Sales is the be-all and end-all for every startup. Without enough sales startups can’t generate the cash they need to survive, grow or attract investment. With most startups generating sales online, the amount of admin and data management for sales teams has grown exponentially.
Unfortunately, many salespeople spend significantly more time setting up and managing their sales funnels and processes than they do actually concentrating on the vital business of closing deals.
Luckily, there’s a range of great tools and platforms to help automate, improve or simplify the sales process.
At Smash,vc, we’ve put together a list of 20+ tools that can help you spend more time focusing on closing deals:
Prospero
Crafting unique and high-converting proposals is often one of the more difficult tasks every startup faces. However, with the help of Prospero you can cut down the time you spend on proposal writing significantly, and ensure better results.
The tool allows you to personalize and brand your proposals with the addition of images and videos, logos, charts and tables. It then lets you track your success via notifications when a client opens the proposal, and it can be integrated with numerous third-party tools, including Zapier, Stripe and Google Analytics.
With numerous proposal templates to choose from, Prospero can save you time, earn you money, and as an added bonus it’s priced extremely competitively at under $10/month.
Mailshake
Mailshake is an excellent email prospecting and sales automation tool. The tool automates personalized emails and follow-ups, allowing sales teams to save a significant amount of time on the outreach process, while giving them the freedom to focus on the actual selling.
The platform allows users to send an email with automatic follow ups, connects replies to your mailbox, and provides detailed analytics such as delivery, click, open and response rates.
ProofHub
ProofHub is a project and team management tool that can help you stay on top of all your different tasks and deliverables from a single space.
It enables you to keep track of progress, milestones, and timeframes without having to look through different email threads and other apps. You can easily tag people, mark your progress as you go, and delegate tasks. Sharing files and chatting is also available on ProofHub, and you can even create detailed reports.
Really Simple Systems
Really Simple Systems is an affordable, accessible CRM tool suitable that scales perfectly with a growing startup.
The main purpose of every CRM is to create a great relationship between a business and its users. The best way to form a quality relationship is to always have the data about your users, and approach each based on their previous behavior.
The data system allows the whole team to create segmented email campaigns based on customer profile. It is also good to know that CRM software can help you align your marketing and sales team, and never miss an opportunity to reach out to your customers in the right way.
Poptin
Poptin helps you create popups and forms for your website within minutes, without actually having to understand the coding that is involved in the process.
There are 9 different kinds of popups to choose from, from full screen and lightbox popups, to those allowing you to promote a limited offer or play a video. You can also create contact and email forms, select from a wide range of triggers, and even send out autoresponders to your audience.
The tool comes with built-in analytics that can help you track the results of your popups, as well as over 40 templates and 50 integrations that will take your marketing to the top.
Storydoc
Creating a compelling pitch deck is vital for a startup, whether it’s an investment you’re seeking or turning a prospect into a new customer. Storydoc is an interactive AI pitch deck generator to ramp up sales or fundraising.
You can choose from an array of interactive templates tested for any device. And they all come with analytics that tell you how your decks are performing.
StoryDoc integrates with your CRM which allows you to personalize your decks. You can embed any of your sales tools into your decks, Vidyard Calendly, Intercom, Gong, and more.
An account starts at $30/month.
NeverBounce
Over 40,000 organizations trust NeverBounce for their email cleaning services allowing you to reach more customers by cleaning your lists and preventing bounces, all for less than a penny per email.
Preserve your domain’s authority and brand reputation by not getting penalized for bounced emails. NeverBounce also has easy drag and drop importing via their dashboard or API access, with popular ESP and CRM integrations.
GrowthList
Growthlist offers a comprehensive database of 5,000 B2B tech companies in growth mode: companies that are hiring aggressively or were recently funded.
The list features a description for each startup, links to their social media profiles and blogs, details of the founder/CEO (along with their email address), and more.
It’s a great source of leads for B2B startup teams to put into their sales funnel and start converting into customers.
Contact Out
Contact Out is a great tool to find anyone’s email address or phone number extremely quickly. They claim to have an astounding one billion contacts, which means you can likely find the details for whomever you are looking for.
The tool is built on top of LinkedIn and hooks in with a Chrome extension browser. That means you can navigate to a person’s LinkedIn page and quickly find the emails and numbers of the contact. This makes it one of the most unique and dynamic contact finding tools on the market.
Marketo
Marketo offers powerful marketing automation software to engage prospects and engage customers via digital marketing.
The platform offers a suite of applications to drive engagement from one place, from personalized display ads to predictive content.
With an integrated approach to customer marketing, sales teams can benefit from increased insights and creating effective automated sales campaigns.
