11 Best Sales Automation Software for Small Business for 2022

Sales automation software uses preconfigured processes and/or artificial intelligence (AI) to automate tasks such as streamlining lead and deal management, email marketing, and task management workflows. While there are many standalone sales automation tools, they can be built into customer relationship management (CRM) software. We reviewed dozens of tools to identify the top 11 options for small businesses.

• Calendly: Great for businesses looking for simple, automated appointment scheduling tools
• HubSpot Sales Hub: Ideal for sales teams wanting a free, simple automated email solution
• Zapier: Good option for companies that want to seamlessly combine workflows with external applications
• Pipedrive: Best for organizations looking for a CRM provides artificial intelligence (AI)-powered sales advice
• Mailchimp: Ideal for sales teams that want advanced and automated email marketing features
• Overloop (formerly Prospect.io): Best for sales professionals who want tools to automate their deal management tasks
• Agile CRM: Solid option for businesses that want built-in, automated telephony features
• ActiveCampaign: Ideal for companies looking for automated solutions for both direct sales and mass marketing activities
• Keap: Best option for businesses that want to automate invoicing and payment processing activities within their CRM
• DemandScience (formerly Leadiro): Best option for business-to-business (B2B) organizations that want to automate lead generation tasks
• Freshsales: Great for sales teams looking for automatic AI tools for sales insights

Best Sales Automation Software Compared

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*Based on annual billing

If this list of sales automation tools doesn’t meet your business needs, check out our guide on the best sales management tools to see if the providers listed suit your needs better.

Calendly: Best Sales Automation Software With Simple Appointment Scheduling Tools

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Calendly automates the appointment scheduling process and synchronizes with various calendars, such as Google, Office 365, Outlook, and iCloud calendars.

Calendly is a low-cost, easy-to-use sales management tool that allows businesses to schedule appointments and meetings easily without going back and forth via email. The scheduling portal is intuitive for recipients, and detailed preferences can be set according to the user’s appointment times and setting preferences. Users can simply share their Calendly link, and anyone with the link can easily schedule an appointment with them.

Calendly Features

Calendly offers a user-friendly appointment scheduling system that works well for both managing in-office meetings and client appointments. Below are some of our favorite features:

• Routing forms: Request information from website visitors or invitees and route them to the right person or resource based on their responses.
• Team scheduling: Let your invitees book a time that works for them, and the system will automatically round-robin the meeting by availability or priority.
• Meeting polls: Send meeting polls to your team to find the most popular times before booking meetings.
• Availability preference: Predefine your availability preferences to keep you booked as much or as little as your schedule allows.

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HubSpot Sales Hub: Best Sales Automation Software With Free Automated Email Tools

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automates notifications to sales reps with pipeline changes, task creations, and email follow-ups with prospects.

HubSpot Sales Hub assists teams in automating certain tasks in the sales pipeline, such as generating leads, assigning leads to agents, moving deals through various pipeline stages, and automating sales workflows. The email automation tools can even be accessed through HubSpot’s free plan, along with other useful CRM features, such as meeting scheduling and sales reporting.

HubSpot Sales Hub Features

HubSpot Sales Hub offers fundamental sales automation features to help users manage leads and close more deals. Check out some of its standout features below:

• Pipeline management: Lets users track the progress of their deals through HubSpot’s customizable sales pipelines, which they can design based on their own sales process.
• Task automation: Tasks can be generated automatically for sales agents based on workflow changes, such as receiving a response from a lead or staying inactive for a few days.
• Contact management: Provides an overview of users’ communication history with contacts and leads. It also logs sales activities like active deals and customer service tickets.
• Mobile app: Access customer data on the go, as well as helpful features like business card scanning, email, and caller ID.

HubSpot Sales Hub offers a robust set of sales automation tools, which include lead scoring, sales forecasting, and analytics. It also provides automation functions for marketing and customer support. Check out our HubSpot CRM review to discover if it suits your business needs.

