Like the elusive Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, free sales tools might seem like the stuff of folklore. Sure, everyone claims to have a sighting—but do they really exist?
As intrepid salespeople, we wanted to investigate once and for all. What we discovered might surprise you. Free sales enablement tools do exist—and they’re actually pretty good. Since many sales brands are pivoting to product-led growth, spurred on by a culture of try-before-you-buy, sales reps have a plethora of free sales prospecting tools to choose from.
In fact, some of the best sales software companies now market directly to reps. It makes sense when you think about it: If you start using a free sales tool and close deals, some of your teammates might try it out. And if enough of you start to have success, the tool will catch your boss’ attention—and it’s already proven its value. What’s good for you is good for the sales brands who want to make a good impression on your manager (and that’s pretty good for you).
In this article, we’ll explain the types of free sales tools, their uses, and how to build a sales software stack that helps you find and close more business. Whether you’re looking for free sales tools for startups, SMBs, or enterprise—we’ve got you covered. No matter if you’re cracking small or large accounts, you’ll find something that will help you win more deals.
Contents1.What Are Free Sales Tools?2.Types of Free Sales Tools3.Best Free Sales Tools3.1List Building3.2Outreach3.3Scheduling3.4Presentation3.5Deal Closing3.6Branding3.7Learning4.Benefits of Free Sales Tools4.1Prospect with the Power of Several Reps4.2Speed Up Your Deal Cycle4.3Build Knowledge4.4Level Up Your Team4.5Send a Consistent Message5.Final Thoughts
What Are Free Sales Tools?
Free sales tools are any tools that help people in sales roles—such as account executive, business development rep, sales development rep, and so on—do their jobs faster, more efficiently, or both. These can include everything from tools that help automate repetitive tasks, to learning resources that can help you grow as a salesperson.
In our roundup we’ve included primarily B2B sales tools that have free versions and those that have limited free trials, such as DocuSign’s 30-day free trial. For transparency, we’ll mark these with “free version” or “free trial,” so you know which is which.
It’s important to note that there are no one-size-fits-all sales productivity tools. What works for an enterprise account executive may not work for a team of SDRs or someone selling to small businesses. However, when paired with the right sales methodology, online sales tools can help you take the right steps faster and leave less of your sales process to chance.
Connect, Convert, and Close More Deals
Easily create and share 1-to-1 videos.
Types of Free Sales Tools
There are seven main categories of free sales tools to choose from.
List building: For finding prospects or locating contact information
Outreach: For initiating conversations
Scheduling: For booking meetings
Presentation: For hosting meetings and enhancing slide decks
Deal closing: For signing documents
Branding: For making yourself memorable
Learning: For enhancing both your hard and soft sales skills
In order to choose the best sales tools for your tech stack, you need to first understand what problem you’re trying to solve. Ask yourself the following questions:
Do I need more prospects? Look for sales tools that focus on list building and outreach.
Do I need more demos? Look for sales tools that help with recording, scheduling, branding, and learning.
Do I need more closed-won deals? Look for sales tools that will improve your presentation and deal closing.
Do I need to spend less time in the CRM and more time selling? Look for learning resources that will help you become more efficient.
We’ll get into the different types of tools for salespeople—and the free versions we recommend—in the section below.
Best Free Sales Tools
The best free sales tools for your use case will differ depending on your goals. That’s why it’s key to identify any gaps in your sales cycle. If you do a good job of matching the tool to the need, you can take your selling game to the next level. We’ve broken the best free sales tools into sections below.
List Building
List building tools are free sales prospecting tools that help you find people to call, conduct account research, or locate the contact information of known prospects. Here are some of the best sales prospecting tools you can use for free:
Clearbit (free version): Easily track down hard-to-find email addresses straight from your inbox with their free Gmail and Outlook plugin.
Crunchbase (7-day free trial): Find funding reports and track companies in your target market.
Datanyze (free version): Free Chrome extension for scanning websites to see the company’s revenue, employees, and technology providers.
