9 Best Under-the-Radar Apps for Development of Sales

The sales team is the crux of every organization. Whatever the business you are in, if your sales team does not perform, everything else that works well does not go in vain. While the sales team gets tons of appreciations, the sales development representatives are often not considered. The sale development team conducts tons of research on customer, prospects, make initial engagement, generate qualified leads, and move these leads to the sales team. The traditional approach was a part of the development of Sales previously. The digitalization has offered tons of sales development tools that enable the sales development representatives to automate a significant portion of their daily tasks.

Not all the leads are promising enough to be converted into an official pipeline of sales leads. Teams managing the development of sales funnel have to manage communication with potential leads, which was earlier performed by the representatives painstakingly.

Sending emails to thousands of potential leads and calling them every day can be a humongous and repetitive task that can be performed by a mere click of buttons. Task management, CRM, Sales funnel management, and much more can all be done with a few clicks thanks to the tools that enable the development of sales effortlessly.

Tools allow the sales development representatives to automate the sales sequence, prioritize and track tasks, utilize analytics to make better decisions, bring visibility to customer engagement, track team performance through dashboards, and machine learning-based data extraction. The deal closing sales teams usually have tons of information regarding the rulebook, whether through videos/ webinars or books and software. However, the information available for any handholding of the sales development representatives are very few. The sales development tools enable the team to automate a significant part of their mundane tasks and utilize their valuable time for other essential tasks.

What is sales and business development?

Partnering with various channels to sell to the end customer in a scalable manner is called business development. Following a process to generate revenue through the sales of a product or solution can be called sales. Sales teams communicate directly with potential customers and convert them into happy customers. Business development teams work with a partner to generate business, not necessarily to move it to the end sale.

There are several differences between sales and business development, and they are often mistaken for the same. To be more precise, the business development team stops its work and hands it over to the sales team to begin its work. A sale is a piece of the business development process. It is transactional, involves multiple decision-makers, and may include selling to a business or an individual. Business development is more strategic, includes sales in its process, and improves growth opportunities.

How do you develop sales skills?

Sales skills can be developed/learned through training, reading material, and observing. However, a few of the qualities are inborn and can be polished accordingly. Clear communication, pleasing personality, pleasant dressing, well-groomed, attentive listener, improving your domain knowledge, streamlining your pitch, and asking for feedback are some of the essential qualities that a sales rep must possess. Referrals are some of the necessary sales skills that enable an individual to perform better. However, to become a successful salesperson, it is essential to

• Understand the consumer requirements,
• Use buyer psychology to engage them,
• Establish trust with the leads they engage with,
• Provide information transparently,
• Sell effectively through compelling stories,
• Attend training,
• Ask questions,
• Improve your listening skills,
• Practice public speaking,
• Pay attention to feedback, track progress, and
• Network with customers.

Which are the best job titles for sales and business development?

Some of the most trending job titles in Sales are Sales account advisors, sales account executive, sales account specialist, Area sales manager, Sales Manager, Director of sales, retail sales consultant, sales consultant, sales engineer, and sales representative. Business development manager(BDM), Business development executive(BDE), Business development specialist, Business Initiative manager, Director of business development, and a few others are the most trending business development job titles.

What are the components of sales?

They are engaging with potential customers, and the process of enabling them to make the buying decision can be called the development of sales. Several factors lead to a sales development team's success, like finding prospective customers, connecting with them, researching their details, presenting the product/solution's facts, churning out customers who back off from the process, and closing the deal. However, a few vital components define the success rate of a sales plan/strategy.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) - Choosing the right CRM that helps the representatives to gather the information on the potential leads. CRM also plays a vital role in utilizing the most cost-effective and efficient methods to engage with customers who can be long-term customers.

Qualifying lead - Leads or potential clients need enough information about the product/ solution to start showing interest and graduate into becoming a qualified lead. Lack of enough information to the potential client wastes the sales team's time and gives a bad experience to the potential client, making it a disaster recipe. Building a systematic process through a tool removes any discrepancies and improves the sales/ sales development team's efficiency.

CMS - A centralized content management system enables both the potential clients and the sales/ marketing/ sales development teams to use the quality content that keeps the communication unambiguous. A well classified centralized database of content improves sales conversions, helps the representatives efficiently assess the data, and the potential clients to better understand how they would profit from the buying decision making it a profitable situation for all the parties involved.

