If you could only use six B2B sales tools as a sales rep, what would they be?
Surely a CRM would make the list, along with your favorite sales engagement tool. But what about Chat-GPT, or that app that creates funny sales GIFs?
Would they make the cut?
Though every rep’s Fab 6 will look different, we’re sharing our non-negotiables, along with some sales software products we believe perform best in each category.
This article should help you create an economical sales tech stack that gives your reps the tools they need without overwhelming them, your budget, or your IT department.
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The 6 essential B2B sales tech categories (for sales reps)
A B2B sales rep needs to generate leads, nurture prospects, close deals, and analyze their sales activities to improve their craft.
Any tool that streamlines or supports these core activities should, in theory, impact a rep’s performance.
With that in mind, here are five types of sales tech that most B2B sales reps can’t live without:
Lead generation / prospecting:
B2B databases and sales intelligence platforms like ZoomInfo and Cognism enable reps to generate lists of leads that fit their ideal customer profile and find contact info. Meanwhile, a prospecting tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator streamlines lead discovery, research, and cold outreach on LinkedIn.
Sales engagement
Sales engagement platforms like Mixmax provide tools like multi-channel sequences, email tracking, and AI-powered personalization that help reps automate outreach throughout the entire sales cycle, from cold outreach to post-sale referral requests. These platforms began as SDR toolkits but are now often used by entire revenue teams, since engagement doesn’t stop once you book that first meeting.
Bennie on the importance of having everyone on the revenue team on the same sales engagement platform ⬆️
Customer relationship management (CRM)
CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce give reps a central location to organize customer data and leverage it to create time-saving automations like automated follow-ups and insightful sales reports. They’re where you track your pipeline and find a customer’s birthday. Without one, chaos would reign.
| 💡 Fun fact: Mixmax has an integration with both Salesforce and HubSpot, so you can work seamlessly out of your sales engagement platform. |
Buyer signals
Tools that leverage buyer signals like RB2B and Common Room allow reps to identify and prioritize high-intent prospects based on their engagement with your content, website, social posts, or product. This helps reps focus on leads who are actively showing interest, ensuring a more targeted approach and higher conversion rates.
Sales analysis/self-coaching
Revenue and conversation intelligence tools like Gong analyze customer interactions to provide reps with actionable feedback about their last cold call or presentation. Many also offer sales coaching features that reps can use to hone their craft. For instance, you could compile sales conversations from top performers into an online library, allowing reps to learn from the best.
Video
Sometimes, an email just doesn’t cut it. If you want to really grab your prospect’s attention, video prospecting is a powerful way to make your outreach more personal and engaging. Tools like Vidyard and Sendspark let you easily create and send personalized video messages that break through the noise and build stronger connections with your leads.
| 💡 Fun fact: Mixmax has an integration with both 👀 |
The 6 best sales tools for sales reps (+ some notable mentions)
We’ve covered the most important sales tech categories for B2B sales reps. Now let’s zoom in on some of the software tools that reign supreme in each category.
Whether you’re starting a sales tech stack from scratch or looking to modernize your current one, you’ll find some tools to help you boost sales productivity and grow your bottom line.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator: for prospecting on LinkedIn
According to LinkedIn, 78% of social sellers outperform reps who don’t use social media.
LinkedIn is the social media of choice for B2B reps. It’s where professionals go to learn about their industry, find new solutions, and network with peers.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a prospecting platform that helps B2B sales reps discover, research, and message high-quality leads on LinkedIn.
With the Advanced Search feature, you can use filters to tell LinkedIn information about your ideal buyer, including their job title, industry, location, and more, covering 50+ attributes.
Sales Navigator then reveals leads and companies that match this criteria.
And the Sales Spotlights feature prioritizes results based on factors that indicate the lead is ready to buy or open to connecting, such as a recent promotion or a shared alma mater.
You can then use InMail, the built-in messenger, to reach out to unlimited leads and start conversations. The platform is also great for tracking these in-platform interactions, so you always know where you currently stand with each lead.
Overall, LinkedIn Sales Navigator should help you generate more qualified leads in less time.
Learn: how to nail LinkedIn social selling
Mixmax: for engaging leads, prospects, and customers
Mixmax is an AI-powered sales engagement platform designed for the whole revenue team, from sales development reps and account executives to customer success and RevOps.
The easy-to-use platform helps you efficiently conduct personalized outreach across multiple channels (email, phone, social), and do it at scale.
Below are some of Mixmax’s most impactful features for B2B sales reps:
- Email enhancements: Make emails more engaging with embedded polls, surveys, calendaring, CTA buttons, and more.
- Multi-channel sequences: Build personalized outreach sequences that contain touches across social, email, and phone.
- Sales tracking: Track and analyze outreach data like email opens, replies, and conversions.
- AI smart send: Using machine learning and behavioral data, Mixmax identifies the best time to send emails to your prospects to improve reply rates.
