If you are looking for ways to achieve your sales process optimization target, hundreds of sales automation tools are available in the market. The challenge lies in filtering out the ones that are suitable for your small business needs.
In this blog, you will find a list of the best sales automation tools to close more deals and achieve your sales process optimization goals.
What are Sales Automation Tools?
Sales automation tools are solutions designed to streamline and automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks involved in the sales process. As a result, the sales team can focus on more important tasks such as developing and implementing strategies. 
By automating these manual tasks, sales automation tools contribute to creating profitable customer journeys. They often come as features of a larger ecosystem such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, email marketing tools, sales management, and lead generation platforms.
Sales automation tools can help your business with tasks that range from lead generation to sales forecasting and analyzing various sales reports. 
Why do Small Businesses Need Sales Automation Tools?
As a small business aiming for growth, it is crucial to be ready with a strategy to handle an increase in the volume of leads. You should be able to do so without compromising on brand value, personalized touch, customer satisfaction rates, and every other customer-related parameter that your business holds dear.
Sales automation tools can act as the backbone of this strategy by enabling you to reach a wider pool of prospects and guide them through your sales pipeline. These automation tools make it possible to achieve scalability without compromising the parameters mentioned above.
They not only free up more time and resources by automating manual and redundant tasks but also provide a deeper understanding of your growing customer base.
What are the Benefits of Sales Automation?
Investing in good sales automation tools for your small business comes with a high Return-on-Investment (ROI).
Mentioned below are some benefits that small businesses can observe once they implement the correct automation tool for sales process optimization.
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How can your small business benefit from sales automation?
Increased Sales Productivity
Organized and Accessible Data
Minimal Errors
Better Insights
Streamlined Workflows
Increased Conversion Rates
- Increased Sales Productivity
Businesses hire sales professionals for their unique ability to sell a product or a service. By being involved in manual, time-consuming, and redundant tasks, data suggests that these professionals spend as little as 30% of their time in direct sales-related activities.
These sales automation tools will help with sales process optimization, making more time available for customer-facing sales activities.
- Organized and Accessible Data
Sales automation tools come with data-gathering and analysis features. They have smart dashboards that generate reports based on these data. The advantage of this feature is the easy data access that comes with it.
No efforts need to be made separately to fetch and organize data. The dashboards and reports in these tools do the work for you.
- Minimal Errors
Throughout history, be it the Industrial Revolution or the technological one, machines have been implemented to not only reduce the use of manual labor but also to ensure there are no errors. When mistakes are made, efforts and resources are spent on rectifying them.
A small business, going through its growth spurt, needs help to afford this extra expense.
- Better Insights
With increased business growth comes an uptick in customer interaction opportunities
- Streamlined Workflows
Sales automation tools help complete tasks faster and build a sales pipeline that takes care of multiple touchpoints to generate a positive customer experience. Having a streamlined and organized workflow makes onboarding clients and new sales professionals easier.
- Increased Conversion Rates
Sales automation tools help in efficient lead management by automatic lead capture and tracking them throughout the customer lifecycle.
Consistent data with minimal data-entry errors, along with the opportunity to automate personalization results in increased customer satisfaction. This leads to a high conversion rate.
8 Best Sales Automation Tools for Small Businesses
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Corefactors
Corefactors visual
Corefactors is a RevOps-enabling AI-powered CRM that helps small businesses close more deals with zero revenue leakage. It provides automatic lead capture into the CRM from various sources followed by their assignment to respective agents based on predefined criteria.
Corefactors enables you to nurture your leads across multiple channels through personalized messages. It comes with an in-built cloud telephony that connects the reps to the leads directly from the CRM. You can prioritize and focus on prospects using its automated lead-scoring feature.
Plans and Pricing
Seed: $25/ month for up to 3 users
Sapling: $43/ month for up to 3 users
Tree: $90/ month for up to 3 users
For Enterprises: Custom Pricing
Key Features
- Automatically capture lead details including contact information from multiple sources that can be integrated with the CRM.
- Multiple deciding factors to automate lead assignment among sales reps.
- Multi-channel lead nurturing by setting up journeys.
