Have you been wondering what you can do to improve your sales cycle and ensure you close more deals in 2024?

Our answer is simple – invest in the right sales tools for you and your team. Boosting sales starts with improving every aspect of your sales strategy, from the analysis and optimization you perform to how you conduct sales meetings and down to lead generation and CRM.

If your team is armed with the best sales tools out there, they are ready to take on more challenges and close more sales. With Xara, your sales reps can create, brand, analyze, and share content – all in one place, without extra hassle.

Let’s dive deeper into the world of sales tools!

Why Are Sales Tools Important?

Sales Tools Icons Source

Sales tools help salespeople understand which customers are most likely to be interested in their goods or services when to contact those customers, and what to discuss with them. By avoiding time-consuming administrative procedures, they can focus on what really matters: adding value for both individuals and companies.

Employee need for access to a broader range of modern tools is another justification for investing in sales software. This means that businesses adopting traditional or conservative sales techniques risk losing not just customers but also the top members of their sales team.

The importance of sales productivity tools is highlighted by the fact that, according to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2022, a sizable number of sales professionals (almost 40% of them) report closing agreements worth more than $500,000 without ever having seen the buyer in person.

If you need help convincing your boss to invest in the right tools for your team, here is an article that might help.

7 Types of Sales Tools

CRM Sales Tools Source

This umbrella term encompasses many types of technologies, including:

1. Analytics and Reporting

Only with the proper analytics tools in place can you benefit from collecting sales data. Organizations may better understand and analyze data and acquire insights that drive nearly every part of the sales funnel with the help of sales tools designed for data analysis.

These are some of the metrics successful sales teams are on the lookout for:

  • Per capita sales
  • Conversion rates
  • Sales growth
  • Sales by channel

2. Visual Communication

Creating visuals is a vital step in the sales strategy, both for internal use (e.g., sales plans) as well as for marketing purposes (social media posts, brochures, booklets, etc.). Visual communication is one of the main ways people exchange information in a sales environment.

For a small business, hiring a dedicated design team might not be within their budget. With a visual communication or content creation tool, the team will be able to easily create sales collateral without needing professional help.

Apart from the financial bonus, using a visual communication tool also ensures consistency in the company’s designs. The sales team can utilize professional and efficient templates to create all of their content, leaving less space for human errors.

3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management tools assist you in managing all customer interactions and the relationships between your business, leads, and customers. The focal point of your sales process is your CRM.

If you’ve never used a sales CRM, you should take some time to learn more about it. It’s one of the tools that will definitely upscale customer success.

4. Intelligence and Prospecting

Teams are able to learn more about leads than just their name or email address, thanks to sales prospecting and intelligence tools.

A simplified sales process requires qualified leads to be found and used effectively. These tools influence your company’s marketing and sales decisions, from strategy to income stream.

5. Lead Handling

You will qualify, examine, and nurture prospects with this type of sales tool, which will help you close more deals.

Lead qualification is a crucial step in the sales funnel. To meet ROI goals, businesses must swiftly identify, qualify, and turn prospective leads into sales. Tools for leads and sales handling improve these efforts in numerous ways.

6. Process and Training

Your customers aren’t the only ones you need to focus on when trying to improve your company’s sales and marketing. This kind of sales tool enhances the knowledge and abilities of the seller to promote change and raise the close rate.

The processing and training area includes sales tools that identify and address sales-related obstacles. They also give team members background information on the products they sell and support materials.

These tools not only enhance sales procedures (saving your team time and stress), but also hasten the onboarding of new sales team members and help them begin selling effectively right away.

7. Automation and Integrations

These technologies automate contact, team, analytics, lead prospecting, and prospect research tasks. Many organizational operations, including their sales efforts, can be considerably improved with the use of the proper sales automation tools.

