Last updated on November 10th, 2022 at 02:44 pm

Account-based selling tools are at a premium in our increasingly personalized world. In a crowded online market, a bespoke approach to selling is the future.

This is especially true in B2B and enterprise sales.

Spearheading accounts requires a strategy built around sales intelligence and a varied set of account-based selling tools.

To help, we’ve provided this handy list of the top 8 account-based selling tools.

Let’s first begin with a definition of account-based selling.

What is Account-based Selling?

Account-based selling targets accounts over individuals.

It’s a collaborative effort between marketing and sales teams to target the entire buying committee at an account. It’s a personalized approach according to the needs and pain points of an organization.

This account-level focus grants sales professionals and executives more transparency into the different, multi-level stakeholders of a company. It also provides greater insight into which high-value quality accounts to chase, and which to avoid.

Ultimately, it’s a sales model like any other that leans on your ICP except in how it focuses on each account as an individual market.

With proper research and testing, an account-based selling strategy reveals who the right contacts are within an organization and how best to reach them.

To carry out this new strategy, you’ll need a suite of account-based selling tools to help you stay organized and efficient.

Let’s dive into what some of the best tools look like.

1. Hubspot

At the top of our list is Hubspot, one of the most popular inbound marketing and sales platforms available.

Although this list is in no particular order, it’s hard not to consider Hubspot at the top as one of the most reliable and comprehensive.

Hubspot’s platform will not only help you map out your sales pipeline, but it’ll also support your team with a multitude of other features. With the Hubspot platform, you can expect tools to help you with customer relationship management (CRM), social media management, content management, lead generation, and much more.

However, where strictly account-based selling is concerned the following features are some of the most useful:

• Automatically track performance on sales calls with conversation intelligence
• Make their job easier by linking prospects right to your calendar with Meeting Scheduler
• Manage your pipeline with intuitive dashboards and real-time sales analytics

Hubspot pricing ranges depending on the size of your company and need. Currently, there are four tiers of service, starting with a collection of free tools to help get you started.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Next up is LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

With LinkedIn as the B2B Sales prospecting paradise, this subscription-based lead generation tool should be an essential component of any sales team.

From individuals to sales teams to larger enterprise teams, pricing is broken down into three respective packages: Core, Advanced, and Advanced Plus. LinkedIn also has a lower tier subscription, LinkedIn Premium, that gets you profile insights, unlimited search, and InMails credits.

However, any team serious about using LinkedIn to its full potential should consider the investment in one of the three Sales Navigator plans.

Sales Navigator comes with a full suite of capabilities, but its crown jewel is the search function. Using Sales Navigator’s advanced search features, you can whittle down the search for your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with an array of filters.

Experimenting with some of the most important like Title, Industry, or Company will give you the best results. Additionally, you can filter for prospects who’ve posted in the past 30 days to find active profiles who are more likely to respond to a message.

Another powerful feature of Sales Navigator is the ability to perform a Boolean search.

Basically, this enables you to string together modifiers that either collect or exclude keywords in each filter. Placing characters like quotes or connectors like AND, OR, or NOT with keywords will ensure more accurate results in your search.

Some other useful features of Sales Navigator include:

• Integration with sales tools, email, and SNAP
• Custom saved lists of leads and accounts with alerts to their activity
• Administrative and reporting tools
• Advanced CRM sync and integration

3. Salesforce

Heralded as the world’s #1 CRM tool, Salesforce is indeed home to one of the most popular cloud-based platforms out there.

Its gigantic and flexible software allows customers to incorporate a variety of apps to satisfy their sales, customer service, and marketing needs.

The platform has earned its reputation with Fortune 500 companies as being one of the best in the business for storing, managing, and analyzing customer data.

Salesforce offers a variety of Cloud Services. These services include capabilities for the implementation of marketing campaigns, understanding of analytics, and storing of Internet of Things (IoT) data.

However, Salesforce really shines as an account-based sales tool.

Use it to update the status of a prospect and track where they are in the pipeline. This process can be automated and later reviewed via a customizable dashboard. You can expect productivity to skyrocket as customer data is available to the whole company.

This transparency breaks down silos between sales and marketing which boosts collaboration and ultimately revenue.

There’s simply too much to Salesforce to cover it all here.

Like the others before it, its monthly fees vary greatly depending on the scale of your business.

But given its comprehensive and holistic analysis of the customer journey, we think it should be a fundamental part of your sales team.

4. Salesloft

As you might have guessed by its name, Salesloft is a sales development program.

Specifically, it marks itself as a sales engagement platform from which all digital selling tasks, analysis, and communication are carried out.

Salesloft has multiple products on offer, each one complimenting a different aspect of your sales cycle.

For example, its Cadence + Automation package guides prospects into the right cadence and automatically syncs activities to your CRM.

