Sales Automation Tools: Top 13 for Closing More Deals 

Whether you’re selling to businesses or consumers, sales can be challenging.

Especially when dealing with a high volume of leads or trying to scale, managing your sales processes manually is not only time-consuming but also hugely inefficient. 

The more leads fall through the cracks, the more your sales force wastes valuable hours of the day doing grunt work.

Enter the magical era of sales automation tools!

In this article, we’ll get you up to speed with sales automation tools & technology that can maximize sales productivity, boost conversion rates, increase sales, and improve customer experience, all while you are scaling your business to the next level.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Definition: What’s a Sales Automation Tool?

Sales automation tools are any combination of software and technology that help streamline and optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales processes through partial or complete automation.

Even though we don’t have specific sales automation statistics yet, we know that marketing automation can return up to $5.44 for every dollar spent, keeping things interesting.

Next, here are a few pointers on choosing the right sales automation tool for your needs.

Sales Automation Tools: Key Considerations

Given the sheer number of options, selecting the right sales automation platform for your business requirements can be daunting. 

Forget about getting all excited over the fancy upgrades and high-tech stuff. Our suggestion? Stick to the functions and features that you’ll really use.

Here are some key features to look for:

Now, let’s dive into the sales automation tools worth your attention.

Exploring 13 Sales Automation Software Options

Sales automation tools allow your sales team to achieve more with less. However, not all sales tech platforms are created equally. While many excel at being all-in-one champions, others excel at mastering a specialist role.

Tools for Sales Emails

Emails are a crucial channel for nurturing leads and driving conversions. These sales email automation tools can help your marketing and sales teams design, manage, optimize, and execute marketing campaigns.

1. Sender

Sender is a feature-rich, omnichannel marketing automation platform that helps sales and marketing teams create campaigns that boost customer engagement, increase conversions, and drive sales.

Its drag-and-drop email builder and premade design templates allow you to create professional emails in minutes. Just pick an email template to save time or unleash your creativity and craft a unique newsletter from scratch – it’s like a walk in the park with the human-friendly email builder.

With Sender, you can create automated emails, such as a welcome, abandoned cart, and reminder emails, to engage prospects and skyrocket your sales.

Beyond email, Sender offers powerful SMS marketing. And with 98% open rates, you can be sure your customers will read your messages. The good thing is that with Sender, you can effortlessly run and optimize email and SMS sequences on a single dashboard. 

Sender Key Features

• Email & SMS marketing automation;
• Smart segmentation & personalization;
• Campaign creation and scheduling;
• Simple drag-and-drop email builder & premade templates;
• High Inbox Deliverability;
• High-converting popups (like spin-to-win or exit-intent).

Pricing

• Free Forever: 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails/mo; no limits on email segmentation and automation;
• Standard: Starts from $8/mo for up to 30,000 emails and 2,500 subscribers;
• Professional: Starts from $29/mo for up to 60,000 emails and 2,500 subscribers;
• Enterprise: Contact for pricing.

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2. Active Campaign

Active Campaign is an email marketing platform specializing in automation to help businesses sell more and better.

A library of ready-to-send, responsive email templates ensures your promotion or sales campaign is always just a few clicks away.

You can automate your marketing and sales processes by tracking visitor actions on your website. Use signup forms to collect prospects’ email addresses and segment them to trigger custom automation flows.

Use lead scoring to identify and offer your most engaged prospects what they really want while using attribution to understand where your highest converting leads come from.

ActiveCampaign’s Key Features

• Built-in CRM;
• Site Tracking;
• Event Tracking;
• Behavior-based Segmentation;
• 900+ Integrations.

Pricing

• Free: No free plan, only a 14-day free trial;
• Lite: Starts from $29/mo for 1,000 contacts, unlimited email sends/mo;
• Plus: Starts from $49/mo for 1,000 contacts, unlimited email sends/mo, ecommerce integrations, and more;
• Professional: Starts from $149/mo for 2,500 contacts, unlimited email sends/mo, split testing, predictive sending, and more;
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

While ActiveCampaign does not come with a free plan, there’s no reason for you to pass it up. Its automation features are worth trying.

