The sales industry has been going through a revolutionary period in the past couple of years due to many software innovations that we’ve never seen before. Employing artificial intelligence in different sales systems has really been a game-changer for many companies, which is why you should consider using sales automation tools if you haven’t jumped on the trend yet.
And, while many trends come and go, we assure you that this one is here to stay. Sales professionals across the globe have started incorporating automation in their daily processes to improve efficiency, score better leads and close more deals. Here’s how and why automation has become a must-have for any sales process:
What is sales process automation?
Sales process automation enforces better communication between sales team members and uses a smart approach to automate repetitive sales tasks and administrative tasks. This directly impacts your sales because it allows your experts to spend more time focusing on closing deals instead of manual work. Some tools even use artificial intelligence for reports, forecasting, lead generation and other important tasks. There are many different kinds of sales and marketing automation tools on the market, which we’ll thoroughly review in this article.
Why is sales automation important?
By creating a comprehensive sales automation process, you’ll be able to put boring administrative tasks at bay and let your sales managers focus on other important tasks at hand. It increases sales productivity and it lets you reach more potential customers, and consequently close more deals. Here’s a quick rundown of the benefits of sales automation tools:
- improved productivity
- faster sales cycle
- better data consistency
- better customer satisfaction
- it’s time-efficient
- more effective lead generation
- easier access to customer details
What is sales pipeline automation?
Sales pipeline represents how you move your prospects through various stages of sales until they convert to paying customers. Sales pipeline automation does the manual work instead of your sales reps, enabling them to have more time for closing deals.
How do you automate a sales job?
While you can’t fully automate all activities that your sales reps and managers do, you can streamline various aspects, such as email outreach through the utilization of a cold email outreach tool, as well as automate functions like record creation and lead generation, among others. You do so by employing different sales automation platforms that can be integrated with each other, enabling you to optimize your workflow and improve the sales cycle. In this matter, you may consider using working with companies to offer lead generation services to grow your audience and increase their sales.
Different types of sales automation software
Sales professionals nowadays have access to various types of sales automation tools, each of which caters to a different area of interest. We can divide these tools into the following categories:
Record creating
One of the most annoying parts of any sales process is manually inputting all data you gather from different phone calls, emails and other forms of communication. When emails are your communication tool, follow phishing statistics and prioritize email security to build an image of a trustworthy company. Data collection is an unavoidable part of sales because it gives you insight into what your customers like and don’t like and which techniques work and which don’t.
You can find different tools that automatically collect contact information, create and analyze phone call transcripts and record phone calls. Then, they extract the important information, which you can analyze to make the best selling decisions.
Data entry
Data logging is any sales team’s worst nightmare – all sales reps and managers despise it because it’s so tedious and takes ages to complete. Not to mention that it’s very prone to human error, where one mistyped piece of information can have a domino effect on your whole sales process. Automating data entry will make your sales reps happy and let them use their skills for other more valuable activities.
Communications
Communications are probably the most important part of any sales process. It helps you form partnerships, score more leads, score more deals and enforce improved collaboration between different departments.
Ringblaze is probably the best communication automation platform on the market because it comes with a wide set of features that will help your sales process.
This comprehensive phone system lets you add a widget on your website to convert boring visiting calls to actual sales. For example, Ringblaze can help you handle a high volume of calls during busy holiday seasons, to ensure maximum customer satisfaction and foster a better relationship with them.
Some other useful features include:
- creating phone numbers
- recording phone calls
- team collaboration
- assigning issues
- hunt groups
- access to customer history
- managing open and resolved issues
- call routing
When combined with some other tools we’ll review below, you’ll get an ultimate solution that will optimize all your business processes, foster better communication with your customers and prospects, and cut a lot of costs and hours that you usually waste through manual work. It offers a free trial and it only costs $15 per month for each user.
Top 10 all-around sales automation software in 2022
As you can see, these sales tools have the power to optimize your sales process, create a more efficient workflow and enforce better collaboration between different teams. We’ve done some research on the most popular automation tools for sales leads and other activities, so let’s get right into reviewing them.
Hubspot Sales
User review – G2: “I love that everything I need, and all of the history of the account, as well as the attachments I’ve sent, are captured in that prospect’s or accounts file in Hubspot so I can search for things so much faster. Also, the prospects and the simple way to track email opens/clicks.”
Free trial: Yes – 14 days.
