Working in sales is a real art. To master this profession, a person needs to have strong communicational and selling skills, dedication, patience, and, not less important, a true passion for what he is doing. A few decades ago, if you lack one of those things, your career in sales could collapse before it even starts. Luckily, today everything has changed. The 21st century together with modern technologies has introduced to us a whole bunch of great sales tools that can enhance your potential and boost your strategy.

Modern sales managers can choose from a wide variety of such tools. But how to find something that suits your needs and goals? To help you out, we have created a list of top ten tools that should be in every sales manager’s toolbox for better sales and higher revenues!

What Tools To Use?

Success never comes easy. However, with a well thought-through plan of actions, it is much closer than you could ever think!

What do you do to improve your sales strategy? We bet that all of you invest lots of time and money on advertising. This is a wise approach as advertising helps increase a brand’s recognition, which further will help your company gain more customers. However, have you ever thought of what else you could do to reach success?

We believe that constant self-improvement, training, as well as digitizing and enhancement of your methods of work are not less important than direct advertisement! That is why we have prepared this list of handy tools for you.

1. InsightSquared

Many will agree that building reports can be a real pain sometimes. Let’s face the truth; all sales managers have to deal with numerous reports in their work and often, this takes hours on end. Is there a way to simplify this process? Fortunately, there is InsightSquared, a cloud-based tool that makes sales forecasting, data quality monitoring, activity tracking, and other processes simple and automated. This tool gives you insights on all important business processes, which makes it one of the top tools for the sales department.

2. GoToMeeting

Every specialist strives to optimize his work to save more time. Everyone should agree that time is one of our most important resources, which is why GoToMeeting is another tool that you should use! It is an effective, simple, and reliable way to connect your whole team in one virtual meeting room. Imagine that you can now arrange online meetings with anyone, no matter where you are, using only the Internet and any device. Add GoToMeeting to your sales team’s toolbox, and you will no longer have to waste lots of time on daily meetings.

3. Reply.io

It is not a secret that everyone uses email on a daily basis, and sales managers are not an exception! While composing dozens of emails and follow-ups each day can take hours, Reply.io is a tool that will help you optimize this process. This tool delivers tons of smart email templates tailored to your needs. It is one of the best sales assistants! It can help you schedule emails and personalize each of them faster and with less effort.

4. SalesGravy

Constant self-development is the key to success! Therefore, regular training is something you should bring in to your sales team and Sales Gravy University will help you with this! It is an online university created especially for sales specialists to help them gain new knowledge, hone their skills, and reach the peak of their performance faster and easier. Why is it the best training tool for you? Because it offers remote training led by great instructors, who are professionals in the field of sales.

5. Social Media

Social media is now an important part of every sales strategy, so if you are still not using it, you’d better start ASAP! Popular social channels like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others are powerful tools for marketers and sales managers.

6. Email Marketing

This is another handy tool. Email marketing can help you gain loyal customers, share your content, and update current clients on the news and products you have. Thus, we think it deserves to be in this list of top ten useful tools.

7. Newoldstamp

Email marketing can help you in so many ways while creating email signature will help you empower your strategy even more!

Adding an email signature to your emails will help create a sense of loyalty and trust among your clients. Also, it helps generate new leads, drive the attention of your potential customers, raise the brand’s recognition, and promote your business. All of these will positively affect sales statistics. Thus, we believe that email signature takes a deserved place in our list of top sales tools!

8. LinkedIn

Although one of the points in our list is dedicated to the social networks, LinkedIn deserves a separate mention. It is the best tool for making new, useful contacts and growing your professional network. Also, it raises your company’s social presence, which is also important for sales. Thanks to LinkedIn, you can generate new leads, find prospects, and build trusted relationships with them.

9. Slack

If you are wondering how to optimize the communication inside your team to make it more effective, Slack is the answer. This tool allows you to create online channels for the entire team to help you communicate and boost their performance! This tool will help you share ideas, ask and answer questions, share files, and collaborate easier, without wasting much time!

10. OnContact CRM

If by any chance, your team is looking for an effective customer relationship management tool, OnContact is a perfect solution for you! One of the main benefits of this tool is that it can be deployed both in the cloud or on-premise, depending on your needs. It contributes to the automation of marketing and sales. Besides, it helps improve the functionality of your team’s contact center and customer service. Thus, it is one of the main tools that every sales manager should use!

There’s nothing worse than when your computer fails unexpectedly. You don’t get a chance to back up your hard drive or save the big PowerPoint project you’re working on. You’re infused with both terror and wrath, and you’re tempted to just smash your PC on the ground altogether.

But there are usually tell-tale signs that your computer hardware is failing even before the big break happens. You can get the same sort of signals from your car. For instance, your car makes a whining sound every time you turn the key in the ignition, and after a month your alternator “suddenly” fails. Turns out, it’s not actually that sudden.

Even when the signals aren’t noticeable, you can usually discern impending auto problems by having routine maintenance done on your vehicle. The same goes for your computer. Here’s how to tell if your computer hardware is failing.

Fans

Fans are used to keep your hardware from overheating. Overheating can happen even if your fan is working, but most of the time it’ll only happen if you’re running very intensive programs for a long span of time. If your computer is overheating even when you’re only running non-intensive programs, it might be a sign that your fan has failed.

When your computer overheats, your system might experience random crashes. You can feel the overheating too: just put your hand by the computer. If it’s warmer than usual, it’s probably overheated.

When a fan is running, you can usually hear it whirring. If you’re running intensive programs, you should be able to hear your fan running. If you don’t, your fan is most likely broken.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many obvious signs that your fan is dying. But pay attention to the sounds it makes—if it makes bizarre or irregular sounds, it might be worth looking into.

Hard Drives

Hard drive failure can do the most damage to your computer and all the files on it. Thankfully, it’s much easier to check on the health of your disk, and there’s a good chance you can save all your data. Your hard disk could suffer two kinds of failures: a logical failure or a physical failure.

A physical failure is when the actual hard disk fails. When the hard disk fails, you’ll hear a bunch of strange noises, like clunking and grinding and whirring. If your hard drive hasn’t yet crashed but you hear these sounds, it’s a sign that you should replace your hard drive and reinstall your operating system.

A logical failure is when your computer’s operating system fails. This could happen for a number of different reasons, from a computer virus to a software malfunction. It’s difficult to retrieve your data, but you might be able to do so through software data recovery programs.

CPUs

You’ll know that your CPU failed if your computer turns on, but:

• There’s no screen
• There’s a frozen screen
• The computer immediately turns off

Some users receive the dreaded “blue screen of death“, which is certainly a sign that the processor is at the root of the issue.

A processor could fail for several different reasons, including age, overheating, overclocking, or even because of an electrical surge. The best way to keep your CPU healthy is to make sure that you have a working fan and that you don’t push your computer beyond its limits.

It’s difficult to diagnose a CPU failure, but the best way to do it is to swap it out with a new CPU. If the new processor works, then the old CPU definitely failed. Otherwise, there might be an issue with the computer’s motherboard.

Monitoring and Stress Testing

If you run the Windows 10 operating system, you can routinely monitor the health of your computer hardware by using a desktop app called Performance Monitor. Performance Monitor runs diagnostic tests on various facets of your computer hardware to check for anomalies and potential problems.

You can also use third-party utilities like Prime95 to conduct stress tests on your hardware to make sure your computer is healthy and stable.

It might seem tedious to have to frequently monitor your hardware, but it’s much better than having to deal with hardware failures where your data could potentially get erased. Just take a few extra moments during your computer session to make sure everything is running okay, and you’ll be grateful for it in the long run.