14 Sales Automation Tools: What Should You Automate Next?
My name is Lusha, and I’m here to help you become a better sales team by leveraging technology. In this page, I cover the top tools that help you automate sales activities, and more importantly, suggest what you should automate and what to focus on first.
What are Sales Automation Tools?
A sales automation tool can help a sales team perform day-to-day tasks more quickly and effectively, augmenting human intelligence with relevant data and insights.
Sales teams perform a broad number of activities, from prospecting and discovery calls, to in-depth engagement with relevant accounts, to pipeline and performance management. Today there is a dizzying array of technologies that can help sales professionals perform all of these activities automatically, or with some machine assistance.
As you’ll see below, most sales automation tools are not about replacing manual sales tasks; they are mainly about providing guidance on process, additional data, and removing tedious manual activities. By automating more of your sales activity, you can not only save time, but also become much more effective, help your reps grow professionally, and gain visibility over sales activity and performance.
Sales Automation vs. CRM
Sales automation does not equal CRM. You could say a CRM in a sales organization is the first stage of the automation journey. Some CRMs can do more than the basics — they might include automated prospecting and list building capabilities, integrated telephony, and more. If you have these tools as part your CRM, you’re lucky and should start leveraging them.
But very likely, your CRM will not address automation for all your sales tasks. Therefore, in this post I chose to focus on additional tools beyond CRM that can automate specific sales activities.
What Can You Automate?
While this is not a comprehensive list, here are several core sales activities which are very well covered by automation tools:
Automating prospecting — making it easier to build lists of relevant prospects. The better and faster you can do this, the more high quality opportunities you will have further down your pipeline. Arm your SDRs with machine helpers.
- Automating lead enrichment — obtaining rich data on prospects, such as contact information, organization hierarchy and sales intelligence. This can save time and increase the number of opportunities — tools give you more and better contact details.
- Sales Pipeline Management — digital systems that can help you push sales teams to new levels, by providing process management, sales analytics and powerful feedback to sales reps.
- Automate scheduling — a core activity of sales is scheduling meetings, and is easy to automate. There are tools which can turn this into one click, improving rep productivity and making your team more available and responsive to customer calls.
- Automate emails and sales calls — relying on sales reps to manually send email follow ups, and dial to prospects relying on their memory, is a thing of the past. Modern tools tell reps exactly when they need to follow up, send emails automatically and provide data and templates to make communication more effective.
Automate Sales Prospecting
These are tools that can automatically produce lists of leads, and help you make initial contact with them, based on initial criteria your sales reps provide. Automated prospecting can save time for SDR reps and improve lead quantity and quality.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a LinkedIn product that automates sales prospecting by sifting through leads on LinkedIn and identifying relevant prospects. It provides the Lead Builder, an advanced search box that lets you filter LinkedIn users by company, job title, industry, seniority, years of experience, location and more. This can help SDRs hone in on prospects very quickly and prioritize where to invest research and calls. LinkedIn’s CRM integration allows you to pull lead data directly into tools like SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing: 30-day trial, paid plans start at $79.99 / month including 20 InMail messages and 1500 saved leads.
2. LeadFuze
LeadFuze is an AI-powered lead researcher that automates list building. You can provide criteria like job function or title, industry, and location, and receive double-verified email addresses, company, domain, job title and social media profiles. Data is taken from several third-party providers as well as LeadFuze’s own database. The platform also provides email automation and assists with personalizing follow-ups.
LeadFuze pricing: Paid plans start at $197 / month. Lead-based pricing is also available.
3. Datanyze
Datanyze analyzes a company or websites and discovers which technologies they are using. It can also provide other attributes like company size, revenue, industry, etc., as well as contact details of employees. Datanyze provides a convenient Chrome extension that gives you all this data instantly as you surf the web. This is an excellent way to find relevant accounts for your prospecting or do a “background check” on incoming leads to your website.
Datanyze pricing: Free with 50 domain lookups and 10 email addresses per month. Paid plans start from $10 / month.
Automate Lead Enrichment
Sales automation tools that put your sales team at a much better starting point, without having to invest any time in research. They provide emails, direct dial numbers and other rich data about prospects and the companies they work for.
4. Lusha
The sales funnel can’t operate without contact details, specifically emails and direct dial phone numbers. Our very own tool (yes, named after me ?) can help. Lusha operates a database of hundreds of millions of business profiles and can enrich lead data with emails and direct phone numbers. Lusha finds contact details for over 90% of contacts in most industries, making it a powerful SDR tool — because often good prospects are put to the side because there’s no easy way to contact them.
Lusha provides a Chrome Extension — get started in literally one minute! And also a contact API and Salesforce CRM integration for larger scale use.
Lusha pricing: Free plan includes 5 emails and mobile phone numbers per month. Paid plans start at $75 per month for 100 credits.
5. DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg is a sales intelligence platform that provides detailed information about prospects and the organizations they work in. The platform provides organizational charts; human-verified direct dial numbers; buying triggers, such as a leadership move, an acquisition or a vendor switch; technology used by the company, and more. The platform integrates with all the popular tools in today’s marketing stack including Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, SalesForce Pardot and SugarCRM.
DiscoverOrg pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
6. Discoverly
Your prospects use multiple social networks, and on each network, they share information that might help you close a sale. Discoverly is a browser extension that lets you look up your existing contacts in Gmail, Twitter or LinkedIn, and see what those contacts are doing on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as their activity on AngelList and Crunchbase.
Discoverly pricing: Free! Just download the Chrome extension.
Sales Pipeline Management
These are tools that can take sales teams to the next level, with sales funnel management and actionable data that can help reps close more deals.
7. LevelEleven
LevelEleven is a Sales Management Platform. It gives sales leaders the tools to motivate, engage and coach sales teams. The platform provides real-time dashboards, sales contests, achievement alerts, personalized scoreboards for reps, goal management, and an early warning system for reps who fall behind. It can also help sales managers and veteran reps coach newer members of the team, by providing a snapshot of the coached rep’s KPIs, focus coaching on specific areas, and see how they improve.
LevelEleven pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
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Originally published at https://www.lusha.com on June 4, 2018.
