Welcome to the world of inside sales—where emails, phone calls, and digital finesse rule. It's all about connecting with prospects remotely through multiple touches, understanding their challenges, and qualifying them as leads.
But how do you navigate the vast ocean of customer data to find new clients? Or how do you pack lead nurturing, follow-ups, cold calls, and updating information in the system into one single day without running for the hills? With the power of automation.
It helps you bid farewell to manual data entries and boring follow-ups, ensuring your inside sales squad focuses on what matters the most—forging relationships and sealing deals.
In this blog, we'll dive deep into the world of inside sales software and equip you with 30 amazing tools to supercharge your sales process.
What Is Inside Sales Software?
Inside sales software is a suite of digital tools that help you streamline and optimize the sales process. From generating leads to closing deals, it helps you perform all key functions from inside your office.
Think of it as a trusty sidekick that helps you simplify and automate time-consuming tasks in your sales cycle. With these handy tools, you can manage contacts, nurture prospects, track sales activities, and generate reports without fumbling through spreadsheets and ensuring no opportunity slips through the cracks.
You can select from different types of inside sales software depending on which stage of the sales process you want to simplify. Let us break it down for you.
4 Stages of the Inside Sales Process
The inside sales process is typically divided into four stages.
Prospect
First, you have to find your potential customers, while actively searching for their contact details. Your sole responsibility is to identify as many prospects as possible and collect as much information as possible that you can feed into your CRM.
You can find prospects and their details via a purchased list, lead directories, or by using various LeadGen tools that not only help you access contact details but also with other important information that will let you take complete control of the prospecting process. Here's an all-you-need-to-know guide on prospecting in the modern sales landscape.
Qualify
You have to determine which prospects are most likely to make a purchase. Qualify them based on the details you have gathered till now. Qualification is an essential step in an inside sales process simply because you don’t have time to pursue all the prospects you have on your list as all of them may not have the same buying intent.
The most important requirement in this stage is to have a centralized repository that stores all the prospect’s information in one place. This is where a CRM plays a helping hand. A CRM is a tool that stores not only the basic prospect information but also your team's relationships and interactions with them.
Engagement
Sales engagement is all about reinforcing relationships with the prospects to convert them into buyers at the next stage. Sales engagement is a multi-step process where you listen to the needs of the prospects and provide them with timely information and answers to build trust.
In this stage, you need the help of sales engagement tools. These tools facilitate high-quality interactions between you and the prospects across multiple touchpoints and channels. These tools automate the repetitive parts of your inside sales funnel including running outreach campaigns, following up, tracking conversations, and so on. This lets you focus on more meaningful activities such as building relationships and closing deals.
Meeting
In this stage of an inside sales process, you demonstrate the benefits and features of your product. The primary objective of this stage is to close the deal. Through a sales meeting, you’re showing how exactly your product or service is helping prospects achieve their goals and alleviate their pain points.
Meeting schedulers are going to be life-savers during this stage. Your prospects are busy people and it is often very difficult to get their time for a demo. It can be a colossal waste of time if even after multiple emails about each other's availability, one or the other doesn't show up for the actual meeting. A meeting scheduler avoids such awkward and truth be told, expensive situations by making the entire process of fixing an appointment a breezy experience.
Now, on to the tools that will help you realize your ultimate sales dream: higher close rates.
30 Inside Sales Tools To Optimize Your Sales Process
Lead Generation Tools:
Manually scouring the vast digital landscape, identifying prospects that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer's persona, and capturing their information can take up a lot of your precious time. Not to mention the resources you'll drain along the way.
Lead generation tools help you simplify this. They enable you to sift through vast databases efficiently to discover, attract, and capture potential customers, creating a thriving sales pipeline. Here’s a list of our top recommendations:
1. Linkport
LinkPort helps businesses import contacts from LinkedIn into CRMs like Pipedrive, Hubspot, Zoho, and Salesforce. It allows sales teams to populate LinkedIn contact details such as name, email, phone number, or organization into the CRMs without ever leaving LinkedIn.
Hero Feature: You can map custom fields from LinkedIn into your CRM and eliminate the need for copy-pasting data manually.
Pricing: Linkport is a free software.
2. Aeroleads
Aeroleads is a handy prospect generation software that helps businesses looking for leads with important contact information such as email IDs and phone numbers.
Hero Feature: This prospecting tool generates 15 data points such as full name, job title, location, company details, etc. All these can be imported as CSV files and transferred to your CRM with one click.
Pricing: Aeroleads has multiple plan types with the starting one costing $49 per month.
3. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is used by sales teams of B2B companies as lead generation software. It typically identifies the companies visiting your website, their behavior, and their intent to purchase. Leadfeeder helps the sales team with engagement and conversion tracking.
Hero Feature: You can identify remote workers with Leadfeeder’s unique database of static and dynamic IPs.
Pricing: Leadfeeder has a 14-day, free trial. The premium plan beginning at $63.00/month.
4. Leadberry
Leadberry is a web-based B2B lead generation software that helps SMBs and enterprises to identify website visitors and convert them into sales leads. Leadberry is used by companies irrespective of their size to convert visitors into hot leads. This software has a robust filtering system and you can filter leads based on lead name, page views, time on site, visited URL(s), campaign parameters, geo-location, and traffic source/medium. You also receive alerts when a prospect views your website.
Hero Feature: Leadberry captures accurate data about a company visiting the website like website URL, industry category, general company bio, and all the company’s social media handles.
Pricing: The most basic plan called the Essential Plan costs $24/month billed annually.
5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator enables businesses to target the right buyers, track key leads and engage with potential prospects all within the LinkedIn social network. The tool also has CRM and SSO integrations.
Hero Feature: While prospecting or nurturing leads, Sales Navigator will keep you posted on updates in your network such as job changes, company news, and more. This will help keep your database updated, maintain relationships and reduce email bounce rates. You can also use this up-to-date information to craft highly personalized sales outreach sequences.
Pricing: There is no free plan. The Sales Navigator professional plan begins at $79.99 per user, per month, billed annually.
CRM Tools:
After generating leads, comes the dreaded task of manual data entry. Trying to stay on top of customer chats, contact info, and sales updates with spreadsheets and sticky notes can turn into a straight-up nightmare. Not only is it time-consuming, but any error or miscommunication means saying goodbye to a potential sale.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools take away the hassle, making your sales process way more efficient. They help you capture and store all relevant customer data in one centralized and secure location. Here are some of the best CRM tools in the market:
6. Hubspot
Arguably one of the most popular CRM solutions on the planet, Hubspot CRM can help you manage your sales pipeline, nurture prospects, forecast revenue, and close deals. You also get access to a tailor-made deals dashboard that enables you to view your entire sales pipeline in one place.
Hero Feature: Hubspot offers a bunch of tools like CMS Hub, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and more under the same umbrella. Such a powerful combination of tools empowers clients to offer a truly powerful customer experience.
Pricing: Hubspot has a free plan. The starter plan is priced at $45/user/month.
7. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is the first CRM platform made for salespeople, by salespeople. Pipedrive allows you to track calls, emails, and contact history exactly when you need them and have complete control over your schedule. Pipedrive popularized activity-based selling, a proven approach that’s all about scheduling, completing, and tracking all sales activities.
Hero Feature: PipeDrive offers an AI-powered Sales Assistant which provides your sales team with personalized tips and recommendations. They can use this in their outreach to improve their results. Your team will also receive automated behaviour-based hints that are tailored to every individual rep. This helps them receive critical information when they need it the most.
Pricing: Pipedrive offers a basic plan that costs $15 a month.
8. Close
Close is a sales communication CRM designed especially for turning your leads into revenue. It is packed with productivity tools like a power dialer and task reminder to help you reach more leads, nurture them, and close deals quicker.
Hero Feature: Close is known for its integrated multi-channel sales outreach approach. You can now bring email, phone, SMS, and video under one roof to streamline your sales outreach.
Pricing: Close offers plans starting from $65 a month with a trial period of 14 days.
9. Copper CRM
Copper is an easy-to-use CRM that helps you manage leads and build customer relationships. Copper CRM seamlessly integrates with Gmail and other Google apps to keep track of all your emails and other essential interactions in one place. You can manage all your contacts, deals, emails, files, and more.
Hero Feature: You can set smart workflow rules with Copper CRM right from your Gmail account.
Pricing: Copper CRM offers a basic plan that starts from $25 a month per user with full G-Suite integration.
10. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM caters to the needs of businesses and industries of all sizes. It comes with a global network of over 250,000 businesses in 180 countries. Zoho allows you to automate your routine sales tasks by creating optimized workflows, eliminating redundant tasks, and speeding up the overall sales process.
Hero Feature: Zoho gives you accurate forecasts of potential sales and revenue with AI predictions that enable you to prioritize leads and close more deals.
Pricing: Zoho offers a flexible free trial. The paid plan starts at $18 per user per month.
