Best B2B Sales Tools to Level Up Your Sales Game

Selling in the modern age takes more than being a smooth talker.

B2B sales tools allow you to speed up the sales cycle and remain competitive. Businesses with shorter sales cycles outperform others and achieve higher conversions. If you are spending half your days on manual work, it’s time to curb the issue.

You can automate tasks like prospecting, sending emails, and booking meetings with the sales software. Some sales tools also provide valuable insights that are difficult to extract without technology.

Use sales tools to bring in more prospects, close more deals, and understand customers better than anyone else in the field. Your performance will shoot up in no time.

In this guide, we’ll look at the best tools to maximize your performance in different sales areas, including:

• Lead generation and prospecting
• CRMs
• Social selling
• Sales engagement
• Outreach
• Sales calls

Let’s start.

B2B Lead Generation and Prospecting Tools

Your pipeline is your lifeline. You need to consistently fill your calendar with new business to maintain your company’s growth.

One dry streak is all it takes to leave the bank empty and make you fall behind proactive rivals.

Don’t feel discouraged.

Prospecting is now much easier thanks to technology. You can find prospects, perform outreach, and close deals much faster and easier. Prospecting tools also do the unexciting data work for you, so you spend less time researching and more selling.

Soleadify

Soleadify is a complete search engine for leads. The company boasts a sprawling database of over 30 million companies (and growing) in over 100 countries. What makes Soleadify special is its advanced filtering feature.

You have various options to fine-tune your search results, including filtering by:

• Keywords
• Locations
• Number of employees
• Technology stacks
• SEO score
• Language and much more

Soleadify combines web crawlers and machine learning to extract customer data, so it uncovers information unavailable in other prospecting tools.

You can gather insights from leading companies and even ‘hidden’ local businesses like the mom-and-pop stores down the street. Increased prospecting coverage helps you generate more clients than usual.

The platform includes an advanced import feature to analyze your existing data. Enter or upload a list of websites, and Soleadify will crawl nook and cranny of each site to gather prospect details. You can export the results and use them in the sales processes, like creating custom audiences on Facebook.

Don’t worry about violating data privacy regulations when using the tool. Soleadify only crawls and collects publicly available prospect information.

Who Is It For?

Companies that perform outbound sales because they will speed up their prospecting. Sales reps no longer have to do manual data research either. Just enter your filters, and Soleadify will do the rest.

Unique Features

Soleadify’s exports come with an audit of your lead’s digital performance. The audit detects technical (e.g. SEO errors) and social media issues—like not having a LinkedIn page—and formats them for easy reading.

You can use these audits to personalize your outreach emails. Personalization has been proven to be effective at convincing prospects, regardless of whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses.

Pricing

Starts from $499 per month for 1,500 monthly leads, $799 per month for 5,000 monthly leads, and $1,499 per month for 15,000 monthly leads. A 14-day free trial is available for new users

Hunter.io

Hunter finds prospect emails based on the specified domain. Let’s say you’re trying to connect with someone from Facebook. When you search for facebook.com, the tool looks up and collects all publicly available emails attached to facebook.com.

Hunter’s results come with confidence scores that determine the accuracy of an email address. A great feature in Hunter is its email verifier tool. Enter an email and Hunter will check if it’s legit, so you don’t send emails to non-existent addresses.

The tool also shows the sources used to extract the email, which helps verify prospects and maintain compliance. You can search by name as well as perform bulk requests to speed up research.

Who Is It For?

Hunter works best for companies focused on target account selling. You can use it to filter fake out fake emails when funneling leads into your CRM.

Pricing

It starts at $49 per month for 1,000 email requests and goes up to $399 per month for 50,000 requests. It has a free plan limited to 50 requests per month

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo promotes itself as a global B2B directory— like Yellow Pages for leads. You can see your prospects’ names, company backgrounds, and contact information in one simplified view. You can also filter results to show only prospects that match your requirements.

You can generate ideal customer profiles (ICP) automatically in ZoomInfo. The tool analyzes your existing customers and creates an ICP that changes over time based on your sales history.

The tool sends out notifications whenever prospects are involved in notable events, like receiving funding or gaining media mentions. Getting timely intel like this allows you to tailor your pitch around recent activities and land the elusive first meeting.

