As a marketer, you know that the success of a startup comes down to being able to make enough sales in order to generate the cash needed to survive, grow, and attract investment.
This has been proven time and again as studies show that 9 out of 10 startups fail, with 22% of the causes being a lack of poor performance in marketing. That 22% is already a fairly scary amount for most businesses. There’s no room for taking chances when it comes to balancing the tipping point between success and failure.
So, in order to avoid that, you’re going to need the best startup sales tools that you can get while making sure that you’re also getting the bang for your buck so that you can make your marketing campaigns effective and efficient.
Statistics like these serve to prove how important it is to have the best sales tools in your arsenal that you can rely on, to generate more leads, improve your conversions, grow your income online, and accelerate your startup to success.
In this article, you’ll be exposed to some sales tools that you can use to improve your sales campaign, as well as examples of how these tools can be used for real-life scenarios.
1. Hubspot CRM
Scalable CRM Software For Businesses Of All Sizes
One of the hardest things to achieve in a startup is to have a loyal customer base, especially if you’re just starting out. However, it can be a lot easier to retain existing customers if you have CRM software at hand, and for that, you can choose HubSpot CRM.
While many say that CRM software is meant for medium-large-sized businesses, HubSpot CRM can accommodate startups with their flexible pricing plans. Not to mention that its tools and features can also easily be scalable depending on the growth of your business.
One can even say that HubSpot’s highly optimized pricing plan is one of its strengths as a platform more than its powerful libraries of features and tools.
It’s an all-in-one solution. Rather than investing in multiple different software suites, such as buying a separate license for an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Mailshake, you can instead just go ahead and use HubSpot as a whole as they offer CRM services, marketing, sales, and even customer service tools in their platform.
Another thing that HubSpot excels at is its easy-to-use dashboards and user interface. It doesn’t take much for one to navigate through their platform as it’s all intuitive and straightforward while at the same time being visually appealing.
Overall, it’s a really good bang for the buck for startups that are looking to organize and improve their customer experience services.
Being in the right place, at the right time, and targeting truly interested leads is a fast track advantage successful startups will need to convert prospects.
This is where a business tool like Dealfront might be of assistance.
If you’re still on edge, you can also avail of their free tools and plan; although the available options and features are limited, it can be a good area to measure whether or not you believe it is a worthy investment as your startup sales tool.
Key Features of HubSpot:
- Flexible Pricing Plans
- All-In-One Software Suite
- Responsive Customer Support
- Intuitive Dashboards
- Visually Appealing
- Free Plan Available
Hubspot Pricing Plan
As mentioned before, HubSpot has a highly flexible pricing tool that you can use to determine which features and tools you need, but if that’s too much trouble to get around, they do have bundles available for you to choose from.
1 – Starter Package {$50/Month|$540/Annually}: Access to all starter packages of all hubs from marketing to operations. Features such as email marketing, ad management, email scheduling, live chat, basic bots, calling, email health reporting, ticketing, data sync, and more.
2 – Professional Package {$1,780/Month|$19,200/Annually}: Access to all professional packages of all hubs with an increase of improvements for all previous features. Additional features include dynamic personalization, collaboration tools, campaign management, sales analytics, service analytics, customer portals, data quality automation, duplicate management, and more.
3 – Enterprise Package: {$5,000/Month|$60,000/Annually}: Access to all enterprise packages of all hubs with a significant increase in amount and improvements from all previous features. Additional features include sandboxes, playbooks, recurring revenue tracking, content strategy, SEO optimizations, snowflake data share, SSO, and many more.
2. Marketo
Marketing Automation Software For Startups
Success in sales goes way beyond CRM software. Businesses that invest in proper marketing tend to outdo their competition by a wide margin, and it’s also a great jumpoff platform to accelerate popularity and growth in other markets as well.
For example, there are around 3.78 billion social media users globally. If you’re not taking advantage of that market, then that’s around 48% of the population that you’re missing out on.
Naturally, you won’t be able to hit all of those people at once, and engaging in a platform such as Facebook can be resource-intensive, to say the least. From creating engaging social media content to investing in social media marketing visuals, it can be quite a handful.
That’s why marketing automation can be a huge boost to startups that barely have the extra resources to dedicate their manpower solely to social media marketing, but at the same time, the market itself is too lucrative to miss out on.
In recent years, virtually every aspect of the sales process – from lead generation to contract management – has changed thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, cloud technology, and process automation.
Crm with marketing automation, in particular, is one of the best sales tools for your startup to help you get measurable results from your efforts.
Marketo can be the tool that you need to get started with as they cover all fields of business marketing, from social media to B2B marketing.
