforce admin work, so salespeople can focus on selling. Dooly’s main feature is a note taking like interface that turns notes into updated Salesforce data. Simply write out commands such as “Next Steps” and jot down a line or two, and Salesforce will automatically update with that new information. Dooly is an incredibly intuitive platform that can also update your sales pipeline in real time through their dashboard. Overall, for teams on Salesforce, Dooly is a solid tool to save your team hours per week.
Our choice: Scratchpad
Sales Acceleration
Outreach is a complete sales acceleration and execution platform designed to help sales teams of all sizes boost productivity and drive smarter customer interactions. Outreach Engage is a prospecting tool that includes streamlined workflows, opportunity management, team analytics, and many more powerful features to ensure your reps have all the necessary tools to sell their best. Outreach Guide is a deal management solution that uses AI to ensure your AE’s, CSM’s, and Managers don’t let opportunities slip through the cracks. Finally, Outreach Commit is a forecasting solution built for rev ops, sales ops, and enablement to take the guesswork out of revenue forecasting. Overall, the complete Outreach suite of products will turn your sales team into an absolute powerhouse.
Mixmax is designed to eliminate busywork for all who are in customer-facing roles. It integrates with your Gmail and can run directly through your Gmail inbox, to keep your number of tabs down during your workflow. Some of Mixmax’s best features include: automated email sequences, email tracking, meeting scheduler, phone dialer, and many more. If your sales team does a large portion of their outreach campaigns via Gmail, Mixmax is a very powerful tool that can give your reps complete visibility into the success of those campaigns. Mixmax doesn’t have as many features as Outreach or Salesloft, but for smaller startups looking to boost their productivity quickly without having to completely shift their workflow onto a new suite of software services, Mixmax is a great option.
Salesloft is a complete sales engagement platform that allows sales teams to run the majority of their workflow through. As you would come to expect, Salesloft integrates with your CRM and Email client. On top of the integrations, Salesloft has a complete suite of features that can kickstart and maintain productivity across your entire sales team. Email cadencing and automation, phone dialer and messenger, deal forecasting, pipeline management, meeting recording, and many more features give reps all the tools they need to hit their number and gives managers the data and insights needed to coach their reps. Ranked as the number 1 Sales Engagement platform by G2, you can’t go wrong with Salesloft.
Our choice: Outreach
Partner-Led Growth
Crossbeam is a leader in the parter-ecosystem and account mapping software field. Crossbeam takes in all of your customer data from your CRM, and effortlessly cross-references that data with your partners, to see where overlaps exist. Crossbeam has helped numerous companies switch off of their old account mapping techniques like sending spreadsheets back and forth, saving time and boosting efficiency across all partner channels. If your startup has a large network of partners, Crossbeam is a great tool.
Reveal is another partnership management and account mapping tool for sales and partner teams. Like Crossbeam, Reveal allows your team to see all overlapping opportunities with your network of partners, while keeping your data accurate and secure. Another great feature of Reveal is that it will evaluate and report partnership potential by providing an easy to read percentage score, to give your team valuable insights on weather or not to proceed with the partnership. Also, by pushing valuable partner data directly to your CRM, it makes sure your sales and partnership teams are always aligned.
PartnerPortal.io is an easy to set up, easy to customize, and easy to use partner management platform. With the ability to integrate with payment and accounting platforms such as PayPal and Quickbooks, PartnerPortal.io can automate lead tracking, payments, and accounting all from their platform. Their automation is also tremendously efficient, allowing partner managers to deploy a “set it and forget it” approach to their entire partner program, and CRM automation allows partner-sourced opportunities to be pushed directly to the sales team.
Our choice: Partnerportal.io
Relationship-Led Growth
With countless sales automation tools at your disposal, it’s easy to blast prospects with numerous calls and emails. However, all of this automation has made buyers fatigued. We created Hifive as a way to cut through all of this noise in the market and reach your target buyers through relationships that already exist in your network.
Invite your team, investors, advisors, and anyone else who you know and trust to exchange introductions with. The automated intro flow allows you to introduce two people in a matter of a few clicks. Hifive is truly the first operationalized platform for introductions and referrals of all types: sales, hiring, fundraising, and anything in between. So now, before you start your outreach, you can see if there are any existing relationships with your target buyers, so you can break into the account warm, rather than cold.
Connect the Dots (CTD) is a platform to map your professional relationships to find the strongest connections to the people and companies you are targeting. CTD’s AI organizes your contacts by relationship strength and allows your entire network to be easily searchable. Users can also access the networks of the people they are connected to, which can uncover new opportunities. With a Chrome extension that can be used on LinkedIn, you can find the best way into a conversation with a target buyer via connections in your more private network.
Cabal is a private workspace for founders, investors, and advisors to collaborate on introductions. Startup founders can invite their network of investors and advisors to get critical intros for sales, hiring, and social boosts. Cabal harnesses the power of investor/founder relationships and unlocks a completely new revenue stream for startups. With automated workflows and an easy-to-use mobile app, Cabal is a great option to drive relationship-led growth at your startup.
Our choice (we're biased 🙌): Hifive
Posted March 13, 2024