As a lead generation agency, your #1 focus is to capture a high volume of quality leads for your clients.

But there are plenty of distractions that can get in the way. Indeed, the average salesperson spends at least one hour a day on admin and low-value tasks, and only around two hours a day on sales-related activities.

Sales automation tools are an obvious solution. By automating mundane tasks, agencies can free up time for front-line reps, allowing them to focus on what they do best — selling.

To help you identify the best options, we’ve collated the 15 best sales automation tools across five key categories:

  • Prospecting

  • Cold outreach

  • Customer relationship management (CRM)

  • Sales intelligence

  • Sales productivity

Let’s get into it…

3 Benefits of Sales Automation Tools

First up, let’s consider the reasons why sales automation platforms are such a valuable part of a lead gen agency’s tech stack:

1. Focus on High-Value Tasks

The whole point of investing in automation is to reduce the heavy lifting of repetitive tasks like:

  • Manually sending follow-up emails

  • Updating your CRM

  • Identifying relevant prospects

By automating activities like these, you free up a bunch of time for your sales representatives, giving them more bandwidth to concentrate on closing deals.

2. Increase Sales Productivity

Sales is a numbers game.

Sure, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to finding potential leads or sending sales and marketing emails.

But top-performing lead gen agencies use sales automation software to deliver quality at scale.

That means building a more efficient sales process that streamlines high-value tasks, thereby increasing reps’ productivity (without sacrificing the quality of their work).

3. Level Up Sales Management

Sales managers need real-time access to essential lead gen metrics like:

  • Email open and response rates

  • Conversion rates

  • Cost per lead

The best automation tools give you access to the data you need, when you need it.

Plus they speed up the process of building and sharing reports with clients and internal stakeholders, allowing sales leaders to concentrate on higher-value strategic tasks.

15 Best Sales Automation Tools

Top Tools in Each Category

CategoryTool
ProspectingLinkedIn Sales Navigator
OutreachQuickMail
CRMPipedrive
Sales IntelligenceDealfront
Sales ProductivityZapier

Prospecting Automation

Did you know that 80% of sales reps say prospecting is the most challenging stage of the sale process? Prospecting automation tools aim to make this task easier by giving agencies access to a vast pool of prospect data, with the ability to customize search results based on a client’s ICP.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinikedIn Sales Navigator website.
What Is It?

Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s dedicated prospecting and insights platform, giving reps access to buyer profiles from LinkedIn’s network of 1+ billion members across over 200 countries and territories.

Key Features
  • Build custom personas so Sales Navigator can help you identify relevant prospects based on factors like function, seniority, title, and geography.

  • Find all leads at your target accounts using the “Current Company” filter.

  • Get automatic notifications when a lead matches your criteria by saving your top-performing search results.

Agency Pricing

Pricing starts at $99 per user per month for Sales Navigator Core. However, this entry-level plan lacks collaborative features (like usage reporting and the ability to access the company’s network of LinkedIn contacts), so most agencies choose Sales Navigator Advanced — priced from $169.99 per user per month.

For more additional functionality and automations, request a custom quote for Sales Navigator Advanced Plus, which starts at around $1,600 per year.

ZoomInfo

Zoominfo website.

What Is It?

Zoominfo is a powerful tool offering B2B contact data from 260+ million professional profiles, over 100 million company profiles, and more than 135 million verified phone numbers.

Key Features
  • Track down your client’s ideal prospects with a B2B search engine incorporating 300+ company attributes.

  • Access department org charts to help you reach the right people at target accounts.

  • Received automated notifications about prospects’ job and company changes.

Agency Pricing

Zoominfo doesn’t publish pricing info, so you’ll need to reach out for a quote.

DemandScience

DemandScience dashboard

What Is It?

DemandScience is a global B2B data solutions platform that aims to help sales and marketing teams identify qualified leads. It’s used by big names like Adobe, Cisco, and Google.

Key Features
  • Locate high-value prospects using search filters like location, role, industry, and company revenue.

  • Leverage buyer behavior data to identify potential customers who are already interested in a topic or product.

  • Keep track of which tech solutions your prospects are using and when they install a new tool.

Agency Pricing

Like ZoomInfo, you’ll have to contact DemandScience for a pricing quote. 

Outreach Automation

Once you’ve found the right prospects, you need a way to reach out to them at scale. Outreach automation tools make this possible, encompassing everything from validating contact details to building automated cold email outreach campaigns.

