12 Essential Tools Every Sales Department Should Be Using

Streamlining your sales department starts with implementing helpful tools. Here are 12 tools that YEC entrepreneurs recommend.

Even the most experienced salesperson can find themselves overwhelmed or out of time during the sales process as they’re generating leads, reaching out to the customer and remembering to follow up.

Luckily, there are tools that can be implemented in any sales department to make the process more organized and efficient. From collaboration tools like Slack for asking questions to combined lead generation and outreach tools like LeadFuze, putting these systems in place will give your sales team more time and energy to focus on the customer.

We asked 12 entrepreneurs from YEC what tools their sales teams are using to organize and expedite their sales process. Their answers are below:

1. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a great sales CRM tool that helps you manage your entire sales process from the lead to the actual sale. What makes Pipedrive so great is the visualization it offers for your sales pipeline, which is where it got its name. Organization and follow-up are the keys to any successful sales strategy. – Andy Karuza, FenSens

2. LeadFuze

There are a lot of lead generation and lead management tools, but I can’t think of any that combine what you need the way LeadFuze does. It handles both lead generation and the outreach process of turning those leads into demos. Surprisingly, we found that we were able to convert 50 percent of those leads into paying customers. It’s tough to find anything else that effective. – Ruben Gamez, Bidsketch

3. Proposable

Service companies that invest in a proposal-based sales process should consider using a tool such as Proposable to create/manage their proposals. This tool provides templates, variable data inputs and analytics, all features that cut down on time spent creating proposals and increase the insights garnered from them. – Ross Beyeler, Growth Spark

4. Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is a great way to source leads, addresses, phone numbers and anything else you need to make contact with a potential client. We use it extensively and it has saved us a lot of time in a very efficient, cost-effective way. I’d highly recommend Mechanical Turk for any small company or startup. – Mitch Gordon, Go Overseas

5. Sigstr

Apps like Slack and HipChat are changing the way companies communicate internally, but email is still the No.1 channel for external communication. Sigstr is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to market your best content to your email recipients. This SaaS tool allows you to standardize your signature for all employees while opening a powerful marketing channel with their campaign banners. – Matt Hunckler, Verge

6. Cirrus Insight

Cirrus Insight is one the most convenient tools for seamlessly integrating your inbox with salesforce. It allows you to easily set up personalized templates and drip campaigns, schedule calls, reminders and follow-ups, and more. All neatly synced with salesforce. – Stanley Meytin, True Film Production

7. Slack

Creating channels in Slack around the different issues that salespeople confront will help to improve the performance of the entire team. A dedicated sales channel will help teams help each other by asking and answering questions, sharing files around a topic and building collaboration. In addition, the community building component will help improve performance and productivity. – Marcela De Vivo, Brilliance

8. CallFire

CallFire is a cloud dialer service that has completely changed our methodology for creating dialer campaigns. It has replaced our traditional lead-gen workflow, wherein we relied heavily on hardware- and service-based platforms that, in hindsight, were clunky, expensive and archaic. With CallFire, we’ve really streamlined our outbound dialing process and reduced the impact on our sales team. – Blair Thomas, First American Merchant

9. InsightSquared

All sales teams should be using InsightSquared to optimize efficiency. It’s a very intuitive tool that gives sales organizations the insights they need into the health of their sales pipeline and the analysis needed to make use of the information. – Jake Dunlap, Skaled

10. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an obvious answer, but you would be shocked at how many people don’t take advantage of all the tools that LinkedIn has to offer. Not only is it a social networking tool for professionals, but it also offers networking groups, jobs, prospects asking questions, highly useful content and more. LinkedIn is the core reason why many companies are able to succeed and scale. – Anthony Pezzotti, Knowzo.com

11. Calendly

This simple tool lets prospective customers schedule time directly on your calendar without going through the usual email back and forth. Not only will it free up your time to do more sales, but by reducing the friction to schedule a call or demo, it will increase your conversion rates as well. – Roger Lee, Captain401

12. Yesware

Yesware allows you to track email opens within Gmail and it integrates with Salesforce. This allows your sales department to iterate subject lines, qualify leads and have the information to increase open rates over time. – Nick Akey, MakerSquare