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Zapier: Best Sales Automation Tool That Integrates Third-party Apps

Automation capabilities: Automates and synchronizes the creation of task workflows through integrations with third-party applications.

Zapier automates workflows between various apps businesses use. Through Zapier, users can create tasks based on certain triggers, such as automatically adding an email address to a Mailchimp audience list when someone submits an inquiry form on Facebook. Most of these workflows can be created without any coding knowledge—and the platform integrates with thousands of software applications commonly used by small businesses.

Zapier Features

Zapier’s Zaps streamline customer communication and team collaboration through seamless integrations. Check out some of our favorite features from the platform:

• Third-party integrations: Integrates with more than 5,000 small business applications, like Slack, Google Workspace, Trello, Mailchimp, and Facebook.
• Workflow task automation: Can create workflow tasks from form submissions from one application to another.
• Multistep Zaps: Perform as many workflow actions as you want in variously connected apps.
• Auto-replays: Intelligently retries task accomplishment due to errors and downtimes.

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Pipedrive: Best CRM With Automated AI Tools

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automates pipeline and lead management and offers AI tools for automated, performance-enhancing sales tips.

Most of Pipedrive’s sales automation tools come from its AI-powered sales assistant, Smart AI. The Smart AI either performs or informs users automatically on items that need action, including sending personalized emails, creating a new deal when a contact is added, and transferring ownership of a task when a deal is moved to another stage.

Pipedrive Features

Apart from the Smart AI sales assistant, Pipedrive offers various sales automation tools. Below are some of the most useful for small businesses:

• Personalized emails: Automatically send a personalized email whenever a deal is created or reaches a certain stage, so all deals move along on time.
• Prioritized activity reminders: Choose any combination of in-app, email, and mobile notifications for activity reminders.
• Smart contact data: Automatically acquire publicly available customer information and prequalify leads, including LinkedIn and Twitter pages.
• Workflow automation: Eliminate repetitive tasks by automating workflows for manual activities, such as sending follow-up emails to contacts or transferring task ownership when a deal reaches a certain stage.

Pipedrive is an easy-to-use CRM that offers a visual sales pipeline and tools for managing leads, contacts, deals, and activities. Learn more about what this software can do for your business in our comprehensive Pipedrive review.

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Mailchimp: Best Email Marketing Software With Automation Features

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automates prospect and customer emails by creating email marketing workflows and sending emails based on time or behavioral optimization triggers.

Mailchimp is one of the most advanced and intuitive email marketing software that assists with sales automation, specifically in the email marketing process. Some of the advanced tools in the platform allow businesses to automatically send emails based on time of day, customer purchase history, page navigation, and customer interest in a specific product.

There are also drip campaign marketing capabilities that nurture leads by sending them a series of emails over a set period. It also integrates with many CRMs, making it easy to manage your sales pipeline and email marketing campaigns in one place.

Mailchimp Features

Mailchimp’s email marketing features are specifically helpful for businesses running ecommerce stores because it nurtures customer relationships in the purchasing process. Below are some of its top features:

• Customer journey starting point: Marks the beginning of a customer’s journey and targets customers based on what they like and how they interact with your business.
• Abandoned cart recovery: Send prebuilt abandoned cart emails to get shoppers back to their cart to purchase if they leave your website without checking out.
• After-sales feedback: Send automated emails that request feedback or recommendations on similar products after someone makes a purchase on your website.
• Milestone greetings: Send automated personalized messages for personal milestones, such as anniversaries and birthdays, as well as membership renewal reminders.

Mailchimp is instrumental in acquiring and nurturing leads through its automation features for lead generation and email marketing. When integrated with a CRM, it is able to access essential customer information and automate email campaigns based on their profile and preferences. If you want to know how it can help you improve your relationships with your customers, read our guide on the six best CRM and Mailchimp integrations.

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Overloop: Best Sales Automation Software for Deal Management

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automates sales tasks along the prospecting stages of the sales pipeline, including deal assignments that need to be created, completed, and monitored.