Analytics - Representatives from the sales teams speak to several potential leads daily and accumulate a humongous amount of data through emails and calls. Such a way of working may lead to data loss or mismanagement, making it impossible to trace when required. Good data management enables sales and marketing teams to use it at the right time to convince their potential leads and move them to the next step. Sales development automatically captures such data and keeps it ready to be used without any hassle and enables teams to perform better.

The sales development team works as a bridge between the sales team's collaboration and feedback system and the marketing team. The sales development team works as the company's face because they are the first team that engages with the potential leads. It is essential to consider the feedback provided by this team and align the content and processes as per the feedback. The smooth collaboration between teams and the inbuilt feedback mechanism helps to improve the conversions.

Maintaining an excellent CRM, analytics, collaboration, feedback mechanism, and a centralized content management portal are components of sales than enable the teams involved to work in sync with each other and efficiently convert potential leads into happy customers.

Building a scalable team for the development of sales

It is a common myth that hiring sales professionals in bulk helps to improve revenue. However, defining each job role's responsibilities, placement of new hires into teams based on their capabilities and skills, and cultural fitment both within the sales team and at an organizational level is extremely important to build a successful sales team. A successful leader willing to create a top-performing sales team requires building trust, encouraging feedback, improving collaboration between teams/ team members, obsessing over the company's principles while hiring, and emphasizing overall growth instead of just meeting the numbers.

Let us discuss some of the top sales leaders/ companies and their tips for building a scalable team to develop sales.

Tom Lawton is the VP of Sales at Chowly. According to Tom, this company helps restaurant chains integrate with third-party delivery platforms, paying attention to every team member to understand the factors that motivate them and listen to the sales process's pain points. Tom believes a team that trusts each other, collaborates, and understands the overall company culture has a strong foundation.

A leader who ensures a good number of sales points, a solid sales pitch, has a good understanding of what motivates the team members(Bonus/transfer/ promotion) and is ready to make changes as per the team feedback. A good sales leader must make efficient hiring decisions and understanding the importance of retaining the existing talent to build a robust and scalable team for sales development.

ONNA is a company that enables its users to do anything and everything on a single platform, and Russ Grant is the Vice President of Revenue at ONNA. Russ says there is no available formula to build a successful team for the development of sales. Ensuring constant improvement in hiring, onboarding, and cultural fitment of new hires helps build a strong team. He further adds that making decisions by keeping in mind the scalable challenges would be helpful.

Christopher Jones is the Chief Revenue Officer at BetterCloud, a SaaS operations management company. According to Christopher, constant changes based on what worked well previously in the team, coupled with leaders themselves working on improving their skills regularly and building a healthy competition among the team members are a few ways of building a strong sales development team. Staying positive, high energy, strong sales leaders, and a relentless attitude towards winning are vital components that enable a team to succeed. Christopher further added that a healthy competition and reward system(appreciation) helped scale a sales development team.

David Sobie, CEO and co-founder of Happy returns, a company that specializes in partnering with retailers to enable product returns from customers easier believe that a clear understanding of the marketing strategy, a better idea of the audience/ target, and the team's well-defined responsibilities enable building a strong team. Furthermore, David mentioned that hiring star performers with excellent knowledge of the industry and subject matter expertise are vital to the team's success. When asked about building a scalable sales team, David suggests obsessing over the basics like weekly reviews, training, one-on-ones, and having fun together as a team with potlucks, parties, and games and hiring the best build a robust and scalable team of sales development.

MVF Global is a company that enables hundreds of companies to improve their sales has a strong leader in their head of Sales - Charlie Parkin. According to Charlie, hiring passionate people and providing them with an extensive training program, and encouraging them to work as a team for individual and group success are vital factors. Offering a 360-degree training and motivating the team to talk about the pain points, areas of improvement, and get trained as required for individual success and overall success of the team/ company are some of the areas to consider when building a scalable team for the development of sales.

There are tons of tools available for the development of sales in the market, and each of them offers an array of features coupled with competitive price plans. Let us look at the features, benefits, use cases, success stories, and pricing plans of some of the best web applications in the market:

List of tools used by sales -

If you are a business looking for sales, cold emailing, and prospecting, then Lead Fuze is an excellent tool for your sales development teams. Lead Fuze is a favorite among recruiters, sales, and marketing teams to build a database of potential/prospective leads. The lead generation software works best for teams looking to grow and enable their sales rep to work effectively and efficiently. Integration, outreach through email, and automated sales funnel are all a part of the Lead Fuze software.

