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With so many different business development software available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to identify, pursue, and manage new business opportunities but need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different business development tools with various teams, with my picks of the best business development software.

What Is Business Development Software?

Business development software is a tool that assists organizations in identifying and pursuing growth opportunities. It integrates functionalities for lead generation, market research, client relationship management, and sales strategy implementation. This software provides a platform for streamlining and organizing the various tasks associated with expanding a business, such as managing potential leads, analyzing market trends, and nurturing client and partner relationships.

The benefits of using business development software include enhanced efficiency in managing business growth activities. It automates and simplifies processes, leading to more effective lead management and opportunity identification. The software provides valuable market insights and analytics, aiding in informed decision-making and strategy formulation. Additionally, it supports building and maintaining robust relationships with clients and stakeholders, crucial for long-term business success. By streamlining sales and development tasks, the software helps organizations focus on strategic growth and expansion initiatives.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Business Development Software

As you read each summary below, you’ll find a screenshot of the tool’s inner workings, the main pain point they strive to address, a breakdown of pricing and trials, and a few pros and cons for a quick look into whether these are a good fit for the way you operate.

Best for cold outreach email deliverability

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $49/month
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Rating: 4.7/5

This automated email solution is designed to help business development teams actually reach their intended recipients during email campaigns instead of landing in the spam folder. The QuickMail platform allows you to send personalized emails to prospects and follow up on priority leads from one inbox that can be shared with your entire team.

Why I picked QuickMail: One of the features that really caught my attention on this platform is the pricing structure. Instead of charging per seat or per email like many other tools, QuickMail charges per inbox. You can have your entire team working in one space without paying extra for every collaborator.

QuickMail Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include A/B testing that doesn’t require you to start a new campaign with every test and automated email verification that double-checks a recipient’s domain and address for errors and deliverability.

Integrations include Aircall, Amazon SES, BriteVerify, Gmail, HubSpot, Mailjet, Outlook, Slack, and Twilio. For everything else, including everything from Excel Spreadsheets to Salesforce, you can use Zapier.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Quick configuration and implementation
  • Intuitive, straightforward tool navigation
  • Very easy and fast to learn

Cons:

  • Not as many native integrations
  • Limited data enrichment for prospects

Best for targeting profitability through Google

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $29/user/month
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Rating: 4.5/5

This business development software is a CRM that’s designed specifically for Google. Due to the seamless integration with Google Workspace, business owners can set up in just a few minutes and begin automating repetitive tasks, organizing contacts, tracking deals, and building personalized relationships with the email and marketing tools.

Why I picked Copper: This platform stood out because it’s tied to such a big name — Google. Many businesses use this giant for their everyday operations, so having a CRM that works directly with Calendar, Drive, and Gmail just makes sense. You never have to switch tabs to track conversations, add leads, find files, or manage sales processes.

Copper Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include custom pipeline setup to track deals, personalized reports dictated by your preferred metrics, and a mobile app that’s accessible from wherever you are.

Integrations include Calendly, DocuSign, DropBox, JustCall, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, PandaDoc, RingCentral, Square, and Zapier. All Google tools are also available for integration.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Quick implementation for current Google users
  • Easy to use and navigate
  • Purpose-built for Google users

Cons:

  • Limited customer support for learning the tool
  • Automation rules must be entered manually

Best for when you need to streamline your sales pipeline

  • Free trial available
  • Pricing upon request
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Rating: 4.4/5

This cloud-based tool is primarily a customer lifecycle platform for B2B organizations that helps you find prospects and leverage buyer intent data to better inform your sales and marketing teams. Their tools are designed to provide solutions for lead generation and prioritizing new opportunities. Find data on company mergers, funding announcements, and tech adoptions to better understand your business opportunities.

Why I picked ZoomInfo: One feature that caught my eye on ZoomInfo was the email and phone automation to help you execute multi-touch sales cadences through customizable email templates, tailored scripts for conversations, and account-based selling to contact everyone you need to all at once.

ZoomInfo Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include conversion tools to turn leads into pipelines with ZoomInfo MarketingOS and no-code data management through ZoomInfo OperationsOS.

