Did you know that 70-80% of customers prefer virtual sales interactions over traditional in-person ones?

If you’re used to in-person meetings with prospects, being thrust into a remote sales team can leave you feeling overwhelmed — especially if you haven’t had any prior virtual sales training.

For better or worse, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual sales are the “new normal,” and most salespeople have had to adapt.

How do you create meaningful relationships with your leads when you can’t be in the same room as them? How do you demonstrate your offering’s value in the virtual world when you’re used to in-person meetings? 

Don’t worry. I’ll answer these questions (and more) in this guide.

I’ll explain what virtual selling is and highlight six challenges of remote sales. I’ll also provide seven practical tips to help boost your virtual selling efforts.

This Article Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to a specific section)

• What is virtual selling? 
• 5 Major challenges of virtual selling
• 7 Practical tips for effective virtual selling
  • Leverage the right technology
  • Provide additional value
  • Provide value immediately
  • Ask critical questions
  • Practice active listening to gain trust
  • Align your marketing and sales teams
  • Track key metrics

Let’s jump right in, okay?

What Is Virtual Selling?

Virtual selling (also known as remote selling) is the process of interacting and converting a lead virtually instead of meeting and interacting with a prospect in person.

Why is it important?

As the world was gradually moving towards digitization, sales processes have had to follow suit.

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the speed of the virtual selling revolution.

With in-person meetings out of the picture, salespeople had to adapt.

Quickly.

Whether it was by ramping up their email efforts or scheduling countless Zoom meetings, virtual selling was clearly the new normal.

However, just because it has been widely adopted doesn’t mean that it has been perfected.

Only 26% of buyers believe the average sales professional is skilled at selling virtually!

Clearly, there are several challenges associated with virtual selling.

Let’s take a closer look at some of them.

5 Major Challenges of Virtual Selling

There are several challenges involved in virtual selling, including:

1. Keeping the buyer engaged throughout the sales conversation

91% of virtual sellers struggle to keep buyers engaged.

Why?

Many people look at virtual interactions as an opportunity to multitask. According to one survey, more than half of respondents admitted to checking their emails during virtual meetings.

And if your leads aren’t paying attention to what you’re saying, it’s going to be impossible to convert them!

2. Building a relationship with the prospect can be tricky

In a face-to-face setting, you can discuss the prospect’s concerns and hash things out quickly. You can create an atmosphere where your lead feels at ease, making selling much easier.

However, it’s much more challenging to replicate this same atmosphere when the person exists as a two-dimensional image on your computer screen. In fact, 88% of sellers find it challenging to develop a relationship with the buyer in a virtual setting.

While social selling through a computer is not impossible, it does mean that you’re going to have to work harder to ensure you’re interacting with your prospects in a way that builds meaningful relationships.

3. Can be challenging to demonstrate the value of your offerings

Ultimately, it’s your job as a salesperson to sell solutions, not products.

Your prospect has a problem, and you’re in the position to make recommendations.

With traditional field sales, field reps can perform a quick demo to give the prospects an idea of what they can expect.

However, in a virtual sales strategy, demonstrating solutions via virtual communication can be challenging. 89% of sellers feel it’s challenging to change a buyer’s perspective on how to solve their problem.

Why?

One potential cause for this may be due to sellers using poor visuals.

Visuals are great for showing how your product can help the prospect — without going into lengthy descriptions. Moreover, technological difficulties and poor presentation skills can hamper how effectively you can demonstrate your offerings’ value to the prospect.

4. It’s difficult to gauge body language and pick up personality cues

With an in-person sales meeting, you have the opportunity to leverage non-verbal cues to understand how the conversation is going and steer things in the right direction.

As a sales rep, seeing things like your prospect’s posture and hand signals are powerful indicators that’ll help you gauge their feelings and emotions. This enables you to understand how the prospect feels about the sales conversation and adapt accordingly.

In a virtual meeting, selling is a lot harder as many of these cues aren’t available or are difficult to notice.

5. Leading a virtual sales team can be tough

Communication can be a significant challenge for remote sales teams.

To help mitigate this, sales leaders need to create an environment where team members can express their concerns and collaborate with ease. So if you’re a sales leader, ensure your team knows you’re available should they face any challenges handling prospects.

Clearly, there are a lot of challenges when it comes to virtual selling.

So what can you do?

7 Practical Tips for Effective Virtual Selling

If you’re struggling to close sales virtually, here are seven tips to help:

Tip #1. Leverage the right technology

When it comes to virtual selling, technology is your best friend.

Here’s a look at some essential virtual tools you’ll need:

• An email outreach tool
• Video conferencing software
• A graphics tool
• A CRM

A. An email outreach tool

Reaching out to your prospects through email is one of the most effective virtual communication channels. Not only do most customers prefer to be contacted by email, but it’s also a scalable solution.

Moreover, emails are less intrusive than other communication channels like cold outreach calls.

Why?

Think about it from the perspective of the customer.

If you receive a call from a sales rep and they dive straight into lengthy descriptions of what their product or service can do, you’d hang up the call within seconds.

On the other hand, if you receive a personalized email containing relevant content that explains how their offering can help you solve your challenges and achieve your goals, you’re more likely to engage with it on your own time.

And what’s the best way to leverage the power of email?

GMass.

GMass is an email marketing tool that works directly inside Gmail. It’s popular among employees at tech giants like Google and Uber as well as those working for social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

GMass is an excellent tool for small business owners and entrepreneurs as well, helping them reach their target audience efficiently.

Here’s a quick look at how GMass helps you navigate the virtual selling terrain:

1. 52% of customers state that they won’t do business with an organization that doesn’t personalize emails.

Fortunately, GMass can automatically personalize your emails to increase customer engagement. From auto-customizing entire blocks of text to adding personalized images and links, GMass has got you covered.

2. Track core email metrics to see what’s working in your campaign and what isn’t. GMass will automatically generate a Campaign Report whenever you send an email campaign, highlighting useful metrics like unsubscribes, open rate, click-throughs, and more.

3. As many as 80% of deals require up to five interactions. That’s a lot of emails to keep composing, and a ton of follow-up messages!

But don’t worry; GMass can automate the follow-up process to help maximize your engagements.

4. Schedule your emails to ensure that they arrive in your prospect’s inbox at just the right time. All you need to do is compose the email and schedule it to be sent at your desired time. GMass will take care of the rest.

The best part? 

Getting started with GMass is a piece of cake. All you need to do is download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account, and you’re good to go.

B. Video conferencing software

One of the cornerstones of in-person sales is meeting your lead face-to-face.

And while nothing can replace being right in front of your lead, video calls can help you capture some of that magic. Virtual sales calls can help you provide value in an informative and engaging way, creating a more personal experience for the prospect.

Several video conferencing tools can help you, with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and GoToMeeting being the most popular.

Using a tool that your prospect is already familiar with makes the virtual sales process a lot smoother. So ask them what video conferencing tool they are familiar with and try to set up a meeting on that platform.

C. Use graphics to enhance your presentations

While most sales calls can be dull, you can keep your B2B buyers or B2C customers engaged with graphics that make your interactions more exciting.