11. Salesforce
Salesforce is a well-known name in the CRM ecosystem. It provides comprehensive solutions for sales teams and helps them keep track of all the consumed data and interactions. Being a pioneer in the CRM space, it has enough experience in winning more deals and strengthening customer relationships.
Hero Feature: Salesforce CRM automation offers an intuitive point-and-click interface to the users with a process builder. This helps automate your sales process by auto-assigning the tasks which are due with timely email alerts.
Pricing: The basic plan of salesforce CRM starts at $25 a month.
12. SugarCRM
SugarCRM offers accurate account management and helps you carry out sales-related tasks efficiently. It powers businesses to generate long-lasting customer relationships through its real-time sales insights based on customer interactions. You can use this intel to target accounts based on likeliness to convert and personalize each outreach.
Hero Feature: You can enhance your communications with prospects through sentiment analysis of SugarCRM. Instantly access customer opportunities, purchase history, and many other details without leaving the conversation with the prospect.
Pricing: SugarCRM starts from $40 per user per month.
Sales Engagement Tools:
Sales engagement tools are packed with features that help you step up your client communication game, making it smoother and more effective. Plus, they allow sales reps to connect with prospects using multiple channels, including emails, phone calls, and social media platforms.
These tools also come with powerful automation capabilities, saving you from drab data entry tasks. They equip you with a well-organized and up-to-date database that gives a holistic view of each customer's journey. Here are our top sales engagement tools recommendations:
13. Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams automate all the repetitive activities involved in their sales process like sending cold emails, follow-ups, tracking engagement metrics, etc. This lets the sales reps focus on activities that matter like building relationships and closing deals. Klenty has native integrations with CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, Hubspot, and more.
Hero Feature: You can embed personalized videos in all your cold emails. Simply record videos, access video libraries, and track engagement, all within Klenty.
Pricing: Klenty’s pricing starts at $50 per user, per month. It also offers a free trial.
14. Salesloft
Salesloft helps organizations drive more revenue while improving sales operation using its plethora of sales engagement features. SalesLoft offers features such as lead prioritization, lead scoring, email scheduling, and buyer intelligence.
Hero Feature: Salesloft can transcribe sales calls from speech to text. It also utilizes artificial intelligence to discover insights within recorded sales calls. This helps you coach and improve your sales reps on how to provide your customers with the best experience possible.
Pricing: Salesloft has an array of plans like Prospect, Sell, Engage, and Enterprise. But the details of each package are hidden.
15. Lemlist
Lemlist is an email sequence software that helps you personalize cold emails, automate follow-ups, and engage with leads across multiple channels. It also provides one-click integrations with all email providers and seamless native integrations with Pipedrive, Hubspot, Salesforce, Aircall, and more.
Hero Feature: Lemlist helps you personalize and make your sales emails more impactful by automatically adding screenshots, custom text, and company logos onto images in your emails.
Pricing: Lemlist has a free trial and their email warm-up plan begins at $29 per month.
Find out why should we choose Klenty over Lemlist?
16. Mixmax
Mixmax is a sales engagement platform developed especially for Gmail. It helps revenue teams automate repetitive tasks and enable improved engagement. Mixmax offers a one-click meeting scheduling feature and a powerful dialer to call prospects directly from Gmail.
Hero Feature: Mixmax enhances the customer communication experience through highly automated drip and nurture campaigns.
Pricing: Mixmax has a free version and a free trial. Their plans start at $9 per month, per user, billed annually.
Discover why Klenty is better than Mixmax
17. Reply
Reply is a leading AI-powered sales engagement platform that automates multi-channel touchpoints with your prospects. It assists you in improving your email quality with AI-backed text quality scoring. It also tracks and analyzes marketing campaigns for you.
Hero Feature: Reply can combine emails, calls, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp messages into a multichannel sequence.
Pricing: Reply has a free trial and its pricing is based on the number of people contacted per month. Pricing for individual users starts from $70/user/month.
Discover why Klenty is Different than Reply
18. Mailshake
Mailshake is a sales engagement tool for the modern business to send personalized cold emails at scale. It also automates tasks to engage with prospects via phone and social media, all in one sequence, and that too from a single dashboard. Mailshake also enables a two-way integration with your CRM by tracking sales team actions and prospect responses. You can also seamlessly extract CRM data to populate and personalize your outreach.
Hero Feature: Validate emails before you send them and avoid the bad ones with Mailshake’s List Cleaner.
Pricing: Milkshake does not have a free trial and its basic plan starts at $39/user/month.