Integrations include Dynamics 365 Business Central, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Marketo Engage, Outreach, Salesforce, Slack, Snowflake, Sugar CRM, and Visualize ROI.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Email verification accuracy is at 98%
  • Simple user interface and dashboards
  • Very intuitive for new users

Cons:

  • Can be overwhelming due to all the features
  • Clunky formatting for email templates

Best for helping revenue teams automate tasks

  • 7-day free trial
  • From $39/user/month
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Rating: 4.6/5

Demodesk is a revenue operations platform that focuses on meeting scheduling, real-time guided selling, and customer engagement. Through personalized desktops and coaching during every call, you can empower every sales team member with the customizable tools they need to succeed, including automating non-selling tasks, like meeting prep, CRM documentation, and follow-ups.

Why I picked Demodesk: One feature that really stood out to me about this tool is the types of meeting rooms they offer. Whether you need to meet with customers or collaborate with team members, you can schedule video calls in branded sales rooms with interactive virtual screen technology that allows participants to interact with your product or content on the call.

Demodesk Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include real-time sales playbooks that automatically load the perfect pitch for every prospect, call shadowing that allows managers to get real insights into how each rep sells, and automated scheduling that handles distribution and handoffs more fairly.

Integrations include Allego, Chorus, Gong, Google Suite, Guru, HubSpot, Make, Microsoft Office, Pipedrive, and Salesforce.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Provides a customer portal for meetings
  • Frequent improvements based on customer requests
  • Responsive and supportive customer service

Cons:

  • Scheduling isn’t editable after sending a request
  • Limited reporting and analytics functionality

Best as your all-in-one email outreach platform

  • Free plan available
  • From $49/month
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Rating: 4.4/5

As a cloud-based email marketing tool, Hunter is designed to help businesses of every shape and size send out cold emails. In addition to email finding and verifying tools, you can also use this platform to export domain search results, craft personalized emails with templates, insert images into your emails, and handle follow-ups.

Why I picked Hunter: I included this platform on my list because they do so much more than help you build your email list. Once you have a targeted prospect list ready to go, Hunter also provides email marketing campaign guidance at scale with custom attributes, media and attachments, scheduling automation, email tracking, and warm lead identification.

Hunter Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include a domain search tool that helps you find emails from any company name or website and email verifying tools to ensure the quality of your contact list.

Integrations include Airtable, Close CRM, Copper, Gmail, HubSpot, Outlook, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zapier, and Zoho CRM.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • User-friendly interface that’s easy to learn
  • Guarantees an A-list of prospects with 95% accuracy
  • Has a Chrome extension to use the tool in your browser

Cons:

  • Sent emails look like they’re sent from your Gmail
  • UX isn’t as intuitive as it could be

Best cloud-based dialing system for CRM software integration

  • 7-day free trial
  • From $30/user/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.4/5

This is a cloud-based phone system that’s designed to seamlessly integrate with the most popular Help Desk and CRM tools. You can use this tool on desktop and mobile for calling and texting, as well as enhanced collaboration, productivity, and workflow with tons of other features and content.

Why I picked Aircall: I like Aircall as a business development software because it blends your outreach with a variety of other business needs, including customer relationship management with inbound call management. Use this feature to put callers in queues, route calls to the right people, and create a callback list that allows your customer to skip the line and wait to receive a call from your team members when they have time.

Aircall Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include outbound phone numbers with toll-free and international numbers, warm transfers that allow team members to speak to each other before transferring a call, and call transcriptions to record call activity and history.

Integrations include ActiveCampaign, BigCommerce, Copper, Daton, Enthu, Flip, HappyFox, HubSpot, Klaus, and Microsoft Teams. Aircall offers over 100 native integrations.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Massive array of integration options
  • Only needs to be configured once
  • Very easy to learn to use

Cons:

  • If the tool lags or freezes, it forces you to disconnect your call
  • Conference calls are a little clunky

Best comprehensive solutions for B2B CRM needs

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $19/user/month

Because it’s an all-in-one CRM platform, Nutshell is designed to be simple enough for everyone on your team to use while incorporating sophisticated tools into your workflow. With Nutshell, you don’t have to separate your sales and marketing tools. Everyone can use the same platform for sales automation, pipeline management, email marketing, and team collaboration.

Why I picked Nutshell: This tool is one of my favorites because of the web form collection feature. With this tool, you can capture all the information you need from prospects and collect it in a central repository for automated management and easy access for your entire team. Add custom forms to any website with just two clicks to gather personal information or get answers to unique questions.

