Nowadays sales management software is a crucial tool for organizations aiming to optimize their sales processes and drive growth. By providing comprehensive solutions for managing leads, tracking interactions, and analyzing performance, sales management software empowers sales teams to work more efficiently.
From small startups to large enterprises, businesses across industries use sales management software to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and gain a competitive edge by optimizing their sales processes. In this article, we'll explore the best sales management software available on the market and key features that bring businesses the most benefits.
What is Sales Management Software?
Sales management software is a suite of digital tools designed to streamline and optimize the sales process for businesses of all sizes. Its primary purpose is to empower sales teams by providing them with centralized workspaces to manage leads, track interactions, and close more deals.
These software solutions offer a range of features, including customer relationship management (CRM) functionalities to organize and prioritize leads, sales pipeline management to track the progress of deals, and analytics tools to gain insights into sales performance.
Additionally, many sales management software options offer integrations with other business and sales tools, such as email and marketing automation platforms, to create a seamless workflow for sales professionals.
Best Software for Sales Management
In this paragraph we'll describe some of the top vendors in the field, outlining their key features, advantages, and pricing structures to help businesses make informed decisions in selecting the right sales management software for their sales team:
1. Creatio
Creatio offers the best sales management software that integrates CRM, marketing automation, and service management functionalities. Thanks to a no-code approach, composable architecture, and intuitive interface it’s an easy-to-use tool suitable for users of various technological skills. It offers extensive customization options, industry-specific workflows, and with a marketplace with over 700 connectors, add-ons, and composable apps.
Sales Creatio is an end-to-end sales management software to accelerate sales processes of any complexity. With tools for lead management, opportunity tracking, forecasting, and analytics, Creatio is the best sales management solution for businesses looking to streamline their sales processes.
Sales Creatio provides features to manage customer data in a 360 view thanks to omnichannel customer data capture, providing businesses with full history tracking, customer insights, and engagement scoring.
End-to-end lead automation and sales pipeline management is a part of the Creatio sales management software. It helps businesses control the full cycle of lead management, from lead capturing to handoff, and offers advanced opportunity management workflows, making it a powerful tool to boost lead management and increase sales.
Sales Creatio helps businesses increase sales productivity with coordinated sales task management, communications, and team collaboration. With seamless calendar and email synchronization, intelligent notifications and alerts, personal productivity dashboards, and team engagement tools, businesses can easily maximize their sales rep productivity and improve collaboration.
Creatio’s innovative sales forecasting feature uses AI capabilities to forecast future sales accurately and provide intelligent NBA/NBO recommendations. It also supports data-driven sales performance planning and provides robust sales reporting functionalities with interactive dashboards.
While Creatio offers an intuitive interface, it might pose an initial learning curve, because of its extensive customization options.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $40 per user per month for the Growth plan.
Explore how Creatio's sales management software can boost your team's performance
2. HubSpot
HubSpot stands out for its suite of marketing, sales, and customer service hub, which includes a user-friendly customer relationship management system, tailored for sales teams. HubSpot Sales Hub is a sales CRM that offers features such as contact management, email tracking, pipeline management, deal tracking, and seamless integration with other HubSpot tools.
HubSpot provides sales management software with robust automation features that empower sales teams to streamline processes and effectively manage customer interactions throughout the whole sales cycle. Thanks to analytics and reporting capabilities, it helps businesses make data-driven decisions and further optimize their sales efforts to ensure customer success.
HubSpot is well-suited for small businesses and midsize sales teams, however, it’s unable to support complex use cases of larger enterprises. Additionally, it doesn't offer indirect selling features or provide industry-specific solutions, which limits possibilities for B2B businesses. Users also reported that using advanced features requires expertise and may involve investing in additional resources.
Pricing
While the free version is available, advanced features are reserved for paid plans, starting at $20 per month per user for the Sales Hub Starter package.
3. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a sales management software renowned for its focus on pipeline management and sales process automation. Its intuitive interface and integration with CRM software for marketing and customer service make it a popular choice among sales professionals.