Features

Email Verification, integrations, AI-based sales assistant, account-based selling, and database for existing contacts are some of the salient features of Lead Fuze.

Uses Use cases Success examples

• Douglas Ferguson, an HR specialist, says Lead Fuze worked great for outbound emails, was easy to set up, and an excellent generator of the prospective list of leads.
• From a marketing & advertising agency, Stephanie Curtin suggests that Lead Fuze is an excellent platform for business outreach and helps sales reps generate leads reliably and accurately.

Pricing

The Bombora tool offers its users data on the visitors looking for their products and provides them with the potential leads' details. This feature makes it one of the coolest intent tools that enable sales reps and sales organizations to understand customer needs and strategize/ pitch accordingly.

Features

• Industry research
• Company Data
• Integration to CRM
• Market insights
• Lead analysis
• Segmentation
• Media - Attribution
• Predictive Scoring
• Omni-channel tracking

Uses

• Helps to refine the list of potential leads
• Design advertisements and marketing campaigns

Use cases Success examples

• Hushly is a company with aggressive expansion goals that used Bombora Company surge data and reached eighteen times its ROI goals and seven times more of its website engagement.
• Veristor is another company that used the Bombora features and increased its email open rate and event attendance up to eighteen times more than its goal.

Pricing

• The growth package costs $25000 annually and covers unlimited users and reports. The Growth plan works best for small businesses looking to utilize intent data for a single product line. Dedicated customer support, user interface access CRM, marketing automation, up to twenty-five topics, global geographic coverage, and one integration are part of this plan.
• The enterprise package is a customize-able package and is best suited for large organizations with multiple products and an advanced level of intent data users. Customized features based as per user needs and complete customer support are a part of this package.

Albacross is a great tool to enable sales development teams with its lead generation through website visitor tracking feature that is also compliant with GDPR. However, Albacross captures the data of companies visiting the website and not individuals. The lead generation tool also collects data about the companies enabling users to reach out to the prospective leads.

Features

• Website activity tracking
• Decision-maker identification of prospective leads
• Improves engagement efficiency
• Lead generation list through website visitor data

Uses Use cases Success examples

• Social Zense, a digital media partner, used Alba cross and was able to book new sales meetings week after week, making the sales process shorter and scalable with the efficient data they received from the lead generation tool of Albacross.
• Yosi Dahan from Prove Source says they wanted to change their marketing strategy based on their websites' visitors. They used Alba cross to track their visitors and find the contacts of the decision-makers of those companies. They were able to contact Linked in co-ordinates of a prospective lead through the tracking data, and a new deal is closed with them in less than a week.

Pricing

• The monthly plan costs €79 per month and includes unlimited users, visitors, and companies. Five domains, up to thousand leads data export per month, history of ninety days, integrations with multiple CRM and outreach platforms, filtering & tagging, automated email reporting, and up to a hundred contact details of decision-makers per month are all a part of the monthly plan.
• The annual plan costs €99 per month and covers all the features in the monthly plan.

If you are a small/ medium-sized business looking for a multi-channel platform with a CRM built for sales engagement, then Close is a great tool. Email outreach, automated texting to prospective leads, and many other attractive features enable businesses to sign up new deals and contact qualified lead effortlessly. Close allows automated tracking of communication with qualified leads, enabling the sales reps to check back on the sales cycle stage.

Features

• SalesForce automation features like task management, contact management, and Pipeline management
• Lead management, ROI analytics, email marketing, and campaign management are marketing automation features.
• Customer support features like customer support, Support analytics, and case management.
• Reporting/ Analytics features like Forecasting, dashboards, and reporting.

Uses Use cases Success examples

• Chartmogul was looking for a sales tool to enable its team to develop sales to perform better with a streamlined sales process and increase sales numbers. They began using Close for leadership, customer success, marketing, and sales. Close has helped them sign up more than a thousand customers, build a remote team of thirty-five plus sales reps, sign up a million subscriptions, and streamline their sales process.
• Printavo is a small-sized software platform for screen printing and faces small business problems across any niche. Printavo extensively relied on excel spreadsheets to manage prospective leads and customer management. They found Close to be the platform that enables them to efficiently use, deploy, manage, and customize as per their needs. Automatic prospective lead addition, a systematic sales process that allows the sales reps to reach out to the qualified leads, and automated contact of the qualified lead through call, email, and text were all done using Close. It enabled their sales organization to automate the sales cycle process and work efficiently through Close collaboration and task flow automation features.