Let’s use an example such as this freelancing voice marketplace, they’re looking to the market for both clients and professional freelancers, and that’s certainly a large number of individuals to target. Not to mention that the content needed for both needs to be specifically tailored to their needs.
That’s going to be a lot of resources to invest in different content material, managing social media accounts, email campaigns, and even paid advertisements. For startups, it can be too much, but with automation, it can be viable, and Marketo can do all of these exceptionally.
Utilizing AI and machine learning technologies to enhance and speed up your content marketing campaigns is definitely a no-brainer for many startups. Luckily, Marketo can be an easy solution for most startups looking to effectively penetrate many different markets.
Validate your concepts for performance during the design stage with AI-generated attention analytics
Key Features of Marketo:
- Behavior Tracking
- Automated Marketing Campaigns:
- Data Insights
- Digital Advertising
- Dynamic Chat Bots
- Lead Generation
- Segmentation
- Targeting
Marketo Pricing Plan:
Marketo offers four distinct plan packages for their platform; although no direct pricing plans are offered, it can be a good benchmark as to how you want your services tailored for your business needs, audience segmentation, custom user roles,
1- Jumpstart Package: Features for the jumpstart package includes lead and account database access, audience segmentation, dynamic content, personalization, scoring, email marketing, social marketing, paid media targeting, and many more.
2 – Select Package: Includes all the previous features mentioned plus access to custom data objects and fields, event and webinar marketing, marketing calendar, and attribution and ROI visual dashboards.
3 – Prime Package: Includes all the previous features mentioned plus access to target account management, website personalization, predictive content and audiences, and an advanced journey analytics tool.
4 – Ultimate Package: The ultimate package for Marketo is custom quote only, and the tools and features that are included require a call with their sales team. However, they do guarantee that this is the most complete and powerful package available for large-scale marketing campaigns and strategies.
3. ProofHub
Project Management Tool For Sales Teams
ProofHub is a popular project and team management platform designed to help sales teams manage all their tasks and projects in one single space.
The software allows sales teams to keep track of your progress, timeframes, and milestones without the need to search through different apps, email threads, and other communication platforms. Basically, it’s a practical and convenient platform for essential teamwork to happen.
There is a feature for sharing files and chatting. You can tag people, delegate tasks, and mark everyone’s progress as you go. At the same time, ProofHub can easily be integrated with meeting management software platforms making it flexible and accessible for meetings and webinars.
The platform even lets you create detailed reports. In short, it’s the one place for all your team and project collaboration.
It lets the sales team hyper-focus on their goals plus be on track for their upcoming deadlines. Overall, it’s an integral part of keeping an organization in tip-top shape, something startups could always use.
Key Features of ProofHub
- Discussions
- Announcements and Mentions
- Kanban Boards
- Gantt Charts
- Custom User Roles
- Project & Resource Reports
- Project Overview
- Daily Agenda
- Timesheets
ProofHub Pricing Plans:
ProofHub doesn’t offer a “precise” pricing plan for their software, but instead, they provide flexible pricing plans depending on the number of users that you will have for the platform. However, there is a general rule when it comes to pricing for team sizes.
1 – Standard Package (For 10 & Below Users) – You will have access to the standard features, unlimited projects, and 20GB of storage.
2 – Premium Package (For 11 & Above Users) – All the mentioned features plus an additional 200GB of storage. You also have access to white labeling, detailed activity logs, IP restrictions, API access, and even a dedicated project manager.
If you want to take try out their platform, you can avail of a free trial on both standard and premium packages and opt out if you think it’s not in the best interest of your startup.
4. Unbounce
Landing Page Optimization Platform For Conversions
If you are sending visitors to a poorly performing landing page, it’s unlikely that you will be able to make conversions that lead to sales. All of your marketing efforts from your sales team will be for naught if users would just end up losing interest in your landing page.
Statistics even show that businesses using optimization software on their landing pages see a 30% average increase in conversion lifts. It’s a valuable asset for driving traffic to your site.
Let’s use a sales tool for startups example such as this online tool for board games. Looking at it from the landing page, you’re already greeted with an input box that you can use to answer your question. It’s straight to the point and helpful to the visitor as well. That’s a sign of a good and optimized landing page.
It’s entertaining, helpful, and interesting for visitors.
That’s why it’s crucial to have a reliable landing page optimization tool like Unbounce if you want to improve your sales and conversions.
Unbounce offers a very easy way to build high-converting landing pages for your events and campaigns. Not only that but getting started with it is just as simple with Unbounce’s intuitive dashboards and easy-to-navigate user interface.
The platform has a simple editor that allows you to create quality landing pages by simply dragging and dropping different elements, such as images, text blocks, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, etc.
