Sales
8 min read

Sales team: 7 essential tools!

Discover the essential tools for a sales rep to save time and be more efficient and effective!

Simon Laurino
Simon Laurino
Head of Growth @Qobra
December 14, 2022
Sales team: 7 essential tools!

Are you sure you have all the best software and platforms in your sales stack that will help you to be more efficient and effective? And to save time in your daily management?

This is what you will find out by reading this article! 

Our experts at Qobra have listed the essential business tools for you.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

It is impossible to start this list of business tools without talking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management). 

Whether the sales force is small or consists of several dozen salespeople, the CRM is the key tool for gathering all customer knowledge, but also all information about prospects.

The key features of a good CRM software include

  • Contact management, with detailed records for prospects, customers and companies.
  • Traceability of commercial activity. All actions (past, current and future) carried out by the sales staff on each contract.
  • Management of the conversion tunnel. The ability to see at any time the status of discussions with each prospect or customer, according to their stage of maturity.

Many CRMs also integrate marketing and customer service functions, which offers the possibility of creating synergies throughout the prospect's buying journey. From the management of marketing campaigns to the follow-up of customer loyalty actions, it is necessary to select a CRM according to the real needs of the company.

The best CRM for a sales team

  • Salesforce
  • HubSpot
  • Pipedrive
  • Sellsy
  • Zoho CRM... 

1st CRM: How to choose it?

When a company grows, it naturally seeks to acquire a more robust and efficient CRM in order to integrate its numerous data and benefit from greater flexibility. At this point, it will be a question of migrating the first CRM to the second, and it is important to have this operation in mind as soon as the first CRM is set up.

Indeed, before acquiring a first CRM, it is essential to look carefully at the possible integrations with the various other tools of the sales team. This will make it much easier to keep all the sales team's data and make it easily accessible.

📌 The example at Qobra

At Qobra, for our first CRM, we chose to implement Salesforce. Although it is designed for large companies, and its price may seem high for a young company, its speed, the many possible integrations and its flexibility allowed us to build the ideal CRM. In this way, we also avoided a potential migration later on.

Tools to fill in the CRM simply

Manually populating a CRM can be very time-consuming for sales people or the teams in charge of it, which can lead them to neglect this most important task! 

Fortunately, some tools have been developed to do this automatically.

📌 The example at Qobra

To save salespeople time, Qobra's teams use Surfe, a tool that takes the form of a Chrome extension directly linked to LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. With a single click, a contact can be instantly added to the CRM, and previously defined fields are filled in with the relevant information. Moreover, Surfe is integrated with the best tools such as Kaspr or Dropcontact, which is a walk in the park!

2. Sales Intelligence

In the sales prospecting phase, all information is good to take since it can be used to build a powerful sales pitch. The so-called Sales Intelligence tools offer to provide you with this precious data!

Today, BtoB prospecting must necessarily involve a multi-channel strategy, with emailing, cold calling and Linkedin, for example. In order to maximize this approach, it is therefore necessary to use tools that collect the contact details of prospects on the Internet (websites, social networks, etc.).

Among the tools in this category, the most famous is undoubtedly LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which has become an essential for all sales teams. In this same category, we can also mention Lusha, Kaspr, or Dropcontact, which also enter contact information (name, first name, email, telephone, etc.) from LinkedIn.

📌 The example at Qobra

Our teams chose to use the Kaspr tool for several reasons: its ease of use, its performance on the French market (about 53% of phone numbers found), its price (lower than Lusha), its integration with Surfe and its quality customer service.

For growth teams, Kaspr offers an API account, and for salespeople, a Google Chrome extension. In concrete terms, this allows us to offer sales people the best possible data, and to allow them to be autonomous.

Although Kaspr can also collect email addresses, at Qobra we prefer to use Dropcontact. In addition to being efficient (70% success rate), this tool cleans up the CRM and its integration with the Surfe tool allows us to import the email address into the CRM in one click. In the end, we save our sales teams precious time.

Other sales tools, such as Prospectin, allow you to make contact with prospects by automating the sending of LinkedIn invitations or personalized message sequences. However, be careful to use automation wisely, a prospect always prefers to talk to a human rather than a machine! 

3. Conversation Intelligence

A well-crafted sales pitch and the right posture are essential for closing a sale. And even the best salespeople still have room for improvement in this area!

However, sales coaching requires a certain amount of time, including the analysis of all processes and their improvement, a complex task that is not for everyone.

Conversational intelligence tools have been developed to help managers and salespeople to be more effective in their relations with prospects and customers. These are softwares that record, transcribe and analyze sales calls, and then detect the best practices, share them among employees, but also identify the less good ones and work on them as a team.

The best tool on the market in this area is French, Modjo.

📌 The example at Qobra

We chose Modjo for several reasons. Firs, the quality of the onboarding and the ongoing training offered by the teams lead the sales staff to take full ownership of the tool. Secondly, the tool allows the creation of a library of the best sales calls and pitches, a key resource that is easily accessible to all sales people in the team. Finally, Modjo allows teams to better understand the reasons why a sale did not go through and ultimately to continuously improve the entire sales process.

