9 Essential Sales Tools For Solopreneurs Jonathan Herrick Every solopreneur has a slightly different take on the sales process, based on what they’re selling and their own personal strengths and weaknesses. However, the general process is roughly the same for all salespeople: prospecting, initial contact, sales call, the offer, handling objections, and following up. We’ve researched a variety of sales software for solopreneurs – from complete CRMs to solutions that help with specific parts of the sales cycle – in order to give you a solid list of options for streamlining your sales process and closing more deals. Today’s technology, when implemented correctly, can free up a significant portion of your time for becoming a better practitioner, working on your marketing, closing more deals, or whatever else you might do in your business with some extra time. So let’s get to it! Below you’ll find the nine of the best sales tools for solopreneurs. Zapier Have we mentioned that we love Zapier? With Zapier, you can easily automate pesky, repetitive tasks that eat up a lot of time, create room for error and yet add little value to your day. What’s not to like? Zapier integrates with over 1,000 web applications (including Hatchbuck!) and seamlessly streamlines your workflows to make creating conversations simple and closing sales a no-brainer. Price: Free for personal tasks, plans start at $20/month for businesses Pandadoc Need help creating sales proposals? Pandadoc offers templates to make this process smoother and more consistent across your business. Manage your contract lifecycle and offer secure e-signatures, and even track how your prospects are interacting with your document in order to optimize it for the future. Another bonus? It integrates with over 20 other apps, ranging from Dropbox and Google Drive to Xero and Stripe. Price: Plans start at $19/month per user. Workflow Max This business insights tool is great for solopreneurs and freelancers – especially as it applies to managing the technical aspects of sales, like quotes and financial management. This tool helps you manage legal and other documentation, track invoices and even create custom fields to make a database tailored to your unique business. Price: Free trial, plans start at $15/month for one user Calendly If you typically send lots of back-and-forth emails with prospects to set up meeting times, those tasks can pile up into a lot of wasted time that you could be spending on selling. Calendly is a simple, straightforward scheduling tool for different types of sales meetings (say, for instance, a short introductory call and a longer consultation call). Simply sign up, sync your Google and other calendars, get your custom, branded link, and send that link to prospects so they can schedule meeting times that are convenient for them. Best of all? It’s free. Price: Basic plan is free, premium plans start at $8/month Google Apps Google Apps can serve as the ultimate solution for the bootstrapping solopreneur. If you’re not ready to spend a monthly fee on a CRM, you can certainly get Google Apps to do the trick. Set up your own custom forms in Google Forms, use Google Sheets to track and sort prospects, or use one of the many available third-party apps to integrate your Google account with tools to fit specific needs. Price: Varies depending on the app Quickbooks Online It’s more than a bookkeeping tool – you can use it for logging and automatically categorizing sales-related expenses like gas mileage, travel expenses, and coffee meetups with your prospects. Sync your business bank accounts, transfer money between accounts for free, and automatically invoice your clients when payment is due. Price: Free 30-day trial, plans start at $10/month Slack Whether you’re working with a distributed team or not, Slack is a lifesaver for company-wide or one-to-one communication. With designated channels for various times of communication, departments, and projects, Slack allows your team to convene in one place (even if they’re spread across the country). With the help of Zapier and Slack’s API, you can integrate Slack with numerous other applications to make your channels your hub for all things business dialogues. Price: The free version works for most small to medium-sized teams. The upgraded version is $6.67/user per month. BenchmarkONE If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, powerful sales CRM, we’d be remiss to leave BenchmarkONE off the list. BenchmarkONE’s all-in-one CRM provides all of the typical functionality and automation usually found in more expensive tools such as Salesforce and Hubspot. That means for as little as $89 per month your business gets access to features such as contact management, email marketing, advanced segmentation and tagging, customer behavior tracking on your website and more. Mailshake Mailshake is a sales engagement platform that helps salespeople create highly personalized outreach cadences using email (via your personal email account), social, and phone. With Mailshake, you can upload a list of prospects with personalization fields like name, links to social profiles, phone numbers, and even fully personalized sentences and paragraphs. Once you publish the cadence, the messages are sent automatically according to your campaign settings, and can be paused automatically if a recipient replies or clicks a link. When a lead engages with your outreach, you can reply to them directly from Mailshake, or through your own email. You can also track your campaign’s performance in real time, and see which messages in your cadence have the best engagement. If you’re looking for a sales tool that’s truly comprehensive (and integrates with your favorite apps through Zapier), BenchmarkONE could be the missing link in your sales software stack. Learn more about BenchmarkONE’s small business CRM. Price: Plans start at $39/month.