Sales Management Software: Our Top Picks

Sales management software is one of the few pieces of software that truly saves the day for salespeople as they toil their lives away closing deals.

Sales management software organizes and manages contacts, prospect lists, conversations, track sales deals, and pretty much all the other tasks involved in the sales process.

In a nutshell, a sales management software is a great enabler.

It will not only summarize what you need to do everyday, but also help you keep a track of your prospects in the sales funnel.

And since a sales management software integrates into your workflow seamlessly, it will help managers supervise their team.

Let’s look at a few sales management software that make the cut to be the best the world has to offer.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers a complete sales and marketing platform. They have a CRM and offer free sales tools that can be clubbed together to become a full-blown force.

You get contact management, reporting, sales automation, and lead management all under one roof.

What makes it stand out: HubSpot offers a unique sales armor, called the Sales Management Playbook. It has battle cards, calling scripts, and positioning guides and enables the sales team to generate branded quotes in seconds.

The Good: The great thing about the HubSpot Sales Hub is the 24*7 customer support. And their pipeline management tool is extremely efficient with a tracking, meeting scheduler and click-to-call functionality.

The Bad: Some users have faced issues with task assignment, regarding who assigned the task and who is reporting on it.

Others complained that they can’t offer meeting requests to clients in other time zones.

HubSpot doesn’t offer "contract management" .

Pricing: Hubspot offers both their Sales Hub and CRM for free. Woo-hoo!

They offer extra tools like meeting scheduling, reporting dashboard, deal pipeline starting $50 a month for 2 users.

Suited For: Small business, startups, to large businesses.

Integrate HubSpot With StoryXpress

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is literally named after sales pipelines. It is all about direct sales, sales actions and well, sales pipeline.

When it comes to UI, Pipedrive keeps it simple and very visual. They have a timeline view for each contact with their contact history, making their contact management, and lead management tools the best out there.

What makes it stand out: Pipedrive offers customizable pipelines, so you can add fields according to your business and customize them for each team.

The Good: Pipedrive has a seamless tracking system that allows you to map the sales process for every salesperson. It also offers one of the best onboarding and migrating systems.

The Bad: Pipedrive’s mobile app has been frustrating for users working with multiple companies. A lot of login errors, and overlapping has been reported.

Users also noticed addresses for clients are not in sync with the mobile app.

Pricing: Pipedrive offers their Essential pack at $12 a month per user.

Suited For: Small to medium sized businesses.

Zoho

The Zoho One sales management suite offered by Zoho is a true blue wholesome sales management software.

Zoho offers a module style customizable sales platform, with a multi channel sales strategy in place.

What makes it stand out: From social media, to emails, to live chat, Zoho One focuses on getting leads and closing deals on all channels.

It allows click to call dialing through a phone app as well.

The Good: With Zoho you can actually track real time progress with prospects across channels through a customized alert system.

So, you get a notification every time a user interacts with the sales team on any channel.

The Bad: Zoho has faced a lot of backlash because of its lack of fluidity to import or export leads. Users have reported receiving corrupted data.

Zoho has an auto two factor authentication in place, which can be irritating for multi platform users.

Pricing: Zoho offers a free edition for three users inclusive of some essential features for a home business.

Their paid plan starts at $15 per user per month.

Suited For: Zoho caters to the entire spectrum of businesses, from home based to large corporations.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers a bunch of sales platforms, but the Salesforce Sales Cloud is their major plug for a sales management software.

It is a marketing and sales platform with all the CRM capabilities you will look for in sales management software.

What makes it stand out: Salesforce provides a very comprehensive lead history feature, which allows you to view who followed up when with other additional customizable notes.

This enables managers and the sales team to decide the next salesperson who should be assigned to a lead.

The Good: Salesforce offers integrations with almost all social media channels but their Facebook Business Manager integration automatically imports new leads. The wide range of Salesforce integrations available further enhances its utility.

Using their web-to-lead capture feature they offer sales forecasting that helps you engage with your leads better and close deals quickly.

The Bad: Salesforce offers a wide variety of tools across its platform which can be a little tricky to adapt to. And, their training model hasn’t done too well with users.

Pricing: Their essentials model starts at $25 per month per user.

Suited For: Medium to large enterprises.

Shape Software

Shape an all-in-one business management tool for businesses to help streamline their workflow. It combines all the tools needed for the marketing & sales teams of a company.

