Every B2B sales manager is on a never ending hunt for new ways to exceed sales targets, close more deals, and improve team performance. And to find success in these, managers must find the right sales tools and build an easily usable and integrated stack of B2B tools.

However, with the number of sales tools out there, you’ll only find yourself swimming in an ocean of software demos and trials, paralyzed in your own analysis. 

But don’t worry—we are here to help you out. 

In this article, we’ll share with you 7 different B2B sales tools for different parts of the sales process to improve your productivity.

Let’s dive in!

Key features to look for in a B2B sales tool

If you want the sales tool to eliminate your manual efforts and speed up your team’s productivity, look for the following features when selecting the sales tool:

AI capabilities

AI sales assistants use AI capabilities to generate personalized emails, value propositions, call scripts, email icebreakers, and so on. This saves sales teams enough time, which they can use for prospecting and conducting sales calls. 

For example, if you want to send cold emails to prospective customers but have spent hours thinking about the right icebreaker to use in your emails, it can lead to enough wastage of time. Instead, using AI sales assistant software like Happysales helps you generate icebreakers automatically—within minutes. 

Bulk personalization

With bulk personalization, you can enable personalized outreach on scale—without the manual effort. 

Drafting and personalizing each email takes a lot of time. That's why most reps end up sending generic emails to masses or personalizing the emails just with the prospect's first name. That's not personalization. 

When you personalize your emails and send them in bulk, you:

• Send highly relevant emails that address each prospect’s pain points
• Use personality assessments and AI-enabled research to understand better
• Save enough time and focus more on selling activities

For example, Happysales engages multiple prospect profiles at the same time using DISC personality insights and 100+ intelligence triggers to craft unique emails to each of your prospects.

Sales coaching

With sales coaching, you can coach your reps at scale. When working at medium and enterprise-level sales teams, it’s hard for sales managers to coach sales reps regularly to perform well at their job continuously. 

When you use AI sales coaching tools, you can automate providing feedback to the reps and get detailed insights about the rep’s strengths and weaknesses. This could be a standalone platform that you can opt for or a bundled product feature in a B2B sales tool that you use.

For example, with Happysales’s AI coach functionality, sales managers and leaders coach their sales reps using AI sales coaching techniques and AI-based roleplays. With AI-roleplays, AI provides the rep with the prospect's information—from prospect details to their personality. The AI Coach will then feed the prospect's information and generate an AI prospect avatar so the rep can execute the roleplay. The AI will then provide feedback based on this practice call that the sales manager can review and coach their rep better.

Integration capabilities 

With strong integration capabilities, you can integrate your sales tool with other apps like CRMs, calendars and emails, web conferencing, and sales enablement. This comes in handy when your sales team is using different tools to execute different parts of the sales processes. 

Happysales for instance, integrates with LinkedIn. This helps the sales reps in prospecting and automatically get summarized information about the prospect. 

Analytics and reporting capabilities

Analytics and sales capabilities enable sales teams and managers to track, measure, and analyze their sales efforts in an easy-to-understand, visualized manner. 

These capabilities generate sales reports in minutes (without the reps and managers doing the manual work). Plus, they provide detailed insights, improve sales performance, and enable informed decision-making. 

For example, generating a sales call report and tracking analytics like total calls booked, total outbound calls, total inbound calls, and opportunities created.

7 B2B Sales Tools for a Frictionless Sales Process

Stage 1: Prospecting

At this stage, you find and engage with prospects, and turn them into sales opportunities. 

Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find prospects. Once done, you can leverage AI for sales prospecting tools to conduct research on these prospects and reach out to them. Happysales is one such tool. 

Happysales

Happysales is an AI-powered sales platform that lets sales teams of all sizes leverage AI capabilities to conduct prospect research.

The automated prospecting functionality enables sales reps to integrate the tool with LinkedIn and find prospect information. With personality insights, reps can understand the prospect’s personality and tweak their tone of voice accordingly when reaching out to the prospect. 

