Table of Contents
Your B2B marketing plan is not complete without a layout of the B2B software you’ll want to use. Sales software is a vital component for any B2B business plans to ensure your business effectively executes your vision.
There are many different steps to a B2B marketing plan, so rightfully, there are many different tools with different specialties, purposes, and selling points. B2B startups and growth-stage companies can have a tough time knowing what their company needs to focus on in their marketing plan. Even with that knowledge, it can be difficult evaluating all the different software options available to use.
Which features, integrations, and unique factors you need in your B2B software depend wholly on your startup. Here, we’ve broken down some critical focuses within B2B marketing. The rest of this guide will introduce various software to help with each.
- B2B Sales Intelligence & Lead Generation
- B2B Email Marketing Software
- B2B Marketing Automation & Lead Nurturing
- B2B Sales Automation
- B2B Marketing Attribution
- B2B Marketing Attribution
- B2B Marketing Analytics
- Account-Based Marketing Software
- SEO Software & Content Tools
- Project Management Software
- Integration & Automation Software
- Collaboration & Communication Tools
- Live Chat
- Conversational Intelligence
- CRM
- Customer Support & Service
- Productivity Suites
- Prospecting & Linkbuilding
- Accounting Software
- Design & Video Tools
- Website Plugins and Services
B2B Sales Intelligence & B2B Lead Generation
B2B Lead Generation is how your B2B startup increases sales productivity, and B2B Sales Intelligence gives you a comprehensive understanding of how to scale your success. These tools will help your startup accumulate and keep more customers from generating leads to collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting insights into clients.
Zoominfo
The first go-to-market software with the largest business database
Zoominfo fuels your go-to-market strategy from start to finish. ZoomInfo provides a 360-degree, accurate view of prospects, customers, and potential opportunities with the world’s most comprehensive business database and robust features incorporated into your workflow.
The first-ever go-to-market operating system.
Adapt
Robust CRM integration + chrome extension = whole team can engage seamlessly
Adapt is a global B2B contact and company database provider across multiple industries. Adapt has over 300,000 users and 100 million business contacts. These contacts include an industry-specific company database and contact information such as job title, direct dial, and email addresses.
Seamless.ai
Created by entrepreneurs working to disrupt the industry
Award-winning entrepreneurs started Seamless.ai to organize the world’s contacts and make them universally accessible and useful. Seamless connects to your target market and acquires new clients without the labor-intensive process undermined by outdated technology, information, and data entry.
Lusha
B2B engagement based on trust
Lusha helps business professionals establish a fast and accurate connection with their leads, contacts, and candidates. Lusha enables you to build trust by using simple tools to enrich and verify business profiles. Over 250,000 marketers use Lusha, coming from small businesses to big enterprises including Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Apple.
SalesIntel
Improve connection rates with human-verified contact data
SalesIntel is the top provider of marketing contact data with the highest number of direct dials and human-verified contacts in the industry. They test and re-verified contact info every 90 days, with a 95% data accuracy for contact data. With SalesIntel, your team can find new contact data for your prospects, close more deals, and update current contacts.
Dun & Bradstreet (D&B)
AI-driven credit-to-cash financial analytics
D&B uses a strong Data Cloud to power its AI-driven platform, allowing clients to grow and thrive. More than 400 million entities worldwide use D&B’s Data Cloud, thus making D&B the broadest trusted commercial data set and one of the most trusted analytical insights platforms. The platforms help companies take more intelligent steps to provide those companies with a competitive edge.
Hubspot Sales Hub
Scale your company, not the complexity
Hubspot Sales Hub is a powerful and easy-to-use sales CRM that includes sales engagement tools, configure-price-quote (CPQ) functionality, and robust sales analytics for growing teams. It is built on the HubSpot CRM platform, where customer data, tools, and teams come together to create a single source-of-truth for unprecedented sales rep efficiency.
Groove
Easy-to-use, easy-to-administrate cross-team collaboration
Groove is the leading sales engagement platform using Salesforce. Groove automates activities outside of sales and is built for the needs of full-cycle sellers. This allows your team to spend more time building relationships and generating revenue. Over 50,000 marketers use Groove at some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing companies, including Google, Uber, BBVA, and Capital One.
B2B Email Marketing Software
B2B businesses can use email marketing softwareB2B to streamline communicating to clients and prospects through email.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is known as a powerhouse all-in-one marketing automation tool.
Mailchimp‘s all-in-one Marketing Platform helps small businesses grow faster. As the backbone for your customer relationships, it provides AI-powered tools anyone can use. Mailchimp puts your audience at the center as you send marketing emails, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online.