- In-built cloud telephony allows you to reach out to leads directly from the CRM using the click-to-call feature.
- Smart call routing and IVR to keep customers engaged and satisfied.
- Gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey through easily available reports and dashboards.
- Automated lead scoring to help sales reps focus more on prospects that stand a chance to convert.
- Corefactors also provides a mobile CRM with geo-tracking to monitor your on-field sales team.
- Individual and team productivity reports to determine bottlenecks and come up with strategies for improvement.
- FunnelFlare
FunnelFlare visuals
FunnelFlare is a sales process automation software that helps sales professionals save time by focusing more on the prospects who are ready to buy. It natively integrates with your existing CRM with no involvement of third-party middleware.
It enables small businesses to obtain sales process optimization by automating voicemail drops, call log updates, email outreach, appointment scheduling, lead tracking, and much more.
Plans and Pricing
It is priced at $45/ user/ month.
Key Features
- Comes with a rapid-fire sales dialer to automate prospect connection.
- You can click to call directly from the CRM.
- Browser-based SMS chat app.
- Automate multi-step follow-up email sequences.
- Track open rates, link clicks, and email replies and automatically stop emails based on these metrics.
- Can be integrated with a calendar to automate appointment scheduling and subsequent reminders.
- Allows you to track prospect behavior based on interactions throughout the lifecycle.
- Growbots
Visual for Growbots
Growbots is an outbound sales automation platform that comes with four distinct features to reach potential customers and engage with them. This sales automation tool will bring you closer to 180 million verified prospects spread across the world.
You can narrow this list down by using 15 advanced targeting criteria. You gain access to prospect information such as email addresses, contact numbers, social media profiles, and such.
With this prospect list in hand, Growbots can now automate your outreach efforts across multiple touchpoints. Growbots provides a detailed campaign report that helps you monitor different metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and much more.
Plans and Pricing
Outreach: $49/ month
All-in-One: $199/ month
Pro: Custom Pricing
Key Features
- Constantly updated prospect database through live email verification.
- 15 Advanced filters to get a tailored list of prospects that match your target market.
- Comes with an AI template generator to create customized email templates tailored to engage the target audience.
- Shared Inbox allows you to reply to all emails received through outbound campaigns without having to juggle with inboxes.
- Increase your chances of attracting more prospects through multichannel sequence touchpoints.
- A user-friendly dashboard to manage all campaign activities
- Email tracking to monitor campaign performance. Comes with detailed reports and gives you the ability to perform A/B testing to improve cold mailing efforts.
- Can be easily integrated into any CRM platform you use.
- Overloop
Overloop visuals
Overloop is a sales engagement and automation platform that also deals with prospect engagement and sales productivity. It helps sales professionals come up with personalized outbound campaigns across cold emails, LinkedIn Automation, and phone calls.
It helps track metrics related to campaigns by monitoring the number of clicks, visits, bounce rates, etc. Overloop will help you track your LinkedIn message replies and stay on top of your lead request acceptance status.
Plans and Pricing
Startup: $49/ user/ month
Growth: $ 99/ user/ month
Enterprise: $149/ user/ month
Key Features
- A Google Chrome extension that captures new leads from any LinkedIn profile to be used in your outbound campaigns.
- Automate sending out LinkedIn connection requests.
- You can import all contacts from a CSV or Spreadsheet and can easily migrate data from one CRM to another
- You can personalize and customize fields to suit your business needs.
- Dynamic smart segments to optimize leads through lists.
- A simple visual interface to set up powerful workflows that reduce repetitive tasks.
- Ability to integrate Overloop with tools that are already used by your business.
- Active Campaign
Visual for active campaign
Active Campaign provides a sales CRM that helps sales professionals do away with mundane tasks and free up their calendar space. It comes with sales reporting that helps you track the performance of individual members of the sales team and keep an eye on the sales funnel.
Active Campaigns will help your small business with automated note creation, task assignment, deal updates, lead scoring, and many more such features.