Consider creating an interactive sales deck with photos, charts, icons, infographics, and other graphic tools to add value while keeping the prospect engaged.

Canva is one of the most popular web-based graphics tools that can help you do this. Its free version offers a great variety of templates and designs, or you can opt for a paid plan that gives you access to even more options.

Visme is another excellent web-based platform you can use to create beautiful graphs, reports, and charts to make your presentations more appealing.

D. A CRM tool to help filter data

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is a massive help in streamlining your virtual sales cycle.

With a CRM, you can manage and analyze customer data, segment your customers, create sales reports, forecast sales, and scale your sales process as the organization grows.

Zoho is a popular CRM tool that offers lead management, omnichannel communication solutions, and various analytics options. HubSpot CRM is another well-known platform that can serve your organization.

Tip #2. Provide additional value

47% of modern buyers have viewed at least 3-5 pieces of content before interacting with a company’s sales representative.

And it’s important to be aware of this because you don’t want to tell your prospects what they already know.

If you can’t provide value beyond the information buyers can find on their own, they have no reason to engage with you.

Instead, provide them with additional value throughout the virtual sales process.

Give them solutions to problems that they weren’t aware of that could be affecting their success.

For example, you could explore industry trends that impact the prospect and educate yourself on those areas. Then you can find and share relevant information that makes them aware of these issues.

Adding this kind of value is a sure-fire way to engage them and get them interested in what you’re offering.

Tip #3. Provide value immediately

Keeping the buyer engaged is critical to having a productive virtual sales meeting.

As a salesperson, this means you need to provide value as soon as the virtual meeting begins. Lead with a unique perspective that you’ve developed through similar discussions in the past.

An example would be to start the meeting with a challenge you’ve identified. This will show them you have something to offer from the get-go, help guide the conversation, and create a space where the prospect can trust you.

Tip #4. Ask key questions

Whether it’s B2C or B2B sales, asking the right questions is highly effective and goes a long way in making prospects feel involved during a virtual meeting.

But what questions should you ask?

Start by asking them open-ended questions about the challenges they face and the goals they want to achieve. This helps lay the foundations for creating a meaningful relationship, and you’ll gain valuable insights into the areas where you can help — and that will improve overall engagement.

Moreover, it makes the prospect feel like you care and opens the door for them to ask you questions. And by providing solid answers to those questions, you’ll build trust, which brings me to the next point…

Tip #5. Practice active listening to gain trust

Practicing active listening means paying attention to more than just what your prospect says over the video call.

It’s about taking a close look at their choice of words, tone of voice, etc.

In essence, active listening is about absorbing a deep understanding of what your prospect is saying, rather than listening simply to respond. This helps you uncover the buyer’s needs and see if they’re a good fit for your offerings.

For the prospect, this shows you’re genuinely interested in listening to their concerns and helping them find the best solution.

All of this allows you to demonstrate your expertise, which helps build credibility, leading to trust. And without credibility or trust, you’re unlikely to land a sale.

Tip #6. Align your marketing and sales teams

Marketing and sales are core business components that can’t exist without each other.

And while the two departments may not always see eye-to-eye, having them working in tandem is crucial for an effective virtual selling strategy.

Your marketers have a great understanding of who the customer is through extensive research, but it’s unlikely they’ve spoken directly to your prospects. On the other hand, the sales team can provide great insights into the prospect’s biggest pain points or the goals they want to achieve.

For example, since so much of your marketing efforts are likely already digital, marketing teams will have information on what digital assets your leads are interested in seeing. This can make digital pitches easier for sales teams, as they’re aware of what the prospects are looking for in advance of a sales pitch.

As a result, aligning marketing and sales teams can increase your closing rate by 67% and boost your marketing revenue by more than 200%.

Tip #7. Track key metrics

Tracking key metrics is a must to ensure you’re constantly improving your virtual sales processes. It helps you identify what’s working and what could be improved further in your approach.

Here are some key metrics that will help you analyze your virtual selling campaigns:

• Opportunity-to-win ratio
• Conversion rate
• Revenue generated by each representative
• Average days to close
• Average deal size
• How much time the prospect spends in each stage of the sales pipeline
• Churn rate
• Average lead response time

It’s also worth tracking the performance of your emails — as that plays a crucial role in how you reach out to the prospects in the virtual world.

Fortunately, GMass’s campaign report automatically summarizes all your email campaign data, including:

• The total amount of emails you sent
• How many recipients opened your emails
• How many recipients clicked a link, and more

Wrapping Up

Virtual selling is here to stay, so it’s essential to have the right sales training to stay afloat.

Use the tips in this guide to improve your virtual selling skills and sales performance to hit those targets with ease. And given how popular email marketing is today, you need to have the right email tool to amp up your virtual selling efforts.

In other words, you need GMass.

From auto-personalizing mass emails to analyzing your campaign’s effectiveness, GMass can overhaul the way you send emails.

So, why not give GMass a try today and see the benefits for yourself? 

Footnote:
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/these-eight-charts-show-how-covid-19-has-changed-b2b-sales-forever 

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Picture this:

You’ve been nurturing a potential customer for some time now, and they’re finally ready to advance along the sales cycle and purchase your product or service.

What’s next?

All you need to do now is craft the perfect sales proposal document to close the deal.

Why does it have to be perfect?

A sales proposal can be the difference between closing a deal or losing a potential customer.

But don’t worry.

In this article, I’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to write a winning proposal. I’ll also highlight three tools that can help you create sales proposals effortlessly.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

• What is a Sales Proposal?
• How to Create an Impactful Sales Proposal
  • Step 1: Understand Your Prospect’s Unique Challenges and Goals
  • Step 2: Conduct In-Depth Research
  • Step 3: Analyze How You Can Help a Prospect Overcome Their Challenges
  • Step 4: Prepare a Rough Outline of Your Sales Proposal
  • Step 5: Write an Informative and Compelling Sales Proposal
  • Step 6: Proofread and Edit Your Sales Proposal to Perfection
  • Step 7: Deliver Your Sales Proposal
• 3 Excellent Tools to Help You Create High-Converting Sales Proposals 

Let’s dive in, shall we?

What is a Sales Proposal?

A sales proposal is a formal document you use to pitch your offerings to a potential customer.

It helps you:

• Convince the prospect that you are uniquely positioned to meet their needs
• Offer insights into the nature of a client’s problem or pain point
• Provide a walkthrough of your deliverables, scope of work, associated costs, and more
• Inspire them to take action and purchase your product or service

Essentially, a sales proposal describes how you’ll help the prospect or the prospect’s organization address their challenges and accomplish their goals.

What are the Different Types of Sales Proposals?

You’ll generally come across two types of sales proposals:

1. Solicited Sales Proposal

When a prospect asks you to send them a proposal, it’s known as a solicited sales proposal. With these kinds of proposals, the prospect is already interested in your offerings — you just need to highlight how well your services are suited to their requirements.