Sender
Sender is an email automation tool that will help you stay on top of your incoming and outgoing messages at the fraction of the time this task takes to do manually.
The tool allows you to set up all kinds of automated emails, from welcome messages to cart abandonment reminders, as well as to create stylish and effective newsletters, or pretty much any other kind of email.
It also comes with some very useful analytical features that can help you improve your email campaigns and your open and click rates, boosting your ROI along the way.
Nimble
Nimble is a high-end CRM system that makes use of social media. The platform automatically updates itself with relevant prospects from various data sources and imports contact information and social media profiles from your existing network.
Nimble’s relationship intelligence allows sales teams to easily identify key contacts and turn connections into conversations and relationships into revenue.
Clearbit
Clearbit offers a number of APIs designed to help businesses grow. Their products include Enrichment, which parses emails or domains for qualified leads, Discovery, an extensive company lead database and Prospector, which finds specific company contacts.
With a variety of products and APIs, Clearbit allows sales teams to choose exactly what tools they need.
Followup.cc
Followup.cc is Gmail plugin that optimizes gmail inboxes for sales teams. The plugin lets you import salesforce contacts, offers open tracking, a “send later” feature, reminders and email snoozing.
It’s a useful way to upgrade an existing service to help teams close more deals, build deeper relationships, and save more time.
Boomerang
Boomerang adds scheduled sending and the easiest, most integrated email reminders to Gmail, helping you reach Inbox Zero faster.
Whether you are involved with sales or not, Boomerang really is a must have add-on that’ll allow you take control of when you send and receive email messages via GMail.
All new Boomerang accounts come with a Free 30-day Trial of Boomerang Professional. So go ahead and try it before you decide that you want to subscribe.
Base
Base is a CRM and sales platform aimed at business, mid-market or enterprise sales teams. The software offers a wide range of features including sales reporting and analytics, email intelligence and sales management.
Offering an up to 80% increase in new leads, Base can help teams process sales across their team.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a simple and visual sales pipeline tool for teams. The platform can be setup in minutes, includes iOS and Android apps, allows you to see all deals in a visual sales pipeline, organizes contacts and forecasts sales.
Easy to use for salespeople and great for small teams, Pipedrive allows salespeople to focus on the right deals.
Salesflare
Salesflare is an artificially intelligent sales assistant for Outlook, Gmail and mobile devices. Working with your CRM the platform automatically assists your follow-ups, takes over your admin and creates transparent customer conversations that can be handled by the team.
Salesflare makes it easy for teams to boosts sales performance.
Email Hunter
Email Hunter allows you to “find email addresses of any company in seconds.”
This is a great example of a tool that does one thing, and does it very, very well. Our internal SEO team uses Email Hunter when trying to find relevant contacts for SEO outreach (so we can avoid just spamming random emails). To us, simply head to EmailHunter, enter the domain of who you want to contact, and instantly, they’ll present you with different email address associated with that domain.
EmailHunter also have a simple-to-use and powerful API you can use.
Outreach
Outreach is an enterprise communications platform for sales teams. The service offers sales sequences, personalized interactions and intelligence on what to do next and what isn’t working.
Outreach creates a workflow that streamlines every aspect of sales communication and offers a framework for managers to replicate the highest performing communication process across their teams.
Growbots
Growbots is an all-in-one outbound sales automation platform that offers automatic lead generation and email drip campaigns with CRM integration.
With a database of 200 million decision makers, the platform will automatically generate a list of ideal targets and contact them with an email campaign.
The platform allows teams to generate new sales opportunities by setting up customer profiles and scheduling email campaigns.
RevBoss
RevBoss automates outbound sales for SaaS companies. The platform offers sales prospecting and lead generation using a mixture of automation and cloud workers to create an effective sales workflow.
RevBoss also helps create a sales pipeline for teams by accelerating top-of-the-funnel activity through outbound sales development.
Clever eCommerce
Clever eCommerce offers Google Ads automation for ecommerce websites. Their platform analyzes your online store in order to create unique ads and campaigns based on your products and product categories.
The tool also optimizes the campaigns automatically in order to maximize your return on investment and get the most out of your marketing budget.
Truepush
Truepush is a free push notification tool available with monetization plans where websites can make additional revenue while engaging their subscribers.
This web push notification service is available for WordPress, API, and Shopify platforms. It is the perfect solution to send engaging push notifications for unlimited subscribers.
SEO
While not “a tool”, the vast majority of online-first companies could use SEO to grow their business. If you have a SaaS company, here is a list of SaaS agencies, or if you’re a different type of startup, then these startup agencies could help you.
