Best Sales Productivity Tools to Help You Accelerate Sales Pipeline

Less time spent on admin tasks and more time with customers is the key to unlocking your revenue goals. This is not just a random claim—95% of salespeople agree that less time spent on activities that don’t drive revenue, like admin tasks, helps them reach their quotas.

64.8% of your sales team's time is dedicated to activities that don’t drive revenue.

While it may not be realistic to eliminate activities that don’t drive revenue, there are steps you can take to address this issue. The most effective approach is to identify and automate manual tasks that consume a lot of time in your sales pipeline. You’ll want to automate all tasks that distract you and your team from time with customers. This is where we can help.

After several experiments with various sales productivity tools to optimize our sales process and improve our team's efficiency, we have narrowed down our selection to a few tools that we believe will significantly impact your team.

Now, let's get started.

Best Sales Productivity Tools in 2023

A sales pipeline often consists of six stages. Rather than an extensive list of tools, we will focus on one productivity tool for each stage that can save you hours every day.

1. Sales Prospecting 

Put simply, sales prospecting requires you to search for and find qualified leads (or potential customers), obtain their contact data, and verify it.

You can save yourself and your reps a lot of time when you use a sales prospecting tool that automates one or more steps involved in prospecting. With the right sales tool, you can quickly identify potential customers and access their verified contact information in minutes rather than hours.

Our recommendation? Cognism.

Cognism:

Cognism is a sales intelligence platform that helps your sales team find and connect with potential customers (or qualified prospects). Under the hood, Cognism provides accurate data at both the company and contact levels. The data includes emails, mobile numbers, and more. If your target market includes EMEA, US, and APAC, Cognism can help you find and connect with decision-makers in your target accounts.

Cognism Pricing:

Access to verified contact data of decision-makers comes at a cost. Cognism has two pricing plans: Diamond and Platinum. Each plan has two components: an access fee and a user fee.

While there are several differences between the plans, the main distinction is the number of contacts you can access. The Platinum Plan offers up to 25 million contacts, while the Diamond Plan provides access to 50 million contacts. The Diamond Plan also includes AI segmentation, whereas the Platinum tier offers manual data segmentation.

As for the actual cost, the Diamond Plan has an access fee of $25,000 and a per-user fee of $2,500. The Platinum Plan has an access fee of $15,000 and a per-user fee of $1,500. Please note that this pricing estimate is based on the information available on the open web. Cognism offers custom pricing, which can be lower or higher based on the number of users and other factors.

Cognism Review:

G2: 4.7 out of 5 (read reviews)

“Cognism has stood head and shoulders above other sales intel tools we've used in terms of contact data accuracy. When we adopted it, the contact data quality and connections with our leads (email and especially over the phone) increased measurably.”

- Phillip S.

‍Alternatives to Cognism: 

• Apollo.io
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Reply.io

2. Qualify New Leads

Once you have the list of prospects and their information, the next step is to qualify them. You need to check if they are a good fit for your product or service. While some companies, especially those who rely on inbound leads, qualify prospects in discovery calls, many prefer to do it before they make the first contact.

There are numerous lead-scoring tools available in the market. After trying a few, we opted for Clearbit to qualify leads, and it worked well.

Clearbit:

Clearbit is a data intelligence platform that assists B2B companies in enhancing existing contacts in their CRM, scoring and routing leads, understanding buying intent, and acquiring contact data. You can use Clearbit to qualify your incoming leads in real-time and direct them to the appropriate Sales Development Representative (SDR) or employ email automation to schedule meetings and accelerate the sales cycle.

Clearbit utilizes over 100 data attributes and first-party intent data to help you qualify and score every lead.

Clearbit Pricing:

While Clearbit offers a free plan, it does not include lead scoring and routing features. However, you can try the Business plan to evaluate if the solution meets your needs.

The Clearbit Enrichment API can range in cost from $99 per month (for 275 requests) to $199 per month (for 550 requests). If you have a high volume of requests, the price can increase.‍

Clearbit Reviews:‍

G2: 4.4 out of 5 (read reviews)

“Clearbit helps us, not only to generate leads but also to qualify them. The right effort with the right opportunity. Without Clearbit, our sales velocity would not be that good.”

- Remi S, Acquisition Manager. 

Alternatives to Clearbit:

• Chili Piper

3. Reaching Out to Leads

While you can use your CRM (such as HubSpot) to automatically send emails to new leads, having a specialized email assistant tool can help in triaging emails, writing follow-ups, reducing response time, and more.

We use Superhuman, and it works great for all customer-facing teams.

Superhuman:

Superhuman is an email client that aims to deliver the fastest email experience. It comes with numerous features and powerful keyboard shortcuts to help you achieve Inbox Zero faster. For salespeople who spend a significant amount of time in their inboxes, Superhuman can save hours every week.

It offers a split inbox to help you stay on top of emails from prospects, keyboard shortcuts to write entire emails, attach files, and use frequently used phrases. It also provides reminders to follow up in case of no reply and utilizes AI to write emails and summarize email threads. It also integrates with Salesforce to avoid context switching and retrieve relevant data.

Superhuman pricing:

Superhuman costs $30 per user per month.

Superhuman reviews:

G2: 4.5 out of 5 (read reviews)

“Superhuman makes it effortless to reach inbox zero, template responses, send scheduled emails, follow up on time, and organize emails. Their iOS and browser apps integrate together seamlessly to create an experience that is *super* fast and intuitive. They also have one of the most beautiful UI experiences I've ever seen.”

- User review.