All-in-One Sales Automation Platforms

Next up, all-in-one sales automation platforms that do more than just email marketing automation. These are often more expensive, but that’s because they are designed for sales teams looking to scale.

3. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Using Salesforce’s Sales Cloud module, you can manage contact management, opportunity management, and workflow creation, making your sales processes and conversions more efficient and effective. 

You can foster deeper relationships and identify and act upon closing opportunities by gaining a 360-degree view of your prospects, including activity history, key contacts, customer communications, and internal account narrations.

Track the entire lead cycle from capture to conversion to ensure nothing falls through the cracks while streamlining manual processes to save time and reduce the risk of errors.

Lastly, leverage powerful insights from Salesforce’s real-time dashboards and reporting to make data-driven decisions in the right direction.

Salesforce Sales Cloud’s Key Features

• Workflow & Process Automation;
• Quoting & Contract Approvals;
• Forecast Management;
• Pipeline Management;
• Reports & Dashboards.

Pricing

• Free: Only a free 30-day trial;
• Starter: $25/mo for lead, account & opportunity management features;
• Professional: $80/mo for forecast management, quotes & contracts, and more;
• Enterprise: $165/mo for pipeline management, workflows & approvals, and more;
• Unlimited: $330/mo for all features, including developer sandboxes.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a powerful system to streamline your sales capabilities and get more out of your existing sales efforts. If you’re thinking about it, the 30-day trial is a great way to get started.

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4. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub is a complete sales software suite to help drive productivity and enable organizational growth.

Manage your leads and prospects better using powerful lead management capabilities. Create reusable templates using your highest-converting emails. 

Automate and completely personalize your email sequence while recording and logging all your sales calls into CRM to take control of your sales processes.

You can also add deals, assign responsibilities to team members, automate repetitive tasks, and track your most valuable prospects to keep your deals pipeline full and bulging at all times.

HubSpot Sales Hub’s Key Features

• Lead Management & Prospecting;
• Call Tracking;
• Quotes;
• Deal Pipelines;
• Meeting Scheduler.

Pricing

• Free: 1 deal pipeline, 5 email templates, 200 email tracking notifications, with HubSpot branding;
• Sales Hub Starter: Starts from $18/mo for 2 deal pipelines, 5,000 email templates, unlimited email tracking notifications, 500 mins calling;
• Sales Hub Professional: Starts from $450/mo for 15 deal pipelines, 5,000 email templates, unlimited email tracking notifications, 3000 mins calling, and other advanced features.

Although HubSpot may seem expensive, it is a professional sales software suite with a lot of added functionality that you’ll likely need and pay for anyway.

Tools for Automated Lead Management

Identifying, managing, and converting potential leads demands precision, timeliness, and an effective sales strategy. Here are some sales automation tools that can help you streamline lead acquisition, scoring, nurturing, and conversion.

5. Clearbit

Use Clearbit’s real-time intelligence & data enrichment platform to understand your target audience and create marketing and sales strategies for maximum impact.

By updating business info from 100+ B2B data points, including employee count, location, contact details, and more, Clearbit enriches your leads and improves conversions.

Clearbit’s Weekly Visitor Report is a simple yet powerful overview of the companies that have visited your website and showed interest or buying intent.

Using powerful search capabilities, businesses can find new prospects based on location, industry, size, etc. This ensures more effective and focused outreach efforts.

Your website traffic is transformed into specific company profiles so you can tailor your outreach to convert qualified visitors into leads and sales.

Clearbit’s Key Features

• Data Enrichment;
• Lead Scoring & Routing;
• Form Optimization;
• Advanced Personalization
• Conversion Targeting.

