Building a Winning Sales Pipeline: Essential Free Tech Tools for Your Team

Discover how to equip your team with the necessary tools to kickstart the construction of a robust sales pipeline. This journey is all about the foundational tech tools you’ll need. It’s important to remember that the effectiveness of these tools depends greatly on your sales team’s workflow. To ensure your team stands out in potential customers’ inboxes, here are some tools designed to elevate your outreach efforts.

Whenever possible, we’ll highlight tools offering free options. Our aim is to swiftly identify the most effective outreach methods. By exploring various strategies, we gather valuable insights, enabling us to make informed, data-driven decisions on where to allocate resources more effectively.

Let’s delve into two fundamental areas:

  • Data: The quest for emails, phone numbers, company info, LinkedIn URLs, and more.
  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management): To centralize this data, track activities, organize tasks, and enable comprehensive report generation and data analysis.

Data providers, Apollo.io really stands out, its free version grants you access to emails, a few mobile numbers, and direct links to prospects’ LinkedIn profiles. An added bonus, it allows for sequencing, calling, and can even serve as a CRM.

CRM, HubSpot there is a free version with limited functionality, enough to get started and as you scale you can opt for a different plan. Other CRMs to mention of course Salesforce and also PipeDrive, again this will depend on your organisation and what would suit your needs. Typically I see most organisations start out on of these 3, they usually run into limitations with integrations or reporting, do pick for the future as migration is never as straightforward as it may seem.

With these foundational tools, we’re set to embark on email prospecting. For those planning to send a high volume of emails (40+ daily), consider acquiring an additional domain and creating new mailboxes to protect your primary domain’s deliverability. Tools like snov.io are invaluable for email warming, ensuring your communications are recognized as legitimate.

We’re now positioned to email at scale, monitor activities, and refine our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on the analysis of results.

Lets take a quick look at social selling, Linkedin is free to sign up, Sales Navigator will be helpful to help build lists and track accounts, again you will need to look at your ICP and if Linkedin would be a good channel to reach out to them before you commit to Sales Navigator.

There is a lot of advice on how to social sell, video and voice will help you stand out when everyone else is spamming InMails and DMs.

For Voice, log in on your mobile and you can leave voice notes to 1st degree connections.

Video, we can use Vidyard, Loom or HippoVideo, to record a short video introducing yourself/company to prospects. These are again free with some limitations on the number of videos and length.

Cold-Calling, it is an essential part of your outreach, the most direct way to get an answer from a prospect. Currently. I am unaware of any free diallers, the Apollo paid plan offers a phone number and dialler you can use, while you are still trying this channel, your mobile or e-sims are options to start calling. Further down the line I would highly recommend power diallers like Salesfinity to really scale this channel.

With all this prospecting, a common response is to ask for more information. Typically reps will send a link to the website, a case study or a summary of features. Tools like Notion and Canva can help you organise information and quickly create bespoke information sheets for prospects.

You can also use these to create discovery documents, business cases, pilot proposals and more to aide your sales process. Templates can be created for the team to use, but they can also be easily edited to make it personalised for each prospect.

Lets take a look at some ways to enhance your teams discovery, Fathom Video is free and integrates with HubSpot. You can use AI to take notes of your calls and summarise them, this is automatically synced with your HubSpot so all meeting notes are tracked.

We have here a tech stack that your team can use to find leads, email them, contact them on Linkedin (Voice and Video) and cold call. You can record all meetings with prospects and your CRM is updated with these notes. This should provide your team with a solid foundation to start prospecting.

A few other tools to mention;

Schedule meetings with Calendly

Manage projects with Monday

I am always using new tools and will continue to update this. If you’ve discovered tools or strategies that complement what we’ve discussed, I encourage you to share your experiences and suggestions.