Sales teams are juggling more tasks than ever. Investors are setting tougher benchmarks for growth. In this environment, your sales operations tools and platforms can’t just be effective — they need to be transformative.
The right sales operations tools function as the gears in a revenue machine, multiplying productivity by enabling teams to create more precise sales forecasts, improve customer interactions, and directly influence financial outcomes.
If you’re looking to assemble a new sales operations tech stack — or simply want to upgrade your existing tools — this comprehensive guide to the key categories can help.
What Are Sales Operations Tools?
A quality sales operations tool distinguishes itself with a few key features:
- Automating and shortening key sales processes
- Providing data-based insights to for more accurate sales strategies
- Contributing to company growth by meeting benchmarks and improving bottom-line performance
Within those overarching themes for what goes into a robust sales operations (sales ops) solution, the list of functionalities, features, and capacities can vary widely. However, there are a handful of solution categories that any sales ops team needs to focus on for success.
CRM Software: Your All-in-One Sales Hub
Offering more than just data management, the right customer relationship management (CRM) solution can help align sales with marketing, making for consistent messaging and a unified approach to customer engagement.
Not only that, CRMs enhance sales forecasting accuracy by aggregating historical data and current trends, allowing teams to plan more strategically based on engagement insights. The best CRMs enable personalized customer interactions at scale so teams can form more personalized, deeper relationships with prospects.
With the volumes of data necessary for sales teams to operate competitively today, a CRM that can ensure compliance with data privacy requirements is non-negotiable. But beware: your CRM is just a tool, and the data you supply can quickly become stale or inaccurate without a B2B data partner you can trust.
Consider a few best options:
- Salesforce: Regarded as the market leader, with the integrations, apps, and added features you’d expect.
- HubSpot: Traditionally a more common choice for SMBs looking for an all-in-one solution.
- Microsoft Dynamics: The Salesforce competitor from one of the original household names in software.
- Zoho CRM: Known for its robust analytics and wide variety of integrations.
Sales Intelligence: Turning Data Into Decisions
To apply data to sales strategy at scale, sales intelligence tools don’t just gather data — they analyze and present it in a way that informs strategic decision-making.
Sales intelligence platforms offer real-time market insights, competitor analysis, and provide visibility into customer behavior trends. Robust sales intelligence tools use sophisticated algorithms to score leads based on their likelihood to convert and automation to route the right lead to the right sales rep. This is invaluable for sales teams to identify personalized sales opportunities quickly.
Check out some of the tools that enable sales teams to make smarter, faster, more effective sales decisions:
- ZoomInfo: Integrates comprehensive, highly accurate B2B contact and company data with actionable insights and advanced workflows to accelerate the sales cycle for modern GTM teams.
- Infer: A predictive lead scoring platform that uses AI to determine which leads are real prospects.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Leverages the power of LinkedIn’s massive professional network graph to deliver sales insights.
- Gong: A conversation intelligence platform that uses customer insights to inform growth strategies.
Sales Acceleration: Boosting Sales at Breakneck Speed
With the help of automation, sales acceleration tools are built to speed up the sales process, from lead generation to closing deals. Sales acceleration software streamlines lead generation, contact management, and follow-up strategies by automating repetitive sales tasks — the best tools enable sales teams to do this by integrating AI and machine learning.
The results? More efficient lead management and a shorter sales cycle. The best sales acceleration tools offer real-time analytics that let sales teams adapt to market changes and customer feedback quickly.
Check out some of the leading sales acceleration tools that are redefining the landscape:
- ZoomInfo OperationsOS: The data orchestration solution that allows sales ops teams to clean, enrich, segment, score, prioritize and route leads at scale.
- Saleshandy: Specializes in enhancing outbound sales through personalized, scalable email campaigns and advanced analytics.
- Salesflare: Tailored for small- to medium-sized businesses for efficient lead management.
- SalesLoft: Optimizes sales for smarter prospect conversations and comprehensive sales pipeline tracking.
Sales Enablement Tools: Empowering Your Team
Sales enablement tools provide a comprehensive platform for training your team with tools for content management, training and onboarding, and the creation of sales playbooks.
