10 Best Sales Tools for High-Performing Sales Managers

To meet and exceed sales targets, managers must react quickly to events taking place in real-time. They must know the basics of human psychology and skillfully use the tools they have available to increase their sales numbers. On top of that, sales leaders need to think over management competently.

Sales tools are one of the crucial elements of sales business technologies. They are designed to improve an efficient sales system. Here are some of the very best your business can use today. But before we get to the tools, let’s discuss some important matters first.

Key components of effective sales management

Sales management is the process of organizing and optimizing a sales department. The main goal is to achieve your sales targets. However, you can’t accomplish any of this without using specific tools.

Well-structured sales management will ensure that everyone in your company wins. First, the company will increase its profits. 

Businesses with a clear plan to sell perform better than their competitors. Second, it’s easier for sales managers to get their jobs done. The more precisely the management system is designed, the easier it is to work more productively. Understanding their responsibilities and having an effective motivation system stimulates managers to be more loyal and devoted to the company. This reduces staff turnover and eliminates constant, effective training for new sales job applicants.

Managing sales means coordinating all transactions related to sales, including:

• monitoring managers; 
• automating each stage of the sales funnel;
• studying your existing sales channels. 

In theory, management consists of trading operations, strategy, and analytics. In practice, it includes many more components, such as:

• working with your target audience, starting from its definition, identifying needs, and finally - strategic sales planning;
• working with your sales channels - attracting new distributors, identifying their needs, and discussing the conditions of cooperation;
• developing a sales plan through each sales channel, building a loyalty program, communicating with your customers, and encouraging them to purchase;
• organizing the effective work of the sales department, thinking over the implementation strategy, and calculating the optimal number of employees;
• controlling the sales department - recruiting employees, assigning responsibilities, motivating employees via pulse surveys, and identifying a comfortable way of communication and the need for reporting;
• searching for opportunities to attract new customers, and improving the after-sales service;
• summing up the annual performance, identifying the planned-to-achieve ratio, and adjusting the sales system.

Basic sales management tool benefits

Among the first benefits of sales management tools is multi-level planning. 

With its help, it's possible to determine the specific ways to achieve your goals and predict the approximate timing of success. The main thing is that everyone is involved in planning: the company, the sales department, each sales manager.

The second benefit is related to standardization and regulation. With sales management tools, communication with customers and between employees goes more smoothly. By standardizing sales, the company gets the following advantages:

• a buyer gets to know your company faster and more properly, which leads to profit increase;
• each sales manager understands the structure of the business process (at different stages);
• it is easier for the head of the department to identify the weak point in the sales process and correct it;
• a clear work algorithm contributes to easy employee training and indoor tracking.

Business process automation is the third benefit. You can achieve this by introducing a CRM system into your processes. 

This makes it easier to collect data on each client and all stages of the sale and keeps it in one place. It also helps you to identify weaknesses in the manager’s work.

Additional functionalities of sales management tools include:

• quality control of service provided by reports;
• analysis of your employees’ work and the market situation;
• motivating sales workers, with both monetary and intangible rewards

Standard arsenal of management tools for each manager

1. Whatever the company sells, whatever services it offers, a package of special tools is available to each manager. It significantly saves time and improves sales efficiency. This starts with a CRM system, a software that stores data about clients and their transactions. This allows companies to manage all communication with clients centrally. Working in this program, the manager can carry out a number of the following actions:

• group customer information. For example, create one group of clients that you make appointments with. And in the other — add all the processed buyers;
• promote the client to the second stage of the sales funnel. During the transfer, all information about the transaction, the amount, or the reason for the suspension is provided;
• form reports. The program analyzes the data indicated by the manager. And then it creates reports. This function provides the manager with the ability to assess the effectiveness of their work and predict future transactions;
• automate the control system. A couple of clicks, and the manager has a properly drawn-up document in their hands, ready to present to the C-level executives.

2. VoIP phones are considered a powerful trading tool. This allows you to call and correspond with customers. The integration of two systems (CRM and a VoIP phone) makes it possible to keep all communication with clients in one place. One thing that makes it even more convenient is a computer telephony integration. Thus, the manager has additional capabilities to improve interaction with them:

• access saved conversations or correspondence. This makes it clear what exactly the client is interested in, what stops them from purchasing the desired product;
• analyze time spent on a call or correspondence. You can also calculate the number of your own arguments to convince the client of the need to make a purchase.

The best sales management tools in 2021

Snov.io

Snov.io is a feature-rich platform that offers a variety of possibilities for sales management. It is a simple yet functional sales CRM that enables you to organize your sales process from scratch. You can use it to create deals, build pipelines with up to 100 stages, track at what stage of the sales pipeline your lead is, and give everybody in your team access to each process to ensure they work in cohesion.