Alternatives to Superhuman: 

• Titan
• MailMan

4. Booking Your Meeting

For most B2B sales teams, the primary objective of reaching out to prospects is to schedule a call with them. To simplify the process for both you and the prospect, it's advisable to use a meeting scheduler. Meeting scheduling tools allow prospects to view your available time slots, and their availability, and book a suitable time without the need for exchanging multiple emails.

Our preferred choice? Calendly.

Calendly:

Calendly is a meeting scheduling platform that makes it easy for prospects to book meetings with your sales team. It provides automation features for sending email or text reminders, sharing collateral, sending thank-you emails, and requesting follow-up meetings.

It also enables you to set up round-robin events, ensuring that new leads are assigned to different Sales Development reps (SDRs) or Account Executives (AEs) based on availability and preset priorities.

Calendly pricing:

Calendly offers a free plan for individual users to try out the product. The professional plan, starting at $12 per month per seat, allows you to use Calendly with your sales team. The professional plan also provides meeting automation (reminders and follow-ups), analytics, and other additional features.

Calendly reviews:

G2: 4.7 out of 5 (read reviews)

“When someone goes to book a demo, we can route them to customer success if they are already a customer, and if they are a lead, Calendly will check to see who the assigned owner is in Salesforce and populate that person's calendar for booking. If there is no owner, we round-robin the appointments among our sales team. This ensures that people always get to the right team and the right person which has saved us a ton of time and made the process super smooth for our customers and prospects.”

- Abbie D.

Alternatives to Calendly:

• Cal.com 
• Chili Piper

5. Meeting Automation

Once you have booked a meeting with your prospect, the next, and perhaps most important, stage in the sales pipeline begins: the meeting.

Everything you have done up to this stage is to make this meeting happen. Naturally, you need to be at the top of your game and focus on the prospect, actively engaging with them. At the same time, we both understand the value of sales call notes.

The solution? Automate recording and note-taking with Grain.

Grain:

Grain is an AI-powered recording tool that joins your calls to take notes, document the next steps, and automatically store meeting notes in your preferred platforms like Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

With Grain, you can focus on the call and let AI handle the admin work for you.

When your sales call begins, Grain automatically joins to record and transcribe the conversation. Once the meeting ends, you can access the automated meeting notes, which include time-stamped key points and action items, and share them anywhere you’d like with just a click.

Grain integrates with your CRM and collaboration tools, making it easier to share AI-generated meeting summaries with your team and automate data entry.

"I save up to 25 minutes after every sales call as Grain automatically generates and adds the call notes in HubSpot for me."

- Max Stoiber, Founder and CEO, Stellate.

Grain Pricing:

Grain is free to get started and offers affordable upgrades. With the free plan, every seat can record up to 20 sales calls and set up integrations with HubSpot, Slack, etc. that automate your admin work. The business plan starts at $15 per month per user and allows you to record, transcribe, and summarize unlimited meetings.

The best part? You only pay for recording seats.

Grain Reviews:

G2: 4.6 out of 5 (read reviews)

“Intuitive, easy to set up and deploy, No need for end-user training, lots of innovation happening within the product (AI, Automated Call Summaries, etc.). Better product than Gong/Chorus for a fraction of the price. No brainer.”

- Cailen D, VP of Sales, Neo.tax. 

6. Winning the Deal

When your lead is ready to convert and sign the contract, you need to send a custom sales proposal along with all the ‘quotes’ to close the deal. Rather than manually writing everything down in an email and attaching several documents, and sending a separate request to let your prospect sign the contract, you can do it all in one place and automate the entire process to save time.

How? Meet Qwilr. 

Qwilr: 

Qwilr is a user-friendly sales proposal software that allows you to create sales proposals that look and feel like a website.

It simplifies the process by eliminating the need for multiple attachments, allowing you to share a single URL with potential buyers. This means they can access and interact with your sales content without any hassle. Qwilr's interactive pages enable buyers to sign contracts, make payments, and explore additional offerings, all in one place. 

The platform also provides valuable insights by tracking buyer engagement, showing you what they're reading and clicking. This information helps you personalize your follow-up communication and cater to their interests. 

Qwilr further streamlines your workflow by enabling you to create templates and asset libraries. You can automatically generate sales materials from your CRM with just one click, saving you time and effort. 

Qwilr Pricing:

Qwilr has two plans: Business and Enterprise. The business plan comes with a 14-day free trial and costs $39/mo per user. It offers everything you need and an integration to HubSpot. The Enterprise plan is the right fit if you use Salesforce and require admin control/permission. It costs $59/mo per user and comes with an annual contract. 

Qwilr Reviews: 

G2: 4.5 out of 5 (read reviews)

“Qwilr is really easy for our team to use-- we store templates that we customize for new projects, it is easy for multiple team members to work jointly to edit and refine the proposals together, and our customers love the way the proposals look and feel!"

- User review on G2. 

Alternatives to Qwilr: 

• PandaDoc
• Proposify

Deploy Sales Productivity Tools and Save Time

In conclusion, improving the productivity of your sales team is crucial for achieving consistent revenue goals. When you reduce time on activities that don’t drive revenue and automate manual tasks, you can empower your team to focus more on selling and closing deals. 

Cognism offers accurate company and contact-level data for sales prospecting to help you find and connect with potential customers. Clearbit is a valuable tool for qualifying new leads by enriching existing contacts, scoring leads, and understanding buying intent. 

Superhuman provides a fast and efficient email client to streamline communication with prospects. Calendly makes it easy to schedule meetings as it allows prospects to schedule appointments based on their availability. 

Grain automates recording and note-taking during sales calls, saving time and ensuring important details are captured. Qwilr tops us off and makes it easy to create great sales proposals and allows prospects to interact with your sales content in one place.