Sales management is one of the most core parts of the company. If the sales team doesn’t deliver, there will be no revenues and that’s how companies come crashing down. The entire cycle of sales requires coordination from other departments, only then can businesses perform at its peak.
For success in sales, there needs to be a credible system put in place. The sales manager should take care of educating the sales team about their responsibilities, manage projects, set expectations, take care of monitoring the overall performance of the sales team.
To ensure that everything works in perfect tandem, there are sales management tools that help alleviate the burden of the sales manager. For freeing up the time of salespeople to concentrate on their core activities and recording their day-to-day activities, keeping track of the clients they spoke to, pipeline, sales generated, etc., a sales management tool is your best bet.
12 Best Sales Management Tools of 2023
Sales management tools come in various forms, it can be light solutions for small businesses and can be heavy ones that will be useful for corporates. The kind of sales management tools that you require is totally dependent on your business objectives, budgets, and sales capacity. Here are 12 of the best sales management tools:
#1 Zoho CRM
It provides you deep insights into running your business with its solutions for simplifying the sales process. Zoho CRM manages the sales process with the help of advanced analytics which helps you create targeted marketing campaigns, measure your campaigns, analyze the effectiveness, create email marketing campaigns, and improve the quality of the leads that you get.
The tool integrates with Google Apps, Zapier, MailChimp, and more. Zoho CRM has been a boon for sales managers for more than 20 years now by helping them manage sales teams across the world.
Here are some of the best features of using Zoho CRM:
Dashboard: With Zoho’s CRM dashboard, you can monitor every aspect of your sales cycle, right from the meetings, notes, contact lists, KPIs, deal type, pipeline, etc. All of these will give you an overview of how the sales team is faring. With this visual imagery, you will be able to come up with your own conclusions.
Sales pipeline: It is imperative that you track the progress of the leads. You can see at which stages are each of the leads, including when you expect the sale to close, deal size, etc.
Highly scalable: There are processes in place for each stage of the sales cycle like follow up, lead management, discounts, etc. With this blueprint, you will be able to follow the best practices for each of the stages so that you can close the sale easily.
Sales Prediction: It goes through details about the previous deals, present sales trends, and comes up with a number forecasting your sales. It will also show you sales for each rep across different teams and geographies.
There are many more features that Zoho CRM offers.
#2 Pipedrive
With a simple interface and a clean dashboard, Pipedrive offers a simple solution for salespeople to optimize their work. It has a bunch of features that can be used to track performance, prioritize deals, etc.
Here are some of the features that it offers:
Managing leads: It helps you manage leads from the tool itself where you can have conversations with them. With customizable pipelines that you can create, it helps you add more details about each of the deals. Keep all your leads in one place and even use its live chat facility to talk to prospects.
Insights & Reports: The highly interactive dashboard that it offers provides you with customizable reports that you can use for your business to make decisions. Monitor the progress of your team by verifying with the reports and KPIs.
Communications: It allows you to have full visibility of the entire communication with your audience by tracking calls, emails, and history. Manage your contacts, inbox, calls, and schedule them with the activity calendar that is available.
Automation: With a lot of mundane work that salespeople had to do, Pipedrive takes care of it with automation. It does repetitive admin tasks with the help of AI. It creates streamlined workflows for each sales process.
Integrations: Integrate with more than 150 of your favorite business apps so that you can do more in the least possible time.
#3 Freshsales
With Freshsales, you can take care of your leads better. Automatically capture the leads into the CRM, personalize lead engagement, and close sales as fast as possible. It has a simple and reliable interface and all of its features are available in a single interface. Freshsales has some of the best features that legacy CRMs offer and helps you prioritize pipeline opportunities and sales. They have a great reputation for helping salespeople. Its many integrations make it possible to show its impact at a rapid pace.
Here are some of the features that make it appealing:
Lead management: Freshsales helps with lead capture, gives you a platform to nurture the leads, distribute, and verify leads using various channels of communication.
Email tracking: Salespeople need to know if the emails that they send are being opened because it shows interest in the prospect. It enables sales reps to send bulk emails that are personalized and scheduled.
Event Tracking: The app uses previous conversations and plans for future communication. By knowing the previous conversations and their interests, you can offer the prospect a much more refined solution.
Sales Management: It gives you a complete view of the entire sales pipeline with features like Visual Salespipeline, Deal Predictability, Deal Rotting, etc. It allows you to predict when a client will close, provides a better platform for follow-up, and more.
#4 Bitrix24
The CRM in Bitrix24 allows sales representatives to take care of their interactions with potential clients and works towards bringing them closer to the end of the sales funnel. You can create reports, segment the audience, analyze the data, create marketing campaigns specifically for prospects, and so on. With an intuitive CRM at play, you can take all the actions necessary to bring the lead to closure.
Here are some of the features that make Bitrix24 CRM attractive:
Reports/Sales funnels: The sales funnel shows the entire list of transactions and at what stage of the discussions they are in. They are color-coded for easy understanding.