Pricing: Free; Starter ($45 per month – 2 users); Professional ($450 per month – 5 users); Enterprise ($1200 per month – 10 users).
Hubspot automation tool has a well-established reputation of being one of the most comprehensive tools out there. It’s used by thousands of sales teams across the globe for lead generation and boosting sales.
This powerful sales automation platform offers some impressive features such as conversational intelligence, which allows you to automatically capture details from calls and use their AI-powered insight to analyze them in detail.
The sales automation feature lets you automate mundane processes and manual tasks, which will let your sales representatives focus on other important tasks. Compared to other sales automation tools, Hubspot Sales is a great value for your buck, since it also offers a free version, though with not as many options as premium subscriptions.
When it comes to integrations, some of them include Hubspot CRM, EventBrite, PandaDoc, Proposify, SalesForce and Survey Monkey. If you combine it with a chat and call tool like Ringblaze for easier communication and collaboration, your sales will skyrocket!
Key features:
- email templates
- conversation intelligence
- sales funnel automation
- payments
- sales pipeline management
- quotes
- account-based marketing
- call tracking
Hubspot CRM
User review – SoftwareAdvice: “It is one of the most innovative CRM solutions around. For small and midsize companies this is the best fit to manage your sales team and proper lead analysis. It has a free version as well which can be tested before making the purchase thus enabling trust in the product. The user interface is lovable and easy to use.”
Free trial: No – Hubspot CRM is free to use.
Pricing: Free
Hubspot CRM is a completely free sales automation tool that is a part of the well-known Hubspot suite. Compared to many other automation tools on the market that charge a very high price, Hubspot CRM is great if you’re looking for a combination of great features and affordability.
Of course, if you need something more powerful, you can always opt for the tools Enterprise version that comes with additional features. The free version is still very feature-packed, and it comes with a handy contract record automation feature that enriches your records with data from over 20 million companies worldwide.
It can be used throughout different departments, so your sales leaders, salespeople, and marketing teams will absolutely love it. It also improves your customer relationship management efforts by offering a unified inbox where you can receive and respond to all customer inquiries. It’s also helped numerous small businesses to stay ahead of the game.
This handy tool is used by big companies across the globe, such as Atlassian, Doordash, inVision, and Wistia, among others.
Key features:
- reporting dashboard
- company insights
- deal tracking
- pipeline management
- contact management
- call tracking
- form builder
- ad management
- lead generation and lead management automation
- landing page builder
- prospect tracking
Monday CRM
User review – G2: “The visual representation is seamless. Data organization and comprehension is unfathomable. To find a person who knows power queries, validation, and coding to build a database from the ground up, would cost so much more in time and money and still be half as satisfying as Monday.com is.”
Free trial: Yes.
Pricing: Individual (Free – 1 user); Basic ($8 per month – 1 user); Standard ($10 per month – 1 user); Pro ($16 per month – 1 user); Enterprise ($ N/A);
Monday’s sales automation tool is great if your want to improve your customer satisfaction and marketing automation efforts. This cloud-based sales and marketing automation software is a great way to optimize your workflow and improve communication between marketing and sales teams.
What many love about the Monday sales automation tool is that it’s highly customizable. You can either use their pre-made industry-specific templates or create your own workflow from scratch. Your sales reps and managers can combine pre-sales and post-sales in a single platform and manage everything easily from a single place.
If you have a lot of sales materials like brochures, case studies and decks, you can easily centralize them and even create alerts for sales reps. Their CRM template lets you capture and generate leads more easily, track sales pipelines, forecast revenue and generate unique insights. You can optimize your sales funnel and enforce better communication between sales teams.
Another great thing about this sales and marketing software is that it comes with a wide variety of integrations, such as Outlook, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, One Drive, Zapier, ZenDesk, Shopify and Stripe, among others.
Key features:
- drag and drop interface
- custom automation
- sales pipeline management
- account alerts
- activity dashboard
- approval workflow
- buyer management
- collaboration tools
- sales approval
- accurate sales forecasts
- sales tax management
Pega Sales Automation
User review – G2: “User Interface is good and can get into the detail of each dealer. Process and product are monitors, which helps in following the best options. It does not work well with fewer customer data; it needs more data to predict.”
Free trial: Yes.
Pricing: N/A
While this sales automation tool isn’t as popular and prevalent as some other options we’ve discussed so far, it is still a noteworthy mention especially because of their system that uses artificial intelligence to deliver amazing results.