Pricing

• The starter plan costs $21.25 per month per user and works best for start-ups looking for a CRM with in-built calling and SMS features. Users can manage leads & contacts, create one pipeline, five email templates, call and text the qualified leads, and prospective leads.
• The Basic plan costs $55.25 per month per user and works best for a sales organization looking for a robust CRM to track unlimited leads and use a built-in reporting system. The basic subscription covers all the starter plan features plus unlimited email templates, unlimited leads, reporting, and unlimited customized fields.
• The professional subscription costs $80.75 per user per month and suits the marketing and sales team looking for a CRM with automations and pipelines. Bulk email, power dialer, and email sequences are a part of this subscription, along with all the features available in the basic plan.
• The Business subscription costs $123.25 per user per month and is an excellent fit for marketing and sales teams looking for a robust sales solution. Up to ten pipelines, voicemail drop, predictive dialer, and call recording are some of the features covered under this subscription and all the elements in the professional subscription.

Salesloft is an excellent idea for you. Suppose you are a sales organization or a marketing/sales team on the lookout for a robust platform to enable your sales development reps. It helps to convert prospective clients into qualifying leads in a faster and efficient manner. Salesloft is a marketing and sales tool that allows users to increase demo appointments with qualifying leads up to three hundred times more than their current success. The automated communication, personalized Outreach, and a well-organized sales process enable sales development reps to call, email, track, and convert prospective leads.

Features

Integration of Salesforce, integrated dialer, Cadence scheduling, Sales email engine, and user administration are some of the essential features of Salesloft.

Uses

• Automated workflow enables development reps to stay alert on the qualifying leads.
• Extensive reporting helps to understand customer behavior better and strategize sales communication accordingly to improve the number of closing deals.
• Personalized emails help build a strong network with prospective leads.
• Voice drop and call recording enable sales reps to track the various stages of the leads.
• Real-time reporting and analytics help sales reps make data-driven decisions.

Use cases Success examples

• Uber flip, a content experience platform, was looking for a sales/ business development tool that can work as a single platform to mail, call, integrate, and automate the entire sales cycle starting from website tracking to closing deals. They found SalesLoft to be the most suitable tool that addressed all their requirements. Using SalesLoft cut down the direct mail campaigning time by 50% and improved their ROI by 3000%.
• League is an employee benefits platform that used SalesLoft to improve its personalization and automation activities and reached a whopping 300% growth from their existing ARR. Using Sales Loft as a one-stop platform for all their challenges like Outreach with potentials leads, tracking new leads, communication, and collaboration between the sales development reps, tracking the potential areas of interest of the customers, and improving ROI.

Pricing

SalesLoft does not offer any free trial.

Updation of accurate sales records and verified company and contact data are readily available on the Clearbit tool for the sales development team to optimize their time in more valuable tasks. Verified data enables the sales rep to perform a smart lead scoring. The sales development team receives alerts when a potential lead visits their site, making it easy for them to pitch about their product or service at the right time.

Features

• Data availability features like company data availability, Industry research availability, and contact data availability.
• Contact data and company data accuracy
• API's and reporting
• Lead builder integration with CRM, Marketing automation, and data cleaning

Uses Use cases

• Information Technology
• Computer Software
• Marketing
• Advertising
• Sales

Success examples

• Zenefits is a software platform that offers a one-stop solution to all your HR needs. The Zenefits team looked for a tool to utilize Facebook advertising to generate leads as they did with Linkedin. With the clear bit advertising, Zenefits was able to combine its customer data with Clearbit to improve its Outreach by syncing up with specific segments like Facebook Ads. Zenefits could get a 20% increase in the conversion rate of prospective leads to sales qualified leads.
• Tealium offers content from various niches to its visitors and enables them to collect data through web and mobile. Tealium uses a similar pattern better understand its visitors with data like location and industry. Team Tealium had primary data about their visitors. They decided to find out more about their audience to post messages and gain more knowledge of their visitors' needs accordingly. They used the Clearbit Reveal feature to track more information about their visitors. Combining the Clearbit data and Audience Stream provides Tealium with rich data to strategize their analytics and marketing campaigns according to the visitor's action.

Pricing

Please contact the team for details on pricing.

Sales, marketing, and business development strategies are as per the data that companies collect about their website visitors and potential leads. The IP address intelligence feature of Kickfire enables businesses to manage various data such as revenue, employee counts, industry, and a few others. This data allows companies to draft personalized content, design forms, build marketing strategies, and target advertising according to customer requirements, making these sales and marketing strategy more effective. Kick fire integrations and live data leads also enables its users to strategize with real-time data.