Litmus
Optimize the entire email creation process, from creation to testing to analytics
Litmus empowers marketing teams to increase engagement with subscribers and campaign ROI while also guaranteeing brand consistency. Major global brands use Litmus across every industry. In fact, nine of the top ten e-commerce brands and seven of the top ten technology companies use Litmus.
Campaign Monitor
Create targeted content without technical expertise
Campaign Monitor is an easy-to-use email marketing tool that enables you to send personalized emails, creating a reliable channel to grow engagement and promote loyal readership. Beautiful templates, drag-and-drop builders, and engagement-based segmentation allow marketers to deliver targeted content to large lists of subscribers.
Hubspot
Great for B2B service companies
Hubspot‘s email marketing software simplifies creating personalized email marketing campaigns. The interface is extremely intuitive, making lists and content creation straightforward. This simplicity allows you always to send the most relevant content. Monitor your email marketing with baked-in analytics, so you can continually improve your open and click-through rates.
Moosend
Engage your email subscribers for all sizes of businesses
Moosend helps businesses manage multiple email campaigns and mailing lists using the built-in campaign editor on a centralized dashboard. Key features include drag-and-drop email editor, A/B testing, list segmentation, email automation templates, user tracking, product recommendations, landing page builder, etc.
Omnisend
Tailored for sales-driven eCommerce marketers
Omnisend is built for e-commerce brands focusing on growth. Omnisend allows companies to automate marketing processes by bringing all channels into one place. Earn more revenue with an automation workflow that hyper-targets and personalizes messaging. Major e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, work with Omnisend.
B2B Marketing Automation & B2B Lead Nurturing
Your B2B business must have a good lead nurturing system to build relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales process. A successful B2B lead nurturing program:
- Builds trust
- Increases brand awareness
- Maintains a connection until prospects are ready to make a purchase
- Can be aided immensely with technology
Marketing automation platforms help teams develop flexible, adaptive lead nurturing strategies that attract, convert, and retain customers.
Pardot
Diverse functions and robust CRM integration
Pardot has various automation power tools, including automation rules, completion actions, and engagement campaigns. Pardot integrates with the majority of paid advertising platforms so that you can see both cost and revenue information for a complete picture of marketing performance.
Bitrix24
Helps remote teams collaborate efficiently
Bitrix24 is a leading free social knowledge management and collaboration platform used by over 8 million companies worldwide. Bitrix is available both in cloud and on-premise and has open-source code access. This helps remote teams discuss ideas, manage knowledge, manage projects.
Marketo Engage
Customize personal engagement for customers
Marketo Engage is excellent for companies that care about customized segmentation and personalized customer engagement. Their features include: B2B email software, marketing, nurturing, SEO, landing pages, scoring, and analytics, with advanced features including website personalization, mobile engagement, social and web retargeting.
Oracle Eloqua
Win over audiences with personalized campaigns across multiple channels
Oracle Eloqua‘s marketer-friendly platform equips marketing organizations with intelligent campaign management, flexible data management, accurate lead generation, and insightful sales enablement tools to engage buyers when they want to be engaged on their preferred channel. Use real-time data on Eloqua to create personalized experiences.
Hubspot Marketing Hub
The hub creates one powerful platform where all of your marketing tools and data exist.
Hubspot Marketing Hub helps you efficiently provide a personalized experience that attracts and converts the right customers at scale. Hubspot keeps data at the center of everything, with Marketing Hub built as part of the HubSpot CRM platform.
B2B Sales Automation
Sales Automation is a practical way to improve sales results. Streamline time-consuming, tedious, administrative steps in the sales process allows your sales team to focus more on actually selling. These software tools can help your business save time and money.
Outreach
Triple the productivity of your sales team
Outreach.io delivers performance and insights by automating and prioritizing all customer touchpoints throughout the sales process. Outreach places actionable data intelligence at the sales reps’ fingertips through a single, integrated view of all prospect-related information.
Clearbit Enrich
Maximizing the value of better data
Clearbit Enrich automatically updates your sales records with accurate, verified company and contact data. With best-in-class data at your fingertips, you’ll have better insights into your prospects and more time to connect with them through personalized sales messages.
Active Campaign
Deliver personalized, high-touch experiences even as your business grows
Active Campaign’s Customer Experience Automation (CXA) provides you with hundreds of pre-built automation functions. These automations combine B2B email software, B2B email marketing software, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning. CXA gives companies a personalized, authentic experience so your customer relationships can scale with your business.
Salesloft
Not a CRM or marketing automation tool; Just Sales Engagement—done right.
Salesloft creates an engine for revenue teams to communicate with customers, navigate the sales process, and replicate success. You can orchestrate every email, call, meeting, and customer interaction from anywhere. The platform also allows you to automatically track and log your tasks, activities, and engagement data to your CRM.
