The Software You Need to Accelerate Digital Sales

Having a conventional CRM system and a bundle of supporting tools no longer cuts it to meet today’s digital sales demands. With 71% of customers expecting companies to deliver personalized interactions, the sales industry needs to double down on customer relations efforts. But in fact, 86% of sellers are frustrated by repetitive administrative tasks like updating multiple systems and manually entering data into their CRM. 

These activities leave sales folks no time to perform their primary duty — selling.

Luckily, today’s market is replete with sales acceleration tools. They can take over most of the mundane tasks and, at the same time, draw actionable insights from your sales data. This guide sheds light on the sales acceleration process and the tools you can use to facilitate it.

What is sales acceleration?

Sales acceleration is a set of strategies to help you move prospects through the sales funnel more efficiently. It aims to boost deal velocity and improve the overall sales process for all the parties involved. 

The right tools are critical to put your sales acceleration strategy into motion and optimize the entire sales process. They boost sales team performance by automating sales operations, improving data handling, uncovering hidden patterns using AI, and more.

Sales acceleration solutions should support integrations so multiple applications can work with the same data. With a lesser routine, the sales team can spend more time interacting with customers, which is a key factor in keeping your talent aboard.

Shortening the sales cycle isn’t the only benefit sales acceleration tools offer. When integrated correctly, they let you:

• Use your resources efficiently
• Provide timely data and insights
• Boost your team’s productivity through automation
• Make your customers’ journey more compelling
• Provide better customer relationships and support
• Increase revenue

These solutions can align with any phase of the sales cycle. We reviewed dozens of the most popular sales acceleration tools and want to share our findings with you. 

Prospecting and lead generation tools

Building a prospect list is a crucial step in your sales funnel. It’s about finding the most likely buyers to share your product or service with.

Traditional prospecting entails: 

• Scrolling through LinkedIn or Quora
• Combing through prospect lists to gather contact information 
• Cold calling
• Mailings
• A lot of guesswork

Top sellers spend an average of six hours every week researching prospects. About half of those they find don’t fit their company.

A robust sales acceleration tool can take over that burden and level up your outreach. Based on a buyer persona or criteria you define, it can:

• Analyze large data volumes
• Build your prospect list
• Find contact details
• Add prospect data to your CRM

Consider the following prospecting and lead generation tools: 

• Leadfeeder helps generate leads from your current website traffic (even if they don’t leave contact details). It automatically qualifies them and gathers contact information.

• MatterMark lets you automate prospecting by setting up more than 80 filters outlining your ideal candidates. This helps identify leads for you to prioritize your sales activities.

• UpLead helps you target the right prospects based on more than 50 search criteria. It also supports integrations with the most popular CRMs and email apps, so you don’t need to transfer information manually. 

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Lead scoring software

Lead scoring means prioritizing leads based on a company’s attributes (e.g., demographics, industry, company size, online behavior). It helps salespeople qualify and pay proper attention to the most promising potential leads. 

Accelerated lead scoring can give your sales team instant insight into which leads are more likely to convert to customers. Advanced algorithms and analytics identify trends in your sales data (won and lost) and determine which attributes matter most. This means no more manual point counting or subjective judgments.

Here are a bunch of lead-scoring software applications that can come in handy:

• Breadcrumbs accelerates sales by creating a custom contact scoring engine. This helps you find better quality leads and sort and prioritize them to match your ideal customer profile. 

• Zendesk Sell lets you create unique scoring formulas to evaluate leads or deals based on variables and characteristics you choose (e.g., lead source, industry). 

• Freshsales offers Freddy, an AI-powered assistant that learns from your historical sales data. Freddy uses scores and star rankings to flag high-potential sales opportunities.

Sales-focused CRMs

CRM is the heart, brain, and single source of trust for your sales team. LinkedIn’s State of Sales report revealed that 70% of respondents named CRM a number-one tool in closing deals. 

To speed up the sales cycle, your CRM should support integrations and offer features like collaborative deal tracking, workflow management, forecasting, and automation. Also, by using mobile-friendly CRM applications, you will improve your sales by 87% and increase customer satisfaction by 74%. 

Here are a few CRM examples that can help you streamline sales processes and make effective management decisions:

• HubSpot‘s paid version offers an AI assistant, deep prospect insights, and high-end automation. Internal integrations allow you to share deal details across apps like Slack and Google Sheets.

