23 Best Small Business Sales Tools Of 2022
In a world of same-day delivery and voice-activated virtual assistants, many small businesses struggle to offer the same customer experience as massive brands with hundred-thousand-dollar budgets.
Sales in a small business is even more challenging, with 57% of buyers saying they are less dependent on salespeople during the decision-making process.
To stay competitive, small businesses have to work smarter, and that means employing tools that support the sales process, from the very first touchpoint to the final delivery.
What Are the Best Small Business Sales Tools?
Successful businesses understand that sales are about more than just cold calls and pitches. According to GetVoIP, It is about understanding your customers, building strong relationships, and providing a solution customers genuinely need.
In fact, many small businesses have turned to content marketing and starting a brand new blog in attempts to boost sales.
They use whitepapers, blog posts, and downloadable guides to bring in leads. Some even focus on using bio links and social media platforms like Instagram to organically grow their brand and following.
However, there is an issue with this strategy. For starters, it can take time to draw in enough leads.
Plus, more than four million blog posts are published daily, so passive sales are harder to come by.
To stand out in a crowded market, you need to use tools to actively seek out sales and give your business a competitive edge.
It feels like dozens of new sales tools launch every day. The market is expanding rapidly, which makes it incredibly difficult to determine which tools are the best fit.
To solve that problem, we’ve created a list of the very best tools to support sales in small businesses.
These tools go beyond live chat and prospecting tools to help you with sales and all the systems in your business that support sales, including social media, invoicing, appointment scheduling, project planning, customer support, small business funding, and more.
Plus, we’ve dug into each tool to explain the most useful features each one offers.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
1. ProofHub: Best Project Management Tool
Anyone running a business whether physical or digital knows how essential it is to stay organized and collaborate with teams and clients. That’s why I recommend ProofHub, the ultimate and all-in-one project management and collaboration tool to keep your team on task and your deadlines in check.
With ProofHub, you can assign various tasks to the appropriate team member, utilize kanban boards to visualize your workflows, and even chat with team members in the platform itself. The custom dashboard makes it easier than ever to see what’s going on with your team, what tasks should be prioritized, and even company announcements:
In short, any thriving business can’t go without an effective project management tool, so I definitely recommend checking out ProofHub to help you stay on top of leads, contracts being sent out, tracking signatures, and much more as the ultimate sales tool.
“Don’t let your business fail. Start managing on ProofHub.”
2. Hunter: Best Email Lookup & Outreach Automation Tool
If you ever run a cold outreach campaign, you should know how time-consuming it is to collect prospects’ email addresses, then verify them, and after that draft, send, and track cold email campaigns.
Hunter makes it all extremely easy. They collected all of the tools needed for successful cold outreach in one place allowing you to automate every step of the process.
You can easily find anyone’s email address with Email Finder, Domain Search and Author Finder depending on the final data you want to receive (list of all people working for a specific company or just a single specialist).
Besides that, Hunter allows you to verify all of the email addresses you found with them or if you found them in a different source with Email Verifier.
Their free tool for cold outreach called Hunter Campaigns allows you to automate and personalize the whole outreach sequence. You don’t need to schedule and send follow-ups manually, Campaigns will do everything for you.
3. UniTel Voice: Best Cloud-Based Business Phone System
Every time a prospect calls your business it’s an opportunity to close a sale. But when you’re an on-the-go salesperson or a busy entrepreneur, you’re not always at your desk.
That’s why it critical to have a modern business phone system that keeps you connected no matter where you go. And that’s where UniTel Voice can help you succeed:
UniTel Voice is a virtual phone system that lets you run your business from anywhere, on any device. Whether you’re at home, the office, or on the go, you’ll never miss an opportunity to connect with a potential customer and sound professional.
Not only does UniTel Voice have all the advanced phone system features you need, but their service is also backed by a customer support team that’s there for you every step of the way. Their customers will testify to that.
4. Beaconstac: Best QR Code Generator Software
If you’re not already using QR codes in your business, you’ll soon discover just how handy they are. You can use QR codes to improve brand awareness, offer discounts and coupon codes, and even streamline administrative tasks.
Whether you use QR codes for internal measures such as employee ID cards or document verification, or customer-facing on product packaging and business cards, I highly recommend Beaconstac to automate your QR code creation process.
You can almost always implement these with any locally based businesses, but even digital businesses will find them to be useful.