ZoomInfo has a built-in CRM tool connected to its leads database to accelerate sales workflows. Likewise, integrations are available if you want to link ZoomInfo with your current CRM.

Who Is It For?

Enterprises benefit the most from ZoomInfo’s gigantic pool of vetted, high-quality leads. SMBs, however, are better off with cheaper options due to its steep price.

Pricing

Custom pricing.

LeadFeeder

You can see which companies have visited your site and what they looked at with Leadfeeder’s visitor tracking system. Say an executive from Apple clicks on your homepage. Leadfeeder captures that data, stores it in your CRM, and sends an email alert so you can capitalize on the opportunity.

You can configure alerts to pop up only when a target company visits your site. This stops unwanted prospects from cluttering your pipeline, especially if you’re practicing target account selling.

Leadfeeder also has an integrated lead scoring system. Businesses that frequently visit your sites and have shown interest in your solutions will have higher scores than other leads. This ensures you’re focused on prospects that truly need your solution, leading to greater sales success.

Who Is It For?

Leadfeeder’s visitor insights are useful for businesses with multiple landing pages for different products and services.

Pricing

The premium plan ranges from $55 to $499 per month, depending on the number of unique leads captured. The free plan has a limit of 100 leads and only shows results from the past three days.

Capterra

Capterra is a crowdsourced software review platform. It lists software providers from over 700 categories and ranks them based on user reviews. Users can see product features, pricing, comparison tables, and other helpful details for each piece of software.

Capterra’s comparison feature is surprisingly powerful for a free tool. You can benchmark vendors against each other and receive relevant insights to aid your prospecting efforts.

Capterra qualifIes as a prospecting tool because users who leave reviews on Capterra have their LinkedIn information shared fully or partially, and you can leverage this information to identify prospects with pain points that your solution can address.

The other way around works as well.

You can find companies hampered by negative reviews and pitch your solution to solve their problems. Capterra also comes in handy as a competitive research tool to discover how your brand is performing compared to your competitors.

Who Is It For?

Capterra is useful for early-stage prospecting and discovering pain points based on real user experiences.

Pricing

Free to use.

Once you have a tool for lead generation, you need to manage them. Our next group of tools will help you do that.

CRM Software

A CRM (customer relationship management) software lets you manage leads throughout their entire lifecycle. Think of it as a central information system for all things customer-related.

With the right CRM, you’ll be able to better understand your buyers and achieve higher sales success and customer satisfaction in the long run. Here are some of the best CRMs.

Salesforce

Calling Salesforce a CRM is an understatement. You can capture leads, automate outreach, create marketing campaigns, and perform hundreds of useful tasks all in one platform. If it’s sales-related, you will find it in Salesforce.

What sets Salesforce apart is its bustling app ecosystem. You gain access to useful tools like accounting and invoicing software on top of a complete CRM when you sign up. Being able to do everything in one place is a boon to sales productivity and performance.

Integrations are available as well if you want to make Salesforce work with your existing technology stack.

Salesforce’s smart AI assistant, Einstein, provides personalized services to subscribers. Einstein can analyze existing data and turn it into valuable insights to help businesses make better sales decisions.

Who Is It For?

Enterprises benefit the most from Salesforce’s suite of features. They can extract high-level customer information and identify where prospects stand in the sales cycle to help seal complex B2B deals.

Pricing

$25 per month for the basic plan and $300 per month for the advanced plan. All plans come with a 30-day free trial.

Close.io

Close.io focuses on speeding up the sales workflow. It comes with the cookie-cutter features you’d expect in a CRM, albeit with greater efficiency. Essential tasks like viewing pipelines and dialing customers take only a few seconds to complete in the platform.

Close has a Gmail-like inbox that highlights key touchpoints for each contact in the system. Sales reps only need to glance through the inbox to know the next step for their prospects. This, along with other convenient features, make Close an excellent option for businesses that want to progress between deals quickly.

Close’s dashboard is essentially a supercharged email inbox. You can click on a contact and see past interactions in one integrated view. You can also use the same view to call, email, or text contacts.

Who Is It For?

