The Ideal Sales Stack: 7 Tools your Sales Team Will Love

Every sales team knows the importance of the right set of tools or as some call it, a sales stack. Even if you’re not familiar with the term, don’t worry. In this article, we’ll explain what a sales stack is and provide a guide on how to build one and select excellent software to help you crush your goals. 

With these tools, we cover every aspect of the sales process, from creating business proposals to a CRM, a lead generation tool, different communication tools, a cold emailing tool and a project management tool. 

Let’s jump in and see how you can optimize your sales process with great tools that will help you automate repetitive tasks and spend more time doing the actual selling. 

What is a Sales Stack?

A sales stack refers to all the software you use in your sales efforts. These tools aren’t frequently changed up and when you choose one that works, you’ll probably end up using it for a year or more. Therefore, it’s important to make the right choice from the start. 

When choosing the right software, you need to look at the reviews, talk to your team and take advantage of the free trials. As much as reviews can help you in your selection process, it’s important to test out all the software and find what works best for you. 

The sales cycle has 7 stages: 

• Prospecting leads
• Contacting potential customers
• Qualifying them
• Presenting your product
• Overcoming any objections
• Closing the sale
• Follow-up process

Your sales stack will help you manage all of them, with tools that work wonders in multiple stages.

Business proposal tool: Better Proposals

Better Proposals is software for creating and sending high-converting business proposals online. Every proposal comes with a digital signature option that lets you turn them into legally binding documents. 

We offer a vast library of prewritten proposal templates you can easily customize to your needs. The editor is easy to use, meaning you don’t need to have any kind of design experience.

Another great feature is the payment option which helps you get paid faster. You can choose between the three payment integrations - PayPal, Stripe and GoCardless, which is enough to get paid by 99% of your potential customers. 

In order to help you create high-converting proposals, we’ve created proposal AI. Once you create your proposal, our AI will compare it to other successfully signed and paid proposals in your industry. This process results in actionable tips on how you can improve your proposal for a better chance of getting it signed. 

Our work isn’t over once you send your proposal. Better Proposals will send out notifications to you every time someone opens, signs, and pays for your proposal. You also get proposal analytics that shows which device your proposal was opened on, whether it was forwarded and how much time did the person spend on each of the chapters. 

Knowing all that makes the follow-up process easier. 

Better Proposals’ key features are:  

• An easy-to-use proposal editor
• Content library
• 18+ hour customer service coverage per day
• Responsive proposal design
• Detailed proposal analytics and instant notifications
• Proposal AI
• Zapier and API integrations
• Live chat
• Custom domain option
• Legally binding digital signatures

Our pricing is pretty simple. We offer 3 different packages created for freelancers, small businesses and sales teams respectively. 

CRM tool: Close

Every sales stack needs to have a reliable CRM and Close is one of the best out there. Close helps you keep track of everyone and everything in your sales pipeline by providing you with an overview of all your sales activities. 

Close organizes your sales pipeline by creating a list that shows you what needs your attention. Once you complete a task, it will automatically disappear from the list, helping you stay on top of things. 

A special feature Close will win you over with is the built-in one-click calling automation. It helps your team conduct more sales calls throughout the day. 

Key features: 

The biggest benefit of Close CRM is the flexibility you get in managing your leads. Since every sales team has its own process, the tools they use should provide flexibility and put the user in the focus. 

Once you integrate all your tools and automate that part of your sales process, you’ll easily organize all leads that are currently in your sales pipeline. 

Close has 4 packages - Starter, Basic, Professional and Business. Seeing how the cheapest package allows you to store 2,500 leads, you can easily see that the value of these packages is amazing. 

Email finder: Hunter

Hunter is a tool designed to help you find and verify prospects’ email addresses. It gives you a few different ways to do this to account for different use cases.

You can type in a person’s name and website, and Hunter will provide you with their email address. Alternatively, you can enter a domain name, and it will show you all the email addresses associated with that domain.

Finally, there’s the option to upload a list of names or domains and perform a bulk search.

Hunter offers a Chrome extension that allows you to find the email addresses associated with every website you visit. There’s also a Google Sheets add-on you can use to find and verify prospects’ email addresses from within a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

Key features:

• Email finder
• Email verifier
• Domain search
• Bulk tasks
• Lead lists

Hunter offers a free plan that allows you to make 25 searches and 50 verifications per month. Paid plans start at $49/month.

Lead generation: LeadFuze

Tools that help you with lead generation are focused on AI which aggregates, matches and verifies data in order to find the best leads for your products and services. LeadFuze is an industry leader in designing and utilizing artificial intelligence in a way that will revolutionize your sales process. 

LeadFuze is a cloud-based software that doesn’t only help you generate new leads but also streamlines your sales process. This tool will help you sort and classify your leads all while preventing duplication of entries. 