Discover why Klenty is Different Mailshake alternative
19. Woodpecker
Woodpecker is a multichannel AI assistant and a sales automation tool that helps B2B enterprises grow their businesses with cold emails and follow-up campaigns. Like most other tools on this list, it can be synced with many popular CRMs. Woodpecker also integrates with most email and voice platforms and syncs information such as contacts, emails, and calls to reduce manual data entry.
Hero Feature: Woodpecker allows administrators to schedule emails in advance and automatically follow up on them based on pre-set reminders.
Pricing: Woodpecker has a free trial, and starts $32/month paid annually.
Discover why Klenty is a better alternative to Woodpecker
20. Persistiq
PersistIQ is an email automation platform designed to send personalized emails and help small teams. This tool can be synced with Salesforce, Copper, and Pipedrive directly. Alternatively, you can use Zapier to connect it with any CRM of your choice to segregate lists of prospects into personalized multi-step campaigns.
Hero Feature: PersistIQ includes a LinkedIn Chrome extension that allows sales teams to find relevant information regarding prospects and add them directly into their platform.
Pricing: PersistIQ has a free trial and their plans start at $59 a month when subscribed annually.
Discover how Klenty boosts efficiency over PersistIQ.
Meeting Scheduling Tools:
Meeting scheduling tools transform the chaotic process of setting up appointments into a smooth and hassle-free experience. No more pulling your hair out trying to juggle calendars, time zones, and availability.
With these tools, you can share your availability with prospects through personalized booking links, allowing them to select the time that works for them. Here are our top picks:
21. Calendly
Calendly is a simple, robust, and powerful scheduling tool. It assists your sales teams to save a lot of time and effort by eliminating repeated phone calls and email threads for scheduling meetings. All you need to do is select your availability preference, share the link with clients and let them pick a suitable time slot for the appointment, which is then added to your calendar. Calendly supports integrations with most inside sales tools including popular video conferencing solutions, CRMs, and more.
Hero Feature: Calendly Team scheduling features help you schedule meetings with multiple team members
Pricing: Calendly’s basic plan is free to use while its premium plan starts from $8/user/month (billed annually).
22. Appoint.ly
Appoint.ly is an innovative scheduling solution that removes the hassles of scheduling, managing appointments, and booking meetings. The tool allows the users to schedule an appointment through a digital calendar and select availability with a single click. Appoint.ly saves time and manual intervention by an automated scheduling process that allows setting up meetings via shared links. Appoint.ly also has multiple event types that can be configured, set up, and invites sent effortlessly to your clients.
Hero Feature: Appoint.ly facilitates easy integrations with all your calendars including Google, Outlook, etc., and prevents double-booking your time slot.
Pricing: Appointly’s basic plan is free to use while its premium plan is $8/user/month (billed annually).
23. Doodle
Doodle helps your inside sales team easily avoid conflicting bookings as it automatically syncs appointments to your prospect’s calendar. Doodle offers you a booking page where you can send a single link to anyone who wants to book a timeslot with your sales teams. Doodle can be integrated with useful tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce to name a few.
Hero Feature: Doodle helps you check the availability of timeslots across time zones.
Pricing: Doodle is free for one user with limited features. For $39 per year, Doodle offers features like setting reminders, follow-ups, and polls.
24. Clara
Clara is an AI-driven platform that helps your teams set up, schedule meetings effortlessly. Clara has automatic email follow-ups, which helps your team set up meetings with your prospect as soon as they get back to you. Clara also sends you reminders before the meeting so that your sales team never forgets about them.
Hero Feature: Clara interacts with everyone in natural language via email which helps save time and effort for your sales team. They do not have to worry about drafting and sending emails anymore.
Pricing: Subscription to Clara starts at $99/user/month. The professional plan is priced at $199/user/month while the Executive plan is priced at $399/user/month.
Conversation Intelligence Tools
Listening to call recordings is a great way to find gaps in your pitch and improve. But here's the thing. Storing these recordings and analyzing them manually can quickly become overwhelming and time-consuming. Plus, providing individual coaching and feedback to each sales rep can be an uphill battle for sales managers.
Conversation intelligence tools are digital wizards that do all the hard work for you. They transcribe and analyze every call, capturing all those important nuggets of information automatically. They help you evaluate lead quality, caller sentiment, and your team's communication skills. Sophisticated conversation intelligence software also allows you to automate follow-ups and provides real-time suggestions. Here are our top recommendations for the best conversation intelligence software in the market:
25. Call IQ by Klenty
Call IQ captures, transcribes, and analyzes every sales conversation. Summarize what happened on calls, get context from previous conversations faster, and identify the key drivers that progress deals.