Salesforce High Velocity Sales
A Sales Cloud add-on product to enable agility in your team
Salesforce High Velocity Sales (HVS) is a streamlined Salesforce solution tailored to inside sales teams and designed to improve their sales processes. HVS gives teams insights and automation to prospect smarter and faster, integrated tools to eliminate busy work and multiple logins, and best-practice automation for scalable, repeatable success.
Clari Sales Forecasting
Clari Sales Forecasting advertises that its platform makes sales forecasting less tedious with technology.
Clari Sales Forecasting streamlines the forecasting process using advanced predictive forecasting tools that provide more accurate reports in less time. The tool is also customizable and can be easily adjusted to adapt to what your business needs. You can also link your team’s deals directly to forecasted figures in one simple interface.
B2B Marketing Attribution
Marketing attribution software helps companies determine what contributes most to their marketing and sales teams’ success during the prospecting and sales processes. These tools can help you determine your most effective assets.
Bizible
Make smart sales decisions with a complete understanding of the whole buying journey.
Bizible‘s platform allows B2B marketing teams to effectively track and optimize their efforts based on sales outcomes like revenue. Discover customer journeys, impact digital transformations, and power company growth.
CallRail
Surfacing and connecting data from calls, forms, chat, and beyond
CallRail brings complete visibility to the marketers who rely on quality inbound leads to boost success and sustain growth. CallRail’s leads-focused analytics platform brings clarity to our customer’s digital marketing efforts.
SharpSpring
One of the most flexible platforms, with many marketing automation features
SharpSpring is a comprehensive revenue growth platform with B2B email marketing software that is based on consumer behavior. The platform also includes native or 3rd party CRM integration, dynamic forms, a landing page, blog builders, social media management, universal CMS compatibility, and integration with hundreds of applications.
Social Media Tools
An excellent social media presence has become more and more important for reaching your audience. The content you put out, the format of the content, and the social media platforms you use will depend on your intended audience. These social media tools can help you keep it all organized and consistent.
Salesforce Social Studio
Tap into the power of all aspects of social media
Salesforce Social Studio lets you listen, engage, and publish using a powerful all-in-one social media marketing and management suite — and connects enriched social data to your marketing with sales and service.
Sprout Social
Social media management + customer relationship management
Sprout Social is another all-in-one social management solution that empowers companies to connect with their audiences better. The platform also helps streamline publishing workflows, collaborate in real-time, and turn social data into meaningful insights. It has customer relationship management (CRM) features that allow you to build stronger relationships.
Sprinklr
An AI-based platform that drives collaboration
Sprinklr‘s products suite helps enterprises connect and serve their customers across any channel at scale. Reach, listen, and engage with your customers on more than 35 social channels. Sprinklr’s unified codebase drives collaboration and reduces silos across your organization, even as you grow.
Buffer
Clean and intuitive tools = friendly and timely for small businesses
Buffer is an easy-to-use social media management platform trusted by over 75,000 brands. You’ll have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration (Publish, Reply, and Analyze). Their products are highly refined to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social media management platform.
Hootsuite has over 200,000 paid accounts and millions of free users. The platform powers brands’ and organizations’ social media accounts around the world. Any time of company can use Hootsuite – from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises. Strategically grow your business and customer relationships with social selling, social customer care, and social media management.
B2B Marketing Analytics
B2B Marketing Analytics gives you profound insights into consumer preferences and trends. Understanding the market allows you to build on what works and optimize return on investment (ROI). These software tools can help you be more efficient at your job and understand what to invest more time, energy, and money in.
Google Analytics
Free digital analytics—what’s working and what’s not—from Google
Google Analytics gives companies significant insights into their websites, audiences, and digital marketing. Powerful and easy-to-use, Analytics helps you find what earns your business the best results. Quality conversion attribution and testing tools help companies large and small build better user experiences and maximize their digital strategy.
Datorama
Leading cloud-based, AI-powered marketing analytics
Datorama transforms the way you optimize marketing performance. Connect all marketing tools to one central place, receive AI-powered insights, and see a report on every investment, performance, and outcome across the customer journey. Thousands of brands, including IBM, Nike, Ticketmaster, and Viacom, trust Datorama.
Tableau
Make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization software that transforms enormous amounts of data into interactive visual representations. The software includes interactive dashboards, drag and drop functions, and natural language queries to help anyone who uses the product to discover actionable insights quickly. This all happens from an intuitive and visual interface.
