December 14, 2021
Whether your team is back in the office, working from home, or some combination of the two, keeping your sales ops running smoothly can be tough with so many moving parts. But fortunately, you’re not alone. With the right tools, you can streamline each aspect of your process and set your reps up for success. The best part? You don’t need to break the bank. Here are some of the best free sales tools to build your sales tech stack on a budget.
Before the age of computers and smartphones, most work had to be done by hand. No matter how time consuming or inefficient a task may have been, it had to get done manually, without help from apps, plugins, or shortcuts. But technology has come a long way in the past few decades, giving rise to a number of tools, techniques, and of course, information that helps us work smarter and more efficiently.
Between proposal automation that reduces manual inputs, sales analytics software that helps break down and analyze data, and all of the other programs and applications on the market, the sales world is jam-packed with useful tools that save time and increase efficiency.
But unless your organization has deep pockets or is committed to building out the most comprehensive sales tech stack out there, many of those tools end up being out of reach for the average team. So if you’re just starting out or you’re on a tighter budget, free sales tools are the way to go.
But like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, free B2B sales tools (that are actually free) can often seem like nothing more than a myth. From requiring credit card info for a 3-day trial to leaving giant watermarks on all of your documents, many of those so-called “free” tools aren’t even worth trying.
But there are always exceptions.
Backpacking on our recent webinar with Morgan Ingram of JB Sales Training, we’ve rounded up some of the best free sales tools available right now so that you can stop searching and get back to business. So whether you’re just testing the waters on some new apps or looking to build out your sales tech stack on a budget, you’ve come to the right place.
Best free B2B sales tools:
Asana
Manage projects, pipelines, and people.
Managing a sales team requires a lot of coordination and organization. Between deals, onboarding, internal projects, and everything else you're juggling, it's easy for things to slip through the cracks.
Asana is project management software that helps you easily manage your team's work, projects, and tasks online. It's free for teams of up to 15 people, and there are even templates for sales funnels and pipelines.
Build relationships and find new leads.
Everyone knows about LinkedIn for personal use—it’s the best place to grow your professional network and find your next position. But it’s also an often overlooked free sales tool that you can easily leverage to win more business.
Since the platform makes it easy to find company information and employee details, it’s a must-use tool to build your relationships. Using the search function and your existing connections, you can find potential leads, analyze your competitors, and dig up information on companies that would benefit from your offering.
Hubspot CRM
Get full pipeline visibility.
If this is your first foray into customer relationship management, you're in for a treat. Hubspot keeps track of all customer activity and ensures reps have all the information they need to succeed. It includes features like email tracking & notifications, prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, live chat, and more, in order to help reps understand where they stand with each customer in the buying process.
It also gives leaders insight into the progress and performance of their team with features like a reporting dashboard, deal tracking, company insights, and pipeline management. Plus, it integrates with Proposify to further streamline your team's workflows.
Vidyard
Upgrade your outreach with video.
Tired of writing cold emails get no response? These days, people much prefer a more visual approach, and what better way to stand out than video?
Vidyard allows reps to record outreach videos straight from their computer or smartphone and embed them directly into emails to prospects. If you're looking to accelerate your pipeline, impress your prospects, and win more business, this is the way to do it. Plus, adding a persuasive proposal video has never been easier (or cheaper) with Proposify’s brand new Vidyard integration.
Calendly
Schedule calls with confidence.
Phone calls, emails, and manual calendar invites are a few of the many ways your team can set up calls with prospects or customers, but they’re certainly not the most efficient. With Calendly, reps can put the ball in their prospects’ court.
Once your team sets their availability preferences, they can share their Calendly link with their prospect, who will pick a time slot that works for them. Calendly then notifies your rep and automatically adds the event to their calendar, taking all of the guesswork and back-and-forth out of scheduling.
Hemingway
Whether you're writing a cold email, discussing deal details or following up on a proposal, your writing affects your prospect’s perception of you and your deal. So choose your words wisely.