Key features

• AI agent: Build intelligent lists that match your ICPs, personalize emails and messages, and suggest email responses based on your company's knowledge base. 
• AI collaborator: Identify prospect’s pain points, automatically generate icebreakers, and get tailored messaging recommendations. 
• Bulk prospecting: Engage multiple accounts at the same time with personality insights and 100+ intelligence triggers.

Pros

• Personality insights 
• Integration with LinkedIn 
• Cost-effective

Cons

• No transparent pricing on the website

G2 rating: 5/5

Pricing: Starts at $25 per user per month

Stage 2: Qualification and discovery 

At this stage, you'll qualify the leads you identified in the prospecting stage. Learn about their goals, challenges, budget, and other decision-making factors. 

Here's one tool you can use to qualify your leads:

Drift

Drift is an AI-powered buyer engagement platform. It helps sales teams to qualify the leads and book calls. 

The live chat functionality is one of the standout features as it sends automated questions to leads, and qualifies them. 

Key features

• Live chat: Create multiple Driift inboxes to manage different types of conversations, instantly respond to frequently asked customer questions using Saved Replies, and get feedback from buyers using Conversational Ratings. 
• GPT suggested replies: Automatically generate potential replies in live chat based on the customer's website content, marketing materials, and context of a specific conversation. 
• Drift meetings: Give qualified leads the option to book the meeting in Microsoft and Google Calendar within the bot—whenever they’re ready with
• AI engagement score: Show sales reps which accounts are highly engaged and most likely to buy based on their interactions. 

Pros

• Intuitive user interface
• Personalized customer journey and real-time conversations
• Excellent chatbot and live capabilities 
• Real-time alerts
• Integration with Salesforce and 50+ apps
• Excellent onboarding experience

Cons

• Expensive compared to other AI sales assistant tools
• Steep learning curve for users who are new to chatbots and conversational marketing 
• Initial setup is not easy

G2 rating: 4.4/5

Pricing: Starts at $2500 per month; free plan available 

Step 3: Sales outreach

At this stage, you'll book meetings, nurture the prospects with omnichannel selling, and present product demos to prospects. To do so, use tools like Outreach for this stage. 

Outreach.io

Outreach is a sales engagement platform for medium and enterprise-level sales teams. It helps sales teams streamline their day-to-day sales activities, track sales opportunities, analyze sales calls, forecast sales pipeline, and coach sales reps—all under one roof. 

Key features

• Advanced email sequences: Manage multiple stakeholders within the same sequence, combine responses across multiple emails in a single thread, and send automated follow-ups. 
• OOO detection: Identify when prospects are out of office and pause the email sequence until they return.
• AI insights: Understand what content, workflows, sequences, and rep behaviors are leading to meetings and sales opportunities.

Pros

• Better auto-sequencing functionality
• Responsive customer support
• Integration with multiple platforms including Salesforce and LinkedIn
• Built-in outbound calling system
• AI email writer and sequence creator

Cons

• Expensive compared to other sales platforms
• Reporting feature needs to be improved
• Has a steep learning curve
• Doesn’t have transparent pricing

G2 rating: 4.3/5

Pricing: Starts at $100 per month for Standard plan 

Step 5: Proposal

At this stage, you'll create proposals and send them out to prospects. Here's one tool that helps you draft proposals and automate the entire process:

Proposify

Proposify helps you draft customizable and interactive sales proposals and contracts. Besides creating proposals, it monitors how the prospects are interacting with your proposals—which pages are prospects spending time on and how much time are they spending on each page.

