15 Best Pre-Sales Tools to Maximize Sales Efficiency in 2024

Shreelekha Singh
December 18, 2023
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Pre-sales is the appetizer course in the grand feast of sales—it's where you get a taste of what's to come and set the stage for the main event. 

And just like you wouldn't prepare a gourmet starter with a butter knife, you can't expect to ace pre-sales without the right set of tools.

That’s why we’ve curated this list of the 15 best pre-sales tools to build a strong foundation for your sales process. 

Whether you're a one-person show at a startup or part of a bigger sales setup, these tools are your ticket to a smoother, more effective pre-sales experience.

6 essential activities to build a robust pre-sales function

Wondering what actually goes into setting up a pre-sales function? Here are six activities you should perform before and after closing a deal 👇🏻

  • Prospecting: Effective prospecting goes beyond identifying potential customers; it involves a deep analysis of industry trends, competitor strategies, and potential market gaps. This strategic approach helps in targeting businesses more likely to be interested in your product, considering the market landscape.
  • Lead qualification: This part is all about assessing a lead's readiness to purchase. You have to critically understand their level of engagement, the questions they ask, and their responses to preliminary information. Gauging their urgency and decision-making process is also crucial.
  • Customer discovery: Customer discovery involves understanding a customer's internal decision-making processes and politics. It's about uncovering not only their needs but also the organizational culture and dynamics that may affect the adoption of your solution.
  • Product demo: A successful product demo tailors the demonstration to the specific pain points and interests of the potential customer. The structure of the demo should tell a story and position your product as a solution to every prospect’s core problems. 
  • Proposal preparation: Personalization is critical for creating proposals. A good proposal should address the specific concerns and objectives of a client. It should also include case studies or testimonials from similar customers where you’ve tailored the language and aesthetics to their brand.
  • Pipeline management: You have to engage in constant analysis to optimize the sales process. This includes gathering data from each interaction to improve sales strategies, identifying patterns in successful or failed sales, and adapting to market conditions or customer behaviors.

15 pre-sales software to boost your bottom line 

Let’s break down our top 15 picks for the top pre-sales tools to manage your buyer experience and team performance from start to finish. 

🔎 Prospecting

Apollo 

Apollo offers a vast database with over 200 million contacts and 10 million companies. Users can segment this data based on specific criteria like industry, company size, and technology used, enabling highly targeted prospecting.

You can also use advanced email sequencing to automate follow-ups and track email opens and responses. This helps in understanding prospect engagement.

Plus, Apollo integrates seamlessly with popular CRM platforms like Salesforce, ensuring that sales teams can synchronize their prospecting activities with their existing sales processes.

📚 Learn how to use Apollo with our toolkit

Cognism

Cognism is another prospecting database providing updated and GDPR compliant data across EMEA, NAM, APAC. The tool promises an accuracy rate of 98% for mobile phone numbers with unrestricted access to person and company-level data.

You can get real-time updates about key sales triggers like company expansions, funding rounds, or leadership changes. Plus, you can apply advanced filters to find high-intent leads and reach out to prospects at critical moments when they’re most likely to buy your product/service.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator 

Sales Navigator allows users to use LinkedIn’s extensive network with advanced search filters. These filters include job title, company, location, industry, and more. The tool also provides personalized lead and account recommendations based on user preferences and past interactions.

You can directly contact prospects, even those outside your network, using InMail. What’s more, you can stay informed about your prospects with real-time alerts about job changes, company updates, or news mentions. 

📚 Learn how to use Sales Navigator with our toolkit

🗃️ Lead qualification

MadKudu

MadKudu is a predictive lead scoring tool designed to help sales and marketing teams identify the most promising leads. It analyzes various data points like user behavior, demographic information, and engagement levels, to score leads. 

 The tool uses machine learning algorithms to analyze historical data and predict the likelihood of a lead converting. And it scores leads based on user behavior, such as website interactions, product usage, and engagement patterns.

You can leverage this pre-sales tool to prioritize leads that are more likely to convert and focus your efforts strategically.

Chili Piper

Chili Piper is one of the popular pre-sales tools for automating the lead qualification process. It offers tools for scheduling meetings, distributing leads, and enhancing the overall lead management workflow. 

You can use this software to qualify leads in real-time and get immediate meeting bookings from your company website. You can also sync Clearbot with Google Calendar and Outlook to streamline call scheduling and avoid conflicts.

Not just that, the tool can automatically assign leads to the right sales representative based on predefined rules.

