Any sales team can do well with the bare minimum tools for the job, but to truly excel a team needs truly excellent sales tools. Working with substandard tools leads inevitably to teams performing beneath their true ability. But telling superior sales tools from timewasters and clunky messes can be difficult without more trial and error than any team lead wants to put his or her people through. Fortunately, this article’s here to help. We’ll be discussing five sales tools every sales team stands to benefit from-sales tools we guarantee are worth trying.

1. Sales CRM: Salesforce

A strong CRM (customer relationship management) solution should be considered mandatory for any modern business interfacing with its clients in any meaningful way. That goes double for sales teams, making this the most important of the sales tools on this list by a long way. Salesforce holds a position as the single most popular CRM for sales, due in part to how easily it integrates with other common sales software.

If you’re unfamiliar with CRM, the idea is simple: A single system integrating data from every place customer’s come into contact with the company, ideally implemented across all departments/teams/etc. With properly utilized CRM, nothing ‘slips through the cracks’-you’ll gain an unprecedented insight into and control of your relationships with your customers.

Implementing CRM can be a difficult task on the front end, but it’s not just the most vital of sales tools, but a place where all your sales tools can work together for maximized efficacy. Skipping good CRM is bad business for any sales team looking to do its best.

2. Presentations: Google Slides

There are many solutions out there for presenting your pitches in the field, but Google Slides gets special mention for being easy to use, integrated with a host of other Google products, and extremely versatile. If you have a computing device of any sort, it can probably serve your Google Slides presentation. That sort of flexibility’s vital for a lot of businesses, and useful for the rest.

If you don’t need that flexibility, you can consider alternatives such as PowerPoint and KeyNote–the most important point, however, is making sure that you have the sales tools necessary for delivering a thorough, powerful pitch anywhere and anytime. 

3. Digital Signatures: EchoSign

Bringing us one step closer to completely eliminating hardcopies, EchoSign allows you to share crucial documents and acquire binding signatures easily and securely. If you’re looking to control the pace of the sales process, being able to eliminate the historically slow process of trading contracts and getting signatures is very nice. It’s not the most crucial of sales tools, of course, but it’s something most teams would benefit from utilizing.

4. Internal Communication: SnapComms

The better your sales team communicates, the better your sales team performs-it’s that simple. SnapComms turns internal communications up to 11 with a host of features meant to make sure everyone sees what they need to see when they need to see it. If you’ve ever lost a deal to a spam-filtered email or had a change in company policy go unnoticed for weeks, you should understand the power of SnapComms as a sales tool.

5. Backup: Dropbox

Backups are a universally overlooked aspect of every company. All the sales tools in the world do you no good if you lose every file associated with a top client, if the only system with your list of qualified leads goes kaput, if your email server goes down and your communications break down entirely. That’s why a backup system like Dropbox, or Mozy, or any of their dozens of competitors stands tall as one of the most vital sales tools for any team. It won’t make you any more sales than you’re already making, but if things go wrong you won’t lose any, either-and that makes a backup solution worth its weight in gold.