Nutshell Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include Board View, which offers interactive pipeline management that allows your team to drag and drop leads into every sales stage, and contact management that ensures you can import your contact, emails, and calendar from any source.

Integrations include 3CX, ActiveCampaign, Box, Constant Contact, FreshMail, Gravity Forms, Kixie, Mailchimp, Slack, and Trello. Find over 50 native integrations on Nutshell.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Outstanding support team for technical issues
  • Mobile-app friendly for iOS and Android
  • Easy to maintain without technical knowledge

Cons:

  • Limited email scheduling – only full sequences available
  • iPhone app has limited functionality

Best for collaboration with internal teams, external contractors, and all other stakeholders

  • Free trial available
  • From $6/user/month

If you need a business development software that targets teamwork for project management, Sync.com provides a cloud-based file-sharing and document storage platform to enhance your communication tools. This platform can help you send and receive files, preview documents, organize folders, back up files, and control user permissions to involve customers, clients, contractors, and other stakeholders without risking sensitive information.

Why I picked Sync.com: I consider this tool essential for business development teams because it includes groundbreaking data protection features. Whether you need to ensure HIPAA compliance for medical providers or protect a new product that’s still under development, this platform provides enterprise-grade security infrastructure and support.

Sync Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include access to files from anywhere, including computers, the web, and mobile devices, centralized folders for internal team members, and cloud storage to free up more space on your servers.

Integrations include Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Priced for single users and businesses
  • Easy for non-tech savvy users to learn
  • Simple and straightforward to implement

Cons:

  • Limited service diversity due to security
  • No CRM system integrations to maintain security

Best revenue intelligence platform to increase visibility

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request

As a revenue intelligence platform, Gong focuses on transforming old and new businesses with a more accurate understanding of customer interactions. Using these insights, your business can capture data, prioritize customers, and act on real-time information in one integrated platform. Gong uses a patented and proprietary AI to better interpret customer interactions, increasing your visibility to drive decision-making.

Why I picked Gong: What caught my eye about Gong was their CRM updater feature. This unique tool allows you to edit and update custom fields for open deals as needed without having to toggle between each platform. Gong then shares the new data through bi-directional integrations with your other apps.

Gong Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include deal execution tools that provide a bird’s eye view of pipeline health, personalized coaching for sales reps, and Smart Trackers that can be trained to pick up and track the most important elements of your business.

Integrations include Ambition, Apollo, Crayon, Google, Highspot, Lessonly, RingCentral, Salesforce, Teams, and Zoom.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Intuitive call analysis tools
  • Instant tips and next steps after every call
  • Simple to implement with existing workflow

Cons:

  • Training on the tool could be more proactive
  • Occasional transcription errors from the AI

Best for consent-based website visitor identification

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $59/month

Visual Visitor is a sales intelligence platform that focuses on providing you more leads and reducing prospecting time through website visitor identification. They also provide other tools, including buyer intent data, email and proposal tracking, and a B2B contact database that has over 600 million potential prospects.

Why I picked Visual Visitor: This tool stands out to me as an ideal business development software because of their primary tool — website visitor identification. When someone visits your site, Visual Visitor can get you access to their entire profile, including personal contact information that allows you to reach out right away.

Visual Visitor Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include person-level website ID that includes over 35 data points, company identification and employee tracking from website visits, and buyer intent data that’s gathered by crawling the internet for a visitor’s digital footprints.

Integrations include DropBox Business, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Docs, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, Trello, Zapier, and Zoho CRM.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Intuitive navigation for finding lead information
  • Allows prospecting through the database and your own website
  • Up-to-date data ensures accurate leads

Cons:

  • Some plans are limited when it comes to international visitors
  • May take more than a month to learn all the features
Tools Price
QuickMail From $49/month
Copper From $29/user/month
ZoomInfo Pricing upon request
Demodesk From $39/user/month
Hunter From $49/month
Aircall From $30/user/month (billed annually)
Nutshell From $19/user/month
Sync From $6/user/month
Gong Pricing upon request
Visual Visitor From $59/month
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Other Options

I know the list above seems pretty comprehensive but there are so many different types of businesses out there, you might find an even better fit in this list of my business development software runners-up.

