Top five sales management software to boost revenue and productivity in 2022.
For salespeople, meeting clients in person is key to building strong relationships. But with most customers using digital self-serve channels in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship between sellers and buyers has changed.
The buyer journey, which previously started at a conference or meeting, now begins online (e.g., social media, reviews sites, online marketplaces). Buyers do their own research on companies and products and also decide how and when to interact with the seller. Similarly, sellers have also adopted online means such as video calls and remote presentations to communicate with prospects.
With both parties embracing digital-first sales processes, the demand for online sales management software has increased. Sales tools such as sales enablement, sales forecasting, and sales force automation have been on the market for a while, but due to the rapid shift to remote or hybrid processes, these tools have transitioned to support virtual sales workflows. They have adapted to emerging technologies by offering features that help sales teams serve customers online.
Let's take a look at three trends impacting the sales software market, before diving into the top software systems that will ensure your sales team is ready to face them.
3 software trends that will impact sales teams in 2022
Businesses must consider technology advancements such as machine learning and digital commerce to engage with buyers throughout the customer lifecycle, according to Gartner research (full content available to Gartner clients).
To meet the needs of today’s digital buyers, businesses should upgrade their sales processes with technologies that can help establish trust among online buyers and create an exceptional customer experience in 2022 and beyond.
Let’s discuss a few trends that could impact the day-to-day work of sales teams:
Artificial intelligence (AI): Artificial intelligence helps improve sales processes, identify opportunities, make product recommendations, and convert customers faster. Commonly used AI capabilities such as natural language processing and machine learning can be used to communicate and translate customer searches, offer suggestions based on previous purchases, optimize inventory management by analyzing sales data, and forecast sales revenue.
Personalization: Due to the shift to digital purchasing, customers are engaging less with sellers. Therefore, sellers should personalize offers per customers’ unique needs and interests. Personalization in any form—personalized emails, real-time chat with prospects, tailored in-store buying experiences, and custom-made solutions—helps buyers better connect with prospects and deliver customized experiences even when selling virtually.
Social selling: With more people becoming active on social media platforms, brands know where to reach their audiences. Sales reps can use their social media accounts to interact, engage, and respond to buyers' comments. Directly interacting with prospects on social media reduces the time spent on researching potential leads and cold calling, allowing sales teams to sell faster than traditional sales methods.
Top 5 sales tools with features that keep pace with industry trends
Here at Capterra, we want to help find the right software for sales professionals. We took a look at our Shortlist reports for sales enablement, sales forecasting, and sales force automation to find the top five sales software options (based on user ratings and popularity scores) with features that will make sales teams ready for the aforementioned trends in 2022 and beyond.
What is the Shortlist report?
Shortlist is Capterra’s annual ranking of top software tools, leveraging ratings from over 1 million user reviews scoring vendors on two parameters: user ratings and popularity. Each parameter is weighted and scaled to a value between 1-50.
User ratings: The overall user rating of a product based on reviews written in the last 24 months from the date of publishing the report.
Popularity: The average monthly search volume and position of a vendor’s domain on the search engine results page.
Note: Products are listed in descending order of their score (i.e., summation of user ratings and popularity scores); click here to read the full product selection methodology.
1. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a customer relationship lifecycle management solution that helps automate sales processes and convert more leads.
Zoho CRM leverages artificial intelligence for Zia, its built-in conversational sales assistant. Zia can fetch customer information, detect anomalies in sales activities (e.g., deviations in sales trends), and provide real-time updates on drop in revenue or increase in leads. For sales forecasting, Zia uses predictive AI to determine whether a deal will be successful and assigns a score to every lead.
In addition, Zia offers customer self-service options, allowing sales teams to deliver on-demand support. It fetches information from customers to provide personalized product recommendations. Zia makes these recommendations by analyzing the collected customer data as well as the purchase patterns of existing customers. It provides relevant reasoning for each recommendation. Zia also helps reduce the number of customer tickets by providing AI-suggested customer responses sourced from the knowledge base.
Zoho CRM allows sellers to sell their products on social media platforms. The social tab present in Zoho CRM manages seller profiles on different social channels under one brand, synchronizing all profiles and settings in real time. This helps manage buyer and seller conversations in real time—from sharing content to closing deals.
Key Features
- Sales automation
- Sales enablement
- Marketing automation
- Analytics
- Predictive sales
- Sales tracking
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Starting price
Device compatibility
Screenshots
AI assistant Zia in Zoho CRM
2. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a sales and CRM software platform that offers insights to guide the overall sales strategy. It provides sales enablement, sales forecasting, and sales force automation, among other capabilities.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein leverages artificial intelligence to analyze CRM data and highlight the top deals to close and the next steps to take. It provides lead scoring based on historical deals to automatically prioritize prospects that are most likely to convert. It also provides real-time opportunity, leads, and account insights and connects data from emails and meetings to eliminate data entry.
