The world of sales is a brutally competitive and fast-paced one where tiny details make a crucial difference. Experienced sales reps know that there is little margin for error. Efficiency, agility and the ability to juggle countless tasks are all part of a successful sales rep’s repertoire. A good sales application goes a long way towards achieving this.
Why Does Your Business Need Top Sales Apps
As the volume of tasks increases, you may find yourself snowed under by the sheer number of tasks and details that demand your attention. In order to be effective, a successful sales rep has to be able to produce full, detailed data about any given client at a moment’s notice. The best sales representatives are able to respond immediately as a deal develops, and stay on top of their leads with a proactive approach.
5 Key Features Every Top Sales App Must Have
Versatility and Usability
User-friendly interface and intuitive design is one of the key features that shouldn’t be overlooked while choosing a sales app. At the same time, a good sales application should also be versatile and scalable, so it can be easily deployed and adopted by your sales team. This would help you save a quality amount of time training your sales agent, while getting the most out of the application in no time.
A good sales app comes with a range of interactive features that provides sales reps with the right data and information which is required to optimize the sales experience. It is also better to choose a multilingual sales app with cross-platform design that can be easily distributed across international teams and installed in any kind of device or operating systems.
If your sales agents are required to travel to different clients’ locations, your sales app should be ready for offline use with 100% functionality. This is another additional feature that can be essential in cases where your sales reps may encounter connectivity issues at remote locations, while giving them a hassle-free and smooth sales experience.
Sales Automation
Sales Automation continues to be one of the top priorities for sales teams. Many top companies believe that streamlining the sales workflows can drive better results and help to generate higher revenue. Companies that use marketing and sales automation can observe an average sales improvement of 34%.
But what type of automation do you need in a sales app?
Well, there can be endless possibilities of streamlining workflows inside a sales team, such as automated invoicing, emails, feedback, etc. One of the most commonly used functions is automating the email follow-ups. Prospects who have entered the sales funnel by showing their interests in the product, but are still not sales-qualified, should be looped in the conversation with tactical follow-ups.
There are studies that show that most of the users who are looking for a certain product, service, or solution, tend to go with the company that responds to them first. Therefore, timeliness is essential in the game of sales, and this is why sales may have to automate outreach and follow up. By responding to a prospect, the moment they reach out, the sales reps have significantly increased the chances of converting the prospect and closing the sales deal.
Sales Analytics
Your sales application should be capable enough to collect sales-related data, and give you actionable insights on your sales performance. Sales analytics is an important feature that can help you optimize your sales activities, as well as forecast sales to keep you on track. Top sales apps use a range of sales metrics that allows you to develop a robust sales strategy, set goals and KPIs, and generates higher revenue for the business.
Many sales teams adapt personalized selling to optimize sales performance and acquire more customers. It is quite difficult to offer personalized customer journeys without having key insights on customer-level data such as sales history and buying behavior.
Every customer’s journey is unique and may have multiple touchpoints. Customer’s buying journey can be optimized by tracking important metrics at each touchpoint such as what time the customer visited the website, pages and sections interacted, key actions, etc. Customer analytics can help sales agents to make recommendations based on customers’ actions and behavior.
Reporting Features
Reporting is one of the core parts of the sales team. It is important to measure and track all the sales activities that are happening within a company over a certain period of time. The sales reps use reports not only to forecast sales and tracking goals, but also use it to make key business decisions that impact the overall sales performance.
Sales reports are critical for your sales team to successfully identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the sales funnel, and help the sales representatives to close more deals.
Interactive Dashboard
An end-to-end system that gives an overview of all the sales activities is an important feature of a good sales app. Both the managers and sales reps can be at the top of the game by tracking and monitoring the status of every sales activity at every stage, as well as the accomplishment of tasks by the sales reps. Sales managers can have full visibility on all the live sales along with potential challenges or blockers.
A good sales app with a robust dashboard displays all the important sales data that can be leveraged to monitor ongoing sales as well as the performance of sales reps.
Here we go through 20 of the best sales applications available on the market right now.