GetProspect (free version): Email finder and LinkedIn profile locator that enables you to search for up to 100 contacts monthly.
HubSpot CRM (free version): Visualize and optimize your pipeline in HubSpot’s free CRM tool.
LinkedIn (free version): The iconic business networking platform is also one of the best places to build your list and scope out potential prospects. (Though the paid version, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, is worth looking at.)
Name2Email (free version): A Chrome plugin which enables you to search for any email address, straight from Gmail.
Owler (free version): News and data about companies you’re interested in.
Segment (free version): Collect and clean customer data and send messages to prospects who are browsing in real time.
SimilarWeb (free version): Sales intelligence platform to find leads, get insight into your prospects, and conduct web traffic research.
Outreach
Outreach tools can vastly improve your effectiveness by automating routine tasks, improving your messaging, and providing better ways of connecting with prospects. Here are some of the best free options out there.
CrystalKnows (free version): A free Chrome plugin that uses AI to reveal anyone’s personality from their LinkedIn profile—allowing you to strike the right note and make a great first impression.
Emailable (free trial): Email tool to help improve open rates, prevent being flagged as spam, and win more deals.
LeadBI (15-day free trial): Uncover lead analytics and create automatic, responsive emails and text messages.
Mixmax (free version): Track email open rates, send automated reminders, schedule meetings, and more.
Reply (14-day free trial): Outreach tool which automates routine tasks like looking up emails, LinkedIn outreach, personal emails, and calls.
Vidyard (free version): Record outreach videos straight from your laptop and embed them in emails to prospects.
Scheduling
Scheduling tools allow prospects to book time directly on your calendar, minimizing unnecessary back-and-forth when you’re trying to find a mutually convenient time for a meeting. Here are our picks:
Mixmax (free version): Insert your availability into your emails and easily schedule meetings with one click.
Calendly (free version): Generate a custom link that allows anyone to book time on your calendar.
Chili Piper (free version): Automate bookings through integrations with the top calendar and video conferencing apps
Presentation
Presentation tools allow you to host virtual meetings with leads or create clear, compelling presentations. Here are some of our favorite free tools:
Beautiful.ai (free version): Create beautiful, compelling presentations to dazzle and persuade your prospects.
Uberconference (free version): A free video conferencing tool you can access directly from your browser—no downloads required.
Zoom (free version): Now ubiquitous thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, Zoom offers a crisp and seamless virtual meeting experience.
Cut Your Meeting Time in Half
Or skip the meeting altogether by sending a recorded video message instead.
Sign Up Free
Deal Closing
Deal closing tools simplify contract signing and other paperwork that needs to be completed before a deal can close. Our top picks are:
Adobe Sign (14-day free trial): Ideal for existing Adobe users, Adobe Sign comes packaged with Acrobat, allowing you to add legally binding e-signatures to PDF documents.
DocuSign (30-day free trial): Generate agreements straight from Salesforce and add legally binding e-signatures to any document.
HelloSign (30-day free trial): Associated with Dropbox, HelloSign allows you to add legally binding e-signatures to any document.
PandaDoc (free version): Create a free .png e-signature image and sign legally binding documents online.
Watch and Learn
You can cut down on the back and forth and clear up questions even before they come up by sending your prospects a video proposal walkthrough to accompany your doc.
Branding
Branding tools help you stand out from other reps, come across as a trusted consultant, and when it works really well, you can attract inbound leads.
LinkedIn (free version): Interact with prospects and post content to build your brand. (Try running polls or uploading native videos.)
CreateMySignature (free version): Create a professional email signature.
Vidyard (free version): Sending videos helps put a face to a name and can make you appear more recognizable and trustworthy.
Learning
Learning tools allow you to continuously improve your skills and enhance your sales performance.
Best Selling Podcast (free on iTunes and Stitcher): Consistently rated five stars, host Vince Beese interviews top sales professionals to uncover the secrets of their success.
