Introduction
On the surface, you’re doing everything right. You‘ve got a great product, exceptionally talented sales reps, realistic and measurable goals… but somehow, your team is still underperforming.
If you’re wondering why, we have the answer: your team likely doesn’t have strong sales operational tools to drive sales success.
Today, the average sales professional is busy performing repetitive and menial tasks like sending emails, scheduling meetings, collecting information and analyzing elaborate spreadsheets.
Don’t get us wrong — these are important sales activities. But most sales reps spend over 65 percent of their time doing them.
You'll only start to see results when your reps can spend their time selling. By equipping them with sales operations tools and technologies, you help them save time, increase productivity and facilitate proper sales planning.
So what are you waiting for? In this article, we’ll check out the main types of software and tools that sales operations teams use to manage relationships, track data and support the sales team.
30+ software/tools used by sales operations
A sales ops team has a diverse list of functions aimed at providing sales reps with strategic insight to achieve sustainable growth. Here are the types of tools to keep an eye on if you're looking to augment your organization’s whole sales process.
The top tools you'll see are:
Sales training & content management tool
- Scribe
- Brainshark
- Lessonly
Sales enablement tools
- Salesforce
- TigerLRM
- Adobe Marketo Engage
- MindTickle
Customer relationship management software (CRM)
- Keap
- Hubspot
- Salesflare
- TeleCRM
Sales forecasting tool
- Pipedrive
- Spotio
- Gong
Sales payout or commission tool
- Performio
- CaptivateIQ
- Spiff
- Xoxoday Compass
Sales territory design & planning tool
- Badger
- Salesforce Maps
- Xactly Alignstar
Sales engagement tool
- Klenty
- Koncert
- Clearbit
Configure price quote tool (CPQ)
- Salesforce Revenue Cloud
- Proposify
- DealHub
Sales analytics tool
- Power BI
- Hubspot Sales Hub
- Zoho Analytics
Social selling tool
- Outreach
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Hootsuite
Sales training tool
The whole point of using sales training and content management systems is to increase your sales team's productivity in a way that makes your organization’s sales cycle shorter and more effective.
It also lets you provide reps with a single place to see and access content when needed, making it easier for them to adjust strategies and make their selling more relevant to the prospects’ demands.
Use this category of sales operations tool to compile training modules that enable your salesforce to guide new prospects down the sales funnel and close more deals.
Empower your reps with relevant videos, case studies, brochures, customer testimonials, visualization tools, and other documentation they can share with prospects to personalize their buyers' journey and help them visualize your offering as the best solution to their problem.
Scribe
Scribe is a step-by-step guide generator that documents your processes for you. The browser extension and desktop app work directly with your screen to create a visual guide, complete with text and screenshots. Share a Scribe via link or embed in any knowledge base. And if you need several guides? Simply combine Scribes in Pages, along with text, video and more!
Supplement (or skip!) training sessions and never lose another day copy/pasting. Scribe is perfect for building a formal training program or simply answering one-off questions. Scribes are just as easy to make as they are to use, and can be updated at any time.
Brainshark
Brainshark's sales enablement training and templates let you train at scale. You can onboard employees, reinforce skills and certify them in sales enablement skills and more.
Build a library of topics or skills for your team to work toward. Then monitor how your team is doing. Whether it's product knowledge, account planning or forecasting — support your team's enablTrack those activities across your sales team to ensure key skills are obtained, such as product knowledge, account planning and forecasting.
Lessonly
Lessonly, Seismic's learning and coaching software integrates with Seismic's enablement platform to offer fast and enjoyable training. This measurable training operates at scale to quickly ramp up reps, improve competency speed, and systematically hone skills.
Lessonly offers interactive sales courses, quizzes and direct coaching plans. Ramp up in reps in as little as 10 days with the resources your sales team needs.
Sales enablement tool
A sales enablement tool is any platform that provides sales reps with useful tools and resources to help them close more deals and improve performance.
