Sales management is a challenging job—ask any small business sales manager. You're always on your toes managing a team of sales reps, struggling to hit your quota, training new reps, forecasting sales, preparing reports for your higher-ups, carrying out administrative tasks, and tons more.
With all this on their plates, sales managers spend less than 10% of their time actually coaching and developing their sales people. In other words, sales managers aren't focusing on activities that should be top priority. One reason for this is that the bulk of their time is taken up by resource management or repetitive administrative tasks.
Sales managers in small businesses that use sales management software are likely to have a more productive sales team with higher win rates. They're also more likely to move to deal closure and revenue attainment more quickly.
An analysis of more than 151 companies by InsideSales Labs found that, at the end of the month, sales reps try to push deals that are not ready. This behavior results in three times as many deals being closed on the last day of the month but also in 11 times more deals lost on that day compared with the rest of the month.
Sales managers can address these ineffective, month-end behavioral issues by:
Coaching and mentoring sales reps so they push the right deals at the right time.
Encouraging reps to test different strategic ways of selling.
Focusing on weekly forecasting, not monthly quotas.
Sales management software can help sales managers achieve these goals. Software solutions can help train and coach reps, track and monitor sales performance, forecast sales, decide quotas, and more. All these activities will help your business meet the key goal of improving sales.
In this article, we talk about three top-rated apps that are either dedicated sales management tools or that offer sales management functionality. We also discuss what actual users have to say about them and the best type of buyer for each app.
The three top-rated sales management apps for small businesses are:
(Read more about our methodology for choosing these products at the bottom of this article.)
HubSpot Sales: Complete sales toolkit with marketing integration
HubSpot Sales is an inbound marketing and sales platform that offers a sales kit to manage the sales pipeline, deals, contacts, etc.
It allows you to automatically deliver personalized follow-up emails and reminders at a specific date and time. HubSpot Sales leverages machine learning to know when leads are most likely to engage so you can communicate with them at the right time.
The tool notifies you instantly when a prospect opens your email, clicks a link, or opens an attachment. It automatically logs every contact detail, email open, and click. It lets you connect with prospects using the live chat functionality on the website. Route your chat conversations to the right salesperson to close deals faster.
Using predictive lead scoring, prioritize outreach based on a contact's likelihood to convert into a customer. This helps you save the time otherwise wasted on trying to qualify lower-quality leads.
Integrating HubSpot Sales with the free HubSpot CRM solution lets you track the details of deals won, lost, and in progress. You can also track sales reps' performance to identify the best and worst performers.
Sales pipeline management view in HubSpot Sales (Source)
Common user feedback trends
Based on an analysis of reviews on Capterra from sales management software users in sales roles, here's a list of things users like about HubSpot Sales and things they think could be improved.
What users like:
HubSpot learning academy improves learning. Users find the HubSpot learning academy really helpful, as it offers a short course on how to implement and use the tool.
Marketing integration improves sales. Users mention that the tool's integration with HubSpot Marketing provides centralized information on sales and marketing activities on a unified platform. This helps them attract more leads, close more deals, and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks.
What users think could be improved:
Contact management functions are lacking. Users would like to have a more feature-rich contact management interface, options to add multiple contacts in a sequence of emails, and the ability to merge contacts or companies to avoid duplicate entries.
Who should use HubSpot Sales?
Small businesses that are focused on aligning their sales management tool with both CRM and marketing activities should consider HubSpot Sales. It also works for individual consultants or small businesses that require simple reporting capabilities.
Pipedrive: Sales CRM with pipeline management and customized reporting
Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM and pipeline management app for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). It aims to help SMBs automate and streamline the entire sales process.
Pipedrive categorizes deals based on the sales stage to prioritize high-impact deals. Use the statistics tool to apply relevant filters for analyzing the sales pipeline and for identifying the sales stage that you want to improve.
You can customize the sales pipeline by adding multiple sales stages, team members, and activities. Pipedrive's drag-and-drop interface lets you add deals, contacts, or activities to the pipeline.
You can sync the scheduling functionality with Google Calendar to create and customize activities (e.g., a phone call, lunch, meeting, or email) and attach the event to specific deals, contacts, or organizations. You can also access Gmail tasks, and Pipedrive will send automatic alerts and reminders for activities that are due, overdue, or that have not been assigned.