The Conversations product uses AI-based analysis to transcribe calls and better understand conversation trends through keywords and phrases.

The Salesloft platform gives your team not only the means to contact leads with a local dialer and SMS texting functionality, but the tools to review successes and areas for improvement. You can even coach a rep in real-time while on a call with a prospect.

Need once again determines pricing. There are four Salesloft packages that include different collections of its official products. Each one corresponds to a particular focus: Prospect, Sell, Engage, and Enterprise.

5. Outreach

A leader in two The Forrester Wave reports, Outreach is breaking ground as one of the best email engagement platforms on the market.

Its hallmark among sales enablement tools is how it automates the many tasks related to the sales cycle. The improved performance and efficiency come as a result of the platform’s unique AI-powered machine learning capabilities.

One way Outreach optimizes your team’s workflow is through its automated sequences. From here you can track leads through various touchpoints, creating a holistic view of the customer journey and identifying where they convert.

Outreach also seamlessly links with Salesforce and other CRMs, and can automatically redirect or cease outreach to a prospect based on the data it reads.

With Outreach you’ll be able to target the right accounts and build automatically sustained campaigns around them. Once they’re live, you can analyze how they’re performing with metrics like open rate, bounce rate, and email deliverability.

Pricing is on a per-user basis, which gets more expensive the bigger your team and needs are. Even so, Outreach is a powerful platform with additional features that include:

• A/B Testing, Sequence Insights, and Buyer Sentiment analysis driven by machine learning
• Automated forecast and pipeline projections
• Team and individual rep productivity scorecards

6. Close.io

For remote workers by remote workers, the Close CRM was designed with digital sales professionals in mind.

Its intuitive interface and wealth of options for conducting lead management make it one of the most attractive options out there for sales teams of any size.

It takes pride in automating data entry so sales reps can focus on the sale. Close runs the gamut in terms of approachability.

In addition to the standard features you’d expect from a sales CRM, like sequence building or performance reporting, Close makes placing a call ridiculously simple.

Using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and automatic calling, Close streamlines the process of organizing and placing calls through its powerful dialer.

Email is easy too.

Send bulk campaigns or schedule follow-ups with almost no effort. Salespeople are busy people, and Close knows this by making it a breeze to set reminders to follow up.

Make a mistake in your rush? Close even has an undo feature to take back that email you didn’t mean to send.

What else can you expect to find with the Close platform?

• Easily import lead lists of any size
• Multiple API integrations – including Zapier which works with thousands of apps
• Customizable smart views

Like so many sales platforms out there, Close offers up various pricing plans. These follow the familiar path of giving you what you need based on the size of your team or budget. Listed as Starter, Basic, Professional, and Business each package reflects a monthly plan per user, with a 15% discount for those who opt to pay annually.

7. Seamless.Ai

Collecting contact information on your leads is a critical step in prospecting. And databases – either in your CRM or Google sheet – need constant updating.

With the amount of turnover and constantly changing titles among your top prospects, you’ll want real-time data verification.

In comes Seamless.Ai. This marketing intelligence platform is host to roughly 800 million contacts you can organize into filtered account lists.

Seamless allows sales reps to scrape the internet for pertinent info on their prospects. With it, you can dig up professional emails and direct dials directly from their social media profiles.

Seamless makes easy work of importing contact and account data into your CRM. It has a free version with a perfectly serviceable directory for small businesses. That said, if you want unlimited credits for searches, you’ll have to fork over some cash for either a monthly or annual plan.

8. Zoominfo

Last – but definitely not least – on our list is Zoominfo.

Like Seamless, Zoominfo is a constantly updated real-time database of contact information.

Using machine learning and AI, it pulls its info from millions of sources. Whenever there’s an update at a company or contact, the engine makes the necessary changes to ensure accurate results.

Branded as a Revenue Operating System, Zoominfo helps sales professionals define their target market and persona. Its final spot on our list doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s one of the most popular account-based selling tools out there.

In addition to records of high-quality data, Zoominfo also offers:

• Engagement apps to reach out via call or email straight from the platform
• Automated workflows that target and capture your ICP
• Flexible integration with a complete toolkit of popular CRMS

Zoominfo breaks down its portfolio of solutions by industry: Sales, Marketing, or Recruiting. The Sales package is the only one of the three that offers an additional three tiers of features, including a free trial to start.

Final Thoughts

The software and platforms here come as a personal recommendation from our team at Sellerate.

We wouldn’t write about them here if we didn’t use them ourselves.

Targeting high-value accounts with personalized outreach takes some experimenting. Luckily, many of the tools listed have extremely flexible pricing plans. Test and try out what works for you and your team’s budget.

Soon enough you’ll be breaking into your ideal accounts and scaling your business.

Still need help with outreach and sales strategy?

Contact us today to explore how Sellerate’s highly-skilled SDR teams can develop your sales strategy and grow your pipeline.