Sales Hacker Podcast (free online, on iTunes, and on Stitcher): A weekly roundtable where VPs of Sales, investors, and founders discuss hot sales topics, offer tangible strategies, and provide motivation.
The Art of Charm Podcast (free online and on iTunes): 700+ episodes dedicated to enhancing your relationship-building skills, boosting your business savvy, and building your self-confidence.
Video Selling Master Class (free online): a 20-minute self-paced course that gives you the fundamentals of getting up and running using video for sales.
Benefits of Free Sales Tools
The benefits of using free sales tools might seem obvious—duh, they’re free. But beyond the potential cost-savings, salespeople have a lot to gain from making use of the free tools available. Here are some of the reasons you might not have considered for using free sales tools and why you might want to take them more seriously.
“I’m a fan of using free sales tools for a couple of reasons,” says Kyle Parrish, VP Sales at Mixmax. “You get to try before you make a significant investment and just by the nature of the tool being free, you know it’s going to be easy to use as well. Nobody makes a free sales tool that needs a three-week implementation process.”
In certain use cases, they can be especially crucial. Free sales tools for startups allow small, agile companies to “move fast and break things”—sampling a variety of sales solutions. For a scrappy startup, free tools for sales provide the freedom to pivot with minimal cost if a sales tool doesn’t work out.
Other overlooked benefits of using free sales tools include:
Prospect with the Power of Several Reps
Free sales prospecting tools can save you valuable time and boost your efficiency. The right list-building tools will help ensure that you’ve not only got the right leads, but that you have the correct contact information for them too—preventing you from waiting weeks only to find out you had the wrong email address. Additionally, you can use sales email tools to auto-personalize parts of your messages to save time, or set up email cadences that fire on autopilot. By automating the repetitive parts of your process, you free up more time to focus on the tasks that demand your creative energy and focus.
Speed Up Your Deal Cycle
Scheduling discovery calls, demos, and other conversations can eat up unnecessary time. You probably know by now that if you ask “What time works best for you?” without offering any options, folks will sit on your email for a few days (or longer) before getting back to you. The right scheduling tools can make this simple—instead of going back and forth about times, prospects can schedule calls with you with a single click.
Presentation tools can help speed up deals too. By making your demos clearer, more intelligible and more compelling, prospects can evaluate your offering faster.
Watch and Learn
You can record your demos in a free tool like Vidyard so that all the members of your prospect’s buying committee can watch when it’s convenient for them.
Build Knowledge
The best free outreach software for salespeople will provide you with metrics, allowing you to run tests. Are your outreach emails more effective with three bullets or four? What subject lines get the most clicks? Do you book more meetings when you list times you’re available? What video thumbnails get the most interest? Track your success over time and when you find strategies that work, replicate them.
Level Up Your Team
This iterative process of testing and optimizing new tools and techniques isn’t just great for individual reps—you can apply it across the team as a whole. By allowing their teams to dabble in a range of free tools, sales leaders can determine what does and doesn’t work for their reps and apply that knowledge across the team.
Send a Consistent Message
There’s some crossover between great free sales and marketing tools: Automated outreach tools allow marketers to craft messaging that salespeople can schedule in their cadences—making the message clearer and more consistent across the company. For salespeople, this can save valuable time and brainpower. Instead of creating your own messaging from scratch, simply plug in the phrases and assets that marketing has developed and tested over time. You’re much more likely to resonate with your prospect and get a response.
Final Thoughts
Unlike mythical monsters, free sales tools for startups, SMBs, and enterprise companies are plentiful—and they can have major benefits for your efficiency and overall success. To get the most out of the offerings available, identify where you struggle most in your sales cycle and pick an option from the list of top sales tools above to match. Good luck and happy selling!
Connect, Convert, and Close More Deals
Easily create and share 1-to-1 videos.
The post Free Sales Tools Reps Can’t Live Without appeared first on Vidyard.
Read more: vidyard.com