Businesses operating in fast-moving verticals gain immense value from Close’s speedy workflow.

Pricing

$25 per month for the starter plan and $95 per month for the full package. You can try out any plan for free for 14 days.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a mainstay in the CRM space for a reason. The tool’s ease of use makes it simple for sales reps to manage deals even if they have little to no technical background. Creating and modifying sales pipelines is as easy as dragging cards from one column to another à la Kanban boards.

Apart from the basics, Pipedrive offers chatbots and dedicated web forms to capture leads. LeadBooster is a smart chatbot in Pipedrive that automatically chats with leads when they visit your landing pages. The chatbot can answer questions, book meetings, and qualify prospects with its AI-powered features.

When a prospect fills in a form, Pipedrive pulls the data and organizes it so you can start selling right away. You skip the headache of setting up the flow of leads from your website to your CRM without having to write a single line of code.

Who Is It For?

Pipedrive is an excellent choice for SMEs that want to automate their sales process but lack the resources to invest in full-blown IT teams. CRM beginners will appreciate Pipedrive’s simple workflows.

Pricing

$15 per month for the basic plan and $99 per month for the enterprise package. Prices are 20% cheaper for annual plans. All plans come with 14-day free trials.

Hubspot CRM

HubSpot’s CRM offers the tools you need to manage customers—for free! Getting started is as simple as importing the existing data you have into the system. HubSpot then enriches your contact information based on its massive customer database of 20 million businesses (and counting).

You can track a deal’s entire lifecycle and book appointments with HubSpot’s built-in scheduling tool. The platform also comes with a full-blown ticketing feature to assist customer support teams. HubSpot covers the essential CRM features so well you’d amazed it’s free.

HubSpot’s CRM works like a charm with its suite of products and services. The paid plans grant you full access to HubSpot’s marketing and customer support hub. You can automate the sales process from inbound marketing to after-sales service, which skyrockets productivity.

Who Is It For?

Small businesses should almost always use HubSpot’s CRM while it’s free. It’s also a good choice if you already use HubSpot’s products in your organization.

Pricing

HubSpot’s basic CRM is free forever. The starter plan costs $50 per month and goes up to $120 per month for the enterprise package.

The following tools will help you make the best of social media if that is the most lucrative area for you.

Social Selling Tools

Social selling is no longer a nice-to-have.

84% of CEOs and VPs say social media helps them make purchase decisions. 90% of top sales reps use social selling tools to close deals in high-value industries like B2B software. These numbers alone should convince you of its importance in sales.

What is social selling, exactly?

Social selling is the act of using social media to attract, engage, and convert prospects. However, manual social selling does not work. It takes too long, considering the endless volumes of data scattered across social media.

Social selling tools curb this challenge by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting social media data for businesses behind the scenes, allowing you to focus on sales.

Hootsuite Social Selling

Hootsuite tracks and analyzes brand mentions on social media to help you make informed decisions.

You can configure Hootsuite to send alerts whenever someone mentions your brand on Twitter. Hootsuite then examines the tweets and tells you what they’re all about (i.e., is your brand mentioned positively or otherwise?)

Companies use Hootsuite mainly to generate leads from social media. Generating leads from social channels will become more important in the future as consumers flock to the likes of Facebook and Twitter to discover products. You can also use it to improve your organization’s customer support performance through social listening.

Hootsuite’s social listening feature is one of the best in the industry. It captures relevant content from all social media channels, even if your brand name is not mentioned. This ensures you don’t miss important customer conversations that give you the extra oomph you need to sell better.

Who Is It For?

Brands that rely on a strong social media presence to generate business will put Hootsuite to good use.

Pricing

Plans start at $19 per month and go up to $599 per month for the enterprise deal.

Linkedin Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator lets you tap into LinkedIn’s massive professionals’ network. It shows prospects that match your company’s products and services to a tee thanks to LinkedIn’s AI-enabled search. It also recommends additional contacts based on your results, which helps you cover more ground when prospecting.

Most tools don’t stand a chance against LinkedIn’s contacts quality. 

You can analyze a prospect from company information to their behaviors and interests. And the more accurate your data, the higher the chances of you closing the deal.