You can export all important data and search users based on relevant criteria. The data you get from LeadFuze is high quality and will result in a list of emails, phone numbers, social media and more. 

Key features: 

• Contact database
• Account-based search filters
• Market-based search filters
• Prospecting tools
• Data import/export
• Lead capture
• Lead distribution
• Lead nurturing
• Lead qualification
• Lead segmentation
• Lead verification
• Ad targeting
• Social profiles as part of the database

The pricing is divided into 3 packages - Starter, Scaling and a Custom one. They are designed for individual sales reps, sales teams, and big sales teams respectively. Make sure to pick the right one for your sales stack.

Conversational messaging tool: Intercom

Intercom is a tool for live chat, support and sales. It helps your sales team engage with leads and users. It’s also a tool that we personally use and swear by at Better Proposals. Intercom has 3 distinct services:

• Support - website chat that lets you engage with site visitors
• Engagement - one-off messages or campaigns that drive customers to act (inside and outside the app)
• Marketing - solution focused on building and fostering relationships with customers

Undecisive clients got used to chatbots, which provide a quick way for them to get the needed information. Intercom will help you organize those conversations by sorting the ongoing chats, closed chats, and chats with people who are waiting for a reply. 

In order for your team to have enough time to focus on the entirety of the sales process, communication with potential customers and active users needs to be automated. Intercom will help you quickly send out help articles, engaging emails, give product tours, and more. 

Key features: 

• Live chat
• Support bots
• Shared inbox
• Product tours
• Campaign builder
• Free trial

When it comes to pricing, Intercom has 4 different packages. The Starter pack is designed for very small businesses. 

The other 3 packages include the 3 services we described in the beginning. You don’t need to buy all of them and can use only one, depending on your needs. The prices are calculated based on the number of team members, and people reached. 

Cold email tool: Mailshake

Mailshake is a great tool that can help you with cold email outreach. It lets you contact thousands of prospects at once and help you nurture those prospects with automated follow-ups. 

You can maximize deliverability by pausing automated processes once a prospect replies, unsubscribes, or bounces. 

Mailshake helps you monitor your campaigns with analytics that show the bounce rate, click rate, open rate, prospect count, response rate, unsubscribe rate and more. You can generate reports based on engagement, leads, and productivity. 

Key features:

• Data integration and storage
• Email builder
• A/B testing
• Drip campaigns
• Analytics and reporting
• Email personalization
• Integrations

Mailshake’s pricing plan is divided into 2 packages - one focused on email outreach and one focused on sales engagement. 

Project management tools: Monday.com

Monday is a reliable project management software that offers customizable platforms depending on the type of projects you’re working on. Monday helps you stay on track and reach your goals without sacrificing the quality of your end product. 

The dashboard will help you visualize the progress of your project, see who in the team needs more help, and easily predict if you will meet your deadline. With Monday, you can easily elevate your sales stack, streamline your processes, notify your team members about task updates, add files to your tasks and keep track of everyone’s responsibilities. 

The biggest benefit of Monday is the flexibility. All the boards are easily customizable, with columns that fit specific needs, like date, text, ratings, people etc. 

Key features:

• Account Management
• Analytics/ROI Tracking
• Audit Trail
• Calendar Management
• Calendar Sync
• Chat/Messaging
• Daily Reports
• Dashboard Creation
• Expense Tracking
• Interaction Tracking
• Lead Database Integration
• Sales tracker
• Team Assignments
• Third-Party Integrations
• Timesheet Management
• To-Do List
• User Management
• User Profiles
• Visualization
• Website Management
• Workflow Management

Monday offers a free package for a 2-person team, as well as 4 other packages designed for teams with different needs and the number of coworkers. 

Online meeting tool: Zoom

Zoom is a great communication tool for businesses of all sizes. Even though there was a need for video conferencing before, during the pandemic, tools like these became essential. 

Zoom is pretty easy to use, once you download it all it takes is a single click to join meetings. The platform has such a simple interface, that you’ll never get confused or distracted. Meetings allow for easy screen sharing and a chat option that is usually used to share links. 

Our favourite features are breakrooms and transcriptions of audio content. 

Key features: 

• Screen recording
• Chat
• Participation emojis (like raised hands) that don’t disturb the meeting
• Closed captioning
• Virtual backgrounds
• Screen sharing
• Transcriptions of audio content

Zoom offers a free version that lets you host meetings for up to 40 minutes. There are also 3 packages that offer longer meetings, a larger number of participants and other helpful features.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the importance of a sales stack, you can use our list and start building one. No matter how your sales process works, you’ll find that these tools can save you time and speed up your sales cycle. 

But don’t just take our word for it, try Better Proposals for yourself by signing up for our free trial. You’ll have 2 weeks to test everything out, send your first proposal, and fall in love with the tool.