5. ProProfs Quiz Maker: Best Online Quiz Software
Social media marketing is quite saturated with advertising, but it is still highly relevant for businesses of all sizes. This poses a significant challenge for small businesses that have limited resources to build their online presence and generate leads. ProProfs Quiz Maker provides a brilliant and yet relatively underutilized solution to this problem.
You can use this online software to easily create highly engaging and shareable quizzes to boost engagement through your website and any social media platform. It supports 15+ question types, is equipped with 100+ customization settings, and comes with a massive question bank containing 1 million+ ready-to-use questions.
You can even use your quizzes as a lead magnet by adding a customizable lead form that you can use to capture information, such as name, email address, company, location, etc. The feature-rich tool also supports integrations with all major marketing tools, such as Salesforce, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Active Campaign, etc., meaning that you can automate and streamline lead segmentation and nurturing to create effective, high-converting email campaigns.
6. Spendesk: Best Spend Management Software
Spendesk is built to help employees spend easily at work, while giving finance teams complete control over every dollar, pound, and euro spent.
Users have access to physical expense cards, which can be used like company credit cards but are customizable and far more secure. They can also create virtual cards to spend online, and can completely automate the expense report process.
This is a huge productivity booster because these automation tools cut down on the time spent during end-of-month closing. Finance teams that typically spend days every month reconciling payments now only spend 3–4 hours.
7. BirdEye: Best Prospect Interaction Tool
Whether it is prospects or customers when they reach out to a business, they want nothing but the most prompt responses to their questions. BirdEye’s all-in-one customer experience platform helps businesses keep on top of all prospect and customer interactions.
BirdEye’s comprehensive interactions platform provides one single messaging platform for your team to connect with leads and customers through texting, live chat, and bulk messaging. It gives you the ability to convert more website visitors into leads. Through one unified inbox, BirdEye notifies you each time a customer messages your business, whether it’s through Facebook, SMS texting, or livechat. Keep track of all of your conversation histories in one place, and never miss another message. BirdEye can also help your business get more reviews through timely, automatic review requests.
8. Eversign: Best Electronic Signature Tool
Eversign’s intuitive e- signature tool enables users to prepare, sign and manage contracts online from any device, without having to print or scan them. Eversign meets the most stringent security and authentication requirements. Once a document is signed, it is legally binding and enforceable in court.
Documents are securely stored in an encrypted cloud infrastructure. eversign’s comprehensive audit trail keeps track of every past and present transaction.
Users can create multiple businesses and teams, assign roles and control every team member’s access rights. Eversign’s fully-featured JSON-based API allows users to automate the document creation, delivery and signing processes or integrate eversign with other applications. Apart from Eversign, there are also plenty of free signature makers out there.
9. Right Inbox: Best Email Marketing Software
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to convert prospects in 2021. When it comes to growing your small business with better tools, a good email platform should be high on your list.
The only issue is: most email platforms are clunky and require third-party software. With Right Inbox, you can integrate directly with your business G-Suite for ease of use:
With features from scheduling campaigns to drip emails and more, Right Inbox covers all the bases for stellar email marketing, no matter the goal.
10. Google Drive for Business: Best File Manager
Keeping files organized is a headache for even the most organized business owner.
Whether it’s infographics for content and sales or more importantly, private documents, storage is required.
If you are using contractors or part-time employees, files can quickly get overwhelming. Google Drive for business is a cloud-based file manager that allows you to store and sync files across multiple devices.
Additionally, Google allows users to track changes in documents, add comments, upload a variety of media, create folders and subfolders, and share documents with other users. It is an incredibly powerful file manager.
If you use Gmail personally, you may already be familiar with Google Drive. However, the business version has several additional features you don’t get with the free version of Google Drive.
For around $5 a month, Google Drive for Business gives you:
- Double the storage space (you can also upgrade to unlimited for around $10 per month)
- 24/7 customer support by phone
- Auditing capabilities, which lets an admin see where files have been shared and who accesses each file
- Admin tools that allow you to control granular details, such as who can access files offline, who can sync, etc.
- Access to an API, so you can code additional features
- To extend functionality even further, Google has invested $30 billion in cloud hosting which can be used in unison with Drive for Business
For the price, you can’t beat the storage and power of Google Drive for Business.
11. BIGContacts: Best Customer Relationship Management Tool
Personalization lies at the heart of strong customer relationships. By engaging more personally with your prospects and customers, you can enhance customer satisfaction and consequently improve your profitability. BIGContacts is a powerful and intuitive CRM tool that lets you accomplish this easily.