Each plan comes with complimentary LinkedIn Learning and Premium Career access. LinkedIn Learning hosts thousands of expert-led courses across various topics to hone your skills. The latter is a job search platform on steroids as it provides access to employer insights and opportunities to help users land their dream jobs.

The tool also includes native integrations with popular CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to streamline your sales workflow.

Who Is It For?

Sales Navigator is a useful prospecting tool for sales reps in medium to large businesses. It works great as an impromptu competitive research tool too.

Pricing

$79.99 per month for the Professional plan and $134.99 per month for the Teams package. Free trials are only available for the Professional plan.

Our next tools help you better nurture the relationships with your leads and enable you to scale your sales efforts.

Sales Engagement Tools

Sales engagement software is a vital part of your sales operations. The right tools will maximize your conversions and make your sales teams more efficient in lead nurturing.

Sales engagement covers the whole sales process, but it focuses most on communication with your prospects. If you are looking for a tool that does that, the following choices might be of interest.

Outreach.io

Outreach provides an all-in-one engagement platform to improve sales productivity and performance. Outreach’s unique value proposition is its outreach sequencing tool.

The platform tracks and analyzes every client touchpoint in detail so you can see where you are in the buying cycle and how to seal the deal.

The platform uses machine learning to tweak outreach strategies and increase engagement. For example, you can automate A/B email campaigns and let Outreach choose the winner based on the results.

You can also pull data from your existing tools and bundle them with Outreach Galaxy. All you need to do is connect your technology stack to the platform. Outreach will handle the complex integration work and display your data in a beautiful, all-in-one dashboard.

The platform also monitors sales rep activity to help evaluate your team’s performance. You’ll be able to identify top-performers or help underachieving reps get back on track easily.

Who Is It For?

Medium to large businesses that want more clarity on their sales team’s engagement levels.

Pricing

Starts at $140 per month per user.

Salesloft

Salesloft is as close as you can get to having a personal sales assistant. The platform auto-generates sales pipelines based on your company’s data and customer information.

Suppose a prospect is more receptive to emails. Salesloft detects that and creates an email-focused sales funnel specific to the prospect.

Salesloft also assigns leads to the right sales rep automatically. If your prospect is a technical person, the platform will assess your team members and find someone who can sell to seasoned individuals. This saves you the hassle of delegating work and hoping for the best.

It comes with its own dialer and messenger app so you can contact prospects without switching platforms. Salesloft is also device-agnostic. You can use it on your desktop, smartphone, as a browser extension, and even within your email.

Who Is It For?

Salesloft is useful if you find it hard to assign opportunities to the best sales reps.

Pricing

Custom pricing.

RingDNA

RingDNA is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform geared towards enterprises. The platform analyzes employee performances and highlights effective tactics that increase the likelihood of sales success.

It uses the same insights to create tailor-made strategies—or ‘playbooks’ as RingDNA calls it.

Each playbook comes with a list of who to call, how to call, and what to say to each prospect.

Sales reps will spend less time on menial tasks and focus more on selling instead.

You also gain access to the platform’s predictive dialer if you use Salesforce as your CRM. The predictive dialer uses your Salesforce data to perform intelligent automated calls, making life even easier for sales reps.

RingDNA lets you drop into sales calls in real-time without interrupting the conversation. You can provide live feedback to assist reps or observe your team’s performances in the background without being a nuisance.

Who Is It For?

Enterprises benefit the most from RingDNA’s suite of features. It eliminates a lot of manual work and gives sales reps critical information to tilt deals in their favor.

Pricing

Custom pricing.

These sales engagement tools allow you to optimize your sales process and achieve higher efficiency. If you are looking for tools specialized in email outreach campaigns, keep reading.

Email Outreach Tools

Email outreach is an indispensable part of modern B2B sales. The tools built for automating cold email campaigns remove the noise and enable you to focus on the most important part of it—crafting the right message.

Here are some of our favorite ones.

Mailshake

Mailshake makes cold emailing not scary.

With Mail Merge, you can personalize every part of your outreach email quickly, even if you’re sending it to thousands of people. You can also set when to send out emails to match your prospects’ active times. If you already have a contacts list, upload it to Mailshake and it will set up a customized email campaign for you.