4. Forecasting

In the same way as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) software, Revenue Ops platforms enable customer data to be organized across the various systems used by the company. 

The objective? To gain more accurate turnover insights for solid sales forecasting

Among the tools offering this type of functionality, we can mention Clari. 

For companies using Salesforce, there is a Forecasting tool integrated into the software. A preferred solution for companies that want to bundle as many tools as possible into one software package. 

5. Sales Engagement

As mentioned above, in order to maximize the chances of engaging with a prospect, it is necessary to opt for a multi-channel strategy. That said, diversifying channels also implies a dispersion of data, and therefore a difficulty for sales representatives to find their way through their tasks (Who to contact? When? How?...).

To overcome these frictions, three tools stand out: 

  • Lemlist
  • Outreach 
  • Salesloft

Each of them allows you to organize your prospection in a surgical manner while having the details of each action carried out or to come.

Once again, for companies using Salesforce, they have at their disposal a specific Sales Engagement module named "High Velocity Sales". It may therefore be interesting for them to favor this solution, allowing them to group their CRM, Forecasting and Sales Engagement tools on the same platform.

📌 The example at Qobra

Because of its robustness, its integration with Salesforce, its user experience and the many possibilities for automating processes, Qobra's teams use Outreach.

Example of use: Every Friday at 2pm, Qobra's sales people get together to prepare for the following week. They select 20 accounts in Outreach, and for each of them, they choose 3 to 5 prospects that they include directly in sequences. With this organisation, on Monday morning, at 9.30am, the week of each salesperson is defined. They know exactly who they are going to contact, via which channel, when, and with which message (thanks to the persona-specific templates directly integrated into Outreach).

6. Sales Enablement

Tools to centralize commercial knowledge

Sales Enablement software has become crucial for sales teams!

Their principle is simple: to centralize in one place all the content (playbooks, webinars, customer testimonials, etc.) that can help sales people to win new business effectively.

Many platforms include this type of functionality. These include Lessonly by Seismic, Chorus.ai and Showpad.

💡 Good to know

Before moving to a Sales Enablement tool, the Notion tool is an excellent alternative for centralizing all content for sales teams. 

Commercial training tools

Training is the only way to train new recruits or to help certain employees to improve their skills.

In addition to traditional sales training, salespeople need to practice pitching, arguing, and fighting the most common sales objections. 

This is precisely what Sales Training tools offer: they bring together all the processes and good practices of the sales team, so that each of them can increase their skills independently.

These tools are often included in more comprehensive platforms (e.g. Sales Enablement), such as Lessonly by Seismic, which includes training features.

7. Sales Compensation

"The growth of a company is 100% driven by salespeople, and the variable pay plan determines their sales behaviour, hence their performance, hence the achievement of targets."

Vladimir Ionesco, Director of Global Sales Performance at Doctolib

In addition to dynamic management and stimulating missions, salespeople are motivated by their salary, and in particular the variable part they can receive. This is why the sales remuneration policy, as well as the tools for managing and calculating it, are key elements to take care of.

Among the existing tools, Excel is still the most widely used by companies, especially as it is implemented as standard in almost all organisations. 

However, Excel was not created with this in mind, and there are many reasons why it is a poor tool for managing and calculating commissions: a source of errors in calculations, time-consuming, lack of support, lack of advice and good practices, limited, non-collaborative solution, no connectivity to peripheral software (CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc.), lack of transparency, visibility, etc. So many good reasons that turn this tool of attractiveness, motivation, performance and loyalty into a subject of friction, turnover and demotivation!

"Excel was taking us a long time, whether it was retrieving the different information (quotas, shift changes, etc.) and readjusting all these elements, updating the Excel template, having it validated by the manager and then communicating it to the teams."

Aude Cadiot, Revenue Operations Lead at Spendesk

For a transparent and motivating variable remuneration, it is essential to use a commission management tool like Qobra

Here are some telling statistics from the Qobra and Modjo study on variable commissions in France:

  • 68% of employees who use Excel or Google Sheets to calculate and manage commissions are not satisfied, while 85% of employees who use commission calculation and management software are satisfied.
  • 61.9% of employees using commission calculation and management software exceeded their targets, compared with only 30.1% of those using Excel or Google Sheets.
G2 Qobra

Once the variable remuneration policy has been integrated into Qobra, and the tool is linked to the CRM, the commissions of the sales reps are automatically reported, allowing them to see the results of their actions on a daily basis (or should we say even better, “in real time”). An essential source of performance, motivation and, ultimately, loyalty.

"Since we've had Qobra, we've seen between 15 and 20% improvement on target achievement."

Tomas Hons, GTM Strategy & Operations Manager at Make

The final word...

From CRM to commission management, including sales training, we have listed all the main tools available to sales teams to be more efficient and effective!

Here is a diagram of all the tools by category that have been mentioned in the article, so all you have to do is make your choice and start implementing them!

Sales tools

Sommaire

Simon Laurino
Simon Laurino
Head of Growth @Qobra
December 14, 2022