With features like pipeline visualization, deal tracking, contact management, and extensive customization options, Pipedrive empowers teams to efficiently manage their sales pipelines. Thanks to Pipedrive, businesses can streamline their workflows and enhance productivity, leading to increased sales.
With a unified platform for managing leads, deals, and contacts, Pipedrive helps derive valuable insights and make data-driven decisions. Pipedrive also integrates seamlessly with various third-party tools and applications, allowing users to automate data syncs, notifications, and actions across different platforms.
According to its users, Pipedrive reporting capabilities are not as advanced as other sales management software available on the market. Additionally, customization options can be limited, especially for larger enterprises.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $14 per month per user for the Essential plan.
4. Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud-based sales management software, that offers extensive customization options and a wide range of features to cater to diverse business needs. It provides powerful tools for sales, marketing, and customer service, and seamless integration with over 7000 third-party integrations.
Salesforce Sales Cloud offers industry-specific solutions, suitable particularly for midsize to large enterprises. It equips sales teams with plenty of features, including robust lead and pipeline management, sales forecasting, AI insights, and cross-channel connectivity.
The platform also provides businesses with real-time visibility into sales pipelines and account and opportunity management helping users effectively manage leads and focus on the most profitable opportunities.
Although Salesforce offers an intuitive user interface, navigating the platform may be challenging, especially for users without coding skills and knowledge. Users also report that the customization is complex and sometimes requires developer support, increasing ownership costs.
Pricing
Salesforce's pricing starts at $25 per user per month, but it varies based on the selected features and customization requirements.
See also: Salesforce Alternatives & Competitors and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternatives & Competitors
5. Copper
Copper integrates seamlessly with Google Workspace and provides intuitive sales CRM functionalities. It’s a sales automation tool that offers features such as intuitive contact management, lead tracking, pipeline management, and reporting.
Copper's sales management software helps small businesses streamline and optimize their sales processes, improve productivity, and drive growth. While it excels in simplicity and integration, medium and larger businesses may find its feature set lacking compared to more comprehensive solutions.
Pricing
The pricing starts at $23 per user per month for a Basic plan.
6. Salesflare
Salesflare emphasizes automation and integration with email and other tools to streamline B2B sales workflows. It’s an intelligent sales management tool that offers features like contact management, lead tracking, pipeline tracking, email automation, and predictive analytics.
Salesflare integrates seamlessly with Gmail and Outlook to automatically detect leads in the inbox and calendar and track them across the pipeline. It offers robust contact management features with an omnichannel approach to pulling up information from various sources such as social media profiles, email signatures, and more.
Pricing
While it excels in automation, its pricing may be higher compared to similar simple solutions, starting at $29 per user per month for the Growth plan.
7. Freshworks
Freshsales is a sales CRM offered by Freshworks, that provides a range of sales features, including contact management, lead scoring, email tracking, and workflow automation. It also integrates with Freshmarketer and Freshdesk for managing marketing and customer service efforts. Its user-friendly and intuitive interface helps businesses effectively manage sales data and coordinate teams.
Freshsales provides businesses with ruled-based guided selling, next-best actions, and intelligent sales insights supported by AI-driven deal insights. It also offers out-of-the-box reports and customizable dashboards, which improve data-driven decision-making and performance monitoring.
However, Freshsales has forecasting, pipeline, and territory management limitations, which makes it unsuitable for larger businesses with complex sales processes and advanced customization requirements.
Pricing
The pricing for Freshsales starts at $9, and a free trial is available.
8. Zoho
Zoho CRM is a cloud-based solution designed to streamline sales processes. It provides a comprehensive suite of sales tools suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, such as contact management, lead tracking, pipeline management, and workflow automation.
Zoho sales CRM platform provides businesses with robust analytics, sales force automation, AI-driven insights, and intuitive customization. With its user-friendly interface and extensive customization options, it aims to empower sales teams to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth.
Thanks to account management features it allows businesses to capture real-time data to create holistic customer profiles and personalize customer engagement to ensure tailored experience.
However, Zoho CRM software has limited scalability and reporting capabilities, which makes it not suitable for larger enterprises with complex sales processes. It also doesn’t provide built-in vertical solutions and requires the use of third-party applications.
