Top 21 Sales Automation Software for Accelerating Revenue Growth

Sales automation is the game-changing innovation that brings AI down to Earth.

We’ve all heard that artificial intelligence is going to change everything. It’s been described as the most important technology since the Industrial Revolution.

Artificial intelligence can now be seen in various aspects of our everyday society, including sales and marketing. Let's review the important aspects of sales automation, its benefits, and the tools you'll need to close more deals in 2021. 

What Is Sales Automation Software?

Sales automation software is software that helps reduce friction in several parts of the sales process. Essentially, sales automation tools help to streamline or handle manual tasks for sales reps. This allows sales reps to focus on sales critical tasks.

Some of the processes sales automation software assists with include the following:

• Gathering data on leads
• Updating CRM records
• Lead prioritization
• Lead distribution
• Report generation
• Pipeline tracking

5 Types of Sales Automation Tools

Here are some of the relevant types of sales automation tools:

Sales Prospecting

Prospecting involves building your prospect list, finding contact details, qualifying prospects, and engaging your prospects. This sales stage is where you determine whether or not there is an opportunity for them to become a buyer.

Sales prospecting automation allows you to gather data on prospects and engage prospects more efficiently so you can close deals fast. 

For instance, there are sales prospecting tools that allow you to discover new leads on your website by tracking your site visitors' behavior so you can analyze what pages they are visiting or what content they've downloaded. This helps you know who to reach out to, what to talk about, and when. 

Email Automation

Email automation tools allow you to create emails that reach the right people at the right time with the right message, without requiring you to handle the repetitive tasks involved in sending emails. 

Email automation tools typically have templates for your sales team to use. They also set up automatic follow up dates for email tasks.

This makes it easy for your sales team to run email campaigns, connect with prospects, and follow up with them.

Pipeline Management

Pipeline management automation helps you to automate your sales cycle to ensure you keep your pipeline streamlined and free from bottlenecks. 

Automating your sales process enables marketing and sales teams to visualize a lead's movement from one stage in the buyer's journey to another. This helps your sales team to convert more prospects, optimize communication, and improve sales performance. 

Meeting Scheduling

Scheduling meetings with prospects often seems like a tennis rally. Your sales rep may propose one time to meet, and the prospect may come back and propose another time that doesn't work for both parties. 

Meeting scheduling automation tools alleviate these issues by giving your prospect direct access to your calendar. This way, your prospect can select their own meeting time slot on your calendar. Custom scheduling options for these automation tools are often easy to link to in your email templates. 

Lead Generation

Lead generation tools help you collect important data on your prospects and allow you to capture leads without needing to conduct a lot of manual outreach.

Lead generation tools come in many forms such as:

• Inbound lead generation tools
• Outbound lead generation tools
• Search marketing tools
• SEO tools

5 Benefits of Using Sales Automation Tools

Here are five key benefits of using sales automation tools for your business:

They Give You a Multichannel View of Prospect Behavior.

Sales automation tools provide you with an inside look at your prospects' behavior.

This helps you to build better prospect profiles so you can figure out how to tailor your meetings and offers to fit your prospect better. 

They Make Email Reporting Easy.

Leading a sales team often requires a large amount of reporting, specifically email reporting. Sales automation tools make it easy to keep your team motivated informed because you can use sales automation software to generate automated email reports that are sent to your sales team daily. 

They Save Time and Effort.

Sales automation tools reduce the amount of time you spend doing manual tasks such as adding new contacts to your CRM.

Sales automation tools are there to make small tasks like tracking customer details, historical communication, and event records easier for you so your sales reps can focus their time on more important sales tasks.

They Can Shorten the Sales Cycle.

Sales automation tools allow you to pinpoint high quality leads, which saves time spent fostering relationships and following up with unqualified sales leads. Automating emails and prospecting also frees up time for sales reps, which gives them more time to spend on building targeted relationships.

The effort they apply to meetings, relationships, and providing value for leads can shorten the sales cycle and cause leads to convert faster than before.

They Keep Your Sales Reports Consistent Across Your Organization.

With sales automation software, you no longer have to worry about receiving incorrect data on your sales reps' activity. Instead of them telling you what actions they took throughout a day, they are automatically logged into the software for easy reporting. 

You'll have an accurate idea of deal sizes, closing dates, and other essential sales analytics.

The 21 Best Sales Automation Tools

Naturally, there are tons of sales automation apps to choose from. Let's review the 21 best sales automation software solutions for 2021. 

