Ultimate Guide to Sales and Marketing Tools for Startups

The Ultimate Guide To Sales and Marketing Tools for Startups: How can you make the most out of these tools

First things first…

Do you know what are the most useful sales and marketing tools you can use? We’ve put together a guide to our favorite sales enablement and marketing content creation tools for ambitious early-stage businesses that want to change the world.

We know you haven’t got time to trawl through tons of reviews and google searches, so we’ve done the hard work for you.

The following sales and marketing tools suggestions are either tried and tested by ourselves or come highly recommended by our clients.

We’ve broken them down into three key areas:

Inbound Sales Tools

When developing a sales process, you should ask yourself what your salespeople can be doing at the awareness, consideration, and decision stages to support buyers.

A four-part framework for your sales process is called the Inbound Sales Methodology. This will help you create a process that works for your business and keeps your team focused on the right activities at each stage of the buying cycle.

Identify

Inbound salespeople are like detectives. They identify strangers who may have goals or challenges they can help with. These strangers become leads.

Connect

Inbound salespeople are crucial to your business. They are the ones who connect with leads and help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge. If the buyer decides to take action, these leads turn into qualified leads.

Explore

The next step inbound salespeople take is to explore their qualified leads’ goals or challenges. They assess whether their offering is a good fit for the qualified leads’ context. If both parties agree, these qualified leads become opportunities.

Advise

The final step is for them to advise these opportunities on how their offering is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s context. If the buyer agrees that the offering is in line with their needs these opportunities become customers.

Outbound Sales Tools

Outbound sales is a process that allows you to reach out to potential customers using different mediums and tools. It helps you create a list of prospects and communicate with them through cold calling, emails, or social media.

Calling and visiting prospects is one of the most effective ways to attract new customers. With outbound sales, you can talk to a prospect directly and convince them to do business with you. This leads to more sales and increased revenue for your business.

If you’re looking to find out what are the best ways to improve your sales process, then you’ve come to the right place. This list will be with you every step of the way, as it lays out the tools that will help improve your lead generation and pipeline management.

Marketing Content Creation & Scheduling Tools

Content is the lifeblood of a blog or website. This is why creating irresistible content that gets customers to buy your service or buy your product is important. Fortunately, there are ways on how you can do that. You just have to be creative and take advantage of the right sales and marketing tools and develop the best strategies specific to your business.

Scheduling tools are very useful for bloggers who need to post regularly on their blog or website. These tools allow you to schedule posts in advance so that they are posted at the same time every week or month. If you don’t have a scheduling tool, then it becomes difficult to keep up with your blogging routine since it takes a lot of time to write new posts every day or week.

Marketing tools allow you to market your products or services more effectively without spending too much time doing so. There are many marketing tools available online which can automate most of the tasks involved in internet marketing such as email marketing, social media management, etc., thereby saving both time as well as money spent on hiring someone else to do these tasks for you. 

Don’t underestimate the positive impact the right sales and marketing tools can have on your business.

Inbound Sales Tools

Calendly

Think back to the days before Calendly.

Remember when you had to email people across time zones and ask them what time was best for them? And then you’d have to wait until they got back to you with their answer, which might be hours or days later, depending on how far away they were? And then when you finally did get an answer, it would always be something like “I’m only available between 8pm and 11pm Eastern Standard Time.”

Yeah, those days were a nightmare.

Now it’s super simple: Each person on your sales team can create time slots and customize when they are available for meetings. When your event type is all set up, you share a link with people who have agreed to a demo, and they can see all your available time slots (converted to their own timezone, of course). They can book themselves into whatever times work best—and you’ll get notified right away so that you can make sure someone else doesn’t book that slot first!

Calendly is an essential inbound sales tool that should be featured on your website, LinkedIn profile, and on any other platform and page where you are trying to book sales meetings or product demos.

Intercom

Intercom is a platform to communicate with your sales leads and existing customers. They’re using data from your website to help you connect with your audience in a way that’s relevant to them.

It’s not just a support tool, it’s an engagement tool that brings all your data together in one place and makes it easy to understand who your customers are and what they need.

It’s like having a 24/7 concierge at your beck and call—one who knows everything about your company and can answer any question you throw at them.

Aircall

Calling your customers is not new.

But, it turns out that calling your customers can be difficult. You need a phone system—and a good one at that—for your sales team to be able to call customers and get them on the phone with the appropriate rep.

Luckily, there’s a solution for this problem: Aircall.

