7 essentials sales tools

Are you sure you have all the best software and platforms in your sales stack that will help you to be more efficient and effective? And to save time in your daily management?

This is what you will find out by reading this article! 

Our experts at Qobra have listed the essential business tools for you.

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1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

It is impossible to start this list of business tools without talking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management). 

Whether the sales force is small or consists of several dozen salespeople, the CRM is the key tool for gathering all customer knowledge, but also all information about prospects.

The key features of good CRM software include

• Contact management, with detailed records for prospects, customers and companies.
• Traceability of commercial activity. All actions (past, current and future) are carried out by the sales staff on each contract.
• Management of the conversion tunnel. The ability to see at any time the status of discussions with each prospect or customer, according to their stage of maturity.

Many CRMs also integrate marketing and customer service functions, which offers the possibility of creating synergies throughout the prospect's buying journey. From the management of marketing campaigns to the follow-up of customer loyalty actions, it is necessary to select a CRM according to the real needs of the company.

The best CRM for a sales team

Salesforce

A leading cloud-based CRM platform that offers comprehensive solutions for sales, customer service, marketing automation, and analytics, enabling businesses to streamline processes and improve customer relationships.

HubSpot

A user-friendly CRM that integrates sales, marketing, and customer service tools in one platform. It provides features like lead management, email tracking, and marketing automation, designed to help businesses grow and manage their customer relationships effectively.‍

Pipedrive

A sales-focused CRM designed to help small to medium-sized businesses manage their sales pipelines. It offers intuitive tools for tracking leads, managing deals, and automating repetitive tasks to enhance sales productivity.

Sellsy

A versatile CRM solution that combines sales management, invoicing, and customer support tools. It is aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), offering features like lead tracking, project management, and reporting to optimize business operations.

Zoho CRM

A flexible CRM platform suitable for businesses of all sizes, providing a wide range of features such as lead and contact management, sales automation, analytics, and multi-channel communication to boost customer engagement and sales efficiency.

1st CRM: How to choose it?

When a company grows, it naturally seeks to acquire a more robust and efficient CRM in order to integrate its numerous data and benefit from greater flexibility. At this point, it will be a question of migrating the first CRM to the second, and it is important to have this operation in mind as soon as the first CRM is set up.

Indeed, before acquiring a first CRM, it is essential to look carefully at the possible integrations with the various other tools of the sales team. This will make it much easier to keep all the sales team's data and make it easily accessible.

📌 The example at Qobra

At Qobra, for our first CRM, we chose to implement Salesforce. Although it is designed for large companies, and its price may seem high for a young company, its speed, the many possible integrations and its flexibility allowed us to build the ideal CRM. In this way, we also avoided a potential migration later on.

Tools to fill in the CRM simply

Manually populating a CRM can be very time-consuming for sales people or the teams in charge of it, which can lead them to neglect this most important task! 

Fortunately, some tools have been developed to do this automatically.

📌 The example at Qobra

To save salespeople time, Qobra's teams use Surfe, a tool that takes the form of a Chrome extension directly linked to LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. With a single click, a contact can be instantly added to the CRM, and previously defined fields are filled in with the relevant information. Moreover, Surfe is integrated with the best tools, such as Kaspr or Dropcontact, which is a walk in the park!

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2. Sales Intelligence

Sales Intelligence (SI) tools are software platforms designed to help sales teams gather, analyze, and use data about prospects, customers, and markets to optimize their sales processes. These tools provide detailed insights into potential customers and market trends, making it easier for sales professionals to target the right prospects, personalize outreach, and close deals more effectively. They act as a bridge between raw data and actionable insights, empowering sales teams to make data-driven decisions and improve their sales performance.

Sales intelligence tools go beyond basic CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems by providing enriched data about prospects and companies, real-time alerts, market trends, intent data, and even AI-powered recommendations. They help salespeople not only identify the right leads but also understand their needs, buying behavior, and timing—essentially boosting the effectiveness of every stage of the sales process, from lead generation to deal closure.