Plans and Pricing
Lite: $29/ month/ user
Plus: $49/ month for 3 users
Professional: $149/ month for 5 users
Enterprise: Custom Pricing
Key Features
- Automated lead scoring that notifies when a lead is designated as a hot lead. This will help you automate email triggers and assign tasks based on lead score changes.
- Win probability keeps the sales team informed of the chances of converting a lead.
- Sales pipelines to remain updated on open deals.
- Split automation action to test and compare automation workflows.
- Attribution reports to measure the effectiveness of all touchpoints in converting a lead to a paying customer.
- One-to-one email automation to nurture stronger relationships with customers.
- Task assignments to sales professionals can be done manually and can also be automated.
- Dialpad AI
Visuals for dialpad
Dialpad AI is an AI-powered customer intelligence platform that guides sales professionals to excel at their jobs. Dialpad helps you deliver a seamless customer journey through its intelligent self-service and easy escalations to live agent chat.
Manage all customer conversations on a single platform. Cover all customer touchpoints across omnichannel, digital, and outbound conversations. Leverage the powerful AI tool that provides live coaching and real-time call transcriptions.
Plans and Pricing
Standard: $23/ user/ month
Pro: $35/ user/ month
Enterprise: Custom Pricing
Key Features
- Comes with an AI assistant that connects sales professionals to the right information in real time.
- QA scorecards, sentiment analysis, and in-call features like listen-in, barge-in, and take-over to keep sales reps going in the right direction.
- No need to keep switching between different platforms as it comes with native CRM integrations.
- Improve sales performance by going through automatic call summaries and coaching playlists.
- Built-in objection handling, smart responses, and sales playbooks to hit the target with every sales pitch.
- You can transcribe calls via speech recognition and then analyze them through Natural Language Processing (NLP).
- Record a single voicemail to use when you can receive a prospect’s call.
- Calendly
Visuals for calendly
Calendly is a scheduling automation platform that helps sales professionals schedule any meeting from anywhere in the world. It allows one-on-one as well as team involvement in scheduling calls. You can round-robin calls to different reps using Calendly.
Pre-meeting reminders automatically go out to the involved parties to reduce no-shows. It comes with multiple integrations that blend right into your workflow.
Plans and Pricing
Starts with a free plan
Standard: $10/ seat/ month
Teams: $16/ seat/ month
Enterprise: Custom Pricing
Key Features
- Booking links can vary from a 15-minute Zoom call to a 30-minute in-person meeting.
- Smart routing of meetings to members of your sales team.
- Workflows and integrations to connect Calendly to your existing processes and tools.
- Calendly can be connected to your CRM platform, Video conferencing tool of choice, and also to different billing platforms.
- Get meeting analytics, security, and IT-oriented features with each call.
- Can be used both on browsers and mobile devices.
- One centralized place to manage all users and for scheduling purposes.
- PhoneBurner
PhoneBurner visuals
PhoneBurner is an outreach dial software that enables sales professionals to have high-quality conversations with their clients. They provide delay-free connections that boost answer rates and help close more leads.
The outbound power dialer can automate tasks such as leaving voicemail messages, maintaining call logs, and performing post-call processes. PhoneBurner also generates reports to track every call activity and performance.
Plans and Pricing
Standard: $127/ user/ month
Professional: $152/ user/ month
Premium: $169/ user/ month
Key Features
- Comes with a power dialer to dial 60-80 contacts in an hour with no connection delays.
- Teams can dial from anywhere in the world and can add new users without any additional equipment.
- You get dedicated inbound numbers and can use any phone or phoneBurner’s softphone.
- Hassle-free transfer of calls to any number.
- One-on-one onboarding expert to set up your account.
- Calls come with 99.9% uptime and 100% lag-free connections.
- Achieve streamlined omnichannel outreach and effective lead distribution.
- 150+ available integrations.
Key Takeaways
For small businesses, achieving a sales process optimization that works for their business and market fit is a difficult task. A lot of research goes into checking out tools that would be of use. This blog has listed eight of the most effective sales automation tools presently available in the market.
Each of these tools has its pros and cons. It is a matter of what fits the scenario best. Besides the pricing, the part of the sales process that your small business wants to automate will play a crucial role in deciding the tool you want.