There are essentially two kinds of solicited sales proposals:

1. A request for proposal (RFP) is issued when your prospect knows their pain points but doesn’t know how to solve them. When you receive one of these, your goal is to describe how you’re uniquely positioned to alleviate the prospect’s pain points.
2. A request for quotation (RFQ) is sent when the prospect wants to know your specific deliverables and costs (for example, a bid proposal). Your competitors might also be asked to send an RFQ, so you could highlight how you have an edge over your competitors.

2. Unsolicited Sales Proposal

Here, a prospect could be aware of their challenges and might be looking for solutions to address them — but they haven’t asked you to send them a sales proposal.

That’s why, when you send an unsolicited sales proposal, it’s essential to build your case.

Explain your reasons for reaching out, describe how you can help them overcome their challenges, and show why you’re the best solution out there. Moreover, you can also use unsolicited proposals to pitch new solutions to existing clients or extend current contracts.

In any case, if you create your sales proposals the right way, you stand a good chance of bagging a client and generating more revenue for your business.

Now that you know what sales proposals are, let’s see what goes into creating the perfect sales proposal.

How to Create an Impactful Sales Proposal

Creating a sales proposal that balances genuine value-addition with the right amount of persuasion can be tricky.

To make things easier, just follow these seven steps when developing your sales proposal:

• Step1: Understand Your Prospect’s Unique Challenges and Goals
• Step 2: Conduct In-Depth Research
• Step 3: Analyze How You Can Help a Prospect Overcome Their Challenges
• Step 4: Prepare a Rough Outline of Your Sales Proposal
• Step 5: Write an Informative and Compelling Sales Proposal 
• Step 6: Proofread and Edit Your Sales Proposal to Perfection
• Step 7: Deliver Your Sales Proposal

I’ll cover each of these steps in detail to help you create a high-converting sales proposal:

Step 1: Understand Your Prospect’s Unique Challenges and Goals

Every prospect has unique challenges and goals.

As a result, the value you can add and the proposal you send will vary on a case-by-case basis.

That’s why, to draft an effective sales proposal, you’ll first need to identify your prospect’s needs.

Determining a prospect’s unique goals and challenges will help you understand how to serve their needs best and put forward an individually tailored solution.

There are two ways to go about this:

A. For a Solicited Sales Proposal

Here, you’ll already have an idea about the potential client’s needs and goals.

You just have to analyze your prospect’s requirements in detail to see if your product or service can solve their problems. Moreover, you can determine what other solutions a prospect might be considering and explain how your solution fares in comparison.

B. For an Unsolicited Sales Proposal

For an unsolicited sales proposal, you’ll need to uncover some challenges that are unique to the prospect.

You could go through:

• Trade journals
• Annual reports
• Newspapers and magazines
• Conferences and trade show reports
• Social media content
• Podcast or blog interviews
• Online groups and forums

Since a prospect isn’t expecting a proposal from you, it’s crucial to establish that you’ve got a firm understanding of their challenges and goals before you can present your proposal.

Step 2: Conduct In-Depth Research

Simply digging up data on your prospect’s goals and challenges isn’t enough.

For a more holistic understanding of your prospect’s context, you’ll also need to keep tabs on recent trends and developments in their industry or niche.

Additionally, I recommend researching a prospect’s direct and indirect competitors in the market. Look into the competitors’ strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Analyze their value propositions, and see where you can help the prospect achieve an edge.

You can then include these findings in your sales proposal to show them that you’ve done your homework and are genuinely interested in helping the prospect achieve their objectives.

Step 3: Analyze How You Can Help a Prospect Overcome Their Challenges

Evaluate how your product or service is uniquely positioned to help a potential customer overcome their challenges and accomplish their goals.

You can start by analyzing the historical data from your sales process to identify how you helped past and existing customers in the same niche.

With that in mind, think of the benefits you can offer to new customers.

Analyze how each of your features will potentially solve a prospect’s problem. Finally, develop a unique selling proposition that distinguishes you from the competition and explains how you will add value to overcome their challenges and please their customers.

Step 4: Prepare a Rough Outline of Your Sales Proposal

A sales proposal is usually comprehensive, so it’s easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of your objective.

To overcome this, create an outline that will act as a blueprint for the entire sales proposal. It can cover the following key sections:

A. About Us

Provide a quick introduction to your business and product or service.

Talk about your values and your mission. The goal here is to help your prospects get to know you better and leave a lasting positive impression.

B. Challenges and Goals

Organize the unique challenges faced by your prospects and their primary goals in a logical sequence.

Remember, this is a crucial part of a winning sales proposal — it will demonstrate how well you understand a potential customer’s needs and prove that you’re not randomly approaching them to make a sales pitch.

C. Additional Market Research

Present market research insights that show them that you understand their:

• Business environment
• Target market
• Competitors, and
• Other external factors

This can show a potential client that you have an excellent grasp of their business and industry.

D. Proposed Solution

Describe your personalized solution here.

Walk your prospects through your strategy for making their lives easier. Talk about the positive implications of using your product or service — like increased revenue, better customer experience, more efficiency, and so on.

Additionally, mention the particular objectives you’ll be tackling and any critical milestones in the process.

E. Deliverables

List the features you’ll provide, the type of support you’ll offer, and related promises. Help your potential customer understand what your proposed solution will look like in terms of deliverables.

You could also walk them through your estimated execution timeline and scope of work to give the prospective client a clear idea of what to expect and when.

F. Costs

Explain your product’s or service’s costs here. If it makes sense, offer options so the customer can choose a price that fits their budget.

Jot down the pricing structure, the features included under each plan, whether you charge extra for things like additional users or upgraded levels of support, etc.

If the client has solicited a sales proposal from you, it’s always a good idea to include only the pricing options that fall within the prospective client’s budget.

G. Social Proof

Social proof can inspire trust in your offerings and encourage your prospects to buy your product or service confidently.

Consolidate positive reviews, testimonials, and recommendations from your existing customers or clients and include them in this section.

H. Call to Action

A call to action (CTA) is a great way to conclude your sales proposal as it clearly tells the prospect what they should do next.

Specify the next steps you’d like a prospect to take if they’re interested in your solution. Your objective here is to make it easier for an interested client to close a deal quickly.

Step 5: Write an Informative and Compelling Sales Proposal

With your research and rough outline complete, you’re all set to draft your winning proposal.

Fortunately, there’s no standard length for a successful sales proposal.

It usually depends on the type of proposal you’re writing.

However, you don’t want to create an overly long or ineffectively short document.

To keep that from happening, here are my five tips for writing a great sales proposal:

A. Keep It Brief and Simple

Keep your sales proposal to the point — only include info that will add value to your prospects and aid their decision-making process.

Use clear titles, spacing, and bulleted lists appropriately to improve the presentation. An effective sales proposal makes it easier for prospects to skim through the sales proposal and pay attention to critical information without getting distracted.

B. Focus More on Solving Problems

A great proposal focuses more on how you can satisfy your customer’s needs and less on your service’s/product’s features.

Center the entire service or product sales proposal around your client’s needs.

Describe how your product or service is uniquely positioned to solve a particular prospect’s problem efficiently.

