The Eight Best Online Tools for Sales Professionals

Revised June 14, 2023
Revised December 21, 2022
Revised December 15, 2021
Revised July 20, 2020
Revised July 26, 2019

It’s hardly news that B2B sales and marketing teams aren’t always on the same page. And it’s not just arguments over lead quality. According to research from IDC, over 40% of all marketing materials aren’t used by sales teams. The primary reason is that sales reps are unable to locate or access the materials when needed.

But in top-performing organizations, sales and marketing are closely aligned. A CRM system is usually the starting point, but the technology available to support sales+marketing alignment go well beyond a common platform for customer and prospect contact information.

The eight tools here deliver a range of functionality such as email automation, automatic email and call logging, workflow scheduling, lead qualification, sales enablement, and personalized direct mail.

Though these apps are designed primarily to improve sales productivity, they also support alignment by helping marketing teams supply their sales counterparts with the right social, email, and product/service content at the right time.

Sales Tools

1) Yesware
Google Review Count: 233

An email automation tool specifically for sales professionals. Yesware includes functionality for predictive analytics based on your sales team’s activities; post-send tracking (open and reply rates, clicks, attachment opens); sales prospecting based on emails, calls, lead nurturing, and social selling; and integration of all call and email activity with Salesforce.com.

Sample review: “How do you know whether people who don’t reply are reading your emails or ignoring them?…Use (Yesware) to monitor opens, clicks, and responses for every email you send to influencers. You can also create templates to automate your outreach and track which messages resonate best.” — PR Daily

Pricing: $12/$25/$55 per user per month

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group, PR Daily

2) ToutApp
Google Review Count: 162

Sales software that provides prospect activity tracking across email, web, and documents; a high-deliverability email service; email sales campaign automation; calendaring/scheduling; integration with popular email programs and CRM systems; and reporting.

Sample review: “These top sales tools will help you grow…(use) ToutApp for automating and scaling your lead nurturing and sales processes.” — Marketing Insider Group

Pricing: $49 per user per month; enterprise pricing starting at $15,000 per year

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group

3) Close.io
Google Review Count: 158

An inside sales CRM system for startups and small to midsize businesses featuring one-click calling with automatic call logging, workflow reminders, one-click SMS, email scheduling and history, and integrations to popular lead capture, customer service, and email apps.

Sample review: “Close.io is a cool little app that lets you track and record conversations…so you can focus on the discussion at hand. When you make a phone call to someone on your…list, Close.io logs it automatically in the contact record; you don’t have to do any manual data entry.” — PR Daily

Pricing: $65/$110/$165 per user per month

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group, PR Daily

4) Appointlet
Google Review Count: 138

An inside sales tool for consultants, business coaches, or anyone who schedules their time with prospects and clients. Customize your schedule and booking page, share with clients and prospects or integrate it into your website or email messages, and let people book an available time with you. It’s convenient for clients and eliminates phone tag or email back-and-forth to set appointments.

Sample review: “If you frequently set up phone meetings with customers then check this out. This software enables you to accept appointments from your website 24/7 without needing to manage a thing (syncs with your Google Calendar). All you need to do is set your working hours, and Appointlet will display the available times to your customers.” — StoreYa Blog

Pricing: four levels from $14 to $81 per month

Showcase reviews: StoreYa Blog

5) OppSource
Google Review Count: 131

Closed down in late 2019. Sales development software that enables lead qualification teams to prioritize calls and set daily schedules; create single or multiple phone, email and social touchpoints for campaigns; receive “moment of interest” alerts to improve connect rates; track activities and goals; and deliver account-based reports on sales-ready opportunities to field sales reps. Integrates with Salesforce.com, VoIP and marketing automation systems.

Sample review: “OppSource…(provides) tools to help organizations harness their data and sell more.” — Letters to Leaders

Pricing: contact vendor for pricing

Showcase reviews: Letters to Leaders

6) Whoisvisiting
Google Review Count: 71

Helpful for both marketing and sales teams, Whoisvisiting uses reverse IP lookup from several sources to identify visitors to your site; get the company name, contact details, website and other key information. Receive real-time reports on high-potential leads. See whose visiting your website in real time, create custom alerts, and create reports. Integrates with Salesforce.com.

