13 Top Marketing And Sales Tools For Entrepreneurs

13 Top Marketing And Sales Tools For Entrepreneurs. The number of hours you can put at work is limited. If you’re an entrepreneur, then they often don’t seem enough. You can hire employees and delegate some responsibilities. However, the software can dissect untapped opportunities, save your time, and replace departments at your office altogether.

No wonder, the average company is spending US$343,000 on SaaS. So I got in MPtouch with CEOs, consultants, bloggers, and small business folks for researching the business tools they are using.

Here are 15 tools to use to save time from tedious tasks that you can dedicate to building your brand and expanding your business.

1. Hunter.io

Even as we see unprecedented growth of social media platforms, email is the primary mode of language (particularly among business professionals).

What if you don’t have access to the addresses of relevant people? You can fall back to Hunteri.io as your friendly email address finder.

Here’s Hugh Beaulac, a content strategist at MC2, throwing some light on how the Hunter has been incredibly helpful for him:

“Over the last three years, I’ve found that being a guest author is a proven way to raise brand awareness, gain exposure, and improve reputation. Thus, I reach out to authoritative websites to write for them. 

“Since popular blogs receive lots of emails daily, it’s important to find relevant email addresses, and Hunter.io helps me a lot. Every time I analyze websites, I turn to this app to collect email addresses and optimize the process. Not only does it help to save time, but it also helps to reach out to the right people.”

Beaulac is on point because besides finding emails, the tool also returns the designation of employees. You can export the results in a CSV sheet and plan bulk email campaigns.

Alternative: UpLead

If you’re unhappy with the lead quality generated by using Hunter, then UpLead is a terrific alternative for B2B data. It’s a sales intelligence tool with over 46M business contacts and over 45M global company profiles.

You can search for prospects inside the tool using over 50 filters, including the industry, location, job title, and more. The best part of Uplead is that while extracting leads from the platform, they go through a real-time email verification to ensure accuracy.

2. Lemlist

While we’re on the subject of sending emails in bulk, you must know that cold emails are still a terrific strategy to grow your business. However templated, generic, and uninspiring emails are rampant right now. They end up getting ‘trashed.’

That’s where Lemlist chips in. It offers robust personalization features for sending cold emails. You can communicate on a one-on-one level by customizing the images, videos, and even landing pages of your campaigns.

Once you kick off a campaign, Lemlist measures your open rate, clicks, replies, and bounces so that you can focus on the hottest leads.

If you’re a marketing agency, then the tool has labels for organizing your campaigns across different clients. Also, you can unsubscribe an entire domain (like your competitors) using its Graveyard feature.

3. Automizy

As we’re talking about email marketing, how would you like a powerful email automation platform for your contact lists as well?

I’m talking about executing high-performing drip campaigns and generating sales. That’s where Automizy comes in handy. You can use its drag and drop builder (as well as its newsletter templates) to send elegant emails. It also has an AI-based email subject line tester and allows A/B testing of your subject lines.

Its visual automation builder can take the email experience of your subscribers to the next level. You can create workflows and tag based on interests, website behaviour, and perform advanced personalization.

Automizy also comes with smart email performance, automation, and other analytics. You can tweak your campaigns based on the results and increase your email open rates.

4. Social Pilot

Organically posting on social media platforms is mostly a wasted effort if your goal is to drive direct traffic on your website. It remains important for establishing better relationships with your audience and improving your brand loyalty.

However, social media marketing includes time-consuming tasks like scheduling posts on various platforms, engaging with your audience, and analyzing your results. If you have a presence on multiple social media networks, then it becomes even more tedious.

The pocket-friendly tool, Social Pilot, comes in handy for managing your social presence and improving your engagement rates. You can post through the web, your mobile, and even get high-quality content suggestions so that your posting schedule is always filled.

Another top feature is its bulk social media posting tool that lets you plan up to 500 posts in advance by creating a list in notepad or CSV.

If you’re a marketing agency, it’s super useful for managing the accounts of multiple clients, working with your team, and engaging efficiently using its social inbox.