They improve sales workflow efficiency with characteristics like:

  • Instant customer support
  • Connecting data from different sources
  • Logging calls
  • Automating email marketing campaigns
  • Prioritizing leads

Top 12 Sales Tools for Your Team

Your sales and marketing teams will thank you and definitely improve the sales cycle if you give them access to the right sales tools in 2024:

1. Xara Cloud

Xara Cloud Website

Source: Xara

Xara is a platform that can help you achieve all your design goals in one place. You can produce, work together on, and scale the content that distinguishes your brand with Xara. Instead of assigning duties, include relevant touchpoints with your audience.

Faster campaign launches, effective pitch deck creation, and centralized brand management, with a workflow that adjusts to your creative needs. Everything your team needs to engage your audience with the appropriate material in minutes is available on Xara Cloud.

If you want visually pleasing content without worrying about learning complex design skills, Xara is for you. This tool is as easy to use as it is powerful, providing numerous templates for a wide array of documents and presentations – from booklets to social media content and the indispensable sales plan. All are just one beautifully created template away!

Not only are all templates customizable, but they are also automatically branded through Xara’s Smart Branding Kit, which simply collects font, color story and logo information straight from your website and brings it to your content.

Once your content is created and branded, all that’s left is to share it with your team and work together on analyzing and optimizing sales and marketing campaigns.

Xara Cloud sales templates

Pricing

Xara Cloud Pricing

Xara Cloud offers an Essential plan for $12 a month. For scaling your brand, there is a Scale plan available at $20 a month. For larger organizations, a customized Enterprise plan is available, please contact us for pricing details.

2. Hubspot

HubSpot Website

Source: HubSpot

Whether you want to generate leads, help sales managers boost sales performance, automate customer support, or create a potent website, HubSpot delivers a full CRM platform with all the tools and integrations you need to develop better.

HubSpot is a free CRM for basic use, but you must pay extra for features and solutions that are more tailored to you. This business model may make HubSpot a more cost-effective choice for many start-ups, small companies, and medium-sized companies.

Free Sales Tools Hubspot

Because HubSpot provides straightforward lead generation tools like inbound marketing, email marketing, and tracking, many people opt for it.

Key figures HubSpot

Pricing

HubSpot truly has something for everyone. The pricing starts at $0 if the free tools are enough for you and can reach upwards of $5000 a month if your needs are as complex as they come.

3. Salesforce

SalesForce Website

Source: Salesforce

Many people’s minds immediately go to Salesforce when someone mentions customer relationship management. The business claims to be the top CRM tool in the globe. This isn’t a ridiculous assertion, considering that Salesforce is the foundation of more than 150,000 businesses’ sales initiatives.

What’s the big deal, then?

It’s significant to consider Salesforce’s history in the industry. Salesforce has been in business since 1999, in contrast to many of the new technologies on the market. The business has developed along with the internet.

Salesforce enables businesses of every industry and size to reap the benefits of sophisticated technology and connect to their consumers completely freshly, according to the company’s own words.

SalesForce Industries

Their sales-specific solution, aka their Sales Cloud, allows users to:

  • Track sales prospects and advance more quickly with a detailed client activity schedule.
  • Automate daily activities using task tracking and workflows to boost sales rep productivity.
  • Discover pipeline health information and use AI to make data-driven decisions.
  • Discover effective growth on any channel with CPQ, Billing, and Subscription Management, all on one revenue platform.
  • Utilize a single app to monitor, manage, and update your CRM data and activate your sales channels.
  • Efficiently distribute resources by monitoring alignment history and contrasting various possibilities to acquire the best coverage.
SalesForce Website Overview

Pricing

The Sales Cloud price starts at $25 and can go up to $300 monthly. However, it’s possible to try the tool for free first with a 30-day free trial!

4. Gong

Gong website

Source: Gong

The Gong revenue intelligence tool dissects sales processes to identify what’s driving deals and how they’re moving.

The software is intelligent enough to evaluate sales calls using conversational intelligence, providing businesses with details on how salespeople describe their products during calls. To give a complete picture of what’s happening as agreements move forward, Gong also records and analyzes meetings and emails.

