Top Sales Tools and Strategies for Startups
Explore sales and pricing strategies for early-stage businesses and the sales tools that startup teams need to grow smarter.
written by: Marcel Deer
edited by: Ron Dawson
Introduction
Many pundits have argued that AI will replace entry-level salespeople in the coming years. However, what’s much more likely is that AI-empowered salespeople will simply replace those not using intelligent technologies.
An impressive 79% of sales professionals say that smart sales tools already give them more time for selling, which means they increase productivity immensely. With that kind of value, their use will only increase and there are more effective tools coming online every day. In this article, we’ll look at the smart tools and strategies that successful startup sales teams are using now to make their startups succeed and grow.
Sales strategies for startups
An early-stage startup sales strategy is necessary to guide your sales team. This strategy should consider the products you’re selling, your audience(s), your targets, and what competitors are doing. You’ll also need to incorporate a startup pricing strategy and tools to measure sales performance, and smart tools can help every step of the way.
B2B startup sales vs. B2C startup sales
A critical part of your sales strategy is deciding who you’re going to sell to: businesses, consumers, or both.
In B2B sales for startups, you’ll focus on a smaller number of high-value customers and build long-term relationships with them. You’ll want to use a customer relations management platform like HubSpot, to keep track of your interactions with clients. You can supplement your CRM with smart communication tools like Zoom One or Aircall to tie in communications and gain insights from calls to customers.
Business-to-customer (B2C) sales teams focus on selling to a high number of (often) one-time customers. In this case, it’s more important to get the word out and get a huge number of leads in your sales pipeline. A tool like Apollo can help you access and manage a huge database of leads and turn them into contacts.
Consultative selling
In consultative selling, a sales team works directly with the customer to advise them on the best products for their needs. If your business produces multiple products or versions, this might be the best way for your sales force to operate.
Smart-selling with technology
Smart tools help teams work better and faster. Their work can be more data-driven and time-saving. Automating menial tasks gives your team more time to focus on more important tasks like calling customers and giving demos.
Automated platforms like SalesHub help you manage your contacts, tasks, and data all in one place. That gives you the huge power of efficiency and analysis.
When sales and marketing goals and actions are misaligned, your teams can be working against each other rather than in unison. Integrating the data and management of these divisions can help target leads effectively and lead to increased sales.
Using AI sales tools for startup growth
AI is one of the most disruptive technologies to impact business and culture in a generation. AI’s strengths lie in the generation of content and data analysis, and it works like a backup team to support and complement your sales staff.
According to Sam Mallikarjunan, LinkedIn Learning instructor and former founder/CEO of OSai, “AI is becoming a true digital assistant for the future. It won’t have your expertise or your wisdom, but it can have your knowledge and be very helpful.”
A host of AI-powered sales tools are now available to help your startup grow. These tools can help you manage and analyze your data, looking for patterns that humans might miss. And let’s not forget automatic sales forecast generation based on your past and current data.
Tools like ChatSpot can help with prospecting to find ideal clients. It can also generate content for pitches and other communication with potential customers. AI can even be a training tool for your staff, like SecondNature, which acts like a client for sales practice and even evaluates performance.
Global startup sales considerations
Many startups create products that work anywhere in the global marketplace. That means sales teams need to adapt to different cultures and business practices since customers may prefer different means of communication and levels of formality in different regions. AI technologies can help teams to personalize communications and make them appropriate for customers around the world.
As reported in our “State of AI in GTM Strategy” report, tools like Qloo “The Cultural AI,” have deep learning algorithms that can answer more nuanced questions about different populations worldwide. Akorbi’s Machine Translation is smarter than traditional translation tools as it uses machine learning to speed up translations and improve accuracy.
Startup pricing strategy
Should a startup follow a simple cost-plus model, look to competitors, and price themselves strategically, or simply penetrate the market with an undercutting price?
Many startups are producing products that have never been seen before. How do they calculate the value of their products or how much consumers would be willing to pay for them? Smart tools can help by focusing on real current market trends, analyzing competitors, developing SaaS pricing strategies, and producing SaaS pricing model templates to present prices to customers.
What should a startup’s first sales hires look like?
Smaller startups might start with just one or two sales reps, while a larger project might bring in a sales manager who can then recruit a team of sales reps and account executives.
These professionals all need to be ready to work in the startup sphere. They need to be resourceful, resilient, and passionate to work as the pioneering members of your sales team. They should also have experience working with startups. It’s especially important that they bring a willingness to collaborate with smart sales tools and AI to multiply their efficiency and effectiveness.
Outsourcing sales for a startup
The main benefit of outsourced sales for startups is hiring sales professionals who already work to a process rather than having to reinvent the wheel. However, it may be harder to incentivize an outsourced team, and data security can also become a greater issue.
