A long list of sales tech for your B2B sales stack [routinely updated]

This year has been a very turbulent year to say the least and with it came many changes in B2B sales. Due to the COVID pandemic, we’ve seen many companies cut their budgets, reduce sales force numbers, and transition to remote working.

B2B companies and more specifically B2B sales teams are facing new challenges ranging anywhere from sourcing prospects to closing deals. This guide will cover many digital tools and platforms for sales people to use and help solve some of these new challenges.

A B2B (Business-to-Business) sales stack (more accurately known as sales technology stack) is the collection of technologies or software solutions that B2B sales teams use to carry out their roles.

Some technologies are essential to have and others offer extra value to the sales team such as scalability, automation, or increased productivity.

Well, you don’t need one if you want to do everything by hand.

But the reality is that even right now you already have a sales stack. If you can access email, chat online with your colleagues, or even manage your day from an online calendar, these are all tools we need to use in order to carry out our roles.

The aim of a sales stack is to utilise technology to complete tasks by minimising manual efforts but maximising productivity. The features and functionality of many digital tools can enable B2B sellers to unlock ways to improve their success in closing deals that never even existed before.

The best way to decide what technologies you need is to follow your sales process right from sourcing B2B data up until closing the deal.

This guide is organised in the order of what technologies salespeople would typically use first to what they would use last throughout their sales process.

When deciding on a certain technology, your ultimate goal should be to see how it can increase sales. Whether it’s a calendar to streamline meetings booked, a data provider to scale your outreach, or a CRM to ensure every opportunity is followed up, each solution has its place to directly or indirectly increase sales.

Some things to consider when choosing which tools to invest in are: how big your team is, sales cycle length, where in your business is work slowed down, where are you losing deals, is there visibility of your team’s work, how in-depth are your analytics and reporting, etc.

By identifying inefficiencies within your sales process, you may be able to greatly improve your sales numbers with minimal investments.

Let’s get started!

Before you can begin any selling process, you need to have a source of B2B data. Sourcing data consistently and reliably will be key for any marketing campaign you wish to run. You will also need to make sure that your data is accurate and kept up-to-date to have the highest chances of generating sales opportunities.

Sourcing B2B data

There are a host of companies selling email lists or services to get you data, however, since B2B data is the foundation of your entire sales process, losing prospects at this stage will exponentially decrease your sales growth. Poor quality data will hinder your campaigns’ effectiveness, decrease the health of your domain, and cost you more money in the long term.

You should be looking for GDPR and PECR adherent data curation verified by a trained team, and a wide array of data points on contacts to enable dynamic personalised outreach.

hubsell (contacts)

Our customer’s feedback states that we are amongst the highest quality data suppliers in Europe. We provide on-demand curation of data combined with verification and enrichment by a trained team. This results in the lowest bounce rates and a plethora of variables for message personalisation. All while being GDPR adherent.

Zoominfo

Zoominfo is a B2B database for sales and marketing professionals that provides company and contact information. They also offer solutions to support other sales needs such as territory planning, lead scoring, sales prospecting, and more.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Enables you to tap into LinkedIn’s network, the world’s largest professional network of over 500M members, to find leads and accounts in your target market and connect with new prospects.

B2B data management

Managing your B2B data is a crucial step as it ensures you are focusing on relevant accounts and that you do not tarnish your brand image by seeming to be thoughtless in your outreach. 

The processes that ensure you are keeping good data hygiene are data cleansing, data validation, and data enrichment. This is so you can be confident that you are accurately communicating with your prospects and the information you have is reliable and up to date.

NeverBounce

NeverBounce offers real-time email verification and list cleaning services and ensures the delivery of emails by checking email validity against a database of 6 billion emails and removing outdated email addresses.

Clearout

Clearout is a tool that offers a service to validate, verify and clean email lists in real-time. They are GDPR compliant and have over 98% accuracy with over 20 refined email validation checks with over 400 million emails already verified.

ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce is an online email validation system that ensures companies achieve better deliverability. It can detect and remove known abuse and spam trap emails, temporary addresses, invalid email addresses, and validate IP addresses.

After compiling a list of prospects with quality data, you now require a plan to contact them. To outreach manually would take too much time and money that could be spent elsewhere more productively. These tools enable salespeople to optimise their outreach and improve chances of booking meetings.

Email automation and social selling

Maybe you’re having difficulty calling a prospect and are unable to reach them. The next best channels are email and social media. With everyone being able to access the internet pretty much wherever they are, you can guarantee that these communication channels will always be open.

hubsell (campaigns)

Our customers have stated that we have one of the best outreach software in the market, especially as it integrates with their favourite CRMs. hubsell enables you to execute multi-channel outreach campaigns and automatically create personalised messages using dynamic placeholders. You can also see all your analytics and key metrics on each campaign, all from a single dashboard.

Outreach.io

Outreach.io helps you close more deals by personalising, prioritising and analysing sales activities. They orchestrate email, voice, and social outreach while providing what your sales reps need to execute selling activities. They also provide insights into which sales plays work and where to fine-tune.

Salesloft

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that helps you to close more deals and manage different stages of the sales process. Manage emails, calls, meetings, and interactions while it automatically tracks and logs your tasks, activities, and engagement data to your CRM.

Phone automation software

Cold calling has seen a decline in usage as a customer acquisition channel in B2B. Calling thousands of leads daily manually is hard to track and is usually not as productive as other strategies. However, it is a useful strategy in certain cases.

A solution is to adopt a calling software to auto-dial numbers and organise the leads automatically. All connected to the CRM.

Tenfold

Tenfold allows you to recognise and respond to your customers during the interaction. It automatically tracks and logs all customer interactions into Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce. You can create compelling, consistent customer experiences across voice and digital channels. And without replacing your customer communications infrastructure.

Ringio

Ringio claims to increase sales calling productivity by 2x. You can instantly dial out of Salesforce with native Click-to-Call. You can automatically leave pre-recorded voicemails for leads. They also claim to be able to 3x your connect rate with automated local area caller ID.

Connectandsell

Connectandsell is not an autodialer. It is a platform that gets your best salespeople 8-10x more live conversations with qualified prospects. Their products can turbocharge your SDRs by getting qualified prospects on the phone with every dial. They also allow you to leverage their expert reps to make 1,200 dials and have 40-100 conversations per day.

Video prospecting software

Cutting through the noise and getting the prospect’s attention is always a tricky task. However, using video to prospect can help you to stand out and get your message across. It’s original, creative and personal.

Vidyard

Vidyard is an online video platform to help businesses connect with prospects through a personalised video experience. Used in sales to send videos to prospects, Vidyard can help increase the rate of meeting bookings and accelerate pipeline growth.

Covideo

Covideo lets you record, send and track personalised video emails to help increase response rates and ultimately close more deals. By keeping your message creative and showing a personal touch through eye contact and voice tonality can help ensure there is no miscommunication.

Bonjoro

Bonjoro helps you boost customer engagement with personalised video. You can integrate it with your existing CRM workflows so your videos are sent at the right time. You can measure the effectiveness of your videos by tracking open rates, views and click-throughs.

Direct mail automation

With the ever-increasing number of emails being sent, there seems to be a comeback for good old fashioned direct mail. With direct mail automation software, you can automate the process of sending physical mail to your prospects in the form of letters, postcards, gifts and more. 

These digital tools help you create, track and personalise direct mail campaigns which can be followed up using electronic outreach once your item has been successfully delivered.

Sendoso

Sendoso is a sending platform that enables you to send direct mail, gifts, perishables and much more to companies and combine it with technology to personalise at scale.

Click2Mail

Click2Mail enables companies to outsource their postal mail marketing to save time on in-house printing and posting processes. You can create and personalise posts for your mailing lists utilising their network of printing companies for overnight printing and mailing.