How? Sales reps can use these tools to align sales, marketing and customers and get greater visibility across the sales content lifecycle. This allows for smoother onboarding and educates salespeople in effective selling.
More importantly, sales enablement tools and software create a single source of truth. Whether it’s a product page, video or case study, reps can use relevant and high-performing resources and data to make a better impression on prospects.
Nowadays, marketing and sales teams are working together to maximize revenue generation. Research suggests aligning sales and marketing can increase revenue by over 200 percent from marketing.
Implementing a sales enablement tool into your organization will make it easier for sales and marketing teams to collaborate together and create compelling, engaging content that helps convert more prospects.
Salesforce
Salesforce empowers sales teams in real time with a comprehensive suite of sales solutions. The cloud-based software helps businesses identify more prospects, make more sales, and provide ongoing customer service.
Streamline your team's communication and boost productivity with a single source of truth. Salesforce enables you to send targeted prospecting messages at the right time, and monitors when customers engage with advertisements or your site — bridging the gap between marketing and sales to catch leads at the most opportune moment. Deliver the right content at the right time and get actionable insights for more sales.
TigerLRM
TigerLRM is a next-gen sales enablement platform for end-to-end sales optimization and adoption. It's designed to help sales teams identify, and define a process that increases the number of closed deals. This one-stop-shop has several essential sales tools — like content management, training, a built-in CRM and more.
Take advantage of TigerLRM's multiple features (including several free options) and encompassing solutions. Engage with sales cycle best practices and help your team do what they do best: make the sale!
Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage (formerly Marketo) is a complete tool kit for winning lead-based and account-based marketing across the sales cycle. The tool's advanced approach to marketing automation provides detailed data, analytics and content for fully-fledged campaigning.
Marketing teams can drive demand and fuel deals by working alongside sales to send highly targeted campaigns throughout the sales journey. This is an efficient and scaleable approach that growing teams can rely on.
Mindtickle
Mindtickle is the market-leading revenue productivity platform with enablement and operations solutions. Its platform maximizes sales team performance and revenue growth for businesses, offering various solutions for sales training, sales enablement, sales coaching, conversation intelligence, and forecasting.
Mindtickle combines gamification, data analytics, and interactive learning to deliver engaging and effective training programs. It also enables managers to track and analyze sales team performance, identify skill gaps, and provide personalized coaching. Sales enablement and RevOps leaders trust Mindtickle’s Revenue Productivity platform to optimize sales enablement programs and tie those efforts to revenue impact.
Customer relationship management software (CRM)
A CRM has a simple job: to help your team manage all your company’s interactions with potential and current customers. From building customer relationships to streamlining the customer journey, a CRM is an all-in-one tool that boosts sales, increases profitability, and improves customer service.
Sales ops can use a CRM to standardize the sales process, providing all the necessary data points for salespeople to see what's working and fix what isn't. It also allows them to set up dashboards and create custom reports to identify new revenue opportunities.
Another significant advantage of a CRM for sales ops is ensuring the accuracy of customer records. Delete any outdated and duplicate records in your CRM to ensure all other processes in the software remain effective.
Keap
Keap's (formerly Infusionsoft) CRM is designed with small businesses in mind. It's an all-in-one solution that includes sales and marketing automation. Easily capture, organize, track and nurture leads in one location, and take advantage of in-platform coaching, training and direct support.
Keap offers easy automation to simplify the day-to-day, along with expert playbooks in both sales and marketing. It even has e-commerce features to enable simplified invoicing and native payment processing. It's easy to set up and sets you up to cut down your manual work each day.
Hubspot CRM
The Hubspot CRM has a state-of-the-art visual dashboard and tracker with an up-to-the-minute view of your entire sales funnel on a clean view. Easily sort and manage deals, see what's one and lost, and track your performance against quotas you set for yourself. Automatically monitor potential and current customer interactions across channels (including email, social or even phone calls) to ensure deals are nurtured and finalized across all leads.