Pega also offers specialized sales solutions that are industry-specific:
- Pega Sales automation for insurance
- Pega Sales automation for financial services
- Pega Sales automation for healthcare and life sciences
Pega Sales is very scalable thanks to its AI-powered automation and can handle high volumes efficiently. It’s used by some big names such as Siemens, Cisco, US Census Bureau, HSBC and Aflac.
This is a perfect tool for any sales professional who would like to optimize their daily processes by automating repetitive tasks. Moreover, Pega Sales can even help with eliminating any blind spots through features like opportunity insights, next best actions and guided selling.
Unfortunately, Pega Sales doesn’t display any prices on their websites, so you’ll have to get in touch with their sales team to get a more detailed overview of available subscription models.
Key features:
- AI-guided sales function
- Email and calendar integration
- partner relationship management
- AI sales coach
- intelligent sales forecasting
Overloop
User review: “Something that I really loved about Overloop is the workflow in addition to the accuracy meter when it comes to finding emails. A lot of email finders just give you either a positive result of your search or a negative one. Overloop really goes the extra mile with prospect workflows as well as some feedback about how confident they are about the email address search results.”
Free trial: Yes – 14 days.
Pricing: Lite (€29 per month – 1 user); Standard (€79 per month – 1 user); Advanced (€129 per month – 1 user);
This all-in-one sales and CRM platform is formerly known as Prospect. io and it’s great for lead generation and sales automation that will take your company’s productivity to the next level. According to their website, this tool has the power to save your sales teams’ time by 10 hours per week on average. Also, it can help you close deals 3x faster.
In sales, it’s extremely important that your sales team follow a well-structured process. Overloop does just that thanks to its drag and drop feature where you can move your deals around to create a fully customized sales pipeline.
The aforementioned sales pipeline feature is structured in a way that makes deals the center of attention. In the deals section, you’ll be able to create deals for prospective customers and attach notes and other documentation. All these deals are organized in a sales pipeline structure with different stages. You can also add an unlimited number of custom fields and import CVS documents or spreadsheets.
Another cool feature is deal rotting, where you’ll be notified about any deals that are idle for prolonged periods of time. We highly recommend you combine it with an all-inclusive communication platform like Ringblaze to improve the flow of information between your employees.
Key features:
- deals and pipelines
- conversations
- reporting and forecasting
- email finder
- contacts management
- creating custom workflows
- cold emailing
Zapier
User review – G2: “Easy to use and a friendly format that enables fast automation. Also, the possibilities are wide. One of the aspects I enjoy a lot is the pre-made zaps. They are really useful when it comes to finding automation that I did not know I needed. The app is pretty complete and it seems like if there is an app out there that provides an API, then you are very likely to find it in Zappier.”
Free trial: No, but you can always use the free version that comes with 100 tasks per month.
Pricing: Free; Starter ($19.99 per month); Professiona; ($49 per month); Team ($299 per month); Company ($599 per month);
Zapier is yet another reputable sales automation suite that handles repetitive and manual tasks for you, resulting in increased employee productivity and a well-structured workflow. The whole purpose of this tool is to allow you to integrate and connect all other platforms that you’re using, enabling you to have a well-structured and unified workflow.
You can organize all your leads in one location so that your employees can access everything more easily, resulting in more effective sales processes. This helps with closing deals faster and easier team performance management.
Sales organizations use Zapier to contact and communicate with new leads, add them to CRM and support platforms and share content on social media platforms.
What we especially love about Zapier is that it offers an insane number of integrations – over 3,000. Key ones include Google Drive and Docs, PayPal, Slack, Trello, Zoom, WordPress, Basecamp, Asana, JIRA and HubSpot Marketing, among others.
Key features:
- filters
- formatting
- auto replay
- custom logic paths
- shared app connections
- folder permissions
- apps restrictions
- account consolidation
Chorus.ai
User review – G2: “This tool has been a game-changer for our sales team. The recording provides us the ability to efficiently navigate to the important parts of calls and meetings in our sales department. We can also see trends at a higher level. It’s also an advantage for any new hire training.”
Free trial: No, but you can request a demo.
Pricing: N/A
Chorus.ai boasts itself as being one of the leading sales automation process platforms because it offers conversation intelligence features for sales activities. It’s used by leading enterprises such as DocuSign, Adobe, Zoom and Qualtrics.
