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Sales development representatives (SDRs) spend too much time doing boring, repetitive jobs that could easily be automated.
Instead, they should be doing what they do best – cultivating leads, scoring them, and guiding them through the sales funnel.
With the best SDR tools, sales reps can contact more leads, gather more buyer data, and earn more sales. But that's only possible with the right tools.
That's why we've compiled a list of the best SDR tools currently on the market, from top-level CRMs to ingenious sales tools.
Let's get started!
What is a Sales Development Representative?
Sales development representatives, or SDRs, are at the top end of the sales funnel. They're responsible for going out generating and managing leads. These unsung heroes contact potential leads via phone calls, social media, or email, schedule appointments, and manage the pipeline to ensure your company has a steady flow of business opportunities.
Without SDRs, the wellspring of new leads and revenue streams would dry up. But they're still only human.
Through the latest SDR tools, however, they can cold contact more leads, run more appointments, and even score leads more effectively.
10 Best SDR Tools
1. Trumpet
2. Cognism
3. Outreach
4. Calendly
5. UpLead
6. Salesforce
7. HubSpot
8. Pipedrive
9. Gong
10. Chili Piper
You might also like 80+ Sales Tools and Resources for SDRs in 2023
1. trumpet
Trumpet is a digital sales room platform that helps funnel leads towards a sale.
Useful for everything from cold outreach to already qualified leads, it offers a one-stop shop to educate, track, and convert customers.
SDRs who use Trumpet report a 40% reduction in the sales cycle time from outreach to close. Moreover, compared to traditional PDF attachments, Trumpet's DSR or "pods" have a 70% higher open rate.
Key Features
- Auto Hyper-Personalised Pods: Create personalised microsites instantly, pulling your buyer's branding, colours, and imagery into the site.
- Mutual Action Plans: Offers interaction and collaborative plan creation for client engagement and onboarding.
- Live Dealing Tracking: Receive notifications regarding prospect activity within the pod via Slack, Teams, and email.
- Sales Intelligence Signals: Provides insights into buyer engagement throughout their digital buyer journey – even after becoming a customer.
- Centralised Content Library: Consolidate your sales and marketing content in a single library for your prospects to browse and learn from.
2. Cognism
Cognism is a sales intelligence platform supplying SDRs with key lead information, including phone numbers and email addresses. Using this info, sales teams can expand their cold outreach efforts while still complying with the most data protection legislation globally.
Key Features
- High Accuracy in Contact Data: Offers 98% accuracy in mobile phone numbers of decision-makers, ensuring reliable contact information for effective communication.
- Unrestricted Access to Data: Provides unrestricted access to person and company-level data, eliminating concerns about credit limits or geographical restrictions, and offers international coverage, including EMEA, NAM, and APAC regions.
- Ready-to-Buy Prospects: Utilises contextual data such as hiring, funding, and job join triggers, along with intent data, to identify likely buyers and facilitate better engagement.
- GDPR Compliance: Checks Do Not Call (DNC) lists in multiple European countries, ensuring compliance and reducing the compliance burden for users.
3. Outreach
Outreach is an AI-powered sales execution platform equipping sales development representatives with a host of tools to speed up the sales cycle. According to Outreach, it helps sales teams boost win rates by 13%.
How? The platform's features include mutual action plans, deal insights, pipeline management, conversation intelligence, and much more.
Key Features
- Enhanced Sales Engagement: Improves prospecting effectiveness and follow-up efficiency, enabling reps to build a qualified pipeline that converts to revenue.
- Automated Prospecting Workflows: Simplifies and automates workflows to generate high-quality pipelines. Includes templates, snippets, tasks, and account-based workflows to engage with prospects throughout their buying journey.
- Personalised Messaging: Facilitates sending personalised messages at the right time, with features to manage multi-threaded conversations and prevent prospects from falling through the cracks.
- Optimisation of Sales Plays: Uses machine learning for A/B testing and buyer sentiment analysis, helping to optimise and scale best practices based on unique engagement and sales data.
4. Calendly
Calendly is the go-to tool to simplify scheduling meetings with clients. Using the platform, you can embed a scheduling tool in your website, allowing clients to select a time and date that works for them.
SDRs can customise their availability, connect the Calendly appointments to their existing calendars, and share the scheduling link.