Mixpanel
Powerful, self-serve product analytics solution through data
Mixpanel helps companies analyze how and why people engage, convert, and retain—in real-time, across devices—to improve their user experience. Mixpanel serves over 26,000 companies from different industries around the world, including Expedia, Uber, Ancestry, DocuSign, and Lemonade.
Kissmetrics
Data is personal; collect the metrics your business cares about
Kissmetrics is founded on the idea that data tools should not just plop data onto a graph. This marketing analytics tool personalizes the data by having every number represent a different user, customer, or significant action. These analytics then contribute to crucial marketing metrics and the overall growth of the company. Since every business differs, Kissmetrics partners with each business to ensure that the business collects the best metrics that are important to your business.
Account-Based Marketing Software
Account-based marketing is a focused approach to B2B marketing that targets fitting accounts to turn into customers. Instead of trying to attract everyone broadly, where are your most-likely potential customers, and how do you reach them? These tools can help.
Terminus
Terminus prides itself by stating that it gives businesses everything they need to measure their account-based marketing programs.
Terminus ABM Platform helps you build account lists equipped with the data you need to personalize your strategies. The platform allows businesses to review the customer lifecycle for open opportunities and closed-won deals to see which marketing touchpoints influence deals and use this data to replicate the success with best-fit accounts.
Demandbase
No-limits ABM solution built with B2B marketing in mind
Demandbase ABM Platform provides the data you need for a comprehensive understanding of your accounts and when to engage the right people with the right message. Demandbase will adapt to your needs, unify your revenue teams, and connect to what matters.
LeanData
Only receive the leads and opportunities you need to work on to close deals.
LeanData enables your B2B company to increase speed-to-revenue and improve the buyer experience. With LeanData’s Lead-to-Account Matching, Routing, Engagement, and Attribution solutions, sales reps only receive the contacts, leads, accounts, and potential opportunities they need to work on. This way, the sales rep can close deals and drive revenue faster.
SEO Software & Content Tools
SEO is the all-important key to B2B marketing, and creating quality content is a huge aspect of SEO. It is a complex process, so choosing a tool that suits your business is essential.
Ahrefs
All-in-one SEO toolset easy for all to use
Ahrefs helps you research your competitors, build links, find the most relevant keywords, audit your website, discover the most popular content for any topic, and monitor business alerts. Ahrefs database has 8 billion keywords and 421 billion indexed pages, allowing it to give accurate analysis and suggestions for you.
Moz
Moz is one of the most well-known all-in-one tools for SEO.
Moz allows you to learn how your site health, link building, and keyword performance impact your SEO success. Moz can also analyze your competitors’ efforts, support your keyword research process, and show you new opportunities for link-building outreach. It also comes with a wealth of resources for learning SEO and inbound marketing.
SEMRush
Optimize your online presence across all critical channels.
SEMRush is a SaaS platform that manages online visibility and content marketing. More than 6,000,000 marketing professionals and over 1000 top media outlets use SEMRush. The software contains more than 50 tools and is available in over 140 countries. SEMRush includes integration with Google. Therefore, you’ll have an accurate analysis of your own site.
Grammarly
‘Writing is not that easy…but Grammarly can help!’ We’ve all heard the ad.
More than 10,000 teams use Grammarly Business to improve their communication. Grammarly Business provides its customers with detailed, real-time suggestions to improve word choice, refine tone, make sentences clearer, and fix grammatical errors. It can help ensure the content you put out reflects your business with polish and professionalism.
SEO Pro Chrome Extension
Free extension for Google Chrome browser
SEO Pro Chrome Extension helps you check and analyze the primary SEO information about your business’ website to improve its search performance. Get all meta, link, and script tags just in a few clicks. This extension can speed up and simplify your daily SEO tasks.
Project Management Software
Your startup juggles numerous projects, plans, tasks, and people. Keeping everything organized while planning and performing projects is crucial. Project management tools can help businesses keep track of everything in an accurate, predictable, and profitable way.
Teamwork
Teamwork uses the notion that it is for people who want to ‘own the big picture to optimize the future.’
Teamwork includes all the features you need to plan, collaborate on, and deliver your work, so it takes care of the details while your team’s talents are freed to achieve results that matter to your business. You can use Teamwork to manage everything from delivering client projects to product launches.
Monday.com
Monday.com is an open platform where anyone can create any tools they need for work.
Monday.com is an easy-to-use, visual interface that includes building blocks like Apps and integrations, allowing teams to build or customize their dreams’ work solutions seamlessly. It provides a collaborative space for your teams to stay aligned, agile and efficient, in everything you do.
Airtable
Putting the power of a flexible database into the hands of creators
Airtable is a software platform that empowers people to build the solutions they need to drive innovation and increase agility within their teams. Airtable allows teams to adapt their software when markets evolve or goals change. Over 170,000 organizations are running mission-critical processes and workflows on Airtable.