Alyce

Alyce is an AI-powered personal experience platform that personalises a one-to-one gifting experience for every prospect and enables you to measure and track your ROI.

In contrast to outbound, inbound marketing is a strategy that assumes the way people buy from businesses has changed. With so much information out there buyers tend to have done a lot of research themselves about your company. Inbound marketing is the process of attracting potential buyers to you in the form of providing enough valuable content for them.

People who have found their way onto your website have shown some interest to your company so not to let this opportunity go, the following tools will allow your sales reps to determine the buying interest of each lead and engage with them in real-time.

Live chat platforms

From either organic or paid traffic, your potential prospects have made their way to your website. Live chat software enables you to interact with your website visitors in real-time by either prompting them with pop-up chat messages or simply waiting for them to ask you a question.

Drift

Drift is a conversational sales and marketing platform that helps you interact with website visitors in real-time. It uses bots and AI to provide a modern buying experience for potential customers to generate more qualified leads and speeds up the sales cycle.

Intercom

Intercom helps you build customer relationships through personalised conversational, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey.

LiveChat

LiveChat is a live chat and help desk service application that can be integrated into your website for customer service and to capture more leads. Website visitors can send their questions for you to answer in real-time.

Reverse IP lookup

Not knowing who your non-converting website visitors are is a common situation in the B2B world. All the effort you have put in finding and attracting the right audience would be wasted by not being able to retarget them. With reverse IP lookups, you can track the IP of leads to reach out to them or compare it to your database to find a match. 

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder uncovers which companies visit your B2B website and key people in their organisation to contact. It identifies anonymous visitors, the pages they visit, the campaigns they engage with, and sends that information to your CRM. That allows you to easily connect with the right person from companies visiting your website.

Leady

Leady recognises the corporate visitors that come to your website and reports back to you. The information gives you new opportunities to turn them into new customers. They come with complete person and company profiles and track in-app user behaviour.

Albacross

Albacross tells you exactly who is visiting your website and how to reach them. Find which companies and prospects are visiting your website. Track their activity across the website’s pages and identify decision-makers and their contact information.

Trying to track and manage a large number of leads can be a problem. Effective lead management includes efficient follow-ups, storing information, and ensuring leads do not fall through the cracks of the pipeline.

A B2B CRM helps you to organise and prioritise leads to ensure your salespeople are engaging with them on a consistent basis.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive claims that their users close an average of 28% more deals after their first year. They believe power comes from simplicity, so they designed each element carefully. Your emails, calls, and progress are tracked automatically and you will have access to a single, streamlined view of your sales process.

Salesforce

Salesforce gives your sales teams the power to close deals like never before. They use cloud-based tools that increase productivity, keep the pipeline filled with leads, and score more wins. It includes what you need to succeed with your sales process, lead generation, forecasting, and contact management.

HubSpot

HubSpot helps you to manage your pipeline and speed up your sales team with the HubSpot CRM. Interactions are tracked automatically and deals are displayed on one dashboard for total visibility without any added work. The HubSpot CRM automates the tasks salespeople hate and takes minutes to learn instead of months.

Freshworks

An AI-powered CRM to help you discover the best leads, increase customer engagement, and close deals. The CRM includes marketing automation, chat, and telephony as well as automating conversations with website visitors using AI chatbots, segmenting contacts and creating targeted personalized email campaigns.

Since most people are working from home now, the rise of remote selling has increased demand for a number of technologies to support this new way of working.

The following tools help salespeople to connect with their prospects to organise calls and demonstrate their offering to them.

Appointment scheduling tools

These tools help salespeople and prospects eliminate the hassle of back and forth emails to schedule a time for a call. A single email with a scheduling link is now enough to book meetings and automatically send reminders closer to the time to prompt both parties.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It allows its users to create and edit events, which can be demonstrations of product calls or negotiation of contract meetings.