C. Add Visual Elements

Use visuals to break the monotony of your sales proposals.

You can add relevant visual elements like infographics, flow charts, graphs, and more to your business proposal. They help you better explain complex ideas, challenges, and outcomes.

D. Use the Prospect’s Language

Most sales professionals tend to use too much technical jargon in their sales proposals.

However, if your prospect is unfamiliar with the product or service type, they could be confused about what specific terms mean. Or worse, if they don’t understand what you’re talking about, they can easily assume there’s no pressing need to buy what you’re selling.

As a rule of thumb, emulate the language your prospect would use to help them understand your business proposal better and build rapport quickly. To gauge what tone your prospect is comfortable with, look at their social media profiles, blogs, press releases, annual reports, and more.

E. Make Use of Sales Proposal Templates

If you’re approaching a large number of leads, drafting a brand-new, winning sales proposal from scratch each time can be inefficient.

Instead, you can use an easily adjustable sales proposal template for a prospective customer based on their persona.

For example, if you’re running a marketing company, you could use a sales proposal template to pitch to someone matching the following persona:

• Job title: Marketing Manager
• Industry: SaaS
• Revenue: $1 million to $5 million
• Location: East Coast

On the other hand, you could use another template for a different persona like:

• Job title: Chief Marketing Officer
• Industry: Retail
• Revenue: $50 million to $100 million
• Location: Across the United States

Modifying a proposal template based on a buyer persona for a prospective client can save you a ton of time and help close more deals. Fortunately, many sales proposal tools offer customizable templates that you can modify and reuse to match varying buyer personas.

Step 6: Proofread and Edit Your Sales Proposal to Perfection

When your sales proposal draft is done, read through it carefully and check for spelling or grammatical errors. Additionally, you can use an app like Grammarly or Hemingway for advanced insights on improving your draft.

I’d also suggest keeping a checklist of questions to help scrutinize and improve your final proposal, like:

• Does the sales proposal provide clarity on how you can be of assistance to this potential client?
• Did you include a compelling, unique selling proposition?
• Do you sound genuine and confident?
• Are your key benefits and deliverables tailored to this prospect’s needs?
• Is the sales proposal brief and easy to understand?
• Have you clearly stated the next steps this prospect can take?

Step 7: Deliver Your Sales Proposal

When you feel that you’ve got a great proposal, it’s time to deliver it to your prospect.

Emails are often the best way to deliver your proposal document as they’re quick, reliable, and effective. And for successful email outreach, there’s no better tool than GMass.

What’s GMass?

GMass is a powerful email outreach and automation software that works inside Gmail.

Its ease of use makes it a popular tool used by employees in large companies like Google and Uber and social media powerhouses like Twitter and LinkedIn. GMass also works perfectly for small business owners, solopreneurs, and more.

Here’s a quick look into how GMass helps you deliver your sales proposals:

1. Create automatically personalized links for your sales proposals, so your prospects don’t have to download them.

Additionally, with GMass, you can automatically add personalized images, attachments, and paragraphs to your sales email message.

2. Schedule sales proposal emails to go out at optimal times to reach prospects when they’re most likely to engage with your emails.

2. Quickly build an email list of prospects who match your buyer personas to convert more leads.

2. Set up automated workflows to follow up on your sales proposal emails and boost conversions.

2. Track the performance of your sales proposal emails through analytics reports that cover the click-through rate, open rate, and more.

Great!

Now you know how to craft and deliver great sales proposals.

However, you could still have a hard time managing multiple sales proposals at once.

To make things easier, here are three tools that could help streamline your sales proposal processes:

3 Excellent Tools to Help You Create High-Converting Sales Proposals

I’ve covered each tool’s key features, pricing, and user ratings to give you a comprehensive overview:

1. PandaDoc

PandaDoc is a document automation software that helps you streamline the process of creating, approving, and signing your business proposal, sales contract, and more.

PandaDoc Key Features

• Pre-built templates help you create sales proposals in minutes.
• CRM integrations allow you to personalize the service or product sales proposal based on unique customer data.
• Collect necessary information from a prospective customer via forms to create an effective sales proposal.

PandaDoc Pricing

PandaDoc offers a free plan and paid plans that start at $25/user per month.

PandaDoc Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (760+ reviews)
• G2: 4.6/5 (830+ reviews)

2. Proposify

Proposify can help you manage your sales proposal workflow, close deals faster, and create a winning proposal.

Proposify Key Features

• Pre-designed and approved templates help build a successful sales proposal in minutes.
• Design editor helps you create sales proposals that are visually appealing and on-brand.
• Approval permissions ensure that your product sales proposal is thoroughly vetted before it goes out to a potential customer.

Proposify Pricing

Proposify offers paid plans starting at $49/user per month.

Proposify Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (250+ reviews)
• G2: 4.7/5 (370+ reviews)

3. RFPIO

RFPIO is a request for proposal (RFP) response software that helps you automate the bid proposal response process and close deals more efficiently.

RFPIO Key Features

• CRM integrations help you build contextual proposals.
• You can maintain all proposal-related team sales conversations in one place.
• Reports and dashboards offer insights on win rate, revenue attribution, and resource use.

RFPIO Pricing

Contact their sales team for pricing details.

RFPIO Ratings

• Capterra: 4.8/5 (80+ reviews)
• G2: 4.7/5 (340+ reviews)

Final Thoughts

A great sales proposal helps your prospect understand the value of your solution in the context of their unique needs.

However, creating a successful sales proposal is only half the battle.

You also need to deliver the final proposal the right way to your prospective customer and follow up as necessary to convert a sale — you need GMass.

With GMass, you can automatically add personalized proposal links in your email, send them out at optimal times, track prospect engagement, and do so much more.

So why not try GMass today and deliver your winning sales proposal the smart way?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

How can sales automation increase your revenues?

Sales automation streamlines the repetitive tasks in your sales process to help you focus more on selling your product or service and spending less time on admin work.

In this article, I’ll cover what sales automation is and how it adds value to every salesperson. I’ll then go over how your organization can implement sales automation easily. Finally, I’ll highlight five powerful sales tools to boost your sales productivity today.

This Article Contains:

(Click on a link to jump to a specific section)

• What is Sales Automation?
• How to Implement Sales Automation in Your Organization
• Top 5 Sales Automation Software Tools to Close Leads Efficiently
  • GMass for Sales Email Automation
  • LeadFuze for Lead Generation and Research Automation
  • Pipedrive for Sales Pipeline Automation
  • Calendly for Sales Meeting Automation
  • HubSpot Marketing Hub For Marketing Automation

Let’s jump right in, shall we?

What is Sales Automation?

Sales automation is the process of streamlining repetitive and time-consuming sales tasks with software-based solutions. This can power up sales productivity and help you increase the revenue of your company.

You can automate a variety of manual tasks in your sales process, like:

• Finding leads’ contact info
• Data entry and maintenance
• Emailing qualified leads
• Scheduling meetings
• Logging sales progress
• And much more

There are a few things you’ll need to take care of for effective sales automation:

1. First, carefully evaluate your sales process and look for automation opportunities.
2. Then, create a sales automation strategy and research different sales automation tools like email automation software, CRM software, lead management software, and more.
3. Finally, fine-tune your sales process automation for maximum efficiency.