  1. CloudTalk

    Best for helping enterprise businesses connect with customers

  2. Pipedrive

    Best CRM platform for automating business processes

  3. LeadGrabber Pro

    Best platform for building B2B prospect lists with email verification

  4. Fyle

    Best mobile-based expense-management tool for organizations of any size

  5. Hootsuite

    Best social media management tool to increase engagement for SMBs

  6. Calendly

    Best shared scheduling software designed for small and medium companies

  7. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

    Best software for advanced prospect search and targeting

  8. Trello

    Best team-based solutions for marketing, design, or engineering teams

  9. Mailshake

    Best for automating cold email outreach by improving domain reputation

  10. Hubspot Marketing Hub

    Best all-in-one marketing software for large organizations

Selection Criteria For Business Development Software 

Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best business development software for this article:

Core Functionality

Business development tools can address concerns across every aspect of your workflow, including marketing, sales, customer support, and accounting. If you want functionality that can be useful across any and all of these teams, here is what you should look for:

  • Making manual tasks more efficient
  • Enhancing communication and collaboration
  • Improving visibility across every team
  • Keeping you informed about trends

Key Features

While each of these business development options has a different focus, some key features you’ll see repeated in all of them include:

  • Automation: Whether it’s an automated outreach campaign or data enrichment for prospects, automation is designed to save your team time when it comes to boring manual tasks that a computer can do better.
  • Notes and chat: Some tools allow team members to talk within the platform, others have virtual meeting spaces for real-time collaboration. One other useful collaboration tool you’ll see allows team members to leave notes and comments.
  • Bi-directional data sharing: You have many tools in your tech stack. Some only connect one direction, but others share data back and forth so every single tool has the same information, providing a single source of truth.
  • Analytics and forecasting: Interpreting data on your own can be tough, so you need tools that provide more than just the data. They help you read the information you’re getting and provide forecasts of upcoming trends based on historical data.

Usability

Usability is essential for adding any business development software to your lineup. I focused on choosing tools that were easy to learn or had robust guidance from the platform’s customer support team. I also chose those tools that have intuitive navigation, data visualization for easy readability, and a variety of software integrations.

Software Integrations

I know you have a ton of other essentials in your tech stack so software integration is definitely a priority for you and for me. You’ll see the most popular native or Zapier-driven integrations listed in each tool overview to help you determine if it’s the right fit.

Pricing

Because business development tools cover a broad range of business operations, there’s going to be just as much variation in their pricing. Some tools on my list are free, while others offer custom pricing structures based on what your company needs. For more standardized paid plans, you can expect subscription-based pricing on a per seat or per month basis.

People Also Ask

Still trying to get a better handle on business development software? Check out these answers to the most frequently asked questions.

What are the benefits of business development software

Business development software offers a number of benefits, including more marketing automation tools for your CRM, better time management tools for your sales reps and executives, robust tracking capabilities that help you understand where everyone is spending their time, and data interpretation tools to ensure you make better decisions.

Who uses business development software?

Business development tools offer solutions for nearly everyone. There are platforms that can help startups get the most out of their seed money, software options designed to help enterprise-level organizations, and solutions for every team in your company.

What tools are used for business development?

Business development tools run the gamut of the everyday essentials for your workflow. You’ll see tools designed for prospecting, like data enrichment or email verification, tools made for automation that can auto-dial and leave messages for your entire contact list, and tools that are all-encompassing, including comprehensive CRMs.

Other Revenue Operations Software

If you’re looking into business development software, you likely have a wide variety of needs to round out your tech stack. Take a look at these other tools that may complete your setup: 

Final Thoughts

The first step to accelerating your business operations is to take as much manual labor as possible off the plates of your most valuable team members. Business development software can fill in gaps in your tech stack or help you build one from the ground up. With my breakdown, you have a great place to find the answers you need.

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By Phil Gray

Philip Gray is the COO of Black and White Zebra and Founding Editor of The RevOps Team. A business renaissance man with his hands in many departmental pies, he is an advocate of centralized data management, holistic planning, and process automation. It's this love for data and all things revenue operations landed him the role as resident big brain for The RevOps Team.

With 10+ years of experience in leadership and operations in industries that include biotechnology, healthcare, logistics, and SaaS, he applies a considerable broad scope of experience in business that lets him see the big picture. An unapologetic buzzword apologist, you can often find him double clicking, drilling down, and unpacking all the things.