As a sales leader, making a lasting impression on prospects is part of your sales engagement strategy, and sales tools are at the heart of it. Gartner reports that sales engagement platforms are considered the top priority among sales leaders, and 90% of them plan to invest in technologies, a.k.a. “sales engagement tech stack tools,” that help their reps engage effectively with their prospects.
Considering the options available in the market, as a sales leader, you would have a daunting task of putting together the right set of tools for your teams. How would you go about choosing what you need and what you don’t? Let’s look at the fundamentals.
A sales tech stack is a set of different software and technology needed for the sales function. A thoughtfully created stack would contain tools that streamline workflow of the sales reps to improve their efficiency, and drive increased sales.
While there is no single tool that can perform all the tasks, some have more features than others. The following figure by Gartner shows the most popular tools that make up a sales engagement tech stack:
All organizations today that generate revenue through sales need a robust sales tech stack to create an efficient workflow. While the primary task of sales teams is to sell, 74% of sales reps admit that most of the work they engage in at the office has nothing to do with selling!
Shackled by low-value administrative tasks, sales reps lost time they could have spent on prospects.
Digital tools that are part of a sales tech stack have a number of advantages such as; improving internal collaboration, creating well-structured sales cycles and accurately forecasting sales. The bottom line is that tech stacks drive revenue, but how many of these tools does your team really need?
A survey by GetAccept reported that 67% of respondents used between 4 and 10 digital sales tools in their organization. The purpose of the tools is to act as a catalyst to the sales process by improving sales rep efficiency and maintaining multiple touch points with the prospects to facilitate their movement through the sales funnel.
A sales tech stack that is well put together should comprise different tools suited for different tasks. However, the proliferation of technology into sales is also giving rise to platforms with capabilities that span across multiple niches.
Regardless of how many tools your organization needs to optimize the sales process, here are the top 9 sales engagement tech stack tools you can build your tech stack with:
G2 Rating: 4/5
Sales Features: CRM with Analytics and forecasting
Highlights: lead management, deal management, contact management and workflow automation.
Suitable for: small and medium businesses
Customer relationship management is a critical aspect for all companies, as the majority of their revenue comes from loyal customers. To retain valued customers, it is essential to engage them through various channels such as calls, emails, social media, surveys, etc. Zoho CRM is a comprehensive platform that manages all-important customer relationships while streamlining and automating sales and marketing efforts.
The sales force automation feature improves productivity by taking on time-consuming tasks such as sales appointment scheduling, tracking contacts, follow-up emails, and updating sales opportunities. Reps can use the saved time to focus on generating estimates, nurturing leads, closing the sale, and growing the customer relationship.
Powered by AI, Zoho CRM is particularly useful for sales professionals in analytics, forecasting, and reporting. Sales reps can glean real-time insights into the sales pipeline and analyze the real sales in relation to the predicted trends. Accurate forecasting for allocation and revenues allows teams to budget and track the performance of sales departments to find inefficiencies.
The intuitive application is popular among both startups and established businesses, accounting for approximately 6.95 percent of the total CRM market share.
Hubspot: A good choice for growing teams, HubSpot Sales Hub is a highly intuitive and easy-to-use CRM. It offers functionalities such as sales engagement tools and robust analytics.
Freshsales: A perfect CRM tool for SMBs, Freshsales CRM is an all-inclusive salesforce automation tool to manage leads, maintain client relationships, and manage customer engagement. Additionally, the software is available in 30 languages.
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
Sales Feature: Interactive Video platform
Highlights: Integrated workflows, video creation, browser extension, analytics, and wide-scale integrations.
Suitable for: Small and medium businesses, large enterprises.
Videos have gained tremendous popularity over the last decade due to social media platforms and the evolving way people consume content. Video selling has taken over the B2B industry by storm as it’s a concise and impactful way to deliver a message. Hippo Video is an all-in-one video solution for sales, marketing, communication, customer support, and more.