1. Agile CRM

Agile is one of the biggest names in sales automation today. One of the early adopters of AI, Agile has crafted a CRM that can automate workflows across virtually all sales channels, from email to phone. Plus, it continues to collect data and refine its work over time.

Agile CRM helps you accelerate prospecting by gathering contact information from leads’ web activity, social media, and more. It delivers a full suite of reports and visualizations, allowing you to make the most of its automatic lead scoring at a glance.

Integrations are another key to its value: It works with Google, Twilio, RingCentral, and others.

2. Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is another major player in the sales automation space. Its robust features and mature interface make it easy to get started with.

The app walks you through composing custom, pre-populated quotes by pulling figures from your database. Those quotes are instantly converted into live orders, too.

Since it is 100 percent web-based, you can use Infusionsoft just about anywhere. Lead nurturing on all your favorite channels is expedited. It will even help you remember to follow up at key moments in the buyer journey, removing one of the biggest roadblocks to sales success.

3. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot stands in a class of its own as the brand that brought inbound philosophy to the world.

HubSpot Sales Hub crystallizes those inbound sales best practices in a complete e-commerce system. It grants you immense freedom to craft automated sales processes that fit your business like a glove. It is completely paperless, offers a free service tier, and is the easiest to learn to use.

HubSpot tools are known for their straightforward custom dashboards, which lets you see where you stand with your sales leads based on your KPIs. HubSpot Sales Hubs is no exception here. The UI is so clean and readable, you’ll find it’s a joy to use even on mobile devices.

4. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a fully mobile optimized CRM with deep Google Apps and third party integration. It empowers you to visualize your sales funnel from end to end thanks to adaptive lead tracking. Lead scoring incorporates multiple priority levels to assist you in recognizing the right actions to take.

One of the things that sets Pipedrive aside is how responsive it is. There’s a wide range of modules and layouts, not to mention deeply customizable fields and logic.

It may be a good choice for international brands, too: It has built-in support for 13 languages and lots of global currencies.

5. Salesforce CRM

Salesforce was the original name in sales enablement software. Some nimble competitors have been able to innovate faster, but Salesforce is still the master when it comes to the core feature set. It was one of the first systems to hit the cloud, and boasts snappy performance and great security.

Still the top CRM by volume today, Salesforce leads the pack in the sophistication of its on-board AI and the depth of its analytics. Of course, this can result in a much steeper learning curve. Luckily, Salesforce has developed terrific educational resources for customer success.

It’s worth mentioning that while Salesforce is a full featured CRM, it also has a separate app that manages marketing automation. That app, Pardot, helps manage customer data and keep it all accurate. It also serves as an interface that integrates the sales and marketing pipelines into a cohesive whole.

6. Outreach

Outreach is an account-based sales automation and communication platform made to be highly scalable. It can integrate into Salesforce, above, or stand on its own. As a “sales engagement platform,” it ties together your phone, inbox, and even your website’s content management system.

Efficiency is the big idea behind Outreach, and it automatically keeps you logged in and moving seamlessly between the services and data stores you need. The core goal is to drive more meetings and raise productivity per rep – all built on a flexible role-based framework.

Outreach is designed with enterprises in mind and has a number of workflow governance features for large organizations. Groups can be created and organized at will to reflect the structure of your team. The platform is compliance-friendly due to multiple global security certifications.

7. Prospect.io

Prospect.io is a prospecting automation platform that abstracts away the functions of a dozen tools that sales pros use regularly. For example, the suite has contact info verification baked right in. From there, you can construct templated drip campaigns that leverage your favorite apps.

If you haven’t been satisfied with your email analytics, Prospect.io is the solution that gives you a new lease on life. It keeps deep stats on a per campaign and per message basis so you can amplify your voice. You won’t want to go back to a world before its conversion tracking pixel!

8. Groove

Like Outreach, Groove is a sales engagement platform for account-based teams (not to be confused with Groove HQ, a customer support platform by the same brand). It boasts end-to-end sales campaign automation, lead coverage, and calendar integration.

Its custom dialer app is 100 percent “click to call” and automatically logs the data you need, minimizing manual input. That’s essential to quality of life!

Groove is impressive for the way it acts as a bridge between your existing tools and Salesforce, smoothing out the kind of data inaccuracies that can crop up as you import entries from one system to another. That makes it a worthy addition to a Salesforce-focused technology stack.

9. Freshsales

Freshsales is a sales CRM software that offers sales teams AI-based lead scoring, intelligent workflow automations, visual deal pipelines, and customizable visual reports and dashboards. 