Overloop (formerly Prospect.io) is an excellent sales automation tool for generating new sales prospects and staying in touch with them through email. It allows users to send personalized cold emails to optimize the outreach to potential leads. Its automation capabilities also extend to creating deals at the correct stage of the sales pipeline based on preset conditions or triggers, such as lead actions and time spent in a pipeline stage.

Overloop Features

Overloop allows users to expand their lead base through its personalized cold email campaigns. Afterward, users can manage their acquired leads using the following features:

• Lead and deal management: Automatically enroll prospects based on preconfigured triggers or events. Deals can also be generated automatically based on prospect triggers.
• Lead capture: Capture leads directly on your website using fully customizable web forms, and all the data will be directly available in your dashboard afterward.
• Email finder: Find your leads’ email addresses online and start cold emailing campaigns straight from your dashboard.
• Manual reviews: Queue up contacts, deals, and tasks so you can approve them before they continue to the next stage of the workflow.

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Agile CRM: Best Sales Automation Platform With Built-in Telephony Features

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at slightly higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automates post-call administrative tasks, such as follow-up messaging. It also automates marketing tasks, including social media posting, auto-responders, and distribution of newsletters with premade email templates.

Agile CRM offers notable sales automation capabilities in its integration with voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) software, such as Twilio and RingCentral. Users can preconfigure a list of contacts based on tags and attribute them to auto-dial as part of high-volume phone campaigns. They can also complete post-call tasks like follow-up messaging, call note logging, and calendar scheduling.

Agile CRM Features

Agile CRM’s in-app telephony helps users move tasks along various pipeline stages. Below are some of the telephony features we like most from the system:

• Voicemail drops: Automate voicemail delivery to your contacts using prerecorded messages for any situation you expect to encounter.
• Call forwarding: Lets your team forward calls to their mobile or landline phones when they are in the field or engaged in another task.
• Automated tasks: Automatically send follow-up emails to your contacts after a call to remind them about scheduled demos or meetings.
• Enhanced caller ID: Get real-time information about the caller before taking a call. Have relevant context in your dashboard before starting a conversation with a potential lead.

Agile CRM offers extensive sales, marketing, and customer service tools like marketing automation, social monitoring, and a knowledge base. It also provides campaign workflow management, automation rules, and third-party integrations. Check out our in-depth Agile CRM review to explore this platform’s rich feature set.

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ActiveCampaign: Best Sales Automation Software for Direct Sales & Mass Marketing

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automated email follow-ups, market segmentation, task workflow creation, sales routing, and lead scoring.

ActiveCampaign provides automation for both direct sales prospecting and mass marketing. Users can receive automated updates showing lead scores and deal information. This can then be used to optimize their sales tasks and send automated follow-up emails. Users can also segment customer lists for various marketing campaigns, so highly targeted information is sent to leads and subscribers.

ActiveCampaign Features

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of marketing automation tools that let you acquire new leads and nurture existing ones. Below are some of its highlight features:

• Lead scoring: Once a lead is recorded, the system conducts automated scoring based on factors such as the lead source or job title.
• Market segmentation: Helps users personalize the marketing process automatically based on behavioral and demographic attributes.
• Marketing automation: Automates sales funnels and creates nurturing campaigns for deals that aren’t quite ready to close.
• Campaign workflows: Lets you set up “if-this, then-that” conditional logic-style flowcharts to create email drip campaigns.

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Keap: Best Sales Automation Software With Invoicing Capabilities

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automated text messaging, emailing, payment processing, and task reminders as well as workflow task creation automation.

Keap provides similar automation tools to other software products on this list, such as automated workflows and follow-up emails. However, its most distinctive automation features are its payment processing and invoicing tools. Through integrations with Stripe, PayPal, and WePay, users can automate recurring invoices and reminders throughout the CRM system.