This interactive video platform allows users to create highly personalized videos to generate leads, create customer testimonials, create training content, and create how-to-guides. It also comes with highly intuitive features such as in-built video editing, video thumbnails, video automation, a teleprompter, and a lot more to enable users to quickly make and scale their business videos. The newest addition to a host of features is Humanize AI, with which businesses can create hundreds of personalized videos from a single video and do it all in the time it takes to make one.
The platform’s seamless integration with all social media, leading sales engagement platforms, and CRMs makes it the most versatile video selling tool for sales teams.
Request a Demo for Hippo Video
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
Sales Feature: Sales Engagement Software
Highlights: Prospect tracking, outbound sales automations, multi channel outreach and reporting.
Suitable For: Small and medium businesses, large enterprises.
Sales reps often get caught up in non-selling and administrative tasks that add little value to their time. When these functions are automated, they can connect with prospects to build relationships and close deals. One such tool is Outplay, a highly intuitive sales engagement tool that helps with several tasks, such as prospecting, writing emails, outreach, tracking, and reporting.
Sales teams can visualize their prospects better to track and manage them across several channels, such as LinkedIn, emails, calls, and SMS. Its AI-enabled functionalities include an email writer that helps craft personalized emails. This is done by combining its knowledge about sales and the specific prospect.
Outplay’s automation feature includes interacting with prospects on live and subscription lists to hold them in the sales funnel until manual outreach is possible. The platform also integrates various popular applications such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Gmail, etc., making it one of the best sales engagement tools.
Groove: A sales engagement and productivity tool suited for businesses of all sizes. Groove harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to help reps perform at their best. They also offer a 120-day free trial.
InsideSales: InsideSales is an enterprise sales engagement platform that uses artificial intelligence and a cadence engine to engage prospects in a personalised way. With InsideSales, you get a playbook so sales reps are in the know to help them increase sales productivity, optimize customer interactions, and connect with the right buyer.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Sales Feature: Sales Enablement Software
Highlights: Sales onboarding, sales training, sales certification, manager-led coaching, and ongoing performance checks.
Suitable For: large enterprises
Sales enablement is what facilitates better sales and improves the effectiveness of the process. It provides the sales reps with tools, content, research, and best practices to successfully engage a prospect throughout the buying process.
Mindtickle is a sales enablement tool that also functions as a training platform. The software comes with numerous features for onboarding, coaching, product training and ongoing readiness that helps companies prepare their sales teams in a scalable and effective way.
Users of the tool can track various aspects of sales enablement, such as key learning skills, training, and progression, and stay up-to-date with the latest trends in sales. With Mindtickle, it is possible to define the ideal rep profile for a role and create programs that train new reps and reinforce the best sales behaviors.
The software has a proven track record of decreasing the ramp-up time for new sales reps, and increasing the productivity of teams as a whole. Mindtickle has a broad range of users with some well-known clients such as Ola, Cipla, Hewlett Packard, Henkel, etc.
LevelJump: An onboarding and training software for small and midsized companies. Built inside Salesforce, the platform’s highlights include just-in-time micro learning and out-of-the-box program templates.
Allego: A sales enablement tool, Allego ensures hybrid sales teams have the skills, knowledge, and necessary content to engage buyers at the right time. With a platform like Allego, you can be assured your reps know your message clearly and are well trained to hold conversations with prospects.
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
Sales Feature: Conversational Intelligence
Highlights: Activity dashboard, call monitoring, tracking and reporting, CRM, email management and training management.
Suitable For: small and medium businesses, large enterprises
Conversational intelligence is a cutting-edge technology that is disrupting the sales process. The technology involves recording, analyzing, and gleaning insights from all customer interactions using artificial intelligence. The tool enables sales leaders to understand the performance of individual reps. It also helps make a deeper assessment of customer interactions to understand their interests and pain points.
Chorus is an industry leader in conversation intelligence that offers a scalable solution to capture and analyze data from customer calls, emails, chats, meetings, and other interactions. The insights gained from the data help you understand the behaviours of the top sales performers and train the rest of the team for peak performance.