Key Features of Sales Intelligence Tools

• Contact and Company Data: These tools provide accurate and up-to-date contact information (email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, etc.) for decision-makers at target companies. They often enrich CRM records with detailed company profiles, revenue data, industry classifications, and headcount, helping sales teams refine their targeting.
• Data Enrichment: Sales intelligence platforms can enrich incomplete data by filling in gaps like missing contact details, social profiles, or company information. This ensures that sales teams have the most comprehensive view of their prospects.
• Lead Generation: SI tools are often used to identify and generate new leads. They can analyze market trends, company news, and other factors to uncover opportunities that match the sales team’s target criteria.
• Intent Data: Some advanced SI platforms provide "intent data," which indicates when potential buyers are actively researching or showing interest in specific products or services. This allows sales teams to engage with prospects at the right moment, improving the chances of closing a deal.
• Sales Triggers: Sales intelligence tools can notify teams about key events or triggers that signal potential sales opportunities. These triggers might include a company raising new funding, a leadership change, product launches, or mergers and acquisitions.
• Social Selling Insights: Many tools leverage social networks like LinkedIn to provide insights into a prospect’s behavior, interests, and professional connections. This allows for more personalized and relevant outreach, which is a crucial factor in modern sales.
• Competitive and Market Analysis: SI tools often track competitors, giving sales teams insights into their market position, product changes, and strategies. Additionally, they provide market intelligence by tracking trends, challenges, and emerging opportunities.
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): These tools support ABM strategies by enabling sales teams to focus on high-value accounts. With detailed company insights and contact data, sales reps can create more tailored strategies to engage key stakeholders within target accounts.‍
• AI and Predictive Analytics: Modern sales intelligence tools use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data and provide predictive insights, helping sales teams prioritize leads most likely to convert.

The best Sales Intelligence tools for a sales team

Here’s a breakdown of some of the most popular sales intelligence tools and how they help sales teams:

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is one of the most well-known sales intelligence platforms, offering a large and comprehensive database of B2B contact information. It provides in-depth company data, including organizational charts, direct contact information, and intent data, which help sales professionals identify potential customers and engage them at the right time. ZoomInfo integrates seamlessly with CRM systems and is highly valued for its accuracy and data depth.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Built on the strength of LinkedIn’s vast professional network, Sales Navigator helps sales professionals find, connect, and engage with leads. It provides insights into prospect activities and recommends leads based on the user’s preferences. It’s ideal for relationship-driven sales, offering powerful filters to help target decision-makers, track their behavior, and personalize outreach.

Clearbit

Clearbit is a data enrichment platform that helps sales teams by providing real-time contact and company data. Its database covers a wide range of firmographic details (company size, industry, revenue, etc.) as well as individual contact information. By integrating Clearbit with CRM systems, sales teams can maintain an updated and enriched pipeline, making it easier to tailor their pitches to individual prospects.

InsideView

InsideView offers market intelligence and company insights that help salespeople engage with the right buyers at the right time. It provides detailed company data, real-time news, industry trends, and social media insights, making it a robust tool for account-based selling. Its deep integration with CRMs like Salesforce ensures that sales teams can seamlessly access actionable insights within their workflows.

Lead411

Lead411 specializes in providing verified contact information, including email addresses and direct phone numbers, which are critical for sales outreach. Additionally, it offers real-time sales triggers, such as information about company expansions, leadership changes, and funding events, helping sales reps to approach prospects with relevant and timely information.

D&B Hoovers

Powered by Dun & Bradstreet’s vast data, D&B Hoovers delivers deep insights into companies, markets, and industries. It helps sales teams find and qualify leads, identify potential risks, and get a comprehensive view of target accounts. This tool is especially valuable for enterprise sales teams needing robust and reliable company data.