Lean Data 

LeanData is primarily focused on lead routing and management. It automates the distribution of leads to the right sales representatives to improve response times. You can create sophisticated rules based on factors like geography, company size, or product interest

Besides, you can also leverage the Round-Robin Distribution feature for an even distribution of leads among sales reps. The tool also automatically links leads to existing accounts to provide a holistic view of customer interactions.

🔦 Customer discovery

Clearbit

Clearbit is a data intelligence solution with over 250 data sources and 100+ B2B attributes to filter your search. Clearbit is widely recognized for its data enrichment capabilities. It offers up-to-date information about prospects, including details like company size, industry, and contact information. 

Clearbit can also help you with precise lead scoring and routing to enable rich customer segmentation. Plus, it integrates with various CRM and marketing tools to consolidate all information in one place.

Gong 

Gong is a conversation intelligence tool to analyze sales calls, meetings, and emails and provides insights into customer interactions. Gong's AI-driven analysis can identify patterns and trends in conversations, offering valuable feedback for improving sales strategies and customer engagement.

You can also leverage its sales coaching features to train SDRs and manage your entire pipeline. It offers targeted capabilities to refine your sales strategy based on current opportunities and performance.

Humantic 

Humantic is a buyer intelligence tool using AI to analyze prospects’ personality traits and behavioral patterns. Its Personality AI Assistant offers meaningful insights to tailor your approach for every prospect and drive more targeted conversations. 

With Omnichannel Enrichment, you can access pre-built integrations across different CRM tools to enrich buyer data and understand each prospect comprehensively.

You can also use 1-Click Personalization to quickly customize email and other messaging based on their DISC personality.

⭐ Product demo

Floik 

Floik is a versatile interactive demo tool to create product showcases for different touchpoints in your sales cycle. You can use Floik to:

  • Create a branched product tour for your website to increase sign-ups or demo bookings
  • Make talking-head videos to personalize your outreach and capture prospects’ attention from the first message
  • Produce engaging sales leave-behind resources to handle objections and empower internal champions to influence the decision-making process

Floik’s intuitive builder and editor are purpose-built for users to hit the ground running within seconds. You can also share all your product showcases with a link or embed them anywhere on landing pages or sales docs. 

🗒️ Proposal preparation

Qwilr

Qwilr is another pre-sales software ideal for creating proposals, quotes, and contracts. It allows you to design interactive and visually appealing proposals that can be sent directly from a CRM platform. This interactivity enhances the buyer experience and brings you valuable insights about viewer engagement. 

Moreover, Qwilr stands out for its ability to transform traditional sales materials into dynamic, engaging content that captures the attention of potential clients. You can also use their interactive pricing capability to streamline the process from proposal to payment. 

PandaDoc

PandaDoc is one of the essential pre-sales tools for creating, tracking, and eSigning sales proposals. It offers a wide range of templates backed by research and testing. You can easily integrate the platform with CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce. 

What’s more, you’ll get real-time notifications for all user interactions when a client opens, views, comments, or completes a proposal. The best part: you can build your content library to speed up proposal creation. 

Proposify  

Proposify is a specialized tool for creating and managing sales proposals. Its user-friendly interface simplifies the proposal creation process. But the tool’s true strength lies in its extensive library of customizable and visually appealing templates for a wide range of industries.

You also get a collaborative environment to create proposals at scale. What’s more, Proposify provides valuable insights into client interactions for each document, tracking viewing and engagement metrics. 

💸 Pipeline management

Outreach

Outreach is a sales execution platform for managing sales pipelines by assessing pipeline quantity, quality, and maturity. Some of its core capabilities include built-in win modeling to identify risks early, track progress against quotas, and provide actionable insights rather than mere data aggregation​​.

Outreach also helps you forecast sales to bring more predictability and optimize their pipeline with high accuracy. 

You also get deeper visibility into team performance and opportunities through tools like Pipeline Dashboard, Forecast Rollup, Scenario Planner, and Pipeline Movement. 

Groove by Clari

Groove by Clari is a sales engagement platform designed for enhancing sales pipeline management. Integrated with Clari, the tool offers a unified platform to cover your entire revenue infrastructure. You get a Salesforce-native design to ensure no data latency or sync errors and seamless integration with the CRM. 

Groove uses Flows and Plays to scale prospecting, automate lead follow-up, and aid in expanding accounts. You can also leverage AI-assisted selling to drive seller productivity 

What’s more, you can build your GTM engine with optimized messaging and seamless cross-team collaboration.

Build your pre-sales tech stack for 2024

From finding the right prospects with Apollo and Cognism, to creating personalized proposals with Qwilr, and managing your pipeline with Outreach, we’ve got your entire pre-sales operations covered. 

You’re all set to impress buyers with a seamless journey from awareness to purchase!