Data analysis by the platform also helps with risk mitigation, churn reduction, understanding pipeline health, and robust CRM data procurement. With Chorus, it is possible to make data-driven decisions that give you a competitive edge in a dynamic market landscape.
Gong: Gong is a top-rated revenue-generating intelligence platform. It analyzes customer interactions, including phone, mail, and online meetings, for business insights and provides next actions and analytics to your sales, thus determining the best actions they can take. It is suited for high-end mid market and enterprise markets.
Salesloft: A sales engagement platform that helps teams with their sales cadence to turn prospects into customers. Salesloft brings a number of conversational intelligence features to boost the efficiency of sales teams.
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
Sales Feature: Lead Routing Tool
Highlights: Proprietary lead routing technology, lead capture, management and nurturing, campaign management, and forecasting.
Suitable For: Mid-sized businesses and large enterprises.
Lead routing software automates the task of capturing and distributing leads. It works like a screening tool in the sales funnel that captures promising leads and sends them to the right sales rep. Lead Assign is a highly effective sales tool with a cutting-edge lead management system suited for global companies with demand generation programs and sales partner networks.
The proprietary technology of the software allows organizations to see the efficiency of their marketing programs and distributed sales efforts. Every campaign run with the tool is optimized for a higher ROI and shows improved conversion rates.
Lead Assign works well both as a stand-alone tool and as part of a tech stack, and it integrates well with existing tools. Over 300 large-scale enterprises use this platform around the world. It also routes over a million leads annually to the 30,000+ sales reps and team members who work with the tool.
Bitrix24: Bitrix24 has a great CRM for startups and mid-scale businesses. This tool accurately assigns leads to the right sales reps based on location, deal amount, and product of interest, thus increasing conversion rates.
LeadSquared: It is a comprehensive CRM and marketing automation platform with tools for lead capture, nurturing, management, and analytics. This tool route leads to sales reps based on zip code, product of interest, availability of sales reps, etc.
G2 Rating: 4.8/5
Sales Feature: Sales Intelligence Software
Highlights: AI/ Machine Learning, API, Activity Tracking, AB Testing and CRM.
Suitable For: Small and medium businesses
A sales intelligence tool that captures data useful for marketing and sales teams to discover leads and determine potential customers using data analysis. Apollo.io is a comprehensive sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams prospect and engage their leads to drive conversion rates. The tool allows for the discovery and contact of potential customers, and also connects with them to generate leads.
Apollo.io’s integration with LinkedIn helps with generating high-quality leads for prospecting. The platform’s AI then offers automated suggestions about leads and prospects that the sales reps can pursue. The prospecting is done based on a demographic and behavioral analysis of the leads.
Apollo.io has over 220 million contacts and is trusted by 160,000 companies. With built-in CRM capabilities, the platform doubles as sales engagement software for the teams using its services.
Outreach: Outreach integrates sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and conversation intelligence into one platform. It allows companies to drastically improve their productivity. It is best suited for mid-market businesses.
UpLead: UpLead is a B2B prospecting platform with a wide reach across 200 countries. Some of its features include technology tracking, competitor intelligence, account based marketing, and email pattern intelligence. It is best suited for small businesses.
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
Sales Feature: Data solution and predictive analytics
Highlights: Marketing reports, profitability analysis, real-time data, reporting and statistics.
Suitable For: Mid-size businesses, large enterprises.
Businesses routinely generate mountains of data that are useful for gleaning important insights for a range of functions, such as analyzing previous results and making forecasts for the future. DataPine is an all-in-one data management software that helps sales teams perform everything from basic reporting tasks to predictive analytics.
The highly intuitive dashboard features a drag-and-drop option to make it easy for sales reps of all skill levels. It is divided into 6 main functions: Analyze, Connect, Reports, Dashboards, Alarms, and Insights. Sales teams can seamlessly integrate the tool with CRM and ERP platforms to sync data. The analysis feature allows reps to visualize data with dozens of different charts to make important business decisions. Also, alarms can be set for data alerts, and automatic reporting can be generated with a few clicks.