Pricing

• Free: De-anonymize site traffic, find email addresses and other basic features;
• Business: Custom pricing that includes data enrichment, lead scoring & routing, and other advanced features;
• Powered by Clearbit: Clearbit API plan for products.

All said and done, Clearbit fundamentally does what few other sales automation tools do — lead enrichment. Having as much information about your B2B leads as possible upfront can help you develop a more personalized approach and strategy, resulting in better conversions.

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6. Calendly

Calendly is a cloud-based scheduling tool that helps working professionals and businesses set up meetings, appointments, and events.

Eliminate the hassle of matching availability on both sides by simplifying and streamlining the scheduling process.

Set your availability slots and share a simple link that lets your contact choose a slot that works for them. Calendly automatically detects and converts time zones to local ones to avoid misunderstandings.

Calendar apps like Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCloud, as well as video conferencing tools like Zoom, integrate seamlessly with Calendly. 

Calendly’s Key Features

• Customizable Booking Links;
• Multiple Calendars;
• Routing Forms;
• Group Events;
• Analytics & Insights.

Pricing

• Basic: Free plan with unlimited meetings of a single event type, customizable booking links, and other basic features;
• Essentials: Starts from $8/seat/month, multiple calendars, LIVE chat support;
• Professional: Starts from $12/seat/month, routing forms, automated workflows;
• Teams: Starts from $16/seat/month, Salesforce integration, round-robin events.

Calendly is it’s a game-changer, saving you from scheduling headaches and missed opportunities.

Sales Pipeline Automation Tools

Keeping track of leads within the sales pipeline in real time can be challenging. Thankfully, there are sales automation tools that can help automate lead management so your sales team can focus on closing sales & deals rather than juggling administrative tasks.

7. Salesmate

A dynamic, user-friendly sales pipeline automation platform, Salesmate helps you increase revenue and sales.

Its visual sales pipeline gives you a clear view so you can stay focused and make decisions faster.

Tracking when recipients open your emails or click on the links inside them can help you strategize follow-ups accordingly. 

Your sales team will also love the built-in calling feature, allowing them to call their prospects right from the comfort of their CRM dashboard.

Salesmate’s Key Features

• Sales Pipeline;
• Sales Activity Tracking;
• Contact Management;
• Shared Team Inbox;
• Meeting Scheduler.

Pricing

• Free: No free plan, only a 15-day trial;
• Starter: Starts from $12/user/month. Includes contacts, tracking, multiple pipelines, web forms;
• Growth: Starts from $24/user/month. Includes product management, goal management, team inbox, email reminders;
• Boost: Starts from $40/user/month. Includes team management, power dialer, voicemail drop;
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes a dedicated account manager, priority support, and unlimited dashboards.

If the idea of trying out a comprehensive CRM & sales pipeline management tool that’s also affordable sounds enticing, you must give Salesmate a try.

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8. Pipeliner CRM

An online visual CRM that focuses on pipeline management, sales process, and analytics, Pipeliner CRM is a great choice of sales automation tool for your sales team.

Pipeliner CRM has user-friendly, visual sales pipelines that make organizing and managing your streams of potential customers easy. 

You can create automated workflows to streamline and manage sales tasks and activities efficiently, saving manual effort and time.

Assign dynamic, custom targets to your sales teams while ensuring everyone is aligned with the overall business goals.

Pipeliner CRM stands out for its advanced reporting engine, which can generate a variety of dashboards, including standard, pivot, advanced, or even graphical ones.

Pipeliner CRM’s Key Features

• Lead Management;
• Pipeline Management;
• Contact Management;
• Visual Buying Center;
• Archive (unique feature).

Pricing

• Free: No free plan, only a 14-day free trial;
• Starter: Starts from $65/user/mo (minimum 3 users needed). Includes basic sales management, tracking, and collaboration features;
• Business: Starts from $85/user/mo. Includes full CRM, customization, and unique productivity features;
• Enterprise: Starts from $115/user/mo. Includes full CRM with advanced reporting;
• Unlimited: Starts from $150/user/mo. Includes advanced CRM functionality.