QuickMail

What Is It?

QuickMail is a cold outreach automation solution for lead generation agencies, offering a whole suite of sales and marketing tools to help you engage and convert prospects at scale.

Key Features
  • Build automated, multichannel outreach campaigns spanning email, SMS, cold calls, and LinkedIn.

  • Ensure outreach email campaigns are always sent from your top-performing inboxes using our automated Deliverability AI technology.

  • View all your clients and campaigns via custom dashboards for agencies so you can instantly see what’s working (and what isn’t).

  • Use our advanced analytics to gain actionable insights on which campaigns and cold email sequences are delivering the best results.

  • Add unlimited team members at no extra cost (and with no need to share login details).

Agency Pricing

Our standard plans are designed for companies doing their own outreach, rather than lead gen agencies.

So we’ve introduced new agency-specific packages to help you scale outreach activity and smash your KPIs.

Our agency plans are based on transparent, flat per-client fees — with unlimited inboxes and no hidden costs for adding more leads or team members.

Want to know if QuickMail is right for your agency? Speak to us to learn more.

MailFlow

Mailflow website.

What Is It?

MailFlow is an auto-warmer tool designed to improve your email deliverability, helping you land in more main inboxes — thereby generating more opens, responses, and leads.

Key Features
  • Automatically reply to messages sent from new inboxes before using them in outreach campaigns.

  • Track your email sender reputation daily to understand if you can continue or ramp up sending volumes.

  • Monitor almost 100 email blacklists so you can take action fast if you get blacklisted.

Agency Pricing

The MailFlow Auto Warmer is included at no extra cost in all QuickMail plans. MailFlow’s standalone paid plans range from $49 – $99 per month.

NeverBounce

Neverbounce website.

What Is It?

NeverBounce is an email verification and list-cleaning tool. Use it to maintain your sender reputation and ensure your outreach emails land in the right inboxes.

Key Features
  • Connected NeverBounce to your email provider or CRM for automated cleaning.

  • Enjoy fast turnaround times, such as cleaning 10,000 emails in as little as three minutes.

  • Share credits across your agency, access team members’ stored lists, and monitor account usage and data.

Agency Pricing

Automated list-cleaning plans start at $10 per month for up to 1,000 emails.

CRM

Top-performing lead gen agencies demand more from CRM solutions than ever before. Today, a CRM needs to offer more than just a way to store prospect data — it also has to provide CRM automations to make life easier for the sales professionals who use it day in, day out.

HubSpot

HubSpot CRM platform new image

What Is It?

HubSpot is a sales, marketing, and operations platform with a popular built-in CRM used by the likes of Atlassian and DoorDash.

Key Features
  • Access custom reports on sales activity, productivity, and team performance.

  • Automatically enrich new contacts in your CRM using data from 20+ million businesses.

  • Increase sales productivity with automatic email, meeting, and note tracking.

Agency Pricing

HubSpot’s CRM is totally free, including unlimited data and up to one million contacts.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive homepage image

What Is It?

Pipedrive is a CRM and sales pipeline management platform used by 100,000+ companies in 179 countries.

Key Features
  • Save time with CRM automation, such as scheduling automated follow-up tasks when a deal reaches a certain stage.

  • Use the automated Sales Assistant to help reps through automated performance tips, feature recommendations, and app integrations. 

  • Enhance prospect information by automatically pulling data from sources like LinkedIn and Google.

Agency Pricing

To access valuable CRM automations, you’ll need to choose Pipedrive’s Advanced plan (or higher), priced at $34 per use per month.

Salesforce

Salesforce website.

What Is It?

Salesforce is comfortably the biggest name in the CRM world, with a market share of 21.7% — almost four times its closest competitor.

Key Features
  • Leverage built-in AI to summarize call notes, build customized action plans tailored to individual prospects, and automatically update prospect records.

  • Automatically capture information from your email and calendar tools and sync it with your CRM.

  • Use AI-driven predictions to create more accurate forecasts and identify gaps in your sales pipeline.

Agency Pricing

Salesforce pricing starts at $25 per user per month. But you’ll have to upgrade to at least the Enterprise plan ($165 per user per month) to unlock workflow automations and sales team collaboration tools.

Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence is all about capturing to-the-minute information on prospects, helping your reps craft better-personalized emails. And personalized emails generate more opens, replies, and leads.

Dealfront

Dealfront website.

What Is It?

