Sales reps are always busy, but how much of their time is actually spent selling?
Even the best sales reps can get caught up in admin tasks and gathering sales intelligence, rather than doing what you hired them to do.
In fact, a study conducted by Forbes found that the typical sales rep only spends 35-percent of their time actively selling. Writing emails, prospecting leads, entering data, and scheduling meetings can easily pile up, consuming the majority of the workday for many reps.
Thankfully, these tasks are easy to automate with the right sales automation tools. Once they’re in place, your team can spend less time ticking boxes and more time moving leads through the pipeline.
Benefits of Sales Automation
Sales automation enables your team to handle time-consuming tasks that would otherwise need to be done manually, freeing their time so they can focus on revenue-building tasks.
Sales automation can increase performance by providing your reps with more time to put into closing new business, while also optimizing your process as a whole by reducing the risk of human error.
Automating outreach tasks such as email sends and follow-ups helps standardize your process and shorten response time, improving customer satisfaction by providing a seamless experience to prospect. Easily accessible customer-centric data allows team members to personalize communication and boost closing rates as well.
While sales automation has clear benefits, choosing the right tools for your company can be a bit more challenging. We’ve compiled our top 5 sales automation tools that can help optimize any company’s sales process.
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1. HubSpot Sales Hub
It should come as no surprise that HubSpot Sales Hub is at the top of our list.
There are some key features we love, such as easily customizable email sequences, chat bots, email tracking, advanced reporting and calendar-integration.
Ideal for automating your follow-up tasks, Sales Hub makes it simple to personalize outreach while tracking engagement through replies, clicks, and opens.
- Price: Plans start at $50/month for limited features. Most companies get the most value out of Sales Hub Professional, which includes five seats for $450/month.
- Best for: Follow-up and closing tasks
2. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo uses a proprietary Artificial Intelligence program that helps B2B businesses manage their account-based sales data.
This tool takes data collection one step further by crawling the web for relevant and obscure information that gives a more complete picture of your prospects.
By pulling information from funding, news stories, and product descriptions, ZoomInfo gives a much more comprehensive look at your accounts and their unique needs.
If your company runs on an account-based sales strategy, or tackles high-ticket sales, this tool could be invaluable in providing in-depth data on target accounts.
- Price: Contact ZoomInfo
- Best for: Collecting account-based marketing and sales insights
3. LeadFuze
For businesses that need specific help searching for leads, LeadFuze offers a simple solution. Set filters based on job position, location, company size, and product or service sold, and their AI will crawl the web for contact data that fit your criteria.
The system can provide detailed data about your sales prospects, including their contact information, tech tools, location, and whether their company is hiring.
You can Automate list building with LeadFuze and give your sales team relief from compiling data. LeadFuze integrates easily with most CRMs, and offers workflow tools that can improve sales outreach and response time.
- Price: Plans start at $132/month.
- Best for: Lead generation and qualification
4. Clearbit
Personalized sales messages are essential if you want your prospects to feel like a priority. Clearbit searches for and displays real-time lead data that allows your sales team to send personalized messages throughout the buyer’s journey.
By sourcing data from over 85 attributes, including industry, company size, job title, role, and more, Clearbit’s automation tools remove the heavy-lifting from prospect research.
Lead scoring makes all of this data easy to digest, as all criteria are ranked based on qualifications you’re looking for in a sales qualified lead.
- Price: Contact Clearbit
- Best for: Personalized sales messaging and lead scoring
Related Content: 3 Sales Automation Examples to Boost Your Company Closing Rates
5. Leadfeeder
Minimizing your website’s bounce rate is a constant battle. Leadfeeder helps convert leads by using web intelligence tools to view and qualify your website visitors.
Leadfeeder allows you to automate your sales process by sending notifications when leads are visiting your site, telling you which specific pages they are viewing as well as their company and contact information.
This program allows you to effortlessly capture lead and prospect information without requiring visitors to fill out email forms.
- Price: Free “Lite” plan, premium plans start at $79 per month
- Best for: Converting web traffic
“A study conducted by Forbes found that the typical sales rep only spends 35-percent of their time actively selling.”
Sales teams struggle to balance their time between admin tasks, research, and updating records. These concerns have grown during the shift to remote and hybrid work, as face-to-face communication with prospects has declined.
Sales automation tools like those listed above are a great way to relieve some pressure from your team so they can prioritize tasks that will close deals.
Focus on tools that can handle time-consuming tasks like gathering lead data, automating outreach, and tracking engagement. This will help you boost productivity and bring your sales processes to the next level.
Happy automating!
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