Calendly

Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails. It integrates with Google Calendar. You can let Calendly know your availability preferences and it will do the work for you. You can share your Calendly links via email or embed it on your website. The prospects pick a time and the event is added to your calendar.

Acuity Scheduling

Acuity Scheduling is a self-service appointment booking tool that lets your clients view your real-time availability to select the date and time that works and also to cancel or reschedule on their own. It also sends autonomous emails and texts to remind both parties.

Writing technologies

Whether it’s responding to prospect’s emails or creating documentation for them, the following tools can help ensure what you write is kept organised, clear and professional.

Grammarly

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that ensures whatever you write is clear and free from mistakes. Whether on emails, documents or social media, Grammarly will provide many kinds of corrections while you write and makes you a stronger, more confident writer.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid helps to eliminate writing errors, spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and poor writing style. There are plugins for Word, Outlook, Chrome, Google Docs, and will support your writing wherever you are.

Video conferencing software

Having discussed the solutions to schedule calls efficiently, next comes the call itself. There are many options in the marketplace so you have to choose based on your requirements. Those could be screen sharing, a secure and consistent connection or document sharing features. I would recommend choosing a reputable option recommended by your peers.

Google Meet

Google has launched a new video conferencing application called Meet by Google Hangouts. It is designed for HD video and real-time meetings. You can use your browser to share your video, desktop, and presentations with teammates and customers.

Zoom

Zoom is one of the leaders in modern enterprise video communications. It has an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars. It offers flawless video, clear audio, instant sharing, and an enterprise cloud phone system.

GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is another popular tool for video conferencing with clear audio, smooth screen sharing and HD video enabling customers to meet face to face, share presentations and chat with colleagues.

Without being able to see each other at the office or pop over to each other’s desk, these following tools will help smoothen out any challenges with the shift to working remotely.

Whether it’s sharing files, keeping in touch, or working together on projects, these solutions will end any headaches you may have when it comes to collaborating with others.

Document sharing platforms

When collaborating with colleagues or other companies, there can be many documents which are confidential and the need to securely transfer files to the right people is a must. These tools solve the privacy issue and allow for a safe interchange of documents between parties.

DocSend

DocSend allows you to share business-critical documents with confidence. It includes easy, secure sharing with real-time, actionable feedback. It permits you to fix errors after hitting send, share up to 250MB, control file downloads, and turn off access anytime. Finally, you can share all documents pertinent to a deal in a custom branded space.

Clearslide

Clearslide provides content, communications, and insights to create amazing customer experiences. Online, email, mobile, screen share and in-person communications made easy. They provide unprecedented visibility into every customer interaction. That gives reps, sales leaders and marketers the engagement insights they need to make better business decisions.

Bloomfire

Bloomfire is a secure knowledge engagement platform that helps teams to find information whenever they need it. Content can be uploaded in any format or created directly on the platform. Bloomfire keeps all information in one place to make it accessible for everyone and saves employees an average of 30 minutes a day looking for information.

Project management platforms

With so much to keep track of, these project management platforms are centralised tools to help keep your team connected wherever they are while giving full visibility for all to see.

You can keep track of tasks, ownership, due dates, and essentially customise as it suits your needs to make sure you can plan and coordinate your projects efficiently.

Airtable

Airtable is a platform that helps people to build endless solutions within flexible databases. It has a spreadsheet-like interface that allows real-time collaboration with colleagues while providing transparency and visibility to managers.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based software where teams create customisable workflow templates with time tracking and automation to eliminate manual work. There are dashboards to gain insights and to see everything at once, it also integrates with other tools and apps to streamline processes.

Asana

Asana is a project management tool to help you manage everything from daily activities to larger projects such as product launches and marketing campaigns. There are many different ways to organise your work using views like lists, boards, charts, and much more.