The main feature of the tool is its highly interactive dashboard, designed specifically for data analysis and sales teams working with data scientists.
Tableau Desktop: A pioneer in business intelligence, Tableau is a data solution and predictive analytics platform. It is highly intuitive and features a powerful processing engine and an easy drag-and-drop interface.
Looker: Looker is a data analytics solution that allows you to easily integrate data from multiple sources into a single view. Looker has it all, from performance metrics to strategic planning to visual analytics to trend and problem indicators.
G2 Rating: 4.9/5
Sales Feature: content management platform
Highlights: activity tracking, CRM integration, content publishing options, video support
Suitable For: Small and medium businesses
Content consists of different types of data in businesses, such as written documents, spreadsheets, drawings, video and audio assets, and more. It consists of all the important data pertaining to a business and is essential for keeping records and sharing information both within the organization and outside of it. Paperflite is an all-in-one solution for the content management needs of sales teams that helps them track, share, and store content while gleaning business intelligence.
The highly customizable features of the tool allow users to curate content on microsites and create highly personalized experiences for their clients. The platform also allows users to share multimedia content without worrying about running out of storage space.
The tool is highly intuitive to use and features simple drag-and-drop functionality to make it easy to use. It also integrates seamlessly with a number of popular CRMs, such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, SuiteCRM, and Freshsales. It also integrates with other cloud storage solutions, such as Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox.
Highspot: Highspot is feature-rich content management software that is also a sales enablement platform. Its highlights include customer engagement, contextual guidance, and actionable analytics.
DocSend: Coming from Dropbox, a well-known storage service provider, DocSend helps professionals securely save and share content. The tool is well-known for its security features and a link-based system that facilitates robust content control.
Now that we’re at the end of the tech stack, let’s take a comparative look at the different tools, their types, and their features.
| Sales Engagement tool | G2 Rating | Type | Free version | Platforms supported | Suitable for |
| Zoho CRM | 4/5 | CRM platform | Basic CRM for 1 user | Web, Android, iPhone/iPad | Small and medium businesses |
| Hippo Video | 4.5/5 | Interactive video platform | Yes | Web | Small and medium businesses, large enterprises |
| Mindtickle | 4.7/5 | Sales Enablement Platform | No | Web, Android, iPhone/iPad | Large enterprises |
| Outplay | 4.6/5 | Sales Engagement Platform | Yes, for small teams | web | Small and mid-sized businesses, large enterprises. |
| Chorus | 4.5/5 | Conversational Intelligence Platform | No | Web | small and medium businesses, large enterprises |
| Lead Assign | 4.5/5 | Lead Routing Tool | No | Web | Medium scale businesses and large enterprises. |
| Apollo.io | 4.8/5 | Sales Intelligence Platform | Yes, basic features | web | Small and medium businesses |
| datapine | 4.6/5 | Predictive analytics tool | No | Web, Android, iPhone/iPad | Mid -size businesses, large enterprise |
| Paperflite | 4.9/5 | Content management Tool | Yes, with limited features | Web, Android, iPhone/iPad | Small and medium businesses |
As it is clear from the article you just read, a range of sales engagement platforms are required to successfully generate leads, nurture them, and finally convert the prospects into customers. While your sales engagement tech stack doesn’t require all the platforms mentioned above, some, such as sales engagement, CRM, data management, reporting and analytics, and content management tools, are absolutely necessary to follow the best practises in selling.
That being said, apart from the sales engagement platforms you have in your tech stack, the fundamental principles of sales remain the same: to make a lasting impression, you need a personalized approach that humanizes your prospects.
Videos have a way of instantly seizing our attention and delivering the message in a manner that is empathetic and relatable. With Hippo Video, you can create highly personalized videos in no time that resonate with your audience and not only generate leads but also nudge them through the sales funnel towards a conversion. Coupled with this is Humanize AI, a powerful feature that converts text into videos with you in them, calling your prospects by name.
Start a conversation with us today and see the magic that both videos and humanize AI can do for your business.
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