But is automating your sales processes actually worth the effort?

Note: In the following sections, I’ll talk about the advantages of using sales automation and implementing it in your organization. If you’re just looking for automation tools, feel free to skip ahead to my top 5 sales automation tools.

How Sales Automation Benefits Sales Professionals

Sales automation helps you:

• Automate routine tasks in your sales workflow so that your sales professionals can focus more on selling
• Provide improved customer experience by reducing response time
• Maintain sales data consistency and quality across the organization
• Reduce human error when updating sales-related info
• Gain deeper insights into individual sales rep performance, channel success, and more

In a nutshell, automation simplifies your sales process while amplifying your sales efforts.

How to Implement Sales Automation in Your Organization

There are different ways to implement sales automation in your organization — you can automate the entire sales workflow or just some parts of the process.

Ultimately, your automation strategy will depend on your specific requirements and budget.

To help you, I’ll highlight some crucial parts of your sales process that can benefit hugely from automation software:

A. Prospecting and Research Automation

It’s tempting to sell your product or service to everyone. However, trying to close a sale with people you know nothing about is rarely effective.

Your sales team needs a solid basis to qualify and prioritize your leads.

Prospect research can help with that.

It’s about studying your prospects and their businesses extensively, trying to determine how well they fit your ideal customer profile, and figuring out what buyer persona they embody.

But how do you find the relevant info for a prospective customer?

By using a research automation tool, your sales team members can effortlessly gather info about leads, their specific interests, affiliations, social media presence, and more.

And this information can help you identify qualified leads that you can nurture as you advance them through the sales funnel.

B. Email and Communication Automation

Your sales team will likely approach a large number of qualified leads in the hope of meeting your sales conversion goals.

But sending the same generic message or email to every lead is a bad strategy.

Why?

Your leads usually prefer communications tailored to their specific interests — rather than a generic, boring message that doesn’t address their particular needs.

However, it’s not practical to manually craft custom messages for each lead on a massive prospect list. Additionally, if you need to follow up consistently, it will be an even more painstaking task.

And this is where communication automation comes in handy.

It allows you to automate communication efforts like emails, meetings, follow-up messages, and sales proposals, etc., so you can conveniently approach a larger audience.

C. Sales Activity and Lead Management Automation

Sales is a multi-step process.

You go through a series of interactions and conversations with a prospective customer as you try to advance them along the sales pipeline. Every sales manager should keep tabs on this interaction history to evaluate the rep’s sales productivity.

You should track details on sales calls made, emails sent, and meetings arranged.

Most importantly, you’ll need to ensure that the sales team reaches out to a lead qualified by your marketing team as soon as possible — ideally, within 24 hours. Doing so can drastically improve your sales conversion chances.

However, manually tracking the sales activity log with a spreadsheet can quickly become confusing — especially if you’ve got many reps and leads.

Automating activity logging with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software allows you to store and track sales activities from one central place accurately. This way, you can devote more effort to analyzing and honing your sales strategy.

A CRM can also help you keep track of the metrics related to crucial questions:

• How many leads do you have at different stages of the sales funnel?
• Which leads should be prioritized?
• What are your conversion rates at each stage?
• How is each salesperson performing at each stage?
• How long does it take to close a deal on average?
• What are the conversion rates according to demographic criteria?

D. Sales and Marketing Alignment Automation

You need to keep track of  potential people who:

• Visit your website
• Fill out a subscription form
• Download a whitepaper
• And more

Ideally, all this data should be captured in your marketing automation software. Additionally, you should integrate the marketing automation software with your CRM software. This will allow sales-ready prospects to be handed over to the sales team automatically.

For example, if a newsletter subscriber visits a product page on your website, you can set up a trigger to send an immediate sales email to that subscriber offering a product demo.

Moreover, aligning your sales and marketing teams helps them work together with the shared goal of achieving and exceeding your target revenue consistently.

Top 5 Sales Automation Software Tools to Close Leads Efficiently

Here are five powerful sales automation tools that will streamline your sales efforts:

• GMass for Sales Email Automation
• LeadFuze for Lead Generation and Research Automation
• Pipedrive for Sales Pipeline Automation
• Calendly for Sales Meeting Automation
• HubSpot Marketing Hub for Marketing Automation

I’ll cover their key features, pricing, ratings, and alternatives to give a glimpse at their capabilities, fit, and potential ROI:

1. GMass for Sales Email Automation

GMass is a powerful email marketing and sales email automation tool that works inside Gmail.

Its superior outreach and marketing automation abilities have made it a popular tool with employees in large companies like Google and Uber and social media giants like Twitter and LinkedIn.

GMass is also the perfect email automation software for startups, small business owners, and sales professionals.

GMass Key Features

With GMass, you can leverage powerful sales email and marketing automation features like:

A. Automatic Sales Email Personalization

Personalizing your emails for each recipient can increase sales engagement and conversions — with 72% of consumers only engaging with personalized messaging.

However, manually crafting unique mass emails isn’t practical.

Don’t worry.

With GMass, auto-personalizing mass emails is a breeze.

This sales email automation tool allows you to add personalized paragraphs, links, and images automatically to your emails in seconds. These highly customized messages can quickly boost your sales conversion rates.

B. Detailed Sales Email Analytics and Reporting

To improve conversion rates, you need to hone your sales and marketing process continuously.

To do this, you’ll need to analyze your previous sales campaign’s performance.

GMass can help you with that.

This email marketing automation tool automatically generates in-depth reports right inside your Gmail inbox each time you send a campaign — covering crucial email metrics like open rates, click-through rates, bounces, and more.

These core statistics help you measure different sales campaigns’ effectiveness and continuously improve your sales tactics and strategy.

Additionally, GMass’ email deliverability wizard provides data-driven insights that could help you achieve improved inbox placement, increased open rates, and better sales prospect engagement.

C. Automated Sales Email Follow-Ups

Sending follow-up emails to leads can significantly improve your sales lead engagement. Sending just a single follow-up email can increase your reply rate by around 40%!

With this automation software, you can easily create automated workflows to send follow-up emails to leads until they take action — like opening your email or clicking a link within your email message.

Moreover, you can customize various aspects of these automated emails in GMass, like the:

• Total number of follow-up emails to send
• Time interval between follow-up emails
• Triggers to send follow-up emails
• And more

D. Auto Email List Builder

Manually building a prospect list can be a time-consuming process — you’ll need to gather the email addresses, check their buyer persona fit, and prioritize them.

Fortunately, GMass helps you automate list-building.

Here’s a rundown of what you’ll have to do:

• Input some keywords related to your ideal customer profile in the Gmail search bar and hit Enter.
• Once the search results are generated, click the red “Build an email list from search results” button at the top.
• GMass will automatically build an email list using email addresses from your search results and add it to the To address box of a new Compose window.
• Craft the email message and subject, and click the GMass button to email your new prospect email list.