Dealfront is a sales intelligence solution powered by publicly available and GDPR-compliant B2B data. It also incorporates Leadfeeder, a tool for identifying website visitors.

Key Features
  • Evaluate a company’s sales potential using Dealfront’s up-to-date organization profiles.

  • Find your client’s ideal customers in the B2B company database and narrow down the results using 100+ filters (including firmographics, geographics, and trigger events).

  • Receive automated alerts when a target company hits a predefined sales trigger or appears in the news.

Agency Pricing

Dealfront doesn’t publish pricing for its sales intelligence solution. But its web visitor identification tool — Leadfeeder — offers a forever-free plan, while its premium plan costs €99 per month.

Cognism

Cognism website.

What Is It?

Cognism is a sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams find mobile phone numbers and work email addresses for B2B prospects. It’s used by 3,000+ revenue teams.

Key Features
  • Access a database of 70+ million mobile phone numbers — twice as many as other data providers.

  • Identify prospects in target organizations based on job titles, seniority levels, and departments.

  • Automatically enrich prospect data the second it enters your CRM, or choose weekly, monthly, or quarterly enrichment of existing data.

Agency Pricing

Cognism doesn’t publish pricing information, so you’ll have to contact them to learn more.

PredictLeads

Predictleads website.

What Is It?

PredictLeads provides sales intelligence by structuring billions of pieces of information across categories like job openings, technology adoption, and news events.

Key Features
  • Enhance prospect information with data captured from millions of sources per day, including news sites, blogs, and career pages.

  • Use signals like hiring intent and new customer acquisitions to identify growing companies.

  • Automatically identify company updates across 29 event categories, such as senior hires, financing announcements, and office expansions.

Agency Pricing

PredictLeads pricing starts at $500 per month.

Sales Productivity

Sales productivity software includes a wide range of tool types designed to save your reps time and/or increase their activity levels. Products in this category cover everything from workflow automation to meeting scheduling to document management (and more).

Zapier

Zapier automation tool new image

What Is It?

Zapier isn’t a dedicated sales platform. Rather, its automation features are designed to close the gaps in your tech stack by connecting all your individual tools.

Key Features
  • Build no-code automations across 7,500+ apps, including all the top sales and CRM tools.

  • Use filtering and logic to automatically hand off opportunities to the right rep at the right time.

  • Automate common administrative tasks like updating prospect information and chasing contract approvals.

Agency Pricing

Team plans start at $103.50 per month, including unlimited team members and up to 2,000 automated actions per month.

Chili Piper

Chili piper website.

What Is It?

Chili Piper describes itself as a “demand conversion platform”. In practice, that means it consolidates multiple sales-related tasks — like lead distribution, meeting scheduling, and form routing — into a single tool.

Key Features
  • Make it easy for reps to add their availability to emails and book meetings in a single click.

  • Automatically send prospect information to your reps for fast follow-up when CRM records are created or updated (such as when a prospect performs a specific action).

  • Distribute the right prospect to the right rep based on factors like lead score and company size.

Agency Pricing

Smart scheduling tool ChiliCal Teams costs $22.50 per user per month. Premium plans incorporating advanced features start at $45 per user per month (including ChiliCal Teams).

Process Street

Process street website.

What Is It?

Process Street is a process management platform capable of automating and tracking a wide range of common business workflows. It’s used by 3,000+ companies, including Cisco and Salesforce.

Key Features
  • Connect tasks and workflows across your various tools and apps, including HubSpot, Salesforce, and more. 

  • Never miss a deadline with automated workflow scheduling and notifications.

  • Created complex workflows with automated decision-making based on conditional logic.

Agency Pricing

Prices range from $100 – $1,500+ per month, based on team size, features, and dataset records.

QuickMail: The #1 Sales Automation Tool for Lead Gen Agencies

Okay, so clearly there's a lot of high-quality sales automation software.

But if you can only choose a single tool in this article, QuickMail is the one.

We streamline the tasks and activities that make you money — like building multichannel outreach sequences and prioritizing your top-performing inboxes to ensure more of your emails hit your prospects’ main inboxes.

To find out more about how QuickMail can help your agency, speak with us.

FAQ

What are sales automation tools?

Sales automation tools eliminate labor-intensive manual tasks, freeing up your reps to focus on revenue-generating activities. Use them to automate tasks like:

  • Sending follow-up emails

  • Enriching prospect data in real time

  • Analyzing sales campaign performance

  • Scheduling meetings with leads

  • Updating your CRM