Aircall offers virtual numbers for different countries or regions, which means you can buy numbers for the places where most of your customers live (like USA, New Zealand or Australia). You can also use it to make it easy for customers to reach one number and be routed to the right person on your team. It’s simple and affordable!

When you think of a fancy phone system, what comes to mind? For most people, it’s an expensive investment that requires a lot of technical know-how. But Aircall is different. It’s not just a way to make your business look more professional—it’s also a way to make your business run more efficiently and effectively.

Aircall gives you the tools you need to run your business like a pro without having to break the bank.

Outbound Sales Tools

CRM Systems

Establishing a single CRM software can help you to achieve higher outbound sales efficiency and improve your customer engagement.

A unified CRM software, like Active Campaign or HubSpot, centralizes all the processes of your team. It also makes it highly collaborative and enables everyone on your team to access customer information in a single place. How can you choose between them?

Your communication and engagement with customers improve over time as you can easily build a relationship with them through email, chat, and phone features. The data is visible to everyone, so reporting is accurate and trustworthy.

With automation, you can achieve higher efficiency in outbound sales by reducing manual work required for each step of the process, starting from lead qualification to lead nurturing.

Active Campaign would be ideal for startups who want to send lots of marketing emails as well as manage their deal pipeline all in one place. The free version is a bit basic however, the paid-for starts from around £50 per month.

HubSpot is better from a sales intelligence perspective and has lots of additional tools plus a free version. You can also schedule meetings via HubSpot. Whilst it can get expensive, HubSpot does offer preferential rates for start-ups.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an absolutely essential tool for any start-up business looking to establish an outbound sales function. It’s a great way of connecting with prospects and getting them to raise their hands, as well as identifying potential leads and nurturing relationships with the customer.

LinkedIn has an enormous user base, with over 500 million members worldwide. This means that you have access to a massive pool of potential customers who are actively looking for solutions just like yours!

The benefit of using the LinkedIn platform for outbound sales is that it enables you to reach people directly by searching for them on LinkedIn’s network and then contacting them via email or phone. You can also use tools such as InMail (an email version) or Outreach (a tool that allows you to send personalized messages) in order to get your message across effectively without having to go through a lengthy cold email process every time.

Outreach

With Outreach, you can build and manage your email sequences in one place, saving you the time of having to create them manually. You can use our pre-built templates or create your own from scratch.

Outreach allows you to track performance metrics like open rates, clicks, and reply rates so that you can optimize your sales process over time. We also have integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot so that you can easily integrate all of your data into one place.

We’re proud to have helped thousands of businesses automate their outbound sales processes, improve their sales efficiency and increase their ROI.

Marketing Content Creation and Scheduling Tools

SEMRush

Research is the most important part of creating content. You have to know what kind of content you want to create and for whom you are creating it. If you don’t know what to write about, then you will never be able to create good quality content.

With SEMrush research, it’s very easy to come up with ideas for your next blog post. Just enter a topic and target location, and SEMrush will provide you with potential ideas around that main topic.

Moreover, it also allows users to enter a domain name or URL in order to find out what people are searching for on that specific website or blog. This tool also works great if you’re looking for inspiration on what kind of content should be created for your audience.

Canva

If you’ve ever tried to design a graphic for your blog or social media post, you know how frustrating it can be to find the right combination of shapes, colors, and fonts. 

Canva is a free online graphic design tool that allows you to create stunning visuals across a wide range of formats. It’s an amazing tool that has been used by millions of people all over the world, and it’s easy to use, even for those who aren’t very creative.

With Canva, you can create almost anything including presentations, social media posts, infographics, resumes, newsletters, logos, and YouTube videos—and it streamlines the designing process for just about anyone. You can save money and time spent on hiring a graphics design expert and use Canva instead!

Canva comes with stock elements and a photo library as well as a wide range of templates for every need—from social media posts to infographics and more.

Later.com

Social media scheduling is a great way to save time, stay organized, and post consistently—but it’s not easy to do.

There are so many platforms that you have to keep track of, and each one has its own set of rules and limitations on what you can post and when.

But there’s a better way: using a social media scheduler.

When you schedule all of your content in advance, you save tons of time. You can spend less time manually posting each post and more time doing what you love: growing your business!

Plus, with Later.com, you can schedule content across all of your social channels at once—so if you want to share the same thing on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram… no problem! Just set it up once and we’ll take care of the rest.

All in all

If you want to create the best system for your company to scale fast and experience the growth it deserves, make sure you use some of the tips we put together in this Guide to Sales and Marketing Tools for Start-Ups.