These platforms exist to make sure your sales team has easy access to up-to-date information, best practices, and effective product sales materials.
This not only streamlines the sales process but also enhances the ability of your team to engage effectively with prospects. The best sales enablement platforms deploy the knowledge intuitively for sales teams to have higher quality customer interactions.
- Highspot: Provides tools to train sales teams with content and coaching.
- Seismic: Delivers personalized training content to sales teams at scale.
- Showpad: Think of it as a one-stop-shop for all your sales content and training needs.
- MindTickle: A solution that focuses on sales readiness and skills development through engaging content.
Sales Analytics Tools: Making Sense of the Numbers
Sales analytics tools transform a flood of B2B data into a treasure trove of go-to-market insights.
Sales analysis solutions help teams optimize their sales strategies, tailor their approaches to customer needs with better personalization, and ultimately, make more informed data-based decisions as a strategic advantage.
Consider some of the best sales analytics solutions:
- Tableau: A tool that turns complex data into understandable visuals.
- Domo: Real-time business intelligence delivered in easy-to-use dashboards, alerts, and reports.
- Looker: An enterprise platform for sharing business intelligence and building data-powered applications.
- Sisense: Helps businesses build intelligence analytics into their products.
Sales Automation Tools: Streamlining Your Processes
Sales automation tools are essential for modern sales teams. It allows them to automate routine tasks, which frees up sales reps to focus on more strategic sales activities.
By efficiently managing customer data, tracking sales interactions, and automating follow-up communications, these tools enhance how effectively a sales team operates long-term. The rise of AI in sales is making this one of the categories to watch for major shifts in the years ahead.
With sales automation tools, teams can operate more efficiently, reduce manual errors, and focus on building strong customer relationships.
- FrontSpin: A sales call and email tool that leverages account-based playbooks.
- Leadfeeder: A buyer intent tool that offers a free plan for small businesses.
- Outreach: Streamlines customer engagement to create and close more sales pipeline.
- Zapier: A tool that connects all your favorite apps to automate manual workflows.
How To Choose a Sales Operations Tool
Driving growth and enhancing sales productivity doesn’t happen without the right tools, which means ensuring the solution you select aligns with your team’s needs and overall company goals.
1. Evaluate Your Tech Stack
Choosing a solution that complements your current sales tech stack is an essential part of making sure you don’t add more bottlenecks in your sales workflow. Identify gaps in your sales process that could be filled or streamlined with the help of a sales operations tool. Consider how a new tool would integrate with existing systems, especially your CRM.
Look for tools that offer flexibility and scalability. As your business grows, your sales operations tool should be able to adapt and scale accordingly, saving teams from the headaches of migrating to a new system.
2. Prioritize Data Governance
Governance plays a crucial role when choosing a sales operations tool, particularly because these tools often handle sensitive CRM data. The right tool upholds the integrity and compliance necessary to fulfill data protection requirements.
The right sales ops solutions should offer robust data management capabilities, allowing you to control who has access to what data, how it’s used, and how it’s protected.
Selecting a tool that provides clear data governance policies and practices will not only safeguard your data but also build trust with customers, ensuring that their information is handled responsibly.
3. Lean Into Automation
The right automation features significantly reduce manual tasks, allowing your sales team to focus on more strategic activities like building relationships with prospects. Automation capabilities can range from simple task automation to more complex sales processes, including lead scoring, round-robin lead assignment, and AI-assisted email marketing.
Automating sales workflows software helps to standardize and simplify them — ideal for teams that want to do more with less. The more sophisticated a solution’s ability to automate sales management processes, the better you’re able to keep data silo bottlenecks at a minimum.
Consider a sales solution that automates repetitive tasks without sacrificing personalization. The ability to automate while still delivering personalized customer interactions dramatically increases your team’s efficiency and effectiveness as they free up more time to focus on selling.
Better Tools, Better Outcomes
Sales operations solutions virtually impact every aspect of a business — not just the sales team. A company’s ability to grow and adapt hinges on sound data governance and automation for sustainable sales outcomes.
To make the most of your growth potential, remember to look for scalable, data-backed, AI-assisted solutions that have a commitment to compliance at their core — so you’re not back shopping for another new sales ops solution in just a few quarters.