Its customizable dashboard enables users to explore business-relevant trends and keep track of department-specific performance indicators.

Its collaboration tools help facilitate project information sharing within and across departments, and user roles keep sensitive business data private.

What makes it stand out: The user interface of Shape Software CRM is designed to be intuitive and user-friendly, making it easy for sales teams to adopt and use effectively. This ease of use reduces the learning curve of implementing a new CRM system and helps maximize user adoption and engagement.

The Good: Shape CRM is particularly strong in lead management, offering robust features for tracking, scoring, and nurturing leads. This capability helps businesses effectively manage their sales pipeline and improve conversion rates.

The Bad: While the user interface is user-friendly overall, mastering some of the more advanced features and customization options may require time and training. This could potentially slow down adoption and initial usage for some users.

Freshworks

Freshworks is generally referred to as the next gen sales management software because it is fully AI powered.

It follows a module based sales structure, so you can perform end to end deals within a timeline and follow a strict sales process.

What makes it stand out: Freshworks offers an auto-profile enrichment feature that gathers all the publicly listed information about your leads right on your dashboard.

The Good: The Freshworks Deals page is dedicated to closing deals with a Kanban board layout that allows you to categorize deals.

You can categorize sales in your pipeline, and further add other fields for each prospect.

The Bad: Users have complained about not being able to customize pages post importing a lead to the CRM, especially if integrating with another tool.

And their support has been criticized for not responding with actionable solutions.

Pricing: Freshworks CRM starts at $29 per month per user, with a free trial.

Suited For: Small to medium-sized businesses and large enterprises.

Aritic

Aritic PinPoint is a unified marketing automation software platform for marketing operations teams.

It has landing page, lead scoring, lead tracking, lead nurturing, email campaigning features with mobile optimized interface, CRM and Social integrations.

What makes it stand out: PinPoint integrates with Salesforce, SugarCRM, Zoho CRM making it easy to transfer your leads to the CRM when they become your paid customers. It also allows integration of Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Foursquare, Instagram. With social media integration, you can collect more leads via various groups and communities.

200+ brands are using Aritic platform along inbound marketing and sales engagement.

The Good: PinPoint is designed and developed to be mobile friendly. You can keep a tab on your leads' activities without having to sign in from your desktop only. PinPoint works seamlessly and with equal ease on any and every device.

The Bad: Users need to manually enable the modules they need and disable unnecessary ones.

Pricing: Aritic Pinpoint’s Lite Plan starts at $19/month

Suited For: Marketing operations teams or SMEs

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell is a web based sales management software with an easy to use dashboard layout.

It is aimed at B2C and B2B users looking to streamline their sales process with lead contact management, task management, tracking.

What makes it stand out: Zendesk Sell offers a very powerful sales forecasting tool for close rate prediction, and conversion estimation.

This helps the sales team close deals faster and prepare themselves for each prospect.

The Good: In line with their vision of streamlining the closing process, they offer sales professionals means to focus on high-value leads.

Automated scoring rules, and lead scoring data based on firmographics make it easy to pursue leads and make accurate pitches.

The Bad: Zendesk doesn’t score too well on the customizability front. Users struggle to add basic information on one hand, to not being able to integrate with other platforms. Dedicated task management software might also be a better choice than this feature.

Pricing: Starting at $19 per seat per month.

Suited For: Small, medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises.

NetSuite

Powered by Oracle, the NetSuite CRM offers a 360 degree view of customer communication.

It helps you gather, organize, and analyze leads to close deals. NetSuite offers an integrated platform for e-commerce, quotations, commissions, and sales forecasting.

What makes it stand out: NetSuite records cyberpaths for each and every prospect. This helps their Sales Force Automation module retain prospects and convert them.

The Good: NetSuite makes the sales process extremely convenient by keeping every step in one workflow. Including sales, fulfillment, and retainment.

The Bad: Users complain that they are not able to look for records unless they use a Zip Code or a primary key.

That can be a set back for users with a large database.

Pricing: NetSuite offers a quote based plan.

Suited For: Medium to Large Enterprises.

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a complete sales CRM with advanced sales tools, and everything else you need for a remote workspace.

Bitrix24 is actually an all inclusive software that lets you perform pipeline management, sales cycle management, tracking, reporting down to invoicing, and time tracking.

