2023 Sales Stack Tools:
       Account Based Marketing
       Account Based Selling
       Analytics
       Buyer Enablement
       Collateral Tracking
       Conversation Intelligence
       CRM
       E-Contracts & E-Signatures
       Email Outreach
       Email Verification
       Field Sales Management
       Live Chat
       Marketing Enablement & Automation
       Performance Management
       Phone Systems/Solutions/Dialer
       Planning
       Prospecting Leadgen List Creation
       Sales Automation/Acceleration
       Sales Forecasting
       Sales/Marketing Alignment
       Sales Intelligence / LeadGen
       Sales Learning & Onboarding
       Sales Stack Integration
       Smart Scheduling
       Screenshare, Demoing, Conference Calls
       Social Selling
       Team Communication
       Video Sales Engagement
       Web Visitor ID/Tracking
       Sales Growth Hack Tools
Sales Stack Graveyard

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Straight to All CRMs

CRMs We Use

With sales consulting, lead generation, and outsourced sales clients in the range of 1 to 1500 full time employees you can imagine we come across quite a few different CRMs. Starting 2023 the CRMs we work most with and ecounter the most are Salesflare, Pipedrive, and Hubspot.

Salesflare became one of the CRMs we tinker with way back in 2017. It shines in allowing sales professionals to not spend much time at all updating the CRM and maximize sales time. It'll track any Google-based Sales Professional's efforts across email, calendar, and phone, and share interaction clients have had with emails, websites, or when they've called back. Sales Pros are reminded to pay attention to opportunities before they grow stale. Since its inception the workflows and reporting capabilities have grown tremendously as well! Finally the LinkedIn integration features put Salesflare in a category of its own. Visit Salesflare to get free trial and a demo.

Pipedrive has been part of YourSales and many of our outsourced sales assignments since the beginning. It's one of the most simple and powerful CRMs around to set up - all you gotta do is add data. Probably one of the first to use the now prevalent kanban view for opportunity management. With the launch of the Pipedrive Marketplace a very wide range of third party apps & integrations. For Sales Stack 2023 we'll be using it specifically to automate and ensure engagement with buyer persona stakeholders. The folks at Pipedrive and a free trial can be reached here.

Hubspot CRM - probably have the best free version around. And that's probably why we come across Hubspot as much as we do, as well as for its marketing capabilities. In addition Hubspot has going for it that it's a suite, which aims to solve an entire range of problems for organisations. Increasingly Hubspot seems to be moving in the Salesforce direction and is used increasingly outside of sales and marketing as well.

Salesforce.com - does it even fit the CRM category anymore? Obviously, Salesforce is the gorilla in the CRM-room, having been around since the beginning of SaaS. It's interesting - it's both the CRM everyone aspires to be like and be different than.

Microsoft Dynamics - yes, it seems like we're increasingly running into companies with Microsoft's CRM. If you're strong in the Microsoft ecosystem this one could be a good choice for you.

All CRMs

Of course that's not it - that's not it at all. The full overview of our recorded CRMs can be found below for both small, medium and larger companies. Below you'll be able to review which CRMs fit your existing technology environment. Scroll to the right in the table below  and filter for integrations to find what works for you.

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What is Conversation Intelligence:
In short Conversation Intelligence is the gathering and the analysis of conversations with the aim of saving time and improving sales outcomes structurally. Imagine if you could qualify every single lead faster and more accurately and consistently convert the good leads faster at a higher rate. That's the promise of Conversation Intelligence.

Why is Conversation Intelligence Important?:
As with most other categories there are plenty of good reasons to get started with Conversation Intelligence tools. Here are a few:

• sales managers don't really generally have the time, the skills nor the insight to provide accurate and impactful coaching based on listening in on live or recorded calls;
• saves time by helping reps more efficiently (dis-)qualify leads;
• helps sales leaders understand the answers to many of the questions they'll have about individual deals;
• help sales reps get A LOT better through actually knowing what works and getting coached on implementing it;
• increases the impact of those highly-paid sales reps and improves the conversion of those expensive leads.

How is Conversation Intelligence Done?:
In B2B sales we'll be using call recording, call transcriptions, call analytics and call scoring across all sorts of calling communication including video calls. Conversation Intelligence obvious benefits can be reaped across all customer communications including calls, video, email, sms, and chat. Use the filters in the table below to see if your technology is supported by either offering.

Potential shortcomings?:
Conversation Intelligence used to be by and large an English-only affair. That meant your French-German-Dutch-Japanese-Nordic language sales communication would remain a "mystery" for the foreseeable future. Watch our for language support in the solutions you're considering.