5. Chanty

Collaborating with your team can quickly get cumbersome. You might need to fiddle across multiple apps to share files, manage tasks and workflows, and communicate with your team members. Popular team communication solutions come with limits to messaging and complex functionalities.

Chanty, however, comes with unlimited messages history and a fairly intuitive user interface. It has an AI-driven team chat platform that lets you add collaborative layers to your workflow through tasks.

You can use the tool to engage in one-on-one and group audio/video calls, drop text messages on the go, and leave reactions to messages. You can also share files and links to add context to your discussions. If you’re in a focused mode at work, then you can switch to the DND mode and snooze notifications.

Overall Chanty is an excellent application with great design, robust customer support, and excellent for collaborating with your team.

6. Monday.com

Would you prefer a visual representation of the progress in your projects and know where your team members are stuck? Then Monday.com is the perfect project management tool for you. You can use ‘pulses’ to allocate tasks and assign people in charge in the columns. You can also track time, add tags, numbers, links, and any info that’s important for your team.

Narek Vardanyan, the founder of The Crowdfunding Formula, reckons Monday.com as the goto tool for his agency:

“We are a big agency with 70+ people and 10+ departments, so Monday helps us stay organized, plan, and organize a complex amount of activities for our crowdfunding campaigns. We create and assign daily tasks and do the weekly planning with the tool.”

Team members can use the tool to collaborate by sharing checklists, files, sheets, briefs, and more. All you have to do is invite people via their emails and start customizing your workflow (there are numerous templates that you can use). Once you’ve planned projects and their timelines, you can track the progress of your team and see the big picture.

Alternative: Basecamp

While Monday.com has multiple pricing tiers that are affordable for small business, Basecamp is the old warhorse for project management. Its reliability in managing projects for large teams is unparalleled.

The tool has a clean interface with features like to-do lists, message boards, campfire (a real-time group chat), schedule (for adding events with data and time), and a space for sharing documents & files.

Other neat features include search, reports, email forwards, hill charts, and automatic check-ins. Alex Panagis, the Founder & CEO at Scale Math, loves Basecamp. His team uses the tool alongside Slack for team communication (where they also house the Scale Math Pro community).

“After having tried several project management tools and struggling with all of them as projects grew and we had more team members as well as clients, we’re so glad we came across Basecamp, we are never looking back.”

If the above two tools don’t cut it for your team management, then you can refer to the project management software list by G2.

7. 10Web.io

Are you considering starting your new business on WordPress? Great choice. It’s a responsive, open-source platform with incredible customization options. There are numerous free themes, plugins, and hosting options dedicated to WordPress for quickly setting up your business website.

However, having fiddled with multiple themes and plugins, I can tell you that building your site can get messy and confusing. 10Web.io is a dedicated WordPress website builder (based on Elementor) that takes care of everything for you.

You can use the all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites from dozens of templates, leverage its 50+ premium plugins, and rely on its managed WordPress hosting (on Google cloud). Further, SEO, security, image optimization, and all other essential services are included in your package.

Wondering what the number “ten” represents in 10Web? It’s the components that the company believes are important for a great website.

If you make the switch to 10Web, they also offer free automatic migration.

8. Answer The Public

While Google isn’t infallible, it’s great for getting organic traffic to your site and building brand awareness. However, SEO folks use the same tools and arrive at the same keywords.

Answer The Public is a relatively underused tool that can provide a fresh set of topics and add a visual touch to your keyword research. To get content ideas, you need to plug a keyword in the tool and press the “get questions” button.

It returns the most asked questions on the topic. It also fetches related keywords that are grouped under the umbrellas of “comparison”, “prepositions”, “alphabeticals”, and “related” (not shown in the screenshot).

With a plethora of options at your convenience, you can come up with creative angles on known subjects and add flavor to your content calendar. You can use the questions to grab featured snippets in search results and optimize your content for voice search. The pro version of the tool also fetches you comparison data and lets you analyze the search demand for topics.

Hannah Harris, Head of Partnerships at Answer The Public, shares that the tool has found uses across industries including content, PR, SEO, and creative.