If you’re looking for something that doesn’t overwhelm your sales team or the managers operating them, Pipeliner CRM could be an excellent choice for your business.

Sales Funnel Tools

Sales funnel tools can help your business build, manage, analyze, and optimize the buying journeys of your prospects and customers. It involves tools that take charge of the entire prospect lifecycle from initial awareness all the way to the final purchase decision. 

9. GetResponse

GetResponse is an AI-enabled marketing and sales funnel platform that helps businesses design and scale high-quality buying journeys for their prospects and customers.

Choose from over 200+ landing pages and 100+ website templates to create high-converting web assets quickly. 

Are you feeling lazy? Simply input a few keywords, and generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) will generate a custom landing page complete with graphics and messaging.

Use the powerful automation capabilities to set up highly personalized communication flows to attract, nurture, and convert prospects.

Moreover, GetResponse’s conversion funnel builder lets you create everything from a simple opt-in funnel to a fully-featured sales funnel that promotes your products online in just a few clicks.

GetResponse’s Key Features

• Popups & Forms;
• Drag & Drop Website Builder;
• Landing Pages;
• Omnichannel Automation Workflows;
• Webinars.

Pricing

• Free: Includes a website builder, 2,500 email sends/mo, 500 subscribers, landing pages, and signup forms;
• Email Marketing: Starts from $15/mo. Includes email marketing, autoresponders, websites, and landing pages;
• Marketing Automation: Starts from $48/mo. Includes marketing automation, advanced segmentation, and sales funnels;
• Ecommerce Marketing: Starts from $97/mo. Includes ecommerce integrations, transactional emails, and push notifications;
• GetResponse Max: Enterprise plan starting at $999/mo with SMS marketing, dedicated sending infrastructure, and priority technical support.

Long story short, GetResponse might be a good option for those seeking an all-in-one sales funnel builder with omnichannel marketing automation capabilities at an affordable price point. 

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10. ClickFunnels

With ClickFunnels, you can create beautiful, high-converting sales funnels for your prospects from lead capture all the way through conversion.

With the user-friendly drag-and-drop builder, you can create professional landing pages and funnels without paying for expensive third-party software or website design services.

Performing A/B tests on different versions of your sales funnel will help you identify and scale your winners. ClickFunnels’ one-click upsells to increase your average order value (AOV) by allowing customers to add extra purchases with just one click.

With the built-in shopping cart functionality, you can encourage sales right from the minute someone enters your sales funnels.

ClickFunnel’s Key Features

• Powerful, Drag and Drop ClickFunnels Editor;
• Automation Workflows;
• Websites, Blogs, Landing Pages;
• Email Marketing;
• A/B Testing.

Pricing

• Free: No free plan, but all paid plans come with a 100% 30-day money-back guarantee;
• Basic: Starts from $127/mo. Includes one website, 20 funnels, 1 domain, 10,000 contacts;
• Pro: Starts from $157/mo. Includes 1 website, 100 funnels, 3 domains, 25,000 contacts;
• Funnel Hacker: Starts from $157/mo. Includes 3 websites, unlimited funnels, 9 domains, 200,000 contacts.

ClickFunnels is a robust and proven platform to help you quickly create high-performance sales funnel assets. It is more expensive than other comparable sales automation tools, but it also comes packed with features to provide you with maximum value for your money.

Forecasting Automation Tools

As sales is a resource-intensive activity, having the ability to forecast future sales and revenue can help you assign appropriate resources, strategize, and plan better for your business’s growth.

11. Anaplan

Anaplan is a business intelligence and analytics platform that helps deliver predictive insights, including sales planning and forecasts, to help you run your business growth smartly.

When you plan better, you sell better.

Discover which customers are most likely to buy using Anaplan’s predictive analytics. It allows sales strategies to be optimized, targeted, and segmented efficiently.