Features

• Live dashboard and User permissions
• Real-time lead alerts
• ROI Reporting
• Lead management and segmentation

Uses

Enables users to identify anonymous visitors through the IP address

Integrates with Google analytics to get companies to click on their Adwords campaign

Helps users to Track visitors even if they have not initiated communication

Use cases Success examples

• Terminus, an account-based marketing platform, required IP address intelligence software to improve its customers' ABM campaigns. After eliminating four other providers, they zeroed in on the Kick fire features and engaged accordingly. Using Kick Fire helped its customers do better account engagement and penetration, thereby improving their ABM campaigns' revenue and success.
• Avascent is a management consulting firm looking for software that would help them utilize their invisible pipeline. While the other options failed to identify such leads, they also did not find a user-friendly interface and customer service. However, they found Kick Fire as a single platform that enabled them to host forms, capture contact information, and get Live leads. The Kick Fire support team helped them tremendously in troubleshooting any challenges they faced and could get the contact information on their leads and contact them much faster, enabling their team to close deals more quickly.

Pricing

Kick Fire offers a free trial. Please contact the team directly for pricing.

DealSignal

Accurate B2B data offered by Deal Signal enables sales development reps to maximize efficiency and performance. It allows users to target the potential leads with personalized outreach messages and succeed in conversions. Verified emails, social URL, mailing address, contact profiles, and direct & corporate phone numbers are all provided by DealSignal enabling companies to improve their inbound sales, increase the list of potential leads, increase the number of conversions, contact the precise list of decision-makers, and enhance the effectiveness of their ABM.

Features Uses

• Improves the number of deals closed
• Contact details enable to speed up the contact and conversion.

Use cases Success examples

Yet to be reviewed

Pricing

Please contact the sales team/seller for pricing details.

As the name suggests, Outreach is an excellent platform that enables the sales development team to build relationships and leave other stuff like mailing, reporting, and others to be done by the automated system. Emails, cold calling outreach, sales process analysis, integrations, and automatic sequencing are all managed by the Outreach features enabling the team to build strong relationships with potential leads.

Features Uses

• Effective prospects engagement
• Outreach syncing with integrations

Use cases Success examples

• Docu sign signed Outreach and enabled its team to develop sales to strategize their campaigns with the right content to improve its success. Docu Sign was able to save up to thirty minutes per day per each sales rep, increased their sales funnel visibility and improved collaboration between the sales and marketing team.
• Cloudera also signed up with Outreach and improved the volume of their sales activity tremendously, and their team was also able to simultaneously increase their performance. Signing up with Outreach helped them increase their email open rates up to six times than what it was, the email reply rate increased to twenty percent from a mere three percent, and the number of meetings doubled up in five months.

Pricing

Details not provided by the vendor

Conclusion

Sales development and business development teams at companies of all sizes use tons of software apps to manage their day to day activities. However, utilizing multiple apps for different tasks can be very overwhelming. Using a single platform enables the sales development rep -

• Track potential customers,
• Customers that are sales qualified,
• List of business/likely lead contacts with emails,
• Collaboration within the teams,
• Automated and predictive dialing,
• Reporting and
• An attractive sales pitch about the product or service offered based on the customer's interest.

The list of tools for developing sales discussed in this article helps businesses of every size choose the features as per their individual business needs. We have discussed some of the best software providers, the benefits of their usage, features, and pricing in detail to understand the products better. While most of them offer tons of exciting features and even more attractive pricing plans, it is vital to choose the most suitable one for the company's business needs.

The team responsible for developing sales has to conduct extensive research, create a contact list of the potential leads, communicate with them through emails and calls, offer helpful information about the product or service provided, convert them into sales qualified customers, and collect feedback improvement. With each case at a different stage, all these activities can get very ambiguous and lead to a lot of information mismanagement resulting in losing out of precious leads.

These software tools for developing sales can solve most communication, tracking, collaboration, scheduling, and other lead generation tasks to be automated and cutting the actual time spent on these activities by half. While using these tools helps the sales development rep optimize their time to more useful tasks. It also enables the sales team to draw reports with multiple factors to make data-driven decisions effortlessly. These software tools for the development of sales are extremely helpful in making winners out of your sales development teams.

Questions asked while looking for sales development:

Caroline is an editor and contributor to Wikipedia articles; loves writing around food, wine, and small business. For a short time, she also worked for the Polish marketing consulting firm.