Sales tools for startups
There are already so many smart tools out there to choose from. Your sales team can put together the tech stack they need to improve their efficiency and increase their results considerably.
Sales CRMs
Sales CRMs, or customer relations management tools, help you keep all of your contacts in one place, whether they’re prospects or current customers. These systems keep track of your communications and schedules and help you collect and analyze data to gain valuable insights. A great CRM will have easy-to-use features like contact and lead management, reporting and analysis, task management, and sales statistics. You also want to look for a system that has mobile access for your roving sales team and is customizable to help you get the perfect fit for your organization.
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most powerful, and therefore popular, CRMs out there. This extensive platform includes sales, marketing, operations, customer service, and content management services all under one roof. You get tools like email marketing, live chat, and forms that help you capture data on your leads to store and analyze.
One feature that stands out in HubSpot is the single customer view. This allows you to track a customer across the whole platform, whether you’re looking at their company, colleagues, activities, communications, engagement, and more.
HubSpot includes hubs that add on to the CRM. There’s Marketing Hub, which uses bots and automated workflows to nurture leads, segment your audience, build reports, and enrich your data. Sales Hub helps you manage multiple pipelines simultaneously, automate email sequences, view deals in process, and analyze sales performance. Service Hub automates ticketing, manages service performance, and logs communications with all your customers.
Last but certainly not least, the newly launched Content Hub (previously CMS Hub) helps you build and manage content on your website. Its new AI-powered features allow you to create platform-specific content from one source at the click of a button.
With all these advanced tools, it’s easy to see why HubSpot is the leading CRM for businesses of all sizes.
Sales coaching and feedback tools
You can spend hours of contact time training your sales team or use applications to help with sales coaching and providing feedback. Most of these tools take advantage of machine learning algorithms to study your sales team’s data and performance so they can help you evolve and improve quickly.
SecondNature
SecondNature is an AI-based training program made specifically for sales teams. It can role-play scenarios, allowing staff to hone their pitches on an AI customer before going out to try them in the real world. It gives feedback on how to improve the content and delivery of your pitches, taking them apart section by section. It can even track your talking pace and filler words to help you deliver your pitch more confidently.
When you use SecondNature, you’ll interact with one of its sales training avatars. You can use standard presets, but you’re also able to set parameters for this customer and sales scenario, raise objections, and answer discovery questions. This tool helps get salespeople onboard with new products, even if they’re remote or hybrid workers.
Gong
Gong is an AI-based sales tool that analyzes and improves sales conversations. By recording, transcribing, and analyzing sales calls and meetings, Gong provides valuable insights into customer interactions, sales techniques, and deal progress. One of the most prominent features of the platform is its ability to highlight key moments in conversations, such as objections, competitive mentions, and successful closing techniques. This helps sales teams identify what works best and replicate successful strategies for better outcomes.
Additionally, Gong offers real-time coaching and feedback during calls, helping sales representatives improve their performance on the spot. Companies often praise Gong for its data-driven approach to sales enablement, which leads to increased efficiency, better customer relationships, and, ultimately, higher win rates.
Proposal and contract software
Administration likely takes up a lot of your time. Wouldn’t it be great if there were digital tools you could use to create proposals and contracts in a fraction of the time? Naturally, there are, and these tools can save you inordinate amounts of time by helping with document creation, management, and e-signing.
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is an intelligent document automation platform that helps users create professional-quality documents like contracts, proposals, and quotes. Teams can collaborate live on document creation, streamline the document approval process, and collect legally binding electronic signatures in real-time.
PandaDoc can be fully integrated into CRMs like HubSpot, so you don’t have to leave your CRM to work on documents. This tool has an intuitive user interface and provides templates that help speed along the process of document creation. PandaDoc lets you customize these templates to express your brand identity. Another valuable aspect of this tool is its analytics and reporting features. You’re able to monitor document views, shares, and time spent on each page. You can also generate reports on document metrics like contract and proposal status to help you gain insights into your team’s performance.
DocuSign
DocuSign is software that can write up and manage your proposals and contracts so that every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed. It can help create, manage, and track these crucially important documents. It can also collect legal signatures so that deals can be sealed remotely.
DocuSign creates document signing workflows that can be customized for multiple signers and predefined routes. It includes easy-to-use templates and allows you to create your own customized templates to reduce document prep time in the future. This tool can be fully integrated into your CRM, is mobile-compatible, and has tight security to protect your sensitive documents and the e-signature process.