BIGContacts is a comprehensive customer relationship management tool that lets you track and manage sales opportunities using a custom pipeline. The tool allows you to keep track of the previous interactions, upcoming activities, preferences, and other essential information related to prospects and customers.
It also enables you to deliver personalized follow-up emails, automate redundant tasks and get a detailed calendar view of all pending tasks. It also has a powerful reporting module that enables you to stay on top of your business data without any hassle. Moreover, BIGContacts lets you manage customer data and relationships from anywhere, using any mobile device. And if you ever get stuck somewhere, delightful support is available 24x7 to help you out.
12. NordVPN: Best VPN Provider
In this day and age, securing data privacy is as crucial as ever. With hacks and breaches happening all around us, we’ve got to make every effort to keep our data private.
That’s why I recommend NordVPN as one of the top VPNs for private internet access. If you don’t have your own dedicated access to your office, then you’ll definitely want to invest in a VPN.
Don’t worry, though, they’re super cheap (less than $10/month). I personally always use one when on public WiFi networks like at the airport or my local Starbucks, as you never know when the guy sitting next to you might be a hacker.
The provider that comes out on top for me is NordVPN in terms of speed and reliability. If you ever find yourself updating your CRM from Starbucks or elsewhere, then this is definitely one tool you can’t afford to skip out on.
13. GoToMeeting: Best Meeting Software
If you work with a remote team or have clients around the globe, you need a solid video conferencing tool to stay connected. There are several options on the market, but GoToMeeting stands out for several reasons.
The program downloads in seconds and allows users to share meeting links seamlessly. You get a personal ‘meeting room’ with a set URL, which makes hosting recurring meetings easier. Plus, attendees can join on their computer or mobile device, which makes it convenient for everyone.
14. Lastpass: Best Password Manager
Every business needs a password manager. Cybersecurity has arguably never been more important. While technology progresses, so do hackers and the ability to compromise your data.
When looking to grow your business, having a password manager can help with countless tasks.
For example, new employee onboarding, working with other agencies who need access to your credentials, maintaining data privacy, etc.
Lastpass is your best bet:
Lastpass is constantly ranked as one of the best password managers out there. For a full, in-depth review on Lastpass check out this guide.
15. Loganix: Best Service Reseller Agency
If you run a small business and you are looking to generate more sales, you need to step up the quality of your services.
For example, let’s say you run an SEO or SaaS agency and want to drive more customers. To do so, you likely will need better social proof. And to get that, you’ll need expert-level value delivered to each and every customer.
Sometimes, this can take decades of experience to harness. Fortunately, agencies like Loganix exist, allowing you to resell their services as a white-label:
It’s one of the best unconventional sales tools in the book. Why? You are leveraging professional experience under your own brand without hiring SEO managers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
16. Salesforce: Best CRM
Data-driven marketing is only as good as the system you use to track it. If, for example, you aren’t connecting across platforms or are failing to integrate traffic and campaign data, you could be making costly mistakes.
Salesforce is a powerhouse in the CRM industry, offering a full-fledged CRM solution designed with features for both small and large businesses. It allows you to unify channels, trigger messages based on customer actions, and offer better customer support.
There are seriously too many features to cover them all, but favorites include contact management, collaboration tools, digital marketing tools, and more — all designed to increase the productivity of your sales team.
Salesforce offers several solutions, but the small business tool starts at just $25 a month, which is a steal for the money you’ll save for one of the best CRM solutions.
17. Dropbox: Best File Hosting Service
So, we already talked about using Dropbox’s competitor, Google Drive, to organize your files. Do you really need Dropbox, too? Maybe, particularly if your company is active in online space. Dropbox allows for file syncing across devices, file sharing, and more.
Compared to Google, Dropbox stands out when it comes to speed and convenience. Dropbox users do not have to have a Google account and get access to more advanced features such as the ability to password protect files and set an expiration date for file links.
Other fancy features offered by Dropbox business include 120 days of file recovery, remote device wiping, file event tracking, tiered admin roles, and a variety of collaboration tools.
18. SurveyMonkey: Best Survey Tool
How do your customers or prospects view your company? What do they like or dislike about your sales approach? Is there a niche solution you could be offering that you currently do not? The answers to these questions can help streamline your sales process and even build new products.
So, how do you get this information and organize it so it can be used effectively? By using an online survey tool. Survey Monkey is one of the most popular online survey tools, offering easy to build surveys and polls you can use to be more competitive — including tracking and leveraging your Net Promoter Score.
The top features Survey Monkey offers include access to expert-written questions and survey templates, the ability to add logos and adjust themes and fonts, and access to a deeper analysis of your data.
