This past year has seen a drastic rise in the number of sales automation tools within the B2B sales and marketing space.
In fact, Gartner projects that the market will grow into a $9.4 billion market by 2019.
One of the reasons for this growth is because with easy access to information, customers no longer need to speak to you for product information. They want a relationship with you instead, so you’ve got to be available when they’re ready to talk, you need to connect with them and respond. You need to appreciate them and be respectful of them. Which is hard to do without help.
In sales, it’s all about the authentic relationship, so today’s pro is turning to sales automation tools to build sincere relationships with their customers. Fake or overproduced sales automation can derail the entire process, so it’s important to use the right free sales tools that help you build those authentic relationships.
Free Sales Intelligence Tools for 10X Productivity
Building a real relationship with buyers takes time, however there are sales intelligence tools to help you learn more about them: their personalities, interests, challenges, and more. And not just paid tools, but free ones that sales pros can use to increase their productivity. Here are five free sales intelligence tools that are quick and easy to get started with and will help you have better conversations with your buyers.
Crystal – Personality Platform
Sending that first perfect sales outreach takes a lot of work and research. The words you use, the method you choose to reach out to them (email, social media, etc.), and the length of the text are all important. That’s what makes Crystal so powerful as a simple sales intelligence tool.
Simply put, Crystal saves you all that pre-work time by scanning written data from many sources and connecting with your communication platforms to understand a buyer’s personality. You quickly get insight into how to communicate with this person to match their unique style.
Here’s my profile from Crystal:
Nudge for Chrome – AI Sales Insights
Nudge for Chrome uses AI to provide you with the latest personal mentions, company news, social activity and relationship insights on your buyers as you write emails. Sales pros love Nudge for Chrome because it saves them hours of research time. The Nudge AI gathers all the insights they need to write engaging emails, then makes it available to them when they open their favorite email program (like Gmail,Google Inbox and even inside of SalesLoft). With only so many hours in a day to actually be selling, Nudge for Chrome helps you focus more on the selling and less on the grunt work.
Owler – Competitive Intelligence Platform
It’s great to get an overview of an organization and their industry before you start any outreach. But it takes a long time to do the deep dive you need to get the full picture. Instead of spending an entire day searching the web and your buyer’s website, use Owler to get a free competitive intelligence overview of any organization.
Owler provides financial and competitive data on the company, such as funding announcements and news updates that are especially useful to sales pros. You’ll get the data you need more quickly, so you can use it more creatively and frame it around the current challenges your prospect is facing.
MixMax – Communication Automation & Analytics
After doing all the research on your buyers, it’s time to send some emails. MixMax helps you schedule your emails, tracks who opened them, makes it easy to book a meeting, and more. All with a free tool that works with Gmail and Google Inbox.
One key feature I like is the meeting scheduler. You can include a meeting request directly in the email, and since it’s integrated with your calendar, it shows your free times automatically. No more back and forth emails trying to find the right time.
Hunter.io – Email Research Tool
Finding email addresses for just the right person at your buyer’s company can be just as time consuming as the other research you’re already doing. Who wants to spend even more time doing that? Most sales pros just don’t have that kind of time. Enter Hunter.io. Hunter’s Chrome extension makes it easy to find anyone’s email address on the web. Use it to find all of the email addresses for a buyer’s domain that are publicly available on the web.
The feature I like best (aside from all the time I save using the tool in general) is the email verification. Hunter boasts the “most complete Email Verifier available” today, with a 95% deliverability rate for the verified email addresses it finds.
Conclusion
You’ll notice that I left LinkedIn off this list; that’s because I wanted to highlight the latest free sales tools out there, although it’s usually the best starting place for any buyer research. Integrate these free sales intelligence tools into your tech stack and you’ll be on your way to crushing your sales goals and building future pipeline.
Did I miss any other great free sales intelligence tools? Hit me up on Twitter and let me know. We love hearing about the latest and greatest.
Kevin Hurley is Director of Marketing at Nudge.ai and co-founder / advisor at Paycase Financial. He’s experienced in leading marketing for high-growth companies such as Careerify which was acquired by LinkedIn.