Keap Features

Keap combines CRM, marketing automation, and ecommerce functionalities in one platform.

Below are some of its key features:

• Invoicing and payment tools: Process credit card payments, send invoices, and track payment transactions. Users can also set up daily, weekly, and monthly payment reminders.
• Marketing analytics and reporting: Assess the level of conversions, email open rates, click-through rates, marketing, campaign performance, and contact actions.
• Email marketing audience segmentation: Automatically segments your contacts according to specific criteria like industry, behavior, and personal information.
• Automated follow-ups: Send text and email follow-ups to leads as soon as they fill out a form on your website or social media.

Keap lets you manage leads and contacts, automate sales and marketing processes, and manage invoices and payments. To learn more about what it can do for your business, read our in-depth Keap review.

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DemandScience: Best Sales Automation Software for B2B Businesses With Lead Generation Tools

Automation capabilities: Automates lead list generation and data entry processes specific to B2B data.

DemandScience (formerly Leadiro) is a unique software platform that helps users identify prospects, activate buyers, and convert opportunities with accurate B2B data. The platform acts as a large-scale database prepopulated with contact information and email lists based on the desired target business industry, size, geographic location, and the contact’s job title.

DemandScience Features

DemandScience helps users connect with over 70 million verified contacts to find the right customers for their business. Below are some of its best features:

• Technographics: Lets users target only the accounts, leads, and contacts that are the right fit for you based on the technology and devices they are using.
• Intent signals: Alerts users when prospects are engaging with your marketing materials or showing interest in your products and services. These are generated from information sources like domain-level trends and social media triggers.
• Device and IP-matching capabilities: Track behavior and browsing trends across multiple devices and IP addresses to make sure you’re targeting the right buyers for your business.
• Content syndication: Integrates your chosen keywords in your marketing campaigns to build a targeted account list matched to your identified audience.

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Freshsales: Best Sales Automation Tools for Advanced Sales Insights

*Based on annual billing. Monthly subscriptions are also available at higher rates.

Automation capabilities: Automates sales assignments, contact profile updates, insights on the sales pipeline, sales forecasting, and calendar event suggestions.

One of the most advanced features of Freshsales for sales automation is its Freddy AI tool. It offers advanced insights automatically on items such as the best next steps to take with a prospect and the likelihood of deal success. Users also have access to helpful features like out-of-office detection, predictive lead scoring, sales forecasting, and duplication of contacts within the CRM database.

Freshsales Features

Freshsales is an easy-to-use CRM that provides extensive tools to directly engage prospects, close more deals, and monitor sales growth. Check out some of the best features from the platform:

• Contact and account management: Create and manage a list of qualified contacts and get complete context about them with 360-degree profile views. Users can also create tasks, appointments, and notes for each.
• Profile enrichment: Automated profile enrichment updates contact profiles automatically based on public information, including social media accounts like LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Account assignments: Automatically assigns leads, contacts, and chat conversations to the right agents based on relevant criteria like skill level and availability.
• Sales forecasting: Set probabilities for deals and get revenue forecasts for each deal stage.

Freshsales offers essential CRM features such as visual and multiple sales pipelines, identification of inactive deals, sales forecasting, and predictive contact scoring. Check out our comprehensive Freshsales review to learn more about this provider.

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How We Evaluated the Best Sales Automation Platforms

We looked at the range of sales automation functionality within each platform, particularly its ability to enhance the sales process for pipeline stages. These include automation capabilities for lead generation and lead nurturing, appointment scheduling and task management, sales enablement, and marketing campaign deployment. In addition to automation features, we considered pricing, ease of use, integration capabilities, and customer support for each provider.

Bottom Line

The benefits of sales automation tools can take many forms within the sales process, from more streamlined lead generation and nurturing to the reduced risk of error in repetitive tasks, like processing payments. For businesses looking for effective tools, it’s essential to first consider which sales tasks you want to automate―and use that as the basis to choose the software that offers the most value to your business.