Networking and prospecting tools
AI-powered tools help you prospect for ideal customers and reach out to potential supporters. They help you map relationships and learn the best times to contact decision-makers.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you find and engage with leads and prospects on the LinkedIn platform. It lets you use narrow search parameters to target specific prospects and also give accurate, personalized lead recommendations based on the data it collects on user behavior. Sales Navigator also helps you reach out to prospects even if you’re not connected on LinkedIn by using InMail messaging personalized messages.
You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator tools within your CRM. You can save and organize your leads and accounts into customized lists and interaction tracks, plus set follow-up reminders to ensure you never miss a step. You also get real-time updates on leads, like when they change jobs or companies. This can help your team communicate with your prospects more engagingly.
Apollo
Apollo boasts of tracking over 75 million companies and 275 million contacts in its B2B database. It lets you find new prospects and leads by searching by industry, job title, and company size so you can get in touch with appropriate decision-makers.
Using Apollo, your team can create personalized and engaging messages to target prospects, set automated follow-ups, and track campaigns. You can follow sales performance and campaign effectiveness by producing reports on email engagement, pipeline velocity, and your team’s lead conversion rates. All of these features help integrate workflow and optimize your sales process.
Research tools
What wouldn’t you give to learn more about your target audience and better understand their behavior? Powerful new tools are available to do just that, bringing you insights that can help you at every stage of your sales funnel. Many of these tools incorporate AI-driven data analysis to improve accuracy and nail down your demographics better than ever before.
Clearbit by HubSpot
Services like Clearbit (now part of the HubSpot family) can scour the Internet and use proprietary data to help your teams research market trends, find customers, and create data sets with incredible speed. As a data enrichment platform, it helps businesses gather in-depth information about their customers and leads. By utilizing a wide range of data sources, Clearbit can provide detailed insights on individuals and companies, including contact details, company size, social media profiles, and more. This data can be used for targeted marketing, improving lead generation, personalizing customer communications, and enhancing sales efforts. Clearbit is ideal for businesses of all sizes that rely on customer data to drive their marketing, sales, and customer support strategies.
SparkToro
One of the more unique tools to hit the market is SparkToro, co-founded by Rand Fishkin, former co-founder and CEO of the ubiquitous digital marketing platform Moz. SparkToro is a market research tool that helps marketers identify and understand their target audience more effectively. By analyzing social media and online behavior patterns, SparkToro provides valuable insights into the interests, preferences, and behaviors of specific target demographics. Marketers can use it to discover where their audience hangs out online, what content they engage with, and what influences their purchasing decisions. This information is crucial for developing more targeted marketing strategies, creating relevant content, and reaching the right audience with the right message. SparkToro is best used by marketers looking to improve their audience research efforts and optimize their marketing campaigns for better results.
Sales reporting & analytics platforms
You’ve got sales information, but it doesn’t mean anything until it can be analyzed. New tools can take your complicated data and find clear patterns and trends, then incorporate this information into actionable reports and recommendations.
SalesHub
HubSpot's SalesHub offers robust reporting and analytics features that provide valuable insights for sales teams. Users can track and analyze key metrics such as sales activities, pipeline performance, deal progression, and team productivity. One standout feature of HubSpot's reporting capabilities is the ability to create customizable dashboards and reports, allowing users to visualize data in a way that is most meaningful to them.
The reporting tools also enable users to track sales performance over time, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their sales process. HubSpot's SalesHub provides a variety of reports, including sales performance reports, deal forecasting reports, activity reports, and pipeline reports. Users particularly laud HubSpot's intuitive interface, ease of use, and ability to quickly access and interpret relevant sales data to drive informed decision-making and improve overall sales effectiveness.
Sales forecasting tools
Being able to predict your team’s sales in the short and medium term is indispensable. This can include knowing how to manage pricing, follow and predict market trends, and project your sales data into the future. There are some great tools available to help you do this by harnessing the power of machine learning and AI.
Accenture
What price points should you offer to consumers, and how will that affect your sales? Solutions.ai from Accenture is a tool designed to drive profitability by continuously updating and optimizing your pricing strategies. Thai AI-powered application uses real-time insights to see what customers are doing right now and help you set prices accordingly to maximize customer profitability. AI uses price sensing to create dynamic simulations that let you predict the prices and discounts you should set for your customers. This valuable insight can help you predict your sales numbers, spend less on promotions, and grow your margins.
Zoho Analytics
If you need of a powerful business intelligence and analytics platform, Zoho Analytics is an excellent choice. This tool helps you create visualizations like charts, pivot tables, and maps and analyze data without the need for technical teams. Zoho is great for importing data from multiple sources like spreadsheets and cloud storage. It cleans, transforms, and enriches your data to improve its accuracy and reliability.
