As a Revenue Operations (RevOps) leader, your job is to find an organizational approach to improve the sales process. With so many moving parts to keep track of, software is often the quickest and most efficient way to connect what’s broken.
A RevOps leader doesn’t need to be an expert in every tool, but they do need to be familiar with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. While a CRM platform centralizes customer data in one easy-to-access place – a single source of truth for revenue teams – it is simply not enough. But with an increasing number of martech solutions available (a total of 8,000 as recently as 2020), how do you know which to choose?
How to Decide What Gets Added to the Tech Stack
Here’s a fool-proof process for evaluating tools for your RevOps tech stack:
- Analyze the use cases: Take a holistic view of the entire customer lifecycle in order to identify which tools will best meet your business needs. If any team is spending too much time manually entering key data, it might be time to look at automation. Ask yourself questions like what tools out there can help us? and which ones might we want to use?
- Confirm the ROI: Once you have a rough list of the tools you could add to your tech stack, you’ll need to find out if you’ll have better return on investment by making that purchase. If so, it’s definitely something to consider – providing it’s within the budget. If it’s doable, move on to the next step.
- Crowdsource: Survey the team and let them use two competing tools to see which they like best – get their buy-in. The team will be using these tools in their day-to-day operations, so it’s important to choose by fit, not just by features or price.
What Are the Top Tools for RevOps?
Below you’ll find tried-and-true tools to help optimize and align teams, serving not only revenue teams, but also sales, marketing, and more.
Revenue Operations
1. Salesforce
What it does: The ‘Bible’ for sales teams, Salesforce is the most advanced CRM software tool out there.
Best features:
- Reports and analytics: It’s about more than just managing data efficiently, you can track the growth and sales for the company via robust performance reports.
- Dashboards: Get a 360-degree view of the whole sales team and gain more visibility into the revenue pipeline to help align customer success, marketing, and sales teams.
- Customization: Easily customize Salesforce for exactly what your business needs to help you stay on task.
Pricing: Salesforce offers tiered pricing (billed annually) depending on how many users you need:
- Sales Essentials Edition: An out-of-the-box CRM for up to five users for $25/month.
- Professional Edition: A complete CRM for any size team is $75/month.
- Enterprise Edition: A deeply customizable CRM for $150/month.
- Unlimited Edition: $300/month.
2. LeanData
What it does: LeanData is a routing automation tool that helps you automate go-to-market operations.
Best features:
- Lead-to-account matching: Define your own match rules and build an accurate data foundation.
- Routing: Configure how leads are qualified/disqualified and routed by letting LeanData automatically assign leads to the right person.
- Integration: As Leandata is native to Salesforce, it allows you to apply complex routing dependent on any Salesforce properties, not just the standard stuff.
Pricing: Schedule a call or demo to discuss pricing.
3. InsightSquared
What it does: InsightSquared is an advanced reporting tool with a bright future for RevOps.
Best features:
- Forecasting: Helps empower RevOps to extract out-of-the-box reports that other teams would normally have to deliver.
- Real-time: View activity data such as demos and meetings in the CRM without asking the sales rep to input it first.
- Dashboards: Highlight meaningful metrics and easily customize the dashboards as you see fit.
Pricing: Schedule a call or demo to discuss pricing.
4. Syncari
What it does: One I’m particularly excited to add to my tech own stack in 2022, Syncari helps provide painless data automation and the consistency that revenue teams need.
Best features:
- Leading technology: Extract data from every system to automate processes and optimize workflows.
- Easy adoption: Simple and painless, anyone working in RevOps can create a master data model for critical tables without code.
Pricing: Plans begin at $1495/month.
5. Apollo.io
What it does: Apollo is a board management software that has digitized the entire board management process.
Best features:
- Tracking: Run meetings smoothly by assigning responsibilities, setting due dates, planning check-ins, and more.
- Built-in timer: Stay on track with a built-in timer so there’s less time spent in meetings and more time spent on getting things done.
Pricing: Schedule a call or demo to discuss pricing.
6. Blackthorn
What it does: Blackthorn gathers financial data from different payment gateways mirrored into Salesforce.
Best features:
- Salesforce integration: Run events via simple payment processes that use the robust Salesforce platform.
- Automated payments: Save your sales and finance teams the tedious hours of manually processing follow-up payments by using automated payment renewals.
- Reports: Deliver the data straight to Salesforce and generate insightful reports.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $575/month depending on usage, whereas the Blackthorn Event plan starts at $875/month depending on usage.
Sales
7. ZoomInfo
What it does: ZoomInfo provides prospecting data to create a more cohesive go-to-market strategy.
Best features:
- Accuracy: Remove the manual grunt work of prospecting possible low-intent leads and let ZoomInfo identify target accounts equipped with relevant account news.
- More leads: Monitor website audience behavior to collect customer information and book more meetings.
- Insight-driven workflows: Trigger actions based on key business changes.
Pricing: While they offer a free trial for their simplest solution, you’ll need to get in touch for go-to-market with features and integrations.
8. Dooly
What it does: Dooly is a tool to help sellers update Salesforce faster and stay more organized, so you can spend more time selling.
Best features:
- Pipeline overview: Pull all your opps and create custom dashboards to give you all the intel you need in one view.
- Templates: Get prompted to collect the deal info you need to keep deals moving, and help your team to follow the same winning sales process.
- Note-taking: Take better notes instead of mindless admin work, further helping RevOps create more predictable forecasting (as the inputs are more regular and more accurate).
Pricing: You can try Dooly for free (no credit card required), or request a demo to speak with a Dooly product expert right now.
9. Chorus
What it does: Chorus is a conversation intelligence platform that helps revenue teams replicate winning performances.
Best features:
- Call recording: Get a simple reviewing tool that’s easy to navigate and analyze sales meetings.
- Transcription: Quickly search a transcript for keywords or edit and share clips with rich VOC and market insights with the sales team.
- Snippets: Capture sections and share them as clips for training or allow team members to get the need-to-know headlines without attending the entire meeting (Zoom fatigue, anyone?).
Pricing: Schedule a call or demo to discuss pricing.
10. RevOps.io
What it does: RevOps streamlines your sales team’s proposals.
Best features:
- Templates: Build customized agreement templates and send them from your CRM to Billing with just one click.
- Track changes: Use track changes to reduce the back and forth with legal teams.
- Real-time: View real-time changes to your proposals.
Pricing: Starts at $50/month for the Essentials plan.
Marketing Operations
11. Pardot
What it does: Pardot is a lead management software featuring CRM integration.
Best features:
- Automated email responder: Use pre-made templates or create your own templates, then set auto-response emails which can be triggered whenever a user downloads content such as a whitepaper.
- B2B lead generation: Create segmented lists and tailor campaigns to close more deals.
- ROI calculator: Track your deals with lifecycle reporting.
Pricing: Pricing runs from $1,250/month to $15,000/month (billed annually) depending on your business needs (e.g. priced per user, flat fee, percentage of contract value, or by consumption).
Final Thoughts
With so many tools accumulating, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. First, understand that as a new-ish role, RevOps leaders may have to learn on the job – that’s just the name of the game. Start with the basics (CRM systems, revenue intelligence software, and project management platforms, etc.), then expand your tech stack to help move your RevOps strategy forward and make your teams more effective.