9. MorphL

Google is slowly shifting from the usage of keywords in content and focusing on the user intent behind queries. The search giant confirmed that its machine learning technology, RankBrain, is the third most important ranking factor in its algorithm.

So as search intent gains prominence, you have to allocate resources to it. MorphL optimizes your marketing budget with its artificial intelligence-based technology.

You can plug keywords in the tool to let it predicts the intent behind them in three categories: navigational, informational, or transactional. For seasoned marketers, this classification of search terms is not new.

To give it a trial run, you can upload a CSV of up to 1000 queries in the tool and its AI model will generate predictions.

For coming up with these queries, you need to perform keyword research using another tool like Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, or Answer The Public.

The tool has 85% accuracy right now, and the intent that it returns are in terms of probability between 0 and 1. So the queries with multiple intents are not pigeonholed.

10. TARS

For lead generation, most businesses fall back to static landing pages that request information from. As you can imagine, it’s not fun for the user to find huge walls of text and fill form fields. A better way is by creating conversational landing pages that create an interactive experience for your visitors.

The chatbot powered by TARS makes your brand more human and personal. Here’s an example of how the lead generation process unfolds it:

As you can see, the bot only broadcasts bits of information that’s digestible for the visitor. By answering questions, these visitors get qualified. It’s more convenient as it reduces the time required in filling forms and thereby increases the chances of conversion.

The tool has pre-built templates for creating workflows from scratch. Further, each conversation sits on its URL, so you can even use it as your post-click landing page (i.e., the ad destination for your campaign).

If you want to explore more chatbot tools in the market, then Shane Barker has done a great job here.

11. Mangools

If you’re an entrepreneur getting started with SEO, then you might get overwhelmed.

There are many moving parts: tracking your ranking pages, the backlinks to your site, researching keywords to target, and analyzing your website and SERP. The price tag of professional tools is hefty, and the interface is loaded with advanced features.

Mangools stands out with its set of five tools to take care of everything SEO at an affordable rate. Its user interface is also beginner-friendly with responsive customer support.

The tools subscription consists of the following SEO software: KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. You can also use their Chrome/Mozilla extension to get all the details of a website instantly.

The SEO suite relies on metrics from Moz and Majestic: Domain Authority, Page Authority, Citation Flow, and Trust Flow. You also get other related metrics like Alexa Rank, referring IPs, and Facebook shares.

If you’re starting out, then the links database of Mangools and its functionalities can quickly set you on the right foot with SEO.

Do you still want more help with finding SEO software? Then look no further than Adam Enfroy’s SEO tools list.

12. Survey Anyplace

Surveys are useful to learn about your customers and prospects. However, in the attention-starved economy, ordinary forms may not make the cut. Survey Anyplace can build fun and interactive quizzes and surveys.

Compared with other services, the tool is fast and more feature-rich. It comes with an easy to use survey builder that lets you choose from multiple types of questions, has a modern look that you can customize to match the personality of your brand.

You can also set up incentives using its digital Scratch Card or Slot Machine and open doors to higher response rates. You can use ReportR to set up an automatic PDF generation after a respondent submits their answers. These personalized reports let your brand communicate with every customer individually.

13. User.com

Until now, we explored specialized software for managing different aspects of marketing and sales. However, user.com is a full-stack marketing automation software for managing your marketing, sales, and support in a single dashboard.

Mike Korba, the Chief of Customer at the company, tells us that it’s a system for “turning your visitors into happy customers.”

“You can use the app to gather information about your prospects, communicate with them via live chat and chatbots, gather contact information by using popups, send automated emails and SMS, and more.”

Its suite of tools facilitate lead generation and nurturing for every stage of the funnel. If you want marketing automation inspiration, they offer 75+ automation path templates (that you can filter by goals and industries). You can personalize your message and schedule it at the right time.

You can access its freemium starter package with modules like Chat, CRM, Knowledge Base, and Calendar.

If you’re still looking for more automation opportunities in running your business, I have covered social media automation tools that you check out!

Final Thoughts

Marketing and sales are the lifelines for creating a sustainable business. There are comprised of time-consuming and complex tasks, so you can use software for streamlining your workday and shortening the time required for completion.

Source: e27