Similar to platforms like Wix and Shopify, each page on Unbounce is professionally designed, mobile-optimized, and proven to increase your conversions.
Not to mention, you can also run A/B tests on your pages to further optimize them for lead generation and data capture.
While not necessary for most Startups, it can be a worthwhile investment to get started with a great impression of your business from new visitors.
Key Features of Unbounce:
- Drag-And-Drop Editor
- Quick to Use Templates
- Quick Publishing
- Optimized Page Sections
- Style Guides
- Mobile-Responsive Designs
- Builder Grids
- Multi-Device Page View
- Conversion Goals
Unbounce Pricing Plans:
Unbounce has a fairly straightforward pricing plan with an increasing number of conversions allowed per package. Not too much on the access on extra features.
1 – Launch Package {$90/Month}: Provides you access to 500 conversions with up to 20,000 visitors, and you are provided with 1 single domain.
2 – Optimize Package {$135/Month}: An increase to 1,000 conversions and up to 30,000 visitors with 5 domains. An additional feature of up to 30% extra conversions with their smart traffic feature.
3 – Accelerate Package: {$225/Month}: A significant increase of 2,500 conversions with up to 50,000 visitors and up to 10 domains. Plus, access to the smart traffic feature.
All their plans provide you access to their general features such as unlimited landing pages, Unbounce apps, sticky bars, and popups.
5. Outreach.io
Enterprise Communication Platform For Collaboration
Outreach is a sales platform that makes team communication more effective. The service offers personalized interactions while maintaining the security of data online.
If you’re wondering what’s the difference between this platform and HubSpot or ProofHub, then the answer to that is Outreach.io is quite a mix of both.
Technically, it’s considered as an outreach and sales engagement platform, much like a field sales platform that is specifically made for sales teams, and could be used as a great sales tool for startups.
It’s highly focused on engagement with prospects and lead generation, so it is perfect for tasks suited solely for sales teams, while HubSpot and ProofHub is an all-in-one software.
With Outreach.io, you get valuable data on what is working and what isn’t, so you know what you should do next to optimize your sales.
This enterprise communications platform creates a workflow to streamline all aspects of your sales communications and helps you improve your digital presence.
It also offers a framework that managers can use to replicate the best-performing communication process across the entire organization.
Key Features of Outreach.io:
- Workflow Governance
- User Profiles
- Customer Relationship Management
- Sales Insights
- Prospecting Tools
- Automated Sequences
- Lead Generation
- Team Organization
Outreach.io Pricing Plans:
Outreach.io, unfortunately, does not offer pricing plans and requires a custom quote. You’ll have to inquire with their sales teams about pricing and package plans for their platform.
6. Olark
Live Chat Application For Better Customer Experience
As stated on their website, Olark is a live chat platform that helps you listen, learn, and improve.
It’s designed to make it easy for you to talk to customers in real-time on your website, as well as use customer data tools to learn from all your online interactions. You can integrate tools for language translation so you can chat with a global audience.
In short, you can engage your customers and answer their questions while gathering helpful feedback on one single platform. It’s great for improving customer experience and augmenting your sales team’s efforts.
You can organize your customer data and store chat transcripts and structured notes either in Orlak or on your CRM.
The platform also gives you the ability to apply live chat insights where you use customer input to optimize your product or service, as well as match your chat feature to your website branding.
Overall, Olark gives you the chance to connect with your clients and provide your sales team with valuable data on what your market wants, needs, and complaints about your product, which makes it one of the best sales tools for startups.
Key Features of Olark:
- Custom Pre-Chat Forms
- Unlimited Chat History
- Agent Groups
- Real-time Reporting
- 3rd Party Integrations
- Off-line Messaging
- Triggered Messages
Olark Pricing Plans:
Olark’s pricing is pretty straightforward, with only one single pricing plan being offered for most users unlocking all features of the platform.
1 – Full Featured Live Chat: {29/Month}: Unlock all features such as reporting, integrations, and insights.
7. Sender.net
Email Automation Software For Email Campaigns
Sender.net is a powerful automation platform that lets you manage your incoming and outgoing email at a fraction of the time it would normally take to do it manually.
With this tool, you can set up various types of automated emails, including welcome emails and cart abandonment reminders, and newsletters.
Of course, you can opt for simpler tools like this newsletter maker, but if you require more flexibility for creating detailed email newsletters, then Sender has the tools you need.
The platform has an intuitive email builder that allows you to create emails that are stylish, optimized, and effective.
There are also a ton of useful analytical features to help you improve different aspects of your email campaigns, such as your open and click rates, so you can boost your ROI (return on investment).