19. ShipBob: Best Online Ordering Fulfillment Provider
Two-day shipping is now the norm. If you want to compete with Amazon this year, you need lightning fast shipping.
And when you can’t compete yourself, you need a third-party logistics company (3PL) that has the strategic warehouses and storage across the country to help you sell.
So if you run an eCommerce business today, making the sale is only the first step. After closing it, you need a strong order fulfillment provider to ensure the customer receives their product in a reasonable time.
As Amazon takes over the eCommerce market, many small businesses are struggling to compete, which is where Shipbob comes in.
ShipBob allows small businesses to offer fast, 2-day shipping by utilizing a network of fulfillment centers around the country, which helps reduce shipping costs and transit times. Essentially, they take over the logistics of getting your product to your customer’s door, so you can focus on what you do best — making sales.
20. BuzzSprout: Best Podcast Hosting Platform
Podcasting has become one of the best ways to attract new customers to your business, brand, and more.
While podcasting might not seem like a direct sales tool, it actually is. In fact, it’s a form of inbound sales.
Podcasts work to both build your brand awareness and even drive direct, high-converting traffic to your website.
By podcasting and creating content in your niche, you can show thought leadership and build a curated audience who will buy your product or service.
When it comes to podcast creation and hosting, BuzzSprout is second to none:
With plenty of guides on starting a podcast, Buzzsprout arms you with both step-by-step guidance and a powerful platform that works.
Content marketing is the future of sales, and podcasting is taking the content space by storm.
21. inFlow: Best inventory software
Managing inventory and selling products is at the heart of commerce. But doing these complex tasks is far from easy.
You have to manage each step of the process from inventory to barcoding, stock, manufacturing, and more.
Unless you have a stellar inventory management tool that links all of these together, you will spin your wheels trying to grow your business. When it comes to inventory tech, inFlow inventory management is your best bet:
With clients from Nasa to Google to Intel, they are a clear market leader with deep roots in the inventory space.
inFlow provides real-time updates on your stock, ensuring you always have a clear truth on orders.
22. BigCommerce for WordPress: Best Tool to Sell on WordPress
If you use WordPress to power your website, you are in good company. The WordPress tool options for small businesses are vast, including content management systems (CMS), many different website builders, and eCommerce platforms.
While website builders like Wix and Squarespace are very popular too, nothing competes with WordPress when it comes to functionality and unlimited features.
If you want to sell on WordPress you need an eCommerce solution, which is where BigCommerce comes in.
BigCommerce is considered a “headless” eCommerce integration, which means WordPress stores and delivers all the content, while BigCommerce gets called in when the user hits the “buy” button.
There are several benefits to this model, including the ability to create a more customized user experience and the flexibility to sell through more channels with omnichannel marketing.
BigCommerce stands out as an eCommerce solution for growing businesses due to its scalability, security features, built-in apps, and conversion optimization tools.
They also have a strong partnership with Authorize.net, which provides connections to card brand networks, optimizing response times, and mitigating data security risks. Authorize.net helps BigCommerce accept international transactions and provides advanced fraud protection on all accounts.
23. Reply: Best Sales Enablement and Engagement Software
Sales engagement is a tricky balance. You don’t want to reach out too often and scare prospects away. On the other hand, you can’t sit back and hope they convert on a whim.
You need to reach out at the right time with the right information to close a sale.
And that’s where Reply.io comes into play, serving as a sales enablement and engagement tool to automate everything from email outreach to calls to tasks and more:
They have advanced features for optimizing your prospecting as well, including A/B testing and intuitive personalization. Reply goes above and beyond for their customers, providing free outbound sales guides that walk you in-depth on how to improve sales engagement.
With countless integrations, you can use Reply for inbound sales, outbound sales, PR, link building, business development, and more.
Final Tips
For small businesses to succeed in today’s digital world, you need to keep up with the big guys. That means offering dedicated customer service, fast delivery, and embracing omnichannel marketing. Tools, like the ones above, help support customers through the entire sales process and allow you to provide superior service.
Just make sure to avoid security breaches by using a password manager to control what employees have access to and keep your passwords secure. You don’t want to end up on WIRED’s list of the worst security breaches of the year!
Which tool will you try first? Or, what tool can your business currently not live without?
Author Bio: Adam Enfroy writes about how to scale your blog like a startup to 250,000 monthly readers to his site. He launched his blog in 2019 and started generating over $45,000/month in revenue within 14 months. He wants to teach new bloggers how to start a blog and do the same.