Key Features
- Process automation
- Opportunity management
- Lead management
- Reporting
- Account and contact management
- Sales pipeline management
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Starting price
Device compatibility
Screenshots
Sales dashboard in Salesforce Sales Cloud
3. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is CRM software that offers a wide range of apps and integrations to automate manual sales processes. Its key capabilities include sales force automation, sales forecasting, and insights and reports.
Pipedrive’s AI-powered chatbot can start conversations, answer questions, and collect information to add visitors as leads into the CRM system. The tool’s Prospector database allows sales teams to view the verified emails, direct phone numbers, and social profiles of prospects and pursue the most suitable matches.
Pipedrive provides personalized email templates to automate communication as leads move through the sales funnel. Sales teams can choose ready-made templates or create their own and let the software auto-populate information from their contact database. This helps move deals faster, reduce errors, and eliminate the repetitive task of manually filling in customer information for each email. The software also ensures personalized customer-centric user experiences through chatbots.
Pipedrive offers social selling and social listening through integration with third-party apps. Integrating social tools with Pipedrive allows sales teams to save contacts directly from social media profiles, generate new leads, and manage messaging and interactions via a shared inbox.
Key Features
- Sales force automation
- Sales pipeline and deals management
- Reporting
- Communication tracking
- Customer relationship management
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Starting price
Device compatibility
Screenshots
Contacts timeline in Pipedrive
4. Pipeliner
Pipeliner is a sales CRM software tool that connects salespeople with prospects, customers, and internal staff. It offers account management, email sequencing, project management, and reporting, among other features.
Pipeliner’s Voyager AI uses intelligent algorithms to continuously explore the data captured within Pipeliner CRM. It helps sales teams identify actions that need to be taken immediately and areas that need immediate attention. It also provides early warnings on risks related to ongoing deals and sales opportunities.
Pipeliner allows users to create personalized emails. Sales teams can insert fields from accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities into emails to personalize the email content. They can even personalize the email templates if required.
With Pipeliner’s social feeds, salespeople can stay up to date with customers and prospects. This feature provides automatic profiling to avoid data entry and view feeds from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. All feeds get auto-refreshed in real time, and sales teams can take actions such as creating a business page for a product and responding to comments directly from the platform.
Key Features
- Account management
- Contact management
- Sales insights
- Sales forecasting
- Sales force automation
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Starting price
Device compatibility
Screenshots
Forecasting in Pipeliner CRM
5. HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is a sales CRM platform that helps sales teams handle their pipeline, close deals, and manage customer relationships. It offers sales engagement, reporting, sales enablement, and sales force automation, among other features.
HubSpot Sales Hub provides conversation intelligence by integrating with telephone software and live chat software. The technology captures customer details and takes notes from calls into the CRM to provide AI-powered insights. Sales teams can use these insights to identify customer needs and top trends to make data-driven decisions and optimize the sales strategy.
HubSpot Sales Hub offers personalization tokens. The tokens can be used to tailor emails or follow-up tasks by populating specific details such as contact and company information to connect better with prospects. They can also be used to design personalized onboarding plans for customers. In addition, the software provides suggestions for the best time to send emails to each prospect.
Sales professionals can leverage the social inbox within HubSpot to set up notifications whenever customers experience a trigger event. For example, if a prospect mentions an issue or a company event on a social media platform, an alert is sent to the sales team to get them directly involved in the conversation.
Key Features
- Sales force automation
- Sales enablement
- Customer relationship management
- Reporting
- CPQ
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Starting price
Device compatibility
Screenshots
Personalization in HubSpot Sales Hub
Stay on top of sales software trends with Capterra’s Shortlist reports
The five tools mentioned in this article are among the top sales software solutions on the market, but every business has different needs. For sales professionals, it’s important to stay on top of market trends and choose the right software to manage sales processes and provide the best customer experience.
Capterra’s annual Shortlist rankings provide a strong starting point to find the right sales management tool for your team.
If these tools don’t seem quite right for you, check out the Capterra Shortlist reports listed below to find more tools with high user ratings from businesses like yours:
Appear in Capterra’s Shortlist report as accessed on Feb. 7, 2022. The five products with features for latest trends and highest scores in our Shortlist reports are mentioned in this article.
Meet our market definitions: Sales force automation software: “Sales force automation software (SFA) helps automate business tasks for sales, including account and contact management, activity management, forecasting, opportunity management, and reporting/dashboards. It's often used by sales teams to organize and manage contacts/opportunities in a single, centralized database, and for forecasting and generating reports for sales pipeline management.”. Sales forecasting software: “Sales forecasting software helps companies measure and evaluate historical sales data and trends to generate reports of expected sales. Often used for demand and revenue planning/forecasting, this type of software helps organizations analyze demand through forecast modeling and benchmarking tools.”. Sales enablement software: “Sales enablement software provides sales teams with the tools and content they need to engage customers and sell effectively. This software helps manage content and resources needed for onboarding/training and development of sales employees, as well as tracking their performance and how these resources and tools are being used.”