Best Sales Pipeline Tools in 2023: 5 Top Picks
Many businesses have problems with managing their sales pipeline, thus they need a good tool that would do it for them. These tools would organize their business and thus make it easier for them to earn profits, but with the multitude of such tools out in the market that provides you help in managing your sales pipeline.
This blog will give you the shortlisted top 5 tools that are best for working with the sales pipeline. These tools would have features that you would be able to customize according to your needs, they would be reviewed and used by a lot of companies.
What is a Sales Pipeline?
The sales pipeline is a visual representation of the process incorporated by a sales team to track how close a prospect is to converting into a customer. Often, a sales pipeline is visualized as a bar or a pipe, Thus giving it its name. It helps a business in forecasting its sales, giving them an idea about the quality of its sales campaign. A pipeline generally consists of 6 stages. The first one is prospecting, also known as lead generation. It consists of the creation of leads or traffic for your business. It is a very critical process. After prospecting there is a lead qualification, in this process, you segregate leads that have the best chance to convert into a customer. Then there is the initiation of contact, and scheduling of a demo or a meeting. Then after some negotiations, a deal gets closed.
If you want to find out about the quality of a pipeline, there are some metrics that can be used to find out. The first metric is the number of deals in the pipeline. Then there is the rate of conversion, which tells how many of the deals in the pipeline are actually converted into customers. The time taken by prospects to turn into a customer is also a metric.
5 Best Sales Pipeline Tools in 2023
Below are the 5 best sales pipeline tools:
CRM.io
This product by 500 apps comes packed with powerful features that help you with sales pipeline management. You can set custom filters (field, category, or tag) for any of your searches, and create tags and notes and it offers you the ability to customize the tools as per your needs. It conducts deep pipeline analysis and inspections. It also offers CRM telephony features, like click-to-call, calls reminders, and analytics to help you in building strong relations with your customers. It is priced plans begin at INR.999/mo for the 50 apps.
Highlights:
- Kanban view makes workflows easier to understand and is instrumental in increasing productivity
- Customization of sales pipeline
- Project management system is built-in
Zendesk
Owned by Hellman & Friedman and PermiraIt, Zendesk is an extremely powerful lead management program, which is filled up to the brim with a multitude of features. One such feature is termed ‘funnel tracking’, which provides you with statistics on the revenue-generating ability of a sales campaign. It provides you with accurate pipeline analysis and reports for sales automation. ‘Lead smart lists’ quickly select the best prospects for business, it also logs emails and calls automatically thus saving valuable time. It has a free trial and the paid plans begin from $19/mo.
Highlights:
- View the entire pipeline at once
- Fully customizable dashboard
- Lead tracking from the very beginning of the funnel
Freshsales
Freshsales, which is a product of freshworks.com, is an all-in-one tool for sales and marketing. It helps you in finding quality leads for you to nurture into customers. You can manage multiple pipelines through Freshworks, it lets you track the conversion rate of your deals and also forecasts revenue. It also has automated email and provides CRM telephony with a built-in phone. They provide 24-hour support 5 days a week. It has a free plan and the paid plans start from INR.999, 14-day trials are available for the paid plans.
Highlights:
- Powerful mobile app that provides ease of access
- Get reports with detailed analysis
- Provides multilingual support
HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular CRM software. It has 5 main platforms, one of which is Sales Hub (which is a sales CRM). It helps a business manage and customize the sales pipeline by making the pipeline match and work with the existing sales process. It assists in keeping track of campaigns, bulk emailing, posting to blogs, landing page creation, finding new leads, etc. Its different hubs enable one to focus on different business needs all on one platform. HubSpot has a free version while the paid plans Start at $50/mo.
Highlights:
- Monitor progress and diagnose the health of the pipeline
- Easy-to-use software
- In-depth training provided
Pipedrive
It is one of the most loved sales CRMs, and as the name suggests it specializes in the management of the sales pipeline and provides a variety of data and analysis and you can customize the stages of your pipeline. It has a great array of features like sales automation, email tracking, forecasting, import and export of data, etc. Well over 2000 companies use it across the globe. It has free trials and the paid plans start at $9.90/mo.
Highlights:
- Optimized for pipeline management
- Extremely easy to work on
- Tracks customers through the lifecycle
Pipefy
This tool lets you monitor your calls and emails and automate the sales funnel and speed up the conversion process. It has easy-to-customize chatbots and web forms. It also has a mobile app that facilitates remote working. This can prove to be instrumental in optimizing your sales pipeline to give you the best results. Pipefy provides a free plan and paid plans to begin from $19/mo.
Highlights:
- Custom workflow creation
- Efficient mobile app
- Detailed sales analytics
Things to Consider while Choosing Sales Pipeline Tools
Choosing a sales pipeline tool is a relatively simple job, but there are some factors you should have in mind to decide which sales management tool would be the best for your organization. You have to look at the features of each tool and assess what tool should best fit your organization.
- A right tool should let you make multiple pipelines and it should manage them all efficiently.
- Identify and qualify leads accurately. As a sales pipeline is a visual representation, the tool you use for managing it must be clutter-free with a good interface.
- While buying anything, you should always go through the user reviews and the reputation of the vendors, and it is no different for pipeline management tools. You should ask the organizations using the product you are interested in about their experience with it.
- Most of the time, if not every time, a pipeline management tool is just a part of the bigger CRM software, and you should always make sure that you are satisfied with the other parts of the software you will be using for your organization.
- Keeping this in mind, you have to be mindful of the budget you have allocated for purchasing this tool so you don't extend it unnecessarily.
By keeping all these things in your mind while choosing your pipeline management tool, you would be able to choose the best tool for your business.
Final Thoughts
Sales pipeline is an essential tool that helps an organization with streamlining its sales wing. It is a visual representation of the process followed by the sales team in the conversion of a prospect. Software that lets you manage and handle it is very necessary and should be chosen while keeping a variety of factors like budget and vendor reputation in your mind. That's why we have brought this article to you, it tells you about 5 tools that are proven to be great at handling pipelines and would prove to be a great addition to your company.