But that doesn’t mean you need to be a writer. In fact, as Morgan mentioned in his recent webinar with Nadia, Proposify’s director of demand generation, “The highest performing outbound emails are on a 3rd to 6th grade reading level.” After all, overly complex language can actually push prospects away.
If you want to improve your communication skills, start using Hemingway. It’s a free editor that helps you write more effectively. It grades your writing for readability so that you can ensure that your message is clear, concise, and convincing.
Ready to make every deal a closed deal?
Get started with a free Proposify 14-day trial. No credit card required. Just more closed deals.
Owler
Level up your sales intelligence.
Finding info on companies of interest can be difficult. You can spend hours digging through Google, LinkedIn, and company websites, only to come up empty handed. And if you want to check for updates after an event or news release, you'll have to start all over again. But with Owler, you can skip all of that.
Whether you're interested in learning more about prospects, competitors, or any other company for that matter, the platform collects (and updates) all sorts of interesting data and compiles it in one place. It even lets you follow specific companies and industries so that you can easily receive updates, explore the latest news, and discover new opportunities.
Zapier
Streamline your workflows.
If your team is anything like ours, you rely on a number of web apps to get work done. Between Google Sheets, Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and an endless list of others, it can get overwhelming trying to bounce back and forth between them all. Zapier makes it easier.
It connects all of your web apps, allowing them to communicate with one another in order to make your workflows more efficient. Need to pull attachments from Gmail to Dropbox? No problem. Want to create a new Asana task from a Google Calendar event? Done. At the end of the day, Zapier helps you skip the busywork by moving information between your apps for you.
GetProspect
Find new B2B leads.
Digging through LinkedIn and Google to find contact info for leads is time consuming. With GetProspect, you can skip all of the manual research and automate your prospecting process.
This free Chrome extension allows you to enter your own search criteria to pull contact data from their database of over 200 million contacts. From there, you can enrich your database with verified email addresses and profile information, estimate prospect quality, group leads by common patterns, then tailor your offer based on the data it reveals.
Docsify
Know when prospects open your emails, links, and attachments.
Do you ever wonder what happens with your emails after you click send? Without a way to track them, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether prospects read them, looked at the attachments, or clicked on the links you sent.
Docsify gives you the insight you need. This free email tracker is an extension for Gmail and G Suite, and it notifies you when recipients engage with your emails. It tells you when and where they were opened, how much time prospects are spending on each page of your PDFs, and how each of your reps are performing at email outreach.
Honorable mentions
If you’ve had a chance to watch the webinar, you might remember that there were some other powerful sales tools we talked about. We wanted to include them in this list, but some of them aren’t truly free, so we didn’t feel right lumping them in with the others. But with that said, we still think they’re worth trying—even if you need to sign up for a trial or request a demo.
Chili Piper
Similar to Calendly, Chili Piper is a scheduling software that makes arranging meetings easier. But going a step further, this tool is purpose-built for B2B revenue teams with features like automatic lead routing, instant web form scheduling, live calls and videos, and more.
Growbots
Growbots is an outbound sales platform that aims to make B2B outreach easier and more efficient. With this tool, you can hand select prospects to get a tailored list of potential customers and their contact info, pinpoint the best times to contact them, then create personalized emails that are sent automatically.
Crystal Knows
Used by over 90% of Fortune 500 companies, Crystal Knows incorporates personality insights into your sales process. Using a popular behavioral framework called DISC, it predicts prospects' personalities to help you understand how to motivate buyers and drive deals forward.
Salesloft
Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that automates manual sales tasks to help drive more revenue. It harnesses your data to identify the "most winnable deals" and provides insights on what to do next in order to move them forward.
Uniqode QR Code Generator
Uniqode is a flexible QR code generator, providing entrepreneurs and large enterprises with the ability to generate a single QR code, or infinite string of codes which are trackable, traceable, and editable.
Final thoughts
Managing a sales team is no walk in the park, but with the right tools on your side, it gets easier. Whether you’re looking to level up your lead generation, streamline your workflows, or upgrade your proposal process, these free B2B sales tools are essential for anyone building a sales tech stack on a budget. Give them a try to find out if they’re a good fit for your sales organization.