With features that help with better territory planning and improved alignment between these territories, quotas, and incentives, Anaplan can help you drive more sales with the same resources.

Analyze sales forecasts by geography, product line, or account, and then use predictive insights to focus your limited sales resources on the most profitable opportunities.

Anaplan’s Key Features

• Centralized Data Hub;
• AI & ML-Driven Predictive Insights;
• Predictive Account Segmentation & Scoring;
• Territory & Quota Planning;
• Powerful Connectors & Integrations.

Pricing

• Free: No free plan, only sales-demo-led custom quotes;
• Basic: Includes basic planning & modeling features;
• Professional: Includes advanced planning modules;
• Enterprise: Includes cutting-edge optimization features, data connector bundles, and technical support.

If sales forecasting tools sound like something that could help your business, give Anaplan a shot.

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12. Outreach.io

Outreach.io is an outbound sales automation platform that gives sales teams an end-to-end picture of the entire sales cycle while increasing deal velocity, improving pipeline conversions, and maximizing sales productivity.

The sales engagement feature allows you to create sales pipelines using premade high-impact sequences and playbooks. Outreach.io’s conversational intelligence module helps ensure real-time data and the latest trends analysis support your sales decisions.

Use powerful model scenarios and analyze trends to automate your forecasting, making it more frequent and accurate.

Outreach.io’s Key Features

• Sales Forecasting;
• Deal Management;
• Conversation Intelligence;
• Deal Insights;
• Pipeline Management.

Pricing

• Free: No free plan, only sales-led demos;
• Standard: Custom pricing. Includes all workflows;
• Professional: Custom pricing. Includes advanced features related to sales coaching, deal insights, pipeline management, and forecasting;
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes enterprise-level features, usage limits, and support.

Outreach.io is a versatile sales planning, engagement, and forecasting tool that can make a massive difference to the top-line growth of your business. If your business plans to scale your sales growth, Outreach.io is worth checking out.

Prospecting Tools

A prospecting strategy involves identifying and approaching prospective customers who seem most likely to buy your product. With the help of sales automation tools, this manual process can be made faster, thereby increasing the chances of converting leads into sales.

13. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a powerful sales prospecting platform that helps your business identify other businesses already visiting your website and turn those curious website visits into qualified leads in the sales pipeline.

Leadfeeder’s primary function is to gather and share intelligence about which businesses visit your website and which products or services they are most likely to be interested in, even if they don’t as much as fill out a form.

You can score these leads to identify and filter out the most valuable ones so your limited sales resources can be focused most on them.

Set up custom notifications and alerts to fire whenever a lead visits a particular web or landing page or if they perform specific actions, helping your sales teams to follow up quickly.

Leadfeeder’s Key Features

• Website Activity Tracking;
• Custom Feeds & Filter;
• Monitor Target Accounts;
• Two-way CRM Integrations;
• Automatic Notifications.

Pricing

• Free: Free plan. Includes unlimited users, data from last 7 days, max 100 identified companies;
• Paid: $147/mo (€139/mo), unlimited visits data storage, unlimited users.

If you sell B2B products or services and already have a strong outreach team and strategy, Leadfeeder can help focus your efforts and get you more ROI.

Simplify Sales Process With Sales Automation Tools

Each of the above sales automation tools has strengths and weaknesses. 

While some are great at automating marketing and sales communication at scale, a few excel at managing sales pipelines. Some specialize in helping you forecast and plan your sales capacities better, while others just do it all from a single dashboard.

It is expected that most of these sales automation platforms will:

• Improve results by integrating AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) algorithms;
• Improve their native integration with your existing marketing stack, if any;
• Deliver advanced customization capabilities to work with a platform that truly understands your business needs

Also read:

• 8 Types of Sales Promotion Tools & Advertising Mediums
• Sales Promotion: 25 Examples to Kickstart Your Next Campaign
• 17 Top Email Automation Software to Grow Your Business
• The 21 Best Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms in 2024