Zoho Analytics takes your past data and projects it into the future to create accurate predictions of your sales. You’ll also want to use this tool to report to stakeholders, and this is where Zoho shines. You can schedule reports on metrics like operational KPIs, sales, performance, and customer behavior to be automatically created and distributed to everyone who needs this crucial, timely information.
Meeting tools
Meetings are identified as one of the biggest drains on time resources, so is there a way to make them more efficient? Streamlining your meetings by inviting only relevant people and only when they’re available can reduce friction and prevent time-wasting. When people can’t make meetings, tools also exist to allow them to mine crucial information so that no one on your team misses a beat.
Otter
If you want to know what happened at a meeting you missed or get the exact details of what was said, AI tools can help. Otter can generate transcripts immediately from audio into text and uses voice recognition to identify who was speaking. This tool can also create summaries and action items for different team members. Otter can be integrated into apps like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to capture audio and create instant transcriptions. Once the meeting is over, these transcriptions can be synced with cloud storage or individuals’ calendars. Otter also gives you analytics tools to find insights relating to speaker participation, conversion topics and trends, and action items. These insights can be applied to help make future meetings more efficient and productive.
Calendly
Calendly is a complementary tool to Otter and is one of the more well-known and established calendar scheduling tools.. It can help you manage your team schedules and organize meetings efficiently. Within your team, members can give availability preferences, and Calendly will automatically find the most ideal meeting time for everyone involved. This saves lots of time by eliminating the back-and-forth messages teams use to set meetings. Calendly has a very simple user interface and integrates well with most calendar platforms. It’s also highly flexible and customizable, letting users schedule different meeting types, personalize or brand invites, and set pre-meeting reminders to keep all participants prepared.
Sales chatbots
As soon as a technology becomes available, customers demand it, and this is absolutely the case with AI-driven 24-hour service. Companies are racing to get chatbots on board so that they don’t get left behind and fall victim to churn. There are plenty of tools available for creating your own dedicated chatbot but these are some of the best.
ChatSpot
Built right into HubSpot’s customer platform is the ChatSpot chatbot builder. This advanced tool lets you build a chatbot without having to know how to code or be an AI expert. But the results are just as powerful. You can design your unique chatbot to interact with visitors to your website based on the data in your CRM. It can engage customers, answer questions, and provide them with the support they need. It can also help to quantify leads and schedule meetings for you. ChatGPT powers this chatbot and uses that large language model’s advanced knowledge of human language to make interactions feel natural and authentic. ChatSpot can also interact with your team to analyze your data and give you insights on how to streamline performance at all stages of your pipeline.
Intercom
Intercom is a customer messaging platform that helps to keep all of your client information, meetings, calls, messaging, and more in one easy place. It allows you to manage your team, assign tasks, keep track of performance, and analyze what is and isn’t working in your communications.
Intercom also lets you create an AI agent to interact with your customers. This chatbot lets you create your own customized conversation flows to guide customers based on their questions and interactions. The Intercom chatbot can also initiate proactive conversations with website visitors to engage them and provide appropriate assistance. It’s also designed to provide a seamless transition between the AI and human conversations for when your sales team needs to step in.
Messaging tools
Advanced messaging tools are great for team integration and communication. They help your team converse in real-time, share information, and record communications for future reference. That way, nothing falls through the cracks or gets lost in translation.
Slack
Slack is one of the most popular communication tools for business. It allows you to create messages from conversations, create notifications for meetings, communicate workflows, and more to help your sales team keep communication tight. Slack’s channels let you separate conversations based on topics, projects, or teams for increased organization. It offers direct messaging to individuals or groups and lets your team share important files across the platform.
Slack is one of the most intuitive platforms and is highly customizable. It lets team members set their own alerts and notifications so that they never miss any actions or mentions in their channels. It archives all conversations and files, allowing your team to search for them for reference in the future. It also provides analytics on team activity and engagement to help you track productivity and collaboration trends for your team.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is designed for collaboration and is highly effective for organizations broken up into distinct teams as the name suggests. These teams get broken down into channels based on topics or projects, and then conversations are streamed into threads. This tight organization helps you later find conversations and information within them efficiently.
Teams can be integrated into your CRM so that you can connect with your schedule and sales data. In addition to messaging, it also allows for file sharing and audio and video conferencing. Other collaboration tools like polls, calendars, and task management allow you to use Teams for all of your team communications.
There are already hundreds of smart tools available to support your sales team, and with AI, thousands more are on the way. It’s clear that startups that don’t adopt and leverage these tools will sink while those that do will swim. So look to the best sales tools for startups and build a tech stack that will greatly increase your team’s efficiency and effectiveness.
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