Pricing
Zoho offers flexible plan upgrades and add-ons, with pricing starting at $14 per user per month.
9. Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell offers sales automation and reporting features with a user-friendly interface, designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It provides tools for contact management, sales tracking, pipeline visualization, and performance analytics.
Zendesk Sell integrates with popular tools like Google Suite and Microsoft 365 offering automation features for lead and pipeline management, prospecting, reporting and analytics, and more. It offers versatile channel support, including modern messaging and rule-driven chatbots, which are ideal for businesses with high lead and inquiry volumes.
While it excels in simplicity and ease of use, some users reported weak process management capabilities and insufficient real-time intelligence.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $19/user/month for the Sell Team plan.
10. Insightly
Insightly is a CRM and sales management software designed to help businesses manage contacts, track relationships, and automate workflows. It includes features like lead and opportunity tracking, email integration, task management, and custom reporting. Insightly offers integration with over 500 third-party applications available through the AppConnect platform, including accounting systems, ERP systems, databases, and more.
Insightly provides a user-friendly interface suitable for small to mid-sized businesses. It offers robust project management capabilities alongside CRM functionalities, allowing teams to manage both customer relationships and project workflows within a single platform. Thanks to real-time insights and customizable reports, Insightly helps businesses improve their sales processes and boost productivity.
However, Insightly's customization options are limited compared to other platforms, which restricts flexibility for larger enterprises and organizations with unique needs. The customization process is also complex and requires time and skills, posing a challenge especially for non-technical users.
Pricing
Insightly offers a free version available for up to two users, and paid plans starting at $29 per user per month for the Plus package.
With a sales management system, you can streamline workflows, optimize pipeline management, and manage customer relationships, fostering long-term success for your business. By identifying the right sales management software that best aligns with your organization and sales team's unique needs and goals, you can empower your sales team to improve their performance and drive business growth.
Who Uses Sales Management Software?
Various stakeholders within an organization use sales management software, each leveraging its functionalities to enhance their specific roles and contribute to overall sales effectiveness.
Sales Directors
Sales directors rely on sales management tools to gain insights into the sales team's performance, track sales metrics, and make strategic decisions. They use the software to monitor the sales funnel, forecast revenue, and allocate resources effectively.
Additionally, a comprehensive sales management system provides sales directors with real-time visibility into sales rep activities and enables them to set sales goals and targets, measure progress, and drive business growth.
Sales Managers
Sales managers play a crucial role in ensuring the success of the sales team, and sales management software is an indispensable tool in their arsenal. Sales leaders utilize the software to oversee day-to-day operations, assign tasks, and coach sales reps.
Sales managers also leverage sales software for performance monitoring, providing feedback to their sales team, and implementing strategies to optimize the sales process. By analyzing data and trends within the software, sales managers can identify areas for improvement and implement targeted optimizations to drive better results.
Sales Reps
Sales reps are at the forefront of driving revenue generation, and sales management software empowers them to work more efficiently and effectively. They use the software to manage leads, track customer interactions, and prioritize tasks.
The sales software streamlines administrative tasks, such as updating contact information and scheduling follow-ups, allowing sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals. Additionally, features like pipeline visualization and forecasting enable sales leaders and reps to plan and strategize effectively, increasing the sales team's productivity and success rate.
Essential Sales Management Features
Effective sales management software offers a set of essential features designed to streamline sales processes, enhance productivity, and drive revenue growth.
Below are some key sales management software features that distinguish top-performing platforms:
Contact management
Contact management is a foundational feature of sales management software, allowing users to organize and centralize customer and prospect information. This feature enables sales teams to maintain detailed records of interactions, track communication history, and segment contacts based on various criteria such as lead status, industry, or geographic location.
By providing a comprehensive view of customer data, contact management facilitates personalized engagement and targeted sales efforts.
Lead & opportunity management
Lead and opportunity management features are essential components of sales management software, enabling users to effectively capture, qualify, and nurture leads through the sales funnel. These features provide sales tools for lead tracking, scoring, and automated lead assignment, allowing sales teams to prioritize and follow up on promising opportunities.
