Empower Your Sales Team: Exploring Sales Automation Solutions

One in five business professionals use automation or AI in sales, management, marketing, and customer support. 

By automating their workflows, sales professionals are able to free themselves from mundane tasks while unlocking higher efficiency and shorter sales cycles.

However, in order to enjoy the benefits of business automation, it’s important for you to find the best sales automation tools that suit your purpose.

Here are some of 2024’s best technical solutions for accelerating your work velocity.

Sales automation tools: What are they?

Sales automation tools are your magic ticket to a simple and effective sales cycle. They can perform most of the everyday tasks you need to carry out to ensure a seamless customer journey. 

These tasks include:

• Lead search, qualification, and segmentation
• Writing prospecting, sales, welcome, and follow-up emails
• Answering common customer and lead questions via email or chat
• Tailoring and personalizing marketing, sales, and nurturing strategies
• Booking and scheduling calls
• Scheduling and tracking tasks within a team
• Collecting customer data
• Providing detailed analytics of customer behavior, employee performance, etc.

It’s nearly impossible to find a single sales tool that can cover all these functions. Instead, you’re better off finding a platform that supports multiple integrations and that can be plugged into your current tech stack.

The tool should also be simple enough so as to allow you to avoid a steep learning curve. Bonus points if it will scale as your team and company grow.

Who should use sales automation tools?

If you scan the variety of tasks automation software can perform, especially AI automation tools, you’ll see they can benefit: 

• Sales representatives
• Sales managers
• Marketing teams
• Startups without sales teams
• Solopreneurs
• Small and medium-sized businesses
• Enterprise-level organizations

The best thing about automation is that every business and department can find some benefit.

Benefits you get using a sales automation system

The benefits you gain will differ according to the features of various automation tools and how much businesses and individuals rely on automation. 

For example, one company might want more control over lead search and qualification, while another will completely trust the AI tool with this task. 

Still, any business can access the following benefits with a rational, data-driven approach to technology implementation. 

More optimized and efficient sales processes

Automation tools perform manual and time-consuming tasks, making it easier for sales or marketing agents to complete tasks. This doesn’t mean automation tools simplify sales or marketing funnels themselves. 

But in some cases, you can fully or almost fully rely on sales process automation, making the work easier for employees while maintaining or increasing effectiveness. In fact, on average, sales and marketing employees save 2.5 hours daily using AI or automation. 

Better tracking and reporting

Automation also means that customer data and employee performance information are collected and stored properly. As a result, you gain access to accurate analytics that allow you to clearly see the dos and don’ts of your sales and marketing processes, and adjust them accordingly. 

It’s also one of the key ways sales automation tools can help you optimize and simplify the sales cycle. 

More time for employees to focus on customer experience

AI tools for sales and marketing offer multiple valuable features to increase conversion and sales, from auto-reply and reminders to advanced analytics and sales tips. 

Still, human intuition and communication skills are vital for convincing a lead to buy, especially when we talk about B2B sales. So when employees aren’t busy with mundane tasks thanks to automated sales, they can pay more attention to customer needs that only a human can understand and satisfy. 

Increased revenue

As a result of a more efficient sales and marketing cycle and higher conversion, you achieve higher revenue. According to McKinsey, companies who invest in AI in sales, including automation, have a 3-15% revenue uplift and 10-20% sales ROI growth. 

If you’re on the lookout for tools you can use to automate your sales processes, here are some of the leading options.

20+ tools for sales automation

Considering the plethora of sales tasks, chances are you’ll need to combine several different tools to get the best results. Segmented by purpose, here’s our list of the best sales automation software. 

Email automation

Looking to speed up your message creation, content personalization, or follow-up emails? Check out one of these email automation tools.

AiSDR

AiSDR is a one-stop shop that covers all email automation needs. Send first-touch emails, handle questions, reply to questions, and get meetings booked on full autopilot. On top of that, this sales email automation tool leverages LinkedIn personalization, HubSpot, and other data sources to ensure emails are always relevant, timely, and hyper-personalized.

Pricing: $750 per month per 1,000 emails

Mailshake

With Mailshake, you can streamline sales outreach by personalizing email automation, reaching prospects via social media, and applying conclusions from advanced analytics — all from one centralized task manager.

Pricing: from $58 per manager per month

Lemlist

Lemlist allows you to write highly personalized emails at scale, reinforcing them with photos and videos, as well as creating multi-channel campaigns for cold outreach. 

Pricing: from $59 per seat per month

Sales engagement

Sales engagement can be time-intensive and demanding for your sales team, especially if your sales team is struggling to manage other outreach tasks like follow-ups and lead scoring. These tools can help you increase sales engagement and free your employees to focus on more important matters or improve their knowledge. 

Vidyard

Vidyard is an AI-enhanced software for creating videos and video messages to stand out and capture leads’ attention. High-quality content increases engagement and, hence, conversion. 

Pricing: from free to $59 per agent per month

Hubspot Sales Hub

Hubspot Sales is a fully-fledged sales automation platform with features for every purpose, such as CRM insights, AI-based email drafting, and sales playbooks. 

Pricing: from free to $1,500+ per month

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell offers a pretty simple process for sales engagement: 1) discover leads in Sell’s database with 350 million prospect records, 2) qualify them and create a list, and 3) personalize communication and convert them into customers. Every step is, of course, automated. 