Messaging platforms

For teams to stay connected and up to date on your work, these following messaging platforms offer a variety of features to help companies and teams organise digital spaces to collaborate on ideas.

Slack

Slack is a single platform that connects people across different channels to help organise communications across different parts of the business. As well as messaging, Slack enables users to have voice and video calls as well as share files and documents. Slack also integrates with a number of apps and connects to other tools to keep everything in a centralised location.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based workspace for people to communicate and share content. It integrates across all Office 365 products and more than 180 custom apps. You can also use Microsoft Teams’ voice and video calls that can host up to 80 people.

Discord

Discord is a communications app that was primarily used by gamers but due to its many features such as being able to customise member access, create chat rooms under servers and channels, and unlimited message history, there are a lot of uses in the work setting.

Digital signatures or e-signatures is the way to go paperless and remove the back and forth mailing of papers which can delay the process, create friction and increase expenses.

These technologies allow contracts to be digital but still be just as legally binding as paper contracts.

HelloSign

HelloSign allows you to easily eSign documents, forms and agreements online. You can automate and manage your important business transactions with the HelloSign platform. Also, it is possible to sign and send Google Docs in seconds without the need to export and upload.

DocSend

DocSend is a secure sharing platform to share your contracts and agreements with eSignatures. Its link-based system allows you to set security preferences for each stakeholder, receive notifications for each file view, and analyse content performance.

PandaDoc

PandaDoc empowers your sales team to create, send, track, and eSign beautiful proposals, quotes, and contracts. You can use pre-built templates, content from marketing, and customer data from your CRM. Proposals get out the door faster with collaborative workspaces, automated approval workflows, and metrics that tell sales managers what deals are stuck.

Billing should be the fun part since it implies the nearing of the big payday. Unfortunately, constant reminding and manual sending of invoice emails are impractical in the long run.

There are options that allow a company to automate the payment process. Those decrease friction between the parties involved and save much needed time.

Chargebee

Chargebee platform powers end-to-end recurring billing for subscription businesses. All with its fully automated SaaS billing solution. It offers subscription management, recurring billing, accounting, revenue recognition, and analytics and insights.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks claims to be the best small business accounting software. It allows you to send invoices, track time, manage receipts, expenses, and accept credit cards. FreshBooks products are geared mainly toward small-sized businesses. They offer cloud-based accounting applications that manage and pay bills and payroll functions.

Replicon

Replicon is a time tracking and management app. It is an all-in-one solution for project costing, billing, attendance, labour law compliance and more. It includes cloud time tracking applications including timesheet and expense management software.

These tools will help salespeople get that extra edge by developing themselves. These tools can be a great source of knowledge to learn how to become more knowledgeable or provide greater insight as to where to make incremental improvements.

Udemy for Business

Udemy for Business helps companies by offering on-demand learning content via their content marketplace. It covers a variety of key business and technical topics where you can assign to employees and track and monitor their progress on a dashboard.

Gong

Gong is a conversational intelligence software that gives insights into your sales teams’ conversations. It can record and analyse sales calls to help you understand every customer interaction to improve the quality of the sales team’s calls.

Using these tools can provide just that extra piece of information that may be crucial in winning a prospect over. Seeing what technologies they are using or how they are performing can give you what you need to deliver the right message to start a potential business relationship.

SimilarTech

SimilarTech is a web extension salespeople can use to discover prospecting information on any company website such as website traffic and technologies it uses.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a technology profiler that helps you find prospects based on the technologies they use. You can also find out what technologies certain websites use for market research or competitor analysis.

As you can see, there’s a vast number of different tools available for you to use. With a tool for every step of the sales process, you can enjoy experiencing increased productivity in your work life.

We encourage you to see what steps along your sales process can be completed better and to see if a solution in this guide could be of help to you.

Thank you for reading to the end. You may not need a solution for every step of your sales process, but should you want to have a better way of sourcing accurate and reliable data, we invite you to book a call with us to see how hubsell could meet your data needs.