Moreover, you can create an email list in Google Sheets and quickly connect it to GMass to send mass mail-merge campaigns with ease.

E. Automatic Bulk Email Scheduling

With an email automation platform like GMass, you can reach out to a prospective customer when they’re most likely to engage with your emails.

How?

Just schedule your email campaigns in advance to reach your prospective customer at optimal times. Compose your email, set the schedule, and GMass will automatically send out your bulk sales email campaigns when it’s time.

Moreover, you can conveniently reschedule a sales email campaign by modifying the schedule via the Drafts folder in Gmail.

GMass Pros

• Feature-rich free version
• Works within Gmail’s interface, so you won’t have to get familiarized with a new UI
• Helps you overcome Gmail’s email sending limits by integrating with an SMTP tool like SendGrid
• Allows you to save older marketing or sales emails as templates to modify and reuse later
• Provides free email verification to ensure that your sales or marketing emails don’t bounce
• Lets you send cold drip campaigns to prospects
• Can automatically detect your prospects’ first names from their email IDs
• Lets users access the tool’s email sales automation and marketing capabilities from their Android phone through the Gmail app add-on.

GMass Pricing

GMass has three comprehensive pricing plans:

• Individual:
  • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
  • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
  • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
• Team:
  • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

GMass Ratings

• Capterra: 4.9/5 (580+ reviews)

• G2: 4.8/5 (560+ reviews)

2. LeadFuze for Lead Generation and Research Automation

LeadFuze is a sales automation tool that specializes in lead generation, research, and prospecting.

LeadFuze Key Features

• Automated list building to crawl the web for prospects matching your predefined criteria
• Consolidate contact info of leads like social profiles, phone numbers, and emails
• Data exporting to transfer your lead data into a CSV file or Google Sheets

LeadFuze Pricing

LeadFuze has three pricing plans:

• Starter (starts at $132.30/month):

• • Supports an unlimited number of lists
  • Market-based search filters
  • Supports data export to CSV
  • And more

• Scaling (starts at $447.30/month):

• • Supports all “Starter” features
  • Account-based search filters
  • Deduplication features
  • And more

• Custom (contact their sales team for a custom quote):

• • Supports 5+ users
  • Provides custom feature access
  • And more

LeadFuze Ratings

• Capterra: 4.7/5 (80+ reviews)

• G2: 4.7/5 (100+ reviews)

LeadFuze Alternatives

• Datanyze
• ZoomInfo

3. Pipedrive for Sales Pipeline Automation

Pipedrive is a CRM and sales automation platform that helps you visualize your sales process and enhance sales productivity. This sales engagement platform leverages activity-based selling that involves scheduling, tracking, and completing sales activities.

Pipedrive Key Features

• Custom chatbot and webforms to feed leads from your site directly into your sales pipeline
• Insights and reports to measure sales performance against set goals
• Workflow automation to streamline your sales processes

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive has four pricing plans:

• Essential ($15/user per month):

• • Supports deal management
  • Customizable pipelines
  • Supports data import and export
  • And more

• Advanced ($29/user per month):

• • Supports all “Essential” features
  • Email open and click tracking
  • Workflow automation
  • And more

• Professional ($59/user per month):

• • Supports all “Advanced” features
  • Revenue forecast reports
  • Supports team management
  • And more

• Enterprise ($99/user per month):

• • Supports all “Professional” features
  • Can automate up to 100 workflows
  • Custom onboarding and support
  • And more

Pipedrive Ratings

• Capterra: 4.6/5 (2250+ reviews)

• G2: 4.3/5 (1300+ reviews)

Pipedrive Alternatives

• Pega Sales Automation
• monday.com

4. Calendly for Sales Meeting Automation

Calendly is an automated appointment scheduling and sales automation platform that helps you arrange meetings with sales prospects.

It shows prospects a list of slots when you are available, and they can easily pick one that works for them. This solves the maddeningly irritating problem of sending back-and-forth emails to schedule a mutually convenient time.

Calendly Key Features

• Lets you schedule group events, one-to-one, and sales team meetings
• Offers time zone detection to display availability in your sales prospect’s time zone
• Integrates with Google, Outlook, and other calendars to add bookings to calendars automatically

Calendly Pricing

Calendly has three pricing plans:

• Basic (free):

• • Schedule unlimited events for one event type
  • Personalized links
  • Automated event notifications
  • And more

• Premium ($10/user per month):

• • Supports all “Basic” features
  • Unlimited event types
  • Customizable email reminders
  • And more

• Pro ($15/user per month):

• • Supports all “Premium” features
  • Up to 6 calendars per user
  • Supports SMS notifications
  • And more

Calendly Ratings

• Capterra: 4.6/5 (1390+ reviews)

• G2: 4.7/5 (910+ reviews)

Calendly Alternatives

• YouCanBook.me
• Doodle

5. HubSpot Marketing Hub for Marketing Automation

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing automation platform that helps you attract, engage, and convert the right audience.

By aligning marketing automation software like HubSpot with your other sales enablement tools, you can improve your sales conversions and boost revenue.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Key Features

• CMS, landing pages, and pop-ups to capture leads from your website
• Marketing automation to assist with lead nurturing and scoring, data management, and more
• Revenue attribution reporting to analyze the ROI on your marketing efforts

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pricing

HubSpot Marketing Hub has four pricing plans:

• Free: 

• • Reporting dashboard
  • Forms
  • Conversations inbox
  • And more

• Starter (starts at $50/month for 1,000 marketing contacts):

• • Supports all “Free” features
  • List segmentation
  • Contact website activity
  • And more

• Professional (starts at $890/month for 2,000 marketing contacts):

• • Supports all “Starter” features
  • Marketing automation
  • SEO recommendations and optimizations
  • And more

• Enterprise (starts at $3,200/month for 10,000 marketing contacts):

• • Supports all “Professional” features
  • Single sign-on
  • Webhooks
  • And more

HubSpot Marketing Hub Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (4430+ reviews)

• G2: 4.4/5 (6530+ reviews)

HubSpot Marketing Hub Alternatives

• Pardot by Salesforce
• Zoho MarketingHub

Final Thoughts

Sales automation is one of the easiest ways to streamline your sales process and increase productivity.

And if you’re looking for a sales automation strategy with massive ROI, opt for automating your sales email process. It’s the easiest way to create meaningful outreach to multiple leads quickly.

As an email sales automation solution, there’s no better tool than GMass!

This email automation software helps you create auto-personalized emails, automate mass email scheduling, send automated follow-ups, build email lists automatically, and do so much more.

So why not try GMass today and take your sales automation process to the next level?

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob

Looking for powerful sales management software?

Sales management software can streamline your sales process to help you save time and boost conversions.

But with several products available today, how do you find one that suits your needs?

In this article, I’ll cover what sales management software is and how it can help your business. I’ll also highlight seven powerful sales management tools.

This Article Contains:

(Click on a link below to jump to a specific section.)

• What is sales management software?
• Top 7 sales management software 
  • GMass
  • Pipedrive
  • Salesforce
  • Freshworks CRM
  • Zoho
  • HubSpot
  • monday.com  (I know you’re surprised!)