Salesflare
Salesflare is a simple but powerful CRM for small and medium-sized B2B businesses. The zero-input sales pipeline tool has intelligence that gets rid of the need for manual data entry.
From filling out your address book to tracking interactions, Salesflare uses your data to created automated processes. Use customer timelines to see exactly where you're at with a sale. Salesflare works with desktop, mobile or directly in certain applications.
TeleCRM
TeleCRM is a smart telecalling software and Sales CRM that automates sales processes and enhances communication with leads.
Key features include an auto-dialer for efficient calling, WhatsApp automation for personalized messaging, real-time lead capture from various platforms, and automated task management. It also provides performance analytics and extensive customization options for a tailored CRM experience.
Sales forecasting tool
Sales forecasting software uses quantitative methods to analyze business data and trends (think: close deals, win/loss records), followed by generating reports of estimated sales revenue. These reports also compare sales targets with achieved sales versus expected sales.
This helps sales teams analyze performances over time, set realistic quotas, and make enterprise-wide forecasts, among other advantages. Use a sales forecasting tool to get answers to critical questions like:
- What does your expected revenue look like?
- Do your actual sales match estimated sales? If not, why?
- Which forecasting method gives you the most accurate results?
Sales forecasting software is of two types: sales pipeline and historical sales. While the former analyzes existing opportunities and calculates an accurate win rate, the latter analyzes previous company performance to calculate the average sales level you can expect for a specific time period (month, quarter, year).
Pipedrive
Pipedrive offers lead management and insights to drive revenue. It comes with customizable pipelines and templates to keep your sales team up to date. Pipedrive includes reminders for sales activities, such as follow-up calls, so that no lead is lost in the process.
Pipedrive monitors sales performance to strengthen each team member. It measures your targets against average conversion rates to help sales team's meet goals, and offers real-time reports to see what's on track and what to change.
SPOTIO
SPOTIO is a sales tracking software that makes sales performance more predictable. Its clear insights and analytics enable your team to make informed decisions. Improve your forecast accuracy with more complete and accurate sales tracking data.
This easy-to-use sales tracking software has complete up-to-date insight into team performance and lets you monitor vital activities, metrics and other relevant data for individuals and the team as a whole.
Gong
Gong is a screen recorder that offers call analysis, identifies trends and makes recommendations. By analyzing all of your customer-facing conversations (whether its via phone, email, zoom or more), Gong provides you with technical insights that can help you understand why things go right and when they go wrong.
Gong's autonomous insights capture and analyze frontline interactions to forecast deals, enable better coaching and support strategic initiatives.
Sales payout or commission tool
Commissions are the perfect incentive for reps to get more revenue for the company — but when not properly calculated, it can lead to major frustration. Employees might feel like they aren’t recognized or valued for their efforts.
But this won’t be a problem if you invest in a commissions system for your organization.
Sales operations managers can use a sales payout or commissions tool to accurately (and easily) calculate their sales reps’ salaries, bonuses, commissions and other incentives based on custom company rules. It makes the whole process less time-consuming and error-prone than calculating the compensation on a spreadsheet or by hand.
Another advantage of this tool is it makes the compensation structure transparent and easily available to each employee to avoid misunderstandings. Sales reps can track commissions and plan for different compensation scenarios to understand their true earning potential.
Performio
Performio offers automated commissions, compensation and performance management for building better teams. Let the tool do the heavy lifting to automatically calculate your sales commissions.
Develop compensation plans and add easily additional reps as you build your team. Plus, expert audit logs will automatically keep track of any calculation or adjustments, making it easy to monitor plans for compliance.
CaptivateIQ
CaptivateIQ is an agile tool designed for transparent and accurate sales commissions. You can create, deploy and adapt systematic commission plans with an intuitive interface. The tool is easy for all team members to learn and manage.
You can start to influence sales behavior using valuable metrics, and develop a compensation plan that keeps your team motivated and drives more sales.
