Question
What are the best tools for sales reps to increase productivity and efficiency?
Looking to explore and understand the tools used by high performing sales reps:
- how are these tools used?
- are they stand alone or integration solutions?
- what value do they provide in increasing the productivity and efficiency of the team?
- what is the ROI on investing in these tools?
- what do you love and/or hate about the tools you use?
- what are they missing?
Mentioned
#Sales #Productivity #Outreach #Seismic #Streak #HubSpot #Salesforce #Atrium #Calendly #Chorus.ai #Drift #Gong #Capiche #SoonShare
Will just mention my sales team stack.
- Hubspot CRM (5 professional licences) for sales software
- Pandadocs to send custom contracts (you can track, send reminders, set expiry etc) (3 user licence, Business Plan)
- Soon will be using Outreach.
- Google Sheet (for reports) totally free
I feel in terms of ROI these tools are quite good, there are some features which you can minus out of their plans to keep you in budget, but their basic features are very good.
A few other Capiche discussions that include Sales tools you might want to check out include:
- This discussion on Sales email sequences and free CRMs, where the top recommended tools included gmass.co, HubSpot CRM, and ActionNetwork.org
- What is the ultimate sales tech stack? That saw recommendations of Outreach for prospecting, Atrium for insights, Chorus.ai for feedback on your conversations, Pandadoc for contracts, Calendly for meetings, HubSpot and Salesforce for CRMs, and more.
- A very recent question about Is there a tool that tracks sales reps activity? saw people recommending Outreach, Pipedrive, People.ai, and Inbox.ai.
Hi! Max from Outreach here. Happy to answer any questions directly. Sales Hacker has some great articles on building out the tech stack.
I personally recommend building a tight process first without a ton of tech, then taking a look at where you can augment and automate. Then plug in as you see areas of inefficiency.
Thank you both for the insights.
What tools are you using to automate some of those repetitive and time consuming tasks like importing leads, updating CRM and outbound dialing?
To make the process of updating your CRM easier, I recently launched Rattle (I am the co-founder). My product lets you update your Salesforce instance via Slack.
Feel free to check it out at gorattle.com and let me know what you think.
I'm going to see if any of my friends at Outreach or Seismic want to speak to this. They are the two front runners right now in the new category "sales engagement" platform (not to be confused with Marketing Automation or Conversational MarTech.)
Several people on Capiche had mentioned using Gong. @MelanieCrissey loved it, and said "Gong totally rocked my world in 2019" and that it was a "Total gamechanger." @ericjmurphy also mentioned liking Gong but didn't like that it required annual billing, and ended up going with Refract.ai, saying "It’s not a direct like-for-like comparison with Gong, but it certainly drives the sales reps behaviour in the right direction."
I find the most impactful processes to use a healthy mix of different tools who are focused on doing one thing very well, versus a lot of things mediocrely.
My sales team tech stack is a mix of Salesforce (CRM), PhoneBurner (power dialer + email), SMS magic (SMS follow up) and Drift (marketing/leads).
We have 15k newsletter subscribers, and have around ~2k of them in a Slack group. We're starting to encounter issues in terms of community management - specifically, it's hard to pin content like c...
Google lets you subscribe to a calendar using a URL - although when using an Outlook 365 Calendar link, events are copied over once, and then the syncing stops. This seems to be a relatively new is...
Three major considerations I have been using to evaluate the plethora of options available: 1. Effortless/non-intrusive: It shouldn't feel like a video call 2. Price: As this app would be complime...
Hi! There are simple plugins like Streak that sit on top of your team's gmail account. With a small team, they were easy to organize and use. As the team grew they became quite clunky.
With bigger teams, I'd recommend using pipedrive or something. Plug and play setup. Easy importing of leads and great features for both mobile and web, keeping your sales team (+ crm team) aligned. Love the ROI from the beginning and so far don't hate anything about it.