CRM Dashboards: It shows the entire work being done, what is happening, who is talking to which prospect, the deals that have been won, clients who are yet to pay, and so on.
Invoices: You can create personalized invoices to your customers automatically, including recurring ones.
Quotes: Provide quotes to your customers using customizable fields and statuses. Add more items, taxes, discounts, etc., to the quote.
Targets: You can even set sales targets for your sales reps inside the CRM. Sales targets for each pipeline and the entire company can be tracked in real-time.
Multiple channels: With the help of open channels, all the popular social networks can be connected with Bitrix24. Your employees will respond to clients in real-time, while they are using social media, the prospects will see as if your sales reps are also responding through the social media channel.
#5 Keap
Here is an all-in-one solution that provides marketing and sales automation with campaigns and powerful integrations. The app is specially designed for small and medium businesses. It seamlessly integrates with most third-party software applications. With the help of Infusionsoft, you can automate routine tasks to create brilliant sales strategies. Have all your sales-related leads and conversations in a single place.
Here are some of the features of Keap:
Lead Management: Keap’s software allows you to respond to incoming leads promptly by sending highly personalized communications to drive action. Send automatic messages to new leads using Keap, it will put you ahead of the competitors.
Fully organized: By keeping all your client interactions, including details and all updates at a single point, you will be able to better organize yourself. Pull up any file that you might need or go back and refer to any conversation you have had with a prospect.
Single-channel: You can be connected to your leads through multiple channels, social media websites, emails, and more. There is no need to work with other sales management tools as it provides you with all the functionalities that are required.
Automation: It has superior automation capabilities which makes it easy for the sales reps as they don’t have to take care of mundane and repetitive tasks.
#6 EngageBay
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software designed for small businesses and startups. It helps businesses take care of various business processes without using multiple platforms.
Here are some of the standout features of EngageBay:
Omnichannel communication: EngageBay lets you connect with your customers across multiple channels, including email, phone, social media, push notifications, and the web. With omnichannel marketing, customers can connect with you on one platform and transition seamlessly to other modes throughout the customer journey process.
Dashboards: EngageBay offers an intuitive and customizable dashboard to help you get a bird’s eye view of your company performance, including KPIs and other metrics. You can see crucial information about your marketing campaigns, sales rep performance, call data, deal win rates, and more.
Sales pipelines: The sales pipeline feature helps you organize all your deals and manage them from start to finish.
Appointment scheduling: EngageBay offers 2-way email sync and appointment scheduling capabilities to help you manage your important meetings in one place.
#7 NetSuite CRM
NetSuite’s CRM is a cloud-only solution that gives you a real-time and holistic customer view across the entire lifecycle. It provides a complete 360-degree view of the prospects. Deliver exceptional support to your prospects from the early stages of lead management. It has attractive features like marketing automation and customer service management capabilities that make it a compelling product.
Here are some of the features that make it one of the best products:
Automation: It automates your entire marketing process which helps you to create better campaigns with the help of your sales team. The automation solution lets you track the activity of the prospect, tells you when they are about to buy, and passes the lead to the sales reps based on pre-defined criteria.
Campaign Management: You can create and track highly targeted campaigns based on a variety of factors. Keep optimizing your campaign and track the results in real-time.
Workflow: Be on top of the productivity of the employees by tracking their workflow, stages of the conversation with a prospect, progress reports, etc.
Partner relationship management: You can create partner-focused sales and create joint-marketing campaigns.
Sales Forecasting: It helps businesses determine the sales that they will be able to achieve based on previous history, present pipeline, and sales trends.
#8 Sales Cloud by Salesforce
Salesforce’s Sales Cloud supports sales, marketing, and customer support for both B2B and B2C players. There are different versions of the product available to support businesses based on their size and needs. Discover trends, forecast upcoming quarters, visualize data, manage leads, build a sales pipeline, and more with the help of Sales Cloud. It automates the entire sales process and creates customized workflows. The reps can have all the data necessary to close prospects.
Here are some of the attractive features of Sales Cloud:
Account Management: It lets you take care of all the leads that you have spoken with. You can manage them, using this feature where all the previous conversations are already available.
Customize sales process: You can create tailored sales experiences for reps using the workflows that are available.
Integrated: Get a 360-degree view of all the prospects that you are talking to by connecting the data available across different departments and back-end systems.
Automation: One of the most powerful features that any software can offer is automation. With a lot of datasets available, there is a variety of data, to record or document them one needs to do a bunch of tasks, some of which might be unnecessarily wasting the time of the salesperson.
Sales Cloud Einstein: It provides sales managers with AI-powered analytical capabilities that help with sales predictions, business trends, opportunity engagement, and more.
#9 OnContact CRM
It is a full-featured and a completely customizable CRM solution that helps with sales automation, customer service, marketing automation, and more. OnContact CRM features search functionality, global search functionality, interactive reports and dashboards, integration with many 3rd party-tools, etc. You can even change toolbars, screen formats, buttons, and fields to fit your business requirements.