Their platform makes it easy for organizations to attract, manage, and close their leads and scale their sales without needing to use multiple tools.

Some of their notable features include built-in phone and email, two-way email sync, and iOS and Android apps. Freshsales provides insightful metrics that help you plan relevant sales conversations across various stages.

10. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a B2B sales platform that allows you to track the companies and prospects that visit your website. It sends the leads to your CRM and notifies you when a target company visits.

With Leadfeeder, you also gain automatic lead scoring features, instant lead generation, powerful search, and versatile filtering.

What's great about Leadfeeder is that is sends you leads throughout the day for you to contact so you can reach out to leads with perfect timing.

11. AeroLeads

AeroLeads helps users find the contact information of decision makers in businesses to speed up the lead generation process. All it takes is a simple click or two to get you the verified email addresses or phone numbers of people from various companies from their LinkedIn pages or websites.

Using this tool can help you gain access to data points such as business email address, contact number, full name, job title, and address. 

12. PredictLeads

PredictLeads cuts down the time your sale reps spend conducting prospect research. They use machine learning to extract data from organizations such as locations, products, job titles, and contact details.

PredictLeads searches through millions of websites, articles, job postings, blogs, and about pages to help you locate potential leads and gain key insights that inform your pitch to make it standout from your competitors.

Information is power, and PredictLeads gives you access to the most important information about your prospects and leads.

13. Detective by Charlie App

Detective is a platform that automates call prep and prospecting that your sales reps likely don't have the time to do. This tool digs into thousands of sources so you can sell with value.

Use this tool before meetings, outreach, and cold calls. You can also customize detective to do the prospecting and research right from your browser.

14. Pega Sales Automation

Grow your revenue and accelerate your sales cycle with the AI-driven software Pega Sales Automation. The features Pega includes allow you to automate forecasting for aspects like cross-selling, upselling, and repeat purchases. 

This software uses artificial intelligence to select the most qualified leads and guides sales reps through their processes to help make closing sales easier. 

The central sales dashboard automatically generates lead ranking scores, personalized offers, and data that tells sales team members how they are doing.

15. Calendly

Calendly is a simple automated scheduling platform that makes it easy for you to schedule sales meetings right through your email. It takes the back and forth out of scheduling appointments with sales leads. 

16. Growbots

Growbots is an outbound sales automation software that automatically comes up with your potential customer base by searching over 200 million contacts based on your specific criteria.

It also gives you the ability to conduct personalized and custom email campaigns that are easy to track. 

17. Yesware

Transforming your email into a powerhouse sales tool is possible with Yesware. This tool gives your Outlook or Gmail inbox a sales makeover and automatically tracks, analyzes, and reports all emails that you send. 

This provides you with useful insights such as email, attachment, and link opens in real time. You can also use email templates to create, customize, send, and A/B test your emails.

This tool integrates with Salesforce and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

18. Creatio

Formerly known as Bpm'online, Creatio is a cloud based CRM that focuses on automating the entire sales cycle to drive efficient sales processes for total control over the entire buyer's journey from lead generation to repeat sales. 

This enables better customer acquisition, development, and retention for businesses. With this tool, you'll be able to better identify bottlenecks and avoid common pitfalls in your sales processes.

19. LeadFuze

LeadFuze is a a comprehensive sales automation software that specializes in automated lead generation and sales prospecting. The platform allows you to upload a large list of companies or domains and select the roles you want to find. Then, the platform locates the right contacts for you to reach out to.

The filters LeadFuze is equipped with lets you sort through your contacts by roles, industries, the software and technologies they use, budgets, employee size, and others.

The Fuzebot it comes with helps you to avoid contact duplication, verify emails, and build lists.

20. Copper

Copper is a simple CRM for small businesses that is designed for Google Workspace. The goal of this tool is to allow businesses to grow customer relationships and manage more sales leads without repetitive tasks and data entry.

Sync contacts, meetings, and tasks on Copper so you don't have to waste time copying and pasting. Copper also reminds you when and how you need to reach out to your key contacts.

21. Customer.io

Customer.io makes it easy for sales teams to trigger push notifications, emails, SMS, and webhooks so they can personalize their communication with their customers. 

This platform allows you to harness real-time behavior data so you can send relevant communication to your prospects to create a great customer experience.

No matter what size your company is, there are awesome sales automation tools out there for you to accelerate your revenue growth in 2021. 

As AI continues to gain momentum, automation software is bound to become even more impressive. Don’t wait for the perfect solution to come along: Pick one and get your team used to it. Before you know it, you could be booking more meetings and inking more deals.