5 Essential Sales Productivity Tools to Boost Sales Team Performance 

Even the best sales teams have room for improvement. According to Salesforce research, 84% of sales reps missed quota in 2023, and 67% don’t expect to meet their targets this year.

According to research

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It’s no wonder why so many revenue teams invest in tools and technology to boost sales productivity and performance. Around 70% of sales leaders report 10 or more tools in their tech stacks.

There’s certainly no shortage of solutions to your sales productivity challenges. But investing in a sales productivity tool doesn’t guarantee it’ll impact team performance.

Instead, it’s important to determine which sales productivity tools will drive a return – and then invest accordingly.

Read on as we explore:

  • The advantages the right sales productivity tools can provide to your company
  • The essential solutions and features to look out for when improving sales productivity at your company
  • The top five sales productivity tool “must haves”
  • Our recommendations and best practices

What is sales productivity?

Simply put, sales productivity is how efficient and effective your sales executives are at hitting various revenue milestones and goals. Of course, just because reps make more calls and send more emails does not necessarily mean they are progressing sales or generating revenue.

So what is a sales productivity tool? 

At Mindtickle, we define a sales productivity tool as anything that improves and measures reps’ skills, will, and in-field behaviors.

That might include tools that hold reps accountable, such as email and call activity tracking; those that empower reps to better prepare for meetings and follow-up, such as Content Management Systems (CMS); and solutions that arm reps with insights that help them drive specific deals and accounts forward more effectively.

After reading this post, you’ll be able to understand:

  • The advantages the right sales productivity tools can provide to your company
  • The essential solutions and features to look out for when improving sales productivity at your company
  • The top five sales productivity tool “must haves”
  • Our recommendations and best practices

Why are sales productivity tools important for your business?

The most powerful benefit of sales productivity tools is that they help reps win more business by holding reps accountable, saving them time, and helping them deliver a better, faster customer experience.

This has a butterfly effect that improves revenue metrics like quota attainment, pipeline coverage, number of at bats, average contract value, average cycle time, and even customer lifetime value.

At the same time, these tools align cross-functional members of revenue teams by providing a high degree of transparency and visibility while centralizing access to things like content, training, and insights.

With sales productivity tools, your team can do things like:

  • Search for potential buyers to set meetings with them
  • Grow, develop, and convert sales opportunities throughout the sales cycle
  • Understand areas of opportunity to improve their performance
  • Do more with less time and facilitate better hand-offs or deal collaboration
  • Access content and insights that can help move deals forward faster and personalize the customer experience
  • Learn from the winning attitudes and skills of top peers
  • Keep up-to-date on new strategies, product launches, competitors, and market approaches
  • Keep track of activity, pipeline, and progress toward goals

Modern sales productivity tools make your entire sales process more simple, measurable, and effective. This can result in benefits like:

  • Faster onboarding and revenue contribution
  • More opportunities in the pipeline
  • Higher conversion and win rates
  • Improved performance against competitors
  • Better understanding of winning playbook
  • Increased renewal rates
  • Improved rep performance and retention
  • Improved forecasting
  • Tighter alignment around customer needs

What are the top benefits of sales productivity tools?

Now that we know what sales productivity tools are and why they’re important for your business, let’s look at the top five benefits these tools deliver.

1. Manual data entry & note-taking is eliminated

In 2024, the days of manually inputting deal data into Salesforce and trusting it’s correct are over. This method wastes a lot of time and often results in a complete, inaccurate view of your sales pipeline. It also gravely reduces your organization’s ability to compete by limiting access to voice of customer insights.

Investing in tools like revenue and conversation intelligence that automatically transcribe every call, email, and meeting while scoring deal health is critical.  After all, teams that use conversation intelligence have lower churn rates and close more deals.

These tools also help reps self-coach by proactively flagging any deal risks, issues with buyer sentiment, or competitor mentions that must be addressed to move deals forward faster. As reps move into new roles or leave the company, it’s much easier to ensure no deal or account falls through the cracks by facilitating best-in-class hand-offs.

2. Personalized customer experience

To improve sales productivity, it’s critical that reps can quickly find relevant content to nurture leads, follow up with prospects promptly, and convince important decision-makers of the value your products provide.

Today, half of all customer engagement comes from only 10% of content created. That’s why investing in a sales content management system, or CMS, that helps reps know what content is new, suggested, and preferred by peers is key to boosting customer engagement and wins. The ideal content management system to improve sales productivity helps reps know what content they can use to drive a deal forward without even thinking.

Ideally, it will be integrated with your conversation and revenue intelligence solutions so that the system can suggest valuable assets to reps based on what was said in previous emails and calls, such as a competitor mention.

At the same time, your CMS should include a feature like Digital Sales Rooms to help reps personalize the buyer experience and understand which assets buyers viewed or shared. Since improving pipeline is critical to sales productivity, DSRs automatically identify new potential leads who visit and automatically upload them to your CRM so they can be nurtured through marketing programs.