Here are some of the features that make OnContact CRM attractive:
Opportunity Management: You can find out the opportunities that are available based on the pipeline so that you can take necessary action. When you are working with a lot of prospects, it becomes difficult to keep track of all the details, the CRM makes it easier to identify prospects that are on the verge of closing.
Quotation Management: It makes the proposal creation process simple by generating sales quotes quickly. If you have specific requirements, the CRM customizes it to your needs.
Contact Management: Thanks to its simple visual interface, you will be able to know everything that is required to know about the prospects. Using the CRM, you can cultivate better relationships with your prospects and customers.
CRM Mapping: With the help of OnContact CRM’s CRM Mapping feature, you will be able to find other companies and prospects who you should meet when visiting an area. It even gives you driving instructions.
#10 Workbooks.com
Workbooks.com helps sales reps work more efficiently, offer more value to the prospects, identify opportunities, and so on. With the help of real-time reporting and activity tracking, you can manage your sales team with significant ease.
Here are striking features of Workbooks:
Track sales activities: It helps you track all of the sales activities so that progress is made and no leads are overlooked for any reason. Sales reps will find their lives easier when they get to know all the information about prospects in a single dashboard.
Contact Management: Capture every information about your prospects so that you can use it to create targeted campaigns for each of them. It will give you a 360-degree view of all the interactions with the prospects. You can track activities, find more opportunities and offer relevant information for the prospects.
Subscriptions: With this feature, you can remind your customers whenever they are due for the next bill. Identify renewal rates and based on their activity, you can even predict future renewal rates.
Workbooks Enrich: It gives users more information about the prospects on the CRM by pulling relevant data from the Internet. It gives the sales reps a far detailed view of the people and the business that they are engaging with.
Automated Workflows: Remove the burden of having to repeatedly perform mundane tasks that do not add any value to the salesperson by automating them. Instead of doing this, sales reps can concentrate on selling and adding value to the prospect.
#11 ZenDesk Sell
It provides you with the necessary tools to improve the productivity of your sales team. You can store and sync calls, emails, call records, etc. All the notes and other information you have recorded are synced and available across any device and for any platform. ZenDesk Sell even helps you with assigning the leads to the right salesperson. It accepts various third-party integrations and you can also use it in social networks to interact with your prospects.
Here are some features of ZenDesk Sell:
Sales performance: With its full suite of tools that help sales reps and sales managers, the productivity of the sales team will increase multi-fold.
Email tracking: It keeps all email communication in context as you can log and record all the conversations that happen over email. You can even automate the emails that you get and segment them based on various attributes.
Activity Reporting: Measure key metrics like email count, calls made, demos were shown, etc. It will help the sales reps understand how they can sell better.
Sales Prospecting: Identify the right people to talk to by creating targeted prospect lists, and prospect them across multiple channels. You can build targeted lists using industry, size, role, funding, etc.
#12 LeadSquared
LeadSquared, a sales execution CRM, gives businesses complete visibility into every stage of the sales process. You can automate sales workflows, manage pipelines, and monitor your salesperson’s performance on this all-inclusive platform.
With 150+ integrations, LeadSquared ensures that all your sales data is stored securely while being easy to access on the go with its mobile CRM.
Here are some features that make LeadSquared stand apart as a sales management tool:
Sales workflow automation: From lead capture to closing the deal, LeadSquared can automate each stage including distribution, nurturing, and qualification. Since each lead moves across stages automatically, it reduces a lot of manual and administrative tasks for salespeople.
Sales performance management: The platform helps you build dashboards and reports to track sales metrics. You can even define goals and objectives, gamify the process, and view a target-versus-achievement report with just a few clicks.
Analytics and reports: With your team’s performance and historical data at hand, generating sales forecasts becomes a piece of cake! You can customize these reports to view insights into the pipeline, sales closures, revenue, and more.
Monitor field sales teams: LeadSquared isn’t limited to a fixed desk system, and just like your salespeople it also operates on the go. While sales teams can upload the sales data on ground, the managers can also monitor their progress from the mobile CRM app.
Omnichannel outreach: Salespeople use LeadSquared to nurture their leads across all channels—email, cold calls, SMS, and WhatsApp. This outreach can also be trigger-based and personalized based on the prospect’s interest.
Conclusion
The above ten sales management tools are some of the best in the market, have survived for many years, have had iterations based on customer feedback, and are still helping businesses with what they want. Choosing the sales management tool for your business totally depends on the budget, size, and business needs of the organization. When you have the right sales management tool, you will be able to give the right kind of direction for your sales reps, increase their productivity, make them organized, and provide them more opportunities to close the sales.
If your business still follows traditional methods for its sales team, why not take one of the tools and use it for a few days to get a hang of it. Once you are familiar with it, you will be able to gauge if it really helps your business and helps in ironing out most of your sales issues.
What are some of your favorite sales management tools? What do you think are features you wish were available in the sales management tool that you use? Please do let us know in the comments section.