Let’s dive into it.

What Is Sales Management Software?

Sales management software is a platform designed to help your sales team achieve their goals. For example, you can use sales CRM software platforms to track each lead, monitor where they are in your pipeline, and more.

The sales manager can also utilize sales software to send emails, track sales data, minimize administrative tasks, identify sales trends, and detect improvement opportunities.

Some of the key benefits of using sales management software include:

1. Sales tracking software can help you save time by tracking and consolidating all your customer data in one place, making it easily accessible.
2. These platforms provide valuable insights that help a sales manager analyze revenue goals, optimize the sales process, and generate high-value opportunities.
3. Sales management software can also enhance teamwork by facilitating coordination between various departments in real-time to maximize your chances of conversion.

You’ll usually have to use multiple sales management software tools to streamline the various stages in your sales process.

For example, you can use an email marketing tool and a CRM system together to manage leads and reach out to them whenever they’re at the right stage in your sales pipeline.

Top 7 Sales Management Software in 2024

Here are the seven best sales management tools available today:

1. GMass

GMass is a powerful email marketing tool that works directly inside Gmail and can boost your sales conversions. Its robust outreach and mail merge features have made it a popular tool used by small businesses as well as employees at companies like Twitter, Uber, LinkedIn, and Google.

And to get started with GMass, all you need to do is download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account.

Here’s a quick peek into some of GMass’ impressive features:

A. Automatic mass email personalization

Personalizing your sales outreach emails is crucial as it improves your chances of making a connection with a lead and prevents your email from looking like spam.

In fact, 88% of recipients agree they are more likely to respond to an email that’s personalized for their needs.

However, no one has the time to personalize every email manually.

Fortunately, you don’t have to go to those extremes.

GMass has an automated personalization feature that can automatically tailor each email based on your recipient’s needs.

GMass can automatically:

• Include personalized links and images
• Personalize attachments
• Detect the recipient’s first name from their email address
• Personalize entire paragraphs

B. Accurate email campaign analytics

Accessing information about which emails bounced or the number of unsubscriptions is crucial in analyzing your outreach campaign’s effectiveness.

And to help you out here, GMass auto-compiles detailed reports each time you send an email campaign — tracking various metrics, including opens, clicks, replies, bounces, and more.

GMass then collates this data and presents it in a Campaign Report. Users also have access to a live feed, showing various metrics in real-time.

C. Automated follow-ups

Sending follow-up emails to prospects is a crucial step in each sales outreach campaign — it can even triple your reply rate.

GMass lets you send automated follow-up emails to help maximize prospect engagement. It also offers several customization options to send follow-ups based on prospect behavior.

For example, you can send a follow-up email when the recipient clicks on a link in the email.

You can also adjust the time between each follow-up, how many follow-ups to send, and the total number of follow-ups each recipient will receive.

D. Automatic email list builder

Maintaining a mailing list is an important part of email marketing and sales campaigns.

And with GMass, building large emailing lists is easy.

Here’s how:

• Once you’ve linked your Gmail account to GMass, all you need to do is type relevant keywords into Gmail’s search bar and click the search button.
• Then, Gmail will display a list of results.
• Next, click the build email list button (the red magnifying glass) close to the search bar.

• GMass will then automatically compile an email list using the email IDs from your search results and add them to the To field in a new Compose window.
• You can now craft your personalized email and send it with GMass.

What’s more…

If your email lists are stored in Google Sheets files, you can quickly send mass email merges with the GMass-Google Sheets integration.

E. Schedule your emails to send at the perfect time

GMass lets you compose your emails and schedule them to be sent later, at any date and time.

This way, you can schedule your emails to reach prospects when they’re most likely to check their inboxes — ensuring your emails don’t go unnoticed.

And if you want to update the schedule, simply reschedule any unsent emails directly from your Drafts folder.

GMass Pros

• Free version with all the features
• Works inside Gmail’s intuitive user interface
• Can enhance your open rates by automatically personalizing emails
• Can bypass Google’s sending limits through integrations with a variety of SMTP services
• Automatically detects the first names of recipients from their email addresses
• Email deliverability wizard helps boost inbox placement and open rates.
• Integrates with Salesforce to automatically log your outgoing emails
• Has a powerful add-on for the Gmail app on Android devices

GMass Limitations

• Only compatible with Gmail

GMass Pricing

GMass offers three plans: 

• Individual:
  • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
  • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
  • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
• Team:
  • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

GMass Ratings

• Capterra: 4.9/5 (600+ reviews)
• G2: 4.8/5 (580+ reviews)

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool that can help small teams streamline their sales funnel. Its pipeline management features let sales managers and team members easily track their sales performance.

Pipedrive Key Features

• Can track calls, emails, and contact history
• Compiles customizable reports on deals and sales analytics
• Customizable sales pipeline with several sales stages, activities, and team members

Pipedrive Pros

• Has a mobile app for Android and iOS devices
• Supports 200+ integrations with apps like Trello, Klenty, and Slack
• Live chat allows a customer to connect to your sales team in seconds.

Pipedrive Limitations

• No email marketing capabilities
• Less suited to the needs of larger organizations
• No workflow automation capabilities in the basic plan

Pipedrive Pricing

Pipedrive offers four paid plans: 

• Essential ($15/user per month):

• • Provides customizable pipelines
  • Data import and export
  • Sales Assistant AI
  • And more

• Advanced ($29/user per month):
  • Sales docs
  • Workflow automation
  • A customizable product catalog
  • And more

• Professional ($59/user per month):
  • Caller to make sales calls from the web.
  • eSignatures
  • Unlimited visual dashboards
  • And more

• Enterprise ($99/user per month):
  • Unlimited advanced user permissions
  • 24/7 phone support
  • Automate up to 100 tasks
  • And more

Note: All plans come with an optional lead generation add-on billed at $39/month per company.

Pipedrive Customer Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (2260+ reviews)
• G2: 4.3/5 (1320+ reviews)

3. Salesforce

Salesforce offers several software products for various business needs, such as marketing automation (with their Pardot software) and lead management. Their CRM system, called Sales Cloud, enhances your sales management operations with contact management, collaboration, and marketing tools.

Salesforce Key Features

• Customer management features provide a quick overview of your customers, their activity history, communications, and more.
• With sales forecasting, you get a real-time view of your sales team’s forecast, including in-line forecast adjustments.
• Integrated AI can predict which deals are likely to close, suggest steps for each lead, and automate admin tasks.

Salesforce Pros

• Salesforce provides detailed, customizable reports.
• Built-in quoting capabilities automatically fill out relevant customer data.
• A dedicated sales console gives your sales representative an efficient way to follow up on leads, identify key contacts, and more.