3. Valuable voice of the market and financial insights

Since it’s a given that today’s inside sales teams must use a tool to email and call prospects en masse, such as Outreach.IO, we’re not going to put that on our list of must-haves. But sending generic emails and making calls is not enough. Every interaction must provide value and be highly personalized.

There are many ways to do this at scale. The first is to use a tool like Databook to uncover market and financial insights that will help your reps prioritize accounts and determine what business challenges your solution will need to solve. These insights can also help you write emails that inspire urgency, build better proposals, and make ROI-driven business cases.

When paired with tools like conversation and revenue intelligence that summarize key themes discussed in calls and emails that you can reference in follow-ups and suggest next steps or action items, reps can quickly ensure they’re doing the right things to drive deals home.

Insights on buyer engagement, such as whether reps have the right volume and title of prospects accepting their meetings and responding to emails, are also crucial to ensuring reps focus on truly winnable deals and don’t waste time.

4. Opportunities to practice and self-coach

A traditional approach to enablement does not drive sales productivity on its own. Reps need to quickly learn best practices from peers, practice, and improve independently.

Another way conversation intelligence solutions can improve sales productivity is by providing reps with access to call snippets and playlists of best practice calls. Organizations can build playlists around key competencies such as discovery calls, objection handling, how to lead the perfect demo, competitor smackdowns, pricing/negotiation, and more. They also share examples of what top reps do and say on calls about new products and services.

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At the same time, these tools provide immediate feedback to reps on how they compare to peers. Some of the best conversation intelligence insights reps can use to self-coach include understanding if they’re driving a customer monologue of a minute or more, measuring if they’re getting customers to ask or answer 12-14 questions, and trying to maintain a balanced talk time where reps speak 60% of the time or less.

5. Scale and measure coaching

Last but certainly not least, it’s critical that you not only provide sales productivity tools for reps but also for your front-line managers. One of their biggest challenges is they cannot find the time to coach and get pulled into too many different directions. When they have time to show up for 1-to-1s and offer coaching, they do not often have valuable, highly relevant data on how to help each rep and simply resort to doing deal reviews on the fly.

This is not productive, and it does not scale.

Instead, managers need sales productivity tools to run an end-to-end coaching workflow and measure performance improvement over time.

At Mindtickle, our coaching workflow starts with conversation and revenue intelligence. Every day, our managers can see exactly which deals are healthy and a detailed snapshot of all the calls, emails, and meetings associated with them. They can then show up to 1-to-1s more prepared to discuss how healthy a rep’s pipeline is and where they might be able to offer deal-specific support.

At the same time, our enablement team provides managers with a detailed report on which skills and competencies their team and individual reps need to develop each quarter. This data is provided via our Sales Readiness Index, a comprehensive way to benchmark which reps have the skills, will, and demonstrated in-field behaviors they need to drive deals home – or not.

Based on data like the Sales Readiness Index, managers can see how reps compare to their peers on various competencies, such as buyer engagement, outreach activity, objection handling, competitor win rates, and more. By comparing how reps perform on various competencies to the ideal rep profile created for each role on the revenue team, managers can know exactly who to coach on what topics without much thinking.

Managers can then immediately create and track the coaching as complete. Or, they can sort and filter through a list of recent calls to provide more comprehensive feedback on specific interactions with call scorecards.

At the same time, managers can collaborate closely with enablement and revenue operations teams by helping them understand which reps are ready to hit quota and where they can provide cross-functional support.

What are some of the best sales productivity tools?

Sales productivity tools can deliver significant benefits to both sellers and sales managers. With the right tools, your entire sales team can be more effective and efficient. In other words, sellers can close more deals—and do so faster.

Today, many tools are available that promise to boost sales productivity. But every sales productivity tool is different.

Which sales productivity tools are the best for your business? There’s no easy answer. It’s important to determine your goals and challenges when it comes to sales productivity. Then, you must find the sales productivity tools that best suit your unique needs and goals.

The truth is, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” sales productivity tool. However, the following are some of the most popular sales productivity tools on the market.

Mindtickle

Often, organizations purchase myriad solutions that address a single challenge related to sales productivity. However, a better approach is to adopt an integrated solution that addresses several common sales productivity challenges. Integrated tools like Mindtickle drive sales productivity in several ways – without requiring sellers to switch between different, disparate tools.

Mindtickle incorporates conversation and revenue intelligence, recording and transcribing calls while scoring deal health. This means sellers don’t have to take notes during calls; they can pay attention to the meeting. In addition, sales managers can leverage analysis of call recordings to determine where a sales rep might need additional training and coaching.

Mindtickle also incorporates sales content management. Sellers can easily find the content they need for any selling scenario, spending less time searching and more time actually selling.