The customized reporting feature provides visual insights into sales performance, opportunities, and other statistics, such as deal conversion rates, in the form of charts and tables. Apply custom filters to access other data such as the number of new deals added, the average age of deals, and the number of deals pending.
Pipedrive's mobile app is compatible with both Android and iOS devices. Sales reps can access customer details, contacts, and deals data; check their to-do lists and log phone calls; send emails; and add meetings from their smartphones or tablets.
Pipedrive sales pipeline management (Source)
Common user feedback trends
Based on the analysis of reviews on Capterra from sales management software users in sales roles, here's a list of things users like about Pipedrive and things that they think could be improved.
What users like:
Pipeline management feature shows accurate deal stage. Reviewers like the pipeline management feature because it allows them to see the exact stage of each deal in the sales pipeline. They also mention that the "rotting" feature helps sales managers identify deals that have been lying stagnant for a long time.
Intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Users feel that Pipedrive has a user-friendly interface and is easy to learn and use, even by a novice.
What users think could be improved:
Email integration feature needs improvement. Users would like to see seamless integration with third-party email services such as Gmail and Outlook. This would help them avoid challenges in tracking and syncing email communications with clients and leads.
Outlook Calendar needs automatic alerts feature. Users feel that Pipedrive should offer an automatic alerts option in Outlook Calendar similar to the one embedded in its activity calendar.
Who should use Pipedrive?
Pipedrive suits users who aren't necessarily tech-savvy and want a simple-to-use-and-learn sales management tool that offers core sales management functionalities, such as pipeline management, sales reporting, and activity management.
It also suits small businesses and startups that need customizable sales management software, which can integrate with their existing sales and marketing technology stack.
Agile CRM: Sales enablement, marketing automation, customer service bundled into one CRM
Agile CRM is a CRM software suite that automates sales, marketing, and customer service tasks. It gives users a 360-degree view of contact data with details such as a chronological view of contact interactions, call notes, web activity, and social presence. Its contact timeline feature offers related information about the customer's journey on a single page.
Agile CRM's built-in calendar syncs with Google Calendar to notify users about upcoming meetings and appointments. It also lets you create events related to calls, meetings, sales demos, and more.
The tool's deals management functionality lets you track deals, sales stages, and sales milestones. Its sales gamification functionality helps create friendly competition between salespeople to boost engagement and team morale. The feature allows you to compare each rep's performance based on deals won, calls generated, revenue earned, and other metrics.
Agile CRM deals dashboard (Source)
Common user feedback trends
Based on the analysis of reviews on Capterra from sales management software users in sales roles, here's a list of things users like about Agile CRM and things they think could be improved.
What users like:
Built-in landing page feature saves money. Reviewers find the built-in landing page builder and web forms helpful, since they don't have to invest more to buy those software tools.
Useful customizations. Users like that they can customize Agile CRM based on the sales process and related business needs. Features such as a custom widget (which users can create in JavaScript or any back-end server language), custom fields (used to track extra contact details and map additional fields from web forms or CSV files), and custom code are very useful.
What users think could be improved:
Workflow needs to be more intuitive. Users want the workflow to be more intuitive so they can easily navigate and search for data.
Customer support staff should be more responsive. Users find the customer support team unresponsive and say support staff don't offer resolutions to customer issues as quickly as they'd like.
Who should use Agile CRM?
The app is free for up to ten users, making it an attractive option for startups looking to manage their contacts and activities. You should consider Agile CRM if you are looking for a fully functional CRM that primarily offers marketing automation, sales enablement, deal reporting, and contact center features.
Next steps
Before you pick a tool that seems like the right one, we recommend signing up for a couple of demos with the sales management software vendors you like the most.
HubSpot Sales and Pipedrive offer free trials of about 14 to 30 days, while Agile CRM is free for up to ten users. You should also try free trials for other similar solutions in the market. The trial period offers valuable insider insight into the tool.
Capterra recommends that you evaluate between three and five systems as you research sales management software tools.
You can check out more sales management apps for sales teams on Capterra's sales management software directory page. Read reviews and filter products by rating, features, and more.
Disclaimer: This content, which provides opinions and points of view expressed by users, does not represent the views of Capterra.