Asana
Helping teams orchestrate and organize work.
Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Asana has more than 89,000 paying customers and millions of free organizations. Global customers such as Allbirds, Sephora, and Spotify rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches.
Trello
A fun, visual collaboration tool that creates a shared perspective for your team
Trello is intuitively simple, making group participation easy. All businesses can personalize Trello to fit each internal team’s needs. The platform has over 100 integrations, including the ability to integrate with essential tools like Google Drive, Jira, and Slack. Trello creates an ideal hub for cross-team collaboration.
Wrike
Ensure collaboration and deliver efficiencies for remote teams
Wrike allows for anyone working from home or in various parts of the world to do their best work. This collaborative work management platform has over 20,000 customers and over 2 million users. This is especially useful for geographically dispersed teams and helps organizations align, maintain agility and be adaptable.
Integration & Automation Software
Integration means synchronizing your hardware, software, and equipment systems so everything runs the smoothest it can. B2B Marketing automation optimizes your work by replacing manually-performed business activities with software solutions. The following tools help you automate work in an integrated fashion.
Zapier
Discover and weave together apps without writing any code.
Zapier allows any team member to integrate their apps and automate work without needing to code. It connects over 1,500 apps to help people be more productive at work. For growing businesses that want to make the most of their time, Zapier offers an easy, powerful, and cost-effective B2B marketing automation solution.
IFTTT
World’s leading, low-code connectivity platform
IFTTT is the connectivity standard and low-code alternative to building your own integrations in-house. Over 700 global enterprises use IFTTT to reduce their development costs while extending compatibility and lifetime value, including BMW, Domino’s, Amazon, Bosch, ING, and Samsung.
Dell Boomi
Unite everything and everyone in a digital ecosystem across channels, devices, and platforms
Dell Boomi overcomes IT complexity and breaks down data silos by creating a fabric of connectivity. You can integrate both cloud applications, on-premises applications as well as various devices and data sources. Drag and drop UI, data mapping tools, and use the comprehensive library of connectors to build any integrations easily.
DiCentral
Flexible EDI and supply chain solutions for any industry
DiCentral provides more than 100 pre-built solutions for integrating your ERP, OMS, WMS, accounting, or e-commerce systems. DiCentral promotes companies to utilize in-house services, such as its global implementation team. This team is ready to deploy quickly, scale, and maintain your EDI. Also, this team provides live technical support to its customers.
Collaboration & Communication Tools
You and your team probably already know how important communication is. People can’t collaborate if they don’t communicate. Team collaboration software allows your whole team to stay connected on one platform.
Slack
Your single workspace to connect all the people and tools you work with
Slack provides messaging in real-time through both calls and chat. The platform also allows users to search through all of their conversations and files. Slack is increasing its integration features with multiple bots and apps. Their customers range from two-person startups to Fortune 100 corporations (in fact, 77% of the Fortune 100 uses Slack).
Microsoft Teams
Cloud-based application from the classic Microsoft you know.
Office 365 offers Microsoft Teams as a chat-based workspace. It brings together people, conversations, content, and tools that teams need. Collaborate online easily with its chat and meeting functions, file sharing, team discussion spaces, and more.
Zoom
Everyone knows this cloud-based video conferencing.
Zoom provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across all devices and spaces. Special features include cloud and local recording with transcripts and multi-user annotation capabilities. Access Zoom with one click, chat across platforms, and share files all with encrypted, compliant settings for extra security.
Google Hangouts Meet
Video conferencing built on Google’s robust and secure global infrastructure.
Google Hangouts Meet helps you connect with your team from anywhere. With easy-to-join video calls, you can meet face to face on video calls, instant message people, join voice calls, and create group conversations.
GoToMeetings
Pair productivity with flexibility, working anywhere on any device.
GoToMeetings is trusted by millions of people every day for real-time virtual communication and collaboration. GoToMeeting provides a fast, easy and reliable professional online meeting solution that enables customers to meet face to face, share presentations and chat with colleagues, all with the click of a button.
Live Chat
Live chat software lets your company communicate with website visitors in real-time. These live chat boxes are fantastic customer service tools to support users as they navigate your website and see what you offer.
Drift
Drift provides a modern buying experience for a business’s potential customers and accelerates the sales process.
Drift is a platform that allows businesses to provide conversational marketing and sales. This helps businesses connect with ready-to-buy customers and is leading companies through the customer-driven revolution by using conversations to unlock hypergrowth.