Spiff
Spiff is designed to restore trust in the commission process for enterprise organizations. Spiff prioritizes trust and transparency, using real-time visibility throughout every phase. Easily create commissions plans to motivate your team, no matter the scale or goal complexity. Streamline workflows, enables communication and collaboration, and build trust across all stakeholders.
Xoxoday Compass
Compass is a sales incentive management software that lets you manage and automate sales incentive programs, from launching incentive plans to calculating and disbursing incentives. It enables businesses to motivate sales reps with real-time visibility into performance, commission information, and on-time payouts.
Xoxoday Compass is the most user-friendly gamification software to accelerate sales engines. Standout features include:
- Save time by eliminating the hassles of using lengthy spreadsheets or managing complex sales commissions. No coding required.
- Define sales targets and automate incentive calculations and disbursals based on one-time or recurring achievements, without errors or delays.
- Ignite the sales team's competitive spirit by letting them see how they fare against their peers through leaderboards, level maps, live scores, and earnings.
- Plan better across teams and the organization with powerful, real-time insights, forecasts, and predictive analytics.
Sales territory design & planning tool
The better-designed sales territories you have, the higher your sales volume and market coverage.
Why? Establishing a sales territory, which is the process of assigning an individual salesperson or a group of salespeople to a group of present and potential customers, helps in planning and controlling sales operations.
Sales reps understand they're responsible for making things happen in a specific territory. When you clearly define the geographic area and number of customers, they are better equipped to provide better services to customers and close more deals.
Small businesses typically rely on excel spreadsheets and manual sifting through customer variables to allocate sales territories based on criteria like location, size and sector. Unfortunately, this approach isn't feasible for organizations with huge sales forces in multiple locations and dealing with a wide range of products.
That’s why sales operations teams need territory design software. Not only does it automate the entire process to save time and effort, but it can also add or remove sales reps and adjust territories as new customers come along.
Badger Mapping
Badger Mapping offers a route planner for organizing outside sales. Find prospects in your area and prioritize accounts through the interactive mapping tool. Keep everything in one place! Connect your customer data and track your appointment schedule.
Sell more with Badger's multi-stop route planner. You can set up and get started in minutes.
Salesforce Maps
Salesforce Maps is a valuable member of the Salesforce suite of tools. Its intelligent territory planning and route optimization enable your sales team to move more quickly and catch sales. Visual data supports on-the-go decision making, speeds up field operations and optimizes whole territories quickly and easily.
Help your sales team know which customers to connect with and when, track their activity and mileage, and prep for meetings using customized checklists. Salesforce Maps works with the rest of your Salesforce toolkit to help you win leads and hit sales goals.
Xactly Alignstar
Xactly Alignstar offers optimized territory alignment. Use the interactive mapping interface to place reps in location's with high concentration, and organize leads based on potential. The tool comes with an alignment report card, to see a grade of the current territory alignment measured against target metrics. Leverage and optimize data to analyze "what if scenarios," and meet territory alignment challenges for real results.
Sales engagement tool
The whole point of sales engagement is to make a seamless and customer-centric buyer's journey.
Ninety-two percent of sales development organizations find sales engagement platforms critical to their team‘s success. Here are a few ways that a sales engagement platform impacts revenue.
- Automates menial tasks to elevate emergency.
- Improves opportunities and close rates by increasing the volume and quality of 1:1 interactions with prospects.
- Optimizes engagement, visibility, collaboration and reporting across the organization through performance data.
If your organization also values interactions with customers and prospects, consider integrating a sales engagement platform into your process.
Use it to automate tasks, emails and workflows, as well as manage sales messaging and materials. Sales engagement software also enables sales teams to align their sales and marketing efforts and create personalized and automated sales journeys via several channels, like email, social media and phone.
What’s more, the tool can integrate with other sales operations tools, such as a CRM, sales intelligence software and sales enablement software, among others, to further streamline sales operations processes.
Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that uses multi-channel automation to increase activity rate. Sales teams can sequence their interactions based on channel, and manage engagement in one place. Klenty offers "liquid templates" that request specific prospect details, personalizing conversations while saving time. You can add personal touches to images, videos and more.
Klenty also uses features to ensure sales outreach gets in the lead's primary inbox. This includes email validation, cadence throttle and custom domain tracking.
Koncert
Koncert is an all-in-one sales engagement platform designed to increase revenue while decreasing cycle time. Kadence integrates with other winning apps to ensure the sales team has the tool they need when they need it.
Use Agent-Assistant Dialer for human agent client outreach, have personal interactions across channels with Cadence, Connect with double the leads using Click Dialer (a native Salesforce app) and more. Koncert gives advanced support while being sales rep friendly on an easy-to-use interface.
Clearbit
Clearbit is a flexible go-to-market data activation platform. View your market comprehensively, then take advantage of features that help you engage with target audiences, prioritize potential accounts and decrease buying friction.
Automate your revenue operations and grow in scale, identify and connect with high-quality site visitors, and build a strong pipeline by developing targeted marketing campaigns. Clearbit has one simply interfaces for you to enhance your CRM, CDP and marketing automation — using firmographic, technographic and website intent data.
Configure price quote (CPQ) tool
Configure price quote software (or CPQ software) is a sales operations tool designed to help organizations create personalized, accurate and targeted sales quotes.
It pulls all the available pricing and customer data together in the form of a centralized platform that's accessible in real-time. Sales reps can then use it to create and share sales quotes tailored to meet the client's needs — all at the click of a button.
Implementing an effective CPQ solution streamlines the contract process by ensuring all vital data is ready and up-to-date whenever your sales rep needs it. They never have to use the “let me get back to you“ line when discussing pricing with prospects. This reduces sales cycles and improves overall customer satisfaction.
Another significant benefit of a CPQ tool is the increased deal values.
It helps sales reps with cross-selling and upselling suggestions during the quoting process, where they can recommend additional items as per the use case. CPQ software also has product configurators showing customers customization, accessories, and add-ons to choose from, helping increase deal values without being too "pushy."
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Salesforce Revenue Cloud supports a frictionless experience for sales and customers alike. Open and manage revenue streams with efficient onboarding, support sales reps in accurately quoting businesses across industries and models, and align channels and revenue models.
Streamline activities with an end-to-end revenue management solution. Salesforce Revenue Cloud leverages automation to enhance customer experiences, unify revenue processes and sell efficiently.
Proposify
Proposify is a proposal software with a template and content library, workflow automations and data tracking. Proposify enables teams to create visually interesting proposals while ridding themselves of bottlenecks and maintaining visibility at the close of each deal. Take advantage of alerts and interactive quotes to keep your sales team on the ball and engage prospects even more.
Proposify is more than automation. The customer success team provides edits, recreation or an optimized proposal template designed to fit your needs. This works along with an intuitive design error to enable your teams to develop and customize proposals themselves.
DealHub
DealHub manages even the most challenging configurations for you. They will update configure and price each product, making the parameters easy for your teams to set up and manage at any time.
DealHub automates your quotes for you and supplies simple templates across formats (like Word, Excel and more). Boost your sales performance with real-time insights, and strengthen your CRM with accurate and consistent sales data.
9. Sales analytics tool
Sales teams across the world are increasingly adopting sales analytics software, and it’s easy to see why.
Sales managers use sales analytics to predict sales trends and model sales processes. They collect and measure sales data, such as customer interactions, reach, and purchases, to define metrics for sales analytics at the beginning of each campaign to track their performance and progress.
This helps optimize the sales funnel and identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses to improve processes. You can also use analytics to automate workflows, helping the members collaborate more effectively and reduce time spent on tasks.
For example, you can use the sales effectiveness analytic to recognize what type of content consumers are most likely to interact with and create similar content to generate leads quicker.