20 Best Sales Applications
Salesforce
Salesforce is more than just a sales application. It provides features that support the sales pipeline, it has tools for marketing, project management, lead management, and much more. Because Salesforce has tools that are useful across multiple departments and can automate most processes, it is extremely customizable and can be tuned to your particular business setup.
For this, you might want to enlist the services of a company like OMI. Their experts assess your current setup and help you to carry out the integration that unifies your data assets processes. They also perform any software development tasks that might arise with the customization of Salesforce, help you transition onto the platform and provide technical support afterwards.
Spotio
Spotio features tools to help you manage the different aspects of sales. For the sales rep, there is a mobile app with tools like automated data entry to make their jobs easier. For managers, the platform has features to show live sales-related data about what each team member is up to. This includes visits and correspondence with clients. It also has the usual task management tools, routes, notes, and other such features that the best sales apps offer. Spotio also provides integration with other major platforms, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle Netsuite, Hubspot, and many more.
SalesRabbit
SalesRabbit is intended for use in the field. From a mobile device, you can use the app to manage your sales teams and use aggregated reports to review their performance. The app offers tools to manage leads throughout the sales pipeline, templates for creating presentations, forms, and contracts. SalesRabbit also provides integrations with multiple apps such as Salesforce, Google Tasks, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Hubspot, MailChimp, Facebook Lead Forms, and many more.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk has solutions for sales teams from different sizes of organizations. Start-ups, small businesses, and large enterprises are all catered for. It has tools like email tracking with alerts that notify you when a recipient interacts with your email, smart email automation, and consolidated reports so you can review and analyze performance.
Zendesk can also log phone calls and make recordings, and link interactions to a particular client so you can see the interaction history with them in one place. You can also add notes if you want to. Zendesk has a mobile app so sales reps can access these tools on the go. The platform also has open APIs that you can use to integrate with other products, like MailChimp.
AirSlate
Using AirSlate’s predefined workflows, you can make use of automated services that do everything from creating invoices and reviewing orders, to drafting contracts and NDAs. AirSlate is essentially a collection of predefined process templates that you can use in many scenarios. For marketing, for example, there are solutions for creating marketing campaigns, collecting testimonials, carrying out market research, and a lot more.
Basecamp
Basecamp isn’t necessarily a sales app, but it is a useful platform that can help sales teams coordinate better and improve efficiency. A common message board helps teams quickly see tasks and projects that are pending, or any important information that members might need to share. There are tools for scheduling, assigning tasks, group chats for easy communication that can be referenced later, and the ability to save relevant documents and files in one place. Basecamp provides all the information related to a project in one place.
Asana
Asana, like Basecamp, is a project management tool that provides useful tools which would help any sales teams stay on top of their tasks. It also provides boards so projects can be visually separated. You can drill down further into tasks and subtasks and assign these to team members with specific due dates and times. Asana provides tools for automation, with dependencies that link the results of one task to another. The platform also has dashboards with well-crafted charts that summarize your reports in customizable formats. Asana also offers integration with other apps including major platforms like Google, and Microsoft.
Evernote
Evernote is another popular app that provides note taking, and project planning tools. Though not specifically designed for sales representatives, it has great tools to enhance efficiency and productivity. Sales reps can use character recognition to read text from documents and business cards. It is also possible to annotate almost anything, including pictures and PDFs. You can set up to-do lists, plan projects, all in one place.
Dragon Anywhere
This is a useful tool to add to the sales rep’s toolset as these are people who are typically on the go. Dragon Anywhere is a dictation app that is available across mobile and desktop devices. You can dictate to the app in English or German and it will take notes with impressive accuracy. With no limitations on the length of the dictated document, this tool can be used to complete paperwork on the fly, for example, or simply to take notes.
Dropbox
Dropbox was initially just a cloud-based file storage service. The company has continuously added features to the service and it has now evolved to include more tools for collaboration. Teams can discuss project-related files by placing comments next to them. Teams leads can track how information is shared within the company and with other parties. Stored files can be accessed across multiple devices, with tools to recover data in event that it is lost. The company data benefits from what Dropbox calls enterprise security.