Sample review: “Whoisvisiting.com is a very comprehensive tool to search for potential business leads. There is full transparency of data, as all raw data are presented in the reports…What is also impressive is that an account manager is available to every subscriber, who not only assists the subscriber to get started but also helps in initiating leads and other support issues. — Techno FAQ

Pricing: four levels from $49 to $149 per month; enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Techno FAQ

7) Modus (formerly App Data Room)
Google Review Count: 63

A sales enablement tool that lets you create an online content repository for sales assets (presentations, PDFs, videos, photos, diagrams, etc.) accessible through your own custom mobile app. Sales pros can present right from the app, generate leads and automatically push them to your CRM or marketing automation system. Sales teams always have the newest content, and usage and engagement can be tracked to reveal which content is most effective.

Sample review: “Businesses with sales teams rely on presentations and App Data Room can help streamline the process.” — Inc.

Pricing: $40 per user per month; enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Inc, Marketing Insider Group

Contact Management

1) Plaxo
Google Review Count: 366

A “smart” address book that works across multiple platforms and devices, deduplicating contacts, keep contact records and schedules in sync, and including social media account information for contacts.

Sample review: “Plaxo’s happy to import all your contacts from a range of sources including Gmail, Facebook, and your phonebook. It synchs constantly, so you needn’t worry about manual updates whenever you rub shoulders with someone new. It also recognizes duplicate contact info and merges the results without you ever worrying about it. The Personal Assistant updates any out-of-date or missing information using details from Facebook, LinkedIn, and the White Pages.” — Social Media Explorer

Pricing: free or contact vendor for upgrade pricing

Showcase reviews: Social Media Explorer

More Tools

Qwilr
Google Review Count: 136

Qwilr’s business proposal templates help you quickly create sales proposals that win deals. Embed spreadsheets, videos, SlideShare presentations, and more into your proposals. Get notified when your client views it and enable them to accept the offer with one click. Set up your quote as single select, multiple choice or combined package options. Use conditional pricing to show prices for different quantities in a slick, interactive format.

Pricing: $12/$66/$490 per month

xiQ
Google Review Count: 133

xiQ combines LinkedIn, Twitter, Flipboard, Hootsuite, Google Alerts, personality profiling, search engines and applies AI to help marketers create personalized newsletters for lead generation, and sales professionals to research prospects for more targeted selling. It applies artificial intelligence (AI) to content monitoring to enable marketing and sales teams to develop customized intelligence feeds for Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

Pricing: free or $15/$150 per user per month (per G2Crowd)

Hunter
Google Review Count: 132

Hunter lets you find professional email addresses in seconds. Get the email addresses behind any website. The Domain Search provides a list of the people working in a company with their name and email address, all found on the web. Hunter has 100+ million email addresses indexed, plus search filters (e.g., name or role) and deliverability checks. The company also offers email address lookup functionality through a Google Chrome extension and a Firefox add-on.

Pricing: free, or four levels from $49 to $399 per month

Triggr
Google Review Count: 121

Triggr provides sales people with real-time buyer intent signals. It’s constantly crawling the web to uncover real-time changes that allow your team to be notified when specified events occur, such as technology installations, employee movements, media coverage, new job posting, fundraising announcements, website updates, or mergers & acquisitions (M&A) activity. Triggr’s real-time lead finder tool allows you to access contact data and integrates with popular CRM tools.

Pricing: free or $49/$499/$2,500 per user per month

CallPage
Google Review Count: 103

Close more sales by responding to website visitors immediately. Add a “call me” button/widget to your website; the visitor enters their phone number and CallPage routes this to your next available sales rep, enabling call back in less than half a minute. Customize the widget, add “after hours” functionality, and track / measure / analyze all calls.

Pricing: free; $135/$320 per month; enterprise pricing by quote

Freshsales
Google Review Count: 88

A sales force automation platform that enables you to run chat campaigns and turn your website into a lead generation machine. With Freshsales, you can use AI-powered Chatbots to chat with visitors in real-time; capture visitor information with customizable web forms; and understand visitor intent by tracking page visits and actions on your site.

Pricing: free or $15/$39/$69 per user per month

Vocus.io
Google Review Count: 80

Turn Gmail into an effective sales tool. Vocus.io is a Chrome extension that adds productivity features and other functionality to Gmail, including the ability to accurately track email opens and link clicks, find email addresses from names, schedule automatic follow-up messages, launch multi-stage mail merge campaigns, and schedule meetings. It integrates with popular CRM systems including Salesforce and Pipedrive.