Power BI
Power BI lets you build dashboards and interactive reports in order to identify and visualize target metrics. The user-friendly platform has drag-and-drop capability, so you can easily plug and play data and pull reports. Monitor team efficiency and track results, then see if you are reaching target metrics by tracking win rates, number of wins, revenue, discounts and YTD revenue maps.
Power BI offers real-time data — for both at-a-glance and deep-dive reviews.
Hubspot Sales Hub
Hubspot Sales Hub delivers accurate reporting and performance management. The sales reporting software enables your team to monitor and manage your pipeline, using insights to make accurate performance forecasts and strengthen your team. Hubspot's reporting integrates with your CRM, ensuring you have an accurate reflection of your sales process that you can then use to make strategic decisions to hit targets.
Hubspot Sales Hub gives you access to nearly 100 pre-made reports that you can configure for your needs. Develop dashboards using Sales Hub Templates, or build your own with the intuitive interface. It's an easy and accurate way to monitor and implement insights.
Zoho Analytics
With Zoho Analytics, you can quickly create insightful reports and comprehensive dashboards from raw data. The self-serve BI promotes data analysis so you can monitor vital business metrics, find trends (and outliers), and make accurate predictions. Connect your analytics with a number of sources, including the most popular business apps, and on- and off-prem files. Manage all of that data with a single view, in one place.
Transform and enrich your data with a self-service management module, then augment your reporting with a Smart AI Assistant, automated insights and predictions.
10. Social selling tool
If you want to drive your organization’s sales efficiency, investing in social selling tools is a natural next step.
According to a study from the Aberdeen group, 73 percent of salespeople who used social selling as part of their sales process outperformed their peers and exceeded quota 23 percent more often. This makes sense considering these tools include contact intelligence, social networking sites, and sales AI that helps reps find, engage, and connect with target prospects faster and more effectively.
Furthermore, with the right combination of social selling tools, you can enable your sales team to perform essential activities at scale. This is in addition to the streamlined team collaboration, where reps can use the tools to share tips on which techniques perform best for specific via personas, stages of the sales funnel and industries.
Think of it as equipping your teams with tools that help them improve sales efforts and enhance social selling strategy.
Outreach
Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps revenue organizations automate engagement and move on revenue intelligence to improve efficiency, predictability and growth. Use simple and automated workflows to strengthen pipelines across the organization and increase selling success. Outreach has ready-to-use playbooks and workflows that your team can use today.
Make wise selling decisions with Surface AI-driven insights that can guide reps throughout the entire sale. The Outreach Guide is a revenue intelligence solution that generates insights to give you and your sales team data on the progress of the sale and coaches reps during meetings.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator leans on the titular platform's wide member network to support outreach and longevity. It provides individual reps and entire teams with advanced lead search, recommendations and relationship-building support.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is designed to increase both names in the pipeline and close rate. Develop, share and monitor content using with potential buyers using LinkedIn's communication and sharing tools. And scale and manage deployments securely with enterprise-grade functionality. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an easy way to target, study and engage prospects.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management software with a comprehensive dashboard and insights into meaningful engagement. Plan and schedule content across channels, then track effectiveness in real time. You can customize dashboards to summarize success as you measure it, so that your posts reach their full potential.
Hootsuite also helps you optimize posts to make them better than ever. Take advantage of insights, such as posting time and image recommendations, and set up customizable streams where you can monitor trends and track customers, competition and more.
Fill your sales process gaps with sales operations tools/software
Sales operations can free up sales reps and provide them with the best resources to sell better. This equals crushed sales and a thriving bottom line. When deployed with supporting tools for activities like sales enablement, training and engagement, you give the sales team the necessary boost they need to stay ahead of the competition and engage buyers.
Dive deeper into winning sales methods and empower sales teams to do their jobs more effectively. Create detailed step-by-step selling guides with Scribe and ensure your salespeople have the right resources to succeed.
Sign up for free today to learn more on how you can empower your sales teams to facilitate peer-to-peer learning, create business-critical documentation and enhance the customer experience.