Expensify
In the course of their activities, sales reps accumulate expenses which are normally billed to their employers. Getting this paperwork sorted out is an unpleasant headache that requires time and effort. Expensify is an application designed to automate this process. You simply scan receipts, and the app then picks up the relevant data from it. You can set up approval rules within the app that Expensify can use to notify you if you are about to incur an expense that requires prior approval. Expensify can be integrated with your company’s accounting package or HR platform to make the exchange of data seamless.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a project management platform that sales teams can use to organize tasks and subtasks, files, correspondence and calendar events. The platform has tools for the automation of different tasks in the sales pipeline, the visualization of data from the pipeline, and features that enable collaboration by making data accessible between teams. ClickUp also has templates for things like CRM and account management so you don’t have to start from scratch. ClickUp also integrates with other major platforms like Jira, Outlook, Slack, and more.
SpotHero
When you are a sales rep, you are always on the move. This means the nightmare of finding parking in busy city centers is much more than just a frustrating inconvenience. SpotHero helps to alleviate this problem by providing a platform on which people can reserve parking spots in garages across the US. Sales reps can travel to that next client meeting with the assurance that they will not lose precious minutes trying to find a free parking spot. And emerge from the meeting without dreading the possibility of their car having been towed.
TripIt
In the COVID era, travel has become much more complicated. Regulations are constantly changing for different locations. Staying up to date with all that information is an ongoing process. For sales reps, whose jobs involve more travel than most, having an app that can collate all the information relevant to a specific trip is nothing short of a godsend.
TripIt organizes trip-related info, including COVID advice, itineraries, airport information, and even alerts that tell you if you qualify for compensation after a delayed or canceled flight. You can view all this info on the device of your choice, mobile or desktop.
Mind Tools
Mind Tools provides learning resources that are geared towards personal development. It has resources that help build skills like time management, self-motivation, stress management, decision-making, and communication – skills that are of critical value to people in sales. Subscribers can benefit from carefully curated content that helps people become more effective in achieving their career goals.
Mailshake
Instead of just sending a cold email, or cold calling random people, creating a series of actions that will usher a lead along your sales pipeline is more likely to produce results. Mailshake helps you find the combination that will work best. You might start with social media, and then a campaign email, and only after that phone your prospect. You can automate the emailing process, with Mailshake monitoring statistics and adjusting based on that feedback, for example pausing a campaign when recipients start to unsubscribe.
Chorus
Chorus is like a personal assistant during meetings, but with a lot more functionality. The app reads audio from meetings, transcribes and summarizes it, and forwards the summary to you. The app also reads these notes and generates reminders based on the discussions in the meeting. It collates information from different forms of correspondence, including phone and emails. If a colleague’s name comes up during a meeting, Chorus lets them know in case they need to get involved. The platform offers these and many more tools to help you get the most out of conversations and to help you improve your own communication skills.
SignNow
SignNow is one of AirSlate’s workflows. It eases the complications of getting paperwork done with legally binding signatures. The workflow enables you to create documents for signing, add your own signature and automate the sending process so that the documents arrive in a specific order.
Slack
Slack is a popular collaboration tool that provides a company-wide communication platform. Sales teams can use slack for voice calls, video calling, and text messages. You can set up channels to discuss specific topics and share related files. And you can integrate it with other well-known platforms like Jira, Google Drive, Outlook, Zoom, and more.
Time Buddy
World Time Buddy (WTB) makes scheduling and planning across different time zones much easier. For those sales teams interacting with clients in different time zones, it helps to be able to see at a glance, how different times translate. It is particularly helpful when scheduling meetings or phone calls.
Benefits of Using Sales Apps
Top sales apps provide a unified source of information about any given client, lead, or prospect including the details as they relate to the sales pipeline. At the end of it all, the best sales app will produce reports that will enable you to set targets, analyze performance, and improve your productivity as a sales representative.
Here are the benefits of using a sales app:
- Improved team productivity and more sales deals
- Better workflow with process automations
- Improved communication with prospects
- Efficient customer service with quick response
- Key insights into sales data using sales analytics
How to Choose the Best Sales App
Your choice of the best sales app is entirely dependent on your specific usage scenario. You might be well served by a single comprehensive platform, or by a series of specialized apps. Whatever the case, your choice should be based on your needs. An app that does one thing well might be more beneficial to you than a full-fledged, highly customizable platform with many fancy features.