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Social Selling is one of those terms, which has been sliced all sorts of ways. As a consequence social selling means different things to different people. In our view, sales is a craft which is all about reducing the distance between people. Tools , which help sales get more social with their customers and help them build relationships, belong in the social selling category.

We Use

• Salesflare - Put Your CRM inside LinkedIn.
  We already used Salesflare as our main CRM at YourSales. In Q1 of 2023, though, the team at Salesflare launched their integration with LinkedIn. Instead of trying to put LinkedIn inside Salesflare, they've gone down the opposite path and put the Salesflare CRM inside the LinkedIn user experience. The result is a surprisingly useful ability to interact with all CRM features from anywhere in LinkedIn. 

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – The social selling era starts now.
  LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the regular LinkedIn on steroids. Work with anyone, anywhere, now.

• Shield App - Real-time LinkedIn Analytics
  Before the introduction of Shield App, going through our LinkedIn social selling and content data was rather difficult if not impossible. Now, we have clear, live, actionable insights for any component we'd like analytics of.

• Vidyard - Screen Recording and Video Creation
  Probably the best non-meeting way to present content to customers is through videos. We use Vidyard for small explainers and messages with or without screen sharing.

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We Use

• DocSend – Find and share the documents that close deals.
  We are long-time users of Docsend as part of our sales process. It provides an easy way to show off your content, track views, and build process workflows (using Zapier and IFTTT). Acquisition by Dropbox announced on March 9th 2021.
  Want to hear more, then simply set up a call.

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What if you would know which companies visit your website? You know, truly know for sure which ones... The tracking of website visitors has several applications. You can use it for lead generation, website optimization, and personalization of the web experience to name a few.

We Use

• Leadfeeder – World's best website visitor tracking for sales and marketing
  We've been using Leadfeeder for a long time, and enjoy it for it's excellent overview of visitors to our site. Want a chat about that technology, then simply set it up!
• Online Succes - Simple Lead Generation Software from the Cloud
  Helps out with further information on clients in the Netherlands.

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Smart schedulers help people come to an agreement about a time to talk faster, with greater accuracy and help ensure the appointment goes through with minimum cancellations. For sales teams the benefits are obvious and also include load-balancing within sales teams, round-robin scheduling, or finding time in multiple team members calendars.

Despite equally obvious benefits for prospects, the topic of schedulers is often fiercely debated. New users will often ask themselves if customers will be turned off from using schedulers and simply not book meetings. Others and very few, often on the buying side, will wholeheartedly argue that just sending a scheduling link objectifies them to just "a prospect on the sales conveyor belt". Their feeling is one of being valued less, it's wise to engineer a response to this feeling.

The bottom line for all parties included is clear, though: more meetings get scheduled much faster. They get scheduled with greater accuracy - especially across time zones. They'll fit schedules better and smarter ensure that buyers are helped in a timely manner. More of them go through because of calendar invitations and reminders via channels like email and sms. For when plans need to change they offer easy ways to reschedule appointments.

Here at YourSales we've used smart scheduling to book thousands of conversations for about a decade. For that entire time we've been using several of the schedulers listed below, with Calendly consistently in a class of its own. This is not to say that other schedulers we've worked with from Harmonizely (strong option for CalDav calendars), Pipedrive or Hubspot are bad. It's just that Calendly is that good.

Have a look for yourself in the detailed comparison in the table below. Make sure to use the filters to find what's most important for you.

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In most B2B lead generation campaigns a certain level of list building or data enrichment will be required. Check out here where that fits in a successful outreach campaign.

We Use

• AeroLeads – Prospect & Lead Generation Software
• Apollo - No One Ever Drowned in Revenue
• Hunter – Find email addresses in seconds

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We Use

• Story Chief – create awareness and gather initial interest
  Story Chief makes it a lot easier to generate inspiring thought leadership content and distribute it to blogs, social networks, influencers, email marketing software and more.
  

Other Tools

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What is Sales Forecasting:
Predicting with varying degrees of accuracy which deals or which volume of business is going to close within a certain time period. Forecasting sales volume for product categories is a common addition.

Why is Sales Forecasting Important?:
This varies by industry and the range of reasons for forecasting is fairly wide. It includes the following:

• manufacturing products in correct amounts at the appropriate time and help with correct resource allocation;
• managing stock market expectations for revenue, profit, and for specific product categories;
• an accurate forecast makes it possible to create plans.

How is Sales Forecasting Done?:
In B2B sales the most well-known method is the forecast call or forecast meeting, where each Sales Professional estimates the near-, medium- and/or long-term for their respective areas. All input is consolidated into a department and company view of the total sales forecast.

