While few things can compete with a solid understanding of the basic foundations of sales tactics, strategies, and techniques in terms of improving your bottom line sales, there are an increasing number of tools available to the savvy salesperson looking to give their productivity a kick. Information rules all when it comes to sales, and with the right tools in hand you can gather more data, process that data more effectively, and apply what you’ve learned in the way it will count the most. Here are some of our favorite sales tools for boosting bottom line sales:

Salesforce’s Data.Com

All successful sales teams rely upon actionable data on potential clients and business partners, so having a single powerful, reliable source of business data can have quite the impact on your bottom line sales. With access to information from big name data sources like Dun & Bradstreet available through a powerful interface, few databases can compete. And of course, as part of the Salesforce ecosystem, Data.com’s information can be directly accessed by countless other tools built on that platform.

Nimble

Nimble acts as a representative of the Next Big Thing in sales tools, a social collaborative CRM (customer relationship management) program. Improving bottom line sales is all about communication-with prospects, with clients, with partners, with team members-so a tool that puts all your communication in one place and helps you keep it all organized can go a long way in optimizing your efforts and improving your bottom line sales.

Toutapp

Email plays a big role in some sales methods, but too many tools meant for sales communications result in depersonalized automation. Toutapp eschews excess automation in favor of giving you the tools you need to productively produce, send, track, and respond to emails. Toutapp is basically your one-stop solution to email management and analytics-and it integrates well with other tools. Any email-reliant salesperson utilizing Toutapp to its full potential will see a dramatic impact on their bottom line sales.

Postwire

A powerful tool for communicating information to whoever you need to communicate information to-you can quickly produce easy-to-process resource pages with any necessary links, video, audio, or documents integrated into PDF format. On the back end, you have access to simple, effective analytics so you can see who read what, when, and how often. While use of Postwire may not directly result in sales, cleaning up your communication will definitely improve your bottom line sales in the long term.

KISSmetrics

We’ve mentioned Data.com for external data, but that’s only half of the battle. By using KISSmetrics web analytics to keep track of what happens on your website, you can take big steps towards understanding what’s happening inside your business. Compared to other analytics tools, KISSmetrics offers data on a much longer timeline-that is, it tracks individuals long before and long after the first conversion, letting you see what sort of path visitors to your site may be taking. This can give you an unprecedented ability to optimize your methods and improve your bottom line sales.

Remember…

Properly applied, these tools and others will help an effective salesperson really improve their bottom line sales, but don’t expect them to act as a panacea. If your basic sales methods or the underlying business model aren’t successful, you will be throwing good money after bad in purchasing any of these tools. They enhance a successful business and make it more successful-rarely will any of these tools create the initial success!