Key Features of Sender.net:
- Drag-And-Drop Builder
- Abandoned Cart Emails
- Easy Integrations
- Smart Automations
- Higher Email Deliverability
- Email Templates
- Newsletter Templates
- Analytics & Insights
Sender.net Pricing Plans:
Sender.net is highly flexible and accessible for their pricing plans, with different pricing options and customization depending on your needs. Plus, they also have a free plan for users.
1 – Free Forever Package {$0/Month}: For the free package, you have access to email campaigns, google analytics tracking, SPAM checks, image libraries, image editors, HTML editors, popups, sign up forms, and many more. However, there is a sender branding present.
2 – Standard Package {$50/Month}: The standard package includes everything from the free package but removes the sender branding. It also adds SMS and MMS campaigns and multi-access.
3 – Professional Package: {$250/Month}: The Professional package starts adding in extra features such as animated countdown timers, advanced automation, a dedicated IP address, inbox previews, feedback blocks, and a dedicated success manager.
4 – Enterprise Package: {Custom Quote}: Enterprise is the package that really starts opening up to large features for large-scale operations. You have access to advanced user permissions, service level agreements, activity logs, SSO, and phone support.
8. RingLead
Data Quality Management For Accurate Sales Targetting.
RingLead is a platform for automating your data operations so you can achieve better results from quality data. It goes hand-in-hand with usability testing software that can deliver valuable data on what needs to be improved or even removed.
A data-fragmented sales operation drains energy and revenue from your startup. Tons of resources are wasted on effort duplication – resources that might have been used on engagements that help you close more deals.
RingLead automatically checks data quality during manual entry, data imports, or web form submission in order to eliminate duplicates in your sales pipeline.
This can make a huge difference in your results. In fact, the difference in your bottom line will be comparable to earning income from a money market account and receiving income from paid online surveys.
In general, RingLead can serve as a project cost management software as well due to its role in optimizing your startup’s overall sales process.
Key Features of RingLead:
- Accelerate RevOps
- Workflow Automation
- Real-time Multi-vendor Data Enrichment
- Event Triggers
- Webhook Data Operations
- Sales & Marketing Segments
- Intelligent Routing
RingLead Pricing Plans:
RingLead does not offer pricing packages for their software. However, pricing is available upon request on the website. The platform offers a free trial, and you can request a demo to see how it can help your business.
9. Adobe Sign
Contract Lifecycle Management For Sales Convenience
Adobe has a wide range of tools for marketing and sales, including Adobe Sign, a contract management service that helps to facilitate binding agreements between your business and new customers.
Formerly called e-Sign, Adobe Sign forms part of Adobe’s Document Cloud service. You can use the cloud-based eSignature platform to create, transmit, and sign contracts at any time, as well as manage forms and agreements anywhere, on any device. A similar Adobe product called Adobe Acrobat on the other hand, allows people to add their signature to PDF documents, which is also a handy feature for business owners.
It’s particularly effective for businesses that have a huge number of individual clients while at the same time offering many products or services that require certifications or digital assurances in the case of online signatures.
For example, online educational websites that provide digital tutoring can use this software to make it a lot more convenient to authorize the sales of their products to many independent individuals freeing up additional resources for the sales team to focus on their main task of getting more clients.
It’s a practical and convenient piece of software for startups looking to lessen their administrative duties when dealing with clients.
Key Features of Adobe Sign:
- PDF and eSignatures
- Secure Forms
- Signature Collection
- Custom Branding
- Integrations
- Bulk Sending
- Tracking & Management
- Affordable Plans
Adobe Sign Pricing Plans:
Adobe Sign comes in with multiple pricing packages for both individuals and teams. But for this special case, we’ll be focusing more on the team’s pricing packages.
1 – Standard DC For Teams {$14.99/Month}: Starts off with features for signing and collecting unlimited signatures, tracking and sending reminders for agreements, conversions, export, editing PDFs, and admin console access.
2 – Pro DC For Teams {$16.99/Month}: Offers more powerful features for PDF documents with quick comparisons, information redact, searchable and editable PDFs, and many more.
3 – Sign Solutions: {Custom Quote}: The most advanced feature with all Acrobat PDF tools available as add-ons, customized branding, collecting e-signatures from websites, bulk sending, integrations, API access, SSO, authentication, and many more.
PLUS: Storydoc
Interactive sales deck creator
Storydoc is an interactive sales deck and pitch deck maker that enables startups to stand out with exceptionally attractive and engaging content. You may be making beautifully designed sales PowerPoints but that’s simply not enough any more. It is to be expected.