Pricing: $5/$10/$20 per user per month

Highspot
Google Review Count: 76

Sales enablement software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help sales professionals share the right content with the right prospects at the right time. The platform also includes buyer engagement functionality (email, phone, screensharing), analytics to help sales and marketing measure content performance, and integrations to dozens of CRM, marketing automation, file sharing, web conferencing, and other tools.

Pricing: contact vendor

Reply.io
Google Review Count: 74

An AI-powered sales engagement platform that enables sales pros to find and reach out to targeted prospects. It starts by searching their B2B database using 10+ filters to build focused prospect lists. Generate tailored multi-channel outreach sequences, then let Reply’s Jason AI tool handle basic customer responses, like sharing more details, addressing common objections, and even booking meetings.

Pricing: $60/$90 per user per month; contact vendor for enterprise pricing

Hippo Video
Google Review Count: 62

Hippo Video is a video creation and editing tool designed for sales pros. Create videos for lead generation, prospecting, demos, sales training, and more. Features include video email (ability to record and send videos directly from your email inbox); a template builder to help quickly create professional-looking videos; video personalization; and the ability to create custom sales pages. Hippo Video is also useful for customer support, marketing, and training.

Pricing: $20/$60/$80 per user per month

Click360
Google Review Count: 60

A sales and marketing tool that helps increase revenue by identifying patterns and sequences of digital behavior that indicate buying intent, and help you personalize your tactics for each customer to optimize sales outcomes. Click360 uses deep learning to combine website visitor data and CRM information to help B2B sales and marketing professionals spot their best short-term opportunities, use the right content to accelerate sales cycles, and identify the marketing and sales efforts that are actually generating revenue.

Pricing: $500 or $1,000 per month; contact vendor for enterprise pricing

BizKonnect
Google Review Count: 60

The BizKonnect platform is a cloud-based sales intelligence platform that supports lead generation based on the company’s business ecosystem. It provides organization charts mapped with the connections and pain points, lead scoring, and actionable intelligence.  The BizKonnect aggregator collects the structured and unstructured B2B data over the web to populate a database of 20 million companies, supplying B2B contact data for marketing campaigns, market analytics and personalized email campaigns.

Pricing: contact vendor

Better Proposals
Google Review Count: 56

Quickly create high-impact sales proposals. Choose a cover design from the site’s Marketplace; customize a pre-built template or create one from scratch; add e-signature and payment features plus legally binding terms & conditions; and use smart followup to automatically nudge unresponsive prospects at appropriate time intervals.

Pricing: $19/month single user, or $49/$129 month plus $19/user/month beyond three users

Convolo
Google Review Count: 43

Convolo offers two products to help generate more leads and increase sales productivity, Convolo Leads and Convolo Dialer. Convolo Leads displays a phone button in a popup to website visitors, who can either instantly connect with your sales team or leave their phone number to get a call back. Every lead is called within one minute, either by your sales team, or if they’re not available, by Convolo’s team. Dialer helps automate outbound call campaigns and provides detailed activity reports.

Pricing: contact vendor

UsefulPDF
Google Review Count: 40

Collaborate with your team to create, manage or track documents with accurate analytics, and accept legally binding e-signatures from third parties— all from one easy-to-use platform. Access over 1,000 lawyer-vetted and customizable templates to jumpstart document creation. Get your documents, forms, contracts, and agreements e-signed – fast (in hours, not days). Reduce your turnaround time by over 80% with legally-binding signatures.

Pricing: $15/$30 per month

GrowMeOrganic
Google Review Count: 34

Find unlimited, verified contact information for professionals and send personalized cold emails with automated follow-ups. Get access to more than 15 million companies and 575 million professionals around the world. GrowMeOrganic can be a valuable tool for sales, lead generation, talent recruiting, and media / influencer outreach. Use Zapier, Pabbly, or Make to connect to any tool with APIs / Webhooks.

Pricing: $39/$79/$159 per month

Salesmsg
Google Review Count: 33

A simple tool that gives businesses an easy way to text their contacts online from local phone numbers to help qualify leads and schedule appointments. Send and receive text messages online, automate messages with workflow, and personalize outreach using merge fields. Integrates with popular CRM and marketing automation platforms.