Sales reps, of course, can't hold or crunch vast amounts of data on product category splits sold vs forecasted, seasonal changes, and  under-/over-forecasting percentages.

For this and other reasons companies increasingly use technology to gain productivity and increased understanding in the forecasting process, in order to efficiently produce an accurate company-wide forecast.

This category represents those much needed tools.

Tools

• Aviso - Close more deals with AI
• Kluster - Will you hit target next month? We already know

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Email outreach technology is used for sending email sequences to both prospects, testers, existing customers and for onboarding. It's also used for marketing purposes to send newsletters and various pieces of news.

Popular features of course include tracking, email builders, A/B testing, and statistics.

We Use

• Outreach – Enterprise communication platform for sales teams
  Been using Outreach on assignment for years despite some complaining from Sales Professionals about the complexity of the product.

• Salesflare – The Intelligent Sales CRM
  Most of the time we actually default back to Salesflare's campaign feature. It allows us to send out the right email to clients and prospects in a timely manner, and seeing what happens with that email after sending. Simple & effective.

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If you've ever run an email campaign, the importance of using valid and updated email addresses will not be lost on you.

When building a sales stack - your collection of sales tools for professional B2B Sales - email validation and verification is essential.

A few of the many benefits of email validation and verification include:

• Increased campaign efficiency
• Bigger bang for your resources
• Way lower bounce rates
• Reducing spam complaints
• Get more engagement

We speak about email verification in terms of the problem being solved. When it comes to email verification the problem is invalid data. That's why you'll see that a number of the tools on our list below are not pure email verification services, and others are very much pure.

Here's our selection. Enjoy:

We Use

• Bouncer - Email Verification Done Right
  You know why email doesn't work? It's because those email addresses get outdated lightning fast - literally. Bouncer helps us make sure our data is accurate, so we'll be able to properly stay in touch with our clients and potential clients.
• Apollo - No One Ever Drowned in Revenue

Other Tools

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What is Field Sales Management?:
Selling in the field presents its own set of challenges if it is to be done efficiently. Software for Field Sales Management helps solve those challenges.

Why is Field Sales Management Important?:
Sales Professionals are expensive valuable for the companies they work for. Sales Professionals in the field, sitting in their car, public transportation, or idling in an airplane are SUPER expensive.

Sales Leaders and Sales Professionals alike have a keen interest in maximizing sales time going into the field.

How is Field Sales Management Done?:
Sales Pro's use Field Sales tools to crush their quotas by:

• optimizing route planning, getting the best route to the best prospects;
• convert inefficient and idle planning time to revenue-generating client-facing time;
• make the most of unforeseen schedule changes by replanning on the fly;
• increase conversion rates through leaving a good first impression by simply being on time.

Sales Leaders profit too by:

• making better sales territories;
• manage territories and accounts to maximize return on opportunity;
• help Sales Professionals to maximize sales and minimize travel frustration.

It's quite possible that Inside Sales is on the rise and several of the tools on this page are proof of it. There are still really large opportunities, complex problems, and difficult decisions, which require a visit.

By using some of the Field Sales Management software offerings below, companies can help their clients even more.

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We Use

• Zapier – The best apps. Better together
  If you're reading this and you don't know Zapier already, this might be the biggest find on this entire list. Zapier brings it all together and turns your disparate best-in-class software into a suite on steroids.

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We Use

• Google Meet - Enjoy frictionless meetings
• Jitsi Meet - Get the Most out of Your Meetings
• Vidyard - Turn Video Viewers into Customers
• Zoom – #1 Video Conferencing and Web Conferencing Service
  We're using Zoom on assignments for our clients. In our own environment it's particularly handy for sharing of a whiteboard. Few other apps have as useful collaborative whiteboarding features as Zoom.

Other Tools

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We Use

• Shield App - Real-time LinkedIn Analytics
  Before the introduction of Shield App, going through our LinkedIn data was rather difficult if not impossible. Now, we have clear, live, actionable insights for any component we'd like analytics of.

Other Tools

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What are E-Contract and E-signature Tools?:
Sales organizations were put in the world to increase the amount of signed contracts and healthy business relationships with clients. In the past the entire process of "getting them to sign on the line which is dotted" was physical, slow, and cumbersome. E-contract and E-signature tools change this.

What makes E-contract and E-signature Tools interesting?:
While productivity does play a role, other significant benefits of this section of tools include traceability, auditability, ease of collaboration, and transparency.

E-contracting is all about enhancing the customer relationship through improved handling of contractual aspects of the entire customer life cycle.

E-signing is more incidental in that it just focuses on each contract's moment of signature.