What if you don’t have time to write emails?

Mailshake comes with dozens of email templates to pick and go. You can save your previous emails as templates to avoid double work in future campaigns.

Mailshake is also well-known for its flexibility. Use it as a standalone app or work with it in your inbox—no need to switch apps here and there. The tool also has a built-in dialer to complement your email campaigns. It even tracks client touchpoints to help you sell better.

Who Is It For?

Use Mailshake if you want enterprise-scale outreach without taking months to learn how the software works.

Pricing

$59 per month for the basic plan and $99 per month for the sales bundle.

Reply.io

Reply takes cold emailing one step further by using LinkedIn to populate its contacts database. Enter a name or company in Reply and you’ll receive the most relevant results with additional information to supercharge your emails. The tool comes as a browser extension so you don’t have to leave LinkedIn to perform outreach.

You can automate various sales tasks to speed your workflow as well as create multichannel outreach strategies to generate leads. Reply also provides a complete analytics tool to help you gauge how your campaigns are performing.

Another impressive feature in Reply is its email quality checker. The software will measure your email copy from ‘less likely’ to a ‘very high chance’ of receiving a response. It’s like Grammarly for cold emails.

You can also use Reply to insert short videos in your emails which have been proven to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Who Is It For?

Anyone using email to reach out to prospects. Reply will elevate your cold email success rates, especially if you already know who to target.

Pricing

Ranges from $55 to $120 per user per month.

Yesware

Yesware reveals the ins and outs of how prospects engage with your emails. You can track everything from email opens to link clicks and reply rates. You can even see how long prospects are viewing your attachments.

Yesware captures vital prospect information whenever someone opens your email. This information helps craft effective personalized campaigns—also a feature in the platform. The software works from inside your inbox to avoid the dreaded back and forth between apps.

You can manage your schedule in Yesware for leads to book appointments on their own. When a customer makes an appointment, you will receive a notification for the meeting with key event details.

Yesware also syncs meeting data to your calendar (e.g., Google, Outlook, Apple Calendar) in real-time so you don’t miss out on meetings.

Who Is It For?

Yesware’s flexible pricing makes it a great email outreach tool for both small businesses and enterprises.

Pricing

Starts at $15 per month for the basic version and $80 per month for the enterprise plan.

Woodpecker

Woodpecker comes with the standard personalization features for cold emailing. Its powerful email analytics is what it sets it apart from the rest.

You receive detailed assessments of your prospects’ responses every time you run a campaign. You’ll know exactly how engaging your pitch is to prospects (i.e., are they interested in moving forward?) and what you need to do to move the deal forward.

Woodpecker also tracks lost leads so you can retarget them in later campaigns. The platform compiles information from previous touchpoints and shows you why leads did not convert.

These two pieces of information let you tweak your emails to execute effective, personalized retargeting campaigns.

You can also integrate webinars from popular vendors (Zoom, GoToWebinar, WebEx) and easily funnel leads into the tool.

Who Is It For?

Businesses that run autoresponders and email series should use Woodpecker to improve conversion rates.

Pricing

$40 per month for the starter plan and $80 per month for the team plan. All plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Lemlist

Lemlist turns email campaigns into lead gen machines by automating outreach in a non-robotic way. It sends out casual emails at the start to ‘warm’ your leads before you start selling.

The platform also comes with various personalization features, including custom images and landing pages. You can insert snippets of code in your email bodies to take personalization one step further. You can use conditionals, for instance, to determine how different audiences see your content.

Most email providers like Gmail and Outlook blacklist senders with low open rates. This is not a problem in Lemlist. You can check your email health to see if your domain is in the green. Lemlist provides a tool to test your emails to ensure they land in the coveted inbox and not show up as spam.

Who Is It For?

Small businesses or solo founders looking to perform effective email outreach on a budget.

Pricing

$29 per month for the starter plan and $99 per month for the premium plan. All plans come with a 14-day free trial.

If you can’t reach your prospects via email, then you likely have to call them. While picking up the phone is an outdated term in the age of Voip dialers, cold calling remains an inescapable part of a sales process.