Salesforce Limitations

• Often requires training to understand how to use the tool
• Can be expensive for small businesses
• No offline access

Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce is available in four pricing plans:

• Essentials ($25/user per month):
  • Includes access to the Salesforce mobile app
  • Email integration
  • Account, lead, opportunity management
  • And more
• Professional ($75/user per month):
  • Includes lead registration
  • Rules-based lead scoring
  • Collaborative forecasting
  • And more

• Enterprise ($150/user per month):
  • Access to the sales console app
  • Opportunity splits
  • Advanced reporting features
  • And more

• Unlimited ($300/user per month):
  • 24/7 support and configuration services
  • Unlimited roles and permissions
  • Access to Developer Pro sandbox
  • And more

Salesforce Customer Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (260+ reviews)
• G2: 4.2/5 (11,000+ reviews)

4. Freshworks CRM

Freshworks CRM is sales management software designed to accelerate your sales process by offering in-depth sales management.

Freshworks Key Features

• Create your own contact lifecycle stages based on your business processes.
• Intelligent workflow automation makes it easy to automate sales tasks.
• Conversion rate optimization helps optimize your website with A/B testing, heatmaps, and more.

Freshworks Pros

• Android and iOS mobile app to manage relationships on the go
• Provides insights into your sales process with win-loss analysis, attribution, conversion reports, and more
• AI-enabled features to enhance sales professionals’ productivity

Freshworks Limitations

• There are no radial/territorial mapping features to analyze the physical location of your visitors or compare sales in various regions.
• Pricing can be expensive for smaller businesses as you pay per user.

Freshworks Pricing

• Growth ($35/user per month):
  • 1,000 active contacts (those you engage through your marketing campaign)
  • Live chat and Facebook Messenger
  • Website tracking
  • And more

• Pro ($85/user per month):
  • 3,000 active contacts
  • WhatsApp and Apple Business Chat
  • Conference calling
  • And more

• Enterprise ($149/user per month):
  • 5,000 active contacts
  • Auto-profile enrichment
  • Call recording
  • And more

Freshworks Customer Ratings

• Capterra: 4.6/5 (480+ reviews)
• G2: 4.6/5 (880+ reviews)

5. Zoho

Zoho is sales performance management software that can help you manage every sales activity better. The CRM tool does this through a host of useful features, such as an integrated calendar, sales forecasting, and more.

Zoho Key Features

• Automate your routine sales, marketing, and support functions.
• The Command Center allows you to create personalized customer journeys.
• You can generate price quotes and invoices within the CRM.

Zoho Pros

• Can create notes and tag sales team members for better collaboration
• Mobile app to stay connected to colleagues and clients wherever you are
• AI to fetch information, take notes, predict future sales, and more

Zoho Limitations

• Learning the ins and outs of the program can take some time.
• Pre-designed templates offer limited customization options.
• Base pricing plans don’t support lead conversion and forecasting features.

Zoho Pricing

Their pricing plans include:

• Free: 

• • CRM views
  • Advanced filters
  • Page customization
  • And more

• Standard ($18/user per month):
  • Sales forecasting
  • Email insights
  • Custom dashboards
  • And more

• Professional ($30/user per month):
  • Real-time customer notifications
  • Web-to-case forms
  • Validation rules
  • And more

• Enterprise ($45/user per month):
  • Conversational AI assistant
  • CommandCenter to personalize customer journeys
  • Mobile SDK and MDM
  • And more

• Ultimate ($55/user per month):
  • BI and analytics software
  • The highest possible feature limits
  • And a 30-day free trial

Zoho Customer Ratings

• Capterra: 4.2/5 (4,700+ reviews)
• G2: 4.0/5 (1,830+ reviews)

6. HubSpot

HubSpot offers a suite of sales and marketing tools, including a free CRM and some sales automation tools. The HubSpot Sales software can help you automate tasks to free up time for your salespeople.

HubSpot Key Features

• Predictive lead scoring to qualify leads easily
• Document management functionality to create a shared library of sales content
• Supports call tracking and recording features

HubSpot Pros

• Has a free plan
• Provides real-time access to your entire sales pipeline through one dashboard
• Automatically enriches your contact records with data from over 20 million businesses

HubSpot Limitations

• HubSpot can’t track the time a prospect spends in each stage of the sales pipeline.
• In-app email service is very basic.
• The paid version can be expensive for smaller businesses.

HubSpot Pricing

This sales management software solution offers several plans:

• Free:

• • Automated contact management
  • Live chat
  • Reporting dashboards
  • And more

• Starter ($50/month):
  • Simple automation
  • Live chat
  • Meeting scheduling
  • And more

• Professional ($500/month):
  • SEO recommendations and optimizations
  • Smart content and reporting
  • A/B testing
  • And more

• Enterprise: ($1,200/month):
  • Record customization
  • Field-level permissions
  • Webhooks
  • And more

HubSpot Customer ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5 (280+ reviews)
• G2: 4.5/5 (1,000+ reviews)

7. monday.com

If you have heard of monday.com, you must be surprised to find it here!

If monday.com is project management software, why is it on our list of sales management software?

It’s because you can customize monday.com to work as a simple CRM. You can also integrate it with email, forms, and other tools to create a decent sales management system.

monday.com can simplify your sales management processes and increase your sales performance by organizing company data into one centralized database.

This functionality is quite enough for companies with just one or two salespeople — or even with no dedicated salespeople!

monday.com Key Features

• Sales order tracking to follow a customer’s order through every step of the process
• Supports Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and more to map tasks and track deadlines
• Integrates with tools like Zapier, Pipedrive, and HubSpot

monday.com Pros

• Mobile app to communicate, share files, receive feedback, and more
• Automates repetitive tasks so the team can spend time focusing on sales
• Customizable dashboards to bring all your data into one place

monday.com Limitations

• The software isn’t very intuitive, which can make it difficult to learn.
• It lacks efficient notification management features.
• Basic pricing plans don’t support automations and calendar views.

monday.com Pricing

monday.com charges by the seat (per user) with a minimum of three seats. The four paid plans are charged monthly based on how many seats you choose.

• Basic ($10/seat per month):
  • Unlimited boards to organize your work
  • 200+ templates
  • 20+ columns
  • And more

• Standard ($12/seat per month):
  • Timeline and Gantt views
  • 250 automated actions per month
  • A dashboard combining up to five boards
  • And more

• Pro ($20/seat per month):
  • Private boards
  • 25,000 automations per month
  • 25,000 actions per month
  • And more

• Enterprise (Contact monday.com for a quote):
  • Enterprise-scale automations and integrations
  • Advanced reporting and analytics
  • Combines up to 50 boards
  • And more

monday.com Customer Ratings

• Capterra: 4.6/5 (2230+ reviews)
• G2: 4.6/5 (1460+ reviews)

Wrapping Up

Attracting and converting a sales lead can be a difficult and time-consuming task if you’re manually performing all the steps involved.

Fortunately, with the right sales management tool, you can streamline this process and reduce the time and effort required to convert leads into paying customers.

For instance, GMass helps you reach out to prospects and engage with them using powerful email campaigns. With features like automatic email personalization, detailed reports and analytics, email scheduling, Salesforce integration, and more, GMass can help you reach out to prospects efficiently and boost your sales conversions.

Download the GMass Chrome extension today and experience the benefits for yourself!

Ajay Goel

Ajay is the founder of GMass and has been developing email sending software for 20 years.

twitter.com/PartTimeSnob