Pricing: from $19 to $115 per agent per month 

Lead nurturing

With AI lead generation software, you can find, contact, and nurture potential customers so that you can push them long their customer journey with less time and effort. Some solutions like AiSDR will even manage your follow-ups by automatically personalizing, contextualizing, and sending them according to a pre-established schedule.

Marketo

Adobe Marketo Engage is a B2B sales and marketing automation platform that allows you to create efficient inbound and outbound programs by targeting your website visitors and nurturing them with relevant, personalized content. 

Pricing: Available on request 

Moosend

Moosend offers website and user action tracking, visual workflow builder, content A/B testing, AI subject line optimizer, and many other features to learn exactly what your leads need and effortlessly provide them with the necessary content. 

Pricing: from $9 per month

AWeber

AWeber helps you bring email writing to a new level with engaging and visually attractive templates, an easy-to-use editor, and detailed analytics on email performance. 

Pricing: from free to $899 per month 

Revenue management

Offering customers appropriate pricing for your product and services plays a key role in ensuring successful sales. To that extent, these tools save you from accidentally overpricing or underpricing your product. 

Cloudbeds

Cloudbeds’ Pricing Intelligence Engine helps you to create dynamic pricing, track competitors’ prices, and use analytics to ensure your customers always get the best deal. 

Pricing: Available on request 

Rate Yield

Rate Yield is a tool similar to Cloudbeds for defining the best pricing. But it’s developed specifically for hotels that need to consider many factors throughout the day, from weather to city events, to offer relevant prices. 

Pricing: from $495 per month

Data prospecting

Slow prospecting and poor lead qualification can cause your sales cycles to protract and potentially stall out. The right sales automation solution will not only prevent these from becoming issues, but they’ll speed up your sales.

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a database with thousands of lead records. Using filters, you can find and qualify prospects in a few clicks and get access to their contact information. 

Pricing: Available on request

AiSDR

AiSDR can easily qualify your prospects and create hyper-tailored marketing or nurturing campaigns. It uses data from your ZoomInfo and HubSpot accounts, as well as intent levels and previous lead objections. 

Pricing: $750 per month per 1,000 emails

Email finders

Not all leads publicly share their contact information. And if you don’t have access to a large lead database, finding a target prospect’s email could end up costing you more time and headaches than you expect. 

Snov.io

Snov.io is a CRM automation tool with many great features focused on email marketing, from finding and verifying to sending follow-up and warm-up emails. 

Pricing: from free to $75 per month 

FindEmails.com

FindEmails.com is a simple tool to find and verify the contact information of your prospects. 

Pricing: from $29 to $99 per month

Virtual sales assistants

Having someone to turn to when you have a question or issue is something we can easily take for granted. Nowadays, virtual sales assistants exist, giving you a 24/7 option for getting all of your questions answered. 

ChatSpot

ChatSpot is conversational AI that uses the power of ChatGPT and your HubSpot account data to analyze a company’s work and customer database. Using this data, it provides valuable tips on sales and marketing activities. 

Pricing: Free

Dooly

Dooly helps sales teams reach their maximum performance by keeping all sales information on one page, doing admin work, and recommending the next step to complete tasks the most effectively. 

Pricing: from free to $65 per user per month

People.ai

This AI assistant can help you optimize work by eliminating mundane tasks, giving salespeople tips to prepare for a customer meeting, and even uncovering truths about deals. 

Pricing: Available on request

AiSDR

AiSDR won’t help you with calls, but it can power your texting and email outreach on full autopilot, saving you time spent on personalization, campaign management, and nurturing sequences. 

Pricing: $750 per month per 1,000 emails

A few more AI automation tools

Here are several other tools that don’t cleanly fall into one of the categories above, but they’re likely to prove invaluable to your sales and marketing automation. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud 

The Salesforce automation tool has basically everything you need to automate your sales, from lead management to predictive analytics. That being said, you’ll need more expensive packages to access all features. 

Pricing: from €25 to €500 per user per month

Gong

Gong is an AI tool that analyzes your employee’s interactions with customers via emails, chats, and even calls to define what works and what should be improved. 

Pricing: Available on request

Overloop.com 

Overloop is one of the best outbound automation tools as it helps you build and automate perfect multichannel campaigns for outbound leads, from finding emails to analyzing interaction results. 

Pricing: from $49 to $125 per user per month

Aircall

Aircall is an integrated business phone system that allows you to achieve the highest sales call quality. It has basic features such as speed dialing, a shared call box, and call recording, as well as more advanced ones such as call transcription, analytics, and call monitoring software. 

Pricing: from $25 per license per month

As you can see, some tools cover only a few functions, and others can automate your entire process, but at a significant cost. So, the most cost-efficient way is to combine a few tools with average pricing to automate every stage of your marketing and sales cycle. 

Set up your marketing and sales automation so it works for you

Sales automation tools are definitely worth your money when you know how to integrate them into your sales and marketing activities. They free up your employees’ time for more challenging tasks while increasing the efficiency of mundane but crucial activities, like lead qualification or nurturing. 

The influence of automation has become even more prominent with the spread of AI in sales and marketing. Advancements in AI have enabled companies to achieve results and productivity they never would have dreamed of a decade ago.

Book a demo with AiSDR to check out how it will automate your sales.