Intercom
Conversational Relationship Platform to personalize customer journeys
Intercom builds better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey using chat, bots, and personalized messaging. Over 30,000 paying customers use Intercom worldwide, including New Relic, Sotheby’s, Shopify, and Airtable.
LiveChat
LiveChat is explicitly designed for amazing customer service.
LiveChat is a live chat and help desk software for businesses that also lets you organize all your communications. The user-friendly dashboard organizes emails, SMS, chats, applications, and other forms of communication. It also allows integrations with more than 170 software platforms, including Facebook, Messenger, WordPress, Salesforce, Shopify, Dropbox, and many others.
Podium
Multiple functions redefining the way customers interact with businesses
Podium facilitates everything from collecting reviews on the sites that matter most, text-enabling your website with Webchat, collecting payment via text, gathering private feedback after an experience, to managing all your customer messages, all in one easy-to-use inbox.
Conversational Intelligence
With Conversation Intelligence (CI) software, you can learn more about your customers and sales. These software record, transcribe and analyze your sales calls to identify keywords, topics, and other insights. These are great tools for identifying potential buyers and training new sales representatives.
Chorus.ai
AI-based insights for you to track risks and next steps
Chorus.ai automatically recorded and accurately transcribed all your calls and video conferences in real-time. Sales teams leverage conversation data for note-taking, follow-ups, coaching, and onboarding. Companies like Adobe, Zoom, Outreach, and Qualtrics use Chorus.ai to increase win rates and reduced ramp time.
Gong
Get powerful visibility into your inside sales conversations.
Gong‘s Revenue Intelligence platform captures your customer interactions across phone, web conferencing, and email so that you can hear the unfiltered voice of your market and deliver insights to help your team win more deals. Grow your business like companies such as LinkedIn, HubSpot, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, and SproutSocial.
Execvision
Execvision uses a motto that insights are not useful when they’re stuck in a dashboard.
Execvision believes insights from customer interactions are exponentially more valuable when you can translate them into performance improvements in your team. ExecVision’s AI-powered engine, infused with pattern recognition and human intelligence bridges the Insights-to-Behavior Gap that’s all too common in B2B organizations.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an overarching strategy for managing relationships with existing and potential customers. Many tools can help B2B companies track customer interactions in an organized system.
Salesforce CRM
One integrated platform for your whole team to see a shared view of every customer
Salesforce CRM gives all your departments — including marketing, sales, commerce, and service — a single, shared view of every customer. Salesforce CRM includes: lead & contact management, sales opportunity management, workflow automation, customizable reports & dashboards, and a mobile application so you can use it anywhere.
Hubspot
See everything about a lead in one place—no more digging through inboxes.
Hubspot CRM offers a visual dashboard and a real-time view of the entire sales funnel. The HubSpot CRM marketing tool lets you create email templates and track how well those emails are performing. The HubSpot CRM sales tools help sales reps to manage contacts, track deals, manage their sales pipeline, and more.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a sales management tool built that salespeople built for other salespeople.
Pipedrive is simple to get started but powerful enough to adapt to any sales process. It enables you to plan sales activities and monitor deals on a cloud-based application accessible from anywhere. Pipedrive’s proactive nature automatically tracks and organizes calls and emails and synchronizes schedules across devices.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is one of the most recognizable software for small to midsize businesses (SMBs).
ZohoCRM’s features include lead management, sales force automation, contact management, omnichannel interactions with customers, and other analytics options. Its performance management gives you the ability to make accurate forecasts and even have fun with rewarding badges and trophies when tasks are completed and targets reached.
Keap
Keap is an all-in-one CRM, sales & marketing software for serious business owners.
Keap‘s mission is to simplify the growth process for millions of small businesses. It organizes all of a business’s customer information and daily work into one place. This allows small business owners to no longer have to spend countless hours on repetitive tasks. This way, businesses can have more time to focus on growing the business. Keap serves more than 200,000 users globally.
Customer Support & Service
Customer service is usually thought of in the context of B2C businesses, but it’s vital for B2B business as well, albeit in a different style. Your customers are businesses that need efficient and competent customer service. Software helps you ensure your customers trust you and feel comfortable.
Salesforce Service Cloud
Give your customers faster service across every channel on any device.
Salesforce Service Cloud helps small businesses scale & grow while building loyalty with every customer interaction. Deliver a smarter, more personal customer experience on a flexible, complete service platform by automating service processes, streamlining workflows, and surfacing critical articles, topics, and experts.
Zendesk
Sophisticated enough for complex needs; simple enough to get you up and running immediately
Zendesk knows it can be complicated to provide support across channels—but your customers don’t need to know that. Their Support Suite allows your business to have natural conversations with your customers with ease. All your customer interactions live in a single, dynamic interface with features like web widgets, pre-defined ticket responses, and a full customer history.
