A sales toolkit for startups survives and thrives on meager budgets. Since we are all about effective sales, we thought it might be a great idea to list down sales tools that are light on the pocket but can do most of the heavy lifting.
This by no means is an exhaustive list – we just picked the top ones we’ve used and loved. We’ve included alternatives just in case people want to test them out. You can check out these 11 free sales training resources for your team while you are at it.
Also, we are a B2B company, so we’ve tried these tools from the point of view of B2B sales.
Discovering Emails And Looking Up Prospects- Most Important in your Sales Toolkit
Getting email addresses and quickly looking up leads are two things sales reps spend a LOT of time on. Rapportive helps do both – at the same time and makes a great addition to your sales toolkit. You can guess the email using various combinations and if you’ve got it right, the prospect’s Linkedin profile pops up next to the compose window. It’s hard to believe one extension can have so much use.
Alternative Tools To Discover Emails
Hunter.io, Skrapp, Email-format.com. Hunter and Skrapp give you the emails directly with the accuracy percentage. These have paid versions but their free versions are good enough for small teams with not a lot of heavy lifting. Email-format is completely free – while it doesn’t provide you with the emails directly, it helps you figure out the combination a particular company uses.
Scheduling/Tracking Emails and Prospects
We’ve used Streak in our sales toolkit, and it’s beautiful for when your volumes are low. It’s great for tracking emails – lets you know who opened, when, where, and from which device: Better yet, it has a CRM that sits within your inbox. Oh yes, and it has an elegant mail-merge tool option too.
It’s a brilliant option for teams that are doing very targeted reach outs and want to track views at a granular level. Seriously, so many killer features rolled into this one simple-to-use tool.
Collaborating As A Team
Asana is like a wonderful tool in our sales toolkit. We work in a distributed team across SF and Bangalore, so knowing who is doing what and when is super important. Asana is a pretty neat project management software and the basic version is free for up to 15 users.
Alternative Tools for Collaboration (Inside and Outside your Sales Toolkit)
Slack and “The-whiteboard-at-the-corner-of-the-room- it’s visual and (hence) effective – see ours below. The team in Bangalore uses this).
The tools listed above are free and plenty to make up the sales toolkit. Each of them has many features rolled into one eliminating the need to have a dozen more extensions or apps installed. These work mostly when the prospect numbers are low and the team small, though. If you are looking to expanding your team, you will have to move up and upgrade to paid/full versions of the software.
