Sales tools enhance your business by automating or streamlining processes that otherwise take up a lot of time. Depending on your specific needs, there are different tools available to help. Or, you could invest in a clientflow management software to manage much of your sales process in one place.
A lot of the work you need to do to keep your business running as an independent gets in the way of helping you grow. While you could be reaching out to new audiences, for instance, you may instead be following up with clients for payments or contract signatures.
Sales tools speed up and handle this work for you so that you can instead build your business. But with the number of tools available today, it’s not easy to figure out which will actually help you. Keep reading to learn about different types of sales productivity tools and the best options for each step of your sales strategy.
Jump to:
- Sales video tools
- Prospecting tools
- Customer relationship management software
- Email marketing software
- Meeting schedulers
- Clientflow management platforms
- Pricing guide tools
- Sales brochure builders
- Improve your clientflow, increase your income
Sales video tools
Instead of overloading a prospect with pages of notes and data detailing why your services are perfect for them, you can make that information more digestible with a short, well-crafted video, leading to more conversions.
Sales videos help solidify your brand since you can showcase your voice, tone, and personality. This helps your leads and prospects build familiarity and trust. Through video, client relationships are easier to build since you can speak naturally, without the formalities of writing.
Explore some of the best options for creating and sharing sales videos.
Pro Tip: Videos are easily shareable, which simplifies talking to prospective clients who have multiple decision-makers. People can also share short sales videos with someone they know who might be interested, helping you reach a wider audience.
1. Videoform
When a prospect receives a personalized video or image, they feel like you’re focusing on helping out their specific situation. Videoform makes it easy to implement personalization into your video strategy, so you can send out custom videos to clients through email, LinkedIn, or text messages.
2. Quickpage
Quickpage focuses on getting your video to your clients fast. It offers an innovative way to reach cold prospects who might ignore mass emails or texts, letting you immediately introduce them to the people behind your business to foster a connection. The tool also helps you build video marketing pages quickly and easily.
3. HoneyBook
HoneyBook offers the ability to embed your sales videos into interactive files, like digital brochures, pricing guides, and booking files. That way, you can use sales videos at different parts of your sales funnel to connect with prospects at different stages in their journeys. Its tools help you connect your sales and booking process, using video to best fit your needs. For instance, you can create a video sales pitch when your leads are considering your services, or create a video about you and your business when you’re just trying to generate awareness.
Prospecting tools
Prospecting tools expand on the basic lead information you might collect, like names and email addresses. They help you identify qualified leads — who are more likely to make a purchase — and find ways to capitalize on them.
1. Clearbit
Clearbit is a data aggregator that combines over 250 public and private data sources to make valuable findings to help you. Each record goes through four stringent verification stages to ensure your information is as accurate and fresh as possible.
With this data, it builds personalized buyer journeys to help you reach and engage with your target audience. When it picks up on intent signals from prospective clients, it acts instantly to convert them.
2. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo helps you verify the contact information in your database. It also lets you search for prospects with a variety of filters, like industry type, location, company size, and revenue.
But its main selling point is its buyer intent analytics that help you discover new sales opportunities. You can map your ideal customer profiles against 300,000 publisher domains and more than a trillion keyword-to-device pairings to find contacts who are most likely to be interested in your services.
3. HoneyBook
HoneyBook doesn’t help you generate lead data, but it can help you qualify new leads. When you embed a HoneyBook contact form on your website, you have the opportunity to set up an automated sequence for every new inquiry. With HoneyBook’s customizable templates, you can easily build a client background questionnaire or an intake form to capture more information about your prospects and compare their answers and needs to your ideal client profile.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
CRM software helps you manage, track, and organize your relationship with your clients so that you know the problems they face with you and can identify ways to fix them. This improves your customer service, in turn increasing retention.
This software also helps you centralize client data so you can analyze it more deeply, improving productivity and efficiency. It’ll also help you expand your segmentation and more accurately forecast sales.
1. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a variety of customization options that help you create a platform perfectly fitting your business. For instance, you can use its Flow Builder to create custom automations for process management. This lets you automate responses to different actions the client might take, like signing up for your email list.
You can also set access permissions for pages and fields, helping you segment the platform uniquely for all parties that will be using it and protect important content from getting overwritten accidentally.
2. HoneyBook
HoneyBook fits in this category, though it differs from traditional CRM software. Instead, HoneyBook acts as an all-in-one clientflow platform (more on this later). You can do everything from capturing leads, qualifying them, and booking them, as well as understanding a bird’s eye view of your pipeline. It all works with interactive file templates, actions, and features that are core to independent businesses, such as capturing leads, sending an online contract and online invoice, tracking payments, and using business process automation.
3. Nimble
Nimble’s Prospector engine, contact action lists, and social tracking features help you optimize your customer prospecting. Its dashboard centralizes and organizes your contact list, along with giving you a high-level snapshot of daily reports, like deals, activities, email tracking, and social engagement. It also lets you take bulk actions and send group messages to specific segments of your contacts.
Email marketing software
Email marketing is an incredibly cost-effective way to increase client engagement, especially if you need to nurture your relationship with a lead until they’re ready to make a purchase. In fact, a recent study found that it has an ROI of $36 for every $1 you spend.