Sales Calling Tools

Despite the explosive growth of inbound marketing, sales calls are still essential in closing deals, particularly in large deals. You’d be hard-pressed to find million-dollar businesses that don’t use the phone—if you can even find one.

When people say sales calls are dead, they actually mean the old way of calling a hundred numbers and reading off a script no longer works. You need to call smarter today.

There are many tools out there that provide valuable insights to help you make better calls. Here are some of the popular ones used by sales reps in leading organizations.

RingCentral

RingCentral is an all-in-one communication tool. You can chat, make calls, and set up video meetings in one place which makes communication super easy.

Sales reps will love RingCentral’s cloud-powered phone system. You can make VoIP calls while keeping your phone number intact. If you need to call overseas, browse through RingCentral’s collection of area codes and set up a local phone number in minutes. It’s that easy.

RingCentral is well-known for its security and reliability. All communication channels come with enterprise-grade encryption which protects your information from costly security breaches. The platform also has a 99.999% uptime SLA guarantee for its services. That’s less than 10 minutes of downtime for a year’s worth of usage.

There is also a Confluence-like workspace in RingCentral that allows team members to collaborate on documents, sales, and many more business tasks.

Who Is It For?

Businesses of all sizes. RingCentral is fantastic if you only want to use one platform to facilitate team communications. It’s fairly affordable, considering the quality of services on offer.

Pricing

Starts from $39.99 per month. The pricing scales to the number of users and the package type. All plans come with free trials except for the enterprise plan.

AirCall

AirCall is a lightweight call center software designed for extended teams. Apart from the standard telephony features, AirCall comes with practical features to make call management a breeze. You can transfer calls from one rep to another, make simultaneous calls, and even route calls based on employee availability.

AirCall tracks every call and analyzes them to provide detailed insights on your team’s performance. AirCall provides a complete dashboard to view these data so you can make informed decisions without crunching the numbers yourself.

You can also create a virtual call center to ease collaboration in remote sales or customer support teams.

Additionally, the tool has a giant list of ready-to-install apps—from Hubspot to Teams and Shopify—to enhance your call experience.

Who Is It For?

AirCall’s remote features are suitable for businesses with multiple call centers or distributed teams.

Pricing

Starts from $30 per month for the starter plan and $50 per month for the premium package. All plans come with a 7-day free trial.

Skype

Ask someone to name a call software and you’ll likely hear Skype as the answer. Skype for Business is no longer available. But, the free (and most popular) version is still around and does a great job if you need to call on a pinch.

You can host up to 50 users for both voice and video calls. The latter comes with a screen sharing feature to share presentations in calls. You can even auto-generate captions to help you understand what people are saying without the awkward, “Sorry, come again?” 

You don’t need to download Skype to use it. Create a meeting link and Skype will create a web session for you to call online.

Who Is It For?

Go with Skype if you’re not ready to invest in a dedicated sales calling software yet.

Pricing

Free. If you want to use Skype for calling mobile and landlines, the pricing (for calling US) starts at $8.39/month for unlimited minutes.

Zoom

Zoom provides high-quality video conferencing solutions at unbeatable prices. The video quality of Zoom’s free plan rivals some companies’ paid plans, albeit with a 40-minute call limit. There is no hard restriction, however. You can hold as many 40-minute calls as you like.

Zoom Rooms lets you create virtual conferences for events like company meetings or client presentations. You can even integrate conferencing room systems like Cisco and manage rooms in Zoom.

Zoom came under fire a few months back for its suboptimal security. The company took the heavy criticism in its stride and released a huge security update in April, cementing the platform as one of the most secure video conferencing tools today.

You can also set up cloud phone systems and host webinars on the platform. Zoom is all-in-all a great multipurpose sales call software for both small and large businesses.

Who Is It For?

Zoom is an excellent platform to start with if you’re new to sales calling software.

Pricing

The basic plan is free forever. Premium plans range from $14.99 to $19.99 per month per user.

Conclusion

That rounds up our selection of the best B2B sales tools today.

It’s not a must to use sales tools. But, selling without the technology stack will do you more harm than good in the long run. With the right sales software, you will gain valuable insights that help you understand your prospects better. You will sell faster, generate more leads, and close more lucrative deals.

There’s no better time to invest in a sales tool than today.