It comes packed with features that help you win more deals intelligently:
- Centralized location for calls: Call IQ serves as a central place to store all your audio and video calls across Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Klenty Dialer. It organizes all your calls into a searchable and filterable call library so that you can look up any call anytime.
- Transcripts: Call IQ transcribes all your calls or meetings in less than 5 minutes. Instead of listening to all calls one by one, you can skim through the transcript to get the gist of each call.
- Updates call notes into CRM: Call IQ automatically saves your call details to your CRM so that you can focus on conversations without note-taking distractions.
- Align go-to-market with customer voice: Call IQ lets you comment on transcripts and tag stakeholders so you can bring product and service teams up to speed on customer needs and market trends.
- Organizes meetings based on calendars: Call IQ syncs with both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. Once you sync your calendar, it automatically organizes your upcoming meetings so that your calls, meetings, and their respective details are accessible from the same place.
- Track talk time metric: Call IQ shows the talk time of each speaker in the call, making it easier to check if there was a good back-and-forth between the rep and the prospect throughout the call.
Hero Feature: Call IQ provides 4 types of AI-driven summaries to help you get the most out of each call. 'Spotlight Summaries' highlights important moments of a call, 'Action Items' gives the next steps discussed during the call, 'Questions Asked' records all questions asked by prospects, and 'Sentiments' separates positive and negative sentiments.
Starter: $20 per user/month billed annually or $30 per user/month billed quarterly
Pro: $40 per user/month billed annually or $50 per user/month billed quarterly
26. CallHippo
CallHippo is a conversation intelligence software packed with features like intelligent call routing, keyword tracking, CRM integration, and more. Its speech analytics feature uses AI and ML to analyze recorded phone calls and extract customer information to help you improve your strategy.
Hero Feature: CallHippo offers a voice broadcasting system that allows you to send recorded messages to multiple prospects.
Pricing: CallHippo has a free basic plan with limited features. Its paid plans start at $16/user/month.
27. Gong
Gong uses AI-driven analytics to transform sales conversations into valuable insights. It captures and analyzes customer interactions across multiple channels, helping sales teams close deals more effectively. Gong focuses on revenue intelligence, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions.
Hero Feature: It offers real-time, pipeline-based deal execution and forecasting that helps you identify and close healthy deals quickly.
Pricing: Gong offers custom plans based on your specific requirements.
28. DialerHQ
DialerHQ is a speech analytics software tailored for inside sales teams of SMBs. It offers a suite of features to optimize calling campaigns, track performance, and improve sales efficiency. It allows you to choose a custom virtual number and seamlessly integrates with platforms like Hubspot, Slack, Adobe, and more.
Hero Feature: Its speech recognition feature allows you to convert audio to text and examine customer conversations with ease.
Pricing: DialerHQ offers a free basic plan with limited features and 3 paid plans starting at $7.99/user/month.
29. Enthu.ai
Enthu.ai helps you capture customer conversations across multiple channels and track different KPIs to measure the performance of your sales team. You can also customize the platform to your specific use case.
Hero Feature: The conversation intelligence software comes with an auto-seek audio feature that lets you review a 30-minute call in under 30 seconds.
Pricing: Enthu.ai offers a free plan with limited features for teams with up to 3 voice agents. Its growth plan costs $59/agent/month for up to 20 voice agents. For larger teams, the platform offers custom pricing.
30. Chorus
Chorus uses proprietary machine learning to capture and analyze customer calls, meetings, and emails. It makes it easier for sales managers to identify and replicate winning behavior across their sales teams.
Hero Feature: Momentum by Chorus helps you cut right to the chase and identify interactions that heavily impact deal progressions. This helps you forecast revenue by identifying deals that are worth pushing forward.
Pricing: Chorus offers custom plans.
31. CallMiner
CallMiner is a comprehensive, multi-channel conversation intelligence software that transforms customer interactions into valuable business intelligence. It specializes in speech analytics to enhance customer experiences and boost the performance of sales reps.
Hero Feature: CallMiner's fraud detection feature uses AI to detect potential fraud and notify sales reps in real time.
Pricing: CallMiner offers custom plans based on minutes of consumption.
And That’s a Wrap!
You’ve seen what inside sales is about, and the wide range of tools at your disposal to propel your inside sales activities. But remember to choose a tool that fits your team's needs.
Picking a tool is easier than you think. Here’re some simple thumb rules for selecting the tool:
- It should be simple to use
- Integrates with most other tools
- Offers customizable options
But more importantly, it should assist all the members of your inside sales team right from SDRs to Sales Managers, to help them work smarter and offer a more reliable sales experience to prospects.
