One look at the LUMAscape marketing technology chart – the Martech5000 – is enough to terrify anyone. And for each of those technologies, there’s a dedicated sales team trying to differentiate their organization and sell into an increasingly crowded market.
Targeting sales at prospects who have a need and budget is a task in itself, and effective sales people have their own technology stacks to stay ahead of the competition.
Customer Relationship Management
Every successful salesperson knows how important it is to be organized, no matter if you’re selling media for a company podcast with a handful of subscribers, or an enterprise internal communications solution. If you aren’t tracking your prospects from opportunities to sold, you’ll miss – or worse, lose – prospects you could be closing.
Pipedrive is great CRM for startups and early stage companies with per user pricing as low as $10 per month. It has API integrations for popular tools like Google Apps, Trello, Zapier and Mailchimp.
Microsoft Dynamics is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tool. It’s also the most expensive CRM in this list, but it provides API integrations for Office 365, Outlook, Yammer, SharePoint and other Microsoft properties.
Salesforce is the 800lb gorilla in the CRM space, with an unlimited edition that includes offers forecasting, rules based workflows, custom dashboards and a ton of other functions.
Zoho is a free CRM for up to 10 users, including tracking at lead, contact, account and opportunity levels; email templates, lead forms and some limited workflow functionality.
Read our in-depth comparison of Salesforce and Zoho
Marketing Automation
While email marketing is typically housed in the marketing function of most organizations, its ability to drive leads makes it essential that the sales team is at least familiar with how it works, and is involved in creating targeted messaging for campaigns.
Hubspot leads the pack for marketing automation tools. Create nurture campaigns based on workflows or behavior-triggered emails to connect with your audience and provide additional touch points for your sales process.
Mailchimp has extended its free advanced marketing automation tools to all users, saying “Small businesses look to MailChimp to help them build their brand, and we want to give everyone—no matter their account type or list size—the opportunity to use our marketing automation tools to do just that.”
Pardot is Salesforce’s marketing automation software, and promises to improve alignment between the marketing and sales functions, increasing engagement all along the customer journey.
Sales Intelligence
Sales intelligence covers everything from person-to-person contact data to market intelligence for industry news. Staying current with trends and ahead of technology and organizational shifts is the best way for sales people to stay relevant with their prospects.
Winmo is the leading sales intelligence prospecting tool for the advertising industry, brands, and agency relationships. Users can access and filter information for more than 135,000 individual contacts, along with brand media budgets by channel. Subscribers can also sign up for WinmoEdge, a daily predictive intelligence briefing of news and events, and the opportunities they reveal. Winmo’s Vulnerable Account Index scores opportunities and provides a suggested timeline for outreach.
Datanyze offers technographic information about your prospects: the kinds of technology tools and platforms they prefer. Find out when target accounts add or drop service from a competitor so you can time your outreach to be the most effective.
LinkedIn has been the go-to resource for sales people for more than a decade. With an increasingly competitive social media space, LinkedIn has upped its game over the last few years. It’s now more than just a tool for recruiters and job seekers, it’s a thriving social network and a goldmine of information for savvy prospectors.
ZoomInfo labels itself a growth acceleration platform for B2B sellers, and sponsors a growth acceleration conference to prove the point. The platform itself is primarily a contact database of companies and individuals to increase funnel and pipeline volume.
Find out what predictive sales intelligence can do for your sales team.
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