It gives you an opportunity to directly connect with your customer, making it one of the best channels to measure and build on client engagement. Email marketing software helps you personalize and automate your emails to improve the lead nurture experience.
1. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a great all-around email marketing software, containing most features you’ll need without being too confusing or complicated. You can use it to A/B test email copy, schedule campaigns, and collect metrics like your open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. It also offers a convenient free-forever plan if you have up to 2,000 contacts.
By combining AI with its analytics, it gives you valuable suggestions on how to make your content more engaging. It also learns from your metrics over time, so it can give you personalized recommendations on potential next moves.
2. ActiveCampaign
If you value customer experience automation, ActiveCampaign is a great option. Over 800 pre-built automations help you easily personalize email campaigns for everyone on your contact list. For instance, you can set up email auto-responders to immediately send out welcome emails or lead magnets to prospects.
This tool takes an automation-first approach to sales management, using the customer data you collect from all sales and marketing touchpoints to automate unique emails to send at the perfect time for your goal. The automation also lets you give the client a consistent experience every time they communicate with you.
Meeting schedulers
Maintaining a schedule can get out of hand quickly, especially if you’re an independent business owner. When you’re looking for a scheduling tool, take note of the ease of use. You want it to be valuable for your sales process by letting you set up specific meeting types for consultations and discovery calls.
1. Google Calendar
Anyone with a Google account has free access to Google Calendar, which is a simple and convenient meeting scheduling tool. With it, you can create a customizable meeting by adding an event to your calendar.
You can set reminders for yourself and for guests. And you can give guests different permissions depending on their role in the meeting. If you’re having a virtual meeting, you can even host it on Google Meet so attendees just have to click on their reminder.
Google Calendar also offers a Find A Time feature, which analyzes your team’s calendars and finds times that work best for everyone.
2. Calendly
Calendly uses a simple but elegant interface to help you save time setting up meetings. It lets you suggest multiple times, so guests can pick a time that works for them instead of going back and forth on what meeting time is best for everyone. You can also run a poll to decide on a date and time that works for the most people, converting the winning time slot into a meeting with just one click.
You can set up rules and create a workflow to automate a lot of work that would otherwise be manual, like sending out reminders to attendees before the meeting and follow-up emails afterwards.
3. HoneyBook
Honeybook’s scheduling tool gives your clients a cohesive branded experience that helps you book meetings much faster. It offers you a lot of streamlining, including automated meeting confirmations and reminders. You can set different session types to align with leads, current clients, and more. Once you send a link to your schedule, you can reduce the back-and-forth that comes with trying to find time to meet.
Clientflow management platforms
Your clientflow is the entire process of selling and delivering services according to what a specific client needs. Many sales tools focus on different aspects of this process, like lead nurture and scheduling. However, switching between tools can create friction for the client and could negatively affect their experience.
A clientflow management platform lets you seamlessly transition clients between steps in the sales cycle. This also means it can compile more client data, helping you discover new trends and find new opportunities for growth.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook streamlines your entire clientflow in one place, which means you can combine your sales and booking process.
Along with interactive sales templates like pricing guides and brochures, it also provides ready-to-use contract templates that you can tweak to suit your business. With powerful customization, you can choose to send everything separately or combine everything to remove unnecessary pauses in the sales process.
Clients can also pay securely and easily on HoneyBook, so you don’t need to wait for checks and snail mail. The platform will automatically calculate discounts and taxes, freeing up more time for you to focus on improving your business.
Pricing guide tools
A pricing guide is an introductory brochure you hand to prospects that outlines the services you provide. It’s your opportunity to make a client, so setting it strategically is important.
1. HoneyBook
HoneyBook lets you build fully custom pricing guides. Their experts can help you design and brand your pricing guide to make it the most appealing. You can also use its editor to add social proof, like testimonials and client reviews, or frequently asked questions. Making a strong impression with your guide will help you convert more clients.
2. Vendavo
Vendavo helps you set your prices for your pricing guide. It incorporates AI to help you optimize and digitize your entire commercial process so that you can find the perfect time, price point, and buyer to make sales. It manages your list prices in real-time with advanced pricing strategies to help you get a healthy profit margin.
Sales brochure builders
Sales brochures are a handy way to raise awareness about your business and sales products, but designing them from scratch is time-consuming. Builders reduce the time it takes to make your brochures and can incorporate tracking integrations to collect client data that helps you optimize your marketing efforts.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook offers interactive brochure templates that members can customize and clients can fill out without needing to download software or print. Members can even include sales videos.Â
Actions that clients take on some pages can also impact other pages. For instance, if a client selects services from a pricing guide, the cost can automatically apply to an invoice on the next page.
Improve your clientflow, increase your income
With the variety of sales tools available, it may feel like there are too many options. Just remember that you don’t need to adopt everything at one time. And many of the tools in this article come with a free trial. If anything caught your interest, try it out to see if it’s a good option for your business. However, if you do want to streamline and enhance every part of your clientflow, try out HoneyBook to create a seamless client experience. By creating automations for your various tasks, you can free up time to make major operational improvements to your business, helping you grow and succeed.