Freshdesk
Cloud-based software helping you deliver stellar customer support.
Freshdesk converts requests from email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics. Freshdesk also offers unique features like an AI-powered support chatbot, predictive support capabilities, and field service management.
Surveymonkey
Create and run professional online surveys to understand your market
Surveymonkey gives millions of people around the world a way to turn feedback into action that drives growth and innovation. You’ll have access to expert-written survey templates that speak to customers, employees, or your target audience. You can also create simple to advanced surveys in minutes.
NICE InContact
Act smarter and respond faster to ever-changing consumer expectations
NICE InContact CXone features omnichannel routing, analytics, workforce optimization, automation, and artificial intelligence, all on a cloud platform. NICE inContact supports over 500,000+ contact center agents. Gartner, Forrester, Ventana, Ovum, Frost, and DMG all recognize this software as a market leader.
Productivity Suites
Productivity suites are sets of applications that unify the tools your team uses. A suite includes apps for word processing, giving presentations, making spreadsheets, and communicating. Having one productivity suite standardizes formatting and makes teamwork easier.
Office 365
With the familiar Microsoft apps and more
Office 365 includes the software we all know: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. And it also provides robust services like business-class email, online storage, and teamwork solutions that you can access from anywhere. Easily implement security and privacy controls to protect business data and devices against malicious threats.
Google Workplace
The Google apps you know and love, with more.
Google Workplace (previously G-suite) applications extending beyond email to include documents, file storage, calendars, chat and messaging tools, and many more, Google Workspace is a comprehensive solution for collaboration and communication for any growing startup, and it’s all cloud-based.
Quip
Let your team communicate about projects directly while working on them.
Quip is a team collaboration solution that combines document and spreadsheet creation and editing with chat and commenting capabilities. It works across desktop and mobile, on the web, Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS. Quip also has offline functionality, so your team can work on documents on the go.
Prospecting & Link-Building
Prospecting and link-building has always been an integral part of SEO, but strategies have changed over the years. Some link-building tools offer end-to-end services from link prospecting to vetting to analysis. Some focus on specific aspects like prospecting or outreach only. Find the software that best aids your business.
Buzzstream
Spend more time doing great work and less time in spreadsheets
Buzzstream helps businesses manage word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that create buzz, build links, and traffic their websites by helping potential clients and consumers find you via inbound marketing channels. Buzzstream speeds up the research process, adds contacts to your campaign and automatically gathers website and social metrics.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
The best version of LinkedIn for salespeople
LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it easy to establish and grow relationships with prospects and customers by helping you tap into the full power of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network of 500M + members. You can focus on the right people/companies and connect to new prospects even without their contact information.
Uplead
B2B prospecting platform for business looking to grow faster
UpLead is a B2B lead generation software that provides the highest quality B2B contact & company data. Its features include real-time email verification, worldwide contacts in over 200 countries, 50+ search criteria, technology tracking, account-based marketing, competitor intelligence, email pattern intelligence, social profile links, 13 CRM integrations, robust API, and more.
Drift Video
Send rich, personal messages that stick and convert.
Drift Video is the world’s first conversational marketing platform designed to help you start conversations with prospects and customers. The platform allows you to record and share videos or gifts with prospects in just three clicks. These features help increase engagement, book more meetings, and close more deals.
Accounting Software
Financial and accounting processes are at the center of most business activities. Your startup can streamline, accelerate, and improve accounting-related tasks or procedures, so your business finances stay organized. See which software is most helpful for delivering measurable value to your company.
Quickbooks
Made for small to mid-sized product-based businesses
Quickbooks Desktop Enterprise is their most powerful accounting and business management solution. This feature organizes your business finances in one place with inventory management, customizable reports, order fulfillment, real-time financial dashboards, and advanced management tools. You don’t need accounting knowledge to create invoices and manage expenses quickly.
Netsuite
Focus on revenue-generating decisions rather than your back-end systems.
NetSuite allows any type of business in any type of industry to optimize financial close, reduce IT costs, and eliminate operational inefficiencies. The platform includes built-in business intelligence, reporting, and real-time visibility. It provides a unified platform to streamline back-office processes to areas like CRM, inventory, and e-commerce. NetSuite
Accounting Seed
This is an accounting platform that hopes to transform the way a business does business.
Accounting Seed is a comprehensive accounting application that tracks data through the entire business lifecycle, from marketing, project implementation, product sales, and back-office accounting, to producing financial statements designed by you. It is both 100% native to the force.com platform and fully integrated into Salesforce CRM.
Freshbooks
Wave goodbye to that shoebox of receipts—Freshbooks helps your business effortlessly log and organize expenses.