Key features

• Proposify editor: Embed tables, videos, images, personalized welcome emails, signatures, input forms, etc. to draft your proposals and contracts
• Document analytics: Track how prospects are interacting with your team’s proposals and insights into prospects’ interests and behavior
• Signature history and audit: Maintain an audit of all the document e-signing activities

Pros

• Customizable proposal and contract templates
• Integration with 40+ tools including HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho 
• Seamless onboarding and implementation
• Responsive customer support

Cons

• Occasional glitches in the editor
• Not fully compatible with MS-Word

G2 rating: 4.6/5

Pricing: Starts at $35 per seat per month

Step 6: Objection handling and negotiation

At this stage, you'll address the prospect’s sales objections and negotiate with them. 

Besides handling objections for a current prospect, you can also use the B2B sales tool to collect sales objections based on past interactions with the customer and upskill the reps to handle objections in a better way.

Here's one tool that lets you address sales objections:

Gong.io

Gong is a sales conversation intelligence platform that lets you analyze sales conversations and provide AI insights such as the prospect’s pain points, concerns, and expectations. 

Key features

• Call spotlight: Automatically gives you critical insights from customer conversations such as customer pain points, outcomes, and next steps.
• Ask me anything: Get AI-generated answers to questions about a specific call such as the customer's objections and their expectations. 
• Smart trackers: Train the Gong’s model to uncover crucial trends in customer conversations such as prospects asking for discounts.
• AI notes: Analyzes call transcripts to provide insights like reps talk ratio, customer monologues, etc. 

Pros

• Call summaries and AI follow-ups
• Powerful sales insights
• Excellent AI capabilities 
• Easy to implement
• 70+ languages supported
• Integration with tools like Hubspot and Microsoft Teams

Cons

• Expensive
• Learning curve needed

G2 rating: 4.7/5

Pricing: Available on request

Step 7: Sales coaching

At this stage, sales managers will coach the reps to help them improve their skillsets and improve the team’s performance in achieving the sales quota and conversions. 

Here’s one such AI sales coaching tool that you can leverage to coach your reps at scale with the help of AI.

Happysales

Happysales is an AI-powered sales coaching tool that helps sales managers and leaders coach their sales reps using AI sales coaching techniques and AI-based roleplays. With AI-roleplays, AI provides the rep with the prospect's information—from prospect details to their personality. The AI Coach will then feed the prospect's information and generate an AI prospect avatar so the rep can execute the roleplay. The AI will then provide feedback based on this practice call that the sales manager can review and coach their rep better. 

Because Happysales offers AI-roleplays, which not many other platforms offer, it's the right tool to leverage upon if you want to scale rep coaching. 

Key features

• AI coach: Enable AI roleplays, and identify and provide insights on areas of improvement.

Pros

• AI roleplays
• AI-generated feedback

Cons

• Analytics are not comprehensive

Step 8: Follow-ups and referrals

At this stage, you’ll send follow-ups and ask the customers for referrals. To do so, you’ll need referral automation software that lets you share different types of referral options with customers at the right time—right after they have made the purchase. 

Here’s one referral automation software that you can use to amplify your referral marketing efforts:

ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy is a referral marketing software that lets you create different types of referral awards and track the success of your referral program. One of the standout features of this tool is its monitoring capabilities that alert you about fraudulent activities to maximize your returns. 

Key features

• Automated invitation: Send automated post-purchase emails inviting the customers to your referral program.
• Custom rewards: Send flexible rewards—cash rewards, store discounts, or custom gifts.
• Referral nudges: Add referral widgets, signup forms, and post-purchase forms to your referral program.
• Referral analytics: Track sales and traffic insights to track new sales from referrals and top traffic sources, and customer insights to know the top performers and what they say about your brand on social media.

Pros

• Easy to set up
• Easy-to-use customization
• Integration with email, analytics, and remarketing apps
• Referral fraud management
• Responsive customer support

Cons

• Reward emails land in the spam folder—sometimes.

G2 rating: 4.4/5

Pricing: Starts at $59 per month

Wrapping Up

To improve your sales team’s productivity, first identify which part of the sales process needs to be automated. To do so, discuss with your team to understand the activities they’re spending most of their time on. Once done, pick the tools from the list we shared with you and get started.