- Context sidebar: Find contact information about your recipient inside of Mixmax’s email inbox, without switching to your CRM. Plus. update your CRM directly from your inbox.
Mixmax’s AI-powered sequence builder also enables you to quickly create outreach sequences for every part of the customer journey.
Don’t want to start from scratch? Use the template library to find top-performing sequences, which you can easily auto-personalize with AI.
Mixmax’s AI will even detect when prospects are out-of-office and pause the sequence so you don’t waste critical touches.
Mixmax was simple to set up before its AI features. Now it’s even more of an out-of-the-box solution, ideal for businesses looking to make their entire revenue team’s outreach irresistible to customers, for an affordable price.
Learn more about: Mixmax’s AI features
Salesforce: for managing company and contact data
Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses manage their sales, customer service, and marketing efforts all in one place.
For B2B sales reps, it has a lot to offer. Reps receive a user-friendly interface and powerful tools to track leads, manage deals, and automate repetitive sales tasks.
With its best-in-class analytics and reporting features, sales reps can gain valuable, sophisticated insights into their sales pipeline, helping them close deals faster.
Its AI functionality, named Einstein Copilot, can even make real-time predictions and give sales reps suggestions about the best action to move a given opportunity forward.
To sum it up, Salefsorce is an impressive CRM that’ll save you time and facilitate relationship building.
Alternative option: HubSpot
Some smaller businesses might find Salesforce, especially its more advanced plans, to be a bit of a monster. What makes it so powerful — its multitude of deep features — also makes it slightly difficult to set up and use.
If you’re looking for a simpler solution, consider using HubSpot Sales Hub. Based on user reviews on Capterra, Salesforce’s ease-of-use score is 4.0, while HubSpot Sales Hub is 4.5.
They also offer a free all-in-one CRM with limited functionality called HubSpot CRM.
| Note: Make sure your other sales tools, especially your sales engagement platform, integrate with your CRM so all customer interaction data transfers smoothly between them. Mixmax integrates with both Salesforce and HubSpot. |
RB2B, Common Room & Mixmax: for identifying buyer signals
When it comes to knowing who’s ready to buy, buyer signals are your best friend. Tools like RB2B, Common Room, and Mixmax help sales reps identify and prioritize high-intent prospects, ensuring you focus your efforts where it counts.
- RB2B identifies anonymous website visitors and matches them with their LinkedIn profiles, sending this data directly to your CRM or Slack. With RB2B, you can engage prospects who are actively browsing your site, making outreach more personalized and timely.
- Common Room consolidates engagement signals from various platforms (like in-app activity or social media interactions), giving reps a complete view of how prospects are engaging with your brand. This lets you strike up conversations when the time is right.
- Mixmax adds to this mix by offering engagement scoring. It tracks how recipients interact with your emails, calls, and sequences, so reps can prioritize leads based on their level of interest and likelihood to convert.
| 💡 Fun fact: Mixmax has an integration with RB2B so you can identify website visitors and automatically enroll them into a custom sequence. |
Gong: for self-coaching and improving as a sales rep
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that analyzes your customer interactions and gives you actionable insights to improve your sales skills.
Using pattern recognition, it can also analyze calls across your company, surfacing reasons why they succeed or fail.
For example, Gong could inform you that you spoke too much on your last discovery call, citing that in successful calls the average talk ratio between sales rep to prospect was 40:60.
Here are some other pieces of advice you might receive:
Gong also opens up opportunities for peer-based learning.
For instance, reps can access a library of recorded calls and demos from top salespeople at your company, observe the techniques, and emulate what they see.
With Gong, you won’t have to obsessively wonder if it was that dad joke you made that flubbed the deal. You’ll actually have data-driven reasons, not just gut feelings.
Vidyard & Sendspark: for video prospecting that stands out
- Vidyard: Allows you to record and share custom video messages directly in your emails, LinkedIn messages, or even embed them in your sales sequences. Whether you’re doing a demo walkthrough or just introducing yourself, video prospecting helps humanize your outreach and capture attention in a way that plain text can’t.
- Sendspark: Like Vidyard, Sendspark enables you to create personalized videos for prospects. But what makes Sendspark stand out is its focus on helping sales teams automate the process at scale, without losing that personal touch. You can easily customize video templates, add branding, and embed videos into your emails or sales sequences (like in Mixmax).
Sendspark video inside a Mixmax sequence ⬆️
Bottom line: B2B sales tools
Why make your sales tech stack as succinct as a great essay? Less for reps to learn, lower investment costs, fewer IT problems.
Not to mention more time selling and less time tinkering with automations or investigating features you’ll rarely use.
With just these six B2B sales tools — Sales Navigator, Mixmax, Salesforce, RB2B (and/or Common Room), Gong, and Sendspark (or Vidyard) — sales reps receive a huge boost to productivity and success rates.
So go explore them more in-depth to discover which can most benefit your sales team right now.