Another accounting and invoicing service, Freshbooks saves businesses time and makes them look professional. It helps businesses balance their books, client relationships, and business with many features. Their philosophy is that financial record keeping should be easy and fast but still detailed enough to satisfy your accountant.
Sage Intacct
This platform allows businesses to gain real-time financial and operational visibility.
Sage Intacct lets you streamline your business processes using extensive automation to reduce labor and save costs. Features include accounting, purchasing, vendor management, financial consolidation, subscription billing, contract management, fund accounting, inventory management, and financial reporting applications, all on the cloud.
Design & Video Tools
Visual content for your website and social media channels is a great way to engage prospects and customers. Many DIY graphic design tools make graphic design so approachable now. Check out these tools to jazz up your website, emails, and social media.
Canva
Easily create beautiful visual content with customizable templates.
Canva features a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast library of templates and design ingredients such as fonts, illustrations, stock photography, video, and audio content. You can also include content from the web, such as Giphy and Google Maps, making it easy for anyone to take an idea and create something beautiful.
Pixelied
Made for businesses—brand beautifully and instantly.
Pixelied is an intuitive design solution, emphasizing its ease of use for its customers. The platform allows users to create beautiful, ready-made designs from over 25 formats. The app also allows customers to have access to millions of stock photos, icons, and illustrations, plus an entire suite of design editing tools, like background remover and product mockups, tailored for businesses.
Photoshop
AI-powered to helps businesses transform images.
Photoshop is a well-known, powerful application for image manipulation, from hobbyists to professionals to businesses. It regularly rolls out new features to simplify steps and save time, whether you want to do photo editing, compositing, digital painting, animation, graphic design, or any other creative endeavor.
Pixlr
Free, no-installation, intuitive, online photo editor
Pixlr is a group of web-based and mobile image editing applications built using Flash. This means that it requires the Flash plugin to work. Pixlr allows you mobility and powerful tools, with this suite of image editors and sophisticated editing paraphernalia wherever you are, on whatever device you have.
GIMP
Free image editing software with customization options
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and is a free software for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. GIMP provides businesses with sophisticated tools and many customization options and 3rd party plugins you can add to enhance your productivity and designs.
Easil
Graphic design solution designed for businesses
Easel helps you create templates, posters, flyers, menus, social media images, infographics, and visual interfaces to build your brand. It provides professionally-designed templates, and the drag-and-drop method will let you design graphics like a pro in seconds without even leaving your web browser.
Website Plugins and Services
When you make a website, the first thing to consider is what platform will host your website. From there, useful plugins can amplify your site and skyrocket the success of your business online. Plugins have specific focuses, so you have the freedom to pick and choose what your business needs. Here are a few powerful plugins and services.
WPEngine
The most popular platform for WordPress
WPEngine hosts everyone from small businesses to creative agencies to enterprise brands. The WP Engine platform equips you with a suite of site-building and management tools to drive more creative agility, cloud hosting and security solutions to enable enterprise performance, and optimization tools to give you ongoing intelligence.
Cloudflare
Speeds up and protects millions of websites on the Internet
Cloudflare is a network of over 100 data centers. It is a web performance and security company and powers over 10 trillion requests each month. It serves more web traffic than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Instagram, Bing, & Wikipedia combined. That’s nearly 10% of all Internet requests, impacting more than 2.5 billion people globally.
Yoast
SEO is for everyone
Yoast helps you optimize your site through plugins, blog posts, and courses. Yoast aims to give everyone the opportunity to rank in search engines. The SEO plugin, blog posts, and online courses help both large companies and small websites attract the traffic you desire.
Elementor
Pixel-perfect, code-free website building platform
Elementor contains hundreds of various integrations, features, templates, and widgets, allowing professionals to have building capabilities. The platform is known to have intuitive UI, simplifying the complex processes of website design and development, resulting in beautifully designed and high-performing websites.
Key Takeaways
There’s a software tool to help your B2B business with every step of your business plan.
Think about all that your business needs to do:
- B2B Sales Intelligence & Lead Generation
- B2B Email Marketing Software
- B2B Marketing Automation & Lead Nurturing
- B2B Sales Automation
- B2B Marketing Attribution
- B2B Marketing Analytics
- Account-Based Marketing Software
- SEO Software & Content Tools
- Project Management Software
- Integration & Automation Software
- Collaboration & Communication Tools
- Live Chat
- Conversational Intelligence
- CRM
- Customer Support & Service
- Productivity Suites
- Prospecting & Linkbuilding
- Accounting Software
- Design & Video Tools
- Website Plugins and Services
How can your team benefit from being aided by technology?