Stroydoc lets you break away from the “let’s make it pretty” paradigm into “let’s make it interesting”. It puts dynamic interactive content at your fingertips and makes your decks stand out, hold attention, and elicit action.
Storydoc is made for enabling buyers with built-in stroytelling slides that make reading and understanding a breeze. But it is also built for enabling sales teams to personalize at scale, automate outreach, and support the sales process. It also allows you to embed your favorite sales tools into your decks, like your calendar app, Vidyards, text-to-speech, or AI tools.
Designed with large and small businesses in mind, Storydoc is intutive and easy to use. More importantly, it can be integrated with major Sales CRMs like Salesforce, Salesloft, and Hubspot. This lets you access the tool from within your CRM and bring in analytics data on how your decks are performing.
One of the best parts about Storydoc is that it comes with out-of-the-box analytics that allow you to see how your decks are being read in real time, which slides your prospect spent the most time on and which they skipped never to look back.
Key Features of Storydoc:
- Interactive storytelling slides
- Validatedmobile-friendly sales slide templates
- Intuitive UX
- Sales CRM integrations
- Marketing and sales tool embeding (calendar, chatbot, lead-froms, and more)
- Personalization and automation built for scale
- Out of the box real-time tracking and analytics
Storydoc Pricing Plans:
Storydoc can provide flexible pricing plans depending on the number of users, but also has single seat plans that may be ideal for startups.
1 – Starter or Pro for single seats for $30 and $45 per month, respectively.
2 – Team Plans (for larger teams) – to be discussed with their sales team.
You can try Storydoc for free for 14 days.
PLUS: Snov.io
All-in-one platform for sales automation
If you need to have all basic tools for sales under one roof, Snov.io is a service you should pay attention to. The platform cares about your effective sales outreach from the moment you generate leads till the last email message with the customer.
With Snov.io email finder, you can find email addresses of prospects all over the web, including LinkedIn. Snov.io email verifier will ensure all emails you’ve gathered are valid.
Meanwhile, Snov.io email drip campaigns help you automate bulk email sending, keeping your worries about email personalization away. All email campaigns you send are automatically tracked, so you always know how your email outreach is running.
Having a new email account or any issues with email deliverability? Snov.io warm-up tool will help you prepare your account for bulk email sending with decent sender reputation and inbox placement rate.
Finally, Snov.io free sales CRM allows you to manage all prospects in a pipeline view, gather prospect information in one place, never forget to follow up, and share sales data with teammates.
And if you lack experience in sales, Snov.io offers educational programs such as Sales Cheats to help you master the art of selling.
Key features of Snov.io:
- Email finding
- Email verification
- Email drag-and-drop builder
- Email templates
- A/B testing
- Email analytics
- Email tracking
- Email warm-up
- Pipeline management
- Lead management
- Team collaboration
- Sales education
- Easy Integrations
Snov.io pricing plans
Snov.io has a very flexible pricing policy, offering a free plan, affordable pricing options, and customization depending on your needs.
1 – Free Forever Plan {$0/Month}: With the free plan, you’ve got access to a sales CRM, 150 credits you can spend on email finding, email verification, and email drip campaigns, and the possibility to warm-up 1 mailbox. The plan allows you to do database lead search, send unlimited campaigns and follow-ups from unlimited sender accounts, use all Snov.io Chrome extensions and set custom tracking domain.
2 – Starter Plan {$39/Month}: With the starter plan, you’ve got access to a sales CRM, 1,000 credits you can spend on email finding, email verification, and email drip campaigns, and the possibility to warm-up 1 mailbox. This plan includes everything from the free plan plus bulk lead search, bulk verification, unlimited team seats, 5,000+ integrations including integrations with Pipedrive and Calendly, unlimited data export, REST API $ Webhooks.
3 – Pro Plan: {$99/Month}: With the pro plan, you’ve got access to a sales CRM, 5,000 credits you can spend on email finding, email verification, and email drip campaigns, and the possibility to warm-up 3 mailboxes. This plan includes everything from the starter plan plus email A/B testing, individual team member statistics, team permissions control, and team data sharing.
4 – Custom Plan {$999/Month}: Custom plan presupposes custom lead generation and outreach strategy, prospecting services according to your ICP, copywriting services for email sequences and follow-ups, curated outreach set-up, and custom email warm-up strategy.
Conclusion
These are the 9 best sales tools for startups. Of course, you don’t need all of them, particularly if you choose an all-in-one platform that comes with a wide range of features.
Just decide which features are important to help your sales team achieve better results, and then invest in the right tools to enhance your sales and marketing-related tasks.
Your turn. Are you already using any of these tools or their alternatives? If so, what’s your experience been like?