Besides, as a sales manager, you can assign special roles to your reps and monitor how they work with leads. Meanwhile, your team is equipped with a toolset for an efficient sales outreach as Snov.io offers a lead generation toolset for automated sales funnel replenishment and an integrated email service that helps sales professionals reach out to potential customers with personalized offers. Never be late with follow-ups!

Snov.io also plans to add even more sales management features like a shared team task calendar, built-in Google calendar, role-based access control, data import, and in-depth analytics within the following months.

HubSpot CRM

It is a premier cloud-based CRM with a huge list of useful tools and integrations for sales managers. It copes with a number of tasks, such as content management, task scheduling and tracking, email integration, call monitoring, etc.

There are several tools in the HubSpot CRM arsenal:

• CMS Hub;
• Marketing Hub; 
• Sales Hub; 
• Services Hub; 
• Operations Hub.

Sales managers can work either by integrating all the hubs or using them separately.

HubSpot CRM is based on a customer-centric approach. With its help, the interaction between the manager and the client goes efficiently and smoothly. The collection of customer information is carried out using several sources. Data about the client's personal information, links of profiles on social networks, general history of purchases and history of interaction with this company are available.

VanillaSoft

VanillaSoft performs two specific functions:

• simplification of calling the customer base and increasing sales;
• real-time lead tracking.

Numerous reports are available in the platform dashboard. For example, you get ROI forecasting and overall organizational views. Dialing telephone numbers is automated, and the calls are recorded. All of this makes the phone marketing job much easier.

VanillaSoft also provides SMS and email marketing capabilities. There are also templates for correspondence, drip marketing, and SMS reminders.

Pipedrive

This tool provides good functionality for reporting, sales, and forecasting. Available not only for PC but also for iOS and Android mobile platforms. Its functionality allows you to manage a huge number of data, integrate e-mail, perform intelligent analysis of information, export data, reports on realized sales, and forecast future transactions.  

With the help of reminders, the service informs the manager of all actions and synchronizes them with the Google calendar.

Nextiva

Many consider it the best cloud business VoIP service provider. It provides advanced telephony capabilities, sending voice and text messages to an email address, online fax, and more. Moreover, along with voice calls and text messages, video meetings are also available. 

EngageBay

EngageBay is an all-in-one unified CRM software designed for small businesses and startups. It offers sales pipelines, appointment scheduling, 360-degree contact view, activity timelines, automation, and more. 

Plus, EngageBay’s intuitive sales dashboard offers a bird’s-eye view of all your KPIs to help you derive insights from data. The tool also lets you connect with your customers on multiple channels – phone, SMS, email, web, and push notifications. 

EngageBay could be considered one of the top CRM software for solopreneurs and SMBs due to its ease-of-use and affordable pricing. 

Aviso

A platform that allows you to promote your business on the Internet. To do this, the company uses various strategies to increase the target audience and attract new customers. Business promotion on the Internet provides an increase in the flow of website visitors and helps to increase profits.

Some of its features include:

• predictive forecasting; 
• deep analysis of transactions; 
• activity, relationship, and conversational intelligence; 
• GTM (go-to-market) and customer collaboration; 
• CRM.

SalesHandy

With SalesHandy’s help, the sales manager can shorten the time of the deal by taking advantage of real-time customer interaction insights. To do that you can use email tracking and link clicks, using possibilities sending personalized triggered emails, and more.

All these actions drastically increase the speed of closing a deal and ensure an income raise.

SalesHandy lets you exchange and track documents, emails, and send them in a personalized manner. It's great for both small and medium-sized enterprises and large ones (provided it is used correctly).

SalesLoft

The platform focuses mainly on the corporate segment. It is a tool that implements serious trading strategies.

SalesLoft consists of dashboards with sales pipelines and automatic notifications of possible unsuccessful deals. SalesLoft is indispensable in corporate sales, strategy planning, information analytics, and planning.

Mediafly

Continuous selling platform for content management. Provides the ability to create unique presentations for the sale of goods. With Mediafly, every organization can:

• create and edit information;
• distribute data between sellers in real-time;
• to perform product presentations in person or remotely;
• analyze the effectiveness of content and improve the way you interact with customers.

Competent and high-quality sales management must be mastered by every manager of any enterprise. In the field of trade, the level of competition is quite high, so you should always keep an eye on the latest developments. After all, this is the only way you will be able to cope with tasks as efficiently and promptly as possible.

Conclusion

Correctly managing sales means increasing the number of sales and attracting new streams of interested customers, identifying stumbling blocks in time and promptly monitoring the market. All these actions contribute to improving the quality of service. As a result, the work of the staff becomes more productive.

Choose the tools that will be more suitable for you and your company. Only in this way will you understand how useful they will be for your employees, whether they will be in harmony with your sales plan.

Remember, whatever you choose, the sales team will use it every day. So you need to be 100% sure about the needs of the team in each platform or CRM.