Did you know that 90% of new businesses will fail?
Every entrepreneur starts off with the best intent to disrupt the industry, to democratize usage and to change the world.
But it still boils down to dollar and cents to keep your business afloat.
Ultimately, the website traffic and Facebook likes couldn’t be used to pay the bills.
Whether you are a small business owner, solopreneur or a freelancer, you can increase your revenue by implementing the right tools and creating a strategy that has been proven to yield results.
It won’t be easy if you rely on the same tired strategy and methods that everyone else is using.
Fortunately, opportunities are waiting. There are so many tools that can help double your revenue.
So, what types of tools am I talking about here?
Why #CRM and #SalesAutomation Tools are Critical for Growth in 2016 | https://t.co/j1LzG9jH7H @jakenewfield
— Jacob Simkovich (@JacobThePenguin) March 10, 2016
Here is a rundown of seven paid sales automation tools:
1. Yesware – Yesware is an all-in-one sales toolkit that helps you connect with prospects, track customer engagement, and close more deals.
By injecting data insights and sales communication tools into your existing email workspace, Yesware removes barriers to productivity and empowers sales teams to make smarter decisions, faster.
What I most love about this tool is the integration with my Outlook.
Every email I send out become trackable and that allows me to know when my someone open my email.
It could even monitor the links within my email.
Once notified, I could follow up timely with my prospects since I know they have read my email and/or opened up my links.
My 2nd favourite feature is the template function.
Particularly useful for initial pitches where content is pretty similar.
Instead of typing everything from scratch or copying-and-pasting from an older sent email, it takes less than three clicks to generate a new email with the content.
The paid version comes with mail merge functions so you could upload a CSV with your contact lists and each email could be customized to show their first name and other dedicated information to bring across personalization.
Price: $12 per user per month for a pro license.
2. Followupthen – Clear out your inbox. Shorten your to-do list. Never forget to followup.
Remembering to followup is a real bitch.
It is very easy to get into the flow to do a broad outreach exercise and connect with 100 new leads within a day.
In an ideal world, they would reply to your email right away.
But the perfect world doesn’t exist so you need to follow up with them
You set up a Followupthen reminder by adding instruction in the form of an email in the cc or bcc field.
So if you wish to be reminded of the email again in 3 days time, you add ‘[email protected]’ in the bcc field.
Or maybe you like to remind your recipient instead? Just have the email placed in the cc field then.
Price: $2 per user per month for up to 250 followups.
3. Calendly – Calendly makes life easy for business professionals and their customers by streamlining appointment scheduling through simple, beautiful software.
Once you set it up, you could share a common link that shows your availability. Calendly connects with most major email service providers to retrieve your free time.
Anyone who wishes to make an appointment with you only needs to click on the open slots and book away.
You eliminated email and phone tag for scheduling meetings and appointments.
Price: $8 per user per month for a premium account
4. Pipedrive – Sales CRM for small teams with big ambitions.
One of the best sales CRM I have ever encountered, and it is so easy to set up!
Most of their competitors would make six figures just to setup. With Pipedrive, I did it myself in less than 5 minutes.
Their software is used by more than 10,000 customers around the world, among them are companies like Fortumo, Postmates, Falcon Social, Blippar, Mixcloud and Discovery Channel.
Using easy drag-and-drop functionality, you could easily slot a new deal into your sales funnel and move them across.
One of my favourite features is the deal rot function. If there are no new activities for a deal over a defined period, that deal will turn red.
Price: $12 per user per month for a pro license.
5. Replyapp – With cold calling going the way of the dinosaur, email is your next best outreach. But to scale that effectively is still an enormous challenge.
What Replyapp does it put your email outreach on autopilot, while still making each communication personal.
You simply create campaigns and set up the number of emails sequence within each and when they should be released.
Once you have a new lead dripped into the campaign, Replyapp will take care of the rest.
The sequence will continue until your recipient breaks it, via replying to your email.
Saving you tonnes of time and allow you to focus on the prospects that more receptive.
Price: $12 per user per month for a pro license.
6. Snov.io – Snov.io is a cold outreach automation platform.
With Snov.io you get an all-in-one multipurpose marketing solution, which is great as I don’t need to switch between or subscribe to multiple platforms and software.
This SaaS platform provides you with all the tools necessary for email marketing to help you streamline, save, and improve your workflow.
The main feature is an Email Finder that lets you find prospects’ emails on any website, from social networks (including professional ones) to search engine results.
Their search through Chrome extension is lightning fast and handy if you wanna collect emails to your prospect list while browsing websites.
Their second most popular feature is an Email Verifier that boasts a 98% accuracy, offers a bulk option, and is available through API. Snov.io’s verifier will help you clean your list on-the-go, decrease the bounce rate, and improve deliverability.
Snov.io has also recently launched a Cold Email Sender that lets you build and send triggered email drip campaigns.
I think the greatest thing about this sender is an easy to use drag-and-drop campaign builder – it’s very comfortable and fun to use.