Pricing: $10 per member per month

Salespanel
Google Review Count: 30

A tracking and analytics tool for sales and marketing teams, Salespanel helps sales and marketing teams keep track of all their visitors, leads, and customers, and understand each interaction while leveraging data to nurture and close deals. Use data to qualify leads and nurture them on every step of the buyer journey. Features include lead tracking, segmentation, CRM integration, account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities, lead scoring, and marketing workflow automation.

Pricing: $99/$249/$499 per month

Outplay
Google Review Count: 20

Outplay provides a multichannel sales communication platform to help sales teams close deals faster. Features include personalized multichannel outreach through email, phone, text/SMS, LinkedIn, or Twitter; an integrated dialer enabling sales reps to make and receive calls from within their browser; email-to-chat path; an online meeting scheduler; and a Chrome extension that adds advanced email capabilities (send later, reminders, sequences, etc.).

Pricing: $75 per user per month; enterprise pricing by quote

SalesReach
Google Review Count: N/A

A sales enablement tool that helps align marketing and sales, and gives sales to access to approved content they can deliver to prospects at the right time. It gives sales professionals the ability to quickly create web-based sales pages that can be easily populated with content, personalized, and deployed to their prospects.

ComparableCompanies
Google Review Count: N/A

ComparableCompanies uses machine learning (ML) technology to find the most similar companies to any input target company, for competitive research and lead generation purposes. It provides quantitative insights on the similarity of two companies; online information about any selected company and its market; and email address of senior employees at any target company.

Ampliz
Google Review Count: N/A

A “best fit” sales prospecting tool, Ampliz SalesBuddy screens hundreds of companies relevant to parameters you specify (company size, industry, location, etc.) and provides an exhaustive list of potential customers to expand your prospect base. The tool curates company and key decision makers’ contact information, giving you phone numbers, email addresses, and more in seconds.

Showcase Reviews

Express Writers
Inc.
Letters to Leaders
Marketing Insider Group
PR Daily
Social Media Explorer
StoreYa Blog
Techno FAQ

This was the 45th post in the Best Online Business Tools series.

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#3: The Nine Best Facebook Marketing Tools
#4: The 14 Best Content Planning and Research Tools
#5: The 23 Best Content Ideation Tools
#6: The 24 Best Online Writing Tools and Apps
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#9: The 14 Best Marketing Automation Tools
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#11: The Seven Best File Sharing Tools
#12: The Five Best Infographic Creation Tools and Services
#13: The 28 Best Influencer Marketing Tools
#14: The Five Best Pinterest and Instagram Marketing Tools
#15: The 24 Best Visual Content Creation Tools
#16: The Six Best Online HR, Payroll, and Employee Scheduling Tools
#17: The 20 Best SEO Rank Tracker Tools
#18: The Six Best Screen Capture Tools
#19: The 15 Best Special-Purpose SEO Tools
#20: The Four Best Online Survey Tools
#21: The 26 Best All-in-One SEO Tool Suites
#22: The 32 Best Twitter Marketing Tools
#23: The 29 Best Web Analytics Tools
#24: The 24 Best Email Marketing Tools
#25: The 28 Best Web Design Tools
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#27: The 17 Best Project Management Tools
#28: The 21 Best Content Curation Tools
#29: The 26 Best WordPress Plugins
#30: The 14 Best Personal Productivity Tools
#31: The 11 Best Social Media Campaign Builders and Ad Monitoring Tools
#32: The 12 Best Landing Page and Form Builders for Conversion Rate Optimization
#33: The 17 Best Photo Editing Tools
#34: The Six Best Accounting and Finance Tools for Small Business
#35: The 15 Best Content Distribution and Amplification Tools
#36: The 17 Best Social Media Management Tools
#37: The 23 Best Google Chrome Extensions for Digital Marketers
#38: The 15 Best Audio and Video Editing Tools
#39: The Eight Best Social CRM Tools
#40: The Nine Best Reputation Management, RSS, and Social Search Tools
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#43: The 10 Best Customer Service and Customer Engagement Platforms
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#45: The Eight Best Online Tools for Sales Professionals