Gong website goals

For remote sales teams, Gong is extremely useful. No matter where your staff is located, its capabilities can help you keep on top of employee monitoring and training.

Pricing

Gong’s pricing is customizable, depending on several factors, such as the size of your sales teams and how you sell: in person, via email, on the phone, or any other sales methods. You can fill in a form on their website, and they will contact you and help you determine which license type is for you!

5. Zapier

Zapier website

Source: Zapier

Zapier is an integration tool with a subscription-based model that aids teams in connecting their applications and streamlining their processes. Numerous digital applications, including:

  • QuickBooks
  • Google Sheets
  • Google Docs
  • Gmail
  • Microsoft Outlook
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • Pipedrive
  • Slack
  • Zoom

Zapier is among the simplest to use as an integration platform and sales tool. It functions primarily in the background. When users need to utilize Zapier, they may quickly get what they need or build up automated triggers if they see chances for automation.

By combining data from several sources, businesses may use Zapier to remove manual chores like data entry and redundant duties. It is an excellent time saver.

Zapier Zap Example

Pricing

If you only need a few basic automation or your sales team is currently on a tight budget, Zapier offers a free plan. However, as your needs become more complex, and if you want to experience the power of this tool truly, pricing goes up to $1200 a month, depending on the plan and whether you choose to pay monthly or yearly.

6. Dooly

Dooly website

Source: Dooly

To help companies reach their revenue targets, Dooly’s connected workspace enables sales teams to communicate mission-critical information with the individuals who must be informed.

This sales enablement platform simplifies salespeople to gather the appropriate information, have the appropriate solutions, and forecast sales.

Dooly offers many integrations – for example, it automatically syncs notes to Salesforce so that you may cut out low-value labor.

Dooly example sync

Apart from that, this tool also:

  • Ensures you are always prepared for your following pipe review by allowing you to oversee every deal at once from a single point of view.
  • Demonstrates how tracking your history, deal health indicators, and highlights may help you keep on top of your sales pipeline.
  • Encourages you to gather the deal information you need to keep deals moving ahead during sales calls by using templates.
  • Offers a Chrome extension – DoolyBar – that prevents sales representatives from switching between tabs, saving hours of selling time.
  • Reveals content that sellers need in real time to close deals through Dooly Playbooks.

Pricing

Dooly’s pricing is broken down into 3 tiers: Free, Growth and Premier, ranging from – you guessed it – $0 up to $75 a month per user.

7. Outreach

Outreach Website

Source: Outreach

Outreach combines conversation intelligence, revenue intelligence, and sales engagement on a single platform. It does precisely what its name implies by automating various customer and prospect engagement processes to enhance sales funnels and boost revenue predictability.

Users may visualize each client touchpoint’s time and technique thanks to the tool’s sequence-based methodology. To target particular categories, sales representatives can create tailored nurture campaigns across email, social media, phone, and messaging.

With each interaction, Outreach automatically updates prospect engagement reports, optimizing workflows so sales representatives can spend more time closing deals.

Outreach workflow

Additionally, Outreach offers metrics in real-time for gauging the success of campaigns. The application serves as a platform for A/B testing various messages, touchpoints, and fundamentals like open, bounce, and deliverability rates.

AI-driven reports provide useful information about trends, best practices, and buyer attitudes and behavior. Management solutions gather KPIs in one location, making it simpler for sales managers to provide sales agents with timely feedback.

Pricing

The pricing isn’t listed on their website directly. You need to leave them your work email and inform them where you are located, and they will get in contact with you and discuss pricing.

8. Tableau

Tableau website

Source: Tableau

Remember Salesforce from just a few tools ago? Well, Tableau is a Salesforce product!

In the self-service business intelligence (BI) field, Tableau has a lengthy history. Tableau provides users with visibility into the past, present, and future views of their business operations, similar to other BI products.

Through observable feedback, the sales intelligence tool generates rich data visualizations that assist firms in making sense of trends and forecasting future sales.