• Salesforce offers a robust, customizable CRM with well-developed tools for managing sales processes. It offers multiple integrations, automates many routine activities, and supports advanced team collaboration.

• Zoho CRM offers a simple user interface with customizable modules so you can define workflows, automate processes, and manage leads. It comes in free, standard, professional, ultimate, and enterprise editions. The last one offers stage-by-stage sales funnel tracking, which you can check out with a 30-day free trial.

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Contract lifecycle management solutions

Automated contract lifecycle management (CLM) can speed up contracting, minimize the legal team’s involvement, and foster decision-making. It can even shorten the average sales cycle by 24%, according to chapter two of the Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report.

CLM is a sales acceleration platform that lets you create, manage, amend, store, and track agreements. Features like live collaboration, version control, and automatic alerts let your sales team act fast and take action right when needed.

Most CLM solutions provide their own electronic signing capabilities or easily integrate with eSign providers. What’s more, intelligent CLM tools keep track of your country’s regulations and notify you of changes and possible noncompliance issues. 

These are some of the most prominent tools:

• AXDRAFT is an AI-powered CLM solution that connects with your CRM and offers complete control over your document flow. It lets parties draft, discuss, redline, and sign agreements without switching applications or tabs. 

• ContractWorks lets you store and organize contracts in one centralized repository. It can also boast of built-in electronic signature, optical character recognition (OCR) advanced search and a system of roles and permissions.

• Onit offers you end-to-end automation of the entire contract management process. The tool can be easily integrated into existing processes (Word and email) and automate contract review with the help of AI.

Sales engagement and executions tools

Advanced platforms let your team automate tasks and create personalized touchpoints along your pipeline. They help you set up high-quality email templates and tailor interactions with each prospect based on timing, preferred channels, and other criteria. Thus, you can initiate the right kind of conversation at the right time at every stage of the customer lifecycle. 

Here are the best sales acceleration solutions that improve the quality of engagement with prospects:

• Outreach integrates sales engagement, conversation, and revenue intelligence in one platform. Its AI capabilities improve sales rep performance and save deals you might otherwise lose. 

• Mixmax creates and automates personalized touchpoints. It also monitors real-time lead engagement right from your inbox. Mixmax has a built-in meeting scheduler so your recipients can easily choose a meeting time right from the body of an email.

• Reply lets you create multichannel sequences of personalized emails, LinkedIn messages, calls, SMS, etc. It has a collection of top-performing sequence templates and a built-in calendar for booking meetings.

Customer data platforms (CDPs)

A recent Beagle Research Group survey found that, on average, sales teams need to switch between eight different, poorly integrated applications and manual tools. Customer data platforms streamline their efforts by combining and automatically updating data from multiple platforms into one data stream.

CDPs accelerate the sales cycle by:

Giving a 360-degree view of customers and their activities

Showing data from online and offline sources

Unifying customer profiles across systems

Improving targeting for marketing campaigns

Here are some customer data platforms to consider:

• Segment is a real-time tracking CDP that’s easy to set up. It unifies your customers’ touch points across all platforms and channels. It supports over 400 out-of-the-box integrations to route your customer data to various systems.

• Insider lets you build unified prospect profiles, perform segmentation, and predict future behavior with the help of AI. This means you can create personalized experiences to boost customer engagement and loyalty and reduce churn.

• RedPoint One offers a user-friendly interface, multiple integrations, and predictive AI models to optimize your sales decisions. RedPoint One’s machine learning capabilities automatically determine and suggest the best action to convert more prospects to sales.

Conclusion

A sales acceleration strategy delivers meaningful buyer engagements that increase deal velocity. It empowers your sales team with the right tools to optimize their efforts. 

While all the acceleration tools mentioned above can improve your sales operations, you don’t need to adopt all of them to close more deals. Choose the tools that best align with your company’s goals and boost your team’s productivity.

AXDRAFT’s AI-powered CLM is one of the tools that can help you secure deal closing—one of the most important and stressful aspects of sales. AXDRAFT can help your sales team create, negotiate, store, and sign contracts in one place, saving up to 80% of your sales time and resources. 

Try our free demo and see how AXDRAFT’s CLM software can give you complete control over your contracts and empower your sales team to sell more.