This simple and scalable tool is suitable for businesses of all types and sizes. You can use it for communication automation and analyze customer calls, meetings and emails to look for behavior changes and boost your sales.
It also lets you measure how often your existing customers mention features and how it impacts your conversions. This data will help your teams focus on correct focus roadmaps priorities and get a better overview of why you’re scoring or losing deals.
When you take all this intelligent data into consideration, you’ll basically receive an actionable formula that will help you predict outcomes and result in better deals.
Key features:
- automatic CRM population
- faster feedback loops
- call reviews
- actionable insights
- simplified deal reviews
- intelligent forecasting
- product feedback
Winmo
User review – G2: “Easy to import contacts into Sales Force, advanced search is useful and the Winmo Edge is great for identifying emerging opportunities quickly. They seem to have their ear to the ground on who’s getting a new CMO, ad spend trends, etc. They also integrate various other vendors into their platform, like Bombora, to add intent signals to various companies.”
Free trial: No, but you can request a free demo.
Pricing: Insider ($ N/A); Advance ($ N/A); Pro ($ N/A);
Winmo markets itself as a “sales prospecting tool that delivers the information you need to identify opportunities and close more deals with advertisers and agencies.” It has the power to get you up to speed on which companies and decision-makers you should get in touch with. It does all the heavy lifting for you by constantly researching and analyzing new prospects, consequently optimizing your sales funnel and other processes.
They have a dedicated team of industry analysts who keep track of conversations in real-time, which allows you to receive correct information and insider tips that can skyrocket your business. You can use it for a wide variety of sales tasks and sales data aggregation.
In terms of integrations, it works with Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, LinkedIn, Microsoft Dynamics and Relo Metrics, among others.
Key features:
- ad channel distribution
- competitive reports
- publisher site placement
- planning and buying periods
- notes and reminders
- custom sales lead alerts
- on-demand research requests
MobileMonkey
User review – G2: “We subscribed initially to their free plan and after doing some automation, we’re fully convinced that it’s the tool we’ve been looking for. It’s the only tool that helps us automate our marketing campaigns and contact customers via text messaging, social media, and live chat.”
Free trial: Yes, but you need to request it via the form on their website.
Pricing: For agencies ($ N/A); For in-house marketers ($ N/A); For SMBS, Creators & Brands ($ N/A);
MobileMonkey is a great tool for sales reps, managers, and other parts of your sales workforce. In fact, it’s the only suite that lets you make Facebook ad bots, SMS bots and native chatbots into a single place.
This AI-powered chatbot adopts an omnichannel approach that’s great for teams that use multiple devices and platforms to handle their sales activities. It can even analyze different messages and automatically group them into different categories.
It can be integrated with a wide variety of additional apps such as Asana, MailChimp, Gmail, Google Forms, WordPress and Instagram, among others.
Key features:
- advanced SMS automation
- drip campaigns
- multi-channel inbox
- chatbot builder
- custom variables
- chatbot templates
- multi-user management
- Q&A triggers
Growbots
User review – Capterra: “Easy to stand up, deploy, and use. Unlike other tools, you have the ability to generate new fresh prospects as needed, a functionality that is usually reserved for more expensive tools.”
Free trial: No.
Pricing: Outreach ($49 per month); All-in-One ($199 per month); Pro ($ N/A);
Growbots is an outbound sales platform that can be utilized by sales reps and managers to generate new prospects. It’s extremely easy to set up, which is why it’s a favorite for individuals who have tested it out within their organizations. The setup process goes as follows:
- Select your target market – you’ll get a custom-tailored list of prospective customers and their contact details.
- Set up your campaign – create personalized emails and schedule campaigns. All communications will be sent automatically including follow-ups.
- Start working – start scheduling meetings, closing deals and keeping your pipeline full.
It works best if combined with Ringblaze, to ensure that your communications are effective, both between your team members, as well as your prospects and clients. In terms of integrations, you can expect Salesforce, Hubspot, Zapier and BCC.
Key features:
- custom data delivery
- advanced target criteria
- accounts data enrichment
- warm replies detection
- A/B testing
- email personalization
- activity timeline
- reports
Ready to revolutionize your sales?
Thanks to these sales automation tools, your sales reps and managers will have a much easier time handling all the workload. You will improve your sales efforts, enforce a better relationship with your clients, and generate a lot more income.
Not being able to handle low-priority tasks efficiently really does have a negative impact on any organization, so utilizing these sales automation tools will really make a massive impact on your whole team.