Little wonder that businesses using Calendly saw a 26% increase in website books and held 20% more sales meetings.
Key Features
- Scheduling Links and Booking Pages: Connects with your calendar to create scheduling links and booking pages based on availability, allowing others to book time easily.
- Customisable Booking Links: Offers the ability to create links for various event types and durations, with the option to include team members and route meetings to the appropriate people.
5. UpLead
UpLead generates accurate, reliable contact data for clients coming through your sales pipeline. Get a complete database of information, including names, companies, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and more.
Start more conversations and find more leads than ever before. Without UpLead, it would take an SDR weeks to produce such a comprehensive database; UpLead does it in minutes.
Key Features
- High-Quality Data: Provides access to up-to-date information, reducing time spent on qualifying leads
- Real-Time Verification: Ensures email verification in real time for reliable lead communication.
- Extensive Data Coverage: Offers access to over 140 million business contacts in more than 200 countries.
- Rich Profiles: Enables detailed profiling of leads for better targeting and understanding.
6. Salesforce
Salesforce is a leading CRM – it integrates advanced AI features into its services. Offering one of the most comprehensive SDR toolkits on the market, its features include lead scoring, audience segmentation, internal calendars, revenue intelligence, and much more.
Key Features
- Unified Data Management: Customer 360 integrates data from various sources, providing a single, shared view of customer information for sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams.
- Team Collaboration and Productivity: Improves team communication, automates repetitive tasks, and provides AI-driven insights to enhance business success.
- AI-Driven Marketing: Consolidates customer data for campaign strategy and uses generative AI for personalised messaging and lead notification.
- Sales Automation with AI: Incorporates predictive and generative AI into CRM for task automation, crafting emails, generating summaries, and sales call note-taking.
7. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-around SDR tool covering sales, marketing, commerce, and more. Its Sales Hub, in particular, helps sales reps generate and track email campaigns, automate follow-ups, manage leads, and track calls.
It's the Swiss Army Knife in your sales development arsenal. There's a reason why HubSpot is one of the biggest sales tools online.
Key Features
- Customer Relationship Management: Offers tools to nurture and grow business relationships and manage customer interactions effectively.
- Real-Time Lead Conversion: Enables real-time connection with visitors for lead conversion, deal closure, and support provision.
- Meeting Scheduler: Integrates a meeting scheduler link into emails and websites to facilitate appointment setting.
8. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is another customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps SDRs close more deals. Centralising all your customer data, it delivers key insights into client behaviour, helping you spot the individuals most likely to convert.
Moreover, it'll help you develop a sales pipeline, including automated follow-ups, to reduce workload and increase sales.
Key Features
- Automation: Eliminates busywork through task automation, one-click contact data collection, and an AI-powered sales assistant.
- CRM Platform: Improves workflows and increases sales productivity, aiding in business scaling.
- Customisable Pipelines: Allows customisation of pipelines to tailor processes to specific business needs.
- Email and Communication Tools: Centralise communication efforts to connect with target audiences and move leads through the sales funnel.
9. Gong
Gong is all about revenue insights. Harnessing the power of AI, it analyses your customer interactions to identify the best ways to increase revenue efficiency and improve decision-making.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Interaction Capture: Gong's Reality Platform captures a wide array of customer interactions, including video calls, phone calls, and emails, offering a holistic view of market and team activities.
- Advanced AI Analysis: Utilises industry-leading AI to process the full context of customer interactions, including key topics, questions, action items, and relationship dynamics.
- Personalised Guidance: Provides data-driven insights for coaching opportunities, deal prioritisation, and forecasting accuracy improvement.
10. Chili Piper
Chili Piper does all the heavy lifting for you with its form concierge. Qualifying, routing, and booking leads using your existing forms skyrockets your sales prospects, helping you maximise every opportunity.
As one client explained, "[this] approach really paid off because we optimised what we were already doing rather than going out and spending more money."
Key Features
- Form Concierge: Automatically qualifies, routes, and schedules prospects directly from web forms, simplifying the lead handling process.
- Efficient Lead Routing: Quickly routes sales opportunities to the right representatives, ensuring warm leads are promptly addressed.
- Automated Handoff Process: Streamlines the transition of leads from one representative to another, eliminating the need for manual lead routing spreadsheets.