Mindtickle’s integrated sales productivity platform includes many other features and functionalities that boost sales productivity. For example, sales reps can use Mindtickle to practice skills and unlock self-coaching opportunities on their own time. Sales managers can also leverage Mindtickle to deliver personalized coaching to sales reps and measure how (or whether) their efforts improve seller productivity and sales performance.

Other sales productivity tools

A few additional top sales productivity platforms include:

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRMs in the world. The platform incorporates myriad features that empower teams to increase sales productivity and performance. Salesforce unifies data across multiple sources to provide teams with a single source of truth for all customer information. Salesforce also leverages AI to drive sales productivity and enable better customer experiences.

This is an AI-powered workflow platform. Sellers that use it are better equipped to delight customers throughout the customer journey and close deals. Salesloft also equips sales managers with data and insights that enable them to more effectively coach and lead their teams. In addition, Salesloft provides features and functionality that allow for more accurate forecasting.

Calls and emails aren’t always the most productive forms of outreach. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales reps can tap into LinkedIn to engage buyers and increase sales productivity. LinkedIn Sales Navigator also provides insights to help sellers understand which accounts they should prioritize. That way, they can spend their time on the deals they will most likely win.

Outreach is a sales productivity platform that enables SDRs and other sales team members to engage prospects throughout the sales cycle. With Outreach, sellers can automate their outreach processes – which means they can achieve more in less time. Outreach also gives sales leaders a complete picture of the sales cycle to increase deal velocity and sales rep productivity more effectively.

Databook is a Strategic Relationship Management Platform (SRM). This tool illuminates market and financial insights that help reps prioritize accounts and understand their business challenges. As a result, sales reps can spend less time researching and more time creating and articulating solutions.

Our recommendations and best practices

Now that we’ve covered five benefits of sales productivity tools and some of the top tools in the market, we’ve got a few recommendations and best practices to share.

Centralize tools & simplify the rep experience

Not all tools are created equal, but you must simplify the sales rep experience in mind.

That’s why we believe centralizing and consolidating as many tools as possible is the best way to help drive sales rep productivity, as well as get more out of your tool investments. That means everything related to onboarding, training, ongoing coaching, content, and access to voice of customer or performance insights should ideally be in one place.

Doing so also provides you with a single data model to understand revenue enablement and performance and a single model for compliance and security.

Increase cross-functional collaboration

Driving sales productivity is the responsibility of every division at your company – not just sales. That means teams like product and marketing need frontline access to the valuable insights gauged from your sales interactions, such as competitor mentions or product feedback requests.

At the same time, in modern-day sales, you must ensure that your entire revenue team, including BDRs, sales, SEs, and CSMs are working together to understand deal or account health and drive those opportunities home.

Ensure that whatever solution you are using is standardized across your revenue org, focusing on providing the utmost transparency into what’s going on with key accounts and deals.

Improve visibility into what top performance looks like

Sales productivity is simply impossible if all of the roles on your team aren’t crystal clear about what success looks like in their role. How can I improve if I cannot know if I’m saying, showing, and doing the right things? If I don’t understand how my emails, calls, and how I engage prospects and customers compare to my peers, how will I even know what to do better next time?

That’s why your sales productivity tools must clarify best-in-class performance during every interaction and stage of your sales process.

Sales Productivity Tools FAQs

What is sales productivity?

Sales productivity measures how effective and efficient your reps are at meeting their sales goals. You can measure sales productivity across the entire organization, as well as at the team and individual rep levels.

Why is sales productivity important?

Simply put, unproductive sellers are ill-equipped to engage buyers and close deals. In today’s competitive market, that simply won’t cut it.

When seller productivity increases, so too does revenue generation. Productive sales reps can effectively and efficiently engage buyers and close deals. In other words, they can close more deals, faster, which leads to revenue growth.

What are KPIs used to measure sales productivity?

Ongoing measurement is key to assessing and improving sales productivity. However, there’s no single metric you can use to determine sales productivity. Instead, you must measure it by tracking a variety of metrics, including:

  • Quota attainment
  • Sales cycle length
  • Conversion rates
  • Annual recurring revenue
  • Sales rep habits, such as number of calls made and emails sent

What is a sales productivity tool?

A sales productivity tool is any solution that improves the effectiveness and efficiency of sales reps. In other words, it’s a tool that increases the productivity of sellers.

Reps only have so many hours in the day. A sales productivity tools helps ensure they make the most of that limited time.

What are some of the best sales productivity tools?

There is no single sales productivity tool that’ll solve all challenges for all businesses. Instead, the right sales productivity tools depend on the needs and goals of your organization.

However, some sales productivity tools are particularly popular today. Those include:

  • Mindtickle
  • Salesforce
  • Salesloft
  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • Outreach
  • Databook

Sales Productivity in action

Learn more about how to consolidate your sales tech stack while driving more revenue per rep.

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This post was originally published in January 2023, updated in February 2024, and again in August 2024.