We Use

• Oneflow - E-signing is just the beginning
  At YourSales Oneflow has become the main tool for managing the contract process. We wanted a tool, which could span the full contract process all the way from creating to sending, tracking, signing and even renewing contracts. 
  String collaboration options make it easy and efficient to make changes where needed. Let us know if you'd like a sales tech chat about our use case or reach out to Oneflow.

Other Tools

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We Use

• Slack – Be less busy
  We like Slack for channels, private messages and first and foremost for its Zapier integration, which elevates internal communication to a while new level.

• Microsoft Teams - Meet, chat, call, and collaborate in just one place
  Actually, there isn't much to really like about MS Teams. Except, of course, that it's used by many, many companies all over the World. For companies with just a single Microsoft profile on each machine, Teams is great. In today's Bring-Your-Own-Device reality, though, more often than not multiple MS accounts are present, which can make Teams a fairly painful experience.

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We Use

• Potion - Personalize Videos at Scale

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Before you use the tools in this section, take note of this!!!: These tools should not be used by sales automation novices - guidance highly recommended!
The correct use of tools can take you to your desired destination faster. Without proper process many tools can alternatively accelerate and compound the speed and degree with which things go wrong. 
The nature of the tools in this category is that they can very quickly take you to a very, very dark place far, far from your desired destination. If you decide to use them, make sure to take advice from an experienced Sales Automation Professional. You've been warned! Read on and use at your own risk.

What are Sales Growth Hacking Tools?:
With the rise of technology as a core component of sales operations, a subset of very powerful have emerged. These tools mostly take advantage of web technology to automate actions one would have otherwise had to manually execute.

What makes Sales Growth Hacking Tools interesting?:
It's mostly about productivity, really. Most of these tools carry out actions that any determined individual with plenty of time on their hands would be able to do manually. Here are a few of the potential benefits:

• messaging outreach for faster prospecting, recruitment, and list generation;
• messaging outreach for quick and targeted distribution of content;
• scrape content from website - often social networking sites.

How are Sales Growth Hacking tools used?:
More often than not sales growth hacking tools come packaged as extensions for Google's Chrome browser. In addition to and alternatively they may exist on entirely separate websites.

What's the shortcoming?:
Well, it's simple, really. While these tools aren't necessarily technically illegal, many will go counter to the terms and conditions of the services they're built to make use of. Wrong use could lead to temporary or permanent penalties for your access to any of these services. Handle with care!

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• HeadReach – fastest way to find targeted leads with real emails and social profiles (*** shut down in September 2018, user base acquired by Leadfuze *** : story here)
• Speakeasy – http://speakeasy.co/ (*** seems to have made way for some iOS app ***)
• Socedo – Automated Social Media Lead Generation (*** shut down in July 2018 - core team acquired by Azuqua ***)
• Closr Dashboard - Gamify your sales team (*** Seems to have shut down in July 2018 ***)
• TechSalesIntel.com – Predictive Intelligence and Marketing Data Software (*** shut down during first half of 2018) ***)
• Broadsoft – Unified Communication & Collaboration Solutions (*** Acquired by Cisco in February 2018, their offering rolled into Cisco's solutions and brand ***)
• Avention – Avention | OneSource | Global Company Data Resource (*** Acquired by d&b ***)
• Charlie – The app that helps you make a killer impression on anyone you meet (*** shut down in October 2017 *** : reasons )
• Rainking (*** Acquired by DiscoverOrg August 2017 ***)
• LeadzGen - Convert Your Website Visitors Into Leads (*** Seems to have gone very quiet mid 2017 ***)
• KiteDesk – Sales Prospecting Software for Lead Generation (*** shut down in May 2017 ***)
• Toutapp – Sales Email Tracking, Templates and Analytics (*** Acquired by Marketo in April 2017 - more detail here. ***)
• Unomy – Sales & Marketing Intelligence Platform (*** Acquired by WeWork***)
• Brisk – Save Time Do More ( *** shut down July 1st 2016 *** )
• Salesfinder – #1 Social Prospecting Platform ( *** Acquired by salestools.io April 11th 2016 *** )
• Speek – Speek (*** Acquired by Jive in 2015, Jive acquired by LogMeIn in 2018 ***)
• Pipetop – All-In-One Prospecting: Companies, Contacts & E-mails ( *** shut down *** )

What triggered this article is a year-old passion for tools for the sales process along with a question on Quora wiki, which you can find here. The problem in the Quora wiki is that everyone can add and delete content. Competitors would remove each other and add themselves, making the wiki unreliable.

Edited and categorized as always by Jakob Thusgaard. Making sure to keep a copy, so this list of tools for the Sales Stack remains as valuable and relevant as possible. Send a message or comment here if you have any problems whatsoever with that.