Lusha

Lusha is a sales intelligence tool that focuses on providing accurate contact details, such as email addresses and phone numbers, to streamline direct sales outreach. It integrates with tools like LinkedIn and CRMs, offering sales teams instant access to decision-makers and helping them personalize communications.

Apollo.io

Apollo.io combines a powerful B2B contact database with automated outreach capabilities. It allows sales teams to find leads, create email sequences, and track engagement. With its built-in analytics and AI-driven recommendations, Apollo.io helps optimize sales processes and improve conversion rates.

Cognism

Cognism is a GDPR-compliant sales intelligence tool that provides high-quality, compliant contact data for B2B sales teams. It specializes in intent data, helping sales reps identify when prospects are showing signs of interest in their products or services, enabling timely and relevant outreach.

📌 The example at Qobra

Our teams chose to use the Kaspr tool for several reasons: its ease of use, its performance on the French market (about 53% of phone numbers found), its price (lower than Lusha), its integration with Surfe and its quality customer service.

For growth teams, Kaspr offers an API account, and for salespeople, a Google Chrome extension. In concrete terms, this allows us to offer sales people the best possible data, and to allow them to be autonomous.

Although Kaspr can also collect email addresses, at Qobra we prefer to use Dropcontact. In addition to being efficient (70% success rate), this tool cleans up the CRM and its integration with the Surfe tool allows us to import the email address into the CRM in one click. In the end, we save our sales teams precious time.

Other sales tools, such as Prospectin, allow you to make contact with prospects by automating the sending of LinkedIn invitations or personalized message sequences. However, be careful to use automation wisely. A prospect always prefers to talk to a human rather than a machine! 

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3. Conversation Intelligence

A well-crafted sales pitch and the right posture are essential for closing a sale. And even the best salespeople still have room for improvement in this area!

However, sales coaching requires a certain amount of time, including the analysis of all processes and their improvement, a complex task that is not for everyone.

Conversational intelligence tools have been developed to help managers and salespeople to be more effective in their relations with prospects and customers. These are software that records, transcribes and analyze sales calls, and then detects the best practices, shares them among employees, but also identifies the less good ones and works on them as a team.

The best tool on the market in this area is French, Modjo.

📌 The example at Qobra

We chose Modjo for several reasons. Firs, the quality of the onboarding and the ongoing training offered by the teams lead the sales staff to take full ownership of the tool. Secondly, the tool allows the creation of a library of the best sales calls and pitches, a key resource that is easily accessible to all sales people in the team. Finally, Modjo allows teams to better understand the reasons why a sale did not go through and ultimately to continuously improve the entire sales process.

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4. Forecasting

In the same way as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) software, Revenue Ops platforms enable customer data to be organized across the various systems used by the company. 

The objective? To gain more accurate turnover insights for solid sales forecasting. 

Among the tools offering this type of functionality, we can mention Clari. 

For companies using Salesforce, there is a Forecasting tool integrated into the software. A preferred solution for companies that want to bundle as many tools as possible into one software package. 

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5. Sales Engagement

As mentioned above, in order to maximize the chances of engaging with a prospect, it is necessary to opt for a multichannel strategy. That said, diversifying channels also implies a dispersion of data, and therefore difficulty for sales representatives to find their way through their tasks (Who to contact? When? How?...).

To overcome these frictions, three tools stand out: 

Lemlist

A sales engagement tool that focuses on personalized email outreach, allowing users to create automated, highly customized email campaigns with dynamic content, images, and follow-ups to increase response rates and build better relationships with prospects.

Outreach

A comprehensive sales engagement platform that helps sales teams automate and scale personalized outreach across multiple channels (email, phone, social media) while providing analytics and AI-driven insights to improve sales efficiency and conversions.‍

Salesloft

A leading sales engagement platform designed to streamline communication and sales processes, enabling teams to manage multichannel outreach, track interactions, and analyze performance, all aimed at improving the overall sales cycle and closing more deals.

Each of them allows you to organize your prospecting in a surgical manner while having the details of each action carried out or to come.

