What software (or combination of software) do you use to manage your sales funnel, and why does it work well?
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Pipedrive
The simplicity with which the data is captured and flows through the various stages of the sales cycle makes Pipedrive my number one choice. The visual reporting feature gives a clear view of the current status across leads and their stages. The setup is quick and doesn’t require any significant learning curve even for first-time CRM users. – Rahul Varshneya, Arkenea LLC
2. HubSpot
We use HubSpot‘s sales dashboard to track all of our deals. Because we also use HubSpot’s CRM and COS software, it’s a seamless integration that lets us manage everything about our current and prospective clients in one place. As a CEO, it’s awesome to have one go-to dashboard to reference everything happening at my company. – Brittany Hodak, ZinePak
3. Base CRM
From a B2B perspective, Base has been a key asset to Orange Mud since the start. The sales funnel is clear, tablet and phone apps are fantastic and the integration across all of our devices helps to keep our database user friendly, which means up to date, too. I’ve found that the key to success with CRM systems isn’t their level of complexity, it’s their level of simplicity. – Josh Sprague, Orange Mud
4. InsideSales.com
We use InsideSales.com to manage our sales funnel. It works well because it includes automated follow-up tools. Like any software, it still needs to be managed and supervised, but efficient automation makes a big difference. – Dusty Wunderlich, Bristlecone Holdings
5. Infusionsoft
Being able to target the specific buying stage of each email marketing list subscriber is key for us. We like the advanced marketing funnels and CRM features of Infusionsoft to keep prospects moving up the food chain and into the buying stage. Easy integration with invoicing and payment systems is also greatly beneficial to many of our clients. – Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
6. Contactually
Contactually
is user-friendly software that allows you to automate all of the processes involved with contacting current and prospective clients. It keeps an easy to read, organized summary of all your previous contacts and agreed-upon terms with clients as well as provides the user with information when a client is ready to make a purchase. – David Tomas, Cyberclick
7. RelateIQ
RelateIQ
is a great tool to manage your sales funnel and test out different strategies and processes. They have a reports and analyses feature that can help you quickly track performance on new strategies to help you better identify ways to improve your sales funnel. – Randy Rayess, VenturePact
8. AWeber, OptimizePress, Wishlist Member and More
We drive traffic from various sources to capture pages that contain an email sequence powered by AWeber. Within the email funnel, we drive interested buyers to our landing pages powered by OptimizePress where they can join our membership site that is powered by Wishlist Member. At the same time, we track all funnels through Google Analytics and A/B test variations with Optimizely. – Pejman Ghadimi, Secret Entourage
9. Salesforce and TopOpps
Salesforce
is a great tool that keeps track of each employee’s activity and accounts. I can customize reports that produce a high level overview. This is very effective and easy to do because our information is already in the database. TopOpps is another great software program we have been using lately that helps to identify key opportunities and helps our sales team know where to dedicate their time. – Jayna Cooke, EVENTup
10. Bizible
From a marketing perspective, the top of our sales funnel is tracked using Bizible, which is a third-party tracking app that pulls Google Analytics data into Salesforce. This is helpful because it provides the missing link that reveals which lead entered our funnel from which source. These insights allow us to market smarter by focusing on the channels that drive results. – David Ciccarelli, Voices.com
11. Mixpanel and Segment.io
We use Mixpanel for events-based tracking in combination with Google Analytics, and Segment.io to bring everything together without having to code each new tool into our website. Mixpanel is great because we get a level of insight into the people who go through our sales funnels. We’ve been able to target which countries and referral sources generate the most value for us and optimize accordingly. – Dave Nevogt, Hubstaff.com
12. Streak
Streak
is great for us. It allows us to customize stages of our pipeline to fit our business. We can then associate every email and contact with a prospect in Streak so everything we need to know about an account is right at our fingertips. Streak allows us to easily change the stage of a prospect, has great reporting functionality and offers a user-friendly mobile app. Best of all, Streak is free. – Douglas Baldasare, ChargeItSpot
13. Insightly
With Insightly, our team can not only keep track of CRM and projects, but we can also maintain close communication on a daily basis. We can manage leads, contacts, vendors and more while also having visibility on past projects and those that we are working towards in the future. This software keeps us mindful of how far we have come and keeps us shooting for our sales goals. – Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com
14. Outreach.io
Outreach.io
is a sales email and calling platform that manages cold outreach to prospects. Now the entire top of our sales funnel is automated, personalized and streamlined to create a great experience for prospective clients and our sales reps. – Andrew Fayad, eLearning Mind