The statistics on any launched campaign are displayed in real-time.
You can edit the campaign and the recipient list even after launch, which is a really good addition.
The company’s Email Tracker extension is another star tool.
It’s absolutely free, doesn’t insert any logos or signatures, and integrates directly into your Gmail, letting you track your sent email opens and link clicks. And it has an almost perfect 4.9-star score on Chrome Web Store. What else could you ask for!
Bonus: I wasn’t joking about Snov.io being an all-in-one solution. If you want to know what technologies, marketing solutions, or e-commerce tools your competitors are using, try Snov.io Technology Checker.
Price: from $29 per month. Annual subscriptions are available.
7. Sales.Rocks is a sales enablement tool that helps companies fill their sales pipeline by allowing them to get quick access to full company and contact data.
They allow you to filter companies using criteria such as Location, Industry, Company Size and Status, Contact Option, Web Technologies Used from 9 European countries.
What I like most about this tool is that in just a few clicks, you can download a list of hundreds of leads that contain all the necessary info you need to start prospecting.
This tool can be beneficial for marketing and sales professionals that want to simplify the process of finding leads and helps them save time and money.
My second favourite thing about this platform is that they allow you to test their features before you buy it with the Freemium option.
And if you find it a good fit for your business, you can refer it to a friend and get extra credits when using the Referral program.
Price: € 99 per month (up to 10 users per license)
8. Vocus.io – A rich email outreach tool to send mass email campaigns, with detailed analytics & calendar integrations.
Vocus.io is a great tool, verified by Google that helps you conduct email outreach smoothly and efficiently.
You can send mass email campaigns with Vocus.io without any hassle or tenacious effort. My favourite feature is the mail merge option.
In today’s world, each communication message needs to be personalized, for readers to value it. With mail merge, you can customize each email automatically and better interact with your target audience.
Vocus.io also allows you to track activity such as email opens and click rates. This helps identify your email campaigns’ overall performance.
In order to improve the response rate, Vocus.io also allows you to set up automated follow-ups. Follow-Ups increase the chance of your message reaching your audience and them replying to it.
You can also use this tool for prospecting, finding emails and setting up reminders. Emails and follow-ups can also be scheduled to be sent at a later time. It also allows team collaboration and real-time calendar sync.
With several software integrations, Vocus.io is a great tool to be leveraged for increasing sales.
Price: Comes with a free 30 day trial with no CC details required, and the basic plan starts from $5.
9. Aeroleads
A quintessential SaaS application, AeroLeads can boost your lead generation and track your marketing strategies.
One of the best sales automation tools, you can easily make an email list by integrating the tool with any site.
Monitor the metrics like open rates and click-through-rates of the emails. Verify the email list and segregate it within minutes.
All in one sales tool to know the company details and the contacts of higher officials. It stands at the vanguard of lead generation tools.
Price: 49$ per month (1000 credits available)
10. Hunter
Hunter is one of the most intuitive cold outreach tools on the market. It’s actually not just an outreach automation tool. It offers handy features such as email finder, email verifier, author finder, and Campaigns (tool for cold outreach).
Hunter supports your cold outreach campaigns and makes sure every email sent is email delivered. Connect with the right prospects, track the engagement, and tweak & automate your outreach process.
This is what you can do with Hunter:
- Find the right prospect’s information using Email Finder, Author Finder, or Domain Search
- Verify the prospect’s information using Email Verifier to avoid low deliverability and high bounce rates
- Import prospect’s information into the Leads (which is Hunter’s CRM)
- Create a cold campaign with Campaigns along with outreach sequence and personalized outreach emails
- Start reaching out to prospects
- Track campaign performance & tweak for higher conversions
Hunter offers a variety of subscription plans which makes it a friendly tool for companies of any size. If you’d like to try Hunter, you can sign for a free plan that includes 25 email searches and 50 email verifications per month.
11. ContactOut
ContactOut is a Chrome extension that works on top of LinkedIn. It allows you to look for people’s contact details without having to connect with them. Also, when you do your search on LinkedIn, ContactOut enables you to mass download those searches, and directly save them to your CRM if you are using one.
Aside from the browser extension, ContactOut has a search portal that lets you find candidates directly from your search dashboard, save those leads, organize them into folders, and export them to a spreadsheet in just a few clicks. With ContactOut, you can also send email campaigns using reusable templates, contact multiple people at once, and follow up automatically.
ContactOut is an email finder and verifier tool trusted by hundreds of thousands of recruitment and sales professionals all over the world. They offer various subscription options to their clients, which start from the Free plan with 40 email credits and 3 phone credits per month. They also offer customized plans depending on your needs and requirement.
You can continue to rely on free tools, hoping that these are good enough, or you can invest a few dollars in these tools and watch your profit grow.
The choice is yours, and the direction you take is based largely on your strategy and budget. Just remember that these tools are not an expense. Instead, they are an investment in the future of your business.