What makes it stand out: Bitrix24 offers a sophisticated sales cycle management tool that lets you comprehensively track the journey of a prospect from lead to client.

The Good: Bitrix24 offers a dedicated call center software which includes call recording, inbound calls, outbound calls and video calls.

The Bad: Since, Bitrix25 is an all inclusive software capable of managing the entire workflow, it can be a little tricky to train employees.

Users have complained about the UI, and lack of customization options.

Pricing: Amidst the pandemic Bitrix24 have offered their free starter business tool suite for unlimited users.

Their plans start at $24 per month.

Suited For: Small to medium businesses, and large enterprises.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a thorough sales management software focusing on a premium user experience that invariably leads to more sales.

ActiveCampaign offers email marketing, a sales automation checklist, support tools, and automated customer experience to help you understand buyer behavior and close deals.

What makes it stand out: ActiveCampaign allows users to make flexible pipelines unique to their business.

And you can control the actions and visibility of your pipeline internally. So, at a time every different salesperson would see a different pipeline customized by the manager through access control.

The Good: ActiveCampaign has an automated pipeline tool that keeps your pipeline updated.

Using the automated deal creation tool, every qualified lead will get assigned to a team member and subsequently the pipeline will be updated.

The Bad: ActiveCampaign has come under fire by users because of their support. They do offer eventually good support, but it takes time.

Pricing: They have different pricing models for digital businesses, B2B, and eCommerce starting at $15 per user per month.

Suited For: Small to medium sized businesses.

Integrate ActiveCampaign With StoryXpress

Marketo

Marketo is a lead marketing automation platform by Adobe. It is specifically designed for B2B users looking to streamline their sales process.

Marketo offers tools for growth and engagement. They offer tools for every step of the sales funnel, from landing pages, to outbound emails, to data capture forms.

What makes it stand out: Marketo’s Sales Partnership tool offers a 360 degree customer engagement view.

It has a bi-directional data integration with CRM.

Marketo offers a data backed sales and marketing partnership for strategic planning, and closing deals.

The Good: Marketo offers a tool for every platform out there, ensuring your lead generation is a cakewalk.

Optimized ROI, tailored messages, optimized consumer engagement are few of Marketo’s undeniably powerful assets.

The Bad: Marketo is kind of tricky for new users. They offer video tutorials for training, but users have still struggled to get a hang of it.

Pricing: Marketo has a quote based pricing model.

Suited For: Freelancers, small to medium businesses and large enterprises.

Infusionsoft - Merged with Keap

Infusionsoft is an advanced sales management software that actually takes charge of the sales process with a Sales Pipeline tool.

Infusionsoft touches every step of the sales process through their platform.

You can map out each step of the sales process using advanced tools and a centralized system to improve productivity.

What makes it stand out: Infusionsoft allows users to create repeatable sales processes, completely customized so you can address your sales needs.

The Good: Infusionsoft is extremely popular amongst sales teams because of their email automation process.

Their incredibly intelligent email automation tool actually categorizes prospects into different stages of the funnel and accurately addresses them.

The Bad: Users complain of not being able to split test emails or campaigns.

Pricing: Starting at $79 per month for 1 user and 500 contacts.

Suited For: Infusionsoft is aimed at freelancers and small businesses. But since getting merged with Keap, they are focusing on scalability.

Insightly

Insightly’s CRM ranks as one of the best worldwide. They offer a bunch of sales tools for lead routing, outbound emails, tracking, relationship linking etc.

Insightly actually has an app builder through which you can build a customized app for your employees with the workflow automation.

What makes it stand out: Insightly offers a lead routing tool that lets you track lead information with a rich activity timeline.

This lets you know the marketing campaign source, the reroute the lead for emails, phone calls, meeting and tasks based on the history.

The Good: Insightly records every connection to make a complex relationship linking. This functionality can be used to link existing contacts in your database to create a network of people.

The Bad: Insightly offers a small number of functionalities when it comes to their Gmail, Outlook integrations.

Pricing: Starting at $29 per month per user.

Suited For: Freelancers and small to medium sized businesses.

A sales management software is supposed to handle all aspects of your sales process.

Everything from ad optimization, to lead generation, to the post purchase follow ups comes under the umbrella of a sales management software.

Pick a sales management software that will boost your overall productivity without compromising your sales process.

We hope this post helps you choose the best sales management software for your business.