Once again, for companies using Salesforce, they have at their disposal a specific Sales Engagement module named "High Velocity Sales". It may therefore be interesting for them to favor this solution, allowing them to group their CRM, Forecasting and Sales Engagement tools on the same platform.

📌 The example at Qobra

Because of its robustness, its integration with Salesforce, its user experience and the many possibilities for automating processes, Qobra's teams use Outreach.

Example of use: Every Friday at 2pm, Qobra's sales people get together to prepare for the following week. They select 20 accounts in Outreach, and for each of them, they choose 3 to 5 prospects that they include directly in sequences. With this organization, on Monday morning, at 9.30am, the week of each salesperson is defined. They know exactly who they are going to contact, via which channel, when, and with which message (thanks to the persona-specific templates directly integrated into Outreach).

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6. Sales Enablement

Tools to centralize commercial knowledge

Sales Enablement software has become crucial for sales teams!

Their principle is simple: to centralize in one place all the content (playbooks, webinars, customer testimonials, etc.) that can help sales people to win new business effectively.

Many platforms include this type of functionality. These include Lessonly by Seismic, Chorus.ai and Showpad.

💡 Good to know

Before moving to a Sales Enablement tool, the Notion tool is an excellent alternative for centralizing all content for sales teams. 

Commercial training tools

Training is the only way to train new recruits or to help certain employees to improve their skills.

In addition to traditional sales training, salespeople need to practice pitching, arguing, and fighting the most common sales objections. 

This is precisely what Sales Training tools offer: they bring together all the processes and good practices of the sales team, so that each of them can increase their skills independently.

These tools are often included in more comprehensive platforms (e.g. Sales Enablement), such as Lessonly by Seismic, which includes training features.

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7. Sales Compensation

"The growth of a company is 100% driven by salespeople, and the variable pay plan determines their sales behavior, hence their performance, hence the achievement of targets."

Vladimir Ionesco, Director of Global Sales Performance at Doctolib

In addition to dynamic management and stimulating missions, salespeople are motivated by their salary, and in particular the variable part they can receive. This is why the sales remuneration policy, as well as the tools for managing and calculating it, are key elements to take care of.

Among the existing tools, Excel is still the most widely used by companies, especially as it is implemented as standard in almost all organizations. 

However, Excel was not created with this in mind, and there are many reasons why it is a poor tool for managing and calculating commissions: a source of errors in calculations, time-consuming, lack of support, lack of advice and good practices, limited, non-collaborative solution, no connectivity to peripheral software (CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc.), lack of transparency, visibility, etc. So many good reasons that turn this tool of attractiveness, motivation, performance and loyalty into a subject of friction, turnover and demotivation!

"Excel was taking us a long time, whether it was retrieving the different information (quotas, shift changes, etc.) and readjusting all these elements, updating the Excel template, having it validated by the manager and then communicating it to the teams."

Aude Cadiot, Revenue Operations Lead at Spendesk

For a transparent and motivating variable remuneration, it is essential to use a commission management tool like Qobra! 

Here are some telling statistics from the Qobra and Modjo study on variable commissions in France:

• 68% of employees who use Excel or Google Sheets to calculate and manage commissions are not satisfied, while 85% of employees who use commission calculation and management software are satisfied.
• 61.9% of employees using commission calculation and management software exceeded their targets, compared with only 30.1% of those using Excel or Google Sheets.

Once the variable remuneration policy has been integrated into Qobra, and the tool is linked to the CRM, the commissions of the sales reps are automatically reported, allowing them to see the results of their actions on a daily basis (or should we say even better, “in real time”). An essential source of performance, motivation and, ultimately, loyalty.

"Since we've had Qobra, we've seen between 15 and 20% improvement on target achievement."

Tomas Hons, GTM Strategy & Operations Manager at Make

The final word...

From CRM to commission management, including sales training, we have listed all the main tools available to sales teams to be more efficient and effective!