Additionally, lead and opportunity management functionalities facilitate seamless collaboration between remote sales teams and enable them to track the progress of deals from initial contact to conversion, ensuring a structured and efficient sales process.
Sales pipeline management
Sales pipeline management functionality enables users to visualize and manage the progression of deals through various stages of the entire sales process. With pipeline management tools, sales teams can track opportunities, and identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement.
By offering insights into the sales pipeline, this feature empowers sales managers to allocate resources effectively, prioritize activities, and optimize sales strategies to drive business growth.
Reporting and analytics
Reporting and analytics capabilities are essential for gaining actionable insights into sales performance and identifying trends, patterns, and opportunities. The sales management system provides reporting tools that allow users to generate sales reports and dashboards. Thanks to that, businesses can easily track key metrics, monitor progress, and measure the effectiveness of their sales process.
By leveraging data-driven insights, sales teams can make informed decisions, adapt strategies, and improve their processes.
Sales forecasting
Sales forecasting functionality empowers organizations to predict future sales performance based on historical data, current trends, and market conditions. By leveraging advanced sales analytics and predictive modeling algorithms, sales forecasting tools enable users to generate accurate forecasts of revenue, pipeline growth, and sales outcomes.
These forecasts help sales managers and executives make informed decisions regarding resource allocation, goal setting, and sales strategy.
Workflow automation
Workflow automation features streamline repetitive tasks and business processes, saving time and improving the efficiency of sales teams. They enable users to automate routine activities such as sales data entry, lead assignments, follow-up emails, and task reminders.
By automating manual tasks, sales reps can focus on high-value activities such as relationship-building, and closing more deals, increasing productivity, and accelerating sales cycles.
Integration capabilities
Integration capabilities are crucial for connecting sales management software with other essential business tools and systems, such as customer support platforms, marketing automation software, and accounting systems.
Integration enables the exchange of sales data across different applications, providing a unified view of customer interactions and business operations. By integrating the sales management platform with other tools, organizations can improve collaboration between teams, and deliver an outstanding customer experience across all touchpoints.
These essential features form the core of effective sales management solutions, empowering organizations to optimize sales processes and achieve business goals. When choosing the right sales management software for your business, ensure it provides all the mentioned features to ensure streamlined operations, enhanced productivity, and improved sales performance.
By selecting a solution that offers this comprehensive set of tools, you can empower your sales team to work more efficiently and effectively.
Why Implement Sales Management Software?
Implementing sales management software offers plenty of benefits for businesses, from streamlining sales processes to improving lead management and driving revenue growth.
Here are some of the most important benefits:
- Improved efficiency - automation of repetitive tasks and streamlined workflows allows sales teams to focus on high-value activities, such as relationship-building, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.
- Enhanced sales visibility - sales management software provides real-time visibility into the sales pipeline, allowing sales managers to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions to optimize sales strategies.
- Better lead management - with robust lead management functionalities, sales management platforms enable sales teams to capture, qualify, and nurture leads more effectively, leading to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
- Accurate sales forecasting - advanced analytics and forecasting tools help organizations predict future sales performance, enabling strategic planning.
- Increased revenue - with sales management software businesses can boost conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, and drive revenue growth.
- Improved collaboration - sales management software provides communication tools that foster collaboration between sales teams, marketing departments, and other stakeholders.
- Enhanced customer experience - by centralizing customer data and providing insights into customer behavior and preferences, sales management systems enable sales teams to deliver personalized interactions, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Scalability - as businesses grow and evolve, the most robust sales management solutions scale to accommodate changing needs and requirements, providing flexibility and adaptability to support long-term growth and success.
The Impact of Sales Management Software
The adoption of sales management software is imperative for businesses seeking to thrive in today's dynamic marketplace. With its ability to streamline sales workflows, boost productivity, and increase revenue, sales management tools are indispensable for sales teams across industries.
By providing valuable insights, fostering collaboration, and enabling informed decision-making, sales management software empowers organizations to adapt to changing market conditions, anticipate customer needs, and stay ahead of the competition.
As technology continues to evolve and customer expectations evolve, businesses that embrace the best sales management solutions, like Creatio, can unlock new opportunities for growth, and success.