Tableau Analytics Dashboard

Because of Tableau’s user-friendly interface, which appeals to stakeholders from all departments, many organizations employ it. Tableau gathers data from a wide range of sources as a result of this cross-departmental use, which results in a more thorough market picture.

Pricing

Tableau’s pricing can vary, ranging between $15 and $70 a month per user, depending on your sales reps’ needs.

9. Workato

Workato Website

Source: Workato

A well-liked “no code” solution for linking apps and automating workflows is Workato. Workato’s strong suit is its user-friendly interface, which even people with less technical knowledge may utilize straight away.

Over 1,000 pre-built connectors from various categories are available through Workato to sync and transfer data between apps. Teams become more productive and agile as a result of time and money savings.

For example, you can streamline upsell and cross-sell opportunities with the suitable suite of integrations:

Workato Integrations

Almost every phase of the customer journey may be automated by sales teams using Workato.

For instance, a sales manager can manage a high-value deal desk by making quotes and handling approvals by connecting Salesforce to chat platforms like Slack. Workato can integrate with other sales tools to help salespeople close more transactions while automating the fulfillment, payment, and invoice processes and giving customer success teams handoffs.

Pricing

Workato aims to simplify pricing by only requiring you to pay for what you use out of their suite. All you have to do is give your contact information and a description of what you will use Workato for, and they will pair you with an expert and give you a quote. Moreover, the expert will also tailor a free demo trial for you.

10. ZoomInfo

Zoominfo Website

Source: ZoomInfo

Teams can use ZoomInfo to verify the accuracy of the contact data stored in their CRMs, as they can access the business’s huge database of decision-makers and organizations.

Businesses can use the application to look for prospects based on criteria such as geography, company size, industry, and revenue. ZoomInfo features analytics that, more crucially, find fresh sales prospects.

It can highlight contacts who have searched for particular keywords and themes by mapping a sales team’s ideal customer profiles against a huge network of publisher domains and over a trillion keyword-to-device pairings. It then assists sales teams in determining the purchase intent of prospects and clients using this information.

11. Whatfix

Whatfix website

Source: Whatfix

No matter which tech stack—CRM, CPQ, or CLM—your sales staff utilizes, Whatfix aids in their direction, training, and support.

The platform increases sales reps’ productivity by reducing time spent asking for support and assistance, while task automation and real-time guidance can raise the caliber of sales data.

Whatfix is also a fantastic approach to quickening new employees’ onboarding process because it increases digital adoption.

Some of its most notable features include no-code content creation for your sales team, contextual self-help wiki embedding in your team’s apps, and in-app checklists that can aid in success monitoring.

12. Dialpad Sell

DialPad Sell

Source: Dialpad Sell

The sales outreach platform Dialpad Sell uses AI to manage objections, provide real-time advice, and assess caller attitudes to help the outbound sales teams and support staff.

The technology also provides high-quality audio and uninterrupted service across devices to assist remote teams in operating. Furthermore, integrated CRM connectors make it simple for sellers to connect with existing apps and log notes.

DialPad Sell AI

You can onboard new sales team members and coach them easily by jumping on a call when the deal appears to be at risk and using voice intelligence to better help you resolve complaints.

In short, this tool makes sales calls infinitely easier through the power of AI.

Pricing

If you’re a smaller business, you can get a Standard plan for $15 a month or a Pro plan for $25 a month. However, you need to contact them directly for enterprise-level services and get a quote.

Ready to Upscale Your Resources?

There are many different types of sales tools serving numerous purposes, from lead handling and CRM down to prospecting, training, and even automation. Don’t worry – they all exist for a reason and can benefit your company’s sales teams in many ways.

Sending your team to the sales “battlefield” without the proper resources will soon make them fall behind and lose valuable opportunities. That is why we prepared this list of tools you should consider arming your team with.

With Xara on their side, sales reps will be more prepared than ever to tackle their design tasks effortlessly. Give them 14 free days to fall in love with our platform, and you will see how indispensable we are for your sales strategy!

Upgrade your sales strategy with Xara Cloud for free!