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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
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
| Category | Tool |
|---|---|
| Prospecting | LinkedIn Sales Navigator |
| Outreach | QuickMail |
| CRM | Pipedrive |
| Sales Intelligence | Dealfront |
| Sales Productivity | Zapier |
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
Enriching prospect data in real time
